Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  Although Chateaubriand cultivated the Romantic style of the melancholy genius, misunderstood by and ill at ease in the world, literary or artistic success in fact required both the knitting together of patronage and connections and the manipulation of public opinion. There was no possibility of an artistic career outside Paris, and in Paris it was necessary to frequent salon society and to negotiate support among publishers, theatre directors and academicians. Romantic artists also needed a direct rapport with the public, to show themselves to be divinely inspired, although this might in fact involve begging support from the critics and mobilizing claques to lead the applause in the theatre.

  The first generation of artists to follow in Chateaubriand’s wake, born around 1800, were in some sense sons of giants, either aristocrats who had survived the Revolution or Napoleonic generals. The fall of Napoleon in 1815 created opportunities for artistic careers to take off but it also left many feeling that with the collapse of France’s European power life would never be as exciting again. Alphonse de Lamartine’s father served in the royal bodyguard and was wounded defending the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, the day the monarchy fell, and Lamartine himself joined the royal bodyguard in 1814. After his love affair with the young wife of the seventy-year-old perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences was cut short by her death in 1817, he cultivated a solitary melancholy and published a volume of poems, The Meditations, in March 1820. They had ‘an unheard-of and universal success’, he told a friend.2 It provoked a ‘universal inebriation’, said Théophile Gautier, artist and chronicler of the Romantics. ‘Young people and women were enthusiastic to the point of adoration… Lamartine was not just a poet, but poetry itself. His chaste, elegant and noble nature seemed to rise above the ugliness and triviality of life.’3 This apparent unworldliness as far as his public were concerned sat with a very worldly pursuit of prospects and a career. In June 1822 he married an English heiress with a dowry of £10,000, to which his father added a château and town house in Mâcon, and embarked on a diplomatic career in Naples and Florence. He frequented the salon of Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal, a crossroads for Romantic writers and nexus of contacts. In 1825 he was invited to write a poem in honour of the coronation of Charles X, which led to the award of the Legion of Honour, and he was elected to the Académie Française in 1829, just before the July Revolution caused him, as a Legitimist, to resign from the diplomatic service.4

  In 1816, at the age of fourteen, Victor Hugo wrote in his journal, ‘I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing.’5 He had a row with his father, a former general of Napoleon, who wanted him to enter the École Polytechnique, and he wrote poetry in praise of the restoration of the statue of Henri IV to its plinth on the Pont Neuf that won prizes. He frequented the salon of Sophie Gay in the Chaussée d’Antin, where Chateaubriand dubbed him ‘the sublime child’ and he married very young. He was also an habitué of Charles Nodier’s salon, where he established his reputation alongside Lamartine as one of the ‘two gods of poetry’.6 Nodier put Hugo forward, like Lamartine, to write an ode for the coronation of Charles X, and the award of the Legion of Honour reconciled him with his father. At Nodier’s he met Baron Taylor, the Brussels-born Englishman who was director of the Comédie Française, and used the connection to promote his play, Marion Delorme. Unfortunately, it portrayed a weak Louis XIII in a chaotic kingdom and was banned by Charles X, despite Hugo’s mission to the palace of Saint-Cloud in a bid to make the king change his mind.7 On the positive side, however, Hugo had a tame critic, Sainte-Beuve, who from 1827 created the myth of Hugo ‘born into the camps, brought up amid our warriors, crisscrossing Europe behind our flags’, now fighting battles and seeking glory through the arts.8 When he finally had a play, Hernani, set more tactfully in Charles V’s Spain, performed in February 1830 at the Comédie Française, a veritable ‘Romantic army’ of supporters was organized to mobilize applause and shout down those who opposed the liberties taken by the Romantics with the classical conventions. These were led by the former schoolfriends Gérard de Nerval, a young poet who had translated Goethe’s Faust in 1827, and Gautier, then a long-haired rapin or apprentice in an artist’s studio and undecided between painting and literature.9 Sainte-Beuve, true to form, told Hugo, ‘You will have your Austerlitz, your Jena. Perhaps Hernani is already Austerlitz.’10

