Good morning. Today is sextidi, the 26th of Germinal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le lilas, a flower prized for its pop of purple color.
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Common lilac is actually a tree, usually maintained at shrub size, that took Europe by storm about 400 years ago, which is relatively recently. (Shakespeare never mentioned them, and Shakespeare hardly met a flower he didn't write about.) The popularity of the flower is tied intimately with the popularity of the color, and soon then name "lilac" spread to any similar flower Europeans encountered: Persian lilacs and California lilacs are also shrubs; Australian lilac is a vine; New Zealand lilac is a plantain tree; and summer lilac is a low-lying butterfly attractor found in China and Japan, unless you mean the weed that grows in Russia. None of these plants are even in the same botanical family as each other. Turns out how the flower grows is unimportant to people, so long as it's a lovely shade of pale violet.
Death is a constant, but in the time of the French Revolution – and for a solid century and a half thereafter – death was consistent. While nowadays we're used to any death of someone under retirement age being considered an unnatural tragedy, the death of the young was expected and planned for in the 19th century.
The most conspicuous artifact of this planning were the widow's weeds, the strict rules for dressing expected of British and American women in the wake of a family death. These were black, of course, but when the period of mourning came to a close, women were asked to come back to color gradually, so as not to shock anyone – shock and hysteria being the primary concerns men had for women in that extremely gendered culture.
Enter lilac, the bridge between mourning and moving on.
