Twentieth-century France Research Articles

Picture Books and Childrearing in Twentieth-century France:

<b>Picture Books and Childrearing in Twentieth-century France:</b>

Between biomedical and psychological experiments: The unexpected connections between the Pasteur Institutes and the study of animal mind in the second quarter of twentieth-century France

This article explores the unexpected connections between the Pasteur Institute in French Guinea and the study of animal mind in early twentieth century France. At a time when the study of animal intelligence was thriving in France and elsewhere, apes were appealing research subjects both in psychological and biomedical studies. Drawing on two case studies (Guillaume/Meyerson and Urbain), and then, on someone responding negatively to those connections, Thétard, this article shows how the long reach of biomedicine (linked to the prestige of Bernard and Pasteur) impinged on French biology and played a role in the tortuous, if not unsuccessful fate of animal psychology in France in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It shows how attempts to use apes (and other zoo animals) to yield new insights on animal psychology faced heavy restrictions or experienced false starts, and examines the reasons why animal psychology could not properly thrive at that time in France. Beyond the supremacy of biomedical interests over psychological ones, this article additionally explains that some individuals used animal behaviour studies as steppingstones in careers in which they proceeded on to other topics. Finally, it illustrates the tension between non-academic and academic people at a time when animal psychology was trying to acquire scientific legitimacy, and also highlights the difficulties attached to the scientific study of animals in a multipurpose and hybrid environment such as the early twentieth century Parisian zoo and also the Pasteur Institute of French Guinea.

Paula Martin. Suzanne Noël: Cosmetic Surgery, Feminism and Beauty in Early Twentieth-Century France. (The History of Medicine in Context.) 170 pp., illus., apps., bibl., index. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. £58.50 (cloth).

Paula Martin. <i>Suzanne Noël: Cosmetic Surgery, Feminism and Beauty in Early Twentieth-Century France</i>. (The History of Medicine in Context.) 170 pp., illus., apps., bibl., index. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. £58.50 (cloth).

Suzanne Noel: Cosmetic Surgery, Feminism and Beauty in Early Twentieth-Century France by Paula J. Martin (review)

Suzanne Noel: Cosmetic Surgery, Feminism and Beauty in Early Twentieth-Century France by Paula J. Martin (review)

Beyond ‘resistance’: rethinking nonhuman agency for a ‘more-than-human’ world

This article argues that rethinking historical agency to include nonhuman agents is one way to integrate better animals into historical narratives. Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), and forming part of a growing interest in nonhuman, particularly animal, agency, it aims to clear some theoretical and historiographical ground to provide a basis for claims that nature has agency. It then argues that environmental and animal historians have too readily equated nonhuman agency with ‘resistance’, a concept that does not easily map onto animal behaviour and one which also fails to capture the diversity of nonhuman agencies. Using case studies of Police rescue dogs in early twentieth-century France and animals on the Western Front, it argues that exploring the diverse types of nonhuman agencies and their deep and multiple entanglements with human agents will extend studies of nonhumans beyond the resistance model.

From Interiority to Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Radio in Twentieth-Century France

