109. Revolutionary Echoes. Thursday, 7 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., 406, JW Marriott.

"How Revolutionary Is Our Scholarship Today?" Julia V. Douthwaite, Univ. of Notre Dame

My paper begins with an epigraph by Charles Baudelaire

In his Salon de 1846, Baudelaire wrote : "pour avoir sa raison d'être, la critique doit être

partiale, passionnée, politique." 

In order to be fair, to justify its existence,

critical writing has to be partial, impassioned, and political.

My title could be read as a commemoration—“How Revolutionary is our Scholarship

today?! (Super!)” as well as an accusation—“How Revolutionary is our Scholarship today?

(Not very)”—but I’m not trying to sow discord here. It’s only that the Revolution is not over,

yet, and we still have more work to do. One need only a glance at any newspaper—French or

American—to see how the rhetoric and principles ushered into public discourse in 1789

remain contentious and important today.

I’d like to talk about some potential places to go, and some good work being done

lately, by people involved in French Revolution studies today. By “good work,” I mean the

writings, the classes, and community involvement of an increasingly heterogeneous group of

citizen-scholars, some of whom are amongst us today. There is no necessary connection

between the people I’ll be citing, who live and work in places as far-flung as Queens, Milan,

and London, except the fact that their scholarship resolutely refuses to commemorate the

French Revolution in the ordinary sense of the term, that is, to celebrate or solemnly preserve

its memory through eulogistic or honorable mention.1 They aim on the contrary to retrieve

key moments and revolutionary concepts for all their imperfection, to rally round the notion

of human dignity, and to subject scholarly issues of causality and biography to updated

inquiry. Ultimately, we hope to put the great stories back into circulation.

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“But why bother?” you might ask. Good point. Why should professors care about

things like human rights, when there is so much work to be done elsewhere? Thanks to its

strict rigor and objectivity, our scholarship is expected to survive the test of time. Yet with

the advent of technologies allowing people to share work in real time, on sites such as

academia.edu and the MLA Commons, there is a natural expectation that such work could be

(or should admit that it is) responding in some way to the world outside the scholar’s head.

Why read stuff published this way, unless there is an immediate pay-off or helpful thought on

a current crisis?

“But what if,” you might ask, what I am espousing is merely pie-in-the-sky idealism

of aging Socialists and hippies, who’ve adopted the French Revolution as a stand-in for

progressive hopes of all kinds? “So what?” I would reply, and remind us that, according to a

huge cross-section of historiographical thought, the Revolution was the spark that set aflame

a long fuse of political activism that lead to abolitionism, suffrage, education, and the

generous welfare state established by the Third Republic in France. In our country, it is not

uncommon to consider the French Revolution as the threshold of modernity—the moment

that made possible the radical break with tradition and orthodoxy that led eventually to recent

gains for blacks, women and minorities of all kinds, thanks to the civil rights era, feminism,

and the re-arranged politics of our post-colonial times. But these could be considered partisan

politics.

The most objective and practical place to look, to see if there could be a connection

between republican politics and our professional duty, is the MLA website. There we read the

mission statement which says, “Founded in 1883, the MLA promotes the study and teaching

of languages and literatures through its programs, publications, annual convention, and

advocacy work.”2 In 2015, the MLA’s advocacy work focused on three priorities: 1) the

Humanities workforce; 2) the MLA’s reach; and 3) Collaborations with K-16 Education. The

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first tackles the shortfall in employment opportunities for Humanities scholars in and beyond

academe; the second aims to secure new members for the MLA in North America and

abroad, among a curious and literate adult public; and the third works to strengthen alliances

with teachers and students in primary and secondary schools. Scholars of the French

Revolution are well-situated to these and other kinds of advocacy, and we could do more. At

the end of this talk, I’ll cite some examples.

Engaged scholarship covers the spectrum of media these days: from the traditional

tools of our trade--book reviews, articles and edited collections, course design,

bibliographies, and teaching methods—to new modes of communicating and working with

larger publics, via twitter and blog posts or “Public Humanities” programming at home and

abroad. What makes it engaged? Its relevance to revolutionary principles. For example,

instead of politely avoiding mention of a book’s weakness, a reviewer might point out, as

Aurore Chéry has done, that the history of French clothing during the 1790s will be

considerably impoverished unless it embraces working-class as well as elite trends in

fashion.3 Instead of focusing on revolutionary history for antiquarian reasons alone, a writer

might try to connect, as I have done, the political implications of her work with the political

news of its day. Thus my decision, in the conclusion to The Frankenstein of 1790, to compare

the excitement of Saudi women taking to the wheel in summer 2011 to the effervescence of

women’s political clubs in 1789-90.4 (Although their hopes and those of millions of other

Arabs were aborted in the short term, after the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, there is reason

to believe that the Saudi women will one day achieve personhood.)

