Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture 9789401200806, 9401200807

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Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture

FAUX TITRE 363 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture

Edited by

David Evans and Kate Griffiths

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2011

Cover illustration: © copyright Neal Sanche Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3384-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0080-6 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

For Evie Sheppard

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to express their grateful thanks to all the contributors for their participation, patience and co-operation during the preparation of this volume; to members of the executive committee of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes for their help and advice; to Francesco Manzini for his technical assistance; to the colleagues whose careful reading and considered opinions helped with the selection procedure; to Catherine Rodgers, Nathalie Morello, Derek Connon and Élodie Laügt for their advice; to Christa Stevens at Rodopi; to the various museums and copyright holders for their assistance with the images; to Neal Sanche for the cover image; to Helena Sedgwick for her formatting work, and the Carnegie Trust, the University of Swansea and the University of St Andrews for funding; to Robert Lethbridge and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, for hosting the conference at which first versions of these papers were presented, and to Floriane Place-Verghnes, the Conference Officer.

Contents

List of illustrations

11

DAVID EVANS AND KATE GRIFFITHS Introduction

15

Part I. Political Power: Legacies and Myths NICOLE MOZET Balzac, Théoricien du pouvoir absolu et romancier du chaos post-révolutionnaire

37

DAMIAN CATANI The French Revolution: Historical Necessity or Historical Evil? Terror and Slavery in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize and Confiant’s L’Archet du colonel

51

JEAN-MARIE SEILLAN Institutions et pouvoirs occultes: Huysmans et l’imaginaire conspirationniste

69

JANICE BEST Les Hommes de bronze de la Troisième République: Commémoration ou oubli de l’histoire?

83

Part II. Power and Space ELISABETH GERWIN Power in the City: Balzac’s Flâneur in La Fille aux yeux d’or

101

8

CLAIRE I.R. O’MAHONY The Colony Within? Poets and the Politics of Particularism in Toulouse’s Capitole

115

ANNE-EMMANUELLE DEMARTINI Le Pouvoir de la représentation: Écriture pittoresque et construction de la nation dans la série provinciale des Français peints par eux-mêmes

137

LEONARD R. KOOS Razzia in Stone: Building Colonial Algiers, 1830-1900

149

Part III. Institutions and Knowledge FRANCESCO MANZINI Doctors, Priests, Magistrates: Stendhal, Cabanis and the Power of Medical Practitioners

169

ROSEMARY LLOYD The Crocodiles of Caen and the Molluscs of the Museum: Rhetoric, Science, and Power in Nineteenth-Century France

183

MARY ORR Education, Education, Education: The Space of the Muséum as Showcase for Thinking its Public

201

SCOTT A. GAVORSKY L’État comme propriétaire? Schools as Property in Nineteenth-Century France

219

Part IV. Writing Art History: Institutions and Alternative Authorities JULIET SIMPSON Whose History? Art, History and the Nation State in Early Third Republic France

237

Introduction

9

L. CASSANDRA HAMRICK Beyond Institutions: In Search of le souffle moderne in Gautier’s Salon de 1844

249

GILLES BONNET Le Contre-pouvoir critique: Huysmans, vers une fiction d’art

267

SONYA STEPHENS Auguste Rodin, or the Institutionalization of the Self as Artist

279

Notes on contributors

297

Index

303

List of Illustrations

JANICE BEST Les Hommes de bronze de la Troisième République: Commémoration ou oubli de l’histoire? Fig. 1, Danton (photo Janice Best)

95

Fig. 2, Diderot (photo Janice Best)

95

Fig. 3, Condorcet (photo Janice Best)

96

Fig. 4, Voltaire (photo Janice Best)

96

Fig. 5, Étienne Marcel (photo Janice Best)

97

Fig. 6, Plaque commémorant la mort des Communards (photo Janice Best)

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CLAIRE I.R. O’MAHONY The Colony Within? Poets and the Politics of Particularism in Toulouse’s Capitole Fig. 7, La Salle des Illustres

133

Fig. 8, Henri Martin, Les Troubadours (1897)

133

Fig. 9, Henri Martin, Clémence Isaure délivrant aux troubadours la charte de fondation des Jeux Floraux (1897) 134 Fig. 10, Henri Martin, L’Apothéose de Clémence Isaure (1897)

134

Fig. 11, Henri Martin, Les Faucheurs (1903-6)

135

12

Fig. 12, Henri Martin, Les Rêveurs (1903-6)

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(Figs 7-12: author’s photographs with the permission of the Mairie de Toulouse.) LEONARD R. KOOS Razzia in Stone: Building Colonial Algiers, 1830-1900 Fig. 13, Rampes du Boulevard, c.1900 (J. Geiser)

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Fig. 14, Hôtel des Postes et des Télégraphes, c.1907 (Collection Idéale)

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Fig. 15, Province d’Alger

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L. CASSANDRA HAMRICK Beyond Institutions: In Search of le souffle moderne in Gautier’s Salon de 1844 Fig. 16, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, La Patrouille turque, c.1828, Salon of 1831. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.

264

Fig. 17, Prosper Marilhat, La Place de l’Esbekieh, Salon of 1834. Etching by Marilhat of his own oil painting (Vue de la place de l’Esbekieh et du quartier copte, au Caire). By kind permission of the Musée d’art Roger-Quilliot [MARQ], Clermont-Ferrand. 264 Fig. 18, Théodore Chassériau, Christ au jardin des Oliviers, Salon of 1844. Souillac, Église de Sainte-Marie. By kind permission of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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Fig. 19, Thomas Couture, L’Amour de l’or, Salon of 1844. By kind permission of the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse. Photo: Daniel Martin.

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Introduction

13

SONYA STEPHENS Auguste Rodin, or the Institutionalization of the Self as Artist Fig. 20, Edward Steichen, Rodin à côté du Penseur, Victor Hugo en arrière-plan (1902). Tirage au charbon, gravure? 26 x 32.2 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris. (Ph 217).

292

Fig. 21, Anonyme, Rodin au dépôt des marbres à côté de la Main de Dieu (1902). Aristotype. 11.9 x 16 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris. (Ph 372).

292

Fig. 22, Anonyme, Buste de Victor Hugo (1883). Papier albuminé. 13.8 x 10.5 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris. (Ph 351).

293

Fig. 23, Stephen Haweis et Henry Coles, Buste de Victor Hugo avec les deux Méditations de dos (1903-04). Epreuve gélatinoargentique. 23.3 cm x 16.8 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris. (Ph 259).

293

Fig. 24, Christian Baraja, Assemblage: Petite faunesse dans une coupe en métal. 17.6 x 15 x 26.6 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris. (S 372)

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Fig. 25, Harry B. Lachmann, Rodin sur son lit de mort (1917). Gelatin silver print. Mss Judith Cladel, Lilly Library of Indiana University.

294

Fig. 26, Rodin’s grave or Rodin’s funeral. Mss Judith Cladel, Lilly Library of Indiana University.

295

Figs 20-24: by kind permission of the Musée Rodin; Figs 25-26: by kind permission of the Lilly Library of Indiana University.

Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture

Nineteenth-century France witnessed the rapid emergence of new political, social, economic and cultural institutions from the postRevolutionary landscape, providing countless examples of the ways in which different forms of power are constructed and dismantled, reconfigured and contested. While political, religious and intellectual power had been the object of bitter conflict for centuries before the Revolution, the people’s entry into the political life of the nation, marked by the iconic prise de la Bastille, launched a new period of turbulence; from that moment on, as power became significantly more fragile and unstable, power struggles characterized human interaction at every level of society. The notion of the institution, taken in its broadest sense as a centre of common purpose from government to salons and syndicats, is central to this ongoing process of power division and sharing. The nineteenth century was marked by extraordinarily energetic and far-reaching processes of regulation, order and control, giving form and clearly defined contours to groups and collectives of all kinds: political and legal institutions such as the many tiers of electoral representation and civil control, opposition and protest; economic institutions such as the Banque de France, founded by Napoleon in 1800; educational institutions from the grandes écoles and instituts to the lycées, collèges and écoles primaires; cultural institutions such as the Panthéon, academies, journals, reviews and publishing houses. Structures were created within which collective interests might best be served, yet, at the same time, these structures also imposed limits on the powers which those institutions might enjoy. As such, the process of institutionalization can be seen as both a means to greater efficiency and an instrument of possible repression. The essays collected in this volume explore diverse aspects of this

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drive to institutionalize, illuminating the similarities between the processes of regulation, repression and protest across a broad range of nineteenth-century fields, from literature and the visual arts to medicine, education, colonialism and civic commemoration. They demonstrate how, out of the post-Revolutionary uncertainty, a recognizably modern society emerges, founded on a new sense of individualism which, nevertheless, cannot do without a certain sense of the group and the common cause. In the political landscape, power is remarkably fluid, as illustrated by the succession of royal, imperial and Republican regimes between 1789 and 1877, when elections finally confirmed the Third Republic as a durable entity. The fate of the Assemblée nationale, established in 1789 as France began the long journey towards universal electoral representation, illustrates the instability of the institutions created to facilitate the sharing of power between a greater cross-section of society. Swiftly replaced by the Convention (1792-1795), the Directoire and the Conseil des Cinq-Cents (1795-1799), the Assemblée nationale was removed altogether under the Consulat and the Empire. While a Chambre des députés and a Chambre des pairs did exist under Louis XVIII, with both enjoying more power from 1830 onwards, the Assemblée nationale made a brief reappearance in 1848, before it was dissolved again by Napoleon III, the Third Republic preferring a Chambre des députés and a Senate. Indeed, it only returned in durable form in 1946. If power is unstable and constantly subject to new permutations, the physical, concrete institution of the urban landscape, by contrast, appeared to offer a more stable monument to power. It was often to such tangible monuments that political figures turned, in an attempt to institutionalize both their power and their own identity. Most famously, under the direction of Napoleon III, Georges Eugène Haussmann rebuilt Paris, transforming it to such an extent that the Goncourt brothers were moved to write, as one, on 18 November 1860: Notre Paris, le Paris où nous sommes nés, le Paris des mœurs de 1830 à 1848, s’en va. […] Je suis étranger à ce qui vient, à ce qui est, comme à ces boulevards nouveaux, qui ne sentent plus le monde de Balzac, qui sentent Londres, quelque

Introduction

17

Babylone de l’avenir. Il est bête de venir ainsi dans un temps de construction: l’âme y a des malaises.1

David Baguley has explored in compelling terms the emperor’s need to inscribe his identity as a political institution on the face of modern history: For Napoleon III the program of reconstruction of Paris had one immense and overriding advantage: it allowed him to reconcile his Caesarism and his humanitarianism better than any collection of eloquent speeches or any series of ceremonial events could do. It was, in a sense, his most convincing text. As commentators invariably note when discussing his plans for the city, he had dreamed while a prisoner in the fortress of Ham of becoming a second Augustus, imitating the emperor who had ‘made Rome into a city of marble’, building upon the improvements brought about by the First Empire, but, above all, leaving his own, more permanent legacy.2

In his critics’ eyes, the emperor’s project represents a grotesque self-monumentalization, as Zola argues in La Curée; the buildings created in the new Paris are personified structures which pulse with the blood already staining Napoleon’s map of the project, ‘ce fameux plan de Paris sur lequel “une main auguste” avait tracé à l’encre rouge les principales voies du deuxième réseau. Ces sanglants traits de plume entaillaient Paris plus profondément encore que la main de l’agent voyer.’3 The rebuilt Paris is not only metaphorically stained with the blood spilled in the Second Empire’s ascension to power,4 but it also beats with the lifeblood of Napoleon III as a political leader creating himself as national institution. Yet these institutions ultim1

Les frères Goncourt, Journal, ed. by Robert Ricatte, 22 vols (Monaco: Fasquelle and Flammarion, 1956), IV: 112. 2 David Baguley, Napoleon III and his Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), p. 196. 3 Emile Zola, La Curée, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1962-69), II: 391. 4 Zola was obsessed with the bloody origins of the Second Empire. He wrote, for example, in an article in La Tribune of 29 August 1869: ‘Cherchez plutôt à effacer la tache de sang qui souille, à la première page, l’histoire du second Empire. Appelez vos fonctionnaires, appelez vos soldats, et qu’ils s’usent les doigts à vouloir enlever cette tache. Après vous, elle reparaîtra, elle grandira et coulera sur toutes les autres pages.’ Chroniques et polémiques (1969), in Œuvres complètes, XIII: 244.

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ately prove as fragile as the powers they represent, and the fate of the place Vendôme provides a telling illustration of the speed with which power and institutions changed hands during the century. The statue of Louis XIV on horseback which had adorned the square was replaced in 1810 by the statue of Napoleon Bonaparte as Caesar, which in turn became a fleur-de-lis under the Restoration. The second statue of Napoleon, installed by Louis-Philippe in 1833, was eventually torn down by Courbet’s group of communards, who denounced it as: Un monument de barbarie, un symbole de force brute et de fausse gloire, une affirmation du militarisme, une négation du droit international, une insulte permanente des vainqueurs aux vaincus, un attentat perpétuel à l’un des trois grands principes de la République: la fraternité!5

Politicians were not alone in their attempts to institutionalize their own identities. Literary writers engaged in a similar process, constructing both their works, such as the vast cycles of Balzac’s Comédie humaine and Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, and their public personae as instantly recognizable – and successfully marketable – phenomena. Indeed, Victor Hugo’s stature was such that by the end of his career he represented both French verse and the Republic. Mallarmé suggested in ‘Crise de vers’ that ‘il était le vers personnellement’, and as Hugo entered his eightieth year, Jules Claretie argued in Le Temps that the event represented not just the poet’s birthday, but also the birthday of poetry itself.6 Hugo’s attacks on Napoléon le petit in polemical verse such as Les Châtiments (1853) cemented his status as the embodiment of the Republican spirit and thereby the French nation itself.7 As such, his seventy-ninth birthday

5

See Jean-Pierre Azéma, Les Communards (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 124. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1998-2003), II: 205. For details of Claretie, see Joanna Richardson, Victor Hugo (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), chapter 36. 7 In a notorious speech of 17 July 1851 Hugo described the greatness of Charlemagne and Napoleon I in order to minimize the achievements of Napoleon III, the man he sees as a parody of his forefathers: ‘Vous voulez, vous, […] prendre dans vos petites mains ce sceptre des titans, cette épée des géants! Pour quoi faire? Quoi! après Auguste, Augustule! Quoi! parce que nous avons eu Napoléon le Grand, il 6

Introduction

19

in 1881 was celebrated on a grand scale: the ministre de l’instruction publique et des beaux-arts presented him with a Sèvres vase on behalf of the government, a gilded bust of Marianne was installed in front of his house, and a procession featuring no fewer than 400 musical societies passed beneath his window all day long. As for his death in May 1885, it sparked unprecedented levels of national mourning, with two million people, and delegates from every country in Europe, attending his state funeral. His houses in Guernsey and the place des Vosges became museums, while the naming of avenues, places and a métro station after him characterized the mood of the century’s final decades, as public space came to bear the inscriptions of the nation’s institutionalization of itself and of its mythical figures. Writers such as Balzac and Hugo were able to become institutions partly thanks to the emergence in nineteenth-century France of a new public for literature, resulting from the creation of a financially solvent middle class and the significant progress made in literacy. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, between 600 and 800 books were published every year in France; by 1850, that figure had increased to over 7,500. Although the price of books took time to fall, by 1828, there were 520 cabinets de lecture in Paris, where readers could, for a modest subscription, access vast catalogues of newspapers, journals and books. Moreover, the number of potential readers continued to grow, and in the first fifty years of the century the number of primary school pupils increased from 800,000 children enrolled in 20,000 schools to 3.2 million attending more than 60,000 establishments.8 Concurrently with the progress in reading habits, the status of the writer changed dramatically as a system of private or institutional mécénat or patronage gave way to that of droit d’auteur in the wake of the 1793 loi Lakanal. Moreover, the Société des gens de lettres (1838) and the Convention de Berne (1886-1887) were established in order better to protect author and translation rights, and over the course of the century important publishing houses appeared: Hachette, Hetzel, Plon, Fayard, Calmann-Lévy, Charpentier and Vanier. Publishers became institutions without whom writers could faut que nous ayons Napoléon le Petit!’ See David Baguley, Napoleon III and his Regime, p. 39. 8 See Daniel Couty, Histoire de la littérature française, XIXe siècle, tome I, 1800-1851 (Paris: Bordas, 1988), pp. 31-35.

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not survive, and with whom they were obliged to engage in battles for the integrity of their text, as the lengthy correspondence between Poulet-Malassis with Baudelaire or Banville amply demonstrates.9 Changes in regime also affected the institutional identities of authors, as illustrated by the fate of the Panthéon. Whereas in the eighteenth century the building was originally the église Sainte Geneviève, the Assemblée nationale decreed in April 1791 that religious symbols would be removed and that the building, with its famous devise ‘Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante’ would henceforth act as a temple to the national dead: ‘que le temple de la religion devienne le temple de la patrie, que la tombe d’un grand homme devienne l’autel de la liberté’.10 When Louis XVIII and Charles X, however, restored the Panthéon to its original, exclusively spiritual, function, the tombs were not removed, with Louis declaring of Voltaire: ‘il sera bien assez puni d’entendre la messe chaque matin’.11 Thus the secular Panthéon institutionalized Voltaire whilst its religious incarnation mocked him. Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the building became secular once again, reverting under Napoleon III to church status until 1885, when, with the inhumation of Hugo, it assumed enough significance as a secular temple to the nation for its status to remain unchanged since that date. As political and authorial identities became institutions, so too did knowledge and memory. Andreas Huyssen describes the long nineteenth century as a golden age of musealization: ‘Emerging in its modern form around the time of the French Revolution that first made the Louvre into a museum, the museum has become the privileged institutional site of the three centuries old “querelle des anciens et des modernes”’.12 Kristin Veel concurs, underlining the power of the museum to institutionalize: ‘The museums for art and history that 9

Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1973) and Banville, Lettres à Poulet-Malassis, ed. by Peter J. Edwards and Peter S. Hambly (Paris: Champion, 2006). 10 See Barthélémy, Joseph Méry and Jérôme Léon Vidal, Biographie des Quarante de l’Académie Française, second edition (Paris: Marchands de Nouveautés, 1826), p. 280. 11 Lorédan Larchey, L’Esprit de tout le monde (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1893), p. 101. 12 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 14.

Introduction

21

emerged around the time of the French Revolution [...] became spaces for a hegemonic construction of tradition, heritage and canon’.13 However, whilst such museums symbolized at times a reaction against the destruction of the Revolution and in many ways sought to safeguard institutions and their power, they also testify to the ultimate fragility of institutions, to the fact that they may crumble and be replaced, only to be collected up by the fossilizing spaces of commemoration, existing no longer in fact, but rather in the vestiges of memory. Musealization went hand in hand with the institutionalization of national history. The rewriting of France’s past produced a host of works from Lamartine’s L’Histoire des Girondins (1847) and Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) to Louis Blanc’s Histoire de la Révolution française (1847-1862) and Taine’s unfinished Origines de la France contemporaine (1875-1894). Michelet, keeper of the national archives from 1831 and professor of history at the Collège de France in 1838, produced L’Histoire de France (1867) and seven volumes on La Révolution française (1847-1853) while, alongside these secular narratives, Ernest Renan, historian and professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France in 1862, offered a Vie de Jésus (1862) and Les Origines du Christianisme (1863-1883). In addition, a series of historical dramas institutionalized French history in the public imaginary,14 while Dumas père’s Henri III et sa cour (1829) and La Tour de Nesle (1832), Hugo’s Hernani (1830) and Musset’s Lorenzaccio (1834) provided a historico-fictional lens through which to explore contemporary power struggles. As the national past was institutionalized, so too was learning in institutions such as the Sorbonne. Founded as a theological college in the thirteenth century, it was closed in 1792 and remained so for thirty years, as Napoleon, creating the Université impériale in 1806, gave its buildings to the Université de Paris. It was only at the end of the 13

14

Kristin Veel, ‘Topographies of Memory: Walter Benjamin and Daniel Libeskind’, in Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-speaking World since 1500, ed. by Christian Emden and David Midgley (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 231-51; pp. 232-33. See Mark Darlow, ‘Staging the Revolution: The Fait historique’, in Revolutionary Culture: Continuity and Change, Nottingham French Studies, 45:1 (Spring 2006), 77-88.

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nineteenth century that the Third Republic reconstructed it in its own image, inaugurating the Nouvelle Sorbonne in the 1880s, and suppressing the faculté de théologie in 1885. The Collège de France, founded by François I in 1530, became the Collège Impérial under both empires, and remained independent of the Université de Paris in 1870, when it was expanded and given a large degree of administrative and intellectual autonomy to pursue its mission of free, public education. The École Normale Supérieure, founded in 1794, was closed shortly after, only to be resuscitated by Napoleon in 1810, assuming its present location in rue d’Ulm in 1847, in order to provide cross-disciplinary training for teachers. The École des Sciences Politiques was created in 1872 to train future diplomats and civil servants, and between 1880 and 1882, Jules Ferry created other branches of the École Normale Supérieure in Fontenay, Sèvres and Saint Cloud. In addition, from Napoleon’s time onwards a unified system of state-run primary schools existed while the popularity of lycée texts such as Pierre Fontanier’s Manuel classique pour l’étude des tropes and Traité général des figures du discours autres que les tropes, both of 1827, works which sought to train the mind on a mass scale, underlines the nineteenth century’s keenness to educate the general population. Libraries, too, played an important role in the institutionalization of knowledge, and the library of the Assemblée nationale was created in 1796, making the acquisition, not only of knowledge, but also of citizenship, a matter for the state. The Bibliothèque nationale, which began life in the fourteenth century as the Bibliothèque du roi and passed from monarch to monarch, from Amboise, via Blois and Fontainebleau, to Paris, was considerably enriched by the spoils of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic conquests, as well as acquisitions confiscated from the clergy and aristocratic émigrés. Despite the fact that the Revolution interrupted the system of dépôt légal, in the years of conflict that followed, the collection grew by 250,000 books, 14,000 manuscripts and 85,000 estampes. Napoleon III chose Mérimée to lead a reform commission in 1858 and reconstructed part of what had by then become the Bibliothèque impériale, before a famous donation from Victor Hugo marked an important turning point, with texts by the Republic’s emblematic literary figure symbolizing the institution’s emerging role as a guardian of knowledge in the name of the people and the nation.

Introduction

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As the memorial institutions of nineteenth-century France shifted and changed, so too the boundaries of its cultural and social structures, and the nature of society’s insiders and outsiders, were reconfigured. Tim Farrant has highlighted ‘Napoleon’s example as an outsider triumphantly conquering French society’15 and indeed, Napoleon’s Corsican heritage played a central role in the successful assimilation of the island into the Third Republic. The eventual triumph of the outsider finds frequent echoes in literary contexts, as arrivistes such as Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and Balzac’s Rastignac infiltrate the social institutions which would restrain and exclude them. The celebrated closing lines of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot make clear this act of social conquest: Rastignac, resté seul, fit quelques pas vers le haut du cimetière et vit Paris tortueusement couché le long des deux rives de la Seine où commençaient à briller les lumières. Ses yeux s’attachèrent presque avidement entre la colonne de la place Vendôme et le dôme des Invalides, là où vivait ce beau monde dans lequel il avait voulu pénétrer. Il lança sur cette ruche bourdonnante un regard qui semblait par avance en pomper le miel, et dit ces mots grandioses: ‘A nous deux maintenant!’ Et pour premier acte du défi qu’il portait à la Société, Rastignac alla dîner chez madame de Nucingen.16

If the barriers between classes are challenged and probed in literary works, so too are cultural institutions such as marriage. Napoleon’s Code civil of 1804 clearly sought to fix the boundaries of wedlock by prohibiting divorce, implementing strict punishments for female adultery and requiring, in article 213, a wife to give complete obedience to her husband. Authors such as George Sand, however, explored alternatives to the institution, and her novel Indiana (1831) critiques the structures of marriage, offering in their place a more peaceful, if not wholly unproblematic, alternative in the unmarried partnership between the novel’s eponymous heroine and Ralph beyond the boundaries of France: ‘Tous nos jours se ressemblent; ils sont tous calmes et beaux; ils passent rapides et purs comme ceux de notre enfance. Chaque soir nous bénissons le ciel.’17 Sand’s Valentine (1832) goes 15

Tim Farrant, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature (London: Duckworth, 2007), p. 18. 16 Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 367. 17 George Sand, Indiana (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 342.

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far further, as Bénédict declares outright war on institutions and their power: ‘Mariage, société, institutions, haine à vous, haine à mort!’18 Of course, it was not only female writers who questioned the institution of marriage and the boundaries it imposes, and the infamous trials of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 demonstrated the vigour with which the state pursued challenges to its institutions of individual repression and control. Balzac, too, offers an intriguing portrait, consonant with the concerns of the present volume, of the power to be found beyond or outside institutions. The eponymous heroine’s power in La Cousine Bette stems precisely from the fact that she has not married, that she has no drain on her passions, and Balzac comments on the driving power which virgins enjoy for the accomplishment of their intentions, be they good or bad: La virginité, comme toutes les monstruousités, a des richesses spéciales, des grandeurs absorbantes. La vie, dont les forces sont économisées, a pris chez l’individu vierge une qualité de résistance et de durée incalculable. Le cerveau s’est enrichi dans l’ensemble de ses facultés réservées. Lorsque les gens chastes ont besoin de leur corps ou de leur âme, qu’ils recourent à l’action ou à la pensée, ils trouvent alors de l’acier dans leurs muscles ou de la science dans leur intelligence, une force diabolique ou la magie noire de la volonté.19

Just as the political landscape of France saw the creation of counter-currents in opposition to the official institutions of power, the cultural sphere, too, was marked by pockets of power and opinion formation, in the form of both salons, which evolved from the height of their popularity in the eighteenth century into the cénacles of early Romanticism and the writers’ circles of the second half of the century. Mme de Staël’s salon in Paris (1814-1817) was extremely influential during the early years of Romanticism; the first Romantic cénacle was formed around Charles Nodier and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal from 1827 to 1830, and from Hugo’s cénacle at his house in the rue NotreDame-des-champs came the manifestos of the same years. As Hugo wrote in the preface to Odes et ballades in 1828: ‘une forte école

18 19

George Sand, Valentine, ed. by Damien Zanone (Paris: Champion, 2008), p. 576. Honoré de Balzac, La Cousine Bette, in La Comédie humaine, ed. by PierreGeorges Castex, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1976-81), VII: 152.

Introduction

25

s’élève’.20 While the original salons were private affairs, they allowed women to exert influence, and represented considerable pockets of power within the state, independent of official authorities, as the Girondins met frequently in the salon of Mme Roland. By 1792, however, the social structure in which salons had thrived had dispersed, and despite Napoleon’s efforts to encourage them, their number diminished, surviving mainly in the salons of the duchess d’Abrantès (author of Histoire des salons de Paris, 1836-1838), Mme de Montesson, Mme de Genlis and Mme Récamier. Nonetheless, the July Monarchy saw the salons of Mme Émile de Girardin and Mary Clarke, and the Second Empire those of Mme de Païva, Mme Sabatier, Mme d’Agoult and Mme Mohl, with Flaubert, Gautier, the frères Goncourt and Sainte-Beuve frequenting that of the princess Mathilde. Although politics entered the public sphere more and more as the century progressed, salons and similar small, private gatherings such as Mallarmé’s famous mardis remained important focal points for influential artistic movements.21 Literary and artistic movements succeed each other with great speed in nineteenth-century France, with institutionalized movements overthrown by counter-currents, which in turn become the monoliths quickly replaced by the next trend. In this struggle for cultural dominance, motivated by a fervent belief in absolute artistic values, Romanticism defines itself in opposition to classicism, the Parnassian school reacts against the institution which Romanticism had become, and the Symbolists in turn situate poetry beyond the metrical verse enshrined in treatises such as Quicherat’s Traité de versification (1850), Gramont’s Les Vers français et leur prosodie (1876) and Becq De Fouquières’s Traité général de versification française (1879). In a society in which recognizable identities have a powerful market value, even those who attack institutions eventually submit to that institutional logic. Those who exist on the margins of powerful salons and cénacles, such as the Hirsutes, the Hydropathes, including Bourget, Moréas and Coppée, and the Zutistes, featuring Charles Cros, Verlaine and Rimbaud, groups characterized by their youthful, anti-institutional fervour, nonetheless assume an identity, albeit one founded on op20 21

Odes et ballades, Les Orientales (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1968), p. 37. See Gordon Millan, Les ‘Mardis’ de Stéphane Mallarmé: Mythes et réalités (SaintGenouph: Nizet, 2008).

26

David Evans and Kate Griffiths

position; even the most fervently anti-institutional of groups cannot resist the pull of institutionalization, and as such, Verlaine’s series of Poètes maudits, by drawing the marginalized together, ennobles them with a sort of official identity. Indeed, the passion which the nineteenth century rediscovered for Villon encapsulated the double standards of commercial literary values under the constant threat of censorship; while rebel outsiders such as Rimbaud were excluded from the mainstream within their lifetime, the roguish Villon’s exploits could be enjoyed in the sanitized form of biography and textual reprints, beginning with the Œuvres de maistre François Villon, published by l’abbé Prompsault in 1832. As the nation set about shaping its literary past, constructing the pantheon of greats from Villon, Ronsard and Rabelais to La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine and Molière, for the edification of its citizens and a coherent cultural identity, previously marginalized figures could now be safely subsumed into the mainstream, and Villon could be enjoyed at a safe remove since he had been dead for almost four hundred years. It is instructive to note that more than one reviewer drew a comparison, on the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal, between Baudelaire and Villon,22 although Baudelaire was famously urged to withdraw his candidacy for an empty seat among the immortels of the Académie française, becoming an institutional cornerstone of French poetry only after his death. The complex relationship between institutions and the reaction against them was apparent in the burgeoning spheres of satire and parody. The unstoppable rise of print media saw innumerable literary, artistic, political and satirical reviews spring up. Le Charivari, a daily satirical pamphlet founded in 1832, provides an early example of counter-culture and political protest, with its famous caricaturists Cham, Daumier and Gavarni ensuring it flourished during the Second Empire, and continued into the twentieth century. However, while parody feeds off and critiques institutions, it can have the effect of simultaneously reinforcing them. As Banville insisted in the preface to his Odes funambulesques (1857), ‘la parodie a toujours été un hommage rendu à la popularité et au génie’, and his playful parodies 22

See Robert R. Daniel, The Poetry of Villon and Baudelaire: Two Worlds, One Human Condition (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).

Introduction

27

of Victor Hugo, of whose work Banville was a devoted admirer, succeed in confirming his stature, since only parodies of extremely well-known texts could sell in their thousands, as the Odes funambulesques did, across successive reprints.23 Throughout the nineteenth century there were clear tensions between artistic institutions, guardians of the rules to be taught, learned and obeyed, and the experience of the genuine artist, as the debates about the concept of génie suggest. Banville, for example, writes in his Petit Traité de poésie française (1872) that ‘le génie fait les règles et ne les subit pas’.24 Similarly, Debussy rails in Gil Blas in 1903: ‘la musique doit se libérer aussi vite que possible, des petites chinoiseries dont les Conservatoires cherchent à l’embarrasser. […] Elle a une vie propre, qui l’empêchera toujours de se soumettre à du précis; elle dit tout ce qu’on ne peut pas dire, il est donc logique qu’à la trop souligner on la diminue’.25 Nine years later, he wonders: ‘Par quelle suite de miracles ces deux mots: art, règlement, ont-ils pu se trouver associés, est proprement inimaginable’.26 The danger, of course, is that if art is institutionalized and regulated, it may be subject to mechanical reproduction by inferior artists, and yet, without some notion of a boundary, anything and everything could potentially be taken for art. Although many of the previously unchallenged assumptions about artistic form and content were swept away during the nineteenth century, people had not yet entirely lost their belief in an eternal artistic absolute, however difficult it might be to theorize along institutional lines.27 Thus, against a backdrop of huge upheaval in the political, social, economic and cultural institutions of France, the very meaning of art was constantly renegotiated in a tug-of-war between familiar, officially sanctioned forms, and iconoclastic novelty. As such, when vers libre breaks the verse mould once and for all, the illusion of absolute freedom for which it is initially celebrated is short23

Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. III, ed. by Peter J. Edwards (Paris: Champion, 1995), p.15. 24 Paris: Ressouvenances, 1998, p. 127. 25 Article in Gil Blas, 23 March 1903, in Monsieur Croche, et autres écrits, ed. by François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 130. 26 Article in S.I.M., November 1912, in Monsieur Croche, p. 213. 27 See, for example, Peter Dayan’s Music Writing Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) on the tenacity of faith in absolute artistic values.

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David Evans and Kate Griffiths

lived, as even its promoters seek to regulate and define it, imposing boundaries inspired by elastic notions of aesthetic beauty; as Clive Scott observes, for these writers, ‘it is more testing of true poetic mettle to have to create a discipline out of freedom than to borrow a ready-made discipline and simply conform to it’.28 If the Revolution altered the face of power and the institutions it inhabited in France, French art, culture, society and politics continued to confront the aftershocks of this seismic change throughout the nineteenth century as power, personal or political, and institutions, real and metaphorical, were considered and reconsidered. While the first section of this volume traces the direct impact of politics and the shifting power of regimes on the creative arts, section two turns to analyse the impact of power relations on and in topographical contexts including Paris, the provinces, southern France and the colonies. Section three assesses the evolving relationship between institutions and knowledge in the nineteenth century, considering museums, schools, religion and science. Section four extends the volume’s analysis to the visual arts and ultimately evaluates the key terms of the collection assessing the space beyond institutions, the freedom which can be found in their absence. As such, the essays collected in this volume address key institutional forms and questions of power across a series of interlinked spheres: artistic, literary, scientific and topographical. Since shifts between the institutions of governance are a defining feature of nineteenth-century France, section one assesses artistic representations of political power, and the impact of that power on art itself. First, Nicole Mozet’s essay traces the imprint of various regimes on Balzac’s fiction. Whilst Balzac the ideologue, who yearns for the unity of absolute power, can condemn the destructive force of revolutions, Balzac the novelist thrives on them. Exploring the complex interplay between politics and the written word, Mozet surveys Balzac’s œuvre to demonstrate that, in contrast to the political regimes which wane and are supplanted, the power of writing remains sovereign. The novelist, rather like the collector he depicts in Le Cousin Pons, conserves and makes sense of the objects and events of the past. In chapter two, which moves between Victor Hugo’s Quatre28

Vers libre: The Emergence of Free Verse in France 1886-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 3.

Introduction

29

vingt-treize (1874) and Creole writer Raphaël Confiant’s L’Archet du colonel (1998), Damian Catani considers the political power and the memory of the French Revolution in and beyond the nineteenth century. Both texts, Catani argues, invite the reader to consider how the ideological and political premises upon which the Revolution was built – liberty, equality and fraternity – were severely betrayed and undermined by two historical events: in Hugo’s novel, by the Terror of 1793; and in Confiant’s account by the re-establishment of slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique under Napoleon Bonaparte. The compelling dialogue between these two novels makes clear that the era’s political legacy continues to exert a powerful influence on literature long after the close of the nineteenth century. The betrayal of political and broader cultural institutions is examined in the case of Joris-Karl Huysmans by Jean-Marie Seillan in chapter three. Huysmans subscribed to the belief that political institutions in France and Europe were unwittingly part of a plot led by Jews, devil worshippers and freemasons to corrupt the Christian way of life and destroy the Catholic church. Seillan, tracing Huysmans’s beliefs through the conspiracy theories of Léon Poliakov and Pierre-André Taguieff, analyses the novelist’s literary depiction of the subterranean powers eroding the foundations of France’s political institutions. If such institutions sustained Balzac’s fiction, as Mozet showed in chapter one, Seillan offers a compelling vision of the way in which Huysmans, by contrast, mobilizes his own fiction to sustain precisely those institutions. The impact of politics on art beyond the literary sphere is highlighted in chapter four, as Janice Best evaluates the influence of Third Republic politics on public sculpture and commemorative statues. 150 statutes commemorating the great names of the past were erected in Paris between 1870 and 1914, and this ‘statue mania’, Best suggests, represents an attempt to control the image of the Third Republic’s origins. The Republicans, intent on establishing a durable national and political identity, used public spaces to forge the values of the regime, in an effort to locate its origins in the heroes of the French Revolution and commemorate them accordingly. While the Republicans sought to subdue memories of the regime’s relationship with the bloody events of the Commune, their opponents attempted to combat this policy of national forgetting in the same public space through largely covert means. In the public spaces of the Third Rep-

30

David Evans and Kate Griffiths

ublic, contemporary political debates found expression in a series of heroic bronze statues which made the past a part of the political and national institution. Section two moves from Best’s assessment of power and public space to consider the complexities of this relationship in other nineteenth-century contexts. Focusing on the French capital in the opening essay, Elisabeth Gerwin considers the power dynamics of desire in modern Paris using the theory of Walter Benjamin. Balzac sets La Fille aux yeux d’or in 1814, at a moment when the institutions of the recently fallen Empire are being shaken. Balzac, Gerwin suggests, uses his hero, Henri de Marsay, a flâneur unaffected by time or money, unconstrained by space or property, to evaluate the institutions and power structures of the city at large. Chapter six extends the consideration of power and space to southern France, as Claire O’Mahony assesses the vast project of civic decoration at the fin-desiècle funded by partnerships between municipalities and the central arts administration in Paris. Jules Ferry, as Minister of Education, championed the efficacy of the town hall and mural decoration as a vehicle, not only for sublimating revolutionary extremities, but also for articulating a new Republican coherence after the Prussian defeat and the violence of the Commune. Taking the Capitole, Toulouse’s town hall, and its redecoration under the Third Republic, as her case study, O’Mahony argues that the negotiations and battles between Parisian art administrators, artists and the municipality of Toulouse reflect the contested process of representing regional and national identity. In chapter seven, Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini considers the panoramic vision of provincial types depicted in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, a monumental publication by the Parisian editor Curmer, collected in eight luxurious volumes between 1840 and 1842. Whilst the first five volumes of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, all devoted to Paris, are well-known, the last three volumes, depicting provincial types, have been largely overlooked. This chapter offers a political reading of the final two volumes in particular, suggesting that the picturesque depiction of provincial types is both influenced by and feeds into the broader construction of a national identity. Chapter eight extends the topographies considered in this section to the colonial sphere. Leonard Koos interrogates the relationship between space and power in the nineteenth century as he considers the development of

Introduction

31

urban planning and architecture in colonial Algiers from the conquête d’Alger in 1830 to the beginning of the twentieth century, relating the evolution of colonial space in the city to changes in French colonial policy. Opening the third section of the volume, dedicated to the relationship between institutions and knowledge, Francesco Manzini evaluates Stendhal’s depiction of medical power in the nineteenth century. The physician and ideologue Cabanis, in his Du Degré de certitude de la médecine, claimed for the emerging professional doctor the powers of the priest and the magistrate. Stendhal, for many years an acolyte of Cabanis, nevertheless uses his representations of medical practitioners precisely to denounce their arrogation of sacerdotal and judicial powers. This attack on technocracy follows on from Stendhal’s radical conclusion, recorded in a journal entry of 1829, that almost all modern forms of power are inherently abusive and illegitimate. Continuing the scientific theme of this section, Rosemary Lloyd offers an essay on molluscs, museums, and men. As molluscs make their shells by secreting the calcium carbonate from specialized cells at the edge of their mantle, museums, and particularly Paris’s Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, can be read as secretions in stone of scientific beliefs. The focus of this essay is the scientific presentation purportedly about molluscs which inspired an orgy of rhetoric, primarily from two great scientists of the Muséum, Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy SaintHilaire. While Lloyd assesses the power of the museum and its rhetoric, Mary Orr considers that of the museum guide. Three discrete audiences form the case study – an educated Egyptian Moslem, a Parisian bourgeoise and a Rouennais visiting his local Muséum. This essay examines the authors and readers of the guides to assess the ideological intent of the natural history on display, foregrounding the various kinds of quasi-scientific rhetoric in the guides, to demonstrate how they also convey mixed messages about French scientific progress and power. The explorations of the metaphorical property of knowledge offered by Lloyd and Orr lead into Scott Gavorsky’s analysis, in chapter twelve, of the battle which took place in the nineteenth century for the literal property of schools. The royal ordinance of 29 February 1816, the Bourbon Restoration’s charter on public primary education, made provisions for the founding and holding of schools by private individuals and associations and granted

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David Evans and Kate Griffiths

them significant privileges. The foundation of these privileges was the legal conception of schools as a form of absolute property, held by private owners and thereby subject to limited government interference under the post-Revolutionary bourgeois regimes. Remaining in force throughout the nineteenth century, this conception of schools as property formed a central locus of an increasingly tense struggle of the French state to nationalize primary education. The volume’s final section begins with the power of the visual arts both to reinforce and contest existing institutions, as Juliet Simpson explores the spate of new histories of art and artist biographies in the early years of the Third Republic, showing how they promote a revitalized vision of the French nation state. Art and writing on art not only have the power to reinforce institutions, but also, as L. Cassandra Hamrick’s essay makes clear, they can probe the limits of such institutions. While visitors to the 1844 Salon in Paris commented on its monotonous uniformity, in Théophile Gautier’s Salon de 1844, the failure of the Salon becomes a space in which to sketch out a poetics of art for the modern world. He invites artists to reach beyond the prescriptions of academic institutions and to embrace the diversity of modern life as a rich source of inspiration, while confronting head-on such worn-out formalistic distinctions as line versus colour. Gautier’s art reviews find a powerful echo in the art criticism of Huysmans, as Gilles Bonnet demonstrates in chapter fifteen. Huysmans’s writing on art seeks to question the institutions which validate ‘official’ art: the jury of the Salon, or the public and ultimately critical discourses on art themselves. While Huysmans questions the very institutions of artistic power, considering the space beyond them, Bonnet’s analysis of his highly-charged rhetoric reveals a complex attempt both to contest the established structures constraining art and to wrest a sense of power and authority for itself. Having considered how art negotiates its relationship with external institutions, the final section concludes with Sonya Stephens’s exposition of the transformation of the artist into institution. Exploring two of Rodin’s formative projects, Stephens demonstrates that Rodin’s own archiving of his personal and professional history, his strategic self-representation as a national institution, his gestures, private and public, which place him at the centre of a wide matrix of politics, professions and people, and his organization of his own affairs to that end, constitute a particularly revealing case

Introduction

33

of the artist himself as a kind of museum. Rodin is not merely subject to the institutions of the art world, rather, he creates himself as one of them. Power thus ebbs and flows throughout the nineteenth century, and the institutions it inhabits, be they real or metaphorical, shift, alter, form and re-form. As this volume addresses the changing mechanisms of power and its institutions in all their diversity in nineteenthcentury France, it also explores the spaces beyond institutions where other forms of power – more elusive, uncontrollable and dangerous – can be seen at work. David Evans and Kate Griffiths

Part I Political Power: Legacies and Myths

Balzac, Théoricien du pouvoir absolu et romancier du chaos post-révolutionnaire NICOLE MOZET

La vitalité de Balzac et de la critique balzacienne se manifeste par la très grande diversité des lectures, et cela dès l’origine et jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Un des signes les plus manifestes de cette vitalité est la profusion des éditions, qui s’engendrent les unes les autres, dans un curieux système de réactions en chaîne. La deuxième édition de la Pléiade, par exemple, a révélé de nombreux textes inédits ou peu connus, des brouillons, des épreuves, etc. C’est ce qui a permis dix ans plus tard de faire une édition numérisée de l’édition originale de La Comédie humaine, sans les corrections manuscrites de Balzac sur son exemplaire personnel de La Comédie humaine. Plus récemment, dans deux gros volumes de la collection ‘Quarto’ de Gallimard, on découvre un autre Balzac, celui des fictions brèves dans leur version première, par ordre chronologique, par Isabelle Tournier. Il faut également mentionner le travail d’Andrew Oliver, de l’Université de Toronto, qui donne à lire les éditions originales de Balzac sous forme de livres accompagnés d’un cédérom contenant les variantes et de nombreux dossiers. Ces éditions complètes et diversifiées atténuent les effets pervers des lectures trop centrées sur les mêmes romans, désignés comme chefs-d’œuvre, mais vite usés par cette promotion même. Un exemple parmi mille autres possibles: Eugénie Grandet, roman splendide longtemps considéré comme un des plus beaux fleurons de La Comédie humaine et devenu aujourd’hui à peu près illisible, du moins comme lecture scolaire. Le texte est en effet assez ambigu pour qu’on puisse considérer Eugénie comme une sainte, une sotte ou une névrosée. Comment choisir? Pour ma part, pour continuer d’écrire, je me suis donné pour règles les cadres de la déontologie de l’historien, à

38

Nicole Mozet

savoir une objectivité relative ayant conscience de sa propre subjectivité, mais refusant toutes les formes de révisionnisme. Je n’oublie pas non plus que le propre de la littérature est de se situer entre imaginaire et réalité. En conséquence, la fiction littéraire appelle des interprétations divergentes et même contradictoires, mais cette liberté doit se limiter elle-même par une grande prudence, avec l’aide des institutions et de la communauté scientifique que nous formons. Je m’efforcerai donc moi-même de respecter ces règles à la fois exigeantes et floues. Les préférences idéologiques de Balzac pour le pouvoir absolu et même la raison d’état appartiennent à une catégorie de faits que personne ne remet en cause, avec une opposition maintes fois affirmée entre pouvoir et élection, comme dans Sur Catherine de Médicis, dans la bouche d’un narrateur très proche de l’auteur: Le pouvoir royal a succombé dans cette guerre [entre l’un et le multiple], et nous assistons de nos jours, en France, à sa dernière combinaison avec des éléments qui le rendent difficile, pour ne pas dire impossible. Le pouvoir est une action, et le principe électif est la discussion. Il n’y a pas de pouvoir électif possible avec la discussion en permanence.1

Même déclaration antidémocratique dans Honorine, par la voix d’un personnage de magistrat possédant une grande autorité symbolique: ‘Mais, ajouta-t-il en levant la main par un geste de dégoût, le moyen de perfectionner une législation quand un pays a la prétention de réunir sept ou huit cents législateurs!…’.2 Les occurrences du mot pouvoir au sens politique du terme sont nombreuses dans les écrits de Balzac, aussi bien dans la correspondance que dans les fictions, et le plus souvent dans des conditions d’énonciation qui autorisent à mettre ces propos au compte de l’auteur. En interrogeant la base de données établie par le professeur Kazuo Kiriu à partir du Vocabulaire de Balzac, aussi bien dans sa Correspondance que dans les romans, et accessible sur le site de la Maison de Balzac à Paris, on trouve de nombreux exemples, moins connus que le trône et l’autel de l’avant-

1

Balzac, La Comédie humaine (vols 1-12) et Œuvres diverses (vols 13-14), éd. Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 19761981); XI: 174. 2 Ibid., II: 548.

Balzac, Théoricien du pouvoir absolu et romancier

39

propos de La Comédie humaine, mais peut-être plus parlants.3 Je n’en retiendrai que deux; le premier parce qu’il est amusant, le second parce qu’il est terrifiant. Amusons-nous d’abord, en nous souvenant du personnage de César Birotteau, le parfumeur. César Birotteau est un fervent royaliste que l’exécution de Louis XVI et de la reine a scandalisé; mais il sait également qu’il y va de l’intérêt de son commerce: En vrai parfumeur, il haïssait […] une révolution qui mettait tout le monde à la Titus et supprimait la poudre. La tranquillité que procure le pouvoir absolu pouvant seule donner la vie à l’argent, il se fanatisa pour la royauté.4

À l’opposé de cette alliance plutôt pacifique de la monarchie et de la poudre de riz, l’exemple qui me semble le plus inattendu et le plus paradoxal, c’est lorsque pouvoir absolu et despotisme se rejoignent. Ainsi Balzac, se souvenant de Machiavel, défend-il Robespierre au nom de la raison d’état et pour justifier a posteriori la révocation de l’édit de Nantes en 1685. Voici ce qu’il écrit en 1840, en son nom propre, dans sa Revue parisienne: Aussi n’ai-je point blâmé, ne blâmerai-je jamais, l’intolérance de 1793, parce que je n’entends pas que de niais philosophes et des sycophantes blâment l’intolérance religieuse et monarchique. La Réformation a expiré en France sous le coup d’état de Louis XIV, et il le fallait!5

Première contradiction entre l’idéologue et l’auteur de fictions: un roman de 1836, L’Interdiction, ne tarit pas d’éloges sur les vertus morales du marquis d’Espard, qui pousse l’honnêteté jusqu’à dédommager très généreusement les descendants d’une famille huguenote spoliée par ses propres ancêtres lors de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes: La révocation de l’édit de Nantes eut lieu, reprit-il. Peut-être ignorez-vous, monsieur, que, pour beaucoup de favoris, ce fut une occasion de fortune. Louis

3

Ibid., I: 13. ‘J’écris à la lueur de deux Vérités éternelles: la Religion, la Monarchie, deux nécessités que les événements contemporains proclament, et vers lesquelles tout écrivain de bon sens doit essayer de ramener notre pays’. 4 Ibid., VI: 57-58. 5 Lettres sur la littérature, le théâtre et les arts, II, Sur M. Sainte-Beuve, à propos de Port-Royal, Revue parisienne, 25 août 1840, p. 203.

Nicole Mozet

40

XIV donna aux grands de sa cour les terres confisquées sur les familles protestantes qui ne se mirent pas en règle pour la vente de leurs biens. Quelques personnes en faveur allèrent, comme on disait alors, à la chasse aux protestants. […] La terre de Nègrepelisse, composée de vingt-deux clochers et de droits sur la ville; […] celle de Gravenges, qui jadis nous avait appartenu, se trouvaient entre les mains d’une famille protestante. Mon grand-père y rentra par la donation que lui en fit Louis XIV. Cette donation reposait sur des actes marqués au coin d’une épouvantable iniquité. […] Le pauvre négociant fut pendu, mon père eut les deux terres. J’aurais voulu pouvoir ignorer la part que mon aïeul prit à cette intrigue; mais le gouverneur était son oncle maternel et j’ai lu malheureusement une lettre par laquelle il le priait de s’adresser à Déodatus, mot convenu entre les courtisans pour parler du Roi. Il règne dans cette lettre, à propos de la victime, un ton de plaisanterie qui m’a fait horreur. […] Le marquis d’Espard s’arrêta, comme si ces souvenirs étaient encore trop pesants pour lui.6

Ainsi, au nom même de l’honneur aristocratique, le pouvoir patriarcal peut-il être pris en défaut. Les pères tyranniques sont d’ailleurs nombreux dans La Comédie humaine, que ce soit dans La Vendetta, El Verdugo, L’Élixir de longue vie, L’Enfant maudit ou Un drame au bord de la mer, récit dans lequel un père tue son propre fils, ou encore Eugénie Grandet. La matière romanesque se nourrit des défaillances et des perversions humaines. L’adultère en particulier, dans ces histoires d’amour qui ont toujours plus ou moins le mariage en ligne de mire, est omniprésent, ainsi que le rappelle plaisamment Étienne Lousteau dans La Muse du département: Les Parisiens ne croient à rien, dit le procureur du Roi d’un ton amer. La vertu des femmes est surtout mise en question avec une effrayante audace. Oui, depuis quelque temps, les livres que vous faites, messieurs les écrivains, vos revues, vos pièces de théâtre, toute votre infâme littérature repose sur l’adultère... Eh! monsieur le procureur du Roi, reprit Étienne en riant, je vous laissais jouer tranquillement, je ne vous attaquais point, et voilà que vous faites un réquisitoire contre moi. […]. Soyons justes, si vous les condamnez, il faut condamner Homère et son Iliade qui roule sur la belle Hélène; il faut condamner le Paradis perdu de Milton, Ève et le serpent me paraissent un gentil petit adultère symbolique. Il faut supprimer les Psaumes de David, inspirés par les amours excessivement adultères de ce Louis XIV hébreu. Il faut jeter au feu Mithridate, Le Tartuffe, L’École des femmes, Phèdre, Andromaque, Le Mariage de Figaro,

6

La Comédie humaine, III: 483-84.

Balzac, Théoricien du pouvoir absolu et romancier

41

L’Enfer de Dante, les Sonnets de Pétrarque, tout Jean-Jacques Rousseau, les romans du Moyen Âge, l’Histoire de France, l’Histoire romaine, etc., etc.7

Ainsi, pour ce romancier qui a mis la Physiologie du mariage à l’origine de son œuvre, la sexualité est-elle depuis toujours le premier facteur de division et de désordre. Balzac est l’écrivain romantique français qui est allé le plus loin dans l’exploration des passions, abordant même plus ou moins discrètement des sujets tabous comme l’homosexualité, l’impuissance ou la contraception, bien cachée dans la dernière partie du Contrat de mariage. De cette analyse préliminaire, on peut tirer une première conclusion, à savoir que les intérêts du romancier ne sont pas les mêmes que les fantasmes de l’idéologue. Le multiple est son domaine, ainsi que l’accident et la catastrophe, qu’il s’agisse d’un accident de diligence, comme dans Le Message, ou de la déroute de toute une armée, comme dans Adieu, qui met magnifiquement en scène la défaite des armées de Napoléon lors du passage de la Bérézina. Balzac peut donc à la fois condamner les révolutions, qui détruisent sans produire, et s’en servir en tant que romancier. Quelques revenants de l’aventure impériale sillonnent La Comédie humaine, comme la marquise d’Adieu, devenue folle et muette, ou le colonel Chabert, qui renonce à réclamer son nom, sa femme et sa fortune. La Dernière Revue de Napoléon, texte paru en novembre 1830, évoque l’armée dans toute sa gloire, mais le récit est mis d’emblée, dès le titre et les premières lignes, sous le signe du pressentiment de la fin: La magnifique parade que l’empereur Napoléon allait commander devait être la dernière de celles qui excitèrent si longtemps l’admiration des Parisiens et des étrangers. C’était la dernière fois que la vieille garde exécuterait les savantes manœuvres dont la pompe et la précision étonnaient ce géant lui-même, qui s’apprêtait alors à un duel avec l’Europe.8

À deux ou trois exceptions près, les textes de La Comédie humaine ont été écrits sous la monarchie de Juillet, après la révolution de 1830. 7 8.

Ibid., IV: 680. La Caricature, 25 novembre 1830; repris dans Balzac, Nouvelles et contes, éd. Isabelle Tournier (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Quarto’, 2005), I: 682; repris dans La Femme de trente ans, II: 1041 (avec une variante: ‘étonnèrent quelquefois jusqu’à ce géant lui-même’).

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Ils se nourrissent de tout ce qui a précédé: la révolution de 1789 et le roi guillotiné en 1792 – c’est-à-dire l’effondrement de la monarchie légitime de droit divin; le consulat et l’empire (1799-1814), qui couvrent l’enfance et l’adolescence de Balzac, né en 1799. Ce fut ensuite la série des retours et des restaurations: celui de Louis XVIII en 1814, vite suivi du retour de Napoléon pour ce que l’on appelle les ‘Cent Jours’ (février-juillet 1815), qui se clôt à Waterloo; le second retour de Louis XVIII, auquel succédera Charles X. Cette deuxième ‘restauration’ dura quinze ans et fut elle-même balayée par la révolution de 1830. On trouve dans Le Père Goriot, dans la bouche de Mme Vauquer, un résumé assez cocasse de cette série de coups et de contrecoups, au moment où celle-ci voit tous ses pensionnaires l’abandonner: Et dire que toutes ces choses-là sont arrivées chez moi, dans un quartier où il ne passe pas un chat! Foi d’honnête femme, je rêve. Car, vois-tu, nous avons vu Louis XVI avoir son accident, nous avons vu tomber l’Empereur, nous l’avons vu revenir et retomber, tout cela c’était dans l’ordre des choses possibles; tandis qu’il n’y a point de chances contre des pensions bourgeoises: on peut se passer de roi, mais il faut toujours qu’on mange; et quand une honnête femme, née de Conflans, donne à dîner avec toutes bonnes choses, mais à moins que la fin du monde n’arrive... Mais, c’est ça, c’est la fin du monde.9

Pour Balzac, c’est la série qui fait sens et qui donne à 1830 le rôle du dernier coup, le plus dur, celui qui sonne définitivement le glas de la monarchie légitime pour entrer dans une monarchie constitutionnelle. D’où ce passage de La Cousine Bette: Les grands de l’Empire ont égalé, dans leurs folies, les grands seigneurs d’autrefois. Sous la Restauration, la noblesse s’est toujours souvenue d’avoir été battue et volée; aussi, mettant à part deux ou trois exceptions, est-elle devenue économe, sage, prévoyante, enfin bourgeoise et sans grandeur. Depuis, 1830 a consommé l’œuvre de 1793. En France, désormais, on aura de grands noms, mais plus de grandes maisons, à moins de changements politiques, difficiles à prévoir.10

La rupture de 1830 est omniprésente dans les fictions balzaciennes, créant un avant et un après, avec un incontestable effet de réalité: la monarchie de Juillet est la vérité du siècle. Le convoi de Charles X 9

La Comédie humaine, III: 233-34. Ibid., VII: 151.

10

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s’embarquant à Cherbourg est maintes fois évoqué, comme ici dans La Vieille Fille, avec émotion et une pointe d’ironie élégante: Le chevalier [de Valois] mourut avec la monarchie, en août 1830. Il alla se joindre au cortège du roi Charles X à Nonancourt, et l’escorta pieusement jusqu’à Cherbourg avec tous les Troisville, les Castéran, les Verneuil, etc. Le vieux gentilhomme avait pris sur lui cinquante mille francs, somme à laquelle montaient ses économies et le prix de sa rente; il l’offrit à l’un des fidèles amis de ses maîtres pour la transmettre au Roi, en objectant sa mort prochaine, en disant que cette somme venait des bontés de Sa Majesté, qu’enfin l’argent du dernier des Valois appartenait à la Couronne. On ne sait si la ferveur de son zèle vainquit les répugnances du Bourbon qui abandonnait son beau royaume de France sans en emporter un liard et qui dut être attendri par le dévouement du chevalier, mais il est certain que Césarine, légataire universelle de M. de Valois, recueillit à peine six cents livres de rente. Le chevalier revint à Alençon aussi cruellement atteint par la douleur que par la fatigue, et il expira quand Charles X toucha la terre étrangère.11

Pendant ce temps, dans le même récit, le bourgeois du Bousquier, l’homme qui au début du roman était décrété impuissant ‘comme une insurrection’,12 celui justement qui a épousé ‘la vieille fille’, Rose Cormon, sans être capable de lui donner des enfants, devient le plus riche négociant d’Alençon: Le vieux républicain, chargé de messes, et qui pendant quinze ans avait joué la comédie afin de satisfaire sa vendetta, renversa lui-même le drapeau blanc de la mairie aux applaudissements du peuple. Aucun homme, en France, ne jeta sur le nouveau trône élevé en août 1830 un regard plus enivré de joyeuse vengeance. Pour lui, l’avènement de la branche cadette était le triomphe de la Révolution. Pour lui, le triomphe du drapeau tricolore était la résurrection de la Montagne, qui, cette fois, allait abattre les gentilshommes par des procédés plus sûrs que celui de la guillotine, en ce que son action serait moins violente. La pairie sans hérédité, la Garde nationale qui met sur le même lit de camp l’épicier du coin et le marquis, l’abolition des majorats réclamée par un bourgeois-avocat, l’Église catholique privée de sa suprématie, toutes les inventions législatives d’août 1830 furent pour du Bousquier la plus savante application des principes de 1793.13

Le lien de cause à effet entre élection et grossièreté va donc de soi; et la décadence des mœurs entraîne celle des arts. Mais que devient la 11

Ibid., IV: 934. Ibid., IV: 830. 13 Ibid., IV: 928. 12

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littérature dans cet écroulement généralisé? La littérature résiste, parce que sa matière est la langue. Balzac répond à la médiocrité de son époque en s’égalant à Dante et en appelant son œuvre La Comédie humaine, titre qui combine sublime et immanence. Constatant que la religion est ‘privée de sa suprématie’, ainsi qu’il est dit dans le texte ci-dessus, Balzac propose même de remplacer la religion par la littérature. Le texte du Prêtre catholique (1834), qui reprend la formule saint-simonienne de l’artiste ‘remplaçant’ le prêtre, est sans équivoque à cet égard: Aujourd’hui l’écrivain a remplacé le prêtre; il a revêtu la chlamyde des martyrs, il souffre mille maux, il prend la lumière sur l’autel et la répand au sein des peuples, il est prince, il est mendiant, il console, il maudit, il prie, il prophétise, sa voix ne parcourt pas seulement la nef d’une cathédrale, elle peut quelquefois tonner d’un bout du monde à l’autre, l’humanité, devenue son troupeau, écoute ses poésies, les médite, et une parole, un vers ont maintenant autant de poids dans les balances politiques qu’en avait jadis une victoire. La presse a organisé la pensée, et la pensée va bientôt exploiter le monde.14

En outre, la littérature a le privilège de ne pas dépendre du seul présent. Au contraire, elle se déploie dans un constant va-et-vient entre passé et présent. Béatrix est l’exemple le plus saisissant de la tension balzacienne entre l’Un du passé et le multiple moderne. La date de cette fiction bretonne, qui se passe pour l’essentiel à Guérande, est contemporaine de celle de la rédaction du roman, 1838. Le tour de force est d’avoir réussi, dans un seul récit, à rendre hommage à la Féodalité tout en glorifiant la modernité. L’hommage à la Féodalité ne fait pas de doute, surtout dans la personne du vieux baron du Guénic: ‘En lui, le granit breton s’était fait homme’.15 Homme d’action et de foi, il ne connaît ni le doute ni même la réflexion: ‘Il avait des religions, des sentiments pour ainsi dire innés qui le dispensaient de méditer. Ses devoirs, il les avait appris avec la vie. Les Institutions, la Religion pensaient pour lui’.16 Mais dans le même roman, il y a aussi Camille Maupin, femme célèbre et écrivain reconnu. Elle a restauré le château dont elle a hérité à côté de Guérande, mais à l’intérieur seulement: château janus, breton au14

Ibid., XII: 802-3. Ibid., II: 651. 16 Ibid., II: 653. 15

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dehors et parisien au-dedans. Elle y fait l’éducation amoureuse et intellectuelle du jeune Calyste du Guénic. D’où cet hymne vibrant au XIXe siècle du luxe et de la culture, avec au passage un éloge de Napoléon: Il y lut ces œuvres d’imagination, ces étonnantes créations de la littérature moderne qui produisirent tout leur effet sur un cœur neuf. Enfin notre grand dixneuvième siècle lui apparut avec ses magnificences collectives, sa critique, ses efforts de rénovation en tous genres, ses tentatives immenses et presque toutes à la mesure du géant qui berça dans ses drapeaux l’enfance de ce siècle, et lui chanta des hymnes accompagnés par la terrible basse du canon. Initié par Félicité à toutes ces grandeurs, qui peut-être échappent aux regards de ceux qui les mettent en scène et qui en sont les ouvriers, Calyste satisfaisait aux Touches le goût du merveilleux si puissant à son âge.17

On est en 1838. Ce qui veut dire que le Génie résiste à tout, même aux révolutions. Il faut se souvenir que Balzac a milité toute sa vie en faveur des arts et de la littérature et contre l’exploitation des créateurs: contre les éditeurs, les libraires et les directeurs de théâtre, pour les droits d’auteurs et contre les contrefaçons, etc. La Lettre adressée aux écrivains français du XIXe siècle, publiée dans la Revue de Paris du 1er novembre 1834 est une des plus belles manifestations de cet enthousiasme revendicatif. Le problème esthétique de Balzac a toujours été de faire du beau avec du laid, c’est-à-dire la laideur de son époque. La question est explicitement posée dès le ‘préambule’ d’Eugénie Grandet (1833). Elle devient de plus en plus lancinante après 1840, mais c’est alors que La Comédie humaine prend son essor et que s’affirme définitivement la confiance de Balzac en son propre génie, comme en témoigne l’avant-propos. Les deux grands romans balzaciens de la monarchie de Juillet sont aussi les deux derniers, publiés en 1847: La Cousine Bette et Le Cousin Pons. Le premier commence en 1838 et le second en 1844, et ce sont tous les deux des réflexions sur l’art moderne, ses faiblesses et ses grandeurs. Je me contenterai ici du Cousin Pons, lu comme l’histoire de l’art et des objets d’art dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle. L’âge de Sylvain Pons – soixante ans en 1844 – permet au romancier de condenser l’histoire sur un seul personnage. Le temps 17

Ibid., II: 706-7.

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historique est comme décentré, avec l’Empire comme point d’origine, comme dans La Cousine Bette, époque qui est déjà devenue incompréhensible pour la plupart des contemporains: ‘L’Empire est déjà si loin de nous, que tout le monde ne peut pas se le figurer dans sa réalité gallo-grecque’.18 Les révolutions ébranlent les institutions. Néanmoins, en éventrant les églises et les châteaux, elles éparpillent les trésors, détruisent beaucoup mais permettent aussi la circulation des objets d’art, jusque-là enfermés au profit d’une aristocratie. Plus que toute autre, l’écriture balzacienne s’est intéressée à ce qui est sur le point de disparaître, qu’il s’agisse de la province ou du vieux Paris. Plus que tout autre Balzac a besoin pour créer du plein, d’avoir le sentiment que le vide règne autour de lui et qu’il est urgent de réagir. Comme son marquis d’Espard, dans L’Interdiction, il a besoin pour travailler d’avoir un gouffre sous ses pieds, une dette à rembourser. Or, les victimes de la Révolution sont encore plus nombreuses que celles de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes. La collection du cousin Pons constitue un exemple privilégié de cette opération symbolique de sauvetage des rescapés de la tempête. En Italie, sous l’Empire, Pons fait son éducation de connaisseur. De ce premier apprentissage, il a ramené des trésors, mais aussi les compétences pour deviner avant tout le monde la valeur d’un objet d’art, et l’acheter à bon marché avant que d’autres s’y intéressent et fassent monter les prix:19 De 1811 à 1816, pendant ses courses à travers Paris, il avait trouvé pour dix francs ce qui se paye aujourd’hui mille à douze cents francs. […] Il avait ramassé les débris du dix-septième et du dix-huitième siècle, en rendant justice aux gens d’esprit et de génie de l’école française, ces grands inconnus, les Lepautre, les Lavallée-Poussin, etc., qui ont créé le genre Louis XV, le genre Louis XVI, et dont les œuvres défraient aujourd’hui les prétendues inventions de nos artistes, incessamment courbés sur les trésors du Cabinet des Estampes pour faire du nouveau en faisant d’adroits pastiches.20

18

Ibid., VII: 484. ‘Le mérite du collectionneur est de devancer la mode. Tenez! d’ici à cinq ans, on payera à Paris les porcelaines de Frankenthal, que je collectionne depuis vingt ans, deux fois plus cher que la pâte tendre de Sèvres’ (VII: 511). 20 Ibid., VII: 490. 19

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Le collectionneur conserve, mais le romancier, en mettant en fiction cette pratique, lui donne tout son sens et fait œuvre de création. Pons n’est pas pleinement un créateur, mais l’écrivain qui a inventé Pons, lui, est un grand artiste, un Génie aurait dit Balzac. Le rôle que joue dans la fiction le fameux éventail de Mme de Pompadour, peint par Watteau, me paraît la meilleure illustration de cette sorte de métamorphose opérée par la littérature. En s’emparant symboliquement de cet éventail par l’écriture, Balzac en devient ‘l’auteur’ autrement mais autant que Watteau. C’est le même geste qu’à propos de la Grenadière, petite maison près de Tours qui sert de cadre à la nouvelle portant ce titre. En la décrivant longuement et amoureusement, Balzac en est devenu le propriétaire symbolique, au grand profit d’ailleurs des propriétaires légaux. Revenons à l’éventail du Cousin Pons et à sa double promenade, dans l’espace parisien d’abord, et aussi dans le temps et l’espace social. Ainsi donc, un jour d’octobre 1844, Sylvain Pons promène sous son manteau ‘un objet évidemment précieux’.21 Cet objet est caché et garde tout son mystère. Quelques pages plus loin, après de longues explications sur l’amour de Pons pour sa collection, le texte dit seulement: ‘Aussi l’objet tenu si paternellement devait-il être une de ces trouvailles que l’on emporte, avec quel amour! amateurs, vous le savez!’22 C’est tout ce que le lecteur a appris à ce moment du récit: un objet très précieux déambule sur le boulevard sous la frêle protection du manteau de Pons. Rescapé d’on ne sait quel péril, il va être confronté à une nouvelle sorte de péril, dont on ne sait encore rien. Pendant le trajet de Pons, on apprend l’ascension sociale des Camusot et des Popinot, le fils du droguiste est devenu vicomte et les anciens voisins murmurent que la révolution de Juillet a été faite à son profit ‘au moins autant qu’à celui de la branche cadette’.23 Pons se rend chez une cousine par alliance, Mme Camusot de Marville, qui le méprise. Il tire de sa poche ‘une ravissante boîte oblongue en bois de Sainte-Lucie, divinement sculptée’.24 On apprend à la page suivante qu’il s’agit d’un éventail peint par Watteau, trouvé par Pons chez un brocanteur de la rue de Lappe. Vexé par le dédain et l’ignorance de sa 21

Ibid., VII: 486. Ibid., VII: 491. 23 Ibid., VII: 506. 24 Ibid., VII: 508. 22

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cousine et de sa fille, Pons leur fait un véritable cours d’histoire de l’art et de brocante. Fiasco complet, Pons n’est même pas invité à dîner et les domestiques se moquent cruellement de lui. La scène est très violente. La souffrance de Pons semble d’abord disproportionnée, mais – comme dans Le Curé de Tours quand Birotteau est chassé de chez la Gamard – l’on sent que s’enclenche une intrigue qui débouchera sur la mort de Pons. En attendant, le vieil homme, humilié et répudié, est plongé, tout comme le précieux éventail peint par Watteau, dans un univers de laideur et de méchanceté qui est aux yeux de Balzac le fond de la société française de l’après 1830. Avec la déchéance du baron Hulot, La Cousine Bette signe la mort du Père, tandis que Le Cousin Pons raconte le règne effrayant des matrones criminelles, telle la Cibot ou la seconde femme du père de Brunner.25 Le temps passe, Pons dîne tous les soirs avec son ami Schmucke, le président Camusot de Marville trouve curieux que Pons ne vienne plus chez lui. Moins ignorant que sa femme, il a reconnu la valeur de l’objet, dont le lecteur peut enfin découvrir la description: Cet éventail, reconnu par le comte Popinot pour un chef-d’œuvre, valut à la présidente, et aux Tuileries, où l’on se passa ce bijou de main en main, des compliments qui flattèrent excessivement son amour-propre; on lui détailla les beautés des dix branches en ivoire dont chacune offrait des sculptures d’une finesse inouïe. Une dame russe (les Russes se croient toujours en Russie) offrit, chez le comte Popinot, six mille francs à la présidente de cet éventail extraordinaire, en souriant de le voir en de telles mains, car c’était, il faut l’avouer, un éventail de duchesse.26

L’éventail ne sortira plus des griffes des dames Camusot, qui ne manquent jamais une occasion de l’exhiber. Après la mort de Pons, dont elles sont en partie responsables, et infiniment moins scrupuleuses que le marquis d’Espard, elles réécrivent l’histoire à leur avantage: C’était un homme charmant, reprit la présidente de sa petite voix flûtée, plein d’esprit, original, et avec cela beaucoup de cœur. Cet éventail que vous admirez,

25

‘Pour vingt-cinq francs par mois, les deux garçons, sans préméditation et sans s’en douter, acquirent une mère’ (ibid., VII: 623). 26 Ibid., VII: 539-40.

