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Critical Pedagogies of Consumption

“This book is long overdue. It is time for educators to take consumption and
consumer culture seriously. . . . This volume brings a new language to the table,
outlining new pedagogies and theories of consumption, new dialogues, and new
terms. . . . Utopian in theme and implication, it shows how the practices of
critical, interpretive inquiry can help change the world in positive ways. . . . This
is the promise, the hope, and the agenda that is offered.”
Norman K. Denzin, From the Foreword
“Its focus on learning, education, and pedagogy gives this book a particular
relevance and significance in contemporary cultural studies. It will certainly be
useful to all those who have an interest in a critical pedagogy that is concerned
with the central source of meanings and values in our society. Its impressive
authors, thoughtful structuring, wide range of perspectives, attention to matters
of educational policy and practice, and suggestions for transformative pedagogy
all provide for a compelling and significant volume.”
H. Svi Shapiro, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
“A powerful lineup of international scholars . . . This book adds an international per-
spective to issues that have been taken up more specifically in the U.S. and Canada.”
Deron Boyles, Georgia State University

Distinguished international scholars from a wide range of disciplines (including

curriculum studies, foundations of education, adult education, higher education,
and consumer education) come together in this book to explore consumption and
its relation to learning, identity development, and education. Readers will learn
about a variety of ways in which learning and education intersect with consump-
tion. This volume is unique within the literature of education in its examination of
educational sites—both formal and informal—where learners and teachers are
resisting consumerism and enacting critical pedagogies of consumption.

Jennifer A. Sandlin is Assistant Professor in the Division of Advanced Studies in

Education Policy, Leadership, and Curriculum, Mary Lou Fulton Institute and
Graduate School of Education, Arizona State University, Tempe.
Peter McLaren is Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School
of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.
 Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education
Joel Spring, Editor

Spring • Political Agendas for Education: From Change We Can Believe In To Putting
America First, Fourth Edition
Sandlin/McLaren, Eds. • Critical Pedagogies of Consumption: Living and Learning in the
Shadow of the “Shopocalypse”
Shapiro, Ed. • Education and Hope in Troubled Times: Visions of Change for Our
Children’s World
Spring • Globalization of Education: An Introduction
Benham, Ed. • Indigenous Educational Models for Contemporary Practice: In Our
Mother’s Voice, Second Edition
Shaker/Heilbrun • Reclaiming Education for Democracy: Thinking Beyond No Child
Left Behind
Ogbu, Ed. • Minority Status, Oppositional Culture, and Schooling
Spring • Wheels in the Head: Educational Philosophies of Authority, Freedom, and
Culture from Confucianism to Human Rights, Third Edition
Spring • The Intersection of Cultures: Global Multicultural Education, Fourth Edition
Gabbard, Ed. • Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: The Effects of School
Reform in a Neoliberal/Neoconservative Age, Second Edition
Spring • A New Paradigm for Global School Systems: Education for a Long and Happy Life
Books, Ed. • Invisible Children in the Society and Its Schools, Third Edition
Spring • Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State
Sidhu • Universities and Globalization: To Market, To Market
Bowers/Apffel-Marglin, Eds. • Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental
Crisis
Reagan • Non-Western Educational Traditions: Indigenous Approaches to Educational
Thought and Practice, Third Edition
Books • Poverty and Schooling in the U.S.: Contexts and Consequences
Shapiro/Purpel, Eds. • Critical Social Issues in American Education: Democracy and
Meaning in a Globalizing World, Third Edition
Spring • How Educational Ideologies are Shaping Global Society: Intergovernmental
Organizations, NGOs, and the Decline of the Nation-State
Lakes/Carter, Eds. • Global Education for Work: Comparative Perspectives on Gender and
the New Economy
Heck • Studying Educational and Social Policy: Theoretical Concepts and Research Methods
Peshkin • Places of Memory: Whiteman’s Schools and Native American Communities
Hemmings • Coming of Age in U.S. High Schools: Economic, Kinship, Religious, and
Political Crosscurrents
Spring • Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools,
Advertising, and Media
Ogbu • Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic
Disengagement
Benham/Stein, Eds. • The Renaissance of American Indian Higher Education: Capturing
the Dream
Hones, Ed. • American Dreams, Global Visions: Dialogic Teacher Research with Refugee
and Immigrant Families
McCarty • A Place to Be Navajo: Rough Rock and The Struggle for Self-Determination in
Indigenous Schooling
Spring • Globalization and Educational Rights: An Intercivilizational Analysis
Grant/Lei, Eds. • Global Constructions of Multicultural Education: Theories and
Realities
Luke • Globalization and Women in Academics: North/West–South/East
Meyer/Boyd, Eds. • Education Between State, Markets, and Civil Society: Comparative
Perspectives
Roberts • Remaining and Becoming: Cultural Crosscurrents in an Hispano School
Borman/Stringfield/Slavin, Eds. • Title I: Compensatory Education at the Crossroads
DeCarvalho • Rethinking Family-School Relations: A Critique of Parental Involvement
in Schooling
Peshkin • Permissible Advantage?: The Moral Consequences of Elite Schooling
Spring • The Universal Right to Education: Justification, Definition, and Guidelines
Nieto, Ed. • Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools
Glander • Origins of Mass Communications Research During the American Cold War:
Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications
Pugach • On the Border of Opportunity: Education, Community, and Language at the
U.S.-Mexico Line
Spring • Education and the Rise of the Global Economy
Benham/Heck • Culture and Educational Policy in Hawai’i: The Silencing of Native
Voices
Lipka/Mohatt/The Ciulistet Group • Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yu’pik Eskimo
Examples
Weinberg • Asian-American Education: Historical Background and Current Realities
Nespor • Tangled Up in School: Politics, Space, Bodies, and Signs in the Educational
Process
Spring • The Cultural Transformation of a Native American Family and Its Tribe 1763–1995
For additional information on titles in the Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies
in Education series visit www.routledge.com/education
Critical Pedagogies of
Consumption
Living and Learning in the
Shadow of the “Shopocalypse”

Edited by
Jennifer A. Sandlin
Arizona State University
Peter McLaren
University of California, Los Angeles
First published 2010
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
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© 2010 Taylor & Francis

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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Critical pedagogies of consumption: living and learning in the shadow of
the shopocalypse/edited by Jennifer A. Sandlin, Peter McLaren.
p. cm—(Sociocultural, political, and historical studies in education)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Education—Economic aspects—United States. 2. Education
and globalization—United States. 3. Capitalism—United States.
4. Consumption (Economics)—United States. 5. Consumer
behavior—United States. I. Sandlin, Jennifer A. II. McLaren, Peter.
LC66.C74 2010
370—dc22 2009018965

ISBN 0-203-86626-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–99789–5 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–415–99790–9 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–86626–6 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–99789–8 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–99790–4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–86626–9 (ebk)
To Joe Kincheloe, Bill Talen, Rudy Espino, and Grant St. Clair
Contents

Foreword xiii
NORMAN K. DENZIN
Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xxv

1 Introduction: Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy and

Envisioning a Critical Pedagogy of Consumption—
Living and Learning in the Shadow of the
“Shopocalypse” 1
JENNIFER A. SANDLIN, Arizona State University
PETER McLAREN, UCLA

PART I
Education, Consumption, and the Social, Economic, and
Environmental Crises of Capitalism 21

2 Rootlessness, Reenchantment, and Educating

Desire: A Brief History of the Pedagogy
of Consumption 23
MICHAEL HOECHSMANN, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

3 Consuming Learning 36
ROBIN USHER, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

4 Producing Crisis: Green Consumerism as an

Ecopedagogical Issue 47
RICHARD KAHN, University of North Dakota

5 Teaching Against Consumer Capitalism in the Age of

Commercialization and Corporatization of Public Education 58
RAMIN FARAHMANDPUR, Portland State University
x Contents
PART II
Schooling the Consumer Citizen 67

6 Schooling for Consumption 69

JOEL SPRING, Queens College and Graduate Center, City University of New York

7 Schools Inundated in a Marketing-Saturated World 83

ALEX MOLNAR, Arizona State University
FAITH BONINGER, Arizona State University
GARY WILKINSON, University of Hull, England
JOSEPH FOGARTY, Corballa National School, Sligo, Ireland and
The Campaign for Commercial-Free Education

8 Exploring the Privatized Dimension of Entrepreneurship

Education and Its Link to the Emergence of the
College Student Entrepreneur 97
MATTHEW M. MARS, California State University, Los Angeles

9 Framing Higher Education: Nostalgia, Entrepreneurship,

Consumerism, and Redemption 108
GUSTAVO E. FISCHMAN, Arizona State University
ERIC HAAS, WestEd, Oakland, CA

10 Politicizing Consumer Education: Conceptual Evolutions 122

SUE L. T. McGREGOR, Mount St. Vincent University, Halifax, Canada

PART III
Consumption, Popular Culture, Everyday Life, and
the Education of Desire 135

11 Consuming the All-American Corporate Burger:

McDonald’s “Does It All For You” 137
JOE L. KINCHELOE

12 Barbie: The Bitch Can Buy Anything 148

SHIRLEY R. STEINBERG, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

13 Consuming Skin: Dermographies of Female

Subjection and Abjection 157
JANE KENWAY, Monash University, Victoria, Australia
ELIZABETH BULLEN, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia
 Contents xi
14 Happy Cows and Passionate Beefscapes: Nature
as Landscape and Lifestyle in Food Advertisements 169
ANNE MARIE TODD, San José State University

15 Creating the Ethical Parent-Consumer Subject: Commerce,

Moralities, and Pedagogies in Early Parenthood 180
LYDIA MARTENS, Keele University, UK

16 Chocolate, Place, and a Pedagogy of Consumer Privilege 193

DAVID A. GREENWOOD, Washington State University

PART IV
Unlearning Consumerism Through Critical Pedagogies of
Consumption: Sites of Contestation and Resistance 201

17 Re-Imagining Consumption: Political and Creative

Practices of Arts-Based Environmental Adult Education 203
DARLENE E. CLOVER, University of Victoria, Canada
KATIE SHAW, University of Victoria, Canada

18 Using Cultural Production to Undermine

Consumption: Paul Robeson as Radical Cultural Worker 214
STEPHEN D. BROOKFIELD, University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis, MN

19 Beyond the Culture Jam 224

VALERIE SCATAMBURLO-D’ANNIBALE, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada

20 Global Capitalism and Strategic Visual Pedagogy 237

DAVID DARTS, New York University
KEVIN TAVIN, The Ohio State University

21 Turning America Into a Toy Store 249

HENRY A. GIROUX, McMaster University

22 United We Consume? Artists Trash Consumer

Culture and Corporate Green-Washing 259
NICOLAS LAMPERT, Visual Artist, JustSeeds Visual Resistance Artists’ Cooperative

List of Contributors 264

Index 270
Foreword
Norman K. Denzin

This book is long overdue. It is time for educators to take consumption and con-
sumer culture seriously. Consumption’s pedagogies teach today’s children and
adults how to fashion identities connected to gendered celebrity culture, advertis-
ing, fashion, and the media. Our educational institutions are sites where con-
sumer practices are taught, bought, sold, and exchanged. In classrooms and
playgrounds, children are taught how to consume popular culture. Educational
institutions produce gendered, classed, and racialized subjects—subjects whose
identities are forged out of exchanges in the consumer marketplace. A child con-
sumer is a person who knows how to buy, wear, eat, watch, drink, and exchange
cultural signifiers of childhood.
At the beginning of the 21st century, there is a pressing demand to intervene in
the neoliberal capitalist economic-consumption system. The contributors to this
volume bring a new language to the table, outlining new pedagogies and theories
of consumption, new dialogues, and new terms, including: green consumerism,
consumer citizen, branding, student entrepreneurship, consumer education as
resistance, public pedagogies, signs of the burger, anti-Barbie doll discourses,
regimes of skin care, beefscapes, lifestyle food advertisements, ethical parent-
consumer subjects, unlearning consumerism, re-imagining consumption, radical
cultural workers, culture jamming, and the Shopocalypse.
Utopian in theme and implication, these chapters show how the practices of
critical, interpretive inquiry can help change the world in positive ways. Each
contributor examines new ways of making the practices of critical qualitative
inquiry central to the workings of a free democratic society. Each chapter brings
these practices more centrally into the fields of consumer research and education.
This is the promise, the hope, and the agenda that is offered by the editors and
contributors in this important volume. Together they show how critical pedagogy
can be put to strategic advantage by consumer researchers, by educators, by
adults, by parents, and by children.

Critical Pedagogies of Consumption

Within a critical pedagogy framework, consumption refers to more than the
acquisition, use, and divestment of goods and services. Consumption represents a
site where power, ideology, gender, and social class circulate and shape one
xiv Foreword
another. Consumption involves the study of particular moments, negotiations,
representational formats, and rituals in the social life of a commodity. The con-
sumption of cultural objects by consumers can empower, demean, disenfranchise,
liberate, essentialize, and stereotype. Consumers are trapped within a hegemonic
marketplace. Ironically, as Holt (1997) observes, consumers who challenge or
resist these hegemonic marketing and consumption practices find themselves
located in an ever-expanding postmodern market tailored to fit their individual
needs.
The interpretive rituals and practices surrounding consumption are anchored
in a larger system, called the “circuit of culture” (du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, &
Negus, 1997, p. 3). In this circuit meanings are defined by the mass media—
including advertising, cinema, and television. This circuit is based on the articula-
tion or interconnection of several distinct and contingent processes, namely the
processes of representation, identification, production, consumption, and regula-
tion (du Gay et al., 1997, p. 3). These processes mutually influence one another,
continually shaping and creating consumers who conform to postmodern market
conditions.
Human beings live in a second-hand world. Existence is not solely determined
by interaction or by social acts. Mills (1963) puts this forcefully when he argues,
“The consciousness of human beings does not determine their existence; nor does
their existence determine their consciousness. Between the human consciousness
and material existence stand communications, and designs, patterns, and values
which influence decisively such consciousness as they have” (p. 375). After Smythe
(1994, p. 285), I understand that the basic task of the mass media is to make this
second-hand world natural and invisible to its participants. Barthes (1957/1972)
elaborates, noting that the media dress up reality, giving it a sense of naturalness,
so that “Nature and History [are] confused at every turn” (p. 11). This is the case
because the media’s purposes are to “operate itself so profitably as to ensure unri-
valled respect for its economic importance in the [larger cultural and social]
system” (Smythe, 1994, p. 285).
The prime goals of the mass media complex are four-fold; the first three are to
create audiences who: (1) become consumers of the products advertised in the
media while (2) engaging in consumption practices that conform to the norms of
possessive individualism endorsed by the capitalist political system and (3) adher-
ing to a public opinion that is supportive of the strategic polices of the state
(Smythe, 1994, p. 285). At this level the information technologies of late capital-
ism function to create audiences who use the income from their own labor to buy
the products that their labor produces (p. 285). The primary commodity that the
media produce “is audiences” (p. 268). The fourth goal of the media is clear—to
do everything it can to make consumers as audience members think they are not
commodities.
Each process within the circuit of culture becomes a nodal point for critical,
interpretive consumer and educational research. Critical researchers seek to
untangle and disrupt the apparently unbreakable economic and ritual links
between the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities. Critical
researchers are constantly intervening in the circuits of culture, exposing the ways
 Foreword xv
in which these processes over-determine the meanings cultural commodities have
for human beings. The moral ethnographer becomes visible in the text, disclosing,
illuminating, and criticizing the conditions of constraint and commodification
that operate at specific points in these circuits (see hooks, 1990).
Complex discursive and ideological processes shape the rituals of cultural pro-
duction and consumption. Each historical period has its racially preferred gen-
dered self. These selves are announced and validated through these circuits of
representation, identification, and consumption. The cultural studies scholar
interrogates these formations and the circuits they forge. A single question is
always asked, namely “How do these structures undermine and distort the prom-
ises of a radically free democratic society?” Phrased differently, “How do these
processes contribute to the reproduction of systems of racial and gender domina-
tion and repression in the culture?”
An antifoundational, critical social science seeks its external grounding not in
science, in any of its revisionist, postpositivist forms, but rather in a commitment
to a post-Marxism and communitarian feminism with hope but no guarantees. It
seeks to understand how power and ideology operate through and across systems
of discourse, cultural commodities, and cultural texts.

