Des Deux Mondes Research Articles

English-Language Periodicals in Parisian Reading Rooms and the Cross-Channel Transfer of Editorial Innovation (1800–65)

In the historical context of the development and modernization of the press, of an increasingly intense transnational circulation of ideas and of editorial styles, this essay sets out to analyze the reasons why reading rooms specialized in the foreign-language press, especially in English—for which the market was narrow—were successful in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century. It examines the consequences of the circulation of the normally difficult to access British periodicals and newspapers, such as the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review and the Westminster Review present in these reading rooms, on the transformation of the French media system. In the 1850s and 1860s, the wind started to change direction. By then, on the other side of the Channel, Alexander Macmillan and Mathew Arnold had become fervent admirers of the famous Revue des deux mondes. This turnabout testifies to the complexity of the mechanisms at work behind transnational cultural transfers and media innovation in France and in Britain at the time.

Temporary Housing and Unsettled Population: Drivers of Urban Change in Early Modern Marseille and Rome

Abstract This paper argues that unsettled people, far from being “marginal” individuals, played a key role in shaping early modern cities. It does so by going beyond the traditional binary between rooted and unstable people. Specifically, the paper takes the temporary places of residence of this “unsettled” population – notably inns (garnis in France, osterie in Italy) – as a vantage point to observe social change in early modern cities. The case studies are two cities which shared a growing and highly mobile population in the early modern period: Rome and Marseille. In the first section, the paper focuses on two semi-rural neighborhoods. This is to assess the impact of mobility in shaping demographic, urbanistic, and economic patterns in these areas. Moving from the neighborhood as a whole to the individual buildings which composed it, the second section outlines the biographies of two inns: Rome’s osteria d’Acquataccio and Marseille’s hôtel des Deux mondes. In turn, this is to evaluate changes and continuities over a longer period of time.

Articles on the 19th-century Russian literature in the Parisian magazine “Revue des Deux Mondes”

Articles on the 19th-century Russian literature in the Parisian magazine “Revue des Deux Mondes”

Educating Nélida and Valentia: Female Mentorship in Two Works by Marie d’Agoult

The fact that Marie d’Agoult published her 1846 novel, Nelida —long dismissed as an act of vengeance against Franz Liszt—in a socialist periodical, La Revue independante , rather than the established Revue des deux mondes , suggests that she had other goals in mind. D’Agoult centers both Nelida and her 1847 nouvelle, Valentia , on the eponymous heroines’ education, paying particular attention to the role of the female mentor. In Elisabeth, Nelida’s mentor, d’Agoult gives us a socialist, feminist version of that quintessential male mentor, Vautrin, and an alternative to the male protagonist’s failed social ascent and illusions perdues : social intervention in collective life. The lessons of Valentia’s mentor, Rosane d’Ermeuil, a high society courtesan, are, in contrast to those of Elisabeth, primarily sexual in nature. Through these two original and strikingly different figures, d’Agoult offers a two-pronged “way out” for women, a plan for fulfilling them in both mind and body.

Emilia Pardo Bazán en La España Moderna (1889-1910)

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar las colaboraciones de Emilia Pardo Bazán en La España Moderna, la revista cultural más importante del último tercio del siglo XIX, comparable a la Revue des deux mondes. La escritora coruñesa contribuyó de forma decisiva junto a su director Lárazo Galdiano a la fundación de la revista para la que consiguió la colaboración de los mejores escritores de su tiempo. Ella misma ejerció la crítica literaria a través de artículos y reseñas, publicó algunos de sus trabajos más relevantes sobre feminismo, así como cuentos y novelas por entregas. El análisis demuestra que Pardo Bazán llevó a cabo una importante tarea cultural desde postulados eclécticos y con un marcado carácter regeneracionista y europeísta.

A pena e a espada: a Revue des Deux Mondes e a intervenção francesa no México

Este artigo analisa os textos publicados pela Revue des Deux Mondes a respeito do México, entre 1840 e 1870. A revista expressava a opinião de grupos de intelectuais próximos ao poder político, entendidos aqui como representantes dos interesses nacionais franceses. O México se distinguia, na América Latina, como centro principal de suas atenções. A revista elaborou imagens da França como o mais importante país latino que olhava para sua "irmã de sangue", a nação mexicana, com o desejo de dirigir seus passos. Os artigos lembravam o glorioso passado da França e insistiam na necessidade do país se interpor ao avanço, na região, de sua grande rival, a Grã-Bretanha, e da nova "ameaça", os Estados Unidos. Os articulistas estimularam seus leitores a pensarem a França como grande potência colocada em lugar de preeminência internacional legitimado por sua história, cultura e civilização.

The Midi, Marseille and the Mediterranean: the Case of Les Cahiers du Sud

Les Cahiers du Sud constitutes one of the great success stories of French literary review production in the Twentieth Century. With a span of over forty years, the journal was one of the longest-lived productions in what is a notoriously ephemeral field, surviving and outstripping contemporaries such as the Nouvelle Revue Fram:;aise and Europe, and bettered only by the venerable Revue des Deux Mondes and the more radical Les Temps Modernes. It was also one of the most influential literary and cultural periodicals of twentieth-century France, not merely in the area of contemporary poetry, which remained its mainstay throughout its career, but also in broader literary and intellectual concerns. Moreover, it was a genuinely international review, both in its subject-matter and in its wide range of contributors, and, above all, it constitutes a unique case in French periodical publishing as the only non-Parisian review to have achieved either this longevity or such a national and international reputation: 'la seule revue provinciale d'une telle longevite a pouvoir etre cite parmi les grandes revues fran9aises'.1 As such, Les Cahiers du Sud raises some important questions in the history of the review in France in the Twentieth Century. In the first place, it constitutes a case-history of how a journal begins its career, constitutes itself and, above all, develops and survives. As Louis Brauquier notes: 'naitre n'est rien, Ie difficile c'est de durer. C'est la Ie chef d'oeuvre realise par Jean Ballard'/ a comment which in its tum begs an important question, namely the ambition, unusual in itself in literary reviews, to pass beyond an immediate, ephemeral, stage into durability. Secondly, in the context of twentieth-century cultural history, Les Cahiers du Sud provides a privileged perspective on the ambiguous and troubled relationship between provincial cultural production and the national culture, more precisely between the provincial city (in this case, Marseille) and the capital, Paris. Finally, in its success in establishing itself as a major national and international journal, but firmly rooted in Marseille, Les Cahiers du Sud plays a major role in the creation of the Midi in the Twentieth Century.

The “truth” about the middle ages: La Revue des Deux Mondes and late nineteenth‐century French medievalism

The “truth” about the middle ages: La Revue des Deux Mondes and late nineteenth‐century French medievalism

Translating Metaphors from Québec to Kansas

As a child growing up in Detroit, I always viewed (English) Canada more as a close, next door neighbour than as a distant, “foreign” country. So when I saw the Théâtre de la Marmaille (now Le Théâtre des Deux Mondes) perform Crying to Laugh at their us debut in my home town in 1984, I felt an immediate closeness. This is what children’s theatre ought to be, I thought, for they had captured the essence of what it means to be a child in an adult culture (see Klein, “Le Théâtre”). The fact that Monique Rioux played Mea (a linguistic play on the word “me”) only added to my feelings of intracultural connectedness, since Rioux is my Québec-born mother’s maiden name. When I visited Montreal for the first time the following year to explore my dormant Québécois roots through theatre, I felt an overwhelming, yet inexplicable, sensation of having arrived “home.” How could this be – moi, the incompetent French-speaking “foreigner” in this “separate and distinct society”?

Reconciling France: Jean Paulhan and the "Nouvelle Revue Francaise," 1953

Almost ten years after it had closed down in 1943, the prestigious review La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise reappeared on 1 January 1953. Superficially, the only change was in the additional adjective fixed to its title, La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Frangaise (hereafter designated as Nouvelle NRF). This was a literary and cultural event of great significance, since it was covered by a wide range of French, British, and other foreign newspapers and periodicals. Although its editors-Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland-had hoped to resurrect their review without attracting controversy, news of its impending appearance triggered a bitter polemical attack from Frangois Mauriac, who, as director of the competitor-review La Table Ronde, viewed the resurrection as a threat and a scandal. What was so scandalous in 1953 was that the NRF-the review which had closed down in 1943 under the direction of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle-had been a leading cultural organ of the Collaboration. This had come about because in late 1940, after the Occupation began, the NRF had been considered such an important institution that Otto Abetz, Hitler's ambassador in Paris, insisted that it should start up again. Indeed, the Germans bestowed greater cultural preponderance upon the NRF than upon the venerable and pro-P6tain Revue des Deux Mondes. In 1953, therefore, the reappearance of the NRF was thought on the one hand to present an uncomfortable reminder of French intellectual collaboration with the occupier. On the other hand, Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland believed that they were rendering a service by restoring an important pillar to the battered edifice of French cultural identity. Drawing on published and unpublished sources from the archives of Jean Paulhan, this article will retrace the major phases of the appearance of the Nouvelle NRF, and explain why this was so important in the national cultural context of the time.2

