Writing Against the Reader: Poetry and

Writing Against the Reader:
Poetry and Readership in France 1840-1880
Jacqueline Michelle Lerescu
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2015
© 2015
Jacqueline Michelle Lerescu
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT
Writing Against the Reader: Poetry and Readership 1840-1880
Jacqueline Michelle Lerescu
This dissertation examines the changing ways in which nineteenth-century French
poets addressed readers and constructed relationships with them from the late Romantic
period through the rise of the Symbolist movement. While poetry’s increased isolation from
the public is recognized as an important facet of the evolution of nineteenth-century poetry,
the specific reasons for this have not been broadly studied. This dissertation first examines
the poet-reader relationship in prefaces to poetic works, examining the shift from Romantic
poets such as Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, who considered addressing humanity
an important part of their vocation, to mid-century poets such as Charles Baudelaire,
Lautréamont and Charles Cros, who used prefaces to criticize and chase away readers, to later
poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud, who abstained from addressing
readers by not writing prefaces or publishing their poetry. In order to understand the reasons
for this shift, this dissertation examines new media and new readers which these poets
rejected as the antithesis of poetry: the press, women and working-class readers. This
dissertation studies poetry and critical articles in the mainstream press, women’s publications
and publications by and for workers to reveal the models of the poet-reader relationship they
presented. In so doing, it creates a broader view of poetic practices and readership in this
period, which remain understudied in literary history. The models of the poet-reader
relationship evident there demonstrate that rather than ignoring or rejecting them, elite poets
defined poetry and readership in direct relation to these other practices and audiences.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
iv
Acknowledgments
v
Introduction
1
Previous Scholarship
8
Description of Chapters
13
1 – From “homo sum” to “Hypocrite lecteur”: Addressing Poetry Readers in the
Preface in the Mid- to Late Nineteenth Century
20
Introduction
20
I. Preface Practices
22
1. Romantic and Jeune-France Preface Practices
24
2. Baudelaire’s Preface Practices: Late(r) Romantic and Old JeuneFrance
34
II. “Préface” and “Au lecteur”
37
1. Hugo and Baudelaire in the Literary Field, 1856-1857
38
2. Functions of the Preface in the “Préface” to LC and “Au lecteur”
40
3. Positioning the Poet-Reader Relationship in Pronouns
43
4. The Culpable Reader: “Insensé” and “Hypocrite”
47
5. Hugo and the Reader: Macrocosm and Microcosm
49
6. Baudelaire and the Reader: Aggression and Self-Incrimination
52
III. 1857 and After: Redefining the Poet-Reader Relationship in Negative
1. Aborted Prefaces: From Anger to Silence
59
59
2. Late Nineteenth-Century Prefaces: Insulting and Chasing Away the
Reader
63
3. No Prefaces, No Books: Ignoring the Reader
67
Conclusion
69
2 – Media and Audience: Poetry and Poets in the Press
71
Introduction
71
I. The Rise of the Newspaper and the Feuilleton
74
i
II. Poetry versus the Press
78
1. Material Forms: Mass-Produced Texts versus Luxury Literature
79
2. Readers and Practices: the Corporeal Cuisinière versus the
Disembodied Elite
85
3. Authors and Motives: The Prostituted Journalist versus the Pure Poet 89
III. Poets in the Press
93
1. Cultural Criticism in the Feuilleton
94
2. Poetry in the Feuilleton
101
IV. The Slow Extinction of the Poet-Journalist
114
1. Reviews and Self-Publication
118
2. Poetry as Anti-Publication
120
Conclusion
123
3 – “Catechism” and “Good Actions”: Women Readers and Poets
125
Introduction
125
I. Women Readers in Society and Literature
128
1. Women’s Education and Its Consequences for Readership
129
2. Masculine Bas-Bleus and Women Readers
131
3. Effeminate Romantic Poets and Women Readers
134
4. Gender and Genre on Trial
136
II. Women’s Poetry in the Press
140
1. The Development of the Women’s Press
141
2. Poetry as Prescriptive Moral Lesson
144
3. Poetry as an Exhortation to Action
152
4. The Woman Reader in Elite Publications
158
III. Women Readers beyond the Bourgeois Consensus
1. Women’s Poetry as a Critique of Women’s Social Condition
164
165
2. Women Poets’ Prefaces: Stretching the Boundaries the
Poet-Reader Relationship
168
3. Redefining the Poet-Reader Relationship as a Community of Women 171
Conclusion
177
4 – The Politics of Audience: Poetry and the Popular Reader
Introduction
181
181
ii
I. Poésie populaire 1830-1850: Media and Forms
184
II. Models of the Poet-Reader Relationship 1830-1852
190
1. Trials, Censorship and the Popular Reader as Criminal
190
2. The Poet-Reader Rapport in Worker Newspapers
195
3. Hugo, the Popular Poet and the “Multitude”
203
4. Lamartine and the Popular (Prose) Reader
208
5. Baudelaire in 1850: the Fusion of the Poet and the People
212
6. From Democracy to Aristocracy
221
III. Poetry and the Popular Reader 1852 and beyond: Hugo, Baudelaire,
Mallarmé
224
1. L’Art and le Beau versus le Vrai and l’Utile
225
2. Poetry and the Education of the Masses
227
3. Poetry and Progress
230
4. Mallarmé, Baudelaire and the Paradox of the Popular Reader
232
Conclusion
236
Conclusion
239
Bibliography
244
iii
List of Illustrations
Yves Vadé
Le sujet lyrique et ses allocutaires
61
Front page of La Presse, August 4, 1851
81
“Nostalgie d’obélisques” from Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852)
81
Gautier’s “Contralto” in the Revue des deux mondes (December 1849)
84
J.J. Grandville
The cuisinière and the feuilleton in Reybaud’s Jérôme Paturot à la recherche
d’une position sociale (1846)
86
Jules Vernier
The bas-bleu and the cuisinière in Soulié’s Physiologie du Bas-Bleu (1841)
132
iv
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Vincent Debaene, for his
tremendous encouragement, patience and generosity with his time and reflections. I would
also like to thank Elisabeth Ladenson and Emanuelle Saada, whose guidance has been central
in shaping this project from its earliest conception and who have been formative in my own
intellectual journey. Thank you also to Rachel Mesch and Seth Whidden for generously
agreeing to serve on my dissertation committee.
Thank you to all those in the Columbia French Department who have made my years
here intellectually exciting and fun: Pascale, Benita, Meritza, Isabelle, and all the talented and
kind professors in the Department. I will think of you all and my time here with great
fondness.
Finally, I want to thank my wonderful family and friends for their love and support.
Words cannot express my gratitude for all they have given me.
v
Introduction
In the mid- to late nineteenth century, the relationship between poets and their readers
was profoundly changing. Victor Hugo (1802-1885) argued throughout his long career that it
was their role to enlighten mankind, calling them “les premiers éducateurs du peuple”
(William Shakespeare 238). But by the mid-nineteenth century, young poets rejected this
Romantic conception of the poet as a voice for humanity. In 1857, Charles Baudelaire (18211867) famously addressed his reader in the preface to Les Fleurs du mal1 as “hypocrite
lecteur, mon semblable mon frère;” as Claude Pichois notes in his introduction to LFDM,
from this point on “[l]a poésie est devenue agression” (LFDM 27). Following his conviction
for immorality in the trial against LFDM, Baudelaire reflected bitterly on the fundamental
“malentendu” between poet and reader (idem 246). Instead, he and his successors hardened
their positions on readership considerably, defining poetry as an elite practice isolated from
the public’s gaze. In this dissertation, I examine the context of this shift in the poet-reader
relationship to show why and how poets increasingly defined their work against the reader.
As Baudelaire noted in an 1859 article on his mentor Théophile Gautier, aptly
published in the elite periodical L’Artiste, “la France n’est pas poëte, elle éprouve même,
pour tout dire, une horreur congéniale de la poésie. […O]n peut dire que dans tous les genres
d’invention le grand homme ici est un monstre. Aimons donc nos poètes secrètement et en
cachette” (OC 1961, 696-97).2 This notion that the average reader was unappreciative or even
hostile to poetry led poets like Baudelaire to attck them and increasingly argue that “real”
poetry should keep them away. In so doing, he helped shape a younger generation of poets
beginning in the 1860s, who largely defined their relationship to readers – or more precisely,
1
I will refer to Les Fleurs du mal from here on as LFDM.
I quote from two collections of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes, and distinguish between them by their date of
publication: OC 1961 refers to the 1961 Pléiade edition; OC 1975 refers to a two-volume Pléiade edition,
whose second volume features some of Baudelaire’s critical works on Poe not included in the earlier edition. I
also quote from the 2004 Gallimard edition of Les Fleurs du mal (LFDM) which contains Baudelaire’s notes for
later prefaces which were never published. I similarly refer to the Œuvres complètes of other authors with the
abbreviation OC and their Œuvres poétiques as OP.
2
1
the lack thereof – as based on the poet’s fundamental abstention from public life and any
interaction with the common reader. The leader of the reclusive Symbolist group, Stéphane
Mallarmé (1842-1898), typifies this position in the famous 1891 Enquête Huret, defining the
poet-reader relationship through the poet’s refusal to engage with the public: “L’attitude d’un
poète dans une époque comme celle-ci, où il est en grève devant la société, est de mettre de
côté tous les moyens viciés qui peuvent s’offrir à lui. Tout ce qu’on peut lui proposer est
inférieur à sa conception et à son travail secret” (Huret 104). For Mallarmé and many of his
peers, any contact with a wide audience was a source of corruption and degradation from
which the pure poet abstained. Turned inward, he kept his work a “secret” and accepted only
his fellow poets and artists as potential readers.
While this elitism and aristocracy was an important part of Baudelaire’s legacy among
a younger generation of poets in the late nineteenth century, they took this position further,
making the rejection of the contemporary reader a central part of the poet’s mission, as Maria
Teresa Giaveri writes in “Pour un double circuit des biens symboliques”: “‘Il n’y a que les
poètes pour bien comprendre les poètes.’ Pour Baudelaire, c’est une formule aimable par
laquelle il remercie Swinburne de sa collaboration à la bataille en faveur des Fleurs du
mal. Mais pour Mallarmé, c’est un impératif : tu n’auras d’autres lecteurs en dehors des
artistes” (118). I examine this evolution in the poet-reader relationship between 1840 and
1880, years which represent very different rapports with the reader as Giaveri suggests. In
1840, La Presse and its important literary feuilleton had just been founded, creating a new
commercialized place for literature and a new publishing opportunity which shaped the
careers of poets such as Gautier and Baudelaire. Other new periodicals, like La Sylphide and
L’Atelier, both launched in this period, which I study in chapters three and four, focused on
attracting women and workers as readers, publishing poetry geared particularly towards these
new audiences. Popular poetry was a major literary influence, and poets from the Romantic
2
and post-Romantic generations were increasingly inspired by poetry’s engagement with the
people. In this period, it seemed that the future of poetry lay in this increasing engagement
with broad new audiences of readers. By 1880, a younger generation of poets, who came of
age in the 1860s and witnessed the disillusionment of mid-century poets, were now the
elders, defining poetry through the very rejection of the reader. Rejecting his journalistic
projects of the 1870s as “concessions” (Correspondance 303), Mallarmé became the
figurehead of poetry in the Symbolist movement, defining poetry as isolated from the world,
its readers and its concerns. The role of the poet towards the public lay in his total rejection of
it.
This animosity and distance between the producer and consumer of poetry has been a
defining characteristic of literary modernity and continues to strongly shape our views of the
poet-reader relationship to this day. In fact, I believe that it is difficult for scholars to
critically evaluate the development of this particular model of the poet-reader relationship
precisely because authors like Baudelaire and Mallarmé are central in our conceptions of
poetry and its place in society: but how did this relationship between poet and reader arise? in
relation to what did these poets develop this view? what other models of the poet-reader
relationship they were rejecting by staking this specific position? By examining these
questions, I hope to provide a fresh perspective on these canonical authors and reveal the
origins of the increasingly distant relations between poets and readers in Western literature
over the long term. In so doing, I aim to show that the poet-reader relationship described by
these poets was not somehow inevitable, but rather a specific position they took in a precise
historical, social and economic context for particular reasons, and whose long afterlife
continues to shape ideas about poetry a century and a half later.
In this dissertation, I will address these questions by establishing a broader picture of
the way that poets addressed readers throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century and
3
showing how these positions were always taken in relation to a variety of contemporary
factors, from the rise of the press and the feuilleton to the rapid expansion of the reading
public to changing social and political conditions and shifting alliances between literary
groups. In so doing, I aim to provide a more diverse and accurate picture of the Bourdieusian
literary field, which is an essential frame in this dissertation. This enables me to show how
elite poets defined their practices of “real” poetry by pitting them specifically against other
practices of mere “verse” that addressed different kinds of readers and were predicated on
very different kinds of poet-reader dynamics.
First, it is important to acknowledge how profoundly the views of these mid- to late
nineteenth century poets have influenced our conceptions of poetry and its readership. The
famous line that ‘history is written by the victors’ seems to apply to authors whose names we
equate with modern poetry despite the fact that they were often not well-read or well-known
(albeit partially by design) in their own time. For example, many scholars of nineteenthcentury French literature are familiar with the literary review L’Artiste, published between
1831 and 1904, as the place where poets such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Banville, Mallarmé and
Verlaine published their poetry and critical articles. It is for this very reason that this review
is often mentioned in contemporary scholarship, its name recognized by other scholars. But
this makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that in the 1850s, L’Artiste had only about 500
subscribers, down from a high of 1500 in the 1840s (Lavaud 1171). Arsène Houssaye, the
editor of L’Artiste from 1843-1849 somewhat bitterly reflected on these publication statistics,
noting that “[l]es journaux littéraires ne sont lus que par les littérateurs” (qtd. in Lemaître 20).
Conversely, as I will show in chapter three, women’s publications such La Mode illustrée,
published between 1860 and 1914, had 40,000 subscribers in 1865 and a staggering 100,000
by 1880 (Feyel 40-41). And yet, the poets and poetry published in this and other widely-read
women’s periodicals remain largely unknown to us today. In this way, we lose sight of the
4
perspectives of the contemporary reader, for whom these publications played a central role in
their conceptions of poetry and its readership, far more so than the positions of poets
published in L’Artiste. The poets who have come to symbolize late nineteenth century poetry
today, such as Baudelaire, Banville, Verlaine and Mallarmé, to say nothing of others whose
works were almost entirely unknown until after their deaths, like Rimbaud and Lautréamont,
have thus eclipsed other poets, readers and experiences of reading that I recover in this
dissertation and that were much more widely circulated and known by contemporaries.
There are other indications that our definition of poetry’s readership is informed by
these poets. The conception that poetry is an elite literary product for a small and educated
audience of interested readers perhaps doesn’t seem inaccurate to us; however, as I will show,
this conception of poetry clearly does not accurately represent the different kinds of verse for
vastly different audiences widely distributed and read in the nineteenth century: major daily
newspapers published poems to commemorate national events and signal the publication of
important literary works; women’s magazines instructed women on their familial and social
duties in poems and even featured advertisements in verse form, and protesters behind
barricades called for their political rights through songs and chanted revolutionary poems by
the likes of the chansonniers Pierre-Jean de Béranger and Pierre Dupont. That these traditions
of poetry which had important stakes in public and social life have largely disappeared from
our contemporary definition of poetry today, and moreover that they likely seem foreign to
us, is proof of how much we have inherited from their detractors.
While these forgotten traditions of poetry for a mass readership have more recently
been brought to light in ambitious scholarly works like La Poésie populaire en France au
XIXe siècle : théories, pratiques et réception (2005), which highlights the evolution of
practices of popular poetry and chanson, and Poésie et journalisme au XIXe siècle en France
et en Italie (2005), which deals with particular cases of poets’ involvement in periodicals as
5
journalists, these traditions are often seen as significant for distinctly “other” categories of
literature, like popular literature or women’s literature. In this way, the figures and models
they bring to light remain relegated to the margins of literary history as distinct from elite
practices of poetry, making us inadvertently repeat the bias of these nineteenth century poets.
What I propose here is that these diverse practices of poetry in the nineteenth century help us
better understand not only neglected poets and groups of readers like women and working
classes, but also the elite male poets who redefined poetry and readership in such a way as to
exclude them.
The practices of poetry found in mass periodicals and unknown reviews and books
were places where a variety of authors addressed broad segments of nineteenth-century
readership, establishing particular rapports with them: from the didacticism of the mainstream
women’s press to the mutual recognition of suffering and rights in the mid-nineteenth-century
worker press to the focus on classical notions of “le vrai, le beau et le bien” in mainstream
bourgeois newspaper feuilletons in the late nineteenth century, these sources provide a
different and more diverse picture of the poet-reader relationship over the course of the midto late nineteenth century. That these traditions of poetry – based on duties, social awareness,
and platonic ideals of art – and the relations they initiate with their readers – women, workers
and young people – serve as a negative definition of elite poetry and its readership is essential
in that it shows how elite poets defined their readership in exclusion of most contemporary
readers and practices. The centrality of this exclusionary definition of poetry and readership
in the mid- to late nineteenth century is evident, for example, in Mallarmé’s early article on
the “Hérésies artistiques” of “l’art pour tous” where he defined art, and particularly poetry as
“un mystère accessible à de rares individualités” (OC 2: 362) . Paradoxically, these historical
“victors” are precisely those who argue that poetry should not be read by most readers. To
use Gérard Genette’s categories of literarity in Fiction et diction (1991), they thus rejected
6
the “régime constitutif” of literature, in which for example, every sonnet is intrinsically a
work of literature by the fact that it is a sonnet, and promoted a “régime conditonnel” in
which a sonnet is only recognized as literature under the condition that it has literary value
(7). In so doing, they hierarchized different types of poetry according to their audiences and
the reading practices they entailed: “real poetry” was by definition understandable and
availabe only to “rare individuals,” while mere “verse” was that which was culturally,
intellectually and financially accessible to the vast majority of the reading public.
By studying these other audiences and types of poetry addressed to them, I do not aim
to dethrone the authors we admire or argue that these forgotten poets are better than or even
equal to them. In fact, the didactic and unimaginative poems I analyze in the mainstream
women’s press quickly dispel this notion. Instead, these and other more inventive types of
poetry merit inclusion in literary studies not according to their intrinsic value, but because
they help illuminate underexplored terrain in the literary field, allowing us to better
understand nineteenth-century realities in literature and society. This in turns clarifies how
poets staked their positions in relation to literary works, events and the positions of others in
the literary field.
This distinction between different types of poetic texts, including those which were
widely read but not esthetically valued, and those considered prestigious but which were not
read by a large number of contemporary readers, points to the fundamental contradiction in
the way that elite poets defined poetry and readership in the second half of the nineteenth
century: for them, the very existence of a reader outside the bonds of friendship or literary
affiliation represented a profanation of poetry’s purity. However, this contradictory
relationship is less a sign of disinterest and disengagement with mass readership than a kind
of obsession with it: by refusing to write for the average reader, poets in the mid- to late
nineteenth century defined poetry as that which was not addressed to contemporary readers.
7
This also extends their publishing choices; if poets were not writing to be read, they
decreasingly published or even wrote works suited to publication. As Antoine Compagnon
noted in his May 2, 2009 lecture on La Disparition élocutoire du poète at the Sorbonne, in
this definition of poetry, “la littérature est vécue comme une chute, et le vrai écrivain est donc
celui qui n’écrit pas” (NP). This has had a significant influence on twentieth-century literary
history in figures like Maurice Blanchot, for whom the impossibility of literature is central in
distinguishing it from other types of writing. As he argues in “Comment la littérature est-elle
possible?” (1941), literature, in order to truly be considered as such, must “mettre en question
d’une manière indicible ce qu’il est et ce qu’il fait” (3). By excising publication and
readership from their definition of poetry, mid- to late nineteenth-century poets thus made the
reader – in negative – a central and defining part of the conception of poetry and its
readership.
Previous Scholarship
Studies of nineteenth-century readership tend to fall into two related groups. First,
readership has been a topic of interest for cultural historians such as James Smith Allen in his
books In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France 1800-1940 (1991) and
Popular French Romanticism: Authors, Readers, and Books in the 19th Century (1991),
Martyn Lyons in Readers and Society in 19th Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants
(2001) and Le Triomphe du Livre: une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du
XIXe siècle (1987), and the authors in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier’s collective
volume A History of Reading in the West (2003). These references are essential to my work
through their historical analysis of the important political, economic and social factors that
shape readership. The fact that nineteenth-century France was undergoing a revolution in the
distribution and reception of the printed word is essential to understanding the redefinition of
8
readership by poets: over the course of several decades, a vastly greater number of texts
became available to more readers at lower costs. The spread of literacy and the introduction
of mandatory primary education led to an unprecedented growth in the expansion of the
reading public: from 50% literacy among the male population in 1789 (and half that among
the female population) literacy rates soared to 90% for both sexes in the 1890s, making the
vast majority of the French population readers for the first time in the nineteenth century
(Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century” 313). Along with increased public
demand, the industrialization of printing led to what Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier and
Jean-Pierre Vivet estimate in Histoire de l'édition française: le temps des éditeurs (1985) was
a roughly a 25-fold increase in available printed material between 1840 and the dawn of the
First World War (22). This applied both to the increased diffusion of books as well as the
massive expansion of the press, which entered its golden age with a rise in the number of
periodicals in circulation and their print runs. These important changes in the distribution and
audience for texts signal “l’avènement d’une culture littéraire de masse” in France in the
second half of the nineteenth century (Lyons, Le Triomphe du livre 14).
These studies of nineteenth-century readership provide essential background for my
work by showing how increased literacy created new groups of readers such as women and
working classes, precisely the groups which poets sought to exclude form elite poetry, as I
will show in the last two chapters. Furthermore, the technological innovations and new
advertising strategies which led to the significant reduction in the price of books, newspapers
and reviews, making them available to broader segments of the reading public, are also
essential in studying the publishing strategies of elite poets who over the course of the
nineteenth century went from publishing in mainstream periodicals to disseminating their
work only in small elite reviews, expensive luxury book editions and increasingly not
publishing their work at all, or even not conceiving of their work in terms of discrete books,
9
like Mallarmé and Rimbaud. However, because these studies remain primarily focused on
historical trends of readership, they do not always take into account other aspects which
affect the readership of literature, including authors’ positions and affiliations, and
ambiguities within literary texts.
Histories and theories of the material conditions of texts are another important
reference for this dissertation, in which I consider the importance of material forms ranging
from daily newspapers to expensive and little-read books of poetry as well as other nonmaterial forms of the distribution of chants and chansons. In Les usages de l’imprimé (1987),
Roger Chartier shows that a text is never received in a neutral way: readers don’t read
“texts,” but rather books, letters and feuilletons which create barriers or open access to
different kinds of readers and make suggestions about how they read. In addition, historical
and personal modes of reading together with materiality create potentially limitless variations
in how a single text is read. Studies of materiality are particularly important in response to the
period I study, in which poets increasingly asserted that the text itself was autonomous,
emphasizing texts over their material forms and thus obscuring real readers and practices of
reading. The materiality of poetic texts is thus central to my analysis throughout this
dissertation. For example, in the second chapter, I examine the publication of several poems
from Gautier’s Émaux et camées in the feuilleton of La Presse and in book form to show the
very different ways that these texts are presented to different readers, from the physical
presentation and typography of the page to the author’s statements about reading and writing
poetry. Materiality (or lack thereof) is also essential in my consideration of chant and
chanson in the final chapter, which requires us to expand the definition of readership to
include illiterate people, who consumed and shared texts orally as singers and auditors.
In literary studies, the novel has been the primary focus of nineteenth-century
readership studies by scholars such as Anne-Marie Thiesse in Le roma du uotidie
10
lecteurs et lectures populaires
la elle po ue (1984) and Judith Lyon-Caen in La Lecture
et la vie : les usages du roman au temps de Balzac (2006). These authors go beyond
traditional analyses of the “feminine” genres of the novel and feuilleton by using
unconventional sources such as readers’ letters to authors and oral histories in order to show
how new women readers understood their own reading practices. I draw on these ideas in the
second and third chapters on the feuilleton and women readers, respectively, by how genres
were gendered according to their perceived readership. These studies are also significant in
that they foreground readers’ views of their own practices, rejecting the notion that readers
necessarily defined their practices in line with authors’ wishes or ideas. This is important to
keep in mind when contrasting authors’ statements about readership with other evidence that
suggest quite different reading practices and readers.
While nineteenth-century readership has garnered the attention of historians and
literary scholars who work on the novel, the reading public for poetry has been far less
studied, although, as I aim to show, the relationship between poetry and the reader was
radically redefined in the nineteenth century. It seems that the lack of scholarship on this
issue stems from the acceptance at face value of poets’ statements about rejecting
contemporary readership. While this may suggest that their work has nothing to say about
contemporary readership, I argue that the exact opposite is true: we cannot understand their
redefinition of poetry without a comprehensive study of readership.
Because of the lack of studies which broadly address poetry’s readership in the
nineteenth century, my work is most influenced by studies which focus on the wider literary
field and how it changes over time, including Pierre Bourdieu’s Les règles de l’art Ge èse
et structure du champ littéraire (1992), and Christophe Charle’s La crise de la littérature à
l’épo ue du
aturalisme (1979). These books are an essential reference point for this
dissertation in their sociological approach to literature. First, these studies focus on the
11
importance of changing conditions for literary producers: in Les Règles de l’art, Bourdieu
examines the professionalization and commercialization of the literary sphere and its
profound impact on authors who moved from an Ancien régime system of patronage and
official favor to being thrust into an increasingly commercial system in which they faced the
demands of the market and the tastes of new readers. Charle shows in La crise de la
littérature
l’épo ue du aturalisme how the rise in literacy combined with the archaic
system of consecration, via the conservative choices of Académies and official posts, also
meant that while more people were drawn to the vocation of writer and critic, few could
make a living there, crowding the literary field, making competition increasingly fierce and
leading to greater divisions in the late-nineteenth century between elite poetry and
contemporary institutions.
Moreover, these studies are significant by focusing on how authors and their literary
and critical works were always in dialogue with contemporary debates, other authors’
positions and the conditions of the literary field and society at large. These studies provide an
important framework for mine, which considers the context in which literature was produced
and the way it was positioned in relation to contemporary realities. As Bourdieu argues, this
type of sociological study of literature “vise […] à construire des systèmes de relations
intelligibles capables de rendre raison des données sensibles” (13). Like Bourdieu, I aim to
shed more light on poets’ relationships with the public by showing how they staked their
positions within the realm of contemporary possibilities for action. After first laying the
groundwork by analyzing this shift in the poet-reader relationship in the first chapter, I aim to
create a broader and more complex view of practices of writing and reading poetry and
practices of engagement (and disengagement) between poets and readers by scrutinizing
several binarisms that have been established about poetry and its readership. These pit poetry
against the medium of the press, and against different groups of readers based of their gender
12
(women) or their class (working-class readers). In so doing, I hope in this dissertation to tease
out strands of a complex set of issues that have been turned into these overly neat and
reductive binarisms, and establish a broader picture of the diverse models of the poet-reader
relationship in relation to which elite poets were positioning themselves.
The contradiction inherent in the rejection of the reader by mid- to late nineteenthcentury poets must be understood in such a context. When poets said that they wrote only for
a few like-minded elites, this should not be taken literally or solely as an act of provocation.
Instead, the rejection of the reader cannot be understood without the counterpoint of other
contemporary practices of poetry, readers and rapports between poets and readers, against
which they constructed it. It is precisely these counter-models, which are related to the
historical moment of the emergence of this paradoxical model of readership, which I aim to
uncover and scrutinize here.
Description of Chapters
I envision chapter one as an état des lieux in which I establish the nature of the
shifting relationship between the poet and reader over the course of the mid- to late
nineteenth century. In order to do so, I focus on a specific type of text that puts this
relationship at the forefront: the preface. In Seuils, Gérard Genette shows how particular
types of paratexts serve the main text, informing its reading in significant ways. In particular,
the original authorial preface helps set the tone for reading by establishing a rapport between
author and reader. First, I establish an arc of preface practices in the mid- to late nineteenth
century in order to create a baseline and establish trends and moments of rupture in the way
poets addressed readers. I begin with Romantic poets like Lamartine and Hugo, for whom the
preface was an important space to establish a connection with the reader and propose a lyrical
model that would guide the reading of the text which followed. While for Lamartine, this
13
occurred on an intimate, emotional level, Hugo long used his prefaces as a place to expand
upon his vision of the poet’s abilities, mission and powers, addressing a vast audience of
mankind. For the late Romantic generation, also known as the Jeune-France, the poet’s
mission among the people was no longer prophetic and enlightening, but a source of
frustration and contempt. This is evident in their critical prefaces, in which they regard
prefaces themselves as artificial gestures, and instead use them to mock this convention and
establish a combative relationship with the reader.
This background will help me demonstrate an emblematic shift in the poet-reader
relationship by highlighting two important prefaces in two key years: Hugo’s preface to Les
Contemplations3 (1856) and Baudelaire’s liminal poem “Au Lecteur” in LFDM (1857). In a
close reading of “Au Lecteur” and several other poems which evoke the reader in LFDM, I
examine this relationship based on mutual contempt and violence, and the poet’s role as both
the punisher and victim of the reader. By reading this text in parallel with the preface to LC,
published one year earlier, I show through the choice of epithets used to address the reader
and pronouns used in reference to the poet and the reader more precisely how their
relationship was shifting: from the Romantic poet who declared his powers to illuminate the
masses, albeit in a self-aggrandizing way, to one in which the poet-reader relationship was
based upon greater proximity and mutual contempt.
Finally, I examine another important shift in Baudelaire’s conception of the poetreader relationship, which occurred soon after the publication of LFDM: convicted at trial of
“offense à la morale publique et aux bonnes mœurs,” Baudelaire reflected bitterly in his notes
for a new preface that a fundamental miscomprehension characterized the poet’s relationship
to the reader; this led him to abandon writing an explanatory preface, as communication with
the reader was ultimately futile. By refusing to address the anonymous reader, Baudelaire
3
I will refer to Les Contemplations from here on as LC.
14
moved towards a view that poetry was meant only for select elites and should be insulated
from a broader reading public. It is this position that served as an important part of his legacy
among a younger generation of poets who did not write prefaces, publish books of poetry,
address large audiences in periodicals, and in some cases, did not even conceive of their work
in terms of publishable content. The following three chapters draw on elements of this
paradox of the poet’s abstention from addressing the public, focusing on three binarisms that
poets in the mid- to late nineteenth century used to evoke poetry and its audience’s antitheses:
the press, women and workers. In them, I examine the evolving poet-reader relationship
established in the first chapter by examining what specifically poets were reacting to when
they defined poetry as an isolated practice without a broad readership.
In the second chapter, I address the question of medium by deconstructing the
binarism established by a number of mid- to late nineteenth-century poets, that the press was
the antithesis of poetry. In this chapter, I show how this was not at all true for poets in the
mid-nineteenth century who had careers as literary, art and theater critics at prominent
periodicals and on some occasions published their poetry in these periodicals. After briefly
reviewing the rise of the press in the nineteenth century, I focus on the way that midnineteenth-century poets who worked extensively as critics in the press, such as Théophile
Gautier and Théodore de Banville, evoked their relationship to the press reader in their
critical articles. In them, the dismissive relationship in some of their prefaces is reversed;
instead, they portray themselves as subject to the whims and tastes of contemporary press
readers, who now have the upper hand.
I also examine the kinds of poetry that these same mainstream newspaper feuilletons
published: these are largely reducible to works by Romantic poets and their imitators; poems
that memorialized contemporary social, economic and political events; and isolated
opportunities for collaborators to publish their poetry. By looking at several notable
15
examples, I identify the specific ways in which editors of the mainstream nineteenth-century
press defined poetry and the poet-reader relationship within the feuilleton. As the above
categories suggest, they did so in a way that appears to us as conservative and anachronistic,
praising values and authors which elite poets rejected. For these generations of poets, writing
prose and poetry in the press and grappling with the expectations and demands of its readers
was an essential part of what it meant to be a poet, and needs to be analyzed as such.
By the 1860s and particularly the 1870s, this relationship between poets and the press
began to change as these careers became mutually exclusive: with the rise of professional
journalists and the specialization of periodicals, mainstream newspapers increasingly
excluded poetry from their pages where poets were no longer major contributors. Instead,
poets increasingly published their work – both poetry and prose – in small reviews for
specific literary groups and their followers. In this way, their publication opportunities were
greatly limited compared to those of their predecessors. At the same time, they defined poetry
and the career of poet as antithetical to participation in the mass press, reducing their
publication and diffusion and further rejecting broad readership.
In the third chapter, I look at the exclusion of the reader from poetry through the lens
of gender. As with the press, many poets in the nineteenth century asserted that “real” poetry
was not meant to be read by women, for whom only didactic and moralistic works were
suited. In this chapter, I begin by showing how conceptions of women’s roles in society and
ideas about women readers and the type of works specifically targeted to them put them at
odds with emerging definitions of literature. I examine the narrow repertoire of poetry for
women readers in the popular and widely-read women’s press, which reached a large
audience of women as well as their children and families. In the periodicals I study, Le Miroir
parisien, La Sylphide and the Journal des dames et des modes, only a very limited model of
the poet-reader relationship for women emerges: poetry was didactic, giving women moral
16
lessons, evoking motherhood in idyllic ways or providing counterexamples to scare women
into proper behavior; or it called them to engage in specific actions befitting their status as
bourgeoises, such as charitable actions or consumerism. This limited conception of women
readers is not just evident in the mainstream press, but can also be seen in publications like
Mallarmé’s La Dernière mode (1874) and the second and third installments of the Parnasse
contemporain (1871, 1876), in which women are addressed in surprisingly similar ways.
I end this chapter by looking at other models of the poet-reader relationship for
women outside these constrained options, and find it in large part in poetic works by women
poets. In poems and prefaces, poets like Claudia Bachi, Louise Colet and Marcelline
Desbordes-Valmore, among others, redefine the poet-reader relationship between women as a
shared community of suffering, in which women recognize social inequity and propose
solutions to it, as well as a new community for freer and more forthright expression between
women.
Yet even in this redefinition of women’s poetry beyond pure didacticism, it still reads
as a negative definition of elite male poetry. In many cases, poetry for women in the
nineteenth century was defined in ways that made it incompatible with readership of elite
male poetry. This chapter, in fact, shows the least amount of movement and evolution: while
in chapter two I demonstrate a shift in poets’ participation in the press and engagement with a
broad audience, and in chapter four I establish a turning point in poets’ attitudes towards the
working-class readers, elite male poets’ attitudes towards women were largely unchanged in
the period I study. Women’s poetry and readership were consistently treated as inferior
despite their tremendous distribution and influence on generations of women and young
readers.
In the fourth chapter, I examine the poet-reader relationship through the lens of social
class, focusing on the working-class reader. First, I show how the tremendous popularity and
17
influence of poésie populaire – poetry for, by and about the popular classes in France –
shaped views of readership and was seen as a real opportunity for all kinds of poetry,
including poetry by and for elites, around 1830-1850. In periodicals by and for workers, such
as L’Atelier, poetry and chanson established a link between the poet and reader and provided
the popular reader with poetic texts in which he could recognize himself and his struggles.
While in some cases, these poems verged on the didactic, not unlike women’s poetry, with
poets and editors assuming the role of protectors and representatives of unformed popular
readers, these publications still represent a unique and understudied model of readership in
the mid-nineteenth century.
Next, I examine attitudes towards popular readers in this period among literary elites.
While we tend to associate Romantic poets with a positive view of popular readers and midcentury poets of Baudelaire’s generation as dismissive of them, I argue that it was in fact
quite the reverse around 1850: while Romantic poets saw the popular influence in poetry as a
source of renewal by returning to primitive language, poets like Hugo and Lamartine tended
to generalize and condescend to popular readers by establishing themselves as privileged
guides and even defining popular readership as incompatible with poetry. On the other hand,
poets like Baudelaire, who we tend to associate with the disinterested and antisocial model of
the poet-reader relationship he would later adopt, represents the most ardent supporter of
popular poetry and popular readership in his 1850 preface to the popular chansonnier Pierre
Dupont’s Chants et chansons. In this remarkable text, he considers the fusion of poet and
reader through popular song as an essential revitalizing force for poetry that he claimed
would forever change its relationship to the public.
Yet in light of the fall of the short-lived Second Republic and the 1851 coup d’état,
Baudelaire shifted his position in line with a more conservative view of popular poetry as an
anonymous and historically past representation of national genius. This conception of popular
18
poetry, which drew in part on the legacy of Romantic poets and was codified by the Second
Empire committee to draft a Recueil général des poésies populaires de la France in the
1850s, focused on a politically accepted definition of popular poetry as an anonymous
national legacy, silencing contemporary voices and political messages. In fact, in the Second
Empire and early Third Republic, the massive censorship of popular chanson and periodicals
by and for workers and the surveillance of spaces of popular sociability repressed this once
vibrant tradition of popular poetry and its revolutionary possibilities for the poet-reader
relationship.
While Baudelaire and Gautier, among others in their generations, turned away from
the popular reader out of disappointment with the political and literary failure of poésie
populaire, staking more elitist and aristocratic positions, for their literary successors, their
positions were a starting point. It is from here that we see that a young Mallarmé describe
popular readership as “heresy” and a source of degradation for poets and poetry. With few
exceptions, it is this view which would characterize late nineteenth-century poets’ notions of
readership and which has provided a lasting legacy.
19
Chapter 1
From “homo sum” to “Hypocrite lecteur”: Addressing Poetry Readers in the Preface in
the Mid- to Late Nineteenth Century
Introduction
The preface to Victor Hugo’s Les Contemplations and the liminal poem in Charles
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, “Au Lecteur,” are often quoted as examples of the different
literary traditions to which they are commonly ascribed: Hugo’s preface as an expression of
prophetic Romantic lyricism, and Baudelaire’s an aggressive jab disparaging the reader
characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century literature. By studying them thematically, as central
and foundational texts for two very different movements, it is easy to lose sight of the fact
that they were published just over one year apart, on April 23, 1856 and June 25, 1857,
respectively. Placing these contemporary texts side by side, as they were received by the
reading public, tells a very different story: during this period, a huge shift was underway in
the ways that poets addressed their readers.
In this chapter, my analysis of these two liminal texts will reveal the terms of this
change in the poet-reader relationship. I will begin by establishing a broad arc of preface
practices in poetry and other genres, beginning with an overview of prefaces by major
Romantic poets, including Vigny, Musset and Lamartine. I will then trace the evolution of
prefaces among the late Romantic, or Jeune-France generation of the 1830s, who imbued
prefaces with self-reflection, and debuted a critical and ironic tone in addresses of readers
that would influence prefaces in many genres in the mid-nineteenth century. This panorama
of contemporary preface practices makes both the parallels and the dissimilarities in Hugo’s
“Préface” and Baudelaire’s “Au lecteur” all the more evident. Baudelaire inherited as much
from Hugo and the Romantic generation’s lyrical model, in which the reader was central to
the poet’s mission, as he did from the ironic and aggressive tone of the Jeune-France, like his
20
literary mentor, Théophile Gautier. As I will show, Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur” is a central
transitional text between early nineteenth-century poetry and the poetic movements that came
after. By analyzing Hugo’s “Préface” and Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur” side by side, I will seize
on the specific differences in the way poets constructed their relationship with readers in
terms of the metaphors, terms of address, and epithets they used. As we shall see, the poet
was no longer an imperious prophet facing the awe-struck masses with whom he shared his
message, but a social outcast who stridently attacked his tormentors for being like him.
The trial and condemnation of LFDM in 1857 marks another important turning point
in poets’ relationships with the reader, as I will argue in the final part of this chapter. In light
of his condemnation on immorality charges, Baudelaire tried and failed to write an
explanatory preface for the second and third editions of LFDM; instead he increasingly
defined the reader-poet relationship as predicated on a fundamental “malentendu,” lamenting
“l’épouvantable inutilité d’expliquer quoi que ce soit à qui que ce soit” (LFDM 246, 244) .
From this point on, the relationship between poets and the public was one of contention and
increasingly, abstention: the poet attacked the reader and finally refused to explain himself or
justify his work in any liminal text. Beginning with Baudelaire, I will argue, poets created a
new lyrical model by defining the poet-reader relationship in negative: real poetry was not
read by most. In other words, “Au Lecteur” can be considered the last liminal text in the late
Romantic tradition, in which the rapport between the reader and the poet played a central role
in the work of poetry. After the condemnation of LFDM, poets used prefaces to insult the
reader, like Charles Cros in Le Coffret de santal (1873) and Paul Verlaine in Poèmes
saturniens (1866); to chase him away, like Lautréamont in Les Chants de Maldoror (1869);
to dismiss the very notion of prefaces and even books, like Stéphane Mallarmé in his
posthumous Poésies (1899); and by refusing to write prefaces or even books, like Rimbaud
and Verlaine later in his career. Instead, these figures would displace critical analysis to other
21
spaces, including critical articles in reviews, intimate literary gatherings, and personal letters
and journals. In so doing, they redefined poetry as widely estranged from the public and
contemporary society at large, as something meant to be read only by literary acquaintances.
I. Preface Practices
I will focus in particular on these and other prefaces because they are an important
place to locate the ways in which authors construct a rapport with their readership as a textual
space attached to the work of literature where they can introduce the work to the reading
public as they choose. In his foundational work Seuils, Gérard Genette insists that prefaces,
like other liminal texts or paratexts, are by definition functional: “le paratexte, sous tous ses
formes, est un discours fondamentalement hétéronome, auxiliaire, voué au service d’autre
chose qui constitue sa raison d’être, et qui est le texte” (16). The preface is thus meant to
directly influence the reading of the texts which follow. Genette lays out some broad
historical trends in preface writing, showing how the function of the preface before the
nineteenth century was often to convince the reader why to read the rest of the book, using
rhetorical techniques such as captatio benevolentiae, winning over the reader’s goodwill
(idem 184). Yet with the rise of literary reviews, critics, and the professionalization of the
literary field in the nineteenth century, the reader increasingly picked up a book with a
recommendation from an outside source or at least an understanding of what the book was
about. As a consequence, the function of the preface changed, focusing instead on how the
reader should read the work, explaining the author’s inspiration or motivation for writing, and
establishing an author-reader relationship in a context of increasing reader anonymity (idem
194).
Genette also asserts that specific types of paratexts, like dedications, titles and
prefaces, often adhere to a set of norms established over time. He claims that this especially
22
true of the original authorial preface, which he argues “n’a guère changé, sinon dans sa
présentation matérielle, depuis Thucydide” (idem 18). In other words, this type of preface can
be seen as a genre unto itself: it adheres to a standard set of topics and rhetorical devices
which become “poncifs” over the course of centuries, if not millennia, as Genette has it (idem
153). These similarities are even more striking in the short term: as I show in this chapter,
certain themes become veritable trends in prefaces, and authors, particularly less established
figures, are obliged to address them in some way. Despite the tremendous continuity Genette
assigns authorial prefaces, a radical shift was underway in the second half of the nineteenth
century in the prefaces I study here: clearly, something significant was changing between
Hugo’s preface-manifestos, Baudelaire’s assault of the reader, and Rimbaud and Mallarmé’s
failure to write any prefaces or even books of poetry. It is the very disappearance of the
preface, and eventually even the publishable book of poetry, that suggests that it is an
important place to locate changes in the poet-reader relationship.
While Seuils is an essential reference for my work, it largely overlooks this specific
context in which prefaces emerged: it is a taxonomy of paratexts in which Genette identifies
typical forms and functions and provides specific examples as case studies, isolated from
their context; it is not uncommon that the texts he cites on a single page range across different
millenia, languages, national traditions and genres. Many scholars I am in dialogue with here,
such as Ross Chambers and José-Luis Diaz, have addressed this shortcoming in studies which
analyze prefaces in their immediate historical and literary context. However, these studies
tend to limit the scope by focusing on prefaces by one particular author or literary movement.
Here, I extend this study of poetry prefaces to include a broader range of authors and literary
movements in order to reveal a broad evolution in the poet-reader relationship over the
second half of the nineteenth century: How did Baudelaire and his contemporaries’
conception of the poet-reader relationship differ from that of the first and second Romantic
23
generations? How did his position inform later poets and poetic movements, such as
Symbolists and Decadents? In this chapter, I hope to complicate the critical vision of the
poet-reader relationship in the second half of the nineteenth century that led to authors’
increasing disengagement with a broad reading public. While social, economic and political
conditions undoubtedly helped shape authors’ conceptions of their readership, they were not
simply reacting to them, as scholars such as Sartre in his Baudelaire (1947) have it: their
relationships with audiences are imagined, defined and constructed, not simply endured. By
confronting the preface to LC and “Au Lecteur,” analyzing them in the context of both
authors’ poetry, prefaces to their other works, personal journals, letters and earlier drafts and
comparing them to contemporary prefaces by other authors, I will show how these two
central texts are emblematic of a profound shift in the poet-reader relationship in the midnineteenth century.
1. Romantic and Jeune-France Preface Practices
In order to understand the significance of Hugo’s prefaces in the context in which they
were read, it is important to establish a broad range of the practices of some of his
contemporaries. In so doing, Hugo’s preface tone and style appear are all the more
remarkable, as his prefaces are unlike his contemporaries’ in several important ways.
First, Hugo wrote prefaces for nearly all his works himself. He was a prolific writer of
prefaces: for twelve of the thirteen books of poetry he published during his life, he wrote at
least one preface, the exception being L’Art d’être gra d-père, published late in his career, in
1877. For his first volume of poems, published in 1822 under the title Odes et poésies
diverses (known as Odes et Ballades beginning in 1826), he wrote a total of six prefaces for
various re-editions. In all, Hugo wrote eighteen prefaces for a total of thirteen volumes of
poetry. While Hugo wrote more prefaces than volumes of poetry, it was not uncommon
24
among his contemporaries in the early Romantic generation to omit the preface entirely: this
is particularly true of Vigny, who wrote no preface or other introductory text for either
Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826), or later Les Destinées (1864). Additionally, while Hugo
wrote all the prefaces to his poetic works, books of verse by young, unestablished poets were
oftentimes written by better-known literary figures or publishers. This is true of Lamartine’s
1820 Méditations and 1823 Nouvelles Méditations, which were accompanied only by a brief
“Avertissement de l’éditeur,” which described the value of the volume and endorsed the
young man who wrote it, who, the editor claimed, humbly had no intention of publishing (vvi). This type of “allograph preface,” as Genette calls it, was common for literary debutantes,
and tended to follow a scripted formula: “Moi, X, je vous dis qu’Y a du génie, et qu’il faut
lire son livre” (Seuils 246). This type of preface highlights the fact that the young poet has no
established relationship to his as yet unformed readership; another, reputable person serves as
an intermediary and establishes a rapport between the poet and the public. By not addressing
his reader directly, the untested poet is praised and endorsed yet retains an air of humility in
not doing so himself. In light of this tradition, it is significant to note that Hugo, who first
published Odes et poésies diverses in 1822, just two years after Lamartine’s Méditations with
its humble allograph preface, not only wrote his own preface, but did not introduce himself
politely onto the literary scene in it. Rather, he made very bold claims about what poetry
really was: “le domaine de la poésie est illimité […] La poésie, c’est tout ce qu’il y a d’intime
dans tout” (OP 1: 256). In contrast to the unassuming introduction of a young Lamartine onto
the literary scene by an established figure, Hugo’s first preface shows that at the age of
twenty, he was already apt to use the preface to share his ambitious poetic mission with the
reader.
Throughout his career, Hugo’s poetry prefaces were generally relatively lengthy and
substantive texts where he expounded on his vision of poetry and the poet, with each one
25
outlining another facet of the poetic mission as he saw it. Taken together, these prefaces
represent a broad poetic philosophy of the poet’s powers, duties, and artistic freedoms. The
major themes that emerge in his poetry prefaces relate to this overarching project. Several
prefaces outline poetry’s scope; in the 1829 preface to Les Orientales, Hugo defends poetry’s
ability to address any subject: “tout est sujet ; tout relève de l’art ; tout a droit de cité en
poésie” (idem 1: 577). He expands on this artistic freedom in the 1831 preface to Les Feuilles
d’autom e, in which he defends the publication of poetry in moments of political turmoil:
“l’art a sa loi qu’il suit, comme le reste a la sienne. Parce que la terre tremble, est-ce une
raison pour qu’il ne marche pas ?” (idem 1: 712). In other prefaces, he outlines the role of the
poet in society and history. In the 1837 preface to Les Voix intérieures he argues that “c’est à
lui [le poète] qu’il appartient d’élever […] les événements politiques à la dignité
d’événements historiques” (idem 1: 919-20). He develops this idea in the preface to 1840’s
Les Rayons et les ombres, in which he asserts that poets are representatives of their own era:
“tout poète véritable […] doit contenir la somme des idées de son temps” (idem 1: 1021).
While this list of themes is necessarily reductive, it reveals the broad coherence
among Hugo’s poetic prefaces. His individual prefaces fulfill other functions as well, such as
explaining sources of inspiration, answering questions about forms and other necessary
information for the “good” reading of the text that Genette describes as the primary function
of the preface. What is singular about Hugo’s use of the poetry preface is that he consistently
surpasses this simple functionality. In other words, all his prefaces function as prefacemanifestos in which the author elaborates his broad vision of poetry and the poet’s powers,
notions whose applicability far exceeds the text they accompany. As Marie-Catherine HuetBrichard notes in “Préfaces hugoliennes : le lieu de l’utopie,” for Hugo, “la préface justifie la
place du poète dans la cité” (135). Even more than justifying the poet’s role, his prefaces
sketch an incredibly ambitious image of the poet’s mission not just within his society, but
26
more broadly across all of History and among all mankind. With each preface, Hugo
expanded his notions of the poet’s mission and extended his abilities which, taken over the
course of his poetic career, make up a broad Hugolian philosophy of the poet and of the
institution of poetry.
Romantic poets used prefaces to establish a lyrical model for the work of poetry,
making them an important place for accessing the complexities of the poet-reader
relationship. As scholars of Romanticism such as Paul Bénichou in L'école du
désenchantement (1992) have noted, the poet’s rapport not just to their readers, but more
broadly to humanity was central in Romantic lyricism: “le lyrisme du moi romantique ne
pouvait se séparer d’un vaste mouvement de pensée dont le principe était une foi nouvelle
dans les destinées conjointes de la poésie et de l’humanité” (579); the creation of this lyrical
model plays an important role in the preface. Nonetheless, compared to Hugo, other
Romantic poets’ prefaces are notable for their broad yet intimate model of the poet-reader
relationship. In the famous “Avertissement” to Lamartine’s 1830 Harmonies poétiques et
religieuses, he focuses on the affective rapport between the poet and mankind, addressing his
poetry to “âmes médiatives” and “cœurs brisés” (II). Lamartine defines his readership in
terms of an emotional quality, targeting those who are susceptible to establishing a
meaningful connection to the poet, which he acknowledges may represent only “un petit
nombre” of readers (ibid.) because “Le monde n’en a pas besoin: il a ses soins et ses pensées.
[…] [S]i quelques âmes sensibles et pieuses me comprennent, me devinent, et achèvent en
elles-mêmes les hymnes que je n’ai fait qu’ébaucher; c’est assez” (idem III). Thus, from the
outset of the book, Lamartine defines the poet-reader relationship in a specific way that is
both broad and personal, making the reader involved in the coproduction of the work via a
deep soulful connection to the author. This strikingly intimate relationship between the poet’s
27
“moi” and the reader contrasts with Hugo’s third-person evocation of “le poète,” a constant,
as we shall see, in his prefaces.
Because Hugo wrote and published poetry for over half a century, his publications
coincided with a number of other literary movements. This makes comparing his prefaces to
those of his contemporaries an enormous task. However, if we look at a broad arc of prefaces
in poetry and other genres in the early to mid-nineteenth century, it becomes apparent that
Hugo was also largely at odds with the general evolution in prefaces since 1830: while he
regularly wrote ambitious preface-manifestos, his contemporaries were becoming
increasingly skeptical of the preface, and somewhat paradoxically used it as a place to
criticize the very idea of prefaces. Some authors wrote explicit condemnations of the preface
as a tired or dishonest convention, particularly the Jeune-France generation, reacting to both
the old captatio benevolentiae tradition of prefaces, and the authoritative prefaces of their
Romantic elders, like Hugo. Others were more subdued in their critique of prefaces,
mentioning that they were increasingly irrelevant in the new literary market.
