Keelin McDonell: France's History of Violence
[Keelin McDonell is a reporter-researcher at TNR.]
In the spring of 2003, as the Iraq war got underway, I spent many hours learning about violence in a creaky lecture hall at the Sorbonne. It was a sensitive time to be an American in Paris. "La guerre" had made the city's formerly convivial atmosphere heavy and indignant, and I expected my new class--"Shattered Texts," a literature course about the effects of destruction on people and cultures--to be mired in contemporary despair and maybe even hostility. To my surprise, the news of the day was of little analogical interest to my professor. She assigned texts--short stories, novels, film scripts, articles--that chronicled riots and uprisings and protests. Wars raged on the periphery of our reading, but the focus remained on the little insurrections of urban life. Paris, Rome, Johannesburg, Algiers--the battles were in the cities. And it was with a distinctly aesthetic savor that the violence in these works was discussed. Much admiration--and very little compunction--was expressed over the razing of buildings and the toppling of monuments and even the threatening of the second lieutenant's wife. Yes, I remember one student saying, the author has done a good job describing the way the windows broke. But he might have done something more beautiful by throwing rocks himself.
The recent images out of France's suburbs have returned those Sorbonne lessons to the forefront of my mind. Different rocks, different windows. But violence, and particularly violence as an expression of rebellion, occupies such a distinct place in the French aesthetic that this month's riots can hardly be called anything but, well, French. In France, violence is not merely romanticized--as it is in many cultures, not least ours--it is intellectualized as a legitimate manifestation of philosophical belief. This is linked strongly, of course, to the revolution and to the guillotine, one of the most macabre symbols of freedom ever conceived. But its roots are deeper still, dating back to the Parisian student revolts of 1229, which ended with the young scholars freed from papal law; to Nicolas Poussin's terrifyingly vivid canvasses of the mid-1600s; to Jean Racine's reworking of Greek horrors for the French stage; to the gruesome exposures of the Grand Guignol. In the twentieth century, it was Jean-Paul Sartre who made the tradition modern. Violence, he wrote, is "the beginning of humanity." He does not seem to have mentioned what the end is.
Those rioting these past weeks did not seem to know what the end was, either, but their actions were new iterations of an old tradition. "La poesie est dans la rue." Poetry is in the streets, or so cried the Sorbonne students who, in May of 1968, took to the avenues of the Quartier Latin to overturn trash cans and burn cars after administrators shut down their university....
Read entire article at New Republic
In the spring of 2003, as the Iraq war got underway, I spent many hours learning about violence in a creaky lecture hall at the Sorbonne. It was a sensitive time to be an American in Paris. "La guerre" had made the city's formerly convivial atmosphere heavy and indignant, and I expected my new class--"Shattered Texts," a literature course about the effects of destruction on people and cultures--to be mired in contemporary despair and maybe even hostility. To my surprise, the news of the day was of little analogical interest to my professor. She assigned texts--short stories, novels, film scripts, articles--that chronicled riots and uprisings and protests. Wars raged on the periphery of our reading, but the focus remained on the little insurrections of urban life. Paris, Rome, Johannesburg, Algiers--the battles were in the cities. And it was with a distinctly aesthetic savor that the violence in these works was discussed. Much admiration--and very little compunction--was expressed over the razing of buildings and the toppling of monuments and even the threatening of the second lieutenant's wife. Yes, I remember one student saying, the author has done a good job describing the way the windows broke. But he might have done something more beautiful by throwing rocks himself.
The recent images out of France's suburbs have returned those Sorbonne lessons to the forefront of my mind. Different rocks, different windows. But violence, and particularly violence as an expression of rebellion, occupies such a distinct place in the French aesthetic that this month's riots can hardly be called anything but, well, French. In France, violence is not merely romanticized--as it is in many cultures, not least ours--it is intellectualized as a legitimate manifestation of philosophical belief. This is linked strongly, of course, to the revolution and to the guillotine, one of the most macabre symbols of freedom ever conceived. But its roots are deeper still, dating back to the Parisian student revolts of 1229, which ended with the young scholars freed from papal law; to Nicolas Poussin's terrifyingly vivid canvasses of the mid-1600s; to Jean Racine's reworking of Greek horrors for the French stage; to the gruesome exposures of the Grand Guignol. In the twentieth century, it was Jean-Paul Sartre who made the tradition modern. Violence, he wrote, is "the beginning of humanity." He does not seem to have mentioned what the end is.
Those rioting these past weeks did not seem to know what the end was, either, but their actions were new iterations of an old tradition. "La poesie est dans la rue." Poetry is in the streets, or so cried the Sorbonne students who, in May of 1968, took to the avenues of the Quartier Latin to overturn trash cans and burn cars after administrators shut down their university....