Parisian Social Studies: Positivism and the Novels of Balzac, Paul de Kock, and Zola

by
Anne T. ONeil-Henry
Department of Romance Studies
Duke University
Date: _______________________
Approved:
___________________________
David Bell, Supervisor
___________________________
Deborah Jenson
___________________________
Stephanie Sieburth
___________________________
Neil McWilliam

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
Romance Studies in the Graduate School
of Duke University
2011

ABSTRACT
Parisian Social Studies: Positivism and the Novels of Balzac, Paul de Kock, and Zola
by
Anne T. ONeil-Henry
Department of Romance Studies
Duke University
Date: _______________________
Approved:
___________________________
David Bell, Supervisor
___________________________
Deborah Jenson
___________________________
Stephanie Sieburth
___________________________
Neil McWilliam

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
Romance Studies in the Graduate School
of Duke University
2011

Copyright by
Anne T. ONeil-Henry
2011

Abstract
In this dissertation I argue that the movement of panoramic literature under the
July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its influence on the nineteenth-century urban novel must
be re-imagined in the context of the proto-sociological movement of positivism. Existing
criticism on panoramic literature typically views this movement as emerging from earlynineteenth-century urban upheaval. I focus here instead on early pre-sociological theory.
Published concurrently with these panoramic texts whose popularity peaked in the early
1840s, the progressive theories of Auguste Comte (collected, in particular, in his Cours
de philosophie positive from 1830-1842) promulgated a scientific, observational
approach to the study of society. Throughout the five chapters of this project, I will posit
that authors of urban novels, including Balzac, Paul de Kock and Zola, grappled with
these theories actively, if implicitly at times, and that we can see this engagement most
clearly in the passages employing the typological descriptions known as the tableaux de
Paris, so central to panoramic literature.
.

iv

To Nathan

Contents
Abstract.......................................................................................................................................... iv
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... ix
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1
1.1 Former des thories daprs les observations : Auguste Comte and Positivism .............. 7
1.2 Positivisms Roots in Social Utopianism .......................................................................... 16
1.3 Studying Parisian Social Studies ....................................................................................... 26
2. Panoramic literature and July Monarchy Print Culture ..................................................... 29
2.1 Print Culture under the July Monarchy ............................................................................. 33
2.2 Observing the City: Panoramic Literature ......................................................................... 40
2.3 Panoramic Literature in its Critical Context ...................................................................... 49
2.4 Classifying Panoramic Literature ...................................................................................... 61
2.5 De Kocks Social Studies of Paris. .................................................................................... 71
3. Urban Observations: Positivist Philosophy and the Tableaux de Paris in Balzacs Scnes
de la vie Parisienne ....................................................................................................................... 83
3.1 Balzacs positivism............................................................................................................ 89
3.2 Tableaux dans les Treize: Panoramic Literature and Positivist Social Thought ............... 95
3.2.1 Ferragus: Tableaux and Typologies ............................................................................ 96
3.2.2 Le Faubourg Saint-Germain and La Duchesse de Langeais ...................................... 105
3.2.3 La fille aux yeux dor: une vraie physionomie parisienne? ........................................ 112
3.3 Les Employs as Literary Laboratory ............................................................................. 125
4. De petits chefs-duvre de vrit et dobservation: Comte and the Novels of Paul de
Kock ............................................................................................................................................ 148
4.1 Paul de Kock in Recent Criticism ................................................................................... 153

vi

4.2 Panoramic Digression in Paul de Kock ........................................................................... 159

4.3 De Kock and His Critics .................................................................................................. 177
4.4 Observing the City: Comtes Positivism and de Kocks Novels ..................................... 187
5. M. Zola nobserve plus: Positivism and the Bourgeois Type in Zolas Pot-Bouille .... 191
5.1 Zolas Physiologies ......................................................................................................... 191
5.2 M. Zola nobserve plus ................................................................................................ 202
5.3 Pot-Bouille: un roman bourgeois..................................................................................... 207
5.4 Misleading Observations ................................................................................................. 212
5. 5 On ne connut jamais les dtails................................................................................... 220
5.3 Notes on Pot-Bouille ....................................................................................................... 226
6. Consumer Reportage: Narration and (Impossible) Omniscience in Au Bonheur des Dames
..................................................................................................................................................... 228
6.1 Loeil toujours sur elle ................................................................................................. 228
6.2 Mastering Au Bonheur des Dames .................................................................................. 233
6.3 Jouve: The Bonheurs Watchdog .................................................................................... 240
6.4 Ordered Disorder ............................................................................................................. 248
6.5 Mistakes are Made........................................................................................................... 253
6.6 Les Clientes identifies ................................................................................................... 256
6.7 Les Clientes mlanges ................................................................................................... 266
6.8 Zola and Durkheim.......................................................................................................... 272
6.9 Concluding Remarks ....................................................................................................... 274
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 279
Biography ................................................................................................................................... 293

vii

viii

Acknowledgements
First I would thank my dissertation committee, and in particular David Bell.
Despite an unimaginably busy schedule, David has found time to work on my project
from the minutest aspects of my prose to the larger conceptual questions it addresses. He
has provided wonderful mentorship on all areas of the profession pedagogy, publishing,
literary analysis, academic ethics and given great advice about balancing professional
and personal lives. From his seminars on Balzac and Zola through the completion of this
dissertation, I am so glad to have worked with him. Thank you to Deborah Jenson,
whose arrival at Duke halfway into my time here opened up exciting possibilities for my
study of the nineteenth century. She was kind enough to let me audit every class she
taught, give me feedback on my project, and provide valuable advice on teaching,
research and the job market. Stephanie Sieburth offered wonderful insight on working on
popular authors and, despite my Spanish skills, let me sit in on her class on the city,
which helped a great deal in my work. Neil McWilliam, too, generously allowed me to
audit his course on Paris, whose bibliography helped immensely in framing this project,
and his advice on approaching the history of panoramic literature was invaluable.
Though they were not on my dissertation committee, I want to thank Helen Solterer and
Linda Orr. Linda welcomed me so warmly to Duke and pushed me to think about genre
in ways that left an indelible mark on this project. Helen, too, encouraged me to
challenge myself intellectually in important ways, and modeled extraordinary teaching in
her seminars. I am so lucky to have had such great professional examples.

ix

I was the Department of Romance Studies nominee for an exchange with the
cole Normale Suprieure during the 2007-2008 school year, and I am so appreciative to
have had this experience. Not only was spending a year in the fifth arrondissement,
predictably, fabulous, but I was able to learn so much about the French educational
system and conduct research for this project at the Bibliothque Nationale de France.
Living at the rue dUlm, I made two close friends and colleagues, rlaith Creedon and
Sharon Deane, who inspired me immensely on both a professional and personal level
throughout the year. I am also appreciative that Dukes Graduate School awarded me an
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Teaching Fellowship as well as a Fred and Barbara
Sutherland Summer Research Fellowship in 2009. With this funding I was able to return
to Paris and spend a month reading the novels of Paul de Kock, and with the numerous
conference travel grants I was awarded, I was able to learn more about the field of
nineteenth-century studies.
I could not have chosen a better graduate program than Duke. Durham, North
Carolina was a wonderful place to spend six years, and the rigorous but kind professors
plus the bright and congenial graduate students made the experience exceptional. I want
to thank all the graduate students with whom I took classes, attended lectures and planned
conferences, but in particular Id like to thank Kathleen Antonioli, Dana Chirila, Lesley
Curtis, Brenna Heitzman, Ashley King Scheu, Scott Kushner, Micah True and Sandra
Valnes Quammen. All of them read and provided helpful comments on my work; all of
their perceptive readings and questions in class taught me so much; all of them are good

friends and colleagues. I am especially grateful for Zachary Erwin, whose friendship was
one of the best parts of my experience at Duke. From job letters to lesson plans to
chapters of this dissertation, his input was invaluable, and his inimitable Southern wit
kept me going during stressful times.
Huge thanks go to my parents, Patrick Henry and Mary Anne ONeil. From our
regular trips to France, which began when I was eighteen months old, to their
immeasurable support for my education and all their professional and personal advice,
they have helped me as much as two people possibly could. I had such great role models
in them, and in my grandmother Connie ONeil, and will be so lucky if I have as great a
career and as much fun in life as they do.
I was so fortunate to have met my husband, Nathan Hensley, during my first
semester of graduate school and to have had him with me throughout all phases of this
project. He is the most patient editor, insightful colleague, hilarious companion, and
thoughtful friend imaginable, and I am thankful every day for his presence in my life.
And thanks to June, who made this a little difficult to write at the end, but who made
everything else perfect.

xi

1. Introduction
In this dissertation I will argue that the movement of panoramic literature under
the July Monarchy and its influence on the nineteenth-century urban novel must be reimagined in the context of the proto-sociological movement of positivism. Existing
criticism on panoramic literature typically views this movement as emerging from earlynineteenth-century urban upheaval. I focus here instead on early pre-sociological theory.
Published concurrently with panoramic texts, whose popularity peaked in the early
1840s, the progressive theories of Auguste Comte (collected, in particular, in his Cours
de philosophie positive from 1830-1842) promulgated a scientific, observational
approach to the study of society. Throughout the five chapters of this project, I will posit
that authors of urban novels, including Balzac, Paul de Kock and Zola, grappled with
these theories actively, if implicitly at times, and that we can see this engagement most
clearly in the passages employing the typological descriptions known as the tableaux de
Paris, so central to panoramic literature.
The movement of panoramic literature, which first earned its name in Walter
Benjamins essay Charles Baudelaire, A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, refers
to a group of typological texts from the July Monarchy (1830-1848) that described and
categorized Parisian phenomena people, events, places. Among these texts was a series
of short, comical, and inexpensively printed pseudo-scientific tracts called the
physiologies, and a number of larger collections of descriptions of Parisian phenomena
which were more expensive to purchase and more hybrid in their form and content they

are referred to as either tableaux de Paris or literary guidebooks. Both categories of

panoramic texts, often illustrated by well-known caricaturists of time, were part of an
even wider nineteenth-century trend to depict and fully capture the city, taking their place
alongside vaudeville sketches of everyday life in Paris, numerous poems and novels, and
realist, impressionist and photographic visual representations as attempts to interpret and
render legible this ever-expanding capital. According to Naomi Schor:
[T]hroughout the nineteenth century [...] artists, writers, journalists, and photographers
were seized with the obsession to submit the entire social body to exhaustive scrutiny
and record. [] And nowhere was this obsessive desire to expose and inventory the
real more active than in Paris. [] These inventories take the form of the famous
physiologies, the equally famous guides [...] much of Honor de Balzacs Comdie
humaine and mile Zolas Rougon-Macquart, Maxime du Camps multi-volume Paris,
and many, many more. (Cartes, 215)
In the same way that nineteenth-century Paris saw a widespread interest in scrutinizing
the city, contemporary works of criticism in fields as varied as literature, history, literary
theory, art history, urban studies, sociology, architecture and cultural studies have also
demonstrated a keen interest in the topic of interpreting the nineteenth-century city of
Paris, especially in the past twenty years. Important contributions to this field include
Marxist geographer David Harveys Paris, Capital of Modernity, literary critic
Christopher Prendergasts Paris and the Nineteenth Century, and literary critic and
sociologist Priscilla Parkhurst-Fergusons Paris as Revolution. Many other studies have

focused on more particular aspects of nineteenth-century Paris.1 Whether this critical

interest in Paris can be attributed to an increase in interest in studying the city and urban
phenomena or to an increase in popularity of interdisciplinary and cultural studies more
generally over the past few decades, it is clear that scholars in a wide range of disciplines
have found in nineteenth-century Paris an extremely dense topic of research: as an
archetypal example of the modern, capitalist cities in which we live today; as a rich
cultural space where the modern flourished; or as the site of one revolution after
another and of the emergence of scores of Frances most valued cultural productions. 2
In the past decade, in particular, the movement of panoramic literature has
garnered particular critical attention. As I outline in greater detail in chapter one, critics

Here are only a few more examples of critical works on the topic of Paris: David
Jordans Transforming Paris: The life and labors of Baron Haussmann provides a rich
and comprehensive study of the Prfet de la Seine and of his extensive projects to
reconstruct Paris under the Second Empire; Sharon Marcuss Apartment Stories: City and
Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London analyzes the vastly unexamined interior
space of the apartment in the 19th century city; Mary Gluck works on modernity and
bohemianism in 19th century Paris in Popular Bohemia; Maurice Samuels studies popular
modes of historical representation in post-Revolutionary Paris in The Spectacular Past:
Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France; and Vanessa Schwartz
tackles popular entertainment in the second half of the nineteenth century in Spectacular
Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Sicle Paris.
2
See, for example, the January 2007 issue of the PMLA, dedicated entirely to the special
topic of cities. This issue focuses in part on extremely contemporary megacities and
cities in crisis (post-Katrina New Orleans, post-9/11 New York), but also on nineteenthcentury Paris and early-modern London. Despite this range, some of the same questions
raised often in criticism on nineteenth-century Paris are raised here as well. In her
introduction to the edition, Patricia Yeager asks, for example, How do we create
taxonomies for cities and citizens that are at once off the grid and overly taxonomized?
(15).

including Judith Lyon-Caen, Marie-ve Threnty, Catherine Nesci, Jillian Taylor-Lerner

and Margaret Cohen (whose work predates the others) have productively examined the
overlap between panoramic literature and their contemporary enqutes sociales and the
popular press, have studied caricature and popular marketing techniques in these works,
have fleshed out the myth of the flneur in panoramic works, and have even made
connections between these everyday texts and early cinema. The critics named above
are only a representative group of engagements with panoramic literature, which have
also been appearing extensively in papers at recent conferences like the NineteenthCentury French Studies colloquium, the Socit des Dix-neuvimistes conference and the
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies conference. All of this critical work on
panoramic literature, however, tends to overlook the similarities it shares with the
movement of positivism, an intellectual tradition that parallels the growth of panoramic
literature both theoretically and chronologically. Critics do make passing reference to the
toile de fond positiviste et scientiste (Stinon, 80) concurrent with the appearance of
these texts, but the overlap between the proto-sociological and cultural movements are
never fully explored.3 Moreover, it is rare to find work on panoramic literature that
examines these works from a literary perspective. As we will see, critics have tended to
follow Walter Benjamin and to consider these texts as devoid of genuine social insight
(R. Sieburth, 186), to focus on the generic limitations of the form (Prendergast, 184),

Margaret Cohen also makes passing reference to Comte in Panoramic Literature and
Everyday Genres.

and to treat panoramic literature as indices of knowledge of nineteenth-century culture

rather than as cultural works in themselves worthy of analyses. Those who have written
about these texts are quick to taxonomize them in a way that ironically recalls the very
obsession with taxonomy that gave rise to them in the first place. In doing so, critics tend
to overlook important aspects of the historical context of these works, their rich generic
hybridity, their impact on major literary movements of the nineteenth-century, and the
possibility that they afford us to better comprehend the literary, sociological and
scientific impulse to systematize knowledge throughout the nineteenth-century.
By drawing on research I conducted at the Bibliothque Nationale de France on
the Bibliographie de la France and July Monarchy literary reviews, I attempt to situate
these panoramic texts in their literary and historical context in my first chapter. More
specifically, in that first chapter I study La Grande Ville (1842) by Paul de Kock, a
popular novelist who dominated the mid-nineteenth-century literary market, as
emblematic of this particular hybrid genre. I argue that these pseudo-scientific but also
literary texts of the panoramic movement create a point of intersection between Comtes
theory and the absolute representations of the city which both canonical and popular
authors attempted to capture in their own literary works. In the second chapter, I turn to
Balzac to examine his engagement with the movements of both positivism and panoramic
literature. I anchor my study in readings of his Avant-Propos, his trilogy Histoire des
treize and his often-overlooked novel Les Employs and argue that the similarities and
differences between the novelists literary project and Comtes sociological one are most

clearly borne out in the passages of Balzacs novels that draw on panoramic literature.
My analyses of these panoramic passages show that while the novelist does indeed rely
on positivist techniques of observation and inductive reasoning, his search for causes and
driving forces behind social occurrences inflect his work with a metaphysical approach
and distinguish the author of La Comdie humaine from his positivist contemporaries. I
return, in my third chapter, to Paul de Kock and his fiction. Through readings of scenes
from several of his novels, Le Cocu (1831) and Un homme marier (1837) among
others, I locate multiple digressive passages which, I argue, function not to advance the
plot, but to serve as tableaux de Paris of the urban petit bourgeois. These disjointed
observations, which were almost universally praised by his contemporary critics within
their otherwise generally negative reviews of his work, tell their readers at length about
how certain urban phenomena function and appear, but not why. In this sense, de Kocks
novels function as an aesthetic realization of Comtes positivist observational theories.
The final two chapters of this project revolve around the novels of Zola, who of
the three authors I study here is most commonly associated with positivism. I begin by
showing the clear overlap between the theories of Comte and the naturalist method,
outlined by Zola in Le Roman experimental. Through readings of Pot-Bouille and Au
Bonheur des Dames, however, I show that Zola both appropriates and exposes the limits
of the positivist method, calling into question the possibility of a pure observational
approach to the study of society. Zola, in other words, thematizes the implausibility of
representing social types and of creating the truly omniscient narrator, both so essential to

the naturalist project and to positivism more generally. I argue that Zola aligns himself
more clearly with the theories of a later-century sociologist, mile Durkheim, who lifts
key elements from Comtes positivism in his work to establish the discipline of
sociology, but ultimately arrives at his own understanding of the social fact, which is
unattainable through mere observation. In order to understand the framework of this
argument, a presentation of the conceptual content and historical context of Auguste
Comtes positivism is necessary.
1.1 Former des thories daprs les observations : Auguste Comte and Positivism
Scholarship on Auguste Comte tends to fall into opposing camps: those who
believe Comte to be the founder of modern sociology, and those who do not, those who
discount the early nineteenth-century thinker based on his personal idiosyncrasies and
later work, and those who try to validate the thinkers work despite these personal
idiosyncrasies. But whether Comte was the founder of modern sociology or a
megalomaniac whose later writings further confirm his lunacy, it is nonetheless clear that
his theories of positivism, most clearly elaborated in the Cours sur la philosophie positive
(1830-1842), were not only influential throughout the latter part of the nineteenthcentury, but were themselves grounded in their own particular historical moment. In
what follows, I will briefly outline Comtes theory of positivism, his adaptation of this
positive method to the domain of social physics, and the historical and cultural situation
from which Comtes theories arose.