In the latter camp, Musset’s “Au lecteur” in Co tes d’ spag e et d’Italie (1829)
describes the preface as an artificial gesture, “une espèce de salutation théâtrale, où l’auteur,
comme nouveau venu, rend hommage à ses devanciers, cite des noms, la plupart anciens ;
pareil à un provincial qui, en entrant au bal, s’incline à droite et à gauche, cherchant un visage
ami” (v-vi). Here, Musset compares the preface to a social convention, but paradoxically,
does so within the bounds of a preface explicitly addressed to the reader; by making this
satirical observation in a preface, he implicitly recognizes that this “salutation théâtrale” is
still required of him. He continues “Au Lecteur” by addressing literary debates of the day,
allowing him to have it both ways: while mocking the preface as artifice, he adheres to the
constraints of this norm both in name and content. Lamartine takes a similarly critical posture
towards the preface ten years later in Recueillements poétiques (1839), which is accompanied
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by a hybrid “lettre-préface.” In this text, two common themes appear that we will see widely
in a variety of mid-nineteenth-century prefaces: first, that the preface is an artificial
commercial form or editorial constraint and second, that the reader will not bother reading it.
Lamartine addresses the letter to his friend Léon Bruys d’Ouilly, concluding: “M. Charles
Gosselin me demande un avertissement; si cette lettre est trop longue pour une lettre, tirez-en
une préface. Cela ne se lit pas” (XX). Besides explicitly casting doubt on the reader’s interest
in the preface, Lamartine’s letter-preface destabilizes the preface by blurring the lines
between two very different genres: the text is primarily a private letter to a friend which can
double as a public preface. The author’s ambivalence about the way this text is used
demonstrates how unconcerned he is with the preface; he cannot be bothered to write a
specific text to fulfill this function since it will likely be ignored. This hybrid “lettre-préface”
he creates allows him to satisfy both the editorial demand for a preface while maintaining a
critical stance towards it, a practice shared by many of his contemporaries.
As the two above examples suggest, the self-critical preface became a trend across a
variety of literary genres in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. In particular, in the late
1820s and 1830s, it seems to have become almost obligatory to use the preface to question
the very idea of the preface. José-Luis Diaz examines this trend among novelists in his article
“Quand les préfaces parlent des préfaces (1827-1833).” Like Lamartine and Musset, novelists
such as Charles Nodier, Alfonse Esquiros and Pétrus Borel referred to the notion that
prefaces were tired conventions that no one read – in their prefaces. Although there is
inherent humor and irony in this practice, this cannot be understood merely as a literary
flourish. Instead, as Diaz shows, the role of the preface was changing: “Non plus
l’antichambre modeste et cérémonieuse de l’œuvre, mais le lieu hanté et fantasmé où se joue
l’identité problématique de l’écrivain et le destin aléatoire de son produit” (8). The growing
cynicism about the role of the preface reflects larger anxieties about the role of the author, his
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work and his relationship to the anonymous reader in a rapidly changing literary field. Diaz
shows that in the 1830s, young writers, known as petits romantiques or Jeune-France, saw
prefaces as belonging to one of two equally detestable schools. First was the servile and
ceremonious Ancien-Régime model of preface, in which the author endeavored to obtain the
goodwill of the reader and convince him to read. Xavier de Saintine’s preface to Le Mutilé
(1832), structured as a dialogue between author and reader, takes this notion of the humility
of the Ancien-Régime style of preface further, depicting a reader who expects the author to
bow and scrape:
– Ainsi, ressuscitant l’antique préface avec toutes ces gentillesses et ses
génuflexions, vous allez, selon les anciens us, tout gonflé de modestie et
d’humilité, vous prosterner devant votre cher lecteur, votre ami lecteur, lui
dire comment et par quelle route votre livre est arrivé jusqu’à lui, et terminer
en implorant, avec force expressions courtoises, l’indulgence et les bons avis
de votre cher lecteur, de votre ami lecteur ! (qtd. in ibid.)
While this view of pre-nineteenth-century prefaces was satirically constructed as a “figure de
rejet” by young authors in the 1830s, this notion of the preface and the author-reader
relationship it implied was clearly seen as out of step with the new commercial realities that
underlined literary production and the growing anonymity in the author-reader relationship.
How then should this new relationship be modeled in prefaces? Saintine provides an answer
in this long and vehement response to the reader in which he outlines a new power dynamic
between them:
Ce n’est plus avec ces formes surannées qu’on s’adresse au public ; nous le
traitons aujourd’hui un peu plus lestement. Chacun a repris son rang véritable :
et comme il est reconnu que la masse écrivante a plus de bon sens, d’esprit,
d’instruction que la masse lisante, on signifie simplement à son lecteur que –
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si on a fait un livre, c’est qu’on a voulu le faire ; que n’étant pas forcé par état
d’avoir du génie, il est possible qu’il ne comprenne pas bien tout d’abord toute
la portée ; il n’a qu’à le relire une seconde fois, à l’étudier fortement, à s’en
pénétrer. […] On n’écrit pas pour lui. […] bref c’est un sot ! Qu’il retourne à
sa boutique, à sa caisse, à son régiment, à sa préfecture, ou à son ministère ;
[…] mais qu’il ne juge pas : il n’en a point le droit. (qtd. in idem 8-9)
Far from reflecting a common educational background and shared literary references, the new
author-reader relationship is defined by Saintine as an unequal one that befits the “rang
véritable” of both parties, with the “masse écrivante” far outweighing the “masse lisante” in
the good sense and education necessary to discuss literature. Of course, this example of the
changing author-reader relationship specifically targets the growing popular audience for
novels, and which was seen in particular as subject to the tastes of its many new readers in
the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it provides a revealing and flamboyant example of the
way in which young authors in this era understood the shifting relationship to their readers
and the bitterness and anger they felt towards those who suddenly played an important role in
determining literary successes.
Not only did young authors in the 1830s target of the so-called Ancien Régime model
of the preface, but as Diaz shows, they also lambasted the more recent prefaces penned by the
Romantic generation, who were by this time established figures. Instead of excessive
humility, they were charged with pomposity and charlatanism in overly-long prefacemanifestos, increasing pages and thus prices for books. This charge of arrogance was in
particular leveled against Hugo’s 1827 Cromwell preface, one of his notable prefacemanifestos which, not incidentally, is better remembered than the play itself. According to
Diaz, this preface-manifesto, “apparaît comme témoignant d’une parole d’autorité
insupportable chez un jeune blanc-bec qui, par elle, réussit le coup de maître de faire école”
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(idem 19). While these young authors admitted their literary debt to the Romantic generation,
they also accused them of taking up the trappings of authority they had initially fought.
Edmond Texier’s 1842 Physiologie du poète, published under the pseudonym Sylvius, targets
this pomposity in the (thinly veiled) Hugolian preface: “L’Olympien ne fait jamais la préface
pour le livre, mais le livre pour la préface. Dans sa préface, l’Olympien parle toujours de lui à
la troisième personne. Les domestiques de bonnes maisons agissent de la même façon à
l’égard de leurs maîtres” (qtd. in idem 20). Here, the Hugolian preface is seen as establishing
the author’s authority over the reader, lecturing him and demanding to be regarded with
impersonal reverence. While the above criticism is satirical and certainly reductive, we will
see in a close reading of the preface to LC that this image of the Hugolian Olympian who sees
the reader as an afterthought bears a good deal of truth as well.
In the face of this trend of devaluing and questioning the preface, Hugo’s consistent
use of his poetry prefaces as places for serious reflection on the poet’s powers is all the more
noteworthy. But a young Hugo was not immune to what was occurring in contemporary
prefaces, and even references this trend as early as the 1823 preface to Odes et ballades,
which he concluded by noting: “Nous arrêterons ici ces observations préliminaires […], et
auxquelles on ne fera peut-être pas attention ; mais il faut toujours parler comme si l’on
devait être entendu, écrire comme si l’on devait être lu, et penser comme si l’on devait être
médité” (OP 1: 267). The fact that Hugo references the notion that this text will perhaps not
be read shows the extent to which this phenomenon of prefaces criticizing prefaces was
widespread. But in Hugo’s hands, this statement about the potential futility of the preface
becomes a defense of the author’s right to reflection: because he uses prefaces to elaborate
his doctrines of poetry and the poet, their value is in no way dependent on the attention they
garner. We see in this example Hugo’s confidence in the validity of his poetic mission at a
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young age and the beginning of what will grow to define his poetic prefaces as spaces for
serious self-reflection which render the reader a secondary figure.
Based on the above examples, it appears that the content and tone of poetry prefaces
and the ways poets addressed readers were changing dramatically around the 1830s.
However, I argue that the real impact of this change in the poet-reader relationship was not
realized until the 1857 preface to LFDM for several reasons. First, the generation that
preceded Baudelaire’s primarily shared a strong negative tendency, a desire to write against
prevailing literary and moral values without articulating new ones. Anothony Zielonka, in his
study of “Les préfaces, prologues et manifestes des ‘Petits Romantiques’” notes that “Sans
appartenir à une véritable école, travaillant bien souvent dans l’isolement, ces auteurs […]
ont tenu à inclure une préface polémique, provocatrice, enthousiaste, souvent même agressif
ou choquante, dans leurs premières (et parfois leur uniques) publications” (71). This sense of
rebellion was amplified by the fact that they lived in a period of widespread political and
social disenchantment that Bénichou describes in L’École du dése cha teme t: “Les jeunes
gens qui eurent vingt ans en 1830 n’avaient pas connu l’éveil progressif des esprits sous la
Restauration, les formes renouvelées de l’espérance et de la création. […] L’enthousiasme
tombé, ils jugèrent mal le monde et la vie ; ils aperçurent un abîme entre le réel et leur rêve”
(8). Poets coming of age at this time were also denied the access to commercial success that
their predecessors had enjoyed; as Alain Vaillant notes in “Le vers à l’épreuve du journal,”
while in the 1820s poetry was commercially successful, the 1830s witnessed “la
disqualification culturelle du recueil poétique” (13) on evidence in Balzac’s Illusions Perdues
(1837-1843). Writing poetry was no longer a way to earn a living, let alone fame, in this
decade which saw the rise of the newspaper feuilleton, which I will address in the next
chapter, and with it, the novel. These political and financial disappointments played an
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important role in the growing sense of frustration and outright anger on display in 1830s
prefaces.
But instead of a new literary program, the anger that drove these young authors to
write was not necessarily conducive to developing a coherent new model for the poet-reader
relationship: it is often hard to say what these authors are fighting for. Some scholars have
noted that the lasting impact of this generation on French literature can be better felt through
their influence on later generations than for specific individual contributions or works.
Bénichou notes that “La plupart des Jeune-France disparurent de la scène après quelques
années” (L’École du dése cha teme t, 496). Their blustery prefaces often outshone the
literary works they were meant to introduce, which were rarely as audacious or memorable as
their preface (Zielonka 79). Even Gautier, the most influential author to emerge from this
group, is susceptible to this criticism; as Bénichou asserts, Gautier’s prefaces were
characterized by “une espèce d’insouciance, jetée au défi aux profanes, qui fait douter de son
sérieux. C’est ainsi que Mademoiselle de Maupin a été éclipsé par sa bruyante préface”
(L’École du dése cha teme t, 496). In part, this is because authors were allowed more room
for experimentation in prefaces than in texts themselves because, as Vaillant argues, books
and literary pieces for newspapers were meant to respect the rhetorical techniques taught in
schools (101). Ironically their long, angry and blustery prefaces gave young authors a place to
rebel against the long, authoritative and condescending prefaces of their elders.
2. Baudelaire’s Preface Practices: Late(r) Romantic and Old Jeune-France
Establishing broad trends for Baudelaire’s poetry preface practices is decidedly more
difficult than it is for Hugo in that he published only one book of poems during his life, Les
Fleurs du Mal in 1857, as well as the revised, censored and elongated edition of 1861, for
which he failed to write a preface – a significant point to which I will return later in the
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chapter. A posthumous collection of prose poems was published in 1869 with a letter-preface
to Arsène Houssaye, originally published in La Presse in 1862; but as even the ultimate
choice of the title of this collection, Le Spleen de Paris or Petits poèmes en prose, remains
ambiguous, it is unclear whether this dedication was meant as a preface for the entire work.
In addition to the relative paucity of his literary publications, especially when considered
alongside the incredibly prolific Hugo, the ambiguities and ironies apparent in Baudelaire’s
prefaces represent another significant difficulty. Nonetheless, these prefaces and variants,
along with those to his translations of Edgar Allen Poe, and his letters and personal journals
provide a rich pool of resources for understanding Baudelaire’s conception of the preface and
pinpointing the ways in which it is evidence of a newly contentious poet-reader relationship.
As I will show, he draws significantly from both Hugo and the early Romantic generation as
well as the Jeune-France in “Au Lecteur,” which can be seen as a text which siphons and
distills preface practices in a significant way, developing a significant new model for the
poet-reader relationship that will prove infleuntial.
Baudelaire, among many other writers from his generation, recognized the debt he
owed his late-romantic predecessors, such as Gautier, to whom he dedicated LFDM. This
influence can be specifically characterized by a new attitude toward society and literature that
would inspire their own works: Gautier is a “précurseur et maître en esprit de la génération de
1850, Baudelaire, Banville, Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, dans ce qui la distingue de celle de
1830” and his “choix et pensées directrices – pessimisme et esthétisme – préfiguraient et
orientaient la littérature à venir” (Bénichou L’École du désenchantement, 495-6). The
influence of the 1830 generation on Baudelaire can be seen in the way the term Jeune-France
was used in the nineteenth century. According to Bénichou, it came to signify certain
qualities that were largely the legacy of the young 1830s generation when applied to those
who came later: “il est permis de désigner du nom ‘Jeune-France’, au sens large, […] toute
35
une jeunesse dont le caractère, ainsi que l’idéal, comportait un alliage de révolte et de
désespoir, d’excès voulu dans la passion et d’humour sarcastique, d’abattement et
d’imagination sans frein” (idem 101). In the late nineteenth century, Baudelaire was often
branded with the Jeune-France label, particularly by those critical of him. Jean Rousseau, in
two articles published in Le Figaro in June 1858, criticized Baudelaire as “le dernier des
Jeune-France” (qtd. in Bandy 41) and Jules Vallès called him “ce Jeune France trop vieux”
(qtd. in idem 126). For these critics, Baudelaire’s pessimism and sarcasm were inherently
youthful qualities that had atrophied in this too-old rebel.
Despite the inarguable influence of the so-called Jeune-France group on Baudelaire’s
generation, I would argue that Baudelaire’s lyrical model in LFDM is more directly in
dialogue with Hugo and the early Romantics than it is with their successors. Baudelaire
engaged with and considered his relationship to his audience in a broad sense whereas poets
like Gautier circumscribed their rapport with the reader to a small, intimate space and were
not interested in trying to reach a wide audience with their poetry. Gautier’s poetry prefaces
provide a good example of this. Between the 1830s and 1850s, he maintained a consistent
image of poetry and the poet as shielded from society at large. This is evident in his preface
to Albertus ou L’âme et le péché (1832): “L’auteur du présent livre […] use sa vie en famille
avec deux ou trois amis et à peu près autant de chats. Une espace de quelques pieds […] c’est
pour lui l’univers. – Le manteau de la cheminée est son ciel, la plaque, son horizon. Il n’a vu
du monde que ce que l’on en voit par la fenêtre, et il n’a pas envie d’en voir davantage” (i).
His readers are defined as similarly turned inwards: “Il s’est imaginé (a-t-il tort ou raison ?)
qu’il y avait encore de part la France quelques bonnes gens comme lui qui s’ennuyaient
mortellement de toute cette politique hargneuse des grands journaux” (idem ii). Twenty years
and a failed revolution later, Gautier maintains the same position towards poetry’s place in
society in the preface to the 1852 Émaux and camées: “Sa s pre dre garde
36
l’ouraga / Qui
fouettait mes vitres fermées,/ Moi, j’ai fait Émaux et Camées” (2). In both texts, the window
remains a boundary for the poet and his poetry, separating them from the outside world.
Gautier thus clearly inscribes his work into this restrained intimate space, proscribing a broad
readership and identifying only with the few readers who were like him.
Despite the tremendous differences between Hugo’s and Baudelaire’s relationship to
their readers in the prefaces to LC and LFDM, they both develop and articulate a relationship
between the poet and the reader that is central to the text. This is one of the reasons that these
prefaces share a deep commonality despite the profound differences between them and their
authors’ political and artistic philosophies and status in the literary field. As Nicole Simek
argues in “Baudelaire and the Problematic of the Reader in ‘Les Fleurs du mal’,” “While
Gautier and the Parnassian poets who followed his lead emphasized their distance from the
public, Baudelaire maintains a more ambivalent relationship with his readers” (44). Many
other scholars have noted this link between Hugo and Baudelaire in their address of a broad
readership in their prefaces and poetry; as Bénichou notes, Baudelaire “transfigure sans
l’effacer l’immodeste ego de ses prédécesseurs” (L’École du dése chantement, 585). Next, I
will show the precise ways in which Baudelaire transfigured the lyrical model and established
a new relationship to the reader that would have a transformational effect on mid- to late
nineteenth-century notions of poetry readership.
II. “Préface” and “Au lecteur”
In this section, in a series of close readings of the Preface to LC and “Au lecteur,” I
aim to shed light on several of the notable aspects which make these texts quite similar in
some ways and yet vastly different in many others in terms of the relationship they establish
with the poetry reader. While these two canonical texts have been well studied, by comparing
them side-by-side as contemporary texts with a number of informative points of contact, they
37
help shed light on one another and allow us better understand the ways in which poetry
readership was being redefined around these pivotal years.
1. Hugo and Baudelaire in the Literary Field, 1856-1857
The preface to LC is marked with the location and date, “Guernesey, mars 1856,” the
British island where Hugo had been in exile for over four years following Napoléon III’s
coup d’état, and where he would live until his return to France in 1870. Already a literary and
cultural authority in France, Hugo’s exile and the publication in 1853 of Les Châtiments, his
first collection of poetry in over a decade, would further increase his esteem among his
countrymen; as Robb Graham notes in Victor Hugo: A Biography: “the tutelary shadow Hugo
[…] cast over the Second Empire” only increased with his tremendously popular publications
in exile (328). As we will see in the preface to LC, his personal experience as the exiled voice
of a people led him to further develop his view of the poet as a prophetic figure. In addition to
this prestige, Hugo enjoyed a position of financial independence that was nearly unrivaled at
a time when few writers were able to live off their work. In fact, he was part of an elite group
of writers that not only earned a living from but prospered from their publications. This
placed Hugo in a financial position comparable to that of popular novelists such as Eugène
Sue and Alexandre Dumas. However, as Isabel Roche in her 2003 article, “Inscribing his
Ideal Reader(ship): Victor Hugo and the Shaping of le lecteur pensif,” “Hugo made and
maintained his sizable fortune writing plays and poetry,” not publishing novels during the
1840s and 1850s, arguably the golden age of the roman feuilleton; instead, he made his
money through “careful self-management and [an] understanding of the new business of
literature” (21-22). Hugo’s privileged position in the literary field both financially and in
terms of literary prestige allowed him particular latitude in establishing a rapport with the
reader in his prefaces.
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When Les Fleurs du Mal was first published on June 25, 1857, Baudelaire could
hardly have been in a more different position than Hugo. He was primarily known not as a
poet, but a translator for his successful and well-regarded translation of Poe’s Histoires
extraordinaires in 1856. In 1857, at age thirty-six, Baudelaire was a somewhat tardy
newcomer on the literary scene, and a largely unknown quantity, although as we saw, he was
associated with the so-called minor Romantics or Jeune-France (Bandy 1). Baudelaire’s
poetry had circulated among his peers, and some of his poems were already published in
small literary reviews like L’Artiste and Revue de Paris. According to Charles Asselineau, a
friend and later defender of Baudelaire during his trial, Baudelaire had completed the
majority of Les Fleurs du Mal by 1846, but the volume remained unpublished as a whole for
another ten years (idem 1-2). As the Baudelaire scholar W.T. Bandy notes, by the mideighteen fifties, “[i]t is obvious that the public at large could be pardoned its ignorance of the
very existence of this young writer whose works were dispersed in unimportant periodicals”
(idem 2). Baudelaire had his first major breakthrough as a poet on June 1, 1855, when the La
Revue des deux mondes, an influential literary review, published eighteen poems under the
title Les Fleurs du Mal, including “Au Lecteur” (idem 3). However, the editors of the Revue
were clearly ambivalent about the publication, or at least presented themselves as such, as
evidenced by the editorial note that accompanied the poems:
En publiant les vers qu’on va lire, nous croyons montrer une fois de plus
combien l’esprit qui nous anime est favorable aux essais, aux tentatives dans
les sens les plus divers. Ce qui nous paraît ici mériter l’intérêt, c’est
l’expression vive et curieuse même dans sa violence de quelques défaillances,
de quelques douleurs morales que, sans les partager ni les discuter, on doit
tenir à connaître comme un des signes de notre temps… (June 1, 1855)
39
Undoubtedly hoping to deflect possible criticism that they were endorsing the content of the
poetry or the poet’s aggressive and potentially controversial tone, the editors distanced
themselves by making evident that this was simply one example among many of their efforts
to bring young poets to light and not a specific endorsement. They directly attribute the
poetry’s merit to its adeptness at tapping into the zeitgeist, noting that they don’t “share” and
won’t even “discuss” the content. This ambivalent introduction of Baudelaire as a poet onto
the literary scene was followed by an attack on the poems in the Figaro, the newspaper which
would launch charges of immorality against the volume in 1857. Thus, the arrival of
Baudelaire and his poems from the as yet unpublished volume were marked by a less than
ideal critical reception, according to Bandy: “a magazine in which Baudelaire has
subsequently been treated most disdainfully and a furious diatribe in a popular gazette were
largely responsible for the spread of his literary reputation beyond the boundaries of personal
acquaintance. The importance of these events cannot easily be over-emphasized” (3).
Baudelaire’s first step into the public eye seems to foreshadow the tensions that would
characterize the poet’s relationship with the public.
2. Functions of the Preface in the “Préface” to LC and “Au lecteur”
From the first lines of the preface to LC, Hugo, as is typical in his prefaces,
establishes his authority as a guide for the interpretation of this text: “Si un auteur pouvait
avoir quelque droit d’influer sur la disposition d’esprit des lecteurs qui ouvrent son livre,
l’auteur des Contemplations se bornerait à dire ceci: Ce livre doit être lu comme on lirait le
livre d’un mort” (OP 2: 481). This is a formula of exactly how to read; in prescribing this
method, Hugo implicitly stakes an authoritative position vis-à-vis the reader. As Genette
notes, “Quand un auteur vous explique avec obligeance comment vous devez lire son livre,
vous êtes déjà en mauvaise position pour lui répliquer, fût-ce in petto, que vous ne le lirez
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pas” (Seuils 194). Furthermore, Hugo’s formula for reading is not merely a suggestion, but
rather an imperative (“Ce livre doit être lu”), an unambiguous statement advocating a proper
reading. While effectively dictating how to understand this book, Hugo thus respects a polite,
conversational tone in his rapport with the reader: the hypothetical statement (“si un auteur”)
attenuates the imperative by casting some uncertainty on the authoritative role the author is
assuming. Furthermore, the qualifier “quelque” and the verb “borner” underscore the
potential limits on the author’s power over the reader. From the outset, Hugo maintains a
dose of conversational politesse in addressing his reader but nonetheless establishes his
authority as a guide for interpreting the work.
In addition to prescribing how to read, Hugo uses this preface to describe what the
book is – a deeply personal and autobiographical collection: “Qu’est-ce que les
Contemplations? C’est ce qu’on pourrait appeler […] les Mémoires d’u e âme” (OP 2: 481).
Hugo succinctly and informatively asks and answers important questions about the book
which assure that it is understood in a specific way by his reader. While he does not expand
on the particular death referenced in the first sentence, his acknowledgement of the book’s
autobiographical nature and its structure reveal the subject: the two volumes, Autrefois (18301843) and Aujourd’hui (1843- 1855) are structured around the central date, 1843, when
Hugo’s beloved daughter Léopoldine drowned in a boating accident. This is further evident in
the fourth book, “Pauca meae,” in which there is an interruption between the second and third
poems, with a page marked simply:
4 SEPTEMBRE 1843
...................................................
Again, we can see this as a practical aspect of the preface in that this information presents this
work as both thematically and structurally centered on this death. This is what Genette calls
the “information suprême”(Seuils 194) that guides the reading of the book: it is focused on
41
the death of a loved one. This personal aspect of the work also has profound implications for
the reader, as we will see, in Hugo’s message about the shared destiny of mankind in the
preface.
Unlike Hugo’s tradition of prose prefaces for works of poetry, Baudelaire’s preface is
a poem comprised of ten stanzas of quatrains in the alexandrine verse. This form gives it a
more ambiguous status as expository writing than the ceremonial and didactic prose prefaces
Hugo wrote. The verse preface, as Baudelaire and his defense would argue at trial, blurs the
line between inside and outside the text, making its status in relation to the rest of the text
more difficult to discern; unlike the prose preface, it is not instantly distinguishable from the
content of a book of poetry. In his preface notes for a later edition of LFDM, Baudelaire
explicitly rejects his editor’s call to “expliquer pourquoi et comment j’ai fait ce livre, quels
ont été mon but et mes moyens, mon dessein et ma méthode,” noting that it would be akin to
showing the audience an actress’ dressing room, or the mechanisms behind effects onstage
(LFDM 246-47). This indicates to us that “Au Lecteur” was imagined in a very different way
than Hugo’s prose preface in that it expressly does not explain why or how to read.
Moreover, this choice of a liminal poem addressed to the reader places Baudelaire in line
with the tradition of Jeune-France prefaces: one way of showing opposition to this model
was to write a declamatory prose preface spelling out their rebellion, like Saintine; Baudelaire
takes another route, writing a different kind of preface that is more allusive than explanatory
in nature, setting the tone and establishing themes for the volume without explaining exactly
what the book was about or exactly how to read it.
Instead, from the outset of “Au Lecteur,” the reader is plunged into a world of crime
and vice that is evocative of the mood and tonality for the volume. The vocabulary of sin and
moral fault, the theme of physical and psychic degradation, the insufficiency of human
attempts at redemption, and an overall tone of putridity dominate this text. The first seven
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stanzas focus in particular on human weakness and culpability in a series of contrasts
between pleasure and charm and total horror: “nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin
bourbeux,/ Croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos taches” (8-9); “vers l'Enfer nous
descendons d'un pas,/ Sans horreur” (15-16). In the last two stanzas, Baudelaire rachets up
the tension, telling the reader that “II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!/…/
C'est l'Ennui! L'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,/ II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka”
(33, 37-38). After all of the hideous crimes, monsters, and demonic powers in the poem, one
creature is the epitome of “despicability,” “villainy” and “filthiness,” as underscored by the
repetition of “plus” in line 33. Yet his villainy is muted, literally and figuratively and
characterized by silence and stillness, with the careless yawn highlighting a terrifying sense
of indifference. Thus it is clear that the preface-poem establishes a dark and disturbing
ambiance that will serve as a context for the troubled poet-reader relationship.
In order to better understand the shift from Hugo’s preface to Baudelaire’s preface
poem, it is necessary to establish a series of contrasts between several aspects of these liminal
texts in the use of subject pronouns they use to refer to the poet and reader at various points
in the preface, the invectives they level against the reader, and metaphors for the poet-reader
relationship which elucidate important aspects of the way each one creates a rapport with the
reader in the preface and the poems which follow.
3. Positioning the Poet-Reader Relationship in Pronouns
Although he presents this as a personal and autobiographical work, Hugo maintains a
certain distance by his use of the third person: he refers to himself as “l’auteur des
Contemplations” in the first paragraph and again as “l’auteur” in the second. Even when he
explains the autobiographical significance of the work, he refers to them as the “les Mémoires
d’une âme,” not of his own soul. In fact, Hugo used the third person to refer to himself in
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nearly all of his prefaces, as I noted in the examples cited earlier, either referring to himself
as “le poète” or “l’auteur;” it is exactly this preference for the third person that Texier
criticizes in his satirical description of “L’Olympien” Diaz quotes. Hugo favored the third
person to the extent that he employed it even when he clearly referred to himself, as well as
when he discussed the poet’s role in a more general sense. For this reason, the next section of
the preface to LC is all the more striking:
Est-ce donc la vie d’un homme? Oui, et la vie des autres hommes aussi. Nul
de nous n’a l’honneur d’avoir une vie qui soit à lui. Ma vie est la vôtre, votre
vie est la mienne, vous vivez ce que je vis ; la destinée est une. Prenez donc ce
miroir et regardez-vous-y. On se plaint quelquefois des écrivains qui disent
moi. Parlez-nous de nous, leur crie-t-on. Hélas ! quand je vous parle de moi, je
vous parle de vous. Comment ne le sentez-vous pas ? Ah ! insensé qui crois
que je ne suis pas toi !
Ce livre contient, nous le répétons, autant d’individualité du lecteur que
celle de l’auteur. Homo sum. (OP 2: 481-82)
Hugo abruptly breaks with the third person, creating a striking change in tone: from a cool,
measured and impartial reference to “l’auteur” and “la vie d’un homme,” he seems to become
more personally and emotionally inscribed in the text, culminating in the exclamations
“Hélas! […] Ah! insensé !” The same shift is also apparent in his references to his readers: in
the first paragraph of the preface, he refers to them in the third person as “les lecteurs” and
“… des autres hommes” before switching to the more direct “vous,” and even more
pointedly, “tu” in the exclamation (“toi !”). Veering off his discussion of poets and readers in
a broad sense, Hugo suddenly zeroes in and denounces a certain kind of reader in this
passage. The “tu” form in particular targets a specific single reader Hugo accuses of
misunderstanding, and the informal address contrasts sharply with the largely impersonal
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language in this text. This linguistic shift further underscores the point that Hugo is making,
that there is a profound personal connection between the poetic subject and the reader. We
almost get the sense that in describing this deep connection between the poet and the reader,
Hugo himself gets drawn in, losing the mastery and authority he maintains elsewhere. This
notion is strengthened by the sudden return to the third person in the next paragraph (“[le]
lecteur,” “l’auteur”) after this rhetorical and emotional climax, and the authoritative yet polite
tone that Hugo established with the reader in the first paragraph. While there seems to be a
growing tension mounting in the above passage, by the end, the structured relationship
between “reader” and author” repairs what appears as a momentary rift between the more
spontaneous “toi” and “moi.”
In “Au Lecteur,” Baudelaire insists heavily on the first person plural “nous” in the
majority of the poem. In every one of the first eight stanzas, it appears as a subject or
possessive adjective: “Nous alimentons […] nos remords” (3); “Nos péchés sont têtus, nos
repentirs sont lâches” (5); “Nous nous faisons payer […] nos aveux” (6); “Chaque jour vers
l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas” (15); “Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos
poumons/ Descend” (23-24). As the images accumulate, this insistence on the “nous” form
suggests a strong commonality between poet and reader based on their vices and the pleasure
they take in them. Ross Chambers notes in his article “Poetry in the Asiatic Mode,” that
Baudelaire’s use of the “inclusive” pronoun “nous” is deceptive: “by advertising its
commonality so overtly that it becomes a disguise, [it represents] a disarming captatio behind
which the intended violence and cruelty of the poetic hit at the other can lurk” (103, 106).
However, it seems only the most unsuspecting reader would be taken in by this so-called
captatio: the rhetorical violence evident in the degradation of body and soul is heavily
foreshadowed throughout the poem, making it rather evident that the association between
poet and reader is not especially flattering. Instead, I would argue, this “nous” form actually
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reveals a central paradoxical feature of Baudelaire’s rapport with his reader, one which will
also be true for his successors: while attacking, dismissing and criticizing the reader, the poet
has a higher degree of recognition and similarity with him: while Hugo tends to address the
masses at large rather than imagining real readers, Baudelaire addresses a reader who is much
more like him but who hypocritically fails to recognize it.
In the ninth stanza of “Au Lecteur,” the rhetorical shift from “nous” to “je”/“tu” puts
the emphasis firmly on the famous final lines of the poem: “Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre
délicat,/— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!” The reader is suddenly
directly addressed as “tu,” by the first-person lyric subject (“mon semblable – mon frère”)
(39-40). The fact that this final statement seems to unite poet and reader as “similar” further
brings into question the sudden linguistic division as “tu” and “je”: if the point of these lines
is to stress the “similarity” between poet and reader, why then suddenly distinguish between
them in the accompanying pronouns rather than keeping the inclusive “nous”? Baudelaire’s
linguistic choice implies the limits to the commonality between poet and reader suggested
throughout the poem in the “nous” form. Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s deeply
ambivalent relationship with the masses applies particularly well to this passage: “He
becomes their accomplice even as he dissociates himself from them. He becomes deeply
involved with them, only to relegate them to oblivion with a single glance of contempt”
(188). The final two verses at once highlight the “similarity” and “fraternity” between poet
and reader while distinguishing between them linguistically as well as morally: the reader,
not the poet, is the hypocrite.
This sudden shift in pronouns at first appears remarkably similar to what Hugo does
in the preface to LC: the sudden interjection of a “je”/”tu” interrupts the flow of established
language and launches into a sudden attack on the reader, even leveling a similar charge: you
think you aren’t like me, reader, but you are. However, the difference in form is significant:
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Baudelaire’s lyrical subject in the liminal poem is more nuanced and less readily identifiable
as the unambiguous voice of the author than Hugo’s prose narrator in his preface.
Furthermore, Baudelaire places this linguistic break in the final, culminating point of the
preface-poem: after establishing a common ground of sin and vice, he concludes on this
accusatory note which distinguishes between the poetic first person and the reader. This
rhetorical shift is the climax and ultimately the point of the poem that Baudelaire builds up to:
the reader is a hypocrite. Hugo, on the other hand, places his linguistic break from “il” to
“je”/”tu” in the middle of the preface; he both begins and ends with the impersonal and
authoritative third person in the text. The break in communication in Hugo’s text is thus a
detour along the way and the tone of the poet-reader relationship remains intact at the end. If
Hugo ended with “Ah ! insensé qui crois que je ne suis pas toi!” we would have a very
different impression of his preface and the relationship it posits between poet and reader,
much more in line with Baudelaire’s.
4. The Culpable Reader: “Insensé” and “Hypocrite”
The distinction between the exclamations in the two prefaces – “insensé” and
“hypocrite” – also captures the essence of the difference between the poets’ views of the
reader and their relationship to him. While in both exclamations, the poet denounces the
reader for a specific fault, the charges have very different implications. For Hugo, the reader
is an “insensé;” in other words, he is not willfully wrong, but ignorant to the truth. As a
result, one of the aims of Hugo’s preface is to enlighten the reader about his profound
similarity with the poet. For Baudelaire, the distinction between the reader and poet is the
latter’s hypocrisy. Baudelaire emphasizes this notion through the repetition of the titular word
lecteur, accentuated at parallel positions in the last two lines, at the fifth and sixth syllables.
This position within the verse puts in parallel the preceding clause/word: “Tu le connais” and
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“Hypocrite,” drawing a line between the charge of hypocrisy and its relation to the charge of
knowing: the reader is a hypocrite because he fails to admit what he knows. In other words,
Baudelaire’s invective, “hypocrite,” implies that the reader is willfully ignorant of the facts:
he is not merely naïve or mistaken, but duplicitous. As Chambers puts it, the reader’s
hypocrisy is “his failure to acknowledge what he intimately knows” (105). The choice of
verbs also highlights this fundamental difference: Hugo’s reader doesn’t believe what the
poet knows (“insensé qui crois que je ne suis pas toi”), while Baudelaire’s hypocrite knows
the truth (Tu le connais, lecteur) but refuses to admit it.
While we can link these two epithets to a shared view of the poet as revelatory figure,
the terms of this relationship differ considerably. Both reveal an important truth to the reader,
a trait that we can link to the Romantic lyrical model that Yves Vadé describes in
“L’Émergence du sujet lyrique à l’époque romantique”: the Romantic poet is “un être
privilégié capable […] de dire dans une forme suprêmement musicale ce qu’il y a de plus
intime en lui et que les autres hommes gardent pour eux, par pudeur autant que par incapacité
de s’exprimer” (13-14), although for Hugo and Baudelaire, the reader’s “incapacité de
s’exprimer” is more because of his foolishness or hypocrisy, respectively. While it is Hugo’s
mission to “enlighten” the “foolish” reader, Baudelaire’s role is not to educate the “hypocrite
lecteur”; instead it is to force him to recognize what he does not want to admit. Thus
Baudelaire’s revelatory mission is by definition a violent one, enacted against a recalcitrant
reader: this is the violent gesture that Chambers refers to as “the return of the repressed” (98)
and Claude Pichois calls “unmasking” (Baudelaire OC 1975, 26), and is the crux of the
author’s aggression towards the reader. The difference in the terms “insensé” and “hypocrite”
also reveals a paradoxically higher degree of recognition between Baudelaire and the reader
than between Hugo and the reader: while Hugo’s reader is unenlightened, and does not share
the profound knowledge of the poet, Baudelaire’s reader does have access to this knowledge
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but refuses to admit it. In other words, Baudelaire’s reader, while aggressively attacked by
the poet, is much more like him than Hugo is like his reader.
5. Hugo and the Reader: Macrocosm and Microcosm
Some aspects of Hugo’s preface suggest a profound reciprocity in the poet-reader
relationship, reflective of the interconnectedness in mankind’s destiny; however, upon closer
inspection, there is actually a large degree of separation between the poet, as an otherwordly
prophet figure, and the reader, who is often subsumed into vast categories like “Humanity” or
“Mankind.” In the preface, this can be seen in several ways. First, in the passage I highlighted
before, the chiasmus “ma vie est la vôtre, votre vie est la mienne” is seemingly a statement
about the interconnected nature of man’s life which brings together the reader and the poet.
However, Hugo’s “moi” is not reflective of man in the singular sense; instead the poet’s
“moi” is much more encompassing: if we consider that the pronoun “vous” signifies not one
reader, but all readers, then it appears that he equates himself (“ma vie”/ “la mienne”) with all
mankind (“la vôtre”/ “votre vie”). Hugo’s relationship with the reader is reflective in the
same way that a macrocosm is reflected in a microcosm, a theme he will evoke in his poetry:
while there is an inherent correlation between them, it is not on a one-to-one ratio. Or as Léon
Cellier notes in his edition of LC, the poet’s destiny applies to all men, like a mythical hero:
Hugo “a fait de sa destinée un mythe dont il est le héros, et qui, comme tout mythe, a pour
autrui une valeur d’archétype” (LC 479).
Another metaphor for the poet-reader relationship in this preface, as well as several
poems in the volume, confirms that these seemingly reciprocal images are somewhat
deceptive. In the second paragraph of the preface, Hugo describes the completed book of
poems as a pool of water into which the reader gazes: “L’auteur a laissé, pour ainsi dire, ce
livre se faire en lui. La vie, en filtrant goutte à goutte à travers les événements et les
49
souffrances, l’a déposé dans son cœur. Ceux qui s’y pencheront retrouveront leur propre
image dans cette eau profonde et triste…” (OP 2: 481). The volume is presented as an
organic production, with the poet playing a central role as a receptacle or intermediary
between “life” or nature and man: it is the poet who “filters” life drop by drop through his
being, leaving a natural deposit in which the reader recognizes himself. While “life” is the
active subject of the verbs, and the poet appears passive in the verbal constructions “a
laissé… se faire en lui,” the poet still plays a central role as the site of this dynamic process.
The reader comes later, seeing himself passively reflected in what was produced by nature
and the poet. Clearly in this passage, the man is the third term in the relationship, after the
poet and “life” or nature. Despite what the preface seems to say about the reciprocity between
the reader and the poet, for Hugo, their relationship is far from an equal exchange.
An early variant of the preface, written between 1840 and 1845 sheds further light on
how Hugo understood the connection between the poet and humanity in 1856. In the notes for
the preface at this early stage of the project, then entitled Les Contemplatio s d’Olympio,
Hugo wrote: “il vient une certaine heure dans la vie où, […] un homme se sent trop petit pour
continuer de parler en son nom. Il crée alors, poëte, philosophe ou penseur, une figure dans
laquelle il se personnifie et s’incarne. c’est encore l’homme, mais ce n’est plus le moi.” (OP
2: XII). In other words, the avatar allows the poet to reach dimensions far outside himself, as
a mythical hero. But, by early 1848, Hugo had dropped “Olympio” from the title (idem 2:
1359), inherently associating the titular contemplations with himself. By removing
“Olympio” from the title of the work and from the lyrical model, Hugo assumes the authority
to speak for mankind in the first person, as himself. As Pierre Albouy mentions in his notes
for the Pléaide edition of Hugo’s Œuvres poéti ues, “là [dans la préface pour les
Co templatio s d’Olympio], Hugo distingue la peinture de l’homme et celle du moi, qui,
dans l’aventure de l’exil, lui semblent s’égaler et se confondre” (idem 2: 1372 n. 2). Once in
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exile, he seems to have no longer needed this avatar to assume the epic role of which the
poetic first person is now capable. This is an extremely confident move in terms of lyrical
expression, as Vadé himself notes: “Le sujet lyrique hugolien n’avait pas besoin en définitive
de figure seconde pour s’adresser aux allocutaires les plus divers” (24). At this point, the first
person used by Hugo no longer designates himself as a man, but rather something much
larger. His daughter Adèle recorded her father’s view of himself in her journal: “[…] je vis
dans l'exil. Là, je perds le caractère de l'homme pour prendre celui de l'apôtre et du prêtre”
(qtd. in Guille 3:284) The image of the apostle recurs in the poems which follow, and further
elucidates the asymmetrical poet-reader relationship in LC.
Several poems in the volume expand on the lyrical model developed in the preface in
a way that further underscores the vastly unequal nature of the poet-reader relationship.
While Hugo examines the role of the poet in several poems, including the epic “Les Mages,”
when he mentions the poetic audience, it is as spectators or auditors rather than readers, and
always in the plural, as an auditory comprised of humankind. In the poem “Saturne,” the poet
declares his intent to share his profound musings with the world: “Je ne cacherais pas au
peuple qui m’écoute/ Que je songe souvent à ce que font les morts” (II, 27-8). In the poem “Il
faut que le poète, épris d’ombre et d’azur” he is slightly more specific in dividing the
audience into groups: “Chanteur mystérieux qu’en tressaillant écoutent/ Les femmes, les
songeurs, les sages, les amants” (4-5). Another example can be found in the poem “Les
Mages” from the final book in the collection, a reflection on the powers of geniuses, poetic
and otherwise, throughout history. In it, the public for these geniuses is mentioned only
briefly as “L’homme, esprit captif, les écoute” (I, 215). These excerpts reveal the public’s
limited role in Hugo’s poetic mission. In these examples, the poet is a mystical and explicitly
public figure. Like a biblical prophet or wandering philosopher from Antiquity, he brings his
prophecies to the people in person, orally. Clearly this depiction of the poet-prophet is not at
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all grounded in the realities of a poet publishing in nineteenth-century France. This prophetic
character commands a vast auditory that surpasses the bounds of book publishing and
reading: it is comprised of a mass of humanity as evidenced by generalizing terms such as
“l’homme” and “[le] peuple.” In this way, Hugo’s rapport with the public, in which he
communicates not via the intimacy of the written word shared between author and private
reader, but orally, in a public forum, in front of a vast crowd of listeners, is fundamentally
different from Baudelaire’s.
There is also a striking contrast between the tremendous powers Hugo assigns his
prophetic figures and the almost total passivity of his auditory: while Hugo consistently uses
the verb “écouter,” implying some active participation, man is described as an “esprit captif,”
forced to hear the prophet’s message. Furthermore, the power of the latter’s words is
highlighted by the physical impact they have on the powerless auditor, who listens “en
tressaillant.” There is also a performative aspect to the poet-prophet’s oral presentation: in
these situations, like in the filtering water metaphor, the poet incarnates greater powers in his
being. He is a mythical figure who harnesses powers beyond himself, those of “life” and
“nature,” exposing them to mankind, who absorb them in a passive way. I would argue that
these examples show the true meaning of the relationship Hugo established in the preface: the
divine poet-prophet preaches to a vast assembly of mankind, which appears passive and
powerless before him.
6. Baudelaire and the Reader: Aggression and Self-Incrimination
Despite the harshness and aggression with which Baudelaire addresses his reader, the
reader is a central part of his poetic model. As Ross Chambers argues, the preface’s “primary
role is to establish a text-reader relationship that will be valid for the volume as a whole, this
representativity as address being the essence of its prefatory, introductory character with
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respect to the volume” (“Poetry in the Asiatic Mode” 103). Several factors make it clear that
the focus in this preface is on the poet-reader relationship. First, the title “Au Lecteur,” which
Baudelaire chose over the initial title, “Préface,” insists on addressing the reader (ibid.).
Baudelaire considered writing an epilogue for the book which was never completed; in
describing it, he compares its role to that of the preface: “L’Épilogue […] fait un joli feu
d’artifice de monstruosités, un véritable Épilogue, digne du prologue au lecteur, une réelle
conclusion” (Correspondance 1: 312). This notion that the epilogue should be worthy of “Au
Lecteur” suggests that for Baudelaire, “Au Lecteur” represented a bookend for the proposed
epilogue, or an innaugural “feu d’artifice de monstruosités,” a display of force meant to shock
the reader. Furthermore, calling it a “prologue” makes the import of “Au Lecteur” for the
poet-reader relationship in rest of the book more explicit as a representative preview of what
will follow.
As the above quotation implies, the way Baudelaire crafts his relationship to the
reader is based in part on a voyeuristic pleasure in seeing the effect his work will have on
him. In a January 1855 letter to Émile Montégut, a collaborator at the Revue des deux
mondes, where eighteen of his poems were to published later that year, he wrote: “combien je
suis intéressé à savoir – car je ne l’ai jamais su que très vaguement, très incomplètement –
l’effet que peut produire sur le publique un gros paquet de poésies de moi” (idem 1: 309).
While Baudelaire had little belief that he could enlighten or change the reader for the better,
as did Hugo, he expressed interest in seeing the results of his shock treatment. This gets at the
performative aspect of the poet-reader relationship: Baudelaire conceived of the liminal texts
as a kind of “event” meant to have an effect on the reader, gleefully imagining himself
watching on the sidelines. In this way, while Baudelaire’s tone is obviously divisive, he
actually establishes far greater proximity to the reader than Hugo by getting up close to watch
the turmoil he causes around him.
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In addition to taking pleasure in observing the public’s shock, Baudelaire’s
relationship to the reader is proof of strong masochistic tendencies; by incriminating the
public, he is implicating himself. Bénichou calls this Baudelaire’s “obsession misanthropicosatanique”: “le réquisitoire y a nécessairement valeur d’auto-incrimination. Il n’est pas
question que le poète tonnant puisse échapper à sa propre foudre ; il faut bien qu’il égale son
indignité à celle de ses semblables” (L’École du dése cha teme t 585). It is notable that
Bénichou uses the same explosive vocabulary as Baudelaire; the poet conceived of his
literary work as a chance to have a dynamic, unstoppable and very noticeable impact on the
reading public and himself. As we saw in the last lines of “Au Lecteur,” he incriminates the
reader by comparing him to himself: he is a “semblable” and a “frère” who is guilty of the
same crimes, with the exception of hypocrisy. The notion of “brotherhood” introduced in “Au
Lecteur” is important to understanding the way that Baudelaire defined his sado-masochistic
rapport to the public. In “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres,” the introduction to his translation
of Poe’s Histoires extraordinaires, published in 1856, the year between the first large-scale
publication of poems from LFDM in the Revue des deux mondes and the publication of the
book, Baudelaire defined the author thus: “Certains esprits, solitaires au milieu de la foule, et
qui se repaissent dans le monologue, n’ont que faire de la délicatesse en matière de public.
C’est, en somme, une sorte de fraternité basée sur le mépris” (OC 1975, 313). It is notable
that Baudelaire does not ascribe this brotherhood just to Poe, but to the vague “certains;” in
fact, Baudelaire often described himself as exactly this kind of solitary wanderer in the
crowd. This reflection on the poet-reader relationship clearly applies as much to Baudelaire
as to Poe.
Baudelaire’s relationship to the reader can be understood via his preferred image of
the solitary man in the crowds. This metaphor for the poet-reader relationship has several
significant implications. First, the proximity between poet and public is absolute in a physical
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sense: the poet is literally in the fray, mixing with the vast assemblies of the modern city in
which he resides. Unlike Hugo’s prophet, Baudelaire’s poet is far more enmeshed in the
crowd: he is not set apart, on a hilltop, making his prophecies, but moving around the vast
urban space, silently observing and being involved in the crowd without them noticing him.
Furthermore, unlike Hugo’s assemblies, these crowds are not filled with anonymous masses,
but rather individuals who each have their own story and with whom Baudelaire sometimes
connects on an individual basis. In particular, in the Tableaux parisiens section of LFDM,
Baudelaire singles out figures in the poems “À une mendiante rousse” and “À une passante”
whom he addresses intimately as “tu.” In “Les petites vieilles,” Baudelaire describes the poet
in action, following his subjects around the city: “Je guette, obéissant à mes humeurs fatales,/
Des êtres singuliers, décrépits et charmants” (3-4). It seems ironic in a way that Baudelaire
dedicates this poem to Victor Hugo, whose latest poetic work was characterized less by an
interest in the plight of people than his own prophetic vision. Baudelaire’s proximity to the
crowd is not absolute; he immerses himself in it without ever becoming a part of it. As the
above reference to Poe shows, the poet is unique in that he remains a solitary figure in the
crowd, and is not subsumed into it as other men would be.
This uniqueness is at once what sets him apart as a privileged being among crowds as
well as a source of terror and persecution by the very same crowds evident in several poems
in LFDM. In “Bénédiction and “L’Albatros”, the first two poems in the volume, society’s
capacity for violence is evident in the cruelty exerted on the poet. In “Bénédiction,” the poet
is shown as the ultimate pariah, hated by his mother, who curses him; his loved ones, who
fear and torment him; and his wife, who tries to lure him away from his divine inspiration and
tear out his heart. The cruelty of these characters is evident in the sadistic delight they take in
tormenting their victim, the poet. In these poems, the poet’s only crime is his difference in
harnessing supernatural powers: “L’Enfant déshérite s’enivre de soleil,/ Et dans tout ce qu’il
55
boit et tout ce qu’il mange/ Retrouve l’ambroisie et le nectar vermeil” (22-24). As in “Au
Lecteur,” the “peuple furieux” (56) is accused of “hypocrisie” (35) for throwing away
everything the poet-pariah touches when they themselves are impure. Similarly, in
“L’Albatros,” the poet is a martyr figure in the figure of the animal. This poem shows a
ship’s crew catching albatrosses, “ces rois de l’azur” (6), mocking and torturing the majestic
creatures “pour s’amuser” (1): “L’un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,/ L’autre mime, en
boitant, l’infirme qui volait !” (11-12). The pleasure these men take in torturing the bird
recalls the pleasure in “Au Lecteur” that mankind takes in its crimes. The poem ends with an
explicit comparison of the bird and the poet:
Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer ;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher. (13-16)
The poet is an outcast in society because his assets are not recognized as such; instead, he
seems ridiculous to common men who ridicule and torture him. These poems show society as
culpable of cruelty and violence in dealing with exceptional figures, like poets. While this
uniqueness is a source of suffering for the poet, it is essential. As Sartre describes it, his
alterity has a social function in that it defines and singles out the poet in the crowds
(Baudelaire 68): Baudelaire “se sent et veut se sentir unique jusqu’à l’extrême jouissance
solitaire, unique jusqu’à la terreur” (idem 21). While both Baudelaire and Hugo exalt the poet
and his powers, their depictions of his role in society are at odds: in Les Contemplations, the
poet-prophet dictates while the public passively “listens” and “trembles,” whereas in
“L’Albatros” and “Bénédiction”, the cruel public is in a position of power, which it uses to
torment the outcast poet.
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As we have seen, a major part of the Romantic and late-Romantic preface concerned
the rapport between the lyrical subject and the reader: the poet’s “Je” and the reader’s “Tu.”
This focus on the poet’s connection to humanity is at the forefront of the preface to LC and
“Au Lecteur.” However, as I have aimed to demonstrate in the above analysis of these two
texts, this relationship is constructed in a very different way for Hugo and Baudelaire in ways
which underscore a profound shift in the poet-reader relationship. For Hugo, a mere
“readership” would be insufficient to receive the words of the poet as he defined him; his
project calls for a broader, vaguer and more all-encompassing audience, “mankind,” “man,”
or “humanity,” words he peppers throughout his poetry; tellingly, Hugo only uses the word
“lecteur” in the preface. Instead of grappling with a readership based in reality, I argue that
Hugo developed his conception of the reader in reaction to the needs of the poet-prophet
figure on whom he focused the majority of his attention in LC. In it, the poet figure is
dominant, and the reader/spectator is articulated only inasmuch as he is the object upon
which the poet acts. In other words, rather than addressing the real nineteenth-century reader
who picked up this book, Hugo created a virtual pole of reception, vastly expanding the
boundaries of what the poetic audience could be – not real readers, but some mystical view of
mankind divorced from time and place. As Benjamin explains it, “To him [Hugo] the crowd
meant, almost in the ancient sense, the crowd of his constituents – that is, the masses of his
readers and his voters” (95). Instead of addressing readers as his contemporaries did, either
by searching for an intimate connection among (real) human souls, like Lamartine, or in an
aggressive tongue-in-cheek way, like Gautier, Hugo, addressing the reader in 1856, speaks to
“humanity” in all of the enormity and vagueness that this term implies.
