Abstract
The question of privacy continues to provoke no end of debate in modern discussions of the newspaper. But such debates are by no means confined to the digital age. The French Second Empire, this chapter suggests, was a period characterised by concerns about the ways in which the press threatened to recast the fate of private life. And these concerns come to the fore in Goncourts’ 1860 novel of journalism, Charles Demailly (first published under the title of Les Homme de lettres), a work which reflects on the connections between the rise of censorship, the increasing ubiquity of newspapers and the threat these were deemed to pose to private life.
L’intérieur s’en va. La vie retourne à devenir publique.
[Domestic life is disappearing. Life is becoming public once again.]
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 18 November 1860
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); James Smith Allen, In the Public Eye; Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Emery, Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881–1914): Privacy, Publicity, and Personality (Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012).
- 2.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1992); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 2002); Histoire de la vie privée, ed. by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1985–87); see, in particular, IV (1987), De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre.
- 3.
Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 28: ‘The subject is so vast it is hard to shape. Concerned are issues as diverse as the erosion of public space in cities, the conversion of political discourse into psychological terms, the elevation of performing artists to a special status as public personalities, and the labelling of impersonality itself as a moral evil. As part of the same problem, it is hard to know what kind of specific experience, what kind of “data” are germane to the general theme.’
- 4.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 198.
- 5.
Brooks, Body Work, p. 32. I have already noted the significance of public and private explored throughout Rubery’s The Novelty of Newspaper; see, for example, p. 13.
- 6.
Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9.
- 7.
I shall adopt the title of the novel’s second edition throughout this chapter. All references will appear parenthetically in the text, using Adeline Wrona’s edition, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Charles Demailly (Paris: Flammarion, 2007). Note Wrona’s excellent ‘Présentation’, pp. i–xxxix. The Goncourts’ text, it should be noted, has a complex history: originally written as a play (now lost), it was subsequently refashioned as a novel; indeed, the brothers were loath to abandon this theatrical project and sought to rerelease the work as theatre following its publication in 1860 (on this, note Wrona’s ‘Présentation’, p. viii). Ultimately, a play based on the text did see the light of day, dramatised by Paul Alexis and Oscar Méténier in 1892. This oscillation between stage and prose, between a literary form dependent on public performance and one structured around private consumption, underpins the novel’s complex portrayal of privacy and its limits. Although Charles Demailly was not initially published in the press, it was ultimately serialised in Le Rappel in 1883 (note, again, Wrona’s ‘Présentation’, pp. vi–ix). Recent years have seen the publication of a number of editions of this work: see, for example, Charles Demailly, ed. by Jean-Didier Wagneur and Françoise Cester (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014). This edition is particularly rich in notes and documentary material. See also Charles Demailly, ed. by Serge Zenkine (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016).
- 8.
On the petite presse, see in particular Jean-Didier Wagneur, ‘Le Journalisme au microscope. Digressions bibliographiques’, Études françaises, 44.3 (2008), 23–44.
- 9.
Thérenty, La Littérature au quotidien, pp. 74–75.
- 10.
See Michelle Perrot, ‘Introduction’, in Histoire de la vie privée: De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, pp. 7–12 (esp. pp. 11–12).
- 11.
Charles Monselet, ‘Edmond et Jules de Goncourt’, Le Figaro, 3 April 1864, pp. 1–3 (p. 1).
- 12.
Wilde, The Major Works, p. 230.
- 13.
Wrona, ‘Présentation’, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii.
- 14.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, ed. by Robert Kopp and Robert Ricatte, 3 vols (Paris: R. Laffont, 1989), I, 637. Unless otherwise noted, I will refer to this edition of the Journal throughout this chapter.
- 15.
Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, p. 87.
- 16.
Armand de Pontmartin, ‘Causeries littéraires. Les Hommes de lettres, par MM. Edmond et Jules de Goncourt’, L’Union, 4 February 1860. For this and further contemporary reviews of the Goncourts’ novel, see the website of the Amis des frères Goncourt: http://www.goncourt.org/index.html [accessed 1 September 2014].
