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Not Even Past

Panel: “1968: A Year of Upheaval in Global Perspective”

Why has the 50th anniversary of a year generated so much interest just now? The year was 1968, and it witnessed an extraordinary outburst of protest and upheaval – one that transcended international borders. While the protests were triggered by diverse events and conditions, they seemed linked by more general aims of combatting institutionalized injustice and government abuse. This panel will examine the specific background and dynamics of 1968 movements in France, Mexico, and the United States (including Austin, Texas). At the same time, it will ask why these movements surfaced at this particular juncture, across much of the globe.

Matthew Butler
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Judith G. Coffin
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Laurie B. Green
Associate Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin

Leonard N. Moore
Vice President of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (Interim)
George Littlefield Professor of American History
University of Texas at Austin

Jeremi Suri, moderator
Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs
University of Texas at Austin


The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity, by Kolleen M. Guy (2010)

By Cali Slair

Guy Book CoverSince the twentieth century champagne has widely been seen as inherently French both in France and abroad. In When Champagne Became French, Kolleen M. Guy takes a close look at how this regional sparkling wine came to represent French national identity. Guy not only shares the history of the champagne industry, focusing on the years 1820-1920, but also details the organic qualities of the Champagne region that are believed to contribute directly to the quality of champagne.

In contrast to its signature feature, the story of how this wine became a protected product by the French government is far from sparkling. When Champagne Became French is a story of internal and external conflict. Guy details conflicts between wine-merchants and vineyard owners and workers over the qualities that determined champagne’s authenticity: regional traits or the brand names and processes that were unique to the wine-merchants. In 1911, riots broke out among vineyard owners and vineyard workers in the Champagne region over the lack of formal boundaries marking the areas that contained grapes that could be used in wines labelled and marketed as champagne. Class-based antagonism between wine-merchants and vineyard workers also contributed significantly to the escalation of this conflict. In addition, the success of the French champagne industry was threatened by foreign makers of sparkling wine who tried to sell their wine as “champagne.”

A burned Champagne House after the 1911 riots.

A burned Champagne House after the 1911 riots.

What makes the story of When Champagne Became French historically compelling is Guy’s detailed account of how champagne came to be known as French and how the French saw champagne as representative of their glory and sophistication. French wine-makers presented the protection of the name champagne and the importance of the Champagne region to champagne making as a national issue. One thing on which the wine-merchants and wine-makers could agree was that the French champagne industry needed the French government’s protection to combat foreign or fraudulent champagne. In this way, protecting the elite status and authenticity of champagne that came from the Champagne region became linked with protecting French national interests.

French troops mobilized to respond to the revolt of winemakers in Champagne.

French troops mobilized to respond to the revolt of winemakers in Champagne.

Edwardian English advert for the French Champagne, listing its honours and its many royal drinkers

Edwardian English advert for French Champagne, listing its honours and its many royal drinkers

In telling the story of how champagne came to be associated with French identity Guy discusses various marketing techniques used in the Champagne industry from 1789-1914 which explain how champagne came to be associated with luxury and celebration. She also examines the concept of terroir, the organic properties of the vineyard, that together with the individuality and dedication of the wine-maker, combine to make a region’s grapes unique. She shows how the campaign for champagne set a precedent for associating region, product, and nation in France. After champagne became French so did many other regional products such as brie cheese and bordeaux wine.

When Champagne Became French is not just a great history book; its discussion of wine-making and the wine-industry will impress wine connoisseurs. In fact, it did just that. When Champagne Became French received the 2004 Champagne Veuve Clicquot Wine Book Prize and the 2003 Gourmand International World Book Awards prize for “Best Wine History Book.” This story of the journey of champagne from a regional wine to a national product indicative of modern French identity at home and abroad makes When Champagne Became French an interesting book for all readers.

Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)

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On French History you may also like:

Ronen Steinberg on Ghosts and the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror

Pierre Minault’s First World War Diary

 

Other commodity histories:

Elizabeth O’Brien reviews The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil, by Thomas D. Rogers

Maria José Afanador-Llach recommends Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires, by Kris Lane (2010)

 

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All images courtesy of Wikipedia

 

Ghosts and the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror

By Ronen Steinberg

Can ghosts teach us anything about the Reign of Terror? The Reign of Terror (1793-4) was an event of mass violence in the middle of the French Revolution. Tens of thousands of people were executed and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned. I study the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. I am interested in how the people who had lived through this event struggled to come to terms with it.

In the course of my research, I came across a strange document, a pamphlet containing an exchange of letters between the living and the dead.

Correspondance des vivants et des morts

Correspondance des vivants et des morts

The pamphlet was published anonymously in 1795 and went through several editions. It tells the story of a correspondence between two friends who had been in prison together during the Reign of Terror. In prison, they had promised each other that, should they to survive, they would devote their lives to persecuting those who arrested them and to telling the world about their misfortune. One of them survived, but the other was guillotined. One day, about a year after the end of the Terror, the friend who had been killed appeared in the dream of the survivor. He said that although he was dead, he was still intent on keeping the promise that they had made to each other in prison. When the friend awoke from his sleep, he found strange sheets of paper on his desk. What made them strange is that the writing on them appeared to be mobile, quivering, as if the lines on the page were alive. It turns out that these were letters sent from the netherworld. The two friends embarked on a correspondence between the living and the dead, in which they discussed politics, the events of the French Revolution, and also gossiped about celebrities.

So what should we make of this strange story? Well, ghosts are interesting because they embody a past that has not passed. Normally we think of time in a linear fashion: past – present – future. Ghosts disrupt this linear sense of time. They are the return of what should have been gone forever. This is captured very well in the French term for ghosts, revenants, meaning those who have come back. I think that’s what makes them so scary and also fascinating.

One doesn’t need to believe in ghosts to see that this document teaches us something valuable about the period: it shows us how those who had lived through the Terror expressed the notion that they were haunted (literally!) by the terrible events they experienced. Ghosts gave them a way to talk about a difficult past, a past that continued to reverberate in the present.

Image depicting Étienne-Gaspard Robert's Phantasmagoria show

Image depicting Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s Phantasmagoria show

This popular pamphlet was not the only appearance of ghosts in the immediate aftermath of the Reign of Terror. In 1797, three years after the Terror, a man of science by the name of Étienne-Gaspard Robert invented a machine for the projection of moving images, which he called the phantasmagoria. The word is composed of the Greek fantasma, meaning ghost, and agora, the public meeting place in the city-states of ancient Greece. So the word phantasmagoria means something like a gathering of specters. The shows of the phantasmagoria consisted in the projection of images of ghosts rising from the dead, usually to the accompaniment of the eerie sounds of the glass harmonica, a musical instrument that was invented by Benjamin Franklin and that was thought to have curious effects on the nerves of listeners.

French artist Thomas Bloch, exhibiting the glass harmonica in the Paris Music Museum, Nov. 29, 2007.

 

In short, the phantasmagoria was a kind of 18th century horror show that appeared in Paris immediately after the Terror. Indeed, many of the images that Robert created for the show were of victims of the Terror or other celebrated figures from the French Revolution. Eventually, the police shut down the shows because it found them to be seditious. So in this case, ghosts were used in order to talk about a past that was politically delicate, perhaps even forbidden to talk about.

Image depicting Étienne-Gaspard Robert's Phantasmagoria show

Image depicting Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s Phantasmagoria show

To go back to the exchange of letters between the living and the dead, the most telling detail in that text has to do not with ghosts themselves but with the way they communicated with the living. In the story, one could only read the letters of the dead if one stood at a certain distance from them. The narrator in the pamphlet tells us that if he got too close to the letters, “the magical script started moving before my eyes and became opaque… If I wanted to grab the papers in my hand, the entire script disappeared at my profane touch, and would only reappear once I placed myself at a respectful distance.” [Correspondance des vivans et des morts, 4-5]

This is an interesting detail because it is counter-intuitive. For most of us, I think, the closer we are to a text, the easier it is to read it. But here, proximity makes the text unintelligible and distance makes it legible. I interpret this detail in the following way: the letters of the dead are bearers of traumatic knowledge. This is impossible knowledge, which cannot be grasped when one is too close to the events at hand. This knowledge only becomes accessible from a distance, the distance of time rather than of space.

