Paris as a Stage for Revolution
CL351
Course Description
Did pamphlets and plays cause the French Revolution? Were newspapers responsible for the revolutions of 1830 and 1848? Could novels have set Paris up as a stage for revolutions throughout the nineteenth century? Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir was presented as an account of 1830, a year in which newspapers started a revolution. Eugène Sue’s Mysteres de Paris and its stage adaptation were accused of bringing about the Revolution of 1848, and Flaubert claimed that a better understanding of l’Éducation sentimentale might have prevented the Franco-Prussian War. We will evaluate such claims in the light of nineteenth-century debates over the power of fiction, paying particular attention to concerns about censorship and the commercialization of literature. Taking as a starting point the historiographical debates surrounding what Roger Chartier has called the “Cultural Origins of the French Revolution”, we will read samples of both popular and more consecrated literature along with recent criticism which explores the social impact of different modes of writing. We will also visit theaters and go to the Archives nationales to see what censors’ reports reveal about the limits of political tolerance for theatrical productions. As we study works of melodrama and realism, polemics and publicity, we will see how Paris itself was imagined as a setting for revolution.
Readings
The French Revolution, The Essential Readings, ed. Ronald Schechter
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. Panorama of Paris: selections from Le tableau de Paris
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Sue, The Mysteries of Paris
Hugo, The King Amuses Himself
Flaubert, Sentimental Education
Weeks 1-3 Historiography, Literature and Revolution
1) Darnton, The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (in Schechter)
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. trans. Jeremy D. Popkin, Helen Simpson Panorama of Paris: selections from Le tableau de Paris
2) Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (in Schechter)
Diderot Entretiens sur le Fils naturel
Rousseau Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur le théâtre
Helen Maria Williams Letters Written in France
3) Some combination of Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution
Burke- Reflections on the Revolution in France
Paine- The Rights of Man
Larkin, Edward, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution
Week 4 Law and theater
Maza, Sarah. Private Lives and Public Affairs
Fischer Taylor, Katharine. In the Theater of Criminal Justice
Selections from Foucault
Weeks 5-6 Theater to novel/History and the novel 1
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Samuels, Maurice. The Spectacular Past
(Stendhal. “La Comédie est impossible en 1836.”)
Week 7-8 French Revolution’s uses in England
Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Week 9 The popular novel in France, types, caricatures
Sue, The Mysteries of Paris- selections
Macaire/ Daumier
Terdiman Discourse/Counter-discourse
Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”
Weeks 10
Theater and Censorship, Hugo as prophet/Hugo’s Evolution
Hugo, The King Amuses Himself
(Krakovitch, Hugo Censuré!)
(Felix Pyat, The Rag-Picker of Paris
and/or Vautrin, and/or stage adaptation of Les Mystères de Paris )
Weeks 11-12 History and the Novel 2
Flaubert, Sentimental Education
Benjamin, selections from The Arcades project
selections from Baudelaire
Week 13
Vallès, The Insurrectionist, Selections from Sévérine, Zola
Bibliography
Bennett, Benjamin. All Theater is Revolutionary Theater. London: Cornell UP, 2005.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York London: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Ed. Richard Maxwell. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Paris as Revolution Writing the Nineteenth-Century City. London: University of California Press, 1994.
Flaubert, Gustave. Sentimental Education. Trans. Robert Baldick. Ed. Geoffrey Wall. Paris: Penguin Classics, 2004.
Friedland, Paul. Political Actors, Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 2003.
Guizot, François. “Étude sur Shakspeare.” Oeuvres complètes de Shakspeare. trad. de M. Guizot. Vol. 1. Paris: Didier, 1862-1864.
Hobsbawm, Eric John. Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution. Mason Welch Gross Lecture Series. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1990.
Hollier, Denis. A New History of French Literature. London: Harvard UP, 1989.
Hugo, Victor. Three Plays by Victor Hugo, Hernani, The King Amuses Himself, Ruy Blas. New York: Washington Square Press, 1964.
Krakovitch, Odile. Hugo Censuré! Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1985.
Kroen, Sheryl. Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815-1830. Studies on the History of Society and Culture. London: University of California Press, 2000.
Larkin, Edward. Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Lyon-Caen, Judith. La Lecture et la vie les usages du roman au temps de Balzac. Paris: Tallandier, 2006.
Maslan, Susan. Revolutionary Acts, Theater, Democracy and the French Revolution. Parallax, Re-visions of Culture and Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
Matlock, Jann. Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Maza, Sarah. Private Lives and Public Affairs, The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France. Studies on the History of Society and Culture. Vol. 18. London: University of California Press, 1993.
Mercier, Louis-Sebastien. Panorama of Paris: Selections from le Tableau de Paris [Abridged]. Trans. Helen Simpson. Ed. Jeremy Popkin. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1999.
Nesci, Catherine. Le Flâneur et les flâneuses les femmes et la ville à l’époque romantique. Bibliothèque stendhalienne et romantique. Grenoble: ELLUG, Université Stendhal, 2007.
Popkin, Jeremy. Press, Revolution , and Social Identities in France, 1830-1835. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2002.
Prendergast, Christopher. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Writing the City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009.
Reddy, William M. The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848. London: University of California Press, 1997.
Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le Moment Guizot. Bibliothèque des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1985.
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin. “De la littérature industrielle.” Pour la critique. Ed. Annie Prassoloff et José-Louis Diaz. folio essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.
Samuels, Maurice. The Spectacular Past, Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell UP, 2004.
Schechter, Ronald, ed. The French Revolution, the Essential Readings. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Stendhal. “La Comédie est impossible en 1836.” Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Victor Del Litto et Ernest Abravanel. Genève: Cercle du bibliophile, 1972. 265-78.
—. The Red and the Black. Trans. Catherine Slater. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
Sue, Eugène and Prosper Dinaux. The Mysteries of Paris: A Play in Five Acts. Trans. Frank J. Morlock. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 2009.
Taylor, Katherine Fischer. In the Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Jusitce in Second Empire Paris. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.
Terdiman, Richard. Discourse-Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. London: Cornell UP, 1985.
Vallès, Jules. The Insurrectionist. Trans. Sandy Petrey. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 19721.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Written in France. Calgary: Broadview Press, 2001.
