Modernity and Bourgeois Life
Page 79
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