John Stuart Mill, one of many Victorian thinkers to take an interest in Comtes
work, points to the following quote from the French scholar as an accurate summary of
the thinkers philosophy:
We have no knowledge of anything but Phaenomena; and our knowledge of
phaenomena is relative, not absolute. We know not the essence, nor the real mode of
production, of any fact, but only its relations to other facts in the way of succession or
of similitude. These relations are constant; that is, always the same circumstances.
The constant resemblances which link phaenomena together, and the constant
sequences which unite them as antecedent and consequent, are termed their laws. The
laws of phaenomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential nature, and their
ultimate causes, either efficient or final, are unknown and inscrutable to us. (6)4
Uninterested in explanations for worldly phenomena that searched for first causes (which
for Comte were unknowable), the French scholar theorized that progress was only
achievable through an observational and experimental method he called positivism. In
Comtes own words, dans ltat positif, lesprit humain reconnaissant limpossibilit
dobtenir des notions absolues, renonce chercher lorigine et la destination de lunivers,
et connatre les causes intimes des phnomnes, pour sattacher uniquement
dcouvrir, par lusage bien combin du raisonnement et de lobservation, leurs lois
effectives, cest--dire leurs relations invariables de succession et de similitude (Comte,
4). In other words, Comte posits a method that, rather than searching for why biological,

It is difficult, at times, to take Mills evaluations of Comte at face value, because he

spends a large portion of his 1866 study, Auguste Comte and Positivism, comparing
Comtes work to his own liberal projects and promoting Victorian England as a model
liberal society.

physical and social phenomena transpire, aims instead to study and catalogue discernible
occurrences and, through observation, to discover their relationships, networks and laws.
Comte distinguishes ltat positif from two other disparate phases of
intellectual evolution in what he dubs the Law of Three Stages, which stated that each
branch of knowledge passes successively through three different theoretical conditions:
the theological or fictitious; the metaphysical or abstract; and the scientific or positive
(Lewes, 9; Thompson, 13). According to sociologist Kenneth Thompson, in the
theological state the human mind searches for the origin and purpose of all effects and
supposes that all phenomena are produced by the immediate action of supernatural
beings. In the metaphysical state, the mind supposes that abstract forces (personified
abstractions, actual entities) produce all phenomena (13). The theological state, in other
words, corresponds to mans attempt to find an underlying supernatural cause for our
existence and for the phenomena we encounter on a daily basis.5 The metaphysical stage

Comte broke this theological stage down further, into three chronological stages:
fetishism, polytheism, monotheism. On the topic of Comtes concept of fetishism and the
post-Revolutionary sense of history, Deborah Jenson points out that Comte [] serenely
reincorporates the cultural wound of thinking with things in the interest of a selflegitimating cultural evolutionism. Comte posits fetishism as the first stage of all
cultures (even, or especially, of lite Western culture), followed later by the
metaphysical stage and culminating in the positive stage. The positive stage represents
a vision of the end of history in the sense that evolution was not expected to extend
beyond this utopic realization. [] This internalization within European culture
obviously very relative, since it is relegated to the distant past of fetishistic thought is
characteristic of post-Revolutionary developments of the problem, which typically
borrow the cult of things as a tool for explaining personification and depersonification in
domains from art to capitalism to sexuality (242).

moves past a need for supernatural forces or deities, and seeks, instead, an abstract power
to explain phenomena. Mill elaborates on this second and more conceptually difficult
stage, when he writes that in this stage it is no longer a god that causes and directs each
of the various agencies of nature: it is a power, or a force, or an occult quality, considered
as real existences, inherent in but distance from the concrete bodies in which they reside,
and which they in a manner animate (11). Gods are thus replaced by intrinsic essences,
truths, virtues.
The third, positive stage, as we have seen, moves beyond the need for
metaphysical causal justifications the vain search for absolute notions, the origin and
destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena (Thompson, 13) and focuses
on knowable, observable facts, on what Comte called science. Only then, he believed,
was true knowledge plausible. According to sociologist Ronald Fletcher, Comte
maintained basically that the only methods productive of reliable knowledge were the
methods of science. Knowledge of the world as distinct from metaphysical conjecture
or theological assertion consists of propositions about the regular connections between
phenomena, and they are propositions which can be tested (10). These three stages can
be associated with different historical periods, with Comtes own historical period
marking the beginning of the positive stage. For him, then, humans evolve intellectually
from one stage to the next, each stage building upon the previous one.
The doctrine of positivism is, in a sense, a hybrid doctrine, as George Henry
Lewes, another Victorian scholar, reminds us. Positivist philosophy, he explains,

10

must reconcile the differences between Philosophy that ignores science and Science that
ignores Philosophy (8). Science, in other words, provides Comte the tools with which to
formulate an approach to other areas of knowledge. According to Lewes, [positive
philosophy] is a doctrine capable of embracing all that can regulate Humanity; not a
treatise on physical science, not a treatise on social science, but a system which absorbs
all intellectual activity. [] This is the mission of Positivism: to generalize science, and
to systematize sociality (9). Comtes hybrid doctrine, both philosophical and scientific
in nature, is thus conceived of as universally applicable across all disciplines, a method
by which to encompass all of human knowledge under the same system.
Comte was not unique in his desire to systematize the sciences, as we shall see,
yet he nonetheless dedicates a section of his Cours to the utilization of his method in all
the sciences, claiming, according to Fletcher, that the content of such knowledge could
be systematically comprehended within his classified scheme of the hierarchy of the
Sciences. (10).6 Comte was, however, innovative in his application of this method to

Comtes hierarchy of the sciences refers to his classification of various fields of

science. According to Mill, Comte classes the sciences in an ascending series,
according to the degree of complexity of their phaenomena; so that each science depends
on the truths of all those which precede it, with the addition of peculiar truths of its own
(37). If we follow Mill, Comte begins with Mathematics, and continues with Astronomy,
Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Sociology. Other scholars omit Mathematics and
consider the five main categories to be Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry and Physiology.

11

the social sciences and in his inclusion of sociology in his hierarchy.7 While the
scientific methods had been applied before him to what he views as the other categories
of phenomena, namely, astronomy, physics, chemistry and physiology, there remains a
fifth category which had been omitted in the past. Comte writes:
[O]n remarque une lacune essentielle relative aux phnomnes sociaux, qui, bien que
compris implicitement parmi les phnomnes physiologiques, mritent, soit par leur
importance, soit par les difficults propres leur tudier, de former une catgorie
distincte. Ce dernier ordre de conceptions, qui se rapporte aux phnomnes les plus
particuliers, les plus compliqus, et les plus dpendants de tous les autres, a d
ncessairement, par cela seul, se perfectionner plus lentement que tous les prcdents,
mme sans avoir gard aux obstacles plus spciaux que nous considrerons plus tard.
[] Maintenant que lesprit humain a fond la physique cleste, la physique terrestre,
soit mcanique, soit chimique ; la physique organique [] il lui reste terminer le
systme des sciences dobservation en fondant la physique sociale. (17-18)
The category of social physics, then, is situated at the end of the scientific spectrum and
should be viewed as its most complex category, for it is constructed upon the basis of all
the other categories and could not exist without them.
Comte was thus adamant that since the category of social physics was so entirely
dependent on the other scientific categories, they must all be studied in tandem. He states
that the statical study of sociology consists in the investigation of the action and reaction
of the different parts of the social system. [] This view condemns the existing
philosophical practice of contemplating social elements separately as if they had an

Comte is also innovative in his use of the term sociology. According to Thompson,it
is agreed that Comte invented the name sociology in 1839 to designate the new discipline
that he had previously referred to as social physics (6).

12

independent existence; and it leads us to regard them as in mutual relation, and forming a
whole which compels us to treat them in combination (Comte, Positive, 63). Comtes
doctrine envisions, as Fletcher puts it succinctly, the scientific study of the nature and
the different forms of societies; of social systems (11).
How exactly did Comte propose to go about such a study? In his Cours the
scholar suggests a two-part approach in which the static and the dynamic elements of
society are examined. The study of social statics would deal with, as Thompson has put
it, the investigation of the laws of action and reaction of the different parts of the social
system (14). Put more simply, Comte proposes the analysis of the nature of the social
system its elements, their interconnections, their functions (Fletcher, 14). The study of
social dynamics would comprise not only a cross-cultural comparison of social systems,
but a study of social systems throughout history. This second approach would entail
studying the patterns of change and development which have occurred and are
occurring, within and among them: and in all this seeking to establish testable
generalizations about them (14, emphasis in the original). Beginning with the basic unit
of society which, for Comte, was the family and not the individual, the scholar thus
proposed an in-depth scientific approach to the nature of human society, from its most
basic to its most complicated elements, together with a trans-cultural, trans-historical
comparative approach to society. Only then, believed Comte, could we come to a true
understanding of this ultimate and crucial scientific category, and only then could society

13

be understood and, ultimately, manipulated in the proper direction. He sought, in his

words, to savoir pour prvoir et prvoir pour pouvoir (Thompson, 15).
It is widely agreed upon by readers of Comte that the French Revolution and its
chaotic aftermath were at least in part at the origin of Comtes theories. Discussing the
philosophers life, Fletcher writes that he was continually disturbed and distressed by
the disorder of his time, and by the material and cultural poverty of the people. His
fundamental and lifelong preoccupation was how to replace disorder by order; how to
accomplish the total reconstruction of society (7). But the general situation of disorder,
which Comte believed needed to be rectified, was only part of the Revolutions impact on
his thinking. The very notion of progress more specifically progress achieved through
the actions of man was a byproduct of this remarkable political event. Comte himself
makes this clear:
The strong reaction which was exercised upon the intellect by the first great shock of
revolution was absolutely necessary to rouse and sustain our mental efforts in the
search for a new system. For the greatest thinkers of the eighteenth century had been
blinded to the true character of the new state by the effete remnants of the old. And the
shock was especially necessary for the foundation of the social science. For the basis
of that science is the conception of human progress, a conception which nothing but
the Revolution could have brought forward into sufficient prominence. (Essential, 335)
These historical conditions under which Comte was operating the post-Revolutionary
need for order, the dawn of the nineteenth-century interest in human progress were thus
crucial to the formation of positivism.

14

The French Revolution of 1789 was not the only revolution to affect Comtes
philosophy. Comte was deeply influenced by progressive technological and scientific
theories of the eighteenth century out of which the industrial revolution was born; he was,
according to Alice Grard, issue de la rvolution scientifique qui a prcd la
Rvolution franaise et la traverse comme une flche ascendante (Auguste Comte,
124). In addition to political and scientific upheaval, the work of many of his
contemporaries and predecessors plays a key role in Comtes thinking. While it is
beyond the scope of this study to investigate all of Comtes intellectual influences, it is
nonetheless worthwhile mentioning a few of the philosophers, mathematicians,
economists and scientists whose work had an impact on the positivist philosopher: Adam
Smith, Bacon, Condorcet, Turgot, and Galileo, to name only a few. It is also noteworthy
and fitting that these influences came from such a wide variety of disciplines and periods.
Comte, a scholar whose work tried to synthesize all domains of human knowledge under
one system of interpretation and who viewed human thought as a multi-tiered
evolutionary process, appropriately posits a philosophy that is a synthesis of theories of
past thinkers. In fact, according to Mill, Comte believed Bacon, Descartes and Galileo to
be the collective founders of positivism (6).
One of the principle thinkers to have affected Comte was, of course, Saint-Simon.
Comte was formally trained at a post-Revolutionary institution, namely Lcole
Polytechnique, but his apprenticeship with Saint-Simon between 1817 and 1824 is
thought to have been even more significant to his work. Though their relationship ended

15

on a sour note, Comte was nonetheless profoundly influenced by Saint-Simon.

Thompson explains, [Comte] also gained much from his deep involvement as it is
suggested by the way in which he announced the break to a friend: I have nothing more
to learn from M. Saint-Simon (9). Despite having had a deep intellectual relationship at
such a foundational moment in Comtes career, the young philosophers theories departed
from those of his mentor, most crucially, as Girard points out, because of their different
historical, educational and social backgrounds. She writes, Saint-Simon a le gnie
dattirer lui, tel un aimant, les ides en suspension dans lair du temps, et de les restituer
son entourage, avec le feu de lenthousiasme. Mais cest un homme dAncien Rgime,
par lge et la formation, un autodidacte fascin par le monde des savants, auquel il prte
tous les pouvoirs, mais sans pouvoir entrer de plain-pied dans ce monde (128). If SaintSimon was a self-taught scholar, passionate about many ideas but without the focus to
dedicate himself fully to one, Comte, on the other hand, educated under the postRevolutionary system, was able to devote his career more centrally to the development of
one philosophy. In order further to distinguish the two, some remarks concerning the
writings of Saint-Simon will help.
1.2 Positivisms Roots in Social Utopianism
Like Comte, Saint-Simon is a figure whose historical legacy is in no way
unanimously agreed upon. He has meant many different things to many different critics.
According to political scientist Ghita Ionescu, Gouhiers Saint-Simon or Durkheims
Saint-Simon, Proudhons Saint-Simon, or Hajeks Simon-Simon, to mention a very small

16

proportion of this writers interpreters, cannot be contained within one personality alone.
Revolutionary, anti-Jacobin, anarchist, socialist, positivist, technocratic, protototalitarian,
Christian-radical, these are only the principal ways in which disciples or critics have tried
again and again, in different contexts, to identify him, tel quen lui-mme enfin (5).
Both Saint-Simons influence on Comte and his relationship to the Saint-Simonians are
also hotly debated topics. Scholars have, at different times, both downplayed and
highlighted Saint-Simon as a founding father of sociology or socialism or as the main
influence in Comtes philosophies. For our purposes, a brief overview of the scholars
philosophy and how it relates to Comtes work and the work of their contemporaries will
suffice.
Despite much debate, it is largely agreed upon that Claude Henri de Rouvery or
the Conte de Saint-Simon, like his assistant Comte, was an eccentric human being with a
rather unconventional personal life. He fought in the American Revolutionary war,
witnessed the French Revolution, was imprisoned during the Terror, proposed marriage
(unsuccessfully) to Madame de Stal, purportedly attempted suicide on at least two
occasions, and lived both in great luxury and extreme poverty. Around the age of forty,
after many of these eclectic experiences, the nobleman began a rigorous mid-life
educational program, and for the purposes of his philosophical investigation, SaintSimon moved to the Latin Quarter to begin his formal training and began exploring and

17

studying disparate realms of urban life, including its most unsavory parts (Booth, 9).8
According to author and early socialist Louis Reybaud, Saint-Simon abordait la priode
scientifique et exprimentale. Pour sinitier aux rudiments de la science, il se fit colier
la manire des grands seigneurs, en attirant les professeurs chez lui. [] Quand il eut
acquis de la sorte assez de notions mathmatiques, il se rabattit sur les physiologistes, et
dmnagea pour stablir prs de lcole de Mdecine. Ainsi, il tudia [] dune part
les sciences des corps bruts, dautre part la science des corps anims (76). His social
and educational investigations led him to write several works, including Lettres dun
habitant de Genve, De la reorganization europenne, LIndustrie and Nouveau
Christianisme (some of which he wrote in collaboration with Augustin Thierry and
Auguste Comte), and to lose a substantial amount of his income. Ultimately, the count
ended his career and life as a copyist, barely making enough to survive, yet at the same
time embodying the work ethic he promulgated in his writings. Editor Henri Girard
relates the whirlwind highs and lows of Saint-Simons life in the following way: [A]yant
pass dun rve lautre [] ml la politique lastronomie, la draison au gnie, aim

As Louis Reybaud explains, Saint-Simon believed that le seul moyen de pousser la

philosophie dans des voies progressives tait de se livrer des expriences successives et
personnelles. Cherchant, combinant des actions tranges et inoues, ou de nouvelles
sries dactions, il sabandonna sciemment beaucoup dpreuves folles : il fut
extravagant selon le monde, bizarre, immoral, mal fam; choses qui lui importaient peu,
car il rvait une moralit nouvelle (95). Saint-Simon, in other words, carried out his
philosophy in his personal life, testing out experiences and people in all areas of society.
Later in life he would, according to Reybaud, try to synthesize these experiences with the
goal of rendering them profitables et pratiques pour le monde industriel, scientifique et
politique (96).

18

la bonne chre, la bonne compagnie et la pire, persuad dtre la fois mathmaticien,

physicien, physiologiste, fondateur de Socit et fondateur de cultes [] aprs avoir jet
au vent des millions, ses ides et son mpris, Saint-Simon se retrouve un matin de 1805,
copiste au Mont-de-pit, aux appointements de mille francs par an (xii).9 The one-time
counts life ended in poverty in 1825, but not without garnering attention and followers
who worked to spread his beliefs after his death.
As Ionescus observation reminds us, Saint-Simons work covered a vast array of
topics and has later been interpreted in an even more vast number of ways. While it is
important to be aware of the various theories that took shape in his work throughout his
career, it is perhaps even more important not to stray from our own focus here, that of
Saint-Simons relationship to Comtes theories of positivism. Ionescu summarizes the
most general underlying themes of the counts work when he writes that the aim of
Saint-Simons exhortations remains always the same: to change the institutional
framework of feudal society so as to accommodate the forces and processes of the new,
industrial society (7). Indeed, the autodidacts famous maxim Tout par lIndustrie, tout
pour lIndustrie, the notion that, as his nineteenth-century biographer Arthur Booth
explains, the whole of mankind should be engaged in industry, theoretical or practical,

Deborah Jenson reminds us, too, that later-century feminist thought can even be said to
have roots in Saint-Simons utopian ideology: the feminist exploitation of the ideas of
the comte de Saint-Simon, as interpreted by Enfantin, had by the late 1820s begun to
emphasize the more romantic elements of his work and especially his ideas for a new
religion based on love. Woman and the socio-sexual relationship between the sexes then
emerged as the movements chief concern (195).

