Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture

Time, Politics and Class

C. White

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137373076
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature générale

In this engaging new study, Claire White reveals how representations of work and leisure became the vehicle for anxieties and fantasies about class and alienation, affecting, in turn, the ways in which writers and artists understood their own cultural work.

1

Workers at Play in Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart

Quand les pauvres gens s’amusent, la pauvreté disparaît de la terre.

[When poor people are having fun poverty vanishes from the earth.]

Zola, ‘Causerie’, 18 October 1868

En ces jours-là, il me semble que le peuple oublie tout, la douleur et le travail; il devient pareil aux enfants.

[On days like these, people seem to forget everything, their troubles and their toil; they become like children.]

Baudelaire, ‘Le vieux saltimbanque’, Le Spleen de Paris (1869)

On 18 October 1868, Zola composed an article, as part of his weekly ‘Causerie’ in the newspaper La Tribune, on the subject of popular leisure. The young journalist’s enthused account of a recent Sunday excursion to the Île de Saint-Ouen provides the poetic backdrop to a politically charged defence of working-class recreation:

Je suis resté jusqu’au soir au milieu du peuple endimanché. Peu de paletots, beaucoup de blouses: un monde ouvrier gai et franc, des jeunes filles en bonnet de linge, montrant leurs doigts nus criblés de piqûres d’aiguille, des hommes vêtus de toile, dont les mains rudes gardaient l’empreinte d’un outil. La joie de ce monde était saine; je n’ai pas entendu une seule querelle, je n’ai pas aperçu un seul ivrogne. […] C’était une gaieté de bons enfants, des éclats de rires sincères, des plaisirs sans honte. On eût dit une seule famille, la grande famille plébéienne, venant goûter sous le ciel libre le repos gagné par une longue semaine de labeur.¹

[I stayed until evening amidst the people in their Sunday best. Not many overcoats, lots of workshirts. A cheerful and open crowd of workers: young girls in cloth hats, their bare needle-pricked fingers on show; men, dressed in cotton, whose rough hands still bore the imprint of a tool. The joy of this crowd was healthy; I did not hear a single quarrel, nor did I spot a single drunk. […] Theirs was the cheerfulness of good-natured children, sincere bursts of laughter, and pleasures with no shame attached. They looked like one big family, the great, common family, savouring under the open sky the rest earned by a long week of labour.]

In a way which anticipates the utopian vision of working-class harmony that will triumph, as we shall see in Chapter 4, in the latter stages of Zola’s Travail and surface, albeit fleetingly and intermittently, in Les Rougon-Macquart, the docile leisure of the writer’s populated, pastoral landscape is rendered in a tone of paternal benevolence. Addressed primarily to Baron Haussmann, the article responds to what Zola perceives to be the progressive elimination of popular leisure in and around Second Empire Paris. Since the city and its suburbs had rapidly become a specifically bourgeois pleasure and leisure ground during the course of the 1860s, Zola proposes an ambitious design to create ‘quatre Jardins du peuple’ (OC, III, 475) [four Gardens for the people] by turning over expansive plots of uncultivated land at each corner of the Parisian fortifications to the unrestrained enjoyment of urban workers. Where much cultural and political discourse on popular recreation in the mid-to-late nineteenth century perpetuated a fearful conflation of the proletariat with les classes dangereuses (most dangerous, it seemed, when liberated from the workplace), Zola’s impassioned remonstrations seek to extricate proletarian leisure from the insalubrious behaviour – namely, violence, drinking and promiscuity – with which it had become almost unavoidably synonymous. Instead, he promotes a sanitised and emphatically innocuous portrait of the infantilised worker at play. When left to their own devices, Zola insists, ‘le peuple sait s’amuser’ (OC, III, 474) [the people know how to enjoy themselves]; they dispose, in other words, of the instinctive and acquired capabilities necessary to the self-regulating provision of their own leisure. If the proletariat is drawn to the delights of the cabaret rather than those of the suburban idyll, this inclination is determined, Zola stresses, in a way which suggestively prefigures the concerns of L’Assommoir, by the claustrophobia of the urban, working-class milieu: ‘le travail demande une récréation, et […] lorsque l’horizon est fermé, on prend le plaisir qu’on a sous la main’ (OC, III, 473) [work calls for recreation, and […] when your horizons are closed, you take whatever pleasure you can lay your hands on]. Underpinning Zola’s rhetorical manoeuvring here is not only a paternally benevolent preoccupation with leisure’s affective compensation for a laborious existence – it provides ‘la gaieté saine nécessaire à leur vie de labeur’ (OC, III, 474) [the healthy cheer necessary to their life of labour] – but also an engagement with hygienist imperatives, which insert popular leisure into a rational economy of the expenditure and recreation of energies. Let us recall that in L’Assommoir the proper organisation of labour and leisure is contained in an allusion to the period that falls between the wedding and Coupeau’s accident, when the iterative routine of the Coupeau household is happily metred out by ‘un tour de promenade régulier le dimanche, du côté de Saint-Ouen’ [a regular walk on Sundays, Saint-Ouen way].²