Baudelaire on the other hand, has at once a more aggressive and hostile rapport with
the reader, partly the heritage of the Jeune-France generation, and a much closer relationship
to him than Hugo. The reader he addresses may be a hypocrite, but it is because he denies his
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fraternity with the poet. Furthermore, Baudelaire envisions his audience not in the vague
universal, ahistorical way that Hugo does, but as an urban crowd in which he is immersed and
in which individual figures are discernible. While he shares their vices and crimes, he sets
himself apart as a unique observer of mankind, memorializing the “singular, decrepit and
charming” members of society in his scenes of modern urban decay. By presenting these
troubling images to the reader, Baudelaire hopes to shock and trouble his audience, both for
the pleasure of watching their dismay at being shaken out of their complacency as well as for
the pleasure of implicating himself in their crimes. In this way, the relationship Baudelaire
establishes with the public in the preface and the poems in LFDM suggests that the many
commonalities in the poet-reader relationship – historical, geographical, and moral – are a
source of his loathing.
It would however, be wrong to reduce Hugo’s prophetic model to a patriarchal and
egomaniacal streak; it is important to remember that among Romantic idealist philosophers,
intellectual work, including poetry, had extremely high stakes, as Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy point out in L’Absolu littéraire: “le ‘monde intellectuel’” was charged with “toute
vérité et, du même coup, toute autorité” in the Romantic era (48). Among the next
generations, this poetic mission to change mankind gave way to despair and anger, and as the
social ambition of the Romantic movement faded, many of Hugo’s successors noted the
grandiloquence in his poet-prophet figure’s presumption to speak for all mankind. According
to Baudelaire, while claiming to address all of humanity, Hugo was effectively addressing no
one at all. He seems to have the preface to LC4 in mind when he wrote in his private journal:
“Hugo, sacerdoce, a toujours le front penché, – trop penché pour rien voir, excepté son
nombril” (OC 1961, 1262). Baudelaire has a point: in purporting to represent all mankind,
4
“Ceux qui s’y pencheront retrouveront leur propre image dans cette eau profonde et triste” (OP 2: 481,
emphasis is mine).
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Hugo makes himself the center of the universe. For Baudelaire, what a navel-gazing Hugo
really means in the preface is, “quand je vous parle de moi, je vous parle de moi.”
III. 1857 and After: Redefining the Poet-Reader Relationship in Negative
After the trial and conviction of LFDM for the crimes of “offense à la morale
religieuse” and “offense à la morale publique et aux bonnes mœurs” in August 1857,
Baudelaire’s attitude towards the public and the way he defined his relationship to it hardened
considerably. In his notes for his lawyer, he links the legal charges against the book to the
fact that he did not write a didactic preface for the first edition, instead letting “Au Lecteur”
stand as the only liminal text: “mo
u i ue tort a été de compter sur l’i telligence
u iverselle, et e pas faire u e préface où j’aurais posé mes pri cipes littéraires et dégagé la
question si importante de la Morale” (LFDM 253) . Refusing to spell out his position on
literature and public morality, believing that he would be understood by the so-called
“intelligence universelle,” he was instead painted as a corruptor. After the trial, Baudelaire
tried to write a didactic, explanatory prose preface addressing such topics, but ultimately
failed in the face of what he felt was the impossibility of making the public understand him. It
is his refusal to write a new explanatory preface for LFDM after its condemnation that would
become a central part of Baudelaire’s legacy on the poet-reader relationship for future poets.
1. Aborted Prefaces: From Anger to Silence
The “Projets de préface” contain Baudelaire’s notes for a preface to the expanded
second and third editions of LFDM which were published after the trial against the 1857
version. In them, his successive attempts to write a preface and engage with the reader fail in
the face of a fundamental “malentendu” between them (LFDM 246). A vocabulary of
confusion and ignorance dominates in these texts: he describes contemporary language as “le
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patois incompréhensible de ce siècle,” contemporary literary criticism as having “désappris
les notions classiques relatives à la littérature,” and the morality of those likely to “confondre
l’encre avec la vertu” (idem 243). Baudelaire ends by noting the uselessness of explaining
himself in a preface in such a situation: “je me suis arrêté devant l’épouvantable inutilité
d’expliquer quoi que ce soit à qui que ce soit” (idem 244). In other words, explanations in the
preface have no use when readers were already divided between those incapable of
understanding and those who already understood them: “les uns savent ou devinent, et […]
les autres ne comprendront jamais” (idem 246). In his private journals, he would develop this
idea throughout the rest of his life, systematizing it as a rule for the contemporary world: “Le
monde ne marche que par le malentendu. – C’est par le malentendu universel que tout le
monde s’accorde. – Car si, par malheur, on se comprenait, on ne pourrait jamais s’accorder.
L’homme d’esprit [ … est] celui qui ne s’accordera jamais avec personne” (OC 1961, 129798). Between the poet and the reader, there was nothing more to say. As Maria Teresa
Giaveri notes in her article “Pour un double circuit des biens symboliques,” “le pacte social
qui liait l’auteur et le lecteur à travers l’œuvre a été rompu” (115).
By refusing to address the reader in a preface, Baudelaire redefined in negative one of
the central components of the Romantic mission, the elaboration of the rapport between poet
and mankind in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yves Vadé’s visual representation
of the Romantic lyrical model is useful in understanding the way that the Romantic poetic
mission differs from the movements which followed in poetry. In “L’émergence du sujet
lyrique à l’époque romantique,” Vadé schematizes Romantic poets’ rapport to their
“allocutaires”:
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(Vadé 18)
In this schema, the poet’s first person (in the center of the figure) is in dialogue with three
parties: the universe, the avatar of the self, and the reader. As we saw, Hugo collapsed the
avatar (represented in the lower part of the model as the ‘masque ou porte-parole’) into the
central “Je.” Correspondingly, scholars like Bénichou condense the Hugolian model to twobranched system which represents the two upper branches above, ‘fusionne avec l’univers’
and ‘recontre TU du lecteur’: “Le Mage reçoit sa lumière de Dieu, et il la communique à
l’Humanité: sa grandeur est dans cette liaison avec deux êtres plus grands que lui, et dans le
double service qu’elle implique” (L’École du dése cha teme t, 583-84). For the Romantic
poet, the rapport with the reader is a central aspect of poetic lyricism and of his mission as we
see both in Lamartine and Hugo’s prefaces. As I showed in my reading of “Au lecteur,” the
poet-reader relationship is central as well, but in a negative way: while the poet notes their
commonalities (vice and sins), his ultimate point is their profound difference – the readers’
hypocrisy. This explains the influence I mentioned earlier of the Romantic movement on
Baudelaire and the way that he is unevenly associated with the Romantic movement and its
lyrical model: Vadé considers LFDM as positioned “sur la ligne frontière du Romantisme et
de ce qui vient après” (36). However, as I will argue in the final part of this chapter, the effect
of Baudelaire’s focus on the points of contention between poet and reader as a central part of
his poetic model and his failure to write a preface for the second or third edition of LFDM led
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to a significant change in this model among poets like Verlaine, Rimbaud, Cros,
Laturéamont, and Mallarmé. What comes after, as Vadé puts it, is the redefinition of the poetreader relationship in negative. Poets no longer told their readers in prefaces, as both Hugo
and Baudelaire do, that the reader was just like him, and the days where there was a
“fraternity” among them, even a dark and cynical kind, was coming to a close. Instead, they
barred him from entering the work of poetry in a variety of ways: this is apparent in the
prefaces of poets who distanced themselves from readers through attacks, dismissing them as
suitable readers, or more completely by refusing to write prefaces or even publishable books.
The poet was no longer an “être sociable,” as the German Romantic poet and philosopher
Frederik Schlegel had it (qtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 291); he was an antisocial
being, whose very mission it was to repel the majority of contemporary readership.
It is clear that Baudelaire and not Hugo who would have the last word on this matter
in the late nineteenth century: “[d]ans l’évolution de la philosophie poétique, […] Baudelaire
semble l’avoir emporté durablement. Depuis qu’il a paru, […] l’irrémédiable solitude des
âmes semble plus plausible que toute communion” (Bénichou, L’École du dése cha teme t
584). This important turning point is also apparent to Léon Cellier in his introduction to LC:
“avec les Contemplations, c’est un monde qui finit; avec les Fleurs du mal, c’est un monde
qui commence” (XXXII) . Even the editors for La Revue des deux mondes reluctantly
realized that Baudelaire captured the zeitgeist. What they could not yet recognize is the long
life this collective loss of faith would have, which Bénichou describes in L’École du
désenchantement:
En poésie, la foi tombe pour ainsi dire en ruine du dedans, et essaie d’inventer
ses compensations propres. L’alliance proclamée par la poésie entre ses
inspirations et les destinées du genre humain, article fondamental et constitutif
du ‘grand romantisme’ français, se voit répudiée. On ne croit plus, on ne veut
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plus croire, ni à un avenir providentiel d’humanité ascendante, ni en un rôle
privilégié des poètes dans cette marche de l’homme vers l’idéal. (581)
Instead, the reader came to represent what poetry needed to exclude in order to strive for the
Ideal.
2. Late Nineteenth-Century Prefaces: Insulting and Chasing Away the Reader
This break between poet and reader is evident in several different ways in latenineteenth-century poetry prefaces. Some poets like Lautréamont wrote prefaces in the 1860s
in which they encouraged the reader who was unlike the author to turn away from the book,
targeting only those who shared their dark predilections. These poets elaborated Baudelaire’s
vision of a fraternity based on shared vice, but rejected those who would not explicitly
include themselves in the same group as the poet. Baudelaire himself wrote a sonnet entitled
“Épigraphe pour un livre condamné,” published in a review in 1861, and which he may have
intended as an introduction to the 1868 edition of LFDM, which he did not live to see. In it,
he urged the reader:
Lecteur paisible et bucolique,
Sobre et naïf homme de bien,
Jette ce livre saturnien,
Orgiaque et mélancolique.
….
Jette! Tu n’y comprendrais rien,
Ou tu me croirais hysterique. (1-4, 7-8)
The “bad” reader, a peaceful and good man, is targeted and chased away as a potential threat
to the author, whose poems will not have the right effect on him; instead he will
misunderstand or declare the poet hysterical. Similarly, Lautréamont, in the first “Chant” to
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Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) chases away the majority of readers: “Il n’est pas bon que
tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer
sans danger. Par conséquent, âme timide, avant de pénétrer plus loin dans de pareilles landes
inexplorées, dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. Écoute bien ce que je te dis : dirige
tes talons en arrière et non en avant” (69). As in Baudelaire’s epigraph, the book of poetry is
described as troubling and potentially dangerous for the average reader the poet chases away
via an imperative: “Jette!”, “Écoute-bien”, “Dirige tes talons en arrière.” These prefaces
distinguish between the bad reader, who is morally “good,” and the good reader, who shares
the poet’s darkness. These texts are warning signs: enter at your own risk.
Charles Cros establishes an alternately insulting and indifferent attitude towards the
public in the preface sonnet to the 1873 edition of Le Coffret de santal:
Au plus grand nombre je déplais.
Car je semble tombé des nues,
Rêvant de terres inconnues
D’où j’exile les gens trop laids.
La tête au vent, je contemplais
Le ciel, les bois, les splendeurs nues.
Quelques rimes, me sont venues.
Public, prends-les ou laisse-les.
Je les multiplie et les sème
Pour que, par hasard, ceux que j’aime
Puissent les trouver sous leurs pas.
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Quand ceux-là diront que j’existe,
La foule, qui ne comprend pas,
Paiera. C’est l’espoir de l’artiste. (NP)
Like Baudelaire and Lautréamont, Cros signles out the few good readers who may happen
upon these texts, seemingly intimates (“ceux que j’aime”), from the majority of the bad ones;
but rather than warning them off, he remains indifferent to them: “Public, prends-les ou
laisse-les.” The final tercet ramps up the aggression towards the reader: his most ardent wish
is that the ignorant “foule” will “pay” for not knowing him. The enjambement of “Paiera”
accented in the final verse further underscores this aggression: the artist’s most deeply held
desire is to make the ignorant crowds pay. While these prefaces might initially seem in line
with Gautier’s poetry prefaces which assert that poetry is only for a select few readers, more
is at stake here: the foule is an important part of the poets’ mission here but in the negative:
Cros is not just chasing away the bad readers who might not understand the book in order to
guarantee a good reading, he is also delighting in confounding and excluding them from his
small circle. In other words, the point is not so much to bar the reader from entering as it is to
let him know that he is barred from entering.
In Verlaine’s prologue to his 1866 Poèmes saturniens, he not only signals the poet’s
turn away from the public, but characterizes any past involvement with them as “mistaken”:
Le monde que troublait leur parole profonde,
Les exile. A leur tour ils exilent le monde !
C'est qu'ils ont à la fin compris qu'il ne faut plus
Mêler leur note pure aux cris irrésolus
Que va poussant la foule obscène et violente,
Et que l'isolement sied à leur marche lente.
…
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[…] ; et si naguères
On le vit au milieu des hommes, épousant
Leurs querelles, pleurant avec eux, les poussant
Aux guerres, célébrant l'orgueil des Républiques
…
S'il honorait parfois le présent d'un salut
Et daignait consentir à ce rôle de prêtre
…
S'il inclinait vers l'âme humaine son esprit,
C'est qu'il se méprenait alors sur l'âme humaine. (OP 60)
This prologue is remarkable for its explicit statement of the way that the poet-reader
relationship had shifted by the mid-1860s: if readers had rejected poets, now poets were
rejecting them. Verlaine doesn’t just limit this to the present moment, but also retrospectively
rereads Romanticism’s mission, suggested in the term “prêtre,” as a mistake premised on the
kind of fundamental misunderstanding between poets and the public that Baudelaire
describes as emblematic of the poet-reader relationship in late 1857. Now, to correct this
mistake, the poet’s mission was redefined: to “exile” readers and focus on “isolement,” and
“ne […] plus/ Mêler leur note pure” among the “foule obscène et violente.”
These prefaces demonstrate the belief that the poet no longer addressed all men, seen
as incapable of understanding or appreciating his work, and reveal his unveiled frustration
and anger at them. But they did not fully turn away from readers or a discussion of
readership; instead, as these passages suggest, unfit readers became an obsession among
poets who targeted them for their very unsuitableness to read poetry. This became a dominant
theme throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century: in the 1891 Enquête Huret, Mallarmé
explained the relationship between the poet, reader, and poetry as Baudelaire had, as
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predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding, and which required the poet to take action to
rectify the situation: “Que si un être d’une intelligence moyenne, et d’une préparation
insuffisante, ouvre par hasard un livre ainsi fait et prétend en jouir, il y a malentendu, il faut
remettre les choses à leur place” (104).
3. No Prefaces, No Books: Ignoring the Reader
While these poets wrote angry or dismissive prefaces insulting or chasing away most
readers, others largely abstained from writing prefaces or even publishing their poetry in
books; instead, their critical interventions were no longer linked to their poetic works as
prefaces or other liminal texts, but displaced to different places, including critical articles,
intimate gatherings of literary figures in “salons” or dinners, or in private documents and
letters. I will further examine the question of alternate forms of publication, as well as the
conspicuous lack thereof, in the next chapter.
While Baudelaire remains a transitional figure, his legacy of the poet-reader
relationship was in defining the reading public in negative, and cultivating an intimate and
self-sustaining poetic model in which outside readership was largely barred. Alain Vaillant
describes it as an autarkic and asocial model of poetry: “Produisant et consommant leurs
propres paroles, ils manifestent, par cette sorte d’autarcie collégiale, leur asocialité”
(“Conversations sous influence” 102). This was one of the defining features of late
nineteenth-century poetry and is apparent in the preface “poncifs,” or lack thereof: poets
increasingly rejected dialogue with the majority of readers, leading them to publish sparingly
under conditions which they could better control, in small reviews edited by friends, or not to
publish their poetry at all. Not writing a preface is a refusal to explain to an anonymous
reader: if you are the type of reader that needs a preface telling you what the author thinks of
poetry and the poet, then you are not the kind of reader these poets want. Instead, late
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nineteenth-century poetry was largely created and disseminated in a small and tightlycontrolled universe. In fact, it is significant how little poetry the major poetic figures of the
late nineteenth century actually published; instead, many remained unknown outside their
small circles of sociability, or were primarily known for other kinds of publications, like
critical articles or translations.
There are abundant examples of late nineteenth-century poets who abstained from
writing prefaces and even books of poetry: Verlaine did not write a preface to his first poetic
work, Fêtes galantes (1865), nor for La Bonne chanson (1869-1872), or Romances sans
paroles (1874). Significantly, he only wrote prefaces for works in the twilight of his career,
1880’s Sagesse and 1892’s Liturgies intimes; by this time, he had renounced his former
lifestyle, converted to Catholicism and tried, in vain, to win over a conservative Catholic
audience (Décaudin and Leuwers 207). The preface to Liturgies intimes makes clear this
radical shift in Verlaine’s attitude towards the public in this late preface: “Pour le moment,
l’auteur parle à des catholiques et il préfère leur donner l’impression nette et directe qu’euxmêmes ressentent,” finishing with an only slightly ironic blessing of the author, reader, and
even editor: “Et que Dieu veuille nous bénir tous, auteur, lecteur… et éditeur !” (OP 733).
Other authors more fundamentally questioned publishing books of poetry, let alone
prefaces. A figure like Rimbaud is emblematic of this position: he never published the vast
majority of his work or even arranged it into a coherently publishable format. The only
volume of poetry published in its entirety by the poet is the 1873 Une saison en enfer;
although of the copies printed, paid for by the poet’s mother, only a handful were distributed,
while the rest remained lost in the publisher’s basement until 1901 (Rimbaud 309). While his
brouillons and letters to literary acquaintances suggest a desire to publish, his legacy remains
one of abstention from broad publication. Mallarmé similarly did not publish the majority of
his poetic works; his Poésies were published in reviews and only in book form posthumously
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in 1899, although late in his career he published several luxury editions for an elite audience.
Mallarmé’s distaste for prefaces and publishable books is evident in the paratext to his critical
works, Divagations (1897), which began “un livre comme je ne les aime pas” (OC 2:83). In
the “Préface” to “Un Coup de dés,” which Mallarmé regretted he was forced to write by his
editor, he wished that the preface would go unread: “J’aimerais qu’on ne lût pas cette Note ou
que parcourue, même on l’oubliât ; elle apprend, au Lecteur habile, peu de chose situé outre
sa pénétration : mais, peut troubler l’ingénu devant appliquer un regard aux premiers mots du
Poème” (2). Just as Baudelaire had it forty years earlier, either the reader already understood
or did not; the preface could not change that.
Conclusion
This reworking and finally, relative disappearance of the poetry preface was part of a
broader redefinition of poetry in which the figure of the poet was increasingly disappearing:
as Antoine Compagnon described it in his 2009 lecture on “La disparition élocutoire du
poète,” late nineteenth-century poets excised the author from their ideal of an autonomous
poetry and language: “À l’auteur comme principe producteur et explicateur du texte, cette
tradition a substitué le langage, impersonnel et anonyme, peu à peu revendiqué comme
matière exclusive de la littérature” (NP). In this depersonalized and autonomous view of
literature, “le vrai écrivain est donc celui qui n’écrit pas” (ibid.). This clearly has a significant
impact on the very existence of texts like prefaces: in a context where texts take the initiative,
poets willingly disappear, and readers are excluded, a text that describes the proper reading
and its rapport with the public no longer has a significant role to play. Instead, poetry was not
only increasingly relegated to small elite reviews or expensive book editions in the latenineteenth century, but was conceived of and praised for being entirely divorced from
society. Nor was this only the case for late-nineteenth century French poets. As Dominique
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Combe notes in “La référence dédoublée: le sujet lyrique entre fiction et autobiographie” this
trait was shared by their germanic counterparts like the young Austrian littérateur and
devotee of French literature, Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “de la même manière que pour les
Symbolistes français et leurs contemporains Rimbaud ou Lautréamont […] il demande que
les poètes soient loués pour leur art du langage car ‘de la poésie aucun chemin ne conduit
dans la vie, de la vie aucun ne conduit dans la poésie’” (45). For a young generation of poets,
poetry was valued precisely because it was not meant for the vast majority of the reading
public.
In the following chapters, I aim to lay out some of the contemporary context
informing this profound redefinition of poetry by examining what have become a series of
exclusionary binaries: “real” poetry was the antithesis of the press and women and workers
were seen as unfit audiences for elite poetry. Taken together, these chapters aim to provide
context and flesh out practices of poetry and reading and groups of readers who have been
ignored, in order to better understand the conditions informing the positions on poetry’s
readership from Hugo to Baudelaire to Mallarmé.
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Chapter 2
Media and Audience: Poetry and Poets in the Press
Introduction
In his notes for a preface to the second edition of LFDM, Baudelaire wrote:
J’avais primitivement l’intention de répondre à de nombreuses critiques et, en
même temps, d’expliquer quelques questions très simples, totalement
obscurcies par la lumière moderne : qu’est-ce que la Poésie ? quel est son
but ? de la distinction du Bien d’avec le Beau ; de la Beauté dans le Mal ; […]
etc., etc. ; mais j’ai eu l’imprudence de lire ce matin quelques feuilles
publiques ; soudain, une indolence, du poids de vingt atmosphères, s’est
abattue sur moi, et je me suis arrêté devant l’épouvantable inutilité d’expliquer
quoi que ce soit à qui que ce soit. Ceux qui me savent me devinent, et pour
ceux qui ne peuvent ou ne veulent pas comprendre, j’amoncellerais sans fruit
les explications. (LFDM 243-4)
The sudden reversal in this passage, from the intellectual excitement of a poet listing his
esthetic principles, to a fatalistic recognition of the fruitlessness of this project is centered
around a few “feuilles publiques.” An action that seems unremarkable – reading the morning
newspaper – suddenly makes the poet aware of the utter uselessness of explaining himself
and his condemned poetry to the public. The “quelques feuilles publiques” are not named;
rather it is anything, everything in these pages that gives the poet the proof of contemporary
ignorance, making it impossible to explain even “very simple questions” about Art to the
reader. Baudelaire contrasts the impurity of these “feuilles publiques,” a play on the term
“fille publique” (and as we will see, part of a nineteenth century trope about journalism as
prostitution), against his artistic ideas, the uniformly capitalized notions Poésie, Beau, Bien
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and Mal. The poet no longer has the faith to explain his poetry to the reader, and the press is
to blame.
In this chapter I will examine the influence of the press in the mid- to late nineteenth
century on French poets’ conceptions of poetry and of its readership. Often, the relationship
between poets and the press in the nineteenth century is summed-up as one of total rejection
and loathing: poets such as Baudelaire, Gautier, Banville, Leconte de Lisle, Mallarmé,
Verlaine and many others asserted that the press was the opposite of Poetry and Art in almost
every conceivable way. They lampooned the violence and banality of the newspaper, the
hypocrisy and jealousy of its critics, and the mediocrity and intellectual limitations of its
readership. However, many poets in the nineteenth century were actively involved in
newspapers as regular critics and published their poetry in the feuilleton as well as in a
variety of literary reviews. In light of their involvement in journalism, it seems overly
simplistic to take their criticisms of the press as the antithesis of poetry at face value.
Often, poets’ interventions in the press are interpreted as financial imperatives,
cynical money-making ploys, or superficial side projects by scholars who do not critically
evaluate these statements. While there is some truth in these arguments, they are necessarily
reductive. In the past ten years, researchers have begun to address this oversimplification of
the relationship between poetry and the press. As Martine Lavaud puts it in her chapter on
Théophile Gautier in La Civilisation du journal (2011), poets’ considerable journalistic work
makes it a “nécessité de réconsidérer la réception habituelle de la contrainte médiatique,
jugée dégradante relativement à l’autre, plus noble, du corset poétique,” rather than regard
their journalistic work as secondary in importance to their “pure” literary works, a notion that
seems to reproduce the biases of the authors it studies (1176). Researchers who contributed to
the collective volumes Presse et plumes : journalisme et littérature au XIXe siècle (2004) and
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Poésie et journalisme au XIXe siècle en France et en Italie (2005) have also responded by
delving more deeply into studies of poets’ involvement in and theories about the press.
In this chapter, I aim to enter into this dialogue by focusing on how this journalistic
and publishing activity informed both poets’ and the press’ views of poetry and its
readership. After briefly tracing the importance of the growth of the press in the early to midnineteenth century, I will examine several facets of the binarism contrasting the press and
poetry, including common tropes about press and poetry readers and their reading practices,
the careers of journalists and poets, and the different aims of poetry and newspapers. This
analysis will show how these critical statements made by poets about the press, its forms,
readership, and authors were informed by broad societal debates about contemporary issues
like industrialization, the commercialization of literature and the emergence of new groups of
readers. Furthermore, this opposition of press and poetry was in large part a way of
redefining what poetry was and who could and could not read it in response to the rise of the
press.
I will also examine specific examples of poets’ publications in the press – both critical
articles and poetry – in order to complicate the idea that they only worked there only out of
financial necessity. In reality, these experiences allowed authors like Théophile Gautier,
Banville and Baudelaire to think about and address a broad readership and shaped their views
of the reading public. Their prose and poetry publications also reveal different strategies for
addressing different audiences and reveal that far from shunning the press reader, they
thought critically about their relationship with him/her in critical and poetic works. Next, by
looking at different examples of poetry publications in the feuilleton of several daily
newspapers between 1850 and 1880, we will see the way the feuilleton and its editorial board
presented poetry to its readers, and the kinds of authors, themes and movements they
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privileged which present a very different picture of poetry and its relationship to the reader in
the mid- to late nineteenth century than we expect.
Finally, I will analyze the effects of the shift from the “opinion” press of the midnineteenth century to the “information” press of the end of the century on poetry. As
newspapers were decreasingly literary, young poets found new outlets for their work,
including small reviews, self-publication and literary events, like dinners and cénacles which
gave them less access to a broad reading public than their predecessors had. They
simultaneously developed a poetic culture that considered publication – not just in the press,
but also in books – unnecessary and undesirable. In this way, poets in the generations after
Baudelaire and Banville’s redefined poetry as an insulated practice by and for a select few,
placing a rejection of the average reader at the center of their conception of poetry.
I. The Rise of the Newspaper and the Feuilleton
The rise of the press in the nineteenth century represents nothing short of a revolution
in the diffusion of the written word and played a major role in French society, politics,
economy and literature. Many interconnected factors contributed to this phenomenon. First,
the spread of literacy led to a huge increase in the potential reading public: from the French
Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, literacy rates rose from about fifty percent of
the population, and only thirty percent among women, to ninety percent for both sexes
(Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century” 313). The industrialization of nearly all
aspects of the press, from paper production to printing and transport, lowered costs and
expanded diffusion ( Histoire de l'édition française 22). Finally, new commercial strategies
by entrepreneurs in the press contributed to a sharp rise in the newspaper-reading public in
France in the mid-nineteenth century.
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One of the moments often noted as a turning point in the history of the press is Emile
de Girardin’s founding of the daily newspaper La Presse in 1836. Up to this point,
newspapers were available only for expensive yearly subscription fees, making them
available to only a limited audience of well-off bourgeois and aristocratic readers (Vaillant
and Thérenty 27). Girardin, bolstered by his successes with publications intended for a
broader audience, like the Journal des connaissances utiles and L’Alma ach de la Fra ce,
transferred this experience to a daily newspaper through a multi-pronged strategy. First, he
halved the yearly subscription rate from eighty to forty francs, allowing him to sell
subscriptions to readers of more modest means (Histoire générale de la presse française 2:
115). To make up for lost subscription revenue, he also introduced advertisements on the
fourth page of the newspaper. He also innovated in terms of content. At this point,
newspapers were largely mouthpieces for political parties focusing on the details of
parliamentary debates, intended largely for an audience of “initiés, [et] électeurs de
Chambre” (Vaillant and Thérenty 87). They did not address other kinds of readers or include
content that was accessible or interesting to them (idem, 30). Girardin hoped to draw the new
readers he sought not only through reduced prices, but also through the feuilleton, a potpourri
section of articles ranging from serialized literature to cultural criticism, travelogues and
popularized accounts of recent scientific advances. While the success of Balzac’s La Vieille
fille in La Presse in 1836 is often cited as the first instance of the roman-feuilleton, the
feuilleton already existed in reviews such as the Revue de Paris and the Revue des deux
mondes, which adopted it from British papers (idem. 240). Yet by combining this section
with a reduced subscription price and advertising, Girardin was responsible for transforming
the press into a true business venture, not dependent on government funding for its survival (
Histoire générale de la presse française 2: 114-15). This model would become dominant as
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other newspapers such as le Siècle and le National were forced to lower their prices to
compete (idem 2: 121).
Girardin’s La Presse shaped the future of the newspaper industry based on a
commercial model of lowering prices and increasing distribution. Just as he had with his
popular Almanach, his innovation was to target new groups of readers and create a product
for them: “il s’agit de lecteurs nouveaux, attirés au quotidien par son prix moins élevé,
l’intérêt […] que suscite la politique […], le développement pour l’instruction primaire, le
goût de l’information, l’agrément et la variété des feuilles récentes, le ‘feuilleton-roman’”
(idem 2: 120). While forty francs remained a prohibitively large sum for many Frenchmen
and women, La Presse and other similarly priced newspapers led to a doubling of the
audience for daily newspapers in France in just under ten years, from 73,000 in 1836 to
148,000 in 1845 (ibid.). As Claude Bellanger argues in Histoire générale de la presse
française, 1836 marks a major turning point in the French press: “par l’abaissement de leur
prix de vente et les conséquences qui y sont liées ou en découlent, elle annonce la presse
‘industrielle’ des temps nouveaux et prépare le passage du journal d’opinion, réservé à une
élite, au journal d’information, au journal populaire” (2: 114). The age of the press for a mass
audience was dawning in France.
While these papers were responsible for the first step in the spread of the daily press
to a broader reading public, these changes were progressive during the nineteenth century:
daily newspapers were not accessible to a truly popular readership until the 1860s, with the
launch of Le Petit journal, which did not require a subscription, and cost only 5 centimes per
paper, allowing it to reach a print run of 259,000 copies within two years (idem 2: 328).
Much like Girardin and La Presse, this model had its imitators, and by 1871 there were four
daily newspapers priced at 5 centimes; two decades later, there were an astounding thirty
papers for 5 centimes (idem 3: 140). In other words, while La Presse broadened its audience
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to include less wealthy segments of the bourgeoisie and, as we shall see, those in their
employ, the decrease in prices for the newspaper and the subsequent growth of its audience
was gradual over the course of the nineteenth century. To put this change in perspective, an
annual newspaper subscription cost the equivalent of 421 man hours in 1834, about 210 hours
in 1851, 164 hours in 1871 and only 96 hours in 1889 (idem 3: 141). Furthermore, literacy
was not truly widespread in France until the early twentieth century. While of course literacy
rates do not reveal the vast range of readers’ capabilities, it is important to bear in mind that
illiteracy among the male population remained at 38.14 % in 1832, declining to 8.5% in
1892. It was not until the First World War that mass literacy was truly achieved across France
(idem 3: 142). For these reasons, it is important to relativize the often misused terms the
“popular press” and the “popular novel” in the mid-nineteenth century, which were in fact,
largely confined to bourgeois audiences.
Although many mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines followed this
model of reduced prices and expanded distribution, this was not true for all periodicals. In
fact, many reviews, and in particular literary reviews, catered instead to a small, elite
audience of likeminded readers. In this way, reviews occupied a “cultural middle ground”
between books and the mainstream press (Pluet-Despatin, Leymarie and Mollier 399). For
example, the influential Revue des deux mondes and Revue de Paris, both founded in 1829,
and the smaller but influential L’Artiste, founded in 1831, focused on attracting a
sophisticated reading public by showcasing established authors of the day, like Balzac,
Lamartine, and Benjamin Constant. Because their authors signed their articles by name, they
both highlighted successful collaborators and allowed newcomers to make a name for
themselves (Vaillant and Thérenty 31-32).
Literary reviews were an important space for literary figures in the nineteenth century:
many poets first published in small reviews and made acquaintances in the literary world
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there. During the Second Empire, the number of small reviews formed around specific
literary groups and schools grew significantly and would further accelerate in the late
nineteenth century as press laws were liberalized. While the category of literary reviews
covers everything from the influential Revue des deux mondes to ephemeral publications, it is
important to relativize their reach among the reading public: the review L’Artiste, wellknown to scholars of nineteenth-century poetry as a periodical where Gautier, Baudelaire,
Banville, Mallarmé and Léon Dierx published (Histoire générale de la presse française 2:
297), reached only 500 readers in the 1850s (Lavaud 1171). Arsène Houssaye, the director of
the review between 1843 and 1849, described the reach of small literary reviews in revealing
terms:
[le] journal l’Artiste, […] me prit beaucoup de temps et ne me donna jamais
un sou. L'esprit, le talent, le génie doivent aboutir au néant. Les journaux
littéraires ne sont lus que par les littérateurs, lesquels ne s'abonnent à aucun
journal. Qui le croirait? la Revue de Paris et l’Artiste ont à peine dépassé mille
abonnés dans leurs beaux jours. C'est la politique qui a fait le succès de la
Revue des Deux-Mondes. […] Maxime du Camp […] s'aperçut plus tard qu'il
était bien plus facile, quand on a du talent, d'entrer à l'Académie, que de créer
une Revue. (qtd. in Lemaître 20-21)
In other words, while elite literary reviews were a desirable and common place for poets to
publish their work, their impact on readers outside the literary elite was extremely limited.
II. Poetry versus the Press
In the mid- to late nineteenth century, literary figures consistently contrasted poets,
poetry and its readership with journalists, the press and its subscribers. At times, it is
surprising how common, and often repeated, some of these ideas were, even among poets
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from different periods and literary groups. In fact, poets’ comments on the press often
reiterate the same themes and use a common vocabulary for contrasting it with poetry. By
analyzing some of these tropes about the press, journalist and press reader, we can get a better
idea of the way poetry was redefined in negative against them. In order to better contextualize
poets’ attitudes towards the press, it is useful to first break down these oppositions between
the press and poetry in terms of material forms, types of readers and their reading practices,
authors, and the aims of each type of writing.
1. Material Forms: Mass-Produced Texts versus Luxury Literature
The material forms of texts in the mid-nineteenth century add a visual component to
contrasts between the daily press, reviews and books of poetry. As the printing and
publishing industries developed in France, the written word was available as never before: the
editors of Histoire de l’éditio fra çaise estimate that there were roughly twenty-five times
more total printed materials in circulation in 1910 than there had been in 1840 ( Histoire de
l'édition française 22). In addition to the huge expansion of the press over the course of the
century, the book industry was also developing publications for a mass audience, such as
Hachette’s 1852 launch of novels, children’s books and travel guides sold in train station
bookstores for between fifty centimes and three francs (Histoire générale de la presse
française 3: 286). Simultaneously, the development of new printing techniques and the
possibility of better reproducing images alongside text meant that new, ornate publications
and books catering to a luxury market were also flourishing. The contrast between the
material forms of poetry in books, reviews and newspapers illustrates the growing contrasts
between luxury editions of literature and mass-produced texts.
While the feuilleton is often regarded as synonymous with the roman-feuilleton by
authors such as Georges Sand, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue, the nineteenth-
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century feuilleton covered a very wide range of genres, from serial novels to critical articles
on theaters and art exhibits, essays on morals, non-fiction travelogues, historical texts, short
plays and popularized accounts of advances in technology and industry. The feuilleton’s
unity was in part visual: it occupied the bottom third of the page in most newspapers, known
as the “rez-de chaussée,” and was separated from the columns above by a thick horizontal
line. It ranged in length from the bottom of one to four pages, depending on the day’s news,
the type of text – the weekly theater review, for example, usually occupied two pages – and
the length of serial stories and number of installments into which they were divided. In many
newspapers, the feuilleton appeared only on some days. The feuilleton was also structured by
the periodicity of certain articles; theater reviews usually appeared on Mondays or Tuesdays,
regularly interrupting longer serial stories. The duration of serialized stories in the feuilleton
varied tremendously: while a short serial might last for one or a few days’ feuilletons, other
texts appeared in long and regularly interrupted installments. To take one of the most notable
examples, excerpts from Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe, purchased for an
astronomical 96,000 francs by Girardin in 1844 (and against the will of the author), were
published in La Presse’s feuilleton over the course of nearly two years, between October
1848 and July 1850, interrupted at times by intervals of several months and by a number of
different feuilletons, extending the publication of the text – and the readers it drew – over this
very long period (Chateaubriand XIII-XV).
The differences in the visual presentation of a text in a book, review and daily
newspaper are immediately evident. Below are images of (1) the August 4, 1851 feuilleton of
La Presse with Gautier’s poems “Nostalgie d’obélisques” “Coquetterie posthume” and
“Etude de mains” and (2) the first page of “Nostalgie d’obélisques” in the 1852 edition of
Émaux et camées:
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(1)
(2)
81
While the dimensions of the pages are different, the contrast is nonetheless evident. The
newspaper page is extremely densely packed with text; six narrow columns of tightly
formatted type divide the page in the top section as well as in the feuilleton, although the
verse form allows for more white space in the feuilleton than the prose above. While the daily
newspaper in the second half of the nineteenth century was much shorter than it is today,
typically only four pages ( Histoire générale de la presse française 3: 143), it was so densely
filled with words that it would take up the equivalent of sixteen pages in a modern newspaper
(Vaillant and Thérenty 63). In sharp contrast to the newspaper, the page from the book
edition appears to be extremely sparse, with a tremendous amount of white space around and
above the text. The title and heading take up half the page, so that only one stanza of the
poem, for a total of twenty-two words fit on the entire first page. While in La Presse, the
three poems, two of which have are divided into two parts, take up one feuilleton page of six
columns, the same poems in Émaux et camées would together twenty-one occupy pages, not
counting the blank page inserted between each poem. The connotation of vulgarity associated
with the press is apparently immediate to the eye: the press, densely packed with type, is a
good financial deal, with a very large number of words available for a low price, especially
compared to the spaced-out type in the more expensive book. While by today’s standards, the
newspaper appears incredibly densely formatted, the book format seems excessively sparse.
The visual appearance of the pages creates strong connotations about readership and
reading practices. In their study of the innaugural year of La Presse, Alain Vaillant and
Marie-Ève Thérenty note that the newspaper’s look has several implications: “On perçoit
d’emblée que la force du journal – sa spécificité culturelle, par rapport au livre, qui use et
abuse des blancs et des gros caractères – est sa masse textuelle, qui se présente de façon
compacte, inélégante, austère” (ibid.). Extending this logic, while the newspaper
communicates a sense of inelegance and austerity, the book of poetry creates a sense of
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luxury and even excess in its spacious pages and generous white space. Furthermore, these
very different layouts underscore considerable differences in their costs: the book is an
investment, while the daily newspaper is – and looks like – a bargain. The material forms also
have implications about how to read: the ephemeral “textual mass” of the press suggests to
the reader that he must read quickly, because today’s installment will be followed by a new
one tomorrow, at which point the previous day’s text is set aside. The book’s format
contrastingly calls for reflection and slows down this daily rhythm: the book is a lasting
object and its airier pages call for slower and more sustained practices of reading. The blank
space also calls to mind a space for personal reflection: the ample margins in the book
provide the reader a place to write notes or thoughts, as many nineteenth-century readers did.
Looking at these pages side by side, it is evident that the stark visual differences in the
presentation of texts in books and in the press played an important role in the notion of the
press as a mass-produced object compared to the luxurious book of poetry.
As a further point of contrast, below is another poem from Emaux et camées, also in
quatrains, “Contralto” published in the Revue des deux mondes in December 1849:
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In addition to their in-between status in terms of audience, reviews represent an
intermediate case in literature visually: compared to the standard six-column newspaper
layout, reviews like L’Artiste had only two columns, while the Revue des deux mondes and
the Parnassian Revue fantaisiste (1861) only had one, making them more closely resemble the
airy book layout with its abundant white space than that of the daily press. Gautier confirms
this vision of the review as similar to books in the preface to the first issue of La Revue du
XIXe siècle, which he founded in 1866 with Arsène Houssaye: “le journal, rapide comme
l’oiseau, porte l’idée; la revue, moins impatiente, porte la méditation; car la revue est déjà le
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livre” (April 1, 1866). These underlying themes, of the newspaper as a place for fast reading
and information versus the book or review as a slower place for meditation, are inherent in
the patent differences in their material forms.
2. Readers and Practices: the Corporeal Cuisinière versus the Disembodied Elite
The binary opposition of press and poetry is evident in depictions of readers by poets
and other cultural authorities. As we saw, for Girardin and other newspapermen, the
feuilleton was a way to draw new groups of readers to the daily newspaper by gearing the
content towards them. This readership was broadly understood as a less “serious” one: “A
une clientèle plus étendue, et donc moins exigeante sur la qualité, il fallait, dans une certaine
mesure, donner autre chose que des discussions graves” (Histoire générale de la presse
française 2: 121). The interests of these new press readers were often stereotyped and
referred to in condescending ways by cultural elites. The nineteenth-century literary critic and
author Barbey d’Aurevilly called the newspaper-reading public “standing” readers who,
because of their social status and work obligations did not have the time to sit and read in a
more leisurely way, implicitly contrasting them with more leisurely, and elite, seated readers
(qtd. in Giaveri, 112). The notion that press readers read quickly was not just associated with
the fact that new readers came from segments of the population which didn’t have ample
leisure time, but also with the idea that they had limited mental capacities or interest in
understanding difficult texts. These generalizations about new readers are omnipresent in the
nineteenth century: writing about America just as the press was taking off in France,
Tocqueville evoked the press reading audience in De la démocratie en Amérique as “une
foule” that wanted “des beautés faciles qui se livrent d’elles-mêmes et dont on puisse jouir
sur l’heure […] surtout de l’inattendu et du nouveau” (qtd. in idem 111). The same
generalizations were being made about French newspaper readers, seen as having neither the
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time nor the intellectual ability to grapple with difficult literary texts, preferring amusing and
novel stories to draw and hold their limited attention.
One recurring theme in the repertoire of insults aimed at press readers and their
reading practices described them using metaphors associated with eating and digestion, thus
associating them with the most corporeal and un-intellectual of practices. The image of the
cook, who embodies the consumption metaphor, engrossed in the roman-feuilleton was a
popular trope in the mid-nineteenth century, mentioned by literary figures like Gautier and
Balzac, and in this engraving by Grandville for the 1846 edition of Louis Reybaud’s
bestselling satirical novel Jérôme Paturot
la recherche d’une position sociale:
(Reybaud 65)
In this book, the picture accompanies a passage describing the “social role” of the feuilleton
in the household:
Thèse générale, monsieur, aujourd’hui, pour réussir, il faut faire un feuilleton
de ménage, passez-moi l’expression. Dégusté par le père et la mère, le
feuilleton va droit aux enfants, qui le prêtent à la domesticité, d’où il descend
chez le portier, si celui-ci n’en a pas eu la primeur. Comprenez-vous quelles
racines un feuilleton ainsi consommé a dans un ménage […] ? Désormais ce
journal fait partie intégrante de la famille. Si, par économie, on le supprime, la
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mère boude, les enfants se plaignent : la maison entière est en révolution. Il
faut absolument le reprendre, se réabonner, pour rétablir l’harmonie
domestique et le bonheur conjugal. Voilà, monsieur, comment le feuilleton
joue désormais un rôle social, et s’est placé avec avantage auprès du pot-aufeu et de la batterie de la cuisine. (Reybaud 65-66)
Here, the metaphor between reading the feuilleton and eating is everywhere. The feuilleton is
passed down through the ranks of the family, from the parents to the children, until it
“descends” literally and figuratively, to the servants. Unlike the parents who delicately
“dégustent” the text, the cook in this image, who incarnates the reading as eating metaphor,
devours the feuilleton; in the accompanying image, her nose is just inches from the page. She
is an example of the “standing reader” for whom reading is a distraction from her work
alongside the “pot-au-feu” and the “batterie de la cuisine” around her. Although she knows
how to read in a strict sense – she is literate –, the image suggest that she has neither the time
nor the inclination for a more “serious” kind of reading. Furthermore, only the feuilleton is
passed between the mother, the children and the cook, not the entire paper. These members of
the household – women, children and domestic workers – neatly encapsulate the major
groups of new readers in the nineteenth century described by scholars of the history of
reading, like Martyn Lyons in his article “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women,
Children, Workers.”
Similarly, Gautier blamed the reading practices and mental capacity of the cook with
the decline of the status of poetry in an 1842 article published in the Musée des familles: “Si
les vers ne se vendent pas, c'est que la cuisinière, semblable par ce côté au critique, ne peut
pas souffrir les vers, parce que cela est trop frivole et n'a pas de suite” (Fusains et eaux-fortes
211). The cook, like the ignorant newspaper critic, doesn’t like poetry because she compares
it to serial novels in the press. Singling out the figure of the cook, and insulting critics by
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associating them with the intellectual limitations of domestic workers is an obviously elitist
message: the press has empowered new socially and intellectually inferior kinds of readers to
become the judges of literature.
In another often-repeated criticism of the press, the daily reading of the paper with
breakfast, a practice associated not with popular readers but with the bourgeoisie, again
associates eating with a mindless consumption of the written word. In Balzac’s Illusions
perdues (1843), the narrator describes “ces immenses phrases bardées de mots emphatiques,
si ingénieusement nommées des tartines dans l’argot du journalisme qui tous les matins en
taille à ses abonnés de fort peu digérables, et que néanmoins ils avalent” (64). The bad
writing in the press is buttered-up and gulped down by the reader of the press, whose appetite
for sensationalism masks its “indigestible” content. A violent instance of this association
between the press and the morning meal comes from Baudelaire’s late personal journal Mon
cœur mis à nu, written around 1865, where the press reader’s “consumption” of the
newspaper is not a superficial lack of focus, but a form of complicity:
Tout journal, de la première ligne à la dernière, n’est qu’un tissu
d’horreurs. Guerres, crimes, vols, impudicités, tortures, crimes des princes,
crimes des nations, crimes des particuliers, une ivresse d’atrocité universelle.
Et c’est de ce dégoutant apéritif que l’homme civilisé accompagne son
repas de chaque matin. Tout, en ce monde, sue le crime : le journal, la
muraille, et le visage d’homme.
Je ne comprends pas qu’une main pure puisse toucher un journal sans
une convulsion de dégout. (OC 1961, 1299)
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3. Authors and Motives: The Prostituted Journalist versus the Pure Poet
Another common critique of the press as the antithesis of poetry contrasted the figures
of the journalist and the poet. Journalists were commonly described by literary figures –
including journalists themselves – as failed poets who sold out for commercial motives,
abandoning the rigors of intellectual work as “workers” or “slaves” of the press. As with the
metaphor between press reading and physical consumption, the journalist-prostitute figure
associates the press with a degrading corporeal act. Lucien de Rubempré, the hero of Balzac’s
Illusions Perdues, is the epitome of this figure. Desperate to earn a living and make his mark
on Paris, Lucien rejects the meaningful friendship offered by Daniel d’Arthez, whose
Cénacle Balzac describes in effusive, celestial language as “[une] vivante encyclopédie
d’esprits angéliques” (237) and “ces jeunes gens d’élite” (idem 234). In contrast, he falls
under the charm of Étienne Lousteau, who personifies the corrupting forces of journalism,
introducing the protagonist to seedy locales: “A l’aspect d’un poète éminent y prostituant la
muse à un journaliste, y humiliant l’Art, comme la Femme était humiliée, prostituée sous ces
galeries ignobles, le grand homme de province recevait des enseignements terribles.
L’argent ! était le mot de toute énigme” (idem 281). In the contrasting figures of d’Arthez
and the Cénacle and Lousteau and the press, the paradigm is clear: Art is the noble path for
the young man; journalism on the other hand, is a form of intellectual and moral corruption.
Lousteau provides a counter-education for Lucien, teaching him, and the reader, about
the underworld of journalism. In order to earn money and succeed in the capital, the young
poet is asked to compromise his ideals for the newspaper subscriber, who wants
entertainment, not the truth, as Lousteau tells him: “[l]’abonné rit, il est servi” (idem 270). He
teaches Lucien to write formulaic articles with little gems for the reader: “Là, tu flattes
l’abonné” (idem 363), “Lâche de ces sentences-là, le public les répète” (idem 362). This
dishonesty and sensationalism are justified by financial rewards: “nous sommes de
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marchands de phrases,” says another journalist, Vernou, “et nous vivons de notre commerce.
Quand vous voudriez faire une grande et belle œuvre, un livre enfin, vous pourrez y jeter vos
pensées, votre âme, vous y rattachez, le défendre ; mais des articles lus aujourd’hui, oubliés
demain, ça ne vaut pas à mes yeux que ce qu’on les paye” (idem 377).
Like Balzac, Théodore de Banville, a regular journalist himself, contrasted the poet
and journalist in an 1874 preface which could almost be an excerpt from Balzac’s novel:
En effet, n’obéissant pas aux chalands, aux acheteurs qu’on flatte
jusqu’à les calomnier, […] le poète qui cherche uniquement à contenter son
amour du beau et à se satisfaire lui-même, n’a aucune raison pour ne pas créer
de belles odes, s’il le peut. Son maître est la Muse, qui ne lui a rien promis, et
qui ne lui donnera rien – que d’immenses joies. Sans cesse, au contraire, le
libraire qui vend des romans, le directeur de théâtre ou de journal qui, je le
répète, calomnient le public, disent à leurs ouvriers :
‘Pardon, mon ami, si vous voulez que je puisse continuer à placer votre
marchandise, soyez un peu plus réaliste, un peu plus vulgaire, un peu plus
épris du lieu commun que vous ne l’êtes encore ; il faut cela pour plaire au
public. Vous avez trop de génie, supprimez-en, et, de grâce, si vous voulez
être original et spirituel, soyez-le, mais comme tout le monde.’
Le malheureux esclave obéit pour gagner sa vie et, le désespoir au
cœur, met une sourdine à son violon. Il en résulte que les romans, les pièces de
théâtre et les articles de journaux sont écrits, en réalité, non par ceux qui les
signent, mais par la portion la moins noble de la foule, par celle qui est le plus
affamée de gaîté malsaine et d’émotions vulgaires. (Critiques 461-62)
The poet, who has no attachments outside his own contentment and his Muse, is contrasted
with the journalist or commercial author, an “ouvrier” and “malheureux esclave,” who has to
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please his boss by obeying the mantra “plaire au public,” targeting the lowest common
denominator. For Balzac as for Banville, the point of contrast for this commercialized writer
is the poet and the book, whose only imperatives are self-satisfaction and beauty.
As Banville’s above critique implies, the feuilleton was seen as having a specifically
commercial motive; it was a strategic place for texts aimed to appeal to new groups of
readers, expanding the newspaper audience. However, it would be wrong to represent
newspapers or feuilletons as a purely commercial enterprise; Girardin for one, felt that the
expansion of newspapers had important consequences for the material and moral
improvement of the public, quoting Victor Hugo’s view that the newspaper’s task was to
draw its readers “à l’idée applicable du progrès” in the first issue of La Presse (qtd. in
Vaillant and Thérenty 44). Yet the notion that the press was a vehicle for progress was widely
critiqued by many mid- to late nineteenth-century literary figures. For example, in Illusions
perdues, two journalists, Blondet and Vignon, acknowledge that the newspaper is not a tool
for progress as it claims, but rather for flattering the reader: “Un journal n’est plus fait pour
éclairer, mais pour flatter les opinions. Ainsi, tous les journaux seront dans un temps donné,
lâches, hypocrites, infâmes, menteurs, assassins ; ils tueront les idées, les systèmes, les
hommes, et fleuriront par cela même” (322). Baudelaire and Banville also shared this idea
that the press was a source of degradation, not the education of its readers, as their comments
on it show.
In contrast to the press’ commercial or educational aims, by the 1840s and 1850s, a
majority of poets like Baudelaire, Gautier and Banville, and Leconte de Lisle rallied around
the notion that Poetry and Art obeyed only their own internal logic, as described by Gautier
in L’Artiste in 1856: “nous croyons à l’autonomie de l’art. L’Art pour nous n’est pas le
moyen mais le but” (qtd. in Diaz, “L’Autonomisation de la littérature, 1760-1860” 20 n. 40).