  In fact Hernani had been preceded by another dramatic breakthrough of the Romantic generation, Henri III and his Court by Alexandre Dumas. Dumas, like Hugo the son of a Napoleonic general, was greatly inspired by the Paris tour of a troupe of English players – Kemble, Kean, Macready and Harriet Smithson – who performed Shakespeare with extended sword-fights and death scenes in 1827. He was one of the inner circle of the Nodier salon, with a place laid for him every Sunday night, and he persuaded Baron Taylor to commission his play, a story of adultery and murder revolving around the Duc de Guise, his wife and her lover, for the Comédie Française. When it opened in February 1829 Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, in whose secretariat he worked, turned up with his aristocratic coterie and guaranteed a positive reception.11 After the July Revolution he had an even greater success with Antony, which transposed the drama of adultery and murder to modern times, and abandoned the rather mannered actors of the Comédie Française in favour of the more passionate actors of the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre, the darkly menacing Pierre Bocage in the title role and Marie Dorval, then the mistress of Alfred de Vigny, as the mistress he stabs to death. ‘Never before had applause swept so directly from the audience to the actors,’ wrote Dumas, ‘and what an audience! The fashionable audience of dandies, the audience in the boxes, and the audience that does not normally applaud shouted itself hoarse and split their gloves with clapping.’12

  Fame, of course, was rarely enduring and the competition for esteem was sharp. Lamartine never repeated the success he had with his Meditations. A woman in her thirties, reading his Harmonies in 1837, noted, ‘it does not have the same effect on me as the meditations. That was rapture, ecstasy; I was sixteen, how beautiful it was.’13 After Hernani, Hugo switched to the novel, publishing Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831. Mixing the religious and the pagan, the beautiful and the ugly, it confused those who expected something more uplifting from a novel set in a cathedral. Sainte-Beuve reminded Hugo that Lamennais had said that it was ‘not religious enough’ and described it himself as ‘lit from below by the grates of hell’.14 One reason for Sainte-Beuve’s cooler critique was his love for Hugo’s wife, Adèle, while Hugo was himself infatuated by the actress Juliet Drouet, who played in his Lucrèce Borgia at the Porte Saint-Martin in 1833.15 Dumas also took to writing historical novels, hoping to become a French Fenimore Cooper or Walter Scott, publishing The Three Musketeers in 1844 and The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844–5. In order to maintain an impossible tempo of research and writing he relied on a friend of Gérard de Nerval who made a living as a teacher at the Collège Royal Charlemagne, Auguste Maquet. In 1845 he was accused by a certain Eugène de Mirecourt of running a ‘novel factory’ that turned out thirty-six volumes in 1844 and promised twice that in 1845; how could that be all his own work? Mirecourt argued that he was still the copyist who had worked in Louis-Philippe’s office, a dégrossisseur of what others wrote for him.16 Dumas sued Mirecourt and had him sent to prison for a fortnight. He was riding a wave of literary and financial success. He signed a contract for his complete works for 1.5 million francs in 1843, built the château of Monte Cristo at Le Port-Marly near Versailles in 1844 and a Théâtre Historique on the boulevard du Temple to stage his plays, beginning with La Reine Margot in 1847.17 He was at the pinnacle of his career and it did not matter to him if Delacroix, putting down Monte Cristo, sighed, ‘When you’ve finished reading it, you’ve really read nothing at all.’18

  Some writers, acknowledged as kings of the canon now, had a much lesser impact on the public at the time. Henry Beyle, better known as Stendhal, fitted uneasily into the Romantic generation. Born in 1783, his career was too closely linked to the Na
poleonic era to afford him the right contacts. Between 1815 and 1821 he lived in Italy and London, making a career as a critic and writing about Italian music and painting. In 1821 he returned to Paris, forming a close friendship with Prosper Mérimée and frequenting the salon of Baron Gérard, the king’s painter, where Delacroix was a regular, and that of Madame Ancelot, which was known as ‘a local branch of the Académie Française’.19 He was not invited to the salon of Sophie and Delphine Gay, because he was considered too rude, and preferred the nocturnal salon of the Italian actress Madame Pasta, where the Milanese exiles met.20 He did not find state employment again until the July Monarchy looked more favourably on those with a Napoleonic pedigree, when he was made consul at Civita Vecchia near Rome. He was there when his novel Le Rouge et le noir came out in December 1830. Based on a true-life story of a young seminarist who became the lover of the mistress of the house where he was a tutor and then killed her, it managed only two editions of 750 copies each and was a resounding flop. Even Mérimée asked him, ‘Why did you choose such an impossible character? Read the late Boileau’s Art of Poetry.’21 Stendhal wrote to a friend ironically artistic genius and bourgeois culture in 1831 that Simón Bolívar had died. ‘Do you know from what? From envy at the success of the Rouge.’