So ghosts give us access to the manner in which men and women in the late eighteenth century processed difficult pasts, pasts marked by brutality and massive repression. It turns out that they have a lot to teach us about the Reign of Terror. Bwahahahaha!

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For more on ghosts in early modern France see Julie Hardwick on the Early Modern French Family

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First image courtesy of Ronen Steinberg

Second and third image courtesy of metalonmetalblog

Video courtesy of youtube

 

Life and Nothing But (1989)

by Judy Coffin

French historians love this film.  It’s hard to convey the horrors of what was long called The Great War: the almost unimaginable losses at battles like Verdun and the Somme; the mobilization of whole economies, states, and societies to supply those battles and to replenish the men and material afterwards; the stench of rotting corpses (human and animal) in the trenches; and the grinding boredom of trench life – interrupted by terrifying bombardment or the dreaded command to go “over the top,” through the mud, barbed wire, and, further on, the machine gunners on the enemy side. Life and nothing butStanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (with Kurt Douglas, 1957) captures some of the view from the trenches. So does PBS’s multi-disc documentary: The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century.  Not surprisingly, though, the most popular films about World War I – like the brilliant Lawrence of Arabia  — are set far from the un-cinematic slog of the western front. Life and Nothing But is set on the front, but after the war, where the French are trying both to tally their losses and commemorate their victory. Both projects are heartbreaking and, in some important sense, impossible. That’s the point, and the film captures one of the tragedies of war and a more specific tragedy of twentieth-century French history.

Philippe Noiret plays French Major Delaplane, charged with trying to discover the fates of the over 300,000 French soldiers missing at the end of the war. Most of them were dead, it would turn out. 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, out of 8.4 mobilized. Delaplane presides over a ramshackle, improvised office filled with clerks compiling lists of the dead and descriptions of the missing. In the psychiatric hospital next door, teams of doctors work with soldiers whose minds have been destroyed: trying to get them to walk, to speak, or to recover bits of memory that might help to identify them. In the surrounding countryside, crews dig in a tunnel that had been mined by the Germans, destroying a Red Cross train and the wounded it was carrying. On designated days families of the missing are permitted on site, and they comb through long tables of rings, watches, and occasionally photographs searching for bits and pieces of their loved ones’ lives.

Into this melancholy scene come two women. Irène de Courtil, (Sabina Azena) wealthy and beautiful, is looking for her missing husband and the much younger, middle-class Alice (Pascale Vignal) searching for her fiancé, whom she met while he was a soldier. Alice had taught school during the war, but then had to give up her post to a veteran returning from the front. (This is a nicely understated rendering of the government’s policy after World War I.) She now is working in a café in the area near Delaplane’s project, hoping for news.

No spoilers here, and the plot matters! But you will find love, of course, and deception, class resentments, and cynicism (softened by love). It’s not grim, but haunting. It’s hardly an action film –- I don’t want you to be disappointed — but then World War I was not usually an action war. It’s about a country whose past is mined, literally and figuratively, but which is compelled to return to that past. It’s about memory, a subject that has fascinated historians for decades now. It’s smart about commemoration: Tavernier makes us ask what the French state wants to commemorate and how, what the families want to remember, and what Delaplane, Irène, and Alice, respectively, are looking for. It’s acerbic about the politics of commemoration too. Delaplane has to produce a body for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “Ah non,” the government’s representative says refusing one of the bodies that the major offers him: “certainly not a black!” Why not? Roughly half a million troops from France’s colonies fought in the war.

France’s victory cost more than the country could pay. Reparations would prove a dangerous illusion. We know this, and we know what happened in a few decades later. But this film doesn’t preach or offer general lessons: it looks closely at a grieving culture, trying to gather up the pieces and move on – to what we now know will be another war.

More great French war films:
François Truffaut, The Last Metro

Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity

Marcel Ophuls, Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie

Jean-Pierre Melville, Army of Shadows

Joseph Losey, Mr. Klein

Louis Malle, Au Revoir les Enfants

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