Nearly a year before the publication of Zola’s ‘Causerie’, however, Saint-Ouen had acquired a rather different association as the malevolent setting of Camille’s murder in Chapter 11 of Thérèse Raquin (1867), an episode that would continue to colour later instances of the Zolian partie de campagne with its powerful and fatal admixture of eroticism and violence.³ With this climactic scene of Zola’s macabre novel of adultery we are far from the healthy, joyful innocence of his suburban journalism. Instead, prostitutes (rather than artisans or seamstresses) air their pale complexions ‘que des caresses brutales avaient martelés’ [stamped with brutal kisses], whilst the tenor of mourning combines with the aggressive undertones of the unbridled crowd: ‘au bruit criard de la foule, se mêlaient les chansons lamentables des orgues de Barbarie’ [the dreary tunes of barrel organs mingled with the loud voices of the crowd] (OC, III, 71/59). Here, leisure (from licere, ‘to permit’) threatens to descend into licentiousness, a mode of unrestrained, sordid excess. In what might be taken as an allusion to the emerging mode and subject of Impressionist painting in the 1860s, it is precisely the liberating experience of ‘plein air’ [the open air] (OC, III, 68/55) that arouses Laurent’s indecent desires: ‘la marche au soleil, sur la chaussée de Saint-Ouen, avait mis des flammes en lui’ [the walk in the sun on the road to Saint-Ouen had aroused him] (OC, III, 69/57).⁴ And it inspires, in turn, in Thérèse a certain dazed malleability, or laisser-faire, which will ultimately collude in her husband’s murder.

There is, as Denis Hollier has suggested, something deeply problematic about this passage between murder and play, fratricide and fraternity, that frames Zola’s incongruous diptych of suburban leisure.⁵ Ultimately, Hollier argues, what these scenes amount to are contrasting ways of spending energy: ‘l’une est propre, l’autre sale’ [a proper, clean one and an improper, dirty one].⁶ Unlike the sordid eroticism of Zola’s petit-bourgeois strollers, the popular pleasures of his labourers are acquired ‘sans honte’; theirs is a docile leisure firmly embedded in a dynamic of expenditure and recompense (‘le repos gagné par une longue semaine de labeur’). Indeed, the working body at leisure, or ‘endimanché’, of Zola’s suburban portrait remains partially inscribed with the indelible marks of the week’s labours. On the surface of the worker’s bare hands the experience and nature of the body’s work – here, the ‘piqûres d’aiguille’ and ‘l’empreinte d’un outil’ – is made legible to the attentive spectator. Insofar as these inscriptions attest to the individual’s weekday toil, they participate in the compensatory logic underpinning Zola’s defence of popular recreation, that is, the post-revolutionary ideology that the accomplishment of duty is a necessary condition of leisure. For this reason, Zola goes on to suggest, those elite leisure spaces of Haussmann’s Paris – the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes – cannot accommodate the presence of the working classes: ‘les ouvriers doivent fuir ces allées propres, ces larges avenues encombrées de calèches dont la vue leur donnerait des envies mauvaises’ (OC, III, 473) [workers must shun these neat paths and broad avenues packed with calashes, the sight of which would give rise to bad inclinations]. Read ungenerously, Zola’s proposed social segregation seeks to contain what Naomi Schor terms that ‘highly communicable disease’, poverty.⁷ But Zola’s argument treads a different rhetorical line: the sight of a distinctly privileged version of leisure, which is founded upon an enduring structure of social inequality, risks, he suggests, inspiring a potentially violent, even revolutionary, sense of injustice in the subjected worker: ‘ils seraient capables de se fâcher sérieusement et de demander pourquoi ils gagnent si peu quand des coquins volent tant’ (OC, III, 473) [they are liable to become seriously angry and question why they earn so little when these scoundrels steal so much]. As a result, Zola reasons, the downtrodden peuple requires a vast space of its own, large and remote enough to collude in the temporary oblivion, or at least overlooking, of class difference.

