French Revolution Archives

Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra (2017)

In Age of Anger: A History of the Present, acclaimed author and journalist Pankaj Mishra explores what he describes as the tremors of global change. For the past several decades, liberal cosmopolitanism provided a false sense of security after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, Mishra claims, world schisms have begun to manifest in increasingly overt displays of violence by state and non-state actors alike, leaving dubious possibilities for the coming years. In this accessible work of public history, Mishra traces a long arc of the rise of the Age of Anger from the Enlightenment to what he perceives as the precarious present.

The book was written and published as we watched the explosion of chaos in Syria and Iraq, the collapse of established and relatively balanced political and economic relationships, increases in terrorist activity in places such as Turkey, Kenya, and Nigeria, and increasing violence stemming from racial prejudices in France, Great Britain, and the United States. The rise of rancorous populism cracking its way through the foundations of traditional model democracies in the West, evidenced by the success of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and Brexit, leads Mishra to fear that the globe is on the precipice of world wide disaster.

“After a long, uneasy equipoise since 1945, the old west-dominated world order is giving way to an apparent global disorder.” This new disorderly Age of Anger ranges both from the destabilizing fury of history’s marginalized populations as well as the counterrevolutionary response that has mobilized hatred within mainstream political discourses. Unfortunately, Mishra offers little perspective on how the world may emerge from this predicament. For him, the tumultuous year that was 2016 is only the beginning.

The real value of this fairly pessimistic yet stimulating work is in Mishra’s analysis of how we arrived in the Age of Anger. Scholars in subaltern and imperial histories have argued for decades that the sheer arrogance of narratives of Western liberal progress have concealed the crumbling foundations of modernized globalization. Mishra offers an accessible and nuanced narrative of the emergence of popular rage from the European Enlightenment, through the advent of industrialization and imperialism, and the various alignments of the non-Western world within a Eurocentric global order during the twentieth century. From the upheavals of the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, he shows that the neatly packaged concept of liberal modernization mostly consists of a process of “carnage and bedlam.” Mishra argues that elites, unable to cope with the reality of modernization, take refuge in precipitating alienation: destruction of civil liberties, states of emergency, anti-Islamic movements, rhetoric purporting the global clash of civilizations, and the like. Though perhaps framed within too much of a polarized dichotomy, Mishra’s analysis reveals a massive schism between political and economic elites and the larger masses who have been directed into “cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality” as a result of being denied the promised advantages of modernity. The consequential tension leaves us on the threshold of a “global civil war.”

A Tea Party protest in 2009 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Mishra predicts that continuing economic stagnation will exacerbate the bitterness of these existing divisions. Many will react to literal displacement from their societies or social and political displacement as we have seen with the recent and rapid expansion of activities in United States immigration. The subsequent fear and rage will divide those who may resort to radical violence because they have nothing left to lose from those who will empower more radical elites who promise to tear down the existing system. However, for Mishra, this chaos is fully representative of the process of liberal modernization. Once you strip the implications of liberal modernization of its positive rhetoric, what remains is a cacophony of violence. Slavery, imperialism, and warfare have always been the dark underbelly of the liberal project.

While modernization has generated the context for this violence to take on truly global proportions for the first time, Mishra’s detailed history describes the development of these themes through earlier centuries. For example, Voltaire routinely emphasized the exemplary capacity of humanity to exercise free will, however, he actively encouraged Catherine the Great to coerce Poles and Turks into Enlightenment education under threat of violence. All the while, Catherine’s actions allowed him to make a fortune in the commercial investments of new markets that arose as a result of this coerced ideological diffusion. Mishra also alerts readers to the various thinkers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche who prefigured the growth of dissident populations and their inevitable role as destabilizers during the emergence of modernization, drawing interesting parallels to the role of Islam in the twentieth century.

The Ottoman capitulation in 1877 ended the Russo-Turkish War (via Wikimedia Commons).

