Month: April 2023

“Fuck you Richard Corcoran”

Nothing like ruining a few people’s careers and destroying a highly respected institution to score some cheap political points, I guess. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The issue eliciting the strongest protest was whether five professors who had already cleared the usual hurdles to achieve tenure would be approved by the board — what is normally a perfunctory step. But the college’s interim president, Richard Corcoran, had let it be known that he didn’t want those tenure cases to be approved, citing general upheaval at the college and its new direction. The board acceded to Corcoran’s wishes, voting down the professors one by one, each by a count of six votes to four, before adjourning to chants of “shame on you” from those assembled.

Ron Desantis is a fascist. Control of educational systems is key to the project as much as the bringing into line of private industry.

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!