Update on “Pity and its adversaries”

The research originally mentioned in our posting of June 1, 2009 is now available in print: “Le roi pitoyable et ses adversaires: La politique de l’émotion selon J.J. Regnault-Warin, H.-M. Williams, et les libellistes de Varennes,” La Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 4 (2010): 917-34.

Why Les Miz is Bad for America, or the Illusory Self-Evidence of Solidarity

An old refrain has been reborn of late with startling potency. From talk show hosts to gubernatorial hopefuls, everyone has taken to quoting the Constitution or more precisely its first line: “We take these truths to be self-evident.” What truths? No matter. The refrain alone and its ironclad logic can push any platform, from bashing “Obamacare” and immigration rights to preserving birth control and public education. This sleight-of-hand in the name of Truth-telling is nothing new. In a long tradition of comic satire, from Shakespeare to Swift and Voltaire to Twain, writers have skewed familiar facts in the hopes of prompting a response. The most popular attempt at retelling History in our day is Victor Hugo’s best-seller of 1862 or rather its Broadway spinoff, now in its 26th year, Les Miz. If people were reading Hugo, things might not be so bad. But given that the vast majority of Americans no longer have the stamina to take on the 2,000-page original, we should be concerned. The message of Les Miz is bad for America.

Hugo’s novel Les Misérables revolves around the “self-evident” truth of human equality. Seventy years after the seismic shock of 1789, the French state had still failed to remake the judiciary into a system that would protect its citizens from arbitrary imprisonment, not to mention its failure to build open institutions of public education and social welfare. Solidarity is the goal of Les Misérables. Hugo assumed that the Revolution’s legacy of liberty and equality could be achieved through legislation and he weaves advice on such matters throughout the novel; but more important for him—and more tragic for his characters—was the unrealized promise of fraternity. The French Revolution rode on hopes that one day, people would realize that they need each other and so they would learn to care for one another despite differences in class, age, gender, or politics. The novel abounds in vignettes of hands touching hands, as coins, crusts of bread, and clothing change hands between the poor and the poorer, but beyond the Catholic Church (which sometimes has to be prodded into charity) there is no social net to catch any of them. Once Gavroche is slaughtered on the barricade, the people he once helped will likely starve.

If Les Miz had picked up on this theme, it may have had some redeeming value for American audiences today. The play as we know it, however, highlights a conventional love story, foregrounds the domestic drama, and warns against civic involvement. Hero Jean Valjean is portrayed as a long-suffering scapegoat of social injustice and his nemesis Javert skulks around behind him in suitably sinister fashion for no apparent reason. The tear-jerking tale of child Cosette, whose forlorn expression and wistful song have become synonymous with the story, overwhelms the larger plot even though it occupies only one-quarter of the book. Why does this matter? Because, beyond the “The Simpsons,” Les Miz is one of the few monuments on our cultural landscape that has the potential to bridge the generations, the classes, and the races that make up American society today. Twenty-six years later, the show is still playing to houses packed with families, school children, and more mature theater-goers. Yet with its scenes of thrilling young radicals running headfirst into an ill-conceived, suicidal clash with the army, it deals a cold blow to community activism. Who wants to fight, when activism=death?

Moreover there is an ambiguity in the word misérables. A misérable can be someone suffering from poverty and who is thus worthy of kindly pity, or it can designate someone whose indigence is a target for contempt. This wobbly signifier has a lot to do with why people liked the novel back in 1862 and, I think, why people still like it today. It has a lot to do with why the author tried so hard to argue for solidarity as a solution to the ills he portrayed, too. Hugo wanted Les Misérables to be a political document. Although he stops short of laying out a workable program for social reform, in its celebration of democratic action, it presents a paean to the working man and a visionary platform for social justice that later generations molded into policy during the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics (policies which are currently under attack by the Right.) With its razzle-dazzle barricade scenes and tear-jerking adieux, Les Miz captures the excitement of hand-to-hand combat and the starry-eyed radicalism of its young characters—a virtue not to be underestimated in our cynical times. But in its conventional focus on the love stories and individual destinies of its principals, it ultimately makes political action look futile. This is the first reason why Les Miz is bad for America. It preaches civic disengagement.