By demonstrating the connection of ideas in Europe with the rest of the world, Mishra is able to draw heavily from Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, which encapsulates the innate hatred and envy fostered by groups who are positioned as inferior. For example, ressentiment could describe the attitude of the colonized under imperial regimes. Mishra claims that Muhammad Iqbal, an Islamic poet and religious reformist, and Lu Xun, an activist in China all pulled from Nietzsche’s ideas, while “Hitler revered Atatürk” and “Lenin and Gramsci were keen on Taylorism.” This mix of Enlightenment thought with global adaptations speaks to the paradoxical fusion of self-contempt instilled by liberal otherization with the rage that facilitates resistance to the same system. Indeed, as Mishra contends, leaders from all over the global south and east met imperialism by synchronizing with Western ideology in order to secure their independence from the West. This aspiration failed locking much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and various Marxist movements into liberal modernity. “The key to man’s behaviour lies not in any clash of opposed civilizations, but, on the contrary, in irresistible mimetic desire: the logic of fascination, emulation and righteous self-assertion that binds the rivals inseparably. It lies in ressentiment, the tormented mirror games in which the West as well as its ostensible enemies and indeed all inhabitants of the modern world are trapped.”

The Paris Commune stormed the Tuileries Palace in 1792 during the French Revolution (via Wikimedia Commons).

The ambitious project of Age of Anger is not without its faults, namely some oversights and generalizations. For one, Mishra does not consider social democracy or Marxism as the alternatives to neoliberal world systems that they perceive themselves to be. In other ways, his attempts to paint a larger history in broad strokes risks overgeneralizing some phenomena and exaggerating historical causality. Due to some of these flaws, proponents of liberalism may find his arguments unconvincing, but for those sympathetic to analysis of the darker sides of modernity, Mishra’s work should prove thought provoking while drawing attention to potential linkages in historical developments across multiple centuries in a way that brings arguments previously sequestered to academia into the public sphere.

Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

Also by Ben Weiss on Not Even Past:

My Alternative PhD in History.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert C. Allen (2009).
Violence: Six Sideways Perspectives, by Slavoj Žižek (2008).

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

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

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 18^th 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

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!

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

First image courtesy of Ronen Steinberg

Second and third image courtesy of metalonmetalblog

Video courtesy of youtube

Why is Anne Hathaway So Sad? The History Behind “Les Misérables” (2012)

By Julia M. Gossard

As a French historian, I was bombarded with questions from friends, family members, and even strangers about whether I was excited to see “Les Miz,” the film version of the wildly popular stage musical, which was released in December. For some reason, knowing that someone who studies French history is excited to see Les Misérables makes people want to see the film more. A film adaptation of a stage play is always a risky venture. A film adaptation of a stage play, that itself was a musical adaptation of a novel, especially such a well-known and prodigious novel like Victor Hugo’s 1862 Les Misérables, is even riskier. But after the opening weekend alone, the new Les Misérables is already considered a commercial success with an estimated $18.2 million in box office receipts and many favorable reviews. Overall, Les Misérables is an intense, moving, and beautiful film that will undoubtedly receive numerous award nominations in the next few months and I highly suggest that you add it to your holiday season watch list. But while the 2012 Les Misérables is a moving and entertaining film musical, it lacks historical context and may leave viewers scratching their heads about basic plot elements.

The film follows the life of paroled criminal, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) in his struggle for redemption, from 1815 to the June Rebellion of 1832. After breaking parole, Valjean is chased by Police Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) for nearly fifteen years. Under one of his assumed identities as a factory owner and mayor of Montreuil, Valjean meets Fantine (Anne Hathaway), his former factory worker and now a prostitute who is dying. Valjean promises Fantine that he will rescue her child, Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) from her life with a cruel innkeeper, Thénardier (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his wife, Madame Thénardier (Helena Bonham Carter), and raise Cosette as his own. Escaping from Javert twice, Valjean and Cosette move to Paris where Cosette falls in love with Marius (Eddie Redmayne), a French Republican and member of the “Friends of the ABC.” Marius, along with the leader of the “Friends of the ABC,” Enjolras (Aaron Tveit), plan a rebellion against Louis Philippe’s monarchy that will coincide with General Lamarque’s funeral. This rebellion, known as the June Rebellion of 1832, is chronicled in the last half of the film, with Marius, Valjean, and Javert all becoming involved.

Hooper’s decision to focus on the actors’ faces and upper bodies in lieu of wider shots that could establish the Parisian setting, was particularly striking in comparison to other musicals. When you attend a musical in a stage theater, you typically focus on the cast as a whole, their interactions with each other, and the setting, but rarely on the facial expressions of the actors since they are far away. By employing so many close-ups Hooper brings attention away from the setting, nineteenth-century Paris, and places it onto the individual characters. Shockingly, the only time the viewer may

really realize that Les Misérables is set in Paris is during Javert’s two solos when he teeters precariously on the ledge of the Palais de Justice in front of Notre Dame and later on a bridge high above the Seine. Even then, the viewer only sees a quick and blurred view of Paris at night. Since much of Victor Hugo’s original novel, Les Misérables, describes the deteriorating living conditions of the poor in the increasingly industrial and dirty Paris, this was rather disappointing. I would have preferred to see Paris as a character itself, as it is in the novel, instead of the out-of-focus background that Hooper created.

