Metaphors of Modernity: Prostitutes, Bankers, and Other Jews in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes

Reviewed by: The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France Nicholas Dobelbower Maurice Samuels . The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004. Pp. xi + 280. Cloth $49.95, paper $22.95. The Spectacular Past is an exciting interdisciplinary work blending historical, cultural, and literary studies. Samuels reveals the centrality of spectacle—pictorial, theatrical, and verbal—to the new historical consciousness shaped by Romantic historiography's efforts to assimilate the Revolution and Empire into an organic national narrative. Vivid historiography began the process, but the easing of censorship under the July Monarchy was decisive in releasing an explosion of spectacular representations depicting controversial figures, most importantly Napoleon, on the stage and in popular attractions. Samuels's focus on early nineteenth-century visual culture makes his book a welcome complement to Vanessa Schwartz's Spectacular Realities (1998) and Jann Matlock's Scenes of Seduction (1994). Cultural historians will find insightful observations about the reality effect produced by Curtius's life-like wax displays, Robertson's phantasmagoria shows, Langlois's panoramas and dioramas, boulevard theater, and changing techniques used in illustrated histories. These analyses are deftly enlisted in an overarching argument about the dialogical relationship between the diverse vehicles through which history was conveyed. Samuels includes an especially astute examination of how in-text illustration affected both readers and writers of history. According to Samuels, whose implicit theoretical perspective is indebted to Situationist critiques of twentieth-century mediation, the fraught relationship between history and spectacle was already a matter of impassioned contestation in the 1830s. Adding a new dimension to the "memory crisis" that Richard Terdiman identifies in Present Past (1993), Samuels boldly redefines Romanticism and Realism as competing theories of history. Whereas Scottian Romantics seek to transport the reader into the past, Balzac and Stendhal, and to some extent Flaubert, see the past as an "alienating and destructive force, a false model, leading the plots of the characters awry" (5). Compelling readings of Adieu (1830) and Le Colonel Chabert (1832) assert Balzac's "rejection of the way Romanticism viewed the past." An equally provocative reading of The Red and the Black contends that Stendhal's disillusionment with the historical novel is visited upon protagonist Julien Sorel, whose sense of self has been supplanted by spectacular representations of his hero Napoleon. "By encouraging the public to consume the past and by making that past more real than life […] the new visual forms of history have robbed post-Revolutionary French culture of the very identity such spectacles hoped to foster" (219). Samuels chides Guy Debord, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard for their unfounded nostalgia for a pre-mediated bygone era, countering that modernity has always been intimately associated with spectacle. We are, however, left with persistent questions, stemming in part from Samuels's skepticism of poststructuralist theory. As he acknowledges, historical subjects shared the stage with exotic natural history exhibits, panoramas of distant places, wax figures of living celebrities, and depictions of "historical events" often less than a year old. Are we dealing with the problem of history when inaccessibility hinges on class, space, and money? Is the past extricable or distinct from other commodifications of the inaccessible? Samuels's significant contribution to our understanding of modern historical consciousness leaves us with the somber but timely impression that the truth may be inconsequential, providing the consumer feels the spectacle was worth the price. Nicholas Dobelbower Macalester College Copyright © 2006 L'Esprit Créateur

Reviews 283 alternative worlds, and this is a powerful and inspiring conclusion for a book of literary and film criticism. College of William & Mary (VA) Giulia Pacini Peters, Rosemary A. Stealing Things: Theft and the Author in Nineteenth-Century France. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7391-8004-4. Pp. ix + 264. $95. The author traces the shifting representations of theft from Rousseau’s Confessions to the fin de siècle through revisiting works by Balzac, Vidocq, the Comtesse de Ségur, and Zola as well as sociological texts, legal documents and the Code pénal. She argues that this crime, which has been relatively overlooked by critics, constitutes a fundamental element of the nineteenth-century cultural climate in France and provides a powerful tool for reading that climate and, more particularly, attitudes towards ownership and identity. After an introduction in which she supplies contextual background for the ways theft was framed and read by the nineteenth century, Peters devotes the first chapter of her book to Rousseau’s juvenile thefts, including that of the ribbon, and to Balzac’s Code des gens honnêtes (1825), an amusing sociological analysis of the Parisian thieves’underworld. In chapter two, Peters studies“paraliterary”representations of thieves and thievery, focusing on Vidocq’s Mémoires (1828) and Ségur’s Les malheurs de Sophie (1859). Chapter three considers how Balzac in Annette et le criminel (1824) and Zola in La bête humaine (1890) exploit pocket watches—objects emblematic of a shift to democratized ownership—to comment on property, class, and criminality. Switching from the theft of concrete objects to that of texts, chapter four examines the question of intellectual property and discusses Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s fiction as well as a controversy around the use of a pseudonym. Finally, chapter five addresses the case of kleptomania from different (literary,psychoanalytical, historical) points of view and uses Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) as a focal point. Peters succeeds in shedding light on nineteenth-century French culture by exploring its evolving outlook on theft and offering a number of provocative readings of (canonical ) texts. She underlines the way Vidocq’s writings paradoxically protect the very class structures they expose, for example. She stresses the interplay between personal time and historical time in Annette et le criminel. She considers