Politics & Power Quote by Marcel Achard

Politics rarely shocks; it seduces. Achard’s line is a neat theatrical reversal of a tired cliché: we’re used to hearing about “strange bedfellows” as if coalitions and compromises drop from the sky in moments of crisis. He insists the strangeness is an optical illusion created by ignorance or selective attention. If you didn’t witness the flirtation - the quiet meetings, the incremental concessions, the shared enemies, the traded lines in the sand - the eventual alliance looks like a plot twist. If you did, it plays like inevitability.

As a playwright, Achard understands that the real story isn’t the final pairing but the scenes that make it plausible. “Courtship” frames politics as intimacy with an audience problem: voters and commentators often enter in the third act and demand moral coherence from characters who have been negotiating survival since act one. The subtext is mildly scolding and deeply realistic: outrage is frequently a confession of not paying attention.

There’s also a sly moral critique hiding in the metaphor. Courtship suggests performance, charm, and self-serving promises; bedfellows implies private entanglement with consequences that don’t show on the campaign poster. Achard isn’t saying alliances are virtuous or inevitable in a noble way; he’s saying they’re legible if you track incentives instead of slogans. The line flatters the initiated observer and punctures the innocence of the surprised, exposing “shock” as a spectator’s pose rather than a citizen’s analysis.