The first and most literal meaning of engagé in the Petit Robert dictionary paints an

intriguing mental picture. It comes from Architecture and means “Qui est partiellement

intégré dans un mur ou un pillier,” or what is “partially built into a wall or pillar,” as in an

engaged column. This sense of being part of something, but also being strong and erect on

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one’s own, works metaphorically. Since we scholars of revolutionary France are part of a

guild of teacher-writers, we want to keep the big principles inherited from 1789 intact. That

inflexibility could be our downfall, true. When compared to other options open to

intellectuals today, however, I think that the move is a salutary one and a positive sign for our

profession. It aligns the professoriate with other cultural workers, such as novelists, artists,

and entertainers; it enlarges our audience and thus our potential impact.

Consider German artist Anselm Kiefer’s latest installation at the Centre Pompidou in

Paris, a mixed media installment of rusty implements and furniture, paintings, and other

objects entitled, “For Madame de Staël.” Although the direct political meaning of this vast set

of pieces is open to interpretation, it has been hailed as proof that “the art world is moving

back to much more engagement with history and politics.”5 Kiefer has been doing that kind

of art for years, but the political is now center stage. The media he uses—which include a

chainsaw on an old camp bed, and bleak-looking black and white drawings—are meant to

portray the brutal side of human nature, as inherited from the revolutionary past. Whereas

others might consider Mme de Stael’s time, and the Romantic movement, as an optimistic

time of renewal and innovation for the arts, Kiefer’s view is black, ominous, and invasive.

Those of us who write on revolutionary France face similar choices: one can focus on

the explosion of artistic, political creation and activity and innovations that made the

revolutionary decade so remarkable for democracy, or one can ponder the darker legacy of

totalitarianism, fascism, and intolerance. Some combination of the two necessarily must be

adopted, weighed, and committed to writing. The best writers tread a fine line, but they do

not shy away from controversy or fear that engaging in real-world issues will make their

books less “timeless.” (Let’s be real: how many scholarly books really do bear the test of

time? Why not speak to readers who are living alongside us today, rather than wait for

posthumous honors?)

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The best scholarship allows us to make common cause with others—including our

students—for outcomes that transcend any one person’s life. Our motivation should be to

inspire. It should be political in the best sense of the word, that is, as it was understood by

visionary Earl Shorris. In 1995, Shorris founded the Clemente Course in the Humanities—a

non-profit that has since brought free, first-rate college teaching to generations of urban poor.

In Riches for the Poor (1997), he wrote:

We followers of Socrates—and in the modern world we are all his intellectual

progeny—live with the loss or misrepresentation of much of what he said. …

Socrates refrained from writing down a word. He did not write, because he thought

that the written word was dead; it could not be argued, changed, clarified, improved,

or denied. … In selecting his method for the Clemente Course, rather than the French

model for example, in which the students sit for the lectures of their professors, we

begin the political life of the student […] politics is always dialogue; it cannot ever be

done alone. Like dialogue, politics does not happen within a person, but in the free

space between persons.6

Making our students into political beings is something we can all aspire to. But those

of us who are experts on the French Revolution could and should do more, I think, because

that event was when people began to understand human life in terms of agency. Despite the

fact that it had no name until years later, and regardless of where exactly it took root (whether

in political debates over the rights of man or theological quarrels over free will), the concept

of human agency was one of the most important, and irrevocable, changes to result from the

decade-long unrest in France. Few in the West would challenge the axiom that mankind’s

intellectual autonomy is an improvement over feudal and religious forms of subjugation. One

of America’s leading philosophers, Jonathan Lear, defines agency as “a distinctive form of

life of which humans are capable, namely that which is typically thought of as rational self-

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governance.”7 The American Constitution takes such principles to be self-evident. But as we

all know, it is not easy to define “rational” and “self-governance.”