In Conclusion
How can we use critical, interpretive consumer and educational research to
communicate across racial, gendered, and classed barriers? How can we use this
research to criticize the commercial signifiers of neoliberal culture? Can we
imagine new forms of consumer culture, forms that do not rely on the images
and sounds of sexism, violence, and mindless consumption? Over 50 years ago
Ralph Ellison asked whether Americans can “use their social sciences, and their
art, cinema and literature to communicate across [the] barriers of race and
religion, class, color and region?” (Ellison, 1952, p. xxii). Today Ellison’s ques-
tions are more poignant then ever: “How can we share in our common human-
ity, while valuing our differences?” “How can the interests of democracy,
post-consumerism, environmentalism, education and art converge?” “How can
we use our literature, cinema and critical social science to advance the goals of
this democratic society?” (p. 11). Can we overcome the structures of racism and
sexism that are so deeply engrained in the marrow of this consumer-based
democracy (Feagin, 2000, p. 270)?
I believe that a critical consumer and educational research agenda can advance
this project. With John Sherry (2000), I am convinced that critical pedagogy and
critical interpretive consumer research has “a vital moral and political role to play
in the new millennium” (p. 278). I too am concerned with how our patterns,
practices, and philosophies of consumption estrange us from and threaten our
place in the “natural” world. And with Sherry, I believe we need to craft new
humanistic “interdisciplinary methods of methods of inquiry and inscription”
(p. 278). The problem is clear—work must be focused around a clear set of moral
and political goals. The editors and contributors to this volume explore several
ways in which this could occur. For this we are deeply in their debt.
xvi Foreword
References
Barthes, R. (1957/1972). Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang.
du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. (1997). Doing cultural studies: The
story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage.
Ellison, R. (1952). Invisible man. New York: Random House.
Feagin, J. R. (2000). Racist America. New York: Routledge.
Holt, D. B. (1997). Poststructuralist lifestyle analysis: Conceptualizing the social patterning
of consumption in postmodernity. Journal of Consumer Research, 23(4), 326–350.
hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End Press.
Mills, C. W. (1963). The man in the middle. In I. L. Horowitz (Ed.), Power, politics, and
people: The collected essays of C. Wright Mills (pp. 374–386). New York: Ballantine.
Sherry, J. F., Jr. (2000). Place, technology, and representation. Journal of Consumer Research,
27(2), 273–278.
Smythe, D. (1994). Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism. In T. Guback (Ed.),
Counterclockwise: Perspectives on communication (pp. 266–291). Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Preface

Consumption has become a term much more prevalent today than perhaps at any
other time in history as the scourge of capitalism continues in its reckless fury to
excoriate every vulnerable and hitherto uncommodified space while it takes root,
germinates, and inflicts its pestilence on a planetary scale. The term consumption
permeates not only academic disciplines such as marketing, consumer behavior,
anthropology, consumer psychology, and sociology, but it is also the point d’appui
for much of the work in cultural studies, where scholars have investigated how the
brand-names of the corporate capitalist order help to shape identity. What is often
missing in this work is a focus on the learning and education involved in the pro-
cess of becoming both consumer literate and also a living commodity, the latter
of which has affected all of us in this age of the postmodern spectacle and its orgy
of consumption. Critical Pedagogies of Consumption attempts to redress these
lacunae by bringing together researchers from a wide range of subfields within
education who represent a range of age levels and types of education.
While in the face of the world’s unspeakable suffering and tribulation amidst
the downward spiral of the economy caused by capitalist overproduction that
has produced the boom-and-bust-cycle for the last several centuries or more—
culminating in the Crash of 2008–2009—executives from the recently bailed-out
insurance giant AIG continue to receive $165 million in bonuses, and workers
continue to be laid off in record numbers. The full-throated chorus of “no govern-
ment interference” that was sung by the right-wing corporate press for decades is
suddenly nowhere to be heard, even in the business community.
Gore Vidal presciently noted in 1963 that the U.S. government prefers that “pub-
lic money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in
which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich” (quoted in
Vidal, 2002, p. 129) and the truth of this statement is no more evident than in the
recent nationalization of Fannie and Freddie where you can see clearly that
the USA is a country where there exists socialism for the rich and privatization for
the poor, all basking in what Nouriel Roubini (2008) calls “the glory of unfettered
Wild West laissez-faire jungle capitalism” (¶ 6) that has allowed the biggest debt
bubble in history to explode out of control, causing the biggest financial crisis since
the Great Depression. Indeed, socialism is only condemned when it profits the
poor and the powerless and threatens the rich. But capitalists are quick to embrace
a socialism for the rich—which really is what neoliberal capitalism is all about. But
xviii Preface
of course, it’s not called what it really is—a system of mass destruction—but rather
bears the euphemistically coined phrase, “free market capitalism” and is seen as
synonymous with the struggle for democracy. In fact, for the last 60 years the
military budget has propped up capitalism, which would have fallen into crisis
much sooner had it not been for imperialist wars waged by the United States. And
now we are witnessing the most massive transfer of wealth to the rich in human
history to the tune of more than eight trillion dollars, which has been funneled to
the biggest banks, investors, corporations, and insurance companies. This helps
explain why democracy works for the rich, while the poor are cast into quasi-feudal
steampunk landscapes of dog-eat-dog despair. Those whose labor is exploited in
the production of social wealth—that is, the wage and salaried class—are now
bearing most of the burden of the current economic crisis in the United States.
Those financiers and institutions that precipitated the crisis that has destroyed the
jobs and homes of millions of people are bailed out while the poor are left defense-
less in the face of a massive structural collapse of capitalism.
This book is an attempt to heed various calls by educators such as Usher, Bryant,
and Johnston (1997), who urge scholars to begin taking consumption seriously
within the field of education. It is simultaneously a call for education scholars to
explore consumption and investigate the “lines that disrupt and overturn the brand-
name corporate order” (Reynolds, 2004, p. 32). This edited volume represents the
first attempt to bring together scholars from across a wide range of disciplines
within the broader field of education to explore consumption and its relation to
learning, identity development, and education. Moreover, this volume brings a vari-
ety of education scholars together to focus on resistance to consumerism and to
envision what we are calling a “critical pedagogy of consumption.”

Structure of the Book

This book is divided into four parts, plus the Introduction. In the Introduction,
we (Jenny and Peter) set the stage for the rest of the book, as we argue that educa-
tors must begin to take consumption seriously as a site of learning and education,
and as a potential site of production and resistance. In order to facilitate this
engagement with consumption’s pedagogy and to work towards envisioning a
“critical pedagogy of consumption,” we provide an overview of various perspec-
tives on consumption, and of various ways in which education, learning, and
consumption intersect.
Part I, Education, Consumption, and the Social, Economic, and Environmental
Crises of Capitalism, expands upon many of the points we make in the
Introduction, as contributors set the context for the study of education and con-
sumption by providing overviews of various theoretical approaches to examining
the intersection of education, learning, and consumption; historical overviews of
consumption; and overviews of the many crises that are connected with consumer
capitalism and the implications these hold for education and learning. Michael
Hoechsmann tracks the long history of the growth of a pedagogy of consumption
that culminates in the Parisian experience of the late 19th century. In doing so, he pays
attention to historical moments where consumer goods played an instructive—or
 Preface xix
pedagogical—role in people’s everyday lives. He argues that the emergence of
consumer desire, and the cultural production of imaginary wants and needs,
involves a re-enchantment of the world for populations undergoing tremendous
and ruptural social, cultural, and economic change.
Robin Usher delves into the theoretical terrain of consumption studies, and
discusses how consumption is linked to learning. As the focus of modern life has
become crafting meaningful lifestyles, Usher posits that the desire to create these
lifestyles motivates individuals to learn in multiple and varied ways. Usher raises
questions about what it means for educators to operate within this new consumer
world where individuals are constantly engaged in expressive, aesthetic, and
identity-based learning as they enact lifestyle practices.
In their respective chapters, Richard Kahn and Ramin Farahmandpur each
focus on the various crises—including social, cultural, economic, and environmental
crises—connected with hyperconsumerism and overconsumption. Kahn focuses on
how global capitalism and hyperconsumption are implicated in massive global
environmental destruction; he also highlights how a critical ecopedagogy can
address these issues. Farahmandpur presents an overview and analysis of the cur-
rent social, political, and economic crises facing the United States, arguing that these
crises are inextricably linked to capitalism and U.S. imperialism. He examines how
these crises manifest in the commercialization and corporatization of public educa-
tion, focuses on how Marxist analysis is needed more today than ever, and describes
how activists across the globe are engaged in anti-capitalist struggles.
Authors contributing to Part II, Schooling the Consumer Citizen, examine
how formal institutions of education are implicit in crafting what Spring (2003)
calls “consumer-citizens.” Molnar (2005) and Spring (2003) argue that formal
institutions such as schools help establish consumer culture, and work to craft
consumer-citizens through formal curriculum as well as other spaces where com-
mercialism has risen within schools. Spring (2003) states,

While schools are teaching consumerism through conveying the message

that education is a form of consumption, in-school ads, and consumerism-
oriented courses, the school’s most important contribution is creating a
peer group of teens who relate through brand names and consumerism-
oriented activities.
(p. 188)

This “consumer education” continues into higher education, which has increas-
ingly become a site where education is branded, marketed, and corporatized. In
this part, authors critically examine how schools have operated with the best
interests of the market in mind, and how educators are beginning to problematize
and challenge the ways in which schools socialize learners to be consumers.
In his chapter, Joel Spring provides an historical look at how consumerism
grew to be the dominant ideology in the United States. Spring examines how
children and adults were crafted as consumers throughout the 19th century
through the information contained in and disseminated through advertisements,
newspapers, textbooks, home economics teachers and courses, and spaces of
xx Preface
consumption such as the department store. Spring also examines the particular
gendered and racial craftings of “the consumer” that these spaces fostered.
Alex Molnar, Faith Boninger, Gary Wilkinson, and Joseph Fogerty examine
how K-12 schooling has become a corporatized space, as school commercialism
has been steadily on the rise. Drawing upon their recent work, the authors exam-
ine the many ways commercialism manifests in schools, and how this commer-
cialism is crafting consumer-citizens.
Matt Mars’ chapter is situated in the context of higher education. He discusses
what he calls state-sponsored student entrepreneurship, that is, the idea that some stu-
dent entrepreneurs now have the market agency to utilize university capital as a lever
for creating independent entrepreneurial ventures. Mars outlines the privatized
dimension of collegiate entrepreneurship education through an exploration of pri-
vately endowed entrepreneurship faculty positions and collegiate entrepreneurship
centers, and argues for a more critical perspective on entrepreneurship, one that is
explicitly centered on how entrepreneurship can be used to foster social change.
Gustavo Fischman and Eric Haas approach the issue of the corporatization and
commodification of education—and in their case, specifically higher education—
through examining the prototypes about higher education that are crafted and
distributed through the opinion-editorials of three influential U.S. newspapers.
Drawing upon Norman Fairclough’s notion of “mediatization,” they found
that there are only three consistent framings of “higher education” in the media,
and that two of these—what they call “educational entrepreneurship” and “redemp-
tive consumerism”—are closely connected with consumerist conceptions of higher
education.
Sue McGregor traces the history of consumer education since the 1960s, focus-
ing mainly on formal consumer education that is taught in K-12 and higher
education settings. She shares how consumer education has moved from a preoc-
cupation with teaching consumers how to function efficiently in the free-trade
marketplace, towards encouraging them to strive for citizenship, solidarity, and
sustainability.
Part III, Popular Culture, Everyday Life, Consumption, and the Education of
Desire focuses on public pedagogy and everyday life as sites of education and learn-
ing that are possibly even more influential than formal educational institutions.
Critical educators view forms of mass media such as soap operas, television, and
movies as forms of public education, and consider popular culture and everyday life
powerful sites of pedagogical practice. Giroux (1999), for instance, argues that “pub-
lic pedagogy” is performed through popular culture, a site that produces meanings,
social practices, and desires among the public. He explains that media culture

has become a substantial, if not the primary, educational force in regulating

the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms that offer up and legiti-
mate particular subject positions—what it means to claim an identity as a
male, female, white, black, citizen, noncitizen. The media culture defines
childhood, the national past, beauty, truth, and social agency.
(Giroux 1999, pp. 2–3)
 Preface xxi
and, we would add, it helps define what it means to be a citizen and a consumer.
Authors in this part explore how public pedagogy works to craft consumers with
particular relationships with consumer culture.
Many of the authors in this part provide analyses of specific sites of popular
culture that help shape who we are as consumers. For instance, Joe Kincheloe and
Shirley Steinberg, in their respective chapters, provide critical analyses of two
icons of American consumer culture—McDonald’s and Barbie. Kincheloe explores
how McDonald’s public relations strategies have worked to equate the idea of
“McDonald’s” with “America,” “freedom,” and “democracy.” While Kincheloe
asserts that McDonald’s and its advertisers want to transform children into con-
sumers, he also posits that children are not simply passive consumers, but negoti-
ate their own meanings within this corporate climate. Steinberg, on the heels of
Barbie’s 50th birthday, provides an analysis of Barbie’s cultural and consumptive
aspects. She discusses how Barbie has influenced generations of children and
adults, providing a role model of a particular kind of “true American” who
embodies dominant capitalist consumerist hegemonic ideologies.
Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen explore how skin functions as a site where
female subjection and abjection are both produced and reproduced, and examine
what skin teaches us about femininity, feminism, and consumerism. They exam-
ine the dermographics of regimes of skin care (such as hair removal) and the
mechanisms of consumer-media culture that drive them—and show how the
pedagogies of consuming skin rely on processes of subjection and abjection.
These processes, they argue, seek to erase the signifiers of girls’ and women’s life
stages and life stories that the skin narrates.
Anne Marie Todd argues that food advertisements commodify food products
that are far from their natural states in ways that portray an intimate connection
between food and nature, and investigates how this process works in two specific
food advertising campaigns: the California Cheese advertisements that portray
“happy cows” that make “good cheese,” and the American beef industry’s adver-
tisements that depict larger-than-life cuts of meat.
Lydia Martens focuses her chapter on “The Baby Show,” which is a consumer
extravaganza showcasing baby care products for new parents held in various sites
across the UK; she explores how the Show constitutes new parents as pedagogical
subjects in consumer culture, which she argues is a process that mirrors an analo-
gous development in the medical-health field.
In the last chapter of Part III, David Greenwood uses an “ethic of place” frame-
work to explore the political and economic relationships between his own con-
sumption and people and places across the globe. Using case studies from his own
teaching, and specifically conversations about the politics of chocolate that
emerged in his classes, he connects everyday consumption to social, political, and
economic inequalities; he also urges us to unpack the “invisible knapsack” of con-
sumer privilege we all carry, so we can begin the process of transformation in our
individual and collective stories of consumption.
In Part IV, Unlearning Consumerism: Sites of Contestation and Resistance,
contributors focus on sites of contestation and resistance to consumerism. In a
xxii Preface
recent article focusing on the brand-name corporate order currently permeating
Western society and American schools, Reynolds (2004) asks, “Where are the con-
frontations, the protest, and the resistance?” (p. 29). He goes on to argue that there
has yet to be a “major political or policy battle on classroom commercialization”
(p. 29). However, there are some educators across the globe who are taking con-
sumption seriously, and are particularly interested in learning and enacting con-
sumptive resistance. This part explores how children, youth, and adults learn and
“unlearn” consumerism, how learners in a variety of settings are participating in
learning and education around issues of consumption, how educators are enacting
critical consumer education in a variety of settings, and how social movements
focused on issues of consumption operate as sites of critical learning.
In their chapter, Darlene Clover and Katie Shaw discuss consumption and
production in Canada—highlighting specifically the gendered nature of con-
sumption and production practices and discourses—and explore how environ-
mental adult education, non-governmental organizations, and the government of
Canada are responding to these issues.
Stephen Brookfield provides an analysis of critical adult education occurring
within the realm of popular culture. Brookfield discusses how educator-activists
have created political forms of consumption that themselves serve to challenge the
ideology of consumerism. In particular, Brookfield examines the pedagogy of
activist-educator Paul Robeson, and how he used popular culture and media as
anti-capitalist forces.
Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale discusses the links between capitalist pro-
duction, consumption, and revolutionary critical pedagogy. More specifically, she
focuses on the forms of resistance captured under the umbrella term of “culture
jamming,” which seek to confront and contest the hegemonic discourses of con-
sumer society. She argues that culture jamming fails to provide an adequate chal-
lenge to the fundamental injustices of capitalism and often perpetuates the very
ideological discourses it claims to resist. In contrast, Scatamburlo-D’Annibale
discusses how a revolutionary critical pedagogy can operate as a more effective
challenge to capitalism.
David Darts and Kevin Tavin take a different perspective on culture jamming,
exploring its potential to counter the ideology of consumption. They discuss their
teaching work with pre-service art education students, through which they encour-
age critical projects focused on consumption and inspired by culture jamming; and
urge other educators to create educational experiences that support critical self-
expression, political agency, and careful interrogations of consumer culture.
Henry Giroux, in a reprint from his 1999 book, The Mouse that Roared, dis-
cusses how the Walt Disney Company wields ideological influence over the global
cultural landscape. He also focuses on a variety of ways children, adults, teachers,
and policy-makers can counteract the commercial onslaught of Disney and other
multinational corporations. He urges educators and citizens to engage in the
kinds of pedagogical and political work that move towards enacting a “critical
pedagogy of consumption,” including critical pedagogy, critical media literacy,
public debate, and other actions that link cultural battles with policy battles.
 Preface xxiii
Nicolas Lampert, who created the cover art for the book, provides a description
of how he uses collage and other media to create art with political and social
content. He urges artists and educators to engage in creative actions, including
visual projects, as small parts of a larger struggle to challenge consumer capitalism
and to reclaim public space against privatization and corporate control.