Unlike the Broadway show, Hugo’s novel cannot be reduced to soap-opera earnestness. Its characters are complex. Jean Valjean and Javert are, as their mellifluous names suggest, mirror images of each other. Both struggle to live up to their ideals of human virtue: the one strives to incarnate Christian charity, while the other lives for the Law. Both are laudable, both serve commendable ends, yet both ideals prove fatal to the men, given the problems facing French society in the 1860s. It did not have to be that way. The scenes of suffering in Les Misérables were meant not only to elicit pity, but also to remind us that we too are abject, we too are implicated: none of us will escape unless we bring a change to our world. As Hugo would have known from reading Rousseau’s Social Contract, “He who believes himself the master of others does not escape being more of a slave than they.” Unfortunately, these traits have little to do with why Americans like Les Miz today, because the production glosses over the gritty, uncomfortable bedrock of Hugo’s epic to make suffering seem like somebody else’s problem. That is the second reason Les Miz is bad for America. It begs the problems raised.

Those “self-evident” truths that are now being touted by politicians did not grow naturally from American soil. They were a result of a long and messy process of democratic political action involving many people thinking, arguing, conversing, and writing together. The next time you hum along with Cosette’s song, “I Have a Dream,” think about the Truths that we Americans take to be self-evident as regards social equality, for instance, or the pursuit of happiness. Remember that free, public education was the crucial missing link to creating the vital workforce that has sustained our economy for generations, and that our nation was built to protect free-thinkers and immigrants seeking refuge. Remember that Hugo did not mean for his novel to be mere entertainment, rather Les Misérables was supposed to be a blueprint for social optimism, a snapshot of present ills that would incite a productive, collective demand for progress. We could do worse than to work on that wish: “Utopia today; flesh and blood tomorrow.”

Marat returns to the the people via Vik Muniz

The work of Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz brings the career of revolutionary rabble-rouser Jean-Paul Marat to his rightful end.
According to an article by Carol Kino in the New York Times, Mr. Muniz’s art builds on his early experience in the tenements of Rio to give back to the people. As he explains in the documentary, “Waste Land,” Muniz aims to ennoble the catadores (garbage pickers) of Rio slums by creating classical portraits in their image. He models the portraits in his studio with their help, using garbage they have scavenged from a junkyard, and he pays them for their time and the materials. In the portrait featured here, we see Mr. Tião Santos, president of a workers’ cooperative (Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho), sitting in a bathtub like David’s “Death of Marat” (1793) awash in a sea of filthy clothes, plastic bottles and abandoned toilet seats. The $50,000 proceeds from this modern remake of David were donated by Mr. Muniz to the worker’s cooperative. What a perfect example of an artwork that meets–and gives new meaning–to life. Ashes to ashes, sewer to junkyard… L’ami du peuple would have been proud.

Blood in the margins – Freedom and The French Revolution, by Matt Stewart

One year ago today–Bastille Day–I released my debut novel The French Revolution on Twitter. It got some pretty good attention, and last fall I landed a traditional book deal with Soft Skull Press. Today, the novel launches as a hardcopy book.

It has been one hell of a year.

Everything about this experience has been larger than life. The novel is a San Francisco family saga, loosely structured on the radical events of the historical French Revolution. I strived to make my characters big and bodacious, colorful and creative, capturing the fiery personalities that make San Francisco such an entertaining place to live. I baked a plot that weaves classic San Francisco “industries” of gourmet food, anti-war politics, music, marketing, and–of course–drugs, lampooning extremes and puncturing caricatures. Zany events progress from a proverbial Bastille Day on down to Waterloo, and I did my best to pack in as many literary guillotines as possible.

