Beauty and the Beast was originally released all the way back in 1991. While the live-action remake came out in 2017, it’s not like the story of the film has been changed in any serious way. However, a clever fan might have just explained why Belle and her father aren’t exactly well-loved by everyone in their “little town filled with little people.”
The original post by 634425 is incredibly long but quickly went viral with thousands of upvotes on Reddit. With the length in mind, we’ll try to summarize it here.
Belle and her father are ostracized from their village not because of their eccentric natures, but because of their politics. The theory states that the films takes place in the “immediate aftermath of the deposition of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration” and that Belle’s father supported the French revolution which the French peasantry was largely against.
The fact that there only seem to be mostly old and weathered men in the town would point to the film being set in this period as:
“For the last twenty-five years, Belle’s village has seen every generation of its young men taken away to die in Spain, Russia, Germany, and Italy.
This explains why everyone’s so enamored of Gaston even though he’s kind of an asshole. It’s not just that he’s handsome and a good hunter—it’s that he’s really all the town has got left. All of the other young men are dead or missing.”
When Belle sings, “since the morning that we came to this poor provincial town” she seems to be implying that they did not always live in the town they now live in. This could mean that her father was one of the représentants en mission — a person in charge of maintaining law and order in the providences by the National Convention.
As a man of science and enlightenment, Maurice would have been the perfect person to be interested in Jacobin activities. The theorist also explained the timeline of the films and Maurice’s age perfectly line up with the theory.
The best part? It finally explains why everyone didn’t care why the prince, AKA the Beast, suddenly disappeared. “When the prince and his courtiers suddenly vanished, the townspeople probably assumed they had seen which way the wind was blowing, and lit out for Germany or England like so many other émigrés.”
Does the idea change how you think of the Beauty and the Beast films? It seemed to certainly move quite a few Redditors.
Remember, there is a whole lot more depth to this theory with tons of evidence which can be found in the original post. But what do you think, does this new theory paint Beauty and the Beast in a whole new light? Sound off in the comments!