The Melodramatic Thread: Spectacle and Political Culture in Modern France (review)

Brooks claims that melodrama was a radically democratic theatrical form during the Restoration because its impulse was to make its representations clear and legible to everyone.¹ Legibility was achieved by weaving universalistic concepts of good and evil into melodramatic plots. In his interdisciplinary study, The Melodramatic Thread, Lehning explores the relationship between melodrama and democracy through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By paying close attention to the melodramatic form in political as well as theatrical performances, Lehning promises a new understanding of the process of democratization in modern France.

In order to understand the process of democratization more fully, Lehning proposes an interdisciplinary approach. He includes methods associated with political science, but given the paucity of anecdotal sources recording audience reactions to performances, he also uses the methods of literary analysis and cultural studies to explore how political ceremonies and theatrical performances helped to constitute the process of democratization.

In Chapters 2 through 5, Lehning deftly moves through nineteenth- and twentieth-century French history, selecting representations of the Revolution of 1789 and the First Republic to support his claim that “French mass democracy is closely linked to the commodified spectacle in modern France” (17). His documentation and analysis of performances on stage and screen, as well as those played out in the streets, courtrooms, and textbooks of modern France, are rich in detail and suggestive in their interpretive framework.

For Lehning, melodrama casts the issues, whether domestic or political, in a particular sensibility in which virtue is threatened by vice, and the conflict unfolds through the intervention of a heroic character. This struggle between good and evil might be played out in any number of ways—republicans versus monarchists or counterrevolutionaries, radical republicans versus liberal republicans, and so on. Despite the absence of any agreement about what embodied virtue, Lehning argues that this struggle between good and evil became, through the impact of melodrama, the legitimate way of viewing politics.

As illuminating as Lehning’s insights are concerning the melodramatic sensibility found across these various texts, his inclination to treat all representations—declarations, processions, plays, and legislative debates—in the same way without considering their disparate audiences; the particular conditions of their production; or their various origins as entertainment, national policy, or political opposition is a little unsettling. Even if, as Lehning insists, these performances “created forms of viewing that constructed the world—whether the world on stage or the world of politics, society and economics—in melodramatic terms,” surely critical distinctions need to be made between these two worlds (46).

By viewing public ceremonies and other political spectacles through the lens of melodrama, the dynamic processes by which multiple expressions about the French Revolution (and French politics more broadly) might have been expressed become emptied of their particular meanings. Consequently, Lehning’s notion of a monolithic political culture obscures key distinctions in French politics and culture—between creating national attachments or national identity and participatory democratic practices; between official, commercial, and oppositional cultures, even when they evince important continuities; and between melodrama and other theatrical forms. Moreover, a deeper understanding of the divisions within French politics may be gained by exploring such critical distinctions.