French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  As Stendhal's novel showed, the France of the early decades of the 19th century was divided politically and culturally between, on the one hand, the desire for reconnection to traditional institutions (such as the Roman Catholic Church, monarchy, the countryside and village) that imparted the sense that everyone had a relatively fixed place in the social order and, on the other hand, the aspiration to ideals of human potential, freedom, and universal rights. This dichotomy often took the concrete form of the opposition between Paris and la province (anywhere else in France; significantly, in French, this is expressed as a singular noun and conveys as much the sense of a condition as of a place).

  Nostalgia and history

  The aftershocks of the French Revolution and the reactions against it continued to the very end of the 19th century - the Dreyfus Affair and Zola's resounding editorial `JAccuse!' in 1898 exposed the persistence of aristocratic privilege in France - but another revolution, the Industrial Revolution, was at work shaping French society and the perception of time, place, human relations, and human creations. Fascination with the Ancien Regime and the Christian cultural heritage, exemplified by Chateaubriand, became a trend, taking on greater historical weight through the work of historians like Jules Michelet, literary historians like Sainte-Beuve, and architects like Viollet-le-Duc. The latter is responsible for rebuilding (in ways that are now often seen as more fanciful than historically accurate) the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the Mont Saint-Michel, and the fortified city of Carcassonne. Following upon the writings of Chateaubriand and de Stael, Victor Hugo vigorously asserted a theory of social and aesthetic progress in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1827), framed historically within the concept of three ages of human society - the primitive, the ancient or antique, and the modern - which correspond to the sequence of development of literary genres: lyric, epic, and dramatic.

  The `modern' period for Hugo is quite extensive, for he equates it with the dominance of Christianity in Europe. Drama was born on the day Christianity said to man:

  `You are double, you are composed of two beings, one perishable, the other immortal; one carnal, the other ethereal; one chained to its appetites, needs, and passions, the other born up on the wings of enthusiasm and reverie; one always bent towards earth, its mother, the other always springing towards heaven, its homeland'. This is the day that drama was born.

  From this concept of doubleness, Hugo derives an insistence on the mixed character of all modern art, which should depict the sordid as well as the sublime, the trivial as well as the important. In rejecting the drama of the 17th and 18th centuries, Hugo (like Stendhal in Racine et Shakespeare, 1823-4), saw the English dramatist as superior to the French tragedian because Shakespeare included the melancholic, the earthy, and the grotesque alongside the sublime. Accusing the French Academy and its neo-Aristotelian poetics of stifling Corneille's creativity, Hugo particularly praised the author of Le Cid as `an entirely modern genius, imbued with the Middle Ages and Spain, forced to lie to himself and to throw himself into Antiquity'.

  9. Engraving by Luc-Olivier Merson (1881) inspired by Victor Hugo's novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831)

  Heroes of the grotesque

  The link between the grotesque and the medieval appears in Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831, fourteen years before the restoration of the crumbling monument was undertaken, in part because of the impact of Hugo's work) - a novel best known in English as The Hunchback ofNotre Dame. Although Hugo disapproved of the English title, because for him the cathedral itself was the central character, the association of a deformed body and a generous spirit in the fictive late 15th-century bell-ringer Quasimodo provides one example of the doubleness that the author so prized. The hunchback first appears in the novel when a festive crowd decides to elect its own `pope of fools' on the basis of the ugliest grimace. The contestants in turn poke their faces through a broken circular window in a chapel wall - thus, in effect, uniting the grimacing face with the stone to suggest a gothic grotesque or gargoyle. Finally, a head appears that is universally acclaimed. It is perfect: `But then surprise and admiration reached their pinnacle. The grimace was his face. Or rather, his whole body was a grimace' (Mais c'est alors que la surpise et l'admiration furent a leur comble. La grimace etait son visage. On plutot toute sa personne etait une grimace). This is Quasimodo, who is both metonymically and metaphorically tied to the cathedral itself: he is constantly present in the church, and he is also similar to the building in its gothic aesthetic.

  But the best-known dramatic example of this grotesque doubleness is Lorenzaccio, Alfred de Musset's drama published seven years after Hugo's preface to Cromwell. Neither Cromwell nor Lorenzaccio were ever performed during their authors' lifetimes, both were too incendiary by the standards of censorship of the time, and both were, in their published form, considered impossible to stage - Musset's play seems to require from sixty to a hundred actors and extras. Musset based Lorenzaccio in part on a text by his lover George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant), a scene historique entitled Une conspiration en 1537.

  Musset's work concentrates on the main hero's moral character, which at first seems, both to the audience and to almost all of his contemporaries within the play, to be entirely vicious. Completely absorbed in the pleasures of drink and sex, Lorenzo serves as procurer for his master and cousin, Alexandre, Duke of Florence, for whom he quickly and skilfully acquires the sexual services of the women of the city, by threats, promises, and money. A coward, he never carries a sword and is called by the Duke himself afemmelette (a `womanling') after Lorenzo faints when challenged to a duel. As the scenes unfold, Lorenzaccio (the contemptuous form of the name that the Florentines have given him) seems entirely to merit everyone's scorn as bully, spy, toady, and coward. But then it appears that Lorenzaccio's character has been deliberately assumed for the purpose of killing Alexandre - in this way, Lorenzo would simply be a highly successful actor, concealing a unified and noble self. What makes Lorenzaccio fascinating to Musset, however, is something much darker: Lorenzo, the originally pure, studious, idealistic scholar of ancient Rome, who modelled himself on Lucius Junius Brutus, the killer of Tarquin, is not merely feigning to be vicious but rather he has really become Lorenzaccio.