Exploring the ways in which people have sought to achieve rational self-governance

over time should galvanize our scholarship. One might, for example, look to the work of

Milan-based scholar Erica Manucci, who has unearthed an active, well-published group of

anti-religious activists who mounted such a campaign in the Alps of France and Italy during

the 1790s. “We are certainly speaking of a minority of Italian patriots,” Manucci admits, but

the evidence she has revealed is nevertheless remarkable, in that it shows how the

“dechristianization” campaign of 1790-93 launched a positive step toward secularism in Italy.

Thanks to events taking place hundreds of miles away, a “tradition of antichristian critique”

took root. According to Manucci, such freedom of thought “had never been able to find

expression within the confines of the eighteenth-century Italian States.” The publication and

popularity of books by notorious Deists, atheists, and free-thinkers such Voltaire and

d’Holbach in northern Italy implies a hitherto unknown current of ideas running strong

through South-Central Europe. As Manucci explains, it forms a “double migration of

heterodox ideas over a long temporality, where a mostly submerged ongoing transnational

and transcultural aspiration finds peaks of visibility.”8

Manucci’s engagement, as you can see, is political and spatial: she wants people to

realize the reach and audience of anticlerical writing in a region and time that have long been

written off as cautious and stalwartly Catholic. In so doing, Manucci gives hope to others

who are troubled by the Roman Catholic Church’s power in state affairs past and present, and

reminds one that home-grown republicanism may spring up by sympathists who seek to

emulate the French model far from Les Champs élysées.

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Jonathan Israel’s series of books on the “Radical Enlightenment” shares a similar goal

for an American readership. Israel writes in order to help us, as members of a “democratic

civilization avowedly based on equality,” to “know its origins correctly.”9 Like Ursula

Goldenbaum and other reviewers of Israel’s trilogy, I too applaud Israel’s “rejection of the

widespread belittling of the Enlightenment as scientistic, as fostering repressive reason, as

producing prisons, mad houses, and the guillotine,” and agree that “the philosophical and

political views of enlightenment authors were closely connected even if not always visible.”10

Israel’s treatment of revolutionary turmoil in the provinces and abroad provides moments of

breathtaking clarity. In Revolutionary Ideas, he moves smoothly between tumult in Germany,

Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the Italian states, thereby revealing a whole

network of sympathetic partisans who entertained similar notions of democratic rule and

battled monarchical interests each in his own way.11

But engaged writing does not only support a secular or left-leaning political agenda.

Some of the most important areas for inquiry today lie in the clash between the human rights

that belong to all citizens, and the religious freedoms of those same people. This was the

nexus of the violence which destroyed La Vendée, the Catholic region of Western France

beginning in December 1793, just as it is the nub dividing secular versus practicing

Frenchmen today. One fascinating book to emerge from the whirlpool that has been pulling

scholars of religion and history into debates on martyrdom and terrorism as practiced by

modern-day jihadists, is the volume edited by Alex Houen and Dominic Janes, Martyrdom

and Terrorism, whose centerpiece is a section on the French Revolution called “the Invention

of Terrorism.”12 Indeed, historians of revolutionary France are strategically well-placed to

plumb the dynamics which gave rise to—and continue to rile--some of the most rancorous

disputes between republicans supporting laïcité and those who declare the right to practice

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their Roman Catholic, or Jewish, or Muslim, faith. Is it too much to expect historians of

secularism to help think through modern-day quarrels?13

Engaged scholarship on the Revolution makes common cause with other major

currents in today’s intelligentsia, such as black studies, feminism and postcolonial writing.

Like them, it highlights the human struggle to achieve a life of dignity. Like Stuart Hall and

scholars of the Birmingham School in the UK, and Susan Sontag in the US, revolutionary

scholars such as Richard Taws, Antoine de Baecque, and Dominique Godineau, and before

them Richard Cobb, have been hugely influential in revealing the rich tapestry of social and

aesthetic codes operating among the lower classes. Instead of labeling the products produced

by and for the consumption of working-class men and women as “kitsch” or “trivia,” these

writers prove that popular imagery grew out of hybrid traditions—religious, mythic, and

millennial. Although the existence of a class consciousness among the urban poor in late 18th-

century Paris is debatable, the manufacture of objects such as “Bastille bricks” and satirical

prints were political events in themselves. These objects witness to a rich, living culture of

people acting according to certain principles, or at least repeating and monetizing certain

words that formed the republican primer, such as law, nation, rights, and duties.