From Interiority to Intimacy:Psychoanalysis and Radio in Twentieth-Century France Judith G. Coffin (bio) In 1967, Radio Luxembourg recruited Menie Grégoire, well known for her journalism, her expertise on “women’s” issues, and her keen interest in psychoanalysis, to host an audience write- and call-in program on the airwaves. Her radio-therapeutic conversations quickly displaced the advice-from-experts programs and family radio dramas that had been staples of Radio Luxembourg since the end of World War II. Radio Luxembourg was a privately owned “radio périphérique”; its shows were produced in Paris, cabled to Luxembourg, and broadcast out. The program reached deep back into France. By 1970, nearly 2.5 million listeners were tuning in to Grégoire, and thousands of them were writing and calling her program. With the systematizing ambition of a social scientist, Grégoire saved and classified the letters she received (nearly one hundred thousand over fifteen years) and took notes on the telephone calls (around sixteen thousand), aiming to create in the process something like a chart of her interlocutors—what one sociologist calls a “geography of the interior” (Ecrits et Cris de la vie, 6, 35; Maréchal, 218).1 Historians can mine Grégoire’s archive for testimony on countless subjects, from provincial culture to the reverberations of 1968 and the changing politics of sexuality. Her notorious 1971 confrontation with gay activists during a live broadcast from the Salle Pleyel in Paris became a French Stonewall, a flashpoint for gay liberation and the whole anti-psychiatric movement.2 But the program was above all a phenomenon of radio and radio’s history. Virtually all the aspects of Grégoire’s enter-prise—her psychoanalytic self-presentation, the audience-participation format, the letters from listeners, and the careful archiving of those letters in the name of sociology and audience research—represent a bundle of ambitions and projects that were central to radio for most of the [End Page 114] twentieth century. Examining even one part of it, as I do here, namely her conception of radio as a psychoanalytic “adventure into the interior,” reveals remarkably enduring conceptions of radio’s power and purpose and throws into relief the historical moments that reshaped those conceptions. It has been more than a decade since Vanessa Schwartz’s influential and compelling “Walter Benjamin for Historians” underscored the centrality of the image to Benjamin’s conception of modernity and summoned historians to turn toward the visual. As Schwartz herself points out, the transformations of culture, human perception, and experience that Benjamin pegged to modern times in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—a felt collapsing of distance sensory vulnerability, new and more distracted forms of reception, the reconstitution of art as an “object for simultaneous collective experience” and a “change in the mode of participation” in culture—were attributed by many, including Benjamin, to audio as well as to visual media and technologies (1723; Benjamin, 222–23, 228–29).3 Moreover, the qualities that Benjamin’s contemporaries (for reasons we will discuss later) attributed to the auditory in particular—suggestiveness, vulnerability, and interiority—were no less central to the modern self or constitutive of modernity (Connor). Radio proved a powerful magnet to twentieth-century modernists. Radio studios drew in artists and writers from the French surrealists to Benjamin, Carpentier, and Beckett. The “new mental world created by radio” seized the imaginations of modernists in the social sciences, whether psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, or critical theory. The Princeton Radio Research Project, founded by Paul Lazarsfeld in 1937, attracted an eye-popping array of thinkers, including Hadley Cantril, Gordon Allport, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Rudolf Arnheim; the Radio Research Project is but one example of the multidisciplinary fascination with radio and the psychological, political, and commercial possibilities it presented. Not surprisingly, interpreting twentieth-century modernism’s interests in radio as well as, more broadly, communication, sound, hearing, and listening has proved an enormous project, and studying radio’s significance has helped to fuel what deserves to be called a “sonic boom” across the humanities and social sciences. I am interested here in Grégoire’s conception of radio as a distinctively...

Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France

Stephen Hart's volume begins with a fascinating premise, asking whether ‘changing notions of the body, mores, and sexuality in twentieth-century Europe can be explored through the lens of the nudist movement’ (p. 4). To answer this question, Au Naturel provides a social and cultural history of the naturist movement in France in 1927 and takes us on a tour of the earliest and largest French nudist centres such as the Île du Levant in the Var, Cap d'Agde in Hérault, and Montalivet in the Gironde. The first chapter is devoted to a definition of the naturist movement and its gradual association with nudism by the Durville brothers in the interwar years, in the attempt to ‘regenerate’ the health of individuals in a climate of cultural anxiety about France's decline. The following chapters analyse the concepts and practices that were worked out by Kienné de Mongeot, Alfred Lecocq, and their followers before and after World War II in order to legitimize complete nudity in France and define the norms of behaviour that permitted nudism to be disseminated. Hart also stresses that, in practice, the real opportunities for transnational nude tourism were driven by the exponential growth of tourism after 1945. As France's geographical location and warm climate made it a unique European destination for foreign nudists, the positive financial impact on nude tourism on local economies became a convincing justification of municipal acceptance of nudist centres, eventually leading to the state-sponsored development of beachfronts for nude tourism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The role of co-ordinated naturist holiday clubs in driving and regulating international nude tourism is explored, as are the pressures caused by other groups such as sex tourists, exhibitionists, and libertarians infiltrating nudist spaces. Following Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Hart warns against the temptation to infer from increased public nudity in twentieth-century Europe that people were freed from repression. The book offers extensive evidence that this has not been the case. Of particular interest are the sections in which Hart emphasizes the reluctance of naturist associations to engage with the issues of sexuality and eroticism in nudism. Fearing that an acknowledgement of these issues might damage broader acceptance of the movement, they have managed the relationship between nudism and sexuality by imposing formal social codes and behavioural rules that encourage heteronormative forms of sexual control. A number of controversial subjects are explored and challenged, including consent, sexuality, physical attractiveness, obesity, objectification, voyeurism, and exploitation, and Hart succeeds in problematizing these issues within the time period he explores. His arguments are illustrated by useful quotations from primary sources, and images drawn from magazines and postcards are reproduced in the central pages of the book. The volume has been carefully researched and is well documented; it will be useful for any reader with an interest in the history of the ‘exposed’ body and sexuality in twentieth-century France.

