Category: French History

Napoleon Lives

Napoleon’s Tomb, courtesy Musée de l’Armée

When I teach Napoleon Bonaparte in my introductory course (designed to introduce students to the practice of history through a case study, in my case the French Revolution), I emphasize the multiple ways one might view him. Simplifying greatly, I distinguish between “Napoleon as Statesman” (the Napoleon who produce the Civil Code and settled things with the Church) and “Napoleon as Conquerer” (the Napoleon who rampaged over Europe and reintroduced slavery in the French colonies). I make clear to my students which side I think is the most important and emphasize that by leaning on Napoleon’s violence and racism they are being given what is a more recent (and often more Anglo-American) interpretation of the man than had been current in the past and in France.

I was interested therefore to find myself talking with an acquaintance over the weekend who asked me what I did for a living. When I explained that I sometimes taught the French Revolution, he enthusiastically explained that Napoleon was his favorite historical figure and that he had a picture of him as his phone background. I (gently I hope) chided him by saying “you know he was bad, right?” To my surprise, I received a disquisition about the importance of the Civil Code and how Napoleon brought the Enlightenment to Europe. Clearly an educated guy, but also one immersed in a vision of Napoleon as a modernizing statesman rather than plundering barbarian. We wouldn’t expect someone to have a picture of General Lee or Andrew Jackson as their phone background.

I’ll be taking some students to Paris for a class on the French Revolution this summer and I always have to really push against this received view. The honorifics Napoleon continues to receive there (just look at his tomb) make this particularly difficult, but this conversation was just a useful reminder of how much work we have to do to revise the common misunderstanding of what this man did and how he did it.

“Sex in the Archives”

As one of the most read articles published in French Historical Studies last year, my recent article, “Sex in the Archives: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris,” is free to read until the end of the January, 2018. Of course, I’m always happy to provide it to anyone who asks!

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.

Images of Urban Space via Gallica

Although Google Books continues to improve as a research source, I continue to believe that the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s digital library, Gallica, is easier to search and use for those interested in French language sources.  The two most recent posts on the Gallica blog piqued my interest.  First up is a list of the fifty most-downloaded documents.  The list includes a number of notable names, but is otherwise most surprising for its eclecticism.  The second post introduces readers to a newly digitized collection of images documenting Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century.  I’ve only gone through a few pages of them, but they are too most notable for their very banality.  Here’s one example, not chosen at random:

34 quai de l
34 quai de l’hotel de Ville : [dessin] / JA Chauvet [Jules-Adolphe Chauvet]
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France

I came across this particular image by searching within the collection for the “Quai de l’hôtel de ville,” a street as the name implies that progresses along the river and forms one border of the Place de l’hôtel de ville.  This specific street has stuck with me since my archival research because it was one of the few locations noted by the police has being the site of bars and cafés catering to men who sought sex with other men during the 1880s and 1890s.  There is little in the image itself to suggest male-male eroticism, unless we stretch ourselves a bit and imagine that the two figures to the left are pressing together — certainly not an impossibility, however unlikely.

But I do get a bit of pleasure knowing that this kind of ordinary socializing was precisely what one would most likely have encountered had you entered one of the cafés whose clientele consisted of men who sought sex with other men.  The police frequently noted how the men who went to these locations utilized various techniques — playing cards was mentioned a couple times — to deflect away any accusation that their intensions were anything other than honest male sociability.  In other words, although there is nothing explicitly in the image to suggest that the men it depicts were anything but upstanding citizens, there’s also nothing to suggest that they necessarily were.  Some would perhaps argue that I’m seeking out ambiguity where there isn’t any.  I would respond by arguing that to understand the urban spaces of the late nineteenth century as anything but ambiguous is to fundamentally misconstrue the meaning of the transforming city.