  Balzac’s struggle for recognition was also tough but more rewarding. He had a brief career as a notary’s clerk, set up a printing business that collapsed in 1828, made no money from his 1829 novel The Chouans nor from his treatise on The Physiology of Marriage, and fell and concussed himself trying to get elected as deputy for Chinon in 1832. What he earned came from reviews and articles for the various journalistic enterprises of Émile de Girardin.22 His first literary success came with La Peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin) in 1831, a story revolving around an ass’s skin which grants wishes but shrinks with each wish made. Sainte-Beuve described it as ‘fetid and putrid, witty, corrupt, inspired, sparkling, marvellous in the way it threads tiny elements and makes them ring like a clinking of atoms’.23 Balzac began to appear on the town as a dandy, with a turquoise-pommelled cane, seen at the Opéra with other men of fashion such as Eugène Sue and lionized in the salon of Delphine de Girardin. Yet he did not have the stylistic qualities of Hugo, and his studies of modern mores did not usurp the public’s passion for the historic or the exotic. ‘Despite the popularity he was starting to enjoy with the public,’ wrote Gautier, ‘he was not acclaimed as one of the gods of Romanticism, and he knew it.’24 Neither did Balzac have the facility for production that Alexandre Dumas had. He struggled to build a vast interlocking Comédie humaine that would articulate the structure of modern society. Crisis point was reached in 1846, when the serialization of his Peasants in La Presse was interrupted to make way for that of Dumas’ La Reine Margot, which was about to be published.25 Costume drama had more appeal to the bourgeois reader than dark rural tensions, and Balzac himself now spent more time with his admirer and mistress, the Polish Countess Anna de Hanska, than with his books.

  THE READING PUBLIC, PUBLISHING

  AND THE PRESS

  Between the Restoration and 1870 the market for books, newspapers, plays and music achieved a certain consistency and uniformity, which might be characterized as a bourgeois market. At the beginning of the century there was a wide gap between the small, elitist market for high culture and the mass market for popular culture. One market was extremely literate, fashionable and rich, the other semi-literate, traditional and poor. There was often an overlap between genres, with themes from popular culture being taken up and reworked for high culture, and vice versa, but the overlap of publics was much less. Developments over the next few decades however, such as urbanization, faster communications and the spread of elementary education, led to the growth of a market for the middle classes, in which both the elite and ordinary people could participate. The reading public, defined as literate people over the age of fourteen, grew from about 4.6 million men and 2.7 million women in 1801 to 9.8 million men and 8.0 million women in 1871. This was a highly positive development for the production of books, the number of which published in France rose from 2,547 in 1814 to 13,883 in 1866.26 It did not, however, necessarily mean a wider circulation for great works of literature, for the enthusiasm of the wider public was not necessarily for the novels of Stendhal and Flaubert, which goes a long way to explaining the frustration of writers with the undis-criminating taste of the bourgeois public.

  ‘There are only two hundred people in France who buy new novels,’ wrote Émile de Girardin around 1830, ‘and eight hundred cabinets de lecture which monopolize the distribution of books.’27 Under Napoleonic legislation all printers and booksellers had to have a brevet or licence, and in 1867 there were still only 4,000 bookshops for 36,000 communes. In the first part of the century novels were published in small runs of only a few hundred and cost 7.5 francs a volume. Since two octavo volumes was the minimum for a novel, a new novel cost at least 15 francs, about ten days’ wages for an average worker in 1827.28 Newspapers were similarly expensive. In 1824 there were thirteen main political dailies in Paris, with a combined circulation of 60,000. They were circulated to subscribers, who paid 80 francs a year for the privilege. The flow of political opinion, information and literary pleasure was thus restricted to an elite living in the major cities. This did not mean that the populations of small towns and the countryside were deprived of reading material, only that it was made available on an entirely different circuit. In the absence of bookshops colporteurs or chapmen travelled from town to town and village to village carrying a pack of pious works, almanacs, treatises of magic and tiny bestsellers covered in blue sugar-paper, reworkings of traditional epics, romances and fairytales, such as The Four Sons of Aymon, Robert the Devil and Geneviève of Brabant. To these were sometimes added the so-called ‘4-sou novels’ of hacks such as Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, derived from the Gothic horror novels of Ann Radcliffe. The colporteurs generally originated from the high Pyrenees, making a better living travelling the roads than on the mountain pastures, covering northern France in the summer, southern France in the winter. The books they sold, called the Blue Library on account of their covers, were produced by specialist publishers in the Champagne city of Troyes.29