Stephen L. Harp. Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France.

Stephen L. Harp. Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France.

La droite entre les deux guerres : psychologie des foules, sciences de l'organisation et publicité moderne

Les historiens ont souvent expliqué l’absence dans la France de la Troisième république d’un large parti conservateur par son refus de répondre aux défis de la modernité. Ils ont considéré que les diverses réorganisations de la droite sont autant de tentatives infructueuses de la « moderniser ». Au lieu d’interpréter les méthodes de mobilisation de la droite à l’aune des catégories anhistoriques de tradition et de modernité, cet article réinscrit le mot « organisation » dans le contexte de la compétition entre les partis de la droite et dans leur combat contre le communisme. L’article met en évidence le fait que les dirigeants de droite partageaient la même « culture intellectuelle et politique ». Notamment, ils ont eu recours à la psychologie des foules, mise à jour par les sciences de l’organisation et par les techniques de la publicité « moderne ». Mais ils vont s’approprier cette culture politique différemment en fonction des enjeux qui leur sont propres. Trois tentatives de réorganisation sont observées : celles du Centre de propagande des républicains nationaux, de l’Alliance démocratique, et des Croix de feu et de son successeur, le Parti social français. L’analyse montre que l’Alliance, souvent prise pour un parti anachronique de notables, a remporté le plus de succès.

Au naturel: naturism, nudism, and tourism in twentieth-century France

Au naturel: naturism, nudism, and tourism in twentieth-century France

Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France by Naomi Davidson

Only Muslim: Embodying in Twentieth-Century by Naomi Davidson. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. xi, 299 pp. $25.95 US (paper). For more than two decades, French public discourse has cast a challenge to French secularism. Journalists and politicians have taken headscarves and halal meat, prayers in public streets and requests for women's-only swimming pool hours, evidence that recent immigrants to France, especially from North Africa, pose a new and visible threat to norms and laws that govern a religiously neutral public sphere. In these accounts, are seen to repeatedly physically transgress republic's cherished laicite. These corporeal transgressions are imagined to represent Muslims' inability to properly privatize their faith. Naomi Davidson's important book offers crucial historical insight into why body is focus of public debate about Islam. In doing so, it offers compelling correctives to standard narratives about problem in modern France. First, book suggests that these state concerns are not just a recent phenomenon. It shows that managing has a much longer colonial well postcolonial history. Secondly, by focusing on Muslims and Davidson questions the usefulness of laicite a category for understanding history of in France (p. 12). Standard accounts of laicite, in her view, fail to account for why bodies and embodied practices gamer so much state attention. In order to understand pervasive corporealization of Islam, she argues, one needs to attend to questions not just of religion, but also of race. Indeed, writes Davidson, Muslim must be understood as a category of racial rather than one of religious difference (p. 11). Muslim in state discourses and practices of what she terms Islam francais is simultaneously homogenizing and particularizing. It presumes that possess a unified culture that expresses itself in distinct material forms such architecture and food. In its materialized particularity, Muslimness of North African migrants resists assimilation into universal and presumptively disembodied abstraction of French citizenship. The racialization of religion that Davidson describes recalls fate of Jews and Judaism in post-revolutionary and colonial North Africa. Throughout book, Davidson productively draws out such parallels and divergences in order to clarify specific ways in which North Africans have been racialized. How did Islam francais produce Muslimness an embodied condition? In order to illustrate how state officials were concerned with bodies they were with souls, Davidson adopts a highly original phenomenological approach to state and colonial archive. Studying architectural plans of Mosques alongside official correspondence, Davidson reconstructs how officials conceived a built environment. She details how Islam francais assigned embodied practices (praying, eating; healing) to specific places and spaces. In process, she shows how state produced ideas about North African colonial migrants' prayer habits and hygiene, culinary and vestimentary practices. Since First World War, institutions that were created to at once serve and surveil Muslim migrants in metropole conceived their faith in material terms--as matters of architectural and aesthetic detail, bodily conditions, and embodied traditions. Rather than approaching Islam francais a coherent set of discourses and practices, Davidson's book explores constitutive contradictions that marked it from start. The first chapter lays out these founding contradictions by exploring how orientalist discourse, colonial Algerian law, and eventually anticolonial nationalism shaped conceptions of Islam: its connection to body and its presumptive confusion between public and private. …

