A Word from the Editor

The reviews in this issue revolve around the themes of crimes and misbehaviours, of gender and victimhood.

David Bell reviews Roman Polanski’s J’Accuse [An Officer and a Spy], a film about Colonel Picquart’s engagement with the Dreyfus Affair, determined as he was to find the real culprit. The film, however, neglects the role of the family in the process and gives an image of Dreyfus that has more to do with Polanski’s obsessions than with the historical character.

Colin Jones argues in his revisiting of A Tale of Two Cities that we should rethink the novel for what it is:  a comparison between Paris and London, where Paris comes off better than its counterpart. Dickens loved Paris. Rather than denouncing the French, Dickens sympathized with the victims of the Old Regime, even if he had a murky picture of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, relying instead on his thorough acquaintance with London’s East End.

The next two texts deal with the lives and criminal prosecution of two women: a wartime abortionist and a post-war killer. Gayle Brunelle and Annette Finley-Crosswhite endorse Philippe Jaenada’s conclusions in his docu-novel that Pauline Dubuisson was a victim of wartime trauma, since her father used her to cement his connections with German officers. Her crime passionnel (if crime there was) should be viewed within that context. Instead, she was vilified as too loose and free for the mores of the immediate post-war. This condemnation is repeated by Henri-Georges Clouzot in his film La Vérité, which turns Brigitte Bardot in the role of Dubuisson, into a frivolous and amoral member of the “new generation.”

Amoral and frivolous might well apply to Marie-Louise Giraud who, like so many women, endured the hardships of the Occupation, struggling to feed her children. Accidentally drawn into the role of faiseuse d’anges, she was able to afford the niceties of life and to dream of a future with her milicien lover once her fame spread. There were dark sides to this. The Vichy authorities caught up with her and she was judged and executed in 1943 for “treason to the state.” As Hanna Diamond demonstrates, in Story of Women, Claude Chabrol touches on the life of women in wartime, broadening the scope beyond Giraud.

Happy reading!

This is the last issue that I produce. After eleven years, it is time to hang up my spurs and to let a new person take the bulletin in a new direction, under a new title. I would like to thank all the wonderful authors who have made this such an exciting venture. I would also like to give a big thanks to those who, over the years, have helped me with the technical and creative aspects: the advisory board, Howard Brown with whom this journey started, Laura Mason who will continue it, Eric Reed, Mark Reeves, Chris Tozzi, and David Smith. Special thanks to Charlotte Wells who assisted me in the editing process and had wise words and a salutary sense of humour when I sometimes despaired.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

Roman Polanski’s [An Officer and a Spy], by David A. Bell
[A Tale of Two Cities]: A Transnational Approach, by Colin Jones
The Many Faces and Truths of Pauline Dubuisson, by Gayle K. Brunelle; Annette Finley-Croswhite
Abortion during the Occupation: Claude Chabrol’s [Une affaire de femmes] (Story of Women), by Hanna Diamond

A Word from the Editor

This issue takes us to North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The first piece is by ethnologist-filmmaker Paul Henley who situates within its time André Gide and Marc Allégret’s Voyage au Congo (1929), showing how they navigated the pitfalls of contemporary ethnographic treatment of Africa. The next review is by Laure Astourian who tells us about Jean Rouch’s 1950s and 1960s ethnographic films set in both Africa and France, using Paul Henley’s new book L’Aventure du réel as her guide. Moving away from documentary filmmaking, Roxanne Panchasi examines three recent novels about the French nuclear experiments in Algeria between 1960 and 1966. These examine the repercussions for the unwitting population and the guilt experienced by veterans who were commandeered for this duty. She compares the obscurity the has long surrounded this testing (before outrage moved them to the Pacific) to the bien-pensant anti-nuclear message of Hiroshima, mon amour, a film that came out in 1959 just as the French were about to embark on explosions in the desert.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

A neglected masterwork recovered: [Travels in the Congo] and the French interwar African expedition film, by Paul Henley
[L’aventure du réel] and Jean Rouch’s Passionate Subjectivity, by Laure Astourian
Radiation Affects: Three Novels About French Nuclear Imperialism in Algeria, by Roxane Panchasi

A Word from the Editor

In this time of coronavarius it seems fitting to publish an issue on pandemics. We therefore offer you three reviews, two of them of iconic novels about plague and cholera, while a third deals with the discovery of the plague bacillus and vaccine.

In her review of Albert Camus’s La Peste, Meaghan Emery notes the uncanny resemblance between what Camus imagined and what we are experiencing, but places equal weight on the message of revolt that runs through Camus’s oeuvre. This allows her to link the novel to the Black Lives Matter movement in France.

Jeffrey Hobbs takes a fresh look at Le hussard sur le toit, Jean Giono’s recreation of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Provence. While the Carbonaro Angelo is generally viewed as the model of a Romantic, selfless hero, Hobbs questions this interpretation, viewing it as a more complex combination of egotism and altruism.

In a similar vein, Michael Vann furnishes us with a context for Alexandre Yersin’s discoveries of the plague bacillus. As a counterpoint to Patrick Deville’s hagiographic take in Plague and Cholera, Vann presents us with a troubled man, who combines an interest in science with a colonialist drive to possess territory and control its inhabitants.

Happy reading!

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

To Watch Someone Die: [La Peste], by Meaghan Emery
Jean Giono’s [Le hussard sur le toit]: Egotism and Altruism in the Time of Cholera, by Jeffrey B Hobbs
Alexandre Yersin: Plague Conqueror and White Colonizer, by Michael G. Vann

A Word from the Editor

Two long reviews in this last issue of volume 10. Julian Jackson discusses Gabriel Le Bomin’s 2020 film De Gaulle while offering a thorough background on films and plays about the French leader. He helps us understand why the general has been portrayed far fewer times than Churchill. This latest version, covering but a few months in spring 1940, emphasizes the family man even while he is fighting hard to keep France in the war. Jackson wonders if we can go too far in attempting to “humanize” the great man.

Ben White uses his review of Alain Monnier’s book on the French concentration camp, Rivesaltes, to muse on the imaginary revisiting of traumatic places. This “psychobiography” of a site of memory, or esprit des lieux, if used carefully, can open complementary perspectives on a lost moment in time. Although the camp was also used to detain Spanish and harki refugees, it is the passage of Jews in 1942-44 on their way to Drancy that holds Monnier’s attention. White questions this focus that strays from the overall history of the camp.

Happy reading,

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

[De Gaulle], the films, by Julian Jackson
Psychogeography of a camp: Rivesaltes, by Benjamin Thomas White

A Word from the Editor

This issue’s two films and one novel focus on women. Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Jeune fille modèle do so more directly than Children of Paradise, where four men’s love interest, Garance, is central to the story but not exclusively.