19

makes it clear why he is considered to be as an important early socialist at the moment of

the birth of industry (40). Additionally, for Saint-Simon, this post-Revolution
reorganization of society, which he proposed in LIndustrie in 1818, was not limited to
France. In his earlier De la rorganisation de la socit europene of 1814, the author
promulgated a pan-European improvement of the poor classes by reemphasizing the
obligation to work, whether intellectually or manually.10 His motto from this text Tout
par le travail. Tout pour le travail is further explained by his assertion that toutes les
institutions sociales doivent avoir pour but lamlioration du sort moral, intellectuel et
physique de la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre (Rorganisation, xxix). Once
again, Saint-Simon emerges as an early socialist with utopian ideals of thorough social
reformation through the exaltation of work. The scholars final text, Nouveau
christianisme, studies similar themes couched in more theological terms. Reybaud has
summarized the text in the following way: Du grand principe: Aimez-vous les uns les
autres, il tire la consquence suivante: La religion doit diriger la socit vers le grand
but de lamlioration la plus rapide possible du sort de la classe la plus nombreuse et la
plus pauvre. [] Unit religieuse, infaillibilit sacerdotale, dure du culte, moralit,
influence du dogme. Cest le nouveau christianisme en trois lignes (89). In other

10

As Booth explains, Saint-Simon proposed that while everyone should be required to

work, society should be comprised exclusively of two classes, the learned and the
industrial; the one engaged in investigating the laws of nature, the other in producing by
the application of those laws what is useful and agreeable (40).

20

words, still concerned with social inequality, Saint-Simon takes on religions role in his
own proposed quasi-religious societal reorganization.
A move toward the scientific provided a means for Saint-Simon, and his
colleague Charles Fourier, to conceive of realizing these dreams of social harmony. They
strove to create a totalizing theory of knowledge that would enable them to conceptualize
and enact their political beliefs more effectively. According to Neil McWilliam:
Both Saint-Simon and Fourier [] invested their hopes in specific areas of
investigation unlocking the secret of social concord and individual happiness.
Themselves pretending to the status of scientists who had succeeded in discovering the
fundamental principle governing human interaction, each looked to Newtons theory of
gravity as a unifying force operating in the social as well as the physical domain. In
this respect, both thinkers despite conspicuous differences in rhetorical style
cultivated positivist ambitions shared by such contemporaries as the Idologues and
Auguste Comte. (13)
In realizing such a scientific approach, these scholars looked toward developments in
human physiology which, according to McWilliam, gave Saint-Simon and other theorists
a basic component from which they could extrapolate new systems of collective
organization, [developments in physiology] further offered an epistemological model for
conceptualizing the workings of an organism as complex as human society (12). For
Fourier, these theories influenced his plans of alternative utopian communities organized
as Phalenstres, which would eradicate poverty and maximize the fulfillment of human

21

passion.11 For Saint-Simon, McWilliam points out, developments in physiology held

out the promise of a revolution in theories of knowledge which would herald a positivist
epistemology allowing future decisions in all areas of life to be taken according to
objective criteria (13). Saint-Simon already acknowledged the development of a
positivist approach in other physical sciences astronomy, physics, chemistry. However
he asserted that as long as the domain of physiology was not positive, an allencompassing philosophie positive or a global approach which left no room for
conjecture, cause and non-observational explications, could not exist. Le systme
gnral de nos connaissances sera rorganis, explains Saint-Simon, son organisation
sera base sur la croyance que lUnivers est rgi par une seule loi immutable. Tous les
systmes dapplication, tels que les systmes religieux, de politique, de morale, de
lgislation civile, seront mis en accord avec le nouveau systme de nos connaissances
(133). Of this loi immutable, Booth writes that Saint-Simon believed that the great
work that remains for this age to accomplish is to rescue physiology from its conjectural

11

According to David Harvey, the Phalenstres would offer variety of work and variety
of social and sexual engagements to guarantee happiness and fulfillment of wants, needs,
and desires. Fourier took immense pains to specify how Phalanstres should be
organized and around what principles (he had a very complicated, mathematically
ordered description of passionate attractions, for example, which needed to be matched
up between individuals to guarantee harmony and happiness (71). The early nineteenthcentury theorist, like Comte sought to rectify social chaos, but with the different goal of
creating universal harmony through agricultural association and passionate attraction
(Harvey, 70). He did so nonetheless by appealing to developments in science to help him
more concretely realize his abstract goal. In fact, according to McWilliam, Fourier even
claimed his analysis of human passion followed strict mathematical laws (13), thereby
seeking in science a solution to sociological progress.

22

condition, and this not so much out of regard for the science itself, as because of the
intellectual revolution that it will produce; for the transition will be then definitely
effected from Deism to Physicism, from the system of ideas that ascribes phenomena to
the direct action of a divine will, instead of to the natural operation of an invariable law
(27). Saint-Simon sought a universal theory of the universe and, like Comte, espoused
the belief in a move from the supernatural stage of thinking to the positive stage and
a systemization of knowledge.
Criticism that puts Saint-Simon and Comte in dialogue with one another vacillates
between claiming the older scholar as the founder of positivism or sociology and giving
that distinction to his assistant. Henri Gouhier, for example, attributes this merit to the
younger scholar, claiming that positivism was plus quun arrangement de thmes
antrieurs; cest pourquoi Auguste Comte mrite seul dtre appel son fondateur; le
physicisme et lindustrialisme de Saint-Simon appartiennent lhistoire du
prpositivisme (3).12 For the critic, in other words, Comte synthesized the historical,
scientific and pre-sociological discourses that preceded his work, including that of Saint-

12

Gouhier establishes a list of twelve truths which embody this idea of prepositivism,
predating Comte and comprising the theories of thinkers such as Lagrange, Laplace,
Lavoisier, Turgot, including Dieu est hors du rel and Le monde nest plus cration;
ce nest mme plus un rseau de causes issues dune cause premire mais une armature
de lois (386). We can see that the steps leading to the establishment of the Law of Three
Stages and to the importance of using observation to understand the world as opposed to
metaphysical causal explanations were circulating before both Comte and Saint-Simon
were writing.

23

Simon. Gouhier goes as far as to say that while both Saint-Simon et Comte ont
lambition de fonder une science de lhomme, principe dune morale et dune politique
positives [] la question est lordre du jour depuis les dernires annes du XVIIIe
sicle. Comte navait pas besoin de collaborer avec Saint-Simon pour la rencontrer et sy
intresser (389).
On the other hand, another crucial figure in modern sociology, Emile Durkheim,
would disagree with the assertion that Comtes philosophy would have developed
without his mentor, given the Zeitgeist of the early nineteenth century. According to
Durkheim: Il [Saint-Simon] a t le premier concevoir quentre les gnralits
formelles de la philosophie mtaphysique et la spcialit troite des sciences
particulires, il y avait place pour une entreprise nouvelle dont il a donn le plan et quil a
lui-mme tente. Cest donc lui quil faut en bonne justice reporter lhonneur que lon
attribue couramment a Comte (82). Without lingering for too long on these debates, it
does seem plausible nonetheless to propose a happy medium between the two. As we
have seen, Comtes work was certainly a product of the historical moment (as was SaintSimons), and it was heavily influenced, as he himself explains, by scientists and
philosophers (Turgot, Condorcet) who preceded him. On the other hand, Saint-Simons
work on applying the positivist method to physiology cannot but be seen as laying the
ground for Comtes study of physique sociale and his all-encompassing approach to the
study of human sociology. While the older scholars interest lies in the application of the
positive method to physiology, the younger scholar takes this knowledge for granted and

24

moves past the positive approach to the functioning of the human body in order to
explore the functioning of human society.
Both scholars are obviously interested in the use of scientific method to
understand human behavior. mile Littr asserts that common to both writers is their
insistence upon the great importance of the power of scientific prediction (Booth, 77).
Both, as Gouhier notes, ont lambition de fonder une science de lhomme, principe
dune morale et dune politique positives (389), and they both croient, avec beaucoup
dautres, quun mme esprit rayonne travers toutes les sciences et que, par suite,
lensemble du savoir est dsormais homogne; cette conviction est lme de ce que nous
appelons, aprs eux, philosophie positive (179). Yet Gouhier warns against a simplistic
understanding of positivism that would, for these two reasons, seem to equate the two
thinkers.13 He stresses that while for Comte, philosophy is a field separate from science,
not absorbed by the other sciences, which he hopes to use scientific methods to
understand,14 Saint-Simon aims for one unifying science: une synthse des sciences
unifies dans leur contenu par la gnralisation dune loi universelle; la philosophie a le
mme objet que la science, elle apparat sur la mme ligne, lorsque le principe de lordre
physique est un fait physique (388). Saint-Simons influence on the younger Comtes

13

Gouhier writes, Il ny a, dailleurs, aucun rapport entre la philosophie positive que

dfinit Auguste Comte et celle qui enchantait jadis limagination de Saint-Simon. Que
lunivers puisse tre expliqu sans Dieu et que la seule explication mritant ce nom soit
de type scientifique, cette double banalit ne suffit pas pour les rapprocher (388).
14
Elle [la philosophie] nest pas la science des sciences mais la science de ce qui est
scientifique des sciences [388]

25

philosophy is certainly evident, but it is also apparent that progressive scientific theories
already existed in post-Revolutionary intellectual discourse. Eventually, these theories
found their way into utopian political discussions, but into other contemporary cultural
productions as well. As we will see throughout this project, both Balzac in his AvantPropos, and Zola in his Roman exprimental address this proto-sociological discourse,
without directly referencing Comte; their novels serve as examples of how the novelists
both adopt and question the theories of positivism. The hybrid panoramic literary texts
and de Kocks fiction, on the other hand, function as aesthetic examples of Comtes
internal approach to a theory of society.
1.3 Studying Parisian Social Studies
Like the nineteenth-century panoramic literary texts I study in this dissertation,
my own approach has been hybrid. Influenced chiefly by cultural studies projects like
Sharon Marcuss Apartment Stories, Margaret Cohens Sentimental Education of the
Novel and Andrea Goulets Optiques, I have tried to balance my study of the historical
and cultural period with literary analysis close readings, formal analyses, and attentive
study of generic conventions and the stylistic corresponding features. In studying the
permeable, hybrid genre of panoramic literature, I have relied on theorists of genre,
namely Jacques Derrida and Hayden White, and although I have used genre as an
important category for comprehending how the panoramic texts were understood in their
particular historical moment, I have tried to keep in mind the fact that the notion of genre
is itself is an unstable category. My methods are not those of sociology nor even those of

26

literary sociology of the kind found in the work of Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson.
Instead, I approach Comte in the context of literary and cultural history: I draw on the
theoretical vocabulary he provides for understanding the desire to catalogue July
Monarchy society and show in detail how his methodology is adopted and, at times,
refuted in the novelistic projects of Balzac, de Kock and Zola.
When putting the popular panoramic literary texts and the novels of Paul de
Kock, so often cast aside by both nineteenth-century and contemporary literary critics,
into conversation with novelists now considered part of the French canon like Balzac and
Zola, it becomes difficult to avoid the type of high/low opposition which Stephanie
Sieburth has discussed in Inventing High and Low. As Sieburth suggests, in the
discipline of cultural studies, we have
progressed very far from the nineteenth-century critics who inveighed against mass
cultural fictions without reading them or consulting those who did, and we have gotten
past the dead end of the apocalyptic criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno, who could
similarly be accused of not understanding some of the forms they anathematized in the
1940s. But studies of the relationships among different kinds of cultural production
that do not resort to the limiting and falsifying categories of high and low are still
in their infancy. (9)
Throughout my project, I have attempted to use terms like popular, classic, and
canonical only to refer to the ways in which the texts I study have tended to be
classified by critics. I do not necessarily and always endorse these terms. By examining
the history of the literary market under the July Monarchy, the publishing and purchasing
history of panoramic literature, as well as the methodological similarities it shares with

27

the novels of its contemporaries, I hope to show the extent to which the very categories
of high and low literature are themselves unstable. Rather than juxtaposing the good
literature of one to the bad literature of the other, it is my hope that close analyses of
Paul de Kock, placed alongside readings of Balzac and Zola, might help us better
understand the history of the novel in the nineteenth-century. A study of these varied
discursive interactions can enrich our perspectives both on canonical literary works and
on the context from which they arose.

28

2. Panoramic literature and July Monarchy Print Culture

Readers of a supplement to the May 16th and 17th issues of Le Journal des dbats
in 1842 would likely have noticed the advertisement with the largest typeface on the back
page: the ad announcing the availability of the first installment of Paul de Kocks La
Grande Ville: Nouveau tableau de Paris, comique, critique et philosophique. This new
publication, the ad explains, would eventually include 52 Livraisons de 16 pages, papier
jsus vlin, ornes de quatre six dessins graves [] intercals dans le texte, (Dbats,
16 mai, 1842, 4) thanks to the participation of several contemporary artists such as
Gavarni, Daumier, Victor Adam and Gigoux. Though this announcement does not give
potential purchasers many specifics beyond the name and address of the editor Victor
Magen, 21, quai des Augustins and the price of one installment 40 centimes the title
page of the 1842 publication makes clear the conditions for procuring the work:
Prix de Chaque Livraison: 40 centimes. Il paratra une livraison tous les Samedis,
partir du 16 avril 1842. Les Souscripteurs de Paris qui paieront treize livraisons
davance, les recevront franco domicile. Les Souscripteurs des dpartements qui
enverront un mandat sur la poste, de 12 fr. 50 c, prix du premier volume (26
livraisons), recevront ces livraisons au fur et mesure de leur publication. (Dbats, 16
mai, 1842, 4)
With one installment for each week of the year, La Grande Ville could be purchased in
many different ways by many different types of readers: as luxuriously home-delivered
installments for readers who could afford a larger sum in advance; as individually
purchased installments chez Victor Magen for those who only wanted or were only able
to spend 40 centimes at a time; and even as deliveries to areas outside of the capital.
Later that year, all 412 pages of the completed text would be regrouped and published
29

together as a collection at the Bureau Central des Publications Nouvelles, as would the
second volume of La Grande Ville, written and published between 1842 and 1843, made
up of contributions from Balzac, Alexandre Dumas pre, Frdric Souli and others.1 De
Kocks publishers prospectus, for obvious promotional reasons, labels his 1842 work
un ouvrage dune telle importance, crit par le romancier le plus populaire de notre
poque, specifying that [c]e nest point un roman, ce ne sont pas non plus de simples
tableaux: cest une immense comdie cent actes divers [] Cest Paris tel quil est, tel
que Paul de Kock la vu, lcrivain le plus vrai, le plus gai, le meilleur observateur de son
temps (1-2). According to the material and promotional elements of this text, then, La
Grande Ville, published serially as the first volume of an overarching project with many
other renowned contemporary authors, is to be read as the faithful representation of Paris
by a trustworthy observer.
De Kocks La Grande Ville is an example of panoramic literature, a popular
movement that strove to document all types of Parisian phenomena under the July
Monarchy. As La Grande Villes prospectus announces, these typological texts called
attention to themselves as non-fictional, real observations of urban society whose authors

The title page explains, further, that once collected together, La Grande Ville formera
deux beaux volumes in-8 (4). A way of indicating how many times the paper on which
the text was printed had been folded and thus the size of the book, books in-octavo were
of a medium size, smaller than books in-folio or in-quarto, larger than books in-12 or in16. Grard Genette reminds us that au dbut du XIXe sicle, o les grands volumes
taient devenus plus rares, la diffrence de dignit passait entre les in-8 pour la littrature
srieuse et les in-12 et plus petit pour les ditions bon march rserves la littrature
populaire (Seuils, 23). The physical size of the text, therefore, implies seriousness or at
least a higher quality in the content of La Grande Ville.
30

were among the deftest documenters of mid-nineteenth century life. The movement of
panoramic literature is itself the culmination of July Monarchy print culture a culture of
fluid genres and unstable generic boundaries among multiple types of literary production.
With the aim of better understanding this literary and cultural phenomenon, its
relationship with nineteenth-century literary history and, eventually, its methodological
similarities to Auguste Comtes positivism, I would like to do three things. First, we will
historicize the literary marketplace under the July Monarchy and, subsequently, discuss
the phenomenon of panoramic literature in light of that history. In addition to providing
an overview of twentieth and twenty-first century criticism on panoramic literature, I will
situate the role of these texts in their literary and historical context based on archival
research done in the Bibliographie de la France and other mid-century bibliographical
publications. Finally, with de Kocks La Grande Ville as an example of panoramic
literature, I hope to expose the flux in genre between the social and the literary. Using
this work as an example of the July Monarchy texts permeable generic boundaries, I
hope to set the scene for the emergence and overlapping of the literary and sociological
movements I chart in the coming chapters.
I argue that this rather short-lived literary and social movement panoramic
literature had a lasting impact throughout the nineteenth-century and helped shape the
urban novel in its most significant iterations in the major and minor works of Balzac
and Zola, no less than in the popular works of Paul de Kock. Many scholars of
panoramic literature focus on urban upheaval as the sole motor for this popular literary
phenomenon, or refer only in passing to the scientific and sociological developments
31

emerging concurrently with it. They have also largely neglected to approach these texts
from a literary perspective, an approach, I will argue, that better enables us to understand
their social context as well. I propose to reexamine the movement of panoramic literature
in the context of a work published contemporaneously with it, between 1830 and 1842,
Auguste Comtes Cours de philosophie positive. My aim here is not to undertake an indepth analytic comparison between the writings of Comte and any specific panoramic
literary texts. I will instead provide the historical, cultural and critical context that will
allow me to analyze the intersections between the novel, panoramic literature and
positivism in the remainder of this project. Like the popular literary authors who
observed and chronicled everyday urban life, the proto-sociologist also posited a method
in which observation and classification would replace previous theological and
metaphysical approaches to the study of society with the ultimate goal of forming a
satisfactory synthesis of all human conceptions (Comte, General, 2). While they are
not openly scientific, the physiologies and literary guidebooks, two forms of panoramic
literature which attempt to categorize popular modern life in July Monarchy Paris, share
methodological procedures with the progressive positivist theories of Comte circulating
at the time of their publication. In the context of positivism, these self-consciously
pseudo-scientific but also literary works, whose permeable generic boundaries are so
emblematic of their historical moment, emerge as a site of intersection between Comtes
desire for a comprehensive theory of society and the synoptic representations of society
to which major novelists such as Balzac and Zola aspired.