Teaching practices in architecture workshops in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, a cultural and material approach

En raison de sa polysemie, le terme « atelier » recouvre des realites heterogenes – celles d’espace de production autant que d’apprentissage, dans les mondes de l’art comme dans ceux de l’industrie – entre lesquelles existent des parentes et des recoupements de sens. A ne considerer ici qu’un seul type d’atelier, dedie a la formation des architectes, cette richesse semantique conjugue encore differentes valeurs culturelles, tant elle designe « a la fois le lieu physique de l’enseignement, ...

When Unpaid Workers Need a Legal Status: Family Workers and Reforms to Labour Rights in Twentieth-Century France

AbstractIn the second half of the twentieth century small family businesses were still widespread in France. An important reason for this resilience was the share of unpaid work performed by kin in producing for the market. The unpaid work of family members in a range of craft and commercial family businesses – particularly by spouses, sons, and daughters – contributed to both the survival of the businesses and the well-being of the families, as is testified to in numerous sources, albeit statistically undocumented. Although social rights in France are considered to be some of the most advanced in Europe, the French Parliament was extremely slow to define the legal status of these family workers. It was not until 1982 that a law was finally enacted to bestow occupational status on collaborating spouses and to define a procedure optionally to register this unpaid work and to secure social security benefits for those carrying it out. This article focuses on the process that led to a new definition of the demarcation between the marital duty to assist, and work that exceeds this moral and legal obligation, thus creating a legal right to be compensated. Two empirical perspectives, involving an analysis of the reasons behind the shifting position of trade associations on this issue, and an assessment of the influence of long-standing gendered institutions, such as marital authority, on the formal and informal rules regulating family business are used to illustrate this slow and tortuous process of acquiring occupational rights for family workers.

Book review: Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in the Twentieth Century France, written by Naomi Davidson

Book review: Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in the Twentieth Century France, written by Naomi Davidson

GYGES AND KANDAULES IN ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE

The intriguing story of how Gyges came to succeed Kandaules as king of Lydia in 685 B.C. is told as historical fact by Herodotus in Historiae 1.8-12. In addition to the account of Herodotus, Plato in Republic 2.359d-360b includes the tale of a shepherd called Gyges who finds a ring which renders him invisible and enables him to usurp the throne. This, as will be shown below, refers to the same historical episode and has often been combined with Herodotus' version by later writers. In spite of its kernel of historical veracity, this story has been handled in later literature as if it were mythological. Like many Greek myths it has provided inspiration for later writers in a variety of genres. 1 It is the purpose of this paper to examine how Jean La Fontaine in seventeenth-century France, Theophile Gautier in nineteenth-century France, Friedrich Hebbel in nineteenth-century Germany, Andre Gide at the start of the twentieth century in France and Anthony Powell in the second half of the twentieth century in England, have each made use of this story in the creation of a particular work of literature.

Vorwarts zum neuen Menschen? Die sozialistische Erziehung in der DDR (1949-1989)

Non-German approaches to East German history can usually be divided into British, American or ‘other’. One international perspective we do not hear enough of is that of French researchers. Unlike Britain and America, twentieth-century France had a relatively strong and influential Communist Party, which possessed important regional strongholds. During World War II French Communists played a crucial role in the resistance to German occupation. Those captured often suffered in concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Dachau; they had first-hand experience of the ruthless methods used by the Gestapo. After the war, in recognition of their sacrifices and contribution to la patrie , Communists briefly took part in government. Successive French governments feared the resurgence of German nationalism. In their occupation zone, the French were determined to root out not only Nazism but also Prussianism. This cocktail of Gallic preoccupations—mixing familiarity with Communism with vivid fear of Prussians—gives French histories of divided Germany a unique perspective.