In her review of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, Amy Freund stresses the utopian penchants of the film as it presents an ideal society created by three women: Héloïse, the noblewoman, Marianne, the painter, and Sophie, the maid. This involves a torrid love affair, an abortion, and much convivial cooking and frolicking. Although some of its content is anachronistic, the way that director Céline Sciamma frames the film and marries art and life provides a splendid vision of women’s lot in late eighteenth-century France.

With Grace Ly, as Dervila Cooke tells us, we move into the present but one haunted by a dramatic past. Teen-aged Chi-Chi is trying hard to navigate her Chinese-Cambodian heritage which frustrates her desires to fit into her native land, France. The issues of hybridity are raised with other characters, survivors of Pol Pot’s murderous regime, and with a young Franco-Maghreban youth. In so doing, Cooke asserts, Ly has created a provocative and important novel that joins a vibrant French literature on mixed identities and exile.

We return to the past with Laura Mason’s review of Les enfants du paradis, set in the first half of the nineteenth century among Parisian Bohemians, artists, actors, criminals, and cold-hearted aristocrats. It is a film about le peuple, but it is also a commentary on the Occupation, as the film was made during the last stages of the war. Aside from its remarkable cast of actors and brilliant sets, the lasting attraction of the film lies in the appeal of the Romantic era and a buoyant vision of the people that populated it.

Happy reading!

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

Love and Art: [Portrait de la jeune fille en feu] (2019), by Amy Freund
Hybrid identities: [Jeune fille modèle] by Grace Ly, by Dervila Cooke
The Soul of France on the Boulevard du Crime: Marcel Carné’s [Les enfants du paradis], by Laura Mason

A Word from the Editor

We return with three reviews that cover different ground, each in their own riveting way. The first, by Susan Whitney, is a review of Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas [One Sings, the Other Doesn’t] of 1977. The film retraces the struggle for abortion rights in France, but is also about the friendship of two women over the decades and the right to choose one’s path in life. In the second review, Mike Kicey tackles the translation of Marcel Proust’s Du côté des Guermantes [The Guermantes Way] comparing the recently published volume 3 of A la recherche by Yale University Press, with annotations by William Carter, to Scott Moncrief’s and others. He proposes why this edition offers much needed help in understanding Proust, especially in the classroom. Our third reviewer, Abby Lewis, shares her research on Julia Pirotte and her photographs of wartime Marseille. A Polish Jew who emigrated to France, Pirotte worked as a photojournalist and took pictures of everyday life under the Occupation, the round-up of Jewish women and children in July 1942, and upon her return to Poland, the massacre of Jews in Kielce in 1946. This is our first foray into photographs as a pedagogical tool, and we trust that you will enjoy it.

Happy reading!

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

Agnès Varda and [L’Une chante, l’autre pas], by Susan Whitney
Translating Proust, by Michael Kicey
Photographic Perspectives on the Everyday: Julia Pirotte’s Images of Occupation in Marseille, by Abigail E. Lewis

A Word from the Editor

This issue of Fiction and Film for Scholars of France revolves around the voyage of the Capitaine Paul Lemerle carrying famous and less famous “undesirables” from Marseilles to Martinique in March 1941. These were refugees from the Spanish Civil War, artists, intellectuals, and politicians, many of them German Jews, hunted by the Gestapo and expelled by the Vichy authorities. They were on their way to the United States and Mexico but found themselves stranded for months in Fort-de-France. Novelist Adrien Bosc follows the trajectories of some of its most famous passengers: André Breton, Victor Serge, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anna Seghers, Wilfredo Lam, and Germaine Krull, to name but a few. Eric Jennings who recently published a scholarly study of Martinique during the Vichy regime, tells us how vividly and accurately Bosc recreates the ship’s departure from France, life on board, and the horrific conditions they endured in the makeshift concentration camp on the island.

It is there, in spring 1941, that André Breton discovered Aimé Césaire, his wife Suzanne, and other members the island’s négritude movement, and surrealism merged with anti-colonialism. Kristen Stromberg Childers reviews Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, its inception and future versions, the encounter with Breton, and the women who are too often neglected in the telling of this story.

The masterpiece to emerge from this period is Anna Seghers’ novel Transit, retracing through its characters the bureaucratic madness of collecting all the necessary papers and permits to leave Marseilles and reach a safe haven across the Atlantic. Ruth Schwertfeger analyses the novel and Christian Petzold’s 2018 film adaptation by the same name. While Petzold updates the story to an imaginary present –a Marseilles where Arab refugees and immigrants are hounded by a police state–he retains some aspects of the past, including the wartime pursuit of Jews. Schwertfeger wonders how far one can universalize the particular circumstances of the Holocaust

Happy reading!

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

Anna Seghers’ and Christian Petzold’s [Transit], by Ruth Schwertfeger
Adrien Bosc’s novel on the voyage of the [Capitaine Paul Lemerle] (1941), by Eric Jennings
Aimé Césaire’s [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land], by Kristen Stromberg Childers

A Word from the Editor

Three films and the two novels on which two of the films are based revisit the eighteenth-century nobility. The first, L’échange des princesses (The Royal Exchange), Marc Dugain’s 2017 adaptation of Chantal Thomas’s novel, deals with teen-aged Louis XV’s little-known marriage in 1720 to the Spanish Infanta then aged three, repudiated when she is seven. As part of the Regent’s strategy to bring the French and Spanish monarchies closer together, his 12-year old daughter is wed at the same time to the adolescent heir to the Spanish throne. As Lisa Graham explains, both novel and film depict how poorly contemporaries understood childhood and adolescence, with children presumed to act and respond as miniature adults, leaving them feeling alone and bewildered.

In his review of the 1975 acclaimed Regency film, Bertrand Tavernier’s Que la fête commence (Let Joy Reign Supreme), Jonathan Spangler considers the film’s 44-year legacy. Its 1970s permissiveness and spoofiness do not age as well as the melancholy arc of the Regent’s troubled self. Tavernier depicts Orléans, played by Philippe Noiret, as kindly if debauched, nothing like the steely and ambitous ruler portrayed  by Olivier Gourmet in Dugain’s version. Since the plot involves the Breton conspiracy of 1718-1720 to put Philip V on the French throne (that Orléans’ chief minister Dubois ruthlessly repressed), perhaps both versions of the Regent leave something to be desired.