- 17.
Referencing Robert Ricatte’s important study of the Goncourts, Jacques Noiray points out that in Illusions perdues ‘no key is certain’. On this point, see Noiray, ‘La Subversion du modèle balzacien dans Charles Demailly’, in Les frères Goncourt: art et écriture, ed. by Jean-Louis Cabanès (Talence: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1997), pp. 167–180 (p. 176). See also Ricatte, La Création romanesque chez les Goncourt: 1851–1870 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), p. 121.
- 18.
Goncourt, Journal, I, 679–680.
- 19.
See Jean-Louis Cabanès’s ‘Introduction’ to the new edition of the Journal des Goncourt, ed. by Jean-Louis Cabanès, 3 vols (Paris: Champion, 2005–13), II, 9–22 (p. 10).
- 20.
Goncourt, Journal, I, 444.
- 21.
Noiray, ‘La Subversion du modèle balzacien dans Charles Demailly’, p. 167.
- 22.
See ibid., pp. 179–180.
- 23.
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero & Elements of Semiology, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Vintage, 2010), pp. 23–24.
- 24.
Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), I, 188.
- 25.
Armand de Pontmartin, Les Jeudis de Madame Charbonneau (Paris: Lévy, 1862), p. xxv.
- 26.
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 59: ‘How could we suppose that the political experience of this generation, with the failure of the revolution of 1848 and the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, and then the long period of desolation that was the Second Empire, did not play a role in the elaboration of the disenchanted vision of the political and social world which went hand in hand with the cult of art for art’s sake?’
- 27.
See Wrona, ‘Présentation’, p. xxxix. Peter Vantine also reflects on the novel’s representation of the emerging literary field; see ‘Entre fantaisie et réalisme: texte, contexte et métatexte dans les premiers romans des frères Goncourt’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009), pp. 141–169. Jean Goulemot and Daniel Oster note the novel’s originality in its depiction of the literary field in Gens de lettres, écrivains et bohèmes: l’imaginaire littéraire: 1630–1900 (Paris: Minerve, 1992): ‘With Charles Demailly […] the Goncourts even invented a genre: the novel of the literary field’ (pp. 107–108). Such concerns are equally central to the special number, Les Goncourt et la bohème, Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, 14 (2007), ed. by Sandrine Berthelot and Sophie Spandonis. Also note Berthelot’s study of the text alongside Champfleury’s Les Aventures de Mlle Mariette, ‘Des Aventures de Mlle Mariette à Charles Demailly: variations sur la bohème’, Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, 11 (2004), 189–212. Berthelot questions why Bourdieu did not in fact utilise Charles Demailly in Les Règles de l’art (see p. 212).
- 28.
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 53. Detailing the Goncourts’ travails with the press, Vantine cites this remark from Bourdieu’s work. Evoking Bourdieu at various junctures, Vantine’s thesis highlights the set of hierarchies at the literary field’s heart; see, for example, ‘Entre fantaisie et réalisme’, pp. 141, 145, 157.
- 29.
See Ricatte, La Création romanesque chez les Goncourt, pp. 105–106. For discussion of Champfleury, see Berthelot’s ‘Des Aventures de Mlle Mariette à Charles Demailly’, 189–212. Note also Vantine’s analysis of these texts, ‘Entre fantaisie et réalisme’, pp. 139–153.
- 30.
Goncourt, Journal, I, 632. Allen cites this remark from the Journal, connecting the Goncourts’ concerns about privacy with fears for the future of the novel. See In the Public Eye, p. 213: ‘The domestic locus for literate activity was so important that the Goncourts worried about its demise during the Second Empire’.
- 31.
Note prior reference to such concerns in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Une voiture de masques (Paris: Dentu, 1856), p. 101: ‘Le lecteur de 1830 était un lecteur dévoué, incomparable, héroïque, inassouvi: il lisait tout’ [The reader of 1830 was a devoted reader, peerless, heroic, never satisfied: he read everything].
