Modernity and Bourgeois Life

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Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 79

by Jerrold Seigel


  7 Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982). For Huysmans, see ch. 4. Breton’s comment on Picasso is quoted by Mary Ann Caws, André Breton (New York, 1971), 46. This whole range of issues and the ties they create between the avant-garde and modern commerce is simply ignored by a recent book whose contrast with the perspective adopted here is indicated in its title, Walter L. Adamson’s Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007). That particular vanguard figures felt alienated from “materialist” consumerism and from what Adamson calls “marketplace logic” is true enough, but artists’ resistance to the commodification of their work, apart from being an old story (and one in which significant figures did not participate, as noted in Chapter 12), closes off access to the kinds of continuities between bourgeois activities and the creative impulses they helped let loose of which all the writers just discussed, including Marx, were powerfully aware.

  8 This discussion of bohemia draws on and summarizes what I wrote in Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life (New York, 1986; reprinted Baltimore, 1999). For Vigny and Pyat see 15–18. For an eighteenth-century example see Anne-Gédéon Lafitte, The Bohemians, trans. Vivian Folkenflik, with an introduction by Robert Darnton (State College, PA, 2009).

  9 Magasin pittoresque XVIII (1851), 893–94; cf. Bohemian Paris, 24–25.

  10 The paragraphs that follow summarize my account of Murger in Bohemian Paris, Chapter 2, where sources are given for all the quotations.

  11 Perhaps still the best account of these themes in Mann’s life and work is T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann and the Uses of Tradition (Oxford, 1974, 2nd edn., 1998), where the quotation about hunger and the real appears on 102.

  12 Buddenbrooks, trans. John E. Woods (New York, 1993), 10–11, 92, 258–59.

  13 Ibid., 219, 223.

  14 Quoted in Reed, Thomas Mann and the Uses of Tradition, 112–13.

  15 Ibid., 526.

  16 See Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, 1994), chs. 2 and 6, discussed above in Chapter 12.

  17 Leo Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York, 1972), 3–16. Gautier’s comment appeared in Le Moniteur universel, May 11, 1868, quoted in F. W. J. Hemmings, Culture and Society in France, 1848–98 (New York, 1971), 177, and by Francis Haskell, “Enemies of Modern Art,” The New York Review of Books, June 30, 1983, 19. Laforgue’s comment appears in translation in Barbara Ehrlich White, ed., Impressionism in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978), 34. I discuss L’Oeuvre in Bohemian Paris, 303–05.

  18 Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, 1994), ch. 5; quotations on 139 and 149–50.

  19 Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven and London, 1988), 96–98 and passim.

  20 My account of Degas’s New Orleans pictures takes much information from Marilyn R. Brown’s valuable study, Degas and the Business of Art: a Cotton Office in New Orleans (University Park, PA, 1994), although I disagree with many of its assertions. The letter quoted here appears on 17. There is a slightly different translation in the catalogue of the exhibit held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974–75, Impressionism: a Centenary Exhibition, ed. Anne Dayez, 99. There is also much information about the Degas family and the picture in Christopher Benfey, Degas in New Orleans (New York, 1997).

  21 Zola’s comment is quoted here from the Centenary Exhibition catalogue, 101–02; it appears also in Brown, 70, who also cites Duranty’s comment, 77 (I have slightly altered the translation).

  22 Herbert, 52–53.

  23 Brown, Degas and the Business of Art, 16–17; Herbert, Impressionism, 56–57. On Agnew and Manchester interest in painting more generally, see Diane Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge, 1996). Peter Gay also discusses these matters at length in Pleasure Wars (New York, 1998); see 75–90 on Manchester.

  24 See Brown, 34–36, and Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War (Baltimore, 2003). Brown emphasizes the difficulties of the Musson firm, which was liquidated in 1873, even proposing that René may be reading about is end in the paper. This is mere speculation, and imposes a narrowing perspective to boot, and her notion that the firm’s difficulties had to do with the Panic of 1873 is questionable since the liquidation took place in March and the Panic only broke out in September. Because the new firm Musson formed took over the old one’s debts, the old one was not bankrupt. All the same Musson may have had difficulty adjusting to the new conditions; that he never quite recovered the position he held earlier makes his history parallel to the one Mann ascribes to his fictional family at the same time in Buddenbrooks, but without the patina of “decadence” Mann attached to it.

  25 Herbert, Impressionism, ch. 1.

  26 See above, Chapter 6.

  27 Herbert, Impressionism, 28–29.

  28 Ibid., 19–23 for Caillebotte; 24–27 for Monet. I do not know whether Herbert would accept the last sentence of this paragraph.

  29 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth and Baltimore, 1972), 390–93. For his comments on Murger’s bohemia see the preface to Leon Cladel’s anti-bohemian novel Les Martyrs ridicules (1861), in Baudelaire L’Art romantique, ed. L. J. Austin (Paris, 1968), 354–55, 362. Mon coeur mis à nu, ed. Beatrice Dedier (Paris, 1972), 127. I discuss these features of Baudelaire’s career in Bohemian Paris, ch. 4.

  30 Mon coeur mis à nu, 45. Baudelaire, “L’Art philosophique,” in L’Art romantique (Paris, 1925; part of the Oeuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques Crepet, not the volume of the same title cited just above), 119.

  31 The letters are conveniently available in Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. and ed. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago and London, 1966), 302–10. Rimbaud’s comments on his state of mind can be found in A Season in Hell [and] The Illuminations, trans. Edith Rhodes Peschel (London and New York, 1973), 70, 80, 86. On this aspect of Rimbaud’s career the comments of Yves Bonnefoy remain invaluable: Rimbaud, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York, 1973), esp. 43.

  32 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), 211–12, 227–28.

  33 For the interest in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Vienna, see William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, 1974). I discuss both thinkers in The Idea of the Self (Cambridge and New York, 2005), ch. 16. Schorske’s account of Klimt’s career, for all its illuminating insight, fails to recognize how much the aggression given vent in these images was directed against the expanded and more professionalized University as a representative of the “scientific” culture from which Schopenhauer and Nietzsche also felt alienated, and not against bourgeois life more generally, with parts of which he always retained close ties.

  34 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 217, 222. Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (Ithaca, NY, 1981), 198.

  35 Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Gallimard, 1953), 145 for the last quotation, 135–36 for the other ones in this paragraph, 81–82 and 109–11 for the previous paragraph. There is an English translation by Simon Watson Taylor, Paris Peasant (London, 1971, reissued Boston, 1994), some of whose renderings I have used in the previous paragraph, but it is often unreliable.

  36 Dieter Hein, “Bürgerliches Künstlertum. Zum Verhältnis von Kunstlern und Bürgern auf dem Weg in die Moderne,” in Bürgerkultur im 19. Jahrhundert. Bildung, Kunst und Lebenswelt, ed. Hein and Andreas Schulz (Munich, 1996), 16–17.

  37 For a much more extended analysis of Duchamp’s career in these terms see my book The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1995).

  15 Conclusion

  1 That this is true of states, despite prophecies of their waning importance, as well as markets and the Internet, has been persuasively argued by Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York, 1996) and Territory, Authority, Rights: from Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, 2006).

  2 See above, Chapter 9.

  3 Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in 19th-Century Industrialization,” Past and Present, 108 (August, 1985), 133–76. Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton and London, 2002).

  4 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ch. 1.

  5 Quoted by Gilles Feyel, “Négoce et presse provinciale en France au 18e siècle: méthodes et perspectives de recherches,” in Cultures et formations négociantes dans l’Europe moderne, ed. Franco Angiolini and Daniel Roche (Paris, 1995), 448.

  6 All the texts are cited, with references, in Yves Leclercq, Le Réseau impossible, 13–17.

  7 Both quoted above in Chapter 13.

  8 For the economics of information, and its bearing on the Internet, see Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London, 2006), ch. 2. The observations about the Internet here owe much to Benkler. However, I am less sanguine about its potential for democratization of life as a whole than is he.

  9 For these features of the early history of printing see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago and London, 1998). Robert Darnton cites the letter of Franceso Guarnerio quoted in the text in The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York, 2009), xiv-xv, and discusses the situation of early modern printing and the instability of information in ch. 2 of the same book.

  10 Catherine Bertho, “Le Télégraphe à la conquête du monde,” in Catherine Bertho, ed., Histoire des télécommunications en France (Paris, 1984), 18–26.

  11 In addition to the article cited in the previous note, this paragraph and the previous one are based on the following: Frédéric Barbier and Catherine Bertho-Lavenir, Histoire des médias: de Diderot à Internet (Pairs, 1996); Menachem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: the Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1994); Menachem Blondheim, “When Bad Things Happen to Good Technologies: Three Phases in the Diffusion and Perception of American Telegraphy,” in Technology, Pessmimism, and Postmodernism, ed. Yaron Ezrahi et al. (Dordrecht, Boston, London, 1994), 77–92; and Iwin Rhys Morus, “‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time, and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000), 455–75 (although I think Rhys Morus gives too much emphasis to the theme of discipline and too little to the increased agency nineteenth-century people found in telegraphy).