We move half a century forward with Emmanuel Mouret’s Mademoiselle de Joncquières, his 2018  adaptation of Denis Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître, composed toward the end of the Old Regime. Elena Russo finds it visually exquisite, but misses the mordant modernized touch of Robert Bresson’s 1945 Les dames du Bois de Boulogne. The story of female revenge, similar to that of Les liaisons dangereuses, sees a feckless but endearing nobleman woo and then abandon a charming young widow. She then plots to have him fall in love with a prostitute whom she presents as a dévote. Her evil project is foiled in the end in a surprising twist. The philosophical ruminations that surround this story in Diderot’s version disappear, yet the dialogue-driven film does question human psychology and its motivations.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

Stolen Childhood, Marc Dugain and Chantal Thomas’s [The Royal Exchange], by Lisa Jane Graham
Is the Party Over? Bertrand Tavernier’s [Que la fête commence]/Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975), by Jonathan Spangler
[Mademoiselle de Joncquières] or Diderot Updated and Corrected, by Elena Russo

A Word from the Editor

This issue offers three assessments of Pierre Schoeller’s 2018 film on the French Revolution, Un peuple et son roi [One Nation, One King]. The movie opened in Paris at the end of September 2018, drawing enthusiastic endorsements from some historians and film reviewers and criticisms from others. The first since Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1939) to treat the Revolution from below, Schoeller privileges the people over the Court, making working-class Parisian women pivotal to the struggle for equality. Marie Antoinette, meanwhile, is a shadowy figure, consort to a Louis XVI laden with anxiety. Historians of the period, Peter McPhee, Jack and Jane Censer, and Janine Lanza offer three takes, with diminishing degrees of enthusiasm. Are the film’s omissions insurmountable or do they provide ground for discussion? All point out how the film might be used in teaching. As I write on this 25 April 2019, the film has not yet been released in the United States. A subtitled region 2 DVD is however available from the UK, and, of course in French only from France. The trailer, embedded in the middle of the second review, will give you a sense of the film’s élan.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

[Un peuple et son roi] (One Nation, One King), 2018, by Peter McPhee; Jack R. Censer and Jane Turner Censer; Janine Lanza

A Word from the Editor

This issue’s theme is French colonialism and decolonization. Ethan Katz reviews Gillo Pontercorvo’s 1966 masterpiece The Battle of Algiers. He explains how it can be used in class from multiple perspectives, including that of the Holocaust. Don Reid looks at a neglected aspect of the Battle, the voice of women. Based on her memoirs, he shows how Zohra Drif, one of the iconic female bombers in the film, envisioned her participation, why her perspective differed from Germaine Tillion’s, and how her relations with Yacef Saâdi (the film’s impressario) soured. Their rivalry takes us all the way to the present. Lastly, Mike Vann explains why he took to the “comic history” format to tell story of the Great Hanoi Rat Hunt. The book offers visual guidance to the modernization of the city by the French, including a new sewer system that failed to stem plague outbreaks, and exacerbated the racism of the colonizers.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

Multi-directional History in [The Battle of Algiers], by Ethan B. Katz
Re-viewing [The Battle of Algiers] with Zohra Drif, by Donald Reid
Confessions of a Rogue Historian: Why I Wrote a Graphic History of Colonial Hanoi, by Michael G. Vann

A Word from the Editor

In this issue you will find reviews of three classics.

Shannon Fogg returns us to the composition of Marguerite Duras’ The War, a Memoir (1985), which may or may not be actual recollection based on her wartime diary. The six stories revolve around the Resistance and Duras’s heart-rending longing for her husband Robert Antelme’s return from concentration camp. The first two have been combined in the 2017 film Memoirs of War [La douleur] by Emmanuel Finkiel, and Fogg offers suggestions on how the book and film can be combined with scholarly sources for effective classroom discussion.

Alan Morris doubts that Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1978 four-hour film Molière can be shown to students in its entirety, but segments could certainly be used to demonstrate Louis XIV’s theatrical monarchy. Altogether, although the biopic does not mean to be comprehensive, Molière depicts the theatricality of Molière’s own life and his experiences in city and country. It also revisists the conflicts and cruelties of the French court. Molière used these to move French theatre from comedia dell’arte to the classic comedy we so admire. Mnouchkine’s aesthetic choices, foreshadowed in the film’s Prologue, address performativity, Time’s arrow, and the ever-present shadow of death.

In her review of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, Dominica Chang persuades us to consider teaching the novel. It is famous for its treatment of the Revolution of 1848, but is also a Bildungsroman that spans thirty years of its hero’s life, from law student to disillusioned adult. Chang encourages her students to reflect on the parallels between the choices they face in the twenty-first century and those faced by students in the 1840s. They also come away with an understanding of Flaubert’s literary innovations in the “long realist novel.”

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

Film and Fiction? Marguerite Duras, [La Douleur] and [The War], by Shannon L. Fogg
One Man in his Time Plays Many Parts: Ariane Mnouchkine’s [Molière], by Alan Morris
Classics in the 21st-Century Classroom: Gustave Flaubert’s [L’Éducation sentimentale], by Dominica Chang

A Word from the Editor

With this issue, Fiction and Film for French Historians is getting a facelift. It will now be known as Fiction and Film for Scholars of France, although the web link remains the same to provide online continuity. We have dropped the categories Buzz/Maybe Missed/Classics in the Classroom, which proved hard to fill for every issue, as, for example, we artificially moved a new work to Maybe Missed. Reviews will simply be numbered, starting with the newest item. Months of publication will still appear but without a rigid schedule. Our goal remains unchanged: to communicate to scholars of France what fictional works might be useful in teaching or as insights into a period that scholarly studies often miss.

In this issue, Martha Hannah reviews Xavier Beauvois’s 2017 film Les gardiennes/The Guardians, based on a 1927 novel of the same name. She tells us what the film gets right about women on the home front during World War I and where the filmmaker exaggerates the successes of its female farmers, and the post-war mobility of its female farmhand. While labour on the fields is beautifully conveyed, she warns us that the depiction of American troops may not be to everyone’s liking!

Charlotte Wells takes us on a ride through the first two volumes of a new graphic history of France, L’histoire dessinée de la France, under the direction of Sylvain Venayre. Its gambit is to match a current specialist of the period with an illustrator and, depending on the volume, to have the two interact with the historical characters they are discussing. And a ride it is. The first volume resurrects Joan of Arc, Molière, General Alexandre Dumas (the famed novelist’s father), Michelet, and Marie Curie and has them circle contemporary France and compare it to their day. Pétain is a reluctant fellow traveler. The second volume takes us back to France’s Celtic past and the Roman Conquest, with a new historian and illustrator. A third volume is already out. Each is funnier than the last, Wells assures us.