32

2.1 Print Culture under the July Monarchy

In his 1846 treatise against the serial novel, conservative critic Alfred Nettement
made the following argument about this new form of littrature industrielle and, in
particular, about Alexandre Dumass recent publication Le Comte de Monte Cristo:
Comment lart trouverait-il sa place dans ce chaos, o tout est faux, arbitraire, en dehors
de la nature et de la vrit? Au milieu de cette confusion de situations mlodramatiques
pniblement amenes au dpens de la vraisemblance, quel emploi peut trouver le sens
littraire? Lart sefface et sloigne, le sens littraire steint dans de pareilles
compositions (407). Nettements critiques of the serial novels depravity, addictive
nature, and lack of good and beautiful qualities so highly valued at this moment of
literary history, seem to the contemporary reader both reactionary and nave.2 Yet certain
terms he uses to characterize this low-brow literature actually serve to characterize the
state of literature itself under the July Monarchy confusion and chaos, for example
and his insistence upon the dissolution of a certain sense of the literary amid the
littrature industrielle is highly emblematic of this moment of flux in the literary world.
To be sure, the mid-nineteenth century, and in particular the period of the July
Monarchy, saw great upheaval in the domain of literary culture. As James Smith Allen
has aptly demonstrated in Popular French Romanticism, a number of events and
developments converged to provoke an especially transformative moment in literary

Priscilla Parkhurst-Ferguson explains in Literary France that the logic of the market
had to counter highly charged emotional definitions of literary creativity in the traditional
moral conception of art, in the hyper-aestheticism of art for arts sake, and in the
objectivity proposed by the scientific method (60).
33

history. Improvements in press and paper technology coincided with declining literary
patronage and the transformation of an author from someone whose writing was
sponsored by the court into someone who had to sell his works to make a living.3 Writers,
as Allen explains, took advantage of this market for financial gain: authors born at the
turn of the century learned to profit in the literary marketplace (Popular, 7). Authors
also began to collaborate more frequently, a phenomenon Corrine Pelta has called
lcriture collective, and described in the following way: [l]criture journalistique se
mue alors en une authentique criture collective, se chargeant formellement et
fondamentalement de toute lidologie librale, portant et constituant une nouvelle vision
sociale (Presse et Plume, 371). 4 Still further, the overwhelming rise in literacy rates
coupled with the proliferation of lending libraries and the cabinet de lecture made for

According to Allen, [t]he book trade moved from a traditional artisanal craft to more
modern industry in consumer goods by the middle of the nineteenth century [...] Printers
adopted stereotyped plates and mechanical presses that permitted the mass production of
classical and popular titles well before 1850. Similarly, publishers attempted to stimulate
the market for books by publishing in less expensive formats and more attractive book
designs. And libraries learned to advertise effectively in newspapers and wall posters
(Popular, 103). Among other technological developments, Allen counts late eighteenthcentury inking techniques, stating that [a]lthough eighteenth-century modifications to
the hand press made traditional printing more efficient, they did not affect production as
radically as the mechanical press built first by William Nicolson, the inventor of the
rubber ink roller in 1790 (112). Allen elaborates on nineteenth-century technological
advances in his In the Public Eye when he explains that after 1800, new commercial
practices in publishing and new machinery in printing, including the rotary press and the
linotype machine, significantly expanded the availability of texts (8).
4
Others, as Parkhurst-Ferguson describes, [f]aced with the uncertainties of the market
and only the barest remnants of patronage [] looked elsewhere for support. They
turned to groups that seemed to promise a refuge from the market and its alien
conceptions of the literary enterprise (Literary, 65). These groups or cenacles were one
solution for early to mid-nineteenth century writers looking for support.
34

radical changes not only in how people wrote and read but in who the reading pubic was
as well.5 Radical changes also occurred in the actual forms of literature, with the
beginnings of littrature industrielle (a term used to refer to the rapid production and
commodification of literature against which contemporary critics such as Nettement and
Sainte-Beuve railed), the proliferation of literary journals and political newspapers, the
birth of advertising in periodicals and, of course, the serial novel.6 Progress, but also
fluctuation and upheaval can be said to characterize this particular historical moment

By 1848, Allen reports, [t]he Paris Chamber of Commerce study stated that 87 percent
of the ouvriers and 79 percent of the ouvrires were completely literate (Popular, 155),
concluding that the simple ability to read in early nineteenth-century Paris must have
been a widespread one, even if the ability to write was not (158). Describing the
frequenting of the lending libraries by the working class, Allen writes that lending
libraries constituted [...] the publics most accessible source of book [renting books] by
the month, by the year, by the sitting, by the volume, or by the day for nominal fees,
often as little as 10 centimes per title. This made access to books during the Restoration
cheaper than a kilo loaf of bread, well within the means of the Parisian day-laborer who
normally earned more than two francs a day (139).
6
Not only French critics were against serialized fiction. Speaking generally about
Western Europes industrial revolution in the introduction to her work Inventing High
and Low, Stephanie Sieburth explains [t]he new availability of serialized fiction was
assumed to lead to corruption, and the development of this kind of mass cultural product
was often seen as a metaphor for the development of an organized working class. Mass
culture therefore meant, in the eyes of the dominant class, a threat to social control (6).
35

when the lines between literature and press, between author and journalist, and between
clear and hybrid genres were continuously blurred.7
The relationship between press and literature was an especially blurred one, as
Marie-ve Threnty has described it in Presse et plumes: le journal renvoie
constamment la littrature qui se situe dans un trange rapport dintriorit/extriorit
par rapport la presse, la frontire ntant ni celle du support ni mme celle du genre
mais se situant dans un ailleurs mi-textuel mi-symbolique constamment redfini dans le
sicle (369).8 Nowhere was this trange rapport more evident than in the case of the
serial novel, le roman-feuilleton, which constituted one of the most radical changes in

Many authors, including Thophile Gautier and Jules Janin, straddled the line between
journalist and writer (poet, novelist, etc), as they published in and edited journals
prolifically in addition to their other work. Gautiers heavy involvement in the art for
arts sake movement is particularly fascinating to consider in light of his journalistic
work the juxtaposition between Gautier Parnassien and Gautier crivain journaliste as
Patrick Berthier characterizes him (Presse et Plumes, 443). Dean de la Motte also
explores the complex relationships in the 1830s of both aestheticism and utilitarianism
to the development of an inexpensive mass press (Making the News, 142). Describing
the state of the newspaper under the July Monarchy, de la Motte writes [The French
mass press] was also relentlessly innovative, using caricature, argot, advertisements, and
other attention-grabbing techniques that blurred the lines separating art, politics, and the
news (back cover). Not only was the general state of literature in chaotic, unstable form
under the July Monarchy, but certain subsections of the literary market here the press
were themselves in a state of unsettlement.
8
For Threnty, this rapport trange can only be viewed as a positive one. Or, rather,
we as critics can benefit greatly from understanding the literature of the time period in the
context of the press, as she explains in Mosaques, where she writes, la littrature du
XIXe sicle ne peut que gagner tre lue la lumire du priodique non seulement parce
que sans doute il a contribu la naissance de genres littraires (le roman-feuilleton
certes mais aussi le pome en prose, le roman policier et aussi sans doute limpossible
roman-mosaque voqu dans cet ouvrage dont La Comdie humaine reste lunique
mais combien important monument rescap pour la postrit) mais aussi parce que
limbrication constate entre les milieux journalistiques et littraires au XIXe sicle
explique les mutations esthtiques et sociologiques de la littrature (11).
36

nineteenth-century print culture from both a literary and marketing standpoint.9 The idea
of using the roman-feuilleton un roman publi par tranches dans le feuilleton des
quotidiens (9) as Lise Qufflec defines it to promote inexpensive newspapers was
introduced by mile Girardin in 1836, and the first novel to be published serially in
France was Balzacs La vieille fille.10 Though Balzacs text did serve to promote and sell
Girardins La Presse, the most popular and successful writer of the roman-feuilleton was
Eugne Sue, whose Mystres de Paris and Le Juif errant sold thousands of copies. Les
Mystres was so successful, in fact, that Le Juif errant, was purchased in advance of its
creation for the large sum of 100,000 francs. According to Adanowicz-Hariasz, [t]he
success of Les Mystres de Paris not only made Sue a dominant figure in the literary
market (1842), but also created a roman-feuilleton frenzy, as other newspapers and
authors tried to profit from his success [] [I]n the years 1842-47 the very existence of
many papers depended on the success of the serial novels they published, as readers no
longer based their decisions to subscribe on papers political affiliations, but on the kind
of fictional works offered (164). The advent of the serial novel sparked the

The roman-feuilleton was not without precedent. The editors of Making the News,
Jeannene M. Przyblyski and Dean de la Motte, are careful to explain that the serialized
novel evolved from the earlier feuilleton devoted to art and literary criticism, travel
narratives, society gossip, or social and political commentary (4).
10
Maria Adamowicz-Hariasz credits Girardins cheaper newspaper with transforming the
predominantly political character of the press and making the press more profit
oriented and accessible to a wider public (Making the Press, 160). She explains further
that the influence of the roman-feuilleton helped to create a new type of newspaper
based more on transmitting information and providing entertainment than on shaping or
discussing political opinions and that the rez-de-chausse, which was the bottom section
of the daily newspapers in which the roman-feuilleton was published, began the cultural
democratization of the French society from the bottom up (160).
37

transformation of the newspaper from a political publication to one that was more
accessible to a general public, and, in turn, the serial publication of the novel transformed
the shape of the novel itself.
Serial novels were readily consumed by a large public, generally but not
exclusively bourgeois, in Parisian newspapers, in cabinets de lecture and in provincial
newspapers that reproduced the copy from the Parisian papers. The authors of these texts
took into account their popular audience as they crafted the form of these narratives.
Writes Adanowicz-Hariasz, a successful roman-feuilleton made frequent use of clichs,
it privileged dialogue over description, and it delighted readers through swift action and
rapidly and unexpectedly changing events [] The fragmentary style of the romanfeuilleton reflected the novelty-oriented content and the look of the new press and further
strengthened their symbiotic connection (165). The roman changed shape and content
to conform to the interest of its readers and, by extension, the clients of the newspaper.
Put another way, the July Monarchy literary market dictated the form of the novel, its
readers participating in the intrigue almost as actively as the authors themselves.11
By no means, however, were praise and interest in the serial novel universal.
Labeling the roman-feuilleton littrature industrielle, literary critics (Sainte-Beuve, G.
Planche) argued against the style of the works too hastily written, lacking depth and
thought, clichd and against the lack of morals found in the content. The critics

11

In her article Une Histoire de limaginaire social par le livre en France au premier
XIXe sicle, Judith Lyon-Caen examines letters written to Sue by his readers, including
letters in which readers claimed to know the characters in his Mystres de Paris and
others where readers begged for certain outcomes in the plot.
38

concern for the values of the readers of the roman-feuilleton were similar to the concerns
of other contemporary journalists and politicians, namely Nettement, who saw these texts
as corrupting, perverse, and politically damaging. It is no wonder, then, when the
popular revolution broke out only twelve years after the first serial novel was published,
Quefflec tells us, that certains critiques conservateurs demandrent labolition du
roman-feuilleton (36). In many literary debates, a clear line was drawn between those
who condemned this popular literature and those who felt the expansion of the reading
public was a positive change. According to Quefflec, in La Querrelle du romanfeuilleton,
Certains [critiques] rejettent totalement ce public et sa littrature et, sen dmarquant,
dessinent donc [] une ligne de partage entre la foule et llite qui permet de
sauvegarder la fonction sacralisante de lactivit potique et lective de lactivit
critique. Mais dautres voient dans cet largissement du public un acquis de la
dmocratie et contestent la lgitimit des distinctions dans le public que les autres
tentant dinstaurer; le roman feuilleton [] est bien la littrature que convient notre
socit affaire, presse, ennuye, avide dmotions et de divertissements. (16)
Whether a popular threat to upper-class literature, culture and society or a symbol of
the increase of literacy rates and general widespread interest in culture to the poorer
citizens of France, the advent of the serialized novel unquestionably characterized the
upheaval the literary world experienced under the July Monarchy. The literary market,
which had previously been made up almost exclusively of an elite readership, witnessed
an unprecedented moment of change and disorder. Collective writing, the rising
popularity of the illustrated book, the developments in and tensions between the romantic
and realist movements, heightened critical discourses on high and low cultural
39

production, advances in the novel, and the advent of the serial novel converged with the
changes in Parisian geography and population, the literate public and print culture.12 It
was precisely during this moment of emerging literary genres and discourses that the
phenomenon of panoramic literature occurred.
2.2 Observing the City: Panoramic Literature
De Kocks La Grande Ville: Nouveau tableau de Paris of 1842 was one of many
nineteenth-century re-writings of Louis-Sbastien Merciers original Le Tableau de
Paris. Between 1781 and 1788, Mercier, prolific playwright, essayist and poet, wrote Le
Tableau de Paris, a text comprised of multiple short scenes of Parisian life, ranging in
subject from Latrines to Noblesse, from Trs haut et trs puissant seigneur to
Filles publiques. A revolutionary representation of Paris published eight years before
the French Revolution, Merciers Tableau, in addition to documenting the topography of
the city, combined theater, philosophy and literature into a new hybrid genre of guides to
Paris in its attempt, as Jeffry Kaplow has put it, to tout voir, tout dcrire, faire de tout la
matire de la littrature (10). By depicting sections and citizens of Paris that other
documenters of the city chose to ignore, Mercier was largely criticized for his subject
matter, but recognized later as having produced a democratic view of the majority of the
city of Paris. The author exiled himself after the publication of the first edition, but the
effects of his work were felt throughout the nineteenth century. Priscilla Parkhurst-

12

For two quite disparate readings of the importance and presence of Realism and
Romanticism during the July Monarchy, see James Smith Allens Popular French
Romanticism and Sandy Petreys In the Court of the Pear King.
40

Ferguson calls his work in Le Tableau de Paris a proclamation that points ahead to the
journalistic principles and the realist practice of the next century (Revolution, 52), and
Anthony Vidler has read Le Tableau as a model for poetic flneurs and a dramatic
restaging of the experience of the citizen in the city (237). Merciers work set the scene
not only for some of the major literary movements of the nineteenth century, but for the
massive body of work which attempted to capture the rapidly changing city and its
inhabitants produced throughout the nineteenth century as well.
De Kocks re-writing of Mercier was itself published during a particularly
revolutionary moment in social history, in addition to the period of great literary
development we studied in the previous section. Urban upheaval, caused by massive
migrations to Paris, multiple revolutions (1789, 1830) and political upheavals, as well as
technological advancements and new forms of transportation brought on by the industrial
revolution, drastically reshaped the way Parisians worked in, moved about and conceived
of their city.13 Due to these immense social changes in the city, Parisians, especially
bourgeois Parisians, sought orientation within this chaos and, according to Richard
Terdiman, endeavored to catalogue, master, and institutionalize the knowledge that
would enable them to move within a cultural system in which meaning was signified by
counters which were alien to their experience and their understanding (95). It was this

13

David Harvey in Paris, Capital of Modernity, writes of a boom in the population of

Paris from 785,866 in 1830 to 1,988,800 in 1876 (95). Similarly, Peter Brooks, in
Reading for the Plot, reminds us that [p]rostitution in Paris in fact took on new
dimensions with the large increase of population in the first half of the 19th century and
the creation of an impoverished urban proletariat (157).
41

desire for understandable social codes and mastery of these new social systems, argues
Terdiman, that generated not only the nineteenth-century roman dducation, but also
these curious subgenres providing orientation within this mysterious world of social
signs the Codes, Tableaux, Dictionnaires, Traits, Monographies, Physiologies and so
on which flourished in the 1820s and early 1830s(93).14 Throughout the July Monarchy,
and in particular during the years of 1840 to 1842, Parisians saw a frenzy of short
typological studies of new urban phenomena, including the prolific nouveaux tableaux de
Paris and the physiologies series, a movement which Naomi Schor would attribute to the
nineteenth centurys desire to to submit the entire social body to exhaustive scrutiny and
record (Cartes, 215) and which Walter Benjamin would later dub panoramic
literature.
From the Greek see all, the word panorama was already in circulation during
the flourishing of these urban texts because of a visual spectacle extremely popular in
Paris, London and throughout Europe toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning
of the nineteenth century. The painted panorama was a representation hung in a circular
fashion on the walls of a rotunda and illuminated from above, generally of a historical
scene or a landscape. It allowed viewers either a total immersion in history (33), as
Maurice Samuels has argued or absolute dominance (19) over a visual space, as

14

Terdimans dates are slightly inaccurate. The Codes certainly did flourish in the 1820s,
but the early 1830s saw only the publication of Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un and the
1833 Nouveau Tableau de Paris. As we shall see, the physiologies were published most
prolifically in the first two years of the 1840s, along with the multi-volume Les Franais
peints par eux-mmes and the two volumes of La Grande Ville.
42

Bernard Comment has written. This idea of absolute dominance over a visual landscape
is fitting when we think of the texts labeled panoramic literature as well. These works
claimed mastery over their urban subjects and promised to depict and decipher the city
for their public. In addition to being caused by urban upheaval, however, I believe these
texts, published concurrently with Auguste Comtes Cours de philosophie positiviste,
benefit from being read in the context of the scientific, observational approaches to the
study of society of the positivist scholar. Though their authors claimed no knowledge of
or reliance on the proto-sociological theories circulating at the moment of their great
popularity, the panoramic literary texts and their great commercial success testify to the
widespread interest in seeking a comprehensive theory of society like that which Comte
hoped to establish through his positivist method.
One series grouped under the heading of panoramic literature were the
physiologies short studies of urban social types that were very inexpensive to purchase,
made for quick and easy consumption, and resembled a sort of comical biological or
ethnographic study. La Maison Aubert, the publisher of satirical journals such as La
Caricature and Le Charivari, was the principle publisher of the physiologie series, which
included titles like Physiologie du flneur, Physiologie de la grisette, Physiologie du
tailleur, and so forth.15 In her 1957 essay Les Physiologies, Andre Lhritier explains
that the physiologies ton humoristique, plaisant, parfois satirique, convient ces textes