Due to what we now consider the ethically problematic definitions of “man” and

citizenship that mark even the most progressive of political oratory circa 1789, when the

Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen was written, or 1791, when the first

Constitution was accepted, our current ideas are bound to differ. The confrontation between

post-colonial authors and republican principles sometimes produces explosive results, as in

Laurent Dubois’s classic article of 2000, “La République métissée: Citizenship, Colonialism,

and the Borders of French History.” He traces the Republic’s current impasse on race

relations with Blacks and Arabs back to the original founding fathers. Dubois claims that they

did not really think through the logical conclusions to be drawn from their universalist

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rhetoric, and from that blindspot a whole world of troubles has arisen.14 Or consider Michel

Winock’s eye-opening essay on the “very colonial Republic,” which reveals a staggering

snapshot of Africa in 1914, when the entire continent save two small areas was mapped out

and “possessed” by European colonial powers. It is useful to remember that France was one

of the most prominent absentee landlords in Africa from the 1880s to 1962. Winock’s essay

is also helpful for keeping republican political rhetoric in perspective, a point he argues

masterfully by showing how none other than Jules Ferry promoted colonialism for its

“emancipating” effects on native peoples.15 He ends with the law passed on February 25,

2005, whereby the French Parliament voted to encourage textbook authors to acknowledge

“the positive role of the French presence overseas”16 Scholars would do well to pursue such

confrontations between les Français de souche (ancestral French) and people of color in

France, because they may help unblock the long-term logjam on equality and human dignity

in that country.

One of the most creative and perplexing examples I have discovered of such a

confrontation is found in Leïla Sebbar’s 2013 memoir, Voyage en Frances: pays de ma

mère.17 In Chapter One, “La République,” Sebbar reflects on her problematic relationship

with the concept of laicité as an Arab growing up in France in the 1940s and 50s. In order to

stress the hypocrisy at root of the Fifth Republic’s treatment of Muslims, she inserts a

facsimile of a revolutionary pamphlet right onto the pages of her book.18 This pamphlet

reproduces the Constitution of 1793, considered the consummate trace of republican political

thought at its most progressive. Those generous words offer French citizenship to a broad

swath of humanity and especially victims of foreign oppression, and solemnly promise

freedom of religion to all. When read alongside the memoirs of an angry feminist of

Algerian-French origins, it creates an acute sensation of cognitive dissonance. All the more

perplexing are Sebbar’s denunciations of veil-wearing—which she despises as much as any

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LePen supporter—and the text’s fine ink drawings of a naked “Marianne” with her red

bonnet akilter and her vagina splayed open for all to see. The nude may be considered a free

and unfettered citoyenne who is unafraid and unashamed of her body, or an unfathomable

distraction from the author’s earnest indignation. It is hard to know: and that is exactly

Sebbar’s point. She disproves stereotypes and forces readers to think about what went wrong,

and what could go right, in a France that follows the constitution of the First Republic.

Coming from the outside of France and looking at the spectacle of Islamophobia as

reported in the press and seen on the streets today, one has the feeling that the French are

reducing debates about basic human rights to a trivial case of identity politics and or a knee-

jerk sympathy for victims, on the one hand, or blaming a Big Government that doesn’t listen

to the People, on the other. The white, left-wing intelligentsia of the Grandes Écoles and

major universities may feel put upon by the dysfunctional French bureaucracy, but they

nevertheless are equally guilty of skirting the elephant in the salon these days. In numerous

encounters I had in 2015, our French counterparts have appeared tone-deaf to issues of Arab

inclusion or race relations. They don’t seem to get the basic facts: 1) that France is now a

multi-cultural, mixed-race, post-colonial country like ours, and 2) that many French people of

non-Gallic ancestry feel that they owe nothing to the French Revolution or the republican

principles which it gave forth. As far as such folks can see, the long arms of French

universalism have always been just a little too short to touch them and their kids.

What’s a caring American supposed to do? I have no one answer, but I’ve got a few

ideas. They may sound quaint or pollyannesque to you. Unlike trendy theorists such as the

Post-Humanists, whose idea of changing the world is “just to say no to everything,” as Garth

Risk Hallberg put it so well, I agree with the heroine of City on Fire who said: “I don’t think

you can really change anything unless you’re willing to say yes.”19 Yes to promoting

equality, especially. We might consider showing business students who are “hungry to make

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an impact” that there are other ways to “be a disrupter” than by joining a start-up producing

apps for cell phones and other gadgets.20 Consider the possible disruptions one might make

through a career in education, policy or human development, for example, where

professionals are paid to “disrupt” local politics, tax codes, and school funding practices so

that low-income kids and their teachers have a chance at success.