While the autonomisation of Art in this period has been the object of considerable critical
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attention by Bourdieu and others, I want to focus on how this call for the autonomy of
literature explicitly put it at odds with the development of the press in terms of their very
different aims, providing a counter-example against which to define poetry. As Dominique
Combe describes it in “‘Nul n’échappe décidément au journalisme,’” “A bien des égards, la
question du journalisme se confond avec celle de ‘l’Art pour l’Art’, et bientôt de ‘l’Art pur’
[…]. l’affrontement du Poète et du Journalisme, […] repose alors entièrement sur le ‘principe
d’utilité’, par quoi s’effectue le partage entre l’Art et les autres activités, et singulièrement le
journalisme” (130). Poetry’s “purity” lay in its alleged indifference to economic, social or
moral imperatives, unlike the press.
These prevalent tropes about the press reader and his or her practices, poets and
journalists and the aims of press and poetry reveal how poetry was negatively defined against
the press in several ways in the mid- to late nineteenth century. While informative of this
trend, this binarism between Poetry and the newspaper cannot be accepted as a
comprehensive picture of this complicated relationship between poets and the press. As Silvia
Disegni notes in the introduction of Poésie et journalisme au XIXe siècle: “L’erreur était de
prendre pour argent comptant les déclarations des poètes du siècle de Gautier, Baudelaire, ou
Mallarmé qui pestaient contre l’écriture sérielle et servile, utilitaire et ‘prosaïque’ au nom de
la spécificité et de la pureté de l’art” (5). In fact, these poets actively participated in the press
as both critics and literary authors; this work implies that their views about the press and its
readers are more ambiguous than the above binarisms allow. This paradox of hating and
working in the press is at the heart of the relationship between poets and the press – and poets
and readers – in the mid- to late nineteenth century. I will now turn to the more complicated
and illuminating cases of poets’ work in the press in order to better understand the much
more complex and ambiguous dynamics evident there.
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III. Poets in the Press
While many mid-nineteenth-century poets wrote in the press in some capacity, the
extent of this involvement varied widely. Gautier was a central figure in the legitimization of
the critical feuilleton as the theater and art critic for La Presse between 1836 and 1855, and
for the Moniteur universel between 1840 and 1868, and worked at and founded a number of
other periodicals (Lavaud 1170). During his lifetime, he published an astonishing 2,993
articles, mostly theater reviews and art criticism, but also ones which included his travel
narrations, literary criticism, satires, poetry and contes; he also served as an editor for the
reviews Ariel, L’Artiste and La Revue du XIXe siècle (idem, 1169-70). In short, Gautier, along
with Jules Janin, his principal rival at the Journal des débats, was one of the most important
feuilletonists in nineteenth-century France and played an important role in defining the work
of newspaper critics. Banville also published a weekly theater review in Le National for the
majority of his career, between 1849 and 1880; he also participated in the Bonapartist daily
newspaper Dix Décembre as well as at the literary reviews L’Artiste and Le Nain jaune.
Baudelaire felt the lure of the press as a young man, writing to his mother in 1846 about his
plans: “rédiger cinq feuilletons pour l’ sprit Public, […] – deux pour L’Épo ue, deux pour
La Presse, – ainsi qu’un article pour la Revue nouvelle. – Tout cela constitue une somme
énorme” (Correspondance 1: 135). While Baudelaire only completed two of these early
feuilletons (idem 1: 774 n. 5, 6), he published all of his critical articles, with the exception of
the 1845 and 1846 Salons, and many of his literary texts in the press (Vaillant “Charles
Baudelaire (1821-1867)” 1189-90). Although poets railed against it, working in the press was
in many ways an integral part of their careers in the mid-nineteenth century.
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1. Cultural Criticism in the Feuilleton
In this section, I will focus on poets’ critical work for the press, namely as theater,
fine arts and literary critics in the feuilleton. These texts will help us identify how mid- and
late nineteenth-century poets grappled with the question of readership by analyzing how they
addressed their readers, constructed relationships with them, and more generally how they
envisioned and described the reading public of the press. In fact, critical articles in the press
are a particularly informative way of understanding the relationship critics constructed with
readers for several reasons. First, newspaper criticism was largely authored by a small
number of authors whose articles often appeared regularly over the span of many years; it
was also, significantly, the only part of the newspaper which was signed by name, what
Gérard Genette refers to as the “onymat” in Seuils (40). Thus feuilleton critics like Gautier
were defining voices in the history of the press: he penned La Presse’s Theater review
between 1836 and 1855, the only section that appeared weekly with almost no disruptions, as
well as yearly reviews of the Salons, and also published travel journals, stories and poems
over the course of his tenure there.
Secondly, in the opinion-driven newspaper of the mid-nineteenth century, cultural
criticism was often conceived as a “conversation” with the reader, an inheritor of the salon
model in the media age. The conversationality of the critical feuilleton is also evident in its
prototype, Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du lundi, whose very title implies the conversational
model between critic and reader. As Marie-Françoise Melmoux-Montaubin points out in
“‘Contes, et lettres’ et l’écriture de soi : la critique littéraire dans le journal au XIXe siècle” in
Presse et plumes, conversationality was one of the defining features of the nineteenth-century
feuilleton: “[l]e ton de la causerie peut-être indifféremment tissé de louanges ou de
persiflages, pourvu qu’il demeure constant et que le lecteur se reconnaisse dans ce rendezvous hebdomadaire que lui propose son critique” (483-84). This “conversation” was also
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meant to attract new readers and make them dedicated subscribers. As Lise DumasyQueffélec writes, the feuilleton created “une habitude, une attente, visant une fidélisation du
lectorat, en même temps que la fiction d’un échange personnel entre le chroniqueur et le
lecteur” (928). The continuity and good rapport with the reader were particularly important in
the 1830s-1860s when newspapers were primarily available through yearly subscriptions.
Gautier’s critical texts are an important source for understanding his views of the
press’ readership because of his frequent metatextual references to the feuilleton, its reader,
and the work of the feuilletoniste in them. The self-referential nature of the feuilleton can also
be seen as a strategy for filling up pages: typically, a cultural critic would have to fill two sixcolumn feuilleton pages per week, regardless of the quality of the plays, books or works of art
being reviewed, or his interest in them (Vaillant and Thérenty 10). Because of these
constraints, Gautier became adept at what Patrick Berthier in “Théophile Gautier journaliste”
describes as “comment faire un bon feuilleton alors qu’à limite il n’y a rien à dire” (446).
More than just filler, this metatextuality also helped create the illusion of a convivial
relationship between critic and reader, by giving him a glimpse behind the scenes, so to
speak, of the feuilleton.
Gautier often joked in his articles about his difficulty writing the weekly feuilleton. In
a June 1845 theater review, mentioning the change in management at the Odéon Theater, he
remembered its usefulness for the feuilletonist: “Que de services ce pauvre théâtre a rendus à
la critique dans les jours de disette ! Quand il ne s'était rien joué sur la rive droite pendant la
semaine, il y avait toujours bien sur la rive gauche quelque tragédie ou quelque comédie […],
qui fournissait les assises nécessaires pour terminer le feuilleton, réduit à deux ou trois
colonnes comme un temple ruiné” (Histoire de l’art dramati ue e Fra ce depuis vi gt-cinq
ans 4: 94). Gautier’s eulogy of the Odéon is a sort of confession to the reader: rather than
remembering the quality of its productions, he would miss it because it gave him something
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to write about. The metaphor of the feuilleton, regularly called the “rez-de-chaussée” of the
paper, as a ruined temple without enough material to prop it up adds a visual analogy to the
critic’s struggle to fill his columns. Similarly, Gautier inserted a mention of his critical work
into the feuilleton in a review of Alexandre Dumas’ nine hour play, La Reine Margot: “Avant
de commencer notre compte rendu, nous réclamerons humblement l'indulgence du lecteur.
Sans être le bon Homère, il pourrait nous arriver de sommeiller quelquefois pendant notre
feuilleton et de laisser tomber notre plume au beau milieu d'une phrase” (idem 5: 41). By
including commentary on the act of writing the feuilleton within his critical feuilletons,
Gautier blurs the lines between the feuilleton as an impersonal critical text and a personal
conversation. This regular reference to his work served as a kind of in-joke between the critic
and the reader, a distinctive trait that Gautier’s readers would recognize.
However, the self-referential aspect of Gautier’s feuilletons often led him to reflect on
his dissatisfaction with his work and obligation to fulfill the reader’s expectations. Gautier
depicted the feuilleton reader – in the feuilleton – as perpetually dissatisfied, superficial and
fickle. In a 1838 theater review, he describes the rapport between the feuilletoniste and his
readers: “le feuilletoniste, dont l’état est de tout voir et d’être partout, [a] peur d’avouer aux
lecteurs de son journal qu’il n’a pas le précieux don de l’ubiquité, […] voulant d’ailleurs
satisfaire l’appétit vorace de l’abonné, grand dévorateur d’analyse” (OC 1: 386). Gautier
defines the relationship between the critic and his reader as motivated by “fear”: the
feuilletonist doesn’t want to disappoint the reader’s expectations, even if they are clearly
ludicrous. The reader is pejoratively depicted as ravenously consuming the content of the
feuilleton in a corporeal way (“l’appétit vorace,” “grand dévorateur d’analyse”) just as we
saw earlier in this chapter with the cuisinière. Gautier also depicted the reader as having
unsophisticated tastes to which he had to cater. On more than one occasion, he bristles at this
limitation in the theater feuilleton: “l’analyse à perpétuité de ce vaudeville, toujours
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renaissant, à laquelle nous sommes condamnés, nous laisse si peu de place et de loisir, […]
mais le public veut avant tout savoir où en est son cher vaudeville” (idem 1 :188). Although
Gautier makes it known that he doesn’t care about vaudevilles, he recognizes that it is his job
to cater to the public’s interests by writing this review.
Satisfying the reader’s demands led the poet-critic to recognize the need to adapt the
forms of his articles to the readers of the feuilleton as well. Ironically, in one of the few
critical texts Baudelaire never published in the press, the Salon de 1846, he considers the
importance of the form of a review on readership. In “A quoi bon la critique?” he asserts that
art criticism is ideally be artistic and poetic, “Mais ce genre de critique est destiné aux
recueils de poésie et aux lecteurs poétiques” and not to the “monsieur, grave, sec, roide et
cravaté de blanc, tenant à la main son dernier feuilleton” (OC 1961, 876-77). In other words,
the critic’s job is to communicate his ideas to the audience for whom he is writing, not to
write the best or most ideal response to a work of art. With the failure of the 1848 Revolution,
the Coup d’état and his own trial, Baudelaire’s views of the press and its reader would
deteriorate to the point of hatred and revulsion, as we will see in the last chapter in particular.
But for a young Baudelaire, the press was both a financial opportunity and a place to address
a different reader in a different way than his poetry would.
In Gautier’s critical articles, there is at times a palpable sense of anxiety about the
poet-journalist’s relationship with the reader or subscriber. Gautier’s references to the reader
often seem tinged with apprehension that he is bored by the feuilletonist. In the theater
feuilleton, Gautier describes his task as “faire un logis confortable où l’abonné ne se déplaise
pas trop” (OC 1: 201). While there is a certain ironic humor in these self-referential passages,
there is a palpable sense of anxiety: it is not a question of pleasing the reader, but rather of
“not displeasing him too much.” Elsewhere, he wrote that although “Notre feuilleton est bien
court (le lecteur le trouve peut-être long)” (idem 1: 532). It is almost as though the reader’s
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boredom interrupts this article, cutting off the feuilletonist’s thought mid-sentence in the
parenthesis. Unlike Gautier’s combative tone and take-it-or-leave-it attitude in prefaces to Les
Jeunes France or Mademoiselle de Maupin, contemporary to these critical texts, in the
feuilleton he recognizes and seems to both resent and fear that his occupation requires him to
satisfy the reader’s expectations.
This anxiety in the feuilletonist-reader relationship can also be seen in the image that
Gautier and Banville paint of the critic as an entertainer or clown who struggles to mollify, if
not entertain, the all-powerful subscriber. Gautier, in a March 1845 theater review, describes
the feuilletonist in a particularly sad light:
Cela est bien solennel pour un compte rendu de folie carnavalesque; mais, en
vérité, cher lecteur, le temps est gros de spleen aujourd'hui. — Les
feuilletonistes, ces graciosos hebdomadaires, sont des hommes après tout, ils
sont tristes quelquefois; la rêverie s'empare d'eux comme s'ils étaient des
poêles. Le vent d'hiver qui siffle peut les distraire du tintement fêlé des grelots
du vaudeville; tout en étant penchés sur le pupitre pour faire au maître le
rapport des plaisirs de la semaine, ils peuvent penser que les ifs sont noirs dans
la neige, et que la terre est froide aux derniers couchés. (Histoire de l’art
dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans 4: 65)
In another article, Gautier revisits this metaphor: “Qu'est-ce, en effet, qu'un feuilleton? Une
espèce de tréteau hebdomadaire où l'auteur vient parader et danser sur la phrase avec ou sans
balancier. Les critiques ne sont plus vraiment que les graciosos et les clowns du journalisme”
(Fusains et eaux-fortes 104). In Portrait de l’artiste e saltimba
ue (1970), Jean Starobinski
examines this frequent image of the artist as clown as “un autoportrait travesti” which allows
the modern artist to escape from contemporary industrial society by creating “un lien
psychologique” with “le microcosme de la parade et de la féerie élémentaire” (9). He also
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describes this figure as inherently sadomasochistic, targeting the bourgeois reader and the
author himself: “La critique de l’honorabilité bourgeoise s’y double d’une autocritique
dirigée contre la vocation esthétique elle-même” (idem 10). This self-sacrificing tendancy is
evident in a January 1850 article in which Banville described the “mérite pour un acrobate du
feuilleton qui a des planches, à s'exposer volontairement aux sifflets pour être sincère”
(Critiques 330). In light of a situation where the reader and the critic don’t share the same
priorities, there is a certain greatness in this type of buffoonery.
This power imbalance evident between critics and the press reader in the feuilleton is
far from the provocative rapport between the poet as instigator and the reader as prey that we
saw in the first chapter, beginning with Gautier and the Jeunes France. The dynamic between
reader and author in critical articles is radically different, and in a sense the roles have
flipped: in the feuilleton, critics recognize that catering to the reading public is a central part
of their task, whereas in book prefaces, the author is empowered to chase away, insult or
ignore his reader. Studying the press thus expands the recurring image of the poet’s
sadomasochism in this period: while he punishes and chases away the reader in his poetry
prefaces, he is mistreated and jeered by him in the feuilleton.
In an autobiographical text posthumously published in 1872, Gautier sees this work as
a feuilletonist as a kind of cosmic punishment for his youthful insults of the press, which
made him its laborer: “Le journalisme, pour se venger de la préface de Mademoiselle de
Maupin, m'avait accaparé et attelé à sa besogne. Que de meules j'ai tournées, que de seaux j'ai
puisés à ces norias hebdomadaires ou quotidiennes, pour verser de l'eau dans le tonneau sans
fond de la publicité” (Poésies de Th. Gautier ui e figurero t pas da s ses œuvres 12).
Gautier also reflected on the rapport between his sadomasochistic relationship to the reader as
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a poet and feuilletonist in the poem “Après le Feuilleton,” published in the Revue nationale et
étrangère in 1861 and the 1872 edition of Emaux et camées:5
Mes colonnes sont alignées
Au portique du feuilleton ;
Elles supportent, résignées,
Du journal le pesant fronton.
Jusqu’à lundi je suis mon maître.
Au diable chefs-d’œuvre mort-nés !
Pour huit jours je puis me permettre
De vous fermer la porte au nez.
.
.
.
.
.
Voix de l’âme et de la nature,
J’écouterai vos purs sanglots,
Sans que les couplets de facture
M’étourdissent de leurs grelots. (1-8, 13-16)
It is significant that in this poem, published in a review and later in a book of poetry, he
apostrophes the reader
as “vous,” slamming the door in his face, while in his critical
feuilletons, he regularly refers to him in the more formal third person as “le lecteur” or
“l’abonné.” He also turns away from the public in his language, addressing the “voix de
l’âme et de la nature” later in the poem as vous, (“J’écouterai vos purs sanglots”), not the
reader, thus figuratively shutting him out yet again. In this poetic space, Gautier’s attitude
5
Gautier vastly expanded Emaux et camées over twenty years: the first edition, in July 1852 contains eighteen
poems, including the preface sonnet; the definitive edition, published in 1872, contains forty-seven poems.
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towards the press reader reverses his submissive status in the feuilleton, allowing him to
violently dismiss the reader once again.
Writing for the feuilleton as a critic required poet-journalists like Gautier, Banville
and Baudeaire to grapple with the interests, limitations and demands of the contemporary
reading public. For a young Baudelaire, this represented an opportunity to adopt a new tone
and form suited to the audience he was addressing. Gautier and Banville, who wrote much
more extensively for the feuilleton, appear more apprehensive of their rapport with the press
reader: unlike their prefaces where they can mistreat, ignore and drive away the reader, their
employment in the feuilleton was predicated upon their ability to satisfy the demands of a
broad segment of the contemporary reading public. These critical articles show a complete
reversal of the power structure between author and reader, where the poet-critic faces the
jeers, indifference and rejection of the reader.
2. Poetry in the Feuilleton
The relationship between poets and the press went beyond their work as cultural
critics; many mid-nineteenth-century poets published poems in the press, including in in the
feuilletons of prominent newspapers. In his article, “Le vers à l’épreuve du journal” in the
collective volume Poésie et journalisme, Alain Vaillant describes the years between 1830 to
1870 as a “brutal” new era for poets: as audiences favored novels over books of poetry, only
the biggest names, like Hugo, were safe publishing bets; other poets had to pay to publish
their books (13-14). It is during these years, Vaillant notes, that poets were also often
journalists and thus, had vastly different experiences publishing, including widely prepublishing their poems in reviews and newspapers. This phenomenon raises several
questions: if the press was the antithesis of poetry, what was the status of poems published in
the mainstream press? How did poets position their work in terms of its readership in these
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cases? What kind of poetry was published in the feuilleton, and how was it presented by the
editors? In an age where poetry was not a big seller, publishing in the mainstream press
represented a real opportunity for mid-nineteenth-century poets and played a significant role
in the relationship between poet and reader. As Gautier noted in an 1868 essay on Baudelaire,
the feuilleton’s influence was decisive in defining this relationship: “car, en France, on ne lit
guère des poëtes que leur prose, et ce sont les feuilletons qui font connaître les poëmes”
(“Charles Baudelaire” XLVI).
In order to answer these questions, I consulted the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s
digital collections of several large daily newspapers with feuilletons including La Presse, Le
Siècle, and Le Constitutionnel in order to assess the place of poetry in the feuilleton of major
newspapers in the period between 1850 and 1880. Three of the largest newspapers during the
Second Empire, their combined print run was nearly 85,000 in 1858 ( Histoire générale de la
presse française 2: 259). These newspapers thus provided the kind of large audience for
poetry that many literary reviews simply did not have. In the course of my research, it
became apparent that it was rare for the feuilleton of a daily paper to be dedicated to a work
of poetry: in the period 1850-1880, this was only the case on a handful of occasions.
However, these occurences can be divided into three distinct categories, which are revelatory
of the attitudes of mainstream periodicals and their readers towards poetry in this period.
These include publications marking the release of new books of poems by Romantic
superstars like Lamartine and Hugo, publications of poems by newspaper collaborators, and
the publication of poems that were meant to memorialize contemporary social, economic and
political events.
The first type, which covers by far the most incidences of poetry publication in the
feuilleton, was the pre-publication of poems by poetic superstars of the Romantic era. For
example, La Presse devoted two days of feuilletons to Hugo’s Les Contemplations in the
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spring of 1856, calling it “un véritable évènement littéraire” (April 21, 1856). La Presse
further extended this literary event with other related feuilletons, including excerpts from
“Guernesey” by Auguste Vacquerie, a Hugo family friend and collaborator, in which he
describes life on the island. The following month, LC was favorably reviewed by La Presse’s
literary critic, Eugène Pelletan, who lauded the book, in line with the preface’s assertions, as
a tool of mankind’s Progress alongside other poetic works by Hugo, Lamartine and
Chateaubriand, in contrast to what he described as the contemporary decadence of poetry
(May 13, 1856), a recurring theme in mid-century literary criticism in the feuilleton. Le
Siècle also pre-published some of Hugo’s poems on April 22; however, only two poems,
taking up just three and a half columns, were included in the one-page feuilleton, and a brief
theater review occupied the balance of the page. Le Constitutionnel waited until May 27 to
publish excerpts in the feuilleton along with a not entirely favorable review of the book by
the critic Vallery-Hadot, who accused Hugo of megalomania (“Il ne se contente pas de nous
dire: je suis un penseur; il nous dit: je suis le penseur”). The publication of La Légende des
siècles in 1859 garnered far less attention in major newspaper feuilletons: La Presse
published excerpts in a two-page feuilleton while Le Siècle again combined Hugo’s poems in
the feuilleton with a short critical article on the Alsatian novelist Alexandre Weill. Other
major daily newspapers, such as Le Constitutionnel and the Journal des débats did not note
the publication at all. Compared to the ample space given to serial novels and other kinds of
texts in the feuilleton, even poetry that was a “literary event” only garnered a few feuilleton
columns in major daily papers.
Lamartine was another Romantic author whose new publications made it into the
feuilleton of daily papers in the mid-nineteenth century, and whose model of poetry was
widely praised. Le Siècle marked the publication of his eleven-volume Œuvres in January
1850 with a two-page feuilleton. La Presse published the posthumous “Vers inédits de
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Lamartine” in the summer of 1873, along with a pessimistic editorial note again contrasting
Lamartine’s poetry with the contemporary state of poetry as “une reine déchue” (La Presse,
June 3, 1873). These instances of daily newspapers marking the publication of works by the
Romantic poets in the mid- to late nineteenth century suggest that when it came to poetry, the
mainstream press, like book publishers, relied on a small handful of well-known figures; as
Gautier noted in his 1868 Rapport sur les progrès de la poésie, “Deux ou trois poètes
semblent suffire à la France, et la mémoire publique est paresseuse à se charger de noms
nouveaux” (Souve irs de théâtre, d’art et de criti ue 357-58). This is evident in the
feuilleton, where literary critics repeatedly evoked these illustrious names in contrast to
contemporary poetry, often described as decadent and sterile.
The focus on Romantic authors also reveals the conservative views of literary critics
in the press that were out of step with contemporary poetry: the mainstream press praised the
prophetic model of poetry by Romantic poets decades after the heyday of Romanticism. This
explains one of the critiques of the bourgeois press as antithetical to poetry: not only was the
bourgeois insensitive to the arts, preferring the commercial literature of the press, but he was
also late in his tastes compared to what was going on among avant-gardes. This helps us
understand the claim by many poets that they were writing for the future, because the present
was blind to their work. Of course, it is precisely these poets who were critical of the press’
model of poetry who have shaped our views: if we see this definition of literature in the
1870s as late and somewhat erroneous, it was of course not recognized as such at the time. In
fact, the feeling that society was behind the times in poetry was one shared by many
ambitious newcomers, including the young Romantics half a century earlier, in their battle
against the “classiques” (Vacquerie 7).
Another instance of poetry publications in the feuilleton were by poets who were
contributors to newspapers, typically feuiletonists. In the case of La Presse, this included
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both Gautier and Baudelaire, who published some of his critical articles in the feuilleton. By
examining the publications of their poems in the feuilleton of La Presse, I will show how
they understood their work in relation to the tastes, reading habits and interests of the press
reader and how this often marked a sharp contrast from the way the poems were presented in
reviews or books.
The publication history of Émaux et camées indicates that Gautier presented his work
poetry differently depending on the medium in which it was published. Over the course of his
career, Gautier widely published his poetry in the press; only the 1830 Poésies were not at all
pre-published, largely because of the political turmoil (Berthier 443-44). However, only three
poems from Émaux et camées, including the preface sonnet, were not pre-published in the
press (ibid.); most were published in literary reviews, while others appeared in the
mainstream newspapers La Presse, Le Moniteur universel and Le Pays (Lavaud 1175). In the
spring of 1851, Gautier inserted a poem into his theater review: he included the poem
“Premier sourire de printemps,” without a title, introducing it as “a hymn” to spring, “une
petite pièce de vers que nous avons rimée l’autre semaine” (La Presse, April 7, 1851).
Gautier underplays the insertion of this poem into the theater review in two ways. First, he
casually categorizes it as a way to fill up his weekly column because an actor in one of the
plays he was meant to review that weekend refused to go onstage. He also excuses himself
for inserting “cette impression personnelle” into his theater feuilleton. In this way, Gautier
presents the poem to the feuilleton reader in the tradition of “vers d’occasion,” poems
inspired by particular events, like the arrival of spring, as a spontaneous and lighthearted
reflection that interrupts his theater column rather than as a serious poetic work written with
great attention to language and form.
The poems “Nostalgies d’obélisques,” “Étude de mains” and “Coquetterie posthume”
were published in a one-page feuilleton in La Presse on August 4, 1851. No editorial note
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accompanied the texts or announced the date of publication of Émaux et camées, as they did
for Lamartine or Hugo. Furthermore, this publication replaced Gautier’s Monday theater
review; rather than being presented as a literary “event,” Gautier’s poems appear to a
feuilleton reader as a substitute for his theater review in the same weekly allotted space. The
choice of poems, in particular “Nostalgies d’obélisques” and “Étude de mains,” seem to
reflect very different things to Gautier and his literary friends than it did in the press. For
Gautier’s friend Louis de Cormenin in a letter to the poet the day the poems were published
in the feuilleton, “Nostalgie d’obélisques” represents “une bonne veine moderne – un peu
trop chargé comme technicité peut-être comme dirait mon papa” (Correspondance générale
4: 370). He thus reads it as potentially disorienting or unpalatable for an older generation of
readers because of its technical virtuosity. Yet the very publication where these poems first
appeared, La Presse, took exactly the position on the book that Cormenin ascribed to his
“papa”: in a positive review of Émaux et camées in the feuilleton of La Presse in 1852,
Paulin Limayrac gently reproaches Gautier for his tendency to “oublier, dans son culte ardent
pour la forme, le côté intérieur de l’art, le côté du sentiment” (La Presse, October 3, 1852). In
other words, the reviewer finds fault in the work for the over-emphasis on the very quality
that for Gautier and his friends defines the newness of his poetry. In 1851, the publication of
these poems in La Presse is based on a reading of them informed by the Romantic model of
poetry. Gautier cannot explain the newness of his poetry in the feuilleton because the way he
saw poetry and its rapport with the reader was entirely at odds with La Presse’s ideas. While
from our perspective, the years 1851-52 represent a tradition of poetry that is more in line
with Cormenin than Limayrac, this could not be the case for a contemporary reader who was
necessarily unaware of an emergent school of poetry that Émaux et camées signaled.
Interestingly, as we saw in the first chapter, in the preface sonnet to Émaux et Camées,
Gautier defines his poetry very differently, as conceived in isolation from contemporary
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affairs: “Sans prendre garde à l’ouragan/ Qui fouettait mes vitres fermées,/ Moi, j’ai fait
Émaux et Camées” (2). In other words, the idea advanced about poetic work in the preface,
one of a few poems not published in the press, that it is created in an intimate oasis, sheltered
from contemporary political turmoil, is misleading in the context of the publication history:
these poems had already been tested in the most public and contentious of spaces in the
nineteenth century, the press. While many poems were pre-published in small literary
reviews, others were exposed to the scrutiny of those Gautier told off in “Après le feuilleton”:
ravenous, vaudeville-hungry feuilleton readers. The book reader is given the impression that
this poetry is meant for a small audience for “Art,” while the press reader who first read these
poems in the feuilleton sees them in a very different way, not just as part of the diverse and
varied content of the feuilleton, but also in line with Lamartine and Hugo’s poetry, to which
La Presse’s reviewer, Limayrac, compares Émaux et camées (La Presse, October 3, 1852).
The qualification that the editor of Gautier’s critical Œuvres, Patrick Berthier, makes about
the reception of Gautier’s travelogues holds true for his poetic output as well: “Notre
perception globale de ces œuvres, lues en volume, n’a évidemment rien à voir avec la
connaissance ainsi disséminée que pouvait en acquérir l’abonné de bonne volonté (445). The
publication in book-form of these poems allowed Gautier to reinterpret the poem’s
relationship to the contemporary world for the book’s reader. By reading the poems in line
with the preface, we read them in a very different way than that in which most midnineteenth-century readers first did. This example shows us how rather than simply rejecting
newspapers and feuilletons and seeing them as inherently anti-poetry, Gautier savvily
represented his work in different ways in different media.
Baudelaire, an occasional critic for La Presse, famously published three installments
of his “Petits poëmes en prose” in the feuilleton of La Presse on August 26, 27, and
September 24, 1862. Again, no editorial note accompanied the texts announcing their
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publication or discussing the author as they did with celebrated poets like Hugo. The first
installment included the introductory text addressed to the newspaper editor Arsène
Houssaye. In it, Baudelaire describes the way that his prose poems can be read – and abused
– by the editor and the reader of the press:
Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire,
sans injustice, qu’il n’y a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la
fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. Considérez, je vous prie,
quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à
moi, et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie,
vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture ; car je ne suspends pas la volonté
rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d’une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une
vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans
peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut
exister à part. (OC 1961, 229)
The insistence on verbs like “couper” “enlever” and “hacher” suggests sadism towards the
text by all parties involved, a quality required by the serial nature of the feuilleton. This
language is significant for a poet whose previous poetic work, the fruit of almost twenty tears
of laborious revisions, was ultimately chopped into pieces by censors. Instead, this new, as
yet unfinished work is represented as a resilient whole that either fuses itself back together,
like an animal whose limbs regenerate, or makes sense in autonomous, mutilated fragments.
However, there is a flip side to this abuse: the poems show the poet’s tendency to
abuse the reader and editor. This is evident in the dedication to Houssaye – hardly a friend –
and suggests ulterior motives for publishing his prose poems in the feuilleton. The term
“commodité” in the above passage signals a particularly irony; in these years, Baudelaire was
highly critical of the idea that Art should be “useful,” and this term marks an implicit
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criticism of the public’s taste for convenience in matters of Art. Instead, his letters to
different editors of periodicals where he published the prose poems reveal his voyeuristic
pleasure in this project. Much like his desire to witness the “joli feu d’artifice de
monstruosités” (Correspondance 1: 312) that LFDM would have on the reader, he described
the prose poems to Louis Marcelin, the founder of La Vie parisienne, in a February 1865
letter as “des horreurs et des monstruosités qui feraient avorter vos lectrices enceintes”
(Correspondance 2: 465). To the bookseller Julien Lemer, he wrote later that year that there
were “vingt [poèmes] inintelligibles ou répulsifs pour le public d’un journal” (idem 2: 534).
For Baudelaire, multiplying the different outlets for his poems also meant being able to
access, offend and repulse a wider audience with his work.
This provocative interest in offending his readership is evident in the prose poems as
well. The first prose poem published in La Presse, “L’Etranger” is a short dialogue that
targets the bourgeoisie and its values:
Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis ? ton père, ta mère, ta sœur ou
ton frère ?
– Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère.
– Tes amis ?
– Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour
inconnu.
– Ta patrie ?
– J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située. (OC 1961, 231)
The questioner asks about the bourgeois values of familial love, friendship and patriotism,
and the interlocutor answers these questions in an enigmatic and destabilizing way: not only
does he not answer the question about his family, he denies that he even has one, and
questions the meaning of important bourgeois values like friendship and the homeland. While
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the questioner addresses the “enigmatic man” as “tu,” he replies with “vous”; this implies
both disrespect towards the enigmatic outsider by the questioner and a broader targeting of
“vous” not just as the questioner, but the audience at large which shares these values.
Baudelaire more blatantly attacks the press reader in “Le Chien et le flacon,” published in the
first feuilleton installment in La Presse. The first person in the prose poem offers his “cher
toutou” a sniff of an exquisite perfume by a renowned perfumer, which the dog rejects “en
manière de reproche,” leading him to respond: “Ah! misérable chien, si je vous avais offert
un paquet d’excréments, vous l’auriez flairé avec délices et peut-être dévoré. Ainsi, vousmême, indigne compagnon de ma triste vie, vous ressemblez au public, à qui il ne faut jamais
présenter des parfums délicats qui l’exaspèrent, mais des ordures soigneusement choisies”
(OC 1961, 237-38). While the first person speaker is not named, his comparison of the dog
and the public’s lowly tastes could hardly be more direct or brutal: the public is exasperated
by “parfums délicats,” preferring excrement like the dog. Furthermore, the idea that the
“ordures” must be “soigneusement choisies” implies a public so knowledgeable about
garbage that it has specific types it prefers.
The case of another collaborator at La Presse, Imbert de Saint-Amand, known
primarily for his work as a historian, differs radically from that of Gautier and Baudelaire. In
1871, two poems from his book of poems Souvenirs were pre-published in feuilleton of La
Presse, along with an elogious editorial note calling him “un de nos collaborateurs les plus
distingués […] un exemple qui ne saurait être trop encouragé” (La Presse, November 17,
1871). This served as an occasion for the (unnamed) editors to announce their literary
principles: using the “meilleurs modèles du grand siècle,” finding “inspirations honnêtes,”
and respecting “la muse immortelle du vrai, du beau, et du bien” (ibid.), values which seem
radically out of step to us in the context of poetry in the 1870s. The two poems in the one-
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page feuilleton reflect these values and serve as an exemplar for contemporary poetry. The
first poem, entitled “Introduction,” is an attack on young poets:
Qui te reconnaîtrait, ô jeunesse frivole,
.
.
.
.
Toi qui riche d'espoir, de force, de beauté,
Marchais vers l'avenir d'un pas précipité,
Te voilà maintenant inerte et languissante;
Ton œil ne brille plus, ta marche est chancelante,
Tu bâilles et, blasée avant d'avoir joui,
Tu gémis sous le poids de ton stupide ennui ;
Tes goûts sont avilis, tes plaisirs sont moroses. (ibid.)
The poem, written in 1860, when the poet was himself a young man, marks his distance from
his contemporaries in terms of poetic inspiration and style, as well as his use of a canonical
alexandrine form. Like the literary critics in the press, he longs for the prophetic poets of the
past, and dismisses the “ennui” and moroseness of young poets. This theme is further
emphasized by the next poem, “Fiat lux,” about man’s dissatisfaction with the sun, the “soleil
terrestre,” and his quest for light/enlightenment from the “soleil des cieux.” Unlike
Baudelaire’s and Gautier’s poetry pre-publications in the feuilleton, which are presented
without any editorial note, this poet is shown as a model to imitate because of his classical
inspiration and themes; he is celebrated precisely because he is so unlike the contemporaries
he criticizes. The elogious presentation of this poet, like the continued insistence on
Romantic figures like Lamartine and Hugo, shows how the feuilleton of La Presse promoted
a specific view of poetry in the mid- and late nineteenth century that was entirely different
from what was going on in contemporary poetry.
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A third category of poems published in the feuilleton of daily newspapers in the midto late nineteenth century were poems with historical significance, which memorialized
specific events, figures or phenomena. These poems were often written by poets who are little
remembered today. In April 1856, the feuilleton of La Presse gave two pages to Eugène
Villemin’s long poem, “Les Chercheurs d’or.” The poem won a second-place prize in a
competition by the Société de gens de lettres; the competition was to compose a poem based
on the theme “Les chercheurs d’or,” “une idée très à l’ordre du jour,” according to one of the
jury members, Sainte-Beuve, (Causeries du lundi 13: 370). It is not clear why this entry in
particular was chosen for a two-page feuilleton, although the poem, a call for human industry
and progress to replace man’s servitude and misery, touched on two favorite themes of La
Presse’s feuilleton including mankind’s progress through industry, and American exoticism.
The theme of progress in this poem seems to make it a thematic successor to the great
Romantic poets hailed in the feuilleton for this same poetic vision. Similarly, on September
21, 1879, La Presse devoted a one page feuilleton to “Les fêtes de Montbéliard: Ode à
Denfert Rochereau” by the poet Charles Grandmougin, who published a poem in the third
edition of Le Parnasse contemporain in 1876. The poem was read at the unveiling of a statue
of Denfert-Rochereau’s likeness in Paris the same day. These examples show that verse
poetry in the feuilleton was also a way to memorialize an event or capture the zeitgeist,
drawing on preferred themes like progress, industry, and patriotism.
In an 1859 article on Gautier, Baudelaire assessed the impact of the feuilleton on
poetry reading; in it, he highlights how the kind of poetry published in the feuilleton limited
contemporary readers’ interest in other kinds of poetry:
Je vous suppose interné dans un salon bourgeois et prenant le café, après
dîner, avec le maître de la maison, la dame de la maison et ses demoiselles
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[…] Bientôt on causera musique, peinture peut-être, mais littérature
infailliblement. Théophile Gautier à son tour sera mis sur le tapis ; […] Tout
ce monde-là a lu le feuilleton du lundi, mais personne, depuis tant d’années,
n’a trouvé d’argent ni de loisir pour Albertus, la Comédie de la Mort et
Espagna. […] Je sais bien qu’il n’est pas un homme de lettres, pas un artiste
un peu rêveur, dont la mémoire ne soit meublée et parée de ces merveilles ;
mais les gens du monde, ceux-là mêmes qui se sont enivrés ou ont feint de
s’enivrer avec les Méditations et les Harmonies, ignorent ce nouveau trésor de
jouissance et de beauté. […] Depuis lors, ce public a diminué graduellement la
part légitime de temps consacrée aux plaisirs de l’esprit. Mais ce ne serait là
qu’une explication insuffisante ; car, pour laisser de côté le poète qui fait le
sujet de cette étude, je m’aperçois que le public n’a glané avec soin dans les
œuvres des autres poètes que les parties qui étaient illustrées (ou souillées) par
une espèce de vignette politique, un condiment approprié à la nature de ses
passions actuelles. Il a su l’Ode à la Colonne, l’Ode l’Arc de Triomphe, mais
il ignore les parties mystérieuses, ombreuses, les plus charmantes de Victor
Hugo. Il a souvent récité les ïambes d’Auguste Barbier sur les Journées de
Juillet, mais il n’a pas, avec le poète, versé son pianto sur l’Italie désolée, et il
ne l’a pas suivi dans son voyage chez le Lazare du Nord.” (OC 1961, 677-78)
Baudelaire divides the reading public into two groups: “gens du monde” who read the press,
and “hommes de lettres” or “artistes” who read books of poetry. When it comes to poetry, the
feuilleton reader is interested only in what he sees in the press: big names, like Lamartine and
Hugo and poems with political content; and while they know Gautier as a feuilletonist, they
are ignorant of his poetic “treasures,” preferring the feuilleton version of Gautier, who must
aim to please them, taking what they liked and discarding the rest “sur le tapis.”
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IV. The Slow Extinction of the Poet-Journalist
For several intertwined reasons – political, social, economic and esthetic – Baudelaire,
Gautier and Banville were the “derniers représentants de la poésie-journalisme” (Vaillant
“Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)” 1196), the last generation of poets for whom journalism
was a fundamental part of their careers. Beginning in the mid-1860s, a series of events would
have profound consequences on the relationship between poets and the press, and in
particular, would serve to further isolate poets from the mainstream reading public.
Beginning in the 1860s, the fastest growth in newspaper sales was occurring among
less affluent segments of society that purchased individual newspapers at 5 centimes, a
phenomenon that increased in the following decades. The growth in the readership of the
popular press was astronomical when compared to that of the distribution of major
newspapers of the 1850s and 1860s, which largely catered to bourgeois readers. While as I
noted earlier, the print run of the three major daily newspapers in 1850 was around 85,000,
by 1880, the largest popular newspaper, the Petit Journal alone had a print run of 584,000
copies (Histoire générale de la presse française 3: 234). The tremendous growth in this
segment of readership called for a change in the content of newspapers, including fewer
literary spaces for audiences with different educational backgrounds and interests.
The 1881 freedom of the press law accelerated the move of newspapers away from
literary content: by loosening restrictions on political commentary it allowed newspapers to
more openly address political issues in their columns. Newspapers which had to previously
use allusive language to mask political critiques in cultural and literary articles could now
directly address these topics. These factors played a role in what scholars call the move from
the “journal d’opinion” of the early and mid-nineteenth century, to the “journal
d’informations” and the “journal populaire” that began to develop in the late nineteenth
century, and which allowed less room for literary content. The increased liberalization of the
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press also made it much easier to start new publications, vastly increasing the number of
periodicals in circulation, including all kinds of small reviews, magazines, newspapers and
other periodicals.
Logically, as newspapers included more political content, it made sense that
collaborators were more often young men interested in political careers, not young poets or
novelists (Mesure(s) du livre 118). Furthermore, by the 1870s, journalism was gaining
recognition as an increasingly autonomous career path, not a sideline for literary figures. As
Marc Martin notes in his study on “Journalistes et gens de lettres” in Mesure(s) du livre, until
the 1850s, the terms “gens de lettres,” “homme de lettres” and “journaliste” were used
interchangeably (107), after which they began to splinter off and specialize in meaning. By
the beginning of the Third Republic, journalism was recognized as a separate career, and in
1880, the first union of trade journalists was founded, a sign that it was no longer a backwater
of the literary world (Histoire générale de la presse française 3: 281).
These significant political, economic and social changes are readily apparent in the
press in the content and space assigned to literature. In my research, this was noticeable in
several ways. After 1874, the feuilleton of La Presse was moved to the second page of the
newspaper; the bottom of the first page was occupied by the “Bourses” section, previously
located on the last page. Only the theater critic was given the front-page feuilleton on
Mondays, when there was no financial news to report. In fact, La Presse only had a feuilleton
about half the time, marking a real decline in the number of pages available for literary
content. Finally, beginning in 1878, the occasional literary review in La Presse was no longer
signed by name, but by initials. This was a huge departure from the days in which critics
occupied a position which gave them a tremendous amount of influence and made them
household names. Using initials brought the feuilleton more in line with other columns,
which were often unsigned or initialed. As I established in the preceding section, the poems
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published in the feuilleton of La Presse in the 1860s and 1870s were also increasingly
didactic or historical in content.
The decreased literariness of the press in this period made it both less attractive and
less open to young poets. As Claude Bellanger puts it in the Histoire générale de la presse,
the 1870s and 1880s mark a turning point in terms of the worlds of literature and the press,
with young literary figures seeing “[un] abaissement du niveau du journalisme tant à cause de
la démocratisation de la presse et donc de son indispensable adaptation à des lecteurs de
culture primaire, que de la place croissante prise par l’information et l’exposé des faits de
l’actualité au détriment des rubriques de commentaires ou d’exposés d’idées et de doctrines”
(3: 277-278). This shift in the trajectory of journalism would lead young poets to pursue new
strategies for publication. This is not to say that poets writing after 1870 abstained completely
from participation in the press: poets like Banville continued to write weekly theater reviews,
and young poets did publish some critical articles in mainstream publications. However,
unlike the generation born in the 1820s who came of age in the 1840s, like Baudelaire and
Banville, the generation that came of age in the 1860s, including Mallarmé, Verlaine, Léon
Dierx, Francois Coppée, and Catulle Mendès, experienced journalism in a very different way.
Their overall participation in periodicals intended for a broad reading public was less
frequent than that of their predecessors; furthermore, it was increasingly conceived in a
negative way, as a “concession.” On the other hand, other poets from this generation,
particularly those involved in the Parnasse movement, became more involved in the
mainstream press late in their careers, in the 1880s and 1890s, once they had already been
officially accepted in the mainstream as poets.
Mallarmé’s limited publication history in the press is telling of this trend. Of the
handful of texts he wrote for the non-literary press in the 1870s, he often did not sign by
name. In 1871, he published a three-part review of the London International Exhibition in Le
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National under the pseudonym L.S. Price, a practice he would repeat in La Dernière mode,
the fashion and style magazine he wrote in 1874 under a variety of female pseudonyms which
I discuss in the next chapter. Mallarmé also wrote an anonymous “Gossips” column,
chronicling Parisian culture, for the London review L’Athae eum in 1875 and 1876. He only
published two other critical articles in reviews under his own name. Verlaine, who published
in several small reviews, praised this quality among the subjects in his Poètes maudits: he
noted approvingly that Tristan Corbière was “dédaigneux du Succès et de la Gloire” (3) and
lauded Mallarmé for publishing in luxury illustrated editions (idem 54). As for Rimbaud,
Verlaine imagined he would likely resist participating in this vicarious publication of his
work: “Eussions-nous consulté M. Rimbaud (dont nous voulons ignorer l'adresse, d'ailleurs
vague immensément) il nous eût, c'est probable, déconseillé d'entreprendre ce travail pour ce
qui le concerne” (idem 36).
Longer associations between poets and the press in the late nineteenth century were
increasingly rare. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did some poets from the Parnasse
movement participate in mainstream journalism after they had been accepted as poets by the
mainstream culture of the press. Catulle Mendès was involved in several important literary
reviews early in his career, and was a founder of the Revue fantaisiste in 1861 and director of
the first Parnasse Contemporain in 1866; later he worked at a number of mass-distribution
newspapers, including la Lanterne, Gil Blas, Le Petit Parisien and l'Echo de Paris. It was not
until 1893 that he became a regular theater critic at Le Journal where his fellow Parnassian
José-Maria Heredia would succeed him in 1899 (Histoire générale de la presse française 3:
314-315). Another poet from the Parnasse group, François Coppée, was also a theater critic at
the conservative paper La Patrie between 1880 and 1884. By the 1880s and 90s however,
these men and the Parnasse movement were largely accepted in official culture: Coppée
joined the Académie française in 1884, followed by Heredia in 1894; Leconte de Lisle and
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Heredia were responsible for the poetry selection at the influential literary review La revue
des deux mondes (idem 3:391). These positions made them part of the mainstream as
recognized and institutionalized literary figures. This privileged position allowed them to
reinterpret the poet-press relationship in a very different way than they had as young,
stuggling poets: recalling the 1862 founding of the Revue fantaisiste twenty-two years later in
the 1884 La légende du Parnasse contemporain, Mendès noted that: “nous méritâmes sans
doute les railleries de la critique et du public, railleries oubliées maintenant que la bonne
entente de la poésie et du journal, de la chronique et du conte poétique sont un fait accompli”
(90). What Mendès interprets as a new “good relationship” between poets and the press is
really his own acceptance and ease in official culture, something that did not apply to many
other poets.
As poets were becoming less involved in daily papers, they found new outlets,
publishing and founding small literary reviews and meeting in intimate literary gatherings
that allowed them to share their work. They also increasingly developed an anti-publication
ethic, increasingly regarding any kinds of publications – including in books – as both
undesirable and unnecessary for a career as a poet.
1. Reviews and Self-Publication
As poets had fewer outlets in the press, they sought different opportunities to publish
their work. Beginning with the Parnasse Contemporain, there was a renaissance of selfpublication in the late nineteenth century, particularly at a number of small and oftentimes
ephemeral reviews catering to different literary groups and schools. These kinds of selfpublications opened up new possibilities for poets not just to publish their work, but also to
find likeminded authors and publications. In his introduction to La Belle Époque des revues,
Michel Leymarie describes them as “autant de microsociétés qui […] organisent une
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sociabilité entre individus […] souvent issus de la même génération, unis par le sentiment
d’être entre soi” (14). These reviews had several advantages for poets: first, they allowed
them to come together and work in a collaborative way, as Seth Whidden describes in
“Poetry in Collaboration in the 1870s: The Cercle Zutique, ‘Le Fleuve’ and ‘The Raven,’”
developing their ideas together as a school or in a manifesto. Additionally, the rapid growth
in the number of publications at the end of the nineteenth century meant that poets could
more easily find, or start, a review that fit their esthetic rather than face rejection or demands
to change their work by an editor or publisher. Valéry captures the ferment and excitement of
these small poetic coteries in Existence du Symbolisme: “On y fondait dans l’instant même
une revue, dont personne ne pouvait prévoir les moyens d’existence. Mais il importait peu.
L’essentiel était de trouver le titre et de rédiger le manifeste. C’était là la grande affaire”
(Œuvres 1:701). As Valéry makes clear, these self-publications were more about literary
affiliation and expression than a practicable project for publication and distribution. While
these small reviews offered an outlet to young poets, they did not allow them to reach the
broad audience of daily newspapers to which poet-journalists of past generations had had
access. In many ways, self-publication also meant self-consumption, as Valéry notes: “Sans
appuis dans la presse, sans éditeurs, sans issue vers une carrière littéraire normale […], ils
s’accommodent à cette vie hors cadre ; ils se font leurs revues, leurs éditions, leur critique
intérieure ; et ils se forment peu à peu ce petit public de leur choix” (idem 1: 691).
Another outlet for late nineteenth-century poets were gatherings in cafés, diners and
cénacles in which participation in the group in some ways replaced publication. While
Mallarmés mardis, for example, followed the long-standing salon model of young poets
gathering around a central figure, there were many more types of spontaneous gatherings, for
example in cafés, dinners, and other poetic events. As Alain Vaillant notes in his article
“Conversations sous influence,” there were a large variety of these literary events: “Cénacles,
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scènes de bohème, orgies, dîners, réunions de café, réceptions intimes… On n’aurait pas fini
de décliner les formes variées, mais également pittoresques, de la rencontre littéraire” (101).
Valéry too recalls these intimate meetings as a privileged place for intellectual work:
“Comme les salons, les cafés ont été de véritables laboratoires d’idées, des lieux d’échanges
et de chocs, des moyens de groupement et de différenciation […et de] la plus grande activité
intellectuelle” (Œuvres 1: 701). Although some of these literary events or groups produced
written traces of their works, like the Cercle Zutique’s L’Album Zutique, in which poets like
Léon Valade, Rimbaud, Charles Cros, and Paul Verlaine collaborated on obscene poems and
parodies of Parnasse poets, these events placed participation in the group and the moment
ahead of publication or diffusion of poetic works, as Whidden highlights in Authority in
Crisis in French Literature (39). Even more than self-publication and self-consumption of
poetry in small reviews, these events closed off and redefined poetry as an internal affair
outside of publication in the press or diffusion of poetry beyond an intimate circle of
acquaintance.
2. Poetry as Anti-Publication
In addition to turning to self-publication and literary events, poets in the 1870s and
1880s increasingly defined the career of poet as one that eschewed publication in the press,
and even in books, as much as possible. Being an elite poet did not necessitate publishing
your work or having it read by a broad audience, but rather being recognized by fellow poets;
in fact, this was seen as far more important. There is an important aristocratic and antidemocratic aspect to these publication choices, which I will discuss in more detail in the
fourth chapter. The most remembered poets from this period are precisely those whose
publications were extremely limited: Mallarmé did not widely published his poetry during his
life, instead focusing on the “utopie éditoriale” of his all-encompassing Livre (Durand 345).
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Most of Rimbaud’s oeuvre was unpublished during the years he was actively writing, and he
only became publicly known via poetic acquaintances, which gave him a particularly
mythical status. Verlaine’s Poètes maudits is emblematic of this phenomenon: the uniting
logic behind the figures Verlaine presents is the fact that they remained largely unknown to a
wide audience.
Not publishing became something of a badge of honor among poets in the late
nineteenth century, who referred to publication as a kind of “concession” to be avoided if
possible. In the preface to Les lèvres closes (1867), Léon Dierx, in a long diatribe on the press
and the contemporary reader, noted that the true poet, “Sous peine de déchéance, […] ne doit
pas faire aux intérêts de son temps des concessions équivoques, ni des sacrifices aux idoles
du jour” (14). Mallarmé, justifying his publications in the press in an 1885 letter to Verlaine,
excluded even publications in books from his list of “concessions:” “J’ai dû faire, dans des
moments de gêne ou pour acheter de ruineux canots, des besognes propres et voilà tout
(Dieux Antiques, Mots Anglais) dont il sied de ne pas parler : mais à part cela, les concessions
aux nécessités comme aux plaisirs n’ont pas été fréquentes” (Correspondance II 302-03). The
present was antithetical to the spirit of poetry, and any involvement in it was defined as a
dangerous compromise. Mallarmé continued his letter:
Au fond je considère l’époque contemporaine comme un interrègne pour le
poète, qui n’a point à s’y mêler: elle est trop en désuétude et en effervescence
préparatoire, pour qu’il ait autre chose à faire qu’à travailler avec mystère en
vue de plus tard ou de jamais et de temps en temps à envoyer aux vivants sa
carte de visite, stances ou sonnet, pour n’être point lapidé d’eux, s’ils le
soupçonnaient de savoir qu’ils n’ont pas lieu. (idem 303)
To keep his purity, the poet abstained from involvement in contemporary public life, leaving
behind only poetic traces of his existence.
