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208 pages

English

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A fresh insight into the rich possibilities of expression opened up to French Second Empire writers through apparently trivial aspects of modern material life.

The French Second Empire (1852-70) was a time of exceptionally rapid social, industrial and technological change. Guidebooks and manuals were produced in large numbers to help readers negotiate new cultural phenomena, and their concerns – including image-making, diet, stress, lack of time, and the frustrations of public transport – betray contemporary political tensions and social anxieties alongside the practical advice offered. French literature also underwent fundamental changes during this period, as writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Hugo and Zola embraced ‘modernity’ and incorporated new technologies, fashions and inventions into their work. Focusing on cultural areas such as exhibitions, transport, food, dress and photography, ‘Changing France’ shows how apparently trivial aspects of modern life provided Second Empire writers with a versatile means of thinking about deeper issues. This volume brings literature and material culture together to reveal how writing itself changed as writers recognised the extraordinarily rich possibilities of expression opened up to them by the changing material world.

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Exhibitions; 3. Transport; 4. Food; 5. Photography; 6. Costume; 7. Ruins; 8. Conclusion; Bibliography; Index

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History of Europe

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Publié par	Anthem Press
Date de parution	01 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783081004
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0080€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Changing FranceAdvance Reviews
‘This lively, lucid, and meticulously researched book will be a rich resource
for those wishing to know more of the burgeoning material culture of Second
Empire France. It breaks new ground both in its exploration of how that
culture, even at its most apparently trivial, reﬂ ected larger social and political
anxieties; and in its compelling account of how the literature of the period
responded to and engaged with it.’
—Professor Heather Glen, University of Cambridge
‘Anne Green has applied a deep knowledge of social history to the gamut of
texts produced during the Second Empire, from the works of major novelists to
railway manuals and fashion magazines. The result is a brilliant and engaging
tour de force of literary and cultural analysis. This book should be required
reading throughout the humanities and social sciences.’
—Professor Patricia Mainardi, City University of New York
‘A brilliant account of how literature responded to a materially changing world
in Second Empire France. For laptops, spaceships, and climate change, read
cameras, trains, and urban redevelopment. Meticulously researched, shrewdly
argued, and beautifully written, this book offers important new perspectives
on the relationship between culture and our lived environment.’
—Professor Roger Pearson, University of Oxford
‘Anne Green’s innovative and observant study engages illuminatingly with the
responses of writers to certain fundamental changes affecting life in Second
Empire France. Changing France will be read with proﬁ t and enjoyment by
specialists and the general Francophile reader alike, while reinforcing Green’s
reputation as a leading authority on Flaubert.’
—Dr Michael Tilby, University of Cambridge
‘This beautifully crafted study is essential reading for anyone interested in the
cultural history of Second Empire France. With immense erudition, exemplary
clarity and an eye for the telling detail, Anne Green shows us how texts of
every variety reﬂ ect the social, political and industrial upheavals of the era.’
—Professor Timothy Unwin, University of BristolChanging France
Literature and Material Culture
in the Second Empire
Anne GreenAnthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition frst published in UK and USA 2013
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
First published in hardback by Anthem Press in 2011
Copyright © Anne Green 2013
The author asserts the moral right to be identifed as the author of this work.
Cover image ‘Madame Paul-Sigisbert Moitessier, née Marie-Clotilde-Inès de Foucauld,
Seated’ by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, oil on canvas, 1856.
Image reproduced courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library, UK.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Green, Anne, 1947–
Changing France : literature and material culture in the Second Empire / Anne Green.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-85728-777-9 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-85728-777-X (har
1. French literature–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Literature and society–
France. 3. France–Intellectual life. I. Title.
