Nineteenth-Century French Studies provides scholars and students with the opportunity to examine new trends, review promising research findings, and become better acquainted with professional developments in the field. Scholarly articles on all aspects of nineteenth-century French literature and criticism are invited. Published articles are peer-reviewed to insure scholarly integrity. The journal has an extensive book review section covering a variety of disciplines.
Vol. 36, no 1 (automne 2007)
Olds, Marshall C.
From the Editor
Ousselin, Edward
Madame de Staël et Victor Hugo face à la réalité et la légende napoléoniennes
A la fois témoins privilégiés et participants actifs aux bouleversements sociopolitiques de leur époque respective, Germaine de Staël et Victor Hugo devinrent, chacun à sa manière, des écrivains "engagés" avant la lettre. Adversaire très tôt déclarée du régime napoléonien, l'auteure de Considérations sur la Révolution française décrivit "la longue lutte [que Napoléon] a établie entre sa toute-puissance et ma faiblesse" (218). L'auteur de Napoléon-le-petit, cependant, fut initialement un admirateur et propagateur d'une légende napoléonienne qu'il ne récusa entièrement que lorsqu'il fut confronté à la réalité du Second Empire, devenant à son tour un opposant politique et un exilé. (In French)
Le Hir, Marie-Pierre
Stendhal et l'invention de l'intellectuel
Less attention has been devoted to Stendhal's contributions to cultural criticism than to his literary works. Inspired by recent re-editions in that area, this essay examines the writer's militant struggles during the Restoration, as well as a work that exemplifies the originality of his thoughts on intellectuals, his 1825 political pamphlet D'un Nouveau Complot contre les Industriels. Whereas Stendhal's isolated position in the cultural field of his time has usually been ascribed to his age and his leanings towards the 18th century, it is his modernity and his significance as a theorist of the modern intellectual that are emphasized here, not only with regard to his values, but also to his conception of the classe pensante as an autonomous and independent social force. (In French)
Hamilton, James F.
Sand's La Mare au diable, Awakening through "Evil" and the Hero's Journey
The theme of evil implicit in Sand's title and confirmed by her quotation from Genesis found above a woodcarving of Holbein points to the hero's journey in La Mare au diable (1846). This narrative device explains the transformation of Germain in the devil's pond as the shock of awakening from depression and from a false innocence by an encounter with the Shadow. Sand's portrayal of evil as a necessary encounter in the journey to maturity shows intuitive insight. The transformation of her hero upon exiting from the woods is confirmed by his acceptance of rejection and by his subsequent realization of a Warrior's energy in the defense of Marie, a precondition to attaining the Lover's stature. His service to love and the mediation of woman's culture lead to marriage and to self-integration celebrated in a closing scene of poetic union between earth and heaven bearing witness to Germain's new consciousness of nature's beauty and the gift of life.
Counter, Andrew J.
Tough Love, Hard Bargains: Rape and Coercion in Balzac
This article explores representations of rape in the fiction of Honoré de Balzac, in an attempt to understand how both the event and the threat of rape acquire a peculiar and distinct significance in Balzac's writing. A distinction is made between the simplistic depictions of rape in Balzac's earlier "Romantic" novels, and its complex signifying potential in the more developed Realist period. There, rape appears first as a form of homosocial communication; then as a performance which might be used to (re)assert masculine identity; and finally, in the face of the failure of that assertion, as a desperate, pathological repetition of the violence which is inseparable from masculine subjectivation and from patriarchal ideology. These questions are understood through the various works of Luce Irigaray, Eve Sedgwick, and Slavoj ÎiÏek.
Wright, Beth Segal
The Space of Time: Delaroche's Depiction of Modern Historical Narrative
After 1814, the French looked to parallels in the past to explain the causes of contemporary events. For them historical time was doubled, understood through analogies. Signaling multiple times, easily accomplished in historiographic narratives, posed a challenge to historical painters. Delaroche utilized innovative approaches to representing time in his works, which were praised by contemporary historians and art critics as visual parallels to modern historical literature. In this essay I argue that Delaroche's repeated visual quotation of works from the Bowyer Historic Gallery enabled him to represent a doubled moment in his historical paintings. I examine his approach to temporality in Jane Grey (1834), Assassination of the duc de Guise (1834), a suite of watercolors (c.1825) on an episode in Rousseau's Confessions (1782), and Cromwell (1831). The latter was one of several works by Delaroche inspired by Chateaubriand's Les Quatre Stuarts (1828), an insistently multi-temporal text which compared Stuarts and Bourbons, written to ensure the stability of the newly restored Bourbon dynasty.
Chesney, Duncan McColl
The History of the History of the Salon
The article traces the development of an historical and ideological understanding of the French salon in the nineteenth century, especially during the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. The salon, while continuing to be an important social space, becomes a lieu de mémoire for writers and scholars intent upon reconciling the inherited aristocratic and revolutionary traditions. Balzac and others are briefly discussed before attention is focused on Sainte-Beuve as the key to this historical, revisionist work. His study of salonnières and the conversational tradition is also, relatedly, a major exception in the development of nineteenth-century academic literary criticism.
Olmsted, William
Apostasy Apostasized: The Effects of Censorship and Self-Censorship on Baudelaire's "Le Reniement de saint Pierre"
For the 1857 Fleurs du mal Baudelaire restaged earlier poetry to suit his changed religious and political views. "Le Reniement de saint Pierre," originally a blasphemous challenge to both institutional Christianity and the idealistic Christian socialism of 1848, became part of Baudelaire's "douleureux programme" of dramatizing evil at once sympathetically and judgmentally. Partly shielded from the censors by his formal choice of dramatic monologue, Baudelaire used context and paratext to ensure that the apparently lyric expression of religious apostasy and militant politics would appear symptomatic of "l'agitation de l'esprit dans le mal." Censorship, both self- and state-imposed, motivated a poetic revision that achieved deniability of the very blasphemy the poem still affirmed.
Haezewindt, Bernard
"Le Père Judas," ou la (re)construction laborieuse d'un conte peu convaincant de Guy de Maupassant
"Le Père Judas" a été publié par Guy de Maupassant dans Le Gaulois du 28 février 1883. Ce journal de droite sera plus tard antidreyfusard et affichera ouvertement les préjugés antisémites de sa rédaction et aussi de ses lecteurs.
Ce conte, non repris du vivant de Guy de Maupassant fait partie de ceux que l'auteur, pour des raisons diverses, n'a pas jugés dignes de figurer dans ses recueils. Serait-ce pour des raisons politiques ou purement artistiques, l'écrivain jugeant que ces récits, au moment de leur première parution, étaient plus alimentaires que littéraires? Nous ne pourrons peut-être jamais répondre à cette question qui exige, en fin de compte une explication de l'auteur. Néanmoins, nous pouvons tenter d'élaborer des supputations à cet effet, fondées sur une étude structurale et textuelle approfondie du "Père Judas." (In French)
Mayer-Robin, Carmen
Justice, Zola's Global Utopian Gospel
Following the paean to colonial expansion Zola had developed at the end of Fécondité, it comes as a surprise perhaps that Justice, Zola's unwritten conclusion to the Quatre Évangiles, should promise so consistently to focus on anti-imperialism. Judging by the beginnings of the Dossier préparatoire for this novel, which Zola was already assembling simultaneously to penning Fécondité, and on the basis of the author's evident shift in thinking about society-building, this study highlights Zola's sensitivity to the changing mentalities of the period, his ability at times to predict the future of humanistic striving, his polyvalence, finally, as he envisioned the exemplary role France would play in shaping a pan-European economy.