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This rejection of publication was largely a generational phenomenon; in addition to
changes within the press, it and can be understood in part by the example left by these poets’
literary predecessors. As young men, Baudelaire’s generation had as models publicly
reknowned poets: “Baudelaire appartient à un siècle où rien ne semble plus beau que d’être
un grand poète. L’extraordinaire gloire de Victor Hugo, le rayonnement de Musset, et aussi
de Lamartine et de Gautier, suscitent l’envie et l’émulation des jeunes gens” (Niderst 159).
They began their careers thinking it was possible and desirable to reach a wide audience with
their poetry. However, this generation became disillusioned over the course of their careers,
in part because of their experiences working in the press and facing the demands of the
feuilleton, the editor, and new readers: “pauvre Théo,” as friends called him (Bellati 23) saw
himself as the slave of the feuilleton, facing cosmic retribution at the hands of the press for
his youthful attacks; Baudelaire was targeted and convicted for his poetry, beginning with a
critical attack in Le Figaro, and Banville described himself as an indignant clown, trying to
keep his pride while being jeered. These pessimistic images of the poet at the hands of the
press are omnipresent in their late works and letters, and became a major part of their view of
the poet’s place in society: Baudelaire, in his personal journals called “L’homme de lettres
[…] l’ennemi du monde” (OC 1961, 1289) while Banville, in his 1871 Petit traité sur la
poésie francaise noted that that the poet, “vit exilé” (241).
For the many young poets who looked up to them, being a “great poet” didn’t mean
becoming Victor Hugo, but becoming Charles Baudelaire: enduring the hatred and
misunderstanding of the press and its reader. As Valéry notes of this and later generations:
“Tous ceux qu’ils admirent ont souffert: Edgar Poe, mort dans l’extrême dénuement ;
Baudelaire, poursuivi ; Wagner, sifflé à l’Opéra ; Verlaine et Rimbaud, vagabonds et
suspects ; Mallarmé, ridiculisé par le moindre chroniqueur” (Œuvres 1: 691). This
fetichisation of misunderstanding and rejection by the public was given a name by Verlaine
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in the poète maudit, a model for the poet’s troubled role in society among a young generation
of poets. As Bénichou explains in L’ cole du dése cha teme t, unlike his predecessor, the
hugolian poet-prophet, who receives his message from above and communicates it to
humanity at large: “Le poète maudit, entre un Idéal avare de communication et un auditoire
sourd, vit dans l’échec ; mais il est souverain dans sa solitude ; il peut dédaigner ce qui, des
deux parts, se refuse à lui ; il incarne une aspiration infinie, qui vit d’elle-même” (583-4). In
this way, the model of the poète maudit defined poetic greatness as isolation and public
failure. Banville described Baudelaire in 1870, after his death, in exactly these terms: “il est
mort méconnu, insulté, calomnié, raillé, martyr […] Au lieu de faire semblant d’être un
poète, il a été un poète en effet, et il n’a trouvé le repos que dans la tombe” (Critiques 133). It
is not just the lagacy of Baudelaire’s poetry, but also his treatment at the hands of the public
and the press that proves he was a “real” poet.
As these passages suggest, although poets were no longer widely involved in
mainstream publications in the late nineteenth century, the press and the press reader still
played a central role in the conception of poetry and the poet, albeit in a negative way. Again,
Valéry’s Existence du Symbolisme is informative of this mindset. For him, it was not shared
esthetic values that united the Symbolist movement, but rather an “ethical” one – the
rejection of the press and the mass reading public: “Ils s’accordaient dans une résolution
commune de renoncement au suffrage du nombre: ils dédaignent la conquête du grand
public” (Œuvres 1: 690).
Conclusion
In the mid- to late nineteenth century, poets largely defined poetry in opposition to the
press, poets against journalists, and poetry readers against press readers. Yet in the midnineteenth century, journalism was a central part of what it meant to be a poet. We cannot
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isolate poetry from the press at a time when the most important poets wrote critical articles
and published their poems in periodicals, both in literary reviews for a small reading elite and
in the feuilletons of major daily newspapers intended for new readers in French society,
including women, young people, and working class French men and women. Mid-nineteenthcentury poets experienced their relationship to the press and its readers as a source of creative
opportunity, publicity and inspiration as well as intellectual decay, financial servitude, and
public condemnation. The editors and critics of the mainstream press in turn regarded many
contemporary poets with suspicion as decadents and endorsed a narrow definition of poetry
as a tool for makind’s progress, favoring a Romantic model that appeared to young poets (and
to us today) as out of date.
As the audiences and forms of the press evolved in the mid- to late nineteenth century,
poetry no longer had a place in the mainstream press, and the hybrid poet-journalist figure
grew rarer. Poets looked for their only readers in their own insulated groups. While in the last
years of his life, Mallarmé affirmed his position as a pro-Dreyfusard, the leader of the
Symbolist movement’s legacy remains one of isolation from the public. He and other avantgarde poets not only turned to small reviews or started their own intimate social gatherings,
but also increasingly defined the career of poet as one isolated from any “corrupting”
influence in the press or even in books, a position for which he and Rimbaud are emblems.
Beyond publication choices, this position more broadly reflected a divorce between poets and
institutions. Even the Parnasse poets who in the mid-nineteenth century represented a poetic
avant-garde and the heroes of a younger generation became objects of scorn and ridicule for
the likes of Rimbad and Cros for their turn towards institutional recognition in the press and
the Académie française. While the redefinition of poetry is understandable in the particular
economic, political, and literary context in which it arose, poets in the late nineteenth century
redefined poetry around this rejection, providing a lasting legacy for poetry.
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Chapter 3
“Catechism” and “Good Actions”: Women Readers and Poets
Introduction
In the mid- to late nineteenth century, poets, literary critics, and legal authorities
insisted: poetry was not for women. They made this assertion in essays, letters, legal
documents, and verse. Gautier, a favorite target of charges of immorality in the press,
famously wrote in his 1833 Albertus:
[ …] j’en préviens les mères de famille,
Ce que j’écris n’est pas pour les filles
dont on coupe le pain en tartines. – Mes vers
Sont des vers de jeune homme et non un catéchisme. (349-50)
However humorously, Gautier draws boundaries of readership: his steamy scenes are not for
young ladies; they are “young men’s verses.” The analogy between readers and content is
clear: explicit loves scenes in poetry are to men what catechism is to ladies. Not only are
these poems not meant for young women, but neither is any poetry that doesn’t provide moral
teachings.
More than twenty years later, in an aborted preface project for the second edition of
LFDM, Baudelaire makes a similar statement about gender and readers: “Ce n’est pas pour
mes femmes, mes filles ou mes sœurs que ce livre a été écrit ; non plus pour les femmes, les
filles ou les sœurs de mon voisin. Je laisse cette fonction à ceux qui ont intérêt à confondre
les bonnes actions avec le beau langage” (LFDM 242) . Of course, Baudelaire had neither a
wife nor a daughter nor a sister, let alone multiples of any of these relations. Instead, this
proliferation of female relatives reflects the language Gautier used in his attack on a specific
kind of moralistic journalist, whom he called “le journaliste à famille féminine” in the preface
to Mademoiselle de Maupin, written just one year after Albertus: “D’abord pour se poser en
journaliste de cette espèce, il faut quelques petits ustensiles préparatoires- tels que deux ou
trois femmes légitimes, quelques mères, le plus de sœurs possibles, un assortiment de filles
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complet et des cousines innombrablement” (Préfaces des romans français du XIXe siècle 9798). While both Gautier and Baudelaire mock these critics and the absurd multiplication of
their potentially offended female relations, they make clear that there are two separate literary
traditions: a men’s literature of “beau langage” and a women’s of “belles actions.”
In this chapter, I will examine the ways in which the woman reader was evoked in
periodicals, trials, satire and poetry in order to better understand what her exclusion from
“real” poetry entailed in terms of specific reading practices, models of readership and
conceptions of the poet-reader relationship. While it is tempting to consider the exclusion of
women readers by male poets the simple result of widespread misogyny, I will show how a
broad array of factors, ranging from shifting literary affiliations and the commercialization of
literature to the rise of the press and growing bourgeois dominance in French politics and
society, inform their staking of positions. First, I will briefly review how the educational
system and dominant bourgeois culture in the mid-nineteenth century diminished women’s
roles in cultural practices, relegating them to the private sphere as wives, mothers and
mistresses. Women were also painted as unsuitable readers through gendered critiques of
authors associated with female readers, such as mannish bas-bleus and effeminate Romantic
poets. I will also look at portrayals of gender and genre in literary trials, which point to very
deep biases about what women readers supposedly could and could not read. This first
section aims to review the pervasive political, social and cultural conditions informing the
exclusion of women from elite poetic practices which have received significant attention
from literary scholars.
While the poets cited above claim that poetry was not for women, there was in fact a
major current of poetic production for and by women, published in books and particularly in
a large number of widely-read periodicals throughout the nineteenth century. In the next
sections, I will analyze some of this poetry in order to better understand how women’s poetry
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and the models of the poet-reader relationship it posited were defined. As we shall see,
women’s poetry in mainstream periodicals was largely limited to the prescription of moral
actions for female readers as mothers and love objects, and the direct exhortation of women
readers to specific activities, such as charity and consumerism. It is impossible to seriously
analyze this tradition of poetry for women without conceding its extremely restricted and
repetitive character, and in fact, poems were often recycled both in individual periodicals and
across competing publications. Furthermore, this model of women’s poetry is not unique to
the mainstream press; Mallarmé’s La Dernière mode and vers de circonstance, suggest that
poetic elites shared the same limited ideas about women readers we see in the mainstream
press.
In the final part of the chapter, I will analyze women’s poetry that went beyond this
narrow model of the poet’s relationship to the woman reader. In large part, it was women
poets, ranging from the relatively well-known Louise Colet and Marcelline DesbordesValmore to largely forgotten figures like Claudia Bachi and Aglaé de Corday who pushed the
boundaries of this relationship, promoting poetry as a unique community for women poets
and readers to share their experiences and suffering. As prefaces and poems taken largely
from their volumes of poetry show, this allowed them to reconfigure their relationship to the
woman reader outside the strict boundaries of what was seen as suited to readers of their
gender in mainstream publications. Taken together, these texts provide a broader and more
ambitious image of the poet-reader relationship as it pertained to women in the nineteenth
century.
Not coincidentally, women’s poetry and its models of readership were largely
antithetical to avant-garde poetry and its conception of readership in the second half of the
nineteenth century. While women’s poetry was a neglected subgenre in terms of prestige, it
was a major presence in society: tens of thousands of readers regularly read women’s
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magazines and journals and the poetry they published. In this way, women’s poetry had a
significant influence in defining poetic practice in the nineteenth century, arguably larger
than that of the insular poetic avant-garde. In light of this popularity, it is not an exaggeration
to understand the redefinition of avant-garde poetry and its readership by elite men as a
staking of positions in relation to the widely read and disseminated work of their female
counterparts.
I. Women Readers in Society and Literature
In the increasingly dominant bourgeois culture of mid-nineteenth-century France,
women were largely relegated to the private sphere, distinct from the male-dominated public
sphere. As many historians have pointed out, post-Revolutionary France was in many ways a
setback for French women: divorce was illegal between 1816 and 1884, and women were
considered minors in legal proceedings throughout the century (Foley 41). Bourgeois society
defined women primarily as wives and mothers, not actors in intellectual and literary life, as
some elite women had been in the Ancien Régime. In fact, as Susan K. Foley notes in Women
in France since 1789, in the nineteenth century, “the maternal-centered family” increasingly
became a model not just for bourgeois women, but also for women from both higher and
lower classes (45). Furthermore, as literature was increasingly autonomous and situated
outside the sociability of private salon culture, there was what Alain Vaillant calls a
“déféminisation du monde des Lettres” in his article “Conversations sous l’influence”: “Dans
le salon d’Ancien Régime, le centre est occupé par la maîtresse de maison […] qui s’opère la
médiation entre la pensée et le code de la politesse, la sensibilité et la socialité. […] Au XIXe
siècle, les auteurs tendent à rester entre eux et n’attendent plus de la femme, épouse légitime
ou femme entretenue, qu’un rôle subalterne” (103). The democratization of literature in the
press and through mass printing meant that women no longer played the central role that
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Vaillant describes; instead, as the previous chapter shows, the press and its literary critics
occupied this important new role. While some women continued to host salons, including the
poet Louise Colet and the actress Alice Ozy, they were, as Vaillant notes, more often the
mistresses of writers or artists than intellectual leaders, as Banville’s humorous epigram
suggests:
Les demoiselles chez Ozy
menées
Ne doivent plus songer aux hyménées ! (qtd. in Zenkine 152)
1. Women’s Education and Its Consequences for Readership
Unsurprisingly, this redefinition of women as wives (or mistresses) and mothers had
significant consequences on their education, as Foley points out: “Given their specific
destiny, girls were perceived to have little need of intellectual development, and until the late
nineteenth century received a patchy education designed to make them suitable companions
for their husbands” (29). There was no mandatory system of education for women throughout
the nineteenth century, and women’s illiteracy remained high until the 1890’s, when the
gender gap in literacy rates closed (Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century” 313).
Yet even among elite women, nineteenth century education was “intellectually limited,”
focusing almost solely on “accomplishments” like “music, dancing, drawing and…
languages” (Foley 30) rather than the wider range of subjects elite women might have learned
in the Ancien Régime, including Greek, Latin, poetry and mathematics, designed to make
them “briller à la Cour” (Parturier 10-11). Furthermore, women were often married at a
young age, allowing little time for education, and enabling their husbands to finish their
young wives’ education as they wished (Foley 39). The nineteenth-century feminist Olympe
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Audouard described this piecemeal system of education: “la maintenir dans l’ignorance est le
système d’éducation le plus répandu. […] je ne saurais mieux comparer ce système qu’à celui
que pratiquent les éleveurs de perroquets” (23). It was not until the 1880 loi Camille Sée,
named for its proponent in the Senate, that public collèges and lycées for women were
created. Even then, the decision was highly controversial, with major newspapers ridiculing
the “lycéens en joupons” and grammatically dubious “doctoreuses” and “professeuses”
(Ozouf 98).
The shortcomings of this type of education on women’s participation in literature both
as authors and readers are evident. As Gretchen Schultz notes in The Gendered Lyric, this is
particularly true for poetry, “a genre that relied so heavily on precedent” (3). Elite lycées for
men focused heavily on writing verse in both French and Latin, and all men who passed
through them read and wrote a considerable amount of poetry as a part of their basic
education. The effects of this educational disparity for women readers were understood, as an
1842 article on “Les femmes poètes” by the conservative journalist Gaston de Molènes in La
revue des deux mondes indicates: “Horace et Virgile ! bon gré, mal gré, nous les avons tous
eu pour compagnons dans les premières années de notre vie. […] Les femmes n’ont jamais eu
ces amitiés salutaires ; je crois donc qu’il y a des sources de poésie qu’elles puissent deviner,
[…] mais dont elles ne peuvent pas jouir” (59-60). Unlike elite men, who were so steeped in
classics from a young age that Horace and Virgil were their “compagnons” and “amis,”
women’s relationship to poetry is marked by difficulty: they are able only to “deviner,” and
cannot more fully and spontaneously “jouir,” as it is implied male readers do. As Joan
Acocella notes in a review of Belinda Jack’s The Woman Reader (2012), women’s lack of
education and intellectual difficulties were thus cyclical: without education, “women seemed
stupid; therefore, they were considered unfit for education; therefore, they weren’t given an
education; therefore they seemed stupid” (88). Because women were largely excluded from
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both the educational system of lycées and “informal social networks, such as salons and café
culture” (Schultz 3), those who were able to penetrate into the masculine world of elite poetry
were there “due to affinities with individual but influential members of the group, rather than
through direct participation with the inner circle,” as in the case of salonnières (idem 146).
2. Masculine Bas-Bleus and Women Readers
If, despite these severe limitations, women aspired to access culture as authors, they
were derided as bas-bleus. Taken from the British “blue stocking,” designating women’s
literary clubs in late eighteenth-century London, the term became a common pejorative for
the female author (Parturier 16), and in mid-nineteenth century France, bashing the bas-bleu
was “le bon sujet, le sujet à la mode et sans risque” (idem 14). In large part, the bas-bleu
challenged central aspects of the bourgeois image of womanhood by transgressing the
boundary between public and private at the heart of the bourgeoisie’s anxious self-definition:
unlike lower class women who had to work outside the home, for the bourgeois, “La femme
est censée être un objet de luxe” (Goblot 23). For this reason, bas-bleus were often depicted
as masculine in appearance and manners: Honoré Daumier’s satirical drawings of bas-bleus
portray them with large phallic noses and flat chests, smoking pipes, dressed like men (as the
writer George Sand famously did), and standing with their legs spread or hunching over
writing desks. They also neglected women’s most sacred duties in the home, as Jules Janin
asserted, by “renonçant à la beauté, à la grâce, à la jeunesse, au bonheur du mariage, aux
chastes prévoyances de la maternité, à tout ce qui est le foyer domestique, la famille,” in
short, everything that defined bourgeois femininity (qtd. in Parturier 22). While the bas-bleu
has been well-studied, certain aspects merit further attention here because of the specific
ways that criticism of the bas-bleu targeted a female readership.
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Just as critiques of the roman-feuilleton targeted it through attacks on its reader, as in
the example of the cuisinière in the previous chapter, so too did attacks on the bas-bleu
caricature her reader. In a remarkable image by Jules Vernier and accompanying passage in
the successful novelist Frédéric Soulié’s 1841 satirical novel Physiologie du Bas-Bleu, the
cuisinière trope is taken further, devaluing the woman poet through her audience – her own
cook: “Sa cuisinière elle-même prétendait qu’il avait une flamme dans les yeux. C’était là
une belle conquête ; le jour où une cuisinière peut croire à la supériorité de sa maîtresse est un
jour plus glorieux pour le Bas-Bleu que le jour où on la couronne au Capitole” (35-36).
(Soulié 36)
As we saw in the previous chapter, the cuisinière is the embodiment of the reading as
consuming metaphor: her literary tastes signify the easy pleasures of mediocre texts that she
can easily “gobble up,” in contrast with the focus and application it takes to understand “real”
literary works. The woman author is further ridiculed for the pride she takes in the cook’s
literary opinions, ironically compared to official state honors, an allusion to Madame de
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Staël’s titular character in Corinne, a constant comparison for women poets.6 Here, the cook
is a character straight from farce, propped on her broom with an entranced, if rather dim, look
on her face, deeply moved by a literary work which is obviously inferior because it appeals to
her. Furthermore, the contrast between these women’s appearance and their activities is
meant to signal the absurdity of their pretention to take part in literary culture: the mistress’s
dress and hair style make her appear frivolous and overwrought, particularly when seated at
the desk, and the cuisinière’s wistful pose is contrasted by her broom and apron.
Other images of women readers similarly associated them with the masculine actions
and appearance of the bas-bleu. For example, avid readers like Emma Bovary were depicted
as masculine and thus deviant according to the values of their society: Emma “se promène
avec son amant une cigarette à la bouche et s’habille en homme. Dans les représentations de
l’époque, ces attitudes sont interprétées communément comme des symptômes de déviation
sexuelle” (Sapiro 271). Emma is also the figure par excellence of the woman reader who is
unable to distinguish between reading and reality, a point emphasized by her deathbed scene,
in which she vomits up black bile, or ink, making literal the charge that reading was a
“poison” for women, a cliché present in nearly all moralizing accounts of reading (Leclerc
93). In these ways, the Emma Bovary character embodies the significant anxieties about
women’s association with the new mass literary culture as readers in the nineteenth century.
6
Souilé describes the proliferation of women poets under the Restoration an invasion of amazonian Corinnes:
“Corinne vivante, en chair et en os, s’est promenée dans les rues de Paris, a posé dans les fauteuils académiques,
a jeté des cris de poésie du sommet des Alpes, et a baigné les longues tresses de ses cheveux noirs dans les eaux
amouruses de Vaucluse et dans les flots guerriers du Rhin” (35). Similarly, Barbey d’Aurévilly, in his preface
to Eugénie de Guérin’s Reliquiae (1855) assured readers that she had nothing to do with Staël’s infamous
character: “La simple fille de la terrasse du Cayla n’était point une Corinne” (qtd. in Sauvé 56). Béatrice Slama
notes several other instances of the Corinne-mania among the nineteenth century critics in her article on
“Femmes écrivains”: “Delphine Gay […] est ‘Corinne enfant,’ Marie d’Agoult ‘la Corinne du quai Malaquais’ ”
(216).
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3. Effeminate Romantic Poets and Women Readers
On the other extreme, women readers were associated with an excess of femininity in
criticisms of Romantic poets’ emotional lyricism by later generations. As Gretchen Schultz
demonstrates in The Gendered Lyric, for the 1840 generation, the Romantic “lack of
compositional tightness came to signal femininity, as did the lack of emotional restraint and
focus on personal expression” (28). Lamartine was ridiculed by detractors through adjectives
with feminine connotations and grammatical forms like “indécise,” “molle,” “rose,” “lactée,”
and “gracieuse” (idem 96-7). Lautréamont similarly targeted Romantic poets in an 1870 letter
as “femmelettes” for their weepiness: “Toujours pleurnicher” (Les chants de Maldoror;
Poésies I et II; Correspondance 382-83). In these critiques, there is considerable slippage
between the characteristics of the poetry being attacked and its perceived readership; Leconte
de Lisle thus condescendingly refers to Lamartine’s emotional poems as “des gloires admises
dans les institutions de petites filles” (Derniers poèmes 264). Correspondingly, depictions of
women readers showed them as uniquely susceptible to the emotional and melancholy
character of Romantic poetry. Daumier’s satirical drawings of women readers, while less
physically hideous than the emasculating bas-bleu, are depicted as ridiculous and
sentimental, often unable to distinguish between reading and real life, like Emma Bovary. In
one image, a woman walking on a bluff with her husband, exclaims “O mon Victor idolatré
… il me vient une idée poétique !! précipitons-nous ensemble et à l’instant du haut de cette
grise falaise dans les flots bleus de l’Océan ! …” (Daumier 26). The imagery of the cliff and
the sea and the notion of melancholy and suicide as an “idée poétique” closely align this
critique of the woman reader with the critique of the excesses of Romantic lyricism in the
post-Romantic period.
As Gisèle Sapiro argues in La Responsabilité de l'écrivain, post-Romantic poets
therefore responded by emphasizing formalism and objectivity in poetry: “Contre le
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spontanéisme qui valorise l’émotion et la perception immédiate, ils multiplient les procédés
de distanciation : observation, description, ironie, style, construction formelle. Atteindre au
plus haut degré d’objectivité, tel est leur but, en rupture avec l’exaltation romantique de la
subjectivité” (191). This was also explained in specifically gendered terms, as Schultz makes
clear: “Parnassian poets […] began to view Romantic verse as weak and feminine or, more
simply stated, as low literature. Poets and critics questioned the positive valuation of
femininity and characterized elegiac poets as lacking in muscular qualities” (xi). This
gendered assessment of writing style and its feminine audience is omnipresent in poets’
critical essays and letters: Baudelaire praised the “vigoureux” Leconte de Lisle who “s’élève
bien au-dessus de ces mélancoliques de salon, de ces fabricants d’albums et de keepsakes où
tout, philosophie et poésie, est ajusté au sentiment des demoiselles” (OC 1961, 748). He also
contrasted the “serré, concaténé” style of Edgar Poe with the bas-bleu George Sand, who
“jette ses chefs-d’œuvre à la poste comme des lettres” (OC 1975, 2: 283). Everything in these
passages signals the woman reader’s negative effect on literature: the unpoliced and effusive
writing style, the association with non-literary genres like albums and letters, and the taste for
emotion and melancholy are adjusted according to young women’s “sentiment” of what
literature should be.
However, as a number of scholars have pointed out, Romanticism remained a hugely
male movement: “[t]he poetry of […] Romantics often confirms the Poet’s femininity,
although it rarely represents a female poet” (Schultz 33). Marlon Bryan Ross confirms in The
Contours of Masculine Desire that the poet was largely depicted “in ways sociohistorically
determined as masculine” (3), through metaphors closed to nineteenth-century women: as we
saw in chapter one, Hugo called the poet a “prophet” and “priest”; other Romantic poets
compared the Poet to a soldier, creator (Schultz 34-5), or “magically powerful male
adventurer” (Graña 165) engaging in “quest and conquest” (M.B. Ross 49), all of which
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excluded women as actors. However, the backlash against Romanticism in the 1840s did
have a more direct impact on women authors: “aux environs de 1840, il se faisait une réaction
contre la littérature des femmes […]. On se détournait de la poésie sentimentale, plaintive et
personnelle” (qtd. in Schultz 43).
Not much changed by the late nineteenth century: Verlaine and his poetry replaced
Lamartine as a favorite target of gendered barbs as “féminin,” “une de ces âmes femmes” and
a “vierge folle” according to Charles Maurras, Émile Zola and Rimbaud (qtd. in idem 210,
212). Furthermore, the qualities deemed “masculine” in literature – “erudition, opacity,
density, and abstraction” as well as impersonality and formalism, would largely characterize
Symbolist poetry through the end of the century (idem 248). In fact, as I will show in the
second section of this chapter, the conception that women’s poetry meant something vastly
different from serious male poetry is evident in Mallarmé’s choices of poems for women in
La Dernière mode. While, as Schultz notes, Symbolism’s lyric voices defy the central
masculine identity of Romantic and Parnasse poetry (xii), late nineteenth century movements
nonetheless defined themselves in specifically masculine terms and for an unambiguously
male readership.
4. Gender and Genre on Trial
Criticisms of the bas-bleu and disordered women readers reveal real anxieties in
society about women and reading culture, particularly with rise of the mainstream press in the
1830s and the marketing of literature specifically to women. As historians of reading like
Martyn Lyons have shown, new readers were seen as needing the guidance and protection of
more experienced readers – men (“New Readers in the Nineteenth Century” 314). This led to
debates in newspaper articles, books, and courts of law about what content was appropriate
for whom. This was tied to the gendering of genres and media: the newspaper feuilleton and
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novel were seen as specifically targeted to women, unlike the rest of the newspaper. Poetry
was also widely defined as a “male” genre, in contrast with the novel. This gendering of
genres in trials against poetry leads to a central and unresolved paradox: if only dispassionate,
educated men could read poetry, who was at risk?
In Crimes écrits, Yvan Leclerc excerpts a memoire by Eugène Poitou, the winner an
essay prize on morality in literature, which reveals how the novel was historically understood
as part of a social mission tied to women readers: “Le roman, ce doit être le monde meilleur.
Nous avons besoin […] de mêler à notre vie une certaine dose d'idéale: la réalité est souvent
si triste. Cet idéal, c'est la mission de l'art de nous l'apporter” (qtd. in Leclerc 48). Authors
like Flaubert and Baudelaire who did not fulfil this ideal of literature were accused of the
realism Poitou targets here. This view of the novel implicitly describes its connection with
the woman reader, who embodied the moral center for her husband and children within the
home, while “reality” is associated with a “masculine” medium, the newspaper, which dealt
in the sordid details of everyday life. This distinction between genres based on content and
readership is clear, as Leclerc asserts: “La fiction, féminine par genre grammaticale et par
destination, [...] doit remplir une sorte de rôle maternel. Le journal est mâle, lu par des
hommes sérieux, pratiques. La fiction doit consoler, reposer” (idem 45).
The insistence that the novel and feuilleton were specifically female, moral and ideal
explains the targeting of novels for immorality in trials; but what about poetry, a “male”
genre? While the defense in Baudelaire’s trial asserted that because of their elite, male
readership, poetry books should be judged differently from the feuilleton, “qui s’adresse à
tous indistinctement,” discussions of readership played almost no role in trials against poetry
(“Appendice” 386). In the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire, the prosecutor Ernest Pinard
insisted on the usual distinction between genres and the gender of the reader, noting that “les
pages légères de Madame Bovary tombent en des mains plus légères, dans les mains de
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jeunes filles, quelquefois de femmes mariées” (qtd. in Leclerc 105), while he only mentioned
readership in Baudelaire’s trial to confirm that “Les vers s’adressent aux hommes” (qtd. in
idem 108). As Leclerc notes, this largely evacuated the usual discussion of offended women
readers from his trial: “La poésie ne s’adressant qu’aux hommes, on est privé du
développement habituel dans les procès littéraires sur la vertu menacée des jeunes filles et des
épouses” (idem 253).
Yet Baudelaire seemed to take the possibility of a female readership seriously on a
personal level, warning his mother in a letter shortly after the initial publication of LFDM:
“Une seule recommandation : puisque vous vivez avec la famille Émon, ne laissez pas le
volume traîner dans les mains de Mlle Émon” (Correspondance 1: 411). Obviously, the
argument that his poetry was not meant for women readers was more than a means of defense
in his trial; as Elisabeth Ladenson writes in Dirt for Art’s Sake, this letter “suggests that
Baudelaire subscribed to the idea that female readers might well be corrupted by a book such
as his, which in this context means that reading his volume might turn innocent girls into the
very sort of women described in its pages” (58). If even the poet acknowledged and seemed
to fear the possibility that a woman might read his poetry, why didn’t the prosecution? And if
women reading poetry was not an issue, why did Sainte Beuve tell Baudelaire that he should
have written “A celle qui est trop gai” in Latin or Greek, languages accessible to both
Baudelaire and his prosecutors, but essentially, not to women? The notion that poetry was for
men was so pervasive, that the premise of a woman reader of poetry was not seen as a
plausible prosecutorial argument.
Other trials against poetry in the mid- to late nineteenth century reveal a central
paradox: while not questioning the cultural assumption that poetry was for male readers, they
nonetheless targeted content related to women, namely, female sexuality outside the confines
of marriage and motherhood. The majority of the poems targeted in Baudelaire’s trial, “les
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Bijoux,” “le Léthé,” “A celle qui est trop gai,” “les Métamorphoses du vampire,” “Lesbos,”
and “les Femmes damnées” all center on depictions of women’s sexuality; the same is true of
a young Verlaine’s Baudelairian “sapphic” love poems in Les Amies, sonnets en rime
féminine, tried in 1868, Jean Richepin’s La Chanson des gueux (1876) and Maupassant’s
poem, “Une fille,” (1879) (Leclerc 377, 87-89). The same focus on women’s sexuality is
evident in the majority of novels and plays charged; but these genres were considered suited
to women, and thus these trials seem to have a specific link to readership: keeping these
books out of the hands of women. In censoring poetry though, this central paradox remains:
who was threatened if only male readers could read such poetry? Although this question
remained unanswered in these trials, two things are clear: first, the cultural presupposition
that erudite poetry was solely for men was so strong that not even prosecutors questioned it.
Furthermore, these trials reveal the extremely restrictive nature of bourgeois society in the
Second Empire and Third Republic when it came to depictions of women’s sexuality in
literature: any depiction of femininity outside the accepted bounds of motherhood and
morality was subject to censorship, no matter for whom it was intended.
As we saw in the previous chapters, poetry and its readership were often defined in
negative and exclusionary ways by elite male poets; in this chapter, I aim to demonstrate that
the relationship between gender and poetry in the nineteenth century was much more
ambiguous than poets, literary critics and legal authorities claimed. Instead, by better
understanding women’s poetry and male poets’ attitudes towards it, we will see how the
claim that poetry was for men defined the genre via a specific practice of language with
specific goals that left out significant contemporary practices of poetry for and often by
women. In the next sections, I will analyze broader practices of poetry by and for women in
the nineteenth century in a variety of periodicals and books to provide a fuller view of
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women’s poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century, and enable us to better
understand what, exactly, elite male poets were defining themselves and their work against.
II. Women’s Poetry in the Press
As we saw in the previous chapter, the increased availability of periodicals in the
1830s played an important role in codifying bourgeois culture. Just as cultural critics defined
literary tastes, women’s periodicals defined women readers’ tastes, needs and interests, and in
so doing, womanhood itself. In fact, women’s periodicals played a central role in the
definition of bourgeois culture, as Goblot points out in his sociology of the bourgeois, La
barrière et le niveau (1925):
C’est à cette époque qu’on voit se former l’esprit bourgeois, se formuler le
monde de la vie bourgeoise. On peut en suivre l’évolution (elle est
étonnamment rapide) en parcourant les collections des journaux de modes et
des magazines destinés à l’éducation des familles. On y trouve, discutées avec
un sérieux comique, les graves questions du ‘bon ton’ et des ‘bonnes
manières’, ces mille riens qui font l’homme et la femme ‘bien élevés’, ces
minutieuses règles du ‘savoir-vivre’ à la délicate observation desquelles on
reconnaît un ‘homme comme il faut’. Et ces règles décident de tout : du
vêtement, du logement, du mobilier, des gestes, du langage, même des
opinions et des croyances. (8-9)
The women’s press also influenced society by targeting the family through women, dictating
the “rules” that set the bourgeoisie apart. As Gilles Feyel explains in “La Presse féminine au
XIXe siècle (1794-1914)” the women’s press in the nineteenth century included not only
periodicals which explicitly mention women or fashions in their titles, but all kinds of
publications for the family and children concerning style, decor, education and even popular
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medicine. When taken in this broad sense, he estimates that there were as many as 400
women’s publications over the course of the nineteenth century (36). While men were the
primary audience for newspapers (except of course, the feuilleton), the women’s press was a
veritable potpourri of subjects, from literature to advice on child rearing, recipes, sewing
patterns and the latest fashions (idem 31). Yet this diversity of subjects does not indicate a
diversity of viewpoints: these periodicals were tremendously conformist, prescribing how
women should dress, eat, decorate, and raise their children. As Evelyne Sullerot points out in
Histoire de la presse féminine en France des origines à 1848, the women’s press “cherche à
donner forme et à répandre toute théorie, toute morale, qui risquent d’engendrer une nouvelle
mentalité. […] Tout changement doit être signalé, que ce soit dans la façon de se vêtir, de
danser, de manger, de parler, d’aimer et de penser” (211). For this reason, the women’s press
is an essential place to understand the development and spread of assumptions about women
readers.
1. The Development of the Women’s Press
One of the earliest periodicals for women was the Journal des dames et des modes,
published between 1797 and 1839, which outlined the topics that would largely make up the
women’s press throughout the nineteenth century: social gossip, literature, theater reviews,
fashions and advertisements (Sullerot 94, Feyel 34). It had a virtual monopoly on women’s
fashion journals until Émile de Girardin launched La Mode, a major competitor, in 1815
(Sullerot 89). During the Restoration, the women’s press flourished: between 1818 and 1847,
there were sixty-three different periodicals for women (Feyel 36), focusing in particular on
“modes” and salons, reflections of the socially conservative monarchy (Sullerot 127). The
expansion of the women’s press accelerated during the Second Empire and Third Republic:
between 1849 and 1870, in addition to the periodicals already in circulation, thirty-four new
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women’s publications appeared, followed by another thirty between 1870 and the start of the
First World War (Feyel 36). While periodicals in the first half of the nineteenth century were
largely for well-off bourgeois and aristocratic women, during the Second Empire, new
publications were geared towards women readers from lower classes as well (Sullerot 138),
enabling them to reach greater numbers of readers. During this period, major women's
publications printed between 2000 and 5000 copies per issue; the largest periodicals like the
Moniteur de la mode (1843-1913) counted 10,000 subscriptions in 1848 and double that by
the end of the century. The popular La Mode illustrée (1860-1914) had 40,000 subscribers in
1865 and 100,000 just fifteen years later (Feyel 40-41), leading the 1880 Annuaire de la
presse française to call it “la plus belle affaire de librairie qui existe en France” (Mermet and
Avenel 252).
Despite the expanded choice of titles, content was especially restricted under the
Second Empire and the Third Republic, with their strict views on women’s role in society. As
we shall see, the question of morality was ever-present: the choice of literary content both
reflected and shaped conservative bourgeois opinions about what was appropriate for women
readers, and literary reviews focused predominantly on moral and religious criteria (Sullerot
184). Although these publications featured women writers, most periodicals were managed
by men, and, just like their male counterparts in the feuilleton, they had to toe the editorial
line, writing on approved topics. While in the previous chapter, we saw that poetry in the
feuilletons of major newspapers was often outdated and mediocre, this was even more the
case in the women’s press: after reading many women’s journals, I can confirm Sullerot’s
assertion that “dans cette presse, les journaux féminins sont certainement parmi les plus
médiocres” (210).
In recent decades, there has been increased critical attention on refocusing on
women’s poetry and women poets who have been “marginalized.” However, as evidenced by
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the huge numbers of subscriptions for major women’s periodicals, women’s poetry was much
more widely read than the work of avant-garde poets in little-read reviews, suggesting that
our notions of the center and the margins of poetic practice reverse the perspective that a
reader in the nineteenth century would have. Instead, it is important to recall that the
influence of women’s poetry was tremendous: not only on its thousands of real readers –
women and crucially, their families – but also in shaping the landscape of poetry in the
nineteenth century.
Despite the popularity and reach of these publications, many of them have not been
conserved, and are unavailable to researchers today. Other, smaller publications mentioned in
the Annuaire de la presse, which might tell a more interesting story about women’s poetry,
including La revue de la mode, whose editor was none other than the outspoken woman poet
Louise Colet, have similarly been lost. For this reason, I limited my research to several
periodicals digitized by the French National Library: the Journal des dames et des modes
(1797-1839), La Sylphide. Revue parisienne. Littérature, arts, mode (1840-1873) and Le
Miroir parisien: journal des dames et des demoiselles (1865-70) as well as Mallarmé’s La
Dernière mode (1874). If there is a silver lining in this loss of original documents, it is that
the content of women’s publications was so limited and repetitive, that the women’s
periodicals I read seem largely representative of what was available to women readers in the
nineteenth century.
The Journal des dames et des modes early established the types of content that would
define women’s periodicals, and it served as a model for other publications, including La
Sylphide, which catered to the most high-end clientele of the publications I studied. It
appeared every ten days, and in addition to the colored plates nearly all women’s magazines
featured and used as a major selling point, was lavishly illustrated with engravings between
each article. It cost 28 francs for a yearly subscription, clearly reserving it for women from
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well-off families. Like many women’s periodicals, it prominently featured serial novels with
female-centered titles like Louise: roman intime and L’orpheli e de Waterloo, while poetry
was found in the last pages. It also covered Parisian social life, theater and music, the history
and culture of food, reviews of new products, and a variety of columns on women’s fashions.
Le Miroir parisien, published between 1865-1870, appeared once a month and cost a more
modest 10 francs for a yearly subscription. It was also more simply formatted with fewer
illustrations, although it included many of the same types of articles: fiction, some poetry,
fashions, theater and music reviews, and a chronicle of Parisian life. Unlike La Sylphide,
whose well-off subscriber likely had more domestic help, Le Miroir parisien also featured
useful resources like sewing and embroidery patterns and recipes. This formula was common
among publications meant for less well-off women, for whom household management was a
central concern (Foley 30). In contrast, an 1850 article in La Sylphide, entitled “comment
employer sa journée” described the boredom common among its readers, advising them to go
shopping and get their hair done in the new styles (October 10, 1850). Clearly, this advice
was meant for a very elite slice of the population. However, as I will show, despite real
differences in cost and readership, the poetry in these periodicals addressed the woman reader
in strikingly similar and repetitive ways: poetry for women centered on prescriptive
evocations of women as wives, mothers and moral guides as well as exhortations to specific
actions, like charity and consumerism. Taken together, these publications present us with an
extremely limited conception of the woman reader’s relationship to poetry and the poet in
mid- to late nineteenth century France.
2. Poetry as Prescriptive Moral Lesson
Poetry in the women’s press centered on prescribing morality to women, and through
them to their families, putting into practice the dictum of the day: “si les hommes font les
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lois, ce sont les femmes qui font les moeurs” (Sullerot 209). An 1850 editorial comment in La
Sylphide shows how editors considered moral lessons as the central criterion in selecting
poetry for women readers. Introducing the poem “Le vapeur et les ballons,” a rare lyric poem
inspired by new aerial technologies, they justified their unconventional choice: “les lecteurs
de la sylphide connaissent notre répugnance à publier les poésies qui ne renferment aucune
valeur d'idée, ni aucune portée morale ; mais nous espérons qu'on nous saura gré d'extraire
d'un recueil lyrique l’ode suivante” (November 20, 1850). By insisting on their “revulsion” at
the thought of publishing poetry not explicitly focused on morality, the editors of this
publication reveal the didacticism at the heart of the poet-readership relationship in the
women’s press. This passage also indicates the extent to which this conception of poetry was
dominant: any move away from it needs to be explained and justified. Furthermore, it
indicates how male editors and publishers inserted themselves into the poet-reader
relationship as important intermediaries assuring the morality of women readers and often
women poets. This passage also points to the way that the model of the poet-reader
relationship in the mainstream women’s press was antithetical to what was going on in
literature in this period; it is precisely this notion that the poet was a moral guide for the
reader that literary modernism disputed. As Goblot notes, “L’idée que la bourgeoisie s’est
faite de la moralité a rendu impossible l’éducation littéraire et artistique de la femme” (94).
This didactic model of the poet-reader relationship indicates that the central practices of the
women’s press were at odds with the orientation of avant-garde poetry.
This editorial note also highlights the bizarre tendency of women’s periodicals to
address male “lecteurs” in some literary articles rather than “lectrices.” In fact, in La
Sylphide, discussions of literature not specifically gender coded for women, that is not
centered on motherhood and morality, often mentioned an imagined male “lecteur.” For
example, an elogious three-page review of Hugo’s Les Contemplations in 1856 by the literary
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critic Julien Lemer insists on a male reader, although the poems he excerpts concern
motherhood and mourning, obviously specifically chosen for the female readers of this
publication. Nonetheless, he insists on the importance of Hugo for the male reader: “Tous les
hommes quelques peu lettrés de cette nombreuse génération […] ont dû ou doivent éprouver
un sentiment analogue en retrouvant devant eux ce nom objet de tant d’admiration et
d’enthousiasme”; “à quel jeune homme de ce temps-là Victor Hugo ne fut-il pas comme un
ami éloquent […] ?” (April 30, 1856). It seems that when morality was not the central topic
or when the author concerned was prestigious, like Hugo, women readers – even in a
publication explicitly for women – were relegated to a secondary status as readers. Like
Molènes, Lemer asserts that the male reader has a much stronger tie to Hugo, for whom he is
an intimate “ami,” putting women readers of Hugo at arm’s length. Contrastingly, other
editorial notes in La Sylphide specifically addressed “lectrices” when the poems concerned
specifically female themes, like Jules Frey’s “Les Femmes” (January 10, 1850), or were
written by women poets, like Rose Harel and Adèle Caldelar, whose interest for “lectrices” is
highlighted in two reviews (May 10 and November 30, 1862).
La Sylphide and Le Miroir parisien also affirmed this didactic model of the poetreader relationship through the frequent publication of fables, often with explicit morals
designed to be remembered and repeated. To name just a few of the abundant examples, E.
Ménissier’s “L’enfant et le vase” puts the moral in the mouth of the “calme et sévère”
mother, who tells her son, “qui trop embrasse mal étreint” (La Sylphide, April 10, 1858).
Juliette Lormeau’s “Le ver luisant et le ver de terre” teaches the reader that “L’éclat des
envieux attire la colère,/ L’obscurité nous met à l’abri des méchants” (La Sylphide, February
10, 1860). A particularly amusing example is the fable “Le chien et le lapin,” written by a
thirteen year-old Napoléon Bonaparte in 1782, which ends with the Napoleonic moral “Aidetoi, le ciel t’aidera” (Le Miroir parisien, April 1869). The fables chosen are often short,
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between twenty and thirty lines of verse, and almost always have an explicit moral at the end,
making them easy to read aloud to children and providing moral lessons that are easily
remembered and repeated. As the example “L’enfant et le vase” shows, these texts sometimes
put words in the (fictional) mother’s mouth, blurring the line between fable and reality by
prescribing a specific lesson to the child through the mother/reader. While these moral poems
and their often female authors are not remembered today, their influence at the time was
likely immeasurable, as Evelyne Sullerot remarks: “quelle influence n’ont-elles pas eue
réellement, ces conteuses qui bercerent l’enfance de tant et tant d’enfants et leur inculquerent
cette morale courante…?” (173).
The didactic aim of poetry in the women’s press is also evident in poems which
provide women with models to emulate or avoid, particularly of women as mothers and
lovers. In particular, during the Second Empire, publications adhered to a conservative image
of women, focusing in particular on ideals of motherhood (Feyel 44-5). In a society where
women were largely confined to the home, motherhood marked an important turning point in
their lives, which brought them a special status in society, and provided fulfillment that
marriages of connection often did not (Foley 48). In women’s poetry, the cult of motherhood
is omnipresent: many poems focused on an idealized maternal love and intimacy between
mother and child. For example, in the poem “L’enfant et l’oiseau” by Madame Eugénie
Dupuis, childhood is remembered fondly as a cherished time in life: “… j’ai prié Dieu de me
laisser longtemps/ L’âge où, sur ses genoux, je me glisse à tout heure;/ L’âge où j’ai ses
baisers…” (La Sylphide, Novermber 30, 1858). The poem “L’ange gardien” by Marie de
Gallet Kulture published in La Sylphide the following year calls the mother an “Ange
d’amour” (June 10, 1859). Similarly, the poem “Memoria” by Felix Daviot, published in Le
Miroir parisien in 1866, fondly recalls: “le nom d’une mère” and “les baisers de l’enfance”
(September 1866). Poems about motherhood by celebrated Romantic poets, whose work, as
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we saw, was seen in the mid-nineteenth century as suited to emotional women readers, were
also published in the women’s press. This is especially true of poets like Lamartine and
Hugo, whose poems about children and religious devotion were featured regularly in Le
Miroir parisien. As their titles indicate, Hugo’s poems “Sur le tombeau d’un enfant au bord
de la mer” and “Dieu est toujours là” published in 1864, fit in well with the dominant
evocations of womanhood in this periodical, providing suitable ideals for women readers.
Many other poems feature invocations of guardian angels to watch over and protect
children, providing prayers for women readers to repeat, like Marie de L’Epinay’s
“L’Angelus,” published in the Journal des dames et des modes (December 10, 1837), the
“Prière de mère” reviewed earlier that year and the poem “A ma fille Marie (Héloise), le jour
de sa naissance” by “Achille G – t,” published in the same review in 1839. These poems give
women the words to ask the Virgin Mary or other saints to guard over their children, a real
concern in the nineteenth century, when infant mortality remained high, even among the
higher classes (Foley 48). Many other poems explore a mother’s sorrow at the death of her
child, like “Pauvre enfant, pauvre mère” by J. Martin de Morestel, addressed to a young
victim who ascended to heaven, as an “ange du ciel” while “Celle qu’il faut plaindre,…/
C’est ta mère qui prie et pleure” (La Sylphide November 20, 1855). At times, this had
particular contemporary significance: in 1872, Le Miroir parisien published an anonymous
poem entitled “Pouvoir des larmes” from Silesia, about a deceased child whose mother’s
tears prevent him from finding eternal rest. While the topic – the death of a child – was
common, these poems added a contemporary significance, marking historic events in a
particular way for women and mothers.
While motherhood was seen as a “natural” way for women to access poetry, editors
reminded readers that motherhood remained their most important role. In an 1837 review of
Hermance Lesguillon’s Rosées, in the Journal des dames et des modes, the editor Marie de
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L’Épinay writes that “Il n’est point une mère qui ne votera des remercimens à madame
Lesguillon, pour avoir traduit en un si gracieux langage les sentimens que l’on éprouve près
du berceau d’un nouveau né [sic]” (May 10, 1837). This maternal poetry is seen as the
translation of a shared female experience, one that can be appreciated by women readers
because it puts into words what they too feel as mothers. Yet the review carefully points out
to its readership that motherhood is more important than poetry for women: “Que peut être la
gloire de mettre un ouvrage au monde, pour celles qui donnent le jour à l’homme! et quelle
est la mère qui ne se sentira pas plus d’orgueil au cœur, pour avoir produit un Byron, un
Châteaubriand, un Victor Hugo ou un Lamartine, que pour avoir fait imprimer un roman chez
Janet ou Ollivier !” (ibid.). An excerpt of the poet’s “Prière d’une mère” supports this idea:
“Mon fils! que mon orgueil voit d’un oeil triomphant!/ […]/ Lui, c’est mon avenir, c’est mon
autre existence” (ibid.). While Lesguillon’s work was judged good enough to merit an
elogious review in a major women’s publication and be featured alongside prominent poets,
both reviewer and poet are careful to emphasize to the reader that the work of the woman
poet is always secondary to her role as a mother, as it should also be for her.
Just as poetry about motherhood prescribes the proper relationship between the
woman reader and her child, poems about love in the women’s press prescribe appropriate
relationships to men. In these poems, women are depicted either as muses and love objects
for male poets or, when the poetry is by a woman, as lovers who sacrifice themselves to men.
The examples of love poems I found were mainly in publications for upper-class women, the
Journal des dames et des modes and La Sylphide. Interestingly, I did not find any love poems
in Le Miroir parisien, which addressed women and “demoiselles.” Instead, it focused on
fables and poems about motherhood, avoiding passion and love entirely, even within sociallyaccepted bounds.
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Love poems by male poets feature the woman as muse, a distant, unattainable, figure
and source of inspiration for the male poet. In fact, Molènes wrote in “Les Femmes Poètes”
that this was the true meaning of women’s poetry: “je ne leur demande même pas de renoncer
à la poésie, si l’on donne à ce mot son véritable sens : leur poésie, à elles, est dans les vers
qu’elles inspirent et non pas dans ceux qu’elles font. Leur poésie, avant tout, c’est d’être
belles et de se faire aimer” (76). These poems are among the most unoriginal and
uninteresting in the women’s press, and fall almost entirely on canonical images found in
French poetry since the tradition of amour courtois – flowers and birds, youth and
springtime. An example from 1862 neatly sums up the use of every cliché element in a love
poem: aptly titled “Amour,” a poem published under the pseudonym Stephen, describes the
elusive love object as a “bel ange,” and a “hirondelle” with “lèvres roses”; she is in the
“printemps” of life and “Met l’incendie [au] cœur” (La Sylphide March 10, 1862). Despite
the conservative and chaste depiction of love as inspiration, the poet emphasizes the lesson
the woman reader should retain: “…tout se délie,/… tout bonheur doit finir” (ibid.). Another
poet, Théodore Alfonsi, acknowledges in his love poem “Le Printemps” that this type of
poetry is out of style: the poet who writes about love in springtime “… se voit traiter de
rapsode,/ De perruque et de rococo!...” (La Sylphide June 10, 1857). Out of style as these
poems may have been in literary circles, they were quite common in the women’s press,
reminding women readers that love was as fleeting as youth and springtime.
When women poets are the ones expressing their love, they teach readers what Susan
Foley describes as “the acceptable ideal that that women should surrender themselves to love,
seeking fulfillment only in devotion to a man” (36). The poem “A toi” by Juliette Lormeau,
published in La Sylphide in 1858, demonstrates this through metaphors for burning and
consumption of the woman martyr (“Je veux me consumer à la divine flamme,/ Qui jaillit de
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ton cœur et qui brûle le mien !”) for whom love is “le seul bonheur que Dieu m’ait donné sur
la terre.” The poem ends with her imagining losing this love as her demise:
S’il me fallait, hélas ! perdre ce bien suprême !
Rien ne pourrait jamais consoler ma douleur,
Et j’y succomberais en murmurant : Je t’aime !
Dans le dernier soupir exhalé par mon cœur ! (August 10, 1858)
While the emotion is profound and passionate, it is centered on the woman’s sacrifice and
carefully described as God’s will, not transgressive.
Poems about passion outside of socially acceptable bounds served as cautionary tales
for women readers, like the long narrative poem “Madeleine” by Louise Leneveux, published
in La Sylphide in 1864. In the second part of the poem, after setting the scene of a poor
country village, young Madeleine’s father dies, leaving her alone and at risk to her passion:
Mais hélas ! dans ses yeux qui révélaient son âme
Brillait timidement une naissante flamme.
Au doux bonheur d’aimer s’abandonnant un jour,
Confiante, naïve, elle crut à l’amour.
Bientôt elle oublia les leçons de sa mère,
Jusqu’à la croix d’honneur que son pauvre vieux père
Comme un dépôt sacré lui présenta mourant,
Disant : Je te bénis, sois sage, ô mon enfant !
Crois-en mes cheveux blancs, le bonheur d’une femme
Ne saurait être vrai sans la paix de son âme.
Malheur ! de ses conseils il ne lui restait rien !
Rien ! que le désespoir, la honte, le chagrin !
