Nineteenth-Century France Research Articles

Herminie and Fanny Pereire, elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France

Herminie and Fanny Pereire, elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France

Art and Monist Philosophy in Nineteenth Century France from Auteuil to Giverny by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer

Art and Monist Philosophy in Nineteenth Century France from Auteuil to Giverny by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer

The Revolution Takes Form: Art and the Barricade in Nineteenth-Century France by Jordan Marc Rose

The Revolution Takes Form: Art and the Barricade in Nineteenth-Century France by Jordan Marc Rose

Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France by Cheryl Krueger (review)

Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France by Cheryl Krueger (review)

“Un son si étrange”: Writing Dissonance in Les Chants de Maldoror

Abstract: This article considers the role of unpleasant sound, dissonance, and noise in Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror . The author presents his writing as dissonance, allegorizing his text as a strange-sounding lyre as he recounts the nefarious adventures of the misanthropic Maldoror. Despite the sonic nature of this text, evident even in its title, few have engaged with the sounds of Lautréamont’s work. I argue that Lautréamont uses dissonance as a metaphor for writing and that unpleasant sound in the form of frightening moans and a primal scream catalyzes the protagonist’s exploration of his fraught identity and facilitates his coming to writing within the narrative. Considered alongside emerging sound technologies from the time, Les Chants de Maldoror compels us to rethink modernist aurality in nineteenth-century France.

Designing deaf spaces: education, hygiene, and citizenship in nineteenth-century France

ABSTRACT This article examines the changing architectural environments of deaf education in the nineteenth century, taking the national institutes in Paris and Bordeaux as its main focus. Founded in the late eighteenth century and initially housed in government-expropriated properties, both schools underwent comprehensive renovation and reconstruction projects in the nineteenth century to emerge as modern educational spaces. Although these projects remain overlooked in the history of modern architecture, they were closely tied to contemporary discourses on education, hygiene, and citizenship. The renovation of the Paris Institute for Deaf-Mutes during the 1820s–30s engaged pressing questions about hygiene and social progress in the postrevolutionary era of national reconstruction. The architectural transformation of the Bordeaux Institute for Deaf-Mute Girls from the 1860s not only reflected the changing pedagogical focus from sign language to oralism; it was also imbricated in broader debates about laïcité and educational standardisation as France transitioned from empire to republic. Far from being marginal, these institutions functioned as key sites for working through notions of citizenship and national identity. Their histories reveal how architectural and material frameworks could serve to impose ideology on the one hand, and provide important grounds for the formation of a minority community on the other.

Translation as Politics: Translating Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler in Nineteenth-Century France

This article examines the three translations of Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler published in nineteenth-century France. Relying on Descriptive Translation Studies so as to challenge the traditional narrative about the political innocuousness of Karamzin’s travelogue, it reconstructs the historical contexts of the three publications in order to highlight the political agendas of their translators and/or translating patrons. Far from being the innocent product of the translators’ sheer curiosity, the three translations prove to be political objects, used at three key moments in the history of Franco-Russian relations in the nineteenth century, in order to call for political change, to try and restore Russia’s damaged reputation, or to attempt to forge new diplomatic alliances.

Growing Old in Nineteenth-Century France: Texts, Fictions, and Representations

Abstract: The introduction to this special issue about French fascination with the aging process provides an overview of cultural interest in this topic from the Second Empire to World War I. It sets the scene for other contributors' analysis of the ways in which nineteenth-century writers and scientists took up aging or aged figures to explore complex new social dynamics.

Blurred Humanity: The Grandparental Fantastic and the Values of Aging

Abstract: Within storytelling economies of nineteenth-century France, grand-parental authors and narrators operate ambiguously, often relegated to the outworn periphery of social life but still central to the circulation of inheritable tradition and cultural wealth. Further, Charles Nodier suggests, grandparents' age gives them privileged access not so much (or not only) to the heights of wisdom but also to the strangely "intermediary" and often devalued realm of the fantastic. This article sets off to explore Nodier's suggestion by means of five tales—by Clémence Robert, Delphine de Girardin, Madame de Ségur, George Sand, and Victor Hugo—in which encounters with the nonhuman push the grandparental fantastic to scrutinize the unstable values of intergenerational exchange.

A Study of the Translation and Influence of Tang Poetry in Nineteenth-Century France

A Study of the Translation and Influence of Tang Poetry in Nineteenth-Century France

Don't Let Them Eat Horse

Review of: Kari Weil, Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France. Animal Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. xiv + 217 pp. 32 illus., 4 in colour. $97.00 (hb), $32.00 (pb).

Book Review: Republican Passions: Family, Friendship and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France by Foley, Susan K.

Book Review: <i>Republican Passions: Family, Friendship and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France</i> by Foley, Susan K.