Conclusion
We have fashioned our work under the assumption that researchers and practitio-
ners, especially those interested in social contexts of learning and education, cul-
tural studies in education, environmental education, informal and incidental
learning, social movements, curriculum studies, and critical pedagogy, will be
drawn to the importance—even the urgency—of examining the politics of con-
sumption. We also believe that this book will be of interest to educators who are
interested in learning more about contemporary social and cultural theory. There
could not be a more precipitous time to engage the issues set forth by the leading
scholars of this volume.

References
Giroux, H. A. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Molnar, A. (2005). School commercialism: From democratic ideal to market commodity.
London: Routledge.
Reynolds, W. M. (2004). To touch the clouds standing on top of a Maytag refrigerator:
Brand-name postmodernity and a Deleuzian “in-between”. In W. M. Reynolds & J. A.
Webber (Eds.), Expanding curriculum theory: Dis/positions and lines of flight (pp. 19–33).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Roubini, N. (2008, Sept. 18). Public loses for private gain. The Guardian. Available: http://
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/18/marketturmoil.creditcrunch
Spring, J. (2003). Educating the consumer-citizen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Usher, R., Bryant, I., & Johnston, R. (1997). Adult education and the postmodern challenge.
London: Routledge.
Vidal, G. (2002). Dreaming war: Blood for oil and the Bush–Cheney junta. New York:
Thunder Mouth’s Press.
Acknowledgments

This book, like all edited books, is truly a collective effort. Together, the contribu-
tors, Routledge editors, and other friends and colleagues with whom we have had
extensive conversations about consumption and education have collaboratively
engaged in the production of knowledge—all of this collective work has helped
create this book. We would like to thank Naomi Silverman, our editor at Routledge,
for her support, patience, and guidance through the entire process of bringing this
book to fruition. We could not have done it without her. We also thank Meeta
Pendharkar at Routledge for helping us through many of the technical aspects of
the process, and Joel Spring for encouraging us to pursue this project and for
including it in his book series. Additionally, we would like to thank the external
reviewers of this book, Rebecca Martusewicz, Deron Boyles, and H. Svi Shapiro,
for their helpful comments, critiques, and suggestions. They particularly pushed
us to consider ecological issues we had not yet thoroughly explored, and guided
us to include more authors who focus on the environmental consequences of
overconsumption. The book is stronger now because of these additions.
We would also like to thank all of the contributors to this book. Through the
process of editing this book, we have benefited and learned from the diversity of
perspectives authors have brought. The process of working on this book has brought
forth new intellectual as well as social relationships, and for that, we are grateful.
Additionally, we want to acknowledge and thank Carly Stasko and Trevor Norris for
their infectious enthusiasm for this project; and Brian Schultz for his “super sleuth”
editing eyes. And special thanks goes to Bill Talen, aka Reverend Billy, who created
the concept of the “Shopocalypse,” and in many ways was and remains the original
inspiration for this book. As the Reverend exclaims, “Change-a-lujah!”
Jenny would also like to thank Jim Scheurich and Yvonna Lincoln. In the early
Spring of 2007, when I first had the idea for this book, Jim and Yvonna spent
hours listening to my ideas, reading drafts of the proposal, providing me feedback,
connecting me with potential contributors, and, most importantly, encouraging
me to move forward with the project. I am grateful to Jim for introducing me to
Peter McLaren, who was enthusiastic about the project and graciously climbed
onboard to help. I am also grateful for Shirley Steinberg, and want to wholeheart-
edly thank her for all of her help and patience, for embracing this work, and for
her mentorship through this process. I would also like to thank Jake Burdick, not
xxvi Acknowledgments
only for his help with editing, but also for co-teaching a consumption and educa-
tion graduate seminar with me at Arizona State University in the spring of 2008.
During that semester, and since then, Jake and I have spent countless hours dis-
cussing issues related to consumption and education, popular culture, consumer-
ism, the wonders of One Tree Hill, the cute yet scary ideology of Hello Kitty, the
hilarity of failblog, and the healing powers of tsoynamis. Jake has introduced me
to new theoretical perspectives on curriculum, consumption, and popular culture,
and I am grateful to have him as a friend and colleague. Finally, I want to thank
my husband Rudy Espino and my son Grant St.Clair, who graciously participated
in many book-inspired discussions over dinner—about the public pedagogy of
Disney, the horrors of fast food, commercialism in schools, the connection
between playing online games at lego.com and Grant’s growing desire for legos,
and why we all can’t stop singing “Chocolate Rain.” And I want to give extra spe-
cial thanks to Rudy for the beautiful garden he created during the last few months
of the editing process. I was sustained by gorgeous greens as I stayed up late nights
editing.
1 Introduction
Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy and
Envisioning a Critical Pedagogy of
Consumption—Living and Learning in
the Shadow of the “Shopocalypse”1
Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren

In a world where Michael Jordan is paid more for a single Nike advertisement
than the combined wages of workers in a Southeast Asia Nike factory, is it any
wonder that Mattel has brought out a new ‘Cool Shoppin’ Barbie,’ the first doll
with a toy credit card. The offspring of a Mattel and MasterCard initiative to
secure a future generation of lifetime credit card addicts (similar to the way that
the Joe Camel advertisement was designed to addict a generation of children to
cigarettes), Cool Shoppin’ Barbie is a shameless exploitation of children in a
country in which 1.35 million people filed for bankruptcy in 1997 because of
the easy availability of credit. Is this any more ethically repulsive than the
media’s glorification of wealth, or celebration of violence, or its anointing of
high-priced consumer items with a sacerdotal status, and its overall linking of
consumption to identity? Is it any wonder that gun-obsessed children are feel-
ing alienated and blowing away their classmates with high-powered rifles and
then complaining that they can’t order pizzas in their jail cells? Should we blink
an eye at the fact that the former president and chairman of the Communist
Part of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was paid one million dollars by
Pizza Hut to play his character on a TV commercial, where he is praised by the
Russian people for introducing them to the delights of pizza, democracy, and
Western-style freedom.
(McLaren, 2005, p. 79)

This opening quote sets the stage for this book, as it describes the current state of
consumption in our hypercapitalist world, and its oppressive cultural, social, eco-
nomic, and ecological consequences. In this book, we take the acts and processes
of consumption as our starting place—being ever mindful of consumption’s inex-
tricable links to capitalist production—and explore how education and learning
are impacted by, grounded in, implicated with, and tied to consumption. This
edited volume focuses on the connections between consumption, education, and
learning. It explores the present context of consumer capitalism and the various
implications our current times hold for lifelong education and learning; it also
examines how consumption is tied to learning and identity development. In this
book, authors explore the learning and education that are located in the hege-
monic aspects of consumption, as well as those that are situated in the more play-
ful, ludic, creative aspects of consumption. Finally, this book explores educational
2 Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren
sites of contestation and resistance—both formal and informal—where learners
and teachers are enacting critical pedagogies of consumption.
The ideology of consumerism is currently one of the most dominant forces in
society; we undoubtedly live in a consumer world, and we enact processes of
consumption in almost every aspect of our lives. Scholars of consumption, how-
ever, take various perspectives on consumption. Some scholars focus on the
destructive economic, social, and cultural impacts of rampant overconsumption,
while others, like Twitchell (1999), praise consumption as a creative way of form-
ing identities and materialism as a form of freedom. Our own theoretical perspec-
tives on consumption are more complex, lying somewhere in between these two
views (see the section later in this introduction where we briefly discuss our own
conceptualizations).
Regardless of one’s theoretical perspective on the meanings and consequences
of consumption, many argue that consumer behavior, “rather than work or pro-
ductive activity has become the cognitive and moral focus of life, the integrative
bond of society” (Usher, Bryant, & Johnston, 1997, p. 16). Usher et al. (1997)
assert that contemporary consumer capitalism—for better or worse—encourages
and requires both consumption and “people who develop their identities through
consumption” (p. 16).
Given the omnipresence of consumption in our lives, Usher et al. (1997) insist that
it is currently impossible to understand education and learning “without a concep-
tion of the part played by consumption and consumer culture,” (p. 18) and urge
educational researchers and practitioners to begin taking consumption seriously as a
site of education and learning. We, in turn, call upon educators to not only consider
consumption as a space of education and learning, but also to critically analyze what
it might mean to resist consumerism and overconsumption. This activist work exists
both inside of schools and in more informal spaces of learning such as the broad and
diverse social movements focused on resisting consumerism and consumption,
which include groups working towards labor rights and opposing global sweatshops,
fighting against globalization, advocating for fair trade, and fighting against the
ecological destruction that accompanies massive overconsumption.
We, in this introductory chapter, and the other contributors in this book, in
their chapters, reiterate these calls to educators to begin to take consumption seri-
ously as a site of learning and education, and as a potential site of production and
resistance. In order to facilitate this engagement with consumption’s pedagogy
and to work towards envisioning what a “critical pedagogy of consumption”
might look like, we believe it is important for educators to understand various
perspectives on consumption, and to get a sense of the many ways in which educa-
tion, learning, and consumption intersect. In explicating these issues, we hope to
convince educators to more vigorously begin discussing, reflecting upon, learning
about, teaching, and researching consumption and its intersections with educa-
tion, learning, and resistance. While there is a small but growing interest among
educators in issues of consumption, learning, and education (Haiven, 2007;
Hoechsmann, 2007; Jubas, 2007; Kenway & Bullen 2001; Molnar, 2005; Sandlin,
2005; Sandlin & Milam, 2008; Spring, 2003), this work is only just beginning
to build an understanding of the kinds of learning and education that are
 Introduction: Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy 3
intertwined with the processes of, participation in, negotiation of, and resistance
to, consumption.

Historicizing, Defining, and Theorizing Consumption

The practices and processes of learning and education exist within a context of
consumer capitalism that is increasingly structuring how social, political, and
economic life around the world is organized (Finger & Asún, 2001). Consumption
is defined by McCracken (1990, p. xi) as “the processes by which consumer goods
and services are created, bought, and used” and has become perhaps the most
significant organizer of twenty-first century life. And Paterson (2006) argues that
individual acts of consumption are embedded in larger processes of consumption.
That is, a particular act of consumption is part of a series of processes that extend
beyond processes of production. An individual act of consumption, then, has
“taken account of branding, images, [and] notions of self-worth,” has “responded
to themes and signs that trigger elements of the sensory consciousness and the
nonconscious states,” and has “exercised the temporary satisfaction of a desire or
felt need” (Paterson, 2006, p. 3). Others within the field of critical environmental
economics position consumption as the “using up” of natural resources, and focus
on the “commodity-chain approach,” which sees consumption decisions as being
“heavily influenced, shaped, and constrained by an entire string of linked choices
being made, and power being exercised, as commodities are created, distributed,
used, and disposed of ” (Princen, Maniates, & Conca, 2002, p. 15). Princen et al.
(2002) craft what they call an “ecological political economy” of consumption—
which combines an analysis of the effects of consumption on the environment
with a look at the social and political dimensions of consumption, especially the
ways in which power benefits some and harms others. Thus, they place environ-
mental concerns within the context of issues of “community, work, meaning,
freedom, and the overall quality of life” (Princen et al., 2002, p. 3).
It is widely posited that contemporary “consumer society”—and, along with it,
a new era of consumer capitalism—has its roots in the post-World War II era,
where there was an “explosion of consumption in the industrialized nations,” as
“many industries, such as automobiles, chemicals, domestic appliances, electrical
and electronic goods, took off, fueling as well as feeding off a culture of consumer-
ism” (Gabriel & Lang, 1995, p. 12). This new “consumer capitalism” involves “a
shift towards consumption as a central social, economic and cultural process” as
well as the globalization of capital and proliferation of multinational corporations
(Bocock, 1993, p. 78). As this frenzy of consumption has moved from the modern
into the postmodern era, the meanings of consumption have shifted accordingly,
and have become tied much more to identity formation. Within current times,
lifestyle choices and consumption patterns have come to shape people’s senses of
identity, rather than their work roles, a change Bocock (1993) sees as ushering in
a new phase of capitalism. Indeed, Bocock (1993, p. 77) argues that consumption
is “the characteristic socio-cultural activity par excellence of late twentieth-century
post-modern capitalism . . . Consumption is a, even the, major characteristic of
post-modernity.”
4 Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren
Consumption is sometimes described as a process—a “set of social, cultural, and
economic practices” (Bertelsen, 1996, p. 90), which in capitalism is supported by the
ideology of consumerism which “serves to legitimate capitalism in the eyes of ordi-
nary people” (p. 90). The promise that the ideology of consumerism makes is that
“consumption is the answer to all our problems; consumption will make us whole
again; consumption will make us full again; consumption will make us complete
again; consumption will return us to the blissful state of the ‘imaginary’” (Storey,
1996, p. 115). While some sociologists and cultural studies theorists who study con-
sumption focus on the “negative” ideology of consumerism that they assert under-
lies all processes of consumption, others seek to remove the tone of “condemnation”
(Sassatelli, 2007, p. 2) inherent in many descriptions of consumption, and focus
more on the complexity of actual, contextualized, consumer practices.
Within the sociology of consumption, there are various theoretical perspectives
on consumption (Martens, Southerton, & Scott, 2004); these various theoretical
perspectives are in turn categorized differently by different authors (see, for
example, Giles & Middleton, 1999). Drawing upon these various ways of catego-
rizing different approaches to consumption within the sociology of consumption,
we briefly discuss four different perspectives on the meaning of consumption. The
first perspective is grounded in critical theory and conceptualizes consumption
from the vantage point of the sphere of production. This perspective focuses on
how consumer culture helps reproduce capitalism (Kenway & Bullen, 2001) and
is grounded in Marxist and Frankfurt School approaches to the study of culture
and consumption. This approach views “individuals as trapped within a system of
exchange over which ultimately they have little control” (Giles & Middleton, 1999,
p. 220). Storey (1996) explains that for Marx,

men and women are denied identity in (uncreative) production, and are
therefore forced to seek identity in (creative) consumption. But this is
always little more than a hollow substitute (a fetish). Moreover, the process
is encouraged by the so-called ideology of consumerism—the suggestion
that the meaning of our lives is to be found in what we consume, rather
than in what we produce. Thus the ideology legitimates and encourages the
profit-making concerns of capitalism (a system demanding an ever increas-
ing consumption of goods).
(pp. 113–114)

