Journalistic Intermediation: The Newspaper Poetics of Nerval and Baudelaire

ABSTRACT

This article analyses interconnections between the newspaper press and the creative processes of Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire. From Nerval's dizzying challenge to press restrictions in Les Faux Saulniers (1850), to Baudelaire's harnessing of the cacophony of La Presse in his placement of the petits poèmes en prose, the press environment becomes a unique site of experimentation in prose. Focusing on their exploitation of the feuilleton as a means of contending with press restrictions, I demonstrate that these poets' engagement with newspapers is inseparable from their aesthetic achievements.

KEYWORDS:

• Nerval
• Baudelaire
• journalism
• poetry
• prose
• feuilleton
• censorship

Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire engaged with rapidly changing political, social and economic contexts, as well as with longstanding poetic traditions. These poets injected new energy into traditional verse forms – like the sonnet – while simultaneously investigating the critical potential of prose. A recent collection edited by Patrick Labarthe and Dagmar Wieser (2014) has demonstrated the value of considering both the similarities and the differences in their approaches. While twenty-first-century readers are most likely to encounter their writings in book form, Nerval and Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century contemporaries found much of their work in literary periodicals and in newspapers. The symbiotic relationship between literature and the press, during the years when Nerval and Baudelaire were active, is well-documented.¹ The system of private patronage that existed in France under the ancien régime declined during the Napoleonic period and, although some provision was made to support writers by Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis Philippe and Louis Napoléon, formal sponsorship continued to be eroded throughout the nineteenth century, meaning that most authors relied on newspapers and other periodicals for their income (Lough 1978, 301–302). This was particularly true of novelists, but it also impacted the work of poets, whether they were writing in verse or in prose. Alain Vaillant notes that, of the poets who started out under the July Monarchy, those who entered the ‘panthéon littéraire’ were those who engaged with journalism: ‘c’est le cas, en particulier, de Nerval, de Gautier, de Leconte de Lisle, de Banville, de Baudelaire’ (2009, 44–45). Various press restrictions limited freedom of expression in the newspaper during the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, these forms of censorship often seem to have served as springboards for literary inventiveness, as writers circumvented them in more or less subtle ways. Vaillant argues that both Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal owe much of their subversive subtlety to the authoritarian censorship regime in place under the Second Empire (2011, 17). Analysing the work of Nerval and Baudelaire alongside that of Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, Ross Chambers identifies literary ‘opposition’ or ‘duplicity’ – a kind of veiled rebellion – as a defining characteristic of early French modernism, due to the political circumstances of the time (1993, 8–9). William Olmstead argues that stylistic features like Flaubert’s free indirect discourse and Baudelaire’s multiple poetic personae are ‘products’ of these authors’ navigation of censorship (2015, 2).

In this article, I will explore the ways in which the world of journalism may have influenced Nerval and Baudelaire’s writing in prose. I will concentrate, in particular, on these poets’ use of the feuilleton as a means of navigating the limitations of the newspaper environment. Following the success of experiments by the new mass-circulation dailies – La Presse and Le Siècle – in 1836, newspapers of all political affiliations had begun to publish fiction in instalments in the feuilleton, a section at the bottom of the first two to four pages, cordoned off with a heavy black line, which had previously been devoted to reviews and criticism. Authors wrote novels and shorter fictional works specifically for serial publication because the newspaper provided a more reliable source of income than book publishers, and, in any case, the same material could be republished later in book form. Although verse poetry generally appeared in literary periodicals, poets like Nerval and Baudelaire also engaged with the newspaper by publishing prose texts – including those that eventually informed Nerval’s Les Filles du feu (1854) and Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1869) – in the feuilleton.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve noted with irritation that the publishing conditions described above blurred the distinction between popular literature and the kind of writing that contributed to ‘la gloire littéraire d’une nation’ (1839, 675–691). However, although the pressure to produce copy for the feuilleton was often seen as limiting artistic freedom, the newspaper also constituted a space in which multiple voices confronted one another, and where both literary and socio-political conventions could be questioned, whether overtly or indirectly. A recognizable repertoire of feuilleton techniques – such as the alternation of remplissage and cliff-hangers – developed in response to the financial and practical constraints of this publishing model, and texts exhibiting these characteristics, such as Eugène Sue’s highly successful Les Mystères de Paris, have been dismissed as conventional.² However, writers also reacted against established practice within the space, meaning that the feuilleton can be seen simultaneously as a snapshot of the society in which it originated, and – as Marie-Ève Thérenty has argued – as a kind of ‘laboratory’ for literary innovation (2007, 20).

By analysing Nerval and Baudelaire’s engagement with the feuilleton and with different forms of censorship, I seek to illustrate the complex two-way relationship between the contingencies of the mid-nineteenth-century newspaper environment, and these poets’ creative choices. I will focus on two texts that are central to the poets’ literary legacies: Nerval’s Les Faux Saulniers (1850) – part of which was repurposed in Les Filles du feu (1854) – and Baudelaire’s instalments of short prose texts published in La Presse in 1862, which later formed the bulk of Le Spleen de Paris (1869). Nerval wrote Les Faux Saulniers during the final stages of the Second Republic, whereas Baudelaire’s insertion of ‘poetry’ into the newspaper took place in 1862, several years after Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) was censored, at a time when the much more serious press restrictions of the Second Empire were well established.³ Building on the work of Michel Brix, Claude Pichois (Brix 1986, 2013; Pichois and Brix 1995), and Alain Vaillant (2009, 2011) – who have established the publication history of these poets’ writings in the press – I will demonstrate that Nerval and Baudelaire reacted in different but equally strategic ways to the newspaper environment with which they were confronted, and that their press publications left subtle but important traces on some of their most important works.

