The cat, the weasel and the rabbit
The cat, the weasel and the rabbit (French: Le Chat, la Belette et le Petit Lapin ) is the 16th fable in the seventh book of the collection of fables, Fables Choisies, Mises En Vers by Jean de La Fontaine .
With this animal fable, La Fontaine presents the conflict between nature and culture, between primitive violence and the law. What his weasel uttered was to teach Rousseau 100 years later : “The person who first enclosed a piece of land and said: this is mine! and found people simple enough to believe him that was the true founder of civil society. "
The fable tells how the weasel once took over the rabbit's earthworks when it was not at home. The weasel justified itself by saying that the land always belongs to the respective occupier . However, the rabbit insisted on its property rights based on custom and tradition. The conflict was insoluble, because although the weasel was superior to the rabbit (weasels can kill rabbits), the rabbit appealed to the support of "all rats in the country". The resulting tie of the opponents led to the weasel's suggestion to fall back on the judgment of the judge (the cat). The rabbit agreed to this suggestion. However, the cat then resolved the conflict situation quite “neutrally” by simply devouring both plaintiffs. Since neither side was preferred, the judge brought the situation to a "final solution".
moral
Through his description, La Fontaine makes the rabbit appear innocent and lovable, while the weasel appears as a cunning manipulator. The death of the impeccable rabbit represents the weak who are victims of injustice. The weasel apparently pays the penalty for seeking justice from one who is more powerful than it is. But there is an additional moral. First, the weasel's fate shows that malice does not go unpunished. Second, that those who are weaker than themselves cannot be harmed with impunity. The third character, the cat, is compared by La Fontaine to a number of fictional characters, all hypocrites, e.g. B. Tartuffe from Molière , which shows from the start that the cat cannot be trusted.
In the seemingly naive text, La Fontaine represents the paradigm of the judge and, through the weasel and the rabbit, illustrates the clash of two balanced forces in a sustained tension. The weasel appeals to natural law, while the rabbit turns to civil law. Civil law, however, brings with it the potential power of the rats, which offsets the natural and immediate power of the weasel over the rabbit. With its appeal to a superordinate law (that of the judge), the weasel gives up the law of nature (which is the law of violence), but only because it does not believe itself in a position to hold the rabbit's den by force alone . On the basis of a similar assessment on both sides, the rabbit also declares its willingness to take the dispute to a higher court of appeal.
It is not violence that contradicts the justice of the law or nature - if that were the case, the conflict would ipso facto be resolved by the triumph of the weasel. But "law without power is helpless", the basis for this assessment is the recognition of both plaintiffs of the superordinate law. The cat has become both opponents in one fell swoop; by absorbing both. This violence is the hidden face of justice, so set because in a sense it was required of the opposing forces of the weasel and the rabbit, enslaved as they were to the higher law.
See also
Web links
- The cat, the weasel and the rabbit. Livre VII - Fable 16 lafontaine.net, accessed May 14, 2020.
Individual evidence
- ^ Ferdinand Lotheissen : History of French Literature in the XVII. Century . C. Gerold's Sohn, 1877, p. 208–209 ( google.de [accessed on May 13, 2020]).
- ^ Andrew Graham, Leszek Kolakowski, Charles Taylor, CL Ten, Louis Marin: Neutrality and Impartiality: The University and Political Commitment . Cambridge University Press, 1975, ISBN 978-0-521-09923-3 , pp. 106 ( google.de [accessed on May 13, 2020]).
- ^ Slater, Maya: The Craft of La Fontaine . The Athlone Press, London 2001, ISBN 0-8386-3920-8 , pp. 166-168 .