Séverine an author and emphasizes the dangerous power of her letter in La bête humaine. She argues that Zola wages war against women in Au Bonheur des Dames. Many of Peters’s points are clever—she likes punning, paradox, etymological arguments—but some are not very clear (e.g., p.130, on La bête humaine, the end of the Second Empire, and the July Monarchy) and some are not quite compelling (e.g., p.102, on little Sophie’s gluttonous eating of bread and cream being linkable “to the agricultural thefts of the eighteenth century”). More generally, Peters, who does not provide any hard data about the number of convicted thieves or the number of novels about thievery in 1830, 1848, 1870, or 1890, at times fails to distinguish clearly between things and words, theft and its representation. That said, Stealing Things constitutes a fine performance and will be of interest to students of crime fiction and the nineteenth century. University of Pennsylvania Gerald Prince Piva, Marika. Chateaubriand face aux traditions. Passignano: Aguaplano, 2012. ISBN 978-88-97738-19-0. Pp. 175. 16 a. Written in five chapters, this study places Chateaubriand’s work at the intersection of the old and the new: a hybrid of tradition and modernity. Through an analysis of Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Piva explores Chateaubriand’s use of historical sources and proposes a new perspective on the originality of his writing. Rather than recycling citations from authors such as Montaigne, Le Tasse, and Valery, Chateaubriand instead creates a mosaic that rewrites and interrogates traditional literary and historical concepts. The result is a contemporary construction of the author’s identity through the act of writing and questioning of history.According to Piva, the basis for this study is that the art of Chateaubriand“trouve son acmé au carrefour de différentes traditions et que l...

MARTIN, BRIAN JOSEPH. Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France. Durham: UP of New Hampshire, 2011. ISBN 978-158465 -956-3. Pp. xvii + 379. $39.95. This book examines the evolution of a military model of intimacy and affection between male soldiers in nineteenth-century France. The author draws on archival military memoirs and literary fiction to trace the development of homosocial ‘Napoleonic friendships’ in the Grande Armée that ultimately culminates with modernity’s gay soldier. In his introduction, Martin outlines various homoerotic theories of combat, from antiquity to modern days, citing in particular the work of nineteenth-century military theorists who placed an emphasis on physical and emotional intimacy among soldiers as a strategy for stronger, more cohesive armies. The revolutionary military reforms of 1789–99 made these relationships possible as they transformed recruitment and training practices and socialized soldiers as fraternal and devoted equals. In part one (of three), Martin identifies the three forms of Napoleonic friendship of the Grande Armée: “lateral relationships between soldiers of similar rank, compassionate relationships between leaders and their men, and devotional relationships between soldiers and their superiors” (49). Perhaps appropriately, Martin’s archival research strongly suggests that Napoleon himself engaged in this eponymous model of homoeroticism. While he does not go so far as to conclude that Napoleon participated in sexual relations with any of his officers, Martin’s astute reading of archival letters between the Emperor and one of his generals reveals an intimacy characterized by affection and seduction. In his next chapter, Martin turns to a genre whose interest lies in its slippage between history and fiction: the Napoleonic military memoir. Drawing on Philippe Lejeune’s work on autobiography, Martin considers the published memoirs of three of Napoleon’s officers and establishes a compelling link between these personal historical accounts of combat and friendship and the Napoleonic military fiction that he examines in part two. In this subsequent section devoted entirely to the battle at Waterloo in post-1815 Napoleonic fiction, Martin convincingly reads Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir as an allegory for the Napoleonic military closet and Balzac’s recurring veteran pairs in La comédie humaine as the products of military ideologies that discouraged heterosexual contact and marriage. His discussion of Hugo’s military memory in Les misérables, however, seems to stray at times from the work’s larger themes and intentions. Part three examines Napoleonic friendship from the Restoration to the Second Empire (1815–70) in the works of Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola. In his continued discussion of La comédie humaine, Martin identifies an evolving model of the Napoleonic family during the Restoration and July Monarchy that centers on surrogate military fathers and sons. In his final chapter, Martin turns to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the anti-militarist fiction that materialized following France’s emasculating defeat. Perhaps of most interest in his discussion of Maupassant and Zola is the link that he establishes between the nineteenthcentury model of Napoleonic friendship and the homosexual soldier that surfaced alongside nationalistic discourses on masculinity. Indeed, in his conclusion, Martin argues that Proust’s Le temps retrouvé marked the emergence of the gay soldier in the French literary tradition. While the figure of Saint-Loup went on to influence the homoerotic works of writers such as Cocteau and Gide, Martin persuasively reminds us that the roots of this evolving homosexual military culture date back to the revolutionary days of the late eighteenth century. Reviews 577 One of the greatest strengths of Martin’s Napoleonic Friendship is that it reaches across multiple disciplines in history, literature, art, and gender studies. Perhaps of most interest to literary scholars is the fact that Martin also perceptively recognizes the intertextuality within these nineteenth-century memoirs and novels and situates them against a long tradition of French epic poems, epistolary novels, and pastoral romances. Though a bit repetitive at times, overall this timely study poignantly resonates with modern-day discussions regarding gays in the American military. University of Central Florida Sharon Larson O’DEA, MICHAEL, éd. Rousseau et les philosophes. SVEC 2010:12. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7294-1004-5...