  Hugo's concept of a double man, both hideous and sublime, is realized in Musset's hero, who has really become addicted to the brutally licentious life while still aspiring to a heroic gesture of political and personal purity. We are led to suppose that what we have seen of Lorenzaccio in the first scene is not simply a feint but a true expression of his own desires:

  What is more curious for the connoisseur than to debauch an infant? To see in a child of fifteen the future slut; to study, seed, insinuate the thread of vice under the guise of a fatherly friend...

  (Quoi de plus curieux pour le connaisseur que la debauche a la mamelle? Voir dans une enfant de quinze ans la rouee a venir; etudier, ensemencer, infiltrer paternellement le felon mysterieux du vice dans le conseil dun ami...)

  Disseminating corruption throughout the families of Florence as within himself, Lorenzaccio has become such a cynic, or such a realist, in regard to human nature that his intention to follow through on his solitary plot to kill Alexandre has no connection whatever with the anti-tyrannical agitation among certain groups of Florentine families. In representing the character of the Florentines - and through them, no doubt, his 19th-century contemporaries - Musset shows that those who are outwardly `noble' and quick to defend their honour are ineffectual. Lorenzaccio, outwardly despicable, manages to achieve the death of Duke Alexandre, though this really changes nothing. At the end of the play, as at the beginning, the Florentines complain and conspire, and life goes on as always.

  The provincial life

  The exasperated sense that heroic striving is vain, and that the coarse, materialistic, conservative common sense of the bourgeoisie will always triumph over those who seek something more out of life often was embodied in the contrast between fast-chang
ing, fashionable Paris and the stodgy, rustic, and boring provincial life. Balzac's immense collection of novels, which, in the course of its evolution, he decided to call The Human Comedy (La Comedie Humaine) is divided into various series and subseries that reflect the importance of the Paris - province distinction, such as the `Scenes of the life of the provinces' (Scenes de la vie de province), the `Scenes of Parisian life', and `Scenes of country life'. Yet the greatest hero to strive against the prison of the provincial life is Emma Bovary, the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary.

  When it first appeared as a serial in 1856 in the Revue de Paris, the work had the highly significant original title, Madame Bovary, moeurs de province. For Emma, a woman more intelligent than any of those around her, though with only a convent education, the most powerful magic is contained in the words, `They do it in Paris!' (Cela se fait a Paris!), five words that suffice to propel her into the arms of her second lover. Paris is for her the ultimate place of dreams, though the dimension of place is insufficient without the figure of an ideal role or persona. Flaubert's novel is full of representations of the effect of representation, fictions that propel actions. Emma delights in heroines who come to her from stories told by the nuns, novels, magazines, and even from plates! As a child in the convent, `they had supper on painted plates that depicted the story of Mlle de La Valliere' (the young mistress of Louis XIV, who once fled from the court to a convent). In her remote Norman village, Emma receives magazines from Paris, and she reads the novels of George Sand and Balzac. At one point, her mother-in-law tries to keep her from reading novels - a hint that Emma is a latter-day Don Quixote, maddened by reading. Her life cycles through fits of intense energy and striving to make something of herself, followed by periods of lethargy and sickness. This alternation contrasts with provincial routine, so regular in its seasonal cycles that it seems to be unchanged since time immemorial. Though she stands out from her milieu - and thus permits Flaubert to create a multitude of picturesque characters with all the acuity of a Dickens - Emma is neither a person of great intelligence nor refinement. Her unhappiness illustrates something said in Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind one. He knows what he is missing' (Un borgne est Bien plus incomplet qu'un aveugle. Il sait cc qui lui manque).

  The view of la province conveyed in Flaubert (as in the novels of Stendhal and Balzac) shows that the cult of nature and of village life, so dear to followers of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, had by mid-century provoked a backlash. There is nothing uplifting and noble about herding cows in Flaubert's work, and vistas of fields with flowers do not bring Emma any consolation. In fact, through Emma's cliche-ridden imagination, Flaubert parodies the romantic notion of an idyllic escape to the countryside when Emma fantasizes eloping with Rodolphe to `a village of fishermen, where brown nets were drying in the wind, along a cliff with little huts. That is where they would settle down to live: they would have a low house with a flat roof, in the shade of a palm tree, at the end of a gulf, on the seaside'. This is both particularly comic and also very sad, in that Emma, who lives in the country, has internalized the fantasies of the city dweller she aspires to be.

