Abstract
This chapter draws on Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and the political culture of the 1880s, with the aim of highlighting a further dimension critical to nineteenth-century reflections on the press: the question of corruption and the colonial world. Bel-Ami was written in an age obsessed with the possibility of collusion between government, high finance and the press, and the chapter explores Maupassant’s 1885 novel with particular attention to the ways in which this work references recent French military intervention in Tunisia. It also reflects on Maupassant’s own journalism.
Il sentait grandir son influence à la pression des poignées de main et à l’allure des coups de chapeau.
[He sensed his growing influence by the firmness of handshakes and the speed with which hats were raised.]
Maupassant, Bel-Ami
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Notes
- 1.
All references to Bel-Ami are to the Pléiade edition of Maupassant’s Romans, ed. by Louis Forestier, and are included parenthetically in the text. English translations refer to the Oxford University Press edition of Bel-Ami, ed. by Robert Lethbridge and trans. by Margaret Mauldon. These too are included parenthetically in the text and follow references to the French edition.
- 2.
See Maupassant, Romans, ed. by Forestier: ‘La Vie française était avant tout un journal d’argent, le patron étant un homme d’argent à qui la presse et la députation avaient servi de leviers’ [La Vie française was above all a financial paper, since the owner was a financier who had used the press and the deputies as a means of influence] (p. 288/p. 94). See also Forestier’s informative study in the French edition (pp. 1324–1341).
- 3.
See Nicholas White, The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Chap. 3, pp. 73–97 (p. 87). On Maupassant’s debt to the Tunisian Affair, see André Vial, Guy de Maupassant et l’art du roman (Paris: Nizet, 1954), pp. 316–329. Note also Gérard Delaisement, ‘Les chroniques coloniales de Maupassant’, in Maupassant et l’écriture, ed. by Louis Forestier (Paris: Nathan, 1993), pp. 53–59, and ‘Les Problèmes de la colonisation’ in Les Chroniques politiques de Guy de Maupassant, ed. by Delaisement (Paris: Rive droite, 2006), pp. 204–222.
- 4.
See, for example, Marie-Claire Bancquart, ‘Maupassant journaliste’, in Flaubert et Maupassant: écrivains normands, ed. by Joseph-Marc Bailbé and Jean Pierrot (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981), pp. 155–166; Noëlle Benhamou, ‘De l’influence du fait divers: les Chroniques et les Contes de Maupassant’, Romantisme, 97 (1997), 47–58; Adrian Ritchie, ‘Maupassant en 1881: entre le conte et la chronique’, in Guy de Maupassant, ed. by Noëlle Benhamou (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 11–20; Edmund Birch, ‘Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and the Secrets of Actualité’, Modern Language Review, 109 (2014), 996–1012. Critics (notably Bancquart and Ritchie) have also noted the importance of Maupassant’s North African journalism for the writing of Bel-Ami. More broadly, on Maupassant’s representation of North Africa, see Pierre Soubias, ‘La place de l’Afrique dans l’imaginaire de Maupassant: une lecture des Nouvelles Africaines’, Maupassant multiples, ed. by Yves Reboul (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1995), pp. 29–39; Susan Barrow, ‘East/West: Appropriation of Aspects of the Orient in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 30 (2002), 316–329.
- 5.
Thérenty, Mosaïques, p. 438. Thérenty is an important critic of the notion of actualité; see also La Littérature au quotidien, pp. 90–120.
- 6.
For details of Maupassant’s travels, see Marlo Johnston, Guy de Maupassant (Paris: Fayard, 2012), pp. 372–397. Note also Johnston’s research on Maupassant’s biography in the period of Bel-Ami’s publication and on the nature of its reception: Chap. 12, ‘Bel-Ami et l’Italie’, pp. 515–563; Chap. 13, ‘L’effet Bel-Ami’, pp. 564–615.
- 7.
Angenot, 1889. Un état du discours social, p. 595. Note that the uniformity of this ‘everyone’ proves complex in Angenot’s study (see p. 596).
- 8.
Ibid., pp. 29–30.
- 9.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Marc Angenot, Literary History, and the Study of Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 248.
- 10.
Sensitive to Angenot’s research, Guillaume Pinson notes the newspaper’s status as object and producer of news in L’Imaginaire médiatique, p. 14: ‘The newspaper is an object which makes actualité and which is actualité.’
- 11.
The region of Khroumire, home to the Kroumirs, lies in north-western Tunisia, spanning the border with Algeria. For consideration of this episode, see, among various examples, Forestier’s discussion of Bel-Ami in Maupassant, Romans, ed. by Forestier, p. 1328; Vial, Guy de Maupassant et l’art du roman, p. 318. For further analysis of the historical context, see Jean-Marie Mayeur, Les Débuts de la Troisième République 1871–1898 (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp. 124–133, and Charles-André Julien, L’Affaire tunisienne 1878–1881 (Tunis: Dar el-Amal, 1981).
