Art and Literature of the Second Empire — Les Arts et la Littérature sous le Second Empire

Edited by David Baguley. (Durham Modern Language Series). University of Durham, 2003. xv+182 pp., 17 b&w plates. Unlike many books based on conference proceedings, this interesting collection of essays has a sharp focus, thanks to the editor, David Baguley, a premier critic and bibliographer of Émile Zola. Like the author of Les Rougon-Macquart, Baguley limits his work to the Second Empire, thus giving it a definite compass despite a broad range of essays dealing with literature, art, and politics. Since Baguley provides a succinct summary of each of the ten fine essays, all erudite in scholarship and lucid in presentation, I will attempt to unravel some common threads that point to essential characteristics of this much-maligned period of French history. Perhaps the most pervasive feature emerging from the essays is the close relationship of the arts and politics of the time: Rémi Dalisson illustrates the contribution of various arts to public ceremonies; Catherine Vercueil-Simion details the appointment of artists as bureaucrats; Peter Whyte describes the poet-courtier Théophile Gautier's relations with the royal family; Marie-Cécile Levet analyses the philanthropic George Sand's letters of petition for clemency to government officials; and Laurence Brogniez traces the artist-critic Claude Vignon's ambivalent opinions of current issues. That both of the latter women authors would adopt masculine pseudonyms and write surreptitiously (and that women are subjugated by the male gaze in Zola's novels, according to Gaël Bellalou), underscores a second characteristic of the period, an overall aura of censorship, reflected in the 1857 obscenity trials of its two most famous literary works, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. Another aspect of the era is its famous eclecticism, often equated with mediocrity, but re-evaluated by Patricia Mainardi, who sees it rather as a sign of variety and vitality, embodied for her in the under-appreciated landscapes of Corot. Similarly Richard Hobbs calls for a distinction between a mediocre eclecticism based on a mild mixture of styles and a more vigorous brand stemming from the confrontation of conflicting identities that he finds in Thomas Couture's work and writings. A final thread running through this tapestry of the Second Empire is the use of subtle subversion to undermine the conservative values of Napoleon III's regime: Robert Lethbridge shows Manet's dispassionate and ludic stance, much like Flaubert's, to constitute a rejection and reversal of the status quo; just as traces of subversion are revealed by Hobbs in Couture's independent studio; by Dalisson in the reintroduction of republican elements into public ceremonies; by Levet in Sand's rhetoric; by Dousteyssier-Khoze in Ponson du Terrail's shady character Rocambole; by Whyte in Gautier's fidelity to the exiled Victor Hugo; and by Brogniez in Vignon's criticism

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