get away from the "literal"
Explanation:
Yes, it looks like vouloir with its notions of willing, wanting, and aspiring to .... But would we, the Albionese, say "a moment wanted to or aspired to do or achieve something"? I don't think so, not unless we're feeling particularly poetic or are under the influence of some substance. And while the French are more flowery in their language, I don't think they would either ...
"Contextually" se vouloir here is merely a flowery way of saying "to be". So "two moments which were/constituted a break with the past/what preceded". Not very flowery is it?
Enter Maurice Grévisse:
"Se vouloir, avec un attribut, s'emploie assez fréquemment de nos jours au sens de se croire, se dire, se déclarer, se montrer ..., ou de vouloir être ..., se donner pour ... ; ... Le tour, dans beaucoup de cas, paraît un peu recherché".
I certainly agree with that last comment.
Now, the first three "meanings" Grévisse gives don't work because they are too "personal" in the sense that they require as subject a person, or an animate being, or something so personified. Yes, moments can be personified, but I don't see it working here. However, at the foot of our podium of the first three we find se montrer :
"l’articulation entre deux moments qui se sont montrés l’un et l’autre des ruptures vis à vis de l’histoire".
Now this works for me. We still have the reflexive verb, but given that "showing" involves the active participation of another party, the "showee", i.e. us, the world, it flies. These two moments showed themselves to us to be breaks with everything that went before them.
They revealed themselves to be ...
They demonstrated that they were ...
They proved to be ...
etc.
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Note added at 7 hrs (2010-11-17 13:59:01 GMT)
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As Emma says, some "moments" might be intended - by their instigators, whose will may in such cases be personified into the "moments" - to be a break with the past. The French Revolution (or any revolution for that matter) and the restoration of the monarchy, the 3rd Reich and the Yalta Agreement (not that I'm sure all of these qualify as "moments") might be said to have been moments with an articulation between them which "aspired to" changing tracks and heading in a different direction ... even if, ultimately,plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.
More topically we might look at the drop in the retirement age in France and its subsequent increase, i.e. "moments" with human volition behind them. I'm not sure the discovery/invention of penicillin, the outbreak of AIDS, or the détournement of the magnetron into the microwave oven, or even the "moments" of 911 qualify.
| Bourth (X)
Local time: 04:34
Native speaker of:  English
PRO pts in category: 204
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