Lastly, Ben White takes on Annie Ernaux’s magisterial 2008 novel Les années, recently translated into English. It is a summation of Ernaux’s lifelong attempt to recapture her past, offering the portrait of a generation born around the Second World War up to the present day. It is filled with vignettes about economic, social, and political changes over half a century, and on a more personal front, the changing nature of family, and the social mobility offered by the Trente glorieuses.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

Reviews

The Homefront During WWI: Xavier Beauvois’s [Les Gardiennes] (2017), by Martha Hannah
C’est drôle, l’histoire: [L’ histoire dessinée de la France], vols. 1 and 2, by Charlotte C. Wells
An Infinite Present: Annie Ernaux’s [The Years] and Modern French History, by Benjamin Thomas White

A Word from the Editor

In this last issue of the academic year, three films depict three moments in French and World history. In the Buzz Jonathan Beecher explains why Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is relevant to today’s public. The film is set in the mid-1840s when Marx and Engels began to collaborate on a revolutionary project and met in various places of exile (Paris, Brussels, and London), culminating in the publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Despite obstacles to transplanting intellectual struggles to film, Beecher deems that Peck has done a highly convincing job.

In Maybe Missed, Hunter Capps examines Robin Campillo’s outstanding recreation of the Paris ACT UP movement in his film 120 battements par minute/BPM [Beats Per Minute]. Set in 1992, the movie addresses the French government’s and pharmaceutical companies’ lack of urgency in handling the AIDS crisis. It is told through stories of those severely affected by the virus and their caretakers, but more importantly through the collective discussions and actions of a small movement determined to make a difference.

Howard Brown enthuses about the new version of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) produced by the British Film Institute. The five and a half hours of film (on 4 DVDs) include new footage painstakingly assembled by Kevin Brownlow and are enriched by a new score from Carl Davis. We get more about the common soldier, more about family life, and the spectacular juxtapositions and battle scenes are even more impressive.

Have a good summer!

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Raoul Peck’s [The Young Karl Marx], by Jonathan Beecher

Maybe Missed

A Small Movement With a Big Agenda: Robin Campillo’s [BPM], by V. Hunter Capps

Classics in the Classroom

A [Napoleon] for the Digital Age, by Howard G. Brown

A Word from the Editor

In this issue, an art historian, a specialist in contemporary French literature, and an anthropologist review two recent novels and a film.

In our first Buzz, Neil McWilliam situates Jacques Doillon’s film Rodin (2017) within the genre of artist biopics and contrasts it to Bruno Nuytten’s tempestuous Camille Claudel (1988). In an amusing and highly informed review, he explains how the film’s didacticism boosts the conventional cliché of the tormented artist without really engaging with Rodin’s artistic process. The relationship with Camille Claudel is approached more soberly than in Nuytten’s version, but leaves no doubt about Rodin’s failings with women.

In the second Buzz, Alan Morris takes us to the wartime experiences of Samuel Beckett and his future wife Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil as re-imagined by Jo Baker in A Country Road, a Tree (2016). The novel offers a highly atmospheric account of their struggle for survival in a depleted Paris and involvement in resistance movements in Paris and the Midi, ending with Beckett’s volunteer work for an Irish hospital in bombed-out Saint-Lô. With much ingenuity, Baker weaves in Beckett’s creative distancing from Joyce and the memories that would infuse his post-war work.

Lastly, in Maybe Missed, Kimberley Arkin entices us into the world of multi-cultural Belleville, one of the several locales in Karim Miské’s award-winning Arab Jazz (2012). A murder has been committed and the suspects include the victim’s neighbour (a starving secular Muslim hiding in the world of books), radicalized Muslim youths, Jewish fundamentalists (in Paris and Brooklyn), and deranged Jehovah’s Witnesses. While the real culprit is greed rather than religion, Miské makes clear his dislike of religious extremism in this complex and lively tale.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Beyond the Gates of Hell: Jacques Doillon’s [Rodin], by Neil McWilliam
Waiting for [Godot]: Jo Baker, [A Country Road, A Tree], by Alan Morris

Maybe Missed

[Arab Jazz] by Karim Miské, by Kimberly A. Arkin

A Word from the Editor

This month’s issue might seem to privilege the French Revolution, but its intent is to present a variety of media that are used to depict the past.

In the Buzz, I interview Guillaume Mazeau, historian of the French Revolution but also at the forefront of a movement to make history accessible to all audiences. He explains his involvement in the composition of Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis, a play staged by Joël Pommerat and his company, that revisits the Revolution with a determination to move beyond clichés to restore its novelty and unpredictability.

In Maybe Missed, Robin Walz brings his expertise to the biographical graphic novel Picasso. Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie took their cues from the artist’s companion Fernande Olivier’s memoirs, and it is her experiences that are the most interesting. While it recreates the atmosphere of early twentieth-century Montmartre, Picasso’s work is alluded to rather than presented outright.

In Classics for the Classroom, Laura Mason takes a look at Jean Renoir’s Popular Front version of the French Revolution that paralleled Georges Lefebvre’s Coming of the French Revolution. La Marseillaise failed to please audience or critics, but she makes the case the case that it is well worth revisiting, particularly with students who have been taught to associate popular mobilization with violence and terror.

Happy Holidays!

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

[Ça ira (1) fin de Louis]: Interview with Guillaume Mazeau, by Liana Vardi, Guillaume Mazeau

Maybe Missed

Loving Picasso (or Not), by Robin Walz

Classics in the Classroom

Celebrating Popular Revolution: Jean Renoir’s [La Marseillaise] (1938), by Laura Mason

A Word from the Editor

In case you haven’t picked it up already, this month’s Buzz, Laurent Binet’s Seventh Function of Language, should get you rushing to your local bookstore. As our reviewer Michael Mulvey, myself, and all the people I know who have read it can vouch, this irreverent and sometimes over-the-top send-up of 1970s semiotics will have you in stitches and leave you wondering why the author isn’t in jail for libel.

In Maybe Missed, Dan Hobbins assesses Jean-Christophe Rufin’s The Dream Maker, a novel about Charles VII’s ill-fated treasurer Jacques Coeur. For Rufin Coeur is a romantic at heart, enamored with the East, who wishes France to increase its trade with the Ottoman Empire and cultivate closer ties. He pursues profit recklessly and becomes immensely wealthy at the expense of a resentful nobility. Hobbins questions the modernity Rufin sees in Coeur, which, as the author concedes, may be more a portrait of himself than that of a fifteenth-century adventurer and financier.

In the Classics section, Rosemary Peters-Hill revisits René Clément’s 1956 film Gervaise, based on Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir. While Zola’s novel depicts alcoholism in its manifold horrors, Clément shifts the attention to the fate of artisans in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. If the preview presents the film as a romp and jolly ménage à trois –if not quatre– the film is in reality a much more sober depiction of the hardships men and especially women endured to survive.

Rosemary Peters-Hill graciously undertook this review after the death of Rachel Fuchs who was the original reviewer.