This approach is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Adorno and Horkheimer
(1944/2000), who focused on the “culture industry” and how it mass-produced
homogenized and commodified culture, art, and entertainment to be consumed
by a manipulated public. In this view, “late capitalism, through the entertainment
and information industry, promotes an ideology of consumption which generates
false needs which function as control mechanisms over consumers” (Sassatelli,
2007, p. 76), all for the benefit of furthering consumer capitalism. From this point
of view, the system of production drives the system of consumption; the culture
industry—which is made up of television, advertising, the entertainment indus-
try, and commercial culture of all kinds—creates false needs in individuals in
 Introduction: Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy 5
order to sell products. Individuals then seek to fulfill those manufactured needs
through consuming the products they see advertised through these various media.
From this perspective, consumers have very little agency to resist the culture
industry.
A second perspective on consumption, exemplified early on by the work of
Veblen (1899/2000) and more recently by the work of Bourdieu (1984) and others
who have pursued Bourdieu’s line of research (see, for example, Holt, 1998), as
well as those who take more anthropological approaches to consumption (Douglas
& Isherwood, 1979, for example) pays more attention to modes of consumption
and consumption as a means of communication. This view focuses on why and
how individuals consume, and how these patterns of consumption help to distin-
guish different social groups and “mediate the social relationships between differ-
ent groups” (Martens et al., 2004, p. 156). These perspectives broadly emphasize
the idea that consumers and the objects they consume “communicate positions in
the social world, and that this is more fundamental than any idea of simply fulfill-
ing a particular concrete need” (Corrigan, 1997, p. 17). These authors, in various
ways, convey the idea that consumption communicates social meaning, and is also
where struggles over social distinction take place. One’s consumption choices
reveal certain social positions and “tastes” that are not natural but are, in fact,
conditioned by growing up in a certain environments with particular kinds of
social, economic, and cultural capital. Furthermore, one’s choices of food or any
other kind of commodity, service, or experience communicate such social posi-
tions to others.
A third approach takes a more postmodern perspective and focuses on how
consumption is used aesthetically (Baudrillard, 1996), or as a part of the “indi-
vidualizing tendencies of modern society” (Martens et al., 2004, p. 156)—see, for
example, Giddens (1991). To these authors, consumption does not necessarily fill
existing “needs” that have been “created” by the culture industry; nor does con-
sumption simply express already-fixed identities that are attached to belonging to
a particular race, class, or gender (as Bourdieu, 1984, or Veblen, 1899/2000, might
argue). Instead, consumption becomes integral to the process of creating identi-
ties in a postmodern world; consumption becomes symbolic, as it is centered on
signifying ideas and creating meaning. In this perspective, individuals do not
simply accommodate themselves to particular styles on offer; rather, they actively
produce their own styles and identities through appropriating, changing, and
individualizing what is offered in the marketplace (de Certeau, 1984), in order to
create their own sense of identity.
More recent conceptualizations of consumption focus on what de Certeau
(1984) refers to as everyday life practices (see, also, Paterson, 2006, who draws
upon de Certeau and focuses on consumption and everyday life). Martens et al.
(2004) argue that these more recent perspectives are in part an attempt to define
consumption as more than simply purchase (a focus on the economics of con-
sumption) or display (a focus on the symbolic functions of consumption);
rather these new “everyday practices” conceptualizations focus on the everyday
life practices that are embedded in, enacted through, and reproduced by
consumption. Paterson (2006) argues that these everyday actions hold more
6 Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren
complexity and meaning than typically assumed; in fact, they “reveal very com-
plex dialogues and transactions to do with identity, status, aspirations, cultural
capital, and position within a social group” (p. 7). Paterson (2006) also argues
that everyday practices of consumption also “potentially show reflexive consid-
eration of ethical, creative, and environmental concerns” as consumers place
“their conscious experiences of acts of consumption into larger processes of
globalization” (p. 7). These ideas are demonstrated by the practices of “ethical
consumers,” whose decisions to buy or not buy particular commodities are
based on political, religious, spiritual, environmental, and ethical convictions
(Sandlin & Walther, 2009). An ethical consumer might choose to spend more
money on “sweat-free” clothes that are not made in sweatshops but, rather, are
made in factories where workers are earning living wages and working in clean
and comfortable conditions. These consumers are thus concerned with the
effects consumption purchases have “on the external world around them”
(Harrison, Newholm, & Shaw, 2005, p. 2).
Others who adopt this “practice” perspective focus on how goods are used once
they are consumed, and focus on the resistant aspects of consumption. McCracken
(1986), for instance, explores the appropriation of commodities, or on what hap-
pens to goods after they are initially bought, and presents a series of “consump-
tion” rituals consumers use to alter the meanings of goods as they incorporate
them into their lives. And authors like de Certeau (1984) and Fiske (2000) focus
on how consumers, through what de Certeau calls “production through con-
sumption” actually enact resistance through using goods and spaces of consump-
tion in ways that run counter to what producers expect or envision. Finally, some
authors such as Sassatelli (2007, p. 109) view the practices of consumption with
more ambivalence, and advocate approaches that seek to explore consumption as
it is situated in particular contexts, and to position consumers as agents who enact
a sort of “bounded reflexivity.” This approach sees consumption as both an
expressive and a performative act. That is, consumption helps shape identities;
through consumption, individuals

not only contribute to the fixing of a series of cultural classifications, not

only express themselves through symbols or communicate their social posi-
tions, but also constitute themselves and their social identities . . . in so
doing, social actors reorganize their surrounding world while being shaped
by it.
(p. 109)

Consumption, Education, and Learning:

Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy
Education and learning intersect with consumption in multiple ways. Martens
(2005) argues that although these intersections have a “distinct” presence in the
sociology of consumption literature, they remain “somewhat implicit” and not
fully explored. We, in turn, argue that the literature in education has also to a large
extent failed to fully explore these intersections.
 Introduction: Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy 7
The Market as Educator
It has been stressed that the market has taken over a primary role as educator or
pedagogue (Martens, 2005). The market teaches learners—in informal and inci-
dental ways—how to consume, how to behave in the marketplace, and how to
interact with consumer capitalism. That is, the market “produces a raft of ‘educa-
tional’ materials (apart from aids to formal teaching), including self-help books,
magazines, television, advertising, websites and product manuals and information
on packaging, all of which operate as conduits of consumer information and
education” (Martens, 2005, p. 345). These teach “consumer knowledge about the
rules of the market and the social organisation of the sphere of exchange” (p. 345).
Consumers are thus acculturated into “appropriate forms of behavior in the mar-
ketplace” (p. 346). The market also teaches learners about culture more generally,
an idea echoed in Giroux’s (2000) arguments about how the public pedagogy of
the culture industries works. In this view of the market as an educator,

consumption is akin to communication, and goods are better than, for

instance, prayers or stories in making visible the categories of culture . . .
Routine and ritualised consumption practices train participants in the rel-
evance and cultural content of social categories, inequalities and diversities
associated with gender, race, class, and age.
(Martens, 2005, p. 346)

This “market as educator” perspective has had the most attention within the soci-
ology of consumption (Martens, 2005). Within the limited field of educators who
write about consumption, this perspective has also been popular. From this gen-
eral perspective, individuals are viewed as learning from everyday practices of
consumption and from participating in various sites of consumption, including
shopping, tourism, leisure pursuits, theme parks, movies, and fashion magazines.
Educators such as Giroux (1999; see also his chapter in this volume) and Kincheloe
(2002; see also his chapter in this volume), for example, focus on sites of con-
sumption such as Disney and McDonald’s as spaces of education and learning.
Giroux’s The Mouse that Roared (1999), for instance, analyzes the Disney Company
as a large corporation that holds great power in shaping the culture of childhood
and the everyday lives of children and their families. Giroux shows how the
Disney Company does not simply produce neutral or harmless entertainment,
but, rather, how Disney is implicated in a complex web of power, politics, and
ideology. And Kincheloe’s (2002) The Sign of the Burger explores how McDonald’s
has come to play so many powerful roles in our global society, and focuses spe-
cifically on the power McDonald’s has exercised to influence or educate the world,
as it has “produce[d] and transmit[ed] knowledge, shape[d] values, influence[d]
identity, and construct[ed] consciousness” (p. 9). Both authors position these sites
of consumption as spaces where identities are shaped, childhood is created, and
nostalgia is crafted.
Within the “market as educator” perspective, researchers have also discussed
the educational or pedagogical aspects of advertising and branding, particularly
how they are related to learning and identity formation (Hoechsmann, 2007;
8 Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren
see also his chapter in this volume). Other researchers focusing on the sociology
of childhood have examined how “childhood” is constructed and commodified
for consumption, and how children become socialized into becoming consumers
through advertising, marketing, and media such as television shows aimed at
them (Giroux, 1999; Kenway & Bullen, 2001). Others have focused on the con-
sumption and commodification of food (Molnar, 2005; VanderSchee, 2005).
Researchers within education (Giroux, 1999; Spring, 2003) have focused on how
consumption shapes identity, “American-ness,” and ideas about family, gender,
and power. Still others have focused on how identity, race, ethnicity, and power
are taught and learned through the realm of consumption (Spring, 2003;
Willinsky, 1998).
In these various works, however, as in much of the literature that focuses on the
“market as educator,” despite many authors providing some evidence of resistance
to the public pedagogies of consumption, the overwhelming message is focused on
the hegemonic power of these various sites of consumption to shape individual
identities in the service of consumer capitalism.

Institutions as “Consumer Educators”

Martens (2005), focusing specifically on children, argues that while the “market
as educator” is an important perspective, those interested in the connections
between learning, education, and consumption, should also look at other realms
of influence that help determine how individuals learn consumption. For
instance, she argues that both the school and the family teach children how to be
consumers. Thus children (and, we would argue, youth and adults) learn within
the realm of the market, as well as within the realms of the family and various
educational institutions. Martens (2005) presents two models depicting the
intersections between consumption, education, and learning, bringing together
multiple factors including

social actors (parent, child, kinship and friendship networks), institutions

(the market and schooling), cultural discourses on ‘good hoods’ (which
includes understandings and constructions of good parenthood, mother-
hood, fatherhood and childhood), household contextual issues (such as
whether the household contains one or two parents and whether adults
engage in paid work outside the home) and individual biographies (of
adults and children).
(Martens, 2005, p. 350, emphases ours)

Within the educational literature, some authors have focused on how consump-
tion, consumerism, and commercialism intersect with formal educational insti-
tutions, and thus help to shape the learning and education that occur within
those institutions. Within the field of education, Molnar (2005) is one of the
leading scholars examining the intersection of these issues within K-12 school-
ing arena; his work specifically explores how schools operate as consumer mar-
ketplaces. Other educational researchers working in similar veins include Boyles
 Introduction: Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy 9
(2005) and Breault (2005). Equally compelling work has been conducted by
educational researchers focusing on the commodification of higher education,
and the ways in which corporate culture has become tightly enmeshed with
higher education (see, for example, Johnson, Kavanaugh & Mattson, 2003;
Noble, 2001).
Other educators seek to understand how schools and other formal educa-
tional institutions are not simply sites where commercialism is invading, but are
also spaces of contestation. McGregor (2005) and other consumer educators, for
example, have begun to focus on how consumer educators within school con-
texts can create a more critical practice of consumer education that focuses less
on the naturalization of consumption and helping people to better navigate that
world, and more on questioning consumer capitalism. These consumer educa-
tors advocate a consumer education that embraces sustainability education,
critical pedagogy, critical citizenship, critical consumer education, and critical
consumer empowerment education (Benn, 2004). Other educators writing from
within curriculum studies and art education focus on classrooms where educa-
tors are encouraging students to question commercial culture through learning
about and enacting critical pedagogies such as culture jamming (Darts, 2004;
Tavin, 2003).

Learning (Through) Consumption at the Intersections of the Market

and Institutions
Others seek to work at the intersection that combines “market as educator” or
“everyday practices” perspectives with the institutional perspectives. Spring’s
(2003) recent work, for example, provides an historical overview of how the
combined actions of educational institutions, advertising, and the media resulted
in what Spring (2003) calls the “triumph of consumerism” as a prominent
American ideology. And Kenway and Bullen (2001), grounded in the disciplines
of childhood and youth studies, examine how “consumer-media culture”
constructs children and youth as consumers; how this culture acts as a primary
socializer for children and youth; how the lines between education, entertain-
ment, and advertising have blurred; and how educational institutions such
as schools have become spaces where corporations are targeting children
and youth.

Lifelong Learning Through Consumption-Related Social Practices

Writing more specifically from the perspective of adult education and lifelong learn-
ing, Usher et al. (1997) also point out several ways consumption, education, and
learning converge. They see consumption as being inextricably tied to learning, as
they argue that consumption is connected with a variety of social practices—
including lifestyle practices, confessional practices, and critical practices—all of
which involve learning. Lifestyle practices involve expressive modes of learning, are
focused on the creation and re-creation of identity, and involve “the self-referential
concern with style and image” (p. 18). Usher et al. (1997) explain that this ongoing
10 Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren
re-creation of identity, with its concern with aestheticization, creates the need for
“a learning stance towards life as a means of self-expression and autonomy” (p. 18).
This form of learning is grounded in postmodern conceptions of consumption as a
means that people use to differentiate themselves from others, belong to particular
groups, and to express individuality (Featherstone, 1991). Therefore, given the
emphasis within lifestyle practices on “novelty, fashion, taste, and style,” lifestyle
practices “are practices of consumption and moreover of a consumption which is
potentially unending, since as desire can never be satisfied, there is always the need
for new experiences and new learning” (Usher et al., 1997, p. 18). Individuals use
confessional practices to help them understand themselves; these practices take the
self as the object of study and involve self-reflection and introspection. Usher et al.
(1997) argue that within confessional practices, what is consumed is the self, as
individuals engaging in confessional practices assume that “there is deep hidden
meaning buried ‘inside’ which, once discovered, opens the door to happiness,
psychic stability and personal empowerment” (p. 19). Like lifestyle practices, confes-
sional practices are never complete—“there is a constant need to change in order
to adapt a changing self and a changing environment” (p. 19); thus confessional
practices as self-consumption also necessitate engaging in lifelong learning.
Finally, critical practices occur both inside and outside of formal educational
institutions, and engage with processes of both production and consumption, espe-
cially against products of consumer capitalism such as waste and environmental
pollution. Usher et al. (1997) argue that in postmodern society, these critical prac-
tices consist of techniques of “ludic subversion and the creation and manipulation
of seductive images” (p. 20). That is, critical resistance takes place not only by work-
ing against material products and processes of oppression tied to consumption, but
also in the symbolic realm, through images “and the signification of, and invest-
ments made in, particular images” (p. 20). Critical practices necessitate critical
learning and a stance of reflexivity about self and society. Within all of these prac-
tices, learners embark on both formal (institutionalized) and informal acts of learn-
ing, most of which have not been taken seriously by educators.
Echoing the ecologically focused concerns captured under Usher et al.’s (1997)
notion of “critical practices,” a growing number of educators are exploring the
negative environmental consequences of consumption and are increasingly call-
ing for ecologically focused education and learning, both inside and outside of
formal educational institutions. Some scholars who focus on the environmental
impacts of consumption (Jucker, 2004; Martusewicz & Edmundson, 2005) draw
on the frameworks of ecojustice popularized by Bowers (2001). Martusewicz
(2004) explains that this work emerges from the “desire to recognize and preserve
traditional knowledges and cultural practices as critical to addressing the ecologi-
cal crisis” (p. 4). Other educators who draw attention to the environmental effects
of consumption are grounded in critical pedagogy, and focus on how global
capitalism has spurred an enormous environmental crisis that is deleterious to
both humans and nonhuman nature. To address this crisis, educators such as
McLaren and Houston (2004) call for what they term a “critical revolutionary
pedagogy” that is “informed by a dialectics of ecological and environmental jus-
tice that highlights the situatedness of environmental conflict and injustice toward
 Introduction: Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy 11
nonhuman nature without obscuring its historical production under capitalist
value forms” (p. 27).

