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6. Conclusion
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6. Conclusion This book has been explicitly interdisciplinary, drawing its emphasis on political culture and spectacle not only from historians but also from political theorists , art historians, and literary critics, and its interpretive methods from historical, cultural, and literary studies. Disciplines, we know, are not natural , preordained forms of inquiry that excavate preexisting truths about the past, or about literature, or about social behavior. Rather, they are structures of knowledge that create their own subjects for inquiry and rules for determining the validity or falseness of an assertion about those subjects. Interdisciplinary projects such as this one, therefore, may clash with the expectations of practitioners of different disciplines. But the end result of the methodological perspective of this book is greater understanding of the French past than would be possible by remaining within the bounds of mainstream historical approaches or by adhering more rigidly to the limits of the disciplines from which I have borrowed. The previous chapters have sketched out an interpretation of French political culture that focuses on the form adopted both in French theater and film on the one hand, and in public ceremonies on the other. I have argued that this was often melodramatic, a theatrical form that builds dramatic tension around a Manichean conflict between good and evil, and in which the plot traces a threat to a virtuous character from an evil one, the rescue of virtue through means that are themselves corrupt, and as a consequence a conclusion that does not re-create the stable, unified situation at the beginning of the plot but rather seeks, without achieving, a new basis for stability and unity. While the revolutionary era certainly had an impact outside France, and indeed outside Europe, it particularly affected French political culture. It is especially important, therefore, that, following Peter Brooks’s view of French melodrama as a form that grew out of the disruptions of the French Revolution in French society, politics, religion, and culture, we understand melodrama as a form in which French culture performed its conflicts, its desire for unity, and its inability to find a satisfactory basis for a stable postrevolutionary society. The popularity of melodrama in French theaters and films over the last two centuries has made it a commonplace in French entertainment, a dominant form in which French culture tells stories. That it was also common in public ceremonies suggests both that it had utility as a way of establishing communication between the organizers of the ceremonies and the viewing audience of citizens and that it played an important role in creating the connection between the increasingly participatory French state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and many, even if not all, of the citizens that it attempted to rule. If the melodramatic form helped political regimes communicate with their citizens, and established legitimacy for them, it did this by limiting the ways in which French political culture could tell stories about the uses of power. This does not mean that the form could not be stretched as these stories were told, just as playwrights and screenwriters found ways to extend the melodramatic form even as it limited the ways in which they could tell stories on stage and film. But even avant-garde authors and directors such as Romain Rolland and Ariane Mnouchkine found themselves pulled back into the form. It was still more difficult for the pageant-masters of the Republic to escape a plot in which the Republic, identified with France, was endangered by internal or external enemies, to be rescued by the heroism of the republicans, the citizens of the Republic, or the people of the French nation. That the conclusion of the plot, or of the pageant, always seemed to be an incomplete resolution seemed to resonate with both theater audiences and citizens. But while the characters in melodramas do not have to deal with the consequences of how they have saved virtue from vice after the curtain falls, it was not so with the performances of French political culture. The Republic and its citizens must face the implications of its political tactics, whether those be the violence of the Terror , the corruption of the Third Republic’s parliamentary politics, the Fifth Republic’s immigration policies, or the ultimate inability to create the utopia on earth that lies at the heart of the radical version of French republicanism. But if melodrama has been a part of French culture since the Revolution, it has not...