Liana Vardi
University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

A Buddy-Detective Romp through Semiology: [The Seventh Function of Language], by Michael Mulvey

Maybe Missed

The Making of a Modern Man: Jean-Christophe Rufin’s Jacques Coeur, by Daniel Hobbins

Classics in the Classroom

Adapting Emile Zola’s [L’Assommoir], René Clément’s [Gervaise] (1956), by Rosemary A. Peters-Hill

A Word from the Editor

Welcome to the eighth year of Fiction and Film for French Historians. We hope that you will find something to stimulate your curiosity, to enhance your knowledge of France, and even to use in class.

In this first issue, Greg Monahan offers his analysis of Alberto Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV, a film I saw at the Toronto Film Festival and so disliked I hesitated to have it reviewed. Greg has convinced me that I was wrong and that, despite Jean-Pierre Léaud’s fright wig, the film’s rendition of the last days of the Sun King captures what memoirists and historians have written about this dramatic moment.

In Maybe Missed, Jessica Hammerman situates Yossi Sucary’s recently translated Benghazi-Bergen-Belsen within the history of Libyan Jewry. Sucary, basing himself on family history, recounts the round-up of the Jewish community in 1941-42, focusing on those with British passports who were first taken to an Italian mountain prison before being transported to Auschwitz in May 1944. Those Jews who were kept in Libya suffered heavy casualties from horrific conditions in local labor camps.

Mike Vann reviews Pépé le Moko, Julien Duvuvier’s 1937 classic Orientalist tale of a lovable French crook hiding out in Algiers’ Casbah, which he, of course, comes to dominate. This male fantasy spawned Hollywood remakes and the cartoon character Pepe Le Pew. It also turned Jean Gabin into an international star. But the real subject, Vann argues, is the European construction of Algiers as exotic, unknowable, and dangerous.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Alberto Serra’s [La mort de Louis XIV], by W. Gregory Monahan

Maybe Missed

Libya and the Holocaust: Yossi Sucary’s [Benghazi-Bergen-Belsen], by Jessica R. Hammerman

Classics in the Classroom

“Blame it on the Casbah”: The White Male Imperialist Fantasies of Duvivier’s [Pépé le Moko], by Michael G. Vann

A Word from the Editor

This summer issue is one long essay. I realized that I needed to add a review of my own to one of our issues and had been wondering in which direction to take it. Should I describe how I use Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan in my Freshman Seminar? Would I write something about the new brand of fictionalized fait divers? It was the latter that won out, especially since I had read Ivan Jablonka’s prize-winning Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes and could not fathom what made it a novel. I had several works in mind. I had very much enjoyed Philippe Jaeneda’s La petite femelle (Juillard, 2015) about Pauline Dubuisson’s murder of her lover in November 1953. I wrote a whole section on it, but the more I read about the fait divers and literature, the more conventional it came to seem. Emmanuel Carrère would be featured as a matter of course. In the end, I also included Laurent Binet’s HHhH, even though it isn’t French history, because so much of it involves the author’s duty to respect the facts. Historical fiction should be true to what is demonstrable and not be “based on real events.” Meanwhile, authors were inserting themselves into the story of the fait divers directly: present at the trial, speaking with those involved in the case. Were they reliable narrators? Emmanuel Carrère had a personal quest; Ivan Jablonka tells us he wished to approach the fait divers through an historical and sociological lens, yet his book is also an emotional homage to the eighteen-year-old victim of an horrendous murder. As an historian, I felt I needed to take a closer look at this hybrid genre, and figure out where I stand on it.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Please note that all three reviews are located within the single link:

Truth or fiction and why it matters. A look at Ivan Jablonka, Emmanuel Carrère, and Laurent Binet, by Liana Vardi 

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Truth or fiction and why it matters. A look at Ivan Jablonka, Emmanuel Carrère, and Laurent Binet, by Liana Vardi

Maybe Missed

[HHhH] by Laurent Binet, by Liana Vardi

Classics in the Classroom

[L’Adversaire] by Emmanuel Carrère, by Liana Vardi

A Word from the Editor

A common thread in the films reviewed this month is friendship: visceral friendships that call on loyalties, sometimes with dramatic consequences.

In the Buzz, Marco Deyasi reviews Cézanne et moi, a film that explores the relationship between Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne. They met as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence and moved to Paris to seek fame and fortune. While Zola made it, Cézanne struggled for years to come up with a style that satisfied him. Their friendship disintegrated with the publication of Zola’s The Masterpiece whose portrait of the mad, failed artist borrowed from Cézanne’s life. While the dynamic is well rendered, Deyasi regrets the film’s lack of investment in the creative process itself.

Divines, this month’s Maybe Missed, takes us to today’s banlieue where two black teenagers desperately try to escape poverty. They latch onto the readily available option of selling drugs and get in way over their heads. The angrier of the two young women is offered a chance to escape by following a new boyfriend’s dance troupe on tour. This hope is shattered when she chooses to save her best friend from a vengeful female dope-dealer. Thibault Schilt reminds us that director Houda Benyamina’s reversal of the “standard” gender roles of banlieue cinema is part of a new movement. Her women are tough and violent, and the male gaze is replaced here with an erotically charged female gaze.

While Divines ends with the riots of 2005, the1993 demonstrations against police brutality take place off-stage in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine. The film begins in their immediate aftermath and follows three friends over the next 24 hours: one white (and Jewish), one black, and one brown (North African). The film has become iconic for its sympathetic approach to the dead-end lives of its multi-racial characters, for its demonstration of the prejudice they encounter, especially in Paris, and for its analysis of the spiral of violence that engulfs them. Michael Gott describes how Kassovitz’s macho version reinforces clichés about the banlieue even as it seeks to challenge them.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

The tormented artist and his friend: Danièle Thompson’s [Cézanne et moi], by Marco Deyasi

Maybe Missed

Reversed Gazes and Blended Genres: [Divines] (2016), by Thibault Schilt

Classics in the Classroom

Banlieue Cinema: [La Haine] (1995), by Michael Gott

A Word from the Editor

Sex and violence might be the theme for this month’s bulletin.

