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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.

Some things never change

Couldn’t help but note this parallel from my reading for the day. First, from Edward Ross Dickinson’s Sex, Freedom, and Power in Imperial Germany, a description of late nineteenth and early twentieth century movement against “immorality” (meaning, in this time, everything from pulp cowboy novels to bars and cafés to erotica):

Ironically, of course, the agenda of the morality movement was not to cover up immorality again but rather to eradicate it, precisely by making it visible (40).

And then today, reading E. Tammy Kim’s article published today in The New Yorker, regarding the fight over book banning in rural Montana:

Cuthbertson called “Gender Queer” pornographic and inappropriate for children. She brought giant blowups of the illustrated panels, ironically putting this content in full view.

Ironic both cases may be, but also illustrative of a common strategy amongst those most devoted to supposedly eradicating so-called immorality from public view. Precisely because no one can agree on what constitutes immorality, evidence of it has to be constantly displayed, pointed to, examined, and denigrated in order to create some kind of common understanding of what is being othered as inappropriate. Fortunately, it’s precisely those practices that often serve other uses of the material. I haven’t read Gender Queer, but all the controversy around it has undoubtedly helped young queer people find it for themselves.

Book Announcement

It has been a long while since I’ve lasted posted, but I am excited to do so to announce my new book, an edited collection completed with Nina Kushner (Clark University), titled Histories of French Sexuality: Enlightenment to the Present. Chapters cover a wide range of thematic, temporal, and geographic ground all in the service of showing how centering sexuality might change our understanding of French history.

From the publisher:

Histories of French Sexuality contends that the history of sexuality is at a crossroads. Decades of scholarship have shown that sexuality is implicated in a wide range of topics, such as studies of reproduction, the body, sexual knowledge, gender identity, marriage, and sexual citizenship. These studies have broadened historical narratives and interpretations of areas such as urbanization, the family, work, class, empire, the military and war, and the nation. Yet while the field has evolved, not everyone has caught on, especially scholars of French history.

Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. This volume makes a set of historical arguments about the nature of the past and a larger historiographical claim about the value and place of the field of the history of sexuality within the broader discipline of history. The topics include early empire-building, religion, the Enlightenment, feminism, socialism, formation of the modern self, medicine, urbanization, decolonization, the social world of postwar France, and the rise of modern and social media.

Order now using code 6AS23 for a 40% discount from University of Nebraska Press!

My Pandemic Year in Film

With the essential end of non-Zoom socializing, I had originally thought that I’d play a lot more video games and read more novels. In the end, game playing was about even and I only read a few more novels than normal. What I really ended up doing was watching a ton of movies, both classic and contemporary, “serious” and for fun. Indeed, my best purchase when this all started was a subscription to the Criterion Channel. Now that we’re at the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, I thought I’d revisit what I’ve watched. Those films in bold are the ones I simulwatched (almost weekly now for an entire year), with my close friend, the art historian Jessica Fripp:

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My Moments

A sign announces that Brandon Scott’s office is closed due to the Coronavirus, Baltimore, MD, April 2020

I woke up this morning to an e-mail from Spot Hero “celebrating” my one year anniversary since joining their parking reservation service. Why had I decided to sign up a year ago? Because I was traveling to Philadelphia to give a talk to a class at the University of the Arts. I went, had a great time, and had no idea that it would be basically the last professional event I would attend in-person for over a year.

On Twitter and on Podcasts, people are talking about their “moment” when they realized that the novel coronavirus was going to be a profound event; that it was going to truly disrupt our lives. For me, the moment was a series of small decisions that were made within a growing sense of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I was regularly reading updates about the Coronavirus. The very day I left for Philly, the University of Washington announced it was evacuating campus. When I went to the store that weekend, I bought some extra stuff including, fortunately, some toilet paper. I knew that something was brewing.

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Archives and LGBTQ+ History

Exterior of the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris. Personal Photograph.

I’m trying to decide exactly how I feel about an ongoing debate occurring in France over the institutionalization of LGBTQ+ history through the establishment of a community archive along the lines of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. The Bay Area Register has a helpful overview in English of the debate. Essentially, The Collectif Archives LGBTQI wants to establish an archive in Paris dedicated to LGBTQ+ History. Presented with their plan, however, the French government has demanded that the archive be put under the control of the state National Archives rather than the Collective. In response, the Collective has argued that the state should be involved in supporting the archive but, considering its history of oppression and erasure, cannot be trusted to document and preserve the history of LGBTQ+ people in France.

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“Use of History” Assignment

I just revised my teaching page, simplifying it and adding some new resources. One of the assignments I included was a new one, which I called — for lack of a better name — a “Use of History” Essay. The assignment asked students in my introductory, general education Modern Europe survey to choose a news article or opinion piece from a mainstream magazine or newspaper and evaluate the ways it used history. I was impressed by the quality of the work even though I was concerned that I had not done enough to prepare them for the task. It’s relative success means that I might be on to something and with some greater scaffolding and revision have a nice way of introducing some more advanced concepts into this course.

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Let Students Drink

In the wake of rising Covid-19 cases, Baltimore City has once again closed indoor dining and bars. I feel terrible about how this act might affect those in the service industry, but ultimately it seems like it was inevitable considering the failure of the federal government to act and the impulse among individual states to reopen well before caseloads had declined to the extent they have in other places in the world. While they may be open again by the time the semester starts, I’m also thankful because it means that students won’t be congregating in bars around the city.

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Scenes from Baltimore

Some pictures from today’s big protest in Baltimore (a local news report and aerial views).

That’s me in the middle.

    Calling the Police

    1892 Letter from B. Rousseau to the Paris Police
    B. Rousseau to Commissaire de Police, August 29, 1892, “Bois de boulogne. Dossier général,” JC 82, formerly BM2 42, Archives de la Préfecture de Police.

    About a week ago, just as the protests and uprisings against police brutality began in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a woman named Amy Cooper called the police after being asked to put her dog on a leash by a Black birdwatcher named Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park. Prior to calling, Amy Cooper warned that she was “going to tell them [the police] there’s an African American man threatening my life.” As many others have noted, in doing so, Cooper deployed her white privilege to threaten the possibility of state violence in ways that resonated with the long history of white women pointing fingers at Black men who were then subjected to extrajudicial violence. The most famous case, of course, was the lynching of Emmett Till who was murdered in 1955 after a white woman named Carolyn Bryant claimed that he had whistled at her. Bryant recanted in 2017.

    I started thinking about this moment again as I continue to work through Josephine Butler’s Government by Police (1879). Butler connects the growth of police power in both Continental Europe and in the United Kingdom to the growth of moral policing, especially around the development of regulated prostitution. For Butler, then, the police posed both a general danger to liberal society and a particular danger to women. Butler’s feminism — at first — was thus organized around protecting women from the police, not calling on them in women’s defense.

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