Another way to “disrupt” common practices in a revolutionary spirit might be to bring

back the genre of the manifesto, as Dave Eggers does at the end of his dystopian best-seller,

The Circle (2013). After leading his reader into a nightmare of corporate control over the

human mind and body that puts Orwell’s Big Brother to shame, Eggers provides excerpts

from a fictional “Rights of Humans in a Digital Age” on the last pages. At first glance, this

updated Rights of Man seems to promote the opposite of human agency. It seems to promote

passivity and mutism with invocations such as: “We must all have the right to anonymity,”

and “We must all have the right to disappear.”21 Yet it makes sense, when you realize that

Eggers envisions a time when people won’t even have the freedom to think or dream without

technological surveillance. The manifesto thus lists “the barrier between public and private”

as a new right, as well as the right to practice activities that cannot be “measured.” On that

note, I’d like to close with some thoughts on other important, ephemeral things that cannot be

measured. I’d like to proffer some eye-witness testimonials of people who are doing engaged

work and who are thus worthy of note at this MLA.

Some scholars leave the classroom for the stage, as Sanja Perovic has done in London,

working with students of a theater history course at King’s College. Not only did she direct

and produce a revamped version of Sylvain Maréchal’s play, Le Jugement des rois for the

public, she also found a way to bring habits of radical thinking urgently to the forefront of her

students’ minds. She did that by making them “own” what Maréchal meant by “tyranny,” for

instance, and making them understand, and feel angry about the things that frustrated the

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playwright in his day. Once they were adequately fired up, the students galvanized their own

sense of injustice into live theatre, replacing political issues of the 1790s with equivalent

problems of our own time and denouncing the malefactors before a distinguished audience.

Others scholars I want to mention feel like trusted comrades in arms. They are among

the 30-some contributors to a book-in-progress I’m co-editing, titled Teaching

Representations of the French Revolution. Teaching Representations will hopefully appear in

the MLA’s series “Options for Teaching.” Contributors include people like Matt Lau, Habiba

Boumlik, and Robin Kietlinski, who teach at Queensborough and Laguardia Community

College, respectively, and who have amazing stories to tell about the Revolution’s meaning

for their students, who count some of the most recently uprooted, war-torn, embattled citizens

from around the globe. As Boumlik and Kietlinski write, “Discussions on the causes and the

driving ideals behind the French Revolution can thus lead students to deepen their

perspective on issues such as class discrepancies and injustices, and their lived experience

with such issues can deepen their engagement with the historical content.”22 Or consider the

work of Jeffrey Champlin, who teaches courses on the French Revolution with students of

Middlebury College in Vermont and Bard College at Al-Quds University in Palestine. In his

essay in Teaching Representations, he “makes use of his own experience to discuss the role

of civic participation in political change as seen by activists in the Arab Spring, the long-

lasting, recent Occupy demonstrations, and the Tea Party movements in the USA.”23

One might incite students to recycle revolutionary ideas and materials in more playful,

creative ways as well, such as Logan Connors does, by having students write for and direct

pieces of revolutionary theater through a series of mini-workshops. Or one might allow

students to respond to course content differently, by writing and illustrating a picture book

anchored in our materials, such as this one, Portraits of Defiance, which juxtaposes the

autobiography of Madame Roland and newspaper articles about women from the Arab

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Spring, in a format accessible to readers as young as age 8. College students have also created

some unbelievably lovely, original “altered books” based on the French Revolution. A copy

of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal was “altered” with the life of the royal family by Cathy Davis

for a final project in her senior year. This was a powerful experience. As she posted on-line,

“In the end, I grew very attached to my project. It became more than just a final project for a

one-semester class. I had thought long and hard about my title, my themes, my procedures,

and the questions that I wanted to invoke and process. It made the French Revolution come

alive to me, and it gave me the opportunity to express what I learned through my own

medium, so that it will continue to be important to me throughout my life. It remains a part of

my learning experience and a part of myself, a work of creative art that won’t be forgotten

with the many papers, exams, and homework assignments of college.”24 Or one could enact

liberation on a different level, and recruit local kids for a free writing workshop offered at the

public library.25 There is no end to the creative ways we can find to make the Revolution

meaningful as teachers, scholars, and citizens.