Car celui qu’elle aimait d’une tendresse folle,
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Sans honneur et sans foi manquait à sa parole ;
Il délaissait l’enfant qu’il avait égaré,
Et le nom d’un vieux brave était déshonoré ! (January 30, 1864)
The outcome is, of course, tragic: Madeleine becomes an outcast and dies in penance at
seventeen. The poem contains an extractable moral for young women readers in the words of
her father: a woman’s happiness is in “la paix de son âme.” While the poem alludes to her
passion, it is only in passing; instead, it emphasizes for the reader in great detail the terrible
outcome of such behavior: dishonor, ostracism and a tragic death. This poem aims to elicit
fear in the woman reader of her sexuality outside marriage, which Goblot describes as the
foremost taboo in bourgeois society: “la ‘bonne société’ […] réprouve si sévèrement toute
immoralité sexuelle qu’elle ne supporte pas qu’on en parle, fût-ce par allusion et à mots
couverts, du moins en présence des dames. Et l’interdiction ne porte pas seulement sur le vice
et la débauche ; elle s’étend aussi à ce que la sexualité a de plus innocent” (70). These
numerous images of women as mothers, love objects and moral guides in poetry provide
readers with memorable examples, counterexamples and repeatable morals aimed to reinforce
in their minds their proper roles in society.
3. Poetry as an Exhortation to Action
Other examples from the women’s press indicate that the poet-reader relationship
there was also based on rhetorical exhortations to action. This is evident in a variety of
poems: in some cases, poems by popular authors were used as examples of the working
people’s plight, and explicitly encouraged bourgeois women to take charitable action. In
other cases, the actions suggested were not so noble: periodicals encouraged women, who
often controlled discretionary income at home, to become consumers of certain books and
publications, blurring the lines between editorials, poetry and advertisements. In these cases,
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the press seems to dwell on bourgeois women’s anxiety about fitting in with their social peers
that Sullerot mentions. However different the aims though, this type of poetry confirms the
limited roles ascribed to women readers in the mainstream women’s press.
Poems about the popular classes often aimed to elicit sadness and pity among
bourgeois readers and inspire them to charitable action. This in part reflects the social
mission that Foley describes: “elite women […] assumed important roles in the broader
society. The ideal woman of the elite turned her maternal virtues – her compassion, her moral
strength and practical accomplishments – to the benefit of the less fortunate” and in particular
to “the needs of poor women and children” (51). Charity was significant in an era before
social welfare systems to help the less fortunate were in place (idem 51-2), and women’s
publications played an important role in defining charitable actions as important for women
readers. For example, an anonymous narrative poem entitled “Les sœurs des pauvres” in La
Sylphide in 1850 was introduced by an editorial note praising the work it described: “Nous
prêtons avec empressement le concours de notre publicité à l’œuvre de bienfaisance que
viennent de fonder de saintes filles pour secourir les pauvres vieillards” (July 10, 1850). The
poem describes how a group of nuns miraculously fed and housed the indigent when they had
little to spare themselves, ending with the exhortation of the “riches” readers: “Soyez donc
généreux” (ibid.). Two poems by the famous gougettier and chansonnier Savinien Lapointe
published in La Sylphide in 1855 describe the misfortune of poor women at the hands of
alcoholic male relatives: “La fille du l’ivrogne” describes the misfortunes of a young girl,
Claire, in the refrain:
Il a bu, le père de Claire,
Il a bu comme un trou
Ce méchant vin de la barrière
Qui le rend fou. (January 10, 1855)
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Another poem entitled “Madeleine” (a favorite biblical reference in poems which describe
poor, sexually compromised women), similarly describes the long-suffering wife of an
alcoholic, who repeats in the refrain: “La tâche est rude,/ Mais de souffrir j’ai l’habitude :/ La
tâche est rude!” (La Sylphide March 20, 1855).
While eliciting sympathy and calling on women to help the poor, this was not without
condescension, as Foley points out: “Since women ‘naturally’ protected and guided children,
and supervised their moral development, they were well placed to perform a comparable role
amongst the poor, who were also perceived as ‘children’ in need of guidance” (52). This is
also evident in many of the articles in the women’s press in which women with aristocratic
titles gave lessons and advice to women of more modest means on everything from literature
and fashion to raising their children. As we will see in the next chapter, the association
between morality and social class was important in maintaining class distinctions in
nineteenth-century society: charitable actions were not only were good, but proved the high
status and good breeding of the women who took them. Furthermore, that bourgeois women’s
periodicals featured poetry about and by people from the popular classes after the early
1850s, when the dominant literary culture had abandoned the social imperative for poetry,
indicates the extent to which poetry in the women’s press was out of step with male poetic
practices, even those that were not particularly avant-garde. In other words, while the status
of the peuple was seen as an important question for elite poetry in the 1830s and 1840s, by
the 1850s, the evocation of their plight was relegated to women readers and women’s
periodicals.
In a somewhat less noble call to action through poetry, women’s publications
encouraged women to purchase books and periodicals that would distinguish them as savvy
consumers. Women’s publications in nineteenth century prominently featured advertisements
which were not relegated to the last few pages, as in newspapers, but were woven into the
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text itself, “offering a kind of fragmented reading, more perfectly attuned to the interrupted
working rhythm of the modern housewife” (Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century”
318). In addition, there were veiled advertisements in product placements and
recommendations by editors, making it difficult to distinguish content from ads. This
occurred even in poetry rubrics, most commonly in elogious introductions to certain poets,
and sometimes in an overt recommendation to purchase a book. Excerpts of fables by Adèle
Caldelar were published in La Sylphide along with this editorial note: “Nous sommes
persuadé que nos spirituelles et aimables lectrices […] trouveront comme nous que les
Nouvelles Fables morales et religieuses sont ce que l’on peut offrir de plus charmant en tout
temps, et surtout comme cadeau de jour de l’an” (November 30, 1862), encouraging women
not only to buy the book, but to buy multiple copies to give as gifts. Earlier the same year, an
editorial note accompanying a volume of poetry by the popular poet Rose Harel, a regular in
La Sylphide and Le Miroir parisien, went even further, combining a call for charity with
consumerism in the poetry section:
L’auteur, Rose Harel, […] pauvre fille des champs, frêle et chétive
créature, dont l’enfance n’a été qu’une lutte cruelle entre la misère et la
maladie, est une humble servante attachée au service d’une famille bourgeoise
de Lisieux, et c’est en vaquant aux soins les plus vulgaires du ménage de ses
maîtres qu’elle compose ou plutôt qu’elle chante les poésie qu’on a eu
l’excellente pensée de recueillir.
[…]
Nous sommes persuadé que nos aimables lectrices répondront à ce
chaleureux appel, et s’empressent d’adresser leur souscription au journal qui a
pris l’initiative de cette publication. (La Sylphide May 10, 1862)
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In another example, a blatant plug for the magazine is embedded into the text of a
poem, signaling an extreme point in the poet-reader relationship is imagined as a sales pitch.
“L’art de plaire” tells the story of two girls, Léontine and Marie, of equal beauty, goodness
and virtue; but only Léontine has luck with suitors. When Marie asks her friend her secret,
she responds:
‘Pour captiver les cœurs il faut charmer les yeux.’
Voilà ce que me dit mon ange tutélaire,
Et, tout en m’amusant, il m’apprend l’art de plaire.
Il dirige mon goût, m’enseigne un petit rien
Que nous ne saurions pas et qui nous va si bien.
Mais vous voulez savoir quel bon ange me guide :
C’est un simple journal, le voici… la Sylphide. (February 10, 1861)
The poem takes the form of an enigma: what “petit rien” or “simple journal” can have such a
profound effect on the two girls’ marriage chances? Léonide, whose speech is quoted in the
above passage, sells the magazine to her friend Marie and to the reader, blending literature
and reality with the demonstrative “le voici… la Sylphide.” This poem-ad exemplifies the
new role of poetry as an object of mass culture and consumption specifically associated with
women readers in this period. This remarkable example also marries several dominant traits
of women’s poetry by directly targeting the reader with images of ideal femininity and
directing her actions through explicit directives within the very text of a poem. These
examples show how the mainstream press defined poetry for women in the very limited terms
of a didactic, prescriptive and exhortative relationship to poetry and the poet.
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The impression of repetitiveness in these poems and their relationship to the reader is
exacerbated by the fact that periodicals sometimes republished the same poems and borrowed
content from rival publications. In the first case, La Sylphide provides abundant examples
between 1861 and 1867, when it republished the same handful of poems: the love poem
“Eva” by Ludovic Duperche was published in 1861 and again in 1864, and Madame Adele
Esquiros’ poem “Sœur Berthe,” about an admirable young woman who becomes a nun after
the death of her fiancé, was published twice in 1864, once in 1865, three times in 1866 and
twice more in 1867! While the exact motivation for repeating these poems is unclear, it points
to the growing ambivalence towards literary content in La Sylphide, in particular poetry,
before its reformatting in 1868 with increased illustrations and content focused almost
entirely on fashion and society, drastically reducing the number of pages given to literature.
The editors in the years seem unable or unwilling to pay for new poetic content, instead
focusing on articles about fashion and society, and not on poetry that a reader would be hardpressed to identify as out of date, considering its well-trodden themes and forms. This
example shows that the women’s press was undergoing the same transition as newspapers,
with the 1860s and 70s marking a cleavage between literature and other content in
periodicals.
Women’s publications also recycled poetry and articles from other one another. For
example, the fable “Le Buisson” by H.M. de Morestel ends with a small note marking its
original publication in the Magasin des familles (La Sylphide February 20, 1857).
Unsurprisingly, La Sylphide relied more heavily on poems borrowed from other publications
after 1868, when it became less focused on literature. In a few instances, the editors use the
borrowed poems as a chronicle of what is going on in other publications. For example, a
notice of the death of M. de Boissieu, president of the Société des Gens de lettres, notes what
other periodicals are saying about him: “le Siècle s’est honoré en ne marchandant point
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l’expression de sa sympathie. Le François seul a pris une attitude de juge et de critique qui
n’est pas exempte de l’aigreur habituelle à ce journal. Le Gaulois a eu la bonne idée
d’emprunter aux Poésies d’u Passa t quelques vers exquis” (La Sylphide April 12, 1873).
The poem in question is reprinted here, allowing the editors to borrow Le Gaulois’s “good
idea” and recycle the same content. An 1873 rubric entitled “Cueillette” takes the idea of
borrowing content even further by making it a standard feature, republishing poems like “le
Premier enfant” (February 16, 1873) which is, of course, an idealizing evocation of
motherhood.
4. The Woman Reader in Elite Publications
This limited view of the woman reader and didactic poet-reader relationship was not
unique to the mainstream women’s press; in fact, the poetry in Mallarmé’s fashion magazine
La Dernière mode, a cult publication, is strikingly similar. Published in eight installments in
1874, Mallarmé’s magazine has been an object of critical attention in recent years. While
some critics claim that the entire project was either literary (a series of prose poems), or
ironic (a joke meant to be shared only among friends), P.N. Furbank and Alex Cain note in
Mallarmé on Fashion that “there is evidence […] that the journal was a real one” (12).
Furthermore, as the authors assert, such notions reveal “a bizarre but rooted prejudice […]
that Mallarmé simply could not have been interested in Fashion” (ibid). Tellingly, while
Mallarmé famously wrote all the articles on fashion, décor, society, and even menus and
floral arrangements under a variety of pseudonyms, the only thing he did not write was the
literary content: a short story and poem in each of the eight installments (idem 4-5). For these
sections, he included works by friends such as Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, Sully
Prudhomme, Alphonse Daudet, Emmanuel des Essarts, and Léon Cladel.
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While we might expect that with a roster of such notable literary figures, the poems
would provide a less generic and didactic model of the poet’s relationship to the woman
reader than that of the mainstream press, of which these poets were critical, it is shocking
how closely these eight poems resemble those published in La Sylphide and Le Miroir
parisien. For example, Sully Prudhomme’s “Conseil” advises a young lady on her marriage
choices:
Jeune fille, crois-moi s’il en est temps encore,
Choisis un fiancé joyeux, à l’œil vivant,
Au pas ferme, à la voix sonore,
Qui n’aille pas rêvant. (September 20)
Alphonse Daudet’s “La vierge à la crèche” describes a young Virgin Mary unable to calm the
crying baby Jesus, explicitly comparing this ideal mother to the woman reader in the use of
the first person plural: “Elle le berçait, et chantait tout bas/ Ce que nous chantons à nos petits
anges…” (December 20). Similarly, Banville’s “La dernière pensée de Weber” (September
6), and Valade’s “Inquiétude” describe the woman in poetry as a muse whose love is fleeting,
the latter through the synechdoche of her hand: “La petite main qui m’est chère/ […]/ Qui
pèse à mon bras si légère,/ Y pèsera-t-elle demain ?” (October 4).
Most of the poems by women in the second and third Parnasse contemporain (PC)
could also have fit within the mainstream women’s press. While this publication was not
intended primarily for women readers, the poems by the eight women poets included in the
second and third PC largely conform to accepted models of the poet-reader relationship for
women. Furthermore, these poems are limited in number: in the second PC, directed by
Leconte de Lisle and published in installments between 1869 and 1871, and the third PC,
published in 1876 by Banville, Coppée and Anatole France, poems by women make up only
about 5% of the total number of pages and poems. Nonetheless, as Schultz shows, these
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publications have typically been judged as more female and less prestigious by scholars:
“Critics tend to consider the first volume the most coherently ‘Parnassian’ of issues, while
suggesting that the third and final volume had lost its specificity. Clearly ‘less Parnassian’
means as well more female and more democratic” (145).
The third PC, abandoning a hierarchical order for an alphabetical one, placed Louise
Ackermann first. Somewhat ironically, this means that the very first poem of the volume,
entitled “Une femme,” is a poem about women explicitly addressed to women. However, this
poem is mostly remarkable for its very conventional address of the woman reader. In it,
Ackermann describes the “tache austère” (2) facing the titular woman she describes, “dans le
sentier rude avançant lentement” (3). She is a model of charity and selflessness: “Vers tous
les malheureux la main toujours tendue,/ …l’époux, [et] enfant à ce cœur ont puisé,/
…l’espoir de plusieurs sur Elle est déposé” (6-8). Rather than a source of pity, she is
presented as a model for women readers: “Femmes, enviez-la,” Ackermann tells them (9)
repeating this exhortation (“Enviez-la”) in line 13. The poem closes with a religious
comparison of the woman to “La colombe au cou blanc qu’un vent du ciel ramène,/ Vers
cette arche en danger de la famille humaine.” Clearly, when including women poets in the
PC, even an avant-garde publication retreated to a remarkably conventional conception of
poetry’s relationship to the woman reader. Other poems in the PC by women which do not
specifically address women or topics deemed suitable to them adhere to a strict repertoire of
Parnassian themes. This implies that in the rare cases where women poets were accepted in
prestigious male publications and groups, it was on the condition that they fulfilled the
expectations of male editors either through their allegiance to the Parnasse school or by
belonging to a tradition of essentially female poetry, like Ackermann. Clearly the avant-garde
nature of the PC did not extend to women’s poetry and its readership.
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Another important tradition which reveals the way that literary authorities envisioned
women readers is the association between poetry for women and vers d’occasio or vers de
circonstance. In some cases, poems in the women’s press are meant to mark a national event,
like those in newspaper feuilletons: La Sylphide published the “Prologue d’inauguration de la
salle Barthélémy” by Mery in 1851 and Alfred Seguin’s poem about the end of the Prussian
war, “Paris ne mourra pas” in 1871. There was also a longstanding mondain tradition of vers
de circonstance, poems dedicated to a specific person to commemorate an occasion, like the
birth of a child associated with women authors in the early women’s press; as Catriona Seth
notes in “Les Muses de l’Almanach” about the early women’s publication the Almanach des
Muses, published yearly between 1765 and 1833, “Très souvent, le poème est une pièce de
circonstance envoyée par exemple à un ami en guise d’étrennes” (107).
In this case, however, there are significant modifications in the personal connotations
of the vers de circonstance in the impersonal medium of the press. In the press, the woman
reader is no longer the destinatrice, but an anonymous woman. In this context of anonymity,
the function of the genre changes: is no longer a question of sociability, but instead it seems,
guaranteeing the appropriateness of poetry for women. The destinatrice, usually an elite
woman with a title, occupies a role as a public guarantor of the poem, her title bestowing her
moral authority on it. This is not entirely dissimilar from a preface which provides guarantors
for the unknown poet, but what is guaranteed in the women’s press is not so much talent, but
more precisely the suitableness of the content for women readers. The mention of a
destinatrice signals that the poems were originally written with a woman reader in mind.
Furthermore, by harking back to this earlier tradition, this type of poetry inscribes both author
and reader in the private sphere as correspondents rather than in the public sphere, which only
the mannish bas-bleu aimed to access. For women readers and poets, the vers de circonstance
thus reassure on several levels that this poetry is suited to the woman reader.
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Mallarmé is a reference point for this tradition, having written hundreds of vers de
circonstance during his life, mostly in the form of witty quatrains accompanying gifts or
letters for friends and acquaintances, often women. However, only twenty-seven of these
quatrains were published during his lifetime; many more remained unpublished until 1920,
well after his death, and still form an ambiguous part of his oeuvre (OC 2: 1245-46). What
specifically marks the singularity of these poems, as Bertrand Marchal, the editor of
Mallarmé’s complete works, points out, is their tone: “Loin des grands poèmes […], ces verslà, proches, par leur brieveté et leur sens de la point, du genre traditionnel de l’épigramme,
relèvent d’une veine plus légère, spirituelle” (idem 1240-41). As Marchal makes clear, this
lightness is specifically coded as feminine and social: “La légèreté est en fait ici celle d’une
poésie essentiellement mondaine […]. Mondaine ou, plutôt, demi-mondaine. […] Poésie
(demi-) mondaine, ces vers de circonstance sont les plus souvent une poésie pour dames et
demoiselles où se formule en vers un art de galanterie, ou de la moquerie” (idem 1241).
Similarly, Yves Bonnefoy, in his introduction to the Vers de circonstance, ascribes these
poems to a particular woman’s influence, Méry Laurent. It is after meeting her in 1884 that
Mallarmé wrote the majority of these poems (31-32), and many are addressed to her and her
many female friends, including a noted woman milliner, an operetta star, several femmes de
lettres and even her maid, Élisa. In this way, this poetry is anchored in a specifically female
and social tradition.
The feminine connotations of this poetry have had a significant impact on its
exclusion from Mallarmé’s poetic works. Most editions of his complete works ignore the
Vers de circonstance as “inconsequential,” thus obscuring what Marian Zwerling Sugano
calls “the poetics of another Mallarmé […], the Parisian Maître, host of the ‘Mardistes’, the
poet of a civil, public language, a discourse at once domestic and obscure, Mallarmé the
loquacious, the occasional poet” (17). While a study of this little acknowledged Mallarméan
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tradition is beyond the scope of this chapter, it points to the continued disregard for poetry
associated with women readers, even when it was written by celebrated male poets.
In La barrière et le niveau, Edmond Goblot warns: “Parcourez les anciens journaux
de modes et les magazines. Essayez, si vous en avez le courage, d’en lire quelques
feuilletons ! Les romans qu’ils publient, ceux qu’ils signalent et recommandent à leurs
lectrices, les livres qu’une femme ‘comme il faut’ pouvait avouer avoir lus, n’avaient rien de
commun avec la littérature” (94-5). The same, if not worse, can be said of the poems in these
women’s periodicals.
Yet in analyzing women’s poetry in the mid- to late nineteenth century press, a major
paradox emerges: while poetry for women largely evokes timeless themes like motherhood,
religious devotion and sacrifice in love as models for women readers, this content was in fact
rooted in a very specific historical moment for very specific social, political and commercial
reasons. Women’s periodicals were a major instrument in the development and spread of the
bourgeois view of women in the mid-nineteenth century. The themes they associated with
women and the relationship they posit between poet and reader are not ahistorical, but
directly related to views of the woman as mother and moral center of the household with a
limited legal and public status. Furthermore, the press was instrumental in creating the notion
that there was something called a “woman reader,” whose gender dictated her tastes and
interests above any other consideration, in order to sell subscriptions. It is these commercial,
historical and social factors, and not timeless truths about women, that led to the definition of
women’s poetry and its relationship to readers in the limited way we see above. As Goblot
points out, this content had nothing to do with literature, and everything to do with a specific
conception of women bounded in the historical moment.
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Furthermore, this constrained world of women’s poetry in the press was selfperpetuating, as Susan Hiner notes in her article “Becoming (M)other: Reflexivity in Le
Journal des Demoiselles.” The women’s press, tied as it was to the family and children,
aimed to reproduce bourgeois values in the next generation, specifically among young
women, thus ensuring the “proper regulation of society” (85). While this is especially true of
publications meant for young ladies, like Le Journal des demoiselles and Le Miroir parisien,
it is also true of the women’s press at large, as Hiner argues: “the feminine press […] served
as a primary medium for disseminating and indeed enacting this pervasive ideology” (ibid).
This can be seen not only in the fables, meant to be repeated by women readers to their
children, but also in pronouncements on style, culture, and manners. In this way, women’s
publications not only set the tone for women readers, but also for their children, particularly
their daughters, thus extending their influence to the next generation.
In light of the poetry and relationships we see in the women’s press, I think we need
to reinterpret male poets’ statements about readership and women: it is not simply elitism and
misogyny that led poets to claim “ce que j’écris n’est pas pour les filles.” Rather, the
exclusion of women readers from poetry was first and foremost a staking of positions in
relation to the commercial and moral focus of this other type of poetry. When Gautier and
Baudelaire say that they are not writing for women, this must be understood in the context of
the mid-nineteenth century, when writing poetry for women largely meant writing about
morality and good actions. Gautier was not exactly exaggerating when he called women’s
literature “un catéchisme.”
III. Women Readers beyond the Bourgeois Consensus
Of course, the limited range of practices associated with women’s poetry in these
publications does not provide a complete picture of the poetry that women were writing and
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reading in the nineteenth century. In this section, I would like to look more closely at some
poets, namely women, who challenged the cultural consensus around women’s roles in
reading and producing poetry. This poetry, by women poets like Marcelline DesbordesValmore, Juliette Lormeau, Louisa Siefert and Louise Colet, can unsurprisingly be found
mostly in their volumes of poetry and only in rare occasions in periodicals for women or the
two editions of the PC that included a small handful of women poets.
1. Women’s Poetry as a Critique of Women’s Social Condition
Some women poets used their poems to highlight the social problems facing all
women, particularly in marriage; in so doing, they raise consciousness of shared issues for
women among their readership and propose varying solutions. Because divorce was illegal,
men and women were forced to remain in bad marriages, an experience shared by many
women poets. However, few questioned the institution itself, instead focusing on exposing its
flaws and arguing for a better union with men and women on a more equal footing. In an
example from the women’s press, an overt critique of marriage in poetry focuses not on
changing this situation, but on stoically accepting it. In October 1859, Juliette Lormeau
published the short poem “La Mariée,” which describes the sad fate of the young bride, in La
Sylphide:
Ah ! puisses-tu vivre heureuse et chérie,
Jeune fille qu’on vient d’enchaîner sans retour ;
Ignore, s’il se peut, que l’hymen dans sa vie
N’a souvent, hélas ! qu’un beau jour ! (October 30, 1859)
Lormeau compares marriage to “chaining” the young girl, using a common metaphor of
marriage as slavery in women’s poetry. However, while the critique is forceful, the advice
that the poet gives her, to “ignore” her fate, is typical of exposés of women’s suffering in the
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press, which often advised women to remember their duties and find solace in their homes
and children. Nonetheless, this overt criticism of marriage is rare in a press that often
describes marriage and motherhood in ideal terms.
In Claudia Bachi’s Les voix perdues (1866), the poems “L’homme selon Dieu” and
“L’épouse selon Dieu” compare the treatment of men and women in marriage. Bachi (18201866), who published six volumes of poetry and was a frequent collaborator at La Sylphide at
the beginning of her career, is all but unknown today. “L’homme selon Dieu” describes man
as dignified, magnanimous, and sympathetic, particularly towards women in his family: “Il
transmet à ses fils l’amour de l’équité,/ Et prend pour son bien seul une dot à sa fille” (35-6),
and“pardonne au coupable et protège la femme” (38). The following poem, “L’épouse selon
Dieu,” is a bookend of “L’homme selon Dieu;” however, beginning with the title, it reveals
the secondary status accorded to the woman: she is not named in her own right, but via her
relationship to the man as his “épouse.” The poem quickly establishes her unequal status and
institutionalized ignorance:
Elle est simple, elle coud auprès de sa fenêtre
Tant que dure le jour, en gardant son enfant.
Elle ignore Musard et Raphaël peut-être,
Et plus d’un nom fameux de l’oubli triomphant :
Mais elle sait au joug d’un époux se soumettre. (1-5)
Surprisingly, the poem goes on to praise the woman’s lack of knowledge of the outside world
as a virtue: “Elle n’a jamais lu ces livres éhontés/ Qui font du mariage un contrat illusoire”
(6-7); “Ses yeux ignorent l’art de provoquer l’éloge” (13); “Active, industrieuse, occupée à
toute heure,/ Elle ignore l’ennui qui rend le teint blafard” (23-4). However, by placing it
back-to-back with the poem about an ideal man, the contrast is clear: while man is made in
God’s image, woman is subject to the “joug” of marriage.
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Other poems imagine a union in which wives play a more equal role. Louise Colet’s
poem “La Femme” in Ce ui est da s le cœur des femmes (1852) forcefully exposes women’s
status in contemporary society with the same comparisons to slavery we saw above:
Nous sommes un débris de l’antique esclavage.
L’homme a toujours gardé sur nous le droit d’outrage ;
Du joug qu’il nous impose il se fait l’insulteur,
Comme il traitait l’esclave avant le Rédempteur. (1-4)
She mentions those who say that marriage offers “ineffable douceurs” to women, retorting:
Oh! que vous savez bien qu’il n’est pas ainsi!
Que, toutes, nous portons au front l’ardent souci
D’une aspiration qui dans nos cœurs fermente,
Mais que ne satisfait l’épouse ni l’amante ! (11-14)
Unlike Bachi and Lormeau, two favorites of the women’s press, Colet targets men,
dismissing the notion that this is somehow a natural state of affairs: “Ah ! ce qui nous déçoit,
… c’est lui,/ C’est l’homme ! …” (23-24). She goes further, calling for a better kind of
partnership, and forcefully appealing directly to men:
Que l’homme s’ennoblisse en relevant la femme !
Plus de ces jougs honteux qui font dévier l’âme !
Rends-nous à la nature après un long détour,
Fais d’un marché légal une honte à l’amour,
Mais d’un sincère hymen qui naît des harmonies
Soit le titre d’honneur de deux âmes unies. (77- 82)
The poem “Le paradis retrouvé” by Léocadie Penquer in the second PC imagines an
idealized relationship between men and women by reinterpreting the story of Adam and Eve.
At the beginning of the poem, Adam repeatedly insists that Eve must choose their new
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destination, and he places himself in a subordinate role, telling her: “Étends les mains:/ Je te
laisse le choix entre tous nos domaines” (4-5); “le Créateur […]/ M’ordonne de te suivre &
de mourir pour toi” (11-12); “Je te suis. Où veux-tu que nous allions ?” (17) “Va, marche la
première !/ Regarde ton chemin; moi, je regarderai/ La trace de tes pas. Marche. Je te
suivrai.” (50-52). Eve is correspondingly shown as a confident guide:
Ève se dirigea vers l’occident, légère,
Non comme une exilée & comme une étrangère,
Mais comme une habitante à qui tout est connu.
A peine elle foulait le sol de son pied nu ;
A peine elle hésitait dans sa route… (53-57)
The rhythm in line 53 puts an emphasis on the last two syllables, “légère,” reinforcing the
idea in this passage about her ease in guiding the couple to their new Eden. The poem ends
with the couple rediscovering a new paradise: “‘Dieu bénit notre hymen, Adam. L’Éden
perdu,/ Nous l’avons retrouvé; l’amour nous l’a rendu’” (91-92). Yet unlike Eden, this new
paradise represents pure love and greater equality in the couple, reinterpreting and
reimagining this foundational story about the male-female relationship.
2. Women Poets’ Prefaces: Stretching the Boundaries the Poet-Reader Relationship
Prefaces for books by women poets reveal the biases against women as poets and
readers in the nineteenth century that I have outlined; however, some women poets used their
prefaces to challenge the limited repertoire of women’s poetry, shaping their relationship
with readers in audacious ways. Many women poets wrote few if any autograph prefaces for
their books; instead, there was often an allograph preface written by an established male
literary figure. Rachel Sauvé examines these allograph prefaces in her article “Genres
littéraires, genres sexuels et discours préfaciel” and notes the overwhelming similarities
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among them: in nearly all these texts, the preface writer insists that the woman poet did not
want to publish her work, but that she was encouraged, or even compelled to by
circumstances beyond her control (57). Sauvé calls “ce renoncement à l’ambition” a
“véritable leitmotiv du discours préfaciel sur les femmes” (53).
When a woman did write a preface, it was often not an open address to the reader, but
under the guise of a private letter. In some ways, like the publication of vers de circonstance
in the press, this allows women authors to occupy an ambiguous private-public relationship:
while they publish, they can maintain that they never intended to write for an anonymous
audience. However, in the context of writing and publishing an entire book, something no
one does without some ambition, these types of prefaces which deny women’s desire to
publish and address their own readers seem more conventional than sincere. For example, in
the preface to her volume of poetry, Les Fleurs neustriennes (1855), Aglaé de Corday
includes a preface-letter entitled “A mon editeur” which claims that she had no intention to
publish these poems (VII), written only “à la prière de quelques amis” as one of her “douces
distractions” (VIII). But, she asserts, she had no choice: she needs to clear her name after
incorrect copies of her poems were published in the press, damaging her reputation. While
she touches on every motif through which women poets renounce literary ambition, she in
fact dictates to the editor how he should present her work to the public:
pour bâtir votre discours préliminaire, mon cher Editeur, puisez parmi les
lettres inédites que je mets sous vos yeux. Abstenez-vous de louanges sur le
livre que vous allez éditer : car la louange qui vient de son Editeur paraît
souvent suspecte ; contentez-vous de choisir parmi les nombreux et sans doute
trop flatteurs autographes que l’on voulut bien m’adresser, et qui tous portent
un nom célèbre. (XI)
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The preface is followed by a long “discours préliminaire,” made up of these letters, by the
likes of literary figures such as Lamartine and Charles Nodier, as well as the Bishops of
Chartres and Poitiers and even Marie Thérèse of France, who attest not only to her literary
talent but to her good character and charitable acts. Corday nimbly exploits the clichés about
women’s poetry as a private “distraction” while effectively presenting her poems as she
wishes. While other people’s words make up the majority of the “discours préliminaire,” it is
clear that the idea behind it is entirely hers.
Louise Colet similarly played with the boundaries between public and private
discourse, and is a central figure in reimagining the poet-reader relationship among women in
the mid-nineteenth century. Colet (1810-1876) wrote poetry and novels, hosted an important
literary salon and won four poetry prizes from the Académie Française between 1839 and
1854; however, she is most widely remembered as Flaubert’s onetime mistress. In fact, much
of what is known about her comes from Flaubert’s letters because her own letters were lost,
making Flaubert central in shaping our view of Colet, as Marie-Claude Duytschaever notes in
“Louise Colet, un ‘poète entravé’” (201). For this reason, her liminal texts are important
resources for understanding the way that she challenged assumptions about women and
poetry. The preface to the 1842 Poésies de Madame Louise Colet, like Corday’s preface, uses
another author’s letters to patch together an allograph preface. Colet similarly insists that her
effort was encouraged by friends, and that she has no ambition as an author: “quelques amis
les ont applaudis, et je les livre au public, sans espérer qu’il les lise” (V). Yet she admits:
“J’aurais voulu qu’un nom illustre et protecteur consentît à s’unir au mien sur le frontispice
de ce volume : si je n’ai pu obtenir cette faveur, il doit m’être permis du moins de
m’enorgueillir d’un suffrage tel que celui de notre plus grand écrivain” (ibid). She continues
by recounting a meeting with Chateaubriand and citing his praise in two letters, including one
in which he refuses to write a preface for the book. But by quoting his letters, Colet cleverly
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uses the very refusal of an allograph preface to make her own hybrid autograph-allograph
preface. This also reverses the power relationship in letters and direct discourse often found
in prefaces: it is the woman poet who addresses the public in the preface and the male literary
authority who is quoted in a private letter. Furthermore, unlike nearly all women poets, she
does not entirely hide her ambition: while she repeats the common tropes of modesty, she
nonetheless notes that Chateaubriand’s praise of her work is her “seule espérance de succès”
(VIII). This directly refutes her earlier assertion that she is “sans espérance” in terms of her
public reception. This audacity explains in part why Barbey d’Aurevilly called Colet “le basbleu même” by (qtd. in Schultz 147).
3. Redefining the Poet-Reader Relationship as a Community of Women
As many scholars of women’s poetry have pointed out, women poets who were
praised by male literary authorities fit a set schema: writing about their own experiences and
focusing on accepted themes like motherhood and melancholy. As Marlon Bryan Ross points
out in The Contours of Masculine Desire, this made them “less threatening to the male poet”
and ensured that they were “seen as competing with other women in their own arena, not with
men” (4). Because of the specificity of these topics to women poets, their poetry was often
interpreted biographically, a “natural” expression by women about what they knew, as we
saw in the case of motherhood. This leads to what Rachel Sauvé calls a paradox in the
reception of women’s poetry: women were almost always read autobiographically; at the
same time, they were deemed representative of an eternal femininity (52).
This is immediately evident in the reception of poets like Marceline DesbordesValmore and Louise Colet. Gretchen Schultz signals the “two-faced” praise which “tends to
compliment Desbordes-Valmore’s poems for the feminine passion and motherly devotion
they represent, thereby reading her work as a transparent reflection of the woman herself”
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(45). At the same time, as we see in Baudelaire’s assessment of Desbordes-Valmore, she is
also a model of femininty: “Mme Desbordes-Valmore fut femme, fut toujours femme et ne
fut absolument que femme ; mais elle fut à un degré extraordinaire l’expression poétique de
toutes les beautés naturelles de la femme” (OC 1961, 718). This naturalness was often
described in metaphors comparing women poets to animals: Baudelaire called DesbordesValmore “la femelle chatte ou lionne, amoureuse de ses petits (idem 719). The woman poet
was also commonly described as a bird, “celle qui écrit comme l’oiseau chante, parce qu’elle
a le cœur et l’esprit pleins de vifs sentiments et de hautes idées, comme l’oiseau a le gosier
plein de chansons” (Soulié 67-8). In Flaubert’s correspondence with Colet, he depicts her
writing process as similarly natural and animalistic: “je ne te sais nul gré de faire de beaux
vers. Tu les ponds comme une poule les œufs, sans en avoir conscience (c'est dans ta nature,
c'est le bon Dieu qui t'a faite comme ça)” (qtd. in Duytschaever 199).
In the face of these essentializing readings, some women poets pushed the boundaries
of their poetry by imagining their relationship with readers in ways that defied these
assumptions about women poets and readers. Some opened up the possibilities of expression
in poetry without straying too far from “natural” topics. For example, Louisa Siefert’s six
poems in the third PC all focus on women’s suffering, a generally accepted topic for women.
However, in some poems, her descriptions challenge the bounds of women’s poetry by going
beyond the traditional domestic images associated with women’s plight. In the poem
“L’Orage,” it takes on epic, masculine dimensions, as a sign of her destiny:
Mon berceau fut marqué par la fatalité.
L’orage qui grondait, terrible, à ma naissance,
M’a pour jamais, dès lors, soumise à sa puissance
Avec le premier cri qu’au monde j’ai jeté. (16-19)
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Here, her condition is inscribed not in her burdens in the home, but in the terrible greatness of
the stormy cosmos. While she laments her impotence (“soumise à sa puissance”), the
“premier cri” that she forcefully emits to the world at birth implies greatness in her fatality. In
this instance, her images of suffering have more in common with the cursed poet in
Baudelaire’s “Bénédiction” and Verlaine’s Poèmes saturniens than with traditional female
suffering at the hands of an unfaithful lover or abusive male relation; notably however, these
poems were largely meant for a male readership.
Elsewhere, the insistence on women’s suffering in women’s poetry gives both the
poet and reader a voice and a community to share their plight, marking a poet-reader
relationship based not on didacticism, but on sharing and co-creation. This is evident in
Desbordes-Valmore’s poem “A celles qui pleurent” in Bouquets et prières (1843). In it, she
specifically addresses her poems to fellow women: “Vous surtout qui souffrez, je vous prends
pour mes sœurs:/ C’est à vous qu’elles vont, mes lentes rêveries,/ Et de mes pleurs chantés les
amères douceurs” (2-4). She tells them: “Chantez: un chant de femme attendrit la souffrance”
(9), adding “Si vous n'avez le temps d'écrire aussi vos larmes,/ Laissez-les de vos yeux
descendre sur ces vers” (13-14). She imagines a positive community where women can share
their burdens with one another through song and verse in what Schultz deems a “call for
solidarity and support” (59), which enlarges the accepted bounds of the poet-reader
relationship for women, encouraging readers to record and share their own suffering as well.
This insistence on solidarity among women is also evident in the poem “A Madame
Roger-Valazé” in Ce ui est da s le cœur des femmes (1852). In it, Louise Colet imagines a
community of women united in their sufffering, but daringly does so by refusing men. like
many women poets, she describes “Le servage qui continue/ Pour la femme toujours enfant”
(15-16) at the hands of the “homme… triomphant” (14); but here she calls on women to
confide only in one another:
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A notre fille, à notre mère,
A notre amie, à notre sœur,
A toute femme aimante et chère
Livrons sans voile notre cœur.
Mais à l’homme qui nous captive,
Qu’il soit amant, qu’il soit ami,
Dans nos pudeurs de sensitive,
N’ouvrons notre cœur qu’à demi. (1-8)
While exhorting her women readers to action, here it is at the expense of the patriarchy,
among a group of women who share their profound feelings through poetry. This sentiment is
repeated in the poem “Deuil” in which Colet describes the male lover as ignorant of the real
feelings and thoughts of the woman he loved: “Tu le sais, maintenant que la mort t’a fait lire/
Dans mon cœur, où, vivant, tu n’as jamais bien lu” (31-32). The insistence on the verb “lire”
at the last syllable of these alexandrines insists on the connection between knowing what is in
women’s hearts and reading, imagining poetry as a community of women poets and readers
sharing their innermost feelings.
Louise Colet represents one of the most audacious figures in the attempt at a
redefinition of the poet-reader relationship. Her poetic works are evidence of a rapport with
the reader in which she tries to do something new and experimental, escaping a rigidly
gendered relationship. The poem “Fragments dramatiques” in Ce ui est da s le cœur des
femmes takes the form of a conversation between two women, Sextia and Pauline, describing
the trials that Sextia, a woman poet, has faced both in love and in her work as a poet:
… j'aimais les arts : tu sais
Qu'enfant je tressaillais à l'espoir d'un succès!
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Musique et poésie avaient formé mon âme;
Plus tard j'y vis la gloire, un leurre pour la femme.
Mon vieux tuteur, durant un voyage à Paris,
M’y choisit un mari, le pire des maris :
Vain, médiocre, oisif, marchant à la misère ;
Mais il changeait mon sort : hélas ! je laissai faire ;
Je ne vis que Paris et ses enchantements,
De ce beau ciel des arts j’ignorais les tourments ;
…
… pour ceindre au front l'auréole de flamme,
Il fallait aux faux dieux prostituer son âme.
Oh ! la gloire à ce prix n’eut plus d’attrait pour moi ;
J’en repoussais l’espoir avec un chaste effroi,
Je voulais fuir des arts l’éclat qui nous enivre,
Je ne le pus, Pauline, hélas ! il fallait vivre…
Il fallait demander le pain de chaque jour
A des chants où vibrait le deuil de mon amour,7
Répandre devant tous la triste mélopée
D’une voix qui tremblait par des sanglots coupée,
Offrir pour un peu d’or extase, rêve, aveu,
Ces choses qu’on ne dit qu’à l’amour et à Dieu.
…
Oh ! ne connais jamais ce suprême malheur,
Qui vend à Shylok par lambeaux notre cœur !
7
Here Sextia refers not to her husband, but to Léon, her first love, who left her with a “cruel souvenir de son
triste abandon” (101).
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Nous forçant d'affronter l'opulence cruelle,
D'un ignare éditeur qui nous tient en tutelle,
Nous livrant au critique, insolent envieux,
Qui ne vante nos chants qu'en vantant nos beaux yeux;
Aux auteurs en renom dont l’orgueil nous protège,
Aux fats nous dénigrant ou nous faisant cortège,
A des Solène enfin, des Derbin, des Nollis,
…
… qui souvent mêlaient le trouble à ma souffrance.
Nollis à mon mari promettait un emploi
Qu’il n’eut jamais ; il vint durant un an chez moi.
Préférant à l’intrigue une pauvreté fière,
Je l’éloignai … Le monde a pensé le contraire… (102-4)
The most powerful aspect of this poem is Sextia’s treatment at the hands of men: the “vieux
tuteur,” who should be a benevolent figure, finds her the “le pire des maris”; the husband is
“Vain, médiocre, oisif”; the “ignare éditeur” keeps her “en tutelle”; the critic is lustful (“ne
vante nos chants qu'en vantant nos beaux yeux”); the “fats” variously insult and court her and
promise her husband work only to damage her reputation. She also evokes the idea of the
poet as a prostitute, one shared by male poets as we saw in the second chapter, but for the
woman poet here, this is made literal: her intellectual prostitution as an artist is doubled by a
physical prostitution, both in the forced marriage with a man who cannot provide for her and
in the reputation unjustly given to her by the man in the last verses. Her insistence on the first
person plural (“Nous forçant,” “nous tient en tutelle,” “Nous livrant au critique,” “nos
chants…nos beaux yeux” etc.) implies that this is not the story of one woman, but that of all
women poets, and even all women, including her reader. The poem is in some ways not
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dissimilar from those we saw in the press which lament the difficult choices facing women;
but here, the female figure is empowered because it is she who holds the family together,
writing poetry to earn a living, something her husband is incapable of doing. It also solidifies
the bond between women poets and readers by making this poem a dialogue between women
who share these challenging experiences.
Claudia Bachi also reimagines the relationship between poet and reader by proposing
a new, positive relationship between women poets based on solidarity. In the poem “A une
contemporaine,” published in the posthumous volume Les Voix perdues (1866), she expresses
admiration for a woman poet in a salon whom she apostrophes as “Madame”: “Chacun vous
écoutait, rêveur;/ On vous prodiguait la louange” (21-22). Despite this praise, the young
woman poet recalls the rumors she has heard: “… on m’avait dit que votre front/ Avait perdu
son auréole” (35-36); “…si, dans vos radieux chants/ L’éloquence du cœur abonde,/ Rien ne
battait dans votre sein” (39-41); “Des plus saintes vertus l’autel/ Etait écroulé dans votre
âme.” (47-48). Yet the young woman defends her against these charges, calling them “tout
ces on dit” (51), and an “œuvre de calomnie” (54), concluding that as a woman: “… le pire de
vos défauts,/ Madame, c’est votre genie” (55-56). In this statement of support for a fellow
woman poet, Bachi depicts solidarity among women which men will not or cannot provide.
These examples by Bachi, Colet, Siefert and Debordes-Valmore show how women poets
challenged predominant assumptions about the poet-reader relationship as it pertained to
women, and to varying degrees, used poetry to explore new sources of connection and
communication with their readers.
Conclusion
In a poem dedicated to Louis Bouhilet in Ce u’o rêve en aimant (1854), Louise
Colet takes a firm stand against the isolation of the artist:
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Notre âme est un élément.
Elle est une part du monde.
Le mouvement la féconde.
Vivons dans l’humanité,
Creusons sa source infinie ;
L’isolement du génie
Serait sa stérilité ! (30-36)
This social engagement might seem surprising from a poet who published poems in the
Parnasse contemporain and took the editing advice of Flaubert. However, as I have
attempted to show in this chapter, the essential traits of women’s poetry in the mainstream
press, in elite publications and in books of poetry in the mid- to late nineteenth century, read
as a negative definition of what elite male poetry was becoming: in the face of rhetorical
exhortation to action and the instruction of the reader in women’s poetry, male poets
advanced a disinterested view of the poet-reader relationship, refusing to instruct the outside
reader how to read. While women’s poetry focused on morality, they focused on esthetics.
When women poets called for social engagement, male poets turned their backs on the
outside world. “Real” poetry was increasingly defined as what women’s poetry was not.
Elite poets widely excluded women readers in staking their positions in the literary
field and defining their readership. This definition of poetry’s readership not only serves as a
foundation of our ideas of what poetry is and who it is for today, but in so doing, shapes the
way we read other nineteenth-century poetry: in my own readings of women’s poetry in the
mainstream press, I found myself discounting this poetry because of its descriptive and
didactic qualities, comparing it to the poetry of the late nineteenth-century poets I prefer. In
order to overcome this contemporary prejudice, I have tried in this chapter to emphasize the
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influence of women’s poetry and its model of the poet-reader relationship as an important
part of the nineteenth-century literary field that has shaped our conceptions of poetry and
readership.
While elite male poets, as I have showed, were often dismissive of women readers,
there is some evidence in this period that some male poets wanted to expand women’s roles
in poetry. Rimbaud’s May 15, 1871 “Lettre du voyant” imagines a world in which women
would be emancipated, becoming poets and visionaries on the same level as men:
Quand sera brisé l’infini servage de la femme, quand elle vivra pour elle et par
elle, l’homme, jusqu’ici abominable, — lui ayant donné son renvoi, elle sera
poète, elle aussi ! La femme trouvera de l’inconnu ! Ses mondes d’idées
différeront-ils des nôtres ? — Elle trouvera des choses étranges, insondables,
repoussantes, délicieuses ; nous les prendrons, nous les comprendrons.
(Rimbaud 92)
It’s remarkable that Rimbaud refers to women’s “servage infini,” the same image repeated in
the women’s poetry I study here. While the call for women’s emancipation is certainly
ambitious, the means of getting to this point is somewhat questionable: it relies on the
“abominable” man suddenly giving up the numerous institutions and attitudes which made
the woman a political, social and cultural inferior in order to suddenly “lui donn[er] son
renvoi.” Rimbaud’s revolutionary attitude towards women here can perhaps be better
understood as an expression of solidarity with the repressed in society during the 1871
Commune, during which this letter was written. This is evident in a poem inspired by the
same event, “Les mains de Jeanne-Marie,” in which Rimbaud contrasts the “mains fortes,/
Mains sombres” (1-2) of a communard woman with the “mains infâmes/ Pleines de blancs et
de carmins” (43-44) of noble women, turning Gautier’s celebration of women’s hands in
“Étude de mains” into a statement of solidarity with working women. As Seth Whidden
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notes in Authority in Crisis in French Literature, 1850-1880, this poem represents a “revolt
against authority” both in reversing the hierarchy between working women’s and elite
women’s hands and in the lyrical fusion of the subject of the poem with his object in a show
of “profound empathy and solidarity with le peuple” (111).
Seemingly more representative of poets’ attitudes in this period is Lautréamont’s
ironic statement about women readers in his complex prose text Poésies I (1870): “Je veux
que ma poésie puisse être lue par une jeune fille de quatorze ans […] Ne reniez pas
l'immortalité de l'âme, la sagesse de Dieu, la grandeur de la vie, l'ordre qui se manifeste dans
l'univers, la beauté corporelle, l'amour de la famille, le mariage, les institutions sociales” (1113). Like Gautier and Baudelaire before him, Lautréamont associates women’s poetry with
obedience, religious teachings, love of the family, and respect of social institutions. This
suggests just how little attitudes towards women’s involvement in literature changed little
between the 1830s and 1870: the relationship between the poet and reader is so self-evidently
contrary to this model that the irony need not be explained to the real reader of the text.
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Chapter 4
The Politics of Audience: Poetry and the Popular Reader
Introduction
Between the 1830s and 1850s, poésie populaire – poetry written for, by and about the
working classes – was a major phenomenon in France. Anthologies of popular songs and
poems spread them to new audiences, newspapers featured a variety of poetic works by and
for workers, and literary celebrities like Hugo, Lamartine, Eugène Sue and George Sand
clamored to find and introduce the reading public to the next big name in poésie populaire in
prefaces and articles. The increased literary consideration of the working classes was tied to
the political upheavals of the period: in the wake of the 1830 Revolution, enthusiasm for
popular poetry helped usher Romanticism into a socially-oriented stage in the 1830s and
1840s; similarly, the Revolution of 1848 was a major turning-point for a younger generation
of poets, including Gautier and Baudelaire, who embraced the role of chanson and the
important role of poetry for the common man. Yet by the early 1850s, almost nothing of this
movement seemed to remain: once influential publications by and for workers, such as La
Ruche populaire and L’Atelier, ceased to exist as bourgeois newspapers increasingly closed
their doors to social poetry; a majority of elite poets turned their backs on poetry’s social
mission; and the Second Empire cracked down on popular chanson and the singing societies
where they originated with massive censorship. The euphoria of a young generation about the
possibilities of popular poetry for the poet-reader relationship turned to dismay and to the
cultivation of poetry as an elite and elitist art, shaping the attitudes of poets throughout the
late nineteenth century.
In this chapter, I will examine how this broad interest in popular poetry and its decline
in the 1850s was central in redefining poetry’s readership in the mid- to late nineteenth
century. I will begin by briefly reviewing this movement and some of the questions it raises,
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including the problem of labeling popular culture a “movement,” and the vastly different
media, genres and forms of reception that it encompassed. Next, I will examine the ways that
attitudes about working-class readers shaped the reactions of political and literary figures to
popular poetry in the first half of the nineteenth century: for most political regimes in
nineteenth-century France, the popular audience represented a political and criminal menace,
a viewpoint used to justify the censoring of popular culture and sociability. For proponents of
the social mission of poésie populaire, the poet-reader relationship was often defined in a
didactic way, with reader in need of education and enlightenment through poetry: while in
periodicals for and by workers, like L’Atelier, the poet-reader relationship was based on
shared social status and mutual understanding, Romantic poets saw themselves as the
privileged guides of the people. In fact, while figures like Hugo and Lamartine are often seen
as advocates of the social mission of poetry, they consistently underestimated the capacities
and interests of popular readers, assigning them a passive role in their own work.
Furthermore, the Romantic myth of the people as “natural” and “timeless” had significant
political repercussions: the Second Empire’s project for a Recueil général des poésies
populaires de la France used the Romantic myth of the people to forge an ahistorical,
apolitical and rural model of popular poetry that denied the existence of contemporary
popular poetry, thus silencing popular authors and readers.
Instead, I will show how in the years 1848-1851, the most progressive views of poetry
and its readership came not from Hugo and Lamartine, but from Baudelaire and Gautier. In
particular, in his 1850 preface for Pierre Dupont’s Chants et chansons, Baudelaire redefines
the poet-reader relationship as one based on profound communication, equality, and the
intellectual and emotional fusion of poet and reader. While the coup d’état and Second
Empire led to their profound disillusionment about the poet’s social mission, I dispute the
widely-held position that this politically tumultuous period represents an exception in their
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view of the poet-reader relationship; rather, I argue that these revolutionary views are
essential to understanding the severity of their positions on mass audiences in the late
nineteenth century.
Finally, I will examine Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Hugo’s positions on the poet’s
relationship to the people in the 1860s and beyond in order to show the legacy of the 1851
shift: while for Baudelaire’s generation, political upheaval helped shape their positions on
poetry and readership, their successors staked an anti-democratic position from the outset, as
a reading of “Hérésies artistiques: L’Art pour tous,” published by a twenty year-old Mallarmé
in 1862 attests. Hugo’s own evolution was quite the opposite: in exile, he became more
firmly convinced of poetry’s essential mission among the masses, and even tried to convince
younger poets like Baudelaire that the poet had a “double et éternel effort : l’Art et le
Progrès,” although this vision was centered more on the great poet-prophet’s powers than on
the people (Lettres à Charles Baudelaire 189). It was the late Baudelaire and Mallarmé who
represent the views of many elite poets in this period, making the rupture between poet and
public in the late nineteenth century a central component of the definition of poetry.
As in previous chapters, I hope to tease out strands of a complex issue that has been
turned into a self-evident binarism, between elite poetry and the unread masses, and analyze
the ways in which the redefinition of poetry and its readership was based on the positions
poets took in response to specific political, social and literary events. In particular, I aim to
show how dashed hopes of a democratic future in politics and poetry played an essential role
in shaping the assertion by late nineteenth-century poets that poetry was elite, pure and
unsuited to the gaze of the common reader.
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I. Poésie populaire 1830-1850: Media and Forms
The newly developing press in the 1830s was an essential medium for the
development of class consciousness among working people and their claim to access the roles
of journalist, poet and reader, as well as an essential organ in spreading their work.