In the Buzz, Charlotte Wells returns to the world of schlock with a review of the popular BBC series Versailles. Devilish plots and rivalries rend Louis XIV’s court while real historical events nourish a made-up narrative. There is so much sex that the series has received the dubious honour of being called the most pornographic among recent historical capers. In keeping with this theme, Jennifer Davis reviews an actual pornographic classic: Thérèse philosophe. In this libertine eighteenth-century novel, ascribed to Jean-Baptiste Boyer d’Agens, the female narrator connects sex with health in defiance of contemporary religious and medical beliefs. As Davis observes, besides a discussion of what is natural and therefore healthy, the novel addresses how texts and images work on the senses, and how the imagination can overcome reason. In the Maybe Missed rubric Roxanne Panchasi reviews the film Les Anarchistes (2015). Director Wajeman, she tells us, was less interested in historical events than in investigating love and betrayal. Thus, although the anarchist group in the film eventually acquires a bomb, ideology and violence do not drive the plot. Rather it focuses on the allegiances of the policeman who infiltrates the group. His loyalties are further torn once he becomes infatuated with the group’s leader’s girlfriend, who comes to share his sentiments. Given the beauty and impeccable dress of the actors, Panchasi wonders if this is radical chic and part of a recent, more superficial approach to the past.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

[Versailles] On a Dark and Stormy Night, by Charlotte C. Wells

Maybe Missed

“[Avec l’amour au poing]”*: Elie Wajeman’s [Les Anarchistes], by Roxanne Panchasi

Classics in the Classroom

The Laws of Eighteenth-Century Sex: [Thérèse philosophe], by Jennifer J. Davis

A Word From the Editor

This issue addresses race and colonialism from three perspectives. In the Buzz, Charles Rearick examines Roschdy Zem’s 2016 biopic of the Belle Époque clown Chocolat. Rafael Padillo was a Black Cuban immigrant who took Paris by storm by playing the dumb sidekick to his partner George Footit. Things grew more complicated, however, once he tried to escape such stereotyping.

In Maybe Missed, Kelly Duke Bryant reviews Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop’s 2006 novel Kaveena, about an imaginary post-colonial African state. The story of a ruthless dictator and his French “handler” who really calls the shots, she argues, reinforces too many clichés about Africa. However, the events recollected by the former head of security and the fragments from the leader’s autobiography also offer insightful commentaries on power, greed, and violence.

The Classic, Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire, dates from 1983. Using the detective genre, the author challenges the French to remember the 17 October 1961 massacre of Algerian immigrants which, his investigation reveals, is tied to the internment of Jews at Drancy during the Holocaust. The French authorities had swept these events under the rug, but the “outing” of Papon in 1981 made that untenable.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

[Chocolat]: A Black Entertainer in the Belle Époque, by Charles Rearick

Maybe Missed

[Kaveena], A Novel of Françafrique, by Kelly Duke Bryant

Classics in the Classroom

Forgetting is Easy, Remembering is Murder: Didier Daeninckx, [Meurtres pour mémoire] (1983), by Alan Morris

A Word from the Editor

We are back after a break! This issue offers reviews of familiar topics, the Occupation, the Holocaust, and Napoleon. These continue to attract novelists, filmmakers, and audiences. Our reviewers explain why.

In the Buzz, Michael Sibalis assesses Thomas Keneally’s new novel, Napoleon’s Last Island. The last island is, of course, Saint Helena and the subject Napoleon’s friendship with Betsy Balcombe, the spunky teen-aged daughter of the provisioner to the exiled court. The story is based on the real Betsy’s memoirs and the review delves into their composition and how far Keneally remains faithful to or strays from the historical evidence.

The other two reviews address works recent enough to count as buzzes but I have squeezed them into the “Maybe Missed” and “Classics in the Classroom” categories for publication purposes. In “Maybe Missed,” Shannon Fogg discusses the runaway bestseller The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (soon to be a film directed by Michelle MacLaren). The story follows two sisters who join the Resistance during the German Occupation, the one immediately and the second after a series of plot turns. Historical accuracy not being Hannah’s forte, Fogg explains what she meant to convey by her overview of conditions in France during the war, most particularly for women and those too-often unsung wartime heroines.

In the issue’s third review, Alyssa Sepinwall describes new approaches to the Holocaust in recent French films. Rather than focusing on the round-ups and camps as most films have tended to do, two films in particular, The Origins of Violence and Once in a Lifetime, set the stories in the present. In a way reminiscent of Sarah’s Key, The Origins of Violence shows how the present is affected by past secrets and denials. In Once in a Lifetime, based on a true story, students at a Créteil high school research what happened to French Jews during the war. The third movie, Victor “Young” Perez, brings the empire in through the biopic of a Jewish Tunisian boxer caught in the maelstrom, an inclusion that changes how we think about French victims of the Holocaust.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Betsy and the Emperor: A Well-Worn Tale Retold, by Michael Sibalis

Maybe Missed

Sisters in the Resistance: [The Nightingale], by Shannon L. Fogg

Classics in the Classroom

New Directions in French Holocaust Film: [The Origin of Violence], [Once in a Lifetime], and [Victor “Young” Perez], by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

A Word from the Editor

Welcome to a new year. As we embark on a new series of reviews, some themes will be familiar and others, we hope, will surprise you. With the increasing difficulty in getting students to read, thinking about assigning novels might seem utopian. Yet I continue to think that they enrich our approach to our own work and offer a different perspective on events to students eager to immerse themselves in the period. I vary my own offerings and this year I’ve added Monsieur le Commandant by Romain Slocombe to my Vichy France syllabus. Each novel in my courses is attached to a series of historical analyses. I’ve reduced the number of movies I show, however, and have students present them instead as part of an oral assignment. Of course, films have always been easier to incorporate in teaching, usually at the risk of losing precious lecture time. Students are immediately engrossed, even if a few find it convenient naptime. As we all know, Media Studies and Film Progams are booming, and many a history department hosts extra-curricular historical movie-nights. More people, as well, even though not trained in film theory, offer courses like my own research seminar on Film in History, as students seek to marry different types of materials. FFFH reviewers themselves seem happier reviewing films than novels. Literature is not so much more daunting than more time-consuming and who has spare time these days? Still, there are stalwarts and it is thanks to them that this bulletin keeps providing reviews of both.

In this first issue we return to the First World War with a review by Béatrix Pau of Pierre Lemaitre’s Au Revoir Là-haut, winner of the 2013 Prix Goncourt. An English translation by Frank Wynne, The Great Swindle, appeared in September 2015. The novel, which focuses on the immediate post-war, begins with a war crime perpetrated on the eve of the Armistice by an ambitious French officer whose further misdeeds are the subject of the book. The war over, that same lieutenant bids successfully for a government contract to remove bodies from battlefield cemeteries for burial in their hometowns and villages. He profits outrageously by providing lower-quality coffins and misidentifying corpses to speed up the process. The scandal bursts and engulfs him by the end of the novel. We also follow the fate of two soldiers who witnessed the first crime and suffered for it. They come out of the war damaged and jobless, the one so disfigured that he refuses to go home to his wealthy family. But he can draw and comes up with a scam to sell war memorials to the thousands of towns that are seeking to honour their dead. From their hovel, he and his friend peddle a brochure with architectural plans from which communities may choose and send an advance. The monuments themselves would never see the light of day but they grow rich. As Béatrix Pau explains, this second scam is a product of the author’s imagination, but the first was very real. Pierre Lemaitre based it on Pau’s prize-winning study of the merchants of death, Le ballet des morts: Etat, armée, familles: s’occuper des corps des la Grande guerre (reissued in 2016). Béatrix Pau offers us her insider’s knowledge, praising the author’s retelling of these sordid undertakings and of the grim aftermath of the war. Exceptionally we publish her review in French.