PQ292.G74 2011
840.9’008–dc22
2011014785
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 070 0 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1 78308 070 1 (Pbk)
This title is also available as an ebook.CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Chapter One
Introduction 1
Chapter Two
Exhibitions 5
Chapter Three
Transport 35
Chapter Four
Food 65
Chapter Five
Photography 91
Chapter Six
Costume 117
Chapter Seven
Ruins 147
Chapter Eight
Conclusion 169
Appendix: Second Empire Timeline 173
Bibliography 187
Index 195ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to the AHRC and to King’s College London for funding
research leave without which this book would not have been completed. I
should also like to thank all those friends and colleagues who have helped with
information, advice or encouragement, particularly Simon Gaunt, Heather
Glen, Nick Harrison, Deborah Jaffe, Robert Lethbridge, Jo Malt, Michael
Tilby and Timothy Unwin.
An earlier version of part of chapter 2 appeared in ‘France Exposed:
Madame Bovary and the Exposition Universelle’, The Modern Language Review,
vol. 99, no. 4 (October 2004), 915–23.Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about writing and change – about changes affecting everyday
life in Second Empire France, about the extraordinarily diverse and creative
responses of writers to those changes, and about ways in which writing itself
evolved during this period. It raises questions about how the material world
impinges upon literature, and how writers, in turn, use that world as a way of
negotiating change.
France had been rocked by momentous changes for more than half a
century before the Second Empire came into being in December1852. After
the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, the country had gone through
a series of revolutions, lurching from Republic to Empire to Monarchy and
back to Republic again with the revolution of 1848, when the monarchy was
ﬁ nally abolished. But the failure of that short-lived Second Republic was seen
by many as a particular betrayal. On 2 December 1851 Parisians woke to
ﬁ nd that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, President of the Second Republic, had
dissolved the Legislative Assembly and proclaimed martial law. Over the next
few days several hundred protestors and a number of innocent bystanders were
killed by troops, and many thousands were subsequently deported to North
Africa or exiled elsewhere. Although a plebiscite indicated that a majority of
Frenchmen approved the move, for many the violence of Louis Napoleon’s
coup d’état and his overthrow of the 1848 constitution he had sworn to uphold
was to be a long-lasting and bitter source of resentment. The following year,
the Second Empire was ofﬁ cially proclaimed on the anniversary of the coup
d’état, the imperial eagle was restored to the French ﬂ ag, and Louis Napoleon
took the title of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. But the shock of his
coup d’état and the repressive manner in which the Empire was established
were not readily forgotten.
For many writers, the coup d’état and its aftermath marked a watershed.
Those who had been drawn into the political debate during the events
surrounding the 1848 revolution turned away from political engagement in
disgust, and their reluctance to involve themselves in political commentary 2 CHANGING FRANCE
was reinforced by the new regime’s strict censorship laws and close control
ndof the press. As Charles Baudelaire famously put it, ‘the 2 of December
1physically depoliticised me’. Maxime Du Camp, at that time editor of the
Revue de Paris, noted in his memoirs that many minor writers who had
made their living by writing for newspapers and journals were ruined when
the administration suppressed these outlets, and he recalled that Gérard
de Nerval had abandoned a plan to write about Hassan-ibn-Sabbah, the
legendary eleventh-century founder of the Assassin sect, for fear that people
2would see allusions to the Emperor in it.
Such reactions explain a recurrent image in Second Empire literature –
that of a room with windows or shutters closed to shut out a raging tempest,
while the writer sits inside, creating a world of his own in his imagination and
apparently oblivious to the turmoil outside. This is the central image of both
Théophile Gautier’s ‘Préface’, where the poet composes his poems ‘[p]aying
3no attention to the hurricane/ That lashed against my closed windows’, and
of Baudelaire’s ‘Paysage’, where the poet refuses to be distracted by ‘[t]he Riot
raging in vain at my window’, instead shutting out the outside world in order
4to conjure up images of his own.
But while writers may have used such images to dramatise their
unwillingness to engage directly with current affairs, they were not oblivious to
the wider changes taking place around them. After the turbulence of the ﬁ rst
half-century, the country was changing on all fronts – not only politically, but
5socially, economically and physically. An energetic foreign policy meant that
French armie