Positioning Ourselves Within the Complexities of

Consumption
I (Jenny) embrace what might be called a “critical postmodern” (Agger, 1992) or
“critical practice” perspective on consumption. That is, I acknowledge some of the
pleasurable, expressive, performative aspects of consumption but do not embrace
them uncritically. I also acknowledge the hegemonic aspects of consumption but
do not see them as completely totalizing. Like Sassatelli (2007), I view the every-
day practices of consumption with some ambivalence; while I see and denounce
the destructive, oppressive forces of multinational corporations and their ideolo-
gies of consumerism, I also see consumers as having some amount of agency, and
see them enacting “bounded reflexivity” (p. 109). I encourage educators to explore
consumption as it is situated in particular, everyday contexts. I long and hope for
a world where the ideology of consumerism is no longer the force driving our
society. I see moments of hope and resistance in critical pedagogies of consump-
tion, but also believe we are fighting a battle characterized by incredibly unequal
power relationships.
I (Peter) locate my work within what I take to be the fundamental condition of
late modernity—a brutal and systematic extraction of surplus value from prole-
tarianized regions of the world (usually festering in a climate of bourgeois-
comprador nationalism) culminating in a condition of substantive inequality and
an egregiously unequal division of labor—a condition that is structurally inescap-
able under the regime of capital. This regressive situation has spawned alienated
lifeworlds festering in the swamp of reification and the commodification of every-
day life by means of the generalization of exchange-values mediated by the
machinations of capital accumulation on a global scale. Since the mid-1990s, the
focus of my work has shifted discernibly, if not dramatically, from a preoccupa-
tion with poststructuralist analyses of popular culture (with a focus on the politics
of representation and its affiliative liaison with identity production) in which I
attempted to deploy contrapuntally critical pedagogy, neo-Marxist critique, and
cultural analysis to a revolutionary Marxist humanist perspective with a focus on
the role of finance capital and the social relations of production. I came to view
the assertion of many poststructuralists—that Marxism constitutes a totalizing
pressuring of meaning into semiotic foreclosure, placing an overlay of determin-
ism on the free interplay of cultural discourses with their free-floating auto-
intelligibilities, their aleatory and indeterminable play of the sign, and turning the
jazz of signification into a military march of pre-ordained procrustean meanings—
as an exclusion of causality from the domain of history by replacing it with differ-
ence and play. In effect, by situating the social as a contingent totality, the avant-garde
politics of representation articulated by the poststructuralists become part of a
larger ensemble of textual reading practices that obscure the production practices of
capitalism (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008). Against a utopian theory of entrepreneurial
individuality and agency backed by a voluntarism unburdened by history, I came to
12 Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren
see the necessity of transforming the very structures of white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy by means of a pedagogical praxis guided by the revolutionary knowl-
edges of historical materialism. In so doing, questions of patriarchal and sexist
ideology are connected to their material origins—of social labor—that emphasize
the relations between the sexes and how the distribution of labor in capitalist
economies has generated the alienating conditions in which men and women relate
to themselves and to one another (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008).
Around the same time, I also had serious problems with what progressive edu-
cators were describing as the struggle for democracy in the public sphere because
so much of this discourse involved pedagogically fostering a respect for the values
of democratic citizenship and appealing to moral sentiments and critical reason-
ing. Of course, this is bound to fail because it rests on an appeal to the individual’s
consciousness—a move that does little to parry the most devastating effects of
capital and is ineffective in bringing about capital’s inanition. As Istvan Meszaros
(2008, p. 341) notes, an appeal to individual consciousness ultimately remains
insufficient because “it avoids the social causes of the denounced negative symp-
toms.” He adds that “what is absolutely excluded is the possibility of changing the
structural determinations of the established social order that produce and repro-
duce the destructive effects and consequences” (p. 341).
I believe that it is the social relations of labor that determine a person’s class loca-
tion, not the opportunities a person has to go shopping. The market distributes the
already available wealth. While, for instance, the stock market may seem to produce
wealth, it is really just redistributing the wealth produced by the labor of the workers.
Profit does not come from market relations (buying low and selling high) but from
human labor power. Those who have to sell their labor power to earn a living (those
who produce the profit for the capitalist) are part of one class. Those who purchase
human labor and take the profit away from labor are part of another class (Ebert &
Zavarzadeh, 2008). I follow Marx’s focus on the development of human productive
forces—a very complex process that is historically related to the material conditions
of production and the class struggle. This profound incompatibility between the
forces and relations of production produces tremendous social conflict.
In the field of education, Marxism’s protean focus on proletarian self-activity and
the self-organization of the popular majorities are anathema to much of the work
that falls under the dubious category of social justice education. While well-
meaning progressive educators might be willing to criticize the manner in which
humans are turned into dead objects that Marxists refer to as fetishized commodi-
ties, they are often loath to consider the fact that within capitalist society, all value
originates in the sphere of production and that one of the primary roles of schools
is to serve as agents or functionaries of capital. Furthermore, they fail to understand
that education is more reproductive of an exploitative social order than a constitu-
tive challenge to it precisely because it rests on the foundations of capitalist exchange
value. This is because, as Glenn Rikowski (2000) writes, “the inequalities of labor-
power quality generated within the capitalist labor process require re-equalisation
to the socially average level in order to attain the equalisation of labor-power values
that is the foundation of social justice in capitalism” (¶ 6, italics in original).
The unmeasured condemnation and broadside assaults on Marx by the academy
in general and education in particular treat Marxism as a chthonic adventure, akin
 Introduction: Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy 13
to what Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale (2009) refers to as “a form of ideological
Neanderthalism, an antediluvian memory invoked by those trapped in the mental
furniture of a bygone era” (p. 23). The retrograde, opportunistic, and banal and
banalizing politics of the critics situates itself in a culture of liberal compassion and
a polyglot cosmopolitanism that effectively masquerades an unwillingness to com-
prehend neocolonialism and to ignore the contradictions inherent in the system of
commodity production and its manifold mediations of our concrete quotidian
existence; it further constitutes a refusal to consider uneven and combined develop-
ment, a structured silence and motivated amnesia surrounding the urgent task of
historicizing power relations in concrete material conditions of production and
reproduction, a grand refusal to disclaim the limitations of bourgeois ethics in the
project of social transformation and a studied reluctance to engage the concrete
multilayered totality of everyday life (read as a determinate socio-historical process)
in which use value is subordinated to exchange value (see San Juan, 2002).
Human decisions are always conditioned; and human history is not
unconditional—praxis is a world-changing activity since human beings are able
to change the circumstances in which they find themselves intractably enmeshed.
Production relations maintain what has already been achieved, whereas material
and intellectual productive forces push society forward. As Marx (1950) writes:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do
not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (p. 225).
Local and transnational movements for social justice have been significantly
impacted by what has been taking place on a global basis since capital began
responding to the crisis of the 1970s of Fordist–Keynesian capitalism—which
William I. Robinson (2008) has characterized as capital’s ferocious quest to break
free of nation state constraints to accumulation and twentieth-century regulated
capital-labor relations based on a limited number of reciprocal commitments and
rights. Accordingly, we have witnessed the development of a new transnational
model of accumulation in which transnational fractions of capital have become
dominant in part because of new mechanisms of accumulation which include a
cheapening of labor and the growth of flexible, deregulated and de-unionized labor
where women always experience super-exploitation in relation to men; the dramatic
expansion of finance capital; the creation of a global and regulatory structure to
facilitate the emerging global circuits of accumulation; and neo-liberal structural
adjustment programs which seek to create the conditions for frictionless operations
of emerging transnational capital across borders and between countries. And while
there still exists national capital, global capital, and regional capitals, the hegemonic
fraction of capital on a world scale is now transnational capital. So we are seeing the
profound dismantling of national economies, the reorganization and reconstitution
of national economies as component elements or segments of a larger global pro-
duction and financial system which is organized in a globally fragmented and a
decentralized way and that is controlled by the concentrated and centralized power
of the transnational capitalist class (Robinson, 2008). The role of the nation state
has changed to meet globally uniform laws that produce capital against the interests
of the international working class. The nation state still serves local capital but it can
no longer fetter the transnational movement of capital with its endless chains of
14 Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren
accumulation. But the nation state still serves the interests of capital against labor.
As Marx and Engels (1977) put it, the nation state remains “a committee for manag-
ing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (p. 44).
The cultural turn in much of current postmodern and postcolonial criticism is
not a passing trend but rather a structural feature of capitalism. Particularly dur-
ing times of crisis, capitalism turns to culture to solve the contradictions that it
cannot resolve in its actual material practices (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008). Class
has less to do with status and lifestyle and the politics of consumption than it does
with the distribution of labor in the capitalist economy.
Because through the medium of experience, the individual is mistaken as the source
of social practices, this process of misidentification becomes a capitalist arche-strategy
that marginalizes collectivity and protects the individual as the foundation of entrepre-
neurial capitalism. As a consequence, the well-being of the collectivity is replaced by the
“politics of consumption” that celebrates the singularities of individuals by valorizing the
desire to obtain and consume objects of pleasure. Experience in this view becomes non-
theoretical and beyond the real of history. This is why we need to locate all human
experience in a world-historical frame; that is, within specific social relations of produc-
tion. Critical revolutionary pedagogy, as I have been trying to develop it, attempts to
create the conditions of pedagogical possibility that enables students to see how, through
the exercise of power, the dominant structures of class rule protect their practices from
being publicly scrutinized as they appropriate resources to serve the interests of the few
at the expense of the many (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008).
The overall agenda that I have been trying to develop since the mid-1990s is
captured in the description of what Meszaros (2008) calls socialist education: “the
social organ through which the mutually beneficial reciprocity between the individuals
and their society becomes real” (p. 347). My concern has been with marshaling
critical pedagogy as a broad, non-sectarian coalition or social movement into the
service of altering historical modes of production and reproduction in specific
social formations, including, if not especially, educational formations. The thesis
here is that capital as the medium for social interaction is based on the logic of
abstraction and in order to control capital its basis of value production must be
uprooted. In other words, the destructiveness of capital cannot be solved through
the welfare state or government intervention into the economy. The path to
socialism can only be made by the abolition of value production itself. Hence, I
reject the call for a post-Marxist and post-structuralist pedagogy of consumption.

Towards a (Critical) Pedagogy of Consumption

The theoretical perspectives on consumption discussed at the beginning of this
chapter are taken up in various ways by the authors in this edited volume.
Contributors’ essays draw from a range of theoretical approaches to the study of
consumption, while also representing a variety of different aspects connecting edu-
cation, learning, and consumption. This diversity of approaches and contexts—
even among us, the editors—makes it difficult to pigeon-hole or easily categorize
the critical work in which contributors are engaged. While the contributors may
study different aspects of consumption/education links, and may be grounded in
 Introduction: Exploring Consumption’s Pedagogy 15
different theoretical perspectives, we posit that all would agree that there are many
aspects of consumption and consumerism that are inextricably linked to the
learning and enacting of oppression, and to ecological, environmental, natural
resource, and cultural destruction across the planet. McLaren and Farahmandpur
(2005) argue that we are currently indulging in “millennial consumer orgies cel-
ebrating the unending promise of 1,000 years of uninterrupted shopping at Planet
Mall” as we “pretend that the social and economic horrors that we have come to
associate with Western capitalist democracies have been a temporary spike in
global capitalism’s blood pressure” (p. 25). And Taylor and Tilford (2000) focus on
the negative environmental and cultural impacts of rampant consumption, stat-
ing that this consumer “binge” has resulted in “devastating levels of environmental
deterioration” (p. 464). Of course, there are some authors in this volume who
recognize the destructive aspects of consumption yet also argue that consumption
is not only a matter of “passive and alienating consumption of goods, services and
images”; they argue that consumption can also be constructed as an “active, gen-
erative process” embedded in social practices that involve learning (Usher et al.,
1997, p. 21). What draws the contributors in this volume together, however, is that
we all agree that we need to take consumption seriously within education, and
that we need to move towards not only understanding how consumption operates
as pedagogy, but also understanding what a resistant “critical pedagogy of con-
sumption” might look like.
We urge educators to begin making more connections between consumption,
education, and learning. We challenge educators to explore the consumptive
aspects of the everyday educational and learning sites that we teach in or learn in.
We also challenge educators to explore the educational and learning aspects of
various sites of consumption. These sites can be formal learning or educational
sites (within schools, formal consumer education, curriculum materials, adult
literacy programs, community educational programs focused on consumer issues,
etc.) or informal, popular culture, or media-based sites of learning (shopping
malls, sporting events, leisure sites, fast-food restaurants, television shows, video
games, magazines, movies, etc.). We urge educators to investigate sites of hege-
mony as well as sites of resistance and contestation, or sites that enact both roles.
Researching these sites would help push us to further articulate consumption’s
pedagogy, that is, to further understand what a “pedagogy of consumption” cur-
rently looks like. These questions also help us think through what a critical peda-
gogy of consumption might look like, in both formal and informal spaces of
learning and education. While consumption’s pedagogy typically frames con-
sumption as the “acquisition, use, and divestment of goods and services” (Denzin,
2001, p. 325), a critical pedagogy of consumption would construct consumption
as a “site where power, ideology, gender, and social class circulate and shape one
another” (p. 325) and would view consumption as “a social activity that integrates
consumers into a specific social system and commits them to a particular social
vision” (Ozanne & Murray, 1995, p. 522). A critical pedagogy of consumption would
ask, “What kind of consumers are being created?” and “In whose interests do those
constructions work?” It would also investigate how consumer resistance works as a
space of critically transformative learning and of critical public pedagogy. Through
16 Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren
a critical pedagogy of consumption, learners would learn not just technical skills,
but would come to investigate the naturalization of the consumer world within
which they as consumers operate. A critical pedagogy of consumption would help
learners recognize that the “hegemonic cultural logic of consumerism systemati-
cally permeates public, discursive, and psychic spaces, dictating that our lived
experiences are increasingly shaped and monitored by marketers” (Rumbo, 2002,
p. 134); here learners would engage in problematizing the naturalization of con-
sumer culture and would form a “different relationship to the marketplace in which
they identify unquestioned assumptions and challenge the status of existing struc-
tures as natural” (Ozanne & Murray, 1995, p. 522).

Note
1 The “Shopocalypse”—a combination of “Shopping” and “Apocalypse”—is a term coined
by anti-consumption social activist Bill Talen, who takes on the persona of “Reverend
Billy.” Reverend Billy, along with the “Stop Shopping Gospel Choir” stage “Retail
Interventions” inside big box stores, chain stores, traffic jams and other monuments of
our current mono-culture.

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 HISTOIRE
DU
CONSULAT
ET DE
L'EMPIRE

TOME XII

L'auteur déclare réserver ses droits à

l'égard de la traduction en Langues
étrangères, notamment pour les Langues
Allemande, Anglaise, Espagnole et
Italienne.

Ce volume a été déposé au Ministère de

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PARIS. IMPRIMÉ PAR HENRI PLON, RUE GARANCIÈRE, 8.

HISTOIRE
DU
CONSULAT
ET DE
L'EMPIRE
 FAISANT SUITE
À L'HISTOIRE DE LA RÉVOLUTION FRANÇAISE

PAR M. A. THIERS

TOME DOUZIÈME

PARIS
PAULIN, LIBRAIRE-ÉDITEUR
60, RUE RICHELIEU
1855
 AVERTISSEMENT DE L'AUTEUR.

Je viens d'achever après quinze années d'un travail assidu

l'Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire, que j'avais commencée en
1840. De ces quinze années, je n'en ai pas laissé écouler une seule,
excepté toutefois celle que les événements politiques m'ont obligé à
passer hors de France, sans consacrer tout mon temps à l'œuvre
difficile que j'avais entreprise. On pourrait, j'en conviens, travailler
plus vite, mais j'ai pour la mission de l'histoire un tel respect, que la
crainte d'alléguer un fait inexact me remplit d'une sorte de
confusion. Je n'ai alors aucun repos que je n'aie découvert la preuve
du fait objet de mes doutes; je la cherche partout où elle peut être,
et je ne m'arrête que lorsque je l'ai trouvée, ou que j'ai acquis la
certitude qu'elle n'existe pas. Dans ce cas, réduit à prononcer
comme un juré, je parle d'après ma conviction intime, mais toujours
avec une extrême appréhension de me tromper, car j'estime qu'il n'y
a rien de plus condamnable, lorsqu'on s'est donné spontanément la
mission de dire aux hommes la vérité sur les grands événements de
l'histoire, que de la déguiser par faiblesse, de l'altérer par passion,
de la supposer par paresse, et de mentir, sciemment ou non, à son
siècle et aux siècles à venir.

C'est sous l'empire de ces scrupules que j'ai lu, relu, et annoté de
ma main les innombrables pièces contenues dans les archives de
l'État, les trente mille lettres composant la correspondance
personnelle de Napoléon, les lettres non moins nombreuses de ses
ministres, de ses généraux, de ses aides de camp, et même des
agents de sa police, enfin la plupart des mémoires manuscrits
conservés dans le sein des familles. J'ai rencontré, je dois le dire,
sous tous les gouvernements (car j'en ai déjà vu se succéder trois
depuis que mon œuvre est commencée), la même facilité, la même
prodigalité à me fournir les documents dont j'avais besoin, et sous le
neveu de Napoléon on ne m'a pas plus refusé les secrets de la
politique impériale que sous la république, ou sous la royauté
constitutionnelle. C'est ainsi que je crois être parvenu à saisir et à
reproduire non cette vérité de convention, que les générations
contemporaines se créent souvent, et transmettent aux générations
futures comme la vérité authentique, mais cette vérité des faits eux-
mêmes, qu'on ne trouve que dans les documents d'État, et surtout
dans la correspondance des grands personnages. J'ai de la sorte
employé quelquefois une année à préparer un volume que deux
mois me suffisaient à écrire, et j'ai fait attendre le public, qui avait
bien voulu attacher quelque prix au résultat de mes travaux.

