The craziest thing happened the other day! I was flaneuring with Roy and Vincent and we saw a man in full 18th century dress- powdered face, wig, and all- walking around the corner. Naturally, we decided to follow him. And we were not disappointed. From the opposite side of the road we saw about fifty women walking towards us, all dressed as peasants (I think?) from the same era. Now, at this point, we didn’t know exactly what time period they were from. And yet, immediately, a vivid image of these women storming the Bastille came to me. As it turns out, they were extras in an AppleTV series retelling Benjamin Franklin’s trip to France to ask for support for the American Revolutionary War. It was perfect and SO fitting for our class topic. I don’t really identify as religious, but it seriously felt like an act of divine intervention… truly a Les Mis moment in which some divine hand, call it fate perhaps, was at work.
As the crew walked by, I asked one man what scenes were being filmed that day. He said that Ben Franklin’s arrival in France was supposed to be kept on the down low, but news had leaked and a crowd of locals was waiting for him. So they were reenacting this momentous, but somewhat secret, arrival. This explained the mass of extras in common person costume. And it also meant we got to see what the masses would have looked like during the time depicted in A Tale of Two Cities! Here’s the thing though. As this man, the stand-in for Ben Franklin (Michael Douglas) himself, was passionately explaining the historical moment being rendered in film, I was skeptical of how it would be portrayed. I caught myself thinking, there’s no way a “secret” moment can be comparable to the original event without being totally dramatized and warped by nostalgia. And why are they even making this series? I question this. Plus, if it were really hushed up, it should not have been such a huge event during which journalists detailed the composition of the crowd, what streets he walked down, and how the people acted when they saw him. My skepticism towards the tv show made me reflect on the way we accept our novels by contrast as semi-historical documents, especially Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. If I'm questioning this TV rendition and its sources, why aren’t I questioning Dickens? Because he wasn’t even alive for the French Revolution... he was only born in 1812, after the storming of the Bastille, after the Terror, heck, he wasn’t even an adult until even after Napoleon’s reign! And yet, my picture of middle class domestic life in the late 1700s is so heavily shaped by this one novel. Which is fine, I actually think walking into this show was a reminder to view the novel as a historical drama- I can take the picture of domestic life seriously but the portrayal of historical events with a healthy dose of skepticism.
So anyways, in the spirit of bookpacking, we stood watching for a full 30 minutes before flaneuring on our way! I even got a photo with one of the extras :)
I had no idea that Hugo was an artist, much less a talented one! This is quite a bleak illustration… it is reminiscent of how he portrays society in Les Mis.
To be honest, I had similar questions when I walked through the Victor Hugo house. Questions about why the directors chose to highlight certain parts of his life: what narrative they were building and with what purpose. I downloaded the Victor Hugo House app which contained images and audio guides. As I was walking through the rooms, I learned about his life in exile and was struck by just how little I knew about his life as an activist. And I didn’t even know he was an artist! Going from thinking Hugo was just an author to thinking about Hugo as an activist was disorienting. I was like, wow this dude really kept himself busy. With the way the directors focused almost exclusively on his life and not at all on his books, it almost seemed to me like his novels were secondary to his activism.
I’m glad that I downloaded and read through the content on the app because I think its perspective on Hugo’s political life balanced out my one-sided perspective of Hugo as a writer. My attention towards why the directors chose to portray Hugo as an activist actually made me realize just how intertwined his political life and his novel writing were. Even as he protests against judicial violence, he renders his arguments in literature through the redemption arc of Jean Valjean. This interplay between his novels and his struggle to shape the real world lends credibility, a sense of his stories being rooted in the painful reality, to Hugo.
This is an example of the media included in the Victor Hugo Museum App which emphasizes Hugo’s life as an activist. I can see how the attitudes which he voices to the senate are rendered in his literature in the themes of forgiveness and progress.
“The publication in 1829 of The Last Day of a Condemned Man - a plea against the death penalty, considered by Hugo to be “judicial violence”, highlights society’s responsibility for the destitution of the lower classes. This empathy and deep humanism would now go hand in hand with both Hugo’s literary work and his political commitments, leading him to intervene by turns as a man of letters, a politician, an orator or exile in favour of liberty.”
Hugo actively shaped not only his present by his activism, but also how people considered the past: the revolution of 1832 was literally not significant until he wrote about it and memorialized it. His credibility as someone politically active in the times he portrayed in his novels allowed him to call attention to the state of society. Similarly, in the present, the Hugo House’s focus on his life rather than his novels does presuppose familiarity with his writing subjects; however, it ultimately deepens the readers’ understanding and belief for his message.
So my two encounters with companies retelling history (AppleTV and the Victor Hugo Museum) made me question how and why each of the narratives are presented as they are, and ultimately led me to question the same about the two texts we read. I concluded that Dickens should not be read as a historical document, but rather taken with a grain of salt keeping in mind where and when he is writing from. In contrast, my experience in the Hugo House helps me trust Hugo’s writing even more as a historical and political document. He witnessed and involved himself in the politics of his time in a way that Dickens could not.