In conclusion, I’d like to remind you that remembering the liberating hopes of 1789

and reflecting on the unsolved problems of our time should not make you despair but rather

gain strength. I’d like to leave you with the mental image of une colonne engagée, thinking of

the material solidity of all of us engaged scholars, working side-by-side, like a wall of

thought. All of us are trying to inspire our students to become well-informed, curious and

political people. And there are hints of something happening in response. Despite the fact that

some news outlets despaired about the “death of the independent bookstore,” since 2009,

sales have been up.26 There has been a steady but significant increase: 25% over the past

seven years. "These days, community-building is the most important key to an indie

bookstore's success," says one shop owner. This is the perfect time for the Public Humanist to

get out there and make connections with the community! As the King of Soul Sam Cooke

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announced, back in 1964, “It's been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna

come.”27

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1 "Commemoration, n.". OED Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxy.library.nd.edu/view/Entry/36998?redirectedFrom=commemoration&2 https://www.mla.org/About-Us/About-the-MLA/The-MLA-s-Mission3 Aurore Chéry, review of Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, in Royal Studies Journal, forthcoming 2016.4 Julia V. Douthwaite, The Frankenstein of 1790 and other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 237-238.5 Doreen Carvajal, “Unrest and a Provocateur Go Together,” New York Times (12/31/15): C1. 6 Earl Shorris, Riches for the Poor: The Clemente Course in the Humanities (NY: Norton, 1997), 28-29.7 Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011), 63.8 Erica Manucci, “The Democratization of Anti-Religious Thought in Revolutionary Times: a Transnational Perspective » presented at King’s College conference, London, June 2015.9 Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60.10 Goldenbaum, cited in Douthwaite, review of Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, in The Review of Politics 77, 2 (Spring 2015): 312-15.11 Douthwaite, review of Israel, Revolutionary Ideas, 314-15.12 Dominic Janes and Alex Houen, ed., Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 107-196.13 This point was inspired by a paper I saw posted by Jean-Clément Martin on academia.edu during December 2015, titled : “Compilation des principaux textes de lois publiés pendant la Révolution française à propos des émigrés (Extraits de la Collection Baudouin 1789-1795).” 14 Laurent Dubois, “La République métissée: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History,” Cultural Studies 14.1 (2000): 15-34. 15 Ferry writes that “les races supérieures, c’est-à-dire les sociétés occidentales parvenues à un haut degré de développement technique, scientifique et moral, ont à la fois des droits et des devoirs à l’égard des ‘races inférieures’,” cited in Michel Winock, « Une République très coloniale,  » L’Histoire 312 bis (septembre 2006): 14-17, 16.16 Winock writes: “2005, 25 février: le Parlement français vote une loi incitant les auteurs des livres scolaires à reconnaître le ‘rôle positif de la présence française outre-mer,” Winock, 16.17 In this memoir where her mother’s region (the Dordogne), and Sebbar’s own experience and imagination of France are studied, she misspells the name of France in order to stress its unspoken multiplicity. Sebbar, Le pays de ma mère: Voyage en Frances (Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule : Bleu autour, 2013).18 Alphabet et syllabaire républicains (Limoges, Barjeas, 1794 [An II]), in Sebbar, 17-19.19 Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 230.20 Natasha Singer, “Universities Race to Nurture Start-Up Founders of the Future,” New York Times (12/29/15): B2.21 Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Vintage, 2014), 490.22 Robin Kietlinski and Habiba Boumlik, “Teaching the French Revolution at a Community College: Challenges and Benefits” in Teaching Representations of the French Revolution, ed. Julia Douthwaite, Catriona Seth and Antoinette Sol. New York: MLA, manuscript in progress and under contract.23 Jeffrey Champlin, Teaching Representations, op. cit.24 Catherine Davis, “Shards of History,” June 13, 2009. https://revolutioninfiction.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/altered-book-shards-of-history-by-catherine-davis/25 See for example the “Write YOUR Story” workshop. Inspired by the 826 National network, this project was featured in an article by Margaret Fosmoe, South Bend Tribune (12/26/15): A1-2. http://www.southbendtribune.com/news/education/kids-creating-their-own-books/article_4813adcf-e8f4-55f7-8d24-69f98da6c6ea.html26 Husna Haq, “Indie Bookstores are on the Rise: What’s Behind their Comeback?” The Christian Science Monitor (5/28/15): http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2015/0528/Indie-bookstores-are-on-the-rise-What-s-behind-their-comeback27 With thanks to Randy Coleman, for the reminder.