- 32.
Peter Vantine, ‘Censoring/Censuring the Press under the Second Empire: The Goncourts as Journalists and Charles Demailly’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 43 (2014), 45–62 (p. 56; see also p. 57).
- 33.
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, pp. 53–54. See also Berthelot, ‘Des Aventures de Mlle Mariette à Charles Demailly: variations sur la bohème’, p. 212.
- 34.
See Roger Bellet, Presse et journalisme sous le Second Empire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), pp. 52–55, 152–157. Villemessant was a source of fascination for the Goncourts, a point noted in the new edition of the Journal, ed. by Cabanès, I, 486, n. 3. See also Alain Barbier Saint-Marie, ‘Villemessant, Le Figaro et les Goncourt’, Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, 7 (1999), 266–284.
- 35.
Hippolyte de Villemessant, Mémoires d’un journaliste, 6 vols (Paris: Dentu, 1867–78), III, 42–43.
- 36.
Ibid., III, 40. The task of translating particular forms of newspaper article from the French can prove a difficult one. While I have translated some of these from Villemessant’s remark, others are better left in the original. The Causerie, meaning talk or conversation, leant itself to a diverse array of journalistic writings over the century, including forms of criticism and gossip; the faits divers, as we have seen, were short, miscellaneous items, often sensational.
- 37.
On the ambiguity of this term—which we shall also encounter in connection with Maupassant’s Bel-Ami—see Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, p. 122.
- 38.
Kalifa, Thérenty, Vaillant, ‘Le quotidien’, in La Civilisation du journal, ed. by Kalifa, Régnier, Thérenty and Vaillant, pp. 269–294 (esp. p. 277).
- 39.
Texier, Le Journal et le journaliste, pp. 18–19.
- 40.
Allen, In the Public Eye, p. 87.
- 41.
I am referencing Charle’s Le Siècle de la presse, pp. 91–92. See his discussion for further detail on the nature of press censorship at this time. See also Vincent Robert, ‘Lois, censure et liberté’, in La Civilisation du journal, ed. by Kalifa, Régnier, Thérenty and Vaillant, pp. 61–95.
- 42.
Allen, In the Public Eye, pp. 99–100. The Goncourts also fell victim to the zealous censorship of Napoleon III’s authorities, hauled before the courts in 1853 for the publication of verse by the poet Jacques Tahureau (see Allen, In the Public Eye, p. 100; Wrona, ‘Présentation’, p. v). The brothers were swift to connect their plight with Flaubert’s and Baudelaire’s: ‘Il est assez singulier que ce soit les trois hommes de ce temps les plus purs de tout métier, les trois plumes les plus vouées à l’art, qui aient été traduits sous ce régime sur les bancs de la police correctionnelle: Flaubert, Baudelaire et nous’ (Journal, I, 646; cited in Wrona, p. v) [It is fairly strange that it should be the three men of this age the most pure of trade, the three pens the most dedicated to art, that should have been brought, under this regime, before the courts: Flaubert, Baudelaire and ourselves]. Their opposition to le périodique developing over the 1850s, the Goncourts—as this episode suggests—were not always so implacably opposed to the press; indeed, they once envisaged founding their own newspaper (see Goncourt, Journal, I, 214). For a discussion of this period, and the Goncourts’ efforts at positioning themselves in the literary milieu, see Loïc Chotard, ‘Deux hommes de lettres en 18… (Sur les débuts des Goncourt)’, Francofonia, 20 (1991), 75–84. For analysis of the Goncourts’ writing on the Second Empire press in the Journal, see Sophie Spandonis, ‘La Presse du Second Empire vue à travers le Journal des Goncourt, ou le Journal comme “document humain”’, Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, 9 (2002), 125–151.
- 43.