15

See James Cunos Charles Philipon, La Maison Aubert and the Business of Caricature
in Paris, 1829-1841, Jillian Taylor Lerners The French Profiled by Themselves: Social
Typologies, Advertising Posters, and the Illustration of Consumer Lifestyles, and
Richard Terdimans Discourse/Counter-Discourse.
43

lgers qui traitent la plupart du temps des travers et ridicules de certains types sociaux ou
des murs et coutumes de lpoque (9). Light, comical texts focused on specifically
contemporary types and mores, the physiologies were quite cheap, often priced at just one
franc, and sold by the thousands.16 Take, for example, La Physiologie de la femme
honnte of 1841, by Charles Marchal, whose format can be taken as representative of the
other texts in the series. Illustrated by Gavarni and Daumier, this physiologies chapters
break down the origins and traits of the femme honnte and include the following titles:
Quest-ce quune femme honnte?; Causes et Varits; Gnralit; Ridiculits et
affectations de certaines femmes; O lon prouve que la femme est amie de lhomme.
Marchal mimics a serious ethnographic endeavor as he sketches out the characteristics of
this Parisian type. Though comical in nature, these typological studies attempted to

16

Announcements of the publications in the Charivari tended to underscore their comic

nature. An announcement in the February 4th, 1842 issue of Le Charivari, for example,
disclosed the publication of La Physiologie du viveur, explaining, [c]e petit manuel de
lart de bien vivre est plein de joyeux prceptes, de piquants aphorismes, de spirituelles
saillies et dbouriffantes anecdotes. Le rire est chose si bonne et si douce, que plus de
3,000 exemplaires ont t vendus hier.
44

render the city readable to their reader, allowing them a chance at mastering their chaotic
urban space.17
In what is perhaps the most complete, critical article on the physiologies written to
date, Richard Sieburths Same Differences: The French Physiologies 1840-1842, the
critic sketches out the history of these pseudo-scientific portraits of social types (163)
of which one hundred twenty different editions were published between 1840 and 1842
alone. In his description of these urban ethnographies, Sieburths addition of the prefix
pseudo is significant, for he adds that [i]f the very title of the Physiologie evokes a
tradition of confident scientific materialism [...] the inventors of contemporary social
types found in these little books would seem rather to derive from the various tudes de
moeurs which were quite popular with the growing reading public of the late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century (164). It is certainly tempting to think that authors
of the physiologie series Charles Philipon and Louis Huart, among others were
inspired by late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century scientists publishing
widely on physiology and physiognomy, at least in the choice of the title for their series.
Whether or not these popular authors were actually familiar with the works of Pierre Jean

17

In his book The Spectacular Past, Maurice Samuels examines this notion of mastery,
not in the context of classifying social types, but in terms of history. By simulating total
historical vision, by making details of the past visible with an unimagined degree of
specificity, the new spectacles of history purported to reassure spectators that a difficult
past could be known and mastered (8). For Samuels, then, it is not only the present
which early July Monarchy writers strove to comprehend fully, to master, but the recent
Revolutionary past as well. Samuels himself makes this link in reverse when he
mentions the physiologies as one of Numerous representational practices [which]
posited the detection of visible signs as the key to knowledge in early nineteenth-century
France (8, n.23).
45

Georges Cabanis and Johann Lavatar, writes Lhritier, le mot physiologie navait plus
ce moment [...] aucune valeur smantique originelle (2). The authors of the
physiologies, in other words, were not engaged in rigorous physiological studies of
society. If Sieburth looks instead to the early-century tudes de moeurs as the inspiration
behind these texts, it is fitting, then, that Balzac, the bulk of whose Comdie humaine was
grouped under the category tudes de moeurs, should have contributed to the series of
physiologies.18 In fact, though Sieburth quotes Balzac, who calls the trend of the
physiologies lart de parler et dcrire incorrectement de nimporte quoi sous la forme
dun petit livre bleu ou jaune qui soutire vingt sous au passant sous prtexte de le faire
rire (163), Balzacs own 1841 Physiologie de lemploy was quite popular, and he is
even thought to have given rise to the movement with his 1829 work Physiologie du
mariage.
If the physiologies were the inexpensive examples of panoramic literature,
predominantly purchased by a petit-bourgeois audience, their pricier counterparts were
the tableaux de Paris, or, as Parkhurst-Ferguson has classified them, literary
guidebooks. From the 1831 Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un, authored by 101 different
writers, to the 1844 Franais peints par eux-mmes, to the numerous works called

18

Judith Wechsler, in A Human Comedy, her own work on the physiologies, looks to the
early nineteenth-century series Les Codes as another possible influence. According to
Wechsler, Les Codes were admonitory and humorous books of rules for eating, for
conversation, for love and marriage, and for the traveler. They were mostly published
between 1825 and 1830 (32). This literature of decorum, as Wechsler has dubbed the
Codes, functioned doubly as a guide to manners and the correct comportment in Paris as
well as a travel guide to the city for foreign visitors.
46

nouveaux tableaux de Paris, which openly cited Mercier in their titles, these works could
be purchased in installments or as elegantly-bound editions and were usually geared
toward a middle-class public. Victoria Thompson underscores the class difference
between those who purchased the physiologies and their larger counterparts, stating that
the physiologies, written primarily by middle-class authors, were designed for a middleclass audience. While those in its upper ranks bought the lavishly bound multi-authored
tableaux, the inexpensive physiologies had a broader middle-class audience (524). The
literary guidebooks were similar to the physiologies in their episodic depiction of
everyday urban phenomena (types, events, places, professions), yet their format less
frequently followed a pseudo-scientific model. The chapters in these works varied at
times as a result of their different author and sometimes took the form of a short story, a
dialogue, an essay or straight typological description as in the physiologies. The second
volume of La Grande Ville (1843), for example, a collaboration of literary heavyweights
such as Balzac and Alexandre Dumas pre, in addition to popular writers and journalists
such as Frdric Souli and Edouard Ourliac, contains a motley assortment of
descriptions of and anecdotes about Paris that blend Merciers vignettes with the popular
physiologie-style taxonomies and with realist fiction: from Balzacs long treatise on the
press an excerpt from his Histoire naturelle du Bimane en socit to Marc Fourniers
and Eugne Briffaults respective short-story-style contributions, Les Canotiers de la
seine and Une actrice de Socit: Chronique de lHtel Castellane. Affirming that the
panoramic text uses clearly differentiated genres to represent differing social species
(233), Margaret Cohen has termed this characteristic of panoramic literature
47

heterogenericity. The literary guidebooks, then, as opposed to the more formulaic

physiologies, were models of hybridity in their generic composition.
Because they attempted to represent contemporary Parisian phenomena, the
literary guidebooks and the physiologies were concerned with capturing Paris in its most
modern version. As Karlheinz Steirle underscores in his article Baudelaire and the
Theme of the Tableau de Paris (the first major piece to take up the specific concept of
the genre of the nineteenth-century nouveaux tableaux de Paris), these tableaux have a
common problem, that of modernity. Each tableau is conceived as out doing all
preceding tableaux by representing the most modern aspect of Paris (351). Each reimagining of Merciers original text, once published, became another potentially obsolete
and un-modern depiction of the city. Parkhurst-Ferguson echoes this idea of modernity
in the guidebooks, stating that because customs change almost weekly, as these works
often claim, literary guidebooks were outdated as soon as they are published. The only
answer possible is to put together another guidebook (69). Depictions of Paris found in
the literary guidebooks were ephemeral and only remained up-to-date for a moment,
before fading into the past a past which could really only be used in later guides to

48

underscore the current moment of modernity.19 Though there were still a few nouveaux
tableaux de Paris published under the Second Empire as well as large guidebooks to the
city which flourished especially around the times of the Universal Expositions, the
phenomenon of panoramic literature, like the individual guidebooks themselves, also
fizzled out quickly, and became obsolete toward the end of the July Monarchy.20
2.3 Panoramic Literature in its Critical Context
Until very recently, panoramic literature was a little-studied phenomenon among
literary critics. At the time of the publication of his article in 1980, in fact, Karlheinz
Stierle recognized his critical topic as a new one, remarking in this focused study of the

19

This notion of ephemerality is repeated in critical discussions of literature representing

Paris in the nineteenth century. Through an analysis of the literature of Zola,
Lautramont, Baudelaire and Flaubert, Christopher Prendergast concludes in Paris and
the Nineteenth Century that these works testify to an endlessly negotiable relation,
within a constantly shifting terrain, between the knowable and the unknowable, the
unknown and the as-yet-unknown, and he cautions the reader against the prospect of
construing the city as knowable (208-214). Similarly, in Paris, Capital of Modernity,
David Harvey, though he admires Balzac in particular for his attempts to map the city and
to expose the inner sanctums of bourgeois values, denies the possibility of an allencompassing representation of the modern city, for he believes that capital did not want
the city to have an image (57). In other words, for Harvey, Balzacs vision of a
totalizing representation of Paris was ultimately unattainable, and the author was well
aware that his social vision and his literature might fade out with the age to which it
belong[ed] (57). Both Harvey and Prendergast, therefore, support the notion that,
though nineteenth-century authors and artists attempted diligently to capture, interpret
and represent the capital of France through their work, the city proved unrepresentable
and potentially unknowable.
20
See Edmond Texiers 1852 Tableau de Paris, and Jules Valless 1882 and 1883
Tableau de Paris. See also the 1867 Paris-Guide, a two-volume, two-thousand-pageplus guide authored by an incredible list of nineteenth-century literary and intellectual
figures including Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Jules Michelet, Thophile
Gauthier, Edgar Quinet, Hippolyte Taine, Champfleury, George Sand, and Thodore de
Banville.
49

overlap between the literary guidebooks and Baudelaires Tableaux Parisiens that the
great histories of French literature of the nineteenth century do not treat [the genre of
tableaux de Paris] as a genre of its own; indeed, they do not even mention it (345).
Until the late 1990s, very few literary critics more than briefly mentioned panoramic
literature except in reference to other nineteenth-century cultural developments.21
Nevertheless, Parkhurst-Fergusons 1994 socio-literary study of the culture of
revolutionary Paris dedicates a lengthy section to the writings and re-writings of Mercier
throughout the century. For Parkhurst-Ferguson, the great number of guidebooks to
Paris that appeared in the new century testifies to the need for guidance, not simply
because of the altered topography but also, and more urgently, because of the radically
altered character [] of a city that had been shaken to its foundations by revolution
(55). She examines from a literary standpoint not only Merciers Le Tableau de Paris,
but Jules Janins introduction to the multi-volume work Les Franais peints par euxmmes and Victor Hugos introduction to the 1867 Paris-Guide. Likewise, using
panoramic literature to encapsulate the July Monarchy contribution to a number of
representational genres whose importance continues into the present, Margaret Cohen,
in her 1995 Panoramic Literature and Everyday Genres, studies the points of

21

Panoramic literature has been studied at much more length in the fields of history and
art historical criticism. See, especially, Clare Hancocks Paris et Londres au XIXe sicle:
Reprsentations dans les guides et rcits de voyage, Judith Weschlers A Human
Comedy, Jillian Taylor-Lerners The French Profiled by Themselves: Social Typologies,
Advertising Posters, and the Illustration of Consumer Lifestyles and A Devils-Eye
View of Paris: Gavarnis Portrait of the Editor, and Mary Glucks The Flneur and the
Aesthetic: Appropriation of Urban Culture in Mid-19th-Century Paris.
50

comparison between nineteenth-century everyday genres and the first cinematic shorts
(230, 228). With careful attention to the texts narrative mode and generic composition,
Cohens article provides perhaps the most comprehensive attempt at a literary
understanding of these works. Richard Terdiman also touches upon the tableaux briefly,
and the physiologies slightly more in detail, in Discourse/Counter-Discourse, writing that
these novel subgenres of the social text educated those not born to them to an
increasingly complex world of hierarchized objects and behaviors (94). But despite his
attention to the role these panoramic texts played in allowing individuals to achieve
mastery of an unprecedented crisis of socialization (93), his work focuses primarily on
the contemporary roman dducation and popular journalistic satire.
It is also the case that when panoramic literature has been evoked in literary
criticism, the analysis tends to focus on the physiologies as opposed to the larger literary
guidebooks. As we saw previously, Lhritiers 1957 essay, Les Physiologies, was a
comprehensive catalogue of the short texts, functioning as a sort of physiologie des
physiologies and providing scholars with invaluable archival information on these texts.
Sieburths 1984 Same Differences: The French Physiologies 1840-1842 takes
Lhrtiers earlier essay one step further by sketching out the origins of the physiologies
and the history of their immense popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, commenting as
well on the influence they had on the literature of the period and on the way Parisians
interpreted their city. Sieburth dissuades his readers from approaching the texts from a
literary standpoint calling attention to their numbing banality and quoting with
approval Benjamins assertion that they are a petit bourgeois genre virtually devoid of
51

genuine social insight (170, 186). Studies of both categories physiologies and literary
guidebooks have tended to treat them as encyclopedias of culture rather than cultural
productions themselves, mining the panoramic literature for information on whatever the
particular author happens to be studying omnibuses, railways, and so forth and not
analyzing the genre as a whole.22
Recent years have seen an increase in critical interest on the topic of panoramic
literature.23 Leading these critics has been Judith Lyon-Caen, whose multiple articles on
July Monarchy popular writing have displayed a particular sensitivity to the category of
genre itself as they explore the blurring of barriers between social, scientific and fictional
writing. She shows that under the July Monarchy, numerous connections existed
between panoramic literature, which she characterizes as a frnsie descriptive (308),
and their contemporary enqutes sociales, works on public hygiene and prostitution.24
For her, [l]ittrature panoramique et romans et enqutes sociales de la monarchie de

22

Even such a sensitive study of nineteenth-century urban culture as Sharon Marcuss

1999 Apartment Stories makes use of panoramic literature as a source for textual
examples of the depiction of apartment houses and the people, specifically women, who
inhabited them. Jeffrey Schnapp refers to de Kocks depiction of railways in La Grande
ville in his 1999 article Crash: Speed as Engine of Individuation. For just one of many
articles which rely on the physiologies for understanding of a cultural phenomenon, see
Masha Belenkys reference to the Physiologie de lomnibus in From Transit to the
Transitoire: The Omnibus and Modernity.
23
See, for example, Catherine Nescis 2007 Le Flneur et les flneuses. Les femmes et la
ville lpoque romantique, as well as Judith Lyon-Caens articles from 2002-2007.
There have also been a number of panels organized at recent Nineteenth-Century French
studies colloquium on the topic, for instance Types et Physiologies at the 35th annual
colloquium in 2009 held in Salt Lake City.
24
For example, Parent-Duchtelets La Prostitution Paris au XIXe sicle or HonorAntoine Frgiers Des Classes dangereuses de la population des grandes villes et des
moyens de les rendre meilleurs.
52

Juillet forment ainsi un voisinage textuel qui brouille les frontires de genres et de
registres (323). Like Cohen, who saw the connection between the panoramic literary
texts and the contemporary recognition of everyday life as a valid object of scientific
inquiry (228), Lyon-Caen focuses the proliferation of texts literary, scientific,
journalistic that together created what she calls the mise en texte du social
(Romancier, 5). And yet, despite their attention to scientific and social developments
during the period these texts were written, none of the critics contextualize panoramic
literature with reference to of the most important social thinker of the moment: Auguste
Comte.25
If this influential nineteenth-century thinker remains absent from criticism on
panoramic literature, a twentieth-century critic is most manifestly present. In fact, it is
nearly impossible to find a reference to panoramic literature without a mention of this
omnipresent figure. Walter Benjamin is unquestionably the most influential critic of
panoramic literature, having established the very category of panoramic literature in his
two landmark works Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century and Charles Baudelaire,

25

Only Cohen briefly names Comte (228) while describing the various scientific and
social developments of the historical moment, but a longer, more fleshed-out analysis of
positivist philosophy is not included in her study.
53

A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism.26 However, Benjamins own inattention to
the literary conventions contemporary to panoramic literature, and to the reception of
these texts, has led to critical confusion about the literary guidebooks for decades after
his death. Indeed, it is not least because of Benjamins dismissive reading of what he
called panoramic literature that the nineteenth-century literary guidebooks have been
largely discarded by contemporary critics as unworthy of literary analysis.
In a frequently-quoted passage from his essay Paris of the Second Empire of
Baudelaire, Benjamin famously describes what he calls panoramic literature,
including many of the literary guidebooks I have mentioned here and the the modestlooking, paperbound, pocket-size volumes called physiologies. He writes:
It was not by chance that the Livre des cent-et-un, Les Franais pents par eux-mmes,
Le Diable Paris, La Grande Ville enjoyed the favour of the capital city at the same
time as the dioramas. These books consist of individual sketches which, as it were,
reproduce the plastic foreground of those panoramas with their anecdotal form and the
extensive background of the panoramas with their store of information. Numerous
authors contributed to these volumes [...] They were the salon attire of a literature
which fundamentally was designed to be sold in the streets. In this literature, the