  12 There is an excellent short summary account of Otlet’s project in Alex Wright, “The Web that Time Forgot,” New York Times, June 17, 2008, F 1–3. Wright relies on the informative but obtuse and difficult work of W. Boyd Rayward, The Universe of Information: the Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organization (Moscow, 1975).

  13 As mentioned above in Chapter 7.

  14 See the general history of the Internet in Wikipedia.

  15 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, cited above in n. 8.

  Index

  A Godly Forme of Householde Gouernment (1614) 307

  About, Edmond 206

  Abrams, M. H. 432

  Académie Royale de Musique 426

  Action Network Theory 10, 29, 544–45

  Acton, William 358

  Adamson, Walter 606

  adultery 337, 341, 364, 368, 371

  Agnew, Thomas 505

  Agulhon, Maurice 211, 213, 247, 395

  Aix-en-Provence mining 187

  Albert, Phyllis 395

  Alighieri, Dante 116

  Allain, Marcel 466

  Allen, Robert C. 548

  Allgemeine deutsche Frauenverein 324

  Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 403, 406

  Alliance Israélite Universelle 394 and German Jews 405

  Alsace 392

  Altenstein, Karl von 233

  Amsterdam 377, 379, 417

  Anderson, Benedict 25

  anti-Semitism. See Jews

  Apaches 479

  Appleby, Joyce 48

  Aragon, Louis 483 Paris Peasant (Le paysan de Paris) 520–23

  Arendt, Hannah 407

  Aristotle 26, 158

  Aristotle’s Masterpiece 356

  Arnheim, Rudolf 503

  Arnim, Bettina von 315

  Arnold, Matthew 431

  Artiste, L’ 423

  Asquith, Herbert 181

  Atiyah, P.S. 344, 374

  Atwood, Thomas 178

  Augsburg, Treaty of (1555) 116

  Augustine, Dolores 330

  Austria 5, 118, 389, 402, 407, 410

  Avignon 392

  Ayçoberry, Pierre 137

  Bach, Johann Sebastian 433

  Baden 259, 329, 400

  Bagehot, Walter 539 Lombard Street 278–79

  The English Constitution 279

  Baker, Keith 92

  Balsaa, Bernard-François 201–02

  Balzac, Honoré de 192, 198–202, 315, 418, 490 “A Prince of Bohemia,” 490

  “Honorine,” 200, 321, 362

  “The Unknown Masterpiece,” 200

  A Harlot High and Low (Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes) 199

  La comédie humaine 198 Preface 201

  Lost Illusions 199, 280–81

  Père Goriot 199

  Physiology of Marriage 362

  The Search for the Absolute 199–201

  Bank of England 275–79

  banking, history 286–93

  Banque de France 281, 290–91

  Barbara, Charles 492

  Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 440

  Barbizon School 424

  Barings 288, 292

  Barmen 250

  Barnett, Henrietrta and Samuel 452

  Barraclough, Geoffrey 171

  Basel 248

  Basserman, Ernst 254, 259

  Bastien-Lepage, Jules 498

  Batignolles School 424

  Baudelaire, Charles 192, 476, 510–14 My Heart Laid Bare 513

  The Painter of Modern Life 475, 513

  Bauer, Franz 234

  Bebel, August 243, 259, 370

  Beckert, Sven 311

  Beethoven, Ludwig van 426, 430, 433, 601 Moonlight Sonata 444

  Bell, David 93

  Belleville (Paris suburb) 215

  Bender, Thomas 454

  Benjamin, Walter 193, 434, 480, 520, 605

  Benkler, Yochai 537

  Bergeron, Louis 286, 290

  Berlin 129–30, 136, 233, 236, 315, 330, 408, 423, 425, 468, 533

  Berliner Morgenpost 468

  Berners-Lee, Tim 535

  Bernstein, Basil 460–64, 467

  Bernstein, Eduard 241, 483 Evolutionary Socialism 259

  Berr, Berr Isaac 396

  Besant, Annie 325, 370

  Bevir, Mark 542

  bills of exchange. 274 See also money, history

  in France 280–82

  Birmingham 55, 161, 176, 183, 429–30

  Birmingham Musical Examiner 430

  Birmingham Political Union 178

  Bismarck, Otto von 5, 129, 171, 224, 230, 232, 243, 245, 247–48, 254, 256, 260, 262–63, 291, 386, 529, 534, 570

  Blackbourn, David 116–17, 133, 227, 261–63, 480, 543, 557

  Blanning, T. W. C. 555

  Blanqui, Louis-Auguste 220

  Bleichröder, Gerson 386, 570

  Blum, Léon 375 Du marriage 367–68

  Boas, Franz 414

  Boccaccio, Giovanni 338

  bohemianism 487–96, 525

 

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