ABSTRACT This article focuses on the final 'chant' of Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) by the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse). In the enigmatic final scenes, Maldoror stalks and kills a young English man, Mervyn, in the streets of Paris. The murder is detailed in striking geographic detail, and Parisian monuments feature prominently in the young man's demise. Combining close readings with original maps of these final scenes, I compare the Paris of Lautréamont's literary imagination with the city's historic, cartographic reality to understand what the representation of the city says about the author's perception of fiction and his literary legacy.

ABSTRACT This essay comments on the articles collected for this special issue about international expositions in France. It finds four major themes for new directions in exposition studies. First is the long literary and cultural shadow of expositions, or the shifting timescales that gave these temporary events lasting legacies. Second are the (often unintended) concrete consequences and costs for host cities of expositions understood as mega-events and mega-projects. Third is the inverse or obverse of ‘display’, those things that expositions conceal or hide. Fourth are the ways that expositions shaped and were shaped by the world beyond their gates.

ABSTRACTHenry Céard's Une belle journée, a ‘plotless' novel, illuminates debates about pessimism in late nineteenth-century France by bringing to the fore the imperative to interpretation. The way that the novel's heroine is cast as having resigned herself to lackluster existence presents a contrast with Flaubert's Emma Bovary and ignites debates about whether resignation represents an abdication of happiness or creates its conditions of possibility. Readers' interpretation of Céard’s novel is bound up with their understanding of pessimism; debates about the novel can illuminate and be illuminated by larger debates about pessimism in fiction and non-fiction in the later nineteenth century.

ABSTRACTBaudelaire’s ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ still fascinates scholars because of the narrator’s enigmatic hatred for the eponymous ‘bad glazier.’ Walter Benjamin (2010. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Howard Eiland et al. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press) emphasized Baudelaire’s originality in describing the shock of encountering modernity, which might explain the narrator’s actions, while other critics examined this animosity from psychoanalytic angles. This article turns, instead, to the power of space—namely, the architecture of 19th-Century Paris as lived social space—influencing the narrator’s odd behaviour. ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier,’ like several other poems in Le Spleen de Paris, takes place in the private space of the narrator’s bedroom. Surprisingly little has been written about the effect of that space on the narrator, and I address this lacuna, touring the bedrooms depicted in Le Spleen de Paris to show how they represent the architectural milieu of Paris in their layout, position in their building, and view of the street. I claim that this space – set in a 6th-floor garret – represents a kind of Foucauldian prison in its ability to structure inhabitants’ behaviours. These bedroom cells are also the sites of fantasies where the narrator dreams of luxurious commodity objects. The narrator’s lashing out stems in part from his reaction against this ‘imprisonment’ and his loss of agency in consumer culture: he is a mere consumer whose ideal is to possess objects. Ultimately, Baudelaire’s bedrooms stand for the social space that shapes the narrator, challenging us to rethink our lifestyle within the private sphere.

ABSTRACTDans la deuxième moitié du dix-neuvième siècle, la Belgique, comme beaucoup d’autres pays européens, reconsidère la relation art-industrie à travers une multitude de projets culturels (littéraires, artistiques, architecturaux) qui ont pour objectif la création d’un ‘système des arts’ fondé sur un langage commun qui peut être partagé et compris par toutes les classes sociales.Ce débat peut être analysé à travers une série d’initiatives destinées à diffuser, par le biais de différents canaux tels que l’enseignement, l’art et la littérature, une nouvelle manière de concevoir l’architecture, les arts appliqués et donc les modes de vie, à même d’incarner des valeurs nationales tout en stimulant l’industrie, l’économie et l’éducation, dans le cadre d’un processus général de transformation et modernisation du pays.Cet article explique d’une part comment les élites politiques, culturelles et industrielles se sont attelées à construire une conscience nationale au moyen d’un langage historiciste fondé sur l’union des arts, utilisé par les architectes, les artistes, les artisans, les dessinateurs et les consommateurs, et d’autre part comment ce projet, qui avait pour objectif d’unifier la Belgique au travers des arts, a fini par s’éteindre vers la fin du siècle, non sans avoir contribué à la création d’un Art nouveau.

Walter Benjamin famously declared that ‘the nineteenth century was more fervently addicted to the dwelling place than any other century’ (1999, 220). The interior has, over the last few decades, at...

ABSTRACTThis article examines the strategies available to women journalists in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on the voice of Cassandra adopted by Marie d’Agoult at the time of the 1848 revolution. D’Agoult created a new journalistic model which included three specific features: the assumption of a poetic, prophetic, and apocalyptic voice in order to announce disaster; the explicit invocation of the figure of Cassandra; and a dramatic practice of ‘coming out’ which meant dropping the disguise of masculinity. For those rare women who, in the wake of d’Agoult, managed to write about politics in newspapers and periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century, the reference to Cassandra was almost inevitable, as illustrated by the careers of Juliette Adam, Claude Vignon and Séverine. This practice of women’s journalism endures into the twentieth century, taken up in particular by Louise Weiss and Geneviève Tabouis when fascism was on the rise.

ABSTRACTThe theme of literary hermeneutics and style is explored in relation to the press trials of 1818. The purpose is to show that contemporary press legislation and the nature and rhetoric of the arguments presented by the prosecution combined to make literary style a significant issue both in the trials themselves and in their subsequent discussion in the press. This connection between literary quality and the freedom of the press amounted to a struggle for control of language and meaning. Whereas the prosecution was forced to demonstrate that texts meant something other than their surface meaning, the defence resorted to literal interpretation and its supporters in the press to denunciations of the literary credentials of the prosecution.

ABSTRACTWhen urbanite Durtal, J.-K. Huysmans's alter ego, takes a spiritual retreat in a Trappist monastery, he spends a significant amount of time next to a pond that mirrors the imposing crucifix that stands in front of the monastery. This pond proves to be an apt metaphor for the different stages of Durtal's spiritual life: whereas the pond's drab water, full of decomposing leaves resembles the state of his soul before his confession, he also considers its stagnant water a representation of the blessings of contemplative life in the monastery. The natural site is also where Durtal has supernatural, mystical experiences: it is on the edge of the cruciform pond that Durtal lives a ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ and next to the larger pond where he feels an overwhelming sense of the illuminating presence of God. However, these passages also show Huysmans's struggles with language and style when describing a supernatural encounter, and his efforts to translate his supranaturalist aesthetics into language. This paper examines the pond as a site of spiritual experience, and argues that it represents the impossibility of writing spiritual experience. It analyzes the literary portrayal of the ineffable, and explores the limits of representation.

RÉSUMÉLa décadence se complaît dans la réécriture des grands thèmes bibliques, littéraires et mythiques. La fascination de J.-K. Huysmans pour les saints transparents par exemple, dont on retrouve plusieurs occurrences dans l’œuvre de l’auteur, peut être qualifiée de décadente grâce à la présence, subtilement agencée dans Là-bas ([1891] 1985), de l’ascèse et de l’érotique dans le corps saint. C’est cette construction en quelque sorte oxymorique que l’on retrouve aussi chez Marcel Batilliat dans Chair mystique ([1897] 1995): la chair diaphane est le lieu privilégié de la décadence et de toute une réflexion ascético-érotique.