26

It is difficult to find recent criticism on nineteenth-century Paris that does not rely, at
least in part, on Walter Benjamin and his seminal works Charles Baudelaire, A Lyric
Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, The Arcades Project and Paris, Capital of the
Nineteenth Century. Numerous critics pay homage to the German philosopher even in
the titles of their studies of Paris see, for example, David Harveys Paris, Capital of
Modernity or Patrice Higonnets Paris, Capital of the World while other texts usually
let few pages of their arguments go by without mentioning this intellectual icon. Page
one of Parkhurst-Fergusons Paris as Revolution, for example, cites Walter Benjamins
brilliant characterization that Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century (1).
Judith Wechsler introduces her study, A Human Comedy, by indicating that Walter
Benjamin has been a model throughout. His Paris: Capital of the 19th Century and
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism are the most profound
and perceptive studies of the period [] One cannot enter his terrain without paying
homage (11).
54

modest-looking, paperbound, pocket-size volumes called physiologies had pride of

place. They investigated types that might be encountered by a person taking a look at
the marketplace [] It was the haute cole of the feuilleton; Baudelaires generation
went through it. The fact that it meant little to Baudelaire himself indicates the early
age at which he went his own way [] It was basically a petty-bourgeois genre.
Monnier, its master, was a philistine endowed with an uncommon capacity for selfobservation. Nowhere did these physiologies break through the most limited horizon
[] Innocuousness was of the essence. (Selected, 18)
Benjamin likens these texts to the visual panoramas, and the term panoramic literature is
coined here. Yet, as we can see, if Benjamin begins by evaluating all of the panoramic
literary texts the larger multi-authored collections such as La Grande Ville as well as
the physiologies he concludes by devaluing all of these subgenres based on the
physiologies: [i]nnocuousness was of the essence (18). In other words, if the critic
begins by stating that what he calls panoramic literature is pervasive in the midnineteenth-century literary market and continues by proclaiming the banality of the
physiologies, his concluding remarks seem to cast the same judgment on all panoramic
literature, as if it all participated in the same genre. For, as he makes it clear, the literary
guidebooks are nothing but the upscale version of the petit bourgeois physiologies, a sort
of collection of physiologies dressed up in salon attire. Benjamin does not indicate any
possible difference between the more standard series of physiologies and the multi-genre,
multi-authored literary guidebooks, and he uses this passage both to define and dismiss
all panoramic literature.
Yet this passage is problematic for several reasons, not the least of which is the
fact that it is steeped in rather ideologically-charged rhetoric. Most significantly,
Benjamins inattention to the actual reception and composition of these texts becomes
55

clear in this passage. As we have seen, the physiologies and literary guidebooks have
similar goals in their attempt to represent the city and its inhabitants, but there are
material and generic differences between the two, in addition to the difference in their
readers that Benjamin does mention. Benjamin neglects, however, to mention the literary
and cultural tradition following Mercier in which these texts participate. Even more
problematic in this essay from his study on Charles Baudelaire is Benjamins claim that
this literature had little impact meant little to Baudelaire. In fact, as Karlheinz
Steirle has shown convincingly, by using the title Tableaux Parisiens, Baudelaire was not
only openly citing the literary tradition of the Tableaux de Paris, but he could be sure
that the contemporary reader of his poetry would be familiar with this background, the
intertexual relation, established with the title of Tableaux Parisiens (345). In other
words, not only did Baudelaire revisit and reimagine themes already present in the
various nineteenth-century tableaux de Paris, such as that of the flneur and the passant,
but his theories of modernity explored in the Fleurs du mal and, in more detail, in Le
Peintre de la vie moderne can also be seen as stemming from the tradition of the tableaux
de Paris. According to Stierle: Baudelaires poetry of the city [] is not a spontaneous
and unmediated reflection of his own experience. This experience is mediated by a given
literary genre, that of the tableau de Paris, and this genre itself is reflected theoretically
in the context of a theory of modernity which provides an aesthetic justification for
passing from a genre of feuilletonistic subliterature to the level of poetry (353). Stierle
even goes as far as to say that [i]f Baudelaire, who holds poetry to the highest of
standards, places his most elaborate poetical work in the context of a genre determined by
56

actuality and thus by the transitory nature of a genre which has never produced any
outstanding work of literature, then Baudelaire must have found something extraordinary
about this genre which made up for its deficiencies (353). I quote these two passages to
underscore the significant lack of attention Benjamin pays to the literary guidebooks and
the important presence they maintained in the literary world of the July Monarchy.
Perhaps not all of panoramic literature had an impact on Baudelaires work and the work
of his contemporaries. By irrevocably fusing the literary guidebooks and the
physiologies and by dismissing the literary and social importance of both, however,
Benjamin ignores an important aspect of cultural history ironically, for this legendary
historian of culture. Benjamins own inattention to these contemporary literary
conventions and to the reception of these texts has led to critical confusion about the
literary guidebooks.
Following Benjamin, many of the critics who study panoramic literature often end
up conflating the literary guidebooks and the physiologies. For example, ParkhurstFerguson begins her description of panoramic literature by proclaiming their variety
[t]he pieces themselves run the gamut from the sketches of urban character types known
as physiologies [] to serious, and generally unimaginative, delineations of sometimes
picturesque institutions [...] to incidents. Like the city that they strove to represent, these
collections offer something from and for almost everyone (59). But she ultimately
concludes that these guides can all be reduced to a particular unity represented by their
table of contents, that these guidebooks are nothing but overgrown physiologie[s] and
that like the physiologies that reduced individuals to types, these multi-authored
57

collections reduced urban society to a string of character types (64). Christopher

Prendergast makes the distinction between the tableau and its cognate modes (in
particular the physiologie) but he also conflates the two as he describes their formal
limitations, the generic limitations of the form, the possibilities of which, on the whole,
made for little beyond a kind of journalistic notation (184).
Cohen, whose work does provide insight into the generic composition of the
literary guidebooks, nonetheless demonstrates confusion about the genre of panoramic
literature itself. Without mentioning their connection to the tradition of Mercier,27 Cohen
begins her discussion of panoramic literature with Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-uns, and
writes that with his multivolume collection, Ladvocat inaugurated an ephemeral July
Monarchy genre that Walter Benjamin has termed panoramic literature (Cohen, 229).
She lists Les Franais peints par eux-mmes, both volumes of La Grande ville, Le Diable
Paris and other multi-volumed texts. Cohen clarifies what she means by this July
Monarchy genre in a footnote, writing that the panoramic genre is a subgenre of a more
durable Parisian everyday genre, the tableaux de Paris, although a discussion of the

27

Cohen writes of Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un that it inaugurated the trend of
collections of descriptive sketches of contemporary Parisian life and habits (229). The
books editor, Ladvocat, does indeed gesture toward a new style of book in the preface
which Cohen quotes, in English, This was a new book if ever there was one; new in its
content, new in its form, new in its procedure of composition which makes it a kind of
encyclopedia of contemporary ideas, the monument of a young and brilliant period
(229). Nonetheless, Ladvocat cites a contemporary review of Paris, ou le livre des centet-un, which explains as one of the main reasons for the publication of this text that il
faut faire pour le Paris daujourdhui ce que Mercier a fait pour le Paris de son temps
(vi) clearly situating the text in the tradition of Mercier. Additionally, in the preface of
this book, entitled Asmode, Janin also calls the work le nouveau Diable boiteux,
(14) and in fact the work was initially to be entitled Le Diable boiteux Paris.
58

relation between later tableaux de Paris and panoramic literature is beyond the scope of
this article (250n12). Cohen seems, then, to view the tableaux de Paris as an
overarching rubric that contains the panoramic genre. This becomes confusing when
we take into consideration that she includes a text, La Grande Ville: Nouveau tableau de
Paris, which makes explicit reference to the tradition of the tableaux de Paris in her list
of panoramic literature, not to mention a host of other texts which are almost
universally considered to be in the tradition of Mercier (Les Franais peints par euxmmes, Le diable Paris, etc.). She continues the sketch of this confusing genre by
writing that if the panoramic texts were closely related to the inexpensive physiologies
mass-produced pamphlets providing description and commentary on contemporary social
types, institutions and mores these more expensive books were consumed in a different
social space (229), thus setting up a more traditional distinction between the two based
on their price and reading publics. The categories Cohen establishes panoramic texts,
tableaux and physiologies demonstrate a tangled definition of panoramic literature, one
that is disconnected, I will suggest, from its actual historical and literary tradition.28

28

Cohen also sets up another problematic binary in her article, claiming that in the
domain of July Monarchy genres of the everyday the realist novel is at the high end of
the spectrum while the mass press is at the everyday end of the spectrum of everyday
genres. Not only does this paradigm replicate what Stephanie Sieburth has analyzed as
the high/low opposition systemic in Western culture, but it ignores the obvious
crossovers between these two genres, namely, that many of the same authors were
producing both novels and journal articles Gautier was a frequent journal contributor
and Balzac ran his own press (La Presse Parisienne) and that many of the realist novels
(Balzacs La vieille fille of 1836 being the first) appeared serially in the daily papers.
59

(Nouveaux) Tableaux de Paris, literary guidebook, physiologie, tudes de moeurs,

urban ethnography, code, everyday genre, panoramic literature: as Cohens confusion
suggests, this hodgepodge of generic terms and labels is employed inconsistently
throughout twentieth and twenty-first century criticism to describe a series of texts on
Paris, mostly (but not exclusively) published under the July Monarchy, which, in the
tradition of Louis-Sbastien Mercier, take the city on, at street level, describing through
the medium of varied literary techniques contemporary social and professional life. I
have attempted to keep these various subgenres of panoramic literature distinct in this
study, but I am surely guilty of some inconsistencies myself. What I hope to have done
consistently, however, is to demonstrate that the critical tendency to put the literary
guidebooks together with the physiologies assumes that these works were viewed as one
unified genre when they were published. As we can see from reading Benjamin, the
literary guidebooks lose their literary credibility, as they are conflated with the
physiologies, which have been almost universally read as formulaic and superficial in
nature. Contemporary critics have followed Benjamins lead in their evaluation of this
corpus and seem resigned to the idea that because many of these texts do share common
themes depicting varied aspects of life in nineteenth-century Paris, the guidebooks are on
the whole indistinct from the physiologies. In fact, literary guidebooks were almost
universally classified separately from the physiologies upon their publication in the
nineteenth century in the official Bibliographie de la France, and when they were placed
in the same generic grouping, it was under a curious and blurry category, a phenomenon
that I shall explore in the next section of this chapter.
60

2.4 Classifying Panoramic Literature

In spite of the fact that critics conflate the literary guidebooks and the
physiologies, an examination of the Bibliographie de la France and other mid-century
literary bibliographies shows that at the moment of their publication and throughout the
nineteenth-century, readers viewed these texts as generically distinct. 29 Described as
the official record of modern French publishing (Parkhurst-Ferguson, Accounting,
205), and first published under Napoleon in 1811, Frances official bibliography is a
valuable source not only for consulting lists of dates, authors and titles, but also for
understanding how texts were understood and classified at various moments throughout
the past two centuries.30 In the Bibliographie de la France, works were indexed by title,

29

In La Bibliothque nationale de France: collections, services, publics, a 2001 study of

this publisher of Frances official bibliography, Jacqueline Melet-Sanson and Daniel
Renoult elaborate, explaining that [l]e dcret napolonien du 14 octobre 1811 crant un
journal dannonces de toutes les ditions douvrages imprims ou gravs est considr
comme fondateur de la bibliographie nationale courante officielle (111), after the
librarys dpt lgal was suspended during the years following the Revolution of 1789.
Though issues of the Bibliographie de la France were printed regularly from 1811 until
2000, when they became an Internet-only publication, their actual format was somewhat
irregular; according to Melet-Sanson and Renoult: [e]lle a plusieurs fois chang de
prsentation, de contenu et mme de nom (111).
30
To gauge the target audience of the Bibliographie de la France in the early to midnineteenth century, one need look no further than an 1832 advertisement in the
Bibliographie itself for a collection of issues of the Bibliographie from 1811 to 1828 (not
only popular journals were guilty of self-promotion!), which explains that [c]ette
prcieuse collection doit exciter spcialement lintrt de la jeune librairie, de MM. les
bibliothcaires et membres des academies de France. As in the case of Le Charivaris
review of La Grande Ville, we must approach this advertisement with trepidation
obviously the publishers of the Bibliographie aimed to sell as many copies as possible.
Nonetheless, in seeing the variety of professionals who could potentially make use of the
Bibliographie, we see its wide influence and in particular the influence that its official
classification of texts could have on all facets of the literary market.
61

author and genre, though there were occasional variations among the generic categories.31
More specifically, mid-nineteenth century editions of the Bibliographie de la France
contained, in addition to indexes of authors and titles, a section entitled Table
Systmatique, under which works were classified: first under a more general rubric
(Sciences et Arts, Thologie and Histoire, for example.), and then further under
more specific sub-categories (Finances, Liturgie and Histoire de France, for
example).
Despite their pseudo-scientific pretentions, both the physiologies and some of the
literary guidebooks were found indexed under the general rubric of Belles Lettres, a
category which predictably contained sub-genres like Romans et Contes, Potique et
Posie, and Thtre. Under the heading of Belles Lettres, a vaguer category entitled
Philologie, Critique, Mlanges existed: it was a category for texts that could not
necessarily be classified, but which still fell somehow under the rubric of the literary.
Between 1831 and 1848, the physiologies were one of the most prominently featured
texts in the category of Mlanges. With a few exceptions, physiologies ranging from
the infamous 1832 Physiologie de la Poire to the 1834 edition of Balzacs Physiologie du
Mariage found themselves labeled under this Mlanges category, along with more than

31

Between 1848 and 1852, for example, though most of the overarching rubrics that
comprised this section of the Bibliographie (Thologie, Jurisprudence, Sciences et
Arts, Belles-Lettres, etc) remained the same in 1848, a number of subcategory names
were changed. I thank Priscilla Parkhurst-Ferguson for suggesting that I return to the
Bibliographie de la France to investigate whether or not these generic categories
themselves stayed stable throughout the time period I am examining, which spans 1830 to
1852.
62

sixty of the physiologies published in 1841 and more than twenty of the physiologies
published in 1842 at the height of their popularity.32 The physiologies thus were reliably
read by the publishers of Frances official bibliography as belonging to no clear literary
category, yet nonetheless as literary: a mlange. It is, of course, an ironic turn that the
texts so obsessed with taxonomies of Parisian society could not themselves be clearly
catalogued.
The literary guidebooks, however, were spread out and bounced back and forth
among various generic categories. Though the Livre des cent-et-un was, like the
physiologies, classified as Philologie, Critique, Mlanges from 1831 to 1833 and again
in 1835, it catalogued under Encyclopdie, Philosophie, Logique, Metaphysique,
Morale in 1834, a category that did not even fall under the over-arching rubric of
Belles Lettres, but rather Sciences et Arts. Les Franais peints par eux-mmes was
also classified as Encyclopdie, Philosophie, Logique, Metaphysique, Morale in both
1840 and 1842, and while, in the tradition of the re-writings of Mercier, various 1833 and
1834 editions of nouveaux tableau de Paris were labeled under the Encyclopdie
category, their 1835 successor merited the label of Mlanges. Curiously, de Kocks
volume of La Grande Ville and the second volume written in 1843 by Balzac, Dumas
pre, Frdric Souli and others were placed in a third category: Romans et contes.
That a book which not only purported to document everyday life in Paris and to place

32

Occasionally, a Physiologie would be placed under the topic it explored. For example,
the 1840 Physiologie du Thtre was classified under Thtre, while another 1840
publication, Physiologie du chant, was categorized as Beaux Arts.
63

itself in a literary tradition which was decidedly non-fiction, but whose editor openly
stated in its prospectus that it was not a novel, that this book should be officially
categorized as romans et contes raises significant questions about the way in which
these guides were read at their publication. These disparate categorizations indicate a
distinction in most cases made by the publishers of the Bibliographie between the
physiologie series and the literary guidebooks. Though the literary guidebooks were not
all universally classified under the same rubric, and at times (albeit infrequently) were
labeled as Mlanges, it is clear that they were not overwhelmingly read as generically
identical to the physiologies, or as being anything but overgrown physiologies for that
matter. This discovery is particularly interesting. In her article Saisir, dcrire,
dchiffrer, Lyon-Caen contends that all panoramic literature is classified under Belles
Lettres in the Bibliographie: la Bibliographie de la France [...] range bien la littrature
panoramique et les romans dans la section Belles Lettres (323). She might have done
well to take a closer look at the Bibliographie in her analysis of the overlap between
panoramic literature and the enqutes sociales (which she finds under Sciences et
Arts). The actual classification of panoramic literature (at times in Belles Lettres, at
times in Sciences et Arts) would have done more to strengthen her argument about the
blurring of boundaries between social, literary and panoramic texts. Instead she opts for
more rigid categories.
These were Frances official generic indexings of the panoramic texts, but other
contemporaneous bibliographies and publications often replicated these same categories
when classifying the July Monarchy works. Mainstream publications such as the journal
64

Revue Critique des Livres Nouveaux tended, for example, to place the physiologies they
reviewed under a section entitled Mlanges in their table of contents. Works like the
1841 Physiologie de lAmour and Physiologie du parapluie (this second text written,
amusingly, by deux cochers de fiacre) were grouped under Mlanges in the table of
contents. Their 1840 predecessors, Physiologie du Thtre and Physiologie du Chant,
were reviewed under the categories Posie, Art Dramatique and Arts Industriels,
Beaux-Arts, respectively. The Revues headings reproduce the Bibliographie de la
Frances method of generally defining the physiologies as literary, but occasionally
grouping them under the subjects they studied.
Pierre Larousses Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Sicle (published
between the late 1860s and 1870s) also includes a lengthy Bibliographie gnrale in its
sixty-two-page entry on Paris (history, geography, culture, and so on) which replicates
some of these generic categorizations.33 This particular bibliography, in which the author
aims to detail la srie douvrages de toutes sortes qui traitent de Paris ses divers points
de vue (279), is split up into several categories, including Descriptions topographiques,
guides, plans, estampes, Moeurs et coutumes, and Romans, among several others.
We would expect to find the majority of the literary guidebooks listed under Moeurs et
coutumes, which Larousse defines as [o] lon trouvera la liste de tous les ouvrages
srieux ou plaisants qui ont rapport la physionomie de Paris et la physiologie de ses

33

Larousses Grand Dictionnaire was praised in 1875 in the following way : Cration
capitale; la plus grande entreprise de littrature et de librairie de ce sicle, et
probablement la publication la plus tendue, la plus monumentale quon at jamais
tente (Pierre Larousse, 5).
65

habitants (279). This is indeed the case. Works from Merciers Le Tableau de Paris to
the subsequent Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris (1833, 1855) to de Kocks La Grande Ville
and Paris au Kalidoscope to Le diable Paris are all found grouped under this category,
as well as a small sampling of physiologies.34 Paris ou le Livre des cent-et-un, however,
is listed here under Romans, much as de Kocks literary guidebook was in the
Bibliographie de la France. This work, whose editor labeled it as ce drame cent actes
divers and une encyclopdie des ides contemporaines [...] lalbum dune littrature
ingnieuse et puissante (Janin, v-ix) and which was repeatedly categorized as
Mlanges in the Bibliographie de la France, was situated, in other words, in a group
with Hugos Les Miserables, Flauberts Lducation sentimentale, Zolas La Cure and a
number of Balzacs urban novels. Like de Kocks La Grande Ville, a book which also
called attention to its non-novel status but which is nonetheless officially indexed as one
in the Bibliographie, Janins heterogeneric work was read as a novel by Larousse.
These categorizations lead us to conclude that the hybrid form of the literary guidebooks
transcended contemporary generic conventions, and in so doing, fully embodied the
moment of flux in literary history in which they were published.
Another large bibliography on Parisian literature, Paul Lacombes 1887
Bibliographie Parisienne, establishes a distinction among the literary guidebooks and the
physiologies. As part of a larger multi-volume project documenting all the literature of