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milord, et qui est celui de Mme de Pompadour, il me l’a remis un matin en me disant un mot charmant que vous me permettrez de ne pas répéter...27

Arraché à son milieu d’origine, l’éventail est néanmoins sauvegardé, dans un mouvement conjoint qui lie promotion et déchéance. D’objet d’art, il est devenu un objet romanesque. Il y a là l’aboutissement de l’esthétique proprement balzacienne de la contradiction, qui mêle délibérément tragédie et dérision. On dirait que l’écriture jubile à mesure que la noirceur triomphe dans la fiction. L’irrésistible ascension de Mme Cibot relève de cette même veine puissamment ironique: la commère elle aussi, comme l’éventail, est devenue un objet romanesque et littéraire. Ordre et désordre. Dans mon livre sur Balzac et le temps, j’ai essayé de montrer que Balzac, quelles que soient par ailleurs ses préférences idéologiques, était entièrement façonné par l’alternance de révolutions et de restaurations qu’a connue le premier XIXe siècle: faillites et catastrophes sur le plan personnel, changements de genres dans la création littéraire.28 Sur le plan de la création, ce système s’est révélé extraordinairement fructueux, car le torrent de l’écriture ne s’est jamais tari. Chaque échec, chaque revers provoquent un regain d’énergie. Chez Balzac, tout se passe comme si la décadence du pouvoir politique appelait la consolidation du pouvoir symbolique, même si les intelligences et les ‘capacités’ ne sont pas reconnues. Avec des Camusot et des Cibot, la monarchie de Juillet a les héros qu’elle mérite, grotesques certes, mais débordants d’énergie et même de ‘génie’, comme Baudelaire l’avait immédiatement senti. Là est le privilège de l’écrivain, qui transforme en or tout ce qu’il touche et donne du bonheur à ses lecteurs en racontant le massacre des innocents et le triomphe des bourreaux. C’est sans doute à partir de Pierrette (1840) que cette thématique se déploie le plus explicitement, toujours en liaison avec la révolution de 1830: Aux élections de 1830, Vinet fut nommé député, les services qu’il a rendus au nouveau gouvernement lui ont valu la place de procureur général. Maintenant son influence est telle qu’il sera toujours nommé député. Rogron est receveur général dans la ville même où Vinet remplit ses fonctions; et, par un hasard surprenant, 27 28

Ibid., VII: 764. Balzac et le temps: Littérature, histoire et psychanalyse (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2005).

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M. Tiphaine y est premier président de la Cour royale, car le justicier s’est rattaché sans hésitation à la dynastie de juillet. L’ex-belle Mme Tiphaine vit en bonne intelligence avec la belle Mme Rogron. Vinet est au mieux avec le président Tiphaine.29

Il y a un côté épopée des parvenus dans La Comédie humaine. Seuls l’écrivain et les lecteurs se souviennent que cette épopée est fondée sur l’oubli des crimes, favorisé par les révolutions qui bouleversent les groupes sociaux et permettent tous les camouflages. Les écrivains et les historiens empêchent les bourreaux de triompher complètement. Dans Pierrette, c’est l’archéologue Desfondrilles qui se charge de ‘réviser’ l’histoire en chantant les louanges des deux Rogron. Quant aux ambitions méthodologiques que j’ai annoncées au début de cet article, j’espère avoir réussi à les assumer en montrant pourquoi le roman balzacien avait besoin de dénoncer le chaos pour mieux le mettre en récit. Là est à mon sens le conflit typiquement balzacien, qui fait naître et rebondir une écriture en lutte perpétuelle contre le manque: une castration collective et personnelle insupportable, hantée par l’image de la guillotine. Il y a là une source inépuisable d’énergie et même de jouissance, qui donne le désir de poursuivre – pour survivre? – aussi bien à l’écrivain qu’au lecteur. C’est également cette tension qui provoque la démultiplication des personnages et des positions d’énonciation, dans une abondance riche en émotions. Entre le désir d’unité et le besoin de diversité caractéristiques de Balzac, il est normal et salutaire que les lectures ne soient pas univoques, mais il existe quand même des limites à la liberté d’interprétation, qui consistent à tenir compte en même temps de ces deux extrêmes. Évitons de jouer les Desfondrilles.

29

La Comédie humaine, IV: 161.

The French Revolution: Historical Necessity or Historical Evil? Terror and Slavery in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize and Confiant’s L’Archet du colonel DAMIAN CATANI

This essay compares and contrasts two historical novels from different eras, Creole writer Raphaël Confiant’s L’Archet du colonel (1998) and Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize (1874), in order to show how both portray the historical legacy of the French Revolution in an ambivalent light. Both texts invite the reader to consider how the ideological and political premises upon which the Revolution was built – liberty, equality and fraternity – were severely betrayed and undermined by two historical events: in Confiant’s account by the re-establishment of slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique under Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, and in Hugo’s novel, by the Terror of 1793. I will argue that there are three compelling reasons why these novels invite us to regard these two events as historical ‘evils’ which question the moral legitimacy of the French Revolution. First, there is the fact that French Revolutionary ideals were betrayed and contradicted by the very political and economic power structures that were meant to promote and implement them. Thus Confiant demonstrates how the initial Revolutionary enthusiasm in the French Caribbean for the abolition of slavery was quickly and ruthlessly crushed by Napoleon’s colonialist ambition to re-establish this inhumane practice as a source of economic wealth for France; while in Hugo’s novel the political idealism of Robespierre and his allies is shown to degenerate into political repression: namely, the violence of the Terror. Secondly, both Confiant and Hugo stress the ongoing topicality and moral pertinence of the historical ‘evils’ they depict. Rather than presenting the Terror and slavery as isolated, unrepeatable incidents consigned to the past,

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they recontextualize and commemorate them in relation to ethical questions that are relevant to their own historical eras: Hugo was writing largely in response to the excessive Republican violence against the Paris Commune of 1871; Confiant wrote his novel to mark the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of France’s belated and definitive abolition of slavery in 1848. Thirdly, the historical ‘evils’ discussed in both novels are also directly relevant to polemical contemporary debates in the fields of French historiography and Colonialist Studies regarding the moral legitimacy not only of the French Revolution and French Colonialism, but of post-Revolutionary French identity and nationhood itself. To begin with L’Archet du colonel, there are two reasons why Confiant’s historical reinterrogation of the French Revolution’s legacy in relation to slavery is of particular importance: first, because of the French Republican overemphasis on the celebration of abolition instead of focusing on the suffering caused by slavery; and secondly, the dearth of historical material available on the impact this slavery had on the people of Guadeloupe and Martinique. A Comité de mémoire was set up in Martinique in 1998 to counterbalance the French Republican celebration of abolition with a detailed investigation and recognition of the trauma that slavery had left on the country.1 The comité, which comprised amongst others Confiant’s fellow Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, highlighted that two important steps in this historiographical reorientation were its role in encouraging the French government both to acknowledge slavery as a crime against humanity and to incorporate slavery and France’s role in it in the syllabus, whether in the métropole or the former French colonies: Les manuels scolaires et les programmes de recherche en histoire et en science humaine accorderont à la traite negrière et à l’esclavage la place conséquente qu’ils méritent. La coopération qui permettra de mettre en articulation les archives écrites disponibles en Europe avec les sources orales et les connaissances

1

De l’Esclavage aux réparations: Le Comité devoir de mémoire – Martinique 19981999, ed. by Serge Chalons, Christian Jean-Étienne, Suzy Landau and André Yébakima (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2000).

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archéologiques accumulées en Afrique, dans les Amériques, aux Caraïbes et dans tous les autres territoires ayant connu l’esclavage sera encouragée et favorisée.2

It also highlighted a number of goals: the question of reparations to the former slave colony; the creation of ‘lieux de mémoire’, public spaces to commemorate the atrocities; the sponsoring of archival research to unearth the atrocities of slavery in the French Caribbean; the necessity for ongoing struggle against slavery in such countries as Mauritania: in short the counterbalancing of the Republican celebration of abolition with a recognition and understanding of its terrible effects and their implications for Martinican and French Caribbean post-colonial identity.3 Secondly, as the historian Bernard Moitt has stated, histories of the slave revolts on the French Caribbean have predominantly focused on Toussaint Louverture and the successful slave uprising of St. Domingue which culminated in the establishment of the first independent black nation state of Haiti in 1804.4 Yet reliable slave histories exclusively devoted to Guadeloupe and Martinique are limited: there are few, if any, accounts in Creole, which has a predominantly oral tradition; hardly any in English and only a handful in French, though this number is gradually growing.5 Moreover, as historian Frédéric Régent has more recently noted, there are no written accounts by the Guadeloupean slaves themselves: only the biased accounts of the colonialists on the one hand, and the equally 2

Article 2 of a law unanimously passed in the Assemblée nationale, 19 February 1999, which recognized slavery as a crime against humanity; cited in De l’esclavage aux réparations, pp. 153-55. 3 Ibid; pp. 225-29. 4 Bernard Moitt, ‘Slave Resistance in Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1791-1848’, in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, ed. by Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Ian Randle: Kingston, 2000), p. 919. 5 Three French studies on the subject that appeared in quick succession in the 1980s – Jacques Adelaïde-Merlande, Delgrès ou la Guadeloupe en 1802 (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1986); André Nègre, La Rébellion de la Guadeloupe (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1987); and Henri Bangou, La Révolution et l’esclavage à la Guadeloupe (Paris: Messidor/Éditions Sociales, 1989) – have, in the light of new archival material, been complemented and updated by Jacques AdelaïdeMerlande, René Bélénus and Frédéric Régent, La Rébellion de la Guadeloupe (1801-1802) (Archives Départementales de la Guadeloupe, 2002); and Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: La Révolution française en Guadeloupe 1789-1802 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2004).

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biased propaganda of the abolitionists on the other.6 It is in this light that Confiant’s novel needs to be understood: the need to salvage the occluded history of slave suffering from Republican discourse; the related need to fill a glaring historical gap regarding the plight of the Guadeloupean and Martinican colonized people that sheds light on their post-colonial identity. How does Confiant tackle these twin aims? Essentially by interweaving two fictionalized historical narratives that bring into sharp relief two key moments in the history of Guadeloupe and Martinique: the main narrative, predominantly related through the eyes of fictional character Amédée Mauville (who featured in an earlier novel by Confiant),7 a Sorbonne educated young man of bourgeois mixed-race origin, centres on the tricentenary celebrations in Martinique in 1935 of France’s colonization of the French Caribbean by Belain d’Estambuc; the secondary narrative predominantly focuses on the perspective of Louis Delgrès, a real historical figure, also of an educated mixed-race Martinican background who embraced the Republic’s opposition to slavery by joining the French colonial army in the early 1790s, only later to turn against the French when he realized that Napoleon’s aim was to re-establish slavery in Guadeloupe. Rather than capitulate to Napoleon’s envoy, General Richepanse, Delgrès and his rebel army preferred to blow themselves up with gunpowder on 28 May 1802. Despite his Martinican birth Delgrès thus became a hero both of Guadeloupean independence and of heroic resistance against French colonialist slave oppressors.8 6

7

8

To circumvent this historiographical bias Régent’s study relies on the detailed legal records (‘actes notariés’) of property transactions pertaining to slave-owners during the revolutionary period in Guadeloupe. These provide a rich, accurate and objective source of information on the slaves themselves: their age, provenance, ethnicity, skills, marital and economic status, as well as shedding light on the impact of colonial legislation on their daily lives. See Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, pp. 12-13. Raphaël Confiant, Le Nègre et l’amiral (Paris: Gasset et Fasquelle, 1988). In this novel Amédée Mauville’s character similarly represents the complex relationship between the métropole and the Caribbean colonies during another historically contentious period in French Republican history: Vichy France. For two succinct and reliable accounts of Delgrès’s rise to prominence and subsequent military defeat see Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, pp. 413-18, and Laurent Dubois, ‘The Promise of Revolution: Saint-Domingue and

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The relationship between these two narratives – one centred on 1935, the other on the period 1789 to 1802 – is mediated through the figure of Amédée Mauville, who despite his Republican education in the métropole is vehemently opposed to the 1935 celebrations which he sees as a hypocritical betrayal and occlusion of France’s role in the slave trade. He thus represents an anti-assimilationist stance: Martinique should not seek further integration with a ‘mère-patrie’ whose perpetuation of slavery has caused such suffering for the Martinican people. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Amédée’s father, Maître Mauville, a respectable pillar of the colonial community in Martinique, who plays a key role in organizing the tricentenary celebrations, is pro-assimilationist and cannot understand his son’s rebelliousness. Thus father and son represent a tension between assimilation and autonomy, the relationship between métropole and colony that has always been a concern of Confiant’s work and is also addressed in L’Éloge de la Créolité.9 This tension is further overlaid with the question of race: Amédée’s father and indeed his other relatives, including his black mother and mixed race uncles and aunts, want him to marry a white woman whom they perceive to be more respectably aligned with the French Republican values of assimilation. Indeed, Amédée’s own mixed race identity and metropolitan education embodies the conflicting loyalties inherent in the cultural hybridity that characterizes ‘créolité’. Until the end of the novel, Amédée resists the assimilationist attitude of his family, preferring instead to pursue Ida, a black washerwoman, and to spend time with l’Historien, a self-taught black man who frequents the disreputable bars in the working-class downtown area and acts as a surrogate father-figure to Amédée. It is l’Historien who reveals to Amédée that a portrait the young man has found in his family home and with which he has become obsessed because of the physical similarity to himself is none other than the mythical Louis Delgrès. Upon discovering this

9

the Struggle for Autonomy in Guadeloupe, 1797-1802’, in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. by David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 121-29. For the enduring legacy of Delgrès in Guadeloupe today see also Dubois, ‘Haunting Delgrès’, Radical History Review, 78 (2000), 166-77. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

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fact, Amédée, driven by his anger at the tricentenaire, proceeds to write a history of Delgrès in the form of cahiers under the critical eye of l’Historien. It is these cahiers that constitute the second narrative that is the story of Delgrès’s abortive struggle against Napoleon. Amédée’s account of Delgrès certainly echoes historians of Guadeloupe such as Dubois, Moitt and Régent in highlighting the militarily and economically pragmatic, rather than purely philanthropic and ideological, designs of the French Republicans even prior to Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery in 1802. First, as the fictional Delgrès reminds us, although the French Republicans officially banned slavery in the French Caribbean on 4 February 1794, this ban did not take effect in Martinique which was occupied by the English. Secondly, though this ban was implemented in Guadeloupe under the command of General Victor Hugues it quickly became reversed in all but name when the economy of the sugar plantations started faltering and Hugues reintroduced forced labour and sent the previously freed slaves back to their atelier to sustain the colonial economy.10 Thirdly, the rapid promotion of many mixed race or mulatto officers into the French Republican army soon revealed itself to be motivated not so much by a humanitarian desire to extend the French tenets of liberty, equality and fraternity to a previously oppressed racial group as a pragmatic policy to recruit soldiers to fight the English and their Royalist French plantation owner supporters. Indeed, the racial question is vital to any assessment of the extent of the Republic’s aims. After the storming of the Bastille in 1789 the French Assembly was not only reluctant to introduce the abolition of slavery straightaway but also delayed granting citizenship to the free coloured or mixed-race nonslaves until 1792, as they feared they would side with the black slaves and incite revolt and undermine the white plantation owners.11 For 10

11

The best account of Hugues’s hypocritical policy towards slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique is provided by Laurent Dubois who demonstrates a convergence between Jacobin ideology and colonial slavery: ‘Without the threat of force, the ex-slaves would choose other means of survival, and the colonial economy would crumble.’ A less balanced, but equally forceful denunciation of Hugues’s policy is also provided by Lucien-René Abenon, Petite Histoire de la Guadeloupe (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1992), pp. 89-92. This fear was particularly compounded by the successful slave revolt in SaintDomingue in 1791; see Dubois, ‘Haunting Delgrès’, p. 256 and Moitt, ‘Slave Resistance in Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1791-1848’, p. 920.

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their part many mixed-race people saw their own struggle as separate from that of the black slaves.12 Many, like Delgrès, achieved newfound social status within the ranks of the army. Yet, as Régent and Confiant himself highlight, racial discrimination continued in the Republican army: Delgrès was never promoted to General and was stunned to discover that when posted to mainland France he was not perceived as a Revolutionary comrade but a coloured man.13 Confiant goes one step further than the historians in suggesting that a patronising racial attitude was adopted even by the Société des amis noirs, the Republican organ of anti-abolitionism par excellence which included such luminaries as Condorcet, Saint-Just and the Abbé Grégoire.14 In a fictionalized encounter between Delgrès and the Société in Paris, the latter patronisingly ignore his views on the plight of the slaves, regard him as a curiosity and prefer instead to discuss the topic in excessively abstract terms that reveal their ignorance of the true suffering of the slaves in the French Caribbean: Ils sollicitaient mon avis mais ne me donnait pas le temps de répondre et avaient l’air de prendre un extrême plaisir à cette joute intellectuelle dans laquelle les souffrances réelles des Nègres, leurs peurs, leur désespoir, leur rage n’entraient pour aucune part […] cet esclavage dont ils débattaient ne pouvaient être, en fait, qu’une abstraction pour eux.15 12

David Geggus goes so far as to claim: ‘the free coloureds acted like the slave owners they were and were careful not to have their cause confused with that of the black masses’; see Geggus, ‘The Haitian Revolution’ in The Modern Caribbean, ed. by Franklin Knight and Colin Palmer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 27. 13 Raphaël Confiant, L’Archet du colonel (Paris: Mercure de France, 1998), p. 191; Régent highlights the complex racial policies at work in the Revolutionary army in Guadeloupe: on the one hand educated mixed-race (‘mulatto’) – as opposed to black – men found it easier to join the army than white Guadeloupeans; on the other hand discrimination against them still existed: Victor Hugues did not believe that a ‘mulatto’ was deserving of a rank higher than Captain and Delgrès himself complained to the Minister of War in 1798 that he had not been paid for part of his service in the îles du Vent. See Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, pp. 36163. 14 For a succinct account of this society and its aims see Laurent Dubois, ‘The Price of Liberty: Victor Hugues and the administration of freedom in Guadeloupe, 17941798’, in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 259-60. 15 L’Archet du colonel, pp. 223-24.

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Thus Confiant’s novel demonstrates that Republican ideology had severe limitations even before Napoleon re-established slavery in 1802. These limitations are further exposed and reinforced in Confiant’s depiction of the 1935 tricentenary celebrations. Again he echoes existing historical accounts in portraying the carnivalesque and euphoric atmosphere with which they were greeted in Martinique; an atmosphere which has been meticulously documented by cultural historian Richard D.E. Burton.16 Burton highlights the falsity of the pro-assimilationist Republican discourse and iconography that accompanied these celebrations: the frequent allusion to France as a beneficent ‘mère patrie’ who welcomes a suitably grateful and infantilized black French Caribbean population to its nurturing breast.17 Any acknowledgement of slavery and colonialism is occluded. Moreover, Burton highlights that opposition to these celebrations was surprisingly muted: the only gesture of note was a play entitled En Madiana, c’est fou, performed at the Théâtre Municipal in Fort-deFrance, with a portrayal of the Caribbean slave massacres that was sufficiently uncompromising to prompt a walk-out by a number of pro-assimilationist dignitaries.18 Again, Confiant fictionalizes a real historical event by naming this very play as one which Amédée Mauville organizes and participates in. He scandalizes the proassimiliationist audience, including his father, by depicting the horrors of the slave struggle and the oppressive actions of the colonialists.19 Once again Confiant merges fact and fiction to invite a reorientation of Martinican and Guadeloupean history away from a normative French Republican discourse that hypocritically promotes a policy of assimilation that occludes the suffering of the slaves. If Confiant reinterrogates the French Revolutionary and Republican legacy through an examination of slavery, to what extent does 16

Richard D.E. Burton, La Famille coloniale: La Martinique et la mère patrie, 17891992 (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1994). 17 Ibid., pp. 138-39. 18 Ibid., p. 144. 19 ‘Madiana’ is the Creole word for Martinique. The anti-colonialist and antiassimilationist message of this play is reinforced by Amédée’s insistence that this language be spoken by one of its characters when he demands Martinique’s independence from France: ‘Té tala sé ta nou! Blan, viré lakay zôt, fout!’ [‘Cette terre est la nôtre! Blancs, rentrez chez vous!’], L’Archet du colonel, p. 209.

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Hugo undertake a similar reinterrogation in relation to the Terror in his novel Quatrevingt-treize? A moral framework to this question can be provided if we consider the pertinence of two factors: first, the contemporary historiographical controversy surrounding the Terror; secondly, the role played by the 1871 Paris Commune in influencing Hugo’s interpretation of the Terror. The historiography of the Terror, like that of slavery, is a vast topic that can only schematically be outlined here. Broadly speaking, however, since the bicentenary of Bastille Day in 1989, there has been a tendency for historians, even within France, to question the political necessity of the Terror. Up until the late 1980s the Republican legacy was paradoxically championed by Marxist Sorbonne historians such as Albert Soboul and Daniel Guérin who legitimized the Terror on class-based and populist, rather than bourgeois grounds: it was, they argued, the inevitable consequence of the hardships caused by the Revolution, notably the bread shortages of the ‘Sans-Culottes’, rather than the premeditated and cynical calculation of Robespierre and Danton.20 Since the late 1980s, however, at least three factors have contributed to a historiographical reinterpretation of the Terror as a historical evil rather than a political necessity: first, the erosion of left-wing politics within France which has discredited class-based interpretations; secondly, the shift to a cultural rather than political historiography, typified by Antoine de Baeque, that privileges the victims of the Terror rather than its perpetrators, or the psychological and anthropological readings of Eli Sagan that assimilate the violence of the Terror to that of other twentieth-century horrors such as the Holocaust;21 thirdly, a geographical broadening of focus on the impact of the Terror from Paris to the provinces.22 Despite a polemical backlash 20

21

22

Albert Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes parisiens de l’an II: Mouvement populaire et gouvernement révolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793-9 thermidor an II (Paris: Clavreuil, 1958); Daniel Guérin, La Lutte des classes sous la Première République, 17931797, 2 vols, 1946 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). Antoine de Baecque, La Gloire et l’effroi: Sept Morts sous la Terreur (Paris: Grasset, 1997); Eli Sagan, Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001). For a useful summary of this historiographical shift, especially within France, see Patrice Guéniffey, La Politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire, 1789-94 (Paris: Fayard, 2000), pp. 9-17.

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from the radical left, most notably by Žižek, who has actively sought to rehabilitate Robespierre and his policy of Terror as positive models of virtue and political engagement that in his view bring into sharp relief the moral apathy and defensiveness (or ‘biopolitics of fear’) that paralyse modern global society, the overwhelming concern of presentday historiography is to raise serious questions about the historical necessity of the Terror.23 It is from this dominant contemporary historiographical perspective that Hugo’s novel takes on a renewed moral relevance: by focusing on the Vendée more than Paris he anticipates the approach of recent historians such as Colin Lucas who extend their analysis of the impact of the Terror to the French provinces;24 and by re-examining the Terror in the light of 1871 he implicitly anticipates the approach of cultural historians such as Eli Sagan (to this list could be added ethical philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt) who regard the

23

Žižek follows philosopher Alain Badiou in calling for a reinvention of ‘emancipatory terror’ in the face of what he regards as the regressive mode of our predominant global capitalist liberal ‘politics of the status quo’ (which originate in the late twentieth-century shift in values from the ethical acceptability of ‘humanism and terror’ in favour of an ethical choice between ‘humanism or terror’). Such a politics has ‘fear as its ultimate mobilising principle’ (fear of immigrants, crime, ecological catastrophes etc.) to the extent that it has discredited the very notion of ‘humanity as a collective subject [that] has the capacity to somehow limit [sic] impersonal and anonymous socio-historical development.’ In other words, global capitalism conceives of the social process as dominated by ‘an anonymous Fate beyond social control’ which precludes or severely limits collective human agency. Any attempt to steer society in a particular direction is quickly dismissed as ‘ideological and/or ‘totalitarian’. Robespierre’s politics are thus positively reinterpreted by Badiou as a morally virtuous attempt at ‘emancipatory terror’: not so much the ‘abstract terror’ characteristic of big political revolutions but the ‘concrete terror’ which involves ‘translating’ the ‘democratic explosion’ of the people by imposing a new and lasting social order on daily life which breaks with the status quo of the established order. See Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, introduction by Slavoj Žižek, ed. by Jean Ducange, trans. by John Howe (London: Verso, 2007), pp. vii-xxxix. 24 Colin Lucas, La Structure de la Terreur: L’Exemple de Javogues et du département de la Loire [1973], trans. by G. Palluau (Saint-Étienne: CIEREC-Université Jean Monnet, 1990).

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Terror not as an unrepeatable and discrete event, but as one that can, and should, be assimilated to other historical evils.25 How, then, can the Paris Commune be linked to Hugo’s interpretation of the Terror? Of those critics seeking to read Quatrevingt-treize from the perspective of Hugo’s reaction to the Commune, Sandy Petrey has put forward the most sustained and coherent case. He argues that Hugo privileges family over ideology in his novel, universal humanity over Republican politics, a scale of values that is directly attributable to Hugo’s own biographical experiences during the height of the Commune.26 For the concluding episode of the novel, 25

Both Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben assimilate the Terror to totalitarianism, albeit from different perspectives. Arendt argues that the French Revolution mistakenly valued equality over freedom: cruelty was justified in the name of reducing the gap between rich and poor, meaning that men were equal in rights but not free to act upon the world. Agamben argues that in promoting the notion of ‘peuple’ as sovereign the French Revolution spawned dangerous ideals (such as the Nazi notion of ‘Volk’) of homogeneous pure peoples; these ideals were used to justify the persecution of those, such as Jews, who did not conform to them. French philosopher Sophie Wahnich attacks these positions as dangerously decontextualized and lacking in political objectivity: the French Revolutionary Terror, she counters, was a specific event that was morally justified by the need to regulate and curb popular emotion: namely, the desire for revenge against the monarchy and the fear of counter-revolution. Hence Danton’s famous statement: ‘Soyons terribles pour dispenser le peuple de l’être’. See Sophie Wahnich, La Liberté ou la mort: Essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), pp. 59-63; Hannah Arendt, Essai sur la Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); Giorgio Agamben, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?’ in Moyens sans fins (Paris: Rivages, 1995); both quoted by Wahnich, pp. 17-20. If Danton’s quotation supports Wahnich’s localized defence of the Terror as a psychological, politically pragmatic response that was specific to the French Revolution, Žižek’s Marxist, universalist approach more radically interprets the same quotation as the perfect historical manifestation of a violent explosion of democracy (‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) which originates in ancient Greece and can be found in other socalled historical ‘terrors’ such as those of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Thus Arendt and Agamben’s ‘assimilationist’ approach to the French Terror, which argues that it can, and should, be linked to other historical ‘terrors’, is paradoxically reappropriated by Žižek in positive, rather than negative, terms which substitute the conventional link between terror and totalitarianism with an alliance between terror, virtue and democracy. See Žižek, introduction to Virtue and Terror, p. xxix. 26 Sandy Petrey, History in the Text: Quatrevingt-treize and the French Revolution (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1980), pp. 98-119. Petrey’s argument that

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where the idealist Republican Gauvain compassionately releases the Royalist Lantenac after the latter has rescued peasant woman Michelle Fléchard’s children from the burning tower of la Tourgue, can be seen as morally analogous to the grief and family loyalty Hugo felt at the death of his own son Charles, which led him to visit Brussels to tend to his widowed daughter-in-law and grandchildren’s affairs and then to a country retreat in Luxembourg. Hugo’s own alternation between family duty and political engagement, his grief-stricken exile in Brussels on the one hand and his plea for amnesty for the Communards on the other is, for Petrey, thematized in the novel through Hugo’s alternation between on the one hand the political and historicized rhetoric of ideologically motivated characters such as Gauvain and Cimourdain, and on the other the more compassionate ‘pastoral’ or ahistorical language of depoliticized mother figures such as Michelle Fléchard.27 This argument carries some weight, though as Yves Gohin has pertinently argued Michelle Fléchard’s children’s savage destruction of the library of St. Barthélémy somewhat undermines the myth of childhood innocence.28 Rather than being predicated on an ethics of humanity and family, as Petrey argues, Hugo’s recontextualization and reassessment of the Terror in the light of the Commune can predominantly be seen as the reflection of a political dilemma. For if we consider the figures of Gauvain and Cimourdain who represent Republican idealism versus Quatrevingt-treize was strongly influenced by Hugo’s experience of the Commune and his sympathy for the Communards is largely echoed by Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); see also Winifried Engler, ‘Une poétique du regard ou la mise en perspective de la Révolution: Quatrevingt-treize’ in Lectures de Victor Hugo: Actes du colloque franco-allemand de Heidelberg, ed. by Mireille CalleGruber et Arnold Rothe (Paris: Nizet, 1986), pp. 43-51. Mehlman’s Marxist interpretation typically gives weight to 1848 as a pivotal year in Hugo’s political evolution: ‘Hugo judges 1793 in the light of 1848 in the wake of 1871’ (Revolution and Repetition, p. 46). 27 Petrey makes a convincing case for the coexistence of these two types of discourse throughout Hugo’s novel (History as Text, pp. 35-50). 28 As Gohin puts it with delicious irony: ‘les radieux chérubins ont avec tant de plaisir déchiré, écartelé, exterminé un superbe exemplaire de l’Évangile selon SaintBarthélémy’; see ‘Alternance et adhérence des contraires dans Quatrevingttreize’, in Victor Hugo: Romancier de l’abîme, ed. by J.A. Hiddleston (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), pp. 156-78; p. 164.

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Republican absolutism respectively, then Gauvain’s call for amnesty is arguably an echo of Hugo’s own ill-fated call for amnesty for the Communards (most notably his attempt to get Rochefort released), as opposed to Cimourdain, who might be seen to embody an excessively repressive form of Republicanism embodied by Thiers’s provisional government.29 Yet any explicit endorsement by Hugo of Gauvain’s pacifist Republican idealism as opposed to Cimourdain’s legitimation of political violence is mitigated by the fact that Cimourdain commits suicide and rises into Heaven with Gauvain, suggesting an unresolved political dilemma in Hugo’s own mind, one which appears to be amply reflected in his frequent letters and diary entries of 1871 in such comments as: ‘Férocité des deux côtés. La Commune a exécrablement tué 64 ôtages. L’Assemblée a riposté en fusillant six mille personnes’; and ‘Raison des deux côtés et tort des deux côtés. Pas de situation plus inextricable’.30 Victor Brombert has acutely diagnosed Hugo’s ambivalent stance in terms of the novelist’s ultimate desire to ‘exit from’ political history rather than settle for an ideologically reductive interpretation of revolutionary violence. Thus Quatrevingt-treize attempts to place history in a ‘transcendental context’ which negates political contradictions by presenting the reader with an interpretation of the Terror as part of the divine scheme for cosmic redemption – culminating in the fusion of Cimourdain and Gauvain’s souls as they rise into heaven.31 Brombert’s view is convincing in relating Quatrevingttreize to Hugo’s other historical works, but disappointingly glosses over his specific attitude towards the Paris Commune. This point is 29

Henri Rochefort, Hugo’s ‘third son’, was a politically active Republican journalist imprisoned by Thiers’s government for supporting the Commune. Hugo’s repeated interventions on Rochefort’s behalf, including a visit to Thiers in Versailles to ensure that he would not be deported, have been seen by some commentators as a sign of his limited political engagement and influence. Graham Robb suggests of Hugo: ‘It was his “pressing and imperative duty” to plead for the Communards who were being shot or deported, although it seems the duty only became irresistible on 22 September [1871] when he learnt that Henri Rochefort was to be sent to Cayenne’, in Victor Hugo (London: Picador, 1997), p. 470. 30 Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jean Massin (Paris: Club Français du Livre, 1970), tome seizième, II: 723. 31 Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 205-30.

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not lost on Claudie Bernard, who follows Brombert in stressing Hugo’s metaphysical treatment of history, but condemns the novelist’s silence on the Commune within the text itself as a form of escapism: Rien n’est dit des évènements qui précèdent et nourissent l’époque de l’écriture, et qui, avec la Commune, démentent si évidemment les visions de Gauvain […]. Hugo se réfugie dans l’avenir mythique pour éviter de considérer cet avenir-là, qui l’engage en tant qu’homme historique et que romancier historique.32

Be that as it may, by avoiding discussion of the Commune or restricting consideration of it to the novel, both Brombert and Bernard overlook how the political dilemma of Quatrevingt-treize between violence and Republican absolutism on the one hand, and pacifism and Republican idealism on the other, is strikingly similar in tone to the genuine political dilemma Hugo seems to have felt regarding both the Republic and the Commune: whether he should, as the above diary entries show, endorse one movement over the other when both had engaged in acts of excessive violence. Hugo’s unresolved moral dilemma is most poignantly crystallized in his morally ambivalent description of the guillotine, the iconic instrument of the Terror, with which Cimourdain is associated. In the following quotations from the novel the guillotine is first described as a mystery: it is likened to an Egyptian hieroglyph; it is then evoked in what Petrey calls a pastoral register (it is surrounded by heather);33 the focus then shifts to a rational description of the guillotine’s component parts; and, finally, it is described as both the incarnation of negative human attributes and a work of genius: C’était une silhouette faite de lignes droites et dures ayant l’aspect d’une lettre hébraïque ou d’un de ces hiéroglyphes d’Égypte qui faisaient partie de l’alphabet de l’antique énigme. Elle était là parmi les bruyères en fleur. C’était une sorte de tréteau ayant pour pieds quatre poteaux.

32

Claudie Bernard, Le Chouan romanesque: Balzac – Barbey d’Aurevilly – Hugo (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), p. 200. 33 See Petrey, History in the Text, p. 29.

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On sentait que cela avait été construit par des hommes, tant c’était laid, mesquin et petit; et cela aurait mérité d’être apporté par des génies, tant c’était formidable.34

Hugo, in other words, shrouds this emblematic symbol of the Terror in a morally ambivalent light in that he both associates it with, and divorces it from, a reprehensible human agency. Hugo’s symbolic description of the guillotine also usefully offers us a route back to Confiant’s novel which, tellingly, also provides us with a description of the guillotine, albeit from a markedly different moral and historical standpoint. Whereas in France, and especially Hugo’s novel, the purpose of the guillotine was ostensibly to execute Royalist counter-revolutionaries, in Guadeloupe it was used to execute counter-revolutionaries who were specifically opposed to abolitionism. Indeed, as historian Laurent Dubois has argued, Victor Hugues, the Republican General sent by France to Guadeloupe to defeat the Royalist slave owners and their English allies used the guillotine extensively to execute his enemies. Thus, historically speaking, the guillotine, in this initial phase of Hugues’s arrival was a tool of abolitionist Republican ideology. Its use could legitimately be seen as a necessary evil in the name of conquering a greater evil: the slave trade. But portrayed through the eyes of Ignace, Delgrès’s companion in arms, a real historical figure, former slave and carpenter who can thus be seen to embody the views of the ordinary black colonized oppressed,35 Confiant’s depiction of the guillotine does not wholeheartedly embrace this Republican use of Terror, even if it is in the name of abolitionism. First, the guillotine is repeatedly referred to by Ignace and his companions as Mme. Guillot which suggests its irreducible foreignness and alien status for the colonized slaves; secondly, the guillotining of former slave-masters brings no joy to the slaves but is seen as a political process beyond their control: 34

Victor Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize, ed. by Judith Wulf (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), pp. 431-32. 35 Although historians understandably devote far more attention to Delgrès’s role in the Guadeloupean uprising, Ignace’s historical importance in the rebellion is nevertheless underlined by Roland Anduse in his study: Joseph Ignace: Le Premier Rebelle (Paris: Éditions Jasor, 1989). For a brief summary of Ignace’s likely biographical origins see also Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, pp. 36162.

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Damian Catani Nous avions espéré être transportés de joie, imaginé l’intense satisfaction que nous ressentirions à la vue de notre maître baignant dans son sang, décapité, mais nous n’éprouvions que le sentiment de la fatalité. Nos gestes ne nous appartenaient pas.36

Finally, Solitude, again a real historical figure, who fought alongside Delgrès and Ignace while pregnant and was executed in November 1802 once her baby had been delivered, harshly condemns this Republican violence as insignificant, especially in the light of the atrocities she herself endured on the slave ships that carried her from Guinea to Guadeloupe: Elle terrifiait les Blancs qui avaient épousé notre cause car elle n’avait cesse de les vouer aux gémonies […] ‘Vous êtes la lie de l’humanité! Vous êtes la honte de Dieu! Là-bas, en Guinée, où les vôtres ont capturé ma mère, vous n’avez laissé que cendres et pleurs infinis. Sur le bateau négrier où vous l’avez embarquée de force, vos marins se sont complu à l’humilier, la dénudant pour la violenter à tour de rôle’.37

Thus the Terror in a Guadeloupean context is presented as a hypocritical moral diversion from the real atrocities that took place before the so-called Republican ‘liberators’ arrived. Ultimately, both Hugo and Confiant undertake a historical reinterrogation of the role played by the French Revolution and Republican discourse through their moral investigations of the historical evils of slavery and the Terror. Confiant’s denunciation emerges as the more powerful in its content: he explicitly exposes the inconsistencies of a French Republic that abolished the slave trade for pragmatic as well as philanthropic reasons, allowed racial prejudice to endure despite abolition, allowed the re-establishment of slavery under Napoleon and promoted a policy of assimilation that masked the horrors of suffering of the descendants of slaves until the late 1990s. Hugo, for his part, implicitly proposes Gauvain as a figure of non-violent Republican idealism but does not condemn Cimourdain’s Republican absolutism outright, nor the use of the guillotine as the instrument of Terror with which Cimourdain is associated.

36 37

L’Archet du colonel, pp. 203-4. Moitt, ‘Slave Resistance in Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1791-1848’, p. 924.

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What both novelists do share, however, is an awareness of the challenge that they pose to Republican discourse in the type of history that they write. In other words, both Hugo and Confiant exhibit a deep concern with the moral responsibilities inherent in the methodological approach they adopt to their fictional histories. Hugo, it is true, drew on orthodox Republican historians such as Michelet, Quinet, Louis Blanc and Lamartine’s Les Girondins, but he also felt that unmediated direct sources such as Duchemin des Cépeaux’s Les Lettres sur l’origine de la chouannerie were more relevant in bringing out the life of ‘les inconnus de l’histoire’, as opposed to iconic figures such as Danton or Robespierre.38 Indeed, Hugo devotes more space to Cimourdain and the peasant woman Michelle Fléchard than he does to Robespierre, Marat and Danton. Confiant advocates a similar shift in historical perspective through the voice of l’Historien – the self-taught black man who not only is excluded, but also wilfully excludes himself from the Republican celebrations of 1935. Instead of writing a history of Louis Delgrès, he suggests, Amédée would do better to write the history of his own family, which is more representative of the plight of Martinicans under slavery than that of an exceptional, mythical figure: Au fond Delgrès est une exception, certes brillante, certes admirable, dans la tragédie que nous vivons depuis trois siècles. Ton père, par contre, est représentatif de dizaines, de centaines de Martiniquais qui ont vécu avant lui, qui vivent avec lui au présent et qui, je n’ai guère de doute là-dessus, continueront à peupler cette île demain. Pourquoi évoquer l’exception avant de portraiturer le commun des mortels?39

A shared historical focus on the common man or woman rather than the exceptional icon, and the careful elaboration of fictional histories of people, regions and nations hitherto largely ignored by normative Republican discourse, namely the Vendée and the colonized Guadeloupeans and Martinicans: these are what ultimately unite Confiant and Hugo in their moral problematization of the French Revolutionary legacy.

38

On Hugo’s historical sources see Judith Wulf’s perceptive introduction to Quatrevingt-treize (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2002). 39 L’Archet du colonel, pp. 211-12.

Institutions et pouvoirs occultes: Huysmans et l’imaginaire conspirationniste JEAN-MARIE SEILLAN

Huysmans, on le sait, a effectué toute sa carrière dans la fonction publique. Il est entré au ministère de l’Intérieur au rang le plus modeste et a gravi les échelons jusqu’à celui de sous-chef de bureau, puis de chef de bureau honoraire. À ce rang, il exerçait les responsabilités d’un jeune énarque d’aujourd’hui; ses attributions touchaient à la politique, à la sûreté de l’État et, comme le prouve sa correspondance, il avait accès au bureau du ministre pendant l’intérim de son chef de bureau. Il était donc à même, semble-t-il, d’observer et de comprendre le fonctionnement d’une administration centrale et du pouvoir de l’État. Or ce fonctionnaire bien noté développait simultanément une théorie du pouvoir niant le pouvoir de l’État au bénéfice de contrepouvoirs occultes dotés de contre-institutions omnipotentes. Cette croyance, appelée aujourd’hui ‘conspirationnisme’ ou ‘théorie du complot’, peut bien sûr être imputée à la crédulité de l’écrivain vis-àvis d’affabulations partagées par une partie de l’opinion de son époque. Mais on peut aussi, par hypothèse, la prendre au sérieux pour en saisir la cohérence et évaluer son rôle dans l’idéologie et l’imaginaire du romancier. C’est ce que nous ferons ici en prenant appui sur les travaux consacrés par Léon Poliakov et Pierre-André Taguieff aux théories conspirationnistes.1

1

L. Poliakov, La Causalité diabolique, I. Essai sur l’origine des persécutions [1980] (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2006); P.-A. Taguieff, La Foire aux illuminés; L’Imaginaire du complot mondial: Aspects d’un mythe moderne (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2005 et 2006).

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Huysmans et la thèse du complot universel Établissons les faits. Si l’on s’en rapporte à Taguieff, cette théorie est propre aux périodes de l’histoire touchées par une ‘crise de sens’, où les hiérarchies sont ébranlées, les principes de causalité frappés d’incertitude, les systèmes de référence religieux, éthique, politique et esthétique décrédibilisés. Or peu de livres répondent mieux que Làbas à ce diagnostic. C’est bien une crise de sens généralisée qu’exprime le scepticisme de des Hermies: ‘à quoi peut-on croire et que peut-on prouver?’.2 Tous les personnages du roman, plongés dans ‘l’abominable margouillis du temps présent’, confrontés aux ‘décourageants mystères qui [les] entourent’, ‘pataug[ent] dans l’inconnu’.3 Aucun des modèles épistémologiques hérités du passé ne leur offre de secours: Durtal juge que les historiens sont ‘des notulateurs qui pointill[ent] sans donner un ensemble’ et qu’‘il n’y [a] plus rien debout dans les lettres en désarroi’; le médecin lui fait écho: ‘Ah! elle est bien la science contemporaine!’, et Carhaix, le sonneur de cloches, confirme que ‘le vieux Ciel divague sur une terre épuisée et qui radote’.4 Quant à l’Église, elle a renoncé à donner au peuple ‘les Saints qui le sauvèrent’ depuis que ses prêtres ont ‘des cerveaux qui se débraillent et qui fuient’.5 On comprend que Durtal, enlisé dans un siècle qui ‘n’a rien édifié et tout détruit’, où ‘l’on ne croit plus à rien et [où] l’on gobe tout’, résume son ‘désarroi spirituel’ par la prédiction désespérante qui ferme le roman.6 C’est dans de telles conditions que s’impose la thèse conspirationniste, s’il est vrai, comme l’écrit Taguieff, que ‘croire au complot, c’est se mettre en mesure de donner du sens à ce qui en paraît dépourvu, et qui inquiète’.7 Cette théorie, Huysmans ne l’invente évidemment pas. Elle circule dans les milieux catholiques réactionnaires que l’écrivain fréquente pour préparer Là-bas, et il lit et fait lire les livres qui la développent. Le premier en date, en 1886, est La 2

Là-bas, éd. P. Cogny (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1978), p. 152. Ibid., pp. 79, 33 et 43. 4 Ibid., pp. 48, 37, 113 et 265. 5 Ibid., p. 281. 6 Ibid., pp. 130, 279, 282 et 46. 7 L’Imaginaire du complot mondial, p. 14. 3

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France juive de Drumont qui impute aux juifs tous les malheurs de la France; Huysmans en a approuvé les thèses et sera un lecteur assidu de La Libre Parole.8 Il lit également Le Diable au XIXe siècle du Dr Bataille9 – alias Léo Taxil, le mystificateur prétendument converti en 1885 et devenu dénonciateur du pouvoir occulte de ses anciens frères francs-maçons.10 Du côté ecclésiastique, il cite les libelles de Mgr Fava, évêque de Grenoble,11 l’ouvrage de Mgr Meurin, La FrancMaçonnerie, synagogue de Satan,12 ainsi que l’histoire délirante de Cantianille, par l’abbé Thorey.13 Surtout, il préface longuement Le Satanisme et la magie, ouvrage de son ami Jules Bois où il est luimême souvent cité. Ajoutons qu’il fréquentait Maurice Talmeyr, auteur ultra-réactionnaire d’un opuscule sur La Franc-Maçonnerie et la Révolution française qui impute au complot de la première les désastres provoqués par la seconde.14 De la consultation de ces livres ressortent deux constats opposés et complémentaires. La preuve, d’abord, d’un désarroi devant le monde moderne, perçu comme inexplicable et angoissant parce que les clés d’intellection de l’ordre ancien sont inopérantes et qu’on ne se donne pas les moyens intellectuels d’en forger de nouvelles; mais aussi une 8

Lettre à Adolphe Berthet, 10 mai 1903, Arsenal, Ms Lambert 67. Le Diable au XIXe siècle (Paris: Delhomme et Briguet, 1892-95); livre écrit en collaboration avec Charles Hacks. 10 Taxil publie chez Letouzé et Ané les Révélations complètes sur la FrancMaçonnerie: Les Frères Trois-Points (1885, 2 vols), Le Culte du Grand Architecte (1886, 416 pp.) et Les Sœurs maçonnes (1886, 400 pp.), puis une édition populaire résumant (ses) plus complètes révélations sous le titre La FrancMaçonnerie dévoilée et expliquée (s.d., 318 pp.). 11 Le Secret de la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris: H. Oudin, 1882); Appel aux catholiques français et aux catholiques des diverses nations (Grenoble: Baratier et Dardelet, 1896). 12 Paris: Victor Retaux et fils, 1893. Huysmans en conseille la lecture dans sa préface au Satanisme et la magie de Jules Bois (Paris: Chailley, 1895). Nous citerons ce texte sous le nom de ‘préface’ dans la réédition du Griot (Boulogne, 1991). 13 Rapports merveilleux de Mme Cantianille B… avec le monde surnaturel (Paris: L. Hervé, 1866). Voir notre article ‘Les Rapports merveilleux de Mme Cantianille B…, ou Satan feuilletoniste’, Mélanges offerts à Yves Vadé (Presses Universitaires de Toulouse, 2002), pp. 121-35. 14 Paris: Perrin, 1904, 94 pp. Lire aussi sa conférence destinée aux Mères de famille sur La Conspiration maçonnique contre les mœurs (Paris: Librairie Française Antimaçonnique, s.d., 14 pp.). 9

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affirmation rassurante: l’Histoire s’éclaire, reprend un sens dès lors qu’on l’explique par la volonté maligne d’une société secrète, hiérarchisée et organisée en cercles de pouvoir concentriques. Au milieu, Satan, qui manipule les juifs, qui manipulent les francs-maçons, qui manipulent les protestants, qui manipulent les libres-penseurs et les socialistes. Avec un objectif commun: détruire la religion catholique.15 Car la thèse du complot mondial antichrétien est étayée par rien moins que l’encyclique Humanum genus, donnée par Léon XIII le 20 avril 1884. Le pape y montre que les francs-maçons, ‘rattachés les uns aux autres par le lien d’une fédération criminelle et de leurs projets occultes’,16 sont liés par ‘des espèces de mystères que leur constitution interdit avec le plus grand soin de divulguer’;17 puis, constatant que cette secte ‘a envahi tous les rangs de la hiérarchie sociale et commence à prendre au sein des États modernes une puissance qui équivaut presque à la souveraineté’,18 le pape invite les chrétiens à la combattre en dévoilant ses machinations secrètes. Toutefois, s’il accuse de malfaisance satanique ‘les monstrueux systèmes des socialistes et des communistes’,19 il n’incrimine directement ni les protestants ni les juifs, ce que la littérature cléricale citée plus haut fera sans relâche. À partir de Là-bas, Huysmans adhère à ce pack de convictions et s’en sert comme d’un passe-partout intellectuel, aussi bien pour expliquer l’échec d’une exposition de peinture, puisque ‘la critique d’art est aux mains des protestants et des Juifs’,20 que les débats politiques et religieux qui divisent la nation française: affaire Dreyfus, loi sur les Associations de 1901, loi de séparation des Églises et de l’État de 1905. À titre d’exemple, on citera la lecture de l’Affaire que Huysmans, habitué de la presse antidreyfusarde, expose à Dom Thomasson de Gournay dans une lettre inédite le 24 février 1898. Les 15

Dans sa préface au livre de Bois, Huysmans prête à ce complot l’objectif défini précisément par Léon XIII: ‘abattre le Catholicisme partout où il fléchit et […] préparer le règne attendu de l’Antéchrist’ (Satanisme et la magie, p. 106). 16 Encyclique de SS. le pape Léon XIII sur la Franc-Maçonnerie (Nîmes: Dubois, 1884), p. 25. 17 Ibid., p. 6. 18 Ibid., p. 4. 19 Ibid., p. 5. 20 Lettre à Dom Thomasson de Gournay, 19 avril 1899, Arsenal, Ms Lambert 61.

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mots que je souligne, typiques de l’esprit conspirationniste, montrent que l’ignorance des faits est le moteur de l’affabulation: Cet affreux Juif [Dreyfus] est sans intérêt, mais l’étrange c’est le dessous que l’on devine, sans pouvoir trouver la main qui dirige tous les fils. Commencée par les Juifs associés aux protestants, l’affaire n’a parmi ses comparses catholiques que des gens très spéciaux, libres-penseurs tels que Clemenceau, Y. Guyot, Zola. Tous ont, au point de vue de l’Église – en faisant même abstraction de leur athéisme – une tare. […] Ça a surtout l’air d’un assaut contre l’Église, mais quelle est la tête de ce complot? Le Reinach n’est qu’un sous-ordre; c’est là ce qu’il faudrait savoir. Des bruits de rédaction de journaux désignent Cornélius Herz, comme menant cette affaire d’Amérique où il s’est réfugié – en somme l’on ne sait rien de sûr – sinon que l’on peut imaginer une immense entreprise cosmopolite et maçonnique.21

Au niveau international, Huysmans recourt au même système explicatif. Témoin le tableau de l’Europe dressé par Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam, qui enrôle et amalgame juifs, maçons et protestants sous l’égide de Satan: L’Autriche est rongée jusqu’aux moelles par la vermine juive; l’Italie est devenue un repaire maçonnique, une sentine démoniaque, au sens strict du mot; l’Espagne et le Portugal sont, eux aussi, dépecés par les crocs des Loges; […] quant à la nation privilégiée du Christ, la France, elle a été attaquée, à moitié étranglée, saboulée à coups de bottes, roulée dans le purin des fosses par une racaille payée de mécréants. La franc-maçonnerie a démuselé, pour cette infâme besogne, la meute avide des israélites et des protestants.22

21

Arsenal, Ms Lambert 61. Huysmans reprendra cette thèse en 1903 dans L’Oblat: ‘L’affaire Dreyfus a avancé les affaires de la maçonnerie et du socialisme de plus de vingt ans; elle n’a été, en somme, qu’un prétexte pour sauter à la gorge de l’Église; c’est la sortie en armes des juifs et des protestants’ (éd. Crès, I: 75). Le 24 juillet 1902, il déclare dans une interview donnée à La Libre Parole: ‘Je crois, en réalité, à un mouvement universel organisé par les Juifs qui sont les banquiers des Francs-Maçons, comme l’a dit Drumont. Il y a entente entre les Maçons et les Protestants’. Et il écrit à Arij Prins le 28 février 1898, à propos de l’Affaire: ‘ça a développé l’antisémitisme, ce qui n’est pas sans me réjouir’ (Lettres inédites à Arij Prins, éd. L. Gillet, Genève: Droz, 1977, p. 313). 22 Éd. Crès, 1933, II: 119.

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Les principes de l’esprit conspirationniste Ces textes rappelés, on identifie sans peine dans la pensée de Huysmans les quatre principes auxquels obéit, selon Taguieff, la logique conspirationniste. Le premier veut que ‘rien n’est accidentel ou insensé, ce qui implique une négation du hasard, de la contingence, des coïncidences fortuites’.23 Les lecteurs de Là-bas se rappellent que Durtal énonce cette conviction dès le premier chapitre: ‘Il [est] vraiment trop facile […] de mettre sur le compte du hasard qui est, luimême, d’ailleurs indéchiffrable, les événements imprévus, les déveines et les chances’.24 Là-bas cherche justement à identifier les chaînes de causalité occultes, à remonter du non-sens apparent des choses à leurs mobiles cachés. Ainsi, face au pouvoir de l’argent, Huysmans ne recherche pas, en dépit du recours à un lexique politique moderne (capital, monopole, banques), d’explication d’ordre économique ou historique. La loi qu’il énonce est ‘édictée et appliquée depuis que le monde existe’, et a la forme d’une alternative: ‘Ou l’argent qui est ainsi maître des âmes, est diabolique, ou il est impossible à expliquer’.25 Le refus de l’inintelligible apparent fait ici le lit de l’intelligibilité occulte. Le second principe, qui veut que ‘tout ce qui arrive est le résultat d’intentions ou de volontés cachées’ et nuisibles, donne du sens à des événements apparemment privés de cause rationnelle.26 Ainsi, face à l’éruption de la Montagne Pelée à la Martinique le 8 mai 1902, Huysmans n’évoque aucune explication de type géologique. C’est la faute, il en est sûr, d’un groupe de satanistes qui ont parodié le sacrifice de Jésus-Christ en crucifiant un cochon le vendredi saint et en le jetant, le jour de Pâques, dans le cratère du volcan27: les 20 000 23

Taguieff, La Foire aux illuminés, p. 57. Là-bas, p. 42. 25 Ibid., pp. 42-43. 26 Taguieff, La Foire aux illuminés, p. 17. 27 Lettre à Marie de Villermont, 8 décembre 1902: ‘vous savez ce qui s’est passé à la Martinique: promenade d’un cochon crucifié et, après procession sacrilège, jetage de la bête et de la croix dans le cratère le vendredi-saint. Le jour de Pâques, promenade d’un autre cochon, avec les cris: il est ressuscité! Et le jour de l’Ascension, le volcan a éclaté’ (J. Daoust, ‘Une amitié de J.-K. Huysmans’, Revue 24

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morts de Saint-Pierre constituent le châtiment de ce sacrilège. Toute question trouve ainsi une réponse unique dont la simplicité se passe de démonstration. Le déficit initial de rationalité se renverse en une surrationalisation occulte du monde. Du fait que l’intention malveillante est occulte, rien dans le monde ‘n’est tel qu’il paraît être […] tout est masque’.28 Ce troisième principe s’accorde à l’ontologie huysmansienne où, on le sait, les choses sont frappées originellement de falsification et les êtres de duplicité. Seulement, si cette fausseté apparaît dès Le Drageoir aux épices, elle n’acquiert de causalité qu’avec Là-bas qui tente, comme le fera ensuite En route, de débusquer les manigances secrètes de Satan. Et comme Satan agit par le truchement des juifs, des francs-maçons et des protestants, Huysmans prêtera à ces derniers des desseins et des agissements politiques secrets. Dans le passé puisque, à en croire Làbas qui est sur ce point nourri de littérature antimaçonnique, ‘personne n’est […] à même d’expliquer […] les dessous de la Révolution,29 les pilotis de la Commune’,30 comme dans l’actualité politique immédiate où il trouvera la preuve que les lois de laïcité républicaine résultent du complot mondial. Comprendre, mais pour révéler. Selon le dernier principe, en effet, ‘les liaisons occultes doivent être dévoilées ou décryptées’.31 Loi de divulgation répondant à la fois aux devoirs des catholiques définis par le Humanum genus de Léon XIII (‘Arrachez à la Franc-maçonnerie le masque dont elle se couvre et faites la voir telle qu’elle est’) et à la

des Sciences humaines, avr.-sept. 1960, 290-372; p. 353). Même analyse dans la lettre à Leclaire du 2 novembre 1902 (BNF, N.A.F., f° 290). 28 Taguieff, La Foire aux illuminés, p. 59. 29 Huysmans combine les vues maistriennes développées dans En route, II: 8 (‘En travaillant ainsi à côté de la révolution, en sondant ses alentours, l’on exhumerait ses fondements, l’on déterrerait ses causes; l’on découvrirait certainement qu’à mesure que les couvents s’effondraient, des excès monstrueux prenaient naissance. Qui sait si les folies démoniaques d’un Carrier ou d’un Marat ne concordent point avec la mort d’une abbaye dont la sainteté préservait, depuis des années, la France?’), et la thèse de Drumont, dont La France juive commence par ‘Le seul auquel la révolution ait profité est le Juif. Tout vient du Juif; tout revient au Juif’ (p. vi). 30 Là-bas, p. 47. 31 Taguieff, La Foire aux illuminés, p. 59.

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volonté de dévoilement qui fonde l’esthétique naturaliste.32 De fait, Durtal entend traverser les apparences trompeuses pour atteindre la vérité qu’elles dissimulent et en désamorcer les menaces. ‘En magie, tout acte connu, publié, est perdu’, dit Gévingey; principe rappelé dans la préface écrite pour le livre de Jules Bois: ‘la publicité, le grand air, sont un des antidotes les plus puissants du Satanisme’.33

L’imaginaire de la conspiration La conjonction de ces principes éveille chez Huysmans une défiance et une activité interprétative qui, tout en donnant à l’imaginaire du complot sa coloration paranoïde, se révèlent d’une grande productivité narrative et esthétique. Du fait même de son obscurité, le complot est un vide qui aspire, de multiples façons, l’imaginaire appelé à le combler. Ainsi Huysmans se fait-il fort de décoder dans la presse le sens caché des faits divers juridiques, avec une perspicacité qui le dispense de fournir des preuves puisqu’elle fonctionne avec des si: Si 1’on suivait attentivement les discussions de certaines causes contemporaines, si l’on regardait de très près, par exemple, le procès d’Élodie Menétrey, connu sous le nom de crime de Villemomble, ou bien encore si l’on se reportait aux interrogatoires de ce Mathias Hadelt qui assassina, en 1891, un trappiste d’Aiguebelle, l’on discernerait, en se donnant la peine de lire entre les lignes des dépositions, l’influence, l’intercession même du Très-Bas, dans ces affaires.34

De même, il suit dans les journaux les affaires de vols d’hosties, compose des dossiers, fait des calculs, soupçonne une vaste géographie secrète qui enserre la France dans un réseau de malfaisance:

32

Encyclique de SS. le pape Léon XIII sur la Franc-Maçonnerie, p. 21. Préface, p. 113. 34 Ibid., p. 98; nous soulignons. Huysmans évoque ici deux faits-divers récents: la découverte en 1885 d’ossements humains vieux de deux à trois ans dans une propriété de Villemomble et l’assassinat en octobre 1891 du trésorier du monastère d’Aiguebelle par un faux moine, guillotiné en juillet 1892. 33

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Dans la Nièvre, dans le Loiret, dans l’Yonne, les tabernacles sont forcés et les célestes Apparences prises. Treize églises sont spoliées dans le diocèse d’Orléans et les déprédations s’aggravent […] dans le diocèse de Lyon […]. Et du sud au nord, les attentats se croisent. J’en relève à quelques mois de distance, dans l’Aude, dans l’Isère, dans le Tarn, dans le Gard, dans la HauteGaronne, dans la Nièvre, dans la Somme, dans le Nord.35

Hors de France, sa suspicion gagne Hambourg, ‘ce formidable repaire de protestants et de juifs’,36 la Bavière à cause de ses célèbres Illuminés, l’Amérique où résidait l’anti-pape Albert Pike, Rome où s’est installé son successeur, l’île Maurice et même la Chine.37 Et les agences internationales de cette société secrète agissent en synchronie: ‘toutes, d’un commun accord, à dix heures du matin, le jour de la Fête du Saint-Sacrement, célèbr[e]nt à Paris, à Rome, à Bruges, à Constantinople, à Nantes, à Lyon et en Écosse où les sorciers foisonnent, des messes noires!’38 Une fois mise en branle, la manie de dévoiler se nourrit de la propension naturelle du romancier à l’affabulation. Celle-ci suit diverses pentes. Pente naturaliste quand l’amateur des bas-fonds parisiens divague autour des filières du trafic clandestin des hosties volées: Il est très que celui d’Oublies qu’il y ait

35

possible qu’un Satanique riche, qu’un solitaire, commande un vol, tel de Notre-Dame; il se peut aussi qu’un brocanteur tienne commerce saintes et possède une clientèle de scélérats qui les achète; il se peut un tarif, une mercuriale des Espèces dérobées, dans ce Paris où tout se

Préface du Satanisme et la magie, de Jules Bois (Paris: Chailley, 1895). ‘A Hambourg’, De Tout, éd. Crès, p. 193. 37 ‘L’île Maurice paraît, à l’heure actuelle, être devenue un véritable repaire de démoniaques. Une correspondance adressée de Port-Louis à Marseille et portant la date du 29 mars 1895, nous apprend qu’en une seule nuit, neuf églises ont été pillées. À Port-Louis même, les tabernacles ont été brisés, les hosties volées ou lacérées et empuanties par les ordures, les ciboires remplis avec le sang d’un chat égorgé sur l’autel’ (préface, p. 103, note). Huysmans juge que les Boxers de Chine, ‘avec leurs incantations et leurs prières, sont une secte absolument diabolique. […] Au fond, c’est un royaume de Satan se dressant contre la chrétienté’ (lettre inédite du 29 juillet 1900 à Leclaire, BNF, N.A.F. 12426, f° 195). 38 Là-bas, p. 86. 36

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vend. Peut-être, ferait-on de bien étranges découvertes, si l’on s’engageait dans cette voie.39

Pente hagiographique quand il recompose à coups de supputations scripturaires érudites la biographie de saint Jude: là encore, l’intérêt ne réside pas dans ce qu’il sait de lui, mais dans ce qu’il ignore, Huysmans avouant que si saint Jude ‘[l]e hante’, c’est que ‘tout demeure mystérieux en lui’.40 Sur une autre voie, la fantasmatisation du complot se nourrit du fantastique issu de la microbiologie moderne. Huysmans en a exploré les ressources esthétiques dans son étude sur ‘Le Monstre’: Quel artiste, même dans les songes brisés des fièvres, a pu rêver ces vivantes et humides vrilles qui grouillent comme les Filaria, dans nos urines et dans nos veines; quel peintre a pu forger, dans des heures de trouble, la Douve, cette feuille de myrte qui se recroqueville, coule, se reprend, titille dans le foie lacéré des vieux moutons; […] quel homme enfin imaginerait cette cohue de substance […] qui campent et vermillent dans les routes effondrées des ventres?41

Vision biologique angoissante dont il donne une traduction politique en l’étendant au corps urbain collectif: Il en est de l’infâme goétie, de même que de cette flore qui se ramifie dans les tuyaux d’égout, qui pousse, qui se développe sous le pavé de nos rues, dans l’ombre des conduits de fonte; c’est une sorte de végétation fongueuse, de champignon, d’éponge décomposée, de teigne qui tire ses sucs d’on ne sait quel terreau, qui s’accroît dans l’humidité, s’épanouit dans la puanteur des limons […]. Tel l’Esprit de Ténèbres qui ne se meut que dans la boue et dans la nuit des âmes […].42

Mais Huysmans, gobant les prétendues informations diffusées par le conspirationnisme ecclésiastique, fantasme aussi le complot comme une sorte de fonctionnariat du Mal, un anti-État supranational géré par une administration à la fois territorialisée et mondialisée. Des Hermies l’explique dans Là-bas:

39

Préface, p. 108; nous soulignons. Ibid., p. 115. 41 Certains (1889), éd. Crès, 1929, pp. 134-35. 42 Préface, p. 112. 40

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Je n’ai parlé jusqu’ici que des associations sataniques locales; mais il en est d’autres, plus étendues, qui ravagent les Deux Mondes, car – et cela est bien moderne – le Diabolisme est devenu administratif, centralisateur, si l’on peut dire. Il a maintenant des Comités, des sous-comités, une sorte de Curie qui réglemente l’Amérique et l’Europe, comme la Curie d’un Pape.43

Et Huysmans de reprendre à son compte ces supposées révélations avec un imaginaire pré-kafkaïen construisant dans l’envers du monde un système oppressif omnipotent. La secte des Lucifériens, explique-til en préfaçant Jules Bois, ‘englobe le vieux et le nouveau monde, […] possède un anti-pape, une curie, un collège de cardinaux, qui est, en quelque sorte, une parodie de la cour du Vatican’; elle possèderait même son ‘Saint-Père noir’ capable de mobiliser de ‘nombreux corps d’armée’.44 On aperçoit l’ambivalence de cet imaginaire: il ouvre, d’un côté, de vastes espaces littéraires à l’invention, voire au délire affabulatoire; de l’autre il emprisonne la raison dans de curieux paradoxes.

Les bénéfices d’une logique paradoxale Dès lors, en effet, que l’invisible est peuplé d’êtres organisés à des fins maléfiques, plus rien ne peut être dit innocent. Tout est frappé de suspicion précisément parce qu’il n’y a rien à voir. Car quand il n’y a rien à voir, c’est le défaut d’information qui devient l’information suprême. Il est donc aussi impossible de nier l’existence du complot que d’en apporter la preuve, puisque les institutions chargées de démasquer ce complot complotent en sa faveur. Comme l’explique Huysmans: Le Satanisme bénéficie de la difficulté très réelle où nous sommes de le montrer nettement au public. […] Dès qu’un stigmate infernal paraît, on l’étouffe; il semble que, d’un commun accord, la magistrature et le clergé soufflent les

43 44

Là-bas, p. 85. Ibid., p. 108.

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Jean-Marie Seillan lumières et se taisent quand le Démon passe; dans ces conditions, la preuve à administrer du Satanisme devient presque impossible.45

Phénomène alarmant, mais réversible: l’angoisse s’apaise aussitôt qu’elle garantit l’existence d’un ennemi à combattre. Que l’on réussisse à pénétrer ses desseins secrets et l’on déjouera ses entreprises. La lisibilité du monde est ainsi restaurée grâce à son obscurité même. Et ce paradoxe offre un réel avantage politique à un écrivain hostile à la démocratie. Si le personnel républicain est, comme Huysmans le croit, l’agent inconscient de la désorganisation de l’État, plus il le désorganise et plus il laisse de champ au pouvoir occulte qui peut le gérer selon ses propres intérêts. Le dénonciateur du complot, qui en sait plus sur les politiques que les politiques eux-mêmes, surplombe ainsi un monde restructuré et compréhensible. Ce qu’explique Sainte Lydwine: Il y a dans tous les cas, un fait, indéniable, absolu, sûr, c’est, qu’en dépit des dénégations intéressées, le culte Luciférien existe; il gouverne la francmaçonnerie et tire, silencieux, les ficelles des sinistres baladins qui nous régissent; et ce qui leur sert d’âme à ceux-là est si pourri qu’ils ne s’imaginent même pas qu’ils ne sont, quand ils dirigent l’assaut contre le Christ et son Église, que les bas domestiques d’un maître à l’existence duquel ils ne croient pas!46

Un second paradoxe cimente le système: nul ne peut démentir la thèse conspirationniste, car si quelqu’un nie l’existence du complot, c’est qu’il en fait partie et a juré d’en protéger le secret. Argument sans réplique utilisé deux fois par Huysmans. Quand l’évêque de la Martinique oppose un démenti à l’affaire du cochon sacrilège, il explique à sa correspondante que ce démenti prouve l’implication de l’évêque et de sa hiérarchie dans le complot et confirme ainsi l’omnipotence de la ‘cryptocratie’:47 Eh bien, ces faits ont été démentis officiellement par l’évêque de la Martinique, lequel a avoué, dans l’intimité, mentir par ordre. C’est vraiment bien, Dieu donnant une leçon vraiment biblique et les siens l’étouffant, la niant. Voilà où l’on en est.48

45

Ibid., pp. 97-98. Sainte Lydwine, p. 121. 47 Pour reprendre un mot de P.-A. Taguieff, La Foire aux illuminés, p. 53. 48 Lettre à Marie de Villermont, 8 décembre 1902. 46

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Réflexe similaire dans l’affaire Taxil. Quand Taxil révèle en 1897 que sa conversion était une supercherie visant à duper l’Église, Huysmans refuse de le croire et donne un tour d’écrou supplémentaire à la vis du complot. À ses yeux, cet aveu de mystification prouve l’existence d’une conspiration franc-maçonne encore plus redoutable: La maçonnerie luciférienne qui s’est fait couvrir de ridicule par Taxil pour se faire nier et enlever toute portée aux informations parfaitement exactes que ce drôle avait d’abord données, c’est là qu’est le vrai péril et le grand jeu […].49

Dans ce ‘grand jeu’, Huysmans dispose ainsi d’un système argumentatif imparable pour déchiffrer la politique et l’histoire de son temps. Non sans logique, on le voit même assigner à l’écriture littéraire une fonction militante toute nouvelle chez lui. De même que le livre de Jules Bois et sa préface s’assignaient pour but de ‘préserve[r] les coquins ou les dupes qui rêveraient de pénétrer […] dans l’au-delà du Mal’, Huysmans investit De Tout, le recueil de chroniques qu’il publie en 1902, d’une mission qu’il faut bien dire politique: il servira à ‘rappeler ce que furent les cloîtres […] avant que la canaille des Loges eût pourri ce qui restait encore de sain dans l’âme, si débile, hélas! de ce honteux pays’.50 Huysmans, on l’a rappelé, était chargé au ministère de l’Intérieur de dossiers touchant à la sûreté nationale. Or il faut bien reconnaître que ce fonctionnaire apprécié et décoré dysfonctionnait dans son privé. Pour lui, le pouvoir politique réel résidait moins dans les institutions de l’État que dans un contre-système secret et maléfique œuvrant en parallèle. Ce conspirationnisme est en effet la face noire du providentialisme huysmansien, et il en est étroitement solidaire. Autour de 1900, L’Église connaît en France ce que la plupart de ses membres considèrent comme de terribles revers. L’État vide ses 49

Lettre à Berthet, 30 mai 1900, Arsenal, Ms Lambert 67. Même explication dans une lettre à Ch. Rivière du 30 avril 1897: ‘C’est une affaire moins simple qu’elle n’a l’air. Pour moi c’est un coup de génie de la Maçonnerie, et Taxil n’est nullement un fumiste ou un fou, comme on le représente’ (Arsenal, Ms Lambert 61). Huysmans expose encore cette thèse dans une interview au XIXe siècle le 29 avril 1897. 50 Post-scriptum daté de ‘Ligugé, 22 septembre 1901, en la fête des Sept Douleurs de la B.V. Marie’ (éd. Crès, 1934), p. 322.

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écoles et ses cloîtres, mais pour les chrétiens qui refusent tout aggiornamento, à commencer par la politique de ralliement à la République, et qui constatent que l’Église, en dépit de sa résistance institutionnelle et de ses secours célestes, perd la bataille politique, tout bascule dans un contre-univers obscur, tout s’explique par un plan maléfique mondial qui fait chavirer l’Histoire dans le fantasme et le mythe. Ce mythe conspirationniste, on en conviendra, possède des potentialités littéraires séduisantes: il dispose d’une puissante efficacité affabulatoire et alimente des réservoirs d’images et des scénarios fantasmatiques multiples. On comprend aussi, sous le rapport idéologique, qu’il ait pu rassurer ses partisans en offrant à leur désarroi, comme l’écrit Taguieff, ‘une vision magique du politique non moins qu’une philosophie sommaire de l’Histoire’.51 Mais on peut aussi le juger alarmant puisqu’il a servi à accuser de malfaisance les juifs, les francs-maçons, les protestants et les libres-penseurs – en s’exonérant du devoir intellectuel et moral d’en apporter la preuve.

51

L’Imaginaire du complot mondial, p. 9.

Les Hommes de bronze de la Troisième République: Commémoration ou oubli de l’histoire? JANICE BEST

150 statues furent érigées à Paris sous la Troisième République entre 1870 et 1914.1 La plupart de ces monuments servaient à commémorer les ‘grands’ du passé: Voltaire, Danton, Rousseau, Rouget de Lisle, Diderot, Marat, Condorcet, et j’en passe. Bientôt la capitale fut ornée de tant de monuments qu’on inventa un nouveau terme – la ‘statuomanie’ – pour désigner cette frénésie pour les statues commémoratives.2 Qu’est-ce qui explique cet engouement pour la commémoration du passé? Mon hypothèse est que ce sont les aspects narratifs de ces monuments que différentes factions cherchaient à contrôler dans un effort de façonner le mythe fondateur de la Troisième République. Ceux qui étaient au pouvoir et ceux qui s’y opposaient utilisaient l’espace public afin de forger les valeurs du nouveau régime. La Troisième République avait en effet connu des débuts difficiles. Proclamée le 4 septembre 1870 au lendemain de la défaite de l’armée française à Sedan, la République a dû se défendre à la fois contre les Prussiens qui encerclaient sa capitale et contre son propre gouvernement qui, retiré à Versailles, cherchait secrètement à restaurer la Monarchie. À Paris, la garde nationale, qui avait défendu la capitale pendant un siège de quatre mois, était toujours armée. Exaspéré par les conditions humiliantes de l’armistice et craignant un retour de la Monarchie, le peuple parisien résista aux tentatives de désarmement gouvernementales. Le 18 mars, lorsque les troupes Versaillaises entrè1

2

June Hargrove, Les Statues de Paris: La Représentation des grands hommes dans les rues et sur les places de Paris (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), p. 105. Gustave Pessard, La Statuomanie parisienne: Étude critique sur l’abus des statues, listes des statues et monuments existants (Paris: H. Daragon, 1912).

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rent dans Paris afin d’enlever leurs canons, le peuple se révolta et forma un gouvernement insurrectionnel, composé d’ouvriers, d’artisans, d’artistes, de journalistes, et de membres de la garde nationale et préconisant des idées telles l’école obligatoire, laïque, et gratuite; l’abolition de la conscription et de l’armée permanente; et la lutte ouvrière internationale. Connu comme la Commune de Paris, ce gouvernement dura jusqu’au 28 mai 1871 – 72 jours en tout. Le gouvernement Versaillais réagit vite envers cette menace pour ses propres prétentions démocratiques et le 21 mai, les troupes Versaillaises envahirent la ville et pendant six jours massacrèrent systématiquement tous ceux soupçonnés d’êtres des Communards. On estime que 25 000 à 30 000 hommes, femmes, et enfants moururent sans procès ni enquête pendant cette période, connue comme la Semaine Sanglante, et leurs corps furent jetés dans une fosse commune au cimetière du Père-Lachaise, lieu du dernier renfort de résistance contre les Versaillais. Plus de 7 500 autres personnes furent condamnées à la déportation, et encore 3 000 autres personnes furent condamnées par contumace.3 Après la fin du massacre, et la reprise de la ville par la bourgeoisie, une grande partie de Paris était en ruines car d’abord les obus des Versaillais et ensuite les Communards eux-mêmes mirent le feu à plusieurs bâtiments administratifs – notamment le Palais des Tuileries, le Ministère des Finances, et l’Hôtel de Ville. Le Conseil municipal de Paris avait donc d’importantes décisions à prendre concernant la reconstruction de l’espace public de Paris. Quels bâtiments convenaitil de raser, et quels autres fallait-il reconstruire? Deux édifices en particulier avaient une importance symbolique et idéologique. Le Palais des Tuileries rappelait les régimes du passé – à la fois le Second 3

Voir, entre autres études, celles de J.-P. Azéma et M. Winock, Les Communards (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964); Georges Bourgin, Les Premières Journées de la Commune (Paris: Hachette, 1938); Robert Brécy, La Chanson de la Commune: Chansons et poèmes inspirés par la Commune de 1871 (Hongrie: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1991); Jean T. Joughin, The Paris Commune in French Politics, 18711880, vols 1 & 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1955); P.O. Lissagaray, Histoire de la Commune de 1871 (Bruxelles, 1877); Jacques Rougeire, Jalons pour une histoire de la Commune de Paris (Assen: van Gorcum, 1973); Jacques Rougerie, Procès des Communards (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1978); Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune 1871 (London: Longman, 1999); David A. Shafer, The Paris Commune (London: Palgrave, 2005).

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Empire et les diverses Monarchies qui l’avaient précédé. L’Hôtel de Ville, en revanche, siège du gouvernement de la Commune, symbolisait le pouvoir municipal et démocratique. Les débats concernant leur reconstruction reflètent la lutte entre les différentes factions qui rivalisaient pour le contrôle du pouvoir pendant les premières années de la Troisième République. La discussion concernant une possible reconstruction du Palais des Tuileries gardait par exemple ouverte la possibilité d’un retour de la Monarchie. La décision de laisser ce palais en ruines pendant plusieurs années avait aussi des implications politiques car elle gardait vif le souvenir des incendies de la Commune pendant la période même où l’on jugeait et condamnait les anciens Communards. Différentes factions tentaient donc de s’emparer du pouvoir en manipulant autant que possible dans les espaces publics de Paris la façon dont il convenait de se souvenir de la Commune. On décida dès 1872 de restaurer l’Hôtel de Ville à son état d’avant les incendies. L’idée que la reconstruction de l’Hôtel de Ville devait servir à faire ‘disparaître une des traces de la guerre civile’ fut souvent répétée lors des discussions du Conseil municipal.4 La distinction entre ce que signifiait restaurer ou reconstruire l’Hôtel de Ville acquit vite des connotations politiques. Le 20 janvier 1872, par exemple, le conseiller municipal Tranchant déclara: ‘Il ne faudrait point en faire disparaître complètement le souvenir par une construction entièrement nouvelle, ce serait […] achever l’œuvre de destruction commencée par la Commune.’ En d’autres mots, construire un nouvel Hôtel de Ville serait vu comme la continuation de la destruction commencée par les Communards; restaurer l’édifice à l’état exact où il était avant les événements de la Commune servirait à effacer la Commune en tant qu’événement historique. Le Préfet de la Seine rendit cette distinction explicite lorsqu’il déclara, le 17 juillet 1872: En annonçant un concours pour la ‘reconstruction’ de l’Hôtel de Ville, la Commission ne tient pas compte du désir formulé par le Conseil de conserver le plus possible le souvenir de l’ancien Hôtel de Ville et notamment la façade historique du Boccador. Le mot ‘restauration’ qui avait été employé par

4

Conseil municipal de Paris, Procès-verbaux, séance du 8 mars 1873 (Paris: Librairie La Hure, 1873).

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Janice Best l’administration dans son programme, répondait plus formellement à ce désir, tandis que le mot ‘reconstruction’ tend à exclure du projet toute trace du passé.5

Le programme du concours pour la reconstruction de l’Hôtel de Ville enfin approuvé par le Conseil municipal lors de sa séance du 22 juillet 1872, employa le terme ‘restauration’ et souligna la nécessité de préserver autant que possible le bâtiment original datant de la Renaissance, et de conserver l’œuvre de son architecte, Boccador.6 Paradoxalement, cette volonté d’oubli ne s’étendait pas aux ruines du Palais des Tuileries qui ne furent rasées qu’en 1883, laissant un souvenir bien visible de la déchéance du Second Empire et de la Monarchie. La nécessité de reconstruire la capitale fournissait à certaines factions au sein du Conseil municipal l’occasion de donner un nouveau visage républicain à une ville qui jusque-là s’était surtout décorée de statues de rois et d’empereurs. Un ambitieux projet général pour les travaux d’art dans la capitale, présenté en février 1879 par le célèbre architecte, Viollet-le-Duc, comportait quatre volets principaux: 1e un programme d’ensemble relativement aux travaux d’art à exécuter aux abords de l’Hôtel de Ville en construction; 2e un projet d’ensemble touchant à la décoration de l’avenue des Champs-Élysées, laquelle devait être bordée de statues historiques; 3e un projet de décoration (peinture et sculpture) des salles des nouvelles mairies; 4e le programme d’un concours pour l’érection d’une statue de la République sur la place du Château-d’Eau.7

Salué par certains comme le lancement d’un nouvel art républicain et démocratique,8 ce vaste projet ne plaisait pas à grand nombre d’artistes, qui n’aimaient pas à se conformer aux contraintes spécifiées dans les conditions des concours imposées par le Conseil municipal de Paris. Ces restrictions touchaient à des détails tels que le nombre de figures permis, quels attributs et emblèmes ces figures pouvaient avoir, et précisément quel moment historique devait être dépeint. 5

CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 17 juillet 1872. Programme d’un concours pour la reconstruction de l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris (Paris: La Hure, 1872). 7 CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 27 février 1879. 8 Marius Vachon, ‘ L’Art au Conseil Municipal de Paris ’, La Nouvelle Revue, tome I, 1879, pp. 1088-103. 6

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Chaque détail avait son importance symbolique et fut l’objet de débats animés où l’on voit s’affronter non seulement différentes idéologies, mais aussi différentes manières d’interpréter l’Histoire. Un vaste projet de redénomination des rues de Paris afin d’éliminer ceux qui rappelaient des ‘souvenirs politiques néfastes’9 accompagnait ce projet pour les travaux d’art afin de souligner par la nomenclature de la capitale un changement de régime que les républicains voulaient définitif. Parmi les personnages historiques qu’on statufiait, il y en avait trois sortes: les héros de la Révolution de 1789 tels que Marat et Danton (Fig. 1), les philosophes considérés comme les précurseurs de la Révolution, parmi lesquels on retrouve Diderot (Fig. 2) et Condorcet (Fig. 3), ou encore Rousseau et Voltaire (Fig. 4), et, finalement, les martyrs de l’Ancien Régime, notamment Étienne Dolet et Étienne Marcel (Fig. 5). Si l’idée d’un projet de décoration de la capitale ne suscita pas de controverse, la décision de statufier tel ou tel personnage pouvait souvent provoquer des débats houleux où l’on peut voir clairement se dessiner les différentes factions au sein du Conseil municipal. Il y avait également de nombreuses tensions entre le Conseil municipal et le gouvernement national, de tendance plus conservatrice que les élus parisiens. Plusieurs commentateurs ont analysé la polémique entourant cet ensemble de statues: Guénola Groud, June Hargrove, Serguisz Michalski, mais n’ont pas relevé l’importance des non-dits dans ces débats.10 Car derrière ces projets de commémoration se cachait un débat avant tout politique – celui des origines de la Troisième République. Autrement dit, le pouvoir actuel avait-il ses origines dans des institutions lointaines, comme on tentait de s’en convaincre en faisant élever tant de statues commémoratives dédiées aux précurseurs et aux héros de 1789, ou n’avait-il pas un lien plus direct avec les événements de la Commune qui l’avait directement précédé? Absents de tous ces projets de commémoration sont les héros et les martyrs de la Commune de 1871, malgré les efforts réitérés d’une 9

CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 26 juillet 1879. Thérèse Burollet, Guéonla Groud et Daniel Imbert, Quand Paris dansait avec Marianne. 1879-1889 (Paris: Éditions Paris-Musées, 1989); June Hargrove, Les Statues de Paris: La Représentation des grands hommes dans les rues et sur les places de Paris (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989); Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870-1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998).

10

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majorité au sein du Conseil municipal. Selon l’Assemblée nationale (connue comme le gouvernement de l’ordre moral), la République ne pouvait être vue comme ayant ses origines dans un régime qui avait massacré ses citoyens. L’opposition, en revanche, cherchait des manières de commémorer les morts, et de réclamer la nouvelle République comme la leur. Dès 1883, le conseiller municipal Joffrin déposa donc une proposition concernant un monument qu’il voulait faire élever au cimetière du Père-Lachaise, en souvenir des Communards qui ‘fidèles jusqu’à la mort à leur foi politique et sociale, [étaient] héroïquement tombés’ défendant la Commune et la République.11 D’autres propositions en faveur d’un monument dédié aux Communards furent débattues en 1884, 1886, 1887 et encore en 1895. Malgré un vote de 35 voix en faveur du monument et de seulement 5 voix contre, le Préfet de la Seine, représentant du gouvernement au sein du Conseil municipal, refusa tout simplement d’autoriser un tel monument. À partir de 1880, de nombreuses manifestations eurent lieu dans le cimetière pour commémorer les débuts et la fin de la Commune. Dès le départ, ces cérémonies furent marquées par plusieurs ‘incidents’ entre les manifestants et la police. Le 23 mai 1880, par exemple, plusieurs manifestants ont été arrêtés et emprisonnés parce qu’ils portaient des immortelles rouges à la boutonnière ou voulaient déposer des couronnes sur le mur. En 1888, un soi-disant anarchiste qui s’est retrouvé debout sur le faîte du mur tenant un drapeau noir tira plusieurs coups de revolver et deux personnes furent blessées.12 Selon les manifestants, cet ‘incident’ aurait été en partie déclenché par des ‘agents provocateurs’ du gouvernement.13 En tout cas, il servit de prétexte au gouvernement pour renforcer la présence de la police lors des défilés de commémoration. En 1895, le Préfet de la Police Lépine prit la décision de fermer tout simplement les portes du cimetière, sous prétexte que le rassemblement prévu allait ‘troubler la tranquillité publique’.14 Ces

11

CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 17 mars 1884. Illustration, samedi 2 juin 1888. 13 CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 12 juin 1895. 14 Ibid. 12

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mesures ‘vexatoires’ provoquèrent l’échange suivant, entre le Préfet de la Police et le conseiller municipal Landrin: M. Landrin. – M. le préfet de Police possède une faculté particulière de divination; il connaît d’avance quelles sont les manifestations qui doivent troubler l’ordre, comme il prétend connaître d’avance les grèves qui doivent devenir tumultueuses. M. le Préfet de Police. – Je suis éclairé par une grande expérience. M. Landrin. – Ce don de prescience est une qualité précieuse pour un chef de la police, s’il l’appliquait à la découverte des voleurs et des assassins, la sécurité publique serait parfaite. Malheureusement il n’en use que pour la politique.15

Ce ne fut qu’en 1909 qu’on obtint l’autorisation de poser une simple plaque sur le mur contre lequel les Communards furent massacrés (Fig. 6). Il est clair d’après la lecture de ces débats que le Gouvernement national craignait qu’un monument officiel au cimetière du Père-Lachaise ne devienne un lieu de ralliement pour les révolutionnaires et que des manifestations autour du monument pourraient déclencher une nouvelle insurrection. C’est ainsi qu’en parallèle à ces efforts pour obtenir une reconnaissance officielle des événements de 1871, le Conseil municipal de Paris se tourna vers son vaste projet de décoration de la capitale par des statues commémoratives. Chaque grand du passé était proposé parce qu’il incarnait une valeur républicaine: Camille Desmoulins pour avoir été le premier à avoir appelé le peuple aux armes le 12 juillet 1789, Rouget de Lisle parce que ‘sa Marseillaise enflamma les générations républicaines, enfanta des héros, [et] chassa les traîtres à la patrie’.16 On justifia la statue de Ledru-Rollin en le déclarant le premier à avoir instauré le suffrage universel en France. Et Danton fut salué comme ‘l’âme de la défense nationale’ et fut surtout loué pour avoir: ‘par avance encouragé les efforts faits depuis 1871 en faveur de l’éducation populaire, le jour où il a prononcé à la Convention nationale ces paroles dignes de figurer au frontispice de nos écoles: “Quand vous semez dans le vaste champ de la République, vous ne devez pas compter le prix de la semence: après le pain, l’éducation est le premier besoin du peuple”’.17 15

Ibid. CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 29 juin 1880. 17 CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 7 mars 1887. 16

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Ici, Danton est directement lié aux événements de 1871 et aux efforts de la Commune en faveur de l’éducation publique qu’il est censé avoir encouragés ‘par avance’, permettant au Conseil municipal de se réapproprier un personnage historique afin d’en faire un contemporain. Comme l’a dit le sculpteur Bion au moment de l’inauguration: ‘Ce Danton-ci, c’est notre Danton à nous, celui de 1870, l’année de la guerre et du siège’.18 L’exemple du monument à Étienne Marcel (Fig. 5), le prévôt des marchands qui, en 1358, avait réclamé la liberté municipale de la Ville de Paris, illustre la façon dont le Conseil municipal utilisait ces projets de commémoration afin de relier les héros du passé directement aux idées sociales de la Commune. Faire incarner ces idées dans des statues en bronze sur les places publiques de Paris solidifiait leur importance historique mais aussi leur emprise sur le pouvoir actuel et à venir. C’est ainsi qu’en présentant le projet de résolution en faveur de la statue d’Étienne Marcel le 14 mai 1878 les conseillers municipaux affirmaient leur volonté de multiplier ‘autant que possible les monuments qui rappellent le souvenir des efforts tentés pour l’affranchissement et l’émancipation du pays’ et d’honorer ‘les citoyens qui sont morts pour la démocratie et pour la liberté’.19 La cérémonie d’inauguration de la statue équestre d’Étienne Marcel le 15 juin 1888 servit de prétexte aux élus municipaux de réclamer le retour du poste de maire de Paris, supprimé par Napoléon et restauré brièvement sous la Commune. Le président de la France, qui avait pourtant assisté à la cérémonie d’inauguration du nouvel Hôtel de Ville, refusa d’y assister, ne voulant pas cautionner la célébration d’un personnage considéré par certains comme un traître à son pays. La cérémonie fut, en revanche, présidée par le président du Conseil municipal Darlot et le préfet de la Seine, le célèbre Poubelle, qui saluèrent Étienne Marcel comme le vrai maire de Paris. Ses actions annonçaient les combats contemporains car seules ‘les franchises communales assureront l’unité de la nation et le salut de la République’.20

18

Bion-Saint Gaudens, correspondance: manuscrit conservé à la Dartmouth College Library; copie à la documentation des sculptures du musée d’Orsay. 19 CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 14 mai 1878. 20 Bulletin municipal officiel, 15-16 juillet 1888.

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Insister sur l’importance de la liberté communale comme sauvegarde de la République permettait au Conseil municipal de souligner encore une fois l’importance de la Commune en tant qu’événement historique majeur et le rôle qu’elle avait joué en 1871 pour empêcher la restauration d’une Monarchie en France. Placer la statue d’Étienne Marcel devant les fenêtres mêmes de l’appartement du préfet de la Seine servait aussi comme rappel constant du désir des élus municipaux de voir réinstaurer le poste du maire – vœu qui ne serait exaucé qu’en 1977 avec l’élection de Jacques Chirac. Les cérémonies d’inauguration, les inscriptions sur les socles des monuments, ou parfois même l’emplacement choisi pour une statue permettaient non seulement au Conseil municipal de faire l’éloge des martyrs de la Commune tout en échappant à la censure officielle, mais aussi de contrer les idées et fortunes politiques de leurs adversaires. Décider de l’emplacement d’une statue n’était donc pas chose facile, car chaque place avait sa signification historique, symbolique, et idéologique. La faction radicale du Conseil municipal voulait, par exemple, faire ériger une grande statue monumentale de la République sous l’Arc de Triomphe afin d’indiquer que les empereurs et les rois n’y devaient plus passer.21 Les discussions concernant l’emplacement des statues dédiées à Voltaire et à Rousseau durèrent plus de trois ans. Le projet de faire placer ces deux précurseurs de la Révolution face à face devant le Panthéon échoua car on n’arriva pas à réconcilier les différences idéologiques entre les admirateurs de l’un et de l’autre des grands philosophes. Étienne Dolet, qui fut torturé et brûlé avec ses livres en 1546, était considéré par la Société de la libre pensée comme une victime de la religion catholique. Le monument à son hommage se fit attribuer la place Maubert, en vue des tours de la cathédrale Notre-Dame afin de rappeler à tous la nécessité de continuer la lutte contre le fanatisme religieux, et contre un possible retour de la Monarchie. Et la statue de Ledru-Rollin, le fondateur du suffrage universel, fut élevée sur la place Voltaire, l’endroit où, sous la Commune, on avait brûlé la guillotine et où, pendant la Semaine Sanglante, de nombreux Communards s’étaient réfugiés.

21

CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 11 mars 1879.

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La théorie souvent répétée par les politiciens de droite afin de soutenir leur résistance à toute tentative de commémoration officielle de la Commune était que la meilleure façon de prévenir les insurrections futures était d’oblitérer le souvenir des insurrections du passé. Comme le dit le conseiller de droite Delabrousse: ‘il n’y a qu’une façon de prévenir les guerres civiles de l’avenir, c’est d’effacer celles du passé. Voilà pourquoi l’oubli est nécessaire’.22 La loi même de l’amnistie de 1880, permettant le retour des quelque huit mille exilés de la Commune avait stipulé qu’il fallait ‘tirer un voile d’oubli sur les événements de la Commune’.23 Chacun de ces ‘hommes de bronze’, ayant été commandé par l’État, participait donc à la volonté du gouvernement national de relier les origines de la Troisième République au passé glorieux de la France afin de mieux effacer tout souvenir de la Commune, mais en même temps y résistait. Ce qui semble en jeu dans tous ces monuments sont deux versions distinctes de l’histoire. Selon la première, ce sont les Parisiens et les Communards qui ont sauvé la République car sans eux les Versaillais auraient rétabli la Monarchie: M. Joffrin. – Sans la Commune, vous n’auriez pas la République. M. Loiseau. – Ce n’est pas mon opinion; l’histoire jugera.24

Selon les conseillers de droite, cependant, si les Communards étaient restés au pouvoir, les Prussiens n’auraient pas permis une République; ce sont donc les Versaillais qui ont sauvé la République en supprimant la Commune. Comme l’a dit le Préfet de la Seine en 1884: Et je ne puis m’abstenir de penser aujourd’hui que si la Commune de Paris avait triomphé, le gouvernement allemand n’eût pas traité avec elle et que le gouvernement que l’ennemi eût imposé à la France n’eût pas été la République. […] Si la République a pu s’établir, c’est parce que la Commune a été vaincue.25

Ce paradoxe d’une population divisée entre l’oubli et la commémoration reflète l’ambiguïté de cette période et offre un exemple du rôle important joué par l’espace public dans cette période de crise 22

CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 30 juin 1884. Le Journal officiel, Débats du Sénat, le 4 juillet 1880. 24 CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 11 juillet 1883. 25 CMP, Procès-verbaux, séance du 30 juin 1884. 23

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politique. Les principales factions politiques – les monarchistes, les bonapartistes, et les républicains – rivalisaient pour le contrôle de l’espace public afin de l’imprégner de connotations politiques claires, mais n’ont réussi qu’à rendre l’interprétation de l’espace public plus complexe. La restauration de l’Hôtel de Ville renforçait les objectifs du camp républicain en lui permettant de maintenir un symbole important de l’indépendance municipale de la Ville de Paris mais en même temps aidait les camps monarchistes et bonapartistes à nier l’existence même de la Commune. Les ruines du Palais des Tuileries, en revanche, gardaient présents à l’esprit les incendies de la Commune pendant la période même où l’on jugeait, condamnait et déportait les anciens Communards vers la Nouvelle Calédonie. La lutte pour le contrôle de l’espace public par le biais des monuments qui le décoraient se reliait ainsi directement à la lutte pour le contrôle de l’Histoire et du pouvoir politique. Cette polémique autour de la commémoration ou de l’oubli de la Commune qui a longtemps animé les débats du Conseil municipal est encore vive aujourd’hui. Une nouvelle ‘place de la Commune’ a été enfin inaugurée le 19 avril 2000 dans le 13e arrondissement de Paris, sur la place qui se situe au carrefour des rues Buot et l’Espérance, à la Butte aux Cailles. Le lieu choisi était hautement symbolique: après l’entrée des Versaillais dans Paris le 21 mai 1871, la Butte aux Cailles était un des principaux lieux de combat de la résistance des Communards. Le maire de Paris à l’époque, Jean Tiberi, avait fait reculer la date de la cérémonie pour ne pas coïncider avec les cérémonies du 18 mars, début de la Commune. Avant la cérémonie, les forces de l’ordre, assez nombreuses, ont essayé pendant un moment d’interdire l’entrée de la place aux porteurs de drapeaux rouges. Le discours de Tiberi – qui s’est réclamé de l’héritage de la Commune, tout en appelant Thiers, l’homme qui avait ordonné les massacres, un visionnaire – a fait scandale, la plaque aussi.26 Car sur la plaque inaugurée ce jour-là il n’y avait aucune date. Comme l’a dit Pierre Ysmal dans le journal L’Humanité du 21 avril 2000: ‘Ultime mesquinerie des services de la ville, on a négligé de mettre sur la plaque 1871. Place de la Commune de Paris est anondin. Place de la Commune-de-Paris

26

Tiberi a fait l’éloge de Thiers, l’appelant un ‘prophète’.

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1871 demeure révolutionnaire pour les descendants de l’ordre moral’.27 Il fallait en effet attendre l’élection de Bertrand Delanoë et le retour des socialistes à l’Hôtel de Ville pour que la place de la Commune retrouve enfin sa date et sa (petite) place dans la ville de Paris. Curieusement, cette même année voit la création d’un nouveau comité national qui milite en faveur de la reconstruction à l’identique du palais des Tuileries, présenté comme ‘un acte de réconciliation nationale’.28 Quant aux hommes de bronze de la Troisième République, la plupart ont aujourd’hui disparu. Le Gouvernement de Vichy a décrété en 1941 l’enlèvement de tous les statues et monuments en alliage cuivreux qui n’étaient pas de caractère ‘indubitablement’ artistique. Quatre-vingts statues sont tombées victimes de cette ‘revanche du goût’ qui visait à faire ‘disparaître’ le ‘laid’ des espaces publics de Paris. Bien entendu le choix fut fait en fonction du caractère plus ou moins politique du monument en question. Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Marat, Camille Desmoulins, et Ledru-Rollin partirent tous à la fonderie. Danton et Étienne Marcel furent épargnés. Comme l’a dit Yvon Bizardel, ‘la tragédie des statues comme celle des hommes comporta ses malchanceux et ses miraculés’.29

27

La délibération originale du Conseil municipal précisait en effet ‘place de la Commune de Paris’ (Conseil municipal de Paris, Délibérations, 12 et 13 juillet 1999). 28 http://www.tuileries.org/page.php?id=a.mediter. Citation de Jean Tulard. 29 Yvon Bizardel, ‘Les Statues parisiennes fondues sous l’Occupation (1940-1944)’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts (mars 1974), pp. 129-34.

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Fig. 1: Danton (photo Janice Best)

Fig. 2: Diderot (photo Janice Best)

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Fig. 3: Condorcet (photo Janice Best)

Fig. 4: Voltaire (photo Janice Best)

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Fig. 5: Étienne Marcel (photo Janice Best)

Fig. 6: Plaque commémorant la mort des Communards (photo Janice Best)

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Part II Power and Space

Power in the City: Balzac’s Flâneur in La Fille aux yeux d’or ELISABETH GERWIN

In the French nineteenth century, power was an increasingly urban phenomenon. Famously characterized by Walter Benjamin as the ‘capital’ of the entire century, the city of Paris was setting the stage for articulating modern power dynamics, both for its contemporaries and for those who came after. The terms by which urban forces were being negotiated have been often explored and rehearsed, but perhaps never more vividly than by the self-appointed secretary of his own society, Honoré de Balzac, in L’Histoire des treize. The work as a whole promises to draw the reader in ‘par la senteur parisienne des détails’ and the well-known third volume, La Fille aux yeux d’or, opens by depicting the population of Paris as dominated by false appearances and restless avarice, all driven by the same two elusive objects of desire that echo through the text: ‘or et plaisir’.1 Balzac identifies gold as the representation of the force that propels humanity; in this, as we shall see, he anticipates by a hundred years Benjamin’s understanding of the capitalist driving force that was reorganizing mid-century Paris, its social map and even its streets and arcades. La Fille aux yeux d’or presents the power of gold as one provoking a frenetic and insatiable desire, a force of chaotic avarice more than one of consolidated agency. However, as is often the case in his texts, Balzac will seek to present not only the common drives of the masses, but also the extraordinary figure who incarnates an exceptional power; and within this nineteenth-century urban landscape, a crucial example is provided by the flâneur. Even while, in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith’s city wanderer experienced a perspicacious ‘sympathy’ 1

Honoré de Balzac, L’Histoire des treize, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, ‘Classiques Garnier’ series (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1966), pp. 17 and 383.

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with the unknown passer-by, still ‘unquestionably, the flâneur enters history along with capitalism’.2 For Balzac, who elaborates some of the earliest types of the French flâneur, the contemporary expression of desire in terms of ‘or et plaisir’ provides a foil for the observant and detached flâneur. By mid-century, a very different Baudelairean flâneur will become increasingly bound up in the contradiction of sustaining artistic remove while being, both socially and financially, invested in the forces governing the crowd. However, in La Fille aux yeux d’or in particular, Balzac is interested in whether the position of the flâneur – as one who remains economically and affectively detached from the tumultuous drives of the urban masses – can prove sustainable within the emerging economy of power and desire. For the figure who stands above exchange, maintaining this position may prove to have a cost of its own. What Balzac calls ‘gold’ is not simply the symbolically liberated wealth of an increasingly bourgeois society, for it lies at the heart of a distinctly modern notion of desire as being founded on a perpetual lack. Balzac formulates the inherent irony of this structure early in La Fille aux yeux d’or: ‘À force de s’intéresser à tout,’ he declares, ‘le Parisien finit par ne s’intéresser à rien’.3 Such desire is at once allconsuming and empty, and its force is channelled by the golden signifier, promising the fulfilment of pleasure, and spawning an avidity that spreads like a contagion through the crowded streets. Indeed, this urban population is already marked by lack, according to Balzac, for it is ‘sans mœurs, sans croyance, sans aucun sentiment’;4 furthermore, Balzac’s choice of 1814 as the setting for the tale premises the structure of lack on the power vacuum left by the first exile of Napoleon Bonaparte.5 As is the case with all signifiers, the pursuit of 2

See Bruce Mazlish, ‘The Flâneur: From Spectator to Representation’, in The Flâneur, ed. by Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 43-60; p. 46. Mazlish also discusses Adam Smith in more detail here. 3 L’Histoire des treize, p. 372. 4 Ibid., p. 372. 5 James Creech comments on the choice of 1814 as a setting for this story of desire; see his ‘Castration and Desire in Sarrasine and The Girl with the Golden Eyes: A Gay Perspective’, in The Rhetoric of the Other: Lesbian and Gay Strategies of Resistance in French and Francophone Contexts, ed. by Martine Antel and Dominique Fisher (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2002), pp. 45-63; p. 52.

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gold, once launched, is by definition without end. Balzac observes that, even when one arrives at the summit of Parisian society, in the apartments of ‘la gent aristocratique où [l’or] va reluire, s’étaler, ruisseler’, one finds there ‘rien de réel’.6 By entering the streets of Paris of 1814, it seems, we have also entered into the conceptual system of Lacan, with ‘gold’ operating as signifier, propelling desire and the pursuit of pleasure by constantly underscoring its own alluring absence from the system. Not only does gold, like all signifiers, fail to deliver on any promise of ‘pleasure’, but furthermore, as wealth increases through the seething pyramid of society, so does the sense of lack. Thus at the aristocratic heights of Paris, Balzac explains, ‘On est avare de temps à force d’en perdre. N’y cherchez pas plus d’affections que d’idées’. The consequence of this, which is far-reaching as we shall see, is that at the supposed pinnacle of society, ‘On n’y aime jamais autrui’.7 Within the Balzacian logic, general truths such as the rapacious power of desire in the urban heart of France are established, in part, with a view to setting off their exceptions, and this is what Balzac proceeds to do in La Fille aux yeux d’or. It will remain, however, a genuine question whether any exemption from this avaricious system is in fact viable, for ‘or et plaisir’ were not establishing simply one order among others, as Balzac well knew, but were altering the very fabric of society at all levels. In the words of Françoise Gaillard, at issue in early nineteenth-century Paris is the problematic of ‘la synthèse impossible du désir et de l’économie’.8 Nevertheless, Balzac begins by proposing that amongst the grasping, greedy populace there exist a few contented individuals, and in particular what he calls ‘l’heureuse et molle espèce des flâneurs, les seuls gens réellement heureux à Paris, et qui en dégustent à chaque heure les mouvantes poésies’.9 This early incarnation of the flâneur is one who remains unaffected by the power of the urban market place – a formulation that is borne out by other writers who mention the flâneur, and that will be 6

L’Histoire des treize, pp. 383 and 384. Ibid., p. 385. 8 Françoise Gaillard, ‘L’Effet Peau de Chagrin’, in Le Roman de Balzac: Recherches critiques, méthodes, lectures, ed. by Roland Le Huenen and Paul Perron (Ottawa: Marcel Didier, 1980), pp. 213-30; p. 214. 9 L’Histoire des treize, p. 387. 7

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famously reinvestigated at mid-century by Baudelaire. In the context of his novella, Balzac will not name an individual flâneur; yet it seems clear that when Henri de Marsay is introduced, after a transitional passage mentioning ‘quelques ravissants visages de jeunes gens’ of which his is exemplary, this young dandy is meant to be seen as a manner of flâneur from ‘la haute aristocratie’. Interestingly, while Balzac is often cited as inaugurating the flâneur as a fully-developed literary type, Henri de Marsay is rarely referenced as an example. Flâneur-like characters certainly abound in Balzac’s writing, including those who, like the first-person narrator of ‘Facino Cane’, draw directly on their observations for creative and even remunerative purposes. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson writes, concerning the Physiologie du mariage, ‘there will be more elaborate treatments of the flâneur but none more forceful than [...] Balzac’s fervent celebration of the “flâneur artiste”’.10 Yet while she then quotes the passage above from La Fille aux yeux d’or concerning the less artistic and more readerly ‘molle espèce des flâneurs’, she does not mention the aristocratic protagonist who strolls across the page shortly thereafter. I would suggest that, while Henri is neither precisely artist nor reader (or, as Auguste de Lacroix puts it, neither productive flâneur nor passive badaud),11 he is a manner of flâneur writ large, and one who importantly anticipates what Walter Benjamin will have to say concerning the forces affecting the Parisian flâneur a century later. In order to proceed, I shall speak briefly about the characterization of the flâneur more generally, and then consider how Henri de Marsay does or does not coincide with this type. Flânerie is, above all, a predominantly masculine and strictly urban motif.12 Many of its commentators also claim that it is particular to the nineteenth century (the era in which the idea of the flâneur is 10

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 90. 11 Auguste de Lacroix, ‘Le Flâneur’ in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, III: 66 and 72. Cited in Richard D.E. Burton, ‘The Unseen Seer, or Proteus in the City: Aspects of a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Myth’, French Studies, 42 (Jan. 1988), 50-68; p. 59. 12 This being said, the position of the flâneuse has also been explored, most recently by Catherine Nesci in her Le Flâneur et les flâneuses: Les Femmes et la ville à l’époque romantique (Grenoble: ELLUG Université Stendhal, coll. ‘Bibliothèque Stendhalienne et romantique’, 2007).

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first documented in France),13 and some, such as Auguste de Lacroix, include a geographical distinction, insisting that ‘Nous n’admettons pas même l’existence du flâneur autre part qu’à Paris’.14 For Balzac, at any rate, the flâneur is all of these things, though over the course of the nineteenth century the flâneur’s identity will evolve, as Parkhurst Ferguson has convincingly shown.15 Also according to Balzac, the flâneur, who is the knowledgeable and observant pedestrian par excellence, can himself be encountered in the streets and public parks, which is indeed precisely where Paquita will catch sight of Henri. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the flâneur is best understood as a literary as much as a socio-political phenomenon; as Rob Shields argues, ‘The principal habitat of the flâneur is the novels of Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, and Alexandre Dumas, and the flâneur is their surrogate in the street life of the fashionable quarters of Paris’.16 Sauntering through such texts, and thus through the imaginary urban constructions of the better part of a century, the flâneur is most striking in his ability at once to be an integral part of the crowd, and at the same time to stand entirely apart from it. Parkhurst Ferguson writes that the flâneur is simultaneously ‘on the street and above the fray, immersed in yet not absorbed by the city’;17 he is thus the paradoxical incarnation of the individual within the collective. Rob Shields also claims that ‘flânerie is a sociability of “Ones” which emphasizes and preserves the separateness of the individual’.18 This 13

General consensus points to an anonymous pamphlet, published in Paris in 1806 and entitled Le Flâneur au Salon, ou M. Bonhomme: Examen joyeux des tableaux, mêlé de vaudevilles, as the first printed description of the habits and habitat of the flâneur. See for instance Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’ in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. by Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1995), pp. 59-79; p. 62, and Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, p. 83. 14 Auguste de Lacroix, ‘Le Flâneur’ in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, III: 66. Cited in Burton, p. 58. 15 Parkhurst Ferguson structures the chapters of her Paris as Revolution around the evolution of the nineteenth-century flâneur through both literary and historical events, by mapping it onto the evolution of the burgeoning metropolis of Paris itself. 16 Rob Shields, ‘Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie’, in The Flâneur, ed. by Keith Tester, pp. 61-80; pp. 62-63. 17 Paris as Revolution, p. 80. 18 ‘Fancy Footwork’, pp. 63-64.

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separateness is not simply the manifestation of an intellectual superiority, though the artist-flâneur in particular upholds such a distinction from the man in the street; for intellectuals too have their circles, and artists their salons. Nor is the flâneur’s remove due precisely to what Mary Gluck has identified as ‘a certain kind of fluid, aestheticized sensibility that implies the abdication of political, moral, or cognitive control over the world’,19 for the flâneur has not yielded power or control to another agent. Rather, returning to the opening images of La Fille aux yeux d’or, the exceptionality that elevates Balzac’s flâneur above the frenetic avidity of the urban populace is that he has, and desires, no place in the urban economy. The true flâneur thus incarnates self-sufficiency and economic non-productivity, and as such he is indifferent to the infectious desire for the golden signifier. This also explains his consistent affiliation with discourses of the city; for if he is distinguished by wasting time and ignoring money, he must be in a place where money and time are becoming the conspicuous, even performative, measures of value. For Balzac, the principal mode of expression of desire is still that of romantic intrigue, which is why it is so important that Paquita, la fille aux yeux d’or, should actually embody and feminize the signifying gold. As the century advances, the commodity fetish will become institutional, appearing behind the shop window, with its exchange value displayed on a price tag. In her article on the flâneur, Parkhurst Ferguson writes: He haunts the arcades, he does not buy. He consumes the city at one remove, savouring the display without expenditure, financial or emotional. All the women in the street belong in his personal harem. He need not choose, and he need not pay.20

This portrait, which as we shall see in a moment closely matches Henri, touches on both the emotional distance and the presumed masculinity of the flâneur: for women are seen to be consistently bound up in the discourse of desire, primarily as its the object, and increasingly as its fetishistic subject. Femininity, so strongly defined 19

Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in NineteenthCentury Paris (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 67. 20 Paris as Revolution, p. 28.

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by psychoanalytic theories of the turn of the twentieth century in terms of lack, is depicted as inextricable from the forces of desire, and thus antithetical to the detachment of the flâneur. At the same time, if Paquita is no flâneuse, this is not merely because her gender limits her perambulations (for gender is always in flux in Balzac), but also because she is a desiring subject – though we should note that what she desires is not the commodity fetish. Importantly, she has no dealings with gold, and indeed (unlike Henri) does not comprehend the articulation of power in terms of money or acquisition.21 Rather, as the flâneur Henri will fail to understand, her passionate desire has nothing to do with the golden signifier or its lack, but manifests a genuine value that gold itself belies. This key notion of the Balzacian flâneur as detached from the discourse of desire, and from the glut of humanity that remains defined in all its social echelons by the flow of money, nevertheless has an artistic purpose, for it makes of the flâneur a detached and perspicacious observer. The power of perception will become especially significant to Baudelaire, and in his 1863 publication Le Peintre de la vie moderne, he idealizes the artist (Constantin Guys) as ‘le parfait flâneur, [...] l’observateur passionné’,22 at home in the crowd while hidden from its returning gaze. While Baudelaire’s slippage between artist and flâneur does not quite correspond to Henri, Balzac’s character is equally possessed of ‘cette promptitude de coup d’œil et d’ouïe particulière au Parisien qui paraît, au premier aspect, ne rien voir et ne rien entendre, mais qui voit et entend tout’.23 What differentiates the earlier from the later characterization of the flâneur type is the nature of what Baudelaire calls the ‘passion’ affiliated with the gaze. This is where Baudelaire’s flâneur touches on a sense of desire, a desire that Benjamin will later see as symptomatic of consumerism, and that Foucault in turn will align with the institutionalization of power in the nineteenth century through the ‘all-seeing

21

This is made quite explicit by Balzac when Paquita begs Henri to run away with her immediately, and Henri derides her naïve disregard for the need to budget such a departure. See L’Histoire des treize, p. 445. 22 Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions Robert Lafont, coll. ‘Bouquins’, 1992), pp. 790-815; p. 795. 23 L’Histoire des treize, p. 394.

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and invisible’ panopticon.24 Henri, however, is a pre-Baudelairean flâneur, a product of Balzac’s writing during the July Monarchy; thus he has no such passion, even though he is a penetrating observer, which is why he is so perfectly removed from his milieu. As Creech argues, ‘he is complete,’ in the sense of not having been contaminated by the contagion of lack and castration;25 and prior to his pursuit of Paquita, Balzac tells us, Henri has kept his passion within strict limits.26 Baudelaire will go on to describe his flâneur-artist as ‘un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito’,27 and here Balzac’s prefatory description of Henri’s exceptional band of thirteen – ‘ce monde à part dans le monde’ as he calls them – will provide a striking premonition: ‘Ce furent treize rois inconnus,’ declares Balzac, ‘mais réellement rois, et plus que rois, des juges et des bourreaux qui, s’étant fait des ailes pour parcourir la société du haut en bas, dédaignèrent d’y être quelque chose, parce qu’ils y pouvaient tout’.28 In this urban heart of France, where the monuments of Napoleon are juxtaposed with the palace of the soon-to-be restored monarchy, the thirteen flâneurs are true kings, capable of any action, and committed to no definable state of being. In a sense this further aligns them with Baudelaire’s poetflâneur, inasmuch as, according to Keith Tester, ‘the ontological basis of the Baudelairean poet resides in doing not being’; though again for Baudelaire, says Tester, ‘doing’ will ultimately engage the poet in the rapid circulation that includes ‘traffic, commodities, [and] thoughts’.29 Henri’s power of action, however, seems to exempt him from both circulation and from any clear ontology, in that he is as detached from beings, and from Being, as what Baudelaire calls ‘le dandy [qui] aspire à l’insensibilité’.30 Balzac writes: ‘Henri pouvait ce qu’il voulait dans l’intérêt de ses plaisirs et de ses vanités. Cette invisible action sur le monde social l’avait revêtu d’une majesté réelle, mais

24

Concerning the working of the Foucaultean panopticon, see Burton, ‘The Unseen Seer’, p. 59. 25 ‘Castration and Desire’, p. 56. 26 L’Histoire des treize, p. 444. 27 ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, p. 795; Baudelaire’s italics. 28 L’Histoire des treize, pp. 16-17, my italics. 29 Keith Tester, ‘Introduction’ in The Flâneur, pp. 1-21; p. 5, Tester’s italics. 30 ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, p. 795.

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secrète, sans emphase et repliée sur lui-même’.31 Power and desire are one, for Henri, and his regal existence is removed from a defining and highly Lacanian struggle between the two. Thus it is that, when we meet him, ‘Vers la fin de 1814, Henri de Marsay n’avait donc sur terre aucun sentiment obligatoire et se trouvait libre autant que l’oiseau sans compagne’.32 His androgynous beauty means that he is entirely used to being the object of desire, a point which incidentally makes him more visually remarkable than the Baudelairean flâneur. Yet his freedom and his ability to consume without cost are underscored as he describes the moment when, a few days earlier, he attracted the eye of yet another beautiful young woman. He regales his friend Paul de Manerville with his thoughts at the time: ‘Moralement parlant, sa figure semblait dire: – Quoi, te voilà, mon idéal, l’être de mes pensées, de mes rêves du soir et du matin. Comment es-tu là? pourquoi ce matin? pourquoi pas hier? Prends-moi, je suis à toi, et cœtera! Bon, me dis-je en moi-même, encore une!’33 A genuine exchange of words and ideas in this desireridden society is of no more interest to Henri than to Baudelaire’s voyeuristic flâneur. Just as the Baudelairean poet can elaborate the life story of une passante from a glimpse of her profile, so Henri can generate a dialogue of one, with enough confidence to recognize the contributions of the other party as meriting no more than a dismissive ‘et cœtera’. This may not be quite tantamount to seeing Paquita as the mirror for ‘his own idealized self-image,’ as Shoshana Felman proposes;34 for in fact, at the very moment in which he encounters Paquita, Henri is explicitly given the opportunity to see his own reflection, not in la fille aux yeux d’or, but in the girl’s striking companion. Of this second woman Henri’s friend Paul declares: ‘ma parole d’honneur, elle te ressemble...’, and though he is neither artist nor flâneur, Paul is quite correct.35 This dark, mysterious figure will prove in the story’s dénouement to be Henri’s unknown half-sister Margarita, and a highly 31

L’Histoire des treize, p. 425. Ibid., p. 392. 33 Ibid., p. 400. 34 Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 41-67; p. 46. 35 L’Histoire des treize, p. 401. 32

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Balzacian twist of the tale will hang upon this fact. For his part, Henri has eyes only for the golden gaze, though his relation to this glittering object remains defined within the terms of his perfect selfcontainment. Henri’s power in this moment of flânerie is consolidated by his position as the sole narrator (since he disregards Paul’s intervention) of his earlier encounter with la fille aux yeux d’or. Here, as in the closing words of the récit, he is a particular kind of artist-flâneur: one who, like the ill-fated Frenhofer of Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, creates a pure original work, and disdains any dealings with mere copies and reproductions, even as he recounts a lived experience. In this, we should also note, the flâneur is distanced from the realist writer, who seeks among other things to understand and reproduce an observed panorama of society.36 Thus of his momentary encounter with Paquita, Henri explains two points: ‘Et d’abord, ce qui m’a le plus frappé, ce dont je suis encore épris, ce sont deux yeux jaunes comme ceux des tigres; un jaune d’or qui brille, de l’or vivant, de l’or qui pense, de l’or qui aime et veut absolument venir dans votre gousset!’37 Henri immediately and rightly understands that the living gold of Paquita’s eyes is no mere pocket-money: a point he will, however, later begin to question. As he remarks, the gold of her glance – like any worthwhile object of desire – sparks interest by promising to return the love of the desirer (‘de l’or qui aime’). Nevertheless, the gold of Paquita’s eyes is not to be understood as Balzac’s simple allegory for the alluring power of capital, for Henri is a pre-Baudelairean flâneur to whom money is no object of desire. It is Henri’s second observation that explains more fully the value of her eyes: as he declares, Paquita is ‘la seule dont le sein vierge, les formes ardentes et voluptueuses m’aient réalisé la seule femme que j’aie rêvée, moi! Elle est l’original de la délirante peinture, appelée la femme caressant sa chimère’.38 Clearly Henri is not seeking any double, not even his own, because any cheap cameo, ‘copiée pour des fresques’ as he says, threatens to become an object in the system of exchange, a mere trinket ‘pour un tas de 36

This is also to say that a figure such as the narrator of ‘Facino Cane’ is a rather different flâneur, since his objective at the outset of the tale is a kind of psychological realism, decrying the secret thoughts of the pedestrians he follows. 37 L’Histoire des treize, p. 400. 38 Ibid., p. 401; the first italics are mine.

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bourgeois’.39 Instead he is looking for the invaluable original, as unique as if he himself had conceived of it. Nor does he desire transferable gold coins, but rather, the gold standard: the ideal signifier that, like the flâneur himself, remains aloof from the chain of signification, admitting of no imitation or substitution. Finally, it is Henri’s status as flâneur that will doom his nascent relation with Paquita; yet at the same time is it precisely not due to his falling into the trap that Benjamin identifies as the one awaiting the Baudelairean flâneur. In this, Balzac seems strikingly conscious of the threat that Benjamin will see, a century later, emerging in the play of power between Baudelaire’s flâneur and the crowd. Benjamin appears to acknowledge this early kinship when he suggests that ‘Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie’.40 Benjamin levies his fascinated yet critical examination of the flâneur at Baudelaire, and writes in his fragmentary essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, that ‘Baudelaire saw fit to equate the man of the crowd […] with the flâneur. It is hard to accept this view’, he goes on: ‘The man of the crowd is no flâneur. In him, composure has given way to manic behavior’.41 For Benjamin, the Baudelairean man of the crowd is not an individual at all, but rather emerges as part of a ‘manic’ drive, an amorphous part of a force, the ‘crowd’ which in the nineteenth century was becoming ‘a customer’ seeking its own image in the fiction it consumed.42 This sense of the inhumanity of the ‘crowd’ in lyric poetry is where Benjamin will drive the wedge of what the flâneur represents. He writes: ‘Let the many attend to their daily affairs; the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place’.43 In other words, it is not simply the crowd that defines the flâneur, but his absolute lack of what Benjamin calls ‘place’. There is no place proper to the flâneur, in any 39

Ibid., p. 401. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 146-62; p. 161. 41 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. by Harry Zohn, ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968), pp. 155-200; p. 172. 42 Ibid., p. 166. 43 Ibid., pp. 172-73. 40

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context, and it is this status of being detached from all place that makes the flâneur something that stands apart from the force of the crowd or the frenetic avarice of the bourgeois individual. However, according to Benjamin, the flâneur is verging on entering one place in particular: the market place. As he expresses it in ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’ initially ‘the flâneur is still on the threshold, of the city as of the bourgeois class. Neither has yet engulfed him; in neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd’. Yet the force of this impersonal crowd is manifest once again, and this time to a more particular end. Benjamin continues: ‘The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city lures the flâneur like a phantasmagoria’, and famously, the direction of this luring pull is off the streets, towards the interior, first of the arcades, and finally of the department store, the capitalist institution that ‘puts even flânerie to use for commodity circulation. The department store is the flâneur’s last practical joke’.44 Thus the force of the crowd exerts a power over the flâneur that draws the solitary figure out of a displaced observing leisure and into the domain of commerce – that is, into the avaricious Parisian world of Balzac’s ‘or et plaisir’. Balzac’s hero, in contrast to Baudelaire’s, continues to define place, as the regent in the power dynamic of the city, impassively observing capital while mastering the capital, Paris. Henri – unlike Balzac himself, of course – will not go to market; whereas, Benjamin writes, ‘The man of letters puts himself on the market, in as much as he is a flâneur, to sell himself’.45 However, if Henri remains perfectly aloof from avarice and barter, this also means that he is incapable of negotiating any issue of authenticity, including his own doubt of Paquita’s sentiments, over which he instead elects himself ‘juge et [...] bourreau’.46 Yet despite this kingly gesture, Balzac warns, Henri is unqualified in matters of the heart. Even when he has secured the affection of the girl with the golden eyes, ‘Quoique Paquita Valdès lui 44

All quotations from ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, p. 156. See Shields, ‘Fancy Footwork’, p. 67. This reduction of place in general to the market place is due not only to the seduction of the flâneur by the commodity fetish, as Benjamin would have it, but also perhaps, as Tester suggests, to the gradual disappearance of urban ‘spaces of mystery for the flâneur to observe’ (The Flâneur, p. 13). 46 L’Histoire des treize, p. 17. 45

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présentât le merveilleux assemblage des perfections dont il n’avait encore joui qu’en détail, l’attrait de la passion était presque nul chez lui. Une satiété constante avait affaibli dans son cœur le sentiment de l’amour’.47 Paquita will prove to be all that the flâneur Henri could dream, and more besides. She will surprise him by asking him to cross-dress, and exceed him in passion; and all the while, assures Balzac, ‘[ses] yeux jaillissants ne mentirent à aucune des promesses qu’ils faisaient’.48 Yet Henri’s observer’s detachment from the system of exchange means he cannot comprehend that he himself may have misunderstood its signs; for he becomes convinced that Paquita has been unfaithful, has gone on a shopping spree, and that he, Henri, has been exchanged, ‘qu’il avait posé pour une autre personne’.49 This confrontation with the threat of substitution will bring to the fore a lack that, while outside the market economy, is particular to what Balzac calls Henri’s ‘cœur de bronze’, that is, his incapacity to give freely: for, explains Balzac, ‘ce jeune homme avait une triste qualité [...]. Henri ne savait pas pardonner’.50 The credit line of the benefit of the doubt is anathema to him, and his assumption is that Paquita’s golden eyes have drawn him into the pestilent system of lack and of exchange. What he cannot know, and will not hear, is that Paquita, in crying out the name of ‘Mariquita’ at the height of passion, has not betrayed his rival, but has invoked Henri himself by another name. Her flashing golden eyes have remained ‘fidèle au sang’, for she sees her two lovers as simply different gender expressions of the same being: Henri, and his sororal doppelgänger Margarita. This realization, which comes to both vengeful siblings too late, confirms that though Paquita herself has been bought and sold as a slave, she has prostituted neither her passions nor her lovers. The girl with the golden eyes is not playing at being the signifier, but rather embodies the authentic value that gold never delivers. In the final analysis, it is Henri’s heart of bronze that proves to have been corroded by the infectious malady that invades the highest social repositories of gold: ‘On n’y aime jamais autrui’.51 The perfect 47

Ibid., p. 408. Ibid., p. 432. 49 Ibid., p. 439. 50 Ibid., pp. 391 and 447. 51 Ibid., p. 385. 48

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flâneur, the observing and undesiring subject, cannot take on the risk of any exchange, and in this sense becomes confined and defined, after all, by the system he disdains. By virtue of his lack of passion and compassion, Henri will retain his power – he is in point of fact a rare protagonist in this period of Balzac’s fiction to survive the narrative. He will also re-enter the world of the ‘treize rois’ by a flâneur’s rite of passage, by succinctly telling the tale of his exemption from desire, reducing Paquita’s tragic death for love to a pastiche of nineteenth-century lower-class urban demise from an infectious disease (he will explain to his companions that she has died, as he puts it, ‘de la poitrine’).52 The ‘infinite’ realm beyond the discursive power dynamic of desire and lack, a realm that Paquita had opened before Henri, proves untenable for the Balzacian flâneur. His absolute revulsion towards the idea of substitution and exchange means that he is conceptually bound to the very discourse he eschews, and cannot conceive of a world where interaction proceeds on other terms. By his remove from the forces of consumption and passion, Henri has in fact epitomized the flâneur to the degree that he proves it to be for Balzac what Shields calls flânerie: an ‘unethical practice’, by which I understand him to mean one that is not open to the intervention of another.53 As a result of his detachment from exchange as such, the flâneur’s world is proven to be constrained by the deluding signifier too, given that any claim of authenticity remains just that: a claim, a word, that represents a pact of trust. Though Balzac’s flâneur remains exempt from the unending desire for ‘l’or et le plaisir’, his distance from a growing Benjaminian system of capital does not guarantee that he has found a viable alternative modernity. In resisting exchange, it seems, the flâneur is still caught up in the scintillating signifying power that is embodied by gold.

52 53

Ibid., p. 453. ‘Fancy Footwork’, p. 77.

The Colony Within? Poets and the Politics of Particularism in Toulouse’s Capitole CLAIRE I.R. O’MAHONY

The Third Republic was a period of intense cultural and political transition within French society; the 1880s and 1890s saw the most extreme internal centralization and colonialist expansion the country had experienced since Napoleon’s conquests.1 Educational reforms sought to produce a unified French citizenry imbued from childhood with Republican knowledge and values. These directives were adjudicated in Paris and sought to present an enormous variety of regional traditions and histories as, at best, subservient to, if not supplanted by, a national history of kings and revolutions, a single French language and culture. However, the standardization of identity which this system implied did not pass uncontested, either in the classroom or in the literary and artistic production of fin-de-siècle provincial France. The significant critical analysis of the methods and aftermath of colonialism has focused its study principally upon nonEuropean peoples outside the geographical boundaries of the mother country. Internal regionalist others remain under-scrutinized. Daniel Pick’s critique of Frantz Fabian’s rather monolithic definition of anthropology in terms of a unitary West examining a notional other may help to redress this absence. The recognition of an intermediate space of negotiation between centralized power and institutions in the provincial regions could be characterized as a colony within: 1

My thanks to the Société des Dix-Neuviémistes for the opportunity to present this project as a paper at the 2006 conference and to Professor John House of the Courtauld Institute who supervised the doctoral thesis from which this study derives, funded by the Central Research Fund of the University of London and an Overseas Research Scheme Grant.

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Claire I.R. O’Mahony Fabian’s argument in effect flattens out historical differences, contradictions, shifts within Europe or the West; it abstracts them into singular categories and thus takes, as it were certain nineteenth-century ideologies at their word, accepting the arrogant coherence they may have projected as indeed their unproblematic quality, their true characterization… The ‘aggression’ of evolutionary discourse may have had as much to do with perceived ‘terrors’, ‘primitiveness’ and fragmentation ‘at home’ as in the colonies.2

The underlying fear which inspired the intense centralization of the Third Republic was that the notional unity intrinsic to a modern nation state might potentially disintegrate into the varied and distinct peoples that made it. Thus these internal identities were in need of assimilation or colonization by a broader national construct. This model, which recognizes the fear of regression and degeneration from within inherent in the positivism of much nineteenthcentury discourse, invites a closer examination of regional others. The advent of tourism and the railways allowed the diverse and distant peoples of France to observe their counterparts in the flesh, but also made the notion of a unified French identity less tenable.3 This recognition of diversity required a fraught process of self-colonization of France’s many regions. Within art historical analysis, the task of reassessing regional identity in the Third Republic has begun, but remains rather fixated upon a few regions associated with Modernist case studies. Brittany and Provence, aligned to the work of Pont Aven artists and Paul Cézanne in this period, have been attentively examined.4 The interventions of John House and Richard Thomson have both been important catalysts to the re-evaluation of a Modernist canon of avant-garde heroes. Their critical consideration of formerly derided or ignored pompier painters facilitates a broader geographical scope and more historically nuanced view of the visual culture of the 2

Pick is critiquing Fabian’s Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c.1848-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 38. 3 Ibid., p. 39. 4 Post-Impressionism: Cross-Currents in European Painting, ed. by John House and Mary Anne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1979); Michael Orwicz, ‘Brittany in Third Republic Criticism and Painting’, Art Journal, 46:4 (Winter, 1987), 291-99 and Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton, ‘Les Données bretonnantes: La Prairie de la répresentation’, Art History, 3:3 (Sept. 1980), 314-44.

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nineteenth century.5 However, a key site where the contested power relations between centre and periphery were negotiated remains under-examined: civic decoration.6 These lieux de mémoire and the evocative, but largely unconsidered, pronouncements on art, identity and Republicanism offered at their inauguration ceremonies reveal distinctive traces of a regionalist cultural opposition, as well as the received paradigm of acquiescence to centralizing pressure.7 Townhalls were a particularly politically sensitive and yet vital site for representing identity. These emblems of local municipal authority were useful as historical precursors of Republicanism, but also were frequent combatants against its policies of centralization. Indeed the Commune, like the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, was declared from the balconies of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris, symbolically linking the site of the townhall to leftist politics. The Communards had preferred to burn the Hôtel de Ville to the ground rather than surrender it to the Versailles forces. Ironically the unsuccessful attempts of conservative commentators to prevent the building’s reconstruction in the 1880s, 5

6

7

See John House, Landscapes of France: Impressionism and its Rivals (London: Hayward Gallery, 1995) and ‘Henri Rousseau as an Academic’, in Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (London: Tate Modern, 2005-6); Richard Thomson, Monet to Matisse: Landscape Painting in France, 1870-1914 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1994); Framing France: Essays on the Representation of Landscape in France, 1870-1914, ed. by Richard Thomson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Soil and Stone: Impressionism, Urbanism, Environment, ed. by Francis Fowle and Richard Thomson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Richard Thomson, The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). See Pierre Vaisse, La Troisième République et les peintres (Paris: Gallimard, 1995) and Petit Palais, Le Triomphe des mairies: Grands Décors républicains à Paris 1870-1914 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1986); Marie Jeannine Aquilino, ‘Painted Promises: The Politics of Public Art in Late NineteenthCentury France’, The Art Bulletin, 75:4 (Dec. 1993), 697-712; Nicholas Green ‘“All the Flowers of the Field”: The State, Liberalism and Art in France under the Early Third Republic’, Oxford Art Journal, 10:1, Art and the French State (1987), 71-84; Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Claire I.R. O’Mahony, Municipalities and the Mural: The Decoration of Townhalls in Third Republic France (unpublished doctoral thesis, Courtauld Institute, 1998). Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (Spring, 1989) and the paradigm shifting volumes Lieux de mémoire, ed. by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992).

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underlined rather than undermined the centrality of municipal government and its seat.8 Instead the Third Republic, guided particularly by the Minister of Education, Jules Ferry, devoted vast funds to the embellishment of civic buildings throughout France, implicitly using the vehicle of the townhall and its decoration not only to erase past extremities, but also to envision a new sense of belonging for all its citizens. This initiative was emblematic of Ferry’s conviction that art was a vital instrument for developing social cohesion. In his speech at the prize-giving ceremony at the Salon of 1879, Jules Ferry insisted upon all forms of art and artistic education as a civilizing influence upon the whole Republic: Nous vivons dans une société démocratique, l’enseignement artistique doit se répandre au delà des murs de cette enceinte; il doit pénétrer dans les couches les plus profondes de la société; il doit imprimer sa marque sur toutes les branches de la production nationale.9

Significantly, Ferry closed this important speech with a call for the mural decoration of all of the public buildings of France which illustrated new Republican heroes and histories: Chacune de nos villes a son histoire, chacune a ses héros, et quand je parle d’histoire et d’héros, je ne remonte point aux légendes des siècles passés, mais des héros et des légendes de l’histoire moderne, de l’histoire du dernier siècle, de l’histoire même de cette Révolution qui a enfanté la société nouvelle… Le patriotisme français a, lui aussi, sa Vie des Saints, sa légende dorée.10

The renewal of French national identity after the ignominy of the Prussian defeat and the revolutionary violence of the Commune relied upon art, and mural decoration in particular, to envision a new pantheon of Republican heroes and histories. The profound social disunity between centre and fringe, both in terms of class and region, could be defused by appropriating distinctive localized references to 8

Alain Peyrefitte, L’Hôtel de Ville de Paris (Bellevue: Orne, 1985) and Petit Palais, Quand Paris dansait avec Marianne 1879-1889 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1989). 9 Jules Ferry, ‘Distribution des récompenses aux artistes exposants du Salon de 1879’, Explication des ouvrages de peinture (Paris, 1880), pp. xii-xiv. 10 Ibid., pp. xii-xiv.

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cohesive national culture. Specificity would be used to reinforce hegemony, the appearance of democratic pluralism would defuse active dissent, or so Ferry thought. A consideration of the ways in which the artists and municipality of Toulouse imaged a self-fashioned identity on the walls of their townhall, the Capitole, suggests a more complex view.11 The fragility of the process of self-colonization is witnessed in both the specificities of the commissioning of the artists and the inauguration and imagery of the Capitole decorations themselves. An elaborate festival of ceremonies was held in 1898 after the architectural refurbishment and the first phase of internal decoration was completed. The official speeches and editorial coverage of these events in the Toulousain and Parisian press afford a rich, conflicted body of textual evidence about the power relations between centre and periphery, ministry and municipality. The decorations of Henri Jean Guillaume Martin (Toulouse 1860-Paris 1943) subtly envision Toulousain sovereignty through an imagery of troubadours, medieval and modern. Toulouse was a distinctively problematic case, an isolated leftist stronghold useful to Republicans amidst the largely conservative southern regions, but the independence of its briefly radical municipal council and famous sons such as Jean Jaurès and Jean Paul Laurens (Fourquevaux Haute-Garonne 1838-Paris 1921), was unpalatable to many in Paris.12 The troubadour is a resonant signifier of this passive resistance of the colony within. This persona, and the political aspirations it suggests, emerges as a complex localized memory, only achieving an evanescent presence through the ephemeral traces of word play, festival and pointillist utopia, at best a footnote or black and white comparative illustration in the meta-narratives of history and art history. This study considers how these troubadours, the Capitole, its decorations and festivals, expressed a complex distinctness and dissent without rupture, cultural devolutionism avant la lettre.

11

The Capitole is the secular seat of municipal power of Toulouse; see Henri Ramet, Le Capitole et le Parlement de Toulouse (Toulouse, 1926). 12 Mildred Schlesinger, ‘The Development of the Radical Party in the Third Republic: The New Radical Movement, 1926-32’, The Journal of Modern History, 46:3 (Sept. 1974), 476-501, and Thomson, Framing France.

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Authority and identity: double entendre from meeting minutes to inaugural speeches From the very first discussions minuted in the Toulouse municipal council meetings about redecorating the Capitole, the importance of asserting local identity and supporting local talent was paramount.13 The motivating force behind the project was Mayor Camille Ournac who had initially planned to place easel paintings by native sons in the newly restored Salle des Illustres, but later favoured an ensemble of ceiling and mural decorations.14 The expense of an initial programme of architectural refurbishments meant that in 1888 the municipal council had to seek assistance from the central Arts Administration to fund this internal decoration.15 After a two-year delay, the Fine Arts Administration finally agreed to support the project. Jean Paul Laurens, a member of the Institut and officer of the Légion d’honneur, had increasingly greater authority within government art committees, and was instrumental in gaining this assurance.16 A public competition was opened for three panels for the Salle des Illustres which, despite Toulousain protestations, the Fine Arts Administration insisted would be held in Paris. The three winning artists were: Jean Joseph Weerts (Roubaix, Nord 1847-Paris 1927) from Northern France, the Parisian 13

In the 1870s, the municipality’s engineers designed a plan for the restoration of the Capitole as well as the Théâtre du Capitole and the Musée des Augustins. Violletle-Duc had led the restoration of Saint Sernin and the Donjon; see Ramet, Le Capitole et le Parlement de Toulouse; Lucie Rivet-Barlangue, La Vie artistique à Toulouse 1888-1939 (doctoral thesis, Université de Toulouse-le Mirail, 1989); and Kimberly A. Jones, ‘Art and Regional Identity: Jean Paul Laurens and the Murals of the Capitole of Toulouse, 1892-1915’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 12:2 (Spring-Summer 2005), 96-128. 14 Mayor Ournac proposed an annual fund of 5,000F for the purchase of Toulousain paintings to decorate the interior, Bulletin Municipal (18 August 1884) pp. 122527. The murals and ceiling decorations are toiles marouflées, the method used for all Third Republic townhall decorations. The artists painted their commissions on canvas in the studio and upon completion these canvases would then be transported to the townhall and glued into position. 15 Letter sent 29 November 1886, cited in Rivet-Barlangue, La Vie artistique à Toulouse 1888-1939, p. 27. 16 Kimberly A. Jones, ‘Art and Regional Identity’, pp. 97-98.

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Gosselin and a Toulousain, Casimir Destrem (Toulouse 1844-?). Only Destrem, the Toulousain, would see his artwork installed on the walls of the Salle des Illustres. The correspondence between the Prefect, the Mayor of Toulouse and the Minister of Fine Arts, reveals how regional autonomy was achieved through bureaucratic passive resistance. The Toulousains wrote to Minister Gustave Larroumet, explaining that the municipality would take care of the ‘difficulty of choosing’ the subject matter of the decoration. An offended letter from the Minister retorted that no proposals had been sent for approval to the Ministry and that their suggestion was inappropriate; the Ministry’s authority ‘serait réduit au rôle purement négatif et passif d’un service financier’.17 The letter closes asking for the measurements of the panels so the Ministry may instruct the artists. The Toulousains retaliated quite simply by never sending the measurements. Extraordinarily, the commission was eventually annulled and Larroumet acquiesced, asking the municipal council to send their own proposal for the scheme. The final compromise was that only native Toulousain artists were commissioned, but that the Ministry selected which ones, fulfilling Mayor Ournac’s dream: ‘il serait bon, pour un conseil municipal de laisser une trace des œuvres de ceux qui sont la gloire de la ville qu’il administre [...]. Il faut faire revivre l’École de Toulouse qui est arrivée à son apogée. En effet, nous avons une quantité d’artistes qui sont l’honneur de la France entière, et [...] on établirait un musée qui serait entièrement consacré à réunir les œuvres des artistes toulousains’.18 17

18

This letter of 10 December 1888 is part of a correspondence between the Minister of Fine Arts, Gustave Larroumet, and the Préfet de la Haute Garonne (Archives Départmentales 2 O121) cited in Pierre Vaisse, La Troisième République et les peintres: Recherches sur les rapports des pouvoirs publics et de la peinture en France 1870-1914 (doctorat d’état, Université de Paris IV, Paris: 1984), p. 107; see Rivet-Barlangue, La Vie artistique à Toulouse 1888-1939, p. 29; O’Mahony, Municipalities and the Mural, p. 133; and Jones, ‘Art and Regional Identity’, pp. 98-99. Bulletin Municipal, 28 December 1891, p. 1623. The Mayor sought state support for the decoration in addition to the city’s 150,000F. By 20 January 1892, the Mayor announced that the state had agreed to supply 72,000F while the city would provide 42,000F paid in five yearly instalments of 9,200F, on the condition that the artists would all be Toulousains, but selected by the state. While the works would always remain in the Capitole, they were the property of the state

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The impact of this victory for local authority still resonated a decade later in the inauguration of the Salle des Illustres on 9 August 1898 (Fig. 7). The event again reflected the delicately waged battle between region and centre for authority and identity. The inauguration was carefully orchestrated to coincide both with a visit from Léon Bourgeois, now ministre des beaux-arts, and with a celebration of local culture, the Fêtes de Gascogne held throughout the region.19 A brief glance at the press coverage of the events reveals complex underlying tensions; the reports variously describe the speeches as an assertion of regional autonomy or an attempt at enforced assimilation. How to define the role of the Minister of Fine Arts was a crucial site for analysing these anxieties about centralization. An article in La Dépêche du Midi revealed that protests had been threatened over the minister’s presence but had been averted, by undermining his status: Nous n’avons pas d’ailleurs, l’intention de considérer la visite du ministre des beaux-arts comme un événement politique. Nous lui conserverons son caractère réel, caractère que tous les membres du comité ont parfaitement compris et que de rares personnes, abandonnés dès le premier jour par l’opinion publique, ont essayé de dénaturer [...] on sait que M. Bourgeois vient à Toulouse comme invité et non à titre officiel de délégué du gouvernement.20

(Bulletin Municipal, 28 December 1891, p. 1623 and 20 January 1892, p. 94). The Mayor reported these terms were agreed (Bulletin Municipal, 29 February 1892, p. 279). 19 Local dignitaries greeting the minister included Camille Ournac and Honoré Serres. Ournac, négociant journaliste, was a former Mayor, elected twice between 1888 and 1892, now Senator, who had initiated much of the Capitole’s restoration. Serres, négociant radical, was elected Mayor in 1892 and served until 1905, seeing through most of the decorations. Both men were part of Toulouse’s radical left and had been supported by La Dépêche. Other local dignitaries included Viguié, the Prefect of the Haute-Garonne, Tisseyre and Fabre, generals, several municipal councillors, Senator Abeille, Raymond, Honoré Leygues, Ruau, Calvinhac, Dujardin-Beaumetz, Bourrat, the public prosecutors and the artists Falguière, Mercié, Jean-Paul Laurens, Vidal, Roujon, Benjamin-Constant, among others. La Dépêche reported with relief that the procession was received with applause, rather than a demonstration as had been feared: ‘Les fameux protestataires, dont on nous menaçait depuis quelques jours ont eu, en présence de l’attitude sympathique de la population, l’excellente idée de se tenir tranquilles’ (La Dépêche, 10 August 1898). 20 Ibid.

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This assertion that the Minister was an honorary Toulousain (he had served as a Prefect in Toulouse), not a Parisian minister, was a leitmotif of all the Toulousain representatives’ speeches. The day’s ceremonies were a masterpiece of double-entendre. Toulousain heritage was stridently celebrated as a key site of the region’s distinctness and autonomy, whilst still including the Minister and reinforcing Republican values, thus pacifying centralized government. The speeches, like the decorations themselves, praised the unique nature of Toulousain creativity and the region’s extraordinary history of resisting religious and political invasion. The forces of oppression and philistinism were identified as much with northern France as the invasion attempts by the twelfth-century English nobleman Simon de Montfort, evoked in Jean Paul Laurens’s medieval decorations for the Salle des Illustres. As the préfet Leygues asserted: L’esprit de la France était voilé de ténèbres, le seul sourire qui traversa le pays vint de la Provence et de Toulouse […]. Cette maladie de l’esprit, la race méridionale ne la connaîtra jamais, car envers tout et contre tout, elle conserve sa claire et pure conscience et sa belle santé morale […] [descendue de] l’étincelle sacrée qui a illuminé Athènes et Rome.21

Toulouse and the region of Languedoc are portrayed as having nurtured an innately Latin people with a language and culture distinct from, indeed often historically in conflict with, Paris, her kings and later Republican authorities. The Capitole’s many painted murals and ceilings represented this cultural autonomy through an extraordinary variety of themes and stylistic rhetorics, from the contrasting historicist modes of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (Paris 1845-Paris 1902) and Jean Paul Laurens to the Puvisesque Symbolist ethereality of Casimir Destrem; from the Neo-Baroque colouristic extravagance of Paul Gervais (Toulouse 1883-1944) and Paul Pujol (Toulouse 1848-Toulouse 1925) to the politicized pointillism of Henri Martin. It is the multiplicity of visual strategies that makes this ensemble so evocative of the problematic issue of self-colonization. An analysis of the whole decorative ensemble is beyond the scope of this study. One of its most evocative strains, the representation of local language and literary tradition in Henri Martin’s decorations, offers a resonant 21

Ibid.

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example of the tensions and triumphs of the ensemble and its contrasting critical reception in Paris and Toulouse.

The critical reception of Martin’s medieval and modern troubadours Literary tradition and local patois lay at the heart of debates about centralization in the Third Republic. Many of the Capitole’s decorations represent Toulousain identity through the poets of the langue d’oc (literally ‘the tongue of the south’ as opposed to the langue d’oil, ‘tongue of the north’). These poets appear as the seven medieval troubadours known as the Poètes du Gai Savoir, but also naturally connote their self-appointed descendants, a group of seven, founded by Frédéric Mistral in 1854, known as the Félibrige. Representing the troubadours and, in Martin’s ensemble, contemporary artists and writers, was to assert not only the artistic distinctness of the region, but also to imply the need for political autonomy. The Félibrige was committed to the preservation and revitalization of the langue d’oc, publishing the Arman Provençau which attempted to codify and to promote the language through poetry and cultural articles. This was a seemingly harmless local initiative, but Émile Zola, amongst others, denounced Mistral and the publication as perpetrators of a dangerous separatism. Mistral retreated into a literally as well as politically conservative stance, creating the Musée Arlaten to preserve Provençal culture in a series of mannequin displays of local practices and artefacts, such as the thirteen desserts of Christmas Eve and Arlésienne costume. However, a more overtly leftist wing of the Félibrige also emerged, particularly in Toulouse, calling for greater political as well as cultural devolution for the regions. This politicized wing published a manifesto in 1892, precisely at the moment when the Capitole decorations were being conceived, which again attracted accusations of political separatism. Importantly for the present argument, the manifesto explicitly aligns artistic expressions of local identity with political activism:

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Nous en avons assez de nous taire sur nos intentions fédéralistes, quand les centralisateurs parisiens en profitent pour nous jeter leur méchante accusation de séparatisme. Enfantillage et ignorance! Nous levons les épaules et nous passons… C’est pourquoi nous ne nous bornerons pas à réclamer pour notre langue et pour nos écrivains les droits et les devoirs de la liberté; nous croyons que ces biens ne feront pas notre autonomie politique, ils en découleront.22

Poetry and patois could be marshalled to the peaceful assertion of provincial political power. Debates about the langue d’oc and the local occitan dialect were a constant refrain within the Capitole’s inaugural festivities, just as the figure of the poet was the core motif of the decorations themselves. These oppositional stances were often articulated through sublimated allusion, rather than direct confrontation, but nonetheless should not be underestimated as markers of dissent. The pertinence of such testaments of memory (rather than history, to borrow from Nora’s subtle distinction) has perhaps been underestimated as evidence of the thorny question of centralized power and local artistic autonomy. The ephemerality of Senator Ournac’s toast at the honorary dinner held by the Cadets de Gascogne, who hosted the festival, offers one such complex web of referentiality. Invoking one of the great meridional novels of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin de Tarascon, Ournac teased: Si Daudet qui n’était pas de Toulouse, a pu dire qu’en France ‘tout le monde est un peu de Tarascon’, nous osons dire, si cette gasconnade est permise à un Gascon, que quiconque est artiste en France ‘est un peu de Toulouse’.23

As in Brittany, where the local patois was suppressed, forbidden in schools and bureaucratic life, young Gascons were indeed not permitted 22

Frédéric Amouretti read the declaration; Réné de Saint-Pons and Joseph Mange were among the signatories. See René Jouveau, Histoire du Félibrige 1876-1914 (Nîmes: 1970) pp. 187-89. Initially Mistral seemed sympathetic, publishing the declaration in L’Aioli and signing his own sonnet ‘A un endormeur’ as ‘Le Jeune Fédéraliste’ in the 7 March 1892 issue. However, he edited out the key passage equating poetry with political action and ultimately, the separatist contingent founded a distinct group which fell into factional disruption. The remaining Félibrige movement agreed to accept members of all political tendencies, but to endorse none. 23 La Dépêche (10 August 1898).

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to use gasconisms; they were punished for them in the centralized education system. Thus, as ever, Ournac offers a gentle provocation in word play, both praising the Republic in its role as supporter of distinctive local achievements, whilst also implicitly critiquing the regime’s policies of cultural suppression. The foundation stone ceremony for Alexandre Falguière’s monument to the Toulousain Renaissance poet Goudoulin resonated with these debates about the politics of poetry. The speech of Paul Mariéton, chancelier of the local Félibrige group, aroused particular controversy in the local press for its alleged separatist subtexts. His speech was not quoted in La Dépêche, rather it was described as ‘un dithyrambe pompeux en honneur du félibrige et des félibres, discours contenant des théories séparatistes qui ne passent pas sans soulever des protestations dans le public, protestations que vont souligner bientôt les paroles des orateurs suivants’.24 Le Messager de Toulouse went so far as to cite Mariéton’s praise of the benefits of literary decentralization. La Dépêche, to its credit, did print Mariéton’s letter of objection to their editorial commentary which included the section of the speech to which they referred: Le libre développement naturel des forces vives de la race et du sol, de leur personnalité séculaire, voilà ce que réclament les félibres. Ce qu’ils veulent tous, c’est qu’un Provençal, un Languedocien, un Gascon ait le droit de connaître et d’aimer son pays natal, avec la liberté de ne pas renier ses ancêtres en faveur d’un patriotisme si abstrait qu’il dénationalise. Ils protestent contre un enseignement uniformitaire qui réduit l’histoire de France à celle de l’île-de-France, à celle des agrandissements de la monarchie. Et au-dessous de sa métropole nationale, ils lui souhaitent autant de centres régionaux que d’anciens chefs-lieux historiques.25

Resonant with twenty-first-century debates on devolution, Mariéton’s pleas claim a unique attachment and expressivity of regional culture typified by Goudoulin. This sentiment would also later be suggested in the wall panel in the Salle des Illustres by Édouard Debat-Ponsan portraying the Toulousain poet. A celebrated visitor to Toulouse, the admired comic playwright Molière is shown as a soulless Northern shadow in comparison with the authentic meridional bonhomie of ‘Goudouli’. Languedoc had a vibrant literary tradition, 24 25

Ibid. Ibid.

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unsung in the north and edited out of the national curriculum as dialect. The subsequent speeches by the Republican officials at the Goudoulin ceremony are deft attempts to reconcile the ideological ruptures between centre and province which Mariéton had signalled. Minister Bourgeois claimed that the unity of distinct provinces allowed their differences to be complementary, filling each other’s lacks and forming the strength of the Republic: L’Île-de-France est pareille à tous les autres coins de la terre de France. Entre eux, il n’y a pas […] deux personnes mais deux aspects d’une même personne éclairée à certaines heures de la journée par des rayons de soleil plus ou mois obliques ou plus ou moins perpendiculaires. Michelet disait […] que ce qui fait la grandeur de la France dans le monde c’est ce qu’il y a de divers et d’opposé précisément dans le génie et le tempérament de chacune de nos provinces. Les qualités de chacune suppléent à l’absence de ces qualités chez la voisine. Rappelez-vous qu’on peut, sans rien abdiquer de ses préférences, sans rien perdre de sa personnalité, aimer de toute son âme le sol natal, le village ou la ville où on a vu le jour, mais qu’il n’y a sur cette terre de France ni Gascons, ni Languedociens, ni Dauphinois. Il y a audessus de tout cela quelque chose de supérieur, dans laquelle chacun peut venir se confondre, une chose unique: l’âme de la France.26

Despite Bourgeois’s eloquent plea for an overarching French and Republican unity, the revival of meridional culture in Toulouse of the 1890s centred around an identification of the southern regions with a distinct and Latin rather than French culture, particularly through the figures of its medieval troubadours. These poets and their quasiallegorical patroness, Clémence Isaure, are the most frequent leitmotifs of the vast array of imagery of the Capitole decoration.27 Three works by Henri Martin were highlighted by various art critics as signifying these complex associations with meridional distinctness. The light effects in Martin’s three works underline a thematic progression from a cultural dark ages to a Latinate golden age. The first panel is set in a dark wood where an old man speaks to younger acolytes whilst glowing muses bear lyres above their heads (Fig. 8). A Toulousain art review interpreted the panel as an allegory, derived from Botticelli and the Academy of Florence, of the transmission of 26 27

Ibid. See the Salle des Illustres, Alexandre Falguière’s ceiling Clémence Isaure et les muses and Paul Laurens’s ceiling for the Escalier d’honneur, L’Apothéose de Clémence Isaure (1913).

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the Latin tradition to a new generation.28 The second, more sunlit, panel depicts the seven poets receiving the charter of the Gai Savoir from the floating figure of Clémence Isaure (Fig. 9). Again the local critic highlights her Florentine dress, the classical muses and a statue of Minerva, as underlining Latinate cultural associations. Finally Martin’s ceiling represents the apotheosis of Clémence Isaure in a radiant palette and shimmering pointillist technique, the dawning of a second Latin Golden Age, not in Rome or Athens, but Toulouse (Fig. 10). The critical reception of these works in the Toulousain and Parisian art press reveals contrasting responses to Martin’s local and historical referentiality and pointillist technique. This tension between specificity and universality resonates with Bourgeois’s rhetoric which consolidated all regions into one French personality. A Toulousain critic, J. de L., regretted the inaccuracies and lack of particularism of the works. The poets should be individual likenesses and the inaccuracy of Martin’s use of coastal views and pines in landlocked Languedoc was ludicrous; he would have preferred Toulouse’s own Augustin cloisters as their stage.29 Conversely, in the Parisian press, Léonce Bénédite praised these de-historicizing effects as a laudable Symbolist aestheticism, but as such implicitly advocates an unlocalized, depoliticized vision of the troubadour.30 This complex alignment between aesthetic debates and centralizing politics revolves around the political inflections associated with naturalist detail in the 1870s and 1880s.31 Bénédite championed Martin’s ceiling as a departure from these defunct languages of scientific observation and exterior appearances to an imaging of the soul:

28

J. de L., Le Messager de Toulouse, 15 and 28 November 1897. Ibid. 30 Léonce Bénédite, ‘Les Salons de 1898’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1 July 1898), 5663. 31 The decorations were awarded by a democratic process (public competitions, rather than direct commissions). The iconography of the early ensembles coincided with the improving anti-clerical thematics of ‘Famille, Travail, Patrie’ and were destined for the mairies of the Paris arrondissements and outlying suburbs, such as Paul Baudouin’s decorations for St Maur des Fossés; see Petit Palais, Le Triomphe des mairies and O’Mahony, Municipalities and the Mural. 29

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Leur mépris du sujet, leur dédain affecté de tout choix, leur prétention d’un certain pédantisme scientifique, leur crainte de toute signification élevée, de toute idée générale, avaient conduit la peinture à l’exactitude littérale, au document pur, au terre-à-terre et à la platitude, tandis que l’abus des effets de lumière diffuse et des préoccupations atmosphériques l’entraînait assez rapidement à un état d’anémie, de chlorose, d’épuisement nerveux, nous dirions, maintenant, de neurasthénie [...]. C’est l’époque qu’on avait appelé ‘l’école de la blouse bleue’, de tous ces travailleurs sans caractère, occupés à des besognes auxquelles ils ne savaient pas nous intéresser, parce qu’ils ne s’y intéressaient pas eux-mêmes, qu’on voit se mouvoir avec ennui sur les parois des salles de mariage, des galeries de fêtes, des salles du conseil de tant de mairies parisiennes ou d’hôtel de ville de banlieue.32

The turgid pictorial specificity championed by opportunist Republicans, and infused with an inflection of radicalized local identity, leads inexorably to proletarian, neurasthenic degeneracy for this advocate of fin-de-siècle aestheticism. J. de L. inverts this inference, disapproving of the neutralizing generalization of localized and historical references: ‘L’évocation de la réalité historique n’est-elle pas le plus pénétrant poème? N’est-elle pas surtout à sa place dans une galerie consacrée à honorer les gloires d’une ville’.33 Localization, be it aesthetic, poetic, historic or bureaucratic thus implicitly undermines the obfuscating, and politically homogenizing effects of artistic techniques from Puvis to pointillism, and of the bureaucratic strategies of the centralized powers. Louis de Fourcaud, another Parisian critic, most explicitly extends these subtexts to the issue of decentralized education and cultural authority. Having soundly denied Martin’s aspirational claims for the Toulousain poets and their patroness, he then criticizes the centralization of the nation in Paris. Fourcaud parallels political inequalities to the aesthetic disruptions of modern decorations, where incoherence prevails from the disjointed commissioning process to the aesthetic programmes of the decorations themselves: Il n’y a plus d’esthétiques locales, depuis que la centralisation a absorbé, à Paris, toutes les qualités éparses […]. La négation du régionalisme, d’une part, abolit des forces d’originalité précieuses. La négation de la nécessaire unité dans le décor monumental nous vaut de l’autre, de criants amalgames de platitudes, de

32 33

Bénédite (1 July 1898), pp. 56-58. J. de L. (28 November 1897).

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Perspicaciously, he condemns Parisians and provincials as equally culpable, castigating regional towns and their talented sons for bringing about their own marginalization: Hélas! nous ne savions que trop les résistances de la province au movement décentralisateur. Le rêve est en elle d’envoyer à Paris tous ces artistes. Une fois dépaysés, plus jamais, si la chance leur sourit quelque peu, ils ne feront dans leur milieu natal que des séjours de vacances […]. Tels sont les préjugés répandus et soigneusement entretenus par les provinciaux eux-mêmes que tout ce qui n’est point Paris semble un pis-aller. Rien n’est plus formellement en contradiction avec nos vraies tendances nationales, sociales et politiques. Mais les municipalités ne daignent même pas analyser l’effrayant illogisme. Je sais des peintres pour tout dire, qui ne connaissent pas leur region.35

Henri Martin’s room of murals rebutted these criticisms and fears, celebrating the vitality of modern Toulousain troubadours, promenading on the banks of the Garonne, not the Seine. The Henri Martin room affords a provocative encounter of the contested links between the celebration of distinctive regional culture and political autonomy. Martin’s suite of panels, La Vie, juxtaposes two aspects of provincial identity: the inter-related utopias of the pastoral world of the rural village, identifiable as Labastide-du-Vert (Fig. 11) and the regional city of Toulouse (Fig. 12).36 These parallel, yet distinct, aspects of the Haute-Garonne region mirror each other, not only spatially but also temporally. The city scenes progress from dawn to dusk, the village scenes from spring to winter. Although discounted by many painters and critics of the left, not least Paul Signac who was attempting to create an anarchist art colony in nearby Saint Tropez, Martin projects a utopian social vision of centre and periphery in his cycle. The city and the village resonate together; nature and human endeavour harmonize amidst the radiant light of the south. Lovers wander contentedly both in the city and in the forest. 34

Louis de Fourcaud, Revue des Deux Mondes (1 May 1898), 134-35. De Fourcaud (1 May 1898), pp. 134-35. 36 The panels of Les Rêveurs show the passage of the Garonne river through the city from the Pont Saint Pierre, past the Quai Lombard and the Quai Daurade to the Pont Neuf and Notre Dame La Dalbade. 35

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The poem of nature, and its fulfilment in both the labours of the body and the artistic intellect, is suggested in rhythmic gestures. The harvest scything and the girls’ farandole are echoed in the easy stride of the promenaders in the facing panel of Les Rêveurs. Several critics recognized the confluence of political and aesthetic utopianism in these juxtapositions.37 By including familiar local figures (the painters Laurens, Martin and his sons, the sculptor Jean Rivière) as well as the radical socialist Jean Jaurès, Martin constructs a vision of modern troubadours, a third golden age in the cyclical renaissance of Latin culture. Troubadours would renew their beloved Languedoc, not only through poetry, but also through a new society.38 Third Republic mural decoration remains largely ignored or denounced as juste-milieu, pompier, even in this twenty-first-century age of post-modernist eclecticism. These ensembles, produced under the auspices of centralized state patronage, should not be reduced to simplistic embodiments of sullied propaganda, enacting Republican homogeneity. Rather, the Capitole decorations demonstrate the complexities of capturing in word or image what it is to be a provincial within a centralized state. A toast pronounced by Anatole France at a Félibrige banquet held in Paris in 1894, captures this complex balance between self-colonization and separatism:

37

‘Ainsi la nature et la vie s’associent, ici encore, en une autre synthèse, dans le calme des habitudes et de la liberté des allures, occupations journalières, nonchaloir béat, rêveuses flâneries’, Henry Marcel, ‘Les Peintures d’Henri Martin pour le Capitole de Toulouse’, Art et Décoration (1 June 1906), p. 148. ‘Les travailleurs […] fauchent du même mouvement, et toute la composition est comme emportée par ce large rythme qui s’accompagne d’un autre rythme d’ombre et de soleil [...]. Je vois bien, ou je crois voir ce qu’a voulu l’artiste, la représentation des gens qui ont travaillé cérébralement, qui ont écrit, qui ont peint, qui ont parlé et qui goûtent le charme, d’un beau soir, et qui rêvent encore à leur travail du jour, et qui rêvent déjà à leur travail du lendemain’, Gustave Geffroy, ‘Causeries: Pour le Capitole’, La Dépêche du Midi (19 May 1906). 38 See Geffroy, 19 May 1906 and Ramet, Le Capitole et le Parlement de Toulouse, p. 80. Martin’s preparatory sketch of Jaurès, dedicated to the man himself, is in the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec; see Palais des Arts, Henri Martin 1860-1943 (Toulouse, 1983), p. 88. Jaurès had published articles and a preface setting out principles for a cooperative agricultural system which nonetheless allowed for private ownership precisely around the moment of the mural’s conception; see Thomson, Framing France, pp. 147-73.

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Il n’est pas possible que tous les pays soient l’ouvrage d’un même dieu […] le Mont-Blanc n’est pas de la même main que les collines de l’Arno […]. Celui qui fit la Provence était artiste […]. Vous êtes attachés à la petite patrie, et cet attachement ne fait point tort à la grande. A votre exemple, Français du Nord, du Centre, de l’Ouest, de l’Est, aimons notre ville; que notre patriotisme local soit le centre et l’axe de notre patriotisme français.39

The decoration, inauguration and critical reception of Toulouse’s Capitole was full of double-entendre, mingling medieval and modern, regional and national. It achieved an inconsistency which not only evoked the irresolvability of the power relations between centre and region, but also allowed the periphery to survive the centralizing process of self-colonization with its Gasconisms sublimated, but intact.

39

Cited in Jouveau, Histoire du Félibrige 1876-1914, p. 219.

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Fig. 7: La Salle des Illustres

Fig. 8: Henri Martin, Les Troubadours (1897)

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Fig. 9: Henri Martin, Clémence Isaure délivrant aux troubadours la charte de fondation des Jeux Floraux (1897)

Fig. 10: Henri Martin, L’Apothéose de Clémence Isaure (1897)

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Fig. 11: Henri Martin, Les Faucheurs (1903-6)

Fig. 12: Henri Martin, Les Rêveurs (1903-6)

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Le Pouvoir de la représentation: Écriture pittoresque et construction de la nation dans la série provinciale des Français peints par eux-mêmes ANNE-EMMANUELLE DEMARTINI

Les Français peints par eux-mêmes est l’une des productions les plus célèbres, à l’âge romantique, du genre pittoresque. Le terme ‘pittoresque’ désigne alors dans le langage de la librairie une publication ornée de gravures, mais il renvoie aussi à une esthétique spécifique, théorisée en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, et de manière plus générale, à l’aspect original et coloré d’une représentation ou d’un objet méritant pour cela d’être peint. Production monumentale, dont le maître d’œuvre est l’éditeur parisien Curmer, qui s’est entouré d’une pléiade de dessinateurs et d’écrivains alors en vogue, dont Balzac, Les Français ont d’abord paru en livraisons, avant d’être rassemblés entre 1840 et 1842, en huit luxueux volumes. Présentant, sous la forme d’un tableau de mœurs, une spirituelle galerie de types contemporains, ils relèvent du genre de la ‘littérature panoramique’, selon l’expression de Walter Benjamin.1 L’ouvrage est bien connu des spécialistes du XIXe siècle, notamment grâce aux travaux de Ségolène Le Men ou de Karlheinz Stierle.2 Mais c’est le cas surtout des cinq premiers volumes 1

‘Le Flâneur’, Charles Baudelaire: Un poète lyrique à l’apogée du capitalisme, rééd. Jean Lacoste (Paris: Payot, 1982), pp. 55-98. 2 Luce Abéles et Ségolène Le Men, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Panorama social du XIXe siècle (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1993); un chapitre, rédigé par Luce Abélès, s’intitule ‘La Province vue par Les Français’ (pp. 47-61); Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes: Paris et son discours (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 2001; 1993 pour l’éd. allemande). On mentionnera également la journée d’études sur Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, organisée par José-Luis Diaz (Université Paris 7), 31 janvier 2004, Maison de Balzac.

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– d’ailleurs les plus réussis – qui sont consacrés aux types parisiens. Les trois derniers, consacrés aux types provinciaux, ont été, eux, peu étudiés. Cette série provinciale comprend un premier volume, dévolu à des types provinciaux généraux, et deux autres volumes, qui détaillent les types des différentes provinces de France. Cette étude est spécifiquement consacrée à ces deux derniers volumes et en propose, dans la perspective d’une réflexion sur les usages historiens de documents littéraires, une interprétation politique. On montrera comment le regard porté par Les Français sur les provinces articule la peinture des types provinciaux, soit des identités locales, fondée sur l’inventaire de l’espace et le découpage du territoire, à une réflexion sur les composants et les enjeux de la construction nationale.3 Ce faisant la description pittoresque rencontre la question du pouvoir politique. Au XIXe siècle, en effet, le pouvoir politique se métamorphose par la consécration de l’État-nation; dans cette construction, État et nation sont dans un rapport dialectique et conflictuel, la nation servant à légitimer l’État tout en s’affirmant comme une instance de revendication d’un pouvoir de la société civile contre l’État. On verra comment le projet d’un auto-portrait de la nation place au cœur de l’entreprise des Français-Provinces le problème de la représentation: représentation d’abord esthétique, certes, mais qui n’en revêt pas moins en filigrane une dimension politique. On le montrera en rapprochant l’entreprise de représentation pittoresque de la nation de la problématique de la représentation politique: nation et souveraineté nationale, pouvoir central, institutions représentatives, démocratie, autant de concepts relatifs au pouvoir politique qui trouvent une pertinence dans ce panorama, à la fois divertissant et instructif, des types provinciaux.

3

Pour une approche plus globale, voir A.-E. Demartini, ‘Le Type et le niveau. Écriture pittoresque et construction de la nation dans la série provinciale des Français peints par eux-mêmes’, dir. A.-E. Demartini et Dominique Kalifa, Imaginaire et sensibilités: Études pour Alain Corbin (Paris: Créaphis, 2005), pp. 85-97.

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Les Français-Provinces ou les modalités de la représentation Le succès rencontré par les types parisiens a poussé Curmer à étendre en cours de route son entreprise éditoriale à la province. Mais cette décision marque une inflexion du projet, désormais davantage soucieux de coller à son titre – Les Français peints par eux-mêmes – dans un pays où la capitale ne concentre que 3% de la population. La question de la représentativité discutable des types parisiens fournit à la série provinciale sa justification, comme l’explique Ourliac dans son introduction: ‘Les modèles, toujours pris à Paris, n’auraient représenté que Paris au lieu de la France’.4 Représenter l’ensemble de la nation, tel est donc l’objectif désormais poursuivi par Les Français, qui prennent leurs distances par rapport au projet initial d’un tableau centralisé des mœurs contemporaines. Cet objectif implique de penser le type provincial dans sa spécificité, par rapport au type parisien, essentiellement défini par la profession. Or, écrit Ourliac, ‘les plus nombreuses professions sont les mêmes en province qu’à Paris’.5 S’est donc imposé un nouveau découpage, non plus professionnel mais territorial: ‘On a pensé qu’il suffisait, pour compléter le tableau, d’ajouter la description des mœurs, coutumes et caractères particuliers des diverses parties de la France?’6 Ce choix marque une rupture avec le premier volume de la série provinciale qui reprenait le découpage professionnel (‘L’aubergiste’, ‘Le mineur’, etc.), en courant le risque de la répétition et de l’appauvrissement, conformément à la remarque de Balzac, à propos de la femme de province: ‘à Paris, il y a plusieurs espèces de femmes’, mais en province, ‘il n’y a qu’une seule femme’.7 L’infléchissement de la série provinciale marque ainsi la volonté de cerner, dans sa spécificité, un pittoresque provincial, dont la terre d’élection ne serait pas la province, qui peine à exister face à la capitale parisienne, selon 4

Les Français peints par eux-mêmes-Province [que nous référencerons F-Pr], Paris, Curmer, 1841-1842, II:1. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

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une représentation alors dominante, mais les provinces, bruissantes de patois curieux et foisonnantes de coutumes étranges. La définition territoriale du type provincial conduit donc à inventorier, à travers leurs types, les différentes parties de la France, la division retenue pour le découpage étant la province traditionnelle, au détriment du département moderne: aussi a-t-on ‘Le Franc-comtois’, ‘Le Languedocien’ ou ‘Le Basque’. Trente-huit notices se répartissent sur deux volumes. Le premier concerne une France centrale, tandis que le second est consacré aux marges géographiques du territoire: il comprend huit types provinciaux périphériques (essentiellement des anciens pays d’État moins anciennement rattachés), auxquels s’ajoutent ‘le Juif’, seul type déterritorialisé à figurer dans la série, et sept types coloniaux. Car à partir de la livraison 194, Curmer a décidé d’étendre encore le portrait de la nation aux possessions françaises d’outre-mer, la logique d’exposition restant alors territoriale, puisque chaque possession fait l’objet d’une monographie.8 La série des provinces s’insère dans la tradition de la description régionale, aux genres multiples et poreux, qui atteint son apogée dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Elle reprend les motifs de la littérature d’espace, essentielle dans la diffusion des motifs de la description pittoresque, et certains auteurs de notices adoptent même le genre du récit ou du guide de voyage. Par son souci de couvrir le territoire dans sa totalité et de le décrire dans ses divisions territoriales, elle relève de la veine de la ‘description géographique’, qui est proche de la statistique régionale. La plupart des notices sont de véritables monographies encyclopédiques, au ton sérieux, et non pas ironique, comme dans les notices parisiennes, et elles puisent dans le bric-à-brac de l’érudition régionale, mêlant découpages administratifs, agronomie, géographie, villes, célébrités. Cela dit, le projet d’une ‘encyclopédie morale’, pour reprendre le sous-titre des Français peints par eux-mêmes, a conduit à une certaine sélection dans les rubriques de l’inventaire régional, en privilégiant la peinture des mœurs, coutumes, caractères, usages, langues et 8

Dégagés à partir d’un découpage administratif et politique, les types peints dans la série des provinces ne sont donc pas à proprement parler des ethnotypes, ceux-ci pouvant éventuellement être passés en revue à l’intérieur des différentes notices: ainsi, la notice sur ‘L’Algérien français’ passe les diverses ‘races’ en revue et l’article sur ‘Le Créole des Antilles’ ménage une place à part au ‘Nègre’.

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costumes. Dans la correspondance des Français, Curmer a tenu d’ailleurs à souligner l’originalité de son entreprise: ‘nous sommes encombrés de statistiques, de vues pittoresques, de détails industriels, agronomiques et territoriaux, et rien ne parle de l’intelligence et de la forme morale des habitants. Les Français rempliront cette lacune’.9 C’est prendre ses distances avec deux autres monuments de l’édition pittoresque romantique, tels les fameux Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France de Nodier, Taylor et Cailleux (1820-1845), qui reprennent le découpage provincial, et La France pittoresque d’Abel Hugo (1835), qui adopte, elle, le découpage départemental et étend la description aux colonies françaises. Si l’idée d’un pittoresque appliqué, non pas aux vues comme chez Nodier, mais aux mœurs, non pas aux ressources comme chez Hugo, mais aux hommes, est en fait moins originale que ne le dit l’éditeur, l’innovation dans ce domaine réside ici avant tout dans la systématicité de la typisation, accentuée encore par l’illustration, puisque chaque article a pour objet de décrire un type provincial, représenté en frontispice sur une planche hors texte.

L’auto-portrait pittoresque de la nation ou le problème de la représentation La peinture des identités provinciales répond aux deux règles de la composition pittoresque, définies au XVIIIe siècle par Gilpin: la variété et le contraste.10 Il s’agit de présenter dans le cadre d’un tableau, toute la bigarrure des caractères provinciaux, et ce projet se décline à l’intérieur de chaque notice où la typisation s’emballe, chaque type se subdivisant lui-même en de multiples types. Comme dans la série parisienne, la multiplication des types est pensée selon le modèle classificatoire des sciences naturelles et l’on décline la gamme des ‘espèces’ et ‘variétés’ provinciales. Plus original, en revanche, est 9

Correspondance des Français, citée par Abéles, in Abéles et Le Men, p. 48. William Gilpin, Trois Essais sur le beau pittoresque, post-face de Michel Conan (Paris: Le Moniteur, 1982), p. 25.

10

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le recours à l’espace pour penser le type régional. Les notices, en effet, sont gouvernées par le néo-hippocratisme qui fait de l’homme le reflet de son environnement: pour peindre le Bressan, dit Francis Wey, il faut ‘montrer les relations qui existent entre le caractère physique du sol et le caractère moral des hommes qui y respirent. Chaque effet, à l’aide de cette étude comparative, va trouver sa cause, et le Bressan, observé sur ses terres, s’expliquera de lui-même’.11 Le recours à ces modèles cognitifs, qui calquent l’espèce humaine sur les espèces naturelles, fait de la topographie la clef de l’inventaire des types et de leurs variétés. Puisque ‘Telle terre, tel homme’, selon la formule de Félix Pyat, le type régional, tel la plante ou l’animal, varie suivant le sol et le climat.12 Partis à la recherche d’un type, les auteurs déclinent ainsi des types, dressant l’inventaire infiniment morcelé des contrastes écologiques. ‘Sautez un ruisseau, tout est changé’, déclare Alfred de Courcy à propos du Breton.13 La logique hippocratique de division, qui veut que la gamme des types soit potentiellement aussi variée que la carte topographique, rencontre la logique pittoresque de sélection, qui privilégie l’originalité, maître-mot de l’esthétique pittoresque. Car si le sol de la province abrite une kyrielle de types, certains sont plus pittoresques que d’autres: ce sont ces types désignés comme ‘purs’ et ‘tranchés’, qui sont érigés en types emblématiques de la province. Ils dessinent une géographie pittoresque qui distingue les provinces enclavées, comme le Forez, ou périphériques, comme le pays basque, l’originalité pittoresque se concevant comme ‘excentricité’, qui prend le double sens de singularité et de distance par rapport au centre. D’ailleurs, les types sélectionnés pour faire l’objet d’une notice dessinent une carte des provinces monographiées où l’espace géographique du Bassin Parisien est quasi-absent, comme si la centralité parisienne défiait dans cette portion du territoire la production de types provinciaux spécifiques.14 11

F-Pr, II: 318. F-Pr, II: 231. 13 Ibid., III: 10. Le modèle des Français est ici la topographie statistique étudiée par Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France: La Statistique départementale à l’époque napoléonnienne (Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 1988). 14 A l’évidence, l’espace des Français est organisé autour d’un absent, Paris, le centre, traité séparément dans l’ouvrage mais selon une logique de déterritorialisation qui 12

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A l’échelle intraprovinciale, la géographie pittoresque valorise campagnes et montagnes et s’associe à une sociologie pittoresque, qui met en avant paysans et bergers. De sorte que, passée par l’extrême variété, la démarche aboutit à des équations simples: ‘le paysan: c’est le Breton par excellence’.15 Alors que la série parisienne repose sur l’image de l’accouchement jubilatoire des types par la ville, dans la série des provinces, la ville, lieu d’échange et de mélange, n’abrite que des identités incolores ou hybrides: ainsi, dans la Beauce, ‘l’habitant des villes n’offre pas un caractère bien tranché, c’est une espèce d’être métis, moitié paysan, moitié bourgeois’.16 Et les bourgeois, précisément, sont exclus de la sociologie pittoresque, ‘ils sont frustes et sans couleur originale’, explique la Bédollièrre à propos du Normand.17 Pour les plaines, c’est comme pour les villes: du Roussillonnais de la plaine, Achard précise ‘ses aspérités se sont usées, les nuances de son caractère se sont fondues’.18 Dans les villes et les plaines, les reliefs s’usent, les nuances se fondent: c’est le règne de l’uni, c’est-à-dire le contraire du pittoresque que Gilpin définissait précisément par la rudesse. En somme, c’est le lieu de la norme, comme le suggère La Bédollièrre qui renonce à décrire le costume des citadins normands au prétexte qu’il ‘se distingue peu de celui de l’universalité des Français’.19 Le Français, tel est bien, en définitive, la norme qui définit en creux le type provincial. Cette norme s’incarne géographiquement dans le centre nord du pays, en accord avec une représentation de la nation selon l’opposition nord/Midi qui s’enracine dans le premier XIXe siècle et réserve le caractère français au seul nord.20

fait de lui un ‘non-lieu’, pour reprendre l’expression de Paule Petitier à propos du Tableau de la France de Michelet, où, comme dans Les Français, Paris n’est pas décrit en tant que lieu: Petitier, La Géographie de Michelet: Territoire et modèles naturels dans les premières œuvres de Michelet (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1997), p. 83. 15 F-Pr, III: 5. 16 Ibid., II: 110. 17 Ibid., II: 126. 18 Ibid., III: 91. 19 Ibid., II: 165. 20 Voir entre autres Maurice Agulhon, ‘Conscience nationale et conscience régionale en France de 1815 à nos jours’, Histoire vagabonde (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), II: 114-74.

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Car c’est bien du point de vue de la norme et pour elle qu’est peint le tableau des Français, comme le suggère Romey, lâchant à propos du citadin corse: il ‘se distingue à peine de vous ou de moi’.21 Éditeur, dessinateurs, et vraisemblablement aussi, pour une bonne part, public sont à Paris. Quant aux rédacteurs des notices, quand ils ne sont pas Parisiens de souche, ils ont quitté leur province natale, en général au moment de leurs études, pour gagner la capitale où ils ont fini par graviter dans le milieu des lettres et du journalisme. En somme, Les Français peints par les Français sont ‘les Français peints par le Français’. Et que trouve-t-on dans le tableau? Il est frappant de noter que, de tous les types présentés, seul le type picard est désigné explicitement comme un type français, tandis que les auteurs s’appesantissent sur la description d’une franche altérité régionale, héritée du passé et arc-boutée sur des traditions immémoriales. C’est dire les limites de l’auto-représentation revendiquée par la série à travers son titre spéculaire: le projet pittoresque aboutit en définitive à faire défiler des types non français dans ce qui est présenté comme une ‘galerie nationale’. On voit donc comment l’application de l’esthétique pittoresque au projet d’un auto-portrait de la nation pousse à l’inventaire infini des différences irréductibles, débouchant sur une mosaïque d’isolats culturels. Ce faisant, elle introduit dans la représentation une contradiction entre diversité et unité, contradiction inhérente à l’histoire de la construction de la nation et construite en antinomie par la Révolution. La nation se fait, disent Les Français-Provinces, qui peignent des identités locales en sursis, devant la marche de l’uniformisation. Celle-ci est concrétisée par l’arrivée du chemin de fer dans les provinces et elle est symbolisée par l’image du ‘niveau’ qui égalise les particularités. Mais comment faire la nation? Telle est, au fond, la problématique de la série, dans laquelle s’affrontent les deux options particulariste et universaliste. En témoignent les deux textes qui servent d’introduction. Le premier, rédigé par le catholique conservateur Ourliac, est une dénonciation réactionnaire de la civilisation moderne et un plaidoyer en faveur des particularismes locaux, inspiré par la pensée de Burke et de Constant. Mais le second, signé Delatre, 21

F-Pr, III: 448.

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est centré sur l’évocation de la grande nation unitaire qui a gagné le pari de l’intégration des différences. Ces deux textes donnent le ton aux différentes notices. Ainsi, les unes, réfugiées dans l’éloge passéiste de la ruralité, déplorent la destruction des physionomies locales, en dénonçant une construction nationale inféodée au pouvoir central. Les autres, au contraire, s’en félicitent, comme le prix à payer pour qu’advienne la nation moderne. L’inventaire des mœurs se fait alors mesure du processus de fusion dans l’unité nationale en repérant, ici, les types régionaux ‘aujourd’hui parfaitement soudé[s] au reste du royaume’ et, là, ceux qui sont en voie de l’être, comme ce Provençal dont ‘l’existence ne tient plus qu’à un rail’.22

La nation pittoresque ou le pouvoir de la représentation Non contents de dire que la nation se fait ou est à faire, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes contribuent à la faire à leur manière. Pour faire la nation, en effet, Les Français mettent en œuvre une solution descriptive et pittoresque. D’abord, le projet d’exécuter le tableau des Français répond à l’exigence première de l’idéal d’unité nationale, à savoir la visibilité de la France, impliquant sa description. Essentielle est ici l’ambition encyclopédique, qui embrasse la totalité du territoire, y compris ses confins où les frontières se brouillent, comme l’atteste, entre autres, la difficulté à situer le type Corse, curieusement rejeté en fin de défilé, après les types coloniaux auquel il est de facto assimilé.23 22 23

Ibid., II: 41 et III: 88. Le caractère encore récent de la conquête, la Corse étant la dernière province annexée (si l’on excepte le comtat Venaissin et Avignon, non représentés dans la série), s’ajoute ici à la rupture de la continuité territoriale et à l’insularité, qui explique sans doute le voisinage avec ‘L’habitant des îles Saint-Pierre et Miquelon’, avant-dernière monographie du recueil. Le type corse est d’ailleurs purement et simplement oublié dans la table des matières qui classe les articles selon leur nature: absent de la rubrique ‘mœurs coloniales’ où aurait pu le rejeter sa place dans le volume, il est aussi absent de celle ‘mœurs de province’, où il aurait dû logiquement se trouver. Autre oubli, ‘l’habitant du Sénégal’, traité dans la sixième des notices consacrées aux colonies, mais absent de la rubrique ‘mœurs coloniales’ qui les accueille dans la table: peut-être faut-il rapprocher cet oubli des

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Inscrire les parties dans les limites d’un tout, c’est ce que permet le genre du tableau, qui plus est avec la mise en recueil des articles après leur publication par livraisons. Pour peindre le tout, Les Français valorisent ses parties. La logique pittoresque pousse à souligner les mérites des espaces locaux – terroirs féconds ou magnifiques panoramas –, à vanter les qualités des caractères locaux, personnages célèbres ou races fières, en soulignant la contribution de chacun à la grandeur de la France. Le projet esthétique d’une composition tirant ses effets de la diversité et du contraste permet d’ailleurs de récupérer tout ce qui fait tache dans le tableau de l’unité nationale, comme ces types sauvages des déserts centraux, Landes ou Sologne. La description pittoresque possède manifestement un pouvoir intégrateur, qui réside avant tout dans sa capacité à projeter les identités locales dans l’ordre de la représentation. L’entreprise de représentation pittoresque pourrait ainsi s’inscrire dans la problématique de la représentation politique sous la monarchie censitaire, comme l’a déjà suggéré Pierre Rosanvallon pour qui ce mode de déchiffrement de la société est le substitut d’une représentation politique défaillante.24 Parallèlement à la démocratie juridique, sinon à la place d’une véritable démocratie politique en l’absence de suffrage universel, il y aurait la démocratie pittoresque. Félix Mornand, auteur de l’article sur ‘l’Algérien français’, en trouve la formule: ‘Tous les Français sont égaux devant le type’.25 Cette formule fait écho à son modèle, qui figure sur le frontispice du dernier volume. Il représente une femme, allégorie de la mère patrie, tenant entre ses mains les Tables de la Constitution où l’on peut lire ‘Tous les Français sont égaux devant la loi’, message adressé à ses enfants qui l’entourent, ces types périphériques de l’ensemble national, provinciaux ou coloniaux, qui sont représentés dans le volume.26 remarques de La Bédollièrre, auteur de la notice, sur ‘la moins connue et la moins explorée de nos colonies’ qui, précise-t-il, ne peut être française ‘que nominativement’ (F-Pr, III: 409-10). 24 Le Peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 298. 25 F-Pr, III: 255. 26 Ce message égalitaire est adressé notamment aux types coloniaux – près de la mèrepatrie, on reconnaît le type de ‘l’Arabe’, figuré en arrière-plan, et celui du

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Instrument central de la description pittoresque, le type, suggère Mornand, est la clef d’une représentation démocratique de la société française, en vertu de laquelle tous les Français ont droit à la représentation. Si c’est peut-être aller trop loin que de dire qu’il lie identité française et modèle représentatif, l’ouvrage, en tout cas, produit la représentation des Français et parvient du même coup à fabriquer ce Français qui semble pourtant défier le pinceau, tant est enracinée la bigarrure des mœurs. En somme, la typisation fournit un moule pour fabriquer le Français: car si l’entreprise pittoresque met l’accent sur la singularité de chaque type, ils sont tous virtuellement identiques, construits selon le même code, pétris des mêmes lieux communs, en particulier le déterminisme mésologique du néo-hippocratisme.27 Le type s’impose en définitive comme un instrument de normalisation des identités. Dans l’ordre du littéraire ou du pictural, il est l’équivalent du chemin de fer dans l’ordre du social ou du politique, c’est-àdire le ‘niveau’ qui passe. L’adjonction de l’espace provincial à l’entreprise éditoriale des Français peints par eux-mêmes a orienté le projet d’une peinture des mœurs contemporaines, initialement visé par Curmer, vers le tableau d’une nation. Mais comment représenter la nation? Cette question, aux enjeux esthétiques mais également politiques, est au cœur des Français-Provinces. La description pittoresque ne prend tout son sens que rapportée au contexte institutionnel du temps, celui d’une monarchie représentative, fondée sur le principe de la souveraineté nationale. Aussi est-ce en regard du débat qui agite la monarchie de Juillet sur la question de la représentation politique et de l’extension de celle-ci que doit s’appréhender l’ambition pittoresque de représentation démocratique. Par ailleurs, le discours des Français sur les identités provinciales porte la marque de la renaissance, après la Révolution, du discours particulariste selon lequel l’amour de la particularité fonde le sentiment national. À une époque, donc, où d’une part la question de la représentation se pose avec acuité et où d’autre part les liens entre

27

‘Nègre’, agenouillé à ses pieds – conformément à l’idéologie libérale et émancipatrice des notices sur les types coloniaux qui appellent à l’assimilation et à la fusion des races. Le parallèle s’impose ici avec le genre des physiologies étudié par Richard Siéburth, ‘Une idéologie du lisible: le phénomène des physiologies’, Romantisme, 47 (1985), 39-60.

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le local et le national se redéfinissent, des enjeux politiques percent sous l’aspect superficiel de la représentation pittoresque des identités provinciales. Témoignant de cette réflexion à l’œuvre, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes dessinent les contours d’une nation qui associe la particularité et l’égalité: dans le tableau pittoresque, ne peut-on pas entrevoir cette France des petites patries et de la représentation démocratique que réalisera plus tard la Troisième République?

Razzia in Stone: Building Colonial Algiers, 1830-1900 LEONARD R. KOOS

Ainsi la vie agissante, qui est le propre des sociétés nouvelles et qui, en Algérie, se manifestait par la fébrilité des créations et transformations, nivelait les ruines et ébauchait la grande œuvre colonisatrice. (J. Cazenave, La Colonisation en Algérie, 1900)1 Le harem, jadis impénétrable à tous les regards, a été transformé en auberge. (Baron Baude, L’Algérie, 1841)2

From the telling first sentence of Louis Bertrand’s 1899 colonial novel Le Sang des races, – ‘On bâtissait l’Alger moderne’ – the French colonial enterprise in North Africa is represented as an enormous construction project.3 The colonial capital, and by extension an entire empire, following the violence of the 1830 conquest of Algiers and subsequent occupation that clears the terrain, is quite literally being built from the ground up. The anonymous and invisible agency of the verb’s subject, the imperfect tense conveying the inevitable progressiveness of the action, and the valorizing adjectival modification of modernity, all contribute to the expression of the fundamentally transformative grammar of the French imperial presence in the recently occupied city. As the first chapter of Le Sang des races continues in prologue-like fashion recounting the exploits of the protagonist’s parents as newly arrived Spanish immigrants in the late 1850s (the latter part of a generation frequently called in colonial discourse ‘les pionniers de la première heure’), the establishment and development of colonial space in the Maghreb begins with a series of invasive 1

La Colonisation en Algérie (Algiers: Girault, 1900), pp. 18-19. L’Algérie, 2 vols (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1841), II: 25. 3 Le Sang des races (Paris: Ollendorff, 1899), p. 1. 2

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demolitions in the lower portion of Algiers followed by ‘une fièvre de construction qui dure encore’.4 With substantial amounts of stone retrieved by Spanish immigrant workers from nearby quarries, ‘on édifiait les voûtes du port et le boulevard de l’Impératrice’ (later called the boulevard de la République), not to mention the creation of the main city arteries of the rue d’Isly and the rue de Constantine in order to carry ‘le flot des populations neuves’ from the city centre to the beaches and the flowered ravines of Mustapha to the south-east.5 By 1867-1868, a groundbreaking new chapter in colonial economic history was being written as important public and commercial interests and buildings began to open on the boulevard de l’Impératrice like the Hôtel des Postes et du Trésor, the Banque de l’Algérie, the Crédit Foncier de l’Algérie, the Algiers branch of Crédit Lyonnais, and hotels like the Hôtel de la Régence and the Hôtel d’Orient.6 From the pages of Louis Bertand’s quasi-epic fictional account to the historical realities of the construction of colonial Algiers by the midnineteenth century, the implementation of European urban planning, architecture, and commercialization articulates an explicitly visible discourse of space which physically expresses the manifestation of imperial violence in the colonial arena, offering an ongoing narrative in stone of the evolving power relations between colonizer and colonized from military conquest to colonial society (Fig. 13). The acknowledgement of an intimate relationship between power and space should come as no surprise, particularly in a century when 4

Ibid. Ibid. For more information on the design and construction of the characteristic ramps and vaults of the boulevard de l’Impératrice, see Federico Cresti, ‘Une façade pour Alger: Le boulevard de l’Impératrice’ in Alger: Paysage urbain et architectures, 1800-2000, ed. by Jean-Louis Cohen, Nabila Oulebsir and Youcef Kanoun (Paris: Éditions de l’Imprimeur, 2003), pp. 64-87. 6 Another notable construction project during these years was the basilica Notre Dame d’Afrique. Designed in a neo-Byzantine style by the architect Jean-Eugène Fromageau, who was also associated with the restoration of the Cathédrale d’Alger, Notre Dame d’Afrique, was begun in 1854 and completed in 1872. The use of the neo-Byzantine style for this basilica is a significant departure from the neo-classical and Renaissance architectural styles that had dominated colonial construction in Algiers since 1830. The other notable colonial building project in Algeria that was designed in a neo-Byzantine style was Oran’s cathedral which was completed in 1913. 5

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the reconstruction of urban space followed a logic that surreptitiously yet unwaveringly expressed the ideological dictates of morality and political order. This emerging discourse of modern urbanism, while concealing fears of sedition, contagion, and revolution, nonetheless sought to negotiate effectively and reliably the aleatory underside of the metropolitan city with a thin facade of less threatening values like sanitation, beautification, monumentality, and even commodification. However, in colonial Algiers as well as in other cites of the empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European urban signifiers like boulevards, arcades, public and botanical gardens, and so forth, are far more conspicuous and resist neutralizing discourses that conveniently efface the brutality of the exercise of power. Put simply, construction in the colonies, like empire building itself, was neither an innocent nor an innocuous proposition. On the political front, in the wake of the 1830 conquest and in the course of the first decade of the French occupation of Algeria, the military concept and practice of razzia emerged as a post-conquest embodiment of the conceptualization of emerging power relations between colonizer and colonized. Based on the Arabic word for ‘raid’, razzia as an offensive military strategy was officially inaugurated in 1841 under the leadership of General Thomas Bugeaud, who had been credited with the initial defeat of the Algerian resistance leader Abd-el Kader in 1837 and was subsequently named Governor-General of the colony in 1840, in an attempt to address local resistance to French efforts to expand their control over Algeria and pacify its population. According to Bugeaud, the goal for the French military ‘n’est pas de courir après les Arabes, ce qui est fort inutile; il est d’empêcher les Arabes de semer, de récolter, de pâturer […] de jouir de leurs champs’.7 The razzias performed during these years took the form of the systematic and regular if not annual destruction of crops and land, in principle designed to control the land and the livelihood of the local population. However, these razzias, quite often descending into little more than an unbridled violence and revenge that included mass killings and massacres of suspected participants or sympathizers of the local resistance to the French military, constituted a didactically brutal 7

Quoted by François Maspero, L’Honneur de Saint Arnaud (Paris: Plon, 1989), p. 177.

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example of the exercise of metropolitan power whose effect was just as psychological and ideological as physical. In this respect, as Patricia Morton has suggested in her study Hybrid Modernities, there is a startling consistency between military strategies and cultural policies enacted in the early days of the colony.8 More specifically, the practice of razzia in the early years of the colony can be compared directly to the targeted expropriations, demolitions, and constructions that resulted in the decisive and irrevocable transformation of a nonEuropean urban and cultural space into a nineteenth-century French colonial capital.

Empire builders On a déjà construit une place et de larges rues à l’européenne, dans toute la partie de la ville qui borde la mer; toutefois ces changements n’ont pas encore atteint les quartiers les plus élevés qui ont conservé leur caractère primitif. (Clara Filleul de Patigny, L’Algérie, 1846)9 L’architecture ne lui [le nouveau débarqué] cause aucune surprise: il la connaît, il l’a déjà vue de l’autre côté de la mer. Des hôtels aux enseignes dorées, des magasins aux riches devantures, des bars étroits et des débits de tabac, des brasseries aux terrasses garnies de sièges, tout l’appareil en un mot d’une ville européenne a été porté là. (Prosper Richard, Les Merveilles de l’autre France, 1924)10

The fortified city the French came to occupy on 5 July 1830, following the capitulation of the Dey and the withdrawal of Ottoman authority, had remained a major North African urban centre. With a population at this time estimated at 30,000 inhabitants, Algiers had nonetheless declined significantly in its prosperity in the early nineteenth century due to internal political unrest, disease, and famine as well as military incursions from abroad. The medina of Algiers, centrally located and the political, religious, economic, and social 8

Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation in the 1931 Colonial Exposition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 9 L’Algérie (Tours: E. Pornin, 1846), pp. 93-94. 10 Les Merveilles de l’autre France (Paris: n.p., 1924) , p. 19.

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locus of the city, was organized around three major, centrally intersecting streets: the Bab al-Jazira which led down to the port, the Bab Azzum which ran as far as the city’s gate to the south, and the Bab elOued which terminated at the northern city gate. The Casbah, perched on the easternmost heights of the city, was largely residential and housed the urban underclass, dominated by rural émigrés to the city. In a spatial configuration typical of the Arabo-Ottoman city, Algiers on the eve of the conquest possessed two distinct urban spaces: the open, quasi-regular streets of the public spaces of the medina contrasted sharply with the irregular, vaulted and covered streets and impasses of the primarily residential Casbah.11 During the first years of the French occupation of Algiers, substantial changes were effected in the lower city.12 The French military presence immediately requisitioned notable public buildings like the Dar Hassan Pacha which became the Palais d’hiver and the Dar Mustapha Pacha which ultimately housed the Bibliothèque-Musée by 1863.13 Far more dramatic and convulsive, however, were the 11

For more on the history of the city of Algiers prior to the French conquest of 1830, particularly with respect to its significant buildings, its fortifications, its city gates, its souks, and so forth, see Mohamed Sadek Messikh, Alger: La Mémoire (Paris: Éditions du Layeur, 2000). For more information on the city up to 1830, see also André Raymond, ‘La Région centrale d’Alger en 1830’ in Alger: Paysage urbain et architectures, 1800-2000, pp. 46-63. 12 While the primary justification for the rebuilding of lower Algiers was military, a number of writers on the scene also contended that the city was in great need of urban renewal and rebuilding. Eugène Pellissier de Reynaud in Annales algériennes (Paris: Anselin et Gaultier Laguionie, 1839), for example, described old Algiers as ‘une ville bâtarde, qui paraissait déjà vieille et fanée, quelques années après sa naissance’ (III: 276), thereby associating the reconstruction of the lower city with modernization. As French colonial discourse develops in the nineteenth century based in large part on the example of Algeria, modernization (as opposed to the static ‘backwardness’ of indigenous societies, as conceived of by the European) becomes a frequent and prominent value in its articulation. Modernization in the colony, of course, had many forms including city planning, sanitation systems, the introduction of the railroad, bridges, technological innovations, and so forth. 13 The Dar Hassan Pacha was erected in 1791 and served as a residence for the Dey Hassan until 1798. Following its expropriation by the French army in 1830, the Dar Hassan Pacha became the winter residence of the colonial Governor-General and the architect Pierre-Auguste Guiauchain redesigned its façade in 1839. The Dar Mustapha Pacha, a palace constructed in 1798 for the Dey Mustapha Pacha, was initially occupied by French soldiers and colonial administrators following its

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invasive demolitions carried out around the Djamâa el Kebir, among Algiers’s oldest and most venerated mosques, in order to create the place d’Armes (later called the place Royale, then the place du Gouvernement). The inception of the place d’Armes was designed to provide the army with a large, open space where military manoeuvres could take place and from which the entire city could be centrally monitored. As well, the rue Bab Azzoun and the rue Bab el Oued (and later, the rue de la Marine) were widened in order to facilitate the passage of military vehicles and troops. In the early 1830s, a series of construction plans by military municipal architects and engineers extended these expropriations and demolitions to the surrounding neighbourhoods, such that, in 1830, reportedly 90 buildings were demolished and the next year some 355 met a similar fate. An 1830 report of the head engineer Callas notes that ‘[l]es maisons se détruisent avec une effroyable rapidité’14 and the Baron Baude remarks in 1836 that ‘une poussière suffocante obscurcit les rues en construction’15 in the lower city due to these demolitions and subsequent construction. As J.-L. Miège has very aptly noted, the spatial reconfiguration of the lower part of the city also realigned the city’s population according to a new colonial ‘relationship between space and ethnicity which moreover, on occasion, cut across the divisions between classes’.16 The primary result of this new relationship between space and ethnicity in colonial Algiers was a drastic reduction of Algiers’s Moslem population and a nearly total displacement of the city’s middle class and commercial districts which included renowned souks and specialized streets, only a fraction of which would relocate in the increasingly over-populated Casbah.17 expropriation in 1830 before eventually becoming the colonial city’s municipal Bibliothèque-Musée. 14 Quoted in René Lespès, Alger: Étude de géographie et d’histoire urbaine (Paris: Alcan, 1930), p. 202. 15 L’Algérie, II: 22. 16 ‘Algiers: Colonial Metropolis (1830-1961)’ in Colonial Cities, ed. by Robert Ross and Gerald Telkamp (Amsterdam: Nijohoff, 1985), p. 174. 17 Population records before the mid-1840s are only approximate, but it is believed that the population of Algiers on the eve of the conquest was in the neighbourhood of 30,000 inhabitants. Following the arrival of the French and during the 1830s, large numbers of Algiers’s inhabitants definitively left the city. On 31 December, 1845, according to Georges Guiauchain (quoted by Jean-Jacques

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The modifications made by the French military engineers and urban planners in the lower city in the 1830s were clearly conceived of and articulated as a function of facilitating the army’s presence and movement. Another, and perhaps more telling dimension to the demolitions carried out in the lower city, however, was directed at specific types of buildings: Moslem shrines and mosques. The creation of the place d’Armes initially involved the demolition of the minaret of the al-Sayidda mosque, reputed to be one of Algiers’s most beautiful edifices, and in 1831, the entire building was demolished. In the early 1830s, seven mosques were destroyed in this portion of the city. Other mosques like Ketchaoua and Ali Bitchnin were transformed into Catholic churches, the former becoming the Cathédrale d’Alger in 1832 and the latter expropriated the same year and officially christened Notre Dame des Victoires in 1843.18 In the August 1844 issue of Le Nador, Victor Bérard presents a ‘Hymne à l’occasion de la

18

Deluz, in L’Urbanisme et l’architecture d’Alger, Algiers: Office des Publications Universitaires, 1988, p. 12), the Moslem population of the city had yet to reach its pre-conquest level, numbering some 17,858 inhabitants (as opposed to 46,832 European inhabitants of which 24,728 were French). J.-L. Miège notes that the Moslem percentage of the total population of Algiers steadily decreased throughout the nineteenth century and remained a minority percentage in the city until 1960 (‘Algiers: Colonial Metropolis’, p. 175). The Ketchaoua mosque, located in close proximity to the Dar Hassan Pacha, was begun in 1612 and was renovated and enlarged in the late eighteenth century. Following its conversion into a Catholic cathedral in 1832, it was renovated over the course of the next 59 years. A number of architects were associated with its renovation, most notably the turn-of-the-century proponent of the style of arabisance Albert Ballu, who was responsible for its final decoration in 1890. Louis Bertrand, in Alger (Paris: Fernand Sorlot, 1938), provides the following negative description of the renovated cathedral: ‘À l’époque où je l’ai connu, ce quartier était déjà tout transformé à l’européenne, éventré en tous sens et mis à l’alignement. La cathédrale affligeait déjà par son orientalisme de pacotille. On n’y retrouvait presque aucune trace de la mosquée des Ketchaoua qu’elle a remplacée’ (p. 49). The Ali Bitchnin mosque, located near the northern gate of the city, was constructed in 1662 and served as a pharmacy for the French army before being converted into the church Notre Dame des Victoires in 1843. Following the independence of Algeria in 1962, both of these edifices became mosques again. René Lespès (Alger: Étude de géographie et d’histoire urbaines, p. 210) additionally reports that a small mosque outside of the Casbah was converted into the Sainte Croix church in 1839.

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conversion d’une mosquée en église catholique’ composed in 1832 and which ends: Que nos monuments neufs se fondent Sur la croix où tout s’appuia Dans l’éternel alleluia Que toutes les voix se confondent!19

One of the most curiously denigrating of these expropriations and transformations was mentioned by Louis-Adrien Berbrugger, the first director of the Bibliothèque-Musée d’Alger and one of the city’s earliest European historians. Berbrugger notes in 1841 that on the Route Pointe Pascade just outside of the Casbah, a marabout shrine was presently occupied by a cabaret owner and wryly remarks: On nous demandera par quelle subtile interprétation des arrêtés pour cause d’utilité publique, le marabout Sidi Yôquob, à qui cette quobbah était consacrée, a été chassé de sa sainte demeure pour faire place à un débitant de liquides… Peutêtre est-ce en considération des services culinaires que cet industriel était appelé à rendre qu’il a pu obtenir cette étrange concession.20

Even the Djamâa el Kebir, which had escaped demolition when the place d’Armes had been created, could not escape the new visual rhetoric of the lower city, being bordered on two sides by what would become the boulevard de France and the expansive square on which a statue of the Duc d’Orléans faced the mosque. Visually constricted by these French signifiers of power, the mosque in its new spatial configuration offered to all of the inhabitants of colonial Algiers a powerfully didactic lesson of the city’s newly asserted power relations. The convulsive and invasive nature of these initial demolitions, expropriations, and reconfigurations of Algiers’s central public and private spaces illustrates the unabashedly political nature of colonial construction in the first decade of the French occupation and relates directly to other aspects of military strategies of colonization in Algeria during the same period like the decimating policy and practice

19

20

‘Hymne à l’occasion de la conversion d’une mosque en église catholique’, Le Nador, 6 (Aug. 1844), p. 187. Quoted in André Ravéreau, La Casbah d’Alger: Et le site créa la ville (Paris: Sinbad, 1989), p. 24.

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of razzia which equally sought to pacify physically and psychologically the potentially resistant indigenous populations. In the early years of the French occupation of Algiers, urban planning in the form of demolitions and targeted appropriations not only fulfilled the exigencies of a military presence, but also, in an explicitly brutal fashion, comprised a demonstrable exercise of power meant to illustrate the physical authority of the French occupiers to the local population. By the 1840s, however, as colonial policy itself was shifting in terms of justifying the ongoing French military and colonial presence in Algeria, urban planning and architecture in Algiers, which had given the city, as Jean-Jacques Jordi has noted, ‘une image européenne et quelques caractères de monumentalité’, acquired an additional rhetorical valence as part of the emerging discourse of the mission civilisatrice.21 Of the demolitions and new constructions carried out in the lower portion of Algiers, Alexis de Tocqueville evoked this newfound value in emergent nineteenth-century colonial discourse when he contended in his Notes d’un voyage en Algérie de 1841: ‘Les Français substituent de grandes rues à arcades aux petites ruelles tortueuses des Maures. C’est une nécessité de notre civilisation’.22 The process of urban planning in colonial Algiers and the transplantation of European architectural styles which would relentlessly continue through the 1850s, not only comprise a demonstrative exercise of imperial power and violence as well as the creation of a spatial familiarity for arriving colonists, but can also be read as an extension of the mission civilisatrice. In an increasingly materialist century where thinkers and theorists cite the importance and influence of milieu, colonial architecture and urban planning in Algiers in the first decades of the colony provide the spatial analogue to other cultural institutions like European legal, political, and economic systems whose enactment in the colony was rhetorically designed to assimilate the non-European to the discourse of civilization.

21

‘1860-1930: Une certaine idée de la construction de la France’ in Alger 1830-1930: Le Modèle du triomphe colonial, ed. by Jean-Jacques Jordi and Jean-Louis Planche (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1999), p. 25. 22 Sur l’Algérie (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), p. 62. René Lespès additionally notes that by 1839, 218 European style houses and 319 arcades had been built in the lower portion of Algiers (Alger: Étude de géographie et d’histoire urbaines, p. 221).

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Countless nineteenth-century travelers, excursionists, seasonal sojourners, and semi-residents, however, fail to share an enthusiasm or zeal for the architecture of civilization in colonial Algiers. Lured to the colony by the promise of exotic excesses, these writing, painting, and photographing selves invariably lament the loss of indigenous architecture in colonial Algiers beyond the quarantined and increasingly side-show orientalism of the Casbah. Eugène Fromentin, writing in Une année dans le Sahel (1859), details these construction efforts and the transformation of lower Algiers: La France a pris de la vieille enceinte tout ce qui lui convenait, tout ce qui touchait à la marine ou commandait les portes, tout ce qui était horizontal, facile à dégager d’un accès commode. […] Elle a créé une petite rue de Rivoli avec les rues Bab-Azoun et Bab-el-Oued, et l’a peuplée comme elle a pu de contrefaçons parisiennes.23

While Paris’s rue de Rivoli as emblematic of the Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of the French metropolis during the Second Empire drew mixed reviews from metropolitan commentators, its analogical evocation by travel writers when describing the streets of colonial Algiers (invariably when writing about the rue Bab Azoun, the most fashionable of the commercial streets of the colonial capital), quite often with pejoratively diminutive modifiers, left little doubt as to those writers’ categorical condemnation of the architectural approach ultimately taken by the French in the creation a colonial urban space in Algiers following the conquest. Louis Bertrand, writing in the 1938 book of memoirs Alger about his arrival in the city in the early 1890s, expresses a similar disappointment with a colonial city whose conception and articulation seemed to convey an inferior facsimile of the Metropole, ‘une France de seconde zone, avec quelque chose de vieillot, de provincial’.24 Even greater dismay was displayed by Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin upon his arrival in colonial Algiers: D’avance, il s’était figuré une ville orientale, féerique, mythologique, quelque chose entre Constantinople et Zanzibar… Il tombait en plein Tarascon… Des cafés, des restaurants, de larges rues, des maisons à quatre étages, une petite place macadamisée où des musiciens de la ligne jouaient des polkas d’Offenbach, des

23 24

Une année dans le Sahel (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 46. Alger, p. 73.

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messieurs sur des chaises buvant de la bière avec des échaudés, des dames, quelques lorettes, et puis des militaires… et pas un Teur!...25

Like many other visitors to Algiers, Théophile Gautier, also evoking with displeasure a comparison with the rue de Rivoli, conveys in 1865 the ultimate dismay of the metropolitan traveller to Algeria with the question: ‘O maudites arcades! On retrouvera donc partout vos courbes disgracieuses et vos piliers sans proportions?’.26 These disappointed and disgruntled observers, among many others from the mid-nineteenth century on, resoundingly reject the cultural mission of ‘civilization’, although that rejection seems to be increasingly based on commercially negotiated expectations of emergent tourism’s commodification of north African orientalist signifiers, rather than on a critique of the ways by which colonial policy and practice negotiated the reality of cultural difference in the colonial arena.

Civilization and its discontents La civilisation est une belle chose, mais je l’aimerais ailleurs. (Octavie Lagrange, Souvenirs de voyage: Algérie, Tunisie, Correspondance, 1868)27 Que la voilà mutilée la vieille Alger la guerrière! Pourquoi ce sacrilège inutile? Quand, singulière ironie, nous voyons au pied de la ville arabe qui s’ouvre par monceaux la cathédrale restaurée à la mauresque. (Jane Fancy, Quelques jours en Espagne et en Algérie, 1891)28

Beyond the transplantation of European architectural styles in colonial Algiers, the reconstruction and expansion of the city through urban planning was pursued in a series of municipal proposals and projects like the Plan Pelet in 1832, the Plan Poiret in 1837, the Plan 25

Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), p. 112. Voyage en Algérie (Paris: La Boîte à Documents, 1989), p. 38. 27 Souvenirs de voyage, Algérie, Tunisie, Correspondance (Laugres: Vathelet, 1868), p. 85. 28 Quelques jours en Espagne et en Algérie (Paris: Librairie de Paris, 1891), p. 133. 26

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d’Alignement Guiauchain/Delaroche in 1846, the Projet de Ville Nouvelle à Mustapha in 1855, the Plan Vigouroux/Caillat, the Plan Macarthy/Genevay, and the Plan Chassariau pour Napoléonville of 1858, among a number of others.29 Not only did these successive plans result in the rebuilding of the lower city in the spatial and architectural image of the conqueror, but they also extended the surface area of colonial Algiers beyond the city’s original fortifications by establishing suburban communities in Mustapha, Agha, and Bab-el-Oued for the ever increasing influx of arriving European emigrants and pleasure travellers. While the fever of construction in Algiers did not slow in the 1860s, the redesigning and refashioning of the city was effectively halted in 1865 following the second imperial visit of Napoléon III. In a letter to Marshal Macmahon, then the Governor-General of Algeria, the Emperor strategically outlined, in the context of what came to be known as the royaume arabe, his Algerian policy: Mon programme se résume en peu de mots: gagner la sympathie des Arabes par des bienfaits positifs; attirer de nouveaux colons par des exemples de prospérité réelle pour les anciens; utiliser les ressources de l’Afrique en produits et en hommes; arriver par là à diminuer notre armée et nos dépenses.30

The Prefect of Algiers, in a letter to the Mayor, specified the Emperor’s conception and ultimate plan for the city: La ville [telle qu’elle a été conçue depuis 1860] devait conserver sa physionomie actuelle, c’est-à-dire que la haute ville devait rester telle quelle, attendu qu’elle est appropriée aux mœurs et aux habitudes des indigènes, que le percement des grandes artères aurait pour résultat de leur porter grande atteinte, et que toutes ces améliorations ne pourraient qu’être onéreuses à la population indigène qui n’a pas la même manière de vivre que les Européens.31

In these remarks ostensibly on the future of municipal planning and construction in colonial Algiers, but nevertheless revealing the evolv29

For more on the details of these and other plans for the city and the environs of Algiers in the nineteenth century, see Rachid Ouahès, ‘Plans d’aménagment et d’urbanisation pour Alger’ in Alger: Paysage urbain et architectures, 1800-2000, pp. 280-87. 30 Comité de la Recherche et du Développement en Architecture, Arabisances: Limites et grands tracés (Paris: Roux-Bauer, 1978), p. 34. 31 Quoted by Jean Jacques Jordi, pp. 31-32.