Je dois ajouter qu'au scrupule s'est joint chez moi le goût d'étudier
à fond comment, à l'une des époques les plus agitées de l'humanité,
on s'y était pris pour remuer tant d'hommes, d'argent et de
matières. Les secrets de l'administration, de la finance, de la guerre,
de la diplomatie m'ont attiré, retenu, captivé, et j'ai pensé que cette
partie toute technique de l'histoire méritait de la part des esprits
sérieux autant d'attention au moins que la partie dramatique. À mon
avis, la louange, le blâme pour les grandes opérations ne sont que
de vaines déclamations, si elles ne reposent sur l'exposé raisonné,
positif et clair de la manière dont ces opérations se sont accomplies.
S'extasier, par exemple, devant le passage des Alpes, et, pour faire
partager son enthousiasme aux autres, accumuler les mots,
prodiguer ici les rochers, et là les neiges, n'est à mes yeux qu'un jeu
puéril et même fastidieux pour le lecteur. Il n'y a de sérieux,
d'intéressant, de propre à exciter une véritable admiration, que
l'exposé exact et complet des choses comme elles se sont passées.
Combien de lieues à parcourir à travers monts, combien de canons,
de munitions, de vivres à transporter sans routes frayées, à des
hauteurs prodigieuses, au milieu d'affreux précipices, où les animaux
ne servent plus, où l'homme seul conserve encore ses forces et sa
volonté, le tout dit simplement, avec le détail nécessaire, sans les
particularités inutiles, voilà, selon moi, la vraie manière de retracer
une entreprise telle que le passage du Saint-Bernard par exemple.
Qu'après un exposé précis et complet des faits, une exclamation
s'échappe de la bouche du narrateur, elle va droit à l'âme du lecteur,
parce que déjà elle s'était produite en lui, et n'a fait que répondre au
cri de sa propre admiration.

Telles sont les causes de la lenteur que j'ai mise à composer cette
histoire, et de l'étendue aussi de mes récits. Ceci me conduit à dire
sur l'histoire, et sur la manière de l'écrire, quelques mots inspirés par
une longue pratique de cet art, et par un profond respect de sa
haute dignité.

Je ne sais rien, dans les œuvres de l'esprit humain, au-dessus de

la grande poésie. Mais on m'accordera qu'il y a des époques plus
propres à la goûter qu'à la produire. Je ne crois pas que jamais
Homère et Dante, par exemple, aient été plus vivement sentis que
dans notre époque à la fois profondément érudite et profondément
émue. Pourtant, bien que nous ayons eu des poëtes et des peintres
remarquables, notre temps n'a pas produit cette poésie naïve et
énergique de la Florence du treizième siècle, ou de la Grèce
primitive. Les sociétés ont leur âge comme les individus, et chaque
âge a ses occupations particulières. J'ai toujours considéré l'histoire
comme l'occupation qui convenait non pas exclusivement, mais plus
spécialement à notre temps. Nous n'avons pas perdu la sensibilité
aux grandes choses, et en tout cas notre siècle aurait suffi pour nous
la rendre, et nous avons acquis cette expérience qui permet de les
apprécier et de les juger. Je me suis donc avec confiance livré aux
travaux historiques dès ma jeunesse, certain que je faisais ce que
mon siècle était particulièrement propre à faire. J'ai consacré à écrire
l'histoire trente années de ma vie, et je dirai que, même en vivant au
milieu des affaires publiques, je ne me séparais pas de mon art pour
ainsi dire. Lorsqu'en présence de trônes chancelants, au sein
d'assemblées ébranlées par l'accent de tribuns puissants, ou
menacées par la multitude, il me restait un instant pour la réflexion,
je voyais moins tel ou tel individu passager portant un nom de notre
époque, que les éternelles figures de tous les temps et de tous les
lieux, qui à Athènes, à Rome, à Florence, avaient agi autrefois
comme celle que je voyais se mouvoir sous mes yeux. J'étais à la
fois moins irrité et moins troublé, parce que j'étais moins surpris,
parce que j'assistais non à une scène d'un jour, mais à la scène
éternelle que Dieu a dressée en mettant l'homme en société avec
ses passions grandes ou petites, basses ou généreuses, l'homme
toujours semblable à lui-même, toujours agité et toujours conduit
par des lois profondes autant qu'immuables.

Ma vie, j'ose le dire, a donc été une longue étude historique, et si

on en excepte ces moments violents où l'action vous étourdit, où le
torrent des choses vous emporte au point de ne pas vous laisser
discerner ses bords, j'ai presque toujours observé ce qui se passait
autour de moi, en le rapportant à ce qui s'était passé ailleurs, pour y
chercher ce qu'il y avait de différent ou de semblable. Cette longue
comparaison est, je le crois, la vraie préparation de l'esprit à
l'exécution de cette épopée de l'histoire, qui n'est pas condamnée à
être décolorée parce qu'elle est exacte et positive, car l'homme réel
qui s'appelle tantôt Alexandre, tantôt Annibal, César, Charlemagne,
Napoléon, a sa poésie, bien que différente, comme l'homme fictif qui
s'appelle Achille, Énée, Roland, ou Renaud!

L'observation assidue des hommes et des événements, ou, comme

disent les peintres, l'observation de la nature, ne suffit pas, il faut un
certain don pour bien écrire l'histoire. Quel est-il? Est-ce l'esprit,
l'imagination, la critique, l'art de composer, le talent de peindre? Je
répondrai qu'il serait bien désirable d'avoir de tous ces dons à la fois,
et que toute histoire où se montre une seule de ces qualités rares
est une œuvre appréciable, et hautement appréciée des générations
futures. Je dirai qu'il y a non pas une, mais vingt manières d'écrire
l'histoire, qu'on peut l'écrire comme Thucydide, Xénophon, Polybe,
Tite-Live, Salluste, César, Tacite, Commines, Guichardin, Machiavel,
Saint-Simon, Frédéric le Grand, Napoléon, et qu'elle est ainsi
supérieurement écrite, quoique très-diversement. Je ne demanderais
au ciel que d'avoir fait comme le moins éminent de ces historiens,
pour être assuré d'avoir bien fait, et de laisser après moi un souvenir
de mon éphémère existence. Chacun d'eux a sa qualité particulière
et saillante: tel narre avec une abondance qui entraîne, tel autre
narre sans suite, va par saillies et par bonds, mais, en passant, trace
en quelques traits des figures qui ne s'effacent jamais de la mémoire
des hommes; tel autre enfin, moins abondant ou moins habile à
peindre, mais plus calme, plus discret, pénètre d'un œil auquel rien
n'échappe dans la profondeur des événements humains, et les
éclaire d'une éternelle clarté. De quelque manière qu'ils fassent, je le
répète, ils ont bien fait. Et pourtant n'y a-t-il pas une qualité
essentielle, préférable à toutes les autres, qui doit distinguer
l'historien, et qui constitue sa véritable supériorité? Je le crois, et je
dis tout de suite que, dans mon opinion, cette qualité c'est
l'intelligence.

Je prends ici ce mot dans son acception vulgaire, et l'appliquant

seulement aux sujets les plus divers, je vais tâcher de me faire
entendre. On remarque souvent chez un enfant, un ouvrier, un
homme d'État, quelque chose qu'on ne qualifie pas d'abord du nom
d'esprit, parce que le brillant y manque, mais qu'on appelle
l'intelligence, parce que celui qui en paraît doué saisit sur-le-champ
ce qu'on lui dit, voit, entend à demi-mot, comprend s'il est enfant ce
qu'on lui enseigne, s'il est ouvrier l'œuvre qu'on lui donne à
exécuter, s'il est homme d'État les événements, leurs causes, leurs
conséquences, devine les caractères, leurs penchants, la conduite
qu'il faut en attendre, et n'est surpris, embarrassé de rien, quoique
souvent affligé de tout. C'est là ce qui s'appelle l'intelligence, et
bientôt, à la pratique, cette simple qualité, qui ne vise pas à l'effet,
est de plus grande utilité dans la vie que tous les dons de l'esprit, le
génie excepté, parce qu'il n'est, après tout, que l'intelligence elle-
même, avec l'éclat, la force, l'étendue, la promptitude.

C'est cette qualité, appliquée aux grands objets de l'histoire, qui à

mon avis est la qualité essentielle du narrateur, et qui, lorsqu'elle
existe, amène bientôt à sa suite toutes les autres, pourvu qu'au don
de la nature on joigne l'expérience, née de la pratique. En effet, avec
ce que je nomme l'intelligence, on démêle bien le vrai du faux, on ne
se laisse pas tromper par les vaines traditions ou les faux bruits de
l'histoire, on a de la critique; on saisit bien le caractère des hommes
et des temps, on n'exagère rien, on ne fait rien trop grand ou trop
petit, on donne à chaque personnage ses traits véritables, on écarte
le fard, de tous les ornements le plus malséant en histoire, on peint
juste; on entre dans les secrets ressorts des choses, on comprend et
on fait comprendre comment elles se sont accomplies; diplomatie,
administration, guerre, marine, on met ces objets si divers à la
portée de la plupart des esprits, parce qu'on a su les saisir dans leur
généralité intelligible à tous; et quand on est arrivé ainsi à s'emparer
des nombreux éléments dont un vaste récit doit se composer, l'ordre
dans lequel il faut les présenter, on le trouve dans l'enchaînement
même des événements, car celui qui a su saisir le lien mystérieux
qui les unit, la manière dont ils se sont engendrés les uns les autres,
a découvert l'ordre de narration le plus beau, parce que c'est le plus
naturel; et si, de plus, il n'est pas de glace devant les grandes
scènes de la vie des nations, il mêle fortement le tout ensemble, le
fait succéder avec aisance et vivacité; il laisse au fleuve du temps sa
fluidité, sa puissance, sa grâce même, en ne forçant aucun de ses
mouvements, en n'altérant aucun de ses heureux contours; enfin,
dernière et suprême condition, il est équitable, parce que rien ne
calme, n'abat les passions comme la connaissance profonde des
hommes. Je ne dirai pas qu'elle fait tomber toute sévérité, car ce
serait un malheur; mais quand on connaît l'humanité et ses
faiblesses, quand on sait ce qui la domine et l'entraîne, sans haïr
moins le mal, sans aimer moins le bien, on a plus d'indulgence pour
l'homme qui s'est laissé aller au mal par les mille entraînements de
l'âme humaine, et on n'adore pas moins celui qui, malgré toutes les
basses attractions, a su tenir son cœur au niveau du bon, du beau et
du grand.

L'intelligence est donc, selon moi, la faculté heureuse qui, en

histoire, enseigne à démêler le vrai du faux, à peindre les hommes
avec justesse, à éclaircir les secrets de la politique et de la guerre, à
narrer avec un ordre lumineux, à être équitable enfin, en un mot à
être un véritable narrateur. L'oserai-je dire? presque sans art, l'esprit
clairvoyant que j'imagine n'a qu'à céder à ce besoin de conter qui
souvent s'empare de nous et nous entraîne à rapporter aux autres
les événements qui nous ont touché, et il pourra enfanter des chefs-
d'œuvre. Au milieu de mille exemples que je pourrais citer, qu'on me
permette d'en choisir deux, Guichardin et le grand Frédéric.

Guichardin n'avait jamais songé à écrire, et n'en avait fait aucun

apprentissage. Toute sa vie il avait agi comme diplomate,
administrateur, et une fois ou deux comme militaire; mais c'était l'un
des esprits les plus clairvoyants qui aient jamais existé, surtout en
affaires politiques. Il avait l'âme un peu triste par nature et par
satiété de la vie. Ne sachant à quoi s'occuper dans sa retraite, il
écrivit les annales de son temps, dont une partie s'était accomplie
sous ses yeux, et il le fit avec une ampleur de narration, une vigueur
de pinceau, une profondeur de jugement, qui rangent son histoire
parmi les beaux monuments de l'esprit humain. Sa phrase est
longue, embarrassée, quelquefois un peu lourde, et pourtant elle
marche comme un homme vif marche vite, même avec de
mauvaises jambes. Il connaissait profondément la nature humaine,
et il trace de tous les personnages de son siècle des portraits
éternels, parce qu'ils sont vrais, simples et vigoureux. À tous ces
mérites il ajoute le ton chagrin et morose d'un homme fatigué des
innombrables misères auxquelles il a assisté, trop morose, selon moi,
car l'histoire doit rester calme et sereine, mais point choquant, parce
qu'on y sent, comme dans la sévérité sombre de Tacite, la tristesse
de l'honnête homme.

Le grand Frédéric, qui ne fut jamais triste, aimait passionnément

les lettres, et c'est assurément l'un des traits les plus nobles de son
caractère, que cet amour des lettres qui le soutint dans les moments
désespérés, où plus d'une fois sa fortune sembla près de s'abîmer.
Le soir de batailles perdues, il se consolait en écrivant de mauvais
vers, mauvais non par la pensée, car on y rencontre à chaque
instant des idées profondes, ingénieuses ou piquantes, mais mauvais
par la forme, car les vers ne sauraient se passer de correction,
d'harmonie et de grâce. La pensée sans l'art n'est rien en poésie. Ce
n'est pas encore là tout ce qui manquait au grand Frédéric pour
composer des livres: n'ayant jamais fait de la pratique des lettres
son art, n'en faisant que son délassement, il n'avait jamais étendu
ses œuvres au delà d'une pièce de vers, d'un pamphlet ou d'une
épître, et l'art de construire un livre lui était aussi étranger que celui
d'écrire correctement. Et pourtant ce même homme, dans l'histoire
qu'il nous a laissée de sa famille et de son propre règne, exposant
les trames subtiles de sa diplomatie, les profondes combinaisons de
son génie militaire, retraçant les vicissitudes d'une carrière de près
de cinquante ans, les indicibles va-et-vient de la politique dans un
siècle où les femmes gouvernaient les États pendant que les
philosophes gouvernaient les esprits, enfin les alternatives
continuelles d'une guerre où, aussi souvent vaincu que victorieux,
mais toujours couvert de gloire, il se voyait à chaque instant à la
veille de périr sous la haine de trois femmes et le poids de trois
grands États, cet homme singulier a donné en mauvais français et en
style bizarre un tableau simple, animé, et presque complétement
vrai de cette curieuse époque, grande par lui seul et par quelques
écrivains français. Ce mauvais écrivain écrit suffisamment bien,
compose non pas savamment, mais simplement, avec ordre et
intérêt, trace les caractères de main de maître, et serait un juge
supérieur, s'il avait d'un juge l'équité et la dignité. Mais à la licence
de son temps ajoutant la licence de son esprit, méprisant tous les
rois qu'il avait humiliés, leurs généraux qu'il avait vaincus, leurs
ministres qu'il avait trompés, ne se plaisant que dans la société des
gens de lettres qui cependant par leur vanité lui prêtaient souvent à
rire, aimant à faire pires qu'ils n'étaient lui et les autres,
intempérant, cynique, il a donné à l'histoire le ton de la médisance,
mais a immortalisé celle qu'il a laissée en la marquant du caractère
de la plus profonde intelligence et du plus rare bon sens qui fussent
jamais.

Je ne dis rien de César, parce qu'il était l'un des écrivains les plus
exercés de son siècle, ni de Napoléon, parce qu'il l'était devenu. Mais
les deux exemples que je viens de citer suffisent pour rendre ma
pensée, et pour prouver que quiconque a l'intelligence des hommes
et des choses a le vrai génie de l'histoire.

Mais, m'objectera-t-on, l'art n'est donc rien, l'intelligence à elle

seule suffit donc à tout! Le premier venu, doué seulement de cette
compréhension, saura composer, peindre, narrer enfin, avec toutes
les conditions de la véritable histoire! Je répondrais volontiers que
oui, s'il ne convenait cependant de mettre quelque restriction à cette
assertion trop absolue. Comprendre est presque tout, et pourtant
n'est pas tout; il faut encore un certain art de composer, de peindre,
de ménager les couleurs, de distribuer la lumière, un certain talent
d'écrire aussi, car c'est de la langue qu'il faut se servir, qu'elle soit
grecque, latine, italienne ou française, pour raconter les vicissitudes
du monde. Et, j'en conviens, il faut à l'intelligence joindre
l'expérience, le calcul, c'est-à-dire l'art.

