Charrette (pronounced shuh-ret)
A final, intensive effort to finish a project before a
deadline (historically most associated with architecture & students of the subject);
it’s applied particularly to group work and other collaborative efforts.
1400s: From the French charrette (small cart), from the Middle French charrete, from twelfth century Old French charrete (wagon, small cart), a diminutive of charre, from the Latin carrum
& carrus (wagon), the construct
being char (chariot; wagon) + -ete (the diminutive suffix). The sense of “work to meet a deadline” came
from French, the conventional explanation of the origin being the use by groups
of students of architecture who, after working all night, loaded their
drawings, plans and sketches into a cart (pulled the legend suggests by the
youngest member) into a small cart (pulled by the youngest member) on the day
of the presentation of their work to the professor. The alternative spellings are charette & charret. Charrette is a noun; the noun plural is
charrettes.
In the late nineteenth century, just before the deadline,
the authorities of the École des
Beaux-Arts in Paris would send to a designated place on campus a charrette
(a small cart) into which students of architecture would deposit their final
drawings and models. As every student
and ex-student knows, it’s the final few hours before the deadline during which
much of the work is done and the young Parisian scholars so associated the
impending arrival of the little cart with this frenzied activity that the term “charrette”
came to signify this burst of sudden enthusiasm. . Most
sources suggest the use of charrette & charette (in this context) appeared
in English only in either (1) the mid-1960s when adopted by university students
as a verb meaning “an intense effort to compete a project before the deadline
expires” or (2) sometime in the next decade when architects in Chicago added it
to their project planning timelines; it’s now also used of any activity which
is increased to meet a deadline. Inevitably,
charrette (used as noun & verb) has entered the jargon of management-speak
to describe “intensive workshops”, “brainstorming sessions” and such where
people gather to solve problems (which the management gurus often insist should
be called “challenges” or “opportunities”), develop concepts and such. The essence of the corporate charrette is
said to be collaboration, creativity and a rapid arrival at decisions.
In French, the noun charrette was coined simply to describe “any cart smaller that that usually deployed for whatever purpose” and specific terms evolved to refer to devices of a certain design or function. A charrette à bras was “a hand cart” (the French bras meaning “arm”) and described a cart propelled by a person rather than pulled by some beast of burden. The best known of the variants was the charrette des condamnés (the cart of the doomed (ie those condemned to die) and it was in these those convicted of this and that were taken to their execution.
The charrette des condamnés famously used to take victims to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror (the period in the mid-1790s after the declaration of the First Republic, marked by massacres, public executions, anti-clericalism and internecine political struggle) were properly called tumbrels although many illustrations of scenes at the guillotine depict the use of four-wheeled carts rather than tumbrels. Presumably both types were used but historians generally believe it was usually the tumbrel because the revolutionaries preferred the symbolism of something usually used for moving dung or rubbish while artists choose the four-wheelers for compositional reasons. The noun tumbrel (two-wheeled cart for hauling dung, stones etc) was from mid-fifteenth century French, a name, curiously perhaps, used in the early thirteenth century to describe what some eighteenth century dictionaries described as a mysterious “instrument of punishment of uncertain type” but which turned out to be (1) a name for the cucking stool used, inter alia, to conduct the dunking in water of women suspected of this and that and (2) was a type of medieval balancing scale used to weigh coins. It was from the Old French tomberel (dump cart) (which exists in Modern French as tombereau), from tomber ((let) fall or tumble), possibly from a Germanic source, perhaps the Old Norse tumba (to tumble), the Old High German tumon (to turn, reel).
In English the charrette des condamnés was called the tumbril (the alternative spellings tumbrel
& tumbrill), the English as
content to pilfer other languages for words as their Empire builders would be
to steal the lands of others (the Anglo-Latin was tumberellus), from tomber & tumber (to
fall). As well as being (1) the cart
used to carry prisoners to the gallows, the tumbril was also (2) a cucking
stool (actually based on a medieval torture device used, inter alia, to “detect”
witches), used as a tool of punishment and humiliation (miscreants (usually
women) accused of “social” offences such as “gossiping” or “trouble-making”
strapped to the stool which was by some sort of mechanical apparatus “dunked”
into a pond or river), (3) a cart designed for “dumping” its load, with a
single axle and sometimes with a hinged tray or tailboard (ie the antecedent of
the modern dump-truck), (4) a type of balancing scale used in medieval times to
check the weight of coins and (5) a basket or cage of osiers, willows, or the
like, to hold hay and other food for sheep (long extinct).
In a transition which would please historians and social
theorists, the tumbrel began life as two-wheeled cart or wagon hauled usually by
a single horse or ox and their most common use was the carrying of manure
(horse shit, cow shit etc) and later was re-purposed to carry the “excrement”
of society (criminal condemned to death).
The use of the word to describe the dunking stool is also indicative of
the attitude of the establishment to another undesirable class: talkative
women. The point of the cucking stool
was not to drown but simply publically to humiliate offenders and hopefully
change their behavior. It can be thought
a kind of pre-modern community service order.
Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.
A genre scene in the tradition of post-impressionism, the original title was La Partie de Canpagne and is an example of works of Toulouse-Lautrec which would be influential in the development of art nouveau (modern). The dog cart (also as dogcart & dog-cart) was a style of coach-building popular in England and described both (1) a small cart drawn by a dog and (2) A larger two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage with two transverse seats back to back (an outgrowth of the original design in which the rear compartment was an enclosed (usually caged) box for carrying dogs used for hunting or other sports. It’s not clear if the phrase “in the dogbox” was an allusion to this design. The French phrase La Partie de Campagne translates to “A Day in the Country” and both titles continue to be used of the work. So evocative was La Partie de Campagne of the outdoors, nature, fresh air (no small thing for those accustomed to the pollution and filth of the cities of the age) and the charming simplicity of rural life that the phrase appears often in French art and literature. The idea appealed even to modernists, so often associated with things urban.
Léger’s art wasn’t
always political but it became so (“the
century made me so” he claimed) and the stilted, robotic figures in this
1951 work represent his take on man’s place in capitalist society and a rural
environment ravaged and debased. A sculptor and filmmaker as well as a painter, he was a
significant (if rather neglected in the English-speaking world) figure and his
creation of a style of painting he called “tubism” was the basis of much of his
later, figurative works and there
are critics who maintain tubism was a seminal influence on both agitprop and
pop art.
1897 Panhard & Levassor with charrette anglaise coachwork.
Powered by a 1648 cm3 (101 cubic inch) two-cylinder gas (petrol) engine rated at 6 (taxable), the car is a typical example of the automobile at the dawn of the twentieth century when new innovations in engineering were beginning to be added to what had for the first decade-odd of the new type been literally “horseless carriages” in that the technique had usually been to take existing coach or cat designs and add an engine. The example on the left was built in 1897 and fitted originally with a tiller-steering mechanism (right) but steering wheels (still in use today) were even then becoming the new standard and this restored example was fitted with one in 1898.
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