Sujet 2 - Partie 1 · Bac Anglais Métropole remplacement 2024

Document A

The scene takes place at Lady Hunstanton’s. Lady Hunstanton, Miss Hester Worsley, and other ladies are having a conversation.

LADY HUNSTANTON. I hear you have such pleasant society in America. Quite like our own in places, my son wrote to me.

HESTER. There are cliques in America as elsewhere, Lady Hunstanton. But true American society consists simply of all the good women and good men we have in our country.

LADY HUNSTANTON. What a sensible system, and I dare say quite pleasant too. I am afraid in England we have too many artificial social barriers. We don't see as much as we should of the middle and lower classes.

HESTER. In America we have no lower classes.

LADY HUNSTANTON. Really? What a very strange arrangement!

MRS. ALLONBY. What is that dreadful girl talking about?

LADY STUTFIELD. She is painfully natural, is she not?

LADY CAROLINE. There are a great many things you haven't got in America, I am told, Miss Worsley. They say you have no ruins, and no curiosities.

MRS. ALLONBY. [ To LADY STUTFIELD.] What nonsense! They have their mothers and their manners.

HESTER. The English aristocracy supply us with our curiosities, Lady Caroline. They are sent over to us every summer, regularly, in the steamers, and propose to us the day after they land. As for ruins, we are trying to build up something that will last longer than brick or stone. [ Gets up to take her fan from table. ]

LADY HUNSTANTON. What is that, dear? Ah, yes, an iron Exhibition, is it not, at that place that has the curious name?

HESTER. [ Standing by table. ] We are trying to build up life, Lady Hunstanton, on a better, truer, purer basis than life rests on here. This sounds strange to you all, no doubt. How could it sound other than strange? You rich people in England, you don't know how you are living. How could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don't know how to live—you don't even know that. You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost life's secret. Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears.

Oscar WILDE, A Woman of No Importance, 1893.

Document B

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph Ellis recounted an exchange in his 2018 book, American Dialogue, between John Adams and his friend and rival Thomas Jefferson 1 about the state of aristocracy in the new republic.

Adams’ chief heresy was his direct refutation of Jefferson’s most famous words, that “all men are created equal.” Perhaps in some lofty humanistic sense this was true, Adams wrote, but “Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in the constitution of Human Nature that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a level.” Aristocracies, he therefore insisted, were an inevitable and permanent fixture in all human societies—including the young republic he and Jefferson had helped into being.

Jefferson wrote back to suggest his friend’s argument was true of Europe, where feudal privileges, inherited titles, and limited economic opportunities created conditions that sustained class distinctions. In America, though, the absence of laws such as primogeniture 2 and entail, and the existence of an unspoiled continent, meant “everyone may have land to labor for himself as he chooses,” and thus enduring elites were unlikely here. Given such favorable conditions, Jefferson argued, it was reasonable to expect that “rank, and birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance,” resulting in a roughly egalitarian, middle-class society.

Adams was unconvinced. “No Romance could be more amusing,” he replied, than the belief that the United States would prove an exception to the dominant pattern of economic inequality throughout history. “As long as Property exists,” he observed, “it will accumulate in Individuals and Families [...].”

During a subsequent interview for my new book about America’s superrich, I asked Gabriel Zucman, an economist and expert on economic inequality at the University of California, Berkeley, which founder’s 3 outlook he thought was more prescient. He replied that our situation in America today is arguably worse than the one Adams feared: not a hereditary aristocracy but an economic one “that can present itself as more legitimate than the old-world aristocracy, where you were rich and powerful for totally arbitrary reasons.”

Joseph J. ELLIS, American Dialogue, 2018.

1 John Adams and Thomas Jefferson belonged to a group of American leaders (the Founding Fathers) who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

2 Primogeniture: inheritance to the eldest son.

3 Founder: a Founding Father.

Document C

Partie 1: Synthèse du dossier, en anglais (16 points)

Prenez connaissance de la thématique ci-dessus et du dossier composé des documents A, B et C et répondez en anglais à la consigne suivante (500 mots environ):

Paying particular attention to the specificities of the three documents, show how they interact to illustrate the way aristocracy has evolved through time and space.