"La Revue des Deux Mondes" in Transition: From the Death of Naturalism to the Early Debate on Literary Cosmopolitanism

"La Revue des Deux Mondes" in Transition: From the Death of Naturalism to the Early Debate on Literary Cosmopolitanism

The Essay World of Émile Montégut

In 1865 Émile Montégut, literary critic best known for his long association with the Revue des deux mondes, contributed a major article in two parts to the Moniteur universel on the subject of one of its most distinguished collaborators, Théophile Gautier. In composing this article Montégut had been faced with a problem that might never have occurred to a less conscientious and original critic. His material, after long meditation, was well enough defined. Its content centered around the interpretation of Gautier as a dual nature, “âme gauloise” and “âme contemplative,” and revealed much that was most characteristic of its author as a critic: his concentration on contemporary writing, his interest in defining various forms of the Romantic imagination, his concern with dilettantism as both a strength and a weakness, his frankly personal approach to his subject, an approach based on the belief that in literary criticism there can be no “instrument unique” and that each critic should seek out those aspects of an author with which he has some affinity, hoping that the true meaning and unity of the work will emerge for the intelligent reader from a symphony of individual impressions on the part of numerous critics.

Henry James and his French Contemporaries

14ENRY JAMES made his first contact with France in I844. From this visit he retained only an impression of the Place Vendome; but since he was only one year old at this time, it is a memory which, if authentic, testifies to the early development of his remarkable powers of observation. He was in Europe again from i855 to I858, much of the time in Paris, and again in i859-60. After a ten-year interval in America, he returned in i869-70, and made a short stay in Paris in the latter year. The autumn of I872 was spent in the French capital, and in I875 he came with the intention of settling there, although in actual fact he remained only a little over a year. Subsequently London and Rye were his headquarters, but throughout his life he made frequent visits to France, especially to Paris.1 The fruit of these visits was a lifelong interest in French literature, an interest which left its mark on his own work. When he returned to America in i86o, at the age of seventeen, he eagerly devoured the successive issues of the Revue des Deux Mondes,Y wrote stories in imitation of Balzac,3 and translated short pieces by Merimee and Alfred de Musset.4 Between i866 and I876 he contributed articles to American periodicals on Alfred de Musset, Baudelaire, Balzac, Sand, Charles de Bernard and Gustave Flaubert, the brothers Goncourt, and Merimee. These articles, with the exception of that on the brothers Goncourt, were republished in book form in I878 as French Poets and Novelists. Ten years later the volume entitled Partial Portraits appeared, including articles on Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant. Essays in London and Elsewhere (I893)

Einstein's Paradox

IN his review of Bergson's new book (NATURE, October 14) Prof. Wildon Carr refers to “Einstein's paradox,” which he quotes in inverted commas as follows:—“Suppose a traveller to be enclosed in a cannon-ball and projected from the earth with a velocity amounting to a twenty-thousandth of the velocity of light; suppose him to meet a star and be returned to earth; he will find when he leaves the cannon-ball that if he has been absent two years, the world in his absence has aged two hundred years.” It so happens that a paradox of this identical kind was proposed to Einstein himself by M. Painleve at the Paris conferences in April of this year. Unless I have greatly misunderstood Einstein's reply, as recorded by M. Nordmann in the Revue des Deux Mondes of May 1, this particular paradox, arising from the imaginary departure and return of an observer travelling with great speed from a given point and back again, was shown to be one not legitimately derivable from the restricted theory—the theoretical construction is not one to which the transformation formulae can properly be applied (PP. 146–152).