Ainsi l'homme est un être fini, et il faut presque faire entrer l'infini
dans son esprit. Les événements que vous avez à lui exposer se
passent souvent en mille endroits, non-seulement en France, si le
théâtre de votre histoire est en France, mais en Allemagne, en
Russie, en Espagne, en Amérique et dans l'Inde; et cependant, vous
qui lui contez ces événements, lui qui les lit, ne pouvez être que sur
un point à la fois. Le grand Frédéric se bat en Bohême, mais on se
bat en Thuringe, en Westphalie, en Pologne. Sur le champ de
bataille où il dirige tout, il se bat à l'aile gauche, mais on se bat aussi
à l'aile droite, au centre, et partout. Même quand on a saisi avec
intelligence la chaîne générale qui lie les événements entre eux, il
faut un certain art pour passer d'un lieu à un autre lieu, pour aller
ressaisir les faits secondaires qu'on a dû négliger pour le fait le plus
important; il faut sans cesse courir à droite, à gauche, en arrière,
sans perdre de vue la scène principale, sans laisser languir l'action,
et sans rien omettre non plus, car tout fait omis constitue une faute,
non-seulement contre l'exactitude matérielle, mais contre la vérité
morale, parce qu'il est rare qu'un fait négligé, quelque petit qu'il soit,
ne manque à la contexture générale, comme cause ou comme effet.
Et pourtant on est tenu de ménager cet être fini, qui vous écoute et
qui aspire toujours à l'infini, cet être curieux qui veut tout savoir, et
qui n'a pas la patience de tout apprendre. Que je sache tout, et qu'il
ne m'en coûte aucun effort d'attention, voilà le lecteur, voilà
l'homme! nous voilà tous!

Il faut donc un certain art de mise en scène qui exige de

l'expérience, du calcul, la science et l'habitude des proportions. Mais
ce n'est pas tout encore: il faut savoir peindre, il faut savoir décrire;
il faut savoir saisir dans un caractère le trait saillant qui constitue sa
physionomie, dans une scène la circonstance principale qui fait
image; il faut savoir distribuer la couleur avec mesure, avec une
juste gradation, ne pas la prodiguer, au point qu'il n'en reste plus
pour les parties qui ont besoin d'être fortement colorées. Enfin,
comme l'instrument avec lequel tout cela se fait c'est la langue, il
faut savoir écrire avec la dignité élégante et grave qui convient aux
grandes choses comme aux petites, qui réussit à dire les unes avec
hauteur, les autres avec aisance, précision et clarté. Tout cela est de
l'art, je l'avoue, et souvent même du plus raffiné. Il est donc
nécessaire d'unir à la parfaite intelligence des choses, une certaine
habitude de les manier, de les disposer, de les rendre dans leurs
moindres détails avec une ordonnance savante et facile, noble et
simple, en pénétrant partout, en se traînant tantôt dans le sang des
champs de bataille, tantôt dans les cabinets de la diplomatie, où
quelquefois on est forcé d'aller jusqu'au boudoir pour trouver le
secret des États, tantôt enfin dans les rues fangeuses où s'agite une
démagogie furieuse et folle.

Mais en avouant que l'art doit s'ajouter à l'intelligence, je vais dire

pourquoi l'intelligence, telle que je l'ai définie, arrivera plus
qu'aucune autre faculté à cet art si compliqué. De toutes les
productions de l'esprit, la plus pure, la plus chaste, la plus sévère, la
plus haute et la plus humble à la fois, c'est l'histoire. Cette Muse
fière, clairvoyante et modeste, a besoin surtout d'être vêtue sans
apprêt.
 Il lui faut de l'art sans doute, et s'il y en a trop, si on le découvre,
toute dignité, toute vérité disparaissent, car cette simple et noble
créature a voulu vous tromper, et dès lors toute confiance en elle est
perdue. Qu'on exagère la terreur sur la scène tragique, le rire sur la
scène comique; que dans l'épopée, l'ode, l'idylle, on grandisse ou
embellisse les personnages, qu'on fasse les héros toujours
intrépides, les bergères toujours jolies, qu'en un mot on trompe un
peu dans ces arts, qui tous s'appellent l'art de la fiction, personne ne
peut se prétendre trompé, car tout le monde est averti; et encore je
conseillerais aux auteurs de fictions de rester vrais, quoique
dispensés d'être exacts. Mais l'histoire, mentir dans le fond, dans la
forme, dans la couleur, c'est chose intolérable! L'histoire ne dit pas:
Je suis la fiction; elle dit: Je suis la vérité. Imaginez un père sage,
grave, aimé et respecté de ses enfants, qui, les voulant instruire, les
rassemble et leur dit: Je vais vous conter ce que mon aïeul, ce que
mon père ont fait, ce que j'ai fait moi-même pour conduire où elles
en sont la fortune et la dignité de notre famille. Je vais vous conter
leurs bonnes actions, leurs fautes, leurs erreurs, tout enfin, pour
vous éclairer, vous instruire et vous mettre dans la voie du bien-être
et de l'honneur. Tous les enfants sont réunis, ils écoutent avec un
silence religieux. Comprenez-vous ce père enjolivant ses récits, les
altérant sciemment, et donnant à ces enfants qui lui sont si chers
une fausse idée des affaires, des peines, des plaisirs de la vie?

L'histoire, c'est ce père instruisant ses enfants. Après une telle

définition, la comprenez-vous prétentieuse, exagérée, fardée ou
déclamatoire? Je supporte tout, je l'avoue, de tous les arts; mais la
moindre prétention de la part de l'histoire me révolte. Dans la
composition, dans le drame, dans les portraits, dans le style,
l'histoire doit être vraie, simple et sobre. Or quel est, entre tous les
genres d'esprit, celui qui lui conservera le plus ces qualités
essentielles? Évidemment l'esprit profondément intelligent, qui voit
les choses telles qu'elles sont, les voit juste, et les veut rendre
comme il les a vues.
 L'intelligence complète des choses en fait sentir la beauté
naturelle, et les fait aimer au point de n'y vouloir rien ajouter, rien
retrancher, et de chercher exclusivement la perfection de l'art dans
leur exacte reproduction. Qu'on me permette une comparaison pour
me faire entendre.

Raphaël a créé des tableaux d'invention, des Saintes Familles

notamment, et des portraits. Les juges les plus délicats se
demandent toujours lesquels valent mieux de ces Saintes Familles ou
de ces portraits, et ils sont embarrassés. Je ne dirai pas qu'avec le
temps ils arrivent à préférer les portraits, car bien hardi serait celui
qui oserait prononcer entre ces œuvres divines. Mais avec le temps
ils arrivent à n'admettre aucune infériorité entre elles, et les Vierges
les plus admirées de Raphaël ne sont pas placées au-dessus de ses
simples portraits; la poésie des unes n'efface pas la noble réalité des
autres. Mais comment Raphaël est-il parvenu à produire, par
exemple, ce surprenant portrait de Léon X, l'une des œuvres les plus
parfaites qui soient sorties de la main des hommes[1]? Voulait-il
peindre une Vierge, ce beau génie cherchait dans les trésors de son
imagination les traits les plus purs qu'il eût rencontrés, les épurait
encore, y ajoutait sa grâce propre, qu'il puisait dans son âme, et
créait l'une de ces têtes ravissantes qu'on n'oublie plus quand on les
a vues. Au contraire voulait-il peindre un portrait, il renonçait à
combiner, à épurer, à inventer enfin. Dans la figure d'un vieux prince
de l'Église au nez rouge et boursouflé, au visage sensuel, aux yeux
petits mais perçants, il n'apercevait rien de laid ou de repoussant,
cherchait la nature, l'admirait dans sa réalité, se gardait d'y rien
changer, et n'y mettait du sien que la correction du dessin, la vérité
de la couleur, l'entente de la lumière, et ces mérites il les trouvait
dans la nature bien observée, car dans la laideur même elle est
toujours correcte de dessin, belle de couleur, saisissante de lumière.

L'histoire c'est le portrait, comme les Vierges de Raphaël sont la

poésie. Mais de même que l'on parvient au portrait de Raphaël en
s'éprenant de la nature et des beautés de la réalité, en s'attachant à
les rendre telles quelles, on parviendra à la grande histoire en
observant les faits, en les contemplant, comme un peintre contemple
la nature, l'admire même devant un laid visage, et cherche l'effet
dans la vérité seule de la reproduction.

L'histoire a son pittoresque de même que la peinture, et le

pittoresque est dans les hommes, dans les événements exactement
et profondément observés. Par exemple, ouvrez notre histoire,
prenez Henri IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV, prenez leurs
ministres, leurs maîtresses et leurs confesseurs, Richelieu, Mazarin,
Louvois, Colbert, Choiseul, mesdames de Montespan, de Maintenon,
de Pompadour, Letellier, Fleury, Dubois; de ces êtres puissants,
gracieux, faibles ou laids, allez aux héros, au fougueux Condé, au
sage Turenne, à l'heureux Villars, ainsi que la postérité les appelle;
de ces héros gouvernés, allez à ces héros gouvernants, Frédéric et
Napoléon: contemplez ces figures comme des portraits suspendus
dans le Louvre de l'histoire, observez-les comme ils sont, avec leur
grandeur et leur misère, leur séduction et leur déplaisance! est-ce
que vous n'éprouvez pas une sorte de tressaillement à voir ces
figures telles que Dieu les a faites, comme lorsque vous rencontrez
un portrait de Raphaël, de Titien ou de Velasquez? Sentez-vous
combien, sous leurs traits vrais, quelquefois sublimes, quelquefois
bizarres, quelquefois grossiers, il y a la beauté pittoresque de la
nature? Est-ce que Henri IV avec sa profondeur d'esprit, son courage
chevaleresque et calculé, sa grâce, sa bonté, sa ruse, ses appétits
sensuels; Louis XIII avec sa timidité gauche, son courage, sa
soumission, sa révolte contre le puissant ministre auquel il doit la
gloire de son règne; Louis XIV avec sa vanité, son bon sens, sa
grandeur; Louis XV avec son égoïsme, qui s'étourdit sans s'aveugler;
est-ce que Richelieu avec son impitoyable génie, Mazarin avec sa
patience et sa profondeur, Condé avec sa fougue que l'intelligence
illumine, Turenne avec sa prudence qui s'enhardit, Villars avec son
talent de saisir l'occasion, Frédéric avec son arrogant génie,
Napoléon avec ce génie de Titan qui veut escalader le ciel, n'ont pas
une beauté historique à laquelle ce serait crime de toucher, crime
d'ajouter ou d'ôter un trait? Pour les rendre que faut-il? Les
comprendre. Dès qu'on les a compris, en effet, on n'a plus qu'une
passion, c'est de les bien étudier pour les reproduire tels qu'ils sont,
et après les avoir bien étudiés de les étudier encore, pour s'assurer
qu'on n'a pas négligé telle ride du malheur, du temps ou des
passions, qui doit achever la vérité du portrait.

C'est la profonde intelligence des choses qui conduit à cet amour

idolâtre du vrai, que les peintres et les sculpteurs appellent l'amour
de la nature. Alors on n'y veut rien changer, parce qu'on ne juge rien
au-dessus d'elle. En poésie on choisit, on ne change pas la nature;
en histoire on n'a pas même le droit de choisir, on n'a que le droit
d'ordonner. Si dans la poésie il faut être vrai, bien plus vrai encore il
faut être en histoire. Vous prétendez être intéressant, dramatique,
profond, tracer de fiers portraits qui se détachent de votre récit
comme d'une toile, et se gravent dans la mémoire, ou des scènes
qui émeuvent; eh bien, tenez pour certain que vous ne serez rien de
tout ce que vous prétendez être, que vos récits seront forcés, vos
scènes exagérées, et vos portails de pures académies. Savez-vous
pourquoi? Parce que vous vous serez préoccupé du soin d'être ou
dramatique, ou peintre. Au contraire, n'ayez qu'un souci, celui d'être
exact, étudiez bien un temps, les personnages qui le remplissent,
leurs qualités, leurs vices, leurs altercations, les causes qui les
divisent, et puis appliquez-vous à les rendre simplement. Quand un
personnage passe, peignez-le de manière à faire sortir son rôle de
son caractère, mais sans vous y arrêter avec complaisance; les
personnages ont entre eux de violents démêlés, rapportez-en ce qu'il
faut pour faire comprendre les motifs de leurs différends, le sens de
leurs divisions, les inconvénients de leurs caractères, et ne vous
arrêtez pas pour composer des tragédies; allez, allez toujours
comme le monde; s'il y a des détails techniques, donnez-les, car il y
a le matériel des choses humaines qu'on ne peut omettre, car dans
la réalité tout n'est pas drame, grands éclats de passion, grands
coups d'épée; il y a les longs tiraillements qui précèdent les fortes
crises; il y a la réunion des hommes, de l'argent, du matériel, qui
précède les sanglantes rencontres de la guerre; il faut que tout cela
ait sa place et son temps, que tout cela se succède dans vos récits
comme dans la réalité elle-même; et si vous n'avez songé qu'à être
simplement vrai, vous aurez été ce que sont les choses elles-mêmes,
intéressant, dramatique, varié, instructif, mais vous ne serez rien de
plus qu'elles-mêmes, vous ne serez rien que par elles, comme elles,
autant qu'elles. Et n'ayez aucune inquiétude sur votre sujet quel qu'il
soit. N'en craignez ni les difficultés, ni l'aridité, ni l'obscurité. Dieu a
fait le spectacle du monde et l'esprit de l'homme l'un pour l'autre.
Dès qu'on montre le monde à l'homme, ses yeux s'y attachent; il ne
faut pour cela qu'une condition, c'est de n'y pas mettre les
obscurités de son esprit en les imputant aux choses. Prenez quelque
histoire ou partie d'histoire que ce soit, retracez-en les faits avec
exactitude, avec leur suite naturelle, sans faux ornement, et vous
serez attachant, j'ajouterai pittoresque. Si pour systématiser vos
récits vous n'avez pas cherché à les grouper arbitrairement, si vous
avez bien saisi leur enchaînement naturel, ils auront un
entraînement irrésistible, celui d'un fleuve qui coule à travers les
campagnes. Il y a sans doute de grands et petits fleuves, des bords
tristes ou riants, mesquins ou grandioses. Et pourtant regardez à
toutes les heures du jour, et dites si tout fleuve, rivière ou ruisseau,
ne coule pas avec une certaine grâce naturelle, si à tel moment, en
rencontrant tel coteau, en s'enfonçant à l'horizon derrière tel
bouquet de bois, il n'a pas son effet heureux et saisissant? Ainsi
vous serez, quel que soit votre sujet, si après une chose vous en
faites venir une autre, avec le mouvement facile, et tour à tour
paisible ou précipité de la nature.

Maintenant, après une telle profession de foi, ai-je besoin de dire

quelles sont en histoire les conditions du style? J'énonce tout de
suite la condition essentielle, c'est de n'être jamais ni aperçu ni
senti. On vient tout récemment d'exposer aux yeux émerveillés du
public, parmi les chefs-d'œuvre de l'industrie du siècle, des glaces
d'une dimension et d'une pureté extraordinaires, devant lesquelles
des Vénitiens du quinzième siècle resteraient confondus, et à travers
lesquelles on aperçoit, sans la moindre atténuation de contour ou de
couleur, les innombrables objets que renferme le palais de
l'Exposition universelle. J'ai entendu des curieux stupéfaits
n'apercevant que le cadre qui entoure ces glaces, se demander ce
que faisait là ce cadre magnifique, car ils n'avaient pas aperçu le
verre. À peine avertis de leur erreur, ils admiraient le prodige de
cette glace si pure. Si, en effet, on voit une glace, c'est qu'elle a un
défaut, car son mérite c'est la transparence absolue. Ainsi est le style
en histoire. Du moment que vous le sentez, lui qui n'a d'autre objet
que de montrer les choses, c'est qu'il est défectueux. Mais est-ce
sans travail qu'on arrive à cette transparence si parfaite?
Certainement non. Si le style est vulgaire ou ambitieux, s'il choque
par une consonnance malheureuse, car en histoire les noms
d'hommes, de lieux, de batailles sont donnés par les langues
nationales, et on ne peut pas leur trouver d'équivalent, si le style
choque en quelque chose, c'est la glace qui a un défaut. Simple,
clair, précis, aisé, élevé quelquefois quand les grands intérêts de
l'humanité sont en question, voilà ce qu'il faut qu'il soit, et je suis
convaincu que les plus beaux vers, les plus travaillés, ne coûtent pas
plus de peine qu'une modeste phrase de récit par laquelle il faut
rendre un détail technique sans être ni vulgaire ni choquant. Mais
qui aura tant de patience, de soin, de dévouement, uniquement pour
se faire oublier? Qui? L'intelligence, car elle seule comprend son vrai
rôle, qui est de tout montrer en ne se montrant jamais.

