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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Sharon Larson is assistant professor of French at Christopher Newport University. Her research examines representations of malevolent femininity in Decadent and Naturalist literatures, as well as medical discourses on sexual difference in the late nineteenth century. She has published articles in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Women in French Studies, Dix-neuf, Excavatio, and L’Érudit franco-espagnol. She is currently preparing a book project on fin-de-siècle author Jane de la Vaudère.
Notes
1. Nelly Sanchez cites Marie Aycard's Le Naturaliste et le bas-bleu (1851) and Henriette Bezançon's Bas-bleus (1897) as other female-authored texts that adopted the term.
2. To commemorate the anniversary of her death, Par Ailleurs published a new edition of her 1887 novel Les Ensevelis and the Médiathèque Pierre Fanlac (near her birthplace in the Dordogne) hosted an exhibition dedicated to her life and works.
3. Adrianna Paliyenko's recent book Genius Envy examines a selection of nineteenth-century women poets and the rhetorical tactics that they employed to contest gendered models of artistic genius in scientific and literary communities. Rachel Mesch's Having it All in the Belle Époque credits “Belle Époque literary feminism” with providing women writers with the aesthetic and ideological means to promote their own model of modern womanhood in two women's photographic magazines. In Créatrices en 1900, Charlotte Foucher Zarmanian argues that women artists of Symbolism actively disrupted normative gender codes of production and creativity to carve out spaces for themselves within exclusive artistic circles of the period.
4. All translations throughout are my own.
5. Though the fall of the ancien régime in the late eighteenth century offered hopes for educational reform, girls’ access to affordable, secular education remained relatively unchanged over the next decades. It was not until mid-nineteenth century that girls benefited lawfully from shifting mentalities. The Falloux Law of 1850, though advocating a return to religious education, required that separate primary schools for girls be established in every commune of over eight hundred inhabitants. In 1867, the reformist Minister of Public Instruction Victor Duruy expanded this law to include communes of five hundred inhabitants and improved working conditions for female teachers. The Camille Sée law of 1880 led to the creation of public, secular high schools for young women. By 1882, education for both boys and girls from the ages of six to thirteen was free, mandatory and laic under the Jules Ferry legislation. Reading and writing was a major component of the Republican educational model as the state invested in the formation of informed, cultivated citizens. In addition, girls and women had increased access to novels and periodicals by mid-century, now printed en masse with the rotary printing press.
6. Rachel Mesch cites a selection of statistical studies from the turn of the century, including one that estimates that women accounted for twenty percent of French professional writers in 1907 (The Hysteric's Revenge 3).
7. Reid recounts these linguistic and cultural origins as they appear in the entry for “bas bleu” in Littré's 1863 Dictionnaire de la langue française (48).
8. The multi-volume Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1839–1842) belonged to what Walter Benjamin famously called “panoramic literature” and presented an encyclopedic collection of French social “types” of all layers of society, such as the bas-bleu. For a detailed and comparative analysis of the nuances in Janin's and Soulié's texts, see Reid (especially 47–63).
9. See Planté's aptly-titled chapter “Les bas-bleus contre l’ordre social” (39–61). In addition, Adrianna Paliyenko (Citation2015) engages in a compelling reading of the inherent tensions in scientific conceptions of female creativity and procreative capacities throughout the century.
10. “Chronique printanière: les femmes qui écrivent,” 16 May 1886. Qtd. in Planté 46.
11. In her annotated collection of Peyrebrune's letters, Sanchez provides insightful commentary on the identities of various characters in the novel.
12. As Nelly Sanchez has indicated, Arsène Houssaye was a close friend to Peyrebrune (78).
13. In addition to Les Vestales de l’Eglise, Montifaud was also condemned and fined for Alosie ou les Amours de Mme de M.T.P (1876) and Les nouvelles drôlatiques (1880).