- 12.
See Vial, Guy de Maupassant et l’art du roman, p. 316. Vial’s analysis considers Bel-Ami ‘the masterpiece inspired by events of this period’ (p. 316); his detailed exploration of the specifics of this debate—and the ways in which they play out in Bel-Ami—has proved invaluable to subsequent critics of Maupassant’s novel.
- 13.
The importance of the newspaper has notably been stressed by Vial, Guy de Maupassant et l’art du roman, p. 321, and Gérard Delaisement, in Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, 2 vols (Paris: Rive droite, 2004), II, 1483. Delaisement’s edition is an essential resource for Maupassant scholars. See, in particular, his commentary on Maupassant’s 1881 article, Zut, II, 1410–1415. Furthermore, the quasi-legal ‘association’—noted in the above quotation from Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant—is precisely the term employed by Madeleine Forestier in her explanation of marriage to Duroy following Forestier’s death: ‘Comprenez-moi bien. Le mariage pour moi n’est pas une chaîne, mais une association’ [You must understand me. Marriage, for me, is not a bond, but a partnership] (p. 340/p. 146). White explores this passage in The Family in Crisis, p. 87: ‘Madeleine’s discourse on “free association” refuses to background the ultimately political nature of such a bond.’
- 14.
See Maupassant, Romans, ed. by Forestier, p. 1332.
- 15.
L’Intransigeant, 27 September 1881, p. 1.
- 16.
L’Intransigeant, 24 September 1881, p. 1.
- 17.
Vial, Guy de Maupassant et l’art du roman, p. 327; see also Julien, L’Affaire tunisienne 1878–1881, p. 47.
- 18.
On this point, see Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, II, 1483.
- 19.
Albert Bataille, Causes criminelles et mondaines de 1881 (Paris: Dentu, 1882), pp. 339, 341.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 370.
- 21.
On Maupassant’s hostility to Tonkin, see the article ‘Philosophie–Politique’ in Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, II, 965–969. See also Delaisement’s analysis in the same edition, II, 1683–1687.
- 22.
Pinson, L’Imaginaire médiatique, p. 145. See also Marc Martin, ‘Retour sur l’abominable vénalité de la presse’, Le Temps des médias, 6 (2006), 22–33.
- 23.
See Pinson, L’Imaginaire médiatique, pp. 93–97. The connection with Zola’s L’Argent reflects a further historical phenomenon: le krach de l’Union Générale. See, in particular, Delaisement’s study of questions of money, the press and le krach in Les Chroniques politiques de Guy de Maupassant, ed. by Delaisement, pp. 236–269. On L’Argent, see also Dorian Bell, ‘Beyond the Bourse: Zola, Empire, and the Jews’, Romanic Review, 102 (2011), 485–501. This article explores a central feature of this strand of Third Republic discourse: anti-Semitism.
- 24.
Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, V, 120; Zola, Money, p. 106.
- 25.
See Guy de Maupassant, Lettres d’Afrique (Algérie-Tunisie), ed. by Michèle Salinas (Paris: La Boîte à documents, 1997), p. 278. This important edition brings together Maupassant’s journalism concerning the Tunisian Affair published over the course of 1881 alongside his Algerian articles and travel writing, Au Soleil. See, in particular, Salinas’s ‘Présentation’ (pp. 7–45). The critic proves sensitive to Maupassant’s critique of the value of information provided by the press (p. 27).
- 26.
Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, I, 189.
- 27.
Discussing the press campaigns launched in favour of colonial intervention, Bancquart (in her insightful introduction to Bel-Ami) notes the use of the pronoun ‘on’ in references to Ferry and Gambetta; see ‘Introduction’, in Maupassant, Bel-Ami (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1979), pp. 9–40 (p. 19). On this pronoun, see also Dominique Kalifa’s discussion of early reportage under the Belle Epoque, ‘Les Tâcherons de l’information: petits reporters et faits divers à la “belle époque”’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 40 (1993), 578–603 (esp. p. 594).
- 28.
Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, I, 201.
- 29.
Ibid., I, 201–202.
- 30.
The question of the poverty of language proves crucial to Maupassant’s journalism and is evoked by scholars such as Anne de Vaucher, ‘Théorie et pratique du journalisme chez Maupassant’, Berenice. Revista quadrimestrale francese, 19 (1987), 399–411 (pp. 401–402); Trevor A. Le V. Harris, Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors: Ironies of Repetition in the Work of Guy de Maupassant (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 32; Ritchie, ‘Maupassant en 1881: entre le conte et la chronique’, p. 20.
- 31.
Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. by Louis Forestier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1974–79), I, 1198–1206.
- 32.
Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, I, 230.
- 33.
Ibid., I, 265, 269.
- 34.