Nerval’s Les Faux Saulniers: Literary Retaliation in the feuilleton

Nerval’s pseudo-historical work Les Faux Saulniers was published in the feuilleton of Le National, a moderate left-wing newspaper, between 24 October and 22 December 1850. This relatively obscure text informs the ‘definitive’ versions of some of Nerval’s most widely read prose works. It is particularly central to Les Filles du feu, the celebrated collection of nouvelles to which the twelve sonnets of Les Chimères were appended in 1854, after Alexandre Dumas published ‘El Desdichado’ in Le Mousquetaire without Nerval’s consent. The first nouvelle of Les Filles du feu, ‘Angélique’, reproduces the first part of Les Faux Saulniers with only minor variations. Les Faux Saulniers is also the text where Nerval first evokes the Valois region – so central to his work as a whole – and where a minor character named Sylvie appears for the first time (Bony 1993a, 1213). The author mined Les Faux Saulniers throughout the rest of his life; Les Faux Saulniers also contains earlier versions of other texts which most readers know under their later titles: ‘Histoire de l’abbé de Bucquoy’ from Les Illuminés, five of the chapters of La Bohême galante,⁴ and ‘Sur les scènes de la vie allemande’ from Lorely. Although the feuilleton entries were collected a year after their initial publication in a supplement included in Le National, Nerval never republished them as a single volume, and no reliable edition⁵ of the text existed until its publication as part of the second volume of the new Pléiade edition of Nerval’s works in 1984.⁶ Since Nerval reproduced long extracts from Les Faux Saulniers in the later texts, usually very faithfully, it was perhaps judged unnecessary during most of the twentieth century to republish it. However, as Brix argues in his 2009 edition, Les Faux Saulniers is an important document in itself (2009, 7). Engaging with two provocative press restrictions – the Amendement Riancey and the Amendement Tinguy of July 1850 – it is a model of the récit excentrique (in the tradition of Diderot, Sterne, and Nodier) as Daniel Sangsue (1987) has shown, and it contains some passages which Nerval never reproduced elsewhere. The ambiguous relationship between the author and the narrator of the text makes it a privileged space in which to analyse Nerval’s response to press restrictions and his subversive engagement with the feuilleton space.

Les Faux Saulniers begins as an account of the narrator’s attempts to relocate a book – which he has leafed through during a trip to Frankfurt – on the life of Jean-Albert Archambaud de Bucquoy, a rebel and adventurer from the time of Louis XIV.⁷ The narrator needs the book in order to recount the life of the Abbé de Bucquoy to the readers of the feuilleton of Le National. This is due to the imposition of the Amendement Riancey, which introduced a new stamp tax (or timbre) for newspapers that published fiction in the feuilleton space or in any other format, such as a separate supplement. In order to avoid the tax, everything printed in the feuilleton space had to be verifiably true.⁸ While fiction was the driving force of the feuilleton by 1850, there was a longstanding tradition of publishing everything from theatre reviews to literary criticism in this space, and the narrator reasons that Le National cannot fall victim to this tax if everything he writes is supported with a historical source, and if he refrains from embellishing the story. As contemporary commentators such as Gustave Claudin noted disapprovingly, unlike earlier forms of censorship, the Amendement Riancey did not explicitly restrict the content of what was published on moral grounds; the only requirement was that what was published in the feuilleton was not fiction (Claudin 1850, 14).⁹

Les Faux Saulniers also engages with the Amendement Tinguy, which required authors to sign their articles rather than publishing them anonymously, and threatened hefty fines for non-compliance.¹⁰ Throughout his career, Nerval had exploited aliases to an unusual degree, and did not always take credit for his contributions to collaborative projects; Brix notes that, on two occasions, Nerval even passed off his own original writings as translations of the work of established authors (2013, 10–11). The feuilletons of Les Faux Saulniers are signed Gérard de Nerval. This is a nom de plume, but its status is complicated by the fact that, once he adopted it, the author – born Gérard Labrunie – used it in almost all areas of his life. The Amendement Tinguy does not pronounce specifically on the subject of pen names, but the expectation that authors should use their real names is implicit in the threat of fines for ‘toute fausse signature’ (Chassan 1851, 125). The Amendement Tinguy was a blow to the collective culture of contemporary newspapers, as Catherine Talley (2015, 74–77) has argued, and as Nerval himself observed in his theatre feuilleton in La Presse (Nerval 1984, 2: 1199–1200). It must also have been particularly disconcerting for an author whose relationship with his own name was so complicated.¹¹

The basic purpose of the Amendement Tinguy was to hold writers personally accountable for their printed opinions. Given the increasingly repressive political circumstances at the time it came into force, this obligation would have been a real deterrent to expressing controversial opinions in the newspaper. The author of the amendment, Charles-Louis de Tinguy, stated explicitly that his underlying motivation was to discredit certain arguments based on the identity of those making them:

Quelle est la puissance véritable de la mauvaise presse? Quel est son danger? C’est le prestige de l’anonyme pour la majeure partie des lecteurs. Un journal n’est pas l’œuvre de tel ou tel individu, c’est une œuvre collective, c’est une puissance mystérieuse, c’est le prestige de l’inconnu. Voilà la puissance de la presse, elle n’est que cela, et lorsqu’un article sera signé, il arrivera ceci: où le nom sera honorable, le nom d’un homme connu par l’élévation de ses sentiments, par la pureté de ses mœurs, par l’identité d’une ligne politique, l’article aura toute la valeur que cet homme porte en lui-même. S’il est signé par un homme déconsidéré ou même par un homme inconnu, l’article perd toute sa puissance, tout son charme, tout son prestige. Ainsi, vous aurez établi dans la presse la plus complète vérité: chacun répondra de son œuvre. (Tinguy, cited in Chassan 1851, 125)

It is easy to see how this equation of the value of the words on the page with the author’s character might tempt writers to engage in complex literary retaliation against the Amendement Tinguy.

The motivation behind the Amendement Riancey is less obvious. Why discourage the publication of all fiction in the feuilleton, irrespective of its subject matter? Henri-Léon Camusat de Riancey’s ideological hostility towards the roman-feuilleton is clear in this quotation from his speech to the Assemblée Législative: ‘Le roman feuilleton est un poison subtil qui s’est introduit jusque dans le sanctuaire de la famille.’ However, Riancey also made economic arguments against the feuilleton, arguing that ‘les rois du feuilleton’ should be taxed because they had made ‘des fortunes princières’ through their feuilleton writing (cited in Claudin 1850, 11). In the same debate, Riancey’s colleague, Athanase Coquerel, argued that removing fiction from the feuilleton would force writers to return to book publishing, which would resuscitate the ailing book trade (Claudin 1850, 16). The politicians’ spin obscures more plausible reasons for this form of censorship. Richard Sieburth argues that the stamp tax was ‘part of a broader right-wing strategy to strangle the popularity and the profitability of the daily press’ (2009, 144). It is likely that the new tax was also aimed at reining in writing that challenged the status quo, exemplified by Sue’s realistic portrayal of the plight of the urban poor in Les Mystères de Paris in the feuilleton of the Journal des Débats between June 1842 and October 1843; some conservative politicians blamed Les Mystères de Paris for raising consciousness of class differences and, ultimately, for causing the 1848 revolution (Queffélec-Dumasy 1989, 35). Sieburth also notes that Sue’s novels threatened the July Monarchy because they ‘encouraged a kind of participatory democracy among their reading public’, since they were often read aloud in the workplace and Sue reacted in his serial novels to letters from his readers (Sieburth 2009, 144).

The extent to which Nerval’s freedom of expression was ever really threatened by the Amendement Riancey – which was abolished in 1852 – is debatable. The law certainly had the potential to impose significant fines on newspapers after publication, and we know that L’Événement received a fine of more than 21,000 francs in September 1850, when unstamped copies of an off-print of Alexandre Dumas’s Dieu Dispose – which had been appearing in L’Événement since 28 June – were seized (Bony 1984a, 1339). However, authors do not seem to have been directly affected by financial penalties. The fact that Les Faux Saulniers began to appear at the end of October 1850, three months after the tax was first introduced, probably means that the editors of Le National had understood where the boundaries lay in practice and how to circumvent the restriction. Still, the threat of being condemned under the terms of the amendment provided Nerval with an excuse to explore preoccupations central to his prose writing more generally, such as the boundaries between different kinds of writing.

From the beginning, Nerval differentiates his text – at least superficially – from the most obvious characteristics of the roman-feuilleton by claiming that he will not resort to well-worn techniques to create suspense and prolong the story: ‘Je n’imiterai pas même le procédé des conteurs du Caire, qui, par un artifice vieux comme le monde, suspendent une narration à l’endroit le plus intéressant, afin que la foule revienne le lendemain au même café’ (Nerval 1984, 2: 52). However, the missing book on the life of the Abbé de Bucquoy means that the narrator is ‘forced’ – supposedly due to the deadlines imposed by the newspaper – to fill the feuilleton with other material. The details of the Abbé’s life are eventually provided in the last instalments of the feuilleton, but the majority of the text is made up of various digressions as well as the alternative story of the adventures of Angélique de Longueval. The narrator indicates that it is possible for him to tell the story of this rebellious noblewoman because he has access to a historical account of her life: ‘Je ne sais si cette simple histoire d’une petite demoiselle et du fils d’un charcutier amusera beaucoup de lecteurs. Son principal mérite est d’être vraie incontestablement. Tout ce que j’ai analysé aujourd’hui peut être vérifié aux Archives nationales’ (Nerval 1984, 2: 47). However, Jacques Bony has demonstrated that the presentation of this historical figure as the great aunt of the Abbé is entirely fanciful (1984b, 27). Thus, from the start, the Amendement Riancey is presented as paradoxically provoking the very kind of feuilleton writing it seeks to prohibit.

In typical feuilleton fashion, Angélique’s story is frequently interrupted at moments of high drama. For example, the instalment dated 10 November 1850 ends on a cliff-hanger, with readers having to wait five days to find out whether General Georges Alluisi succeeds in breaking up the relationship between Angélique and her lover, La Corbinière:

Le général, tout en dansant, ne manquait pas de parler à Angélique de Longueval ‘à part de son mari.’ Il lui disait: ‘Qu’attendez-vous en Italie? … La misère avec lui pour le reste de vos jours. Si vous dites qu’il vous aime, vous ne pouvez croire que je ne fasse plus encore … moi qui vous achèterai les plus belles perles qui seront ici, et d’abord des cottes de brocart telles qu’il vous plaira. Pensez, mademoiselle, à laisser votre amour pour une personne qui parle pour votre bien et pour vous remettre en bonne grâce de messieurs vos parens.’

 Cependant, ce général conseillait à La Corbinière de s’engager dans les guerres de l’Allemagne, lui disant qu’il trouverait beaucoup d’avantage à Inspruck, qui n’était qu’à sept journées de Vérone, et que, là, il attraperait une compagnie … (Nerval 1984, 2: 72)

When the next instalment was finally published on 15 November, readers had to endure fourteen paragraphs of narratorial reflections on the inefficiency of the postal system and the history of the Valois region before the outcome was revealed (Nerval 1984, 2: 72–75). The fact that the reflection begins with a reference to the deferral of the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy – just when readers were likely to have transferred their attention to the story of Angélique – seems to indicate that this interruption is no accident: ‘Malgré les digressions qui sont naturelles à ma façon d’écrire, – je n’abandonne jamais une idée, – et, quoi qu’on puisse penser, l’abbé de Bucquoy finira par se retrouver … ’ (Nerval 1984, 2: 72). Nerval simultaneously mocks and exploits the excesses of the roman-feuilleton, feigning obedience to the Amendement Riancey while demonstrating that he is in complete control of the feuilleton space.

He also uses digressions to play with the identity of the narrator, as part of his challenge to press restrictions. It is important for two reasons that the authorities accept that this figure represents Nerval-the-author. First, the equivalence is a prerequisite for believing the account of the search for the book on the life of the Abbé de Bucquoy, and, therefore, the idea that the text is fact rather than fiction, and does not contravene the Amendement Riancey. Secondly, given Tinguy’s aim that articles be judged based on the reputation of their authors, the narrator’s reliability depends on the author’s standing. The narrator claims, in the first feuilleton, published on 24 October 1850, that he discovered the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy when he was in Frankfurt ‘il y a un mois environ’ (Nerval 1984, 2: 3). This corresponds closely to what we know about Nerval’s own movements at this time; Bony places the author in Frankfurt at the end of August and again in September that year (1984a, 1331). Another apparently autobiographical aspect of the text is the eviction notice that the narrator describes receiving due to the extension of the Rue de Rivoli:

Je reçois, avec les renseignements que j’attendais, un congé du logement que j’occupais depuis longtemps à Paris. – Pardon de vous parler encore de moi. Mais de même que la vie de l’abbé de Bucquoy me semble pouvoir éclairer toute une époque, – d’après le procédé bien connu d’analyse qui va du simple au composé, il me semble que l’existence d’un écrivain étant publique plus que celle des autres, qui cachent toujours des recoins obscurs, c’est sur lui-même qu’il doit au besoin donner exemple des faits ordinaires qui se passent dans une société. (Nerval 1984, 2: 95)

The notice follows in its entirety. We know that Nerval did live in a house threatened with destruction due to the proposed works described in Les Faux Saulniers (Pichois and Brix 1995, 301). Bony notes that there is no record of the eviction notice in the Archives de Paris, but also that there is no record of any communications with ‘locataires à petit loyer’, such as Nerval, to whom minimal compensation was due; only letters to owners and to tenants paying higher rents are preserved (Bony 1984a, 1353). The narrator’s apology and justification for this supposedly personal intervention initially seem to reinforce the centrality and trustworthiness of the figure of the author.

However, the use of the uniquely public nature of the writer’s life to prove the narrator’s reliability as a provider of examples of ‘des faits ordinaires qui se passent dans la société’ is suspicious, coming, supposedly, from an author whose library membership was under a pseudonym until 1838 (Brix 2013, 11). Indeed, the internal logic of the argument as a whole crumbles upon careful examination; just as Nerval can hardly be considered a representative citizen, the Abbé de Bucquoy is presented as an extraordinary figure throughout the text, from the first mention of the book in which the narrator discovers his story; its title is Événement des plus rares, ou histoire du sieur abbé de Bucquoy […] (Nerval 1984, 2: 4). The digression about the eviction epitomizes the tangled relationship between Nerval and his narrator; it uses plausible personal information and references to mid-nineteenth-century Parisian life to build up the idea of the authorial narrator as a truth-teller, while simultaneously chipping away at the foundations of that assumption through barely-perceptible inconsistencies. In her study of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, Maria Scott argues that Baudelaire’s petits poèmes en prose invite the reader’s complicity ‘with an authorial spokesperson who is himself the butt of an authorial joke’. The texts therefore act as ‘snares, covertly mocking our blindness as readers’ (Scott 2005, 7). It is possible to consider Nerval’s narrator – who goes to such lengths to be seen to obey the Riancey and Tinguy amendments – also to be a figure of fun, or an alter-ego for an author with much more subversive intentions. The disruptive potential of the ambiguity created between the narrator and the author is evident in the fact that the narrator’s announcement following his presentation of himself as a representative everyman – ‘Je ne voudrais pas ici faire de la politique. – Je n’ai jamais voulu faire que de l’opposition’ (Nerval 1984, 2: 96) – has been attributed by critics, including Chambers (1993, 59), to Nerval himself.

The illusion that the narrator is Nerval is central to the author’s audacious attempt simultaneously to challenge the Amendement Riancey and the Amendement Tinguy; in response to restrictions aimed at shutting down the communication of political ideas in the newspaper, Nerval opens up the possibility of including other voices, including the voices of those who challenge him. Les Faux Saulniers engages with writing in other newspapers, as well as with letters that the narrator claims to have received from his readers. The narrator’s reaction to the writing of others is fractious, consisting of spirited rebuttals of criticisms levelled against Nerval’s writing in the theatre feuilleton of La Presse. On November 3, he takes issue with Auguste Bernard’s one-sentence dismissal of Nerval’s discussion of the invention of the printing press; though describing Nerval’s article as ‘spirituel’, Bernard had contrasted it unfavourably with the work of another writer, M. Landrin, in whose writing ‘nous ne retrouvons plus de fables’ (Brix 2009, 248–249). The narrator emphasizes that getting a reputation for writing fables could cause him a great deal of trouble, given the restrictions on the press:

Ainsi, je tenterais de faire de l’histoire sur des récits vagues; – je me livrerais à des fables; je serais capable d’écrire des romans! – Allez plus loin; dénoncez-moi à la commission chargée de qualifier nos feuilletons et d’y découvrir le vrai ou le faux, – selon les termes de l’amendement Riancey: – cela ne serait pas bien de la part d’un typographe séparé de moi par l’épaisseur de deux degrés hiérarchiques, – et, certes, vous ne vous êtes pas douté de l’embarras qui résulte pour moi d’une telle allégation. (Nerval 1984, 2: 48)

Through this tirade, the apparently autobiographical narrator of Les Faux Saulniers is mobilized as a defender of Nerval’s work in another newspaper. The two pages of counter-argument that follow, on the subject of the printing press, also establish his feuilleton as a space for debate, albeit one in which the narrator retains the ultimate authority.

As Sieburth has noted, the narrator’s incorporation into the text of ‘letters’ from his readers may have been inspired by Sue (2009, 144). Records of readers’ letters relating to Les Faux Saulniers have not been found, however (Brix 2009, 30). Whether the text reproduces real letters, or whether – as seems more likely – Nerval composed them himself as an intrinsic part of this literary contestation of the 1850 press restrictions, these new voices subtly draw attention to the text’s subversiveness. For example, a reader appears to undermine the narrator’s insistence that he is re-telling the story of a historical figure from the time of Louis XIV when he refers to Nerval’s ‘humoristiques pérégrinations à la recherche de l’abbé de Bucquoy, cet insaisissable moucheron issu de l’amendement Riancey’ (Nerval 1984, 2: 86). In the next instalment, the narrator mock-guiltily suggests that he is responsible for the word ‘issu’, having changed the content of the letter (including the amendment concerned):

J’ai déshonoré l’autographe d’un ami inconnu avec ce terme: issu. On avait voulu dire que l’abbé de Bucquoy était le moucheron insaisissable destiné à piquer l’amendement Tinguy –; je ne me consolerais pas d’avoir fait lever ce moucheron; – car je respecte toujours la loi. – J’ai cru affaiblir cette critique, en disant que le moucheron était issu de l’amendement.

 J’ai eu tort; – m’étant imposé cette loi de ne dire que la vérité […] je devais pouvoir représenter, au besoin, la lettre que vous m’avez envoyée vierge de toute addition. (Nerval 1984, 2: 87)

The narrator’s ‘addition’, supposedly aimed at censoring a reader’s comment that might challenge the Amendement Tinguy, actually results in a much more obvious breach of the Amendement Riancey, in that it suggests that the Abbé de Bucquoy is a fictional character invented in reaction to it, rather than a real person from an earlier time whose story can be re-told without recourse to fiction. The ‘original’ letter – which readers of Les Faux Saulniers encounter indirectly, only after the ‘censored’ version – also serves an important purpose in hinting that Nerval is using the Abbé de Bucquoy to criticize those in power indirectly in the absence of the option to write anonymously about their repressive actions. Thus, Nerval’s literary transformation of a historical figure facing persecution under Louis XIV is simultaneously a subversion of the ban on fiction imposed by the Amendement Riancey and a form of retaliation against the equation of the author with the narrator that the Amendement Tinguy implies. Thus, Les Faux Saulniers problematizes both the distinction between fiction and ‘objective’ history and the relationship between author and narrative voice.

Towards the end of his rhetorical critique of the Amendement Riancey, Gustave Claudin suggests that the stamp tax’s limitations could more accurately be demonstrated through literary writing: ‘Quelque étroites que soient, malheureusement pour moi, les ressources de mon esprit, je me charge de composer quand on voudra une œuvre littéraire conçue de telle sorte qu’il sera impossible à MM. de Riancey et Coquerel, malgré leur immense sagacité, de décider si elle constitue oui ou non, un roman-feuilleton’ (Claudin 1850, 20). Nerval’s generically ambiguous feuilleton certainly fulfils the function that Claudin describes. He uses the feuilleton to mount a sophisticated challenge to forms of censorship which – though not as draconian as the narrator of Les Faux Saulniers claims – nonetheless constituted a repressive attack on the mid-nineteenth-century literary scene. These restrictions were just one symptom of the increasingly conservative turn of the Second Republic in 1850, and the press would be restricted to a much greater degree under the Second Empire. When Nerval repurposed the story of Angélique de Longueval for inclusion in Les Filles du feu (1854), he shifted the focus away from press restrictions. Bony points out that the Amendement Riancey would have appeared tame in comparison with the level of censorship in place by then (Bony 1993b, 1195). Yet ‘Angélique’ is marked by its origin in the feuilleton, which is an essential element of its modernity. As the trials of Baudelaire and Flaubert in 1857 demonstrate, the restrictions on writers under the Second Empire had serious consequences. With this in mind, Nerval’s apparently light-hearted send-up of the restrictions on the feuilleton in 1850 is prescient as well as inventive: an important political action from a writer with extensive experience of waging oblique attacks.

Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: the porous boundary of the feuilleton

 – Ah! misérable chien, si je vous avais offert un paquet d’excréments, vous l’auriez flairé avec délices et peut-être dévoré. Ainsi, vous-même, indigne compagnon de ma triste vie, vous ressemblez au public, à qui il ne faut jamais présenter des parfums délicats qui l’exaspèrent, mais des ordures soigneusement choisies. (Baudelaire 1975, 284)

This well-known quotation from Baudelaire’s ‘Le Chien et le flacon’ – published in La Presse on August 26, 1862 – seems to point to the incompatibility of literary creativity and public opinion. It is also tempting to relate it to the trauma, for Baudelaire, of his 1857 trial for ‘outrage à la morale publique et aux bonnes mœurs’. The personalized accusations of obscenity that Baudelaire endured in relation to a collection that had already been printed are qualitatively different from the generalized tax on fiction and obligation to sign his work with which Nerval engaged in Les Faux Saulniers. As well as throwing himself into revising Les Fleurs du Mal so that it could be reprinted legally – and writing new verse poems for the 1861 edition – Baudelaire focused increasingly on prose in the wake of the trial. Though he continued to experiment in verse in the late 1850s and early 1860s (Jamison 2001, 257), he did write more poèmes en prose than he did verse poems towards the end of his career, and the vast majority of these were published in the press. In this section, I analyse Baudelaire’s engagement with the feuilleton and with censorship in the texts that eventually make up Le Spleen de Paris, and the ways in which these interact with his poetics in prose. I focus, in particular, on the texts that featured, in three dispatches, in La Presse, on August 26,¹² August 27,¹³ and September 24, 1862,¹⁴ as well as the set prepared for September 27¹⁵ but rejected by Arsène Houssaye, the directeur littéraire of the newspaper.

The publication of these texts in the feuilleton section is crucial to the subversiveness of ‘À Arsène Houssaye’, as Marit Grøtta has shown (2015, 36–37). The narrator of this text – which serves as a kind of preface to the first instalment – boasts that ‘nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture; car je ne suspends pas la volonté rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d’une intrigue superflue’ (Baudelaire 1975, 275). Given the effort that Baudelaire put into the organization of Les Fleurs du Mal, this apparent disregard for the order of the prose collection has often been taken as a reaction to the censorship of the verse collection, which irreparably destroyed its coherence. Grøtta notes that the ‘fil interminable d’une intrigue superflue’ may also be a reference to the feuilletoniste’s habit of dragging out the story – a technique Baudelaire rejects by filling the feuilleton with a series of apparently unconnected short poems. As we have seen, Nerval reacts to censorship by pushing the feuilleton conventions of digression and interruption to their limits, despite his narrator’s claims to the contrary; the effect is to create complicity with the reader who is alert to the attempt to circumvent the Amendement Riancey. In contrast, Baudelaire treats the feuilleton as a different kind of space. Though there are some thematic connections between the three instalments, and each one ends with the promise of ‘la suite’, ‘À Arsène Houssaye’ casts doubt on readers’ willingness to follow along; no concession is made to the enlightened reader, making this a far more pessimistic feuilleton endeavour.

The narrator of ‘À Arsène Houssaye’ suggests that he has dreamt of ‘le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience’ (Baudelaire 1975, 275–276). The petits poèmes en prose are generically ambiguous, however, and readers have disagreed from the beginning on the extent to which they can be considered poetic.¹⁶ They engage with prose subgenres such as the conte, the nouvelle, the fable, and the essay. As Graham Robb (1990), Thérenty (2007) and Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin (2010) have demonstrated, they also draw on journalistic subgenres, such as the fait divers and the chronique. Grøtta has observed that while the structure of the newspaper separated the feuilleton from news stories, advertisements, and editorials, they were still found on the same page; she also notes that an understanding of this paratextual environment can change our experience of the texts (2015, 28–30, 37). Thérenty argues that the subject matter, concentration, and typographical presentation of many of Baudelaires’s poèmes en prose link them to the chronique, and that contemporary readers would have been unlikely to differentiate between texts such as ‘Un plaisant’ and the chroniques which featured in the press (2007, 260). Thus, while Nerval brings Les Faux Saulniers into contact with opinion columns and readers’ letters, Baudelaire’s petits poèmes en prose actually imitate texts found elsewhere in the newspaper.

For Baudelaire, as for Nerval, the feuilleton becomes a space in which it is possible to interrogate the boundaries of generic categories and the weight that should be afforded to apparent authorial declarations. Thérenty argues that there was a growing tendency, from the late 1860s, for journalists to emphasize their role as reliable witnesses: ‘Se développe un régime de la “chose vue” qui prime sur la parole’ (2007, 22–23). There are many instances in Le Spleen de Paris of texts taking the narrator’s observations as a point of departure. For example, the narrator’s reflections in ‘Le Gâteau’ are presented as resulting from a real encounter with two ‘savage’ children in the mountains, and ‘Un plaisant’ seems to result from the narrator’s observation of an amusing but trivial Parisian scene. ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ is also focused on the description of a scene and the narrator’s response to it. However, as Scott (2005) has argued, in many of the texts of Le Spleen de Paris the conclusions which the narrator draws from his observations are suspect. While the narrators of the poèmes en prose present themselves as witnesses to everyday events of contemporary life, they are not always good judges of what they ‘see’. Since the identity of the narrators of Le Spleen de Paris is ambiguous, we are also unsure of who is claiming to have seen these ‘choses vues’. The gaps in texts which present themselves as being grounded in reality, along with the open questioning, in other texts, of the importance of the truth, could be seen to undermine both the possibility and the desirability of accurately representing reality, which are taken for granted in the chose vue.

Emphasizing its similarity to subgenres which existed well before the nineteenth century (‘canards’, ‘curiosités’, ‘prodiges’, ‘monstres’, ‘anecdotes’, ‘histoires tragiques’ etc.), Philippe Hamon defines the fait divers as follows: ‘Le récit d’un événement exceptionnel, survenant de façon imprévisible dans le monde quotidien, et considéré par l’opinion comme une infraction à une norme (juridique, statistique, éthique, naturelle, logique, etc.)’ (1997, 7). Like the chose vue, and despite its focus on a remarkable event, the fait divers presents itself as being rooted in real life. Thérenty describes the importance of the everyday context of the fait divers as follows:

Le fait divers comprend en effet toute une série de microrécits minimaux […] qui témoignent de la volonté du journal de tout dire, d’évoquer toutes les catégories sociales dans une sorte de démocratie médiatique et d’œuvre-monde modèle. […] Il participe de la variété journalistique et dérive vers une écriture du divertissement. Miroir faussé, reflet inversé, il possède la double qualité d’être en apparence une écriture du réel et dans le même temps de faire apparaître une logique déviante, des destins insolites, de prouver que le non-exceptionnel peut lui aussi être étonnant, révélant la dimension romanesque de destins ordinaires. (2007, 270)

A certain distance is maintained between the strange events and the reader, however, as, during the Second Empire, faits divers were generally based on second-hand accounts and were often even copied from regional newspapers (Thérenty 2007, 282).

The most obvious example of a fait divers-type incident among the texts eventually included in Le Spleen de Paris is ‘La Corde’, published in Le Figaro in 1864, in which the narrator’s friend, a painter, tells the story of the suicide of one of his young models (see Michael Tilby's discussion of ‘La Corde’ in this special issue). This text references a real-life event; it is thought that the child in question, who killed himself in Manet’s studio, was the model for L’Enfant aux cerises (Murphy 1995, 69). The suicide of a child, as well as the involvement of a well-known artist, renders the incident scandalous. Yet the story is framed in Baudelaire’s text as an investigation into the phenomenon of motherly love. As Steve Murphy (1995) and Scott (2005, 181–189) have argued, the text may implicitly suggest the painter-narrator’s blindness to his own culpability in relation to the child’s death. Murphy (1995, 74) emphasizes the fact that the painter glosses over the child’s role as a model when he says that the latter’s only duties were ‘de nettoyer mes pinceaux et de faire mes commissions’ (Baudelaire 1975, 329); Murphy also highlights the fact that the construction of the story around the revelation of the mother’s greed minimizes the narrator’s guilt. Thus, in ‘La Corde’, Baudelaire uses an incident which could have resulted in a fait divers not simply in order to create a gripping story, but to extract its moral ‘lesson’, and perhaps to draw attention to the ways in which readers’ perceptions of the ‘truth’ can be shaped by the narrator’s use of language.

Though not as explicit, elements of the fait divers were already evident in the texts Baudelaire published in La Presse in 1862. ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, for example, begins with a reflection on isolated incidents of impulsive behaviour on the part of those normally ‘tout à fait impropres à l’action’:

Un de mes amis, le plus inoffensif rêveur qui ait existé, a mis une fois le feu à une forêt pour voir, disait-il, si le feu prenait avec autant de facilité qu’on l’affirme généralement. Dix fois de suite, l’expérience manqua; mais, à la onzième, elle réussit beaucoup trop bien.

 Un autre allumera un cigare à côté d’un tonneau de poudre, pour voir, pour savoir, pour tenter la destinée, pour se contraindre lui-même à faire preuve d’énergie, pour faire le joueur, pour connaître les plaisirs de l’anxiété, pour rien, par caprice, par désœuvrement. (Baudelaire 1975, 285)

Though the narrator presents the individuals concerned as personal friends, the dramatic events described, along with the vague explanations provided, would not have been out of place in the fait divers column. Does this perhaps indicate that the actions carried out by the narrator’s friends are not as harmless as the narrator seems to suggest? There are numerous references to fires started deliberately or due to human error in the fait divers section of La Presse on the dates when the three instalments of Baudelaire’s texts were published. On 26 August, on the same page as the text of ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, we read: ‘Le Journal de Bergerac apprend, au moment de mettre sous presse, que les cantons de Montpont et de Villefranche-de-Longchapt [sic] sont dévastés par de nombreux incendies dus sans nul doute à la malveillance’ (La Presse, August 26, 1862). On August 27, there is a report illustrating the potentially devastating consequences of playing with fire:

Pendant la nuit du 22 au 23 août, un accident a eu lieu dans une maison dans la rue de l’Union à Marseille. Une pauvre blanchisseuse habite les bas offices de cette maison avec quatre enfants, dont l’aîné a treize ans et le plus jeune seulement deux ans. Cette femme était occupée de son état, bien avant dans la nuit, après avoir fait coucher ses trois plus jeunes enfants, ne gardant auprès d’elle que l’aîné. Vers minuit, elle a vu des nuages de fumée sortir de la pièce, où les enfants étaient couchés; elle y a couru sur le champ, en appelant à grands cris les habitants de la maison et les voisins. Mais quand on est entré dans la chambre, on a trouvé deux des enfants, celui de huit ans et celui de deux, complètement asphyxiés. L’enfant de huit ans, jouant avec une chandelle allumée, avait mis le feu à des linges entassés, et avait péri, ainsi que l’autre enfant, au milieu des vapeurs délétères résultant de cet incendie. (La Presse, August 27, 1862)

This succinct journalistic account provides all the information necessary to understand the impact of a terrible accident on the family concerned. In the introductory stories in ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, Baudelaire seems to mimic the structure of this journalistic subgenre – the description of events followed by an explanation. The explanations provided, however, are much less convincing than those found in the true fait divers, and the consequences are left unarticulated. The focus then shifts to the narrator, who relates an even stranger incident: his own unprovoked attack on a glazier. The description of the consequences of this episode focuses almost entirely on the image of the broken glass, rather than on the effect on the glazier: ‘je laissai tomber perpendiculairement mon engin de guerre sur le rebord postérieur de ses crochets; et le choc le renversant, il acheva de briser sous son dos toute sa pauvre fortune ambulatoire qui rendit le bruit éclatant d’un palais de cristal crevé par la foudre’ (Baudelaire 1975, 287). The fait divers seems to have served primarily to set up this image of the crystal palace hit by lightning, whose concentration and simultaneous auditory and visual appeal have a certain poetic energy. While ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ is more than a fait divers, the ways in which it draws on this journalistic subgenre demonstrate the porosity, for Baudelaire, of the apparently clear line between the feuilleton and the rest of the page, and open up connections with the wider newspaper and the real-life events recounted therein.

To what extent did censorship constrain – and provoke – Baudelaire’s feuilleton poetics? Some of the texts which would eventually be included in Le Spleen de Paris were censored. Of the fourth La Presse instalment – which was rejected by Houssaye and not published – changes were made to ‘Les Tentations ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire’ and ‘La Belle Dorothée’ before they were published in La Revue nationale et étrangère in 1863 (Murphy 1995, 67). ‘Le Galant Tireur’, ‘La Soupe et les nuages’, ‘Perte d’auréole’, ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, and ‘Assommons les pauvres!’ were first published in the posthumous edition of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes by Michel Lévy frères, and it seems reasonable that their publication may have been delayed due to their being considered controversial. Murphy (1995, 67) notes that Baudelaire’s editors felt that ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ was ‘unprintable’, and that the bowdlerized expletives in ‘La Soupe et les nuages’ and ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ are likely due to censorship rather than to Baudelaire’s own creative choices. However, censorship haunts the texts published in La Presse primarily in terms of their critical vision. Olmstead has argued that formal features of Les Fleurs du Mal indicate that Baudelaire took pre-emptive action to avoid censorship. For example, he notes (2015, 76) that the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal contains a note at the beginning of the Révolte section comparing the author to an actor who must not be equated with the roles he plays: ‘Fidèle à son douloureux programme, l’auteur des Fleurs du mal a dû, en parfait comédien, façonner son esprit à tous les sophismes comme à toutes les corruptions’ (Baudelaire 1975, 1076). It is easy to imagine that the duplicity detected by critics – such as Scott Carpenter (1996), Sonya Stephens (1999), Murphy (2003) and Scott (2005) – in the texts of Le Spleen de Paris is at least partly the result of Baudelaire’s sensitivity to censorship, which would have been even more acute following the 1857 trial.

As we have seen briefly in relation to ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, the shadow of the trial looms over the texts published in La Presse. According to Michèle Hannoosh (2018, 128–129), the glazier of ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ – also published in the first instalment – may represent the poet of Les Fleurs du Mal who refuses to evoke ‘la vie en beau’, while the narrator, who attacks him, may symbolize the prosecutor at Baudelaire’s trial. Although the reader seems initially to be invited to identify with this figure – through the presentation of the incident as being completely out of character, as well as the many examples of ‘friends’ who have carried out similar actions – the cruelty of his actions could be understood as mirroring Baudelaire’s perception of the severity and unfairness with which he was treated at the trial. I have suggested above that this text’s incorporation of aspects of the fait divers connects bizarre stories in the feuilleton with real events and their dangerous consequences; if the attack on the glazier represents the censorship of Les Fleurs du Mal, the permeability of the line between the feuilleton and the rest of the newspaper may emphasize both the newsworthiness of the trial and the seriousness of its consequences.

In conclusion, the press, for Baudelaire, was a bastion of bourgeois society, and involved political censorship and potentially unappreciative readers. In the aftermath of his conviction, however, newspapers also constituted a creative space. Like Nerval, Baudelaire exploited the constraints imposed by censorship in order to create complex first-person narrators. This ensured that the veiled attacks on his readers were unlikely to be recognized, allowing him to use the press for both economic and creative gain. His incorporation of elements of journalistic subgenres – such as the fait divers and the chose vue – into his short prose texts demonstrates his sensitivity to the environment within which his petits poèmes en prose would be published, as well as the aesthetic possibilities of journalistic conventions. His exploitation of the leaky boundary of the feuilleton opened his texts up to the clamour of Parisian life. Though present-day readers encounter the texts from the La Presse instalments in a very different context, Baudelaire’s newspaper poetics made a lasting mark on Le Spleen de Paris.

Conclusion

Les Faux Saulniers and the texts of Le Spleen de Paris were written under different political regimes, but they can both be read as reactions to censorship, whether this is stated explicitly, as in Les Faux Saulniers, or whether it is implicit, as in the texts of Le Spleen de Paris. For both authors, the feuilleton was a space that epitomized the limitations of the newspaper environment, but it also provided the resources to mount a creative challenge to these constraints. For Nerval, this meant pushing feuilleton conventions to their breaking point in a text that demonstrates the absurdity of the Riancey and Tinguy amendments, while insisting that it is not a roman-feuilleton. For Baudelaire, it meant using the space for an entirely different purpose: to house short, self-contained prose texts which engaged primarily with other sections of the newspaper rather than with each other. In each case, the subversion involved mobilizing the ambiguities of the relationship between narrator and author, and of the boundaries between different kinds of writing; Les Faux Saulniers investigates the line between fact and fiction, while the petits poèmes en prose explore different understandings of poetry and prose. The newspaper poetics of Nerval and Baudelaire were forged in reaction to contemporary circumstances and served an important purpose in their own time. Exploring the interaction between these conditions and the poets’ creative practice can deepen our appreciation of the imprint that their newspaper poetics made on texts that most present-day readers encounter in book form.

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Sarah Gubbins

Sarah Gubbins is a Lecturer in French at Aberystwyth University. She works on French poetry of the mid-nineteenth century and on the prose writings of poets of that period. She has published articles on formal and generic aspects of the writings of Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire, and on Nerval’s travel writing in verse and in prose. Her first monograph, Gérard de Nerval’s Political Poetics, is under contract with Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature.

Notes

1 See for example: Bellanger et al. 1969; Charle 2004; Lough 1978; Martin and Chartier 1990; Thérenty 2007.

2 For a reappraisal of this text, see Prendergast 2003.

3 It is, however, important to note that 54 out of the 100 poems of Les Fleurs du Mal were initially published in literary periodicals (Vaillant 2011, 10).

4 IX, X, XII, XIII and XIV.

5 Volume 4 of Michel Lévy’s edition of Nerval’s Œuvres complètes, published in 1868, reproduced the text but with many errors.

6 Les Faux Saulniers was edited by Jacques Bony in this edition.

7 The story of the Abbé de Bucquoy that is eventually presented as having been found in the missing book is heavily based on Madame Du Noyer’s Lettres historiques et galantes de deux dames de condition (1720), which also appeared under the title Événement des plus rares, ou histoire du sieur abbé comte de Bucquoy […] (Bony 1984a, 1332). Despite the warning that the narrator receives from a bibliophile not to rely on Madame Du Noyer’s account (Nerval 1984, 7), it seems that the missing book is simply Madame Du Noyer’s text under a different title. For an analysis of Nerval’s rewriting of Madame Du Noyer’s text, see Le Bail 2017. For a detailed historical account of the life of the Abbé de Bucquoy, see Mulryan 2015.

8 See Illouz (2018) for an analysis of Nerval’s complex exploration of the concept of history in Les Faux Saulniers.

9 Marie-Ève Thérenty (2007, 128–129) notes, however, that, in the wake of this amendment, ‘fictionalisation’ (of historical or travel writing, for example) becomes ‘une façon de faire circuler de la fiction sans le dire’. 

10 For an explanation of the political context of the Amendement Tinguy, and an analysis of Les Faux Saulniers as a simultaneous challenge to the Amendement Riancey and the Amendement Tinguy, see Catherine Talley (2015, 69–95.)

11 For a detailed analysis of Nerval’s pseudonyms, see Brix 2013, 11–26.

12 ‘À Arsène Houssaye’, ‘L’Étranger’, ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’, ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’, ‘Un plaisant’, ‘La Chambre Double’, ‘Chacun la sienne’ (‘Chacun sa chimère’), ‘Le Fou et la Vénus’, ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’. Available at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k479531x/f1.item and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k479531x/f2.item.

13 ‘À une heure du matin’, ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite maîtresse’, ‘Les Foules’, ‘Les Veuves’, ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’. Available at: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4795329/f1.item and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4795329/f2.item.

14 ‘Le Gâteau’, ‘L’Horloge’, ‘Un hémisphère dans une chevelure’, ‘L’Invitation au voyage’, ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’, ‘Les Dons des fées’. Available at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k479560k/f1.item and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k479560k/f2.item.

15 ‘Les Tentations’, ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’, ‘Les Projets’, ‘La Solitude’, ‘La Belle Dorothée’, ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’.

16 For a book-length defence of the idea that the texts of Le Spleen de Paris are poetic (as well as an overview of the reception of prose poetry in the nineteenth century), see Whidden 2022. In contrast, see Brix (2014, 70) who argues that Baudelaire’s experimentation with prose in Le Spleen de Paris was motivated by a desire to destroy poetry.