Peasant Vulnerability, Rural Masculinity and Physical Education in France, from the Early Twentieth Century to the Libération

AbstractDuring the first third of the twentieth century in France, negative and stigmatising stereotypes of rurality, inherited mainly from the previous century, were used as arguments to justify recourse to pedagogical innovations in physical education and sport for people living in the countryside. The invention of rural vulnerability led particularly to the setting up of ‘agricultural athletics’ meetings, ‘rural athletic trail runs’ and ‘rural horse events’ by vocational organisations and associations of educators. These initiatives, carried out mainly by economic and political interests, concerned mostly men and thus contributed to defining weakened rural masculinity.This analysis is based on evidence from articles in regional, national and specialist press, official texts and physical education manuals dealing with bodily training for country people.

The Paradox of Urban Conservation in France, 1830–1930

This article focuses on some key projects of architectural preservation in France from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. These projects collectively demonstrate that as the restoration of individual monuments proceeded to the level of urban spaces, the processes of preservation and modernization were always intertwined; the historic monument was as much about dramatizing the processes of renovation and revitalization as it was about memorializing the past. They spoke to the ephemerality of modernity as eloquently as they represented the past. The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France thus demonstrates the difficulties faced by even the most thoughtful planners as they attempted to reconcile the objectives of modernization and preservation while maintaining the city as a dynamic and exciting place.

Camus and Film

Compared with other writers of his generation, Camus had relatively little to say about movies. Even though he close to actress Maria Casares, even though he began working on a screen adaptation of La Princesse de Cleves for Robert Bresson, (1) even though Jean Renoir proposed to make a film version of The Stranger (this, years before Visconti's 1967 version), Camus never wrote for film journals and never theorized his relation to film. He was, at best, ambivalent about medium and, at times, openly hostile to it. According to Dudley Andrew, in 1949 Camus may even have convinced Gallimard to stop funding prestigious Revue du cinema, one of very few journals in postwar France that treated cinema as a serious art form. Camus, Andrew concludes, was simply not interested in films. (2) And yet, movies constantly appear in Camus's writings, from early essays of L'Envers et l'Endroit, through The Stranger, to long comical description of a day spent at movie theater in Camus's posthumously published The First Man. As critic Vincent Gregoire has written, movies appear discretely, in small doses and quite often in margins of Camus's work, but they are everywhere. (3) In this essay, I look at Camus's often contradictory relation to cinema in an attempt to add to our understanding of relation between aesthetics and politics in his work. Looking at what Camus had to say about movies may help us to better understand Camus's relation to aesthetic forms in general, and, more specifically, it may shed light on how aesthetic hierarchies still very much at work in twentieth-century France may have participated in way Camus approached questions of mass culture, poverty, and colonial space. I want to start with an early example from L'Ironie, a short text published in L'Envers et l'Endroit, collection of essays that Camus wrote in 1935-36 when he only twenty-two. These essays have as their backdrop a number of cities in North Africa and Europe--Algiers, Naples, Prague--and take shape of a series of short meditations on poverty, existential isolation, and what Camus calls absurd simplicity of world. (4) The text titled L'Ironie tells story of a group of young people who visit an old woman who is isolated and dying, her life entirely turned to God. At one point, young people decide to go to movies: Pour prolonger cette reunion, on decida d'aller au cinema. On passait justement un film gai. Le jeune homme avait etourdiment accepte, sans penser a l'etre qui continuait d'exister dans son dos. (40) This, as far as I can tell, is first mention of cinema in Camus's work, and it generates a crisis. The movies very quickly become opposite of everything narrator values: thought, meditation, constant contemplation of death. The young man in story realizes that cinema is a form of distraction and of absentmindedness, a facile happiness. And Camus uses a rare hyperbole to describe dilemma: Lui se sentait place devant le plus affreux Malheur qu'il eut encore connu: celui d'une vieille femme infirme qu'on abandonne pour aller au cinema. (41) This somewhat excessive conclusion--going to movies becomes the most horrible Misfortune young man has ever experienced--can be attributed to an author who is still green. But there is something else at work in this short text. L'Ironie, a story in which Camus establishes tone and some of themes that will recur throughout his career, is also an attempt to situate his writing in opposition to cinema as a form of popular entertainment. From Camus's very first writings, cinema is an agent of social cohesion and of mass distraction. It is technology that turns individual's gaze away from contemplation of poverty and death, these two realities that remain at center of Camus's writing. …

Maupassant: une littérature de la provocation by Thierry Poyet

Reviews 275 traditions is marshaled clearly and appropriately to open the major intellectual and spiritual journey of Emmanuel. The results are impressive, indeed admirable. They leave little question of Emmanuel’s position as one of the major voices of twentiethcentury France. Emmanuel viewed the “crucifixion as the climactic event in human history” (26), and despite the century’s indifference to the gospels, he exploited the enormously rich possibilities of Scripture to the full. Like French baroque poets, however, his powerful images confront the central Biblical tradition with that of Greek mythology.Often heavily eroticized,he opens both short and long poems to the liturgical tradition, to the human condition, and to current events, especially during the Second World War and the occupation of his homeland. “The connections between blood and tears, or dew and flood, exemplify the tropological, or moral, level of typological symbolism” (51). Like others who have considered Emmanuel’s poetry, O’Neil senses both the influence of Freudian and Bachelardian imagery. Thoroughly at home with poems that, while lacking the narrative thread of the longer poems, fit nonetheless firmly into the poet’s world view, she leaves no doubt of her grasp of the poetry. In the process, she takes the poetics, ranging from free verse to the most traditional of alexandrines, into account.Although a poet who sees himself primarily as a storyteller, “Emmanuel loves strong imagery that enables the reader to feel Christ’s agony, or Orpheus’s plunge into the underworld, or Hölderlin’s descent into madness” (66). Emmanuel forces his readers to become intellectually engaged, using “images from contemporary culture to form conceits that make the notion of spiritual combat more relevant to the reader” (147). His poor health kept him from active military service during the war years, but both his poetic and personal involvement highlight his courage and commitment. In the midst of his apocalyptic vision, however, there shines the inevitable triumph of freedom. While Emmanuel is often difficult, as he sees a “world tottering between catastrophe and redemption” (78), O’Neil provides a sure guide. Whether images previously exploited by medieval troubadours, the French tradition,or fresh eyes confronting nature,the Bible,or contemporary history,her book makes the voyage from myth,faith,to the poet’s psyche a singular pleasure.She bases her interpretations on original texts, while providing excellent translations. Both O’Neil’s command of Emmanuel’s many volumes of poetry and the traditions from which he draws inspiration makes this a very important book, not just for those of us who read Emmanuel, but for those of us who wish a firmer grasp of twentieth-century poetry. University of Kansas Allan H. Pasco Poyet, Thierry. Maupassant: une littérature de la provocation. Paris: Kimé, 2011. ISBN 978-2-84174-573-9. Pp. 191. 20,50 a. This study recasts Maupassant’s narrative fiction in a contentious light while affirming its place within the context of fin-de-siècle unconventionality. Poyet defines Maupassant’s polemical writing as“une littérature du dévoilement”and argues that the stories provoke by peeling off the masks that hide unsavory secrets (47). He substantiates this claim by examining the manner in which the provocation manifests itself and plays out within different spheres such as sexuality, marriage, family, society, religion, politics, and literature. The section dedicated to “Maupassant et la question du sexe,” elucidates how the seeds of controversy are generated and sustained by the author’s choice to depict aberrant sexual practices:“une sexualité hors norme, marquée souvent par la violence, toujours par des attitudes inhabituelles” (37). The chapters on women and sexuality also cite Maupassant’s “acharnement misogyne” as a key factor contributing to the corrosive textual elements (49). They contend that the female protagonists are invariably motivated by money—“chez Maupassant, la femme est intéressée”—(43) and habitually figure as commodity:“une marchandise, qui a un prix” (37). Class-based mockery and social satire provide the focus for “Maupassant peintre de société,” revealing the different ways the writer pokes fun at peasants, bourgeois, and aristocrats alike. Poyet explains that while being fully aware of his bourgeois readership, the aristocratic Maupassant enjoyed vilifying...