Thérenty, ‘De la nouvelle à la main à l’histoire drôle: héritages des sociabilités journalistiques du XIXe siècle’, Tangence, 80 (2006), 41–58 (p. 49). Wagneur equally underlines such self-regarding tendencies; see ‘Le Journalisme au microscope. Digressions bibliographiques’, p. 25.
- 44.
Texier, Le Journal et le journaliste, pp. 82–83.
- 45.
Vantine, ‘Entre fantaisie et réalisme’, p. 135. On the novel as a response to censorship laws, see p. 118; note also his article, ‘Censoring/Censuring the Press under the Second Empire’.
- 46.
Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 219.
- 47.
Texier, Le Journal et le journaliste, pp. 103–104.
- 48.
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 181. On such questions, note Alain Vaillant, ‘Le double jeu du journal, entre communication médiatique et correspondance privée’, in La lettre et la presse. Poétique de l’intime et culture médiatique, ed. by Guillaume Pinson (2012) http://www.medias19.org/index.php?id=341 [accessed 11 August 2014]. For further analysis of the newspaper’s role in shaping the public sphere, see Roger Bautier, Elisabeth Cazenave and Michael Palmer (eds), La Presse selon le XIXe siècle (Paris: Université Paris 3 and Paris 13, 1997).
- 49.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux, ed. by Nadine Satiat (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), p. 55.
- 50.
Goncourt, Journal, I, 252–253.
- 51.
Ibid., I, 370. See Annie Ubersfeld, ‘Les Goncourt et les “animaux machines”’, Francophonia, 21 (1991), 103–113.
- 52.
Wrona, ‘Présentation’, p. xxvii. As critics have noted, the Goncourts’ privileging of the cénacle recalls Balzac’s Illusions perdues; see Noiray, ‘La Subversion du modèle balzacien dans Charles Demailly’, p. 170.
- 53.
José-Luis Diaz, ‘Le Pouls des lettres. Le Petit Journal et la Bohème selon Les Hommes de lettres (1860)’, Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, 14 (2007), 55–73 (p. 67). Note that Berthelot draws a similar binary opposition in her ‘Introduction’ to this same special edition; see Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, 14 (2007), 5–21 (p. 21).
- 54.
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 83. Wealth is nevertheless central to those artists seeking to position themselves beyond the market, as Bourdieu makes clear (p. 84): ‘It is once again money (inherited) that guarantees freedom with respect to money.’
- 55.
Ibid., p. 82.
- 56.
See Diaz, ‘Le Pouls des lettres’, p. 67.
- 57.
Vincent Laisney, ‘Les Dîners du Moulin rouge, ou le “dernier cénacle”’, Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, 14 (2007), 75–91 (pp. 84–85).
- 58.
Ibid., pp. 80–81.
- 59.
See Eric Bordas, ‘Interactions énonciatives dans Charles Demailly’, in Les frères Goncourt: art et écriture, ed. by Cabanès, pp. 209–223.
- 60.
Despite the Goncourts’ privileging of the diary and letter, however, both forms testify to the influence of the media. On this point, see Vantine, ‘Entre fantaisie et réalisme’, pp. 170–186.
- 61.
On the question of intimacy in the Goncourts, note Goulemot and Oster, Gens de lettres, pp. 107, 173–174, and Berthelot, ‘Introduction’, p. 18.
- 62.
Laisney, ‘Les Dîners du Moulin-rouge, ou “le dernier cénacle”’, p. 87.
- 63.
Jean-Didier Wagneur places this event alongside the dîners du Moulin-rouge as emblematic of the Goncourts’ privileging of the closed literary community. See ‘Goncourt et Bohèmes. Mythologies bohèmes dans Charles Demailly et dans Manette Salomon’, Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, 14 (2007), 35–54 (esp. p. 46).
- 64.
On the origins of the work, see Goncourt, Journal, I, 176. The novel frequently betrays its origins in scenes of extensive dialogue. See Wrona, ‘Présentation’, pp. ix–x; Ricatte, La Création romanesque chez les Goncourt, p. 109.