Immediately after the 1830 Revolution, three of the first papers by and for workers were
founded: the Journal des ouvriers, Le Peuple, and L’Artisa . While all three folded after only
several months, they set the tone for future publications with their focus on politics and social
debates in both prose and poetry (Weill 89-92). In 1839-1840, new periodicals for workers
under the direction of bourgeois editors, like l’I tellige ce, l’Égalitaire and la Fraternité,
debuted along with influential monthly publications by and for workers, such as the Saint
Simonian La Ruche populaire (1839-49), l’U io
(1843-46), and the Christian socialist
L’Atelier (1840-50) (idem 93). The titles of these publications are notable for their direct
claims about worker identity and sociability: L’Artisa
and L’Atelier target the specific
audience of artisanal workers that also comprised most of its contributors, and form an
interesting counterpoint to the elite contemporary publication L’Artiste. La ruche populaire
more vividly evokes the community of workers and their industriousness in a pastoral image
that would reflect its mission of social harmony. In the next part of this chapter, I will analyze
some of the poetry in these important publications in order to better understand the role they
played in the development of a particular poet-reader relationship among the working classes.
While influential, these periodicals were short-lived: 1848 marked the beginning of
the end of an autonomous popular press, as the historian of the popular press Georges Weill
notes: “la république de 1848, loin de faire naître une presse ouvrière nouvelle, vit mourir
l’ancienne” (99). After the coup d’état of 1851, political repression and the requirement of
authorisation préalable for all periodicals largely spelled the end of a socially and politically
conscious press by and for workers (ibid.). While as I noted in the second chapter,
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publications for a mass audience, such as Le Petit journal, debuted in the 1860s, this was far
from a successor to the autonomous and creative periodicals that were lost, as Marie-Ève
Thérenty notes in her article “Voix, causes et cris du peuple : le laboratoire journalistique des
écrivains”: while L’Atelier was based on a model of popular writers addressing and engaging
their peers about important political issues, Le Petit Journal “propose une voix du peuple
bâtie non pas sur l’authenticité d’une parole ouvrière ou paysanne, mais sur un langage
extrêmement simple, voire simpliste” (Thérenty 115). This is just one of the many ways in
which popular voices were repressed in the second half of the century.
The development of popular poetry at the same time as the rise of the press in France
helps explain the influence and spread of poetry by and for people from the working classes
across society, as Nathalie Vincent-Munnia points out in her Introduction to the landmark
study La Poésie populaire en France au XIXe siècle: “la presse – représente pour […] la
poésie […] un support nouveau et incomparable sur bien des plans : non seulement celui de la
diffusion d’une production pour le moins enclavée socialement, mais aussi, en conséquence,
celui de sa réception” (172). This new mass medium helps explain in part why popular poetry
had such a profound impact on the literary field outside the working classes. The rise of the
press also helps explain how the production of poetry by, for and about the people can be
conceived of as a “movement,” when it is of course “une pratique en réalité ancienne et
constante dans le monde du travail,” as Dinah Ribard reminds us in her article “De l’écriture
à l’événement. Acteurs et histoire de la poésie ouvrière autour de 1840” (79). The
development of this literature in the press helped raise it to the status of a literary event
among elites as well, and thus represents the “révélation et irruption sur la scène publique
d’écritures issues d’une expérience du confinement social” (idem 81).
Another essential component of mid-nineteenth-century poésie populaire is the
prominence of the chanson. Again, while the tradition of French popular chanson is
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longstanding, the nineteenth century saw the growing importance and influence of figures
such as the prolific chansonnier Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1770-1857), Marc-Antoine
Désaugiers (1772-1827), and later Pierre Dupont (1821-1870). Béranger was a major figure
in the popularization of the chanson in the early nineteenth century, and his songs, as well as
the controversies they caused, helped make his name synonymous with the genre. Both he
and Désaugiers began their careers in the caveau, a male social group centered on smoking,
drinking and song writing. In these societies, singer-poets often published their epicurean,
bawdy and often deliberately middle-brow productions (La Poésie populaire en France au
XIXe siècle 74-76). Similarly, among the working classes, goguettes were an important place
for the development of popular chansons. While similar to caveaux, they drew members from
the working classes, and often did not publish their chansons (idem 76-8). These “caveaux de
seconde zone” and the “nombreux sous-Béranger qui s’y produisaient” represent an essential
facet of popular poetry in the mid- nineteenth century (Agulhon 56).
The chanson was closely tied to political protest and revolution in the nineteenth
century because printed political publications were often censored (Portis 178). This helps
explain the continued importance of chanson over other forms of political speech, as Maurice
Agulhon points out in his article on popular culture around 1848: in moments of political
upheaval, “Ceux qui veulent être entendus des ouvriers en masse éditent certes des journaux
[…], mais il est frappant de voir combien, à côté de ce moyen moderne de propagande,
restent vivaces les moyens les plus traditionnels: la chanson, la ‘sociabilité’” (59). The
importance of chanson as a privileged genre for political protest is central to understanding
reactions to it, from state censorship to the idea that it represented a unique source of
reinvention in poetry, as we shall see.
Although popular chanson has its own rich legacy in French literature, it was tied with
poetry as well, “ces deux modes d’expression étant historiquement mêlés et souvent
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génériquement peu différenciés,” as Hélène Millot points out in her general introduction to
La Poésie populaire en France au XIXe siècle (19). For this reason, it is important to study
chanson as part of what was a broad and diverse tradition of poetic practices in the
nineteenth-century literary field. The diversity of nineteenth-century poetry in this broad
sense is thus better revealed: poetry was considered both “la forme privilégiée de la littérature
d’expression populaire” and increasingly the privileged form of an elitist conception of
literature (idem 11). This duality of poetry as both a socially “high” and “low” genre is at the
heart the redefinition of poetry and its audience by elite poets in the second half of the
century.
The genre of the chanson also raises important questions about audience and practices
of reception because of its orality. Literacy was not widespread among the popular classes
throughout much of the nineteenth century: while in 1829, forty-five percent of military
recruits were literate; by 1848 this had increased only modestly to sixty-four percent and truly
mass literacy was only reached in France on the eve of the First World War (Agulhon 54).
Thus “for a still largely illiterate working population, song was a central element in social
relations and cultural life,” as Larry Portis affirms (175). Because of this relatively high
illiteracy, popular culture also encompassed visual forms, like satirical drawings, which were
increasingly available in mass-printed publications (Agulhon 61-62). These forms enabled
illiterate people to become consumers of culture outside of and require an expanded notion of
“readership.”
The prevalence of orality in popular culture also reflects the extent to which it
remained rooted in communitarianism and sociability in the nineteenth century. Popular
poetry and chanson in many cases originated in social situations or groups, like meetings of
goguettes, seasonal and family celebrations, and in the “milieu du travail,” for example when
groups of men walked together to their place of work or over the course of long veillées
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(idem 51). This is not to say that nineteenth-century popular culture remained pre-modern in
its orality and collectivity; instead, as Martyn Lyons and Maurice Agulhon point out, new
advancements in French culture, like the spread of printed texts, were received and absorbed
in traditional structures, creating hybrid practices: “La lecture à haute voix diffuse l’imprimé
[…] ce qui est neuf, mais toujours dans les réseaux de la sociabilité et du travail, ce qui est de
tradition” (Agulhon 55). As Lyons confirms, for these “generations of listeners,” “reading
was often a collective experience, integrated into an oral culture” (Lyons “New Readers in
the Nineteenth Century” 343). Again, it is essential to keep in mind these hybrid practices
and the enlarged definition of “readership” that they imply in order to more fully grasp the
very real differences they present for models of reception and for the poet-reader relationship.
The orality and sociability of nineteenth-century popular culture lead to significant
difficulties for scholars of poésie populaire. For example, while print runs of periodicals
generally provide an incomplete picture of readership, this is even truer of publications which
were largely read aloud by one person to many others. For example, the worker newspaper
L'Atelier had only 550 subscribers in 1847, and 896 in June 1848. However, because this
publication was targeted to a working-class audience, many of whom could not read, didn’t
have the time to read, or could not afford to subscribe, we will never know the real number of
readers and auditors it had, which could have easily included hundreds or thousands more
people (“L’Atelier”).
As I will show in the next section of this chapter, popular poetry encompasses not just
a tradition of popular poets and readers/auditors/singers, but also the profound influence of
the people on elite literature and literary figures. This can be seen in the popularity of
anthologies of popular poetry, published in the 1840s: Poésies sociales des ouvriers (1841),
Chants et chansons populaires de la France (1843), Poètes du peuple au XIXe siècle (1846),
and Chansons et rondes enfantines and Chansons nationales et populaires de la France,
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whose publication in volumes between 1846 and 1852 was interrupted by the 1848
Revolution (Brix 32). The extent of this trend of popular poetry can also be seen in articles
and prefaces celebrating the movement and its key figures by famous authors. To name just a
few examples, George Sand wrote prefaces for the poet-locksmith Gilland, Charles Poncy,
and textile worker Magu; and the novelist Eugène Sue famously prefaced Savinien
Lapointe’s Une voix d’e bas (1844). Even Chateaubriand, normally a skeptic of workerpoets whom he considered “ordinairement ni poètes, ni ouvriers”, joined Alexandre Dumas
and Lamartine in praise of the widely celebrated poet-baker Jean Reboul (qtd in Garguilo 62).
If the diverse types of media, genres, texts, authors, and readers outlined here seem
disparate and heterogeneous, it is because they were: the “popular” influence in literature
between 1830 and 1850 signals a broad trend whose scope and ambiguity Michel Brix
describes in “Une renaissance romantique : les chansons populaires”: “Au cours de la
première moitié du XIXe siècle, toute production poétique inspirée par la muse populaire ne
semble pouvoir être qu’admirable” (39). In part, this vagueness stems from what Maurice
Tournier calls “fuzzy” terms used to describe this diverse array of literary productions by, for
and about the lower classes, like populaire and peuple (18). These terms problematically
lump together those better described with more specific labels such as ouvrier, paysan, or
prolétaire, or, as publications like La Ruche populaire did, according to specific occupations.
In his article “Le Problème de la culture populaire en France autour de 1848,” Maurice
Agulhon rightfully critiques
l’idée que le chanteur rural et le poète ouvrier sont essentiellement apparentés par cela
seul qu’ils sont ‘le peuple’, qu’ils soient donc de la Nature, qu’ils touchent donc à la
source de toute poésie. […] Bien entendu, cette théorie unitaire de la créativité
populaire nous enseigne mieux sur la culture de celui qui émet que sur celle des gens
du peuple auxquels la théorie s’applique. (58)
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Indeed, Agulhon’s assertion that these terms better explain the attitudes of elites who used
them than those they pretend to describe will bear out in the next part of this chapter on the
“Romantic myth of the people.” In the introduction to La Poésie populaire en France au XIXe
siècle, Hélène Millot confirms that the term ‘peuple’ was thus used in very different ways,
both to describe a vast national group, akin to the German volk, or alternately, to signify the
“classes dangereuses” of revolt and barricades that evoked fear and contempt, examples of
which we will encounter in this chapter (Introduction 8). While problematic, the label poésie
populaire has remained as a useful tool which allows scholars to understand the interest in
everything from revolutionary chansons and political poems by poet-workers to sociallyconscious works by elite authors and anthologies of nationalistic poetry, uniting them under
one conceptual umbrella that demonstrates the widespread nature of this literary, political and
social phenomenon.
II. Models of the Poet-Reader Relationship 1830-1852
In this section, I will look at a variety of media, authors and figures associated with
this vast movement of poésie populaire to examine the very different ways that the poetreader relationship was defined by political authorities, periodicals for and by workers, and
elite Romantic and post-Romantic poets. This range of visions of the poet-reader relationship
as it was conceived in relation to popular readers will in turn help explain the move to define
elite poetry against them.
1. Trials, Censorship and the Popular Reader as Criminal
The years associated with the rise and fall of poésie populaire correspond with key
political dates in France: the 1830 Revolution and the end of the short-lived Second Republic
(1848-1852) before the rise of the culturally-repressive Second Empire. However, to varying
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degrees, all governments from Napoleon to the Third Republic regarded the popular reader as
a potential threat to political and social order, as Mariel Oberthür and Hélène Millot point out
in their study of “La Poésie populaire face à la censure et à la répression (1830-1850)” in La
Poésie populaire en France au XIXe siècle: “tout au long du XIXe siècle, l’État, quel que soit
le régime en place, et quelles que soient les orientations idéologiques du gouvernement, veille
à contrôler la parole du peuple” (90). This was particularly true following moments of
political upheaval: both 1830 and 1848 renewed the belief among social elites that the urban
working classes, whose populations were rapidly expanding, were responsible for revolution.
In fact, as Louis Chevalier argues in Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses, by 1848,
this belief united those across the political spectrum: “Adversaires, mais aussi défenseurs de
la Révolution de 48, s’accorderont à faire de ces nouveaux venus, mal fixés dans la ville, les
principaux responsables des difficultés et des troubles” (456).
The notion that the popular classes were the source of political upheaval shaped views
of their cultural productions. As scholars from Chevalier to Walter Benjamin have pointed
out, the link between social class and criminality was omnipresent in newspapers, novels, and
political debates in this period, and is key to understanding repression of popular forms of
expression. Following the 1830 Revolution, newspapers like the Journal des débats asserted
that the urban popular classes were “barbares” and “sauvages” living in “quartiers maudits,”
“flétris par le vice et par la misère” and uniquely subject to “la passion de l’ivrognerie” (qtd.
in Chevalier 451-2). It was not only their living conditions that were seen as a source of their
criminality, but their very genetic makeup: as Walter Benjamin points out, Granier de
Cassagnac’s Histoire des classes ouvrières et des classes bourgeoises (1838) depicts the
urban populace as “a class of subhumans which sprang from the crossing of robbers and
prostitutes” (55). In fact, Chevalier argues, this notion of working people as criminals was so
great that even socially progressive periodicals like La Ruche populaire reaffirmed these
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deeply-held stereotypes by associating periods of economic hardship with increased crime
among the people (498). These pervasive biases help in part to explain the censorship and
repression of popular expression, from chanson to periodicals and pamphlets, which took
place in one form or another throughout the nineteenth century: for many, the popular
reader/auditor was dangerous, and the material he accessed had to be tightly controlled.
Furthermore, the orality and sociability of popular culture made it suspect to power.
The genre of chanson in particular was the subject of censorship both “au niveau de sa
diffusion orale qu’à celui de sa diffusion imprimée” (Oberthür and Millot 93). During the
Restoration and July Monarchy, Béranger’s chansons were a frequent target for prosecutors:
he was tried three times, in 1821, 1828 and 1834 for “outrage à la morale et aux bonnes
moeurs” as well as for political offenses, including “offenses envers la personne du Roi,”
“attaques contre la dignité royale” and “excitation à la haine et au mépris du gouvernement”
(Leclerc 361-2). As Yvan Leclerc points out in Crimes Écrits, this makes Béranger one of
only three authors put on trial for political offense in the nineteenth century, out of a total of
twenty-four authors, the vast majority of whom were tried on moral grounds (60). While
Béranger’s trials are well-known, he was not alone as a target for his chansons. In fact,
everyone from Béranger to relative unknowns, like “un certain Finot, poète vigneron de
l’Aude,” were fined and imprisoned for the distribution of their chansons. This was so
common that historians of the popular chanson Pierre Barbier and France Vernillat affirm
that “les prisons sont devenues des sortes d’annexes du Parnasse de la chanson” (qtd. in
Oberthür and Millot 94). Similarly, goguettes were the frequent targets of police surveillance
both as places where suspect chansons were composed, and popular meeting places for
potentially dangerous elements in society (ibid).
Like many others tried for their literary works in the nineteenth century, Béranger’s
trials and imprisonment helped cement his popularity and that of his chansons, as he asserts
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in Ma Biographie (1859). In 1822, newspapers rushed to make money off the sensation
surrounding his trial, creating an audience far beyond what he could have expected: “il y a eu,
en moins de quinze jours, plusieurs millions d’exemplaires des vers qu’on avait voulu frapper
d’interdit,” leading to another trial for republishing condemned works (Béranger 164). His
1828 trial and imprisonment garnered the attention of young literary figures like Hugo,
Sainte-Beuve and Alexandre Dumas, all of whom, he writes, visited him in prison. Despite
what he calls their “tendance retrograde” in these early years before their political views
became moved to the left, and their youthful “erreurs dont nous ne devons demander raison
qu’à leurs nourrices,” Béranger fondly recalls this as the beginning of a “révolution littéraire
qu’eux et leurs amis avaient osé tenter et qui n’était […] qu’une conséquence un peu tardive
de la révolution politique et sociale” (idem 181-82). It also established Béranger as the major
chansonnier of the period and a hero for young Romantics, and established his songs as a
soundtrack of the 1830 Revolution (Portis 177, 184).
Béranger’s trials also confirm the extent to which chanson was suspect to those in
power because of its oral diffusion. The prosecutor in Béranger’s 1821 trial, Marchangy,
noted that chanson was a privileged vehicle for the corruption of the people compared to the
printed text: “Tandis que la brochure la plus coupable n’exerce que dans un cercle étroit sa
mauvaise influence, la chanson, plus contagieuse mille fois, peut infecter jusqu’à l’air qu’on
respire” (qtd. in Oberthür and Millot 93). This image of pestilence was particularly potent,
considering the unsanitary conditions of popular quarters of cities where revolutionary
violence supposedly emerged. In fact, even while targeting the author’s incitement of the
masses, Marchangy evoked fear of their latent violence: “Des refrains insultants furent lancés
avec dérision sur les objets de nos hommages, bientôt ils stimulèrent tous les excès de
l’anarchie, et la muse des chants populaires devint une des furies de nos discordes civiles”
(qtd. in Leclerc 61). These unnamed masses pit “fury,” “insult” “anarchy” and “civil discord”
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against the respect for civil order. At the same time, it is clear that Béranger is the active
party here, as their “muse;” this allows Marchangy to evoke fear of popular violence while
relegating the masses to a passive role in relation to the bourgeois chansonnier who rouses
their passions. This paradox of passivity and violence was a common one in evocations of
popular readers.
The notion that popular poetry, its creators and its participants were dangerous
elements only increased after 1848. The Second Empire cracked down harshly on outlets of
popular culture, from goguettes to popular newspapers to diffusion via colportage, essentially
signaling the end of tolerance for what it saw as potentially subversive elements in popular
culture, which is to say, nearly all popular culture. After the explosion of productions of
popular songs during the 1848 Revolution, police surveillance of caveaux and goguettes
during the Second Empire was severe and effective, as Larry Portis notes in his article on
Béranger and popular song: “If, in the 1830s, there were at least one hundred popular singing
societies in the Paris region, [...] under the new dictator they were virtually all suppressed.
Song was simply too subversive. Two revolutions had demonstrated its power” (185). Under
the Second Empire, some popular song was relegated to café concerts where the popular
singer and prostitute catered to the tastes of their bourgeois clientele (idem 186-7). In other
cases, select chansons by the likes of Béranger and others sold thousands of copies during the
Second Empire, representing an important commodification of this tradition (idem). But due
to the lessons of 1830 and 1848, the Second Empire and early Third Republic cracked down
on and censored most forms of popular culture, silencing many and relegating others to
mediocre commercialized forms.
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2. The Poet-Reader Rapport in Worker Newspapers
La Ruche populaire and L’Atelier played a significant role in the development and
promotion of poetry by and for the popular reader between 1840 and 1850 and established
new political models of the poet-reader relationship. L’Atelier was founded in 1840 as a
publication explicitly by and for workers, as stated in its innaugural issue: “Le journal dont
nous livrons aujourd’hui le premier numéro au public est adressé aux ouvriers par des
ouvriers”; “les hommes de lettres ne sont admis que comme correspondants” (September
1840).8 Similarly, La Ruche populaire, founded the previous year, maintained the subtitle
“journal des ouvriers, rédige et publié par eux-mêmes” throughout the ten years of its
publication (qtd. in Régnier 102). However, the primary aim of this Saint Simonian periodical
was social harmony among the classes, and as such it aimed to address both popular readers
and social elites as the “Programme,” published at the beginning of each edition indicates:
“Le but principal de La Ruche populaire est d’indiquer les misères du peuple cachées aux
riches bienfaisants. Elle ouvre en outre aux ouvriers une tribune où chacun d’eux peut faire
entendre ses justes réclamations, exprimer ses vœux légitimes, ses espérances
d’amélioration” (NP). While its “principal” goal is spreading awareness of the common
man’s plight among charitable elites, the platform it provides to the working people is
defined more ambivalently (“en outre”) as a secondary concern. Furthermore, as Philippe
Regnier notes in his study on La Ruche populaire in La Poésie populaire en France au XIXe
siècle, the considerable popularity of the Saint-Simonian movement in the 1840s popularized
this periodical among a large readership (idem 101).
In L’Atelier, the identification between reader and poet based on social class and life
experience is reflected in poems which focus on their shared suffering. In a poem entitled
“L’ouvrier et son enfant,” published in L’Atelier in late 1848, an editorial note introduces the
8
Some issues of the monthly L’Atelier are dated with the specific day and month of publication, while other
issues only show the month. This dating is reflected in my parenthetical citations.
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work via the poet’s misfortunes during the recent June Days: “notre ami et notre
collaborateur, […] victime de mensongères dénonciations, est enfermé, depuis les
événements de juin, dans la prison de Meaux, sans qu’il ait encore été possible de se
disculper” (October 7, 1848). While the editors claim to mention this information in order to
explain “le caractère mélancolique de ces vers,” this information suggests the political
motivation of this unfair imprisonment, a situation of which the socially-conscious reader of
this periodical was likely aware. The contrast between the man’s fate as a political prisoner
and the moderation of his message is striking: the poem is a father’s patriotic message to his
son about the importance of fighting for his country and wishing for “un avenir meilleur.”
This furthers the sense that he is falsely imprisoned; there is truly nothing radical, it seems,
about this man’s views. The mention of his son and his family adds to the reader’s sympathy
because his imprisonment deprives them of a breadwinner. Although the reference to the poet
as “notre ami” and “notre collaborateur” refers to the fact that he is a contributor to the
publication, it also seems to encompass the reader’s relationship to the poet: the editors’
message highlights their shared political hopes and suffering. In the same way, the poem
“Mon grand-père,” published in December 1847 describes an elderly laborer on the cusp of
death, returning home “lentement et la tête inclinée” with “sabots qui paraissent bien
pesants.” Worse than the man’s sad physical state is the one he predicts for his grandchildren:
“Vous serez moins heureux que moi dans l’avenir;/ On baisse la main d’oeuvre et la besogne
augmente ;/ […] Les mauvais jours vont revenir.” Like the imprisoned man’s message to his
son, this wise old man’s words to his grandchildren also address the reader directly as “vous,”
implicating him in their struggles. The sympathy these poems elicit thus aim to create
recognition in the reader of the shared status of this suffering among men of his social station.
In L’Atelier, this sympathy is invariably meant to be understood by the reader on a
collective and political level, not a personal one. In fact, L’Atelier was critical of rival
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publications, like La Ruche populaire, for their alleged indifference to political action and
focus on the individual (Weill 95). An 1842 review of the worker-poet Charles Poncy’s
“Marines” typifies the political significance L’Atelier required of the poetry it published:
while Poncy’s talent is praised, he is criticized for his inattentiveness to politics and the
popular reader: “Deux pièces de ce recueil ont une tendance politique. La première (l’Hiver)
est adressée aux riches, qu’elle invite à l’aumône, ce qui nous semble un fort mauvais moyen
de remédier au mal social. La seconde (Méditation sur les toits) est vide d’idées” (May
1842). This critique of Poncy for asking the rich for charity implicitly targets publications
like La Ruche populaire, which explicitly called for charity as a remedy for social ills.
Instead, L’Atelier is firm that the primary mission of popular poets is in the defense of their
peers: “Dieu l’a doué d’un beau talent; il doit l’employer à la défense de ceux parmi lesquels
il a été place, puisque ce sont les faibles et les opprimés. Voilà sa mission, et c’est à cela qu’il
doit parvenir !” (ibid.). The ironic use of the verb parvenir to indicate not the social success
of the author, but his success as a representative of his class, is central to L’Atelier’s
definition of the poet-reader relationship, as I will show. However, it also creates ambiguity
about the audience targeted: if the poet’s true audience is the “weak” and “oppressed”
common man, as L’Atelier asserts, to whom is he defending him?
In fact, while there is a firm insistance in L’Atelier that the poet-reader relationship is
rooted in a shared social status in the working class, there is an indirect reader implied in this
social project: elites. While asserting the fundamental rights of the worker, L’Atelier also
targeted elite readers just as La Ruche populaire did, by demonstrating the people’s worth.
This is evident in the inaugural issue, which heavily insists on the verb prouver in defining
the publication’s mission: “Nous avons d’abord à prouver à la France que nous sommes
dignes d’elle […] que nous sommes de son sang et que nous vivons de son esprit […] Il nous
faudra donc prouver, […] que nous sommes l’avant-garde des travailleurs” (September
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1840). It was not enough for L’Atelier to “prove” to other workers what their peers were
capable of, although that was a central part of its mission; it also had to be proven to political,
literary and social elites. It is interesting that the editors address this proof to “France”: this
allows them to avoid directly addressing the “riches bienfaisants” as La Ruche populaire did,
while depicting their mission as patriotic and unifying rather than socially or politically
divisive. Still, this makes clear that even in its strident calls for self-representation and
demanding workers’ rights, L’Atelier was conscious of the burden of its popular “avantgarde” in proving their fellow working man to social elites.
This representation of the poets and journalists as an “avant-garde” also indicates
another important facet of the poet-reader relationship in L’Atelier: the instruction and
guidance of the popular reader. In many cases, poems prescribe actions with political
significance for the reader to take. This is especially true in chansons with explicit political
messages. “Le départ des colons,” published in L’Atelier in December 1848 demonstrates this
tendency to address popular readers through direct calls to action:
Allez ! l’avenir est à nous !
Partez ! notre amour va vous suivre ;
Sur cette terre qu’on vous livre
Nous serons toujours avec vous ! (December 1848)
The departing colonists are explicitly told what to do in the exclamatory imperative forms,
“Allez !” and “Partez !” as are those who remain behind, assimilated into the first person
collective action (“notre,” “nous”). The alternance of “vous” and “nous” in every line above
indicates the extent of the tendency of poetry in this periodical to group readers together in
images of collectively beneficial action. Many of these poems evoke military themes, as
suggested by the reference to the “avant-garde” which compares the poet to the leader of the
battle. The notion that poetry was a call to the reader to engage in specific political and social
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actions is a central part of popular poetry and chanson in this politically tumultuous period.
Although in L’Atelier, the message is overtly political, this model of the poet-reader
relationship is not entirely unlike what we saw in the women’s press: the popular reader, like
the woman reader, is seen as needing the poet’s inspiration, guidance, and sometimes even
direct instructions about what actions to take.
While this tradition of poetry as a directive may seem overly didactic, it is more
understandable in the context of the nineteenth-century educational system, which was based
on the notion that for different stations in life, different and unequal types of education were
appropriate. Edmond Goblot describes the aims of this system in La Barrière et le niveau in
these terms: “Avant tout, l’éducation crée et maintient la distinction des classes ; […] il s’agit
de l’éducation qui classe, non de celle qui développe le mérite personnel” (9). For the
working classes, l’école primaire provided only the rudiments of reading and math while elite
students in the secondaire had a completely different education, which provided them
markers of intellectual distinction, like the intense apprenticeship of Latin and poetry (ibid); it
was of course, no coincidence that poetry and classical references play a significant role for
the nineteenth-century literary elites educated in this system. Furthermore, while a boy from
the lower classes was lucky to stay in school until the age of thirteen, a bourgeois man’s
education could easily last until the age of twenty-five (idem 77-8). In the context of such a
system, suggesting that authors from the popular classes had an important role to play in
educating their social peers is also a recognition of the fundamental gap in education meant to
keep the lower classes in their place.
Yet in L’Atelier, while the poet is a leader, the editors constantly affirm that he must
not use his intelligence to rise in society, but to help his fellow worker: “En prenant la plume,
nous ne quitterons point l’atelier” (September 1840). In fact, in order to emphasize the
empowerment of workers, not the individual, L’Atelier published the vast majority of its
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poems anonymously. In the aforementioned review of Les Marines, they even warn that
praising individual worker-poets might lead them “dans une mauvaise voie,” where they
forget the plight of the working classes and aim to achieve acclaim for their personal literary
merit (May 1842). The notion of the representative implies that he “stands for” the people by
making their “voices, opinions, and perspectives ‘present’” in poetry (Dovi) because they
cannot, simultaneously marking his inclusion in the group and his privileged status as part of
a popular avant-garde. However, as Rancière argues in La Nuit des prolétaires (1981), we
cannot understand worker-poets as representative of the people because, by the very fact of
their writing, they “ne représentent pas le quotidien de leurs travaux et de leurs colères” (9).
This paradoxical relationship of the poet as an exception and a representative is at the heart of
the poet-reader relationship in popular poetry as it appears in L’Atelier.
Correspondingly, while insisting that the worker-poet is fundamentally representative
of the people, both L’Atelier and La Ruche populaire recognize his special status as a moral
guide for readers. This is evident in literary reviews and poems in which there is a specific
moral lesson for the reader, and which are strikingly similar to those in the women’s press.
However, this overt moralism seems less surprising in the women’s periodicals I studied,
which were almost never entirely independent of the supervision and involvement of male
editors, whereas L’Atelier in particular prides itself as the voice of the people for a popular
readership. The pervasiveness of the idea that working people were particularly subject to
immorality seems to extend to publications where they are called on to express themselves, as
Chevalier asserts in Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses. In the first issue of L’Atelier,
the editors call morality “le meilleur conseiller et la meilleure hygiène pour le pauvre”
(September 1840), indicating that his mind, like his body, requires this moral hygiene.
Similarly, the text addressed “A nos frères” at the beginning of each edition of La Ruche
populaire states that while the publication allows workers “une pleine liberté d’exprimer
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leurs idées,” they must demonstrate “le respect que l’on doit toujours à la morale publique”
(NP).
In La Ruche populaire, proving the worth of the common man often means
demonstrating that he is inherently moral to the elite reader. This is evident in a number of
religious poems which draw inspiration from Gospel or explicitly quote it in epigraphs in
order to demonstrate the moral uprightness of the worker-poet. This also serves as a reminder
to the rich of the importance of charity and compassion in Christianity. Fables in this
periodical also prescribe memorable lessons to the reader, just as those in the women’s press.
For example, in an 1847 fable, “Le chien et l’homme” they seem to particularly target elite
readers with the moral that “A tout mal, la rigeur est un mauvais remède” (June-July 1847).
While this periodical demonstrates the morality and worthiness of the people, this does not
always appear especially empowering; instead, La Ruche populaire often portrays popular
poetry as a reflection of the essential goodness, modesty and religiosity of the common man,
reinforcing stereotypes about “the people,” advanced by well-meaning elites. In order to
prove their worth to the bourgeois reader, they thus limit the expressive capacity of poems by
worker-poets.
L’Atelier, on the other hand, does not paint such a rosy picture; in fact, it targets
immorality it sees in literature both among the working classes and in the culture at large.
This moralistic literary criticism leads to an interesting repetition of the themes omnipresent
in the bourgeois press in this period. For example, certain types of la chanson aux rues are
quoted as proof of their “outrage au goût et à la morale” (August 31, 1843). More often,
however, L’Atelier asserted that it is the dominant culture which deliberately corrupts the
people with its immoral literary works: “Il semblerait, en effet, à voir les écrits qu’on met
sous nos yeux et les exemples qu’on nous prodigue au théâtre, il semblerait qu’il y a un parti
pris pour nous corrompre” (September 1840). Here we see an interesting reversal of the
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notion that popular readers were particularly subject to the corrupting effects of literature:
instead of refuting this, L’Atelier suggests that this is not a matter of personal fault, but a
larger conspiracy by which elites try to corrupt the popular reader and prove his inferiority.
Popular audiences were not spared responsibility either, as we see in an 1843 article, “De
l’enseignement fait au peuple par la presse, les feuilletons, les romans etc.”:
Quand un ouvrier apparaît sur la scène, il est ivre, grossier ou ridicule. L’oubli
des convenances, la stupidité des idées, la bassesse de l’expression, l’obscénité
du geste, rien n’y manque. Ce qui nous afflige profondément, c’est de voir des
ouvriers rester impassibles devant ces insultes quotidiennes et quelquefois
même y applaudir comme à la peinture spirituelle et vraie de leurs mœurs.
(qtd. in Rancière 269)
While elites are to blame for these stereotypical depictions of the masses, the people
themselves are culpable for not refuting them. As Rancière asserts, this insidious cultural
power of the bourgeois to depict the worker as immoral and stupid cements his economic
superiority by denying the humanity of the oppressed: “C’est le jugement de la classe
dominante qui la condamne au travail incessant en lui déniant les caractères de l’homme
libre, susceptible d’utiliser ses loisirs pour une autre activité que l’orgie de l’esclavage” (idem
270). This also justifies the reasoning according to which L’Atelier and La Ruche populaire
only publish works by workers: if elite representations of them were flawed, they had to
prove that these stereotypes were untrue through their counter-examples. For L’Atelier in
particular, the popular poet is a guarantee against this intentional corruption of the popular
reader because of his unique status: as a member of the same social class as the reader, he has
the reader’s best interests at heart; yet as an elite within his class, he is capable of guiding
him. On the other hand, for La Ruche populaire, the moralistic tone of popular poetry proves
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the fundamental decency of the people to elite readers, demonstrating that they deserve their
largesse.
Despite the sometimes prescriptive and moralistic role poet-reader relationship in La
Ruche populaire and L’Atelier, they represent a compelling moment in nineteenth-century
poetry when the popular reader could identify himself and his struggles in poems and songs
published in independent periodicals. Hélène Millot captures the uniqueness of this
movement in her study “Une portée politique : la poésie des goguettes républicaines et la
chanson révolutionnaire” in Poésie populaire en France au XIX e siècle:
Il reste que les années 1830-1850 représentent un moment littéraire étonnant, qui
accorde une place essentielle à la poésie […] parce que de nouveaux poètes
apparaissent, en grand nombre, dans le peuple travailleur même. Parce qu’un nouveau
mode de poésie nait véritablement, neuf par son origine, sa posture d’énonciation, ses
modes de diffusion, ses enjeux… qui fondent en somme toute une poétique populaire.
(321-22)
This “moment littéraire étonnant” proved to be short-lived though: an 1852 law requiring
“autorisation préalable” for periodicals largely spelled the end of this outlet of poetic
expression and the end of the trend of popular literature made it less compelling to elite poets
and readers (Poésie populaire en France au XIXe siècle 496). With these periodicals,
particularly L’Atelier, went a unique poet-reader relationship based on their shared status in
the lowest rungs of society, in which poetry by the people played an important role in their
destiny.
3. Hugo, the Popular Poet and the “Multitude”
As many scholars have noted, poésie populaire also represents the broader influence
of “the people” on the literary field in France, outside works by popular poets. Not only did
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celebrities in the literary world bring popular poetry and poets into the public eye, but their
work was profoundly shaped by these interactions. This is evident in critical articles and
literary works in which they invoke the people as a source of inspiration, renewal and truth
for literature. As René Garguilo puts it, this period between 1830 and 1850 represents “le
moment où la Littérature romantique devint résolument sociale et se met […] à ‘réfléchir son
siècle’” (61). However, elite poets’ reflections on “the people” cannot simply be taken at face
value. Instead, I will show that these seem to be one-way exchanges: “the people” are a vague
source of inspiration in poetry or a passive and collective force upon which the elite poet acts,
and who he guides in literature.
In Romantic poetry, the “popular” influence also reflected a philosophy of primitivism
as a source of the revitalization of poetic language, as Bénichou highlights in Le Sacre de
l’écrivai :
Une théorie du langage primitif est inséparable […] de l’idée qu’on se fait des
origines prestigieuses de la poésie. La poésie fut le mode d’élocution naturel
de l’humanité naissante. Le langage de l’homme à ses débuts avait la force et
la saveur de la vie ; une nécessité spontanée liait les mots aux choses ; la
convention et l’analyse ne sont venus qu’ensuite, comme instruments de
l’intelligence perfectionnée en quête d’une science abstraite. (58)
This philosophy of language inspired by late-eighteenth century thinkers like Rousseau and
Condillac (idem 59) led Romantic poets to see in poetic expression associated with the
popular classes – written or inspired by them – an ideal poetic past in which language had a
fuller sense by linking “les mots aux choses.” In this way, the people, less influenced by the
supposed advances of an “intelligence perfectionnée” and the development of “science
abstraite,” were privileged for their proximity to a “spontaneous” and “natural” form of
expression that other segments of society had lost.
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This idea that the people were a a source of inspiration in poetry explains some of the
“fuzziness” around words like ‘peuple’ among Romantic poets that Maurice Tournier
analyzes in the article “Le mot ‘Peuple’ en 1848.” In it, he confirms that for Romantic poets
this term “sert à la mythification d’un référent aux contours flous, qui change avec des
auteurs et les moments du même auteur. Nous ne sommes d’ailleurs pas interrogés sur le
contenu du terme, mais sur sa qualité et ses qualifications. Entité nationale, voire universelle
pour Lamartine […] Le mot résume une expérience encore ambiguë de la foule et de la rue
chez Hugo” (18). As Tournier makes clear, a term like ‘peuple’ is more suggestive of a set of
ideas about poetry and language than a clear reference to an explicit group of people in a
social or historical context.
In Hugo’s poetry, including in his works published in exile, this is evident in a
number of poems, as I showed in the first chapter, in which he invokes the people in a vague
and vast way as a mass of humanity. For example in the epic poem “Les Mages” from 1856
Les Contemplations, he depicts the geniuses of the world communicating with the people:
“Ils parlent à la multitude, Et font écumer ce torrent” (513-4); “… ils ont en eux, pour muse,/
La palpitation confuse/ De tous les êtres à la fois” (518-20). Here, even in this period in
which he invests his poetry with an important political mission, as we will see in greater
length in the last section of this chapter, the popular audience is always conceived of in a
massive way, as a “multitude,” a “torrent,” and even “all beings.” Furthermore, it is the poet’s
powers which are the focus in verbal constructions like “font écumer,” which underlines that
it is the poet which makes this happen, and the reference to “confused palpitations,” of which
the poet makes sense. This interaction also tends to accentuate the poet’s individuality while
celebrating the power of the people as a collective mass. For example, the “torrent” is a
significant image in that its power comes from the whole; each drop is inseparable and
inconsequential on its own. As Adéline Daumard argues in her article “Le peuple dans la
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société française à l’époque romantique,” this is not unique to Hugo’s poetry; there is a
signficant inconsistency in the Romantic poet’s consistently unequal “exaltation des valeurs
individualistes au nom des droits du créateur d'une part, [et] la glorification des vertus du
peuple dont la puissance véritable reposait sur une action collective quelque peu niveleuse
d'autre part” (28). This model of the poet-reader relationship in Romantic poetry, with one
elite poet facing the indistinguishable masses, highlights the extent to which we need to be
careful about the political implications of Romantic poets’ evocations of the public. It is not
enough that a poet uses words like ‘peuple’ or ‘la multitude’ to make him a social poet.
Hugo’s correspondence with worker- poets also indicates a hierarchy in his thinking
between “poets” like himself and “worker-poets,” which have significant implications for the
poet-reader relationship. Like many well-known literary figures in the 1840s, Hugo
corresponded with and encouraged young worker-poets. In an 1837 “lettre à un ouvrier
poète,” whose name has tellingly not been recorded, he writes, “Soyez fier de votre titre
d’ouvrier. Nous sommes tous des ouvriers, y compris Dieu” (qtd. in Garguilo 70-71). He
repeated this advice four years later in a letter to the popular poet Savinien Lapointe,
published in La Ruche populaire, of which the well-known worker-poet was the editor:
“Continuez, Monsieur, votre double fonction, votre tâche comme ouvrier, votre apostolat
comme penseur” (ibid.). The idea that Hugo like the men he addresses were all “ouvriers” is
an indication of the fluid way that Hugo and other Romantic poets used words like ‘peuple’
and ‘ouvrier’ in ways which emptied them of their specific meaning in favor of vague
expressions of camaraderie. In fact, L’Atelier was openly critical of this tendency among elite
poets who falsely associated themselves with the plight of the working man through such
terms: “Moquons-nous de ces littérateurs, de ces artistes qui, sacrifiant à la mode et voulant
absolument faire partie de l'aristocratie partout où ils pensent la trouver, se disent ouvriers de
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la pensée et du sentiment, de ces avocats qui s'intitulent ouvriers de la parole; car Dieu sait la
besogne que font ces ouvriers-là” (April 30, 1848).
For L’Atelier, rather than helping the cause of the working man, literary elites thus
reproduced a hierarchy between themselves and the people through such alleged statements
of support. This is further proven by their paternalistic attitudes towards popular poets, which
are criticized in review of Poncy’s Les Marines:
M. Poncy est un très-jeune homme, qui fait de la maçonnerie et des vers. Nous
laissons à d’autres le soin de ridiculiser ce contraste: nos adversaires ne
manqueront pas à cette tâche. Nous ne sommes pas non plus de ceux qui
s’extasient en voyant sortir d’une tête de manouvrier une œuvre intellectuelle,
habitués qu’ils sont à ne lui voir faire que ce qu’ils appellent d’obscurs et
grossiers travaux. C’est là un sentiment éminemment aristocratique, que nous
ne donnerons même pas la peine de combattre. (May 1842)
Not only do elite poets posit themselves as the natural leaders of ‘ouvriers,’ but they discredit
those who L’Atelier saw as the true leaders of the popular reader: popular poets.
While the worker-journalists of L’Atelier agree with Hugo that the worker-poet should
remain both a poet and a worker, they do so for very different reasons. For L’Atelier, if
worker-poets leave their social group, they either risk becoming disinterested in the future of
those they left behind, or worse, insincere intellectual ‘ouvriers’ like Hugo who
condescended to people with whom they share nothing. Further, coming from Hugo, this
advice to “stay in your place” suggests the creation of a hierarchy in literature between “real”
poets and worker-poets, whose status as poets is conditional on their remaining a part of a
larger group of workers. This is not unlike the tendency in his poetry to group the people as a
mass and refuse their individuality. Thus, as Hugo told Lapointe, worker-poets poets had a
specific status as a part of the masses, different than his own, as an individual: “les hommes
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comme vous, parmi le peuple, sont les flambeaux qui éclairent le travail des autres” (qtd. in
Garguilo 71, emphasis is mine). While elites like Hugo were poetically above the fray,
worker-poets had to remain in their place “among the people” to have any claim on poetry.
4. Lamartine and the Popular (Prose) Reader
Like Hugo, Lamartine’s address of the popular reader is far from empowering, and
indeed demonstrates the mechanisms of paternalism towards the popular reader in a
remarkable way. In Le Sacre de l’écrivai , Bénichou sees in Lamartine and the generation of
Romantic poets who came of age in the 1800-1820 period the fundamental marks of “la
contre-révolution”:
Leurs vues […] exprimaient et justifiaient, comme l’ancienne orthodoxie, […]
la condition commune d’une humanité dont le vœu terrestre n’était pas près
d’être satisfait. La Contre-Révolution et l’Eglise ont échoué dans leur retour
offensif ; mais des laïques exempts d’attaches dogmatiques étroites ont plus
librement manié les thèmes de la tradition et de la foi selon la convenance
nouvelle. (192)
This explains the foundation of the unequal relationship in the conception of the poet-reader
relationship of these figures like Lamartine and Hugo who we tend to associate with support
for the working people. While their politics were liberalized, they still harbored
fundamentally elitist conceptions their role as poets and prophets among humanity.
In fact, Lamartine’s conception of literature for a popular audience separates it
entirely from other practices of elite literature and from the very genre of poetry. In the
preface to the novel Geneviève (1850), he recounts his 1846 meeting with the self-taught
poète-couturière Reine Garde. He immediately appreciates her poetry for its grace and
harmony, and encourages her to continue her education. Yet, when asked what she reads,
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Reine exclaims, “Ah, voilà le mal […]. Il faut lire et il n’y a rien à lire. Les livres ont été faits
pour d’autres […] Les auteurs étaient tous des hommes d’une condition supérieure à la nôtre
ou du moins qui étaient sortis de notre condition obscure et laborieuse” (Lamartine, Le
conseiller du peuple 233). This idea that, as René Garguilo puts it, “les livres dont le peuple a
besoin n’existent pas” leads Lamartine and his protégé to draw up a list of the qualities
popular literature should have, and which he recounts in this preface (68). The six criteria
they identify include several characteristics commonly associated with popular literature in
the nineteenth century: this literature should be “vraie” “simple” and “naturelle.” It should
also take into account a few practical considerations: books should be short, “longs comme la
durée d’une chandelle” and inexpensive, “pas plus cher qu’une bouteille de vin” as Reine
adds with some folksiness (Lamartine, Le conseiller du peuple 325).
Perhaps surprisingly, this list of requirements for popular literature written by two
poets also dictates that it should be solely in prose: “— Il faudrait qu’elles fussent en prose,
n’est-ce pas, encore ? — Oui, Monsieur, c’est plus simple pour nous ; nous aimons qu’on
nous parle comme nous parlons. Les auteurs devraient garder les vers pour les cantiques, pour
les prières” (idem 323). The way that Lamartine reconstructs their dialogue is striking: the
poet crafts short rules phrased as questions, although they are more affirmative than openended. To each one, Reine responds “Oui, Monsieur,” confirming the elite poet’s statements
about the popular reader and his authority to define this group to which he does not belong.
She also adds long, sometimes effusive arguments in support of his ideas, full of folksy
wisdom, as in the passages above. Her responses conform to elite stereotypes about popular
expression: she tends to focus on concrete examples rather than abstract ideas, and seems
incapable of restraining her ideas to short points like Lamartine does; instead she typifies
popular bavardage. Furthermore, her answer about poetry also confirms specific clichés
about popular readers, like their preference for realism (“parle comme nous parlons”), and
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that their only references for verse are “cantiques” and “prières,” and not for example, verse
of the kind that Reine herself writes! This reconstructed conversation serves as the guiding
argument for the popular novel it prefaces, which is supposed to fulfill these exact criteria. It
is interesting that for Lamartine and supposedly for the fellow poet he makes speak here, the
reader of popular poetry is not even considered in the 1840s, when poetry by, for and about
the people was omnipresent in reviews, books, periodicals and anthologies.
This novel, Geveviève, histoire d’u e serva te, dedicated and partly inspired by
Reine, was published as part of a broader project that Lamartine launched after the 1848
Revolution to address the popular reader in a new way. In 1849, he founded the hybrid
periodical Le conseiller du peuple, which he described as a “journal-livre qui porte dans
toutes les classes de la société, dans les familles comme dans les ateliers, des idées justes,
sages et progressives” (qtd. in Thérenty, “Voix, causes et cris du peuple” 118). Published
monthly, this thirty-page periodical cost only one centime, allowing it to reach an audience of
30,000 within three months of its launch (ibid.). Even though Lamartine asserts that this
project is for “all classes of society,” the title’s mention of the “peuple” and the specific
spaces he identifies like “ateliers” pinpoint areas for popular sociability. Furthermore, while
Lamartine aims to address a popular reader, every aspect of this project underscores the fact
that he is the one who is given a platform to communicate, not them. While “conseiller”
might indicate a generic newspaper title, each issue featured a long column entitled “Conseil
au peuple” written by Lamartine, in which the elite poet turned journalist literally “councils”
the people. Furthermore, the hybridity of this tool for counseling the people indicates which
genres Lamartine associates with them – the newspaper and the novel, as well as a political
“almanach,” which he entitled another one of the rubrics; again, not poetry. As Marie-Ève
Thérenty notes in “Voix, causes et cris du peuple,” “la voix du peuple […] paraît
complètement masquée par la parole maîtrisée de Lamartine, représentant du peuple,
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pédagogue quelquefois, le plus souvent prophète” (ibid.). In the model of the poet-prophet,
Lamartine was not alone among Romantic poets, as we saw above. His preconceptions of
popular readers are apparent, and his guidance leads them directly away from all poetry
towards novels and periodicals full of “simplicity” and “truth.”
While it is tempting to see Hugo and Lamartine’s attitudes towards the people in
literature as largely harmless and typical of elites in this era, particularly in the face of their
progressive political involvement (Lamartine) and personal sacrifice for political reasons
(Hugo), I argue that their positions were far from benign. Instead, the Romantic myth of the
“people” had very real political effects in its adoption as the guiding principle of a
conservative redefinition of poésie populaire. During the Second Empire, the project for a
Recueil général des poésies populaires de la France was launched in earnest, following
similar projects in several European countries to compile a national popular literature.
However, in the hands of this government, poésie populaire was completely redefined from
what we have seen above in the practices of poetry by and for the working classes in the
years 1830-1850. Instead, it was stripped of all contemporary political significance and
defined as a “grand et complet monument élevé au génie anonyme et poétique du peuple,”
and by extension, the heritage and legacy of the whole nation (Instructions pour un recueil
général des poésies populaires de la France 1852-1857, 11).
In the instructions for this project, the committee members defined poésie populaire
in very specific ways: made up largely of members of various Académies, including SainteBeuve, as well as teachers and clercs, the committee affirmed it would only include pieces
that were anonymous and oral – “les poésies nées spontanément au sein des masses
anonymes” (idem 20-21). Popular poetry was also defined as belonging to the historical past:
“le comité a résolu de ne faire entrer dans la collection que des poésies antérieures au XIXe
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siècle” (idem 93). And it could only be comprised of distinct genres and themes: poésies
populaires could be “religieuses,” “didactiques et morales,” “historiques,” or “romanesques;”
and chants and chansons could concern stages of life, the occupations of “chasseurs,”
“pêcheurs,” and “bergers,” or satires and “chansons badines [et] bachiques,” as long as the
latter did not push “les bornes de la décence” (idem 26). While this project was never fully
realized, and the Recueil was never published, the official definition of popular poetry by the
Second Empire as anonymous, historically distant, and thematically conservative allowed it
to “canaliser [l]a culture profane dans un folklore régional” and thus silence contemporary,
innovative and political popular poetry (Agulhon 64). In this way, the Second Empire
censored and coopted poésie populaire: the decree of September 13, 1852 that launched this
project came less than seven months after the reestablishment of authorisation préalable for
periodicals, which censored political writing, and at the same time as massive police
surveillance of goguettes and other places of popular culture and sociability. By forcing the
closure of these outlets for popular poetry and canalizing what was left into café concerts and
a state-sponsored project, the Second Empire thus doubly censored popular poetry.
5. Baudelaire in 1850: the Fusion of the Poet and the People
While poets like Lamartine and Hugo reveal attitudes towards popular readers that are
less supportive than one might imagine, it is Baudelaire and Gautier’s generations who in the
years around 1848 endorse a real engagement with the popular reader in way that is both
politically and esthetically radical. In particular, I will focus on Baudelaire’s preface to the
chansonnier Pierre Dupont’s Chants et chansons (1850) to demonstrate the extent to which
he saw popular poetry in these years as capable of redefining poetic practice by creating a
new model of the poet-reader relationship based on profound communication, equality and
even fusion.
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In this preface, published in August 1850, it is clear from the outset that a gulf
separates Baudelaire from Hugo in his views on the status of the worker-poet in relation to
his public. Baudelaire recounts Dupont’s trajectory, from a canut in Lyon to a new arrival
into the Parisian literary world, where he befriended the young Baudelaire, Banville and
Gautier, as a move from oppression to freedom. Leaving behind “la pression d’une odieuse
tyrannie” he struck out on his own: “Il voulut être libre, et il fit bien. Le poëte doit vivre par
lui-même; […] Il faut que son outil le nourisse” (OC 1961, 608-09). For Baudelaire, to
become a poet, one has to leave behind any occupation that stands in the way of his real work
– literature. However, this move from worker to poet does not mean that the popular poet
denies his roots in the working class; his past experience allows him to appreciate freedom
and shapes him as an active agent more finely attuned to the suffering of the working man: “il
n’en reste que ce qu’il faut, un souvenir de douleur, un levain pour la pâte” (idem 608).
Baudelaire also represents Dupont’s literary career as undergoing a profound change
in audience in line with his maturity and evolution as a poet: he passes from an entertainer of
the bourgeois to a representative of the working masses. Baudelaire credits Dupont’s early
volume Les paysans, chants rustiques (1846) with introducing a breath of fresh air “sur les
pianos de la bourgeoisie” which “introduit un peu de vérité et de nature dans ces chants
destinés à charmer les soirées. Ce n'était plus cette nourriture indigeste de crèmes et de
sucreries dont les familles illettrées bourrent imprudemment la mémoire de leurs
demoiselles” (idem 609). However, for Baudelaire, it was not Dupont’s destiny as a poet to
remain an entertainer of young bourgeois ladies and their families, even if this career was
open to him. Instead, he took a different path, targeting a new, broader audience: “Cependant
Dupont, […] avait composé un chant d’une allure plus décidée et bien mieux fait pour
émouvoir le cœur des habitants d’une grande ville” (ibid.). The transition here is significant:
leaving behind a career as a chansonnier whose job it was to entertain young bourgeois
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women, his new audience extends across the urban population, which as we saw earlier in
this chapter, was associated with the swelling laboring classes implicated in political
uprisings. Thus, his task is no longer to “charm” the bourgeois audience, but to emotionally
“move” the urban populace, signaling a real change in both the audience and the tenor of his
relationship to them.