34

Perhaps due to the fact that this bibliography was situated under the dictionary heading
of Paris, only the physiologies with the word Paris in their titles appear in this list:
Physiologie du provincial Paris (1841); Physiologie du Parisien en Province (1841);
Physiologie des rues de Paris (1842).
66

Paris, Lacombe catalogues the Parisian tableaux de moeurs throughout history and
incorporates a comprehensive list of many of the texts we have studied up until this point,
including Merciers Le Tableau de Paris: La Grande Ville; Les Franais peints par euxmmes; and Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un. The physiologies, too, are included in this
bibliography of the tableaux de moeurs, yet the author seems to hold them apart from the
other texts he includes in his register, interrupting this chronological list for eleven pages
to deal with the category of the physiologies: En 1840, plusieurs diteurs parisiens ont
commenc publier sous le titre de Physiologie des ouvrages dun format tout spcial et
dun genre assez original [] La liste que jai dresse se compose denviron cent trente
de ces Physiologies en y comprenant, titre exceptionnel, quatre ou cinq ouvrages qui,
malgr un titre diffrent, rentrent, par leur caractre, dans cette collection (Lacombe,
122). Once again, this introduction to the physiologies demonstrates not only their notquite-categorizable category genre assez original but also their status as clearly
divergent from the tableaux de moeurs. This eleven-page interruption in an otherwise
perfectly chronological register echoes the earlier classifications of the Bibliographie de
la France, systematically placing the physiologies in a category distinct from the literary
guidebook, even within a domain as narrow as the Parisian tableaux de moeurs.
Still other bibliographies included the literary guidebooks among their lists of
works, but demonstrate difficulty in knowing how to categorize them. Frdric
Lachvres Bibliographie Sommaire des Keepsakes et autres recueils collectives de la
priode romantique, 1823-1848, for example, includes among its titles the various
literary guidebooks, but not the physiologies we have examined here. A keepsake, which
67

retains its English definition in French, is characterized in its nineteenth-century context

by Lachvre in the following way: Le mot anglais keepsake [...] sapplique dune faon
spciale ces livres albums, o de fines gravures sur acier illustrent tantt des morceaux
prose ou posie de tons et dauteurs varis, tantt des descriptions topographiques
entremls danecdotes et qui furent si la mode, comme cadeaux de Nol et le jour de
lAn entre 1822 et 1850 [...] Ctait vraiment des publications de grand luxe (xii-xiv).
Though this definition could feasibly apply to the various literary guidebooks we have
seen, Lachvre situates our guidebooks after the first section of his book dedicated solely
to keepsakes (Description des Keepsakes ou mlanges de littrature contemporaine et
publications similaires classs dans lordre chronologique de leur publication) in a
second section entitled Recueils de Nouvelles et douvrages collectifs se rapportant
Paris, aux Parisiens, la Province. 35 Among those included in this section are the
following usual suspects: Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un; Le Diable Paris; Nouveau
tableau de Paris; La Grande Ville; Les Franais peints par eux-mmes ; Autrefois ou le
bon vieux temps. Types franais du XVIIIe sicle (1842); and Scnes de la vie prive et
publique des animaux. For Lachvre, the literary guidebooks on Paris do not fully fit into
the keepsake genre, despite their collective authorship structure, their illustrations, and
their anecdotal nature. The literary guidebooks seem to trouble Lachvre, since he is not

35

This definition is echoed in the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe sicle:

Keepsake: Album, recueil de pices de vers, de fragments de prose, entremls de
dessins et de gravures. (1175)
68

comfortable merely situating them within the category of the keepsake, and yet he is
unable to write his comprehensive bibliography without mentioning of them.
In the spirit of the nineteenth century, whose interest in recording and dissecting
society Naomi Schor has characterized as the obsessive desire to expose and inventory
the real (215), we have, in this study, appropriately scrutinized bibliographies,
catalogues and records from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to
comprehend better the way in which literary guidebooks were read and understood in
their own contemporary moment. In our own attempt to establish a taxonomy of these
works, themselves so focused on categorizing nineteenth-century culture, it has become
clear that nineteenth-century readers were unable to classify these documents in a
uniform way, marking them as hybrid (mlanges), setting them apart from other more
clearly established categories, or widely and inconstantly labeling them across generic
categories (sciences, belles lettres) and sub-categories (tableau de moeurs,
roman). While the Bibliographie de la France is surely the most influential of these
archives given its official status and great prominence in the nineteenth-century literary
market, these other documents serve to stress the authorized bibliographys fluctuating,
varied classification of the literary guidebooks and its recurrent generic distinction
between the guidebooks and the physiologies.
It is, of course, problematic to rest an argument fully on the concept genre, as if
this were itself a stable, immutable property. Theorists including Hayden White and

69

Jacques Derrida have demonstrated the complexity of the notion of genre.36 Derrida
argues, in fact, in The Law of Genre that though a basic law of genre exists, there
also exists a second property or law (the law of the law of genre), a principle of
contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy [whereby] the trait that marks
membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination,
an internal pocket larger than the whole (59).37 Put more simply by Derrida, a text
would not belong to any genre. Every text participates in one of several genres, there is
no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never
amounts to belonging (65). For this French philosopher, by virtue of marking itself as
belonging to a genre, a text invariably puts itself at odds with that genre and can no
longer be said to fit into that category. Any text that announces its belonging to a genre
does not actually belong to it. An interesting example of this law of the law from the
texts we have looked at here is the category mlanges so commonly employed in both
the Bibliographie de la France and in other contemporary literary journals. In order to
participate in this genre, the text must be a hybrid. In Derridas argument, the pretext
played out in a text is that in order to be in a genre, a text must be pure and not

36

White has studied in numerous books and articles the blurring of genre, the mixing of
fact and fiction, literature and history, pointing out, for example, that there has been a
reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal
fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which
have more in common with their counterparts in literature that they have with those in
sciences (82).
37
Derrida describes this initial law of genre in the following way: as soon as a genre
announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one
must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity [...] genres should not intermix (57).
70

intermixed. The hybrid text stages a more complex way of approaching the notion of
genre, one that might even be capable of disorganizing Derridas perspective. In any
case, my analysis of these different generic nineteenth-century categories as they play out
in the listings I have consulted is essential for comprehending the literary guidebook, its
role in July Monarchy literary history and, more generally, the way the literary market
copes with drastic change, but we must always keep in mind the that the notion of
genre itself is unstable. We might push one step further to say that, though White and
Derrida explore the inconsistency in genre in their twentieth-century philosophical works,
the hybrid texts we have examined in this study themselves betray the instability of
literary categories, the vagueness of all literary boundaries, and, ultimately, the
precarious and fluid nature of genre.
2.5 De Kocks Social Studies of Paris.
In order to flesh out the more general claims I have made about my method of
reading the literary guidebooks in their social and literary context and my claims for the
hybridity of this genre, I want to focus on a particular example of this movement: de
Kocks La Grande ville. My reasons for choosing this 1842 re-writing of Mercier as
representative of these literary guidebooks to Paris are threefold. First and foremost, in
spite of the fact that this text is always evoked in studies about panoramic literature, it is
also always cast aside in favor of the two literary guidebooks edited by Jules Janin: Les

71

Franais peints par eux-mmes or Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un.38 This may be
because Janins name carries more weight among literary critics Paul de Kock did not
typically receive favorable treatment and despite the fact that he was one of the
nineteenth centurys most prolific and well-paid authors, he can usually be found as the
butt of many jokes about low-brow literature, a phenomenon we will study more closely
in our third chapter. In addition, these two texts were multi-authored works, and, finally,
Janins Paris was published ten years before La Grande Ville and thus seem to have
chronological precedence.39 Nonetheless, to my knowledge, no study of the first volume
of La Grande Ville as a work exists, nor a more general study of panoramic literature
which does anything more than make mention of the title or the preface, nor any study on
nineteenth-century literature or culture which makes more than a quick reference to the
presence in La Grande Ville of whatever topic or theme the particular critic happens to be

38

See, for example, Parkhurst-Fergusons second chapter in Paris as Revolution, LyonCaens Saisir, dcrire, dchiffrer, and Stierles Baudelaire and the Tradition of the
Tableau de Paris.
39
Margaret Cohen in her article Panoramic Literature and the Invention of Everyday
Genres notes, for example, that [t]he editors of the panoramic texts related the
panoramic genres multiple authors [...] to its panoptic aims [] postrevolutionary social
reality [had] grown too complex to be encompassed by a single individual (232).
72

studying.40 Despite the fact that de Kocks re-writing of Mercier is listed in Paul
Lacombes 1887 Bibliographie Parisienne as an ouvrage [qui] mrite dtre recherch,
autant cause de son texte qu cause de ses illustrations (137), critics have, on the
whole, left La Grande Ville out of their research. I believe that Paul de Kock is, as much
as Janin and others, a figure at the very center of the literary guidebook, having not only
authored La Grande Ville in 1842, but chapters in the Nouveau tableau de Paris au XIXe
sicle (1834) and Paris-Guide (1867) and works on the margins of this genre, such as the
1837 Moeurs Parisiennes. In order to come to an understanding of the place of this genre
in literary history, it is essential to examine de Kocks work more analytically. Finally,
this particular literary guidebook was reissued on many occasions and was classified
under different generic categories upon its publication. Its fluctuating status within the
literary market coupled with its well-known author and the lack of critical attention paid
to it make La Grande Ville a prime subject for anyone trying to understand the role of the
literary guidebook in the nineteenth century. In addition, studying La Grande ville
should elicit a reevaluation of de Kock not merely as a prolific hack, but rather as an
author whose oeuvre fully embodies a fluctuating moment of literary history.

40

See Sharon Marcus p. 215n57 for a mention of de Kocks preface in which he invites
the reader to come along with him on his journey through Paris: Promenons-nous au
hasard. See Philippe Perrots reference to fashion in the chapter entitled Le dimanche
Paris in his Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth
Century, Jeffrey Schnapps reference to de Kocks depiction of railways in his article
Crash: Speed as Engine of Individuation, Robert D. Tamilias reference to department
stores in the chapter Magasins de nouveauts in his article The Wonderful World of
the Department Store in Historical Perspective, or Anne Martin-Fugiers reference in her
1978 article La fin des nourices to de Kocks chapter on wet nurses, Le bureau de
nourices.
73

In the August 30th, 1842, issue of Le Charivari, the journals usual daily
lithograph was replaced with images excerpted from de Kocks new work, and a note on
the preceding page explained that Le Tableau de la grande ville, dont les vignettes
remplacent aujourdhui notre lithographie, est un amusant et fidle panorama de Paris. Il
parle la fois aux yeux et lesprit: aux yeux, par des dessins dus au crayon de nos
plus spirituels artistes; lesprit par un rcit vif, piquant, anim, tel quon devait
lattendre de la plume de M. Paul de Kock (Le Charivari, 30 aot, 1842, 4). That the
daily lithograph should be replaced with an advertisement for a new publication was
certainly not unheard of in Le Charivari, whose editor Charles Philipon had close
financial and familial ties with La Maison Aubert, meaning he generated publicity and
praise for the works they published, as critics such as James Cuno, Jillian Taylor Lerner
and Richard Terdiman remind us. What is surprising about this short summary of La
Grande Ville is that Paul de Kock, whose reviews in journals such as Le Charivari and
elsewhere tended to range from the mocking to the extremely harsh, seemed finally to
have gotten a good review.41 De Kock, an exceptionally prolific novelist and playwright,
was usually criticized for his repetitive, anecdotal, yet prolix style. As we will see later,
critics echoed one another in decrying ce style hach in its novelistic form, but at the
same time seemed to accept and even praise it, if elliptically, in his shorter and more
fragmentary works. As an 1837 reviewer of Moeurs Parisiennes wrote: Ce serait l, je

41

Two examples of these unfavorable reviews include the following: Nous regrettons
que le roman de M. Paul de Kock soit un des plus amusants quil ait bcls; ce succs va
faire tort aux autres romanciers (Le Charivari, 8 avril, 1840); Jamais imagination de
romancier ne fut moins fconde que la sienne (Revue Critique des livres nouveaux, 295).
74

crois, le vritable caractre de son talent, qui excelle peindre certaines scnes
grotesques de la vie commune (295).42 In the anecdotal, fragmentary tableaux of La
Grande Ville, published five years after many of these reviews, de Kocks style hach
finally receives positive descriptions: vif, anim, piquant. This critical praise was
likely in part due to promotional purposes, resulting in a profit for Le Charivari, a
phenomenon Terdiman explores in Discourse/Counter-Discourse.43 Nonetheless, this
positive (albeit tactical) reception, coupled with the insistence in each of the
aforementioned negative reviews on the fact that the author should stick to shorter, more
anecdotal writing, leads de Kocks public to believe that in La Grande Ville the author
had found an ideal genre for his particular narrative style.
De Kocks preface contextualizes the succeeding fifty-two chapters of La Grande
Ville in relation to other works on the city, explaining that though many of his
predecessors have attempted to make Paris known to their readers, his effort is different.
Though he aims to produce a more modern depiction than Mercier, De Kocks narrator,

42

Another 1837 review of his Un homme marier noted that had de Kock chosen to
reduce his entire novel to five or six pages, it would have resulted in an episode [qui]
aurait pu tre fort plaisant (79). Finally, in an 1843 essay on de Kock in the Bostonbased North American Review, editor Francis Bowen remarked upon the authors
slender vein of invention, but commented that even when producing a faithful copy of
what was before his eyes, de Kock was most successful, when not obliged to string
together the sense into a connected story, but when each subject stands by itself, and
single incidents and characters are not worked up into an elaborate narrative (229).
43
In light of Richard Terdimans analysis of each section of the daily paper under the
July Monarchy, this favorable mention of de Kocks work could likely fall under
editorial publicity, a recommendation which completely disguised its status as
advertisement (124). According to Terdiman, editors such as Villemessant, the editor of
Le Figaro, were not satisfied with an issue unless every single line within it had been
bought and paid for in some way (125).
75

like that of Le Tableau de Paris, will use walking and observing as means of
documenting nineteenth-century Paris, and he playfully invites the reader to accompany
him through the streets of Paris exclaiming Promenons-nous au hasard (6). Assuming
the role of flneur, the narrator will not set up a preplanned itinerary around the city but
rather will report on whatever he stumbles upon: a store where one can rent a bath tub,
the ubiquitous galette stands, the sidewalks themselves. Finally, the narrator uses a
lighthearted tone but takes seriously a number of crucial themes surfacing in literary
discourses of the period, ranging from the popularity and difficulty of depicting Paris in a
literary work, the concept of realism, the status of the author within the literary text and
the relationship between history and modernity.44 Through this light yet richly
intertextual preface, de Kocks narrator sets up La Grande Ville as a consciously literary
work, acutely aware of its position within a specific literary tradition, and though the
subtitle of this work offers comique as the first adjective in describing the subsequent
tableaux of La Grande Ville, the preface establishes its status as a critique as well.
La Grande Ville, a mixture of text and image, proves to be a mixture of genres in
its structure and content, as its prospectus suggests: Ce nest point un roman, ce ne sont

44

On the topic of Parisian literature, de Kock writes: On a fait beaucoup douvrages sur
Paris; sans doute on en fera beaucoup encore! (de Kock, Grande, 1). He goes on to
explain that [s]ans doute aussi, tout en cherchant dpeindre la grande ville et ce quelle
renferme de curieux, damusant ou de remarquable, nous oublierons bien encore quelque
chose (2). On the concept of realism, he explains that [n]ous dcrirons ce que nous
avons vu, cest le meilleur moyen dtre vrai (2). On the presence of the author in
narrative, the author writes, Le dfaut de la plupart des auteurs, cest de parler deux,
quand il ne faut que dcrire ou relater des faits, cest de venir toujours se poser entre le
lecteur et le sujet quon traite (3).
76

pas non plus de simples tableaux: cest une immense comdie cent actes divers (de
Kock, Grande, 1). The work is made up of fifty-two chapters, a journey through the
streets of Paris through the lens of an observant guide, depicting a blend of commercial,
domestic, social and recreational spaces (indoor, outdoor and in-between). Furthermore,
the form of each of the narrators observations changes shape as often as the Parisian
sites the narrator reports on, a phenomenon that Cohen has called heterogeneriticy.45
The chapter Les Rvrbres, for example, is a concise historical description of lanterns
in Paris, from oil lamps to the becs de gaz. La Galette, is journalistic in tone and reports
on the newest craze in Paris, the galette: where one can find a good galette stand,
examples of fortunes earned by opening a galette stand, and how the galette is on par
with, if not superior to, other modern inventions such as the steam boat, the free press and
the moustache. Les Bains domicile recounts the short story of a young grisette who,
furious over her eviction, takes revenge on her landlord by ordering six baths to his home
at once. Les faux-toupets, in place of describing the advent of the toupee, presents a
dialogue between two women coutez plutt la conversation de deux jolies dames
(61) who critique a well-known society man for tricking them into admiring his false
locks. Une soire dans la petite proprit is told as a moral lesson, a fable in the style of
La Fontaine (whom the narrator quotes at the beginning of the piece), on how all people,