  Since Emma is a reader of Flaubert's friend and fellow novelist George Sand, it is difficult to resist comparing the character of Emma to the heroine of Sand's earlier work Consuelo (1842), a vast historical novel, set in the 18th century, that is almost picaresque in its structure though not in its tone. Consuelo follows the life of Consuelo from her impoverished childhood in Venice to her eventual marriage to the half-mad Bohemian (Czech) aristocrat Albert of Rudolstadt. Point by point, the two novels are entirely opposite: Emma is trapped in a prosaic French village, while Consuelo's life is almost a travelogue of the Austro Hungarian empire; Emma yearns for the aristocratic life and for the sophistication of the city and the theatre, while Consuelo spends a good deal of time fleeing all of these things. The life around Emma seems intensely boring but she tries to infuse it with excitement, while Consuelo's life is fully Romantic in the atmosphere and adventures that take place in medieval castles with subterranean passageways and gloomy forests. But most of all, the temperament of each heroine is directly opposed. Consuelo is goodness itself, always patient, generous, resourceful, caring for others, indifferent to wealth and prestige, and with no need for exotic escape.

  Urban exiles

  Any where out of the world', was Charles Baudelaire's diagnosis of human aspirations, so well represented by Emma Bovary and so foreign to Consuelo. The expression, in English, was the title of one of the prose poems in the volume Le Spleen de Paris (1869). In Any where out of the world', he evokes the power of the eternal `elsewhere': `This life is a hospital where each patient is obsessed with the desire to change beds'. This interest in what is happening in the other parts of the world/hospital is a key to the fascinating paradox that Flaubert, like Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, and others, could entertain sophisticated readers with stories of the supposedly stifling provincials, who, in turn, are shown to spend their time longing for Paris (or longing for village life as if they were Parisians). What could Parisians like Baudelaire find to interest them in the life of an unhappy provincial housewife?

  Baudelaire was one of the many admiring readers of Flaubert's novel. In his review essay on Madame Bovary - which appeared several months after the trial that acquitted Flaubert for outrage to public and religious morality - Baudelaire described the novel as the triumph of the power of writing, a power so great that it scarcely needed a subject. Baudelaire either knew or intuited a famous formulation that Flaubert used in a letter to his lover Louise Colet five years earlier, saying that his dream was someday to write `a book about nothing... that would have almost no subject or at least where the subject would be almost invisible' (1852). Baudelaire found in Madame Bovary the triumph of this artistic challenge: to take the most banal subject, adultery, in the place where stupidity and intolerance reign, la province, and to create a heroine who faces this `total absence of genius' in a masculine way. This heroine, Madame Bovary herself, `is very sublime in her kind, in her small milieu and facing her small horizon. Baudelaire, in praising both Flaubert's novel and its heroine, seems at times to identify with her, despite the radical difference in places.

  The quintessential Parisian poet, Baudelaire is almost unimaginable elsewhere, but this is not to say that he sings the praises of Paris. Having absorbed Hugo's teaching about the grotesque and about human doubleness, Baudelaire was fascinated by the ugly and by the sublime, by all that was unpredictable and out of place. Perfectly Parisian, Baudelaire, as both poet and as subject of his poetry, cultivated his sense of being in the wrong place as much as Emma Bovary did hers. He wrote of Emma that in her convent school she made for herself a'God of the future and of chance', and one of the great values of the capital for Baudelaire was its capacity to produce random encounters that generated lyrical fusions.

  It is understandable that the metropolis in mid-century should offer freedom and opportunity on a quite different scale from any other city in France, for it was growing explosively. In 1801, Paris had had virtually the same population as at the end of the 17th century, roughly half a million inhabitants in an area of less than 14 square kilometres. By the end of the century, the population quintupled, and Paris had annexed nearby towns and villages so that the urban area was eight times larger. Such an environment favours the `God of chance' Baudelaire attributed to Emma Bovary, and he seized for himself a poetic persona well adapted to this moment, that of the stroller (le flaneur), a role that he describes in an essay on the painter Constantin Guys, `The Painter of Modern Life': `For the perfect stroller, for the passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure to dwell in the multitude, in the undulating, in movement, in the fleeting, and the infinite'. The sonnet `To a Woman Passing By' (A unepassante, in Les Fleurs du mal [Flowers of Evil]) illustrates the intensity and the chance nature of the encounters that the poet-stroller prizes in the immense, fast-movin
g, modern city. The two quatrains, with no addressee, describe a crowded street scene and then the vision of a striking woman. The tercets start by evoking the woman's glance, and then the poet addresses the woman directly. The lightninglike strike of the glance turns the poet's thoughts forward from this encounter to the improbability of future encounters, and shifts the sonnet into a thematic well known to Emma Bovary and her readers: the longed-for elsewhere and another time, when love is fulfilled. The single italicized word,jamais (never) - Baudelaire almost never used italics - stresses the other-worldly character of this time, which may not come in this life. The woman, who is in mourning, may indeed be Death, but she may also be simply a woman in the crowd whose ephemeral image nourishes the poet's imagination and to whom the poet attributes an equal role in this mental exchange. The very title of the poem suggests extremes, the fullness of life in a city in which people move rapidly and pass one another (as they do not in a village) and also the eventual absence of movement of someone who has passed beyond life - life and death themselves telescoped into the antithesis of a lighting flash followed by darkness.