As we saw in the Introduction, the progressive democratisation of leisure was one measure of the century’s revolutionary ideals, and to some extent the optimism of Zola’s article shares in this vision. A proper division of leisure appears to be capable of neutralising (or naturalising) the effects of social inequality. The insouciant state of forgetfulness that leisure or amusement induces in the disenfranchised worker is valorised as a unique source of consolation, a means of alleviating those affective and corporeal pressures brought about by social injustice: ‘la gaieté, c’est votre grande force, c’est l’oubli et c’est l’espérance, c’est la puissance saine et irrésistible qui vous donnera le courage de vos destinées’ (OC, III, 473) [cheerfulness is your greatest strength; it brings oblivion and hope, it is the healthy, indomitable force helping you to brave your destiny]. But popular recreation could inspire, Zola appears to suggest – and this was an idea that would be even more pressing after the Commune – class consciousness as much as class forgetfulness; and as a potential vehicle for discontent, the prospect of the unbridled ‘foule’ looms, unmistakeably, over Zola’s vision of infantile play. Departing from Zola’s journalistic account of popular recreation, this chapter sets out to explore the ways in which the early idealism of this portrait is played out in Les Rougon-Macquart, where the pursuit of pleasure and leisure has far less fortifying consequences.

Zola’s most famous novels of work – L’Assommoir, Au Bonheur des Dames and Germinal – are all punctuated by moments of leisure. From a trip to the Louvre to a Sunday jaunt into the Parisian suburbs, those brief excursions outside of the high capitalist workplace lend the plot of modern labour certain anecdotal or episodic possibilities. Against the metre of repetitious toil and the monotonous routines of daily life, the Naturalist plot is in part borne forward by the short interludes that leisure affords. For if many of Zola’s novels of work successfully turn labour into drama, their intrigue surely located in the loves, trials and tragedies of the working existence, leisure too participates in making the working plot readable, affording an element of escapism associated with imaginative literature. In Les Rougon-Macquart, Zola depicts a society captivated by the novel possibilities of amusement and sociability that were provided by the expanding leisure industry of the Second Empire, and which fuelled the ravenous appetites – ‘le débordement des appétits’ (I, 3) – that were a characteristic of both the family and the age. Just as work proliferates in various guises over the series – industrial, scientific, writerly, artistic, commercial, agricultural, and so on – Zolian leisure takes on a multiplicity of forms, including sports, such as lacrosse and shuttlecocks; shopping; the opera; variety-theatre performances; café culture; card playing; the bal populaire; gambling; reading; ice skating; boating; people-watching; Salon-going; drinking; swimming; and urban flânerie. From a guided encounter with institutionalised culture to a relatively privatised, spontaneous version of leisure which crystallises out of the rhythms of work, leisure is variously the active expenditure or passive recuperation of energies, the investment of funds, the occasion for consumption, senseless intoxication, corporeal play, and intellectual or edifying endeavour. This chapter treads a necessarily delimited route through this vast terrain of Second Empire leisure, giving particular attention to that moment of Zolian recreation with which we began, the trip to the countryside. In foregrounding less familiar narrative episodes which have often been occluded in Zolian criticism, it attempts to redress a dual emphasis that has largely prevailed in critical discourse, in particular where the representation of the working classes is at stake, on the politics of labour and the body of desire.⁸ This is not to preclude either subject from the present discussion but rather to suggest a shift in approach, which seeks to connect the two via the space of leisure. For if focusing on the Zolian worker at play involves returning the desiring body and consciousness to the sociopolitical conditions in which it is necessarily embedded and from which it necessarily emerges, the critical study of popular leisure also engages those terms central to the politics of labour – alienation, self-estrangement, freedom – in a way which attends to the subjective, imaginative and experiential reality of the working individual.