BOOK REVIEWS89 so that anyone who can read French should read and savor Maistre in the original (a new critical edition has been prepared by Darcel). Jack Lively's Works ofJoseph de Maistre (New York, 1965) translates excerpts from all eleven dialogues of the Soirées, but omits the endnotes, and tries rather toe obtrusively to save the reader from falling under Maistre's spell. Lebrun, who has been writing on Maistre for thirty years, and who translated Maistre's Considerations on France (Montreal, 1974) has now given us the first complete version of the Soirées in English. Readers may be pained to see a writer like Maistre described as "honing his literary style" and "polishing his linguistic skills" (p. xi), and the incidence of typos is distressingly high. But Lebrun would not claim to write English as well as Maistre wrote French (if such a comparison makes sense), nor would he claim to have rendered the original version redundant (p. xi). What he has done is to produce a clear and complete translation, including numerous corrections (following Darcel) to Maistre's reference: (e.g., p. 48, n. 29), and a fifteen-page, three-column index, "so that those who are unable to read him in his original language can come to a better understanding . . ." (p. xi). We can be glad that he did. E. D. Watt University of Western Australia The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France. By Geoffrey Cubitt. (New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1993. Pp. viii, 346. S59.00.) The king of France scuttled through the tunnel connecting the royal palace with the Jesuit novitiate. There the Master of Novices told him how to rule the country. Meanwhile the novices were in the basement practicing small arms drill. This was not the stuff of Gothic novels but only a small snippet of the "true facts" that made up the Jesuit myth. However ridiculous the myth, all too many people in nineteenth-century France firmly believed such stories and others much more far-fetched than these about the Jesuits. TheJesuitMyth is "a study on what has sometimes been called the 'paranoid style' in politics or 'conspiracy theory.' " René Rémond, the historian ofFrench anticlericalism, said that around theJesuits there developed "a veritable myth, comparable in many respects to those which have formed around witchcraft, the Templars, Freemasonry or the Jews." A literary and political tradition of anti-Jesuitism exists in the English-speaking world, to be sure, but in no way does it rival in breadth and intensity that tradition in France. This was a phenomenon that engaged Beranger in libelous anti-Jesuit songs, gave Eugène Sue fame with his potboiler serial novel, LeJuifErrant, intrigued Balzac, and turned the deservedly great historian Michelet into a vulgar anti-Jesuit propagandist . 90BOOK REVIEWS In an introduction, ten chapters, and a conclusion this book provides a vivid, thoroughly documented case study, replete with example, of "the propensity to formulate and to accept conspiracy theories" in nineteenth-century France. The first of two such leading theories came from the Right which "provided a tradition of counter-revolutionary conspiracy theory, focusing on Freemasonry and revolutionary secret societies." Plenty ofserious studies exist on this end of the spectrum. The liberal and republican Left had its own tradition of such theory, "as highly developed, as tenacious and as influential . . . . The enemies denounced in this tradition were the Jesuits." About this end of the spectrum, there have been few such serious studies. Cubitt's book treats the phenomenon in all its complexity. The first chapter explores in general anti-Jesuitism and the Jesuits in France from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, and then after die Society's restoration in 1814. Then three chapters deal with the opposition to theJesuits as portrayed in myth during the Restoration and the July Monarchy and, in its third great manifestation, in the debate that culminated in the Ferry Decrees of 1880 to its final spasm in the anti-Jesuit portion of the Dreyfus Affair. Then in six more chapters the author turns to an analysis of the structures, imagery, and argument of anti-Jesuitism, to "murder, money and spies" as Jesuit...