There’s a theoretical underpinning to this madness–after all, the historical French Revolution is one of the greatest identity crises in history. Mirroring those bloody extremes, the family in my novel lurches from extreme (monarchy) to extreme (Reign of Terror) to extreme (Napoleon) before a definitive showdown (Waterloo) marks the family forever. It’s a classic self-discovery journey, packaged and punched through the Hegelian mill.

This is a brassy book, a balls-out book, a book that tickles and bites and occasionally spanks for no good reason. It was tremendous fun to write–and I hope it’s just as fun to read.

While writing a book structured on revolution, it was hard to resist the urge to flip over a few metaphorical cop cars along the way. Last year, I was tired of waiting for publishers to figure out if they wanted to take my book, so I seized control of my own publishing destiny with the Twitter experiment. This year, I’m launching a free iPhone app with Ricoh Innovations that helps the book function as “clickable paper”–you can zap any page in the book with your iPhone camera and launch relevant videos, recipes, articles, or even bonus chapters to get more involved in the story. Think of it as DVD bonus content available via old-fashioned, readily available books, and the world’s leading mobile device. (Please try it out and let me know what you think.)

I’m not out to revolutionize publishing. But it’s been liberating to work within the structure of the French Revolution, where disruption can be regenerative, where extremes are OK, where I kind of get a free pass to break a few rules.

Vive la révolution!

–Matt Stewart

Running on Hope

“Running on Empty” (1988) is a must-see for anyone pondering what it means to be political. Director Sydney Lumet treads a fine line in this story of antiwar activists who, despite their fugitive status because of an inadvertent crime committed in a napalm lab in 1971, remain committed to leading lives that matter. Although the film shows them uprooting their two adolescent boys from school and friends, and focuses on the story of the 18-year old son in particular to convey a message about the difficulty of letting go, this family unit is also strong, intact, and joyful. The parents are devoted to their children at the same time as they are devoted to the cause of democratic political activism. With each new move, the father in particular tries to keep on empowering the people he touches with a message of political activism. A poignant scene towards the end shows him forced to leave his small restaurant, wistful about the relationship established with his employees and the efforts he’d made to ensure that they earned a living wage in decent work conditions. In the scene featured here, the mother meets with her father after a long absence, admits how hard her life has been, and asks him for help. Running on empty? I think they’re also running on hope. As the emotionally tortured father (Judd Hirsch) reminds the guilt-stricken mother (Christine Lahti), “we are trying to make a difference.” Clearly, it’s hard to balance family and political action, and this couple takes the challenge to extremes. But it is rare to find an honest representation of that challenge in our popular culture. Kudos to Lumet for this brave portrait of radical activists who suffer the consequences of walking the talk.

In Corporation We Trust? Lady Liberty Fights Back

On this fourth of July holiday, our media are once again cloaked in an unhealthy mix of corporate partisanship presented as patriotism. The fireworks display tonight in New York (broadcast on corporate network NBC) is the “Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks” featuring a “Norwegian Epic” and a performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Why on earth should this combination of Scandinavian mythology and right-wing Protestantism parade as patriotism? Because the sponsors of the event—Norwegian Cruise Lines, Jeep, Levi’s Inc., and Macy’s—willed it thus. More egregious is today’s full-page article in the South Bend Tribune (A10) that reads “IN GOD WE TRUST.” This paid advertisement (which is not labeled as such) features quotes from Ronald Reagan and the Bible along with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to make it look like a kind of evangelical Christianity lies at the basis of our constitution. May I inform Hobby Lobby CEO David Green that our founding fathers would blanch at his effort to cast patriotism as Christianity? Many of them professed what we would now label Deism, or a kind of “natural theology” akin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s solitary vicar (from Emile, 1762) who eschewed church-going. Although Jefferson considered Jesus the teacher of a sublime and flawless ethic, he also revered the power of reason. In a letter to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787, Jefferson advised, “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god.”

