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Writing about recent politics carefully
This is the second lesson in the year with no Alex in it, and for the same reason as lesson 75. The subject is the recent political history of a country, the events are inside living memory and contested, and a dialogue in which somebody explains their own revolution to a foreign learner would either flatten it or editorialise. Two people from different North African countries talking to each other does neither. **The framework, briefly.** Protests beginning in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010 after the self-immolation of a street vendor spread across Tunisia; President Ben Ali, in power since 1987, left the country in January 2011. What followed included free elections, a constitution in 2014 widely regarded as a significant achievement, a Nobel Peace Prize for the national dialogue quartet in 2015, a decade of fragile coalition governments, severe economic difficulty, and from 2021 a concentration of power under President Saied, a new constitution in 2022, and the arrest of opposition figures. Protests elsewhere in the region in 2011 produced different outcomes, several of them catastrophic. **What Tunisians disagree about**, and it is not a single argument. Whether the revolution achieved what it set out to; whether political freedom without employment counts as success — Leïla's line 8 is the sharpest form of that question; whether the post-2021 consolidation is a restoration of order or an end to the transition; what the role of Ennahda and of the old administrative state has been; and whether the region's other outcomes make Tunisia's look fortunate or make its disappointments harder to bear. People who were on the avenue in 2011 hold all of these positions. **Karim's line 5 and Leïla's line 6 are the lesson.** He says he is not sure Morocco's quiet was a misfortune; she tells him to try that in Tunis. He agrees that he would not. That exchange is the actual advice: a judgement that is reasonable to offer among people at one remove becomes something else said to those who were there. The same applies to you, with more force, because you were not there at all. **What this course will not do** is tell you whether the revolution succeeded. The question is partly empirical and disputed, partly a matter of what you count, and entirely not a language course's to settle. What it offers instead is the grammar for being in the conversation: the past subjunctive for conceding a fact before disagreeing with its weight, 'je ne suis pas sûr que' for declining certainty, 'alors c'est que' for drawing a conclusion tentatively, and topic-first dislocation for naming the thing at issue before judging it. These are the tools Karim and Leïla use, and they are the reason the conversation stays a conversation. If you want to read people who disagree: Tunisian newspapers and broadcasters cover this continuously and from different positions, the francophone press of the region is accessible at B2, and the historiography is being written now. Reading one account is not reading the field.