Letters

I wonder about T.J. Clark’s choice of Pierre Bourdieu as a foil for Frantz Fanon (LRB, 26 September). Clark mentions Bourdieu’s referring, in an interview, to Fanon’s ‘irresponsibility’, and goes so far as to call Bourdieu a ‘boor’, in contrast to Fanon’s ‘real’ readers, such as Hannah Arendt.

The interview in question took place in the context of the ‘black decade’ in Algeria, from 1992 to 2002, when between 44,000 and 200,000 people were killed. This period represented the bitter coda to the optimism of the Algerian revolution of 1954-62. It may have been partly Bourdieu’s reflection on such losses that led him to accentuate his distance from Fanon. But it is also true that Bourdieu had from the early 1960s been critical of Fanon’s view that the peasantry would be the sole or main revolutionary force.

Bourdieu, who was himself conscripted to Algeria, was a noted advocate for the colonised Algerians and critic of colonial anthropologists; he ended his first book, The Algerians (1958), with a revolutionary song. Although he opposed some of the National Liberation Army’s methods, he and his Algerian colleagues – including Abdelmalek Sayad, Mouloud Mammeri and Mouloud Feraoun – fully supported the decolonial struggle. Feraoun, a lycée headteacher, was killed by the OAS, and Bourdieu himself had to flee, late one night, having discovered he was on the French army’s red list.

Both Bourdieu and Sayad, like Fanon, favoured a socialist revolution in Algeria. They wrote an article together in 1964 about the need to avoid the bureaucratic deformation of the revolution. Vital to this, they argued, was the creation of radical educational programmes that would not alienate the peasantry: tools that would counter the ‘demagoguery’ and hierarchical centralisation that both they, and Fanon, feared. However, in Bourdieu’s view the peasantry – especially dispossessed ex-peasants, forced to hawk goods or search for work in the cities – might be absolutely impoverished but often didn’t attribute their alienation to social causes. Instead they perceived magical reasons for their bad fortune and nurtured magical hopes for its redress. What’s more, the ‘empeasanted peasants’, still living on the land, often did not see the scarcity of agricultural work as unemployment, and tended to adopt a traditional cyclical view of life and of the future. Thus for Bourdieu it was the urban working classes, especially those who had gained permanent work and a regular wage, who would be able to embark on what he called a ‘rational revolution’. They had a longer temporal perspective on the potential future (the ‘à venir’) than empeasanted peasants or shantytown dwellers with precarious employment.

Clark seems to imply that Bourdieu’s comments on Fanon sprang simply from moralistic individualism, but they are better viewed as part of an anti-colonial radical humanism. Much later, implacably antagonistic to the ‘bankers’ realism’ of neoliberalism, he would appeal for a ‘reasoned utopia’.

Clare Jackson writes that Susan Doran, in From Tudor to Stuart, is concerned not with ‘how James’s English self diverged from his Scottish one, but with the ways in which he differed – or didn’t – from Elizabeth’ (LRB, 26 September). Little is said, however, about one of the fundamental differences between Elizabeth and James, namely gender. The novelty of two female monarchs, Mary and Elizabeth, in succession necessitated a structural change in English politics. For dignity’s sake, the bedchamber became impermeable, and thus apolitical, giving ministers more unofficial autonomy and ensuring that all royal business was conducted in the form of public-facing pageant. Such changes did not occur in Scotland, where at a young age James inherited an informal, flexible political system of favourites and personal relationships, centred on the king’s own apartments. Indeed, as James often could not afford his attendants’ wages, access to the royal person in private could be bought remarkably easily. The imposition of James’s male, Scottish brand of personal politics on an English political class which had not known it for two generations should not be overlooked as a cause of the rifts between the two sides. It is an irony that perhaps the most extravagant royal project of Robert Cecil, the man who benefited most from the dislocation of politics from the bedchamber, was Theobalds House, which was intended for Elizabeth and incorporated into its architectural scheme a marked separation of private life from public grandeur. James, however, mainly preferred to spend his time in hunting lodges, notably the converted public houses at Royston and Newmarket, built in the Scottish manner, with cramped, shared spaces for the king and his closest favourites.