This year’s corporate promotion of the 4th of July focuses naturally on spending. The bulk of messages on our airwaves and newspapers make the linkage between the holiday and the economy explicit, with special sales of computers, electronics, summer clothing, and cookout foods that one can purchase today. A person who is unfamiliar with our popular culture might well confuse the celebration of political freedom from the despotism of the King of England (the original meaning of today’s holiday) with the consumer’s freedom to buy stuff.

The Declaration of Independence (1776), reprinted in American newspapers, broadcast on TV, and in parades from coast to coast today, is a fine testament to the demand for political and religious freedom that gave our country its original identity. But it is dated. The writers were most concerned to clarify political issues of the late 1770s, and focused primarily on distinguishing the new colonies’ political status as independent from the English crown and its laws. Our nation has more pressing issues to contend with today. Primary among them is our commitment to civic equality. We are, after all, not only the land of freedom but also the land of opportunity, an opportunity based on a belief in human dignity and equality. All of us—whether our families have been in this country since the 1600s, the 1990s, or the 1850s, like me and the Day-Danford-Somerville clan from which I hail, owe a debt to that principle that helped our families get started here. We owe a debt of equality to newcomers to our nation, and the economically disadvantaged.

The bill of rights (1791) proclaims “The right to be treated equally before the law, regardless of social status.” Yet the news abounds in reports of Americans whose lives are negatively impacted by inequalities, whether they be driven by economic status, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic identity, or simply one’s name or accent. The latest brouhaha over immigration law and the Arizona governor’s racist remarks on our Mexican neighbors put us to shame.

On this fourth of July, let us reflect on a more important icon of our national identity, the Statue of Liberty. Established in 1886 with a gift from the French Republic, this statue presents a more fitting, because more modern, concern for the American dream, and reminds us that we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to freedom and equality for all.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
‘ With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

–Emma Lazarus (1883) “The New Colossus,” inscription on base of Statue of Liberty, New York, New Jersey.

Memoirs of Terror: a new spin on the cause célèbre

My recent reading has uncovered an interesting connection: memoirs of the Reign of Terror (1793-94) are clearly indebted to and sometimes written by the same people who penned the famous causes célèbres of the Old Regime judiciary. One writer who lived in both worlds, and achieved a certain literary fame right after the end of the Terror in what is called the Thermidorian period, is Pierre-Anne-Louis de Maton de La Varenne (1761-1813). A well-respected lawyer and member of the Parlement de Paris, Maton de La Varenne gained early fame during the Revolution for his espousal of civil status for the family of the executioner Sanson, but was arrested during a purge of suspected royalists and imprisoned in La Force right before the massacres of September 2-3, 1792. Maton de La Varenne’s memoirs, published in 1795, focus primarily on the grisly events of September 1792 when the Jacobins, under orders from Marat and Robespierre (according to Maton), orchestrated the mass slaughter of thousands of clergy and royalist sympathizers being held in Paris prisons.
Like the mémoires judiciaires penned by the author during his former life, his memoir uses the literary technique of dramatic suspense and revelation in the service of political persuasion. Minute by minute and paragraph by paragraph, the reader relives the prisoner’s anguish as he hears the shrieks of the dying amid the metallic clink of axes falling, and cringes at the heavy tread of the guards outside his cell. When his own turn arrives, the author dexterously shields his royalist tendencies from sight, citing the personal integrity he had developed through years in the legal profession as proof of his innocence to a dumbfounded judge and awe-struck crowd of murderers. His narration of leaving the make-shift tribunal stages a melodramatic coupling of Good and Evil that is mirrored in the gory frontispiece to the book (See illustration):

I cringed in horror at the sight of an enormous pile of naked cadavers lying in the gutter, filthy with blood and mud, upon which I had to take an oath. … I was saying the words they demanded from me, when one of my former clients fortuitously passed by. He recognized me, swore for me, embraced me a thousand times, and even brought the killers to my side. (1)

