Month: January 2013

Les Misérables

Charles Walton’s review of the new film version of Les Misérables echoes my own disappointment with it:

Victor Hugo was no Karl Marx, but he did believe in progress through revolution — a fact that viewres of Tom Hooper’s new film Les Misérables, would never guess.  Adapted from the immensely popular musical version of Hugo’s classic (first performed in Paris in 1980), Hooper’s cinematic rendering is stunningly staged and brilliantly performed, but it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one.  It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence.

I think this may actually give the film a bit too much credit. Sitting in the theater with a group of students, I couldn’t help think what a missed opportunity the film was as I considered another recent book adaptation: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.  In a way, the two mirror one another.  While the original version of The Hobbit is a plot-driven children’s novel of about two-hundred pages, the film, once complete, will be an epic exposition of an entire mythology over the course of about six hours.  The original version of Les Misérables, on the other hand, is a 1,500 page meandering rumination on the relationship between progress and revolution (among other things), while the film is a two and a half hour love story that overshadows, rather than works through, its major social themes.  Indeed, while the film puts on display the social miseries of early nineteenth-century France, it only does so in order to maneuver the audience back to the individual characters as exemplary, rather than normative, representations of those problems. Social discontent propels individual characters towards their various ends — for better or worse — but fails to justify, or even represent, the revolutionary impulse as a social phenomenon.

In Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, we get the themes without the crisp plot, in Les Miserables we get the plot without the themes.

The French Intervention in Mali in Context

Historian of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century France, David Bell, puts the French intervention in Mali into its historical and contemporary political contexts:

It remains to be seen whether France’s military intervention in Mali will be considered a military success, but it already seems possible to count it a political one. The war has earned support from across the French political spectrum, President François Hollande has garnered acclaim for his leadership, and the French public broadly supports the country’s stated humanitarian mission. The intervention recalls the days when “la grande nation” laid claim to an ambitious international role, particularly within its former colonial empire.

But in today’s France, this portrait of unity and resolve is actually something of an aberration. Far from expressing a confident sense of mission, the French public has recently been more inclined to a sense of decline, malaise, paralysis and crisis. And it is at least partially justified.

Via Arthur Goldhammer.

New Courses

I’m rapidly gearing up for another semester and have prepped new versions of my syllabi for survey courses on Modern Europe and Modern France, as well as a new course on “Sex and the City.” The new sites for these courses have just been put up and can be accessed under “Teaching” above. These websites will remain mostly static. Although I am trying out some new kinds of assignments this semester, I am not having students in these courses use digital tools as I have in the past, primarily because doing so requires a level of individual attention and constant grading not amenable to a semester where I’m teaching three survey courses. Once I’m back to seminars, I plan on trying out new things with blogs and wikipedia especially. In any case, I hope the materials I make available through these websites will be useful to other students and instructors.