Assessing the impact of the Antonine Plague under Emperor Commodus (177-92 CE), Josephine Quinn states that ‘rebellion against Roman forces gathered pace from Sparta to Egypt’ (LRB, 15 August). The reference seems to be to a Spartan inscription of the time mentioning hoi neoterismoi. This would indicate a civil disturbance in provincial Sparta, serious certainly, but not known to be anti-Roman – as opposed, for example, to a municipal riot. There were no ‘Roman forces’ in Antonine Greece, an ‘unarmed’ province. Sparta was a Roman success story, acquiescent and heaped with favours by an imperial regime admiring of its martial traditions. Self-styled Spartan descendants of Heracles and Brasidas now sat in the Roman Senate and commanded Roman legions.

Like Rosemary Hill, I too miss Fenwick’s store at Bond Street and lament the passing of so many ‘high street titans’ (LRB, 26 September). In the early 1990s when I was researching the rise of modern retail I set myself the task of working out which had been the first department store. My friend and fellow social historian John Walton was at the same time on a quest to discover the first fish and chip shop. We both narrowed the search to two possibilities. John found a shop in the East End which opened at the same time as one in the North, and I turned up Kendal, Milne & Faulkner in Manchester and Bainbridge’s in Newcastle, both of which opened in 1838. Bainbridge’s got there a few weeks before Kendal’s and, being a Geordie, I was happy to give the title to the Newcastle store. Both were what I called ‘proto-department stores’ in that they had four or more separate categories of goods and deployed the revolutionary innovation of clearly marked prices. But they were rather stuffy places. Female customers were met at the door and chaperoned by a male floorwalker. It was difficult in these circumstances to enjoy the shopping experience and browsing was discouraged: Gordon Selfridge recalled being told to ‘’op it’ by a floor manager when he tried to wander round a well-known London establishment during a research visit.

Aristide Boucicaut’s Bon Marché made the real breakthrough in the development of the grands magasins by emulating the 1855 Exposition Universelle, where getting lost among the crowds while being visually bombarded by the clearly priced, dramatically displayed items provided an exciting new experience. The Bon Marché gave this phantasmagorical world a permanent home, which customers could enter unaccompanied and roam freely, fantasising over goods displayed in glazed atria – ‘democratic luxury’, as Zola put it, housed in ‘cathedrals of commerce’. No matter if you didn’t buy anything: you were sure to see something that would excite a new desire and inspire a return visit.

British store owners were horrified by this new retail form, afraid that the lower classes might come through the doors and unwilling to lose control over the customer (no doubt the floorwalkers were also worried about losing their commission). The new ideas weren’t adopted until the young Fenwick brothers returned to Newcastle from an internship in Paris and transformed the family’s dress shop on Northumberland Street into Britain’s first venue dedicated to ‘democratic luxury’. Selfridge’s opened on Oxford Street a few years later, contributing to the evolution of the department store with the introduction of dramatic, artistic window displays, an idea borrowed from Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, with his glass store on State Street in Chicago.

Today, the majority of the empty hulks on the high street are either former chains such as BHS and Littlewoods, or the department store groups that adopted a uniform, corporate style which quickly tired, such as Debenhams and the House of Fraser. Some department stores may survive, in particular those with a sense of the retail principles appropriate to their genre and a strong connection to their local markets: Jarrolds in Norwich, for example, or Barkers in Northallerton. In Newcastle, Fenwick’s white marble flagship, with five large floors, still dominates Northumberland Street – and it still employs window dressers.

Barbara Newman writes that Doubting Thomas was ‘allowed to penetrate Christ’s open wound with his finger’ (LRB, 26 September). Glenn Most, in his book about Thomas from 2005, explores the mismatch between the conventional iconography, in which Thomas touches the wound, and the text of the Bible, in which Thomas initially says that he will believe only if he can touch Christ’s wounds; but then, when Christ shows him his wound and invites him to touch it, Thomas makes his statement of belief – ‘My Lord and my God!’ – without having to touch after all.

Jonathan Rée, tracing the etymology of the word ‘host’, lists a variety of words in modern English that derive from the Latin hospes: ‘host’, ‘guest’, ‘stranger’, ‘friend’, as well as the more contradictory ‘enemy’ (LRB, 10 October). However, I understand that the word ‘hostage’ is not etymologically related to ‘host’, but rather to the Latin obsidatus (condition of being held).

Sacha Levey suggests that ‘under the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022 … you can no longer marry anyone under eighteen’ in the UK (Letters, 26 September). Aye ye can! Just take the high road to Scotland and you will find folk can marry at sixteen and vote (for independence).