With Zola’s attention to popular recreation in view, this chapter explores the ways in which Naturalism, as a representational and quasi-scientific project, anticipates twentieth-century sociological critiques of leisure and the leisure industry, focusing principally on Henri Lefebvre, and referring, in the process, to Theodor Adorno, Jean Baudrillard and Pierre Bourdieu. My intention is not to provide a comprehensive account of Zola’s prospective relationship to any individual thinker or school of thought, but rather to suggest new correspondences and potentially productive ways of thinking Zola’s particular mode of culture critique forward into the twentieth century. Partly, then, this study responds to Susan Harrow’s persuasive call for Zola’s aesthetic and conceptual project to be mapped onto twentieth-century modernism, and even postmodernism, as well as twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory and philosophy.⁹ ‘Reading Zola through the lenses offered by recent critical thought reveals’, Harrow asserts, ‘a certain homology between his Taine-grounded approach to moment and milieu, and the broader reach of modern cultural studies’.¹⁰

In Zola’s Naturalist fiction, those forces of heredity, social and material environment and political context, which underpin Hippolyte Taine’s theory of determinism, combine to inflect, even produce, familial and national narratives.¹¹ In this respect, the Rougon-Macquart series is informed by attempts to provide a framework for the production of an individual, and of a class, in a particular social environment; it seeks, as Harrow suggests, to elaborate an explicative system for the development of ideologies, subjectivities and social behaviour in a way which anticipates, to a certain extent, ‘the rise of the social sciences in the later nineteenth century as a means of analysing modernity’.¹²

In what follows, we shall explore how twentieth-century sociological concerns intersect with Zola’s project and the explicatory imperative underpinning it, evidenced in the opening line of his preface to La Fortune des Rougon (1871) and, subsequently, in his plans for L’Assommoir: ‘montrer le milieu peuple et expliquer par ce milieu les mœurs peuple’ (II, 1543) [show the environment of the lower classes and explain lower-class behaviour through this environment].¹³ Put differently, it will be argued that the social determinism at stake in Zola’s brand of Naturalism anticipates the concepts of social and cultural domination that would be central to twentieth-century sociological thought and its critique of modern leisure. This is a connection that, as we shall see, goes beyond a similar treatment of the leisure industry to play into broader questions posed by both novelist and sociologist about class, freedom and alienation. Firmly anchored in a mid-to-late twentieth-century context, Lefebvre and Adorno’s sociological critiques of leisure develop with the rise of capitalism’s burgeoning consumer society and its expanding market of mass amusement. What was perceived to be the colonisation by capital of everyday social practices – or what T. J. Clark terms ‘the invasion and restructuring of whole areas of free time, privat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Prefatory Note
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Workers at Play in Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart
• 2 Dominical Diversions: Laforgue on Sundays
• 3 Beyond the Leisure Principle: Luce and Neo-Impressionism
• 4 Work and Pleasure: Zola’s Travail
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index