Truth is a “bird of prey”: interpreting the postcolonial dialectic in Agustí Villaronga’s El ventre del mar (2021) with Frantz Fanon

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that Agustí Villaronga’s 2021 film El ventre del mar (The Belly of the Sea) explores a post-Fanonian version of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as a historical struggle between colonizer and colonized, and between the elite and the dispossessed in a limit situation. Villaronga’s cinematic vision of this historical struggle is neither progressive-linear nor simply non-linear, but iterative, as it casts light on uncanny analogies between necropolitical strategies (Mbembe 2019) marking different periods and political regimes: from the absolutist and colonial nineteenth-century France to the democratic European Union of the twenty-first century. To this end, Villaronga interweaves three hermeneutic layers into his filmic fable: the memory of a nineteenth-century historical event as mediated through pictorial and literary representations, a critique of the present marked by refugee crises and postcolonialism and an exploration of the human condition in its agonistic-tragic dimension. In Villaronga’s cinematic vision, the agon between master and slave ends neither in reciprocal recognition (as theorized by Hegel) nor in the emergence of the “new humanity” overcoming the Manichaean, “compartmentalized world” of colonialism (Fanon [1961] 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Books), but in an open dialectic of resistance and radical uncertainty.

Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria. By Joseph W. Peterson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xi + 284 pp. $55.00 cloth; open access e-book.

Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria. By Joseph W. Peterson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xi + 284 pp. $55.00 cloth; open access e-book.

The Birth of Hirudiculture: Parisian Medicine, Leech Farming and the Transformation of Marshland in Nineteenth-Century France

This article examines health, human–animal relationships and environments within nineteenth-century France, focusing on Hirudo medicinalis , the medicinal leech. Drawing upon medical, environmental and ‘more than human histories’, we investigate how a ‘mania’ for bloodletting in the wake of Parisian medicine and what Michel Foucault has characterised as the ‘birth of the clinic’ produced a trade in leeches that threatened to push the species to extinction. While urban-educated naturalists, physicians, pharmacists, merchants and politicians worried over the scarcity of what was widely considered a commodity of national economic and medical importance, rural ‘leech gatherers’ quietly developed ways to breed leeches artificially. The outcome was hirudiculture: the farming of leeches on an industrial scale. We argue that the birth of hirudiculture was more than a practical and commercial response to the needs of medicine; it reflected and embodied similar shifts in knowledge and reveals the complex and diverse ways in which rural and urban environments, human and non-human relationships, have shaped each other in the pursuit of shared visions of health. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-Century France

Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-Century France

Book Review: Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-Century France

Book Review: Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-Century France

Images of Female Inventors: Women and Patents in Nineteenth-Century France

The study of the social and cultural context of women’s inventiveness reveals an unfamiliar picture that adds a new facet to women’s history. Not only patents, but also surveys (for example by the chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Paris in 1848 and 1860) carried out in the nineteenth century, sectoral studies and statistics help to better understand the part played by women in invention and thus to better appreciate their economic role. These sources provide information on female patent holders, their origins, their social and marital status and their attitudes to invention. They also help us to understand how women inventors were viewed by their contemporaries. The quantitative data come from the patents, but the search for these female patentees in the institutional networks of invention, particularly widespread in France in the nineteenth century and already well studied, illustrates the figures. Indeed, the number of patents in itself is of little interest unless it is correlated with the agency of the applicants, while the discourses of the nineteenth century convey a derogatory and inactive image of women. Indeed, it is not so much the presence of women, or even the comparison with men, that needs to be questioned, but rather what they reveal about a little-known activity.

The Good Death of a Christian Through the Eyes of Sophie de Ségur (1799–1874)

This paper attempts to analyse how Sophie de Ségur (1799–1874) performed the mission of spreading the Catholic faith through children’s literature. The biography of this Russian woman who converted to Catholicism is presented at the beginning, together with her connections with the Ultramontane environment being active in nineteenth-century France. This is to prove that de Ségur’s writing activities were part of a planned programme aimed at shaping society in the spirit of Catholicism. The analysis is carried out on the examples of how she presented scenes of a good Catholic death in three novels for children: "Les vacances, Jean qui grogne et Jean qui rit and La sœur Gribouille". The study is divided into three parts: the death of the mother, the death of the child, and the death of the sinner, according to the criterion whose death was described. It is shown that in de Ségur’s perspective, a good death is a reward for a good and pious life. The social aspect of death and good preparation for it are also important.

Crafting racism, civilization, and margins through plaster busts of Icelanders

ABSTRACT In the mid-nineteenth century, Iceland’s small population under Danish rule tried establishing itself as part of Europe's civilized and progressive population. The production of racist texts and images that emphasized Iceland's natural place with ‘progressive’ European nations reflect Iceland's relationship with colonialism and the anxieties of being categorized with colonized others. The paper focuses on plaster casts of Icelandic faces, which were a part of collections meant to showcase racial diversity in the late nineteenth century in France and Spain. The analysis of the making and commercialization of the busts reflects one of the multiple ways Iceland was engaged in a world of imperialism and colonialism, underlining Iceland's ambiguous status in mid-nineteenth century Europe as a marginal European country. This status shaped Icelandic identity during the 19th and twentieth century, characterized by a strong need to position themselves as civilized subjects.