Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France

Edmund Birch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319722009
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores how writers responded to the rise of the newspaper over the course of the nineteenth century. Taking as its subject the ceaseless intertwining of fiction and journalism at this time, it tracks the representation of newspapers and journalists in works by Honoré de Balzac, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Guy de Maupassant. This was an era in which novels were published in newspapers and novelists worked as journalists. In France, fiction was to prove an utterly crucial presence at the newspaper's heart, with a gilded array of predominant literary figures active in journalism. Today, few in search of a novel would turn to the pages of a daily newspaper. But what are usually cast as discrete realms – fiction and journalism – came, in the nineteenth century, to occupy the same space, a point which complicates our sense of the cultural history of French literature.

© The Author(s) 2018

Edmund BirchFictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century FrancePalgrave Studies in Modern European Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72200-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Edmund Birch¹

(1)

Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

End Abstract

Lord, what a fuss about an old newspaper!

Henry James, The Reverberator¹

Julien Sorel’s first steps must number among the most inopportune of literary beginnings. About to embark on a new life with the Rênal family, the protagonist of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir passes an idle moment of reflection in a local church. Like so many heroes of nineteenth-century fiction, Julien sets out to make it in the world; and yet here, in the town of Verrières, he encounters, as if by chance, a misplaced fragment from a newspaper:

Sur le prie-Dieu, Julien remarqua un morceau de papier imprimé, étalé là comme pour être lu. Il y porta les yeux et vit:

Détails de l’exécution et des derniers moments de Louis Jenrel, exécuté à Besançon, le…

Le papier était déchiré. Au revers, on lisait les deux premiers mots d’une ligne, c’étaient: Le premier pas.

– Qui a pu mettre ce papier là, dit Julien? Pauvre malheureux, ajouta-t-il avec un soupir, son nom finit comme le mien… et il froissa le papier.²

[Julien noticed a scrap of printed paper spread out on the stool, left there as though it were intended to be read. Casting an eye over it, he saw:

Details of the execution and final moments of Louis Jenrel, executed in Besançon the…

The paper was torn. The first two words of a line were legible on the back, and these read: The first step.

‘Who can have left this paper here?’ said Julien. ‘Poor wretch,’ he added with a sigh, ‘his name ends just like my own’, and he crumpled up the paper.]

Before too long, Julien will find himself back in this church, revolver in hand, preparing to fire on Mme de Rênal; his execution will swiftly follow. But the cataclysm of his ending is unknown to the hopeful protagonist in this, his beginning; and indeed, Julien only partially acknowledges the scarcely concealed portent of his fate, apparently ignorant of the anagrammatic reference which binds Louis Jenrel to Julien Sorel. In these first steps, the narrative already knows what will befall its hero and employs the newspaper as some thinly veiled harbinger of an ending already written, seemingly beyond the control of any fictional protagonist (however dynamic). Such determinism draws us back to the novel’s origins in the newspaper, recalling, in particular, the Berthet Affair, reported in the Gazette des Tribunaux over December 1827. As numerous critics have noted, Antoine Berthet’s attempted assassination of Mme Michoud de la Tour mirrors the story of Stendhal’s Julien.³ In this displaced newspaper, then, we encounter the troubled history of fiction and journalism in nineteenth-century France; its incongruous presence prompts us to question, as Peter Brooks has: ‘How do we read the newspaper in the novel?’⁴

What is at stake in fictional representations of the press? This is the question this book will endeavour to answer, tracking the depiction of newspapers and journalists in works by Honoré de Balzac, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt and Guy de Maupassant. At first glance, the nineteenth-century novel suffers few illusions about the workings of the press. As Balzac’s Claude Vignon puts it in Illusions perdues: ‘Les journaux sont un mal’ (V, 404) [Newspapers are an evil]. Pessimism is rife in nineteenth-century reflections on the press, a point underscored not only in fictional works but across an array of writings depicting and commenting on the state of contemporary journalism. And yet newspaper and novel become inseparable in this period; Stendhal’s decisive ‘morceau de papier’—dubbed a ‘mortal intertext’ in Brooks’s reading—comes to reflect the newspaper’s ever-increasing centrality, emblematic of a phenomenon we will encounter time and again in this study: fiction borrows from the press, the twists and turns of its various plots inextricably bound up with the news.⁵ Evident in Julien Sorel’s ill-fated example are the ways in which the newspaper threatens to reconfigure not simply the object of literary representation, but the shape of fictional plots. My intention here is to trace a particular history of reading, to explore the ways in which the novel interprets the newspaper: a history of reading, that is, from the perspective of the novel itself. This, after all, was the ‘century of the press’, an era in which novels were published in newspapers and novelists worked as journalists.⁶ It was also, as scholars such as Martyn Lyons and James Smith Allen have explored, an era of new readers: literacy rates were shifting and new technologies brought the printed word before an ever-greater public.⁷ Robert Darnton, in his ‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading’, offers a timely reminder of the inevitably historical character of reading:

We may enjoy the illusion of stepping outside of time in order to make contact with authors who lived centuries ago. But even if their texts have come down to us unchanged—a virtual impossibility, considering the evolution of layout and of books as physical objects—our relation to those texts cannot be the same as that of readers in the past.⁸

Indeed, the fact of the novel’s frequent publication in the newspaper represents only the first consideration in assessing the material transformation of the nineteenth century’s various literary legacies. Yet the point is instructive. Today, few in search of a novel would instinctively turn to the pages of a daily newspaper.⁹