  Ways of bringing these two circuits together developed after 1830. On the demand side, the cabinets de lecture to which Girardin referred were commercial reading rooms which held all the newspapers and doubled as lending libraries. There were over 400 of these in Paris in the Restoration period, with the same number outside the capital. It was possible to borrow a single newspaper to read at home for 5 centimes a day or 2 francs a month, or read all the newspapers in the cabinet, on the spot, for 20 centimes a day. For 30 centimes books as well as newspapers could be read, and for 3 francs a month books could be borrowed.30 This clearly increased access to books and newspapers many times over. Newspapers were also sent out to the provinces by mail-post, to a radius in 1832 of 250 kilometres after one day, 400 kilometres after two days, reaching cities such as Bordeaux, and arriving in Marseille on the third day. Although there was always a local press, with three political papers of different political persuasions in the Dordogne in 1832, for example, newspaper reading was generally limited to the urban bourgeoisie in northern and eastern France.31

  On the supply side changes in publishing also increased the availability of newspapers. Political caricature exploded after the fall of the monarchy in 1830 and Charles Philippon, a former apprentice in Baron Gros’ studio, launched the weekly Caricature (November 1830), with a lithograph folded into the paper, and the daily

  Charivari (December 1832), whose prints were integral to the text. These were still quite expensive, the first at 52 francs a year with 600–1,000 subscribers, the second at 60 francs with 1,000–1,400 subscribers in 1834, but copies were available in fifty cabinets de lecture and 130 cafés in 1835, waging a war of ridicule on the regime with the help of artists such as Daumier who famously portrayed Louis-Philippe’s face as a pear;
and both publications were constantly harassed by the press laws until forced to close after the September laws of 1835.32 Responding to that political clampdown Émile de Girardin, the husband of Delphine Gay who nevertheless permanently struggled for fortune and recognition, founded La Presse in 1836. Selling at 40 francs a year, half the price of the existing dailies, it dealt more in business than in politics, tapped a new income stream by selling advertising space, and above all launched the romanfeuilleton or serialized novel, taking Balzac’s La Vieille Fille as its first serial.33 This brought new novels to the attention of the non-book-buying public and boosted newspaper circulation, turning women for the first time into newspaper readers. Sainte-Beuve observed that Balzac’s works appealed in particular to women aged between twenty-eight and thirty-five, exploring as Balzac did the question of the arranged marriage. However he also condemned as ‘industrial literature’ what he saw as the perversion of writing for what was in effect the contemporary equivalent of the soap opera.34 The practice of the serialized novel was imitated by other papers, which competed for the most popular writers. Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris was serialized in the Journal des Débats between June 1842 and October 1843 for a fee of 26,500 francs while after a bidding war his Wandering Jew went to Véron’s Le Constitutionnel for 100,000 francs, boosting its circulation from 3,600 in 1844 to 25,000 in 1845–6.35

  Despite the success of La Presse it did not become the paper with the widest circulation. It had the reputation of being on the side of the government, especially after Girardin, challenged on the subject of his illegitimate birth during a circulation war, fought a duel with the republican Armand Carrel, editor of Le National, on 22 July 1836, and killed him.36 Le Siècle, with a circulation of 34,000 in 1845–6, as against La Presse’s 22,000, was more radical and anticlerical in tone, and circulated in cafés where popular opposition to the government was fomented and which became the bases for political banquets in 1847 and political clubs in 1848. It educated the crowd that Tocqueville witnessed invading the National Assembly on 15 May 1848 and whom he called Montagnards. They spoke a curious jargon, he observed, that was ‘neither the French of ignorant people nor that of the educated’, using ‘swear words but also grandiloquent expressions… a constant stream of abusive and jovial comments… I think they have developed their attitudes in cafés and sharpened their wits on newspapers alone.’37