French Realism in the novel
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the
controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet’s realism
consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness
rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable
concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as
various as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and the
social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils.
Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond
Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Réalisme (1856), supported the view that novels
should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or working-class people, but
he insisted that the Realists’ main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-François-Félix
Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research
and documentation and rejected any element of didactic intention. The practice of those labeled
Realists was even more diverse than their theory.
The writers who most fully realized Champfleury’s ideal of a documentary presentation of
the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic
perfection of style that Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In
the Goncourts’ six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels
written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother’s death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the
interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented
portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state—the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renée
Mauperin (1864; Eng. trans. Renée Mauperin) or the degenerating lifestyle of a female servant in
Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Eng. trans. Germinie Lacerteux).
Flaubert
It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such
writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability
in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that any version of reality is relative to the
person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected the idea that there was any merit in
attempting to transpose a “slice of life” onto the page in “everyday language.” For him, only art
could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world; only through its
reworking by the artist could language be lifted above the utilitarian emptiness of everyday use
and forced to inscribe objectively the perceptions of the author, and characters, that create a
world.
Flaubert’s juvenilia show the writer’s struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and
to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of the pettiness of
contemporary materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear
in Salammbô (1863; Eng. trans. Salammbo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The
Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrays exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical
fashion. However, his major novels—Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and
L’Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses
closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in
hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world. Emma Bovary, trapped in the
unrelieved dullness of provincial landscape and domesticity, destroys herself by attempting to
base her life on the ideas of passion and happiness she has gathered from popular romance. In
her efforts to make the world around her fit her preconceived images, Emma—at best a dreamer,
at worst a social climber—is an easy victim for the exploitative men who come her way, and she
is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and, eventually, suicide. Emma’s own mediocrity is
part and parcel of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by
the various illusions entertained by all the major characters.
Most of these, however, being men, have more scope to pursue their dreams, or else they
are happy to confine desire within the limits of bourgeois values and convention—as, for
example, the apothecary Homais, the master of the idées reçues (“received ideas”) that Flaubert
so loathed (and would later satirize in his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet [published
posthumously in 1881; Eng. trans. Bouvard and Pécuchet]). Sentimental Education extends the
study to cover the entire “generation of 1848,” showing how all emotional, artistic, and social
ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frédéric Moreau, is a passive
version of Emma, and the ruling motif is one of prostitution—the sale of love, talent, and
principle.
The key to both Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education is the brilliance of a style that
manages to mold its contours to the personality, ambitions, and limits of each character it evokes.
Syntactic rhythms and images are drawn from each character’s own experience and point of
perception, as well as from the common stock of discourses to which their historical situation
gives them access. Over the whole, Flaubert casts his own authorial presence, unobtrusive but
visible, drily ironic, and sharply analytic. His Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) is a stylistic tour
de force, evoking the possibilities and limits of three lives, each lived at a distinct and significant
moment of historical transition, and telling the tale of each life in the language, artistic forms,
and perspectives each moment offers.
Drama
The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third
Republic, did not like to see itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in
reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the
stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance from 1850 to
1890 of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social
drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between
new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family
life posed by extramarital sexual relationships—all themes touched upon previously in light
comedy (in, for example, the plays of Eugène Scribe). The settings and character types were
related to the audience’s milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time,
although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic turns of plot make
them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Dumas fils
and Émile Augier. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La
Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the
libretto of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme
Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical
of his major works. Augier’s morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas’s, as can
be seen from one of his best-known plays, Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855; “The Marriage of
Olympia”), which proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an
innate propensity to vice. On the other hand, Augier’s treatment of the venality of the press and
the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontés (1861; “The Shameless Ones”) is as trenchant as
comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists.
Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social
relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the
main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and
the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world
would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of
the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851;
The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were
obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not
staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of
the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of
all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac
and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène
(1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire
on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political
satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible
effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations.
Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic
form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment
nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only
effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre
Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the
century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine,
who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its
content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August
Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien
Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles
to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that
principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage,
including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new
antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work
(by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite
Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout
Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng.
trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the
celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such
theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King
Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow
Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on
December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night.
Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the
joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola,
Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The
Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality
than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s
attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher
who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a
coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and
his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly
the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a
parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An
examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,”
the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans
indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu,
the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a
(more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism.
However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective
transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality
through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction
of the real.
Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook
before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle
Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The
Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The
linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects
of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than
Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885;
Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The
Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The
Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their
land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts,
particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was
not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the
novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality
that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes
both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are
dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual
and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who
work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and
commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis
story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses,
the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s
penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).
The trilogy Les Trois Villes (1894–98; “The Three Cities”) and the unfinished tetralogy
Les Quatres Évangiles (1899–1903; “The Four Gospels”), which followed Les Rougon-
Macquart, are unreadably didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress and
socialist humanitarianism, and the hostility toward the philosophy and politics of Roman
Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola’s
contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the
Dreyfus Affair, with his combative open letter, “J’accuse,” of January 13, 1898, taking up the
cause of the Jewish army officer unjustly convicted of treason.