This is not the sole fault of the current filmmakers as there is little historical context in the original musical composed by Alan Boubliland and Claude-Michel Schönberg for the stage in 1980. Instead of focusing on republicanism, the failures of the 1789 Revolution, antimonarchism, the increased suffering and austerity of the poor, the changing nature and architecture of nineteenth-century Paris, and issues pertaining to religion that were fixtures in Hugo’s Les Misérables, Boubliland and Schönberg chose to concentrate on Hugo’s more romantic themes of individual redemption and simplified ideas of social justice as they are more easily expressed in emotionally powerful songs. By continuing to have these themes drive the plot of the movie, Hooper and William Nicholson, the main screenwriter who adapted the musical for film, overlook Hugo’s sharp political criticism and even the reasons why particular characters were so angry and so opposed to monarchy. Although many viewers are likely to be satisfied with the romantic plot and the great songs, many, especially those unfamiliar with the historical context, are undoubtedly perplexed. Throughout the nearly three-hour film, my dad nudged me and whispered, “Why is Cosette living with the Borat guy (Thénardier played by Sacha Baron Cohen) and his wife? Why are the boys mad? Who’s General Lamarque? Why does it matter that he died? Who’s Louis Philippe? Is this in Paris? When is this?” In fact, exiting the movie theater I overheard a woman asking her friend, “So that was the French Revolution and it was unsuccessful?”

This woman’s question pointed out a common misconception about Les Misérables: that it is set against the backdrop of what historians call the French Revolution which began in 1789. That revolution lasted until 1799 and at first overthrew Louis XVI’s absolutist monarchy in favor of a constitutional monarchy and later, after Louis XVI’s execution in 1793, created a republic, or a democratically elected

government without a monarch. But the 1789 revolution is not the backdrop for Les Misérables. Instead, Hugo’s novel and the musical take place during The Bourbon Restoration (1815-1830) and the very beginning of the July Monarchy (1830-1848). Although Hooper includes a quick five-second text at the beginning of the film that reads, “1815, twenty-six years after the Revolution there is once again a French king on the throne,” few understand the implied, complicated historical context these words are supposed to provide.

Unless you just took a course on French history, you might not remember that 1815 marked the end of the First French Empire. Following his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo and his subsequent exile to St. Helena, in 1815 Napoleon abdicated as Emperor. From 1815 until 1848, France was ruled by a monarchy, but unlike the earlier absolutist French monarchy, often referred to as the “Ancien Régime,” the Restoration was a constitutional monarchy that began with Louis XVIII who was later succeeded by Charles X. Under the Charter of 1814, a constitutional monarchy meant that even though the king still held considerable power over policy-making, his legal decrees had to be passed and legitimated by Parliament before they went into effect. But in 1830, Charles X tried to amend the Charter of 1814 to restrict the press and create a more absolutist form of government. Unhappy with this attack on their rights, many Parisians mobilized in July 1830 and forced Charles X to abdicate his throne in what became known as the July Revolution, or the Trois Glorieuses in French, referring to the three days of the uprising. The July Revolution is only glossed over in the novel and not addressed in the musical though it impacted the future June Rebellion of 1832 which is showcased in Les Misérables.

Louis Philippe succeeded Charles X and was initially very popular. But, like constitutional monarchs before him, he became more conservative, wanting to increase monarchical power. Working and living conditions of the poor rapidly deteriorated under Louis Philippe and the income gap between the working classes and the bourgeoisie widened considerably, resulting in increased opposition, antimonarchism, and civil unrest. One of the leading members of the opposition was Jean Maximilien Lamarque, referred to in the novel and the musical as “General Lamarque.” Once an enthusiastic supporter of Louis Philippe, Lamarque quickly became one of his biggest opponents, insisting that Louis Philippe’s form of constitutional monarchy was an affront to civil rights and political liberty. In the novel, General Lamarque is portrayed as a champion of the poor, working classes. Although this is implied in the film, his role beyond being a supporter of the poor is left unexplained, leading many to wonder why his death was the catalyst to the unsuccessful June Rebellion led by Enjolras, Marius, and other “Friends of the ABC.” Led by Parisian Republicans, most of whom were schoolboys, who wished to incite another rebellion like that of July 1830 and dissolve the monarchy, the June Rebellion was defeated and resulted in an estimated 800 casualties in Paris. Despite Enjolras mentioning that the “other barricades have fallen,” in the film we do not get a sense of just how many other barricades there were or how many other people were involved in the uprising. Only about twenty men are shown with Enjolras and Marius in the film, leading the viewer to believe that this was nothing more than an attempt by a handful of schoolboys to overthrow the government, when in actuality it was a somewhat larger movement than suggested. Their motivations for wanting to overthrow the government are only superficially explained with the song “Do You Hear the People Sing?” Although a sort of battle cry in the film, the song does not actually explain why these men, French Republicans, were opposed the constitutional monarchy.