Note how the good lawyer avoids sullying his honor by sidestepping the oath, and how he is saved by a symbol of his former power (a satisfied client of the royal court). Right and Wrong, Good and Evil are clearly legible in this text, and reveal its debt to the mémoires judiciaires.
That genre, as Sarah Maza has noted, deftly employs the melodramatic mode to go beyond an obvious appeal to readers’ or viewers’ hunger for strong sensations: it works to visualize and simplify morality. (2) The stark juxtaposition of a weirdly calm Marat pontificating in front of his murderous butchers, while the cautious lawyer picks his way out of the fray, build upon the melodramatic urge to assign unambiguous moral labels to situations fraught with political complexity.
Les Crimes de Marat went through three editions in 1795; most interesting to us are the successive editorial changes Maton de La Varennes made to his book, because they reveal how a death threat, and the alarm it spawned, were employed to confer authenticity and political urgency on his work. Psychological manipulation of readers was widely and effectively employed in Thermidorian fiction; it may explain for some of the upsurge in novel reading after the Terror. Maton de la Varenne claims that one person was so enraged on reading the first edition of Les Crimes, and seeing the name of a friend amid the list of ignominious deputies who egged on the September massacres, that she announced: “I will be for the author another CHARLOTTE CORDAY.” Although he suppressed G…’s name in this edition, and admits taken precautions against his would-be assassin’s “pretty project,” Maton de la Varenne also enlists the reader on his side, and cites a stirring quote from Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois to defend their freedom of speech from persecutors. Dire threats raise book sales, as we know. The death threat against the author may very well have revved up sales of his other two books advertised on the inside cover of Les Crimes…

(1) P.A.L. Maton de La Varenne, Les Crimes de Marat et des autres égorgeurs, ou Ma résurrection (Paris : Chez André, An III (1795). (available on-line via Gallica, catalogue of the BNF, Paris)
(2) Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs : The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

French Frankenstein article wins prize!

Late-breaking news: We recently learned from the Editorial Board of the European Romantic Review and the Executive Board of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, that “The Frankenstein of the French Revolution: Nogaret’s Automaton Tale of 1790” has been selected as the winner of the prize for best article published in the journal in 2009. The selection, based on the article’s merits in scholarship, originality, quality of writing, and significance for Romantic Era Studies, was made by the Editorial Board.
Click here for free access to the article, compliments of Routledge’s electronic platform, Informaworld: http://www.informaworld.com/ERR
Click here for the news release from the University of Notre Dame

New books in revolutionary history, politics, and art

On Jean-Clément Martin, ed., La Révolution à l’œuvre; Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution; and Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes.

The best academic writers tread a fine line. On the one hand, they must be meticulous and careful, buttressing claims with close readings and archival findings. On the other hand, they should aspire to engage readers and spark interest by providing innovative syntheses and contributing to ongoing debates. This feat is made more difficult by the vogue for case studies. Like a scholarly politique de bascule, there seems to be a reaction underway against the previous generation’s enthrallment with grand theories; call it the “new positivism.” Although admirable, the sheer volume of information produced by positivists can feel distracting to readers, raw and indigeste. The books reviewed here reflect the excitement of archival discovery, but they prove more challenged by the scholar’s duty of marshaling accumulated evidence to prove a point. Their stores of knowledge are a wonder to behold, yet the minutiae sometimes overwhelm. A bit of pruning might have shaped this work to better effect, and saved a few trees as well.