Not many people, even among specialists in French literature, will have heard of Paul-Louis Courier. In the nineteenth century, however, he was almost as famous as Diderot and Chateaubriand still are, mainly because in 1824 he published a pamphlet entitled Le Pamphlet des pamphlets that, in inadvertent homage to its title by posterity, became something like a model of what a pamphlet should be. For many years during the nineteenth century, Courier was associated as strongly with the pamphlet as Lafontaine with the fable or La Rochefoucauld with the maxim. He is, as a result, one of the major figures in Laetitia Saintes’s large and very well documented study of French pamphlet literature in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Courier had a readership and a presence comparable to those now enjoyed by Chateaubriand, Germaine de Staël, or Benjamin Constant. Unlike them, however, Courier adopted a persona, in this case that of a plain-spoken peasant from the Touraine, to comment on topical subjects, current events, and public figures. Here too the persona in question became something like a model of what a persona should be. In this respect, Courier was soon matched or followed by the chansonnier Pierre-Jean de Béranger and by the many assorted publications of Louis de Courmenin and Claude Tillier, and their work in turn provides the basis of much of the historical and analytical content of the whole monograph. Despite its size, both the historical and analytical sides of this otherwise fine study are somewhat limited. Pamphlet literature did not begin in France between 1814 and 1848; even in nineteenth-century France, it had its earlier counterparts in the publications of the period of the French Wars of Religion or the mazarinades of the time of the Fronde. The reason for making the point is not to indicate a straightforward historical omission but to suggest, instead, that overlooking this temporal dimension makes it more difficult to recognize the several different levels of historicity built into the combination of a pamphlet and a persona, irrespective of whether its target is situated in France in the nineteenth century or, as in the persona of John Bull and the pamphlets of William ­Cobbett, somewhere entirely different. Something, in short, about the genre itself has gone missing. ­Pamphlets clearly belong to the world of print, but their content could belong to the worlds of Roman satire, the Greek Cynics, or even the Parisian sans-culottes. The multiple connotations of the satire, diatribe, or polemic often involved in pamphlet literature are not particularly visible in this study, and neither is discussion of the procedures and evaluations followed in other well-known studies of pamphlet literature by, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin or Robert Darnton. On its own terms, however, this remains an impressively thorough examination of French pamphlet literature between 1814 and 1848.

...la feuille de figuier de notre mere Eve etait une robe de cachemire.Theorie de la demarcheIn the first Convolute of The Arcades Project, taking for subject Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautes, and Sales Clerks, Walter Benjamin identifies the cashmere shawl as the essential hot commodity of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Quoting an 1854 volume entitled Paris chez soi, Benjamin offers the following synopsis of the lifespan of the shawl:... In 1798 and 1799, the Egyptian campaign lent frightful importance to the fashion for shawls. Some generals in the expeditionary army, taking advantage of the proximity of India, sent home shawls.. . of cashmere to their wives and lady friends . . . From then on, the disease that might be called cashmere fever took on significant proportions. It began to spread during the Consulate, grew greater under the Empire, became gigantic during the Restoration, reached colossal size under the July Monarchy, and has finally assumed Sphinx-like dimensions since the February Revolution of 1848. (55)Benjamin's source conflates two favorite nineteenth-century discourses in his brief chronology-that of malady (disease, spread) and that of orientalism (Sphinx-like)-linking the two through the concept of size (gigantic, colossal, etc.). According to Benjamin's bemused speaker, who historicizes the contagion of cashmere, the cashmere shawl, unlike most other shorter-lived fashion trends, possesses an ever-expanding appeal that seems, curiously, to be directly linked to the shifting political regimes of nineteenth-century France.What might this feverish acquisition of cashmere shawls indicate about French society and its consumption habits in the nineteenth century and, no less significant, what does it suggest about the cultural impact of the object itself? Further, what political subtext might be lurking beneath the surface of the story of cashmere in nineteenth-century France? This article investigates the trajectory of cashmere shawls in Balzac's La Cousine Bette and Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale and proposes that the rise and fall of the cashmere shawl as fashion trend expresses significant social and political concerns-namely the inter-related anxieties over authenticity and social mobility-that preoccupied the nineteenth-century imagination. Before exploring the novels, first I will outline the historical context of the cashmere shawl in nineteenth-century France and then consider two key early texts by Balzac that define its cultural context.1. CASHMERE IN CONTEXTAn expensive, hand-woven textile brought to France from the East through Napoleon's campaigns, the cashmere shawl was to become a cultural fetish evoking sensual fantasies of the Orient before falling out of fashion in the latter half of the century. Frank Ames, in his history of the Kashmir shawl, describes the first point of contact between fashion and empire: When Napoleon returned from Egypt, the generals and officers who had served under him brought back mementoes of the Orient. Among these were Kashmir shawls which they wore wrapped around their waists as belts, and which had been plundered from the Mamelukes, the soldiers of