Note, for example, Soubias, ‘La place de l’Afrique dans l’imaginaire de Maupassant’; Roger Little, ‘“Tiens, Forrestier!” Maupassant et la colonisation’, Plaisance, 8 (2006), 75–87. See also Mireille Gouaux-Coutrix, ‘Au soleil de Guy de Maupassant ou un romancier face à la colonisation’, in Minorités, échanges, populations et l’individu. Actes du colloque international ‘Entre l’occident et l’orient’ (Nice: Université de Nice, 1983), pp. 271–284.
- 35.
Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, I, 240.
- 36.
See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995) and Jennifer Yee, Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Oxford: Legenda, 2008). On Maupassant, see also Yee’s The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 106–110.
- 37.
See Delaisement’s discussion of this article in Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, II, 1427–28, and also Johnston’s useful summary, citation and discussion in Guy de Maupassant, p. 378.
- 38.
Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, I, 254.
- 39.
Ibid., I, 254–255.
- 40.
Ibid., I, 255.
- 41.
Ibid., I, 257.
- 42.
See Christopher Lloyd, Maupassant. Bel-Ami (London: Grant and Cutler, 1988), p. 70.
- 43.
The question of Maupassant’s status as a political writer (and, indeed, Bel-Ami as a political novel) has proved the subject of some debate; see Lloyd, Maupassant. Bel-Ami, p. 84. Lloyd stresses the novel’s failure as a political work, even going so far as to claim (p. 89): ‘I do not think it is a service to Maupassant to invest his work with a profundity or intellectual complexity which it does not really possess.’ A. C. Ritchie offers a different reading in ‘Maupassant et la démocratie parlementaire’, Studi Francesi, 78 (1982), 426–434. See also Harris, Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors, Chap. 3, pp. 25–36.
- 44.
On the relation of private to public in Maupassant (and the connection between his fiction and Balzac’s), see Bancquart’s introduction to her edition of Bel-Ami (esp. p. 35).
- 45.
Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, I, 405.
- 46.
The question of Roustan’s relationship with the prominent Mme Elias was a central feature of the debate about the consul’s inadequacies; see ‘Choses du jour’, in Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. by Delaisement, I, 404–407.
- 47.
See Robert Lethbridge, ‘Introduction’, Maupassant, Bel-Ami, trans. by Margaret Mauldon, pp. vii–xlvii (p. xxxii). Lethbridge’s study not only details the novel’s historical context but explores ‘the triangulation of money, sex, and power’ (p. xix). His above comments on manipulation, moreover, highlight a further theme crucial to Bel-Ami explored later in my discussion (p. xxxii): ‘the language of duplicity’. On such questions of manipulation, note also Pinson’s discussion of the roman du scandale médiatique in L’Imaginaire médiatique, p. 94: ‘The manipulation of information is at the heart of the scenario of novels of media scandal.’
- 48.
Marc Angenot, ‘What Can Literature Do? From Literary Sociocriticism to a Critique of Social Discourse’, trans. by Robert F. Barsky, Yale Journal of Criticism, 17 (2004), 217–231 (p. 219).
- 49.
Angenot, 1889. Un état du discours social, p. 836. Cited in Jameson, ‘Marc Angenot, Literary History, and the Study of Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 247.
- 50.
Angenot, ‘What Can Literature Do?’, p. 220. We might, with Angenot, also note the literary text’s ability to distort the nature of social discourse (p. 229): ‘What we can occasionally find in a state of culture are a few writings, classified as literature or not, that shake up the entropy of accepted ideas, or hold up to them a mirror that deforms them.’
- 51.
See Lethbridge, ‘Introduction’, pp. xix–xxi.
- 52.
See Gérard Delaisement, ‘L’Univers de Bel-Ami’, Revue des sciences humaines, 69 (1953), 77–87 (pp. 80–81). See also Francis Lacoste, ‘Bel-Ami roman naturaliste?’, Bulletin Flaubert-Maupassant, 12 (2003), 49–59 (p. 56).
- 53.
Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, p. 99. Prendergast’s chapter on Balzac (pp. 83–118) is of particular relevance here.
- 54.
On such questions of name changes (and, indeed, broader issues of originality and repetition), see Harris, Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors, Chap. 6, pp. 83–104 (esp. p. 100).
- 55.
See René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961). See also Gerald Prince, ‘Bel-Ami and Narrative as Antagonist’, pp. 219–220, 222. Prince’s important essay reflects on the novel’s preoccupations with narrative (p. 220): ‘In the novel too, narrative services the already said and done, the hackneyed, the rehearsed.’ Central here is the thesis that the novel aims to subvert narrative itself. Referencing Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, the critic sees journalism as crucial to Maupassant’s undermining of narrative and highlights the centrality of copy and imitation for the text (p. 222): ‘Duroy is a mere reproduction.’ On imitation in Bel-Ami, see Noëlle Benhamou, ‘L’Imitation dans Bel-Ami’, Bulletin Flaubert-Maupassant, 12 (2003), 33–48.