In an arresting opener, Michael Sonenscher states: “This book is about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in the French Revolution” yet a footnote to this first sentence warns: “It is also an attempt to correct some of the gaps or mistakes” in three earlier publications by Sonenscher. “It is also a book about Rousseau,” Sonenscher continues, “and, no less centrally, a book about salons,” whose aim is to “open up a way towards the real political history of the French Revolution”: in other words, how ancient republican politics conjoined with modern debt-based economics so that the latter became seen as the means to revive the former (1, 3, our emphasis). This breathless overture, which confidently takes on a number of seemingly unrelated and extremely complex topics, is emblematic of Sonenscher’s style. Sonenscher’s insights into the moral and economic history of pre-revolutionary France are wide-ranging and extremely well-documented; few can rival his breadth. Some of his findings, for example, on Robespierre’s proto-socialist ideas of using public finance to reimburse citizens for contributions to political life, cast revolutionary politics in surprising new lights (53). But there exists so much detail that the narrative movement sometimes runs aground.
[…]
A sense of energy emerges also from Jean-Clément Martin’s aptly entitled volume, La Révolution à l’œuvre. In stressing the artisanal way that scholars craft their research into print (à l’œuvre means “at work,” as in a workshop), Martin sets the stage for an erudite overview of trends in revolutionary history, especially political, institutional, international, and art history. Coining the term transversalité to underscore these cross-currents, Martin’s introduction describes eighteenth-century studies in France today. Most surprising to Anglo-American readers will be the sense of newness, even trepidation, that French scholars express about approaching topics that we consider mainstays of intellectual discourse, particularly gender studies and colonial relations.
[…]
Of the three books reviewed, Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohl effect the most successful synthesis of detail and argumentation in their co-written Vizualizing the Revolution. The book’s exquisite production value—with 187 illustrations, 46 in color—its luxuriously heavy paper stock, and extensive bibliography make this volume a must for anyone seeking new insights into the pictorial culture of 1789-99. Moreover, where most art historians (such as those reviewed by Bordes in La Révolution à l’œuvre) focus on a single genre, artist, or political tendency, Reichardt and Kohl’s “communicative and discursive” approach allows them to reveal the interplay between a dizzying variety of works, especially “lower” forms of art such as prints, and the elite, religious, and folk traditions from which they emerged. By zeroing in on icons such as Hercules, martyrs, and the new man, the authors pull off an amazing synthesis that demonstrates the continuity between Old Regime and Modernity, and proves the importance of “popular” art in that transition.
[…]
Although our scholarly infatuation for the trees of detail and minutiae remains strong, with guides like the authors reviewed here, the revolutionary forest is assuming startling new contours that should inspire more travelers to venture within. A bon entendeur, salut!

From review essay by J. Douthwaite, “On Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Finding a Way through Revolutionary Politics, History, and Art,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, 2 (Winter 2010): 259-66.

Jean-Clément Martin, ed. La Révolution à l’œuvre: Perspectives actuelles dans l’histoire de la Révolution française. Rennes. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005, 375pp. 22.00 €
Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France. London. Reaktion Books, 2008. 294 pp. $45.00
Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution. Princeton. Princeton University Press, 2008. 493pp. $45.00

Lucien Bonaparte’s La Tribu indienne: A protomarxist allegory?

Lucien Bonaparte is best known as Napoleon’s brother and a one-time statesman under the Consulate but, as this re-edition of La Tribu indienne (1799) reminds us, French politicos have long dabbled in literature. Georges Pompidou published an Anthologie de la poésie française (1961); Valérie Giscard d’Estaing has published two novels—Le Passage (1994) and La Princesse et le président (2009). The unhappy fact remains, however, that neither Giscard’s nor Lucien Bonaparte’s literary works have done much for their political reputations. The value, such as it is, lies elsewhere.

To our mind, the most interesting aspect of the romantic tragedy behind La Tribu indienne is its allegory of economic determinism. As Karl Marx wrote in 1859, “The mode of production in material life determines the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Bonaparte’s hero Edouard is primarily a trader avid for gain, so his actions—even the ultimate abandonment of pregnant Stellina—must be read in light of economic rationale. While the primitive Indian girl is tortured by useless remorse and nostalgia, the British merchant keeps his eyes firmly on the future. Would any modern investment banker have acted otherwise?

Cecilia Feilla’s introduction outlines a number of other interpretations for La Tribu indienne and places the novel in a rich literary tradition of sentimental exoticism. See our book review, forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Lucien Bonaparte, La Tribu indienne, ou, Edouard et Stellina, ed. Cecilia A. Feilla. London : Modern Humanities Research Assoc., 2006.