Victor Hugo, himself, was originally a royalist and a member of Louis Philippe’s government, but became discontent with the monarchy. In the 1830s he supported republicanism that favored a constitutional form of government with more freedom of the press, increased self-government, and a fairer justice system. When the Revolution in 1848 brought an end to monarchy and created another new French republic, Hugo was elected to the Constitutional Assembly and the Legislative Assembly, taking an active role in the elected, republican government. However, this Second Republic was short lived. Napoleon III, originally elected as President of the Second Republic in 1848, took power as a monarchical ruler in 1851 and declared himself Emperor in 1852. Following this, Hugo publically declared Napoleon III a traitor and was exiled to Guernesy. It was here, during his exile, that Hugo wrote Les Misérables in the 1850s and early 1860s. Therefore, Les Misérables was not only intended as a political criticism of Louis Philippe’s reign in the 1830s and 1840s, but also of Napoleon III’s rule over France in the 1850s. Hugo hoped that Les Misérables would reveal the social injustices that occurred under any monarchical or imperial rule, spurring support for the French Republic. By focusing on the death and suffering of the poor and the revolutionaries, Hugo also made sure to explain that more freedom would come with a price and attempts to overthrow a government would sometimes be unsuccessful, but were worth fighting for.

The musical not only omitted Hugo’s scathing political criticism of Louis Philippe, and Napoleon III, but also the anticlerical sentiments espoused in Hugo’s novel. With the reestablishment of the monarchy in 1815, the Roman Catholic Church once again became a powerful force in French politics and society. Hugo displays the importance of the Catholic Church to French society during this period by emphasizing the importance of Bishop Myriel to his community and by staging numerous scenes in convents and other religious houses. However, his inclusion of these characters and

scenes is not to be confused with praise. As he became increasingly opposed to monarchy, Hugo also became increasingly opposed to the Church. Despite being raised as a Catholic and remaining a believer (the last line of his will reads “Je crois en Dieu” or “I believe in God”), he found little use for organized religion and often viewed the Church as responsible for increasing the suffering of the poor thanks to its reduction in public services and what he saw as a general apathy of the people. But, based on the musical and the film, one might conclude that Hugo was a strong supporter and admirer of the Catholic Church.

Another issue that could have been better addressed in the film was the peculiar living situation of Fantine and Cosette. We learn early on that Fantine, who initially is working at Valjean’s factory, has an illegitimate daughter who she sent to live with an innkeeper, Thénardier, and his wife. After seeing the film, both my dad and one of my friends asked me, “Why in the world would Fantine send her daughter to live with an innkeeper and pay for it if Cosette works for them?” Sending children, especially girls, to live and work in other households was a rather common practice throughout this era. Similar to indentured servitude, young girls were employed as domestic servants in households throughout Europe. Paid at the end of their terms, these domestic servants were usually allowed to live in the household in provided quarters and, under coverture laws, were legally dependent upon the head of the household they lived in. For many single mothers like Fantine who could probably not afford to care for Cosette completely, let alone watch her during the day, sending a child away to work and live would have been a difficult, yet necessary decision.

Les Misérables is a musical masterpiece and a thoroughly enjoyable movie-going experience, even without the historical context. However, if you are distracted by lingering contextual questions, I suggest that you browse the Wikipedia page on Les Misérables (the novel) before you see the film. This article will provide you with a brief synopsis of the plot, the characters, and enough historical context so you do not feel lost. And maybe forward that information to your friends and family beforehand so you aren’t the one being nudged every few minutes for answers to historical questions.

Photo Credits:

An 1886 engraving of the Les Misérables character “Cosette” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Louis Philippe I, the King of France from 1830 to 1848 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Painting of the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

1849 caricature of Victor Hugo (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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