- 65.
Diaz notes this parallel, tracing the connections between the fictional texts produced by Charles in the novel and the Goncourts’ own literary output. See ‘Le Pouls des lettres’, p. 58.
- 66.
Note Lawrence Schehr, ‘Ryhparographers: Les Frères Goncourt and Monstrous Writing’, in Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen, ed. by Seth Whidden (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 153–166.
- 67.
See Wrona, ‘Présentation’, p. xxxv.
- 68.
See Bara and Thérenty, ‘Presse et scène au XIXe siècle. Relais, reflets, échanges’, in Presse et scène au XIXe siècle (2012) http://www.medias19.org/index.php?id=3011 (para. 56 of 63) [accessed 30 November 2012].
- 69.
Dominique Laporte, ‘“Le Démon du foyer was playing at the time at the Gymnase”: Inscribing Vaudeville in the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly, or Putting Realist-Naturalist Readability to the Test’, trans. by Anthony Allen, in Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. by Pratima Prasad and Susan McCready (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007), pp. 199–213 (pp. 201–202).
- 70.
Monselet, ‘La Police littéraire’, in Trétaux (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1859), pp. 151–164 (p. 157). Wagneur also points to the Théâtre du Figaro as an example of such theatricality and draws attention to Monselet’s portrait of the Goncourts; see ‘Goncourt et Bohèmes’, p. 45.
- 71.
Villemessant, Mémoires d’un journaliste, III, 36–37.
- 72.
See Miller, The Novel and the Police, pp. viii–ix (p. ix). Note Miller’s analysis of the particular stakes of power—explored, here, in theatrical terms (p. viii): ‘A power that, like the police, theatrically displays its repressiveness, becomes of interest here only in its relation to an extra-legal series of “micro-powers” disseminating and dissembling their effects in the wings of that spectacle.’ On the connections between fiction and privacy, moreover, see p. 162.
- 73.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 227.
- 74.
See Berthelot, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–6.
- 75.
See Wrona, ‘Présentation’, pp. xxx–xxxi.
- 76.
For the novel’s keys, see Goncourt, Journal, I, 679–680. Note also Ricatte, La Création romanesque chez les Goncourt, pp. 121–122; Wrona, ‘Présentation’, p. xxx. As critics have remarked, the list of keys is not—in fact—exhaustive and, for example, makes no reference to the dramatist Mario Uchard, who is deemed to have partially inspired the marital plight of Charles and was married to Madeleine Brohan (the model of Marthe); see Wrona, ‘Présentation’, pp. xi, xxxi and Vantine, ‘Entre fantaisie et réalisme’, pp. 202–203.
- 77.
This dynamic emerges in the accounts of Berthelot and Thérenty. Both note the ways in which the novel utilises a literary strategy it purports to undermine. See Berthelot, ‘Des Aventures de Mlle Mariette à Charles Demailly’, p. 197; Thérenty, ‘De la nouvelle à la main à l’histoire drôle’, pp. 55–56.
- 78.
Goncourt, Journal, I, 443–444.
- 79.
Ibid., I, 444.
- 80.
Ibid., I, 445.
- 81.
Ibid., I, 492.
- 82.
Ibid., I, 489.
- 83.
Vantine, ‘Censoring/Censuring the Press under the Second Empire’, p. 49. (Note also Vantine’s discussion of the publication pressures bought to bear on the novel—and the roles of Solar, Lévy and others; see p. 49.)
- 84.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Renée Mauperin, ed. by Nadine Satiat (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), p. 205. On this episode, note also Pinson’s reading in L’Imaginaire médiatique, pp. 99, 101.
- 85.
Goncourt, Renée Mauperin, p. 220.
- 86.
Ibid., p. 221.
- 87.
See Éric Bordas, ‘Interactions énonciatives dans Charles Demailly’, p. 213.
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Birch, E. (2018). The Brothers Goncourt and the End of Privacy. In: Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72200-9_4
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