The song Baudelaire is referring to above is the 1846 “Le chant des Ouvriers” about
the exploitation of workers; its refrain became a revolutionary hymn in 1848:
Aimons-nous et quand nous pouvons
Nous unir pour boire à la ronde,
Que le canon se taise ou gronde,
Buvons, buvons, buvons,
À l’indépendance du monde ! (Dupont).
Baudelaire evokes the great emotion that hearing this song produced:
Quand j'entendis cet admirable cri de douleur et de mélancolie (Le chant des
Ouvriers, 1846), je fus ébloui et attendri. Il y avait tant d'années que nous
attendions un peu de poésie forte et vraie! Il est impossible, à quelque parti
qu'on appartienne, de quelques préjugés qu'on ait été nourri, de ne pas être
touché du spectacle de cette multitude maladive respirant la poussière des
ateliers, avalant du coton, s'imprégnant de céruse, de mercure et de tous les
poisons nécessaires à la création des chefs-d’œuvre, dormant dans la vermine,
au fond des quartiers où les vertus les plus humbles et les plus grandes nichent
à côté des vices les plus endurcis et des vomissements du bagne; de cette
multitude soupirante et languissante à qui la terre doit ses merveilles; qui sent
un sang vermeil et impétueux couler dans ses veines, qui jette un long regard
chargé de tristesse sur le soleil et l'ombre des grands parcs, et qui, pour
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suffisante consolation et réconfort, répète à tue-tête son refrain sauveur:
Aimons-nous!... (OC 1961, 609-610; emphasis Baudelaire’s)
Despite his appreciation for the artist and his song, it is what they represent in relation to the
public that is central: “Le chant des Ouvriers” is “un événement grave, non pas tant à cause
de sa valeur propre, qui cependant est très grande, qu’à cause des sentiments publics dont
cette poésie est le symptôme, et dont Pierre Dupont s’est fait l’écho” (idem 605). The image
of poetry as an echo of public feeling repeated several times in this preface is one that Hugo
often used in his poetry (idem 1658). However, this preface describes this “echo” in the
opposite way that Hugo used it: while for Hugo, the poet is the stimulating force, for
Baudelaire, the poet represents a receptacle for the people’s voices, a kind of chambre
d’écho: “La Révolution de Février activa cette floraison impatiente et augmenta les vibrations
de la corde populaire; tous les malheurs et toutes les espérances de la Révolution firent écho
dans la poésie de Pierre Dupont” (idem 610, emphasis mine). While for Hugo, poets “font
écumer” the masses, here it is the popular vibrations that “firent écho” in Dupont’s poems.
Furthermore, this reference to a contemporary event – the February Revolution – suggests the
“populaire” refers to a group of people that is concrete in a historical and political sense. This
passage also suggests a literal meaning for this sound: the vibrating (vocal) cords and “echo”
of voices behind the barricades belong to the people. While Pierre Dupont’s songs made him
“le Béranger de la nouvelle république,” according to Maurice Agulhon (61), Baudelaire
emphasizes the primacy of the people’s voices, and not Dupont’s role.
That Baudelaire is redefining the Hugolian “echo” is also clear in the contrast between
poetry he criticizes as “académique” and “égoïste” in comparison to the new school of
popular poetry, which Dupont represents:
je préfère le pöete qui se met en communication permanente avec les hommes
de son temps, et échange avec eux des pensées et des sentiments traduits dans
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un noble langage suffisamment correct. Le poëte, placé sur un des points de la
circonférence de l’humanité, renvoie sur la même ligne en vibrations plus
mélodieuses la pensée humaine qui lui fut transmise ; tout poëte véritable doit
être une incarnation” (OC 1961, 606)
The choice of words like “communication” and “exchange” make clear that Baudelaire’s
model of the poet-reader relationship is based on a two-way rapport between poet and
reader/singer that is absent in Hugo and Lamartine’s conception of the popular audience. The
model of the poet-reader relationship in this circle of humanity also emphasizes its reciprocal
and cyclical nature: the poet fundamentally remains a part of this circle, and his position
allows him to turn ideas into songs, while signaling that he does not change or initiate these
ideas. On the contrary, they are “transmitted to him” by the people; his reception of their
thoughts turns to action when he “sends them back” in a melodious form. This passage also
argues for the primacy of shared feeling and thought over formal concerns; poetry need only
be “sufficiently correct” and “more melodious,” not an esthetic or formal masterpiece.
Baudelaire will return to this important idea that form is far less important than feeling
in a note at the end of the preface about the reader/performer’s reenactment of these chants
and chansons: “Il ne suffit pas d’avoir la voix juste ou belle, il est beaucoup plus important
d’avoir du sentiment. […] Il vous faut donc, pour bien représenter l’œuvre, entrer dans la
peau de l’être créé, vous pénétrer profondément des sentiments qu’il exprime, et les si bien
sentir, qu’il vous semble que ce soit votre œuvre propre” (idem 614-615, emphasis
Baudelaire’s). The italicized passage about “entering into the skin” of the poet makes literal
Baudelaire’s earlier reference to an “incarnation” of the people in the figure of the poet:
Baudelaire encourages the singer to imagine these songs as his own. This is a very powerful
indicator of the extent to which he reimagines the poet-reader relationship not only in the
empowerment of the popular audience, but as a real fusion of his feelings and thoughts with
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the chansonnier: the idea of an incarnation, unlike the representative, insists on the primacy
of the people’s voices. By singing these songs, the singer incarnates the poet, wearing his
skin and singing his words as though they are his own; and, in that they are inspired by the
voice and the feelings of the people, they are. This completes the circle that fuses the poet
and the public.
In this new poet-reader relationship, genre appears to be significant: chanson
facilitates the union of the poet and public because the latter actively embodies the text and
its author by performing it. However, Baudelaire does not put too fine a point on this
distinction between poetry and chanson; instead, he refers to this work alternately as “chant,”
“chanson” and “poësie,” indicating that his message applies to a variety of forms, and
emphasizing that what he says here is true for all forms, both written and oral: “Tout cela
deviendra livre, poésie et chant, en dépit de toutes les résistances” (idem 614). The last page
of the preface suggests the scope of this new conception of poetry and its audience by calling
for the disappearance of an old kind of poetry as inaction and individuality and the dawn of a
new social poetry profoundly involved in the affairs of the world:
Disparaissez donc, ombres fallacieuses de René, d'Obermann et de
Werther ; fuyez dans les brouillards du vide, monstrueuses créations de la
paresse et de la solitude ; […] Le génie de l'action ne vous laisse plus de place
parmi nous.
[…]
Ce sera l'éternel honneur de Pierre Dupont d'avoir le premier enfoncé la
porte. La hache à la main, il a coupé les chaînes du pont-levis de la forteresse ;
maintenant la poésie populaire peut passer.
[…]
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C'est une grande destinée que celle de la poésie ! Joyeuse ou
lamentable, elle porte toujours en soi le divin caractère utopique. […] Dans le
cachot elle se fait révolte ; à la fenêtre de l'hôpital, elle est ardente espérance
de guérison; dans la mansarde déchirée et malpropre, elle se pare comme une
fée du luxe et de l'élégance ; non seulement elle constate mais elle répare.
Partout elle se fait négation de l'iniquité.
Va donc à l'avenir en chantant, poète providentiel, tes chants sont le
décalque lumineux des espérances et des convictions populaires ! (idem 61314).
To anyone familiar with Baudelaire’s work, these lines are surprising, to say the least.
In fact, many critics find it impossible to believe that Baudelaire is sincere here, and interpret
this preface as motivated by something else. For Pascal Pia, this is a negation of all
Baudelaire’s values in the interest of his friendship with Dupont: “Sa notice sur son ami le
chansonnier Pierre Dupont nous présente Baudelaire le plus déconcertant qui soit : infidèle à
lui-même, à son esthétique, à sa poésie, à son goût de la solitude et de la rêverie, – infidèle à
tout, pourrait-on dire, sauf à son amitié pour Dupont !” (Pia 73). Walter Benjamin also
emphasizes the friendship with Dupont, but sees this not as a betrayal of Baudelaire’s
ideology, but as a strategy: “Baudelaire intended his friendship with Pierre Dupont to indicate
that he was a social poet;” the Dupont preface is “an act of literary strategy […]. Baudelaire’s
abrupt break with l’art pour l’art was of value to him only as an attitude. It permitted him to
announce the latitude which was at his disposal as a man of letters” (57-59). Other critics
have insisted on the more “Baudelarian” subtext between the lines: in these interpretations,
what he is really expressing is a desire for revenge against the bourgeois, not for the people;
or it is a new take on a common theme, like the pleasure of the “foule” (Vaillant, “Baudelaire,
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Pierre Dupont et la poésie populaire” 425). While these analyses are tempting ways of
resolving what appears to be a paradox, I argue that his position in 1850 is only truly
paradoxical if we consider it retrospectively, from a vantage point that includes the last
fifteen years of Baudelaire’s life rather than from the vantage point of Baudelaire’s life up to
1850. By defining this text as “un-Baudelarian,” we interpret Baudelaire’s elitist position on
poetry and the public as a constant to which this text is an exception. In fact, this sudden shift
makes more sense if we consider the experiences of poets like Baudelaire and Gautier in
these years: from a political and literary revolution that suggested that poetry had a vital role
to play in public, to the closure of the publications they worked for, political repression that
forced Dupont to pledge allegiance to the authoritarian state, and the surveillance and
censoring of a once vibrant literary tradition. It is not my aim to engage in a political and
esthetic rehabilitation of Baudelaire as a democrat, but rather to embrace the complexity of
his positions as a means of understanding the abrupt shift in his model of the poet-reader
relationship and its repercussions on the positions staked by his poetic successors.
While Baudelaire’s actions between 1848 and 1850 are partly unknown, letters and
anecdotes from his peers give us reason to believe that the Revolution of 1848 played an
important role in his life politically and esthetically. An early biographer of Baudelaire,
Eugène Crépet, quotes a letter in which the poet Gustave Le Vavasseur recounts Baudelaire’s
activity during battle of June 26, 1848 alongside Pierre Dupont: “Je n’avais jamais vu, écrira
La Vavasseur, Baudelaire en cet état. Il pérorait, déclamait, se vantait, se démenait pour
courir au martyre […] Quoi qu’on ait pensé du courage de Baudelaire, ce jour-là, il était
brave et se serait fait tuer” (qtd. in Niderst 237). Nor does it seem that Baudelaire conceived
of his political actions as separate from his literary and journalistic work: he helped found a
republican journal, Le Salut public, and likely collaborated on the revolutionary journal Le
Travail during a 1849 trip to Dijon to meet its editor, Jules Viard, as his friend Charles
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Asselineau confirmed (Baudelaire Correspondance I: 788-9; Niderst 233). It is also likely
that Baudelaire’s early project for a volume of poetry, Les Limbes, contained poems inspired
by the political ferment of these years, and which Baudelaire claims to have largely removed
in the editing process that reimagined the book as Les Fleurs du mal (Correspondance 1:
411). Furthermore, some of Baudelaire’s contemporaries continued to associate him with his
position in the Dupont preface even after the disillusionment of 1852. During his trial in
1857, Pinard wrote in his notes that “Baudelaire, en effet, avait beaucoup d’amis dans le
camp républicain” in contrast with Flaubert, “l’hôte assidu et fêté des salons de la princesse
Mathilde” (qtd. in Leclerc 62). As Yvan Leclerc points out in Crimes Écrits, this shows that
“Baudelaire paye l’arriéré idéologique de 1848” (ibid.). For his contemporaries, most of
whom did not know about his esthetic reversal, he remained affiliated with revolution and
republicanism as an enemy of the established order and a friend of the dangerous masses.
Nor was Baudelaire alone in this position in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Even the
partisan of l’art pour l’art himself, Gautier, rallied to the cause and expressed hope in the
political and literary possibilities of this period. After La Presse was suspended and Girardin
imprisoned, he contributed to several republican newspapers, including Victor and Charles
Hugo’s L’Évé eme t, demonstrating a new and “deliberately progressive view” in his
journalistic prose (Hamrick 248-9). He also seemed to share Baudelaire’s view of the
Revolution of 1848 as a privileged moment, albeit a brief one, in which the poet-reader
relationship was fundamentally altered. In the 1868 Rapport sur le progrès des lettres, he
recalled the importance of Dupont’s Chants: “On eut ainsi pendant quelques mois ce
spectacle assurément original et rare […] d’un poète accomplissant sa fonction d’une façon
directe, et communiquant en personne avec le public” (Silvestre de Sacy et al. 90).
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6. From Democracy to Aristocracy
In a March 5, 1852 letter to his financial guardian Ancelle, Baudelaire wrote: “Vous
ne m’avez pas vu au vote ; c’est un parti pris chez moi. LE 2 DÉCEMBRE m’a physiquement
dépolitiqué. […] Si j’avais voté, je n’aurais pu voter que pour moi” (Correspondance 1: 188).
While Baudelaire famously claims to be “dépolitiqué” by the coup d’Etat of 1851, many of
his writings after 1852 suggest that this is not quite true; instead, he moved to a staunchly
aristocratic position. He was not de-politicized, but de-democratized. This letter shows the
direct line he draws between his disillusion with the masses in the coup d’état and a
philosophy that was profoundly individualistic and self-centered (“je n’aurais pu voter que
pour moi”). Baudelaire would further develop this idea in the figure of the inwardly-turned
Dandy, as we see in a journal entry, written around 1865:
Ce que je pense du vote et du droit d’élections. Des droits de l’homme.
Ce qu’il y a de vil dans une fonction quelconque.
Un Dandy ne fait rien.
Vous figurez-vous un Dandy parlant au peuple, excepté pour le bafouer ?
Il n’y a pas de gouvernement raisonnable et assuré que l’aristocratique.
Monarchie ou république basées sur la démocratie sont également absurdes et
faibles. (OC 1961, 1278)
While only sketched out, the grouping of these notions into opposing camps is telling: on the
one hand elections, human rights, and democracy are associated with vileness, absurdity and
weakness; and on the other the Dandy, inaction, scorn for the public and aristocracy are seen
as reasonable. The only contact between the two worlds is cynicism and sadism towards “the
people” who betrayed their promise in 1850: “Imbéciles sont ceux qui croient que de pareilles
choses peuvent s’accomplir sans la permission du peuple” (idem 1286). Deceived by the
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people, he similarly reinterprets his position in 1848 not as a utopian vision, but as a cynical
and violent one: “Mon ivresse en 1848. De quelle nature était cette ivresse ? Goût de la
vengeance. Plaisir naturel de la démolition. Ivresse littéraire ; souvenir des lectures. […]
Folie du peuple et folie de la bourgeoisie. Amour naturel du crime” (idem 1274). It is the
move from the Pierre Dupont preface to this view that I assert more fully explains
Baudelaire’s late positions on poetry and its readership.
It also seems that Baudelaire’s rejection of the people led him to attempt to erase his
earlier stance. This is perhaps best demonstrated in a second article Baudelaire wrote on
Pierre Dupont in 1861 for Crépet’s Poètes français. In this article, Baudelaire significantly
tempers his appreciation for the chansonnier. In a way, it is quite similar to his article on
Marcelline Desbordes Valmore, in which his affinity for the poet is interpreted as an
idiosyncratic personal taste that contradicts his general esthetic. But the Dupont article
completely reinterprets the figure and his work based on a new set of criteria, relegating him
to the poetic backwater of poésie populaire as it was conceived in the Second Empire. For
example, while in the 1850 preface, formalism was a secondary concern, Baudelaire now
reinterprets it as a major flaw in Dupont’s work: “Je sais que les ouvrages de Pierre Dupont
ne sont pas d’un goût fini et parfait; mais il a l’instinct, sinon le sentiment raisonné de la
beauté parfaite” (idem 743). The phrasing (“Je sais que… mais”) signals that formal
perfection is now a criterion by which poetry must be judged, one that Baudelaire admits is
lacking. The expression “un goût fini et parfait” could hardly be more at odds with the 1850
argument about form, that it need only be “sufficiently correct” and “more melodious” than
the expression of his popular muse.
This total reevaluation of Dupont is also evident in the way that his trajectory as a
poet is discussed: whereas in 1850, his early pastoral poetry was seen as a youthful phase
before his more significant revolutionary songs, here Baudelaire reinterprets this rustic poetry
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as the heart of Dupont’s career. In so doing, he strongly associates Dupont with another
poetic backwater – women’s poetry:
L’instinct […] domine en lui la faculté du raisonnement. Le maniement des
abstractions lui répugne, et il partage avec les femmes ce singulier privilège
que toutes ses qualités poétiques comme ses défauts lui viennent du sentiment.
C’est à cette grâce, à cette tendresse féminine, que Pierre Dupont est
redevable
de
ses
premiers
chants.
Par
grand
bonheur,
l’activité
révolutionnaire, qui emportait à cette époque presque tous les esprits, n’avait
pas absolument détourné le sien de sa voie naturelle. Personne n’a dit, en
termes plus doux et plus pénétrantes, les petites joies et les grandes douleurs
des petites gens. (idem 744)
This passage shows the extent of this repositioning: Dupont and his work no longer represent
the revolutionary future of poetic practice, but an ahistorical poetic sub-genre, comparable to
women’s poetry. Every characterization in this emasculating passage associates Dupont with
practices of women’s poetry which distinguish it from “real” poetry in every possible way:
instinct, naturalness, the rejection of abstractions, unbridled emotion. In so doing, Dupont’s
relationship to the reader is redefined, from an avant-garde political and esthetic fusion to an
emotional reflection on the “small joys and great sorrows” of the people. Baudelaire’s choice
of words is indicative of this profound shift: “la multitude” and “l’humanité” of 1850 have
become “les petits gens” of 1861. The poet-reader relationship in Dupont’s poetry is no
longer in service of an esthetic and political revolution, but a source of personal pleasure. The
poet has made Dupont retreat, from the street back into the bourgeois salon.
Once again, Baudelaire is not alone in this radical redefinition of Dupont and his
relationship to the reader: both Banville and Gautier in later articles reinterpret him in line
with the clichés in the Second Empire’s Recueil général des poésies populaires. For Gautier
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in 1868, Dupont’s poetry is part of the anonymous, ancient and rural tradition of poésie
populaire: “Ces chansons-là, où l’âme du peuple balbutie ses secrets sentiments dans une
langue naïve, incomplète et charmante comme celle de l’enfance, se font toutes seules, sur
des vieux thèmes toujours jeunes et aussi anciens que le monde” (Silvestre de Sacy et al. 88).
Similarly, in an 1870 article, Banville describes his friend’s rural origins as the place where
“il avait entendu les murmures, les voix, les chants de la nature, le frémissement universel de
la grand lyre, avant d’avoir entendu de la musique et des vers […]. Il voulait que la Poésie,
comme Antée, fut guéri en touchant la terre sa mère” (Critiques 133-34). By associating
Dupont’s legacy with a tradition of a naïve and bucolic expression and stripping away its
political import, these elite poets reject the legacy of 1850 and its impact on the poet-reader
relationship.
III. Poetry and the Popular Reader 1852 and Beyond: Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarmé
By the early years of the Second Empire, the attitudes of poets towards the readership
of poetry shifted in notable ways. Once a source of poetic renewal and hope, the people were
now seen as the enemy of art, and Poetry and Art, often capitalized, were redefined as
isolated, self-interested and elite concerns for poets and their small circles of acquaintance.
This shift would shape the generation of young poets in the 1860s and is typified by a young
Mallarmé’s article on the “Hérésie Artistique” of “L’Art pour tous,” fittingly published in
1862 in the little-read elite publication L’Artiste. For Mallarmé and his generation, there was
no youthful optimism about the role of poetry for the popular reader, only invectives against
the notion that he had anything to do with it. Even among Romantic poets, 1852 was “la fin
de cet engouement général […], de cette sorte d’état de grâce du peuple,” as Michel Brix
notes in his chapter on chanson populaire in Les voix du peuple (Brix 39). There was one
notable exception: for Hugo, exiled in Guernsey, this period marks an increased focus on the
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importance of the masses for poetry. Now “le herault de l’‘Art Social’” (Garguilo 72), he
fervently argued that poetry should provide an education to the people as a tool of mankind’s
progress, trying to rally other poets to his side, largely in vain.
1. L’Art and le Beau versus le Vrai and l’Utile
While the positions of Hugo, Baudelaire and Mallarmé towards the popular reader
fundamentally differed in the second half of the nineteenth century, they discuss the poetreader relationship by referring to the same sets of terms: Science and Art, Vrai and Beau and
utilité were the major axes of this debate for all three poets. However, what differs is the way
that they positioned these notions in relation to one another and to the poetry and its
readership: while for Hugo, Science and the Vrai and Art and the Beau were not opposed, but
rather complementary forces in the progress of mankind and the education of the reader, for
Baudelaire and Mallarmé, these terms were not only antonymous, but mutually exclusive.
Poetry and the poet were now turned inward and their only goal was themselves.
For the late Baudelaire, Science and Art and Vrai and Beau are not only opposites, but
actively antagonistic to one another. In his essay on “Le public moderne et la photographie”
in the Salon de 1859, Baudelaire defines the French audience’s natural inclination for the
pursuit of the Vrai as incompatible with the arts, which focus on the Beau. While the article
centers on the new medium of photography, Baudelaire’s critique broadly applies to the
practice of the arts: “Le goût exclusif du Vrai […] opprime ici [en France] et étouffe le goût
du Beau. Où il faudrait ne voir que le Beau […] notre public ne cherche que le Vrai” (OC
1961, 1033). In his preface to his translation of Poe’s Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires
(1857), he goes a step further, arguing that the pursuit of the Vrai spells the very death of
poetry: “La poésie ne peut pas, sous peine de mort ou de déchéance, s’assimiler à la science
ou à la morale ; elle n’a pas la Vérité pour objet, elle n’a qu’Elle-même” (OC 1975, 2 :333).
225
The antagonism between Science and Art is also a cornerstone of Mallarmé’s argument in
“Hérésies artistiques”: through its contact with the masses, he argues, “la poésie sera abaissée
au rang d’une science” (OC 2: 361). The relationship between Art and Science is cemented
into a hierarchy: Art is noble while Science is “bas.”
The poem “Les Mages” in Les Contemplations (1856) is revealing of Hugo’s very
different view of the relationship between art and utility: “Près de la science l’art flotte,/ Les
yeux sur le double horizon” (621-2). Art and science are proximate, and their positions are
not cemented into an opposing pair; rather they “float” in relation to one another.
Furthermore, they share a larger goal, represented by this “double horizon” of beauty and
truth, an idea to which he will return frequently. Hugo makes this point explicit in William
Shakespeare (1864) in his examinations of the poet’s role in society, refuting the notion that
“l’utile […] déforme le beau;” instead, he argues for a hybrid concept of “le Beau Utile” in
which both beauty and truth are achieved to a greater extent through their association: “Nous
assistons à la majestueuse jonction du beau avec l’utile” (309). The pairing of these terms is
an oxymoron for Baudelaire and Mallarmé, for whom these notions are not only not
complementary, but antagonistic. For Hugo, Beauty and Truth and Art and Science exist in a
free-form relationship in which they are greater than the sum of their parts; instead they
exponentially amplify each other in a majestic fusion.
The way that these poets define these terms in relation to each other is central in the
way that they understand the poet-reader relationship as a result: pursuit of truth in the arts
meant for Hugo that the poet’s relationship to the reader was based on education and the
relentless drive towards progress, but one which still relegates him to a secondary role behind
the poet. Hugo’s argument about poetry’s social mission was a source of ridicule for poets
like Baudelaire, Mallarmé and their peers. Instead, they obsessed over keeping the popular
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reader away from elite poetry; ironically, in so doing, they made him, in negative, a defining
feature of late nineteenth-century poetry.
2. Poetry and the Education of the Masses
For Hugo, the late nineteenth century presented a privileged moment for poetry
because of the possibility of the education of the masses: the industrialization of France
represented the dawn of an age in which mechanical labor could help working people reduce
their labor while making a variety of literary and poetic texts more easily available to them.
In this process, the poet had an important role to play because of poetry’s elevated status as
an “ideal” art; unlike realistic literature, he could aim for a higher form of education, as he
argues in William Shakespeare: “La littérature sécrète de la civilisation, la poésie sécrète de
l’idéal. […] C’est pourquoi les poëtes sont les premiers éducateurs du peuple” (238). Unlike
Lamartine, Hugo intended this primary education to take place via literature not typically
associated with the popular reader: “C’est par l’explication des œuvres du premier ordre que
ce large enseignement intellectuel doit se couronner. […] Ce magnifique enseignement, le
peuple comprendra-t-il? Certes. Nous ne connaissons rien de trop haut pour le peuple. C’est
une grande âme” (idem 246). This education was seen as an affective and spiritual one, which
would enlighten the masses in a quasi-religious way rather than through strictly utilitarian
instruction.
Yet in William Shakespeare, the poet is still dominant in his relation to the masses.
This is evident in a number of depictions of the poet as a vigorous male force who acts upon
the passive, feminized popular reader, compared both to a “vierge” and a “femme” as a “pâte
vivante que le poëte va modeler” (252). Again, the very mutability of the masses represent
Hugo’s greatest interest in them:
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Les multitudes, et c’est là leur beauté, sont profondément pénétrables à l’idéal.
L’approche du grand art leur plaît, elles en frissonnent. […] La foule est une
étendue liquide et vivante offerte au frémissement. Une masse est une
sensitive. Le contact du beau hérisse extatiquement la surface des multitudes,
signe du fond touché. Remuement de feuilles, une haleine mystérieuse passe,
la foule tressaille sous l’insufflation sacrée des profondeurs. (ibid.)
This passage explains the vibration image in Hugo’s poetry which Baudelaire redefined in the
1850 Dupont preface in a more empowering way for the popular reader/singer: for Hugo it is
the poet’s awesome strength which shakes the passive public to its core (“du fond touché”),
as the repeated images of “frisonnement” “frémissant” “remuement,” and “trésaille” indicate.
While Hugo expanded on the importance of the poet’s connection to the masses, it is clear
that this was always with the poet’s powers in mind.
While for Hugo, poetry’s purity comes from the poet’s sharing his “sacred breath”
with the people, for Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the educative mission of poetry is deemed
“heretical.” In his preface to Poe’s Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires, Baudelaire evokes
“l’hérésie de l’enseignement” (OC 1975, 2 :333), and accuses Hugo of pandering to the
audience by affirming that poetry was in the service of education: “Victor Hugo […] n’a pu
se faire pardonner tout son génie lyrique qu’en introduisant de force et brutalement dans sa
poésie ce qu’Edgar Poe considérait comme l’hérésie moderne capitale, – l’e seig eme t”
(idem 336-37). Similarly, in an 1861 article on Hugo, Baudelaire considers education as
synonymous with degradation. In his back-handed praise for him, the younger poet notes that
in describing things as they are, “le poète se dégrade et descend au rang du professeur” –
although Hugo is supposedly excluded from this general rule (OC 1961, 711).
The idea of the educative mission of poetry as a form of “heresy” is adopted by
Mallarmé in “Hérésies artistiques: l’art pour tous,” beginning with the title. Mallarmé begins
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by evoking this direct comparison between art and religion: “Tout chose sacrée et qui veut
demeurer sacrée s’enveloppe de mystère. Les religions se retranchent à l’abri d’arcanes
dévoilés au seul prédestiné : l’art a les siens” (OC 2: 360). He will further this image of
poetry as a religion by referring to the educative ideal for poetry as an “impiété” (idem 2:
363). For him, as for Baudelaire, education is an inherent source of degradation for poetry:
“Grâce à cette sensation générale, une idée inouïe et saugrenue germera dans les cervelles, à
savoir, qu’il est indispensable de l’enseigner dans les collèges, et irrésistiblement, comme
tout ce qui est enseigné à plusieurs, la poésie sera abaissée” (idem 2: 361).
While scholars of Mallarmé such as Bertrand Marchal have argued that this early
article simply demonstrates Mallarmé repeating “avec une juvenile emphase, le credo d’une
génération regroupée l’enseigne de l’art” (Mallarmé OC 2: 1685), this association between
education and profanation would be a constant throughout his career, appearing in his critical
articles and statements throughout the 1890s. In the 1891 Enquête Huret, he emphatically
reiterates the negative connotation that education represents for anything literary: “je répugne
à tout ce qui est professoral appliqué à la littérature qui, elle, au contraire, est tout à fait
individuelle” (Huret 104). Not only is an education mission for literature criticized, but
literature is associated with individuality, the privilege of the elite poet and not a
characteristic of the inherently indistinguishable masses. Furthermore, as Dominique Combe
argues in “‘L’universel reportage’ […] ‘Nul n’échappe décidément, au journalisme,’” in
Crise de vers, published in La Revue blanche in 1895, “le verbe ‘enseigner’ […] indique le
refus d’une poésie didactique, non seulement d’une poésie philosophique ou scientifique,
[…] mais surtout d’une poésie moralisante” (132). The notion that introducing education into
the poet-reader relationship was a source of “heresy” which “degrades” poetry is a central
tenet of elite poets’ attitudes towards the popular reader in this second half of the century.
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3. Poetry and Progress
Because Hugo saw the alliance of utility and beauty as a catalyzing factor which
enhanced both, in William Shakespeare he reworks “l’art pour l’art” into a new school of
“l’art pour le progrès,” trying to convince fellow poets that this was the true meaning of
poetry: “L’art pour l’art peut être beau, mais l’art pour le progrès est plus beau encore” (253).
In particular, he saw in Baudelaire a kindred spirit, particularly susceptible to this message. In
an 1859 letter, Hugo highlights their affinities:
Je n’ai jamais dit : l’Art pour l’Art ; j’ai toujours dit : l’Art pour le Progrès. Au
fond, c’est la même chose, et votre esprit est trop pénétrant pour ne pas le
sentir. En avant ! c’est le mot du Progrès ; c’est aussi le cri de l’Art. (qtd. in
Baudelaire, OC 1961, 1666).
Despite Hugo’s appeals that these were one in the same thing, there was of course a
fundamental difference between their positions towards the masses. Yet Hugo continued
advancing what Bénichou calls his “filiation” with Baudelaire (L'école du désenchantement
583). Several years later, in 1862, thanking him for a positive review of Les Misérables,
Hugo affirmed that: “C’est l’honneur des poètes de servir aux hommes de la lumière et de la
vie dans la coupe sacré de l’art. […] Nous nous dévouons, vous et moi, au progrès par la
Vérité” (Lettres à Charles Baudelaire 194-5).
Baudelaire’s reaction to this letter sums up his opposition to Hugo’s view of the poetreader relationship, despite the latter’s claims of their profound similarities: as he wrote his
mother in April 1862, “Cela prouve qu’un grand homme peut être un sot” (ibid). Baudelaire’s
attitude was shared by most poets of the day. While there were affinities between Baudelaire
and Hugo, they were certainly not in a belief in the common man, as Sainte-Beuve wrote him
in an January 5, 1866 letter: “Hugo, qui est quelquefois votre voisin, est devenu lui-même un
prédicateur et un patriarche : l’humanitarisme se retrouve jusque dans ses goguettes” (idem
230
346). This letter also shows the extent to which Hugo, while still an avowed reference for
younger generations of poets, was mocked for this continued insistence on poetry’s social
mission, with Sainte-Beuve going so far as to make him the leader of a popular singing
society. For Baudelaire and Sainte-Beuve in the 1860s, the reference to the goguette cannot
be anything but condescending; when it comes to late nineteenth-century poetry, its leader
might as well be the author that entranced the cuisinière in the feuilleton. Hugo’s repeated
overtures to Baudelaire as a fellow poet-humanitarian seem to only have made him more
assertive about his disdain of the common man. In 1865, Hugo sent Baudelaire a copy of
Chansons des rues et des bois with the inscription “jungamus dextras,” which Baudelaire
interpreted in an October 28 letter to Manet: “Cela je crois, ne veut pas dire seulement :
donnons-nous une mutuelle poignée de main. Je connais les sous-entendus de latin de V.
Hugo. Cela veut dire aussi : unissons nos mains POUR SAUVER LE GENRE HUMAIN.
Mais je me fous du genre humain, et il ne s’en est pas aperçu” (Correspondance 2: 539,
emphasis Baudelaire’s).
For Baudelaire, Mallarmé and others, not only was Hugo wrong in tasking the poet
with the common man’s progress, but the very notion was absurd. In his personal journal,
Baudelaire considered that the belief in progress was a source of regression: “le Progrès [a] si
bien atrophié en nous toute la partie spirituelle” (OC 1961, 1263). Instead, on the question of
progress, Baudelaire announced his lifelong affiliation with Gautier and l’art pour l’art in his
article on the author, published on March 13, 1859 in L’Artiste: recounting their first meeting
decades earlier, he recalled: “Nous nous entretînmes également de la grande fatuité du siècle
et de la folie du progrès” and their shared focus on “beauté et non utilité” (idem 680). While
Gautier was a lifelong reference for Baudelaire, this passage again shows how after 1852,
Baudelaire ignored their positions a decade earlier. By drawing a straight line from the 1830s
to the late 1850s and insisting on the primacy of the “beau” over the “utile,” he purposefully
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excludes the evolution in their positions, discounting his assertion in the 1850 Dupont preface
that since the Revolution of 1830, “l'art fut désormais inséparable de la morale et de l'utilité”
(idem 606).
4. Mallarmé, Baudelaire and the Paradox of the Popular Reader
For the late Gautier and Baudelaire and the younger generation of poets who came of
age amid the cynicism of the late 1850s and 1860s, the poet-reader relationship was based on
vitriol and violence. While popular readers were treated with condescension in the first half
of the century by literary elites, after 1852 the attitude among elite poets hardened, relegating
popular readers to what Rancière calls “l’enfer d’antipoésie” in which they intrinsically
represented stupidity, viciousness and baseness; in other words, a menace for poetry (138).
This attitude is everywhere in Baudelaire’s late writings. In his journals, popular readers are
not just uneducated in the arts, but openly hostile to real beauty: one note evokes “la haine du
peuple contre la beauté” (OC 1961, 1286). Another passage associates corporeal pleasure as
the highest aspiration of the masses: “la fouterie est le lyrisme du peuple” (idem 1296). This
denies the people any access to spiritual or literary expression and relocates their highest
form of emotion in the basest part of their bodies. Similarly for Mallarmé, any attempt by the
common man to access art or literature is the source of vitriol and racially-tinged bigotry: in
“Hérésies artistiques,” he calls the “poète-ouvrier” “cette chose, grotesque si elle n’était pas
triste pour l’artiste de race” (OC 2: 364). He is similarly contemptuous of “ces hommes pour
qui la vanité moderne […] a évoqué le titre vide de citoyen […] le même homme, je veux
dire le même citoyen enjambe nos musées avec une liberté indifférente et une froideur
distraite, […] et de temps à autre lance à Rubens, à Delacroix, un de ces regards qui sentent la
rue” (idem 2: 361). After 1852, the common man was not a source of pity, but a sub-human
and source of contempt for the upper-class artist.
232
If this was what the popular reader represented, the poet’s job was to keep him away
from poetry at all costs: this was the new meaning of the poet-reader relationship in the
second half of the nineteenth century. For a young Mallarmé, this is a central concern: in the
1862 “Hérésies artistiques” he fantasizes about erecting barriers both outside and within
poetry to protect it from the public:
Les Fleurs du mal […] sont imprimées avec des caractères dont
l’épanouissement fleurit à chaque aurore des plates-bandes d’une tirade
utilitaire, et se vendent dans des livres blancs et noirs, identiquement pareils à
ceux qui débitent de la prose du vicomte du Terrail ou des vers de M.
Legouvé.
Ainsi, les premiers venus entrent de plain-pied dans un chef d’œuvre, et
depuis qu’il y a des poëtes, il n’a pas été inventé, pour l’écartement de ces
importuns, une langue immaculée, – des formules hiératiques dont l’étude
aride aveugle le profane et aiguillonne le patient fatal ; – et ces intrus tiennent
en façon de carte d’entrée une page de l’alphabet où ils ont appris à lire !
(idem 2: 360-61)
As literacy spread during the nineteenth century, it was felt as an “invasion des barbares dans
le domaine jusque-là réservé à la classe aisée et lettrée” that was inevitable and terrifying
(Vincent-Munnia 171). Mallarmé’s sense of urgency is evident in the conclusion of this
article, a call to arms for the elite poets grouped around the review L’Artiste: “L’heure qui
sonne est sérieuse : l’éducation se fait dans le peuple […]. Faites que, s’il y a une
vulgarisation, ce soit celle du bien, non celle de l’art” (OC 2: 363). While as Bertrand
Marchal notes, it would be an exaggeration to credit Mallarmé’s opacity entirely to his desire
to “éloigner le profane,” this text demonstrates the extent to which the disdain of the common
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man is inscribed in his view of poetry and its readership from his earliest conceptions (idem
2: 1685).
In addition to literacy, the “carte d’entrée” of the popular reader into elite poetry, the
availability of texts through mass distribution and their salability reresented another major
concern. For Hugo, on the other hand, this signaled the dawn of an exciting new age for the
printed word which necessitated his own call to literary action: “il faut traduire, commenter,
publier, imprimer, réimprimer, clicher, stéréotyper, distribuer, crier, expliquer, réciter,
répandre, donner à tous, donner à bon marché, donner au prix de revient, donner pour rien,
tous les poëtes, tous les philosophes, tous les penseurs tous les producteurs de grandeur
d’âme” (William Shakespeare 238). Every intellectual should be involved in a flurry of
activity to make a variety of texts available – both commercially and intellectually – to
everyone. For Mallarmé, it is just the opposite:
On multiplie les éditions à bon marché des poètes et cela au consentement des
poètes. Croyez-vous que vous y gagnerez de la gloire, ô rêveurs, ô lyriques ?
Quand l’artiste seul avait votre livre, coûte que coûte, eût-il dû payer de son
dernier liard la dernière de vos étoiles, vous aviez au moins de vrais
admirateurs. Et maintenant cette foule qui vous achète pour votre bon marché
vous comprend-elle ? Déjà profanés par l’enseignement, une dernière barrière
vous tenait au-dessus de ses désirs, – celle des sept francs à tirer de la bourse,
– et vous culbutez cette barrière, imprudents ! (OC 2: 363)
It is interesting that there is a real conservatism here among this young generation, who refer
to a past in which “l’artiste seul avait [le] livre.” But this literary utopia is a fantasy of the
past: it doesn’t accurately represent the pre-industrial salon model in which the poet was
dependent on his patron, as Bénichou confirms in L’École du dése chateme t: “Il n’est pas
vrai de dire qu’il en a été toujours ainsi, que la poésie ne peut intéresser qu’un groupe réduit
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d’amateurs perdus dans une foule de sourds” (598). Not content with a merely aristocratic
model of literature, a young Mallarmé restricts it further so that it as an artist-centered
system, the projection onto an idealized past of the problems of the present. Disappointed or
passed over by the promise of a political, social and esthetic revolution, poets erected new
utopias in which the people represented not the future and promise of poetry, as they had in
the utopian vision of 1850, but the enemies that the isolated poet had to keep at bay.
This new poetic utopia, from which the poet barred the common reader, called for a
redefinition of a broad array of poetic practices into “real” poetry and mere “verse.” This
division of the poetic field is based in large part on the question of audience: for Mallarmé,
inferior forms of literature are defined by figures who represent wide distribution in the press
and institutional recognition: in “Hérésies artistiques,” “prose” is exemplified by Ponson du
Terrail, a favorite feuilletoniste of La Presse in the 1860s, and non-poetic “verse” by the
Académie française’s Ernest Legouvé. Baudelaire similarly defines “real” poetry in contrast
with the practices of the most widely-read poets of the era in an 1866 letter to Ancelle: “la
France a HORREUR de la poésie, de la vraie poésie ; […] elle n’aime que les saligauds
comme Béranger et de Musset” (Correspondance 2: 610, emphasis Baudelaire’s). That
Béranger and Musset were two of the most widely read, appreciated and successful names in
poetry in the nineteenth century is not inconsequential in Baudelaire’s dismissal of them: it is
at the source of his reprobation. The line between “real” poetry and everything else in the
second half of the nineteenth century is in large part based on excluding a mass popular
readership, as Mallarmé makes clear: “l’art, c’est-à-dire un mystère accessible à de rares
individualités” (OC 2: 362).
Yet in these statements of disdain for the common reader, this figure became
something of an obsession. This is where the central paradox in the late nineteenth-century
poet-reader relationship lies: in the assertion that poetry had nothing to do with the common
235
reader, poets defined poetry and readership to his exclusion. Everything the common reader
was, poetry was not: if the masses were a collective, poetry was individualistic; if they were
natural, poetry adored maquillage and artifice; if the people were democratic, poetry was an
aristocracy. Furthermore, as Maria-Teresa Giaveri argues, and as the move from Baudelaire
to Mallarmé suggests, this anti-democratic turn in poetry moved from a position forged by
experience to a dogma: If Baudelaire wrote that “Il n’y a que des poètes pour bien
comprendre les poètes,” “pour Mallarmé, c’est un impératif : tu n’auras d’autres lecteurs en
dehors des artistes” (118).
Conclusion
The rise and fall of poésie populaire and poetry’s engagement with the popular reader
in the mid-nineteenth century plays a central role in helping us better understand the isolation
of the poet from the public at the end of the century. The cynicism and animosity towards the
popular reader in poetry in the 1850s and 1860s played an important role in the development
of a new generation of poets who defined poetry in large part based on the exclusion of the
reader. While there were some poets who aimed to continue poésie populaire, this was
largely in name only: for example, the poètes humanitaires of the 1860s and 1870s Eugène
Manuel and Francois Coppée, who were inspired by the Hugolian model of the social poet,
represent less a real engagement with the popular reader than poetry “sur le peuple” and “à la
place du peuple” (Fontana, “Une tentative de récuperation : la poésie humanitaire” 503-05).
Instead, by expounding on conservative themes, like patriotism and family, and insisting on
the simplicity and humility of their subjects, they catered to the biases of their elite audience,
earning commercial success and institutional recognition. Furthermore, this pseudo-popular
poetry did not change the Mallarméan orientation of elite poetry in relation to the people. In
236
fact, Coppée was a target of satire, in particular by the Zutistes, like a young Rimbaud whose
“Coppées” parodied his poems in obscene rewritings.
As I noted in the previous chapter, Rimbaud is a more ambiguous figure in his rapport
with the people; his limited publication seems to represent bohemian sociability rather than a
strongly elitist conception of art. In fact, his critical texts and poetry both reflect an anti-elitist
political position. This idea appears in the prose poem “Mauvais sang” in Une saison en enfer
in the famous line “La main à plume vaut la main à charrue” (178). While he repeats the
assertion of L’Atelier’s editors in the face of Romantic condescension decades earlier in a
striking way, this complex prose poem is hardly reducible to a political statement. Much like
Baudelaire in 1848, it seems that Rimbaud in 1870 saw the political uprising as a source of
renewal and hope both politically and in the evolution of poetry, as Wallace Fowlie writes in
his article on “Rimbaud and the Commune”: “During that spring of 1871, an inner turmoil or
revolution was going on in Rimbaud that corresponded to the political revolution of the
Commune. He felt in sympathy with the Commune politically and emotionally” (518).
Moreover, as Whidden notes in Authority and Crisis in French Literature, the Commune
represented less “a unifying agenda,” than “a clear rebuke of the central authority that had
dominated the previous two decades” (14). That a young man like Rimbaud, eager to throw
off the constraints of tradition and authority in politics and his own personal life and poetry
was drawn to this movement is understandable. But like the short-lived Second Republic
before it, the poetic and political excitement that the Commune created seems to have largely
dispersed with the barricades.
Chansons continued to play an important role in the political uprisings of 1870 and
later anarchist movements; but unlike in 1830 and 1848, these seem not to have not changed
the orientation of elite poetry in a significant way. Instead, Mallarmé continued to assert the
importance of the isolation of poetry from the reader in the 1890s: “Nous assistons, en ce
237
moment, […] à un spectacle vraiment extraordinaire, unique, dans toute l’histoire de la
poésie : chaque poète allant, dans son coin, jouer sur une flûte, bien à lui, les airs qu’il lui
plaît ; pour la première fois, depuis le commencement, les poètes ne chantent plus au lutrin”
(Huret 100).
238
Conclusion
The trajectory I have traced in the relationship between poet and reader from 1840 to
1880, from Romantic poets’ assertion about their important role among mankind to midcentury poets’ cynicism and violence towards readers to Symbolism’s increased isolation of
the poet and his work from the public, is recognized as one of the major axes of the evolution
of nineteenth-century French poetry. Pascale Durand neatly summarizes this movement in
“Sharing One's Death: Le Tombeau de Théophile Gautier (1873)” in Models of Collaboration
in Nineteenth-Century French Literature:
From Romanticism to Symbolism, high literature and more particularly poetry
are gradually inclined to define themselves as activities isolated within the
social world and pursued by individuals, each of whom is firmly convinced of
his own singularity toward his equals. Hugo, Lamartine, and Vigny already
thought of themselves as pure subjectivities linked by a biography and a
personal imaginary. But the romantic ‘ego’ nevertheless remained in touch
with history and politics, giving himself to the reader as the sensitive prism
through which the whole world – and any of its members – could reach full
self-consciousness. Things do change to a considerable extent after 1850,
when the side of the ‘artistes’ triumphs over the side of the ‘utilitaires.’ Art,
which has no other object than itself, becomes a matter for specialists, and the
public is only allowed to view artistic products from a respectful distance.
Poetry then closes itself like an oyster under the pressure of reality. (67)
But the process through which this shift in poet-reader relations occurred has been less wellstudied: what led “things [to] change,” and how did the “side of the ‘artistes’ triumph over
the side of the ‘utilitaires’”? In order to answer these questions, I showed how the binarisms
which poets constructed to define poetry and its readership in negative against the press, a
239
“tissu d’horreurs” (Baudelaire, OC 1961, 1299); the young lady, “épouvantail, monstre,
assassin de l’art” (idem 1291); and the worker, “l’ignorant” and “l’ennemi” of poetry
(Mallarmé, OC 2: 360), were far more complex and ambiguous in reality. By more closely
examining the terms of poets’ experiences and interactions with these audiences and forms, I
demonstrated that these “other” types of poetry for “other” audiences are central to
understanding the redefinition of elite poetry and its readership in this period.
My end point of 1880 does not mark a moment of rupture, but the consolidation of the
trajectory I describe in the rise of Symbolism as the dominant elite poetic school in the late
nineteenth century. It is this movement which would expand the opposition of elite poetry
and its readership from broader practices and audiences, a legacy that I argue is still with us.
While the elitist and isolationist foundations of this literary movement were underway in the
period on which I focus, there are some notable figures who stood apart from this general
movement in poetry. In particular, as I showed at the end of the last two chapters, Rimbaud
was at times directly at odds with the increasingly elitist and purist orientation of poetry; his
poems and letters reveal serious reflection about social and political inequalities and
demonstrate sympathy towards the oppressed and even a drive to remedy their situation
through political action and a new “visionary” view of poetry. In particular, his focus on
these questions in the poems “Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie” and “Mauvais sang” through the
synecdoche of workers’ hands, visual symbols of their struggles in contrast with the cult
image in poetry of elite hands, show how his reflection on these questions has both political
and poetic importance. Yet Rimbaud remains an outlier in the trajectory of late-nineteenth
century poetry, particularly when considered from a contemporary perspective: while he was
affiliated with Verlaine and the Zutistes, he was only a fleeting presence on the literary scene,
writing poetry only between 1870 and 1873. He also did not prepare the majority of his
poems into publishable manuscripts, with the exception of the self-published Une Saison en
240
enfer in 1873. While such a publication history could at first glance suggest continuity with
poetry’s elitist movement away from publication for mass audiences, in the case of Rimbaud,
this seems to reflect something quite different: his peripatetic existence and bohemian
sensibility do not point to an elitist conception of art that made publication “impure,” as his
contemporaries held; in fact, his reflection on the popular classes suggests that the notion of
elitism or ‘purity’ in isolation from the people was contrary to his views as Steve Murphy,
Yves Reboul and Kristin Ross have shown.
With these notable exceptions, elite poetry accelerated its isolationist path, distancing
poetry and readership more and more from other forms of poetic practice and readers in the
late nineteenth century. It is not until much later, in the second decade of the twentieth
century, that things would change significantly, as Pascal Durand notes: “Poetry will only be
brought out of […] this dark crypt by a great call for fresh air and the new poetic frenzy that
Apollinaire and Cendrars will create in Alcools and the Prose du Transsibérien” (“Sharing
One's Death: Le Tombeau De Théophile Gautier (1873),” 75).
Women’s poetry at the turn of the century also witnessed some significant changes,
opening up new possibilities for women as poets and poetry readers that are largely absent
from the period I study. In Having it All in the Belle Époque (2013), Rachel Mesch examines
how publications for women created new models of engagement and collaboration between
poet and reader, leading to the imagining of women readers in new and liberating ways: the
women’s periodicals “Femina and La Vie Heureuse constructed a new kind of reflective
woman reader, who was not just seen as a consumer of goods, but of culture and literature.
Part of Belle Époque literary feminism’s most important work – and its appeal – was to make
its devoted lectrices into veritable collaboratrices” (35). While these publications were for
elite women, they also helped to “collapse boundaries, not just between reader and celebrity
role model, but between kinds of readers – sophisticated Parisian, provincial worker” (idem
241
112). This “expansion of women’s worlds” around 1900 (idem 41) suggests that the
empowering and inventive models of the poet-reader relationship debuted in the nineteenth
century by women poets such as Colet and Bachi, who imagined women’s poetry as a special
community of sharing and mutual support, began to play a role in the mainstream of women’s
poetry by the turn of the century.
The case of popular poetry is somewhat more checkered in the late nineteenth century,
shaped by the tumultuous political landscape of the period. While the Second Empire largely
censored popular expression from reunions to songs and texts, chanson still represented an
important part and even a motivating factor in revolutionary uprisings like the Commune of
1871 (Gauthier 551) and the Belle Époque’s anarchic movements (Simard) as well as in
workers’ strikes in the late nineteenth century (Fontana). While the early Third Republic
maintained many of these restrictions on expression, 1881 marked an important turning point
with a law establishing the freedom of the press, opening up the possibility for the creation of
new reviews allowed to publish politically potent poetry and chansons (idem 574), although
the 1894 “lois scélérates” tamped down on these freedoms (idem 573). Restrictions on social
gatherings and surveillance endured until 1906 (idem 574), marking the continued suspicion
of political power towards the cultural productions of the working classes, still seen as
dangerous readers and auditors in society.
By dismissing these other audiences and practices of poetry, it is the poets in the later
part of this study, from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, who serve as the foundation of our
conception of what literature is and whom it is for in literary theory. Their legacy has
supplied the central paradox of modernism in which poetry is founded on the impossibility
and nothingness Maurice Blanchot describes in “L’expérience d’‘Igitur’”: “l’œuvre n’est
possible que si l’absence est pure et parfaite” (L’espace littéraire 137). In such a conception
of literature, the “œuvre” takes precedence over both author and reader, who become
242
anonymous abstractions: “toute lecture […] annule [l’auteur] pour rendre l’œuvre à ellemême, à sa présence anonyme, à l’affirmation violente, impersonnelle, qu’elle est. Le lecteur
est lui-même toujours foncièrement anonyme, il est n’importe quel lecteur, unique, mais
transparent” (“Lire” in idem 254). This view of literature is clearly grounded in latenineteenth-centuy ideas about elite poetry that I’ve examined here, like the notion that the
reader is a threat to the work of literature, evident in Blanchot’s essay on “Communication”:
“ce qui menace le plus la lecture : la réalité du lecteur, sa personnalité, son immodestie,
l’acharnement à vouloir demeurer lui-même en face de ce qu’il lit, à vouloir être un homme
qui sait lire en général” (idem 263); “plus l’œuvre est estimée, plus elle soit en péril : elle
devient une bonne œuvre, elle est rangée du côté du bien qui l’utilise, qui en fait une œuvre
utile” (idem 268). This view of poetry, taken from late nineteenth-century authors like
Mallarmé, Rilke and Kafka, continues to dominate our understanding of literature, authorship
and the reception of texts. Yet in grounding our theory in this period in literature, we lose
sight of the fact that this conception of literature arose in relation to specific realities that
informed its emergence. By rediscovering and reexamining other contemporary practices of
poetry and conceptions of the reader, as I have done here, we open up new interpretive
possibilities for these canonical texts.
243
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