the Egyptian army (135). From its origin as a war souvenir, back in Paris the shawl was quickly transformed into fashion's dernier cri, in part for its beauty but also for its functionality in the new, simpler fashions of the first Empire, which necessitated warm coverings for exposed decolletages and gauzily-clad limbs (Ames 135). An erotic vestimentary sign because of its warmth and delicacy, the cashmere shawl permitted fashionable ladies to dress scantily in public and still remain decorously covered. The garment that was once associated with the masculine, public domain of the military, its appropriation indicating conquest and power, shifted as it moved into the feminized, private, and domestic sphere of fashion, but lost none of its power. Its rise to the status symbol par excellence of the mid-nineteenth century was precipitated largely by the trend setting and exhorbitant spending of the Empress Josephine, who reputedly never asked the price of a shawl (Ames 135). …

...la feuille de figuier de notre mere Eve etait une robe de cachemire.Theorie de la demarcheIn the first "Convolute" of The Arcades Project, taking for subject "Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautes, and Sales Clerks," Walter Benjamin identifies the cashmere shawl as the essential hot commodity of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Quoting an 1854 volume entitled Paris chez soi, Benjamin offers the following synopsis of the lifespan of the shawl:... In 1798 and 1799, the Egyptian campaign lent frightful importance to the fashion for shawls. Some generals in the expeditionary army, taking advantage of the proximity of India, sent home shawls.. . of cashmere to their wives and lady friends . . . From then on, the disease that might be called cashmere fever took on significant proportions. It began to spread during the Consulate, grew greater under the Empire, became gigantic during the Restoration, reached colossal size under the July Monarchy, and has finally assumed Sphinx-like dimensions since the February Revolution of 1848. (55)Benjamin's source conflates two favorite nineteenth-century discourses in his brief chronology-that of malady (disease, spread) and that of orientalism (Sphinx-like)-linking the two through the concept of size (gigantic, colossal, etc.). According to Benjamin's bemused speaker, who historicizes the contagion of cashmere, the cashmere shawl, unlike most other shorter-lived fashion trends, possesses an ever-expanding appeal that seems, curiously, to be directly linked to the shifting political regimes of nineteenth-century France.What might this "feverish" acquisition of cashmere shawls indicate about French society and its consumption habits in the nineteenth century and, no less significant, what does it suggest about the cultural impact of the object itself? Further, what political subtext might be lurking beneath the surface of the story of cashmere in nineteenth-century France? This article investigates the trajectory of cashmere shawls in Balzac's La Cousine Bette and Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale and proposes that the rise and fall of the cashmere shawl as fashion trend expresses significant social and political concerns-namely the inter-related anxieties over authenticity and social mobility-that preoccupied the nineteenth-century imagination. Before exploring the novels, first I will outline the historical context of the cashmere shawl in nineteenth-century France and then consider two key early texts by Balzac that define its cultural context.1. CASHMERE IN CONTEXTAn expensive, hand-woven textile brought to France from the East through Napoleon's campaigns, the cashmere shawl was to become a cultural fetish evoking sensual fantasies of the Orient before falling out of fashion in the latter half of the century. Frank Ames, in his history of the Kashmir shawl, describes the first point of contact between fashion and empire: "When Napoleon returned from Egypt, the generals and officers who had served under him brought back mementoes of the Orient. Among these were Kashmir shawls which they wore wrapped around their waists as belts, and which had been plundered from the Mamelukes, the soldiers of the Egyptian army" (135). From its origin as a war souvenir, back in Paris the shawl was quickly transformed into fashion's dernier cri, in part for its beauty but also for its functionality in the new, simpler fashions of the first Empire, which necessitated warm coverings for exposed decolletages and gauzily-clad limbs (Ames 135). An erotic vestimentary sign because of its warmth and delicacy, the cashmere shawl permitted fashionable ladies to dress scantily in public and still remain decorously covered. The garment that was once associated with the masculine, public domain of the military, its appropriation indicating conquest and power, shifted as it moved into the feminized, private, and domestic sphere of fashion, but lost none of its power. Its rise to the status symbol par excellence of the mid-nineteenth century was precipitated largely by the trend setting and exhorbitant spending of the Empress Josephine, who reputedly never asked the price of a shawl (Ames 135). …

As scholars have observed recently, the study of hallucinations, hypnosis, and dreaming in nineteenth-century France was often linked to divisive social, political and cultural issues. For example, during the July Monarchy (1830-1848) many secular and religious figures on the political Left celebrated these phenomena for their capacity to disclose moral strategies that would lead to the regeneration of French economic and political life. The revolutionary implications of these views alarmed moderate liberals like Alfred Maury (1817-1892) who instead believed that all involuntary mental states were no more than the natural results of physiological conditions in the brain and nervous system. Maury's pioneering studies of the psychology of the unconscious mind are important not only because they cast doubt on the reliability of Catholic ideas, but also for the way they refracted growing bourgeois anxiety about the escalating threat of revolution from France's 'dangerous classes'.

The regime produced by the French Revolution of 1848 ultimately failed to endure. The Second Republic passed into the hands of men who would emasculate and finally destroy it. But it did not fail, as Friedrich Engels thought, because the time was not ripe for revolution, or at least for significant social change.' The failure of the revolution was the fault of republican leadership, which in early 1848 made a political mistake of truly epic proportions. In brief, the republicans followed a policy in flat contradiction to the nature of the regime they were trying to construct and largely irrelevant to the society in which they lived. The first half of the nineteenth century in France witnessed one of the richest and most creative movements of social thought in modem history. A variety of theorists brilliantly anticipated the development of industrial capitalist society, found it wanting in crucial respects, and proposed any number of substantive modifications and radical alternatives. By the 1830s and '40s la question sociale had come to dominate discussion on the left, whose spokesmen mostly accepted (though in varying degrees) the responsibility of the state to preserve its citizens from at least the worst rigors of economic misery; the July Monarchy itself hewed closer to a classical laissez faire policy. While these facts are well known, it has less often been noted that, in actual practice, most writing on the social question encompassed a rather limited range of issues. First and foremost, social criticism on the left concerned itself with urban poverty-the plight of city artisans, unskilled laborers, and, where they existed, factory workers.

Reviewed by: Pour le Sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature ed. by Roxanna Curto and Rebecca Wines Jodie Barker Curto, Roxanna and Rebecca Wines, eds. Pour le Sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature. Liverpool UP, 2021. ISBN 978-1-80085-689-9. Pp 332. When choosing this book to review over the summer, I believed that I would be embarking upon a reading voyage full of fun and amusement, as the title might imply. While these characteristics do make appearances throughout the edited volume, the work as a whole presents the nuanced—and often thorny—circumstances and perspectives that sport and physical culture highlight in the literatures and cultures of the French-speaking world. The volume opens with a thorough introduction that outlines its organization and explains the content of each essay, which is particularly useful considering the large scope and diversity of its essays. According to the editors, the essays are ordered "more or less chronologically" and while their theoretical tone is at times heavy, the observational quality that many of them embrace as part of their style is a welcome point de repère for the reader. For scholars working in early time periods whose physical culture is often overshadowed by contemporary sport phenomena, Part I, "Physical Activities and Games Prior to the Twentieth Century," will be of particular interest. Each of the three chapters performs unique and insightful readings of physical culture that include jeu de paume, mountaineering, and trictrac in works by Chrétien de Troyes, Montaigne, and Mérimée. In the four parts that follow, the essays explore sports including rugby, running, boxing, cycling, and, as one might expect, soccer as seen in literature and in contemporary culture. One of the volume's most important contributions is its exposure of the common themes that arise regardless of the century or sport, such as the relationship between sport and power, between sport and social class, between sport and race, and also between sport and gender, which is demonstrated in Cynthia Laborde's engaging analysis of Le petit Nicolas. Yet it is the relationship between sport and violence that is perhaps not only the most fascinating, but also the most disturbing and urgent issue, which the volume brings to light. With a work that encompasses so much, then, what could be missing? Sports like fencing, pétanque, and sailing, which one could assume as inexorably linked to some French-language cultures, do not make an appearance in the volume. This, however, is not necessarily evidence of an oversight or inherent lack. Rather, it reveals further opportunities to explore physical culture in French-speaking countries in scholarly contexts, or even just pour le sport. [End Page 272] Jodie Barker University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Reviewed by: Pour le Sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature ed. by Roxana Curto and Rebecca Wines Benjamin Sparks Curto, Roxana, and Rebecca Wines, eds. Pour le Sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature. Liverpool UP, 2021. ISBN 978-1-80085-689-9. Pp. 344. Sport, for centuries, has played a significant role in creating personal, collective, and national identities, conjuring regional and national heroes in moments of triumph, and scapegoats in those of failure. This edited volume analyzes physical culture, defined by the editors as the development and care for the physique, including sport, in the modern sense, as well as leisure and athletic activities. The title implies that these activities are indeed forms of culture that can be analyzed similarly to art and literature. The contributors for this volume come from a broad interdisciplinary background, situating this work at the crossroads of history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and media studies, among other fields. Moreover, to broaden the scope of this work, the editors chose not to focus on one specific sport, period, or geographical location. Therefore, this work looks at physical culture from the Ancient Regime's jeu de paume to present-day soccer in post-colonial Algeria. The emphasis from these contributors focuses on the genre of sports literature, from sports manuals to novels, questioning its existence and characteristics. The primary focus of this work is that of literature. However, this literature opens itself to addressing sports' social, cultural, and political nature. The essays in this volume are ordered chronologically and divided thematically. The first division looks at physical activities and games before the twentieth century. The complication with this portion of the work derives from the fact that the term "sport," as understood today, did not become such until the late nineteenth century. Hence, the contributors focus on physical culture, which includes jousting, jeu de paume, other ball games, and physical activities. Literature about sport during this period demonstrates the cultural significance of physical games as an integral component of the upper-class' way of life and a source of pride, not mere pastimes. The second part of this work looks at the Tour de France and cycling as a demonstration of masculinity and as a means for sport to convey cultural concerns for the body and hygiene. As one of the contributors argues, this annual cycling event projects French society and culture to the outside world. The third part of this book looks at the athletic event of competitive running and sports as a medium for propaganda and manipulation for ideological and political purposes. The next part of this work looks at football (soccer) cultures to illustrate the power of narratives to shape opinions. One contributor looks at soccer as a colonial legacy in Algeria and the ideological relationship between the sport and national identity. The contributions in the final section of this work analyze how narratives about sport and physical activity, especially rugby, soccer, and boxing, can expose tensions in differing views of society and national culture. Pour le Sport provides an engaging discourse around physical activities through a literary lens but, more importantly, provides insight into the social, political, and cultural milieu surrounding sport. [End Page 209] Benjamin Sparks University of Memphis (TN) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Of Dolls and Girls in Nineteenth-Century France Valérie C. Lastinger (bio) Most French children become acquainted with the nineteenth-century poet Victor Hugo through excerpts from his novel Les Misérables, a book filled with lively and memorable children. The three main female children characters—Cosette, Ponine, and Zelma—are introduced after the following passage: A doll is one of the most imperious needs, and at the same time one of the most charming instincts, of female childhood. . . . To care for, to clothe, to adorn, to dress, to undress, to dress over, to teach, to scold a little, to rock, to cuddle, to put to sleep, to imagine that something is somebody—all the future of woman is there. . . . The first baby takes the place of the last doll. A little girl without a doll is almost as unfortunate and quite as impossible as a woman without children. [343] Reading this passage, Laura Kreyder comments that "these famous pages . . . continue to represent the model of the play-relation of the 'child-woman' in yesterday and today's textbooks" (90).1 Certainly, Victor Hugo remains a dominant patriarchal authority figure in France; within the narrow limits of these few lines, feminists can recognize a deterministic summary of maternity as the only possible female destiny. Hugo's responsibility is great; his impress on French literature and politics and his influence in the domain of French children's literature are undeniable. French children today commonly read abridged versions of Les Misérables (1862) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Excerpts from Les Misérabks, as Kreyder notes, are usually part of grade school curricula, and the favorite passages—those that deal with Cosette as a child—are the passages I consider here. It is tempting for feminists to portray Hugo as perpetuating a conditioning of female childhood into the maternal role. At the center of this conditioning rests the doll, this reified child—usually, this reified female child. But Hugo deserves a fair hearing; an analysis [End Page 20] of gender role models should not rest on a few lines. These few lines, moreover, should be read with great care, for they are rich and controversial. Indeed, Hugo's text contains a number of "windows" through which readers may glimpse a world not quite so rigid as the one first readily perceived. Typically Hugolian, typically romantic, the rhetoric of the passage is based on a series of binary oppositions or equivalences: imperious/charming; something/ somebody; doll-less girl/childless woman; first baby/last doll. These rhetorical pairs, so familiar to Hugo's landscape and so forcibly penetrating the reader's mind, prove here, however, to be just as many sophisms for the contemporary reader.2 Where, we may ask, is the rational impossibility in the sentence "as impossible as a woman without children"? The word impossible works on at least two levels, implying both biological impossibility and an incompatibility of characters (that is, a woman without children is impossible to live with). Of course, infertility is hardly rare and barren women are not necessarily high-strung and inflexible. Thus taken apart, Hugo's deceptive aphorism implies another: "a little girl without a doll is as possible as a woman without children." Take another of Hugo's assertions: "to imagine that something is somebody, all the future of woman is there." The cleanness of such a phrasing at first seduces, but again one is tempted to reverse the sentence to make sense of it. Under patriarchy, a woman's future is not to imagine that something is somebody but rather to understand that she, somebody, is something. The temptation to reverse the axiom is all the stronger since historians have shown that by the late seventeenth century, contrary to earlier practice, babies were certainly considered as somebody rather than something(Aries 53-73).3 With such examples of the slyness of apparently clear-cut sentences, one suspects that when it comes to the portrayal of gender, Hugo may also distort stereotypes. In this context, a stereotype is defined as an idea that on a superficial level can pass as being expected, predictable, unimaginative. In the opening passage, for...