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ing relationship between colonizer and colonized, the beginnings of a shift in colonial policy can be perceived. The assimilationist rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice that had dominated colonial discourse in the previous decades wanes in favour of a discursive if not physical separation of colonial and indigenous realms. This change in the overarching design of colonial policy explicitly emerges following the pivotal 1891 senatorial expedition to the colony headed by Jules Ferry. In his report to the Sénat on what he termed the ‘crise de la colonisation’ Ferry recognized the failure and perhaps impossibility of assimilation between ‘deux races rivales’, noting that French institutions of civilization ‘n’ont pas la vertu magique de franciser les rivages sur lesquels on les importe’. Ferry’s avowal that ‘l’indigène n’est pas une race taillable et corvéable à merci’32 paved the way for the turn-of-the-century politics of association in which the recognition of the irrevocable otherness of the colonized justified a set of policies of guarded tolerance and unequal coexistence, effectively suspending the politics of assimilation and its attendant rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice of French nineteenth-century expansionism. In terms of construction (since urban planning had been for all intents and purposes halted since the mid-1860s), the politics of association and the era of the protectorate which it ushered in at the turn-of-the century correspond to the architectural phenomenon of arabisance (sometimes called a ‘style néomauresque’), at first a highly ornamental style, then a decoratively spare one that on the surface takes its inspiration from local architectural traditions. This style was vigorously promoted for public and commercial building projects by Charles Celistin Jonnart, the Governor-General of Algeria in 1900, 1903-1911, and 1918-1919. According to Georges Guiauchain, Jonnart: veut lui [l’Algérie] conserver ce cachet oriental qu’elle doit aux constructions mauresques et que semble nécessiter son atmosphère spéciale; dans cet espoir, il demande aux architectes chargés de la construction d’édifices publiques, de rédiger leurs projets dans un sentiment inspiré par l’architecture mauresque.33

32 33

Discours et opinions, 7 vols (Paris: Collin, 1893-1898), VII: 210. Alger, p. 119.

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However, arabisance does not take its inspiration from Islamic architecture per se, but rather more specifically from the model of the djenane, the Algiers country villa. The most prominent example of high arabisance in the city of Algiers is certainly the renovated Cathédrale d’Alger whose ornamentalized facade drew a substantial amount of criticism from residents and travel writers alike for its, in Louis Bertrand’s phrase, ‘orientalisme de pacotille’.34 The new Hôtel des Postes et des Télégraphes of Algiers (commonly called the Grande Poste), overlooking the port and designed by the architects Jules Voinot and Marius Toudoire, was completed in 1910 and remains the most celebrated example of the less ornamental low arabisance in the entire colony (Fig. 14).35 Comparable to the rise of regionalism in metropolitan architecture in the second half of the nineteenth century, arabisance participates in the same decentralizing tendencies that generally mark colonial culture in Algeria in the 1890s, however in a somewhat different and unique fashion that is more directly related to the ideologically economic propositions of city planning and architecture. While the majority of the types of colonial cultural expression at the turn-of-the-century tend to exhibit a nascent colonial identity that conceives of itself as distinct from metropolitan varieties of selfhood, architecture and photography distinguish themselves from an emerging literary culture (as represented by, for example, Stephen Chaseray’s Père Robin letters, Musette’s immensely popular Cagayous broadsheet series, and colonial novels like Louis Bertrand’s Le Sang des races) in that the latter strikingly erase from the representational field the presence of the indigenous populations as a nascent European colonial self asserts its identity in a fantasy of residential legitimacy.36 In contradistinction to this, the politically 34

Ibid., p. 49. For more examples of buildings in colonial Algiers designed and articulated in the low arabisance which would dominate colonial architecture through the 1930s, see Nabilia Oulebsir, ‘Les Ambiguités du régionalisme: Le Style néomauresque’ in Alger: Paysage urbain et architectures, 1800-2000, pp. 104-25. Elsewhere in the colony, the train station of Oran, which was completed in 1907 and includes its minaret-like clock tower, is another significant example of low arabisance. 36 For more on this issue in the context of emerging colonial literature in Algeria in the 1890s, see Leonard R. Koos, ‘Between Two Worlds: Constructing Colonial Identity in Turn-of-the-Century Algiers’, French Literature Series 26 (1999), 97107. 35

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sanctioned style of arabisance, contemporary to the rise of an historic preservationist mentality among the city’s cultural elite in the early years of the twentieth century (as with, for example, the establishment of Le Comité du Vieil Alger in 1903 or the popular postcard series published in Algiers by G. Lachaud in the early years of the twentieth century entitled Vieil Alger and featuring scenes of the pre-conquest city), self-consciously engages in a commodification of the colonial cityscape negotiated through the visual economy of touristic culture that operates beneath the thin veneer of a protectionist rhetoric. As Henri Klein wrote in the newspaper La Dépêche algérienne in 1903: Il est incontestable que c’est à son caractère, plus qu’à ses nouveautés européennes, qu’Alger doit être visité des touristes. […] En multipliant les échantillons mauresques, nous restituerons à ce pays une partie de l’originalité qu’il avait perdue à notre faute, et le rendons plus intéressant aux yeux du touriste.37

The constructed hybridity of arabisance, therefore, like colonial photography in the form of the illustrated postcard, fulfils competing and contradictory representational demands. On the one hand, it simulates an array of fetishized orientalist signifiers consumable by the tourist immediately upon arrival. On the other hand, it enacts an illusion of legitimacy through preservation in a fusion of European functionality and monumentality with non-European architectural style.38 In this way, arabisance constitutes a monstrous compromise that feigns participation in cultural difference while inevitably undermining the non-European signifiers that it appropriates and rearticulates for the boatloads of arriving tourists.

37 38

Quoted by Nabilia Oulebsir, ‘Les Ambiguités du régionalisme’, p. 113. It is notable that the example of colonial Algiers from the Conquest to the rise of arabisance and what a number of critics have called the style of the protectorate provided French empire builders with a valuable lesson that would alter the French approach to colonial city planning and architecture in later colonial ventures. For more information on these policies in Morocco, Indochina, and Madagascar, see Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 85-301, and Zepnep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). On the institutionalized success of these architectural styles as part of Paris’s 1931 Exposition Coloniale, see Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities.

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The history of urban planning and architecture in Algiers, unique in the nineteenth-century French empire, from the 1830 conquest to the beginning of the twentieth century, physically inscribes onto the colonial cityscape the narrative of the evolution of the process of colonization itself in Algeria. In the early days of the French colonial enterprise in Algeria, the physical destruction of the lower city and the transplantation there of metropolitan architectural styles correspond directly to both military strategies of violence and the emergent discourse of the mission civilisatrice as vehicles for establishing and maintaining metropolitan authority over the space. From the 1860s through the turn-of-the-century, however, as the mission civilisatrice was progressively replaced by the politics of association, the waning of urban planning in the city and the rise of both high and low versions of the architectural style of arabisance signal a reorientation of colonial discursive ramifications that engage in a more subtly subversive cultural hybridity that responds to the marketplace of orientalist tourism. In these respects, Alexandre Vuillemin’s map of the ‘Province d’Alger’ in his album La France et ses colonies serves as an emblematic image to the question of how the space of Algeria was treated and ultimately modified throughout this process (Fig. 15).39 In that map, the cartographical space of Algeria is framed in the north by the architectural contours of the city of Algiers with the characteristic vaults and ramps of the port dominating the foreground as the heights of the architecturally authentic Casbah recede into a formless, detail-free background. To the south, a European technological innovation like a bridge stands parallel to French soldiers brandishing weapons as a lone Arab horseman flees, leaving a lush and fecund natural space for the occupiers to build their empire. Like many other maps of the period, Vuillemin’s ‘Province d’Alger’, from north to south, from west to east, from military invasion and occupation to colonial residency, replays the process through which the French constructed colonial Algiers, initially displacing local residents in an architecturally xenophobic politics of the visible, yet ultimately retaining traces, authentic and simulated, of the local and regional in a touristically sanctioned hybridity that reflects the conflicted and contradictory nature of colonial culture itself. Both figuratively and 39

Paris: J. Migeon, 1879.

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literally, as Raoul Bergot noted with an aptly suggestive metaphor in 1890, ‘L’Algérie est le boulevard de la France en Afrique’.40

Fig. 13: Rampes du Boulevard, c.1900 (J. Geiser)

40

L’Algérie telle qu’elle est (Paris: Albert Savine, 1890), p. 65.

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Fig. 14: Hôtel des Postes et des Télégraphes, c.1907 (Collection Idéale)

Fig. 15: Province d’Alger

Part III Institutions and Knowledge

Doctors, Priests, Magistrates: Stendhal, Cabanis and the Power of Medical Practitioners FRANCESCO MANZINI

The physician and Ideologue Cabanis, in his Du Degré de certitude de la médecine (written in 1788, but first published in 1798), claims for the emerging professional doctor the powers of the priest and the magistrate. Stendhal, by his own account for many years an acolyte of Cabanis and the Ideologues, nevertheless uses his fictional representations of medical practitioners precisely to denounce their arrogation of sacerdotal and judicial powers. Stendhal’s critique of professional doctors therefore constitutes an implicit disavowal of the Ideologues and their ambition to regulate French society. It also serves to interrogate the nature of modern medical power, forming part of his wider attack on (Orleanist) technocracy. Hence Stendhal’s radical conclusion, recorded in a journal entry of 1829, that almost all modern forms of power are inherently abusive and illegitimate. Stendhal’s pessimism in this regard, as well as his newly sceptical attitude to notions of utility and truth, therefore finally run counter to Cabanis’s optimistic vision of a France regulated by an institutionalized professional technocracy working impartially in the service of les vérités utiles. Stendhal, by foregrounding the unorthodox treatment regimes of Dr Du Poirier and Dr Sansfin in Lucien Leuwen and Lamiel respectively, presents his reader with two closely related paradigms of abusive medical power. These paradigms proceed logically from his various other interrogations of (patriarchal) power as this was reconstituting itself in the nineteenth century. Indeed Stendhal’s works together present a radical critique of such power, encapsulated by, although probably not derived from, Fourier’s formula: ‘ainsi va le

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monde civilisé, il n’y a que dupes et rieurs’.1 As far as Stendhal is concerned, power – in its modern, civilized form – is a deception; a confidence trick played on the gullible; an escamotage exemplified by Louis-Philippe’s hijacking of les Trois Glorieuses. Stendhal’s novels again and again show fripons exercising power over submissive dupes. It is with good reason, therefore, that Baudelaire remarks of Stendhal ‘qu’il avait grande frayeur d’être dupe’.2 It is this frayeur that haunts Stendhal’s heroes and heroines, forever engaged in the attempt to break free from the tentacular articulations of civilized power. Lucien Leuwen in particular struggles to dissociate himself from those fellow Frenchmen ‘[qui] ont du plaisir à être menés monarchiquement et tambour battant’: ‘la majorité aime apparemment cet ensemble doucereux d’hypocrisie et de mensonge qu’on appelle gouvernement représentatif’.3 In order to succeed, Stendhal suggests Lucien must free himself from the hypocritically benevolent claims 1

2

3

Théorie de l’unité universelle, originally published as the Traité de l’association domestique-agricole (1822), in Œuvres complètes de Charles Fourier, 4 vols (Paris: La Phalange, 1841), IV: 67. Stendhal claimed, in an unpublished fragment eventually inserted by Romain Colomb in the 1854 edition of the Mémoires d’un touriste (1838), that Fourier’s system was flawed from the outset precisely on account of his inability to predict the threat posed to it by the will-to-power of fripons: ‘L’association (de Fourier) fait des pas immenses; mais, comme Fourier n’avait aucune élégance et n’allait pas dans les salons, on ne lui accordera que dans vingt années son rang de rêveur sublime ayant prononcé un grand mot: Association. Fourier, vivant dans la solitude, ou, ce qui est la même chose, avec des disciples n’osant faire une objection (d’ailleurs il ne répondait jamais aux objections), n’a pas vu que dans chaque village un fripon actif et beau parleur (un Robert Macaire) se mettra à la tête de l’association, et pervertira toutes ses belles conséquences’. Stendhal, Voyages en France, ed. by Victor Del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1992), pp. 762-63. In the main body of the Mémoires, the Tourist takes time out of his schedule to explain ‘l’association de Fourier’ to some startled inhabitants of Nantes (p. 239). The timing of Stendhal’s interest in Fourier was most likely prompted by press coverage of the latter’s death in 1837. See also Fernand Rude, Stendhal et la pensée sociale de son temps, second edition (Brionne: Monfort, 1983), pp. 246-47. L’Œuvre et la vie de Delacroix, in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1975-76), II: 757. Lucien Leuwen, ‘Le Chasseur vert’, in Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques complètes, ed. by Yves Ansel, Philippe Berthier and Xavier Bourdenet, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 2005-), II: 726.

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made not just by monarchs but also by the many other putative patriarchs, his own father included, who continue to demand obeisance in Orleanist France. Mérimée tells us that Stendhal liked to make the following joke about divine Providence, or the temporal exercise of God’s patriarchal power: ‘“Ce qui excuse Dieu”, disait-il, “c’est qu’il n’existe pas”’.4 This joke – praised by Nietzsche as the perfect atheistical joke that he himself ought properly to have been the first to make5 – seeks to deny the existence of, rather than simply to denounce, the traditional fountainhead of power. As a consequence, all forms of patriarchal power are implicated; for, as Stendhal points out in the Vie de Henry Brulard, ‘toutes les tyrannies se ressemblent’.6 Stendhal comes to this conclusion after considering Henry’s relations with his own father. Henry is presented as the ‘esclave’ of Chérubin Beyle7 – suggestively referred to elsewhere by Stendhal as ‘mon bâtard’ and ‘the father’.8 Henry’s slavery takes the form of an absolute powerlessness before the (patriarchal and illegitimate) absolute power embodied by Chérubin: Peu à peu je pris les sentiments de cet état [slavery]. Le peu de bonheur que je pouvais accrocher était préservé par le mensonge. J’étais absolument comme les peuples actuels de l’Europe: mes tyrans me parlaient toujours avec les douces paroles de la plus tendre sollicitude, et leur plus ferme alliée était la religion. J’avais à subir des homélies continuelles sur l’amour paternel et les devoirs des enfants. Un jour, ennuyé du pathos de mon père, je lui dis: ‘Si tu m’aimes tant, donne-moi cinq sous par jour et laisse-moi vivre comme je voudrai. D’ailleurs sois bien sûr d’une chose: dès que j’aurai l’âge je m’engagerai.’ Mon père marcha sur moi comme pour m’anéantir, il était hors de lui: 4

H.B., in Prosper Mérimée, Carmen et treize autres nouvelles, ed. by Pierre Josserand (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Folio’, 1965), p. 445. 5 Ecce Homo, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 700. 6 Stendhal, Œuvres intimes, ed. by Victor Del Litto, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1981-82), II: 624. 7 Ibid., II: 623. 8 Journal, in Œuvres intimes, I: 158 and 340 respectively. Stendhal habitually deploys variants of these appellations (‘my father’, ‘my bastard’, ‘le Bastard’, ‘mon Bastard’) in the Journal, particularly from 1804 to 1814, a period marked by his growing disenchantment with Napoleon, increasingly perceived as a tyrant. See in this regard my Stendhal’s Parallel Lives (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 116-18.

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Francesco Manzini Tu n’es qu’un vilain impie, me dit-il. Ne dirait-on pas l’Empereur Nicolas [I] et la municipalité de Varsovie dont on parle tant le jour où j’écris (7 décembre 1835, C[ivit]a-Vecchia).9

The Tsar’s fury when confronted by Polish subjects daring to rise up against a rule he alone considers to be benevolent exposes the narcissistic will-to-power underpinning all claims to patriarchal authority, a will-to-power typically occluded by more able (and less securely powerful) tyrants, such as the Orleanist politician-king represented in Lucien Leuwen or else Lucien’s father François. Such a laying bare of patriarchal power, in the era of political instability and paranoia ushered in by the French Revolution, represents a challenge to order itself: ‘aujourd’hui, c’est une énorme imprudence, une énormité pour les trois quarts de mes connaissances, que ces deux idées: le plus fripon des Kings, le Tartare hypocrite, appliquées à deux noms que je n’ose écrire [Louis-Philippe and Nicholas I]’.10 Stendhal’s works seek everywhere to deny the authority of the father – typically by denying his paternity, but also by denouncing his will-to-power over his children.11 Stendhal’s family romances are not only neurotic, as in Freud’s account,12 but also revolutionary: they engage with the Jacobin attempt to write out the father-tyrant. Stendhal acknowledges, however, that the revolutionary moment is long gone, assuming it ever came, and that patriarchal authority continually reasserts itself. True, God is dead and the monarch no more than restored, or else bourgeois; the prestige of sovereign authority can therefore no longer derive from a divine right to rule emanating from God the Father. It derives instead from a new set of rights to regulate, issuing from the normative morality of modern civilization and its hypocritical appeals to truth, utility, and progress. It is this normative morality that both requires and sanctions the 9

Œuvres intimes, II: 624. Ibid., II: 536. 11 See in this context the excellent chapter ‘The Novel and the Guillotine, or Fathers and Sons in Le Rouge et le Noir’, in Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 62-89. 12 See ‘Family Romances’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. by James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), IX: 236-41. 10

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exercise of power in what Stendhal, citing Byron, refers to as ‘This age of cant’.13 Stendhal’s nineteenth century – the century that begins in 181514 – is governed by the power generated by the cant of utility, that is to say the cant of the emerging professional classes. Stendhal’s attack on the Industriels, published in 1825, ironizes their position in the following terms: L’INDUSTRIEL

Mon cher ami, j’ai fait un excellent dîner. Tant mieux pour vous, mon cher ami. L’INDUSTRIEL Non pas seulement tant mieux pour moi. Je prétends que l’opinion publique me décerne une haute récompense pour m’être donné le plaisir de faire un bon dîner.15 LE VOISIN

The Industriels – little more than a claque for powerful bankers as far as Stendhal is concerned – justify their claim to regulate the French economy and, more broadly, French society by invoking notions of utility and progress. However, in Lucien Leuwen – a novel about a son breaking free from the control of his powerful banker father – and then again in Lamiel, Stendhal’s attacks on technocracy focus instead on the regulatory aspirations of the medical profession. Cabanis, in Du Degré de certitude de la médecine, argues that ‘sous certains rapports, la profession de médecin est une espèce de sacerdoce: sous d’autres, c’est une véritable magistrature’.16 The latter claim was to find its echo in the nineteenth century, for instance in the words of the doctor and (socialist) politician Raspail, scornfully transcribed by Flaubert: ‘“Les médecins devraient être des magistrats, afin qu’ils puissent forcer...”, etc’.17 Flaubert notes, by way of commentary, that France is clearly still ‘ivre d’autorité’, the many

13

Les Cenci, in Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques complètes, II: 1123. Armance, ‘Avant-propos’, in Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques complètes, I: 86. 15 D’un nouveau complot contre les industriels, in Stendhal, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Victor Del Litto and Ernest Abravanel, 50 vols (Geneva: Cercle du Bibliophile, [1967]-74), XLV: 271. 16 Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Du Degré de certitude de la médecine (Paris: Didot, 1798), p. 136. 17 Letter to George Sand of 3 February 1873, in Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. by Jean Bruneau, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 19732007), IV: 642. 14

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revolutions and insurrections notwithstanding.18 As the son and brother of prominent surgeons, he presumably considered himself well-placed to spot the dangers implicit in such sentiments. To be fair, Cabanis saw them too, hence his stress on the sacred priestly functions of the doctor: Comme dans les objets de ses travaux il ne s’agit de rien moins que de la vie des hommes, son devoir de dire toutes les vérités utiles, de n’en altérer aucune, de donner à son esprit toute la perfection dont il est susceptible, devient si sacré, que la plus légère violation, le plus léger oubli, la moindre négligence sur chacun de ces points, a toujours quelque chose de véritablement criminel. [...] C’est peu qu’il sache médicamenter, il faut qu’il sache guérir. Et pour cela, il n’a pas moins besoin de connaître les divers effets des impressions morales, que ceux des remèdes ou des aliments: il faut qu’il soit initié dans tous les secrets du cœur, qu’il sache en remuer à propos toutes les fibres sensibles.19

The doctor, as the new priest, recognizes that le physique and le moral are interdependent and that he must therefore serve as a new kind of director of conscience in the wider interests of the body. For the anticlerical Stendhal – an admirer of Cabanis, particularly the Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, described as ‘ma bible à seize ans’20 – this priestly function of the doctor perverts rather than legitimizes any claim to power founded on the doctor’s fitness to regulate health and disease in the interests of utility. Stendhal is therefore less optimistic than Cabanis. The latter posits an abuse of power that can only emerge in exceptional circumstances: few doctors, surely, would stoop to outright criminality. Stendhal sees the danger rather differently. In a journal entry of 26 February 1829, he declares that: Le gouvernement doit fournir au plus bas prix possible: 1o La justice entre particuliers, 2o La sûreté dans les rues et sur les chemins, 18

Ibid., p. 642. Du Degré de certitude, pp. 136-37, my italics. 20 Souvenirs d’égotisme, in Œuvres intimes, II: 463. Stendhal actually read the Rapports du physique et du moral for the first time at the age of 22, alongside Du Degré de certitude. See Victor Del Litto, La Vie intellectuelle de Stendhal 180221 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), pp. 169-71 and the entry for 5 February 1805 in Stendhal’s Journal, in Œuvres intimes, I: 199 and 1224n. Stendhal read Du Degré de certitude in its second edition of 1803. 19

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3o La monnaie bien marquée à sa juste valeur, 4o Il doit bien diriger la guerre. Et voilà tout. Chaque Français doit payer son prêtre comme il paie son médecin.21

Stendhal does not here mean that priests should be rendered as powerless as doctors; rather that neither priests nor doctors, already powerful by virtue of the positions of trust in which they find themselves, should be gifted any further power by the state. They should not publicly be rewarded for the excellent dinners they are already giving themselves. Stendhal uses Lucien Leuwen to engage in a virtual dialogue with Cabanis. Lucy Garnier has demonstrated how Stendhal draws on Cabanis’s essentialist theories of gender, particularly in his characterizations of the two main female protagonists.22 Stendhal had in any case been thinking of the Cabanis family when writing the novel. The charming, overly tall and therefore unmarriageable Théodelinde de Serpierre, one of Lucien’s few friends among the Nancy aristocracy, is drawn from life, for Stendhal had already been introduced to Annette Cabanis, the physician’s daughter, ‘haute de six pieds et malgré cela fort aimable’, by a matchmaking Destutt de Tracy.23 Stendhal claims his subsequent flight from the Cabanis family home, blamed on the heat in the stuffy salon rather than on Mlle Cabanis’s excessive height, was never forgiven by the Ideologue.24 The shadow of Cabanis also hangs over the novel on account of the characterization of Dr Du Poirier, for this modern professional doctor is shown seeking to arrogate the powers of the priest and the magistrate. Du Poirier is reputedly the best doctor in Nancy. He also serves as the unofficial spokesman of Legitimism, the political party of his aristocratic clientele. Yet it becomes clear that the doctor’s ambitions 21

Œuvres intimes, II: 103. Lucy Garnier, ‘ “La femme par M. De Stdl”: Discours médical et sexualité féminine’, Institutions and Power, Society of Dix-Neuviémistes Fifth Annual Conference, Cambridge, 29 March 2007. 23 Souvenirs d’égotisme, in Œuvres intimes, II: 463. Anne-Marie Meininger, on the basis of a manuscript notation, suggests instead the daughters of baron Regnault de la Susse as the models for the various demoiselles de Serpierre. See her edition of Lucien Leuwen (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Folio’, 2002), pp. 927-28. 24 Œuvres intimes, II: 463. 22

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extend far beyond the building of his professional practice. Du Poirier is obsessed with power for its own sake. He takes over the role of the abbé Frilair in Le Rouge: he is a Jesuit of the modern age; a provincial power-broker with national ambitions; a doctor who, by exploiting his control over bodies (and souls), intends in time to regulate the body politic. It therefore comes as little surprise when, at the end of the novel, Du Poirier resurfaces in Paris, this time as an Orleanist member of the Assembly. The poire, widely recognized as the symbol of Louis-Philippe thanks to Daumier’s famous caricatures, is after all embedded in the doctor’s name. Du Poirier is described as looking like a fox – ‘c’est un désavantage pour un apôtre’, the narrator notes sardonically;25 he was originally conceived as a comic character, the comic aspect consisting in his pronounced physical cowardice, traces of which survive in his eventual characterization. It is the combination of cunning and cowardice that allows Du Poirier to understand and exploit human weakness; and the best position from which to exploit human weakness in an increasingly secular age is not that of the priest but that of the doctor. Du Poirier – in order to consolidate his power over the Legitimists of Nancy, themselves desperate, for reasons of caste, to end Lucien’s relationship with the aristocratic Bathilde de Chasteller – improvises a plan to force Lucien to leave the city. He is already physician to both Bathilde and Lucien; when she contracts a mild fever, he decides to exploit his physician’s knowledge of Lucien’s secrets du cœur. He lets it be known that she is much more ill than at first appears; treats her by blistering her leg, thereby preventing her from walking for a month; looks grim when taking her pulse and recommends she practise the full range of religious observances. Du Poirier has invented Bathilde’s illness in order to fulfil his social and political ambitions. Outlandish though his conduct may at first appear, it actually serves to exemplify nineteenth-century clinical practice. For Du Poirier is reflecting and exploiting anxiety in order to generate the power that proceeds from the social construction of disease. This includes an apparent power over life and death: ‘Mourir n’est donc que cela! se disait Mme de Chasteller, qui était loin de se douter 25

Lucien Leuwen, ‘Le Chasseur vert’, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, II: 802.

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qu’elle n’avait qu’une fièvre fort ordinaire’.26 Soon, she is reduced to welcoming her imminent death as a release. It is only during Bathilde’s illness that Du Poirier develops feelings of hatred for Lucien. Young, good-looking men always attract the hatred of older, less good-looking men in Stendhal’s work. However, Du Poirier’s hatred appears particularly extreme, for he hates the young and healthy in the way that, in Stendhal’s work, the powerful hate the powerless, deceivers hate the gullible, fathers hate their sons. Du Poirier arranges for Lucien to be admitted to the antechamber of Bathilde’s bedroom, where he is made to wait behind a wooden partition.27 Presently, Lucien hears the cries of a baby and then sees Du Poirier emerge holding the infant in a sheet spotted with blood. Du Poirier, apparently ignorant of Lucien’s presence, converses with his accomplice, speculating on the likely paternity while announcing that Bathilde is now out of danger. Lucien, who knows he cannot be one of the candidates, leaves the house and then Nancy, bringing the first book to a close. Stendhal prepares the reader for Bathilde’s return at various points in the second book, but the novel ends without these expectations being fulfilled and it is Du Poirier instead who returns, winning election to the chamber and claiming, in his maiden speech, to represent the poor and the sick. While other deputies were no doubt learning how to dance and behave in polite society, ‘moi je visitais des chaumières dans la montagne couverte de neige, et j’apprenais à connaître les besoins et les vœux du peuple’.28 Du Poirier’s false labour – to reappropriate a medical term – has been passed over in relative critical silence. The episode’s lack of verisimilitude can be taken as evidence of Stendhal’s literary incompetence, or else, more positively, as an example of how le vrai exceeds le vraisemblable, how literature ought properly to exceed the artificial limits and proprieties set by normative literary codes. I would argue, however, that the episode, foregrounded by its jarring implausibility, serves principally to interrogate the nature of modern medical power. Thus the atypicality of Du Poirier’s resort to outright criminality, as allowed for by Cabanis, paradoxically serves to draw 26

Lucien Leuwen, ‘Manuscrit autographe’, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, II: 350. 27 Ibid., pp. 354-57. 28 Ibid., p. 606, my italics.

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the reader’s attention to the typicality of the professional doctor’s willto-power. It is in this way that Du Poirier’s false labour comes to function as a paradigm case. Du Poirier exploits his power as a magistrate, punishing and then incarcerating Bathilde for her transgressive romance by spuriously invoking utility; he exploits his power as a priest by using his position to locate Lucien’s fibres sensibles. Du Poirier has found out Lucien’s secret du cœur, namely his jealousy of his alleged predecessor in Bathilde’s affections, the Legitimist and aristocratic former colonel of his regiment, Busant de Sicile, himself a symbol of traditional patriarchal power mistakenly figured by Lucien as a powerful lover.29 By contrast, Lucien feels himself to be powerless, not just as a lover, but also before his seemingly omnipotent father, whose mentoring role is played in Nancy by Du Poirier. Lucien is (ambivalently) jealous of power itself; he worries he is Bathilde’s dupe while hoping that their (largely imaginary) relationship will itself allow him to escape from Stendhal’s depressing paradigm of power. Du Poirier’s claim to magistracy over the body of Bathilde refers back beyond Cabanis and his vérités utiles to the reinvention of the physician as a technocrat thanks to the successful containment of the Marseilles plague of 1720. In the unpublished Voyages en France, Stendhal discusses both the Marseilles plague and the Paris cholera of 1832. He notes that: Les quatre mille élèves en médecine qui étudient une science raisonnable dans cette ville de l’esprit, voulant avoir quelque chose de neuf à dire, ont inventé que la peste et plusieurs autres maladies fort connues ne sont pas contagieuses. En France il n’y a point de vérités; il n’y a que des modes; il est donc parfaitement inutile de démontrer qu’il est utile de faire telle ou telle chose.30 29

See René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961). Girard cites the triangle formed by Bathilde, Lucien and Busant as a kind of proof that all desire is mediated, claiming as a result that Stendhal, in his novels, argues against his own Romantic opposition of vanity and passion; instead these are (truthfully) shown to form part of a continuum. Thus Lucien’s passionate desire for Bathilde is determined by the elusive figure of Busant, conjured up as a rival by Lucien’s vanity: ‘chez Lucien Leuwen, la pensée du mythique colonel Busant de Sicile fixe sur Mme de Chasteller un désir vague, un vague désir de désirer qui eût pu tout aussi bien se poser sur une autre jeune femme de l’aristocratie nancéienne’ (p. 29). 30 Voyages en France, p. 512; Stendhal’s italics.

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Staking out a new position, however false, allows doctors to accede to power. This is the kind of lesson Ernest Dévelroy tries to teach his cousin Lucien at the start of the novel. Ernest is a ‘jeune savant qui brillait déjà dans la Revue de *** et avait eu trois voix pour l’Académie des Sciences Morales’.31 There is, however, little connection between Ernest’s learned articles and his three votes. He has manoeuvred himself into position by locating the fibres sensibles of existing academicians. Just as the influence of Frilair in Le Rouge is said to originate in his unusual skill in de-boning his Bishop’s favourite fish, so Ernest’s final elevation depends on his accompanying a moribund academician to take the waters in a spa town. The power of magistracy that is wielded over the nation is derived, in the first instance, from priestly control over the residually powerful representatives of the old order. Proximity and insight are combined to locate weakness. This method works also to accede to a position of power over the perennially powerless masses, for les besoins et les vœux du peuple have, hypocritically, become the source and object of power. Dévelroy becomes a moral rather than a natural scientist; his science claims to be founded on the useful truths prospected by Cabanis, but is actually founded on the useful deceptions of cant. The Académie des Sciences Morales, refounded by Louis-Philippe in 1832, may have appointed the high-minded Destutt de Tracy to its first fauteuil in philosophy; the economics section nevertheless functioned from the outset as the officially-sanctioned mouthpiece for the same liberal (in the French sense) economic orthodoxies championed by the Industriels under the Restoration. However, doctors such as Du Poirier find themselves even better placed than Dévelroy, for they can claim to unite the natural and the moral sciences, invoking the often spurious utility of the former to justify the technocratic cant of the latter. Bathilde is ill because Du Poirier says she is. The French people are ill because he says they are. It follows that he must arrogate power to effect a cure. Louis-Philippe, the monarch Du Poirier will finally serve, is after all le roi des Français rather than le roi de France; his reign exemplifies the transition, identified by Foucault and others, from a state of territory to a state of population; a state where the 31

Lucien Leuwen, ‘Le Chasseur vert’, in Œuvres romanesques complètes, II: 727.

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physical (and, by Cabanis’s extension, moral) life of the people becomes the primary object of sovereign political power.32 Stendhal, by the time he turned to writing Lamiel in 1839, had already abandoned all plans to publish Lucien Leuwen, not least on account of the new Press Laws promulgated in September 1835. It is perhaps for this reason that Dr Sansfin appears as a new version of Du Poirier. The adolescent Lamiel is forever trying to make her own sense of the world. Dr Sansfin offers her the following explanation: ‘Le monde’, lui disait Sansfin, ‘n’est point divisé comme le croit le nigaud, en riches et en pauvres, en hommes vertueux et en scélérats, mais tout simplement en dupes et en fripons. Voilà la clef qui explique le XIXe siècle depuis la chute de Napoléon’.33

Thus Sansfin, in the manner of Du Poirier, seeks to dominate the local aristocracy, noting: ‘Je joue sur leurs terreurs comme Lamiel joue sur son piano: je les augmente et les calme presque à volonté’;34 he loathes young and healthy men;35 he entrenches his power by making a healthy woman appear sick.36 At times, Sansfin replaces Lamiel as the novel’s central character: proof, according to Naomi Schor, of Stendhal’s inability to write a nineteenth-century feminist novel.37 Sansfin’s prominence can, however, also be taken as evidence of Stendhal’s continuing interest in medical power. Sansfin, like Du Poirier before him, will not abandon his diagnostic duties in cases where there is no physical illness. Rather, he will recognize that his power as a physician lies in understanding and controlling the moral life of his patients, thereby exercising the priestly functions set out by Cabanis. Sansfin debunks 32

See Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, ed. by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), III: 719; Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 188; and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 3. 33 Stendhal, Lamiel, ed. by Jean-Jacques Hamm (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1993), p. 118. 34 Ibid., p. 130. 35 Ibid., p. 67. 36 Ibid., pp. 87-97. 37 Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 141-43.

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power in the lessons he gives to Lamiel; but he does so in an attempt to reinforce his own power over her; he has used his position as a doctor to understand Lamiel’s secret du cœur, her need to set herself free from the cant that regulates her life. The duchesse de Miossens has taken Lamiel into her house to preserve herself from boredom; it is boredom that Sansfin correctly diagnoses as the disease afflicting Lamiel. Sansfin prescribes invigorating extracts from the sensational Gazette des Tribunaux; he further enlivens Lamiel by expounding his cynical philosophy of life, contradicting the homilies of the Church and the cant of (Restoration) morality. His cure works and Lamiel is soon restored to full health. However, Sansfin keeps her recovery a secret, teaching her that her power, and by extension his, consists in keeping the Duchess in a state of perpetual anxiety. Every day he smuggles a live bird into Lamiel’s room, cuts off its head, collects its blood and uses this to impregnate a small sponge which he places in Lamiel’s mouth. She then coughs up the blood in the presence of the Duchess, who becomes convinced that Lamiel is on the point of death.38 Sansfin’s actions are designed to entrench his power not just with the aristocratic Duchess but also with the working-class, or else classless, Lamiel, whom he has turned into his accomplice and so compromised. From this point on, Sansfin is in a position to mediate between the two women, and also to mediate between each of the two women and the outside world. Lamiel, as the singular heroine of Stendhal’s novel, will find the way to break free from Sansfin. However, his career as a deputy in Paris after the revolution of 1830 would no doubt have seen him consolidate his hold over the gullible, playing on political terrors the way he plays on medical terrors – the way Lamiel plays on her piano. For Sansfin, as well as for Du Poirier, what matters is not truth but the plausible: the ordered fictions that gain the acceptance of the gullible. At the same time, the plausible must contain within it an element of disorderly truth if it is to capture the imagination: the plausible must engage with the inchoate fantasies and fears of those being deceived. Du Poirier and Sansfin variously invoke the spectres of birth, disease and death, showing just enough of these simultaneously to disrupt and authenticate the patterns of meaning 38

Lamiel, pp. 94-96.

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created by diagnosis and prognosis. In the age of cant, power is wielded not by kings; it is wielded by the creators of fictions at once plausible and disturbing: doctors exercising the functions of priest and magistrate, but not in the manner envisaged by Cabanis.

The Crocodiles of Caen and the Molluscs of the Museum: Rhetoric, Science, and Power in Nineteenth-Century France ROSEMARY LLOYD

This is a tale of molluscs, museums, and men, of the power of space and the power of language, of the ways in which we build our vision of the world around us and the ways in which that vision can limit sight. Where molluscs make their shells by secreting the calcium carbonate from specialized cells at the edge of their mantle, museums, and particularly Paris’s Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, can be read as secretions in stone of scientific beliefs. But scientists also build up around themselves a secretion of rhetoric that pours layer on layer to protect those parts that are weakest. My focus here is on a scientific presentation purportedly about molluscs that set loose an orgy of rhetoric, primarily from two great scientists of the Muséum, Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The historian of science Toby Appel argues that the debate had implications that went beyond biology, touching not just the scientific community but art and literature as well.1 In fact, its influence extended to architecture too, for as Paula Lee Young has shown in an article nicely titled ‘The Meaning of Molluscs’, the debate sparked a similar argument on the morphology of constructed form between the architectural theorist Quatremère de Quincy and Henri Labrouste, designer of the old Bibliothèque nationale.2 One thinks of Balzac’s Mme Vauquer as the human equivalent of her lodging house while the lodging house in turn embodies her in bricks and mortar, an analogy intensified by the 1

2

Toby Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 3. Paula Lee Young, ‘The Meaning of Molluscs’, The Journal of Architecture, 3 (Autumn 1998), 211-48.

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presence in the pension of an employee of the Muséum, the character who parodically categorizes Goriot as ‘un colimaçon, un mollusque anthropomorphe à classer dans les Casquettifères’.3 Indeed, the debate paralleled the use of spaces in the Muséum in the desire to build an institutional and architectural structure that could guarantee the possession of power and that had the effect, for most of the nineteenth century, of locking thought in France about what we now term evolution into, if not a cul-de-sac, at least a maze. As Yvette Conry argues, Darwinism in France between 1860 and the end of the century had to fight its way through a complex labyrinth of science, ideology, the politics of state and the politics of institutions.4 Perhaps that rhetoric, both verbal and spatial, might have been less powerful had the Muséum in the early years of the nineteenth century not resembled so closely a tightly-knit village, situated on the edge of Paris and reflecting in its own idiosyncratic way the political power struggles of the city and more broadly the country as a whole. It was not just a working space: those appointed to it and working for its garden and laboratories lived there, intermarried, and, not unlike hermit crabs, built up a physical space around them that corresponded to their personalities and to their power within the institution. Francis Ponge’s tongue-in-cheek definition in ‘Le mollusque’ leaps to mind: Le mollusque est doué d’une énergie puissante à se renfermer. Ce n’est à vrai dire qu’un muscle, un gond, un blount et sa porte. Le blount ayant sécrété la porte. Deux portes légèrement concaves constituent sa demeure entière. Première et dernière demeure. Il y loge jusqu’après sa mort. Rien à faire pour l’en tirer.5

On the scientist’s power to close the door depended, for several decades, the evolution of French science. Dorinda Outram, Cuvier’s biographer, presents a picture of the museum as a series of households with no sharp dividing line between the domestic and the institutional, either metaphorically or physically. Cuvier’s private rooms, for instance, were directly connected with the 3

Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1976-1981), III: 73. 4 Yvette Conry, L’Introduction du Darwinisme en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1974), p. 28. 5 Francis Ponge, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bernard Beugnon (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1999), I: 23.

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anatomy galleries of the museum. The great Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, who was the first to give a comprehensive account of JeanBaptiste Lamarck’s views in English and would have such an influence on the young Charles Darwin, announced in a letter of 23 February 1829: I got into Cuvier’s sanctum sanctorum yesterday, and it is truly characteristic of the man. In every part it displays that extraordinary power of methodizing which is the grand secret of the prodigious feats he performs annually without appearing to give himself the least trouble, but before I introduce you to this study I should tell you that there is first the Museum of natural history opposite the house and admirably arranged by himself, then the anatomy Museum connected with his dwelling.6

Further insight comes from a satirical work published in 1847 by Isidore S. de Gosse and Frédéric Gérard according to which: Le Muséum d’Histoire naturelle est une république aristocratico-démocratique, – une république capable de dégoûter les Brutus les plus intrépides de toute espèce de république. Elle est composée de 15 professeurs inamovibles assaisonnés de 15 aides-naturalistes, pauvres infortunés soumis au bon vouloir de ces messieurs. [...] Chaque professeur a son petit palais et gouverne en autocrate dans sa spécialité. Il a seul la clé des collections visibles et cachées, seul il peut en disposer à son gré.7

While this is parody, it is, like all parodies, not without a strong element of truth. The nature of the Muséum meant, indeed, that its collections as a whole displayed as many different classificatory systems as there were chairs to which cabinets were attached, as if each professor were a mollusc whose gallery was extruded by his individual interests. Cuvier, who divided animals into four categories: Vertebrata, Articulata, Radiata, and Mollusca, with the molluscs firmly set apart from the vertebrates, certainly used the structures of the museum to body forth his own ideas and attitudes about comparative anatomy. When the 6

Dorinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 248. On Lyell and Lamarck see Charles Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 301. 7 Histoire naturelle, drolatique et philosophique des professeurs du jardin des plantes, des aide-naturalistes, préparateurs etc., attachés à cet établissement, accompagnée d’épisodes scientifiques et pittoresques (Paris: Gustave Sandre, 1847).

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galleries under his control reopened to the public in 1806 for the first time since 1793 they reflected in their physical set up and in their intellectual implications Cuvier’s predominant interest in internal structures. Lamarck’s galleries revealed a classification based on external structures, while Geoffroy’s foundation and control of the menagerie and the zoology collections enabled him to give a concrete form to his own convictions. One of the great students of the nature of power, Michel Foucault, argues in Les Mots et les choses that the theory of natural history cannot be disassociated from that of language.8 However that may be, it is certainly the case that the history of natural history cannot be separated from the rhetorical use of language. It was Cuvier’s gift of rhetoric, that art of public oratory, which let him convince his hearers of the truth of his scientific theories and consolidated his reputation as a magician of science. Nowhere was that gift more in evidence than in the heated debates that took place in 1830, drawing the attention of the whole of Europe to the Muséum and its proceedings. The debate was not of course an example of spontaneous generation, that attractive but untenable theory Buffon proposed for the presence of living things on the planet, but had evolved from earlier disputes, and has its own fossil record, fossils being, etymologically and practically, what one gets by digging. It was in the late 1820s that the discovery of fossilized crocodile remains in the oolitic soil near Caen triggered a series of animosities that would eventually lead to the more famous public debate. What gave teeth to the dispute were the growing tensions between what later became known as fixisme (the conviction that species are created and unchanging, and that the earth had been transformed by a series of catastrophes which had wiped out all species, forcing life on earth to be created afresh) and transformisme (the theory that species develop over time, evolving away from the models left by the fossil record). This particular debate around transformisme, which focused on the Lamarckian evolution of biological species, according to which acquired characteristics could be passed on to offspring, began around 1825 and continued for well over 50 years. Although the idea of species changing through time has been around since at least the days 8

Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 170.

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of Heraclitus in the fifth century before the present era, the modern debate began as an intellectual skirmish between the convictions and rhetoric of Cuvier on the one hand and those of Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire on the other.9 They were responding in large part to Buffon’s rejection of the theory that a series of catastrophes had destroyed entire species, forcing their re-creation. It was Buffon’s student Lamarck who, in his Philosophie zoologique of 1809, first upheld the conviction that all living species had evolved through time, passing on acquired characteristics to their offspring. E. S. Russell, in his classic work Form and Function, asserts: ‘The contrast between the teleological attitude, with its insistence on the priority of function to structure, and the morphological attitude, with its conviction of the priority of structure to function, is one of the most fundamental in biology.’10 Is the giraffe’s neck long because it browses on tall trees, or does it browse on tall trees because its neck is long? More interestingly still of course: has it grown a long neck in order to browse on tall trees? Was Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss right to claim that it is because our noses are perfectly formed for wearing spectacles that we have come to wear spectacles? After the death of Lamarck, Geoffroy and Cuvier were the greatest representatives of these opposing views, the morphological and the teleological. Geoffroy was convinced that all animals were variations on the same basic design, and that they changed their form according to surrounding conditions, giving rise in this way to multiple homologies across species. For Cuvier, there could be no possibility of species changing, since their form dictated their function, and any significant variation in form would prevent the animal from functioning. Indeed, all Cuvier’s analyses of fossils reinforced his conviction that ‘Les animaux de l’ancien monde différaient tous de ceux que nous voyons aujourd’hui sur terre’.11 That conviction is still to be found in, for instance, the Roret manual to paleontology of 1846, which takes for granted the 9

A useful guide is Goulven Laurent, Paléontologie et évolution en France de 1800 à 1860: Une histoire des idées de Cuvier et Lamarck à Darwin (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1987). 10 E.S. Russell, Form and Function (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; first published 1916), p. 3. 11 ‘Notice sur le squelette d’une très grande espèce de quadrupède inconnu...’, Magasin encyclopédique, 2 année 1796, I: 310.

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‘destruction totale’ of all species, and the conviction that ‘ces espèces anciennes n’ont aucun rapport avec celles qui vivent maintenant’.12 These convictions were central to the argument that erupted in part because of the crocodiles of Caen, fossil remains that revealed four types with markedly different features. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, whose familiarity with crocodiles stemmed from his having spent a long period in Egypt as part of Napoleon’s scientific campaign, asserted that these differences showed that the crocodiles had developed into different species because of different environments. Cuvier’s argument, based on his own considerable knowledge of fossils, was that each was a separately created species. It is worth pointing out that just as Geoffroy had gone to Egypt, while Cuvier, who had also been invited, stayed home building up his power base, so Geoffroy went to Caen to see the crocodiles for himself, while Cuvier relied on drawings done by others. Moreover, while Cuvier, the analyst, moves from the particular to the general, identifying an entire creature from a single bone, for Geoffroy, the synthesizer, the particular can separate itself from the general, and monsters (his words for embryos that display significant differences from their parents) can be born through the workings of the environment. The tensions caused by this difference not just of opinion, but of method and character, reached a climax over something apparently unrelated, an unexpectedly potent blend of molluscs and a small u-shaped bone, and in doing so they shed a particularly lurid light on the question of institutions and power in the early nineteenth century, in ways that are intricately associated with rhetoric. However strongly he was convinced that he was right, Geoffroy lacked the rhetorical fire that made people flock to hear Cuvier’s lectures and lent power to his affirmations. The charge for these lectures was low, and admission was open to all who wished to attend, from the general public, even tourists, to serious students, making them an ideal vehicle, for those with the skills to do so, to gain ascendancy over the popular imagination. And Cuvier pulled none of his punches, either in private or in public. In 1820, for instance, he hurled the following rebuke at Geoffroy in front of the other professors of the 12

Marcel de Serres, Nouveau Manuel complet de paléontologie (Paris: Éditions Roret, 1846), p. 5.

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museum: ‘Votre mémoire sur le squelette des insectes manque de logique du commencement à la fin. Vous comparez des choses qui ne sont nullement susceptibles de l’être. Rien de commun, absolument rien entre les insectes et les animaux vertébrés: tout au plus un seul point, l’animalité’.13 The rhetorical technique here, which is also a psychological one, is to annihilate the opposition by completely denying their argument and then follow the annihilation with what seems a small concession, which is of course a concession that yields only the irrefutably obvious, not something essential to either argument. What was at issue was less the skeleton of insects than the questioning of Cuvier’s system of four separate branches of animals. Yet the tone of this attack reveals how ferociously Cuvier used rhetoric as much as scientific proof to fight his corner: in his courses he would pour scorn on Lamarck and Geoffroy, attacking their literary style in order to weaken their scientific arguments. As for Geoffroy, his friend and admirer George Sand sheds considerable light on him when she depicts him in her autobiography in these terms: Il est des génies malheureux auxquels l’expression manque et qui, à moins de trouver un Platon pour les traduire au monde, tracent de pâles éclairs dans la nuit des temps, et emportent dans la tombe le secret de leur intelligence, l’inconnu de leur méditation, comme disait un membre de cette grande famille de muets ou de bègues illustres, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.14

It is worth recalling at this juncture, however, that it was Geoffroy who published the debate as a book, and therefore had the chance to organize it as he saw fit, and add his own preface and copious notes, giving himself the chance to answer at leisure points the quick-witted and fiery Cuvier had raised ex tempore. Moreover, Geoffroy embellished it with long footnotes which represent a magnificent esprit d’escalier, even if it is an escalier en colimaçon. What is clear 13

14

Quoted in Goulven Laurent, Paléontologie et évolution en France de 1800 à 1860, p. 332, from Cuvier’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire et à l’anatomie des mollusques, Second Mémoire, p. 34, note. George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, ed. by Georges Lubin (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1970), I: 47. On this relationship see Jacques de Caso and André Bigotte, with Isabelle Naginski, ‘Amitiés romantiques: Théophile Bra, George Sand et Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’, George Sand Studies, 2 (2004), 3-31.

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from the preface is that the central issue in this debate, more important still than any system of classification, is one of hierarchy: ‘Il y a au fond des choses un fait grand, essentiel, vraiment fondamental, donnant une âme à l’histoire naturelle, et appelant dès lors les généralités de cette science à devenir la première des philosophies’.15 What takes place, therefore, initially in the halls of the academy and rapidly thereafter reverberates through the newspapers and penetrates even into the parlours of the bourgeoisie, is a struggle for a further kind of classification: that of the forms of knowledge themselves and the prestige (and funding) that each form of knowledge would attract. It was that battle that would have such a profound effect on nineteenth-century writers from Chateaubriand and Balzac, Flaubert and Baudelaire, to Taine and Zola. Like many revolutions, it began imperceptibly: two junior anatomists, Laurencet and Meyranx, requested the right to present a lecture to the Academy, blandly titled ‘Quelques considérations sur l’organisation des mollusques’. Following normal practice two more senior members were appointed to judge it, in this case, Geoffroy and Pierre André Latreille. It was their report that set the crocodile among the dinosaurs so to speak, although it began in a sufficiently anodyne manner: ‘quelques considérations: titre vague, mais sans couleur, probablement par excès de modestie’.16 And there suddenly the gloves come off, when Geoffroy affirms that modesty is uncalled for, since what these two scientists have found is order, where their predecessors had seen only confusion; they had found a common measure in creatures their elders and betters had set aside as unclassifiable. All one has to do, inspired by the fact that the mollusc’s mouth is in the middle of its body, is to turn it inside out and one immediately sees the homologies with the vertebrates. Of course, the report concludes disingenuously, this work is of interest only in so far as it expands our knowledge of molluscs. But before that hypocritical captatio benevolentiae, it has slipped in a passage that Cuvier demanded be suppressed in the published version, a passage that referred to his work as being ‘riche de faits, puissant et éclatant de savoir et de 15

The debate has been republished by Patrick Tort as La Querelle des analogues (Paris: Éditions d’aujourd’hui, 1983). 16 Ibid., p. 37.

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sagacité’, but nevertheless shown by this recent study to be, if not incorrect, at least incomplete.17 Geoffroy might have been better advised not to take on his adversary so directly: Cuvier is described as ‘mordant, polémique, volontiers critique’, capable of ridiculing his opponents in public and able to speak to his audience in terms that they not only understood but that convinced them that he was right. His cunning manipulation of extended rhetorical tropes can best be seen in his deceptively-titled ‘Éloges’, the obituaries he wrote for members of the academy of sciences and that he sometimes used, most notoriously in the case of Lamarck, not to praise his subject but to bury him, throwing Lamarck’s arguments completely and without scruple into disrepute: En traçant cette vie de l’un de nos plus célèbres naturalistes, nous avons pensé qu’il était de notre devoir, en accordant de justes louanges aux grands et utiles travaux que la science lui doit, de signaler aussi ceux de ses ouvrages où trop de complaisance pour une imagination vive l’a conduit à des résultats plus contestables, et de marquer, autant qu’il est en nous, les causes et les occasions de ces écarts, ou, si l’on peut s’exprimer ainsi, leur généalogie.18

For Cuvier, no ‘de mortuis nil nisi bunkum’. Geoffroy was in many ways too gentle a soul to take on such a blistering orator as Cuvier, as we can see from a footnote inserted into the publication of the debate: when Cuvier asked Geoffroy haughtily and point blank to tell him where the brain of a cephalopod was situated, Geoffroy, knowing he had been shown to be correct, confesses, perhaps disingenuously: ‘Je m’arrêtai à l’idée de ne point blesser un ancien ami’.19 Elsewhere in the debate, Geoffroy insists: ‘je n’ambitionne point un succès qui tiendrait au talent de bien dire. Je n’emploîrai donc ni art ni précautions oratoires dans mes récits’.20 Perhaps this is rhetoric too, but the point is that Cuvier would never have hesitated about hurting a former friend: he would happily have used all the rhetorical thunderbolts at his considerable command. Indeed, Cuvier not only responded personally but also rallied his troops, turning not to fellow scientists, but significantly to a journalist 17

Ibid., pp. 120-21. Cuvier’s eulogy for Lamarck can be found on http://www.lamarck.cnrs.fr/ 19 Tort, La Querelle, p. 138. 20 Ibid., p. 151. 18

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who provided the Journal des débats with a summary of the argument. By no means is this impartial reporting: having mentioned that Meyranx and Laurencet had given their paper on the cephalopods, the journalist went on to explain that these are animals that Cuvier placed among the molluscs whereas the two young naturalists related them to vertebrates by, as he put it with a fine touch of irony perhaps dictated by Cuvier himself, a highly ingenious fiction. Cuvier then clarified matters through what the reporter qualifies as ‘un mémoire qui se distingue par une méthode et une clarté parfaites et par ce charme de style qui caractérise tous les écrits de l’auteur’.21 Cuvier’s response reveals that he chose to present Geoffroy’s support for Meyranx and Laurencet as a whole-hearted attack on current zoology for its lack of substance. Geoffroy, according to Cuvier, wanted to base the entire science on what he termed the principle of unity of composition, meaning that each creature reveals the same elements of structure but set up in different ways. Such an argument, insists Cuvier, that great manipulator of rhetoric, can be maintained only by a manipulation of rhetoric, of metaphors, tropes and paronomasia: Si [...] au lieu du langage simple des mots propres, rigoureusement exigés dans les sciences, on emploie des métaphores et des figures de rhétorique, le danger est bien grand. On croit se tirer d’embarras par un trope, répondre à une objection par une paronomase, et en se détournant ainsi de sa route directe, on s’enfonce promptement dans un labyrinthe sans issue.22

An affirmation in which it would be hard to deny the guiding presence of rhetoric... Geoffroy’s improvized response to Cuvier’s first attack begins with two rhetorical flourishes: the first, an assertion of friendship for his attacker, and the second, less conventional and more remarkable perhaps, a commentary on the context in which all this is taking place. When the sessions were attended uniquely by scientists, Geoffroy argued, there used to be lively debates after each memoir was read, then with an increased audience from the general public, such lively debates were set aside through a sense of reserve and stultifying politeness, such that each paper was read only in order to be deposited 21 22

Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 128.

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in the public archive. Cuvier has boldly set aside all this stultifying academic coldness, Geoffroy announces, and he has done well to do so, an assertion that sends the blame for any rough conduct straight back to Cuvier. Realizing his inability to improvize an adequate response to Cuvier’s rejection of the paper, however, Geoffroy returned on 1 March with a detailed written summary of his thinking, beginning with a classical rhetorical ploy, the elaboration of personal history. He refers to his early appointment at the Jardin des Plantes and the scientific observations this had inspired in him, observations that had led to his conviction of the existence of the unité de composition. The example he chooses to illustrate this argument is a small u-shaped bone mentioned above, the hyoid bone, which can be found, in differing manifestations, in all mammals, including, although in reduced form, in humans. It is typical of Geoffroy’s tendency either to forget the rank and file in his audience, or to wish to overwhelm them with scientific evidence, that he then goes into a detailed description of all the bones associated with this structure. Cuvier’s response to Geoffroy’s second memoir drips with a sarcasm founded on a pretension of modesty. A battering ram of repeated ‘nous comprenons’ implies that ordinary scientists, in comparison with ‘notre savant confrère’, look at things with ‘des yeux communs’ with the result that everything is explicable without all this intricate arguing.23 The conclusion draws on a reductio ad absurdum: of course natural history students would prefer to believe that everything is analogous, that you can learn about all creatures by studying one, just as a medical student would prefer to believe that all illnesses are the same.24 Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the press lapped this debate up, with both Le Temps and Le National offering their readers extensive and fairly even-handed summaries, while, as we have seen, the Journal des débats reported each exchange as it happened, but with a marked bias towards Cuvier. The irony of this resides in the fact that Cuvier had long sought to keep the wider dissemination of scientific knowledge within the control of scientists, but by bringing in his 23 24

Ibid., pp. 226 and 229. Ibid., p. 230.

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acolyte from the Journal des débats he was allowing that control to pass into other hands. If Cuvier won the debate, Appel argues that it was not by convincing his audience that species were fixed, but by persuading them that animals were created with particular ends in mind, rather than evolving to fill certain niches, that the hyoid bone in humans is as it is because of its function, and not because it evolved differently in a species that walked upright. Ironically, while Cuvier remained convinced he had won, and in terms of scientific development in France had indeed won, in the mind of the broader public the scientist who gained most from it was Geoffroy, seen as a great romantic figure, the scientist whose perceptions were too profound to be contained within mere language. Echoes of the debate can be found in numerous works of literature, suggesting the imaginative power of the rhetoric deployed if not necessarily much comprehension of what was involved. In 1848 Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe takes pains to reject the question of whether ‘l’homme est d’une nature semblable aux mollusques; si les mollusques sont le premier degré et l’homme le dernier dans l’échelle des êtres animés; ou plutôt si l’organisation n’est qu’une’.25 George Sand wrote a draft for an extra chapter of the 1839 Lélia in which she struggled to come to grips with the concept of analogies. Geoffroy, in an attempt to rally writers around his cause as Cuvier had already done around his, had asked her to write about his studies. Despite a certain reluctance based mainly on a sense that her publications were not the ideal vehicle, she did write to him in August 1838 affirming that she would do what she could: ‘Dès que j’espérerai ne pas trop dénaturer vos principes en les vulgarisant par mes mauvaises phrases, j’essayerai de le faire’.26 A year later, however, she abandoned the fragment she had written. That fragment consists of a letter from Lélia, responding to books she had received, books that risked throwing her religious convictions into doubt. Her answer includes the following paragraph, whose rhetoric functions by a patient building up of epithets and comparisons, as well as by suggesting that those who favour Cuvier reveal in so doing a judgement 25

Francois-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, ed. by M. Levaillant (Paris, Flammarion, 1948), I: 616; Chateaubriand’s italics. 26 Quoted in George Sand, Lélia, ed. by Pierre Reboul (Paris: Garnier, 1960), p. 552.

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based on current popularity rather than an awareness of the genius that only posterity understands: L’événement philosophique dont le présent s’est le moins occupé, au milieu des préoccupations d’une époque toute commerciale, et dont l’avenir s’occupera le plus, lorsqu’il nous jugera, c’est la lutte qui s’est engagée entre les deux plus illustres naturalistes de nos jours. L’un spontané, puissant, doué d’une éloquence prompte et lucide, travailleur infatigable, heureux, adulé, hardi comme Napoléon, dirai-je: capable de fautes du même genre dans son immortelle carrière... L’autre, plus patient, plus âpre, plus consciencieux, plus attentif, plus religieux dans son respect pour la vérité, parlant des études de quarante ans de sa vie comme l’autre parlerait de celles d’un jour, obstiné, persévérant, adorateur vénérable de l’universelle plastique de Dieu. [Here the Napoleonic figure is Cuvier, while the second is Geoffroy, with Sand deliberately emphasizing him as ‘religious’ because his research threw into question traditional creation myths.] Dire que le premier étouffa presque pendant un temps la voix de son rival, que les hommes, les richesses et la popularité furent son partage, est conclure selon les irrésistibles pentes de la masse selon les attraits invincibles d’un génie éclatant. Dire que le second ne se rebuta jamais et qu’il poursuivra jusqu’à sa mort la recherche et le développement du principe écrit en caractères de diamant dans la conscience de son génie, c’est écrire l’histoire de tous ceux que les générations du jour ne comprennent pas bien, mais que celles du lendemain réhabilitent.27

Cuvier, Lélia goes on to argue, would suddenly stop abruptly in his explanations, as if he were determined to introduce lacunae into knowledge, either to safeguard secrets for his own caste alone, or to avoid the wrath of a god who had ordered human ignorance. Given Cuvier’s catastrophism, his belief that the earth had been formed, not just by the biblical catastrophe of the Flood, but by a series of massive convulsions, Sand’s use of this image of lacunae implies that the gaps in his speech correspond in some indirect way to the gaps in the fossil record. She finds an equally appropriate image for Geoffroy too, comparing him to a priest of Osiris seeking out truth in the depths of temples, as indeed he did devote years to studying specimens, including mummified specimens, in Egypt. That Lélia’s letter fails to face up to the intricacy of the argument is not surprising, given the vagueness of Geoffroy’s terminology and explanations, as well as the complexity of the topic; but that Sand contemplated including the debate in a novel suggests something of the intensity of the rever27

Ibid., p. 547.

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berations it set off, and something, too, about the nature of readers and novels at that period. Those reverberations are, as is well known, particularly strong in Balzac, who in Illusions perdues evokes the debate itself as: La célèbre dispute entre Cuvier et Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, grande question qui devait partager le monde scientifique entre ces deux génies égaux, quelques mois avant la mort de celui [Cuvier] qui tenait pour une science étroite et analyste contre le panthéiste qui vit encore et que l’Allemagne révère [Geoffroy].28

Balzac abandoned his initial plan to dedicate Le Père Goriot to Chateaubriand and turned instead to that ‘panthéiste qui vit encore et que l’Allemagne révère’ whom he first met early in 1835 when he had just completed the novel: ‘Au grand et illustre Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Comme un témoignage d’admiration de ses travaux et de son génie’. La Peau de chagrin, which he dedicated to another scientist, Savary, was written in 1831, when the debate was still fresh. Seized by Cuvier’s legendary ability to recreate entire animals from a single bone, Balzac devotes a magnificent passage in La Peau de chagrin to the scientist, in which he transforms him by a curious but characteristic act of legerdemain into a great poet, thus paying tribute to Cuvier’s command of rhetoric: Vous êtes-vous jamais lancé dans l’immensité de l’espace et du temps, en lisant les œuvres géologiques de Cuvier? Emporté par son génie, avez-vous plané sur l’abîme sans bornes du passé, comme soutenu par la main d’un enchanteur? En découvrant de tranche en tranche, de couche en couche, sous les carrières de Montmartre ou dans les schistes de l’Oural, ces animaux dont les dépouilles fossilisées appartiennent à des civilisations antédiluviennes, l’âme est effrayée d’entrevoir des milliards d’années, des millions de peuples que la faible mémoire humaine, que l’indestructible tradition divine, ont oubliés et dont la cendre, entassée à la surface de notre globe, y forme les deux pieds de terre qui nous donnent du pain et des fleurs. Cuvier n’est-il pas le plus grand poète de notre siècle?29

Balzac the archaeologist clearly wants to draw on Cuvier the fossilreader to evoke vast ages encapsulated within the different objects and 28

Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1976-1981) V: 317. 29 Ibid., X: 74-75.

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layers of the second-hand store that Raphael has wandered into. Yet he pays Cuvier the enormous compliment of assuming that readers of fiction will also have read him and will have been carried away by his genius, his inspired ability to evoke the passage of enormous periods of time. In comparison with this, Balzac goes on: Lord Byron a bien reproduit par des mots quelques agitations morales; mais notre immortel naturaliste a reconstruit des mondes avec des os blanchis, a rebâti, comme Cadmus, des cités avec des dents, a repeuplé mille forêts de tous les mystères de la zoologie avec quelques fragments de houille, a retrouvé des populations de géants dans le pied d’un mammouth. Ces figures se dressent, grandissent et meublent des régions en harmonie avec leurs statures colossales. Il est poète avec des chiffres, il est sublime en posant un zéro près d’un sept. Il réveille le néant sans prononcer des paroles artificiellement magiques; il fouille une parcelle de gypse, y aperçoit une empreinte, et vous crie: ‘voyez!’ Soudain les marbres s’animalisent, la mort se vivifie, le monde se déroule! Après d’innombrables dynasties de créatures gigantesques, après des races de poissons et des clans de mollusques, arrive enfin le genre humain, produit dégénéré d’un type grandiose, brisé peut-être par le Créateur.30

While it is clear from the reference to the type grandiose that Balzac follows Geoffroy’s arguments, this superb passage indicates the extent to which Cuvier has attained mythic status in Balzac’s eyes. Balzac, moreover, uses Cuvier’s ability to systematize nature as a yardstick by which we can measure Louis Lambert’s abilities in the domain of metaphysics, and both Le Cousin Pons and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes include references to Cuvier: in the first we are assured that ‘dès qu’on admet la fatalité, c’est-à-dire l’enchaînement des causes, l’astrologie judiciaire existe et devient ce qu’elle était jadis, une science immense, car elle comprend la faculté de déduction qui fit Cuvier si grand’;31 while in Splendeurs et Misères he becomes yet another kind of yardstick: ‘Ainsi, cet homme prodigieux devinait vrai dans sa sphère de crime, comme Molière dans la sphère de la poésie dramatique, comme Cuvier avec les créations disparues. Le génie en toute chose est une intuition’.32 Most remarkable is that it is perfectly clear that Balzac does not really care who won the debate – for him both are equally powerful representatives of science and that is what 30

Ibid., X: 75. Ibid., VII: 587. 32 Ibid., VI: 733. Cuvier would hardly have relished the word ‘intuition’. 31

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matters for his artistic purposes, especially in his desire, as he expresses it through Raphaël in La Peau de chagrin, to ‘faire une histoire naturelle des cœurs, de les nommer, de les classer en genres, en sous-genres, en familles, en crustacés, en fossiles, en sauriens, en microscopiques, en..., que sais-je?’33 although, as Richard Somerset has argued, it is clear from his theoretical writing that Balzac largely follows Lamarck and Geoffroy in his thinking about natural history.34 Countless other writers, from Sainte-Beuve to Toepffer, from Stendhal to Michelet, evoke the two scientists and their debate in their writings over the course of the century. Meanwhile, across the channel Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson all pondered the meanings of such fossilized remains as those of the crocodiles of Caen. Keats in ‘Endymion’ of 1817 meditated on those ‘skeletons of man, / Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan, / And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw / Of nameless monster’ (III, ll. 133-36). Tennyson, wrestling with the death of his closest friend, famously asked in his poem ‘In Memoriam’ shall the individual Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law – Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed – Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal’d within the iron hills? (canto 56)

What was sealed, by that mollusc blount or gate that Ponge evokes, and what slammed shut as a result of the debate, was the fate of Darwin’s Evolution of Species in France. Both the general public and many of the scientists felt that the debate had already taken place and that Darwin’s additions would change nothing. His revolutionary book was therefore not translated into French for five years, and then entrusted to a woman, Clémence-Auguste Royer, which shows how 33 34

Ibid., X: 119. Richard Somerset, ‘The Naturalist in Balzac’, French Forum, 27:1 (Winter 2002), 81-111. See also Freeman G. Henry’s article ‘Rue Cuvier, rue Geoffroy-SaintHilaire, rue Lamarck: Politics and Science in the Streets of Paris’, NineteenthCentury French Studies, 35:3-4 (Spring-Summer 2007), 513-25.

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low on the evolutionary scale it was placed, a woman moreover who used the opportunity to offer a fiery, political preface that revealed the extent to which rhetorical fireworks had become accepted as inextricable not just from the vulgarization of science but from scientific argument itself.35 By turning the mollusc’s anatomy around, Laurencet and Meyranx, together with Geoffroy, had turned the argument inside out and moved the focus squarely to the mouth, and the CuvierGeoffroy debate, however much Cuvier might have denied the validity of such a move for molluscs, ensured that it was the mouth that would have the final word.

35

Charles Darwin, De l’Origine des espèces par sélection naturelle, trans. by Clémence Royer (Paris: Masson, 1866).

Education, Education, Education: The Space of the Muséum as Showcase for Thinking its Public MARY ORR

Imagine arriving, eager to see the treasures on display, at any national Natural History Museum to be greeted in the first line of the welcome pamphlet or the opening words on the audio-guide with the following: ‘La différence est grande d’un jardin à un Musée. – Là, tout vit, tout parle doucement à l’imagination: la plante croît... Dans un Musée, tout est mort, débris sur débris, pourriture sur pourriture, et l’enfant n’oserait s’y aventurer seul’. Rightly, the visitor would be shocked to discover that, rather than seeing marvels to capture the imagination, s/he will view mostly decay, disintegrating matter, fragments and dust. Perhaps the bigger shock, however, is that these are indeed the prefatory remarks to just such a museum guide, the first to be produced for the collections at Rouen, written by Georges Pouchet (1833-1894) and published in 1859.1 This essay will return to Pouchet and his rather excellent guide in more detail below. Yet his guide epitomizes the resource and display case that are surprisingly underexplored in cultural and critical studies, let alone in the history of the public dissemination of the many burgeoning fields of French nineteenth-century science. Instead, history of science concentrates almost exclusively on writing for specialist academic, and often science discipline specific audiences. Its focus in terms of nineteenth-century France has been primarily on the massive contributions to science across all fields by institutions such as the Jardin des Plantes and its Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle within the context of the

1

Georges Pouchet, Visite au Muséum d’Histoire naturelle (Rouen: A. Aillaud, 1859).

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economic and social development of the period.2 Cutting-edge science, leading scientists or museum collections are thus showcased as resource and source of national pride in the competitive, international stakes of scientific progress since comparison is inevitably made with those of other leading scientific nations.3 The subject of the public dissemination of science within a secular, post-Revolutionary France has only recently begun to be tackled, albeit obliquely and retrospectively, by historians of education policy and curriculum reform.4 Rare insights by French nineteenth-century commentators on their own national, let alone major foreign, collections must otherwise be gleaned from sources such as correspondence. For this to have been archived, however, the visitor in question will have been an important public figure or scientist, not a member of the ordinary public. Where the Muséum de Paris did in fact go to London in the person of George Cuvier and his entourage in 1818, the following is recorded: Nous y avons vu de très belles choses en histoire naturelle et surtout en fossiles. Leurs collections ne sont point à comparer aux nôtres. Le Collège des Chirurgiens contient de belles préparations faites par Hunter et en outre quelques squelettes; mais les anatomistes anglais, non plus que les naturalistes, ne sont pas forts en zoologie et en anatomie comparée, de sorte qu’ils ne connaissent pas même la valeur de leurs richesses. En général les établissements scientifiques sont presque nul en Angleterre, le gouvernement ne favorisant que l’art de gagner de l’argent, qui est porté en ce pays à sa perfection.5 2

See, for example, the excellent Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire, ed. by Claude Blanckaert, Claudine Cohen, Pietro Corsi and Jean-Louis Fischer (Paris: Éditions du Muséum National d’Histoire naturelle, 1997). 3 The final section of Le Muséum au premier siècle above, entitled ‘Le Muséum et le monde’, is an interesting case in point. Overtly exploring the influence of the Muséum as rôle model, the implication is its unsurpassed supremacy. See in particular the essay by Phillip R. Sloan, ‘Le Muséum de Paris vient à Londres’, pp. 607-34. 4 See Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 18701920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 5 In Sophie Duvaucel d’après des correspondances inédites par Docteur M. Duvernoy (Montbéliard: Société Anonyme d’Imprimerie Montbéliardaise. Extrait des Mémoires de la Société d’Émulation, 1939), p. 6. It lies outside this essay, but the speaker, Sophie Duvaucel, was Georges Cuvier’s stepdaughter. With her mother, stepsister Clémentine and the research assistant Laurillard, she accompanied Cuvier on his tour of London and Oxford Museums as translator and illustrator.

