:The Melodramatic Thread: Spectacle and Political Culture in Modern France.(Interdisciplinary Studies in History.)

Abstract

This book is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating in its analysis of the consistent power of melodramatic narratives across two centuries in arenas of French public life as apparently separate as civic festivals, public funerals, political trials, parliamentary debates, popular plays, classic movies, avant-garde theater, and experimental film; frustrating because it never quite fulfills its opening promise to demonstrate the causal connections linking the use of melodrama in any one of these arenas to its subsequent appearance in any of the others. James R. Lehning stresses the power of what he calls the “melodramatic thread” in the process of creating French republican national identity, claiming that “the discourses of French culture that divided the world into a conflict of good and evil, that sought to rescue threatened virtue, and that continually hovered on the edge of exposure helped assemble the elements of French political culture into images of the world and, through them, created the processes of social, economic, and political life for French men and women” (p. 19). While the parallels that Lehning identifies between theatrical and political rhetoric are certainly provocative, his argument that the presence of the melodramatic thread can explain the persistent polarities of French political culture is not completely convincing because the causal relationship between the popularity of melodramatic plays and the republican use of melodramatic rhetoric remains unclear. In addition, Lehning's argument does not account for the popularity of melodrama in other countries whose political cultures do not share the French style.