We cannot hope to understand the nineteenth-century novel in France without first considering its myriad connections with the newspaper. The story of the press at this time is one of rampant expansion, with circulation multiplying by a factor of forty between 1830 and 1880.¹⁰ The scope of such upheaval becomes evident in two nineteenth-century representations of the printing press. The opening lines of Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837–1843) identify in the press an emblem of provincial society’s technological inadequacies: ‘À l’époque où commence cette histoire, la presse de Stanhope et les rouleaux à distribuer l’encre ne fonctionnaient pas encore dans les petites imprimeries de province’ (V, 123) [At the time this story begins, the Stanhope press and rollers for the distribution of ink were not in common use in the small printing shops of the provinces]. Balzac’s now famous description of the press privileges precisely the processes of reproduction which align novel and newspaper. Illusions perdues, after all, is a narrative of paper, concerned with the materiality of texts (from articles, to novels, to letters).¹¹ In the image of this outmoded press, indeed, we find a particularly nineteenth-century symbol of innovation. By the end of the century, and the publication of Paul Brulat’s 1898 novel of journalism, Le Reporter, the press has undergone something of a metamorphosis. Brulat’s protagonist, Pierre Marzans, is a hero with Balzacian illusions. Wandering the streets of Paris in the early hours of the morning, he strikes on a printing press and loses all sense of time contemplating the hypnotic movement of the machines:

Les cylindres, longs et minces, courts et puissants, tournaient, roulaient avec une rapidité qui, par instants, semblait s’accroître avec le bruit. Trente-six mille exemplaires à l’heure! A mesure que cette heure avançait, l’activité se faisait plus formidable; les machines, comme excitées par leur propre vacarme, paraissaient précipiter d’elles-mêmes leur mouvement, se hâter. Les piles de journaux s’élevaient, l’atelier soufflait; sur le plancher, un pêle-mêle d’épreuves froissées traînaient, piétinées sous le va-et-vient des ouvriers, portant l’empreinte des talons.¹²

[Long and thin, short and powerful, the cylinders turned, spinning with a rapidity which, at times, seemed only to increase with the noise. Thirty-six thousand copies every hour! As this hour went by, their activity became all the more formidable; the machines, as though excited by their own racket, seemed to quicken their pace all by themselves, to be in a rush. The piles of newspapers grew tall; the workshop exhaled. An array of crumpled proofs littered the floor, trampled beneath the comings and goings of the workers, and bearing the imprints of their boots.]

Brulat’s machine offers a vision of the transformed technology of reproduction on the eve of the twentieth century. This book will focus on the gulf which divides Balzac’s provincial press from this diabolical creation, a naturalist metaphor in the style of the train of Émile Zola’s 1890 novel, La Bête humaine. Brulat’s printing press is responsive less to the efforts of attending workers than to some impulse for continual propulsion.

What has changed in the years separating Balzac from Brulat is not simply the technology of reproduction but the culture of journalism. Le Reporter’s printing press emphasises both rapidity and volume of production, the mechanical emblem of a society refashioned by the newspaper’s inexorable rise. Nineteenth-century commentators were sensitive to such refashioning. In fact, so swift was the pace of change that by 1877 Zola reflected that a golden age of journalism under the July Monarchy had been lost amid skyrocketing subscription figures and supposedly populist concerns: ‘Le journal cessa d’être l’organe d’une certaine opinion pour raconter, avant tout, les faits divers et les détails de la vie quotidienne’ [The newspaper ceased to be the organ of some particular opinion and came to recount, above all, the faits divers and the details of everyday life].¹³ And yet while literary criticism has long suspected the importance of the press for writers of this period—not least in the case of Zola, whose 1898 article, ‘J’Accuse’, remains one of the most influential in the history of French journalism—only in recent years has the study of journalism risen to due prominence, particularly in the Francophone world.¹⁴ Literary scholars and cultural historians, notably Marie-Ève Thérenty, Alain Vaillant, Dominique Kalifa and Guillaume Pinson, have redrawn the critical map of nineteenth-century studies, sensitive to the continual crossover, overlap and exchange which bind literature and journalism in this period.¹⁵ Building on the work of an earlier generation of French historians (not least that of Claude Bellanger), these scholarly endeavours stress the newspaper’s foundational role in nineteenth-century society in an approach which glosses the era as la civilisation du journal (or as the civilisation of the newspaper).¹⁶ I shall reflect on the work of Thérenty and her colleagues throughout this study, one of the objectives of which will be to analyse, explore and develop the intellectual foundations of this novel project, and I shall highlight, as a consequence, theoretical approaches outlined by Pierre Bourdieu (Les Règles de l’art) and Marc Angenot (1889. Un état du discours social). Both represent crucial points of reference in this rich vein of Francophone scholarship.

Such critical focus has, in the main, received scant attention in the Anglophone world. Where British and North American research has been particularly successful in the study of the nineteenth-century French press, it has sought to consider the connections between press and power, notably in the case of Richard Terdiman’s Discourse/Counter-Discourse, a work whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Newspaper Fictions, Newspaper Histories
• 3. A Sentimental Education: Balzac’s Journalists
• 4. The Brothers Goncourt and the End of Privacy
• 5. Sleight of Hand: Maupassant and Actualité
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter