Stealing Things: Theft and the Author in Nineteenth-Century France by Rosemary A. Peters

Abstract

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...