J'ai annoncé déjà qu'elle seule aussi saurait être juste. On me

permettra de dire encore quelques mots sur cet important sujet.

Si j'éprouve une sorte de honte à la seule idée d'alléguer un fait

inexact, je n'en éprouve pas moins à la seule idée d'une injustice
envers les hommes. Quand on a été jugé soi-même, souvent par le
premier venu, qui ne connaissait ni les personnages, ni les
événements, ni les questions sur lesquelles il prononçait en maître,
on ressent autant de honte que de dégoût à devenir un juge pareil.
Lorsque des hommes ont versé leur sang pour un pays souvent bien
ingrat, quand d'autres pour ce même pays ont consumé leur vie
dans les anxiétés dévorantes de la politique, l'ambition fût-elle l'un
de leurs mobiles, prononcer d'un trait de plume sur le mérite de leur
sang ou de leurs veilles, sans connaissance des choses, sans souci
du vrai, est une sorte d'impiété! L'injustice pendant la vie, soit! les
flatteurs sont là pour faire la contre-partie des détracteurs, bien que
pour les nobles cœurs les inanités de la flatterie ne contre-balancent
pas les amertumes de la calomnie; mais après la mort, la justice au
moins, la justice sans adulation ni dénigrement, la justice, sinon
pour celui qui l'attendit sans l'obtenir, au moins pour ses enfants!
Mais qui peut se flatter en histoire de tenir les balances de la justice
d'une main tout à faire sûre? Hélas! personne, car ce sont les
balances de Dieu dans la main des hommes! Que de problèmes, en
effet, que de complications dans ces problèmes, que de nuances
pour être complétement équitable! Tel homme a exécuté de grandes
choses, mais a-t-il tout fait lui-même? n'a-t-il pas eu des
collaborateurs pour l'aider, ou des prédécesseurs pour lui frayer les
voies? Alexandre a eu derrière lui son père Philippe, dont l'éloge le
remplissait de courroux. Le grand Frédéric a eu son père et le prince
d'Anhalt-Dessau qui lui avaient préparé l'armée prussienne.
Napoléon avait reçu de la révolution française une armée
incomparable. Tel homme a causé beaucoup de mal; mais ce mal
appartient-il à lui ou à son temps? N'a-t-il pas été entraîné? Les
passions auxquelles il a cédé n'étaient-elles pas celles de ses
contemporains autant que les siennes? Et puis, s'il a été assez
malheureux pour verser le sang humain, ne faut-il pas lui tenir
compte des temps où il eut ce malheur? Une seule goutte de sang
dans notre siècle, où l'on sait le prix de la vie des hommes, ne doit-
elle pas peser dans la balance de la justice presque autant qu'un flot
de sang au treizième siècle? Que d'autres problèmes encore! Voilà
un général d'un courage éprouvé, d'une intelligence prompte et
sûre, qui un jour se trouble, s'égare, et perd une armée! Voilà un
personnage toujours sage, qui un jour, distrait ou affaibli, s'est laissé
grossièrement tromper! Comment apprécier tant d'accidents divers?
Et combien de jugements plus difficiles encore à porter, si on
approche de notre histoire!

Voici un jeune homme extraordinaire, qui, après dix ans d'une

horrible anarchie, se présente couvert de gloire à ses contemporains!
Sur les lois de son pays foulées aux pieds, lois, il est vrai, qui
n'inspiraient guère le respect, lois enfin, il arrive au pouvoir
suprême. Il devient par sa sagesse, sa prudence, ses bienfaits, ses
miracles, les délices de son pays et l'admiration du monde. Mais
bientôt l'ivresse du succès monte à sa tête, il se jette sur l'Europe,
l'accable, la soumet, l'opprime, la révolte, l'attire sur lui, et tombe,
entouré d'une gloire sans pareille, dans un abîme où la France est
précipitée avec lui! Comment juger cette prodigieuse vie? Eut-il
raison, eut-il tort en se saisissant d'un sceptre que tout le monde le
conviait à prendre? Quel homme eût résisté à une telle invitation? Sa
faute ne consiste-t-elle pas plutôt dans l'usage qu'il fit de l'autorité
suprême? Mais si on absout l'usurpation du pouvoir pour n'en blâmer
que l'usage, n'oublie-t-on pas que dans la manière violente de le
prendre il y avait en germe la manière violente de l'employer? Et
puis, cet abus de la victoire qui révolta le monde, la faute en est-elle
tout à fait à lui, ou au monde contre lequel il lutta? Le tort de cette
horrible lutte, qui a fait couler plus de sang qu'il n'en coula jamais
dans aucun siècle, est-il ou tout à lui, ou tout au monde, ou par
moitié à l'un et à l'autre? Est-ce à l'insatiable orgueil du vainqueur ou
à l'implacable ressentiment du vaincu qu'il faut s'en prendre?

Ainsi dans une seule vie, bien grande, il est vrai, que de
problèmes profonds comme l'âme humaine! Comment arriver à les
résoudre?

La première condition c'est d'éteindre toute passion dans son âme.

Mais comment, demandera-t-on, opérer un tel miracle? Autant dire
qu'on vous placera devant le plus vaste des théâtres, le plus vaste
assurément, car c'est l'univers lui-même, et qu'assis devant ce
théâtre où passeront les plus illustres acteurs connus, avec leurs
grandeurs et leurs misères, leurs traits terribles ou risibles, vous ne
serez jamais ému, vous n'éprouverez ni indignation, ni amour, ni
haine, ni sentiment du ridicule! Glacer ainsi l'âme humaine est
certainement impossible, et n'est pas désirable. Mais n'est-il pas
possible de détruire la passion sans détruire le sentiment? Il me
semble qu'on le peut, et qu'on y arrivera en élevant son esprit par
l'étude assidue de l'histoire. Placez-vous, en effet, devant le
spectacle des choses humaines; méditez-le sans cesse; parvenez à
le comprendre, à le pénétrer; vivez avec les hommes dans le passé
et le présent; rendez-vous compte de leurs faiblesses, pour les
mieux comprendre songez aux vôtres, et, par la connaissance des
hommes, vous deviendrez sinon impassible, du moins équitable et
juste. Toute amertume à coup sûr sortira de votre cœur. Suivant vos
goûts, vous aurez une préférence pour Turenne ou pour Condé, pour
Richelieu ou pour Mazarin; mais votre raison, indépendante de vos
instincts, planera au-dessus de vos sensations, et rendra les arrêts
que la faible humanité peut rendre, en attendant ceux de Dieu. Si
par caractère vous êtes indulgent ou sévère, il en paraîtra quelque
chose, non dans le fond, mais dans la forme de vos jugements. Vous
pourrez être triste comme Guichardin, ou comme Tacite, mais,
comme eux, vous aurez cette justice qui tient à la hauteur de la
raison. Ainsi j'en reviens à ma proposition première: ayez
l'intelligence des choses humaines, et vous aurez ce qu'il faut pour
les retracer avec clarté, variété, profondeur, ordre et justice.

Pour moi, j'ai passé vingt-cinq ans dans la vie publique, et plus de
trente dans l'étude de l'histoire. Je me suis particulièrement attaché
aux annales de mon temps, de celui du moins qui finissait quand ma
jeunesse commençait. Après avoir écrit l'histoire de la Révolution
française, j'ai essayé d'écrire celle du Consulat et de l'Empire.
L'histoire de la Révolution française est connue, et je puis dire, au
moins par le nombre des exemplaires répandus, que mon siècle l'a
lue. J'ai publié une grande partie de celle de l'Empire, je vais en
publier la fin. Celle-ci reste à connaître et à juger. Je ne sais ce qu'en
pensera le public. Il y a cependant un jugement qu'il en portera, si je
ne m'abuse, c'est qu'elle est empreinte du sentiment profond de la
justice et de la vérité. Je l'ai commencée en 1840, sous un roi que
j'ai servi et aimé, tout en lui résistant sur quelques points; je l'ai
continuée sous la république, et je l'achève sous l'empire rétabli par
le neveu du grand homme dont j'ai retracé les actions... Il y a une
espérance dont je me berce, c'est que personne n'apercevra dans
mes écrits une trace de ces diverses époques, non-seulement dans
le fond de mes jugements, mais dans les nuances mêmes de mon
langage. Quand on est en présence de choses d'une dimension
prodigieuse, de prospérités ou d'adversités extraordinaires, qui ont
eu pour le monde des conséquences immenses, qui ont leurs
beautés et leurs horreurs éternelles, songer à soi dans le moment où
on les contemple, atteste ou une faiblesse de caractère, ou une
faiblesse d'esprit, dont je me flatte de n'avoir jamais été atteint.
J'espère donc qu'on ne s'apercevra pas que tel jour je fus en
possession du pouvoir, tel jour proscrit, tel autre paisiblement
heureux dans ma retraite, et que ma raison, tranquille, bienveillante,
et juste au moins d'intention, apparaîtra seule dans mes récits. Je ne
dis pas qu'on n'y retrouvera point mes opinions personnelles: ah! je
serais bien honteux qu'on ne les retrouvât point, mais on les verra
dans le dernier volume telles qu'elles ont paru dans le premier.

J'ai toujours aimé la vraie grandeur, celle qui repose sur le

possible, et la vraie liberté, celle qui est compatible avec l'infirmité
des sociétés humaines. Ces sentiments, je les avais en naissant, je
les aurai encore en mourant, et je ne m'en suis point dépouillé pour
écrire l'histoire de Napoléon; mais je ne crois pas qu'ils aient nui à la
rectitude des jugements que j'ai portés sur lui, je crois plutôt qu'ils
auront contribué à les éclairer. Aucun mortel dans l'histoire ne m'a
paru réunir des facultés plus puissantes et plus diverses, et après
avoir médité sur la fin de sa carrière, je ne change pas de sentiment.
Mais lorsque je commençai son histoire, je pensais, comme je pense
en finissant, que l'abus de ces facultés prodigieuses le précipita vers
sa chute, et je pensais, comme je pense aujourd'hui, que
l'impétuosité de son génie, jointe au défaut de frein, fut la cause de
ses malheurs et des nôtres. En l'admirant profondément, en
éprouvant pour sa nature grande, vive, ardente, un attrait puissant,
j'ai toujours regretté que l'immodération naturelle de son caractère,
et la liberté qui lui fut laissée de s'y livrer, l'aient précipité dans un
abîme. Sous le rapport poétique il n'est pas moins saisissant, il l'est
peut-être davantage. Du point de vue de la politique et du
patriotisme, il mérite un jugement juste et sévère. Mais à toutes les
époques de sa carrière je me suis attaché à le rendre tel qu'il était,
et on le verra tel, j'en ai la conviction, dans mes derniers récits,
poussant en 1811 et en 1812 l'aveuglement du succès jusqu'au
délire, jusqu'à s'enfoncer dans les profondeurs de la Russie;
apportant dans cette fatale expédition une force de conception
extraordinaire, mais faiblissant dans l'exécution, atterré même
pendant la retraite sous le coup imprévu qui l'a frappé, se réveillant
au bord de la Bérézina, et à partir de ce jour, se relevant tout à fait
sous l'aiguillon du malheur, déployant en 1813 pour ressaisir la
fortune des facultés prodigieuses, mais se trompant encore sur l'état
du monde, insensé cette année même dans sa politique, admirable à
la guerre, admirable dans les journées les plus malheureuses,
jusqu'ici mal jugées, parce qu'elles sont tout à fait inconnues; se
relevant avec plus de grandeur encore en 1814, alors ne se
trompant plus ni sur l'Europe, ni sur la France, ni sur lui-même,
sachant qu'il est seul, seul contre tous, ayant pour la première fois
raison dans sa politique contre ses conseillers les plus sages, aimant
mieux succomber que d'accepter la France moindre qu'il ne l'avait
reçue, comprenant avec autant de profondeur que de noblesse
d'esprit que la France vaincue sera plus digne sous le sceptre des
Bourbons que sous le sien, luttant donc, luttant seul, et quoique
n'ayant plus d'illusions conservant un dernier genre de confiance, la
confiance dans son art, la conservant immense comme son génie, et
la justifiant si bien, que quoique ayant tort contre le monde, n'ayant
plus la France avec lui, ne conservant à ses côtés que quelques
soldats qui ont noblement juré de mourir sous le drapeau, il pèse un
moment dans la balance de la destinée, autant que la raison, la
justice et la vérité! Devant un tel spectacle, un tel homme, de tels
événements, éprouver je ne sais quel désir de rapetisser ou de
grossir telle ou telle chose pour satisfaire un sentiment personnel,
serait la plus insigne des puérilités. J'ai la certitude que mon
caractère n'en admet pas de pareille.

Le génie de Napoléon devant l'histoire est donc hors de cause.

Mais, à mon avis, ce qui ne l'est pas, c'est la liberté qui lui fut laissée
de tout vouloir et de tout faire. Ma conviction à cet égard date, non
pas de 1855 ou de 1852, mais du jour même où j'ai commencé à
penser. Pouvoir tout ce qu'on est capable de vouloir est, à mon avis,
le plus grand des malheurs. Les juges qui voient dans Napoléon un
homme de génie, n'y voient pas tout: il faut y reconnaître un des
esprits les plus sensés qui aient existé, et pourtant il aboutit à la plus
folle des politiques. Le despotisme peut tout sur les hommes,
puisqu'il a pu pervertir le bon sens de Napoléon. On verra donc dans
mon récit la trace constante de cette conviction, mais qu'y puis-je
faire? Il y a quarante ans que j'ai commencé à réfléchir, et j'ai
toujours pensé de la sorte. Je sais bien qu'on me dira que c'est un
préjugé de ma vie, je le veux bien; mais je répondrai que c'est un
préjugé de toute ma vie. Je ne demande aux yeux de certains
esprits que ce genre d'excuse. Je sais tous les dangers de la liberté,
et, ce qui est pis, ses misères. Et qui les saurait, si ceux qui ont
essayé de la fonder, et y ont échoué, ne les connaissaient pas? Mais
il y a quelque chose de pis encore, c'est la faculté de tout faire
laissée même au meilleur, même au plus sage des hommes. On
répète souvent que la liberté empêche de faire ceci ou cela, d'élever
tel monument, ou d'exercer telle action sur le monde. Voici à quoi
une longue réflexion m'a conduit: c'est à penser que si quelquefois
les gouvernements ont besoin d'être stimulés, plus habituellement ils
ont besoin d'être contenus; que si quelquefois ils sont portés à
l'inaction, plus habituellement ils sont portés, en fait de politique, de
guerre, de dépense, à trop entreprendre, et qu'un peu de gêne ne
saurait jamais être un malheur. On ajoute, il est vrai: Mais cette
liberté destinée à contenir le pouvoir d'un seul, qui la contiendra
elle-même? Je réponds sans hésiter: Tous. Je sais bien qu'un pays
peut parfois s'égarer, et je l'ai vu, mais il s'égare moins souvent,
moins complétement qu'un seul homme.

Je m'aperçois que je m'oublie, et je me hâte d'affirmer que je ne

veux persuader personne. J'ai voulu seulement expliquer la raison
d'une opinion dont on trouvera la trace dans cette histoire, opinion
que l'âge et l'expérience n'ont point affaiblie, et dont, j'ose l'affirmer,
l'intérêt personnel n'a point été chez moi le soutien. Si en effet
j'osais parler de ma personne, je dirais que jamais je ne fus plus
heureux que depuis que, rentré dans le repos, j'ai pu reprendre ma
profession première, celle de l'étude assidue et impartiale des choses
humaines. Certains esprits pourront ne pas me croire, et ils en
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