This module is called Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century
France. It is a module about the changes that took place in
nineteenth-century France:
How did writers and artists respond to the new `bourgeois century' that
brought about industrialisation and urbanisation, a new mass market for
culture as more and more people learnt to read and an ever-growing and
increasingly prosperous middle class became eager consumers of painting
and literature. What this module is all about then, is cultural history:
the shifting nature and function of writers and artists in a rapidly
changing society.
The module is divided into four separate sections or mini-modules each
with their own theme. In the first, `Introduction to Nineteenth-Century
French Culture' we help you come to grips with nineteenth-century culture
by studying representative examples of poetry, prose fiction and painting.
This provides the context for the next three sections which focus on,
respectively, representations of the city, representations of women from
la femme mal mariée to la prostituée, and finally, on the
development of new literary and artistic forms (modernism) and the
growth of oppositional cultural movements (avant-garde) in the last
quarter of the century.
The most important thing to say about the six authors studied on this
module is that they were all men of their age and that that age was an age
of revolutionary change. Theirs was an age of social and political
instability, of turmoil and disruption in which certainties of
psychological and social existence were turned on their head. The books
we'll be reading together are all responses to this age.
Let's take a quick look at the dates of our six authors:
The more radical revolution of l848 which was to be followed by the Second
Empire of Louis Napoleon took place during the early adult years of both
Flaubert and Baudelaire - the latter, incidentally, was a direct witness
of events.
And finally, both the final years of the Second Empire and the events of
the Paris Commune were experienced by both Zola and Rimbaud.
A more detailed chronology of nineteenth-century France is available at Chronologie
littéraire française 1848-1914
One major outcome of the momentous events that shook Europe 1789-1848 was
a new sense of historicism. This is a key term to remember in
relation to the authors on this module. What I mean by this is that
Europeans came to see their lives as historically conditioned, a point
which the German philosopher Hegel makes in his writings. `Man' was
conceived as a product of his own activity in history, as both determined
by history, but in turn also able to determine history, to change history.
This new sense of historicism informs all of our set texts.
What happens in the nineteenth century is that the novel becomes a
historical narrative shaped by the real history of real nations. What
Balzac writes about in La Comédie humaine, for example, are the
turmoils and changing social, political and economic conditions of French
society from 1789 to 1848. In fact, Balzac conceives the role of the
novelist to be akin to that of the historian, placing his narratives in
and as part of a public history. One of the interesting things about the
novels of Balzac is that they are often praised by historians and
political analysts for their insight into the period about which they
write. None other than Karl Marx praised Balzac's `deep grasp of the real
situation'. Balzac is an obvious example of how this new historicism, this
new sense of history informed European culture but all of are set authors
may be seen as having been influenced by it.
Another important feature of nineteenth-century French cultural life was
the expansion of literacy: more and more people could read, unlike in the
eighteenth century when reading was the privilege of the aristocracy and
the upper middle class. Michael Moriarty claims that it makes more sense
to talk of `literacies' in the plural in the nineteenth century as the
reading public both increased in size and fragmented into a variety of
different groups or markets.
In the eighteenth century, literary production was more limited than in
the nineteenth century. It was either an amateur cultural practice or else
took place within the context of royal, aristocratic or wealthy patrons
who themselves formed a small and élite reading public. What makes the
nineteenth century different is that literary production began to take
place within a market structure. Publishers began to mediate between
writers and an anonymous and enlarged reading public, with books written
and sold in larger and larger numbers for higher and higher profits.
Throughout the nineteenth century controls were gradually removed from
publishing which had hitherto been viewed with suspicion by those in power
as a potential source of dissemination of dissent. During the First Empire
and the Restoration, for example, printers and booksellers were required
to obtain a brevet or certificate of political reliability which
were relatively hard to come by. This was relaxed under the July Monarchy
and more publishers emerged. More investors, who saw publishing as a
potentially profitable business, emerged too and helped finance what was
still a relatively under-capitalised area of economic activity.