Maupassant
Of the other Naturalists, only Guy de Maupassant, a protégé of Flaubert, is still widely
read. His Naturalism, as evidenced in “Le Roman” (1887; “The Novel”) by his declaration that
his intention was to “write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state,” involves
the use of significant detail to indicate the neuroses and vicious desires masked by everyday
appearances. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply
reductive, satiric techniques directed against his favourite targets—women, the middle classes,
the Prussians—and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in
human life (as in “Boule de suif” [1880; “Butterball” in Butterball]). His tales of mystery and
imagination (for example, “Le Horla” [1886–87]) bring sharp psychological insight to the
evocation of the supernatural. There is a shift in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A
Woman’s Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait
of the worlds of journalism and finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans. Bel-Ami), to the powerful
evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean).
The reaction against reason
In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition
intensified between those creative writers who grounded their thinking in the material world and
those who rejected physical experience as meaningless without reference to some spiritual
dimension or intellectual ideal. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both
attitudes into their writings, other poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or
the other line to an extreme. The turn of the century saw the rise of a variety of disparate
movements: Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic revival.
The Decadents
The basis of Decadence—bitter regret for the loss of a world of moral and political
absolutes, and middle-class fears of supersession in a society where the power of the masses (as
workers, voters, purchasers, and consumers) is slowly but inexorably on the increase—is well
illustrated both in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the
Grain) and the Culte du moi (“Cult of the Ego”) trilogy (1888–91) by Maurice Barrès. It derives
from the same determinist philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with
Impressionism in that it focuses on subjectively perceived moments of physical experience, held
to have no significance beyond themselves. It is also a form of late Romanticism, looking for
inspiration to the strand of Baudelaire that treats of revolt, neurosis, the cult of cruelty, and
extreme sensation, cast into novel and highly wrought forms. Originally associated primarily
with poetry (generally of poor quality), it found its best stroke in prose, in the track of
Baudelaire’s admirer and fellow dandy, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, celebrated for his novels and
tales of blasphemy and sadism. Huysmans’s Là-bas (1891; “Down There”; Eng. trans. Là-Bas: A
Journey into the Self) combined a heavy-footed study of Satanism in modern-day Paris with a
documentary investigation of the exploits of the medieval Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais. As
Huysmans changed direction yet again, toward a Roman Catholicism characterized by a mixture
of right-wing political prejudice, superstition, and antiquarian interest in symbols and doctrine,
other writers emerged who were more subtle and experimental in both content and form. The
novels of Octave Mirbeau (Le Jardin des supplices [1899; The Torture Garden]) and Jean
Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas [1901; Eng. trans. Monsieur de Phocas]), with their lyrical
evocations of the bizarre contradictions of bourgeois fantasy, evoking formations of homosexual
as well as heterosexual desire, have also a sharp satiric edge; they criticize their own posturing,
and they highlight the unjust class privilege on which it depends. Though Rachilde is sometimes
considered to belong to the Symbolist movement—mostly for her connections with its journal,
the Mercure de France, edited by her husband—her novels are best understood as productions of
the Decadent ethos: for example, Monsieur Vénus (1884; Eng. trans. Monsieur Venus), reversing
gender roles in the power play of sexual exploitation, or La Marquise de Sade (1887), with its
vampiric heroine.
The aristocratic hero of Huysmans’s À rebours included on his shelves the poetry of Paul
Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, the comte de Lautréamont (pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, whose
poem Les Chants de Maldoror [1868–69; Maldoror] influenced the Surrealists), and Stéphane
Mallarmé. Verlaine and Laforgue remain linked in critical memory with the Decadent
movement.
Much of Verlaine’s early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians in
the Fêtes galantes (1869; “Parties of Pleasure”) and in his major collection, Romances sans
paroles (1874; “Songs Without Words”). In his famous manifesto poem, “L’Art poétique” (“The
Art of Poetry”), written in 1874 and collected in Jadis et Naguère (1885; “Yesteryear and
Yesterday”) he created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of
psychological distortion that constitute his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used lines
with an odd number of syllables (vers impair), ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of
abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French
verse. In his work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important and that the
function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These
features, together with his experiments in dissolving form, were seized on by the younger
generation of poets in the 1880s and developed in the review Le Décadent, founded in 1886,
whose title adopted a label coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best
exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his
studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic
contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885; “Lamentations”) and
L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady of the Moon”), are a series of
variations on the Decadent themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored
through a host of recurring images (the wind, Sundays, moonlight, and the tragicomic figure
Pierrot [Pedrolino in Italian] from the commedia dell’arte). Laforgue’s fluid verse form, shaped
by rhythmic patterns and assonance, is the first important example of free verse in French poetry.