45

Cohen explains that this hybrid form is typical of the overarching genre she terms
panoramic literature: That these authors write in a variety of genres is also an
important characteristic of panoramic texts (232). For Cohen, this heterogenericity
coincides with these multi-authored texts panoptic aims: the panoramic text uses
clearly differentiated genres to represent differing social species (233).
77

desirous of what those in higher classes have, attempt to imitate them at all costs. De
Kocks guide to mid-century Parisian social life, therefore, is a compilation of genres and
discourses, from the theatrical scene to the short story, to the historical and journalistic
narrative, to the fable, all grouped together under the form of a comedy, as the editor
remarks in the preface, but also, as we see in the introduction, this is a sort of travel
narrative throughout the city of Paris and an tude de moeurs.
In addition to the multiple literary genres that form this hybrid work, close textual
readings of de Kocks social urban guide further reveal the authors literary approach to
his subject, and, in particular, the relationship the narrator establishes with his
interlocutor throughout this work. De Kocks debt to Mercier is obvious throughout his
preface; yet he faults Mercier, with other writers, for including themselves in their prose.
De Kock explains, il ne faut que dcrire ou relater des faits; [le dfaut des auteurs] cest
de venir toujours se poser entre le lecteur et le sujet quon traite, comme pour lui dire: A
propos, noubliez pas que cest moi qui cris cela (3). To distinguish himself, de Kock
almost fully absents himself from the text after the introduction, remarking wittily,
quest-ce que tout cela fait au lecteur, qui sinquite fort peu de savoir comment vous est
venue lide de faire tel ou tel ouvrage, mais qui veut seulement que cet ouvrage lamuse,
linstruise ou lintresse? (4). While the je of the introduction is certainly absent from
the fifty-two chapter-length vignettes that comprise La Grande Ville, the pronoun vous
seems to be the focal point of the guide. Throughout this text, the narrator has created an
extraordinarily varied interlocutor, using vous in a complex and inconsistent manner,
and even writing the fictitious interlocutor into each of his descriptions of Paris. In the
78

first vignette, Bureau des nourrices, vous is an observer of the scene, someone, we
are told, whose wife has just had a baby and who is unaware of how to procure a wet
nurse. Through the various interactions carried out in front of vous, the reader is left to
believe this pronoun refers to a bourgeois French male. This interlocutor varies, however,
in gender, class and nationality. In the case of the vignette titled Le Daguerrotype, for
example, the vous evoked by the narrator who climbs to the second floor of an
immeuble to have his or her portrait taken is of ambiguous nationality, a fact evident
when the narrator states from the beginning of this chapter: les Parisiens ne sont pas les
seuls se faire daguerreotyper: les trangers qui sont venus visiter Paris ne veulent pas en
partir sans avoir essay de cette invention (de Kock, 193). Here, the vous may be a
Frenchman from the country, a Parisian, or even a visitor from outside the Hexagon. In
the chapter Les Bains Domicile, the vous begins as an impersonal pronoun, yet is
quickly referred to as Madame, changing gender from the previous vignette. The
gendered vous returns in the episode Le Vent when the narrator calls out to women
in danger of having their skirts blown by the wind.
Throughout the vignettes, colloquialisms and cultural facts are explained to the
interlocutor as if some will comprehend certain aspects of Parisian life and others will
not. In fact, the narrator calls out explicitly to readers of different classes. For example,
in Chantier de Bois Bruler, he declares, [v]ous qui vous chauffez agrablement les
pieds devant un bon feu [...] bon bourgeois, commis, hommes daffairs, employers
rentiers, vous tous qui sans avoir une assez grande fortune pour charger votre intendant
ou vous domestiques des dtails intrieurs de votre maison, and later, in La Galette,
79

Vous qui, pour vous enrichir, croyez quil est ncessaire daventurer de nombreux
capitaux.46 De Kocks vous thus seems to encompass all Parisian citizens and to invite
each one to come to his own understanding of this nuanced city.
De Kocks almost-frantic, ever-shifting interlocutor passing among genders,
professions, classes and even nationalities makes sense from a narrative standpoint
when one considers the context of its eighteenth-century predecessor. As ParkhurstFerguson points out, Merciers text was radical for its democratic view of the majority of
the city of Paris: [t]he consequent jumble of the text faithfully reproduces the disarray of
the city. Both in Merciers aggressively egalitarian view repudiate the hierarchy and
chronology that implicitly or explicitly order the conventional guidebook (53). If
Merciers guide is radical for reproducing the chaotic nature of the city with his short
tableaux and for almost anticipating the Revolution with his writings on the poor
Parisians as well as the rich, de Kocks guide moves the egalitarian depiction to another
level. One could argue, in fact, that within the humorous, meandering narrative on
different parts of Paris, a more complex politics of class, equality and inclusion are
concurrently being played out. Whether a conscious choice on the part of the author or an
implicit, utopian element of the text, this shifting narrative (written six years before 1848)
encompassing such a range of Parisians, certainly underscores a desire for equality and
itself embodies the shifting, fluid character of the moment in which it was written. This

46

Here the narrator goes on to explain the advent of the galette to the uninformed reader,
labeling the reader as naive, and assuming that it will be the role of the narrator to set
him/her straight. The reader is thus cast in the position of the out-dated, one ignorant of
vogues and trends who will be updated by this modern narrator.
80

nuanced use of pronouns throughout the urban observations also highlights the decidedly
literary patterns and tropes found at the heart of this social study.
Once this social study was published in 1842 its form continued to shift. Not
only did the author pull out, rework and republish chapters of La Grande Ville for
instance a longer, theatrical version of the second chapter, Les Bains Domicile, was
written and performed in 1845 but he essentially republished the book three years after
its initial publication under a different title. Paris au kalidoscope from 1845 was a 48chaptered book which contained, word for word but in a different sequence, forty-one of
the same chapters with the same titles as La Grande Ville. Between 1867 and 1873,
numerous editions of La Grande Ville ou Paris il y a vingt-cinq ans were published,
containing thirty-nine of the same chapters in a slightly different order. While this
literary recycling may seem like a disingenuous attempt by de Kock to make more
money, it also reveals his canny manipulation of the forms and formats in which his work
appeared. We should also remember that such reissuing was not uncommon during the
time period. Threnty writes of the frequency in the July Monarchy of the changement
de titre qui permet de tenter de vendre deux fois le mme recueil au mme lecteur (124)
and Taylor Learner reminds us of the modularity of these forms: equally at home in
literary anthologies, fashion journals, or caricatural albums, they could be lucratively
recombined and repackaged to create multiple product derivatives (10). In its form and
content, De Kocks La Grande ville can thus be seen as representative of the literary
guidebook under the July Monarchy, and de Kock, in his narrative and publishing
practices, reveals himself to be an emblematic practitioner of this hybrid genre. For all
81

these reasons, his amusant et fidle panorama de Paris sets the stage for our study of
the intersection of the urban novel and Comtes sociological theory in the following
chapters.

82

3. Urban Observations: Positivist Philosophy and the Tableaux de Paris in Balzacs

Scnes de la vie Parisienne
In the preface to his 2003 The Misfit of the Family, Michael Lucey writes that
there is nothing particularly original in the observation that for Honor de Balzac the
novel was an instrument for historical and sociological analysis (xii). Indeed, the idea
that the Comdie humaine depicts a complex web of social connections in Restoration
France, offering portrayals of multiple social types, is certainly not a new insight into
Balzacs work; the author himself points this out throughout his fiction. Lucey, using the
sociological terms of Emile Durkheim, maintains that he understands Balzacs method
in his novels, his experiments in narrative form, as part of an effort to envision the
substratum of social facts, the complicated locus of social forms (xvi). Citing Henry
Jamess assessment of the author, Lucey goes on to write that for Balzac, nothing
appealed [] more than to show how we all are, and how we are placed and built-in for
being so (xxiv). Lucey thus alludes to two late nineteenth-century thinkers, Durkheim
and James, to conceive of Balzacs sociological method, and this makes sense.
Although positivist Auguste Comte is credited with first employing the term sociology,
the field of sociology was not truly established until the end of the century. Durkheims
1894 Les Rgles de la method sociologique, often considered the cornerstone of French
sociological thought, sets up sociology as an autonomous practice separate from other
disciplines in which a rigorously objective, scientific approach is taken to the study of
social facts. Even if it might be viewed as anachronistic to discuss Balzacs
sociological method, the concepts that Lucey, Durkheim and James are using to
83

characterize the authors practices depicting how we all are, capturing the
complicated locus of social form are all part of theories circulating at the time Balzac
produced La Comdie humaine. As early as the 1820s, scholars such as Saint-Simon and
Auguste Comte, whose work we have previously studied, had already begun to theorize a
method of approaching social physics scientifically, of applying an objective,
observational method to the study of society, of systematizing sociological knowledge.
Balzac scholars have recently begun to use the term presociologue to describe
his analyses, putting him in dialogue with contemporary naturalist scientists and
philosophers like Louis Bonald, and reading his work through the lens of later
sociologists such as Erving Goffman.1 Though this line of inquiry couches the study of
Balzacs social representations in perhaps more historically appropriate terms, there are
still relatively few studies that put the authors work in conversation with the presociological theories of positivism contemporary to the publication of the Comdie
humaine. Scholars like Judith Lyon-Caen have recently focused on the body of presociological social writing under the July Monarchy, which includes novelistic work
like Balzacs and Sues, but also panoramic literature and the emerging enqutes

This concept of Balzac presociologue was in fact the subject of a recent symposium
held in March of 2009 by the Sminaire dtudes sur le XIXe sicle at Paris III and IV,
where papers ranged from Lanthropologie de Balzac et le modle des sciences
naturelles (Jacques Noiray) to Microsociologie balzacienne: Balzac, Goffman et le
thtre du monde (Agathe Novak-Lechevalier) to Une extension de la sociologie
bonaldienne? La guerre des sexes dans la relation conjugale selon Balzac (Jean-Yves
Pranchre).
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sociales.2 All of these texts, according to Lyon-Caen, inventent ou revendiquent des

postures similaires lgard de lobjet socit contemporaine, and though they are
generically disparate and target different audiences, they all proposent leur manire
des sociographies du monde contemporain. Et ils adoptent des manires communes de
dsigner, de dcrire, de classer et de dchiffrer le monde (305).3 While it is certainly
true that these texts proposed to document Parisian social life and render it legible,
neither the panoramic literary texts that we discussed in chapter one, nor Balzacs novels,
are rarely discussed at any length in the context of Comtes and Saint-Simons theories.
Lyon-Caens work is no exception. The critic labels these texts as pre-sociological, yet
makes no mention of those thinkers who were producing some of the foundational works
in the field of sociology concurrent with the publication of this July Monarchy social

The term enqutes sociales refers to studies menes par souci dhygine publique et
de philanthropie qui se focalisent, partir du milieu des annes 1830, sur le pauprisme
(Lyon-Caen, Saisier, 305). These included, for example, Parent-Duchtelets 1836
Hygine publique and De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris.
3
Elsewhere, Lyon-Caen has discussed this goal of the novelist under the July Monarchy
(in addition to that of the writer of panoramic literature and social studies) to render
Parisian society legible, remarking the following: de nombreux romans des annes
1830-1848 proposent, selon certains procds, de mettre en texte le monde social pour
le donner lire: nous montrerons quils se situent, dune part, au coeur dune entreprise
collective dcriture du social, partageant avec dautres types de textes une interrogation
sur la manire de reprsenter la complexit du monde contemporain ainsi que des modes
dcriture spcifiques (6).
85

writing (volumes of Comtes Cours de la philosophie positive were published between

1830 and 1842).4
The link between the Comdie humaine and panoramic literature is not a difficult
one to make: Balzac made frequent contributions to both physiologies, including the 1826
Physiologie du Mariage and the 1841 Physiologie de lemploy, and to literary
guidebooks such as La Grande Ville (1842). A detailed analysis of Balzacs own
involvement in the movement of panoramic literature is beyond the scope of this study.
Still, it is important to point out that some critics cite the author not only as the father of
the physiologies phenomenon, but as a major critic of the movement as well.5 Richard
Sieburth quotes Balzac, who describes the phenomenon of panoramic literature as lart
de parler et dcrire incorrectement de nimporte quoi sous la forme dun petit livre bleu
ou jaune qui soutire vingt sous au passant sous prtexte de le faire rire (163). As we
saw in the previous chapter, Sieburth argues that Balzac dismissed the panoramic literary

A few scholars have countered this trend. In his doctoral dissertation entitled The
Painter of Modern Mores: The Rise of the Sociological Imagination in the Writings of
Louis-Sbastien Mercier and Honor de Balzac, Lance Taylor Peterson does briefly put
Balzac in conversation with Comte, stating that [his] writings developed a unique
literary form, the tableau de moeurs, which described the customary ways of thinking and
doing animating social life. The form of imagination exercised in their works is thus
intrinsically sociological avant la lettre, in the sense the word takes from Auguste
Comte through to Louis Dumont (Abstract). Tom Conley, too, has termed Balzac a
creative positivist, for example, but distinguishes him from scholars like Comte: the
really creative positivists of the 19th century Balzac, Hugo, and Proust built works
whose mass, fragmentary totality, and changing effects impugned the tabled symmetries
that their scientific counterparts had invented (x).
5
Judith Weschler notes that Balzac claimed paternity of the physiologie as a genre his
own Physiologie du mariage had been published eleven years before the Aubert series
appeared (32).
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movement and counsels against making connections between the project of the Comdie
humaine and that of panoramic literature:
Although it is certainly no mere coincidence that the Avant-Propos to the Comdie
humaine, which contains Balzacs most ambitions statements on the novelist as
taxonomist of les espces sociales, was composed at the very height of the
physiologie vogue (1840-1842), and although Balzac himself contributed [] to the
series, it would be misleading to equate Balzacs scientific theory of the novel with
the taxonomic project of the physiologies. Their humorous recourse to the language or
method of Buffon, Linneaeus, or Cuvier merely serves to create what Barthes might
have termed an effet de science whose humor lies in the obvious disproportion between
the rarefied scientific technicality of the description and the utter banality of the social
species in question. (171)
While there is no question that the physiologies and other subgenres of panoramic
literature, as we saw in the previous chapter, are written in a pseudo-scientific, humorous
tone, it is nonetheless also clear that Balzac relies very heavily on this genre within his
Comdie humaine. In fact, I will argue that it is precisely in Balzacs passages modeled
after physiologies and tableaux (or passages copied directly from his own contributions to
panoramic literature, for that matter) that the authors relationship to positivist philosophy
is most evident. In other words, the passages in the Comdie humaine that mimic the
genre, which the author dubbed the art dcrire incorrectement de nimporte quoi, are,
in fact, the locus of Balzacs engagement with and questioning of early sociological
methodology.
In this chapter I propose to examine Balzacs relationship to the early sociological
movement of positivism. It is my argument here that he does engage on some level with
the theories that Auguste Comte and, before him, Saint-Simon posited, but that his novels
contain fundamental differences from those of the early nineteenth-century social
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scientists. These similarities and differences are most clearly borne out in the passages of
his novels that draw on panoramic literature, both on tableaux de Paris and physiologies.
Recalling the theories of Comte and Saint-Simon outlined in the introduction to this
project, I elaborate upon how they relate to Balzacs methodology of describing French
society in both the Avant-Propos of his Comdie humaine and in several novels from
the Scnes de la vie parisienne segment of his work. Analyses of these diverse tableauxstyle passages in Balzacs Histoire des Treize as well as Les Employs will show that
while the author does indeed employ positivist techniques of observation and inductive
reasoning, his belief in abstract forces, his search for causal explanations of urban
phenomena and his staging of the tension between inductive and deductive approaches
distinguish him from his positivist contemporaries. Since so many of Balzacs novels
take place in Paris and contain tableaux de Paris that it would take a lifetime to catalogue
and analyze each example, I have chosen here to focus solely on works that the author
himself classified under the heading Scnes de la vie parisienne.6 This section of

The most notable example of a tableau de Paris in the Comdie humaine is perhaps the
lengthy excerpt in the 1837 novel Illusions perdues on the comtemporary publishing
practices. This section is later reflected in Balzacs contribution to the second volume of
the 1842 literary guidebook La Grande Ville: Nouveau Tableau de Paris entitled
Monographie de la presse parisienne. I have chosen not to focus on this passage not only
because it has already been treated frequently in criticism, but also because I have limited
my examples to novels organized in the Comdie humaine under the Scnes de la vie
parisienne. Illusions perdues also contains a much remarked upon passage concerning
Balzacs sociological writing in which DArthez counsels Lucien, saying Vous ferez
ainsi une histoire de France pittoresque o vous peindrez les costumes, les meubles, les
maisons, les intrieurs, la vie prive, tout en donnant l'esprit du temps, au lieu de narrer
pniblement des faits connus (172). Lucey writes about this passage as well, citing it as
88

Balzacs Comdie humaine, whose title itself is reminiscent of the titles of many
examples of panoramic literature, is described in the Avant-Propos as offering le
tableau des gots, des vices et de toutes les choses effrnes quexcitent les murs
particulires aux capitales o se rencontrent la fois lextrme bien et lextrme mal
(18). By reading panoramic-style passages of novels exclusively from this portion of the
Comdie humaine, itself in dialogue with the phenomenon of panoramic literature, we
gain perspective on Balzacs approach to a sociological method and on how this method
affects his literary form.
3.1 Balzacs positivism
In his Avant-Propos to the Comdie humaine, composed in 1842, Balzac
outlines the origins of and the thinking behind his literary works and points to many of
the various philosophical and scientific thinkers who have had an impact on the way in
which he approached his project. Citing scholars from Buffon, to Cuvier, to his hero
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Balzac claims to be pntr [du] systme which established the
notion that il ny a quun animal and that this singular animal took shape based on the
milieu in which it developed (Avant-Propos, 8).7 The author decides to apply these
concepts from the naturalist sciences to his social project, hypothesizing that la Socit

proof that Balzac and a certain part of his public read novels as programmatic historical
or sociological writing (xiii).
7
According to Balzac, Lanimal est un principe qui prend sa forme extrieure, ou, pour
parler plus exactement, les diffrences de sa forme, dans les milieux o il est appel se
dvelopper (Avant-Propos, 8).
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ne fait-elle pas de lhomme, suivant les milieux o son action se dploie, autant
dhommes diffrents quil y a de varits en zoologie? (8) In other words, the
differences among workers and lawyers, priests and poets are just as considerable as
those among cows, donkeys, and sheep. Inspired, therefore, by Buffons immense
Histoire naturelle, which attempted to represent dans un livre lensemble de la
zoologie, Balzac hopes to do the same for society by capturing the Espces Sociales
(8). The author posits a scientific approach to a social subject, basing his project on many
of the same biological, zoological and philosophical thinkers whom, as we have seen,
Comte and Saint-Simon counted among their influences.8 Can we read Balzac, then, as
an early positivist, as someone influenced by nineteenth-century pre-sociological
discourse?
Many passages from the Avant-Propos suggest Balzacs interest in an
observational approach to French society, an approach in accord with a purely positivist
method. Balzac writes, for example, of copiant toute la Socit (14), of lisant
attentivement le tableau de la