- 56.
See Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. by Forestier, I, 3–8.
- 57.
Angenot, 1889. Un état du discours social, p. 652.
- 58.
Angenot explores the repetitive aspects of actualité and, citing Walter Benjamin, defines it as ‘l’éternel retour du même’, in 1889. Un état du discours social, p. 597.
- 59.
Noting this passage, Louis Forestier stresses Maupassant’s interest in the motivations behind the fait divers. See ‘Maupassant et le fait divers’, Bulletin Flaubert-Maupassant, 5 (1997), 7–14 (p. 10).
- 60.
See Terdiman’s Discourse/Counter-Discourse, Chap. 2, ‘Newspaper Culture: Institutions of Discourse; Discourse of Institutions’, pp. 117–146.
- 61.
I have modified the original translation here.
- 62.
For a reading sensitive to this connection, see White, The Family in Crisis, p. 88.
- 63.
Lethbridge notes the connection between these discourses (and briefly contrasts les échos and the conversation at the Café Riche), underlining the fact of linguistic duplicity: ‘Above all, in both the private and public domain, language is seen as a substitute for reality rather than a reflection of it’ (‘Introduction’, p. xxxii). Note also Prince, ‘Bel-Ami and Narrative as Antagonist’, p. 219.
- 64.
Prince, ‘Bel-Ami and Narrative as Antagonist’, p. 221.
- 65.
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 67.
- 66.
Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, p. 118.
- 67.
See Delaisement’s commentary on Maupassant’s article ‘Philosophie-Politique’ in his edition of Maupassant, Chroniques, II, 1684: ‘The colonial war is thus nothing but a deception [duperie]: deception for expropriated peoples, deception for the colonisers, fed with lies, with “balançoires”, designed to conceal the scandalous character of such campaigns.’
- 68.
See Lethbridge, ‘Introduction’, p. xl.
- 69.
See Emmanuèle Grandadam, ‘Maupassant journaliste littéraire’, Bulletin Flaubert-Maupassant, 21 (2007), 111–130 (p. 119). Grandadam discusses Maupassant’s article ‘Les Académies’, which draws on this theme.
- 70.
Angenot, 1889. Un état du discours social, p. 597.
- 71.
Crucial to Lethbridge’s and White’s readings of the novel, such a circulatory logic contradicts the notion that Bel-Ami merely details the inexorable rise of its protagonist.
- 72.
Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. by John Goode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 304.
- 73.
Waugh, Scoop, p. 42.
- 74.
Lacoste deems the bilboquet symbolic of journalism; see ‘Maupassant et le journalisme’, Bulletin Flaubert-Maupassant, 17 (2005), 45–51 (p. 46).
- 75.
Terdiman, Dicourse/Counter-Discourse, p. 122.
- 76.
Charles Cros, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jacques Brenner (Paris: Le club français du livre, 1954), p. 371.
- 77.
See, for example, Forestier’s study of Bel-Ami in his edition of Maupassant, Romans, p. 1367. Forestier evokes Cros’s monologue as evidence of this trend. Furthermore, Bancquart—in her edition of Bel-Ami—also traces this history, noting the reference to the character of Dumersan and Varin’s play Les Saltimbanques (p. 393): ‘This name referred to those characters who knew how to get out of trouble, honestly or otherwise, in any eventuality; Jules Bertaut tells us that the director of Le Figaro, Villemessant, was commonly nicknamed thus.’ See Maurice Alhoy, Taxile Delord and Edmond Texier, Mémoires de Bilboquet, 3 vols (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1854). Note also Françoise Rubellin’s edition of Pierre Marivaux’s Le Bilboquet (Paris; Saint-Etienne: CNRS; Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1995) which makes reference to the nineteenth-century development of the bilboquet (p. 76). As further evidence of this trend, note the following remark from an article in Le Figaro of 12 September 1882, p. 2: ‘L’apprentissage du bilboquet dure six mois, à peu près, pour ceux qui ont la vocation; pour les autres, il peut durer indéfiniment; quand on ne comprend pas le bilboquet, on est perdu’ [The apprenticeship in the cup-and-ball lasts for six months, more or less, for those who have a vocation. For others, it can last indefinitely; when one does not understand the cup-and-ball, one is lost].
- 78.
Jean Frollo, ‘Les jeux disparus’, Le Petit Parisien, 24 November 1910, p. 1.
- 79.
Andrew Counter, ‘The Epistemology of the Mantelpiece: Subversive Ornaments in the Fiction of Guy de Maupassant’, Modern Language Review, 103 (2008), 682–696.
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Birch, E. (2018). Sleight of Hand: Maupassant and Actualité. 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_5
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