Nicholas White’s new book builds on his previous work on the representation of marriage and the family in nineteenth-century French literature, especially The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction. Where The Family in Crisis focused especially on French novels of adultery, seduction and incest, French Divorce Fiction emphasises the ways in which recurring French political debates over marriage, separation and divorce inspired French writers to explore these additional themes in their novels as well. White devotes roughly a third of the book to an overview of the history of marriage and divorce in France from the French Revolution to the First World War. Key episodes in this history include the legalisation of divorce for cause, by mutual consent, or on charges of mutual incompatibility in 1792; the reorganization and limitation of the right to divorce under Napoleon in his influential new Civil Code of 1804; the outright elimination of divorce under the Bourbon Restoration in 1816; the unsuccessful attempts to revive divorce immediately after the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848; and, most importantly for White’s critical project in French Divorce Fiction, the eventual reintroduction of divorce for a limited list of causes in the Naquet Law of 1884. The four chapters that follow focus on a series of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French novels that put the question of divorce at their centre: André Léo’s Un divorce (1866), Claire Vautier’s Adultère et divorce (1889), Marie-Anne de Bovet’s Après le divorce (1908), Anatole France’s Le lys rouge (1894), Alphonse Daudet’s Rose et Ninette (1892), Edouard Rod’s La vie privée de Michel Teissier (1893) and La seconde vie de Michel Teissier (1894), and Camille Pert’s Cady novels, La petite Cady (1909), Cady mariée (1911), Le divorce de Cady (1912) and Cady remariée (1926). White approaches these novels through a series of analytical approaches that he derives from sources as various as micro-historian Carlo Ginzburg’s exploration of the ‘conjectural or evidential paradigm’ at the root of nineteenth-century bourgeois society and culture; literary critic Malcolm Bowie’s discussions of fin-de-siècle cultural concerns in the works of Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust; sociologist Anthony Giddens’s work on modern ‘life-politics’, the search for ‘pure relationships’, and the new importance of ‘confluent love’; and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s work on the shift from ‘heavy modernity’ to ‘light modernity’, the nature of today’s ‘liquid modernity’, and the importance of contemporary forms of ‘liquid love’. White himself argues that the novels he discusses are both interesting and important because they show how divorce opens the way for new literary plots that do not have to end with marriage or death, because they explore changing forms of family relationship in ways that mark them as ‘avant-garde in socio-sexual terms’, because they give us ‘a fuller vision of turn-of-the-century literary culture’ that includes both classic male and rediscovered female writers, and because they foreshadow today’s debates about the positive and negative implications of Giddens’s ‘confluent love’ and Baumunt’s ‘liquid love’, two forms of love that open the possibility of individual satisfaction but also threaten the possibility of permanent commitment. White’s analysis of the characters, plots, and themes of these novels amply demonstrates both the hopes and the fears that the divorce debates raised for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French observers and cultural critics. For those who would like to know more about the complicated relationships between and among French political debates, divorce novels, public opinion and social experience, it would be helpful to know more about how and why White selected this particular set of seven authors and eleven novels for the centre of his study. It would also be useful to know more about how these authors and their novels fit into the changing French cultural and literary landscape. How popular were these authors and novels when they first appeared, for example? How many other such novels were there, and how much more or less attention did they attract? To what extent were these authors and their novels conventional or controversial in their own time? To what extent might these novels seem to reflect or transcend the circumstances of their creation for different readers today? Nicholas White has considered a series of important questions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novels in French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War. His work opens the way for interested readers in fields as various as history, literature, sociology and gender studies to ask and answer new questions of their own about these novels now.
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Jun 1, 2017
Eamon Duffy 
Open Access