Technological innovations like cheap paper mass-produced in continuous
rolls, the introduction of the sterotype (a cast metal printing plate),
and the steam- powered prinitng press all led to the creation of
affordable mass-produced editions of texts by such popular writers as
Balzac, Georges Sand and Victor Hugo - the so-called romans à quatre
sous - to a wide public.
One of the most striking cultural developments taking place in
post-revolutionary France was the extension of the reading public. The
influential nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve wrote of what he called
`l'invasion de la démocratie littéraire'. A number of reasons explain this
new phenomena: demographic explosion, the growth and increasing power of
the bourgeoisie, the expansion of the urban working-class, a general
improvement in literacy thanks to the 1833 primary education act and the
development of the commercial press. It is the early nineteenth century
then, that witnesses the beginning of `mass culture' and `mass
communications' and the split between so-called `high culture' and
`popular culture'. All these developments led to a transformation of the
nature of the reading public. This change in the reading public was
particularly influential to the development of the novel which becomes, in
the nineteenth century, the most widely read literary form. Novels were
not read, as they are now, in single volumes. Rather, they were read in
installments published in various newspapers and magazines and known as
roman-feuilletons. Without going to much into the details, in the
1830s there was a commercial battle between the old established newspapers
which were relatively expensive and new daily newspapers which sold for
half the price. The only way these new newspapers could make a profit was
through advertizing. Since advertizers needed to reach a high target
audience the new newspapers included stories by popular writers published
in serial form. Thus le roman- feuilleton was born and Balzac's
La Vieille Fille was amongst the very first.
The reading public was no longer a tiny, highly educated élite but a
genuinely mass and heterogenous mix. This created some new problems for
writers. How were writers to respond to this new situation?
Broadly similar developments were taking place in the art world. Patronage
of artists by royal and aristocratic patrons/connoisseurs began to be
replaced by an interpersonal art market in which dealers and critics
became the most influential arbiters of taste. The Académie Royale de
Peinture et de Sculture (originally founded in 1648) declined in influence
as dealers and critics seized the initiative. This led to the domination
of what Harrison and Cynthia White call the `dealer- critic system'.
More importantly still, this module is about how those changes were
registered by writers - like Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave
Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola and Arthur Rimbaud as well as
artists like Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas and Eduourd Manet at the
time.
Structure of Module
The Writer and/in History
Balzac: 1799 1850
As you can see, two of the authors studied on this course - Hugo and
Balzac - were born within fifteen years of the revolution of 1789 and grew
up in the aftermath of the French Revolution, passed their childhood and
youth in the heroic days of Napoleon and grew to manhood during the period
of the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (Louis XVIII and Charles X).
They also witnessed the Revolution of July 1830 which established the
constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe, `the bourgeois king' and which
inaugurated the beginnings of France's urbanization and industrialization.
Hugo: 1802-1885
Flaubert: 1821- 80
Baudelaire: 1821-1867
Zola: 1840-1902
Rimbaud: 1854-1891
A New Historicism in European
Culture
A New Role for the Writer
At the risk of greatly oversimplifying literary history, these were the
three responses available to writers in nineteenth-century France. Writers
like Eugène Sue, Frédéric Soulié and Alexandre Dumas took the first option
and capitulated to the pressures of the market. Victor Hugo, Alfred de
Vigny and Leconte de Lisle all took the second option and developed the
notion of the writer as a kind of leader or educator, a deeply élitist
view in itself with its distinction between the `leader' and the `herd'.
De Lisle, in fact, described writers as `éducateurs d'âmes' and Vigny as `les
maîtres de la pensée et les guides éloquents des grandes nations'.
Finally, the third option was taken by writers like Théophile Gautier,
Charles Baudelaire and Flaubert (`Il faut vivre pour sa vocation, monter
dans sa tour d'ivoire') who deliberately turned their backs on a mass
audience and cultivated an aloof, quasi-aristocratic aestheticism.