The tone is much lighter in Ken Alder’s review of 1001 Grams, a Norwegian riff on universal measures that bring representatives to France to test their national prototypes of the kilogram. A delightful rom-com develops around predictability and human whim that he heartily recommends, even if he thinks it’s too low-key to be of use in the classroom.

In our classics section, Michael Lucey revisits André Gide’s 1902 The Immoralist. Using Bourdieu as a guide, he makes the case for a thorough historicization of the novel. This is a difficult work that raises hackles and requires careful handling. The temptation is to project on the era sentiments that were not its own, and he makes sure that we grasp the range of gender identities at the turn of the twentieth century. As such a careful reading of The Immoralist remains fruitful.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

[The Great Swindle] ou [Au Revoir, Là-haut] de Pierre Lemaitre, by Béatrix Pau

Maybe Missed

Universal measures: [1001 Grams], by Ken Alder

Classics in the Classroom

On André Gide’s [The Immoralist] (1902), by Michael Lucey

A Word from the Editor

In this issue we cover two topics that never grow old: war and sex.

In the Buzz, Patricia Lorcin reviews Laurent Mauvignier’s outstanding novel, The Wound (Des hommes), a harsh and moving look at the traumatic effects of the Algerian War on a couple of French soldiers from the same town.

In a second Buzz, Alan Morris reviews Didier Daeninckx’s Caché dans la maison des fous, the second novel in a series that mingles History (with a capital H) and poetry, commissioned by Bruno Doucey. Daeninckx tells the tale of Paul Eluard, who hid with his wife in the asylum at Saint-Alban during the Occupation. There he composed a series of engaged poems and the novel becomes a reflection on writing itself, the relation between art and madness, and the construction of memory. The first edition sold out within weeks.

In Maybe Missed, Alysssa Sepinwall turns to what she is defining as a new genre in French filmmaking : the Jewish-Muslim relationship film. Her example is Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s comedy He’s My Girl where a gay Jewish Parisian must sort out his difficulties with commitment: to his Muslim cross-dressing boyfriend, to his ex-wife and son (from a Hasidic New York background), to his Jewish mother, a Holocaust-survivor.

Charlotte Wells returns to Classics in the Classroom, this time discussing adaptations of The Three Musketeers, from silent film to the BBC series currently entering its third season. Swashbuckling heroes mingle with innocent maidens and evil femmes fatales; the violence of the early modern era is transformed into jolly sparring; the rise of the absolutist state into the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu against a weak monarch. While faithfulness to Dumas, never mind to history, is rarely a consideration, the new BBC series takes a new tack, treating the seventeenth century as a Western with leather-clad heroes and strong-willed women.

Happy reading and great summer break. We return in October.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Men at War: Laurent Mauvignier’s [The Wound], by Patricia M.E. Lorcin
In Praise of Folly: Didier Daeninckx, [Caché dans la maison des fous], by Alan Morris

Maybe Missed

Jewish-Muslim Romance with a French Twist: Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s [He’s My Girl], by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

Classics in the Classroom

“Keep Those Swords Away from the Computer, Boys!” The Three Musketeers in the Classroom, by Charlotte C. Wells

A Word from the Editor

In this issue’s Buzz, we revisit Albert Camus’s Algeria through the adaptation of his short story “L’hôte.” In this spare tale, a French Algerian escorts an Arab to jail across a mountainous wilderness. David Oelhoffen has created a very different film, exploring the two main characters’ background in ways that did not interest Camus. Through a series of encounters, he also shows the various groups engaged in the struggle for and against Algerian independence, making the film eminently teachable. But, as Joshua Cole explains, Oelhoffen’s more nuanced and humanistic approach can backfire when it moves too far away from Camus’s original intentions.

In Maybe Missed, Adam Watt tackles Nina Companeez’s four-hour TV adaptation of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.In something of a tour-de-force, he compares this to other movie adaptations and demonstrates how, albeit in highly compressed fashion, she manages to render Proust’s major themes and characters, including societal shifts between the fin-de-siècle and early1920s. Some of these choices are explained in the “making-of” inserted in the review in lieu of preview (there being none). As for the rest, it is best to dip into the great work itself.

In the Classics section, Brian Sandberg introduces the first two books of Robert Merle’s saga, Fortune de France, whose 13 volumes are being translated into English at the rate of one a year. Set during the wars of religion, the books focus on a Périgord noble family thrown into the maelstrom of this great conflict, with some family members becoming Huguenots and others remaining Catholic.While Merle offers swashbuckling adventures to rival Dumas, he has also carefully recreated the social panorama of the era through the insertion of “notarial records and livres de raison” inspired by Annales School research in vogue when he began in 1977.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Albert Camus’s “L’hôte” becomes [Loin des hommes] (Far From Men), by Joshua Cole

Maybe Missed

Nina Companeez tackles [À la recherche du temps perdu], by Adam Watt

Classics in the Classroom

Robert Merle’s Wars of Religion: [The Brethren] and [City of Wisdom and Blood], by Brian Sandberg

Word from the Editor

Love, loyalty and families, murder and suicide, oppression and self-realization all feature in this month’s reviews.

In the Buzz, Philip Nord shares his enthusiasm for Christophe Boltanski’s La Cache. The central characters are the author’s grandparents and their apartment on the rue de Grenelle. This is a family with secrets, not all of which are unraveled. At its heart, Myriam, the formidable grandmother, is determined to insulate her brood from the outside world, despite meagre resources. She manages to hide her husband Etienne from the French police during the Occupation. While uncles Jean-Elie and Christian, aunt Anne and his father Luc are part of the narrative, it is Christophe’s fond and bemused recollections that allow us to penetrate this fortress and gain some insight into a family forever poised between two worlds.

In Maybe Missed, Natalya Vince guides us through The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud’s response to Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. The novel treats the original as “real,” and reveals Meursault’s victim’s identity (Musa) who, in Camus’s account, was just a nameless Arab. Seated at a bar in Oran, the murdered Musa’s now elderly brother Harun describes to a young journalist what life was like under colonial rule, during the fight for independence, and in its aftermath. He has little to be proud of in his own life, but his mother and long-ago girlfriend had the guts he lacks. As Natalya Vince demonstrates, this is a multi-layered tale in which the present confronts the past.