Reviewed by: Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth Century France by Eliza Jane Smith Amanda Dalola Smith, Eliza Jane. Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth Century France. Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN: 978-1793621146. Pp. 298. Combining sociolinguistic methods and literary analysis, this volume seeks to demonstrate how writers in the nineteenth century represented slang in French literature and ultimately helped define lower-class and criminal culture via linguistic means. True to its title, the book revolves around a concept the author coins "literary slumming," a sociolinguistic style shift in which writers from privileged backgrounds explore forbidden social realms via the appropriation of aspects of lower-class culture, and then fashion them for a bourgeois public in a way that creates a collective cultural image of what it means to be socially disadvantaged, criminal, immoral, or sexually deviant. The phenomenon is heavily mediated by the concept of "indexicality," a process in which context-bounded ways of speaking reference attached cultural ideologies like social class, gender, race, etc., in both referential, e.g., the overt use of informal tu pronouns, and non-referential ways, e.g., the use of a certain dialect, gestures, or slang. Because indexes are subject to an infinite number of interpretations, they exist within an "indexical field," a constellation of meanings that are fluid but ideologically linked. The author's main argument in this text is that the non-referential indexes of slang presented in nineteenth-century French literature are part of a larger adaptable system of ideological interpretation that witnessed a noticeable shift during this time: whereas slang in texts early on often served to index criminals, it later served to index hip Parisians or working-class prostitutes. A new indexical order emerged altogether in Victor Hugo's Les misérables, where slang was used for the first time to index victims, poverty, and social misery, performatively positioning its larger referential group of criminals and working-class figures as individuals in need of assistance from the upper classes. Following an introduction that situates the sociolinguistic framework, the text branches off into six thematic chapters, each exploring a different indexical value for nineteenth-century French slang: criminal code, embodied language, language politics, language of misery, language of Parisians, and language of whores. Within each chapter, discussion proceeds through a series of literary excerpts, each of which is analyzed in terms of its non-referential indexes informing the larger indexical field of slang at various moments in history. The book closes with an epilogue that contextualizes literary slumming even outside the confines of nineteenth-century French literature, e.g., during the Renaissance, in American and British writers, even among 21st-century white hip-hoppers. While advances in printing technology leading to the proliferation of serials for the public may have first accelerated it in the nineteenth century, the mechanism of literary slumming is still alive and well today, not only in literature, but also in music, film, and Internet culture, propagated by the continued presence of social, racial, and gender inequalities. [End Page 254] The book concludes with a call to arms for the dominated to reclaim their self-stylized languages (and not necessarily those popularized by outgroup writers) as an act of resistance against the dominant culture, a message that both literary scholars and sociolinguists alike will agree must never go out of style. [End Page 255] Amanda Dalola University of Minnesota Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Blonski and the texts of French culture The article is devoted to Jan Blonski’s connections with French literature and culture. Blonski, a Francophile and expert on France, repeatedly wrote about the greatest French novelists and playwrights. He also showed interest in twentieth-century French philosophy and French literary criticism (i.a. criticism of consciousness) and was engaged in translation and popularization activities as well. In the French texts of culture he has seen model forms of experiencing the modern cultural, historical and civilisation transformations. However, it did not prevent him from keeping the critical approach to many phenomena present in the French culture. The author of the article thus shows both the main areas of interest and fascination of the critic, as well as those phenomena in contemporary French literature and theory to which Blonski retained far-reaching scepticism.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0in">Learning a foreign language cannot
 be separated from literature and culture. One of the definitions of literature
 is a reflection of society; so through literature we can know the real image of
 society as well as the culture. Moreover, by knowing the foreign cultures of
 the countries from which we learn the language, we can not only read, but also
 understand the problems that appear in the texts studied. Similarly, French
 culture cannot be separated from Maghreb culture. The two cultures complement
 each other, later becoming the content of various literary, French literary and
 Francophone literary. The relationship between the two cultures is also part of
 the content of Virginie Despentes' novel <i>Apocalypse
 bébé</i>. Through this novel, we can see an image of the relationship between
 France and the Maghreb people in their social life. Thus, as a learner of
 French, we could know not only French culture through the textbooks published
 by French publishers, but also recognize the French culture associated with
 France both directly and indirectly. Therefore, the literary text entitled <i>Apocalypse bébé</i> can be an alternative
 source of learning French, not only in terms of language attached to vocabulary
 and grammar, but also to know French and Francophone culture so that students
 know the relationship for understanding and analyzing literary works.</p>