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Clearly, if the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle is the benchmark by which to judge the mounting of exhibits, the quality and arrangement of its collections, and the cultural rather than economic ends of its endeavours, how can an insight be gained about public rather than insider-specialist evaluation of the items on display? I want to suggest that the museum guide offers precisely such a means whereby to gauge the extent, and also the success, of the popularization and public dissemination of this same gamut of scientific achievement. As quintessentially a genre for the general public, it also enables evaluation of related educational issues. One is the level of prior scientific knowledge that intended visitors/viewers may be assumed to possess; another is the ideological intent or purpose behind any selection of the natural history put on display (whether by curators or scientific experts), since only certain items in the public show-cases and cabinets are flagged in the guide as more significant than the others. Moreover, because the guide directs the overall sense (and sense-making) of the visit, it also reveals much about how orders of comprehension, scientific knowledge, or disciplinary impact are controlled and exploited. Given the absence of research devoted to nineteenth-century French general public responses to scientific collections, this essay is a first bid to fill this empty, but hugely rich, cultural space about national scientific enquiry, seen specifically through the medium of museum guides for public consumption.6 Alongside the larger aim of recuperating and highlighting this genre for cultural and critical study and within history of science, the readings to follow of a selection of guides within the same decade offer a way to start looking afresh at

6

Although some of these sentiments echo something of Cuvier’s opinions, Sophie can make her clear, comparative and scientific, judgements because of her direct experience of working in the Muséum’s collections. See my recuperation of Sophie as one of early nineteenth-century France’s un-hailed women scientists, ‘Keeping it in the Family: The Extraordinary Case of Cuvier’s daughters’ in The Role of Women in the History of Geology, ed. by Cynthia Burek and Bettie Higgs (London: Geological Society Special Publications 281, 2007), pp. 277-86. I am using the word ‘guide’ as something larger than one folded A4 sheet, but portable, inexpensive and available to accompany the visit. To my knowledge, no study of such guides for the nineteenth-century French general public to scientific collections in museums exists. I have not ascertained whether there are studies of museum guides for English or German collections of the period.

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the exhibits and cabinets of artifacts on display, and within specifically educational and ideological frames of reference. I will start by briefly outlining those that were overtly enshrined in the founding Constitution of the Jardin des Plantes in 1793 (when it ceased to be the Jardin du Roi). Its grand aims will then be tested by their more humble practice, three publics drawn from very different cultural backgrounds and levels of education in nineteenth-century French sciences. The first is an educated Egyptian Moslem at the turn of the nineteenth century, responding to hastily produced ‘notices’ (rather than a formal guide) about the latest French science. A Parisian bourgeoise in the late 1850s is the second, this time imagined, public availing herself of a new pocket-sized guide in order to make a visit to the Jardin des Plantes. The third is a Rouennais of the same period – Pouchet’s guide in hand – making a Sunday visit en famille to his local, regional Muséum.7

Founding principles of nineteenth-century French scientific institutions From the very outset, the Jardin des Plantes was envisaged as at once a scientific research establishment and a public organ of the new Republic. While access to its professoriat and hence to the scientific endeavours of the Muséum were the prerogative of the very few, the task for this male elite of furthering their disciplines by research and publication was translated into three particular responsibilities, their ‘public accountability’ in today’s terms. First, the chair-holder in a given discipline was required to extend his collections, so that the very forefront of work in his field could go on display in the public galleries and cabinets of France’s premier national and international museum. Second, he was required to disseminate the importance of discoveries in his particular scientific fields by means of publication, 7

The Muséum d’Histoire naturelle in Rouen was only open on Sundays and holidays, from noon to 4pm. Students and foreign visitors could, however, have access throughout the week (including Sunday) from 2-4pm.

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public lectures and annual series of free, but more specialist, science courses. Finally, aides-naturalistes were to be trained under him in order for them to take up posts in the French provinces and colonies, with oversight over regional collections, or (scientific) curriculum provision in educational establishments in the départements they served. The original documents, drawn up by A. F. Fourcroy, A.-L. de Jussieu and the former Jardinier du Roi, André Thouin, mirror the latter’s work and interests. His main aim was to add to what was the world’s most encyclopedic collection of plants and seeds by means of correspondence with other collectors and collections, and a network of explorers bringing back specimens. The propagation and acclimatization (naturalization) at the Jardin of new non-European species for their practical, medicinal and aesthetic value then allowed distribution of their seeds to regional France and beyond.8 Voltaire’s famous ‘Il faut cultiver son jardin’ therefore had strongly patriotic and imperialist aims, even if these were also enlightened and ‘Republican’. The dissemination of scientific knowledge and educational policies constituted the many new seeds to be sown and sent out for the furtherance of their species, but via French soil and specialist expertise in their cultivation. If the well-documented model pertained – the expert (French) scientist inhabited the Paris hub, around which revolved the explorer, the regional practitioner, the amateur – the national Jardin des Plantes was then also the father of all its regional offshoot collections. Early stages of an institution’s life often prove the most fascinating, since these are usually the period of greatest experimentation. While there was an unusual continuity and organizational seamlessness between the Ancien Régime’s Jardin du Roi and the First Republic’s Jardin des Plantes, thanks largely to the same personnel and its statutes, some of its initial figures were more radical about its public and civic missions. One was the young Chair in mechanics, Napoleon Bonaparte; the other was the Protestant comparative anatomist, Georges Cuvier, arriving in Paris after exile during the Revolution spent in Normandy. Their Muséum science overtly impacts on

8

See Jean Gayon, ‘Le Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle et l’amélioration des plantes au dix-neuvième siècle’, in Le Muséum au premier siècle, pp. 375-402.

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the three general publics visiting its spaces, gazing into its cabinets, or attending its lectures.

The Egyptian Moslem public Prior to becoming Emperor and on the express orders of Talleyrand, Napoleon led the expedition to conquer Egypt for France in 1798, thereby to keep this lucrative trading centre and the East from British control. France’s occupation of Egypt was short-lived (1798-1802). Napoleon suffered a humiliating withdrawal from Syria, then returned to France in 1801, and military victory for the English ended French rule.9 Yet the expedition was arguably a major scientific coup for France since Napoleon’s ‘forces’ included 167 ‘savants’ of all disciplines, whose job was to map, collect, classify, explore and research Egypt, ancient and modern, in all aspects of its cultural and natural history.10 Whole laboratories, libraries, printing presses and the latest scientific instruments were shipped to Alexandria and then transported to requisitioned palaces in Cairo, where the Institut d’Égypte was quickly founded. This ‘seedling’ from the parent Jardin des Plantes was complete with cabinets, regular publications and public research lectures. Not unsurprisingly in this new desert milieu, plants themselves were bottom of the research agenda, whereas chemistry, mathematics, physics and natural science were all fit for military and ‘pure’ scientific purpose. Time, archive resources and specialist equipment being in short supply, the Muséum savant became by necessity an interdisciplinary expert and explorer scientist in the field, to fulfil both the practical military and ideological briefs 9

For studies of the ‘Éxpédition d’Égypte’ see Henri Laurens, L’Éxpédition d’Égypte, 1798-1801 (Paris: Colin, 1989), Robert Solé, Les Savants de Bonaparte (Paris: Seuil, 1998) and Yves Laissus, L’Égypte, une aventure savante: Avec Bonaparte, Kléber, Menou (1798-1801) (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 10 The fruits of their exploration and research would become the founding work of the new science of Egyptology, and what has itself been described as a monument, the multi-volume Expédition d’Égypte only completed after Napoleon’s own exile and death.

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of the Expédition. Napoleon’s vision, perhaps epitomized in his setting up of the Institut, was not to ‘convert’ Egypt. On the contrary, he sought to ‘civilize’ (modernize and ‘acclimatize’) the whole of Egyptian society into a Republican state by means of education in French science. The cabinets were thus envisaged as public demonstrations and displays of ‘living’ science. Moslem sheiks and political dignitaries were invited to chemistry experiments conducted by Claude Berthollet, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire gave research talks (simultaneously translated into Arabic) on indigenous fish species at the Institut. On public holidays – one such being 21 November 1798 – the populace of Cairo was invited by means of fliers in Arabic posted in the souks to witness new marvels such as the Montgolfière balloon to be launched in Azbakiyya Square that could, they said, take passengers across Egypt’s regions (and borders) on voyages of discovery. Our educated Moslem, al-Jabarti, was eyewitness to all of these events thanks to his education and social standing. If his written, translated and re-edited accounts are frequently cited (in both Arabist and French contexts) as the only extant work on the French Expédition from an occupied, ‘postcolonial’ perspective, they are possibly even more valuable for their public scientific interest.11 Towards the end of his account, al-Jabarti gives an unusually long description of the many scientific instruments (telescopes, retorts, measuring devices of all kinds), the well-equipped laboratories and organized activity of the scientists, and the library, with holdings and a librarian there to serve its users, whether officer, savant or curious ‘native’ such as himself.12 His unalloyed admiration is for this technically advanced ‘civilization’ which encourages such innovations, acknowledges Arab texts and seeks to translate its own into 11

12

There is much debate about the quality and reliability of the belated translations of al-Jabarti’s Arabic text. For our purposes, only the earliest of al-Jabarti’s versions, in their most scholarly English and French translations are quoted, Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the French Occupation of Egypt, ed. and trans. by S. Moreh (Leiden: E. J. Brill. 1975). This informs Joseph Cuoq’s Abd-alRahmân al-Jabartî: Journal d’un notable du Caire durant l’expédition française (1798-1801) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979). My essay is unusual for its primary emphasis on the scientific merits and insights of al-Jabarti’s document. Moreh, Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle, pp. 116-17; Cuoq, Abd-al-Rahmân al-Jabartî, pp. 90-94.

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Arabic. Tacitly, al-Jabarti is criticizing the backwardness of Egypt’s narrow religious tradition and hierarchy as keepers of knowledge. However, fulsome descriptions come on the back of earlier, mixed evaluations of the invited lectures. Without having the technical (scientific) vocabulary to describe Berthollet’s chemistry experiments for example, al-Jabarti accurately recounts the mixing of compounds and their results, both scientific and affective, on the Moslem audience which ‘jumps’ at the explosions (to the amusement of the French savants), but ultimately remains unimpressed.13 Al-Jabarti’s dismissive account of the launching of the French Montgolfière, puffed up like its object in a long description giving the full details of the filling of the red, white and blue balloon, is similarly unequivocal. The mismatch between the promised wonder and reality is risible, but this time the French are the butt: On tendit les cordes pour faciliter l’ascension de la sphère, puis on les coupa. Alors la sphère monta dans l’air, se déplaçant lentement suivant le vent; puis le cercle portant la mèche s’étant détaché, l’enveloppe en étoffe tomba, répandant quantité de papiers imprimés. La chute du ballon contraria les Français. Ce qu’ils avaient annoncé ne se vérifia pas. [...] En fait ce ne fut pas plus qu’un cerf-volant, tel qu’en fabriquent les valets aux jours de fêtes publiques et de divertissements.14

The very style of the account matches its pointed deflation of French pretensions, cultural, scientific and political, to confound a gullible, ignorant, audience. Al-Jabarti’s scathing appraisal of French science centres on the over-inflated manner in which it is put on display. The outcome of the spectacle (when judged against the text of the poster) makes the ‘wonder’ no more than a giant kite, and a less successful

13

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‘Nous sursautâmes, ce qui les fit rire de nous’ (Cuoq, p. 93). Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Napoleon’s private secretary, also recorded the reactions of the Moslem guests to the same experiments in his memoirs. See The French View of the Events in Egypt: Memoirs by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, translated in Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798, introduction by Robert L. Tignor (Princeton and New York: Markus Wiener Publishing, 1993), p. 157. Cuoq, p. 87; Moreh, pp. 112-13. A second attempt in early January 1799 was only marginally more successful.

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model at that.15 Key to the success of any educative and civilizing programme is therefore the need to learn to respect the native intelligence of one’s audience (and their ‘simple instinct’) as clearly on a par with one’s own. The representations of French scientific and technical superiority have very successfully been turned back on their purveyors by the very methods and tenets of French science itself, sharp observation, classification and comparative anatomy.

The Parisian, female general public No Moslem women were of course part of the audience at the Institut d’Égypte. In this they shared the same complete debarment as their French counterparts (thanks to Napoleon’s Code civil of 1804), to the hallowed sanctuaries of science, the Muséum, the University, and its Scientific Institutes. The same Code also barred French women from secondary, let alone tertiary education, and obviously from any pathway into the sciences. However, French women of all classes (and hence educational opportunity) constituted the huge public audience of the wider educational and civic missions of the Jardin des Plantes. Georges Cuvier for one took his educative role to disseminate science extremely seriously, in terms not only of the school curriculum (for secondary-school-age boys and without a training in classics), but also of his general public, particularly women with keen general interest in science (and not just genteel botanizing). When his brilliant daughter Clémentine died in 1827 just before her marriage, the distraught Cuvier suspended both his famous Saturday salons (at which his daughter and step-daughter were glittering hostesses among the international science confraternity), and ceased his public lectures. These 15

It is fascinating then to compare al-Jabarti’s account with the enormous artistic licence of the painting of the Montgolfière event, ‘Envol d’une montgolfière au Caire d’après J. B. Breton’, where the balloon, undeniably aloft and almost out of the left corner of the picture above the square with its minaret, is watched by bystanders in very uniformly French city dress. See Laissus, L’Égypte, une aventure savante for the reproduction (no numbers, in plates between pages 286 and 287).

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were only resumed thanks to his step-daughter, Sophie Duvaucel, who managed to persuade Cuvier of their necessity to inspire women already engaged in their own small way in all branches of natural science.16 With this avid, generally informed and ‘amateur’ public in mind, it is then fascinating to read among the first guides for general visitors to the Jardin des Plantes, Dr Georges Pennetier’s Visite au Jardin des Plantes, published in 1857.17 Although much more comprehensive books were recently available on the history of the Jardin des Plantes, and included hugely detailed catalogues of its collections within the Galleries and the Jardin itself – the major example is Les Trois Règnes de la nature: Le Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, written by P.-A. Cap and published in 185418 – these can hardly be called portable, and were not targeted at the general lay, let alone female, public.19 Albeit 131 pages long, Pennetier’s Visite is excellently pocketsized (10 x 15cms). It was expressly written in response to the singular lack of guidance for curious visitors to the collections on display, ‘pour satisfaire le promeneur qui veut être initié aux notions les plus saillantes’.20 Although the preface explicitly denies it is an

16

See my essay cited in note 5 for further discussion of Cuvier’s extraordinary scientific education of his daughters. 17 Rouen: A. Aillaud Éditeur, 1857. Whether it was the very first of its kind for the general public is a point of fact this paper may help to establish. 18 Paris: L. Curmer. Cap wrote the work in collaboration with ‘une société de savants et d’aides-naturalistes du Muséum’ so it is richly informed by specialist scientific insiders. I am most grateful to Aude Campmas for informing me of this work which is singularly absent from contemporary bibliographies to work by historians of science about the nineteenth-century Jardin des Plantes. 19 While an ‘itinerary’ through the collections in the second part of Cap’s ‘guide’ is its unifying thread, the target audience is clearly the urbane, educated and rather supercilious middle-class man, enjoying some nineteenth-century, Desmond Morris-style, ‘people watching’ as part of the exhibits themselves. See for example pages 14-15, where the ‘foule’ with its ‘observations naïves’ and ‘paroles niaises’ is rather summed up by its preferences: ‘Pour un certain nombre de Parisiens, et pour beaucoup de campagnards, le Jardin des Plantes, c’est la Ménagérie.’ Some very cruel caricatures also accompany Cap’s descriptions (pp. 16-20), including the visual efforts of a ‘cuisinière en bonnet à rubans roses’. 20 Pennetier, Visite au Jardin des Plantes, p. 5. Interestingly Pennetier claims to be the first to offer such a general interest guide: ‘Il n’existe, à ma connaissance […]

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‘œuvre savante’, it is nevertheless patronising in its approach and educative mission. The lofty instructor yet friend to the user devotes a lengthy first chapter to ‘Comment vit une plante’, in order to ensure that what is then seen in the various parterres and allées is understood within wider ‘scientific’ orders of classification. Linnaeus’s classification system is thus briefly introduced and then elaborated by means of a detailed set of lessons on the parts of plants (which undergird the Linnean systems by family), in particular the ‘œuf végétal’ and its ongoing life-cycle of reproduction. Technical botanical terms are put in italics, but the botany is also purveyed in a mix of poetry and mythological allusion as Pennetier takes the visitor through all four main sections of the plant collections to the exotica contained in the glasshouses. Although obviously influenced by the tradition of Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants of 1789, the most lyrical passages in Pennetier’s rather pompous prose verge on the comical when they are to do with the sexual parts of plants and fertilization. One example will suffice to illustrate his style: Approchons du lit nuptial. Que de jeux enfantins se passent dans le calice des fleurs, parmi ces jolies aigrettes que vous voyez refléter au soleil mille rayons dorés! La reine de cette charmante société (le pistil) en occupe le centre, et autour d’elle, comme autant d’aspirants, se rangent ces nombreux filets que nous appelons étamines. À un moment donné, chacun d’eux s’incline vers leur souveraine pour leur conférer ses amours. L’étamine porte de petits sacs ou anthères à la production du pollen, poussière fécondante dont chaque grain présente une forme déterminée et contient un fluide visqueux ou fovilla, dans lequel nagent par un mouvement volontaire, de petits corps auquels il est impossible de refuser l’animalité. Que la nature produit de belles choses me dites-vous, sous les touches délicates de ses doigts créateurs! Mais prêtez-moi toujours votre attention; il est bien des merveilles encore, et je veux qu’à la suite de ce court entretien, vous ayez entrevu une partie des mystères de la création.21

If Pouchet at the outset of his guide will later tell his visitors to expect (inert) dust, Pennetier’s is altogether a ‘poussière fécondante’, designed also to ‘fertilize’ the reader’s interest. By thus ‘feminizing’ the guide’s user, and then taking ‘her’ by the hand on the subsequent qu’une charmante notice de M. Bouteillier sur l’ensemble du Jardin des Plantes’ (p. 6). 21 Ibid., pp. 19-20.

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tour of the many plates-bandes, the language of the ‘loves of plants’ makes the modern botanical garden a quasi mythological one at the same time, a way to look into these ‘mystères’ (sexual and metaphysical). Pennetier’s tour ends in the hothouses: Après avoir jeté un coup d’œil général sur la serre, arrêtons-nous un instant devant quelques plantes les plus curieuses à connaître. En face de la porte principale se trouve un berceau de bananiers aboutissant à un petit bassin surmonté d’une grotte. Remarquez cet amas de fibres qui plonge à gauche dans l’eau de ce bassin et suivez-les: vous verrez avec étonnement qu’il vient d’un Figuier qui croît un peu plus loin.

While a fascinating psychoanalytic study of Pennetier’s style lies outside this essay, his ‘reversion’ to discussion of the calyx of the flower in the initial chapter now becomes an artificial Garden of Eden in a striking scientific overwriting of the creation stories in Genesis. We have a natural, but vegetable snake (the ‘fibres’), but their no less potent and direct lure to the founts of knowledge (‘les plus curieuses à connaître’), is concealed by the covering provided by the ‘figuier’. The blushes of any actual woman user of the guide are thus arguably spared by the ‘botanical’ subject of all the discussions, lessons and itinerary. Yet by feminizing the less educated member of the general public, a strange replication of the power relations visible in the French scientific civilizing mission in Egypt occurs. The French male ‘savant’ is very clearly the comparative anatomist and classificatory expert, to ensure an expressly scientific spin on past mythologies of creation and contemporary civilization, seen through his digressions from the particular plant under scrutiny.22 Pelletier’s guide was by all accounts a huge success, and provides a window on the public interest in, and hunger for, understanding of the natural world, animal, vegetable and mineral. Throughout, Pennetier 22

Pennetier’s guide rather peters out (and into poetry as its ending), but one of these final digressions illustrates this point: ‘Le Créateur, dans ses œuvres, n’aurait-il pas eu pour but l’unité? […] Et devant cette similitude frappante qui existe entre la plupart des choses créées, ne serait-on point fondé à ne voir qu’un règne dans la nature, et à accorder à chaque individu une dose de sensibilité ou d’intelligence proportionnée au degré qu’il occupe dans l’échelle des êtres?’ (p. 131). Pennetier’s rhetorical aside (generated from the ‘sensitive’ in the glasshouse) strongly hints at Saint-Hilaire as against Cuvier, and a transformist rather than catastrophic view of the ‘evolution’ of species.

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assumes no prior knowledge of science in his readers, but he takes their prior knowledge of classical mythology, French poetry and drama for granted and offers them excerpts along the way. While supposing an omniscient stance, Pennetier’s much more limited knowledge (like that of the French scientists in Egypt as exposed by al-Jabarti), is also fully revealed by the itinerary of his guide. It is confined to the Jardin of the Jardin des Plantes as if the Natural History Galleries and the Ménagérie do not exist. If this glaring silence may say more about what lies outside Pennetier’s scientific competencies, his guide adumbrates the educative missions of the Jardin des Plantes. He too sought to disseminate the ‘pollen’ (‘poussière fertile’) of his scientific wisdom to his passive ‘pistils’.

The Provincial, Rouen public and their Muséum d’Histoire naturelle Georges Pouchet’s Visite au Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Rouen of 1859 is eminently aware both of precursor guides and of its public(s) since its preface makes direct comparative reference to Pennetier’s guide as its ‘model’.23 Implicitly, a tome like Cap’s with all its scientific orders and classifications serves as an anti-model: La Visite au Muséum d’Histoire naturelle ne sera donc pas non plus un livre de science, un traité technique, et nous renvoyons ceux qui voudraient parcourir le Musée pour y étudier l’histoire naturelle à la Zoologie classique du docteur Pouchet. [...] C’est au promeneur, au flâneur, que nous adressons ce petit livre, avec prière de l’accueillir favorablement parce qu’il est sans prétention.24

This claim to its lack of pretension – Georges Pouchet was in fact the most polymathic scientific expert of any of the writers of guides examined above, and hence eminently qualified to produce one that was a traité scientifique – prefaces the dramatic opening which was

23 24

Pennetier was a Rouennais known to the Pouchets. Visite au Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Rouen, p. 5.

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the incipit of this essay, guaranteeing dust on the visit ahead.25 It was his father, Félix Archimède Pouchet, who is perhaps better known. As chief antagonist to Pasteur’s new theory of bacteria, he continued to uphold the theory of spontaneous generation as the cause for ‘life’ forms emerging from what seemed dead. Félix Archimède Pouchet was also the mastermind and creator from scratch of the Rouen Muséum and its collections, which were housed in what had been the monastery of Saint Catherine. Hence Georges Pouchet knew the history and scientific rationale for this regional collection intimately. That he none the less took the time to write the Rouen Visite amid his many scientific responsibilities and academic publications to further his glittering career to become the holder of Cuvier’s chair of comparative anatomy speaks volumes about his commitment to the mission of scientific education of the French public (like Cuvier before him). Unlike the pompous, flowery bombast of a Pennetier, or the exhaustive catalogues of artefacts in their ordering ‘règnes’ of a Cap, Pouchet’s style and tone is everywhere understated, taut, direct, succinct and informative in tone. Information is used to direct interest outwards to the rest of the display if the viewer wishes, but homes in on the core piece in the cabinet for the flâneur observer. Numbers in the case match short descriptions in the guide which always elucidate central facts or features that might be otherwise unknown, or go unobserved. Pouchet’s guide thus operates almost as precursor of audio guides today, but instead of telling (in ‘dumbed down’ soundbites), it everywhere assumes discovery on the part of the viewer. By concomitantly concealing yet revealing his expert, positivist, approach to the science of informed observation, Pouchet everywhere animates the seemingly lifeless fragment or object, and its viewers. His scientific and edu25

No biography of Georges Pouchet exists to date although there is a fine biographical essay on him by Jean-Louis Fischer, ‘Georges Pouchet (1833-1894): Le movement, la forme et la vie’ in Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire, pp. 363-73. Fischer is however unaware of Pouchet’s Guide, probably because it does not feature in the extensive list (63 pages) of Pouchet’s published publications that Fischer cites. This Liste des travaux scientifiques de G. Pouchet (Paris: Société Anonyme des Imprimeries Réunies, 1886) constitutes Pouchet’s application for nomination to the Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the Académie des Sciences which was successful second time round.

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cative approach is therefore no less of a reconstitution of a pre-historic creature from a fragment of bone or a tooth in the manner of Cuvier for his public audiences. What is different is the seeming banality of the construction in view and its description, as in the following example. ‘NIDS: […] La collection du Muséum est peut-être unique. […] Un nid est donc plus qu’une habitation, une demeure ordinaire. C’est l’empreinte d’un être vivant, c’est presque l’oiseau lui-même’.26 The understated ‘peut-être’ attached to ‘unique’ has the opposite set of effects to the vaunted scientific wonders of the French Expédition, or the marvels of the figuier in the Paris glasshouses. The real wonder of this ‘regional’ collection is uncovered as being of national as well as international importance: ‘Le Muséum de Rouen brille surtout par une collection sans pareille d’oiseaux d’Europe […] collection aujourd’hui unique en son genre […] légué à la ville par M. le comte de Slade’.27 How better to introduce new visitors, especially children put off by seemingly endless dust, to their local natural environment and its treasures? Paramount in the narrative strategies of Pouchet’s Visite are its self-deprecatory modes of self-display and lack of pretension. What the visitor initially sees in the cabinets, and learns how to see en route by careful guidance, are new worlds opening up from seemingly nothing very much. Pouchet’s guide is therefore exceptional in its ‘visitor-centred’ educative approach which relies on ‘native intelligence’ and ‘simple instincts’. The exceptional can thus be promoted (and revealed) by the ordinary or familiar. Similarly, the exotic is not ‘out there’ in tropical, foreign, environments, but demonstrably ‘at home’ and local. By inference, then, the curators of this ‘local’ Muséum as ‘nest’ are also ‘presque l’oiseau lui-même’. The striking opening rhetorical ploy foregrounding lifelessness, death, old fragments and dust (as precisely that ‘stuff’ that will come ‘alive’ during the visit), is developed at the outset: Un Musée, une collection, est un cimetière, chaque étiquette une épitaphe simple comme celle d’un trappiste; – rien que le nom, pour dire: ci-gît un homme. C’est à l’histoire, au souvenir à raconter ses vertus, s’il en a eu; chacun juge et connaît en remontant à la source; le marbre ne dit rien; il est muet et il ne ment pas.

26 27

Visite au Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Rouen, p. 129. Ibid., p. 16; emphasis in the original.

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C’est cette histoire, touchante ou terrible, oppressive ou opprimée, que nous avons essayé d’évoquer aux yeux du public toujours curieux; avec son immense bons sens, de connaître, d’aller au fond des choses. Le plaisir s’en accroît, et les objets ainsi transformés prennent une valeur qu’on ne soupçonnait pas avant. Un oiseau peut attirer les regards par son plumage brillant, la forme excentrique de son bec; il n’est que curieux: – il devient intéressant si nous savons sa vie, ses combats, sa part dans l’équilibre universel.28

By the end of the tour of the Rouen collections, whether it is mummified ibises, monstrous foetuses in bottles, local fauna or the fossilized remains of shells and ammonites found in the immediate area, everything proves to have a life story. However, it is with its most local dust that the highly crafted tour culminates, as it began, and in the very fabric of the museum itself which might look like simple stone (which never lies) to its visitors: Tout cela provient de la côte Sainte Catherine qui jouit dans le monde des géologues d’une certaine célébrité. [...] Au lieu d’animaux entiers ou presqu’entiers [...] la pioche n’entaille à Saint Paul que débris sur débris, coquilles à demi broyées […] montagnes de craie qui environnent notre cité normande. [C’est] la mer profonde qui accumula avec les siècles les débris des animaux qui vivaient à sa surface. Ceux-ci ballottés par les tempêtes et les courants étaient réduits en une bouillie blanche qui se solidifia peu à peu et que de nouvelles révolutions de notre globe ont poussée dans la suite des temps au-dessus de nouvelles mers.29

This ‘bouillie blanche’ turns out to be hugely important fossilized plankton, of particular interest to histologists and micro-palaeontologists such as Georges Pouchet himself for the dating and examination of the continuities of life forms from among the earliest known on the planet. The educational, public space of the museum, whether the parent plant or its regional off-shoot, is then not what it appears in the official, nationalistic script, especially as history of science. Written from on high, and about science as somehow a thing, an end in itself, or the preserve of only an elite, it will have only limited, even humorous, effect on its publics. The story of the construction of collections and cabinets, as well as the mission to educate the public 28 29

Ibid., pp. 6-7. Ibid., pp. 142-43 and final words.

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in science is better revealed in the humble museum guide which, like Pouchet’s, refuses to patronize the visitor. Instead, by assuming and encouraging the vantage point of a curious, even ghoulish child, it can encapsulate ways of seeing that are central to any scientific exploration of the natural world. The lure of science may indeed be some tempting voice, but not one in a garden or in the form of a snake. Understanding the necessity of arousing public interest by calling things by their proper names – in this case familiar dust – allows Pouchet his best vehicle for captivating public dissemination of the wealth of science behind each exhibit on display. The intimate closeness of the familiar and the local then in fact proves to be the particular, the nationally significant and even the internationally renowned. It simply requires an un-presumptuous expert to reveal such distinctions and, in writing his guide, to allow his widest publics to enjoy their promenades through the natures mortes of a Sunday afternoon.

L’État comme propriétaire? Schools as Property in Nineteenth-Century France SCOTT A. GAVORSKY

In February 1901, the Société civile de la Cité met for its annual meeting in Angers. Founded in 1849 as the property-holding extension of the Catholic Association religieuse et royale d’Angers, the Société civile had continued after its parent’s 1873 dissolution. The members – local Catholic notables each holding actions representing partial ownership of two boys’ schools directed by the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes – were now faced with a large tax bill, based on the yearly dividends of the actions. The problem was, there were no dividends; the Société civile was a charity organization, and any profits – which hardly existed, truth be told – were used to maintain the schools. The contemporary anticlerical environment, inflamed by the Dreyfus Affair, raised concerns about the power and the wealth controlled by Catholic congregations – especially relating to educational institutions.1 Reviewing the organization’s tax records, the Directeur de l’Enregistrement in Angers advanced the opinion in January 1901 that the Société civile ‘présente, en raison de son but, le caractère d’une association religieuse’.2 The state now offered an 1

2

Christian Sorrel, La République contre les congrégations: Histoire d’une passion française 1899-1904 (Paris: Cerf, 2003); Robert Raymond Tronchot, Les Temps de la ‘sécularisation’, 1904-1914: La Liquidation des biens de la congrégation des Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes (Études Lasalliennes, ed. by Frère Léon Lauraire, Rome: Frères des Écoles chrétiennes, 1992); Malcolm O. Partin, Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes, and the Church: The Politics of Anti-Clericalism, 18991905 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1969); Paul Rimbault, Histoire politique des congrégations religieuses françaises (1790-1914) (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1926). Letter from the Directeur de l’Enregistrement to the Société civile, 4 January 1901, Archives diocèsaines d’Angers (hereafter A.Dio.Angers), 2 J 6.

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ultimatum: pay dividends like a regular business enterprise or be declared an unauthorized religious organization subject to property seizure. Faced with this choice, the members voted to sell some rentes sur l’État to pay the taxes, and the following year began to charge the Frères a yearly rent to generate revenue for dividends. From 1901 until its dissolution in 1949, Société civile records make no mention of other relationships with the schools, such as praise for the students or records of visits by members, which had been its original purpose. What the authorities had effectively accomplished was to drive a Catholic philanthropic association into becoming a mere landlord, a propriétaire.3 This unusual episode occurred in the final stage of a century-long struggle to give France a modern primary education system. By the dawn of the Third Republic (1875), control of education became central to state efforts to form a loyal and active citizenry. The longprevailing story that ‘education was offered to the people from above, and then enforced upon them’, borrowing Theodore Zeldin’s noteworthy formulation, embodied a creation myth of the French school system that accommodated both an image of a heroic Third Republic and the modernization theory of the 1960s and 1970s espoused by Eugen Weber and others.4 In reality, however, there was little need for the Third Republic to create the schools for this project; they had access to an extensive network of primary schools built by various contributors since the Bourbon Restoration. Almost every department in France was educating 75% of their children by 1876, according to the research of Raymond Grew and Patrick J. Harrigan, while more 3

4

The story of the 1901 decision can be found in the manuscript registers of the Société civile de la Cité (Archives Lasalliennes, Lyon) and in A.Dio.Angers, 2 J 6. Theodore Zeldin, France 1815-1914, Volume II: Intellect, Taste and Anxiety (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 147. For general histories of the development of French primary education, see Félix Ponteil, Histoire de l’enseignement en France: Les Grandes Étapes 1789-1964 (Paris: Sirey, 1964); Antoine Prost, L’Enseignement en France, 1800-1967 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968); R.D. Anderson, Education in France 1848-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); François Mayeur, Histoire générale de l’enseignement et de l’éducation en France, tome III: De la Révolution à l’école républicaine (1789-1930) (Paris: Perrin, coll. Tempus, 2004); and Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

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than sixty provided de facto universal primary education.5 While the Ferry Laws of the early 1880s made primary education obligatory and free, they were the capstone of sixty-plus years of development of a public institution, not the beginning. The guerre scolaire at the end of the nineteenth century was not, pace Republican historians, Zeldin, Weber and others, the imposition of schooling on a resisting populace – the ‘mythe Ferry,’ as Christian Nique and Claude Lelièvre have dubbed it.6 It was rather the effort to replace a successful – albeit varied – network of schools with one controlled by the Republican state. Over the last twenty years, historians slowly have begun examining how schools were constructed before the Third Republic. Nongovernmental bodies played a major role in the development of this public primary education network, as Marc Suteau and Sarah Curtis have seen in Nantes and Lyon, respectively.7 The western département of Maine-et-Loire, centred on Angers, was no different in this regard; public schools were often constructed in conjunction with private groups. By public, I refer to the écoles communales: those schools – whether directed by lay or religious teachers – charged with accepting students designated by the commune as deserving free schooling and thereby receiving public subsidies.8 The success of private groups in building public schools was founded on the power to manage their schools as they saw fit through a series of rights based, ultimately, on schools as a form of property. At first glance, schools appear an unusual site to discuss property. Certainly, school buildings, grounds and furnishings are real property; 5

Raymond Grew and Patrick J. Harrigan, School, State, and Society: The Growth of Elementary Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France – A Quantitative Analysis (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991), p. 78 and table E.14. 6 Christian Nique and Claude Lelièvre, La République n’éduquera plus: La Fin du mythe Ferry (Paris: Plon, 1993). 7 Marc Suteau, Une ville et ses écoles: Nantes, 1830-1940 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999); Sarah A. Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000). 8 The term école communale was first defined in article 8 of the loi Guizot of 28 June 1833, reprinted in Martine Allaire and Marie-Thérèse Frank, eds, Les Politiques de l’éducation en France de la maternelle au baccalauréat (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1995), pp. 71-79.

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they have a physical presence and an administrative existence in the form of deeds, leases, enregistrement, tax liability, and all the other ways that governments ‘see’ property under their jurisdiction. When a school was provided by private investment, whether by an association’s subscription drive, the sale of actions, or by bequest, another level of real property ownership existed. Yet schools are distinctive; they are not merely the physical components that comprise them. They are locations where a community’s future is formed, and therefore represent something more than a barn or a field. There is an alternative claim to ownership by the society at large. This metaphorical school property could and did often create tensions, particularly as the state began claiming a priority ownership of educational institutions over bodies – most spectacularly those associated with the Catholic Church – that had actually put up school buildings and paid teachers for decades. This essay offers an examination of how the question of the ownership of schools as a form of property structured the development of primary education in the nineteenth century. Like elsewhere in France, the western département of Maine-et-Loire relied extensively on private investment to build its primary schools from the Bourbon Restoration until the dawn of the twentieth century. The need to regulate such private-public cooperation resulted in the formulation of legal guarantees protecting the property rights of contributors to schools. As the century progressed and control over educational institutions became more and more vital to political power, property rights became more contentious. These rights underlined competing claims to power over the future of French society, whether by Catholics insisting on Catholic teaching congregations and curricula or secularists demanding the absence of religious teaching in public institutions. By the 1880s, the solution was clear to both Republicans and Catholics: power belonged to those who owned the schools. The basic principles of schools as property were laid out in the royal ordinance of 29 February 1816. The February ordinance was designed to regulate primary education in an environment where no one public body – neither the state, nor the communes, nor the Church – possessed the resources to provide fully for schools. Before the Revolution, private charities had been the largest providers of whatever schools had existed, and the establishments were bound by the

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provisions stipulated by their benefactors. The writings of Turgot and other philosophes inspired Revolutionary laws limiting private charities and the restrictions they placed on public goods such as school endowments. Subsequent governments, however, were never able to provide sufficient resources for alternatives, and education collapsed across France in the wake of the Revolution.9 By the Restoration, neither the Bourbon state, saddled with huge war indemnities, nor the Catholic Church, stripped of the biens ecclésiastiques which had constituted much of their wealth, had the funds necessary to underwrite anything approaching a national education infrastructure. Cooperation with private providers such as individuals or charitable associations was necessary, and France was fortunate to have numerous groups willing to step in and help. The February ordinance set out to encourage and protect such groups. Two specific sets of rights were granted to fondateurs and entreteneurs of schools, as well as to their heirs and successors.10 First, they could choose teachers for their school, although such teachers would have to meet all official requirements (educational and moral certifications) to take their position. Secondly, the owners of schools were granted broad rights to manage financial affairs, internal discipline, and curricula. As in the case of teachers, state authorities could set minimum standards to be maintained and inspection regimes were instituted and strengthened over time. Despite such limitations, however, the ability to make the initial selection of teachers and set internal policies provided wide latitude for a range of schools to emerge. The two main competitors for education support under the Restoration – the revived Catholic teaching congregations and the proponents of a new English pedagogy termed enseignement mutuel – found within these provisions the ability to utilize their approaches 9

R. R. Palmer discusses the Revolutionary trend towards disendowing education in ‘How Five Centuries of Educational Philanthropy Disappeared in the French Revolution’, History of Education Quarterly, 26 (Summer 1986), 181-97. For an examination of Turgot’s Encyclopédie entry on ‘Fondations’ and other Enlightenment ideas towards private charity, see Jean-Luc Marais, Histoire du don en France de 1800 à 1939: Dons et legs charitables, pieux et philanthropiques (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999), pp. 21-22. 10 Ordonnance royale du 29 février 1816, reprinted in Octave Gréard, ed., La Législation de l’instruction primaire en France depuis 1789 jusqu’à nos jours, 2 vols (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Frères, 1874), I: 87-94.

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with a minimum of government interference; such benefits undoubtedly attracted support from minority groups such as Protestants and Jews as well. The government attracted numerous partners, but at a price. Significantly, these rights were never withdrawn by subsequent laws, largely because of the continued importance of private funds to the spread of schooling. Despite François Guizot’s elegant arguments about the dominant educational role of the state, the laws bearing his name assumed private charity as the norm. Article 13 of the law of 28 June 1833 (the loi Guizot) granted the rights of communes to impose special taxes for primary education, but only ‘à defaut de fondations, donations ou legs, qui assurent un local et un traitement’.11 Almost twenty years later, article 40 of the loi Falloux (15 March 1850) would repeat this condition practically verbatim. Even as late as 1886, the loi Goblet mentions the importance of private philanthropy in supporting schools, even as it made the additional taxes originally intended for when such philanthropy failed mandatory and began the secularization of public schools.12 The original purpose of the property provisions, to encourage private investment in primary education, remained constant throughout the century. Who were the ‘owners’ of such schools? The range was incredibly diverse. The most obvious, the state, was a late entrant, hampered by a division into three levels, the communes, the departments, and the national government. The commune was conceived as the primary level of action, but was also the least able to muster the necessary resources. The national government in Paris easily had the largest resources with which to help, but such aid was handled through a politically-charged patronage system under the Restoration, and from the 1830s onwards spread thin and rationed to support rural schools. The departmental councils were significant providers, but their resources were limited, rationed and subject to political disputes. Outside the state, there were a surprising number of alternative providers, divided into three broad groups. The first were private charitable organizations, most often operating on a subscription 11

12

Loi Falloux du 15 mars 1850, reprinted in Gréard, La Législation de l’instruction primaire, II: 120-46. Loi Goblet du 30 octobre 1886, reprinted in Allaire and Frank, Les Politiques de l’éducation en France, pp. 102-12.

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model. Both the Catholic Association religieuse et royale d’Angers and their liberal counterpart the Société d’Angers supporting enseignement mutuel were in this category, as were the Catholic organizations emerging after the July Revolution. Although capable of raising sufficient funds and having a legal identity, such bodies were restricted to urban areas with a sufficient number of subscribers willing to fund such endeavours. A second group, the most important in both rural and poorer urban areas, consisted of individuals leaving donations or legacies known collectively under French law as libéralités. Organizations associated with the Catholic Church comprised the last group of private holders of schools. Catholic education was rather detached from the Church per se due to post-Revolutionary curtailments of ecclesiastical property ownership; although bishops and curés might donate money to open schools or serve as executors for wills, the Church rarely owned schools directly. A similar situation existed with the teaching congregations. Having learnt their lesson during the 1790s, the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes and others hesitated to own buildings and other property that might be seized by future governments. Most Catholic primary schools, therefore, were held by Catholic associations, by the fabriques (the church councils charged by the state with managing the property of a parish), or as part of inheritances managed by curés or bishops. The biggest conflict concerning schools as property was, not surprisingly, the school buildings themselves. The single largest expense, it was initially assumed that most communes had sufficient space to house any schools. This belief was overly optimistic to say the least. The biens nationaux were the most likely source of school space; in Maine-et-Loire, these included more than seventy pre-Revolution school buildings (including a number of municipal colleges) that had been seized.13 Those not retained by the state or returned to the Church, however, had been sold to private individuals in the latter years of the Revolution. Some communes could use other communal property, whether establishing a boys’ school in the college or girls’ school in the local congregational hôpital.14 Renting buildings was 13

14

Charles Urseau, L’Instruction primaire avant 1789 dans les paroisses du Diocèse actuel d’Angers (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1895), pp. 106-7. Conseil municipal de Beaufort-en-Vallée, séance of 25 July 1816, Archives municipales (hereafter AM) de Beaufort-en-Vallée, 1 D 6 (the primary school had

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another option, leaving communes in a school at the mercy of private landlords. Most municipalities were not so lucky, and all sorts of alternative buildings were considered. One pamphlet distributed under the early Restoration recommended free-standing barns as good places for schools, while the municipal council of Saumur toyed with placing an école mutuelle on the second floor of a proposed municipal boucherie – a plan quickly vetoed by state authorities.15 With the lack of state aid to solve the building problem, the onus fell on the communes and private initiatives or, often, some mixture of the two. These efforts revealed quite early the problems of determining school ownership, as the first primary schools established in Angers illustrate. The Bishop of Angers, Charles Montault, negotiated the purchase of a private building for an école des Frères after he had been promised sufficient funds by the departmental council in early 1820. When presented with Mgr. Montault’s fait accompli, the mayor of Angers became concerned about the possibility of securing a royal ordinance for the new school and requested a decision on who the actual owner of the building would be – the department, the commune, or the bishop? The matter was debated at various levels for the next two years before the Ministry of the Interior finally ruled in October 1822 that ‘c’est donc au nom des Communes que doivent être faites les acquisitions de maisons destinées à la tenne des écoles’.16 This policy of making the communes the owners of schools established with state funds became the standard policy, and an important step in the development of the commune as the centre of French social and political life. The acquisition was regularized by existed since at least 1813, and the new regulations were merely applied to it). For Cholet, letter from the Prefect to the Minister of the Interior, 28 January 1818, Archives nationales (hereafter AN), F17 11757. The school run by the Filles de la Sagesse at the Cholet hospital had been receiving funds from the municipality since 1816 (AM de Cholet, 1 D 3). 15 Instructions pour l’établissement des écoles de village (Paris: Fain, ca. 1820), Bibliothèque municipale d’Angers SA 686; letter from the Subprefect of Saumur to the Prefect, 8 September 1820, Archives départementales de Maine-et-Loire (hereafter ADML), 77 T 12. 16 Letter from the Ministry of the Interior to the Prefect, 21 October 1822, ADML, 77 T 12. See also letter from the mayor of Angers to the prefecture’s Directeur Général, 12 May 1820, and copy of letter from the Bishop of Angers to the Prefect of Maine-et-Loire, 4 November 1822, both in A.Dio.Angers, 2 J 2.

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treating the building as a donation from Mgr. Montault to the municipality – an expedient arrangement which would have dire consequences for the Frères by the end of the century. Initially, the first école mutuelle established by the Société d’Angers appeared to be on more solid ground. A former bien national, the Cordeliers chapel, was purchased in December 1821; the acte de vente named the Société d’Angers and the state (represented by the prefect Baron de Wismes) co-owners. A grant from the Ministry of the Interior provided 8,000 of the 12,000 franc purchase price. The Société was responsible for the remainder, plus an additional sum of 4,000 francs to convert the building to a proper school; these funds were raised from the sale of actions to Société members.17 During the conservative reaction of 1824, however, the local surveillance committee presided over by the Bishop of Angers ordered the Frères to take control of the school building from the Société d’Angers. Initially charging that the teacher, Gellerat, had not met the formalities of installation, the authorities soon justified their decision by arguing that Angers – again, the commune had been named as the official owner of the school – had paid two thirds of the price of the building, and therefore had the right to choose the teachers. The goal was to cripple the mutuellistes by forcing them to raise funds to acquire a new school in a now hostile political environment. The Société d’Angers countered the building had been acquired on their initiative specifically as an école mutuelle – and that their portion had been funded by actions sold to members, who therefore had a real property right that the state had to recognize. Mgr. Montault clearly understood the latter argument, and from the beginning had a list of members to be reimbursed by the state. The school remained closed from the beginning of 1825 as the matter was placed before the Conseil d’État, but the 1827 elections resulted in the reinstallation of the mutuellistes before the case was heard.18 17

18

‘Vente entre M. & Mme. Monnier à la Société de l’Enseignement mutuel,’ 19 December 1821, ADML, 77 T 9. For the decision of the Société d’Angers to sell actions, see ‘Assemblée générale de la Société’, 28 March 1822, AN, F17 11757. Arrêté comité cantonaux d’Angers, 15 November 1824, AM Angers, 1 R 42; letter from the Société d’Angers to the Prefect, 9 March 1825, ADML, 77 T 9; letters from the Bishop of Angers to the Prefect, 17 December 1824 and 14 February 1825, ADML, 77 T 9; Mémoire pour MM. les Membres composant l’Association

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The suppression of the École Mutuelle d’Angers illustrated the intertwining of property and school operation. Whoever owned the school building chose the teachers, and with them the curricula and values that would be transferred to the students. It also demonstrated the real limitations of the state’s authority in education matters. The decision of the local committee to replace a teacher deemed unqualified was clearly specified in the February ordinance; the right of the Société d’Angers to appoint teachers of their choosing as the owners of school property was also stipulated, and forestalled the state’s decision. The pattern would be repeated over the next decades, often in the wake of regime changes. Following the July Revolution, the newly liberal municipal council of Saumur would throw the Frères out of the Récollets facility – purchased in the 1820s by the commune – to install an école mutuelle. Likewise, communes turned schools over to congregations in large numbers in the 1850s, only to take them back in the late 1860s as the political winds blew the other way. And it was not just state authorities who claimed ownership rights to control teacher selection. Beaufort-en-Vallée was able to protect a popular primary teacher against state calls for his replacement for most of the 1830s citing their ownership of the municipal college to which his school was attached.19 The various libéralités establishing schools included very specific instructions about who could teach in the supported schools, often guaranteeing them to religious congrégations or to teachers chosen by an executor. Teachers themselves could use these provisions to try to protect their positions. In 1843, Henriette Bouvalet, the institutrice of the commune of Gesté, attempted to forestall an attempt to remove her for incompetence by citing the provisions of the establishing testament naming the Bishop of Angers as the only one able to name the school’s teacher. In this case, the gamble failed. The new bishop, Guillaume Angebault, agreed with the charges and transferred the funding to a rival école de

19

fondatrice de l’école élémentaire et gratuite d’enseignement mutuel d’Angers (Paris: Hippolyte Tilliard, s.d.). For a summary of the main points of the dispute, see letter from the Mayor of Beaufort to the Rector, 11 May 1829, ADML, 29 T 2.

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filles run by a teaching congregation which became the new école communale.20 Certainly, state authorities recognized early on the problems property arrangements could cause for the control of primary education. Starting in the 1830s with the Guizot laws, efforts were made to reverse this process. State oversight of teacher training and inspection increased, especially with the introduction of a professional primary inspectorate in 1835. More significant was the effort to build stateconstructed schools. Recognizing that the acquisition and outfitting of school buildings was often the single largest obstacle in opening schools, François Guizot pushed for public ownership: ‘Il fallait viser, autant que possible, à ce que, dans chaque localité, la maison d’école fût la propriété de la commune. C’est une des conditions pratiques de la durée et de la bonne organisation de l’école’.21 The national budget for education was increased dramatically, establishing a reservoir of funds. Communes were empowered to impose special taxes to help fund schools. Poorer communes were also encouraged to work with neighboring communes to hold joint schools to reduce costs. The goal of all these policies was simple: to make the state the propriétaire of French schools. Geared initially towards rural communes, these policies resulted in a rapid expansion of school construction through the following decades. A new category appeared in the statistical records now forming the basis of education debates, querying who owned the maisons d’écoles in each commune. Progress towards complete communal ownership was expected. Yet the ability of the state to provide for schools lagged behind the need and the demand for primary education. While 355 out of the 376 communes in Maine-et-Loire had schools for boys or écoles mixtes serving both sexes by 1855, seventy-one did not own the school building, leaving them at the mercy of the property owners for the

20

Comité local du Gesté, 12 April 1843; Comité d’arrondissement de Beaupréau, 16 July 1843; letter from the Primary School Inspector de Beaupréau [Cretté] to the Rector, 31 July 1843; copy of the testament of 26 March 1831 of Prosper Paul de la Morlaye, all in ADML, 56 T 26. 21 François Guizot, Rapport au roi par le ministre secrétaire d’État au département de l’instruction publique, sur l’exécution de la loi du 28 juin 1833, relative à l’instruction publique (Paris: Imprimérie Royale, 1834), p. 30.

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continuation of the school.22 Private groups and funding continued to be significant for the rest of the century. The most rapid period of state school building in Maine-et-Loire, the 1830s and 1840s, was also the period of largest expansion of privately-supported schools. Catholics in particular were able to maintain an active civil society dedicated to securing funding for primary schools, although a Protestant organization was able to open its own school in Saumur by the 1840s.23 The greatest increase in Catholic schools was in areas to which the state was slow in devoting funds – girls’ schools and additional schools in the increasingly populated working-class districts of towns such as Angers, Cholet and Saumur. Between 1833 and 1873, there were only two laïque schools for boys in Angers; Catholic boys’ schools went from two to five in the same period. Private fondateurs et entreteneurs were vital for the expansion of écoles de filles; 151 such schools – about half in the department – were owned by fabriques, private associations, or congregations in 1855.24 The situation became worse after 1850, when the looser policies of the loi Falloux resulted in a rapid expansion of Catholic schools gradually growing more hostile to the idea of secularization.25 Increasingly, the main problem for authorities was libéralités, especially the legacy endowments that formed the primary means for the private establishment of schools. The necessity for such aid to open primary schools resulted in the easing of Revolution provisions under the Restoration. From the July Monarchy onwards, however, the state grew more and more suspicious of legacies as an effort to usurp its power over schools. The policy of assessing l’utilité publique – whether the public good would be served by the libéralité – began to be applied with increasing regularity.26 For the next few decades, the

22

‘Exposé de la situation d’enseignement primaire en 1855’, 7 August 1855, ADML, 51 T 5. 23 Letter from the Subprefect of Saumur to the Mayor of Saumur, 3 February 1843; Bienfaisance mutuelle – Société de l’Église Chrétienne réformé de Saumur: Règlement général, both in AM Saumur, 2 M 15. 24 ‘Exposé de la situation d’enseignement primaire en 1855’, 7 August 1855, ADML, 51 T 5. 25 Grew and Harrigan, School, State and Society, p. 97. 26 Marais, Histoire du don, pp. 38-43.

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need for schools was large enough that many libéralités in favour of primary education were regularly accepted. By the end of the Second Empire, however, it became clear that libéralités – which increased ten-fold between 1855 and 1875 – were effectively placing a large number of schools outside of state control.27 A sophisticated series of legal arguments developed from the 1860s attempted to limit perpétuité clauses, commonly used to name congregations as the teachers permanently, and ensure communal oversight of buildings left for schools or rentes intended to pay teachers by naming communes co-executors. The state was in effect naming itself a co-heir, and thereby a co-owner, of legacies left to support schools. Continuing the legal theory that communes were the owners of schools – an unambiguous claim to the metaphorical property of the school – the Conseil d’État began insisting that all education legacies were to be managed by the legatee – often the fabrique – and the commune jointly. One of the first decisions of this type concerned the legs Langotière to the fabrique of Vieil-Baugé in Maine-et-Loire in 1861. The fabrique, backed by the Bishop of Angers and Catholic legal experts such as François Housset, launched a decade-long legal battle against the ruling. The final decision, enforced through the imperial decree of 8 July 1870, asserted the right of the commune to joint ownership of the legacy and, therefore, of the school. The ruling would become a model for similar decisions throughout France, striking a blow in favour of the state becoming the primary owner of schools.28 The Third Republic would see the final stage of this process, as conflict between the Republican state and the Catholic Church heated up. A primary reason was the development of two increasingly centralized school systems. Liberal schools supported by private funds had gradually given way to state schools; the dissolution of the 27

28

Statistique de l’enseignement primaire, tome II: Statistique comparée de l’enseignement primaire (1829-1877) (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880), pp. clx-xxiv. Décret impérial, 8 July 1870, AN, F17 9495. See also François Housset, Mémoire ampliatif pour la fabrique de Vieil-Baugé contre la Commune de ce nom (Paris: Renou et Maulde, 1869). Details of the case are included in a footnote in Gréard’s 1874 edition of education laws, as the basis of similar decisions during the first years of the Third Republic.

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Société d’Angers in 1867 was accompanied by the selling of their four schools in Angers directly to the commune, which purchased the remaining actions from the original owners.29 The result of decades of Catholic philanthropy naming bishops, curés and fabriques ‘owners’ of schools coincided with a new generation of activist bishops in the 1870s interested in mirroring state efforts by coordinating education spending on the diocese level. The recently-appointed Bishop of Angers, Mgr. Charles-Émile Freppel, encouraged the Association to disband in 1873 to divert resources to the bishop’s own education organization; the Société civile de la Cité remained as a school owner under the new organization. By the 1880s, a full-scale war between the two systems erupted, the guerre scolaire. The old problem of school buildings, still the largest expense, continued to dominate the debate. The 1880s saw a massive school building program undertaken by the state. Although the centerpiece of the Third Republic’s ‘building’ of French education, the relatively small change in the overall number of schools demonstrates this was more an effort to replace older schools or put laïque schools in formerly Catholic-only areas than virgin construction.30 The most recognizable result of this effort is the dyad seen still in many smaller French towns of the école and the mairie combined in the single building. In Beaufort-en-Vallée, for example, the public, secular école de filles was added as part of a new mairie in the late 1890s. Quickly becoming a symbol – or a caricature, depending on one’s political viewpoint – of the new government’s nationalizing drive, the combined building monumentalized schools-as-property. In practical terms, such designs were the result of financial efficiency. Many communes already had hôtels de ville; extending the existing building or replacing it on the same piece of land with a larger building was much cheaper than constructing two building projects on two separate lots. Beyond these practical considerations, however, such placements also had a symbolic purpose. Education was now annexed to the government, in the form of the democratically-elected mayor and municipal council housed in the building where the basic events of life were recorded and thereby made legible to the state. Just as 29 30

Registre de la Société d’Angers, 25 August 1866, AM Angers, 1 R 53. Grew and Harrigan, School, State, and Society, pp. 103 and 251, table S.1.

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importantly, such an association marked the mairie/école dyad as distinctly separate from the third member of the commune’s trois grands, the church. Other practices, such as municipal councils increasingly refusing to vote funds to support any but the laïque schools, strengthen this association. In a very real way, the school became simultaneously the physical and the metaphorical property of the state. The law of 3 August 1886, later incorporated into the more comprehensive loi Goblet, took the final step of displacing congregation teachers from any state-owned school building. For Angers, this resulted in the forcible removal of the Frères from the Tertre St. Laurent building acquired by Mgr. Montault in 1820. In a virtual replay of the 1824 episode with the école mutuelle, municipal authorities argued the original departmental council funding decision in 1819 intended to create a communal school, not a Catholic one. Ernest de Ruillé, the directeur-gérant of the Société civile, waged an eight-year legal battle to save the Frères’s use of the building, arguing that Mgr. Montault had indeed acquired the building as an école des Frères and stipulated this condition when transferring the property to the municipality of Angers. In the end, the state’s position was upheld, with the provision it reimburse the bishopric for the improvements made to the property over the previous 70 years.31 The building became a communal school under a laïque teacher. As across France, the Frères were forced to open their schools as private institutions, securing their own funding. By the turn of the century, a stalemate existed in the guerre scolaire. Catholic resources were stretched thin, but better management and efforts to gain public support allowed them to maintain an extensive network of schools despite the Republic’s efforts to displace them. While the state became the largest owner of schools in France, it still was unable to monopolize primary education. A 1902 study estimated the state would need more than 350 new schools, at a cost of 47 million francs, to replace those of the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes alone.32 Furthermore, most of these schools were owned not by the congregations, but by private individuals. The Société civile and numerous similar organizations, which had increased in number 31 32

‘Acte entre de Ruillé et la ville d’Angers,’ 17 July 1899, AM Angers, 64 M 1. Tronchot, Les Temps de la ‘sécularisation’, pp. 11-12.

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dramatically in the 1890s, were impossible to displace; as private owners, the state could not merely seize their property without creating a huge outcry and betraying its own core principles as a bourgeois state. The ultimate solution was the law of 7 July 1904 banning all teaching congregations in France, an extreme application of the state’s administrative power rather than its ability to ‘own’ schools. Even then, the success was marginal. In Angers, only two of the seven écoles des Frères were closed, both in buildings owned by the Bishop of Angers. The other five remained untouchable, and continued to operate as private schools, often with the former congréganistes remaining after resigning their vows, until after the Second World War. The plight of the Société civile in 1901, then, was the final act in a long struggle to control primary education. As the ‘owner’ of two schools, it represented competition to what was now widely considered to be a state institution. As a private group, however, its property – the schools – was inviolable. The state’s solution was novel. By forcing the Société civile to act as a ‘proper’ propriétaire – to collect rents and to pay dividends – the state made it impossible for the Société civile to concentrate on its original educational purpose. Prevented from becoming the sole propriétaire of schools, the state applied its administrative power to limit the exercise of the rights of owners granted by the ordinance of 29 February 1816 – by indirect threat to the Société civile, then by explicit fiat with the suppression of the teaching congregations in 1904 and 1905. Such actions stripped Catholic education of an infrastructure, effective power over their institutions, and, to all extents and purposes, of a corporate identity. The Third Republic had finally gained a monopoly of primary education – even if it was not the sole propriétaire of the schools.

Part IV Writing Art History: Institutions and Alternative Authorities

Whose History? Art, History and the Nation State in Early Third Republic France JULIET SIMPSON

In 1876, Gabriel Monod announced that the study of the past would be of ‘une importance nationale’ in forming the new Republic’s identity, its political and cultural institutions. Only by rigorous ‘étude historique’ could these develop: ‘c’est par elle que nous pouvons rendre à notre pays l’unité et la force morale dont il a besoin, en lui faisant à la fois connaître ses traditions historiques et comprendre les transformations qu’elles ont subies.’1 He had good reason. The early years of the French Third Republic were characterized by a flood of new histories, and especially of art, but what kinds of history were important at the period, what purpose did they serve and why? My aim here is to explore how art and its criticism become implicated in the construction of models, historical and cultural, that were to play a key role in shaping the Kulturkampf – the cultural institutions and their power systems – of the new Republic, particularly after 1876. There were broader developments central to the period’s growing concern with historical consciousness, notably promoted by Monod’s Revue historique, founded in 1876. But this was the decade that also saw the first attempts to formalize the institution of ‘art history’ itself – around ideas of periodicity and style2 – permeating art-critical discourse with the visibility of what Adrian Rifkin has described as 1

2

Monod, ‘Du progrès des études historiques en France depuis le XVI siècle’, Revue historique, 1 (Jan.-June 1876): 4. See Stephen Bann, ‘Pre-Histories of Art in Nineteenth-Century France’, in The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices, ed. by Michael F. Zimmerman (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2003), pp. 25-40; on the rise of art history as a discipline in France, see Lyne Thierren, L’Histoire de l’art en France: Genèse d’une discipline universitaire (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1998), especially pp. 133-42.

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the problematic of how history is written into it.3 I am not going to attempt in this essay to draw distinctions between art history and criticism. I do not believe such clear-cut divisions existed in the 1870s as we tend to understand them today, and they are not central to my purposes here. What are, are the uses to which historical thinking – or Rifkin’s historical ‘tropes’4 – are put in the construction of artistic and cultural emblems that simultaneously symbolize, challenge and transform the dominant cultural interests that they helped to represent and mould. Two key, defining examples are to be found in Charles Blanc’s Les Maîtres d’aujourd’hui (Firmin-Didot, 1876) and Philippe Burty’s Maîtres et petits maîtres (Charpentier, 1877). Almost contemporary, both are linked by a common concern with constructing authoritative artistic traditions as reference points for a contemporary generation of artists. Both use the artist’s biography as the pre-eminent vehicle for filtering discourses of past and more recent history. Yet both present antagonistic histories from within a common framework of ideas that serve to highlight broader tensions in what the Republic saw as its cultural authority, its underpinning power systems, and the narratives being constructed for it. Biography is, of course, a powerfully personal and focalizing tool for even the most general view of the past. It lends itself much less to evidence in the sense that Hippolyte Taine wished to construct systematic living histories – in literature and art – that were like ‘botanique appliquée’, moving the interrogation of truth from individual to production; from ‘Life’ to process.5 During the Second Empire, biography had become institutionalized in the era’s vast dictionary and encyclopaedia projects, bolstering the power of business-oriented publishing houses, notably Jules Renouard and Firmin-Didot;6 it also became, in Saint-Beuve’s hands, the literary form du jour. It takes off in art criticism in the 1850s as the dominant 3

Rifkin, ‘History, Time and the Morphology of Critical Language, or Publicola’s Choice’, in Art Criticism and its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. by Michael Orwicz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 29-42. 4 Cf. Rifkin, ‘History, Time and the Morphology of Critical Language’, p. 36. 5 Taine, Philosophie de l’art (Paris: Hachette, 1904, eleventh edition), I: 13. 6 See Odile and Henri-Jean Martin, ‘Le Monde des éditeurs’, in H.-J. Martin and Roger Chartier, eds, Histoire de l’édition française (Paris: Fayard/Cercle de la Librairie, 1985), III: 166 and 176.

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vehicle for art history with a spate of artist monographs, principally by Charles Clément, starting with his study of Michelangelo-LeonardoRaphael in 1861.7 It was popularized in England with Charles Robert Leslie’s Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1845), and Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (completed by Tom Taylor in 1865); and in France by Blanc’s massive fourteen-volume Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, collaboratively compiled with Théophile Thoré, Ernest Chesneau, Auguste Demmin, Théophile Silvestre, Paul Mantz and Georges Lafenestre, and published by Renouard in book form between 1861 and 1878. Blanc’s was a bid to dominate the biography market for artist histories, and it was clearly a towering achievement. Acclaimed by sympathetic contemporaries as ‘un chef-d’œuvre d’érudition’,8 the most comprehensive of its kind, it was designed with a broad readership in view, but to appeal especially to collectors and ‘amateurs d’art’. Grouping artists in national and regional ‘schools’, schematic historical frameworks and biographical units unified by common birthright but little else, establish the key features of Blanc’s biographical approach. Even so, it has a serious ideological aim, for Blanc’s Histoire presents a concept of history that turns what is merely personal – memoir and souvenir – into the public and powerfully political: an idea made absolutely explicit in the 1876 École Florentine’s triumphant claim that ‘de Cimabue à Michel-Ange, le prodige est permanent’.9 Deliberately modelled on that most exemplary precedent, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, Blanc’s is, in fact, about energizing and institutionalizing the Great Lives model for his contemporaries in ways that would construct model Republican ideals – but viewed through the lens of a powerfully idealized Republic – for renovating the nation state. 7

Clément, Michel-Ange, Léonard de Vinci, Raphael: Avec une étude sur l’art en Italie avant le XVIe siècle et des catalogues raisonnés, historiques et bibliographiques (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1861). On Clément and biography, see G. M. Thomas, ‘Instituting Genius: The Formation of Biographical Art History in France’, in Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. by Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 260-70. 8 ‘À la bio-bibliographie des peintres français’, in Annuaire des artistes et des amateurs, ed. by Pierre Lacroix (Paris: Renouard, 1862, 3e année), p. 357. 9 Blanc and Mantz, ‘Introduction’, École Florentine (Paris: Librarie Renouard, 1876), p. 1.

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The clearest and most resonant example of this idea is to be found in the collection of ‘contemporaries’: the Artistes de mon temps (1876). Hardly of the age, this was actually a loosely assorted selection of Salon reviews, several dating from the 1860s,10 presented to form a series of single-artist studies, along with a review of the 1867 Exposition Universelle and excursion to Munich in 1869. Yet its publication in the year of the Republic’s declaration and by FirminDidot, one of the most successful houses of the period and distinguished bibliophiles and Old Master print and drawings collectors,11 seems hardly coincidental. Described by Blanc himself as ‘une galerie de portraits, peints d’après nature’, its raison d’être is ostensibly the memoir as the closest and most ‘truthful’ possible vehicle for recent history. Indeed, Mémoires sur les artistes de mon temps was the book’s first title, and it is the importance placed on personal contact and account, Blanc’s ‘souvenirs personnels’, inspired again by Vasari’s Lives that guides, and gives a notional coherence to the collection as a whole. But Vasari’s is not a model emulated for principles of systematic truth, ‘l’exactitude n’étant pas la qualité dominante de Vasari’ as Clément, Blanc’s close contemporary, had freely admitted in his 1861 Michelangelo-Leonardo-Raphael study.12 Instead, following Vasari’s example is his focus on ‘le trait distinctif du caractère’.13 So ‘souvenir’ becomes in Blanc’s pen merely a pretext for a larger and more exemplary type of ‘portrait’, of which Delacroix’s, first pub-

10

‘Eugène Delacroix’ (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XVI, 1864), ‘Francisque Duret’ (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XX, 1866) and ‘Calamatta’ (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2, II, 1869). 11 Indeed, Blanc prefaced the catalogue in 1877 for the first of the six Didot sales of their collections following Ambroise’s death in 1876, a collection that included engravings by Marc Antonio Raimondi, Dürer, Holbein and Rembrandt (Blanc and Geoges Duplessis, Catalogue des dessins et estampes composant la collection de M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot précédé d’introductions par M. Charles Blanc et Georges Duplessis, Vente: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 1877). On Ambroise FirminDidot’s collection, see Les Didot: Trois Siècles de typographie et de bibliophilie, ed. by André James (Paris: Agence Culturelle de Paris, 1998), pp. 69-103. 12 Clément, ‘De l’art en Italie’, Michel-Ange, Léonard de Vinci, Raphael’ (1861), p. 38. 13 Ibid., p. 38.

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lished in 1864,14 by far the longest, most developed of the eighteen, is the most significant. It begins in medias res with a highly coloured vignette of the still-living artist, a prelude to Blanc’s evocation of the ‘longue fièvre, et presque sans intermittences’ of an equally intense life and artistic career.15 Offered thus a privileged glimpse into the artist’s personal and emotional formation, Blanc continues by a biography linked to a chronology of determinant moments and works. Beginning with works that had excited particularly extensive critical interest, notably his Barque du Dante and Massacres de Scio, this is developed in his theoretical section on Delacroix’s use of colour, summed up in its entirety for Blanc by Femmes d’Alger (Musée Fabre, Montpellier) and the late Christ au sépulcre (Church of St Denis-duSt-Sacrement, Marais). The aim is to bring the living artist before the reader’s eyes; Delacroix’s very existence is shown as by nature artistic, but equally, it serves to instruct the viewer in his subtler aesthetic and technical achievements, to highlight their singularity in the light of his contemporaries. This, for example, is not a mere panorama, as is insistently stressed in Blanc’s focus on reading Delacroix through œuvres clefs. He had already made his point clear in the collection’s introduction, emphasizing that his portraits would stand in relief from their times. They would be sculpted, as it were, against ‘les personnages et les faits d’histoire environnante’, rather than becoming, as in Taine’s view, merely an expression of them.16 So it is not surprising to find in ‘Delacroix’, his effective apotheosis as the genius of his generation: ‘Un sentiment original de toutes les poésies, une haute compréhension de l’histoire, voilà ce qui distingue Eugène Delacroix parmi les peintres ses contemporains, en comprenant dans ce nombre ceux des autres nations de l’Europe’.17 It is, for Blanc, this singularity that makes Delacroix by extension a hero of the modern nation: ‘toujours il embrasse la synthèse, toujours il voit le tout à la fois’. Even then as he expresses his age, he monumentalizes it, revealing and synthesizing its two great contradictory forces, that is: ‘sérénité du 14

‘Eugène Delacroix’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XVI, pp. 5-27; 97-129. ‘Eugène Delacroix’, Les Artistes de mon temps, p. 25. 16 Cf. Taine: ‘Car l’état des mœurs et de l’esprit est le même pour le public et pour les artistes; il ne sont pas des hommes isolés’ (Philosophie de l’art, 1904, pp. 2-4). 17 ‘Eugène Delacroix’, Les Artistes de mon temps, p. 56. 15

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monde antique […] émotions fébriles du monde présent’, the moral and material, the earthly and divine in ‘cette âme de feu qui a passé parmi nous comme un lumineux météore’.18 This is life that is already ideal, one that transforms the world by a res gestae of art, yet, in the spirit of Cicero and the great Renaissance classicists (Petrarch), attempts philosophically to overcome it. Amongst the panegyrics, the detailed discussion of technique and attention devoted to the provenance of Delacroix’s work (it is clear, for Blanc, that its value is yet to be recognized) suggest that even if the star has passed, its brilliance is also the future. There are similar attempts by Blanc to promote the other portraits, notably the Italian engraver Calamatta, by subtle and overt references to past masters, to potential collectors, including the state – and to their glory. But none is so insistently eulogized as Delacroix. The lesson is clear: we are called to recognize Delacroix’s as the modern incarnation of the life story of exemplary past artists – Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt – as the emblem for contemporary art of that free-spirited, singular genius who shapes the modern nation state. Blanc’s is an astute and seductive historical picture, marrying a polished-up image of Romanticism with the right-sounding Classical inheritance, channelled via a Renaissance model to fashion a cultural power elite right for the new Republican moment. Like all forms of nostalgia, however, it eschews a plural present for a more legible, potently idealized past. Blanc’s model may have proved hugely influential; after all, his studies were, as Philippe Burty pointed out, ‘à peu près les seuls livres sur les arts qui, en France, se vendent et se rééditent’.19 Yet the antiquarian galerie as a cultural referent was not. Key followers of Blanc’s approach – notable among them Jules Claretie and Burty – were adopting the Blancian biographical formula as the basis for constructing a type of historical model that would take account of relationships between the past and contemporary art, the very history that Blanc avoids, and firmly premised on the idea of inclusion rather than on exemplary isolation. Burty’s Maîtres et petits maîtres is one of the clearest subversions of Blanc’s historical model, using it to construct a narrative for modern French art that makes 18 19

Ibid., p. 88. Burty, ‘Variétés – “Les Artistes de mon temps” par M. Charles Blanc’, La République française (19 December 1876), p. 3.