In the Classics section, Jim Allen looks at the latest adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. While no movie can do justice to the novel, Allen gives us reasons to appreciate Sophie Barthes’s 2014 version. She brings to the film a strong visual aesthetic, turning Flaubert’s words into striking imagery. Likewise, Mia Wasikowska’s combination of poise and intensity is able to convey, with a look, Emma Bovary’s longings, petulance, and ultimate despair. The film is an excellent illustration of the desires created by the new consumer society, with Emma remodeling her house and ordering increasingly lavish (and unforgettable) dresses in her determination to rise above her station.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Christophe Boltanski’s Memories of War and Peace, by Philip Nord

Maybe Missed

Literature as post-colonial reality? Kamel Daoud’s [The Meursault Investigation], by Natalya Vince

Classics in the Classroom

Sophie Barthes’s [Madame Bovary], by James Smith Allen

A Word from the Editor

In the Buzz, Eliza Ferguson reviews Benoît Jacquot’s Journal d’une femme de chambre, the latest adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel. Léa Seydoux is scintillating in the title role and persuasively embittered, but the film sidesteps the full panoply of decadence that Mirbeau depicted. Jacquot is faithful, however, to Mirbeau’s condemnation of bourgeois hypocrisy, anti-Semitism, and right-wing nationalism. Either the novel or the film, Ferguson tells us, would make a fine addition to a course on modern France, giving students an intimate look at gender and late-nineteenth-century social conflicts. The film, available on French DVD, will be released this spring in the United States.

Coincidentally, the remainder of the issue focuses on Victor Hugo. Charles Rearick reviews a new prize-winning novel, Judith Perrignon’s Victor Hugo vient de mourir. In this novelistic “docudrama,” Perrignon recreates the debates and fears surrounding Victor Hugo’s death in May 1885. While the authorities worry that the funeral would occasion a working-class rising, anarchists and socialists fret about the co-optation of “their” Victor Hugo by the State. We are reminded that the Commune had occurred only fourteen years earlier and its legacy was still vivid. Marisa Linton begins her review of Ninety-Three (1874) by stating that the tragic events of the Commune were very much on Victor Hugo’s mind. The novel deals with revolutionary violence through the confrontation of the Revolutionary army and the Vendée’s anti-Republican rebels. Hugo describes the motivations on both sides even-handedly, although conceding that the Revolution was on the side of progress. Still, he wonders whether the hard-boiled revolutionaries of 1793 might not have shown some mercy. Linton concludes that some chapters in particular are worth assigning to students for their forceful recreation of the era.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

Benoît Jacquot’s [Journal d’une femme de chambre], by Eliza Earle Ferguson

Maybe Missed

Victor Hugo’s Funeral as Historical Fiction, by Charles Rearick

Classics in the Classroom

Victor Hugo, [Ninety-Three] ([Quatrevingt-treize]), by Marisa Linton

A Word from the Editor

This issue’s Buzz is the film version of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française. Unlike those film critics who have reproached the director for his unfaithfulness to the novel, Simon Kitson explains why this concern is unjustified. What is more, he believes the author would have approved the inclusion of the rounding-up of Jews, even if anachronistic, because she had intended to chronicle the German occupation to France’s liberation. Although no masterpiece, the movie presents eminently teachable moments.

In his review of Entre les murs/The Class, Martin O’Shaughnessy, author of a new book on Laurent Cantet (Manchester University Press, 2015), describes how the director structures his movies. He focuses on Cantet’s use of space to express isolation or interaction, discussing several examples from the movie. Moreover, he demonstrates how Cantet expertly exposes the myths that surround Republican schooling. It is not Cantet’s style, however, to resolve issues for us; he means us to consider them more deeply.

In the Classics section, another expert, Alan Morris, revisits Patrick Modiano’s Occupation Trilogy. Although not a real trilogy, the set includes Modiano’s first three novels, Place de l’Étoile, Night Watch and Ring Roads, gathered together for the first time in English. In his spare, allusive style, Modiano addresses the Occupation and his father’s louche activities, an obsession from which he would gradually free himself. With each novel, Modiano gets closer to the criminal Gestapo collaborationists operating out of 93 rue Lauriston with whom his father worked, despite being a Jew. As Morris explains, historians have been interested in Modiano because of his fascination with the unreliable nature of memory and for openly discussing collaboration at a time when the myth of resistance still prevailed.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

[Suite Française], by Simon Kitson

Maybe Missed

Are you sure you think what you think? Laurent Cantet’s [Entre les murs] and mythologies of Republican education, by Martin O'Shaughnessy

Classics in the Classroom

Into the Heart of Darkness: Patrick Modiano, [The Occupation Trilogy] (2015), by Alan Morris

A WORD FROM THE EDITOR

We begin this year with a series of film reviews. My preview of new French films with “historical content” at the Toronto Film Festival yielded no gems and some disappointments. I found La peur, set in the trenches of World War I, excruciatingly boring and its supposed “realism” much exaggerated. Although Aleksandr Sukarov’s Francofonia was gorgeous to look at, the director’s meditations on the fate of western culture were heavy-handed and sometimes puzzling. Despite its [French] title, the film dealt little with the Louvre during the Occupation, focusing instead on the intersection of creative and destructive urges. In the end, one film grabbed me: Diastème’s Un Français, about a neo-Nazi skinhead in the 1980s whom we follow over three decades as he sheds his racism and his rage. His personal redemption is contrasted to the Front national’s cosmetic efforts to do the same.

In the Maybe Missed section, Kathleen Wellman reviews A Little Chaos, Alan Rickman’s fantasy about Louis XIV, Le Nôtre, and the building of the gardens at Versailles. The spunky heroine, an independent gardener who seduces both Le Nôtre and the King with her talent, is winningly played by Kate Winslet. The film’s recasting of the monarch as fond paterfamilias and botanical experimenter is more Farmer George than historical Louis, but this is, after all, a fantasy.

Lastly, in our Classics rubric, Elena Russo guides us through Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive, winner of 15 international awards. A class in one of the cités is rehearsing Marivaux’s Games of Love and Chance, while their daily life mirrors some of its plot. Most important, Elena Russo tells us, is that they absorb from Marivaux a different way of expressing emotions and the ambiguous states they cause. The film is not meant to update Marivaux to the banlieue but rather to show how classics can expand one’s conceptual apparatus.

With this issue, Eric Reed, historian of the Tour de France, leaves us as web editor to take on high administrative duties at his univesrity. He has been a terrific colleague and the team will greatly miss him.

Liana Vardi

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Table of Contents

The Buzz

The Politics of Violence: [Un Français], by Liana Vardi

Maybe Missed

[A Little Chaos] in Louis XIV’s Court, by Kathleen Wellman

Classics in the Classroom

Revisiting Kechiche’s [L’Esquive] (Games of Love and Chance), by Elena Russo