Abstract
As Marshall Berman so eloquently stated in All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982), paradox and contradiction define the modern experience. His definition still stands as one of the most useful for understanding the late nineteenth century as well as our own:
Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.1
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Notes
Marshal Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982 ), p. 15.
Examples of works that address these issues include: Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983);
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977);
Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986);
Christophe Prochasson, Les Années électriques, 1880–1910 (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1991);
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
Dominique Kalifa and Alain Vaillant, ‘Pour une histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle,’ Le Temps des médias. Revue d’histoire, 2 (2004): 197–214;
Greg Shaya, ‘The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860–1910,’ American Historical Review, 109(1) (February 2004): 41–77;
and Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds), Making the New: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth Century France (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
Willa Silverman’s The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008) offers an excellent example of how modernity threatened elite identity: in addition to recoiling from the democratization of taste in general, book collectors faced the disappearance of what they most cherished–old books and the traditional modes of book production. The unstoppable use of new technologies for cheap, mass production threatened one of the most important markers of their identity and status.
Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: a History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 221;
Christopher E. Forth, ‘Neurasthenia and Manhood in Fin-de-Siècle France,’ in Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War, Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (eds) ( Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001 ), pp. 329–61.
Among Michel Foucault’s most influential works are Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977) and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). Foucault, of course, contributed heavily to the ‘cultural turn’ in historiography pioneered by Hayden White and deeply influenced by theorists such as Clifford Geertz, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and many others.
For a helpful overview and analysis of this subject, see Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 1–32.
Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Collin Gordon (ed.) ( New York: Pantheon, 1980 ), p. 131.
Georges Vigarello, Le Corps redressé: Histoire d’un pouvoir pédagogique (1978; reprint, Paris: Armand Colin, 2001); Le propre et le sale, l’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1985).
Also worth mentioning are some pioneering historical anthropological investigations: Françoise Loux, Le jeune enfant et son corps dans la médicine traditionnelle (Paris: Flammarion, 1978);
Françoise Loux and Philippe Richard, Sagesses du corps: La Santé et la Maladie dans les proverbes françaises (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1978);
and Marie-Christine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie à l’apogée du Moyen Age ( Paris: Flammarion, 1983 ).
Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce. Misère sexuelle et prostitution (XIXe siècle) (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Le Miasme et la Jonquille. L’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIIe– XIXe siècles (Paris: Flammarion, 1982); Le Territoire du vide. L’Occident et le désir du rivage, 1750–1840 ( Paris: Flammarion, 1988 ).
Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello (eds), Histoire du corps (Paris: Seuil, 2005–06), 3 vols.
Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage, 1975);
Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-CenturyFrance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981);
Jan Goldstein, ‘The Hysteria Diagnosis and the Politics of Anticlericalism in Late Nineteenth-Century France,’ Journal of Modern History, 54(2) (June 1982): 209–39; ‘The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-Siècle France,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 20(4) (October 1985): 521–52.
See also Goldstein, Console and Classify: the French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987 )
and Ian R. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 ).
Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 );
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder, c. 1848–c.1918 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ).
Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’ in Gender and the Politics of History ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1989 ), p. 42.
Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989);
Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Restructuring Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
and Ann-Louise Shapiro. Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
See also Jean Pedersen, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870–1920 ( New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003 ).
Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);
Jo Burr Margadant, The New Biography: Performing Femininity inNineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
James Smith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);
Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: the New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Elinor Accampo, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Also relevant to the status of ‘deviant’ women–and the increased respectability that actual actresses achieved during the Third Republic—is Lenard Berlanstein’s Daughters of Eve: a Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
In fascinating ways, women also appropriated the language of republicanism, male honor, and legal codes for their own benefit. See Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendents: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000);
Andrea Mansker, ‘“Mademoiselle Aria Ly Wants Blood!” The Debate over Female Honor in Belle Epoque France,’ French Historical Studies, 29 (Fall 2006): 621–47;
and Rachel G. Fuchs, Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
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Accampo, E., Forth, C.E. (2010). Introduction: Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. In: Forth, C.E., Accampo, E. (eds) Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246843_1
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