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suggestive associations between its official and repressed histories, and a broader narrative connected with the Republic’s ‘democratic’ aspirations. Burty was, by definition, an ‘arriviste’. One of the first to be described by Gustave Vapereau as ‘critique d’art’ rather than ‘historien’ or ‘littérateur’, he had already made a reputation for himself within a new type of power group of the period.20 This was a small circle of writers, collectors and entrepreneurs that included Paul Durand-Ruel, interested in ‘revivals’ and newcomers. In the 1860s, he was an incessantly active promoter of ‘outsiders’, notably Rousseau (in 1867 and 1869), the industrial arts, links with English art, and the peintres-graveurs during his stint under Blanc at the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. These were interests that coincided with Burty’s own entrepreneurial status as an art critic in relation to his primarily literary contemporaries, on the margins of the mainstream art world and its supporting institutions: the Academy and the Salon.21 In 1868, he had even extended his entrepreneurialism to redefining the role of contemporary exhibitions and the art market, suggesting prophetically that these were becoming institutions in their own right, supplanting the authority of established ones: ‘c’est à l’incessante mobilité des galeries contemporaines que l’hôtel Drouot doit être devenu, depuis quelques années, une sorte de musée permanent de l’école moderne’.22 It is this theme of the entrepreneur as self-styled outsider, of the marginal group or community seen from the independent vantage point, on the margins of the Salon, that underpins the organization of Maîtres et petits maîtres. What emerges is a network of powerrelations that offers an alternative to that of the Salon, and its official version of French art. Indeed, while individual articles in the collection, chiefly on Romantic landscapists and print-makers, date from an earlier period (published between 1864 and 1869), and relate to that 20

21

22

Described as ‘collectionneur et critique d’art français’, Vapereau, Dictionnaire universel des contemporains contenant toutes les personnes notables de la France et des pays étrangers (Paris: Hachette, 1858); fourth edition, ‘entièrement refondue et considérablement augmentée’ (1870), p. 309. See Gabriel Weisberg, The Independent Critic: Philippe Burty and the Visual Arts of Mid-Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Garland, 1993), esp. chs 3 and 5. Burty, ‘Préface’, Collection de M. le Comte d’Aquila: Tableaux et aquarelles de l’école moderne, Vente: Hôtel Drouot (Paris: 21 and 22 February 1868), p. 3.

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context, republished by the Naturalists’ publisher Georges Charpentier,23 with more recent articles on drawing instruction (1873), Millet (1875) and Diderot’s art criticism (1876), the ensemble is instructive and portentous. For a start, although all of the studies, with the exception of ‘L’Enseignement du dessin’, are ‘portraits’ in the biographical mode – Blanc’s shadow is never far away, and most are indeed obituary pieces – none are labelled as such. Rather, the emphasis is on shaping the form towards fresh insights, as a means to create focus, rather than generalize, on the telling life image and personal insight – Méryon as a seaman, hands ripped to the bone, ‘dénudées jusqu’à l’os’,24 Millet’s ‘mains de cultivateur’, the young Jules de Goncourt, ‘blond comme un chérubin’, the nervous Huet who ‘a connu à peine sa mère’25 – and on the image as a guide to an often unexpected angle on the work. This approach – the artistic ‘close-up’ – is given particular emphasis in the individual studies’ concern with relations between ‘freedom’ – personal and political – and medium; the oil study; drawing; etching; poetic criticism, and in those at the collection’s notional core: Rousseau and Millet. While both are contemporaries, one represents the past, the other, the future. The two devoted to Rousseau, one an obituary piece, the other on Rousseau’s studies first published in 1867 to preface his obituary exhibition at the Cercle des arts,26 are by far the longest in the collection. Indeed, it is through Rousseau’s studies that we see the paradigm of the progressive artist. His sincerity and individuality are defined by a continuous struggle with repressive ideological forces, ‘car, de nos temps, toute manifestation d’art personnelle et sincère ouvre une lutte’,27 and especially by his flexible and spontaneous idea of style and technique, ‘un fait

23

See O. and H.-J. Martin, ‘Le Monde des éditeurs’, in Histoire de l’édition française (1985), III: 211-12. 24 ‘Les Portraits de Charles Méryon’ (La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 13 September 1868), Maîtres et petits maîtres, p. 113. 25 ‘Jules de Goncourt’ (La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 26 June 1870); ‘Paul Huet’ (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, April 1869), Maîtres et petits maîtres, pp. 272 and 185. 26 Notice des études peintes par M. Théodore Rousseau, exposées au Cercle des arts (Académie de Bibliophiles), 1867. 27 ‘Les Études peintes de Th. Rousseau’ (1867), Maîtres et petits maîtres, p. 72.

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aussi personnel que le mémoire lui-même’28 for which his landscapes are the vehicle. In 1867, this was a bid to put Rousseau with Delacroix, amongst the front-rank Romantic artists while others had placed him as secondary,29 and to recognize his innovations in landscape and technique as a major tributary to the development of contemporary art. Even in 1867, but especially from a later perspective that could now accommodate Alfred Sensier’s quasi-hagiographic Souvenirs sur Théodore Rousseau (1872), this takes on the character of myth: of the epic égaré who, through his freedom from conservatism, artistic and institutional, will shape the tastes and pantheon of modern art. If in Rousseau’s case, Burty was following (confessedly) in Théophile Thoré’s footsteps, perhaps republishing his two studies in the 1877 rubric to reach a wider audience, with Millet in 1875, he breaks new ground. Millet is presented as the cornerstone of contemporary art; his biography and portrayal confirms him as an artist for the age. A son of the French soil, not a bourgeois, he is painted as a doughty survivor of his upbringing, which he has transcended but not forsaken, and of Classicism, which oppressed him but did not bow him; now: survivant à ces gloires classiques qui l’avaient opprimé sans l’abattre, Millet acquérait l’autorité et prenait une position unique. Son œuvre, d’esprit tout moderne, eût trouvé son développement normal et eût rayonné chaudement dans la société républicaine dont nous foulons le seuil.30

In 1877 though, Millet was still some way from the recognition that Burty’s notice affirmed. The article is more of a projection of how things might be – part of a campaign, taken up particularly by Sensier in 188131 (and to a lesser extent in Chesneau’s Les Romantiques, 1880), to rehabilitate the Barbizon master as an inspiration for a younger generation of artists. The vivid portrait of Millet’s untutored youth, unfettered, at large in nature, his rustic appearance ‘à encolure 28

Ibid., p. 75. Notably in Théophile Silvestre’s Histoire des artistes vivants français et étrangers: Études d’après nature (Paris: E. Blanchard, 1856). 30 ‘Le Peintre J.-F. Millet’ (L’Art, 16 March 1875), Maîtres et petits maîtres, p. 279. 31 Sensier, La Vie et l’œuvre de J.-F. Millet (Paris: A. Quantin, 1881), a study that presented Millet, as with his earlier piece on Rousseau, as a hero of the Republican left. 29

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de taureau avec des mains de cultivateur’,32 therefore, builds an image with Romantic resonances but one also entirely in tune with the new Republic’s mythology, which the politics of raillement would indeed endorse. So if Rousseau and Delacroix are the apotheosis of Romanticism, Millet, unlike both, speaks to the moment: ‘Il clôt l’ère romantique. Il ouvre l’ère naturaliste’.33 With Le Vanneur, he showed ‘une évolution nouvelle de cet esprit français qui ne reste jamais en repos’. Even if we find the vanneur repellent, says Burty, he has become a contemporary symbol, for Millet creates types of modern, popular and accessible heros making him a painter for the future, not of a picturesque past. Millet is thereby positioned as the effective – acceptable – shield for Burty’s covert bid to bring even the most unacceptable égaré back into the historical frame as a painter, not of insurrection but of national patrimony. Burty presses the message home by highlighting affinities between what he sees as Millet’s particular contribution to the development of modern art and the Gambettist line: Il a peint son pays et sa vie agricole. Il a noté scrupuleusement le vieux paysan encore attaché aux outils et aux vêtements traditionnels, encore victime effective du travail manuel et que rendront invraisemblable tout prochainement l’habit acheté à la ville et la machine aratoire. Il nous lègue la dernière incarnation de cet humain arriéré de qui Gambetta pouvait encore dire, en 1875 annonçant sa transformation prochaine: ‘Le paysan ne change pas, lui, il n’est pas mobile […] mais quand une idée y a pénétré, vainement les partis, les factions peuvent l’assaillir: elle est comme un coin dans le cœur d’un chêne, rien ne peut l’arracher. C’est là sa force’.34

For Burty, this forceful image of nation is not only to be found in Millet’s peasant subjects, but in his aesthetics as well. Thus the focus on Millet’s recent posthumous exhibition of pastels and drawings, held for his widow and children in 1877, develops Burty’s other main theme. Through his change of medium, Millet has renewed his art. Pastel is fresh, young; it is vibrant and sensuous. It captures qualities that are viewed as distinctively French. Moreover, it can create the kind of brilliant sensations and material effects as in Femmes revenant 32

‘J.-F. Millet’, Maîtres et petits maîtres, p. 279. Ibid. 34 Ibid., pp. 289-90. 33

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de faire du bois, where ‘on sera surpris de ne voir plus que des ombres noires, sans détail, presque flottantes’, characteristics which the young Impressionist group are already demonstrating as the future vision of French art.35 Only a new perspective on Millet, though, will enable us to recognize what is at hand, for as Burty insists, ‘Il prouve quelle place sont appelés à prendre les artistes dans l’ensemble du movement qui emporte la société moderne vers les grandes conquêtes d’un idéal nouveau’.36 It is this idea of building a community of interests through the force of individual and small group vision, a theme that emerges in the earlier pieces, that is also extended – implicitly in the case of the artist studies, explicitly in the studies on Sainte-Beuve and the review of the new Garnier frères’s Œuvres complètes de Diderot (1875-77) – to art criticism. Paralleling Millet’s re-education of the eye and perception through his artistic vision and fresh use of his medium, the art critic, too, as presented by Burty, is vested with the power to create new tastes and historical constructs from their formation. In this, SainteBeuve is now clearly re-positioned as a transitional figure, enormously influential for his biographical model, but fundamentally unpoetic, while Diderot – a Diderot polished up for the times, anti-academic, fresh, flexible ‘toujours mobile, mais toujours intelligent’ – suggests an extended metaphor for the collection as a whole. Indeed, for Burty, Diderot’s is placed as the model of that form of creative criticism, the mould in which Burty perhaps sees himself and future art critics cast: ‘il est réellement artiste lui-même, créateur, suggestif’.37 Of course, Blanc was also engaged in a process of cultural recreation, but his is poetry of epic: one already being undermined by the very cultural forces it was attempting to heroize as political and artistic heritage. The significant change in Burty’s narrative of ‘Masters’ old and new, is the emphasis on suggestion, on creating histories that are partial, plural narratives, that are fragmentary, incomplete – more empreintes than daguerrotypes – still less relief sculptures that stand outside time. If both Blanc’s and Burty’s texts work from within the same historical biographical mould, Burty’s 35

Ibid., pp. 300-1. Ibid., p. 310. 37 ‘Les Salons de Diderot’ (La République française, 7 April 1876), Maîtres et petits maîtres, p. 382. 36

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Maîtres is not, as some see it, a marginal, reactionary text.38 Rather, it offers a key moment in the reshaping of biography in new and flexible directions to focus on subjects – Millet and Impressionism – far removed from the Vasarian paradigm that Blanc helped to institute and perpetuate. A tool for close-up, Burty’s text resets the historical framework for contemporary art and its institutions from the vantagepoint of naturalism’s power, artistically and ideologically, constructed as the most fitting precedent to the interests and potential – cultural and political – of the age.

38

Cf. Weisberg, The Independent Critic, pp. 157-59.

Beyond Institutions: In Search of le souffle moderne in Gautier’s Salon de 1844 L. CASSANDRA HAMRICK

1844 was a lacklustre year for the annual art Salon in Paris. Even critics who insisted that the exhibition was not devoid of interest invariably found the general atmosphere listless in comparison to the effervescent mood that had dominated the Romantic artistic triumphs of earlier times. ‘En 1844, il n’y a plus ni armée ni bannière’, bemoans the critic for L’Artiste, Arsène Houssaye, after having recalled the ‘folle ardeur’ of those who had participated in the great artistic and political movement of 1830. ‘Le Salon de 1844 ne laissera pas un souvenir durable dans le monde des arts’, he concludes.1 In a similar vein, Théophile Thoré, writing in Le Constitutionnel, wonders: ‘Où est le temps de ces grandes disputes qui passionnaient les artistes et la critique? […] Tous les tableaux se ressemblent. On dirait les produits de la même manufacture industrielle’.2 The industrialized aspect of the exhibition is also noted in the Revue des Deux Mondes by Louis Peisse, who estimates that nearly one third of the entries in 1844 are but ‘articles de commerce’. He laments: ‘Le salon tend évidemment à se transformer en bazar’. For Peisse, the cause of the exhibition’s ‘triste physionomie’ can be traced to the Salon’s administration itself, and in particular to the institution of the jury, which in 1844 had

1

‘Le Salon’, L’Artiste, 3e série, V:10 (10 March 1844), 145 and 4e série, I:4 (26 May 1844), 53. Further references to Arsène Houssaye’s 1844 ‘Salon’ articles in L’Artiste will be indicated by date and page only. 2 ‘Salon de 1844’, Le Constitutionnel, 95 (4 April 1844); reprinted in Salons de T. Thoré 1844, 1845, 1846, 1847, 1848 (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868), pp. 30 and 33. Henceforth references to Thoré’s Salons will be to this edition.

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admitted hundreds of additional works over the previous year’s quota.3 Indeed, after years of ruthlessly refusing works that challenged the academic status quo, the jury appeared to have reversed its course and been unusually indulgent to artists submitting in 1844. Some wary critics, however, surmised that the jury’s apparent indulgence was actually due to the intervention of ‘une haute influence’,4 namely the government, as a result of the petition addressed to the King by artists objecting to the exclusion of numerous works of art from the previous year’s Salon by a jury whose membership was unilaterally controlled by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Some commentators even suspected that the jury’s ‘indulgent’ action in 1844 of admitting not only larger numbers of inferior works, but also previously refused œuvres, was but a ploy designed to demonstrate the need for the jury to return to its old, rigorous, and biased ways of judgement.5 Yet while the number of works exhibited at the Salon in 1844 was greater than ever before, some of the most celebrated artists of the time, including Delacroix, Decamps, and Ingres, were conspicuously absent.6 The violent and tumultuous paintings that had been shown just five or six years earlier had definitely given way to calmer palettes, and visitors to the exhibition were struck by ‘un certain air de sagesse’.7 The artists ex3

4

5

6

7

‘Le Salon’, Revue des Deux Mondes, nouvelle série, VI:15 (April 1844), 45-46. Further references to Louis Peisse’s 1844 ‘Salon’, a single article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, will be indicated by page only. Théophile Gautier, ‘Salon de 1844’, La Presse, 26 March 1844. Pages in La Presse are not numbered. Further references to Gautier’s ‘Salon de 1844’ articles in La Presse will be noted by date only. See Peisse, ‘Le Salon’, p. 144 and Albert de La Fizelière, ‘Salon de 1844’, Bulletin de l’ami des arts, II (1844), 220-21. Further references to La Fizelière’s ‘Salon de 1844’ review appearing in this Bulletin will be by page only. Other well-known artists of the time who failed to send works to the Salon in 1844 included Paul Delaroche, Ary Scheffer, Camille Roqueplan, Ernest Meissonnier, Jules Dupré and Louis Cabat. Gautier, 26 March. Among the works that could have been considered ‘violent’ in subject and execution six years earlier at the Salon of 1838 was Delacroix’s Médée furieuse, which Gautier approvingly qualified as ‘un sujet antique traité avec l’intelligence moderne’ (La Presse, 22 March 1838), but which other critics found too realistic in style for an antique subject. The following year, the eleven paintings Alexandre Decamps presented at the annual Salon represented a milestone in the flourishing of Orientalism as an artistic genre.

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hibiting at the Salon of 1844 had seemingly yielded to a perceived need for moderation and care in execution in accordance with academic formulae. Yet if the break with the reigning artistic power structures was not very visible in the works displayed that year, signs of a newly operative dynamic can be detected in the criticism of the time.8 In his own review of the exhibition, to which Baudelaire would refer in 1845,9 Théophile Gautier responds to the monotony of the exhibition by calling for a renewal of the forme and the fond of art at a time when artistic practices of the past are proving inadequate for conveying ‘le sentiment et l’idéal moderne’ (3 April 1844). Rather than offering a diatribe against the inadequacies and injustices of the jury system, Gautier’s Salon looks beyond the prescriptions of academic institutions to embrace the diversity of modern life as a rich source of inspiration, while confronting head-on worn-out formalistic distinctions between line and colour, painting and modelling, and errors (défauts) in execution versus individual qualités.10 To a certain extent, Gautier’s Salon de 1844 proposes for art what Hugo’s preface to Les Orientales had done for poetry fifteen years earlier: that is, to liberate the visual arts from traditional notions of appropriate subject matter and form, making instead the individual artist’s way of perceiving the world the focus of critical judgement in art. At the same time, freeing inspiration from categories based on fixed notions of time and space in art would allow what Gautier calls ‘le souffle moderne’ (27 March) to permeate the artist’s composition. Although elements of these ideas are already present in Gautier’s earlier writings and while some of the themes may seem to be a redux 8

See, among others, Houssaye, 26 May 1844, p. 53; La Fizelière, pp. 216-22; Thoré, p. 34. 9 In his Salon de 1845, Baudelaire refers to Gautier’s article of 28 March 1844 in which the critic clarifies the concept of drawing (le dessin). See Œuvres complètes (hereafter OC), ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1975-76), II: 355. This borrowing and other points of convergence between Gautier’s Salon de 1844 and Baudelaire’s art criticism, are discussed further on. 10 This article is based on research for a critical edition of Gautier’s Salon de 1844 that I am preparing as a part of the new Œuvres complètes currently being published by Champion (Paris). Because of space considerations, the present essay focuses on a limited number of artists discussed by Gautier in this Salon.

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of the Romantic rhetoric of 1830, what is interesting here is how the void created by the physical absence of noteworthy art works creates in the mind of the writer – who was himself an artist11 – a space in which to sketch out, as it were, a new poetics of art for the modern world. What did this artistic rendition of the preface of Les Orientales look like? How did these ideas apply to artistic production at a time when powerful institutions like the Academy and the École des Beaux-Arts continued to play a decisive role in the establishment of artistic norms? And just where could the souffle moderne be found at the Salon of 1844?

Beyond institutionalized power While the emerging notion of le moderne in nineteenth-century France is often linked with Baudelaire and his early Salons of 1845 and 1846, Gautier’s name comes up far less frequently. Yet in his seven feuilletons devoted to the Salon in 1844 that appeared in La Presse between March 26 and April 3, the word ‘moderne’ appears fourteen times, indicating that contemporary considerations are an important factor in Gautier’s understanding of art in his time. Despite the disappointing quality of the exhibition in 1844, Gautier avoids the common critical practice of proclaiming each successive Salon inferior to the preceding one. Such a stance, which itself had become the stock response for soothsayers who warned of the degeneration of 11

In 1829, Gautier frequented the studio of the painter Rioult. Later, as an art critic, Gautier observes: ‘si nous avons pu apprécier la peinture avec quelque certitude, c’est au séjour que nous avons fait dans son atelier que nous en sommes redevable’ (Le Moniteur universel, 28 January 1856). Gautier’s discovery of Hugo’s Les Orientales while at Rioult’s studio had a decisive effect on his life: ‘nous aurions probablement été peintre sans un volume de Victor Hugo qui nous tomba dans les mains à l’atelier: c’était les Orientales! L’effet que nous produisit ce livre étincelant ne peut se rendre. À dater de ce moment, l’illustre maître a eu dans notre existence une part plus grande que nos compagnons les plus chers; nous lui devons les émotions les plus vives que nous ayons éprouvées’ (La Presse, 20 October 1845).

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the arts, and even the demise of the human species, would necessarily preclude appreciation of anything essentially modern.12 ‘Il faut se défier de ces récriminations chagrines, qui ne sont qu’un moyen de ne pas admirer une chose actuelle et vivante’, notes the critic (26 March). Moreover, for Gautier, the very raison d’être of the Salon is to function not in the manner of a museum – not as an institution for displaying what has already been consecrated by the reigning artistic powers – but rather as a space in which young, unproven artists show their works alongside those of the great masters who have become institutions in their own right.13 At the same time, the Salon ensures communication with the public on whom contemporary artists depend for their livelihood. Indeed, for Gautier, it is because of this kind of opportunity that the French school has become ‘la première école du monde après avoir été la dernière’. Hence, at a time when socioeconomic factors have all but exiled art from modern bourgeois life, these kinds of occasions play an important educational role in enlightening the artistic taste of the public. For this same reason, he continues, modern French masters such as Ingres and Delacroix have an obligation both to artists and to the public to exhibit their œuvres: ‘On disait autrefois: noblesse oblige;14 on doit dire aujourd’hui: talent

12

13

14

‘Nous ne tomberons pas dans ce lieu-commun de prétendre que le salon de cette année est inférieur au salon des années précédentes; […] nous ne croyons pas à la dégénérescence de l’espèce humaine, ni du côté moral, ni du côté physique’ (26 March 1844). Although Gautier was not alone in deliberately refraining from renewing the litany of complaints about the perceived degeneration of the arts, not all writers abstained. ‘Loin de s’élever, l’art descend d’exposition en exposition’, wrote Houssaye (17 March, p. 161). The concept that the annual exhibition serves an instructional purpose for both artists and the public is central to Gautier’s conviction that the survival of the arts depends on educating the eye. Gautier breaks with the more traditional view of the Salon as a museum or institution that showcases and applauds past artistic achievements. Such is the view of Louis Peisse: ‘Le salon est, avant tout, un musée où l’art national vient […] se produire, comme sur un théâtre, et recevoir des applaudissements en échange et pour prix de ses nobles services’ (p. 146). Noblesse oblige. While the underlying meaning of this proverb can be traced to Boethius (De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book 3), Littré (Dictionnaire de la langue française, 1872-77) credits François-Gaston, duc de Lévis (1720-1787) with having coined the expression in his Maximes, préceptes et réflexions. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française first notes the existence of the proverb in its

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oblige.’ Whether out of disdain for a reprehensible jury, or due to sulkiness for having once been refused by the same, unenlightened body, the tendency of contemporary master artists (or those who would pretend to be master artists) to shun the annual exhibition had an unfortunate effect on the overall quality of the Salon. Students of Ingres, for example, had learned the sober lessons of their master only too well. ‘Le carême imposé par Ingres n’est pas encore rompu’, remarks Gautier, referring to the continued movement away from the vibrant palette of Rubens, Veronese and Titian that had been inherited by the daring Romantic coloristes. Indeed, ‘[la] connaissance des procédés’ and ‘[l’]habileté matérielle’ in artistic execution risked becoming in and of themselves the end-all of art.15 ‘Tout le monde peint de mieux en mieux, ce qui nous paraît désolant’, writes Baudelaire in his own Salon the following year.16

A revamped preface It is to counteract the resulting institutionalized sameness of the works displayed at the Salon that Gautier launches his call for opening up art in ways that echo Hugo’s own agenda in his preface to Les Orientales. Although the journalist Désiré Laverdant chastized Gautier for his apparent acquiescence to the jury as a viable institution in 1844 and regretted that the critic was becoming ‘à ce point conservateur’,17 in the end Gautier’s critical reaction to the Salon was far more radical sixth edition (1832-35): ‘noblesse oblige, Quiconque prétend être noble, doit se conduire noblement’ (II: 267). 15 All of the quotations in this paragraph up to this point are from Gautier’s 1844 Salon article dated 26 March. 16 OC II: 407. 17 ‘Salon de 1844. Le Jury’, La Démocratie pacifique, II (1844) 30 March, p. 4, n. 2. In his Salon article of 3 April that same year, Gautier maintains that Laverdant (a fervent Fouriériste) ‘n’a pas bien compris le sens de nos paroles’ which he then clarifies: the jury in its present composition is ‘une institution très peu parfaite; mais la justice en matière d’art est la plus difficile à rendre de toutes. […] Le malheur est que les jurés sont en général des vieillards en dehors du mouvement de l’époque, étrangers aux tentatives de l’art moderne’.

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than any diatribe against those responsible for judging the exhibition entries. In fact, as we shall see, several aspects of Gautier’s proposal for renewing art would continue to frame the debate on modern painting for years to come. ‘Tout est sujet; tout relève d’art’, Hugo had reminded readers of his Les Orientales in 1829.18 Gautier’s proposal for the modernization of the champ artistique was equally sweeping. In the opening article of his Salon in 1844, Gautier affirms his position as follows: Les arts plastiques ont été longtemps enfermés dans un cycle étroit; – quelques types échappés au naufrage de l’antiquité dans l’océan de la barbarie ont suffi aux grands Italiens de la renaissance pour retrouver le style et la beauté. L’admiration sans borne qu’ils ont excitée a créé des troupeaux d’imitateurs plus ou moins adroits; et depuis trois ou quatre siècles, ces types ont été copiés avec une persévérance infatigable. – Il existe cependant autre chose dans cette large création: le monde entier n’est pas dans une langue de terre en forme de botte et une presqu’île découpée en feuille de mûrier. La diffusion des lumières, la fréquence des voyages doivent faire entrer dans l’art une foule d’éléments inconnus. Le mouvement qui s’est accompli en littérature est encore à faire en peinture où le romantisme n’a pénétré que par quelques exagérations de couleur ou de forme tout à fait insignifiantes! (26 March)

Like the author of Les Orientales who claimed not to have seen any ‘cartes routières de l’art, avec les frontières du possible et de l’impossible tracées en rouge et en bleu’,19 Gautier suggests that the sources of artistic inspiration are limitless: ‘On croit que tout est épuisé et tout est nouveau’ (26 March). Gautier maps out multiple options – both literary and geographic – ranging from the revitalization of mythology infused with ‘la symbolique moderne’ and the transposition of poetic themes (Goethe and the Germanic Niebelungenlied), to the exploration of ‘l’Inde mystérieuse et bizarre’, and the evocation of the rich colours and the primitive beauty of the Orient which had opened up to artists following the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. Yet in advocating that the field of artistic inspiration be expanded, the critic is careful to avoid any association with what would later be known as realism: ‘La peinture […] c’est un moyen d’exprimer l’idéal 18

Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Pierre Albouy, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1964), I: 319. 19 Ibid., p. 320.

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secret de l’âme […] elle ne doit pas toujours copier, il faut aussi qu’elle invente’. In 1844, Gautier clarifies a principle to which Delacroix will refer in some of his notes20 and that Baudelaire will mention in his Salon two years later,21 namely, that nature is a dictionary not to be copied, but rather to be consulted in order to extract the ‘words’ the artist might need to express ‘l’idéal secret de l’âme’. Looking beyond polemics and problems of power wielded by institutions, Gautier sets the stage for broader considerations on the nature of art itself and its relationship with the modern world. In claiming that ‘la nature n’est que le dictionnaire où [le peintre] cherche les mots dont il n’est pas sûr’ (26 March), the critic brings to the fore concepts that are a part of the other discourse of the time, the discourse that risks being effaced by more punctual questions of jury composition and past injustices. Similarly, in proposing that the plastic arts literally move beyond the traditional Greco-Roman boundaries to include other geographic areas, other ‘types’ of humanity and their inherent beauty, Gautier moves artistic discourse onto new terrain. In so doing, the critic anticipates the cosmopolitan aspect of beauty that will become the focus of Baudelaire’s 1855 Exposition universelle.22 Faced with a limited number of pertinent examples at the Salon of 1844 that could serve to illustrate the various aspects of his proposed artistic renewal, Gautier often reverts to tableaux shown at earlier Salons. Works from the exhibition of 1827, legendary for the sidingoff of the Romantic and the Classical Schools, and from the Salons of 1831, 1834 and 1839, are the most frequently cited. In discussing the revolutionary effect that paintings inspired by the Orient had on the academic paysage historique, for example, Gautier nostalgically recalls the early Orientalist canvas of Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, La Patrouille turque (Salon of 1831, Wallace Collection; Fig. 16), which he qualifies as ‘une des fantaisies les plus baroques qu’on puisse 20

‘Les formes du modèle, que ce soit un arbre ou un homme, ne sont que le dictionnaire où l’artiste va retremper ses impressions fugitives ou plutôt leur donner une sorte de confirmation’. Delacroix’s notes appear in vol. I of Œuvres littéraires, ed. by Elie Faure, 2 vols (Paris: G. Crès, 1923). This quotation appears on p. 58. 21 OC II: 433. 22 Ibid., II: 576-79.

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imaginer, et qu’on aurait dite exécutée pendant une ivresse de hachich […]; peinte avec une furie de brosse incroyable, [ce tableau] semblait venir d’un autre monde’ (2 April). As one of the celebrated painters (‘les célébrités’) who did not exhibit in 1844, Decamps is grouped by the critic with the artists who are conspicuous by their absence (‘brillent par leur absence’; 26 March). Yet in Gautier’s own ‘Salon’ that year, the physically absent Decamps is very much present as an artiste à part who brought a new sense of le pittoresque to art and challenged the borders traditionally assigned to landscape painting. Gautier also recalls Prosper Marilhat’s exotic La Place de l’Esbekieh (Salon of 1834; Fig. 17),23 of which the critic himself possessed a drawing. ‘Ce n’était pas là, certes, de la peinture timide et contenue; alors on donnait tout ce qu’on avait, on attaquait avec toutes ses forces, et l’on abordait en brûlant toujours ses vaisseaux derrière soi’, recalls the critic. A few years later, Marilhat was convinced to alter his bold manner, seeking out instead le style académique. ‘Heureusement, ce ne fut chez l’artiste qu’une courte maladie, et sa santé pittoresque lui revient bientôt’, observes Gautier (2 April). In reality, however, Marilhat’s earlier affliction was symptomatic of a broader epidemic of sorts that continued to infect the artistic production of the time, as was evidenced by the ‘air de sagesse’ that dominated the general ambience of the Salon in 1844. While the jury had been seemingly generous in the selection process, in reality, the selection had already occurred before the art works reached the jury. The abstention from the Salon of daring painters such as Delacroix and Decamps who relied on their individual ‘tempérament d’artiste’, rather than their ‘volonté’ in creating their work, had left a void which was easily filled by artists whose lifeless work reflected the ‘sages conseils’ of devotees of the academic style.24

23

In a note deposited in the Marilhat dossier in the Documentation of the Département des Peintures of the Musée du Louvre, Bruno Foucart indicates having seen La Place de l’Esbekieh at the ‘Foire de Maastricht’ in 2002. The present whereabouts of the painting are unknown. 24 In his article of 28 March, Gautier reproaches the painter Jean-François Gigoux for just the opposite way of proceeding: Gigoux’s large compositions are ‘produites par sa volonté et non par son tempérament d’artiste’. See also Gautier’s article of 2 April.

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The dichotomy maladie versus santé pittoresque as presented in Gautier’s ‘Salon’ is not only key to understanding the problematic nature of the exhibition and the state of art in France in general, but it is also the underlying force driving his call for artistic renewal, for in the end, the effects of repudiating one’s inner qualities are irreparable. ‘Prenez-y garde, on ne se corrige que de ses qualités’, warns Gautier after noting the ‘triste décadence’ to which Eugène Devéria, the author of Naissance d’Henri IV (Salon of 1827; Musée du Louvre), a veritable icon of French Romantic painting, had fallen when he sacrificed his first painterly instinct in favour of moderation in style (28 March). In the case of Marilhat, although he was not able to recover all the ‘fougue’ and ‘sauvagerie’ of La Place de l’Esbekieh, what was lost in ‘force’ was gained in ‘finesse’. The artist’s six Salon entries depicting scenes from the Middle East not only found favour among numerous critics, including Gautier, but also helped raise Orientalist landscapes to a new level of institutional recognition when, at the end of the exhibition, Marilhat was awarded a first-class medal in the Paysage category. Equally noticeable for Gautier at the 1844 exhibition was the absence of works that sought to capture a new sense of the ‘ideal’, ‘cet idéal flottant dans l’âme et dans l’esprit de tous’ that poets and writers of the Romantic period had evoked earlier in the century. Such an ideal – ‘un idéal qui n’a rien de commun avec l’antique et surtout le classique’ – an ideal infused with ‘le souffle moderne’ and transitory in nature, unlike le beau antique revered by les académiciens, was yet to be integrated into the institutional mores (27 March). Relegated to Gautier’s own imaginary Salon in 1844 are therefore two other contemporary masters: Eugène Delacroix, whose Mort de Sardanapale (Salon of 1827; Musée du Louvre) was inspired by Lord Byron’s tragedy, and Ary Scheffer, whose tableaux inspired by Goethe’s Faust and Marguerite, while too ‘vaporeux’ in style for Gautier’s taste, were immensely popular with the crowds. Since neither of these artists exhibited in 1844, however, it is Théodore Chassériau’s Christ au jardin des Oliviers (Souillac, Église de Sainte-Marie; Fig. 18), ‘le tableau le plus important du salon’ (he was awarded deuxième classe in the History category) that appears to translate most successfully the poetic sense of melancholy associated with modern times. For Gautier, Chassériau’s Christ figure, unlike

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static Gothic effigies or impassive byzantine images, is infused with the breath of life – modern life – with all its sorrow and anguish: ‘une douleur moderne palpite sous la tunique traditionnelle du Christ; ce sont les larmes de notre temps qui coulent par ces yeux, notre mélancolie s’épanche dans ces cheveux en pleurs; […] C’est la souffrance inquiète de notre âge qui a martelé ces joues et bleui ces orbites’ (27 March). Chassériau’s rendering of Jesus follows the same line of reflection evoked the previous year by Vigny in his poem, ‘Mont des Oliviers’, and later by Nerval in his ‘Christ aux Oliviers’ in which Jesus, haunted by doubt and a sense of abandonment, is shown in all his agonizing humanness.25 Of all the paintings at the 1844 Salon, Chassériau’s Christ au jardin des Oliviers seems to convey the best what the ‘vieilles perruques de l’Institut’ did not understand, and that Gautier clarifies in a review of the sculptor Auguste Préault (‘le Grand refusé’) in 1849: namely, that unlike the Ancient models, ‘les types des races modernes’ have been modified by the Christian sense of human imperfection and the undermining effect of an aging civilization. Consequently, it is melancholy that is at the heart of ‘cette grande poésie des temps modernes qui courbe nos fronts en les élargissant et met l’infini dans nos prunelles’.26 The following year, the announcement of the imminent publication of Baudelaire’s Les Limbes (later to become Les Fleurs du Mal) as a book ‘destiné à représenter les agitations et les mélancolies de la jeunesse moderne’ reveals the disquietude and anxiety among the younger generations to be ever more pervasive.27 In 1844, it is this aspect of contemporary existence that Romantic and post-Romantic writers evoked so frequently in their work, but for which there exists as yet no equivalent dimension in art. ‘Le souffle moderne’ had yet to be captured in the

25

Vigny’s ‘Mont des Oliviers’ appeared in La Revue des deux mondes on 1 June 1843. Nerval’s ‘Christ aux Oliviers’ was published in L’Artiste on 31 March 1844. See Stéphane Guégan, ‘Between Paris and Algers: A Stubborn Believer?’ in Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856): The Unknown Romantic, ed. by Stéphane Guégan, Vincent Pomarède, and Louis-Antoine Prat, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 4344. 26 La Presse, 27 July 1849. 27 The announcement of the Les Limbes appeared in Le Magasin des familles in June 1850. See OC I: 793.

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visual arts. ‘Au vent qui soufflera demain nul ne tend l’oreille’, writes Baudelaire a year later in his Salon de 1845.28 Finally, liberating art from the constraints imposed by traditional concepts of subject matter is tightly linked with form and the individual artist’s perception: ‘il n’y a en poésie ni bons ni mauvais sujets, mais de bons et de mauvais poètes […]. Examinons comment vous avez travaillé, non sur quoi et pourquoi’, declares Hugo in the preface to Les Orientales.29 For Gautier, the fusion of forme and fond requires a radically different way of understanding line and colour which will set the stage for the development of modern art: ‘il y a des gens qui ne veulent pas comprendre qu’il y a deux sortes de dessin: – le dessin du mouvement et celui du repos’, writes Gautier in defence of the equal validity of both Ingres’s calm, uncomplicated style and Delacroix’s dynamism and audacity (27 March). As will be the case with Baudelaire, who in 1846 will cite his predecessor in this regard,30 Gautier categorically refuses the academic distinction between artists who draw (dessinateurs) on the one hand, and artists who colour (coloristes), on the other: L’erreur vient de ce que le public et même beaucoup d’artistes ont le préjugé de croire que le dessin consiste à cerner les formes d’un trait […]. Rien n’est plus faux. L’on dessine par les milieux autant que par les bords, par le modelé autant que par les lignes. Ceux qu’on nomme coloristes ont une tendance à tirer des objets un relief, et les dessinateurs une silhouette (28 March).

Thomas Couture, whose painting, L’Amour de l’or (Toulouse, Musée des Augustins; Fig. 19), could be seen at the 1844 Salon, exemplifies the type of colourist Gautier has in mind. ‘Ce qui le frappe d’abord, c’est la rondeur, la saillie des formes et les valeurs diverses des tons’, observes the critic (28 March). In L’Amour de l’or, the artist’s technique of reproducing the ‘roundness’ (‘la rondeur’) of material forms on canvas through modelling (‘par le modelé’) with different pigments, rather than outlining the figures in a contrasting colour, subverts the traditional notion of the line/colour distinction by blurring the technical divisions separating sculpture and painting. Delacroix 28

Ibid., II: 407. Œuvres poétiques, I: 319. ‘Nous n’admettons que deux sortes de peintures, la bonne et la mauvaise’, writes Gautier in his Salon article of 29 March 1844. 30 OC II: 355. 29

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himself, the painter-colourist par excellence of the time, will allude to this same melding of the sculptural with the pictorial when he refers in his Journal to the colourists’ need to ‘massage’ with colour in the same way that the sculptor models clay: ‘Ils doivent masser avec la couleur comme le sculpteur avec la terre, le marbre ou la pierre’ (23 February 1852).31 Couture’s technique of modelling with colour is linked to another aspect of art in transition, however. Unlike the artist whose interest in form is driven by ‘l’idéal’ or ‘la beauté suprême’, Couture – like Rembrandt or Ribeira – is more naturally drawn to the vrai than the beau, to the réel than to the idéal. ‘Son génie est essentiellement moderne’, observes Gautier three years later in his review of the artist’s celebrated Romains de la décadence (Musée d’Orsay).32 In reaching beyond traditional notions of forme and fond in painting, Couture literally infuses old topoi with a new earthy vitality, a material energy that seems to anticipate the subversive modernity of Manet’s work.33 Such is the artistic direction hinted at in Gautier’s assessment of Couture’s L’Amour de l’or, in which the very way that the artist moulds the paint instils new life and breath into the age-old theme of the prostitution of mind and body at a time when l’or et le plaisir, as Balzac had shown in his Physionomies parisiennes, have become powerful driving forces in society.34 ‘Sa peinture est grasse, 31

Journal 1822-1863, introduction and notes by André Joubin, ed. by Régis Labourdette (Paris: Plon, 1981), p. 292. See also Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Delacroix and Sculpture’, in Sculpture et poétique: Sculpture and Literature in France, 1789-1859, ed. by L. Cassandra Hamrick and Suzanne Nash, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 35: 1 (Fall 2006), 95-109. 32 ‘Salon de 1847’, La Presse, 30 March 1847; reprinted in Gautier, Salon de 1847 (Paris: J. Hetzel, Warnod & Cie, 1847), p. 17. 33 Baudelaire’s seemingly provocative comment to his friend Édouard Manet, ‘vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrépitude de votre art’, can also be read as a tribute to the painter who dared to raise artistic decrepitude as found in the work of such painters as Couture to even greater heights. Baudelaire’s comment appears in his letter to Manet dated 11 May 1865. See Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1973), II: 497. 34 See Physionomies parisiennes in La Fille aux yeux d’or (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Folio’, 1976), pp. 245-67. Balzac’s Physionomies parisiennes first appeared in April 1834 as a part of Scènes de la vie parisienne in Études de mœurs au XIXe siècle, vol. 11 (Paris: Mme veuve Béchet).

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large, d’une pâte et d’un ragoût bien rares’, notes Gautier in his review of Couture’s painting, ‘plusieurs morceaux de nu sont d’un modelé et d’une couleur superbes. Les têtes respirent et vivent bien quoiqu’elles soient d’un type un peu commun’ (28 March). Rejection of institutionalized concepts regarding line and colour or other aspects of execution freed artists to produce work in accordance with their own temperament. Yet this freedom had its own constraints. Gautier warns against the French tendency of allowing reason to override artistic instinct; ‘en art, rien n’est plus perfide que le sens commun. La folie vaut mille fois mieux […]. Soyez violents, absolus! L’éclectisme […] est mortel en fait d’art!’ advises Gautier in terms similar to those used by Baudelaire in 1846.35 Among the many painters reproached by Gautier for having abandoned their first instinct, thereby repudiating their qualities in favour of ‘sages conseils’ that drained their canvases of life, is his friend Louis Boulanger, whose Mazeppa (Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts) had caused a sensation at the Salon of 1827. ‘M. Boulanger a le tort de se repentir de la fougue et des excès de ses premières années. […] Un des principaux mérites de M. L. Boulanger était […] l’inquiétude, la recherche d’effets nouveaux, la tentative perpétuelle,’ declares the critic after viewing Boulanger’s Salon submission, Notre-Dame de Pitié (Nièvre, Église Saint-Saulge) (28 March). ‘Qu’importent les défauts! Il n’y a que les gens nuls qui n’ont pas de défauts. – N’a pas de vices qui veut’, Gautier wrote in frustration two days later in his review of Charles-Marie Muller’s large religious canvas, L’Entrée de Jésus-Christ dans Jérusalem (Riom, Église Notre-Dame-du-Marthuret) (30 March). In the end, then, for the attentive reader of Gautier’s Salon de 1844, the fact that few art works had been rejected from the exhibition by one of the most powerful institutions in the art world is a paradox. Rather than the result of enlightened deliberations of a jury whose eyes have finally been opened to the new ‘tentatives de l’art moderne’ (3 April), the decline in the number of exclusions from the Salon is, in fact, deceptive. Outwardly, the Salon displayed a calm and reasonable appearance and the jury seemed to have been indulgent. Yet this apparent tranquillity had come at a price. For the jury’s ‘ostracismes’ 35

See ‘De l’éclectisme et du doute’, in Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846, OC II: 472-73.

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of the past had alienated some of the greatest masters of the period, while other artists had fallen victim to the ‘critique éclairée’ (30 March) who based their thinking on worn-out concepts of line, colour, and traditional notions of défauts versus qualités. For the not quite thirty-three year old Gautier, however, the absence of talent at the Salon created a space for reflection on some of the most fundamental issues underlying contemporary artistic production. In his proposals to open artistic inspiration to include the diversity and complexity of contemporary life, Gautier brings to the precepts of Hugo’s preface to Les Orientales aesthetic and formalistic considerations that go beyond immediate questions of institutional power to include a sense of the ‘modern’ whose parameters had not yet been fully defined in art. Although most works exhibited at the Salon of 1844 appeared to contain little evidence of ‘le sentiment moderne’, resonances of Gautier’s ideas can be detected in today’s modern art collections, albeit transformed in ways he probably would not have recognized: from the new concept of line and colour exploited by the Impressionists to Gauguin’s preoccupation with the ‘symbolique moderne’ of French Polynesia; and from the modern melancholy of the Christ figures by Georges Rouault to the pulsating movement of colour as line in Robert Delaunay’s paintings of the Eiffel Tower. In 1844, however, it was not on the walls of the Salon that visitors could find evidence of ‘le souffle moderne’, but rather in Gautier’s Salon itself.

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Fig. 16: Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, La Patrouille turque, c.1828, Salon of 1831. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.

Fig. 17: Prosper Marilhat, La Place de l’Esbekieh, Salon of 1834. Etching by Marilhat of his own oil painting (Vue de la place de l’Esbekieh et du quartier copte, au Caire). By kind permission of the Musée d’art Roger-Quilliot [MARQ], Clermont-Ferrand.

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Fig. 18: Théodore Chassériau, Christ au jardin des Oliviers, Salon of 1844. Souillac, Église de Sainte-Marie. By kind permission of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Fig. 19: Thomas Couture, L’Amour de l’or, Salon of 1844. Photo: Daniel Martin. By kind permission of the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse.

Le Contre-pouvoir critique: Huysmans, vers une fiction d’art GILLES BONNET

‘From a semiotic point of view’, écrit Dario Gamboni, ‘art criticism is linked to the iconic as well as to the verbal system and is reputed to connect the two. In sociological terms, art criticism can be located at the intersection of several fields, foremost the artistic and the literary one’.1 C’est bien ici que se situe un enjeu central de l’extrême véhémence des textes que Huysmans consacre à la peinture et à la sculpture durant les années qui encadrent la parution en 1883 de son recueil L’Art moderne reçu comme un manifeste de l’impressionnisme. Si la dialectique intégration/marginalité définit sa posture d’écrivain, et vient d’ailleurs, se refléter fidèlement dans son œuvre narrative, sa position médiane, ou double, d’écrivain / d’art le condamne également à un entre-deux, ‘localité paradoxale’, paratopie que définit D. Maingueneau,2 et dont Huysmans saura jouer. Pour écrire contre, d’abord, ‘livrer le combat sans merci aux bastilles académiques; abolir le privilège des réputations faites et surfaites, se

1

2

Dario Gamboni, ‘The Relative Autonomy of Art Criticism’, in Art Criticism and its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, dir. M. Orwicz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 182-94; p. 186. Dominique Maingueneau, Le Discours littéraire: Paratopie et scène d’énonciation (Paris: A. Colin, 2004), pp. 52-53 par exemple: ‘Celui qui énonce à l’intérieur d’un discours constituant ne peut se placer ni à l’extérieur ni à l’intérieur de la société: il est voué à nourrir son œuvre du caractère radicalement problématique de sa propre appartenance à cette société. Son énonciation se constitue à travers cette impossibilité même de s’assigner une véritable “place”. Localité paradoxale, paratopie, qui n’est pas l’absence de tout lieu, mais une difficile négociation entre le lieu et le non-lieu, une localisation parasitaire, qui vit de l’impossibilité même de se stabiliser’.

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hausser au rôle de justicier’.3 Huysmans, en fustigeant par le pamphlet, violent et drôle, les ‘affligeantes assises de la bourgeoisie de l’art’,4 épouse ainsi la cause des Indépendants, ces ‘révoltés de l’art’, ‘réprouvés’ qui luttent ‘à quelques-uns, contre toute une foule’ dont ‘l’incorrigible stupidité’ se confirme chaque année, et qui doivent en outre défier ‘l’immense tourbe des exposants de notre époque’.5 L’enjeu s’avère également personnel, de conquête puis de défense d’une ‘autorité énonciative’ gagnée au détriment d’autres critiques d’art, cités – à la barre – à des fins de positionnement.6 Dès lors, et curieusement, l’affrontement esthétique et idéologique se déportera vers une pratique semi-fictionnelle apte à fonder le genre de la critique d’art célibataire, en organisant la collusion de la rhétorique de l’épidictique comme assise d’un ethos de pamphlétaire, et de l’extrême efficacité pragmatique du personnage du célibataire comme relais de ce même discours. Une fiction, donc, comme horizon de la critique d’art de J.-K. Huysmans. Tous les agents de validation de l’œuvre d’art voient leur autorité contestée. Huysmans se plaît à dénoncer ‘l’engouement du vulgaire’ qui consacre à l’unisson d’infâmes tableautins ‘devant lesquels moutonne extasiée la foule des dimanches’.7 Si ‘à Paris, il y a, en moyenne, 95 imbéciles sur 100 personnes’, les membres du Jury ne sont pas à chercher parmi les rescapés.8 Ces ‘garde-malades du vieil art’,9 ‘bouffons médiocres’ accordent le viatique tant espéré avec la bêtise de ‘gabelous de la peinture’.10 C’est tout le champ artistique qui se voit alors conçu comme une ‘lutte’,11 ‘lice courtoise’12 en laquelle 3

Roger Marx, J.-K. Huysmans (Paris: Kleinmann, 1893), p. 8. ‘L’Exposition des Indépendants en 1880’, in L’Art moderne in Huysmans, Œuvres Complètes de J.-K. Huysmans (Paris: Crès, 1929), VI: 116. 5 L’Art moderne, pp. 108, 116, 286, 272 et 270. 6 Maingueneau, Le Discours littéraire, p. 119. 7 ‘Portraits et natures mortes. Salon de 1877’, L’Actualité, Bruxelles, 17 juin 1877; repris dans Écrits sur l’art 1867-1905 (Paris: Bartillat, 2006), pp. 85 et 81. 8 ‘Le Salon officiel de 1884’, Revue indépendante, juin 1884; Écrits sur l’art, p. 283. 9 ‘Le Salon officiel de 1880’, L’Art moderne, p. 175. 10 ‘Le Rolla de Gervex’, L’Artiste, 4 mai 1878; Écrits sur l’art, p. 98. 11 Cf. ‘Portraits et natures mortes. Salon de 1877’, L’Actualité, Bruxelles, 17 juin 1877; Écrits sur l’art, p. 88. 12 ‘Les Paysagistes contemporains’, Revue mensuelle, 25 novembre 1867 ; Écrits sur l’art, p. 39. 4

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le critique attend ‘qu’un homme de génie […] surgisse et enlève d’assaut la place’.13 Si ‘toute œuvre, par son déploiement même, prétend instituer la situation qui la rend pertinente’,14 alors la faillite de l’art académique et des institutions qui l’encadrent permet à Huysmans de légitimer son dire pamphlétaire en une scénographie spécifique. Se déploie dès lors dans le discours critique huysmansien une rhétorique agonistique, qui constamment s’adosse à une pluralité de discours antagonistes qu’il s’agit de dénoncer comme paroles incarnant abusivement le pouvoir institutionnel. Le tout premier texte de critique d’art de Huysmans, en 1867, s’ouvre ainsi symptomatiquement par la mention d’un discours externe contre quoi le débutant va crânement adosser son propre jugement: ‘Les peintres de paysage, me disait-on dernièrement, sont bien dégénérés […] je ne puis croire […]’.15 Constamment, Huysmans aura recours à cette dialogisation interne pour offrir à son dire la butée – aisément procurée par la prosopopée – de ces ‘plumitifs dont la spécialité est de distribuer, dans les feuilles imprimées, des éloges aux gens médiocres’.16 Huysmans ne combat en réalité ni des discours axiologiques ni des œuvres académiques, mais bien ces agrégats iconotextuels – et en cela instruments redoutables de pouvoir – tableaux bruissant des éloges stéréotypés, réels ou virtuels, qu’ils ont/auraient suscités. Tous les coups rhétoriques sont alors permis, qui confèrent à l’article critique l’impact pragmatique du dire pamphlétaire. La nuance n’est plus d’actualité, tant il s’agit de déstabiliser avec l’œuvre adverse le halo discursif et normatif qui l’accompagne. L’amalgame y parvient, qui mêle mauvaise foi et simplification abusive. Huysmans regroupe fréquemment ses victimes en cliques: ‘vaudevillistes’, ‘couturiers’ et ‘pleurnicheurs’ accaparent ainsi les cimaises.17 Il ne craint pas d’afficher un relativisme qui l’incite par exemple à regrouper natures mortes et peintures militaires: ‘Pioupious d’Épinal ou fleurs de taffetas, c’est bon à mettre dans le même sac’, affirme-t-il à propos du 13

‘Le Salon de 1879’, Écrits sur l’art, p. 117. D. Maingueneau, Le Discours littéraire, p. 193. 15 ‘Les Paysagistes contemporains’, Écrits sur l’art, p. 39. 16 L’Art moderne, p. 296. Ce premier article incluait d’ailleurs un pseudo-dialogue avec certains défenseurs de Diaz. 17 ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, p. 68. 14

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Salon de 1879.18 La structure de la liste envahit dès lors la page, qui dénie aux productions officielles toute originalité. C’est toute dimension verticale, synonyme de hiérarchie des valeurs, qui se trouve de la sorte déniée, au profit d’une dérive analogique. Huysmans renonce ainsi ostensiblement à l’acte critique même, par définition discriminatoire. La ruse du pamphlétaire consiste ici à se fier à la force de persuasion de l’exemple, qui tend à présenter comme superflu tout autre développement qui s’appuierait, lui, sur de réels arguments fondés en raison; l’induction et ses vertus paralogiques supplantent alors la déduction rigoureuse. En organisant de tels défilés de croûtes, Huysmans retrouve la tradition du sottisier: ‘Je signale […] M. Pinta (Amable), auteur d’une Cage à singes, M. Saintin, M. Simon Durand, auteur d’Une alerte, peinte tout à la fois d’une façon flasque et aigre, M. Innocenti qui a trouvé ce titre spirituel: Une blanche pointée […]’.19 L’efficace pragmatique de la critique huysmansienne repose donc pour partie sur la saturation d’un texte voué à l’accumulation et à l’énumération. Une pratique systématique de l’abondance stylistique scande l’article critique, dont l’éloquence puise le plus souvent aux sources de l’anaphore.20 Ce style véhément parvient à déplacer l’adversaire, ce qui est déjà presque le terrasser, puisque ‘polémiquer veut dire situer l’autre autrement qu’il ne le ferait lui-même, articuler une représentation de l’autre différente de celle qu’il se donne lui-même et que le destinateur sait qu’il se donne’.21 Le néologisme vient en outre démesurer la représentation, imposant des suffixes dysphoriques – ‘peinturleurs’,22 ‘bavochures’,23 ‘léchotteries à la Cabanel et à la Gérôme’24 – 18

Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 69. 20 ‘La Cruche cassée de Greuze’, Musée des deux mondes, 1 octobre 1875; Écrits sur l’art, p. 42: ‘Ah! fi de la frangipane et de l’iris! de la maréchale et de la bergamote! fi des grandes robes falbalassées, des jupes enguirlandées de fleurettes; fi des mules de satin, des bras de soie ajourés de mailles roses; fi des nudités “du peintre des Grâces”, des poupines qui jouent de l’éventail sur la brocatelle des bergères’. 21 Aage Brandt, ‘Polémique et subjectivité’, in Le Discours polémique, Centre de Recherches linguistiques et sémiologiques de Lyon (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1980), p. 121. 22 ‘Portraits et natures mortes. Salon de 1877’, Écrits sur l’art, p. 80. 23 ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, p. 28. 19

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dans le but de déborder à son profit la norme tacitement admise par les deux belligérants – la tempérance bourgeoise, tout particulièrement.25 Mais il s’agit également pour le polémiste d’attirer l’attention par ces ponctuations phatiques sur la forme de son expression, d’ailleurs parfois soulignée par l’italique: plus que jamais, la connotation autonymique ainsi obtenue peut se gloser comme ‘le mode du comme moi je dis’. En feignant de donner une intensité inédite à la pensée de l’auteur dont il exhibe la créativité formelle, le discours polémique fait une nouvelle fois l’économie d’une argumentation circonstanciée. L’excès stylistique démesure le texte critique au seul profit de l’énonciateur,26 qui s’évertuera, par contraste, à légitimer sa pratique par le recours à des mots-valeurs garants ostentatoires d’une orthodoxie idéologique: tel sera le rôle de la vérité, pierre angulaire de l’ethos dit de Huysmans critique d’art, et fétiche normatif convoqué dès l’ouverture de L’Art moderne: ‘Contrairement à l’opinion reçue, j’estime que toute vérité est bonne à dire.’27 L’énonciation acquiert dans le même temps une valeur nouvelle, comme une urgence légitimée par ces prémisses et qui enjoint Huysmans à justifier son dire par des formules comme: ‘Il serait peut-être temps de dire la vérité’.28 Si le pouvoir-dire se veut devoir-dire, c’est que le pamphlétaire se voit investi d’une mission. Mission cocasse, au demeurant, car tout comme Huysmans écrivait à Hannon que les Stevens exposés en 1878 étaient ‘à chier dessus’,29 il semble concevoir L’Art moderne comme un exutoire mettant fin à une trop longue rétention. Il 24

Ibid., p. 14. Voir Artur Greive, ‘Comment fonctionne la polémique?’, in Le Discours polémique, dir. G. Roellenbleck (Tubingen-Paris: Narr-Place, 1985), pp. 17-30: ‘La phrase polémique prononcée est doublée d’une autre phrase, non prononcée, du genre: Je sais que telle ou telle formule ne correspond pas à ce que mon interlocuteur peut attendre d’après les normes de comportement qui existent entre nous, même s’il est préparé à une critique’ (p. 21). 26 Cf. Françoise Lucbert, Entre le voir et le dire: La Critique d’art des écrivains dans la presse symboliste en France de 1882 à 1906 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), p. 192: ‘Négligeant la tempérance et la prudence, vertus cardinales associées au manque de génie, les écrivains d’art préfèrent toujours verser dans l’excès, la démesure restant à leurs yeux l’apanage de la grandeur’. 27 L’Art moderne, p. 5. 28 ‘Le Salon officiel de 1880’, L’Art moderne, p. 150. 29 Lettres à Théodore Hannon (1876-1886), édition de Pierre Cogny et Christian Berg (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 1985), lettre du 27 mai 1878, p. 144. 25

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y a bien une analité de la vérité dans ce pamphlet: ‘Voilà des vérités qu’il est utile d’énoncer quand on le peut’, confie-t-il après avoir épinglé les œuvres des Daubigny père et fils, avant de poursuivre: ‘Ça offusque bien des gens, mais ça soulage de les écrire’.30 La saturation logorrhéique du texte critique trouve là une justification inattendue. Un tel choix isole le pamphlétaire, vox clamans in deserto marginalisée par sa sincérité sans concession.31 Le critique se portrait donc à l’image des Indépendants dont il prend la défense, ces isolés comme on les nommait, véritables ‘réprouvés’, ‘parias’ en lutte contre les mensonges académiques.32 Le superbe isolement confine alors, au prix d’une inversion carnavalesque des rôles, à une victimisation sciemment mise en scène du critique d’art broyé par une majorité aveugle fédérant artistes, critique et public: ‘sous prétexte de démocratie’, écrit-il ainsi à propos du Salon de 1880, ‘on a assommé les inconnus et les pauvres’.33 Huysmans offre alors impudiquement le spectacle de son incompétence, par exemple face aux paysages officiels: ‘je ne comprends pas grand chose à la plupart des verdurettes qui s’étalent au Salon de chaque mai’,34 confesse-t-il dès 1877. Le critique peut même feindre de renoncer à saisir le sens d’une toile par trop allégorique comme le Souvenir de fête de M. Cazin.35 Huysmans affiche une feinte naïveté de bon aloi, qui l’autorise à buter systématiquement contre toute altérité irréductible rencontrée au gré de sa promenade dans le Salon. Ainsi recourt-il à un métalangage superflu qui tend à obscurcir temporairement la représentation, en retardant la désignation correcte d’une réalité pourtant bien simple, voire transparente. Les figures disposées derrière la Jeanne d’Arc de Bastien-Lepage apparaissent 30

‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, p. 33. ‘L’Exposition des Indépendants en 1880’, L’Art moderne, p. 139: ‘je puis croire que cette vérité que je suis le seul à écrire aujourd’hui sur M. Degas ne sera probablement reconnue comme telle que dans une période illimitée d’années’. 32 Ibid. 33 ‘Le Salon officiel de 1880’, L’Art moderne, p. 144. 34 ‘Tableaux militaires et paysages. Salon de 1877’, Écrits sur l’art, pp. 92-93. 35 ‘Le Salon officiel de 1881’, L’Art moderne, pp. 193-94: ‘Tâchons de comprendre, si faire se peut, cette bizarre énigme. [suit une première description du tableau] Comprenez-vous? – Non. [seconde description] Comprenez-vous mieux? Non, n’est-ce pas? eh bien, moi non plus! […] De quelque côté que je retourne ce sujet, il me semble saugrenu et vague’. 31

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ainsi ‘coiffées de petits cerceaux de cuivre, que le dictionnaire des termes techniques appelle je crois, des auréoles ou des nimbes’.36 Cette technique de la défamiliarisation caractéristique du pamphlet37 rapproche le critique d’art de l’eirôn socratique. Contrevenant aux recommandations de la Rhétorique aristotélicienne, l’écrivain / d’art se dote en effet d’un ethos ironique qui lui permettra de percer au jour tous les alazôns, ces baudruches remplies d’air que le Salon accueille avec trop de bienveillance. Cette mise en scène de soi convoquant l’ironie s’insère, à première vue, dans la tradition héritée du XVIIIe siècle du ‘Vaudeville style of Salon criticism’:38 le pamphlet y suscite ses propres personnages de visiteurs chargés de ridiculiser les croûtes les plus remarquables. Mais ici, c’est bien le critique d’art lui-même qui tend à s’inscrire dans des terres fictionnelles justement arpentées par Huysmans en ces années 1880, troublant les frontières de la critique et de la fiction, au prix d’un rapprochement des champs littéraire et artistique. C’est ainsi que Huysmans invente une pratique célibataire de la critique d’art, qui aboutit à une hybridation générique que l’on pourrait nommer fiction d’art. Ou: quand M. Folantin, le personnage d’À vau-l’eau, passe au Salon. De la salle à manger au Salon, en effet, il n’y a qu’un pas, comme l’a établi depuis longtemps la critique huysmansienne,39 en repérant les multiples métaphores et comparaisons culinaires qui envahissent un texte destiné aux connaisseurs, ces ‘fins gourmets de l’art’.40 C’est le plus souvent une litanie plaintive qui s’élève, assimilant la croûte à un plat raté, agrémenté d’une fallacieuse sauce ravigote. Ainsi de Benjamin-Constant écrit-il: ‘De l’Orient ensoleillé à BatignollesClichy et accommodé à grand ragoût de teintes vives pour en masquer la saveur fade’.41 On songe alors à la moutarde d’À vau-l’eau, 36

‘Le Salon officiel de 1880’, L’Art moderne, p. 149. Voir Marc Angenot, La Parole pamphlétaire: Contribution à la typologie des discours modernes (Paris: Payot, 1982), p. 142. 38 Adrian Rifkin, ‘History, Time and the Morphology of Critical Language, or Publicola’s Choice’, in Art Criticism and its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 28-42; p. 39. 39 Et encore récemment Jacqueline Lichtenstein, dans ‘Huysmans critique d’art’, Europe, 916-17 (août-septembre 2005), 124-34; p. 128. 40 ‘L’École anglaise à l’Exposition universelle de 1878’, L’Artiste, 2 juin 1878; Écrits sur l’art, p. 105. 41 ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, p. 86. 37

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‘masquant le goût faisandé des viandes et attisant la froide lessive des sauces’.42 M. Folantin, dans la nouvelle de 1882, se distingue par son dégoût de la mixité et de la contamination d’un ingrédient par l’autre. Telle est la source de sa déception lorsqu’il constate l’impéritie du marmot qui lui livre ses repas à domicile: ‘une tempête semblait s’être abattue dans la boîte, où tout était sens dessus dessous, où la sauce blanche se mêlait au tapioca, dans lequel s’enlisaient des braises’.43 Comparons avec La Bataille de Grünwald, par M. Matejko, au Salon officiel de 1880: C’est le méli-mélo le plus extraordinaire que l’on puisse rêver. Cela ressemble à une chromo mal venue où les oranges se seraient mêlés aux rouges et les jaunes aux bleus. Les couleurs les plus violentes et les plus criardes se succèdent, montant les unes sur les autres, mangeant les figures qui disparaissent dans cette cacophonie de tons.44

Tout comme le dégoût éprouvé par Folantin face à une nourriture adultérée se mue en virtuosité stylistique, la couleur qui donne des ‘hauts le cœur’ au critique est prétexte à morceaux de bravoure.45 Folantin étouffe dans des restaurants bondés et surchauffés, comme la table d’hôte recommandée par M. Martinet, et souffre de ce que JeanPierre Richard nomma ‘l’imbrication’ de corps ‘mécaniquement liés et comme bloqués les uns dans les autres par la géographie de la table’;46 le critique d’art dénonce de façon tout à fait similaire une double promiscuité, interne et externe à la toile. Interne, avec par exemple La Femme de Loth de M. Toudouze, toile ‘trop encombrée’ où ‘s’enchevêtr[ent]’ les couleurs: ‘on y étouffe, l’air manque’, se plaint Huysmans;47 Folantin, en écho: ‘j’étouffe, je vais respirer un peu’.48 42

J.-K. Huysmans, À vau-l’eau, in Nouvelles, édition de Daniel Grojnowski (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2007), p. 95. 43 À vau-l’eau, p. 125. 44 Écrits sur l’art, p. 187. 45 Jacques Dupont, ‘La couleur dans (presque) tous ses états’, in Huysmans: Une esthétique de la Décadence, dir. A. Guyaux, C. Heck et R. Kopp (Genève-Paris: Slatkine, 1987), pp. 155-166; p. 155. 46 Jean-Pierre Richard, ‘Le texte et sa cuisine’, Microlectures (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 139. 47 ‘Les Envois de Rome’, La République des lettres, 3 juillet 1876; Écrits sur l’art, p. 58. 48 À vau-l’eau, p. 111.

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Externe, avec ce dilettantisme que stigmatise à plusieurs reprises Huysmans et qui fait se côtoyer scandaleusement, en un ‘hérétique coudoiement’, ‘les expositions de Delacroix et de Bastien-Lepage qui se touchaient’ en 1885.49 L’exposition de ‘toiles entassées dans le Palais de l’Industrie’50 tient de la salle de restaurant bondée et surchauffée par ‘une trop copieuse fournée de Delacroix qu’on nous servit, pêle-mêle, dans la Galerie des Beaux-Arts’.51 La passivité du critique ainsi mise en scène confine à l’accablement: M. Besnard, ‘pendant longtemps, nous accabla d’œuvres caduques’; ‘il faut subir l’Histoire des Lettres de M. Flameng, un ramas de figures péniblement agencées’.52 Le Salon n’offre d’ailleurs que ‘le rebut’ de l’art, quand Folantin se voit à jamais voué aux ‘rebuts de l’amour’ comme aux ‘résidus’ du pâtissier qui cherche à l’empoisonner.53 Le texte critique retrouve alors ce comique des petites misères où humour et paranoïa font bon ménage, et qui innerve tout particulièrement les textes narratifs des années 1880, À vau l’eau le tout premier, bien sûr. Au-delà d’une rencontre fortuite de deux pans de l’œuvre huysmansienne, on voit en fait affleurer à la surface du discours critique la tentation de la fiction. Huysmans ne se contente pas de se construire un ethos de critique avisé, voire de pamphlétaire mordant, c’est bien la fiction d’une persona qu’il convoque pour jouer le rôle d’une interface entre le lecteur et lui. Coup de force pragmatique, à nouveau, car avec le personnage du célibataire, man-child à la situation paratopique évidente, il convoque ainsi la figure de l’étranger, avatar de l’eirôn, découvrant une terre inconnue, voire hostile, dans la plus pure tradition satirique. C’est bien en effet à l’indirection qu’accède alors la critique d’art célibataire, en manipulant le recours à l’expérience personnelle du locuteur. Si cette dernière doit constituer l’ancrage du dire pamphlétaire dans l’univers de référence, Huysmans, en faisant par exemple allusion à sa bonne

49

‘Le Salon de 1885’, L’Évolution sociale, mai 1885; Écrits sur l’art, p. 300. ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, p. 15. 51 ‘Ingres et Delacroix au Louvre’, in Certains, 1889; Écrits sur l’art, p. 428. 52 L’Exposition internationale de la rue de Sèze’, Revue indépendante, juin 1887; Écrits sur l’art, pp. 332-33 et 332. 53 À vau-l’eau, pp. 91 et 126. 50

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peu combative54 et en revêtant la livrée d’un Folantin qui se serait égaré au Salon de peinture, déporte cette attestation énonciative vers un pacte de lecture et une scénographie différents. Susciter un personnage quasi fictionnel permet à Huysmans de ne plus affronter ouvertement l’examen critique par le lecteur, mais d’emprunter la médiation séduisante d’un pauvre bonhomme, risible et touchant, car constamment réduit à la passivité des impuissants. Le moyen, dès lors, pour le lecteur, de ne pas baisser sa garde en privilégiant le plaisir de cette auto-dérision plaisamment mise en scène, quitte à ne plus opposer de résistance idéologique à une axiologie passée comme en contrebande? En passant du pamphlet à la satire, Huysmans travestit le Salon en un espace fictionnel proche des contre-utopies canoniques de la satire.55 L’Art moderne, notamment, s’impose comme la chronique mirieuse, mi-désespérée, d’un monde à l’envers, régi par des axiomes du type: ‘Moins un peintre a reçu d’éducation, et plus il veut faire du grand art ou de la peinture à sentiments’, ou encore: ‘moins on a de talent et plus on a de chance de gagner sa vie dans l’art’.56 L’attribution même des places dans les salles du Salon relève d’une inversion totale de la hiérarchie. Une toile remarquable de Renoir se trouve ‘si étrangement placée au ciel d’un des dépotoirs du Salon, qu’il est absolument impossible de se rendre compte de l’effet que le peintre a voulu donner’, quand le médiocre Delaunay bénéficie lui d’une exposition enviable et du respect unanime de ses pairs.57 Lorsque le scandale atteint son comble, Huysmans renoue avec les

54

Voir ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, p. 49: ‘Les mains de sa paysanne [Bastien-Lepage] ne sont pas des mains de femme qui tripote la terre, ce sont les mains de ma bonne qui époussète le moins possible et lave la vaisselle, à peine’. 55 Voir Matthew Hodgart, La Satire (Paris: Hachette, 1969), p. 24: ‘toute bonne satire, à dater d’Aristophane, contient des éléments importants de parodie anarchique. Les grands auteurs satiriques ne se contentent pas d’attaquer les gens et les coutumes […], ils créent un monde de rêve qui est une inversion ou un travestissement fantastique du monde réel’. 56 L’Art moderne, pp. 10 et 280. 57 ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, pp. 72 et 73: ‘Son Gounod regardant le ciel et serrant contre son cœur une partition de Don Juan, est le comble du ridicule et du grotesque! M. Delaunay est, bien entendu, hors concours, et c’est l’un des peintres les plus estimés de France’.

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impossibilia de l’ancienne rhétorique:58 ‘on pourrait peut-être coucher aussi des toiles le long des plafonds pendant qu’on y est!’. Le Salon se fait carnaval, fête printanière, fête des Fous, une de ‘ces mascarades que protège l’État’ qui abritent les ‘mardi-gras’ peints par Bouguereau, Cabanel ou Gérôme.59 Ce dolorisme esthétique pour de faux, ou presque, implique, comme tout discours satirique fondé sur la création d’un mundus inversus, un endroit axiologique. L’eirôn étant gardien de la convention et maniant préférentiellement ‘le bon sens’,60 la scénographie fictionnelle choisie s’adosse à une isotopie de l’orthodoxe: ‘talent sobre’, ‘discrétion’, ‘franchise’ et ‘simplicité’ d’un Bartholomé61 que Huysmans loue à l’instar de M. Guillemet, ‘artiste équilibré et bien portant’.62 Il ira jusqu’à féliciter Caillebotte de s’être ‘borné à suivre l’orthodoxe méthode des maîtres’ pour atteindre à une exécution ‘simple, sobre, je dirai même presque classique’.63 Ultime paradoxe de la critique d’art huysmansienne, car la quête d’une efficacité pragmatique par le recours au pamphlet et à la satire l’autorise à se doter d’une assise esthétique d’arrière-garde, voire réactionnaire, pourtant mise au service d’une défense acharnée des avant-gardes et de la modernité.

58

Voir Roland Barthes, ‘L’Ancienne Rhétorique’, in L’Aventure sémiologique (Paris: Seuil, 1985), p. 140: le mode du on aura tout vu désigne ‘ce topos [les impossibilia ou adunata] [qui] décrit comme brusquement compatibles des phénomènes, des objets et des êtres contraires, cette conversion paradoxale fonctionnant comme le signe inquiétant d’un monde “renversé”: le loup fuit devant les moutons’. 59 L’Art moderne, pp. 30, 301 et 100. 60 ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, p. 14: ‘C’est simple affaire de bon sens’. Cf. Northrop Frye, Anatomie de la critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 276: ‘Le satiriste peut ainsi opposer aisément aux divers alazons de la société un personnage conventionnel, rempli de simplicité et du bon sens le plus communément répandu.’ 61 L’Art moderne, ‘Le Salon officiel de 1880’, p. 167 et ‘Le Salon officiel de 1881’, p. 206. 62 ‘Le Salon officiel de 1880’, L’Art moderne, p. 163. 63 ‘L’Exposition des Indépendants en 1880’, L’Art moderne, pp. 115 et 111.

Auguste Rodin, or the Institutionalization of the Self as Artist SONYA STEPHENS

In two quite different photographs, taken in 1902, Auguste Rodin appears to us now, and indeed is portrayed as, an institution. The first, Rodin à côté du Penseur, Victor Hugo en arrière-plan (Fig. 20), is a composite image, a negative montage created by Edward Steichen in Paris, and the second, Rodin au dépôt des marbres à côté de la Main de Dieu (Fig. 21), was taken in the same year by an unknown photographer. 1902 was not, despite this, one might argue, a good year for Rodin, for although Georg Simmel compared Rodin’s contribution to European culture with that of Nietzsche, it was the year that marked the failure of his monument to Victor Hugo, the unveiling of another sculptor’s monument to Baudelaire, and renewed attacks on his Balzac.1 In relation to the figures, and the works, with which he most identified his success, things were not going well. He was, as he himself put it in an interview for the New York Herald, treated as an ‘outlaw’ by the ‘official world connected with the Ministry of Fine Arts’.2 Despite Rodin’s monumental reputation in America, England, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia, his status as a national treasure was perpetually undermined in France by rejections, vitriolic personal attacks, and public questioning, including complaints about his commissions, commissions such as the Porte de l’Enfer – still not delivered after thirty years – being a waste of public money.

1

‘Rodin’s Plastik und die Geistesrichtung der Gegenwart’, Zeitgeist (Berlin), 29 September 1902. Cited in Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 418. 2 New York Herald (Paris edition), Feb. 23, 1901.

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When one steps into the tranquil gardens of the Musée Rodin, once home to the great sculptor, it is difficult to imagine that anyone could have questioned, as Jules Delahaye did, whether ‘Rodin méritait l’Hôtel Biron’. The question was reasonable. Rodin, a tenant in the building, effectively mortgaged all his work to the state on condition that they did not sell the Hôtel Biron, as planned, on 18 December 1909, but instead kept it as home to a future Musée Rodin, and allowed him to live in it for the rest of his life. The sale was postponed, though, without mention of Rodin’s offer which many saw as setting an unfortunate precedent. And the question of whether his reputation warranted such a memorial after his death, even with the gift to the state, hovered persistently over the bequest that was accepted only in 1916, and finalized by an act of law in 1917. A newspaper clipping, pasted into the journal of Judith Cladel, Rodin’s biographer, a constant friend to him, and one who worked tirelessly to ensure his institionalization in this way, recognizes the outcome: the Beaux-Arts’ formal acceptance of the donation and Rodin’s henceforth unquestionable status as a national monument: À Auguste Rodin Le comité de la Société nationale des beaux-arts adresse à l’illustre président de la section de sculpture, Auguste Rodin, ses plus chaleureuses félicitations pour le don splendide qu’il fait à la France, de la totalité de son œuvre et de ses collections. Il saisit cette occasion pour exprimer, une fois de plus, l’admiration qu’il professe pour le grand artiste qui a contribué si glorieusement au succès des expositions de la Société nationale. – Tous ses confrères du comité estiment que les pouvoirs publics rendront un magnifique et juste hommage à l’art français en acceptant le don du grand sculpteur.3

It is not my intention here to recount a biographical narrative already admirably if differently told by Cladel, Mauclair, Tirel, Coquiot, Ludovici, Grunfeld and, most recently, by Butler.4 Rather, I 3

Cladel Mss. Date book for 1917, October 9. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 4 See Judith Cladel, Auguste Rodin pris sur la vie (Paris: Éditions de la Plume, 1903) and Rodin: Sa Vie glorieuse et inconnue (Paris: Grasset, 1936); Mauclair, Auguste Rodin, l’homme et l’œuvre (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1918); Marcelle Tirel, The Last Years of Rodin (London: A.M. Philpot, 1925); Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai Rodin (Paris: Tallandier, 1913) and Rodin à l’Hôtel Biron et à Meudon (Paris:

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would like to suggest ways in which Rodin represents a particularly arresting example of the institutionalization of the artist through the museum. Rodin sought in unprecedented ways to promote his work through his own studios; studios which by century’s end were already established, in the public consciousness at least, as museums. But beyond this institutionalization of the studio-museum, Rodin used the power of another fast-growing institution, that of photography – itself associated with a monumental mission since the middle of the century, the Mission Héliographique – to promote actively his own creative activity, and this in ways which directly reflect the relationship between the studio and the museum. This chapter, then, focuses on the institutionalization of Rodin, and the role of the monument and the museum in that process. Focusing on the relationship between art and power, and the way these are expressed in the institutions of nineteenth-century art, I will also try to draw out the significance of Rodin’s particular engagement with the idea of both the museum and artistic production, the evolution of the studios into museums, and the very conscious promotion of the creative self as an institution. The last ten years or so has seen a tremendous increase in studies devoted to the museum, to museology, from politics and infotainment to technology and imagineering. In a wide-ranging study of the European idea of the museum, this is what Donald Preziosi and Claire Ferago have termed ‘the documenting, monumentalizing, or themeparking of identity, history and heritage’.5 Some studies, and notably theoretical accounts, have focused more on reception, on the public response to the museum as an institution, and particularly on the function of museums as part of a discursive formation; for example, Foucault’s notion of the ‘power/knowledge’ hybrid that makes use of such disciplinary forms as a means of social control. As Mary Douglas argues, institutions play an essential role in cognition, creating order and coherence in the world of social interaction and they serve their ordering purposes by encoding information, creating categories, and setting boundaries that ‘systematically direct individual memory and

5

Ollendorff, 1917); Anthony Ludovici, Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1926); F. Grunfeld, Rodin, a Biography (New York: Holt, 1987); and Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius. Introduction, Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 19.

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channel our perceptions into forms compatible with the relations they authorize’.6 In nineteenth-century Paris, especially, there is an unprecedented proliferation of institutionally produced labels and categories that ‘stabilize the flux of social life and even create to some extent the realities to which they apply’.7 Although this represents a very promising avenue of enquiry, especially with respect to Rodin, it is not one I want to address here, except inasmuch as Rodin operates from the outset as an institution. The aspect of the museum that interests me here, then, if indeed it is possible to separate this from public response or a preconceived idea of reception and control, is the idea of the museum and its status as public monument. We tend to think of museums as growing out of habits of collecting, an eighteenth-century interest in aesthetics as a philosophical discourse, and a parallel and enduring desire for taxonomies of every kind. Museums, as monuments, are the cultural domain writ large, high culture in high architectural style. Museums play a significant role in defining – particularly in the way they exhibit – relationships by naming agencies and displaying the objects the institution collects. They are the coming-together of diverse artefacts, organized in such a way as to create a sense of history, thematic communality, identity. As Didier Maleuvre argues ‘hardly anything in the museum is not historical, that is, hallowed by official history and productive of what a collective idea of history is. Even the creation of museums is a historical coup staged on the idea of history itself’.8 Rodin’s plan for a museum was hatched in the 1890s, a hundred years after, it is generally accepted, the first state museum, the Louvre, officially came into being, but from the early 1880s, as soon as he received the commission for the doors to the Musée des Arts décoratifs (the work now known as Porte de l’enfer), he had begun his own archives, carefully and consistently collecting everything that might constitute such an artifact. Not only did he keep letters he received, he kept drafts of those that he sent; he kept telegrams, visiting cards, requests for visits to his studio(s), and press clippings (subscribing to agencies such as Argus de la Presse and Je lis tout which provided 6

How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. 92. Ibid., p. 100. 8 Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 9. 7

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him with every article that mentioned his name). In the codicil to his will, prepared on 25 April 1917 (a will which Rodin was too weak in body to sign, but not too weak of mind to make), he identifies these as the constituent parts of the Musée Rodin he had envisaged: Je lègue au Musée Rodin tous les souvenirs qui se rattachent à ma personne, portraits, décorations, etc…. ainsi que mon médailler antique. Je lègue au Musée du Trocadéro, mes collections de moulages anciens. Je lègue à ma cousine, Henriette COLTAT tous mes effets, linge, vaisselle, argenterie, bijoux et tous les objets d’art et objets mobiliers qui n’auraient pas été agréés par le Musée RODIN.9

From this it is clear that the State, embodied by the Musée Rodin, was perceived by the sculptor himself as having first call on any of his goods and chattels that it might consider relevant in preserving his memory. From the 1880s onwards, then, and certainly from the moment he purchased the Villa des Brillants in Meudon in 1895, Rodin constructed an existence centred on a cult of the museum. The sculptor lived very simply and despised domestic comfort, but he collected, as his will makes clear, ‘objets d’art’. If, according to current theoretical thinking, ‘the role of the museum is to stage environments that elicit our selves and locate and orient our desires within the trajectories of an imagined past’,10 Rodin’s collection and exhibitionism correspond to a desire to place art, and particularly sculpted art, at the centre of his world, as a core constituent of his identity in a direct and historical sense, but it also projects, and in a range of ways, a museum, a staging of an environment that would fulfil his desire for commemoration in the future. By way of illustration, let us juxtapose two events: the Exposition Rodin of 1900 and the extension of the Villa des Brillants by the construction of the pavilion in 1901. The Exposition Universelle of 1900 provided the context for Rodin to stage a major exhibition, though not one that was part of the official events. In the Pavillon Rodin, a specially created space in the place de l’Alma, he displayed his works in an innovative way, and flooded with light. Over 160 pieces were displayed in a vast space that, by general assent, represented ‘a breakthrough in the manner of pres9

Cladel Mss. Will of Auguste Rodin. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Grasping the World, pp. 5-6.

10

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enting sculpture’.11 Indeed, Anthony Ludovici, who would soon become Rodin’s secretary, writes of this encounter with Rodin’s work: It was in 1900 that I first made the acquaintance of Rodin’s works on a large scale. I happened to be in Paris for the Universal Exhibition, and I was among those who paid their franc to be admitted into the special pavilion on the place de l’Alma in which he had collected almost everything of importance that he had done up to that time. Like many others, I was struck by the fact that, in an Exhibition in which each big nation was represented only by a comparatively small house of its own […], a special place and shelter should have been provided for the works of one sculptor whom, known to me at the time, I did not believe to be important or popular enough to be worthy of this official recognition. I little knew the true history of that special pavilion, and apparently the Encyclopœdia Britannica has to this day remained in the same state of ignorance as I was then. In the eleventh edition of the Encyclopœdia (article, ‘Rodin’) we read the following: ‘In 1900 the city of Paris, to do honour to Rodin, erected at its own expense a building close to one of the entrances of the Great Exhibition in which almost all of Rodin’s works were to be seen’. This is what I thought, too, but apparently I was wrong. The idea was Rodin’s own.12

What is interesting about this decision on the part of Rodin is that it constitutes a clear attempt to use the formal context of the Exposition Universelle to promote himself as an institution. Rodin, persuaded of his own heterodoxy, saw the Exposition Universelle as an ideal moment and seized upon it not only as an historical opportunity, both in terms of his own career and in terms of the Exposition Universelle, but also a commercial one. At one and the same time, he instituted himself, in an international context, as a national and international figure – and in a way that was clearly intended to simulate state sponsorship – and engaged in a business enterprise of a kind that would not only ensure that the monies invested by all parties could be recouped through ticket sales, casts of works in the exhibition and, not insignificantly either, photographs taken by Druet (who was also manager of the show), but which would also secure further exhibitions and commissions, especially abroad.13

11

Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius, p. 354. Ludovici, Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin, pp. 33-34. 13 See letter to Bigand, cited by Cladel, Rodin, p. 245. 12

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The vision of a museum was a reality, then, from June to November. The next step was to bring the museum home. Very early the following year, Rodin purchased a tract of land between the Villa des Brillants and his neighbour’s property; and his neighbour agreed on 27 February 1901 to the erection of a pavilion. As the Alma pavilion was knocked down, the plans for its re-erection as the Meudon pavilion were drawn up. The construction enabled Rodin to unite private and public spheres, past and present, and to work and to exist amidst his own work. At the same time, he began enthusiastically collecting antique sculptures and effectively established a museum at home in Meudon in which his collection of Greek and Roman sculptures were united with his own creative work. In a key chapter of his account of the museum as historical consciousness and artistic identity, ‘Dwelling in the Nineteenth Century’, Maleuvre examines the bourgeois taste for collecting and identifies the ways in which the domestic interior, the home, comes to enshrine, through collectibles, historicism and conservation – and particularly to betray an inability to deal with the historical other than through imitation and regression. I do not wish to suggest in any way that Rodin’s construction of a pavilion at Meudon, or his collection of antique vessels, bear any relation to the spectacle of the bourgeois bibelot on display. Rather, and significantly, what occurs chez Rodin is a valorization of the very process so adulterated by the bibelotized interior. In a contrary movement, Rodin rejects the generalizing principle of the domesticated (indeed, vulgarized) objet d’art in order rather to institutionalize himself as an artist, even in the most domestic of spaces. The success of the 1900 exhibition and the years that followed in Meudon, with the consequent increase in the number of visitors flocking to his studios, led to public perception of a Musée Rodin – and to some confusion. In 1911, Karl Baedeker wrote to the Mayor of Meudon enquiring about the opening hours of the Musée Rodin. Rodin replied himself that his studios were not open to the public. On the one hand, a very private place, a place of contemplation, on the other, ‘le Bayreuth de la sculpture’ receiving dignitaries and friends from the world over, the Meudon pavilion enabled the aging sculptor to live, on a daily basis, the idea of a Musée Rodin.14 14

Cladel, Rodin, p. 251

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This professional story, punctuated by monuments and unveilings, as well as by disappointments, is the public face of the Rodin bequest. Alongside it runs a no less public, but perhaps less formal, history told by the items in Rodin’s non-sculptural estate, ‘tous les souvenirs qui se rattachent à ma personne, portraits, décorations, etc’. This bequest, as it is constituted by the archives of the Musée Rodin, clearly not only reveals an archival impulse, but also his sense of self as a national artistic institution. More than this, though, these elements combine to create a record of art in the making, so that Rodin’s notion of the museum is one not of sculptural stillness and fixity, of finish, but of art in a perpetual state of devenir, and his institutionalization of the self as artist is not some deified presence, but an artisan constantly reinventing himself and his work. From the archive so assiduously preserved by the sculptor, we can see his work on photographs; work that maps new lines of intervention and shows, perhaps more clearly than anything, the living development of the institutionalized artifact, however unfinished that may be (Fig. 22, Buste de Victor Hugo). Indeed, Rodin also left graphite lines on sculpturally finished objects, too, ordering that they be left if anyone tried to remove them. There are postcards that represent work in progress; postcards that circulated worldwide. One such postcard, a photograph of a reworked plaster relief, La France, provides evidence that Rodin consciously sought to publicize his methods and his aesthetic, to make these, too, an institution in the public consciousness, and to represent the artistic self in relation to nationhood.15 In this conjunction, Rodin, as we shall see with respect to the 1900 exhibition, exercised artistic freedom to suggest state recognition. Yet the photographs are mostly used as tools in the process of graphic editing, demonstrating, as Elsen rightly suggests, that ‘Rodin tied his art to processes of thought rather than

15

The V&A catalogue entry states for this piece states: ‘Originally it was called Byzantine Empress and Bust of a Young Warrior, but when Edward VII visited Rodin’s Paris studio in 1908 it was renamed St George (St George being the patron saint of England). In 1914, when Rodin presented the work to the V&A in honour of French and British soldiers in the war, he patriotically renamed it La France’. See: http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/29314-popup.html

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preconceptions’.16 In another such gesture, Rodin arranged plaster figures into new conjunctions, or performances, sometimes staging them for the camera, creating, for example, a shrine to Hugo (Fig. 23). The ‘souvenirs’ that Rodin left the state included a very large number of transportation bills, revealing just how much he was prepared to pay for such sculptural encounters, and how much he cared about the ‘mise en scène’ of his museums. The fact that Rodin used photography in this way, that he had his sculptures photographed both in the studio and in exhibitions, and that he created such an archive of them, is further testimony to his own conception of his artistic process as an idea of history itself. The photograph of Rodin, en blouse, with the Hand of God, paradoxically captures this sense of conjunction: the artist, his work, and the studio, but it does so in a way that gives museum-like permanence to the staging. The term staging is not used lightly. Preziosi suggests that ‘museums perform the basic historical gesture of separating out of the present a certain specific past so as to collect and re-compose (re-member) its displaced and dismembered relics as elements in a genealogy of and for the present’.17 Towards the end of his life, still searching for perfect form, Rodin brought the two halves of his Meudon museum into yet closer contact in ways that speak eloquently of this conjunction of past and present. He took poor quality, rough-cast plaster, and sculpted tiny figures that he attached to his collection of antique goblets and vases. These ‘assemblages’ (Fig. 24), like the other stagings, play upon the changes that took place in exhibitionary practice at the great exhibitions of the century, the organizational shift from a progressive taxonomy (that is, one based on process) to product, conceived as a national or supra-national institution. Or, they are dynamic reconstitutions of process in remobilized past and polymorphous present, the continuum of art, a sense of self as creative grandeur in relation to the already revered relics of history.18

16

17

18

Albert E. Elsen, In Rodin’s Studio: A Photographic Record of Sculpture in the Making (London: Phaidon, 1980), p. 17. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 511. These were not exhibited until 1967, and then at the instigation of André Malraux. For a fuller discussion of the ‘assemblages’, see Goldscheider, ‘Assemblages et

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Photographs re-member in the same way, and what they remember with respect to Rodin is past and present; they are proof, as Roland Barthes has argued, that ‘le passé est toujours aussi certain que le présent’; and, indeed, that the present can be preserved as history for the future. In fact, what Barthes discloses is the conjunction in the photograph of the ‘this has been’ and the ‘this will be’, the sense of impermanence (of mortality) that only the relic can recover: Je lis en même temps: cela sera et cela a été; j’observe avec horreur un futur antérieur dont la mort est l’enjeu. En me donnant le passé absolu de la pose (aoriste), la photographie me dit la mort au futur. Ce qui me point c’est la découverte de cette équivalence. […] Que le sujet en soit la mort ou non, toute photographie est cette catastrophe.19

The photograph of Rodin on his deathbed (Fig. 25) is, then, the last such relic. Cladel describes the scene, as she saw it: Sur la couche drapée du linge, haute comme un lit d’apparat, dans sa robe de mol ivoire, il reposait, souverain. On eût dit un empereur ayant pris par contrition l’habit monacal, Charles Quint après l’abdication. […] La pâleur du visage, la soie argentée de ses cheveux, de la barbe, où serpentaient des fils de lumière et, paisiblement croisées, les mains, telles deux morceaux d’albâtre, faisaient de lui une incomparable œuvre d’art.20

In an account that mirrors in so many ways the history of the museum, Shelley Rice has examined the establishment of tombs and places of sepulchre, persuasively arguing that nineteenth-century France was marked by a ‘cult of the dead’, and that the ‘cult of tombs’ begun during the French Revolution, found its natural extension in Second Empire forms of memorialization: When the spirit was evicted from the environment in the Industrial age, it took up residence in the memorials to ‘great men and great things’ that were once alive – memorials as permanent as marble markers or as transient as photographs on pieces of paper, which can wither and crumble in time.21

métamorphoses dans l’œuvre d’Auguste Rodin’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Hommage à Jean Adhémar, 111 (Jan.-Feb. 1988), pp. 137-40. 19 See Camera Lucida, p. 96. 20 Cladel, Rodin, p. 417. 21 Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 [1997]), p. 155.

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The dead body, like the monumental masonry that marks its final resting place, becomes the repository of memory. In a fitting gesture, Rodin, who had been overjoyed at the placement of Le Penseur outside the Panthéon in 1904, was buried beneath that particular piece of monumental masonry (Fig. 26). Despite press speculation, and largely for political reasons which had nothing, for once, to do with him, Rodin did not have the state funeral everyone expected, but even as Clemenceau was forming his new cabinet, his own newspaper gave Rodin the headline on 18 November 1917. Geffroy, present at the earlier Panthéon unveiling of Le Penseur, clearly understood the subtle symbolism of the placement. As an ‘énigme’ that proposed both ‘le rêve et l’action’ as a formula for life, he saw it as ‘a funerary sphinx before the necropolis where the nation offers final rest to those it wishes to honour’.22 Just as he lived through most of a century which sought to remember the past, Rodin’s own archiving of his personal and professional history, his strategic conception of himself as a national institution, his gestures, private and public, that place him at the centre of a large matrix of politics, professions and people, and his organization of his own affairs to that end constitutes a particularly revealing case of the artist as a museum. As James Cuno argues, ‘Acquiring, preserving, and providing access to works of art is the basis for an art museum’s contract with the public and the foundation of the trust that authorizes that contract’.23 Rodin initiated this contract with the state in 1910, though as we have seen, it was much longer in the making. In conclusion, let us return to that Steichen photograph with which we began, the only photograph Rodin would have on display. The photograph portrays Rodin with Le Penseur and Monument à Victor Hugo, in an image that, in the way it folds together the artist and his works in mutually mirroring poses and in contrasting materials, has been described as a ‘brilliant conceit’. In this photographic masterpiece of tonal light and darkness, Steichen emphasizes the reflective. All three figures are represented as meditative, as variants of the pose 22

Cited by Butler, p. 426. Geffroy, ‘Le Penseur de Rodin au Panthéon’, Revue bleue, 17 December 1904. 23 ‘The Object of Art Museums’, in Whose Muse?, ed. by James Cuno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 52.

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of the Thinker, and the contrasting – of light and darkness, art and matter, artist and object, flesh, plaster and bronze, and the compositional – all seem to point to Rodin’s own art. Unable to contain within the single frame all of the elements here presented, Steichen came up with the carefully crafted solution of bringing together two negatives. But as I have tried to suggest on my way back to this image, it also brings together elements of Rodin’s work in ways which emphasize new conjunctions, or meaningful ones. From that performance of plasters worshipping at the altar of Hugo’s bust, to Rodin’s own picturing with the bust, to this image by Steichen, Rodin associates himself and his reputation with Hugo. The failure of Rodin’s monument to the great writer, as Roos has shown, was the most stinging of setbacks, but that is tangential here.24 Hugo’s monumental status is a vehicle for Rodin’s own self-promotion as a national institution. Like Hugo, as I hope to have shown, Rodin fashioned his own stardom. As Pierre Georgel has argued with respect to Hugo, though the statement could equally apply to Rodin, ‘[il] travaille son personnage comme un acteur travaille son rôle’,25 and whether through admiration or satirization, the effect is to create a sense of grandeur, enormity even, and to monumentalize, in almost mythical ways, his reputation. Photography plays a key role in Hugo’s self-stylization, too, with ‘memorable key postures’ pointing to the different public conceptions, or creating such conceptions, and leading to what Kathryn Grossman has termed ‘a Pantheon of publicly legitimized icons’, or ‘the author as artefact’.26 Rodin’s postcards, like the photographs of the artist at work, or those of his sculptures, are ways of expanding his audience, of increasing his celebrity – they constitute a form of self-publicity. His own monuments to the great figures of the nineteenth century, and his particular concern with Hugo, as well as the mythical ‘Penseur-Poète’, are fundamentally, as 24

25

26

Jane Mayo Roos, ‘Rodin’s Monument to Victor Hugo’, Art Bulletin, 68:4 (Dec. 1986), 632-56. See also her essay, ‘Steichen’s Choice’ in Ruth Butler, Jeanine Parisier Plottel and Jane Mayo Roos, Rodin’s Monument to Victor Hugo (London: Merrell Holberton, and The Cantor Foundation, 1998), pp. 45-116. ‘La “Figure” de Victor Hugo: Les Images’, in La Gloire de Victor Hugo (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1956), p. 72. ‘From Classic to Pop Icon: Popularizing Hugo’, The French Review, 74: 3 (Feb. 2001), 484-85.

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we might always have suspected, about the monumentalization of the self as artist, but they speak, too, of a deep-rooted affiliation which affirms the desire to be, to invoke Grossman’s terms, both pop icon and national monument. Steichen’s image is a photographic monument to Rodin, one reflecting not only the sculptor’s own method, but his conception of self as artist and as national monument; one which, like the Hôtel Biron/Musée Rodin bequest itself, is also ‘a brilliant conceit’,27 and, as I hope to have shown, was as premeditated and contrived as Steichen’s photograph.

27

Roos, ‘Steichen’s Choice’, p. 45.

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Fig. 20: Edward Steichen, Rodin à côté du Penseur, Victor Hugo en arrière-plan (1902). Tirage au charbon, gravure? 26 x 32.2 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris. (Ph 217)

Fig. 21: Anonyme, Rodin au dépôt des marbres à côté de la Main de Dieu (1902). Aristotype. 11.9 x 16 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris (Ph 372).

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Fig. 22: Anonyme, Buste de Victor Hugo (1883). Papier albuminé. 13.8 x 10.5 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris. (Ph 351).

Fig. 23: Stephen Haweis et Henry Coles, Buste de Victor Hugo avec les deux Méditations de dos (1903-04). Epreuve gélatinoargentique. 23.3.cm x 16.8 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris (Ph 259).

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Fig. 24: Christian Baraja, Assemblage: Petite faunesse dans une coupe en métal (vers 1910). 17.6 x 15 x 26.6 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris. (S 372)

Fig. 25: Harry B. Lachmann, Rodin sur son lit de mort (1917) Gelatin silver print. Mss Judith Cladel, Lilly Library of Indiana University.

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Fig. 26: Rodin’s grave or Rodin’s funeral. Mss Judith Cladel, Lilly Library of Indiana University.

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Notes on contributors

JANICE BEST is a full professor and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literatures at Acadia University. She is the author of La Subversion silencieuse: Censure, autocensure et lutte pour la liberté d’expression (Les Éditions Balzac, 2001) and Adaptation et expérimentation: Essai sur la méthode expérimentale d'Emile Zola (Paris: José Corti, 1986). Other recent publications include: ‘Une statue monumentale de la République’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 3 & 4 (Spring/Summer 2006): 81-101. GILLES BONNET is maître de conférences at Université Jean-MoulinLyon III. He has published widely on the nineteenth century and is author of L’Écriture comique de J-K. Huysmans (Paris: Champion, 2003). He is director of the research group Marge (Université Lyon III). DAMIAN CATANI is a Lecturer in French at Birkbeck, University of London. He works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and thought, with a particular emphasis on notions of evil, nineteenth-century French poetry (Mallarmé and Baudelaire), the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novel and short story, and the visual arts. Among his publications are The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism and Politics in Mallarmé (Peter Lang, 2003) and a forthcoming volume entitled Evil in Modern French Literature and Thought. ANNE-EMMANUELLE DEMARTINI is maîtresse de conférences in contemporary history at Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot. She has published widely on the history of crime, its depiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the figure of the monster and on the construction of local identities. She is author of L’Affaire Lacenaire (Aubier, 2001) and editor of Imaginaire et sensibilités:

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Études pour Alain Corbin, with Dominique Kalifa (Créaphis, 2005). SCOTT A. GAVORSKY completed his BA at Oglethorpe University and is currently a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. His research focuses on civil society in nineteenth-century Europe and its contributions to the development of the modern state. ELISABETH GERWIN is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. Her research focuses on the representation of difference in the French nineteenth century, and on the intersections between philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature. She has published articles on sexual difference in Derrida and Freud, and on the roles of transference and of the city in Balzac. L. CASSANDRA HAMRICK is Professor of Modern Languages (French) at Saint Louis University. She has published widely on the interrelationship between literature and the visual arts and recently edited, with Suzanne Nash, Sculpture et Poétique: Sculpture and Literature in France, 1789-1859, a special issue of Nineteenth Century French Studies, 35:1 (Fall 2006). LEONARD KOOS is Associate Professor of French and Department Chair at the University of Mary Washington. He has published on Perec, Huysmans, Artaud, Jarry, travel writing, Barrès and decadence. He is currently completing a book-length study of the late nineteenth-century decadent movement in France and has begun a new project on colonialist literature in the Maghreb in the nineteenth century ROSEMARY LLOYD was educated at the Universities of Adelaide and Cambridge. She was appointed to the faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge in 1979 and remained there until 1990 when she took up a Professorship in French at Indiana University. She has published studies of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Flaubert, jealousy, childhood and the written still life, and is currently working on the popularization of science in

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nineteenth-century France and the role of women artists and writers in Australian modernism. FRANCESCO MANZINI is a Research Associate in the Department of French at King’s College London, having previously been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL and a Visiting Fellow at the IGRS. He is the author of Stendhal’s Parallel Lives (Peter Lang, 2004), as well as articles on Joseph de Maistre, Stendhal, Balzac, Borel and Barbey d’Aurevilly. He is currently writing his second book, The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos. CLAIRE O’MAHONY is a Lecturer and Fellow of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford. Her recent publications have addressed Edmond de Goncourt as interior designer and collector, the furniture of Emile Gallé and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She is currently preparing a study of the politics and Symbolist aesthetics of the École de Nancy designers and articles on fin-de-siècle gardens in Nancy and the relationship between Cubism and First World War camouflage. NICOLE MOZET is Emeritus Professor of Université Paris-7-Denis Diderot. She has published extensively on Balzac and is the author of George Sand: Écrivain de romans (Christian Pirot, 1997) in addition to a collective work on the same author. She directs the Collection Balzac. MARY ORR is Professor of French at the University of Southampton and the author of Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Polity, 2003) and Flaubert: Writing the Masculine (Oxford University Press, 2000). More recent research projects include a co-edited volume of feminist reappraisals of French and German male canonical writers from Goethe to Gide, an article on women’s history in Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale in Dix-Neuf and essays on the roles of early nineteenth-century French and British women in the natural sciences. She recently published Flaubert’s Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 2008).

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JEAN-MARIE SEILLAN teaches nineteenth-century French literature at the University of Nice and is director of the Centre Transdisciplinaire d’Épistémologie de la Littérature. His work focuses on the texts of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Naturalism and French literature of the Colonial era. JULIET SIMPSON is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture in the School of Design, Craft and Visual Arts, Buckinghamshire New University. She has published widely on French nineteenth-century art, art criticism, Symbolist visual cultures and on word-image relations. This includes Aurier, Symbolism and the Visual Arts (Peter Lang, 1999), Jules Flandrin 1871-1947: The Other Fin-deSiècle (Ashmolean Museum, 2001) and jointly edited with Carol Adlam, Critical Exchange: Art Criticism of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Russia and Western Europe (Peter Lang, 2009). She was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2005-6), to develop a project on ‘Art and its Critics in Fin-deSiècle France’. SONYA STEPHENS is Professor of French at Indiana University. Her publications include Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford University Press, 1999), A History of Women’s Writing in France (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and many articles on Baudelaire and nineteenth-century French culture. She recently completed a book entitled The Art of the Unfinished: Process in Nineteenth-Century France.

Notes on editors

DAVID EVANS is Lecturer in French at the University of St Andrews. He works on form, rhythm and music in French poetry, and has published Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea: Baudelaire,

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Rimbaud, Mallarmé (Rodopi, 2004) and articles on Banville, Debussy and Michel Houellebecq. He is currently preparing a monograph entitled Music, Memory and Mechanism: The Poetic Theory and Practice of Théodore de Banville. KATE GRIFFITHS is Lecturer in French at Cardiff University. She has published a series of articles on adaptation in and of nineteenthcentury French texts and an AHRC supported monograph entitled Émile Zola: The Artistry of Adaptation (Legenda, 2009). She is currently researching a monograph exploring the relationship between Zola’s novels and the small screen. Together they have edited Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture (University of Wales Press, 2009) and, for the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Pleasure and Pain in NineteenthCentury French Literature and Culture (Rodopi, 2008).

Index abbé Grégoire 57 abbé Thorey 71 Abd-el Kader 151 Abenon, Lucien-René 56 abolitionism 54, 56, 65 absolutism 64 abuse of power 174 Académie française 26 Académie des Beaux-Arts 243, 250, 252 Académie des Sciences Morales 179 Achard, Amédée 143 actions 219, 227, 232 Adelaïde-Merlande, Jacques 53 aesthetics 45, 106, 128, 129, 131, 138, 277, 282 Africa 165 Agamben, Giorgio 60, 61, 180 Agulhon, Maurice 143 Algeria 146 Algerian independence 155 Algerian resistance 151 Algiers 31, 149-66, 241, 255 Dar Hassan Pacha 153 Dar Mustapha Pacha 153 Al-Jabarti 207-9, 213 allegory 272 America 77, 79 amnesty 63, 92 Amouretti, Frédéric 125 anarchists 88, 130

Ancien Régime 87, 205 Anderson, R. D. 220 androgyny 109 Anduse, Roland 65 Angebault, Guillaume 228 Angenot, Marc 273 Angers 219-21, 225-33 anthropology 115 anticlericalism 174, 219 Antiquity 61, 123, 128, 212, 242, 256, 258-59, 285 Appel, Toby 183, 194 Aquilino, Marie Jeannine 117 Arab 146, 160 arabisance 155, 161-64 Arc de Triomphe 91 archeology 50, 196 architecture 149-66, 183-84 archives 286 Arendt, Hannah 60, 61 aristocracy 22, 40, 103, 104, 175 Aristotle 273 arrivistes 23, 243 art criticism 32, 127, 243-44, 247, 249-65, 267-77 ascension sociale 47 Assemblée nationale 16, 20, 56, 87, 176 Association religieuse et royale d’Angers 219, 225, 232 assimilation 55, 58, 66, 116, 122, 161

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atheism 73, 171 attentats 77 atrocities 53 Austria 73 authenticity 112 authors 44 avant-garde 116, 277 avarice 101, 112 Azéma, Jean-Pierre 18, 84 Badiou, Alain 60 Baedeker, Karl 285 Baecque, Antoine de 59 Baguley, David 17, 19 Ballu, Albert 155 Balzac, Honoré de 19, 28, 29, 37-50, 101-14, 137, 139, 190, 279 Adieu 41 Béatrix 44 Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu 110 La Comédie humaine 18, 37, 44, 50 Le Colonel Chabert 41 Le Contrat de mariage 41 La Cousine Bette 24, 42, 45, 48 Le Cousin Pons 45, 48, 197 Le Curé de Tours 48 La Dernière Revue de Napoléon 41 Un drame au bord de la mer 40 L’Élixir de longue vie 40 L’Enfant maudit 40 Eugénie Grandet 37, 40, 45 ‘Facino Cane’ 104

Index

La Fille aux yeux d’or 10114 L’Histoire des treize 101 Honorine 38 Illusions perdues 196 L’Interdiction 39, 46 Lettre adressée aux écrivains français du XIXe siècle 45 Le Message 41 La Muse du département 40 La Peau de chagrin 196-98 Le Père Goriot 23, 42, 18384, 196 La Physiologie du mariage 41, 104 Physionomies parisiennes 261 Pierrette 49, 50 Le Prêtre catholique 44 Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes 197 Sur Catherine de Médicis 38 La Vendetta 40 El Verdugo 40 La Vieille Fille 43 Bangou, Henri 53 banks 74, 150, 173 Bann, Stephen 237 Banque de France 15 Banville, Théodore de 20, 27 Odes funambulesques 26 Barthes, Roland 277, 288 Bastien-Lepage, Jules 272, 275 Bastille 15, 56, 59 Bataille, Dr (Léo Taxil) 71, 81 Baudelaire, Charles 20, 49, 108, 170, 190, 279 Exposition universelle 256

Index

Les Fleurs du Mal 24, 26, 259 flâneur 102, 104, 109, 110, 111 Le Peintre de la vie moderne 107 Salon de 1845 251-52, 260 Salon de 1846 252, 256, 262 Baude, Baron 149, 154 Baudouin, Paul 128 Bavaria 77 Beauce, La 143 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Le Mariage de Figaro 40 beauty 258, 261 Becq de Fouquières, Louis 25 Bélénus, René 53 Bénédite, Léonce 128 Benjamin, Walter 30, 101, 110-12, 114, 137 Benjamin-Constant, JeanJoseph 122-23, 273 Berbrugger, Louis-Adrien 156 Bergot, Raoul 165 Bernard, Claudie 64 Berthollet, Claude 207-8 Bertrand, Louis 149-50, 155, 158, 162 Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 24 Bibliothèque nationale 22, 183 biography 32, 238-39, 242, 247, 280 Bion, Louis-Eugène 90 birth 181 Bishop of Angers 226-27, 23132, 234 Bizardel, Yvon 94

305

black masses 77 Blanc, Charles 238-44 Blanc, Louis 21, 67 blood 181 Boccador (Domenico Bernabei da Cortona) 85-86 Boethius 253 Bois, Jules 71, 76, 79, 81 Bonaparte, Napoleon 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 41, 42, 45, 51, 54, 56, 58, 66, 102, 108, 115, 171, 180, 188, 195, 205-9 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon 16, 17, 160 botany 211, 238 Botticelli 127 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe 277 Boulanger, Louis 262 boulevards 151, 165 bourgeoisie 32, 42, 43, 84, 102, 111-12, 143, 190, 245, 253, 268, 271, 285 Bourgeois monarchy 20 Bourgeois, Léon 122 Bourget, Paul 25 Bouvalet, Henriette 228 Brandt, Aage 270 British 206 Brittany 116, 125, 142, 143 Bugeaud, General Thomas 151 Brombert, Victor 63, 64 Brooks, Peter 172 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 186-87 bureaucracy 121, 129 Burke, Edmund 144

306

Burton, Richard D. E. 58 Burty, Philippe 238, 242-43, 245-47 Butler, Ruth 280-81 Byron, Lord 173, 258 Cabanel, Alexandre 270, 277 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges 31, 169, 173-75, 177-81 Cabat, Louis 250 Cadets de Gascogne 125 Caen 183, 186, 188, 198 Caesarism 17 Caillebotte, Gustave 277 Cailleux, Alphonse de 141 Cairo 206-9 Calamatta, Luigi 240, 242 Campmas, Aude 210 cant 173, 182 Cap, M. P.-A. 210 capitalism 60, 101 Capitole 30 Caribbean, French 51 carnival 277 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste 75 Casbah 153, 154, 156, 158, 164 castration 50, 102, 108 cataloguing 140, 142 cathedrals 162 Notre-Dame 91 Catholic church 43, 70, 72, 73, 80-82, 91, 144, 155-56, 181, 219, 222-23, 225, 230-34 causality 74 Cazenave, J. 149 Çelik, Zepnep 163 cemeteries Père-Lachaise 84, 88, 89

Index

centralization 115-17, 124, 125, 128, 129, 138, 145, 231 cénacles 24 censorship 26 Cent Jours, Les 42 Cercle des arts 244 ceremonies 91, 125, 126, 127 Cézanne, Paul 116 Cham 26 Chambre des députés, La 16 Chamoiseau, Patrick 52 Champs-Élysées 86 chaos 37, 49, 50 charity 219, 222, 224 Charlemagne 18 Charles Quint 288 Charpentier, Georges 244 Chaseray, Stephen 162 Chassériau, Théodore 258-59, 265 Chateaubriand, François-René 190, 194, 196 châteaux 46 Chesneau, Ernest 239, 245 children 62, 172, 220 China 77 Chirac, Jacques 91 Cholet 230 Christ 73, 80, 241, 258-59, 262-63 Christianity 21, 29 churches 46 Cicero 242 Cimabue 239 civic commemoration 16, 117 civil war 92 Cladel, Judith 280, 288 Claretie, Jules 18, 242

Index

class 23, 118, 154, 181 Classicism 242, 245, 256, 258 classification 185, 190, 209, 211 Clemenceau, Georges 73, 289 Clément, Charles 239-40 clergy 22, 79 Code civil 23, 209 collections 46, 47, 185, 203, 216, 239-40, 244, 247, 28283, 285 Collège des Chirurgiens 202 Collège de France 21, 22 Colomb, Romain 170 colonialism 16, 28, 30, 51-54, 116, 140, 141, 145, 149-66, 205 internal 115, 119, 123, 131 coloristes 254, 260-61 Coltat, Henriette 283 Comité du Vieil Alger 163 commodities 106, 107, 108, 151 Commune, La 18, 29, 30, 52, 59, 61, 63-64, 75, 83-85, 8792, 117 concours 86 Condorcet 57, 83, 87, 94, 96 Confiant, Raphaël L’Archet du colonel 29, 5167 L’Éloge de la Créolité 55 Le Nègre et l’amiral 54 Conry, Yvette 184 Conseil des Cinq-Cents, Le 16 Conseil d’État 227, 231 Conseil municipal de Paris 84, 87, 89-91

307

conseiller municipal Darlot 90 Delabrousse 92 Joffrin 88 Landrin 89 Tranchant 85 conservatism 254 Conservatoire 27 conspiracy theories 29, 69-82 Constable, John 239 Constant, Benjamin 144 Constantinople 158 Consulat, Le 16, 42 contraception 41 convents 75 Convention, La 16 Convention nationale 89 Convention de Berne 19 conversion 81 Coppée, François 25 Coquiot, Gustave 280 Corneille, Pierre 26 Corsica 23, 144, 145 cosmopolitanism 256 Courcy, Alfred de 142 Couture, Thomas 260-62, 265 Couty, Daniel 19 Creech, James 102, 108 Creole 53, 140 Cresti, Federico 150 crime 50, 174 crocodiles 183, 186, 188, 198 cross-dressing 113 crowds 111-12 Cros, Charles 25 Cuno, James 289 Cuoq, Joseph 207 Curmer, André 30, 137-48

308

Curtis, Sarah 221 customs 140, 145 Cuvier, Clémentine 209 Cuvier, Georges 31, 183-99, 205, 212, 214 dandy 104, 108 Daniel, Robert R. 26 Dante 41, 44, 241 Danton 59, 61, 67, 83, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95 Darlow, Mark 21 Daubigny, père et fils 272 Daudet, Alphonse 125, 158 Daumier, Honoré 26, 176 Dayan, Peter 27 death 114, 176, 181, 215, 288 Debat-Ponsan, Édouard 126 Debussy, Claude 27 Decamps, Alexandre-Gabriel 250, 256-57, 264 decay 201 decentralization 129, 130, 162 deception 170 degeneration 116, 269 Delacroix, Eugène 240-42, 245-46, 250, 253, 256, 258, 260, 275 Delahaye, Jules 280 Delanoë, Bertrand 94 Delaroche, Paul 250 Delauney, Robert 263, 276 Delgrès, Louis 54, 56, 57, 66, 67 Deluz, Jean-Jacques 154-55 democracy 38, 61, 86, 118, 119, 138, 146-47, 272 demolition 156-57 department stores 112

Index

derision 49 desire 30, 101, 106-7, 109 dessinateurs 260 Destrem, Casimir 121, 123 detachment 102 Desmoulins, Camille 89, 94 Devéria, Eugène 258 devolutionism 119, 124 dialect 127 Diderot, Denis 83, 87, 95, 244, 247 dilettantism 275 Directoire, Le 16 disease 114, 176, 178-81, 25758 diversity 50, 116, 251 divorce 23 Djamâa el Kebir 156 djenane 162 doctors 70, 169, 173-82 Du Poirier 169, 175-81 Duvernoy, M. 202 Pangloss 187 Pasteur, Louis 214 Pennetier, Georges 210-13 Sansfin 169, 180-81 Dolet, Étienne 87 Dom Thomasson de Gournay 72 Don Juan 276 Douglas, Mary 281 Dreyfus Affair 72, 73, 219 droit d’auteur 19, 45 droit divin 42, 172 Druet, Eugène 284 Drumont, Édouard 71, 75 Dubois, Laurent 54, 56, 57, 65

Index

Duc de Lévis, François-Gaston 253 Duc d’Orléans 156 Duchemin des Cépeaux, Jacques 67 Dumas, Alexandre, père 21, 105 dupes 170, 178 Dupont, Jacques 274 Dupré, Jules 250 Durand-Ruel, Paul 243 Dürer, Albrecht 240 duty 82 Duvaucel, Sophie 202-3, 210 École Normale Supérieure 22 École des Beaux-Arts 252 École des Sciences Politiques 22 édit de Nantes 39, 46 égaré 245-46 Egypt 188, 195, 204, 206-9 Eiffel Tower 263 elections 49, 91 Elsen, Albert E. 286 emigrants 160 emperors Nicholas I 172 Empire, First 30, 42, 46 Empire, Second 16, 17, 25, 26, 84, 86, 158, 238, 288 empire building 152 Engler, Winifried 62 En Madiana, c’est fou 58 equality 61 essentialism 175 Estambuc, Belain d’ 54 ethics 52, 62, 114

309

Europe 41, 73, 79, 150-52, 157, 159, 160, 162, 186, 241, 279 évêques 232 Mgr Fava 71 Mgr Freppel, Charles-Émile 232 Mgr Meurin 71 Mgr Montault 226-27, 233 evil 51, 52 evolution 116 excess 158, 271 execution 49 exile 62, 92, 206 exotic 157, 211, 215, 257 expansionism 161 Exposition Rodin 283 Exposition Universelle 240, 283-84 Fabian, Frantz 115 Falguière, Alexandre 126, 127 falsification 75, 101 family 61, 62 Fancy, Jane 159 Farrant, Tim 23 fathers 40, 171-72, 177 Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Louis Antoine 208 fear 170 federalism 125 Félibrige 124, 126, 131 Felman, Shoshana 109 feminism 180 femininity 106, 139, 211-12 Ferago, Claire 281 Ferry, Jules 22, 30, 118, 161, 221 Fêtes de Gascogne 122

310

fetishization 106-7, 163, 271 feudalism 44 Filleul de Patigny, Clara 152 fin-de-siècle 30, 115, 129 firearms 88 Firmin-Didot, Ambroise 238 Fischer, Jean-Louis 214 fixisme 186 flags drapeau tricolore 43, 208 black 88 red 93 flâneur 30, 101-14, 214 Flaubert, Gustave 25, 173, 190 Madame Bovary 24 Fléchard, Michelle 67 fonctionnaire 69 Fontanier, Pierre 22 forgetting 29, 50, 92 fossils 186-88, 196 Foucault, Michel 107, 179-80, 186, 281 Fourcaud, Louis de 129, 130 Fourcroy, Antoine François 205 Fourier, Charles 169, 170, 254 Franche-Comté 140 France, Anatole 131 fraternité 18 freedom 244, 262 freemasonry 29, 71-73, 75, 8082 French Polynesia 263 Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes 219, 225, 233 Freud, Sigmund 172 fripons 170, 172 Fromageau, Jean-Eugène 150

Index

Fromentin, Eugène 158 Frye, Northrop 277 funerals 19 Gaillard, Françoise 103 Galerie des Beaux-Arts 275 Gambetta, Léon 246 Gamboni, Dario 267 Garde nationale 43, 83 gardens 151, 217 Garden of Eden 212 Garnier, frères 247 Garnier, Lucy 175 Garonne, La 130 Gauguin, Paul 263 Gautier, Théophile 25, 32, 159, 249-65 Gavarni, Paul 26 Gayon, Jean 205 gaze 107, 110 Geffroy, Gustave 131, 289 Geggus, David 57 gender 107, 175 geology 216 Genesis 212 genius 27, 45, 47, 49, 195-97, 261, 269 Georgel, Pierre 290 Gérard, Frédéric 185 Germany 196 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 270, 277 Gervais, Paul 123 Gillispie, Charles 185 Gilpin, William 141, 143 Girard, René 178 Girondins 25, 67 Gluck, Mary 106

Index

God 13, 66, 80, 132, 171-72, 195, 197-98, 212, 279, 287, 292 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 255, 258 Goncourt, frères 16, 25 Goncourt, Jules de 244 Gosse, Isidore S. de 185 Gosselin, Charles 121 Gothic 259 Goudoulin 126, 127 Gounod, Charles-François 276 Gramont, François de 25 Green, Nicholas 117 Greive, Artur 271 Grew, Raymond 220, 230, 232 Grossman, Kathryn 290 Groud, Guénola 87 Grunfeld, Frederic 280-81 Guadeloupe 29, 51-54, 56, 58, 65-67 Guégan, Stéphane 259 Guéniffey, Patrice 59 Guérin, Daniel 59 guerre scolaire 221, 232-33 Guiauchain, Georges 154, 161 Guiauchain, Pierre-Auguste 153 Guillemet, Antoine 277 guillotine 42, 43, 50, 64-66, 76, 172 Guizot, François 224, 229 Guyot, Yves 73 Guys, Constantin 107 hachisch 257 Hadelt, Mathias 76 Haiti 53 Hamburg 77

311

Hannon, Théodore 271 Hannoosh, Michèle 261 harem 106 Hargrove, June 83, 87 Harrigan, Patrick J. 220, 230, 232 hasard 74 Haussmann, baron GeorgesEugène 16, 158 Heraclitus 187 heroes 49, 118, 220, 241 Herz, Cornelius 73 hieroglyphics 64 Hirsutes, Les 25 historians 21, 67, 70, 183, 202, 221, 243 history 41, 51, 52, 59, 118, 129, 237-48, 258, 287 Hodgart, Matthew 276 Holbein, Hans 240 Homer Iliad, The 40 homosexuality 41, 102 hotels 150, 162, 165, 243 hôtels de ville 117, 232 Hôtel de Ville de Paris 84, 85, 90, 92-93, 117 Capitole de Toulouse 115-32 House, John 116, 117 Houssaye, Arsène 249 Housset, François 231 Huet, Paul 244 Hugo, Abel 141 Hugo, Victor 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 27, 279, 287, 289-90, 292-93 Les Châtiments 18 Hernani 21

312

Napoléon le petit 18 Odes et ballades 24 Les Orientales 251-52, 25455, 260, 263 Quatre-vingt-treize 28, 51, 59-67 Hugues, General Victor 56, 65 humanism 60 humour 268 Hunter, John 202 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 29, 32, 69-82, 267-77 L’Art moderne 267-77 À vau-l’eau 273-75 De Tout 81 Le Drageoir aux épices 75 En route 75 Là-bas 70, 72, 78 Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam 73, 80 Huyssen, Andreas 20 hybridity 55, 152, 163, 164, 273-74, 281 Hydropathes, Les 25 hypocrisy 170, 172, 179 idéal 251, 255, 258, 261 Ideologues 169, 175 Ignace, Joseph 65, 66 Île de France 127 immigration 149-50 impotence 41 Impressionism 248 indemnities 223 Indochina 163 industriels 173, 179 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 250, 253-54, 260, 275 Institut d’Égypte 206, 209

Index

insurrection 89, 174 irony 43, 62, 102, 159, 192-93, 273 Isaure, Clémence 127, 128, 134 Israelites 73 Italy 46, 73, 239-40, 255 ivresse 173 J. de L. 128, 129 Jacobins 56 Jardin des Plantes 193, 201, 204-6, 209-13 Jaurès, Jean 119, 131 Jeanne d’Arc 272 Jesuits 176 Jews 29, 61, 71-73, 75, 77, 82, 140, 224 Jones, Kimberley A. 120, 121 Jonnart, Charles Celistin 161 Jordi, Jean-Jacques 157, 160 jouissance 50 journalism 144 Jouveau, René 125 Jussieu, A.-L. de 205 justice 175 Kafka, Franz 79 Keats, John 198 kings 108, 171 Charles X 20, 42, 43 Edward VII 286 François I 22 Henri IV 258 Louis XIV 18, 39, 40 Louis XV 46 Louis XVI 39, 42, 46 Louis XVIII 16, 20, 42 Louis-Philippe 18, 20, 170, 172, 176, 179, 250

Index

Kiriu, Kazuo 38 Klein, Henri 163 Kulturkampf 237 Lacan, Jacques 103, 109 lack 102, 108 La Bédollière, Émile de 143, 146 Labrouste, Henri 183 Lacroix, Auguste de 104-5, La Fizelière, Albert de 250 La Fontaine, Jean de 26 Lagrange, Octavie 159 laïcité 75, 176, 202, 224, 230, 232-33 laid, Le 45, 48 Laissus, Yves 206, 209 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 18587, 189, 191, 198 Lamartine, Alphonse de 21, 67 Languedoc 123, 126, 128, 131, 140 langue d’oc 124, 125 langue d’oïl 124 Larchey, Lorédan 20 Larroumet, Gustave 121 Latreille, Pierre André 190 Laurencet 190, 192, 199 Laurens, Henri 206 Laurens, Jean Paul 119, 120, 122, 123, 127, 131 Laurent, Goulven 187 Laverdant, Désiré 254 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre Auguste 89, 91, 94 Légion d’honneur 120 Legitimism 175, 178 Lelièvre, Claude 221 Le Men, Ségolène 137

313

Leslie, Charles Robert 239 Lespès, René 154, 157 liberalism 60 libéralités 225, 228, 230-31 liberté, égalité, fraternité 56 libraries 22, 62, 153, 156 libres-penseurs 72, 73, 82 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline 273 lies 80, 81, 170, 171 lieux de mémoire 53, 117, 125 Linnaeus 211 literacy 19 local 148, 215-17 loi de séparation des Églises et de l’État 72 loi Falloux 224, 230 loi Goblet 224, 233 loi Guizot 221, 224, 229 loi Lakanal 19 loi sur les Associations 72 London 202 Louverture, Toussaint 53 Louvre, Le 20, 282 love 113 Lucas, Colin 60 Lucbert, Françoise 271 Ludovici, Anthony 280, 284 Lyell, Charles 185 Lyon 221 Machiavelli 39 MacMahon, maréchal 160 Madagascar 163 madness 262 Maghreb 149 magistrates 79, 169, 173, 179, 182 Mainardi, Patricia 117

314

Maingueneau, Dominique 26769 mairies 86 Maleuvre, Didier 282, 285 Mallarmé, Stéphane ‘Crise de vers’ 18 mardis 25 Malraux, André 287 Manet, Édouard 261 Mange, Joseph 125 manifestations 88, 89 manifestos 24, 124 Mantz, Paul 239 Mao 61 marabout 156 Marat 67, 75, 83, 87, 94 Marais, Jean-Luc 223, 230 Marcel, Étienne 87, 90, 91, 94, 97 Marcel, Henry 131 marginalization 130 Marianne 19 Marilhat, Prosper 257-58, 264 Mariéton, Paul 126 marriage 23-24, 40 Marseillaise, La 89 Marseille 178 Martin, Henri 119, 123, 12731, 133-35 Martinique 29, 51-58, 67, 80 martyrdom 44, 91 Marx, Roger 268 Marxism 59, 61, 62 masculinity 104 Maspero, François 151 massacre 49, 58, 84, 93 masses 101, 102 Matejko, Jan 274

Index

Mauclair, Camille 280 Mauritius 77 Mayeur, François 220 Mazlish, Bruce 102 mechanical reproduction 27 medicine 16, 30, 169, 173-75 medieval 119, 124, 132 Mehlman, Jeffrey 62 Meininger, Anne-Marie 175 Meissonnier, Ernest 250 melancholy 258-59, 263 Menétrey, Élodie 76 mère patrie 58, 146 Mérimée, Prosper 22, 171 Méryon, Charles 244 Messikh, Mohamed Sadek 153 Meyranx, Pierre-Stanislas 190, 192, 199 Michaelangelo 239-40, 242 Michalski, Sergiusz 87 Michelet, Jules 21, 67, 127, 143, 198 microbiology 78 Miège, J.-L. 154 militant 81 Millan, Gordon 25 Millet, Jean-François 244-46, 248 Milton, John Paradise Lost 40 Ministère des Finances 84 ministre de l’éducation 118 ministre de l’instruction publique et des beaux-arts 19, 121, 122, 279 ministre de l’Intérieur 69, 81, 226-27

Index

mission civilisatrice 157, 159, 161, 164, 207 Mistral, Frédéric 124 Mithridate 40 mixed race 55 Modernism 116 modernity 114, 119, 124, 132, 149, 152, 207, 242, 249, 251-54, 258-63, 277 modernization 220 Moitt, Bernard 53, 56 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 26, 126, 197 L’École des femmes 40 Le Tartuffe 40 molluscs 31, 183-84, 190-92, 194, 197, 199 monarchy 20, 25, 39, 42, 43, 61, 83, 85-86, 91-92, 126, 146-47 July Monarchy 25, 41-42, 45, 49, 108, 230 monolinguism 105 Monod, Gabriel 237 monsters 78, 188 Montfort, Simon de 123 Montgolfière 207-8 monuments 108, 151 morality 82, 106, 141, 174, 181, 253 Mornand, Félix 146 Moréas, Jean 25 Morocco 163 Morris, Desmond 210 Morton, Patricia 152, 163 Moslem 154-55, 204, 206-9 mosques 154-56 Muller, Charles-Marie 262

315

Munich 240 murals 118, 131 Musette 162 museums 20, 28, 31, 153, 156, 253 Musée des Arts décoratifs 282 Musée Arlaten 124 Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, Paris 31, 183-99, 201, 203 Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, Rouen 201, 204, 21317 Musée Rodin 279-83, 28586 Musée du Trocadéro 283 Musset, Alfred de 21 myth 82, 83, 212, 221, 245-46, 290 Nantes 221 Napoléonville 160 narcissism 172 national identity 29, 30, 52-55, 116-24, 129-30, 162, 237, 281-82 national security 81 national sovereignty 138 nation building 138, 144, 14748, 202 nationhood 52, 145, 147, 286 nation state 116, 138, 239, 242 nature 131, 256 naturalism 76, 244, 246 Nègre, André 53 neo-Baroque 123 neo-Byzantine 150 neo-Classical 150

316

néo-hippocratisme 147 Nerval, Gérard de 259 New Caledonia 93 Niebelungenlied 255 Nietzsche, Friedrich 171, 279 Nique, Christian 221 Nodier, Charles 24, 141 Nora, Pierre 117 normalization 147 Normandy 143, 205 obituaries 191, 244 objets d’art 49, 283, 285 occitan 125 occupation 153, 157 Offenbach, Jacques 158 Oliver, Andrew 37 ontology 75 oppression 54 optimism 169 order 49 orientalism 158, 162, 163, 250, 255-56, 258, 273 Orleanist 171, 172, 176 Orton, Fred 116 Orwicz, Michael 116 Osiris 195 otherness 144 Ouahès, Rachid 160 Oulebsir, Nabilia 162, 163 Ourliac, Édouard 139, 144 Ournac, Camille 120-22, 125, 126 Outram, Dorinda 185 outsiders 23, 26, 243 pacification 157 pacifism 63, 64 Palais de l’Industrie 275 Palais des Tuileries 84-86, 93

Index

paleontology 187 Palmer, R. R. 223 pamphlets 268-70, 272-73, 276-77 Panthéon 15, 20, 91, 288-90 paranoia 172 Paris 16, 17, 22-24, 28, 29, 30, 32, 40, 45, 46, 52, 59-61, 63, 77, 83-85, 87, 89-90, 92-93, 101, 103, 105, 115, 119-20, 123-24, 130-31, 137, 139, 142, 144, 176, 178, 181, 184, 202, 205, 215, 224, 268, 284 Parkhurst Ferguson, Priscilla 104, 105, 106 Parnassianism 25 parody 26 parvenu 50 passion 113, 114, 178 pastiche 114 patois 124, 125 patriarchy 40, 169, 171 patriotism 118 paysan 143, 246 Peisse, Louis 249, 253 Pellissier de Reynaud, Eugène 153 perversion 40 Pessard, Gustave 83 Petrarch 41, 242 Petrey, Sandy 61, 62 peuple, le 61, 177, 179 Peyrefitte, Alain 118 philanthropy 224 philosophy 179, 181, 190, 223, 282 photography 163, 279, 281, 284, 286-87, 288-90

Index

Picardy 144 Pick, Daniel 115 Pike, Albert 77 Pinta, Amable 270 pittoresque 137, 142, 144, 146-47, 257-58 place Vendôme 18 Plato 189 pleasure 102-3, 108, 112, 114, 215, 261 pluralism 119 Poètes du Gai Savoir 124 poètes maudits 26 poetry 18, 103, 115, 129, 131, 196, 197, 211, 212, 241, 244, 251, 258-60 pointillism 119, 123, 129 Poland 172 Poliakov, Léon 29, 69 police 88-89 politics 28 Pollock, Griselda 116 Pompadour, Madame de 47-49 pompier painters 116, 131 Ponge, Francis 184 Pont Aven 116 Ponteil, Félix 220 popes 79 Léon XIII 72, 75 Portugal 73 positivism 116 postcards 163, 286, 290 post-colonial 207 post-modernism 131 post-Romanticism 259 Pouchet, Félix Archimède 214 Pouchet, Georges 201, 213-17 Poulet-Malassis, Auguste 20

317

power, absolute 37 Préault, Auguste 259 préfet de la Seine 85 Leygues 123 Poubelle 90 press 44, 122, 190-94 L’Actualité 268 L’Aioli 125 Arman Provençau 124 Art et Décoration 131 L’Artiste 249, 273 Charivari, Le 26 Le Constitutionnel 249 La Dépêche algérienne 163 La Dépêche du Midi 122, 125, 126 Gazette des Beaux-Arts 128, 243 Gazette des Tribunaux 181 Gil Blas 27 L’Humanité 93 Le Journal des débats 192 La Libre Parole 71 Le Magasin des familles 259 Le Messager de Toulouse 126 Le Moniteur universel 252 Le National 193 New York Herald 279 La Presse 252, 261 Revue indépendante 268, 275 Revue mensuelle 268 Revue de Paris 45 Revue des Deux Mondes 130, 249 La Revue Parisienne, 39 S.I.M. 27

318

Le Temps 193 Preziosi, Donald 281, 287 priests 44, 169, 175, 176, 182, 195, 225, 232 primitiveness 116 professions 139 professors 185, 204 progress 173 Prompsault, l’abbé 26 propaganda 54, 131 property 8, 30-32, 40, 125, 219-34, 285 Prost, Antoine 220 protectionism 163 protest 26 Protestants 40, 72, 73, 75, 77, 82, 205, 224, 230 Provence 116 providentialism 81 provinces 28, 30, 46, 59, 60, 115, 130, 137-48, 205 Prussians 30, 83, 92, 118 public space 29, 53, 92-93, 154, 216 publishers 19, 45 Pujol, Paul 123 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 123, 129 Pyat, Félix 142 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostôme 183 Quicherat, Louis 25 Quinet, Edgar 67 Rabelais, François 26 Racine, Jean 26 Andromaque 40 Phèdre 40 railways 116

Index

Raimondi, Marc Antonio 240 Ramet, Henri 119, 131 Raphael 239-40 Ravéreau, André 156 Raymond, André 153 razzia 149, 151-52, 157 reactionary 70 Realism 255 rebellion 55 Reformation 39 Régent, Frédéric 53, 54, 57, 65 regionalism 115, 117, 120, 122, 129, 144, 145 religion 28, 44 Rembrandt 240, 242, 261 Renan, Ernest 21 renaming 87 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 276 Renouard, Jules 238 rentes 220, 231 repression 51 Republic, First 205 Republic, Third 16, 18, 22, 23, 29, 32, 83-97, 115-35, 148, 220-21, 231-34, 237-48 Republican army 57 resistance 54 Restoration 18, 31, 42, 179, 181, 220, 222-24, 226, 230 revenge 61 Revolution (1789) 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 28, 29, 39, 42, 43, 46, 51, 52, 59, 71, 75, 118, 144, 147, 205, 222-23, 230, 288 Revolution (July 1830, Les Trois Glorieuses) 47, 49, 117, 170, 225, 228 Revolution (1848) 117

Index

Reynolds, Joshua 239 rhetoric 160, 163, 183-84, 186, 188-89, 191-94, 196, 199, 215, 252, 269, 273, 277 Ribeira, Manuel 261 Rice, Shelley 288 Richard, Jean-Pierre 274 Richard, Prosper 152 Richepanse, General 54 Rifkin, Adrian 237-38, 273 Rimbaud, Arthur 25, 26 Rimbault, Paul 219 Rioult, Louis-Édouard 252 Rivet-Barlangue, Lucie 120, 121 Rivière, Jean 131 Robb, Graham 63 Robespierre, Maximilien 39, 51, 59, 60, 67 Rochefort, Henri 63 Rodin, Auguste 32-33, 279-95 Romanticism 24, 25, 178, 24243, 245-46, 249, 252, 254, 256, 258-59 Rome 77 Ronsard, Pierre de 26 Roos, Jane Mayo 290-91 Roqueplan, Camille 250 Rosanvallon, Pierre 146 Rouault, Georges 263 Rouget de Lisle 83, 89 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 41, 83, 87, 91, 94 Rousseau, Théodore 243-46 Roussillon 143 royalism 38, 39, 65 Royer, Clémence-Auguste 198 Rubens 254

319

Rude, Fernand 170 rue de Rivoli 158-59 Ruillé, Ernest de 233 ruins 84, 85, 86, 93, 111, 149 Russell, E. S. 187 Sagan, Eli 59 saints Jude 78 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 25, 198, 247 Saint-Domingue 53, 54 Saint-Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy 31, 183, 186-95, 19799, 207, 212 Saint-Just 57 Saint-Pons, René de 125 Saint-Simonians 44 Saint Tropez 130 Saintin, Jules Émile 270 Salle des Illustres 120-23, 126, 133 Salons 32, 240, 243 1844 249-65 1878 271 1879 118, 269-72, 274-77 1880 271-74, 277 1881 272, 277 1885 275 salons 15, 24, 25, 209 Abrantès, duchesse d’ 25 Agoult, Madame d’ 25 Clarke, Mary 25 Genlis, Madame de 25 Girardin, Madame Émile de 25 Mohl, Madame 25 Montesson, Madame de 25 Païva, Madame de 25

320

Récamier, Madame 25 Roland, Madame 25 Sabatier, Madame 25 Sand, George 189, 195 Indiana 23 Lélia 194 Valentine 23 sanitation 151 Sans-Culottes 59 Satan 72, 73, 75 Satanism 29, 76-80 satire 26, 185, 276-77, 290 Saumur 226, 230 Savary, M. 196 Scheffer, Ary 250, 258 Schlesinger, Mildred 119 schools 15, 16, 19, 22, 28, 3132, 89, 115, 129, 202, 207, 219-34 écoles mutuelles 227-28, 233 Schor, Naomi 180 science 28, 70, 128, 129, 179, 183-99, 201-17 Scott, Clive 28 Sedan 83 Seine, La 130 Semaine Sanglante 84, 91 Senate 16 Senegal 145 Sensier, Alfred 245 separatism 124, 131 Serres, Honoré 122 Serres, Marcel de 188 sexuality 41 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 198 Shields, Rob 105, 114 shopping 113 Siéburth, Richard 147

Index

siege 83 Signac, Paul 130 Silvestre, Théophile 239, 245 Simon Durand, M. 270 sister 113 slavery 29, 51-53, 56, 65, 66, 113, 171 Sloan, Philip R. 202 Smith, Adam 101, 102 Soboul, Albert 59 socialism 72, 93 Raspail 173 Société des amis noirs 57 Société d’Angers 225, 227-28, 231 Société civile de la Cité, Angers 219-20, 232-34 Société nationale des beauxarts 280 Solé, Robert 206 Solitude 66 Somerset, Richard 198 Sorbonne 21, 22, 54, 59 sorciers 77 Sorrell, Christian 219 souks 154 Spain 73, 159 speeches 18, 93, 123, 126, 127, 177, 186 Staël, Madame de 24 Stalin 61 statues 18, 29-30, 83, 89-94, 128, 156, 279 Steichen, Edward 279, 289-92 Stendhal (Henri Beyle) 23, 31, 169-82, 198 Lamiel 169, 180-82

Index

Lucien Leuwen 169, 170, 175-82 Le Rouge et le Noir 176, 179 La Vie de Henry Brulard 171 Stevens, Alfred 271 Stierle, Karlheinz 137 Sue, Eugène 105 suffrage universel 91 suicide 63 Surkis, Judith 202 Suteau, Marc 221 Symbolism 25, 123, 128 syndicats 15 taboos 41 Taguieff, Pierre-André 29, 6970, 74, 75, 80, 82 Taine, Hippolyte 21, 190, 238, 241 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord 206 Talmeyr, Maurice 71 tax 219-20, 222, 224 Taylor, Isidore 141 Taylor, Tom 239 teachers 222-23, 228-29, 231 technocracy 31, 169, 173, 178 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 198 Terreur, La 29, 51, 59-67 Tester, Keith 108 theatres 45 theft 76 Thierren, Lyne 237 Thiers, Adolphe 63, 93 Thomas, G. M. 239 Thomson, Richard 116, 117 Thoré, Théophile 245, 249 Thouin, André 205 Tiberi, Jean 93

321

Tirel, Marcelle 280 Titian 254 Tocqueville, Alexis de 21, 157 Toepffer, Rodolphe 198 tombs 288 topography 28 Tort, Patrick 190 torture 91 Toudoire, Marius 162 Toudouze, Édouard 274 Toulouse 115-35 tourism 116, 158-59, 163, 170, 188 Tournier, Isabelle 37 tradition 144 tragedy 49, 114 transformisme 186 trials 24 Tronchot, Robert Raymond 219 troubadours 119, 124, 127, 128, 131, 133-34 truth 169, 174, 177, 178, 271 tsars 172 Tunisia 159 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 223 types 142, 146 tyranny 171 unity 50, 143, 193, 212 Université de Paris 21 urban planning 150, 159-61, 164 utility 169, 173, 178, 230 utopianism 119, 130, 131, 276 Vachon, Marius 86 Vaisse, Pierre 117, 121 Vapereau, Gustave 243

322

Vasari, Giorgio 239-40, 248 Vatican 79 Veel, Kristin 20 Vendée 60, 67 Verlaine, Paul 25, 26 Veronese 254 Versailles 63, 83, 84, 92, 117 vers libre 27-28 Vichy 54, 94 victimization 272 Vigny, Alfred de 259 Villermont, Marie de 80 Villon, François 26 Vinci, Leonardo da 239-40, 242 violence 51, 52, 64, 149, 157, 250, 262, 268 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel 86, 120 virginity 24, 110 visual arts 28, 32 Voinot, Jules 162 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 20, 83, 87, 91, 94, 96, 187, 205 voting 88 voyeurism 109

Index

Vuillemin, Alexandre 164 Wahnich, Sophie 61 War, First World 286 War, Second World 234 Waterloo 42 Watteau 47, 48 wealth 51 Weber, Eugen 220-21 Weerts, Jean Joseph 120 Weisberg, Gabriel 243, 248 Wey, Francis 142 will-to-power 170, 172, 178 Wilson, Elizabeth 105 Winock, Michel 84 Wismes, Baron de 227 Wright, Gwendolyn 163 xenophobia 164 Young, Paula Lee 183 Ysmal, Pierre 93 Zanzibar 158 Zeldin, Theodore 220-21 Žižek, Slavoj 60, 61 Zola, Émile 73, 124, 190 Les Rougon-Macquart 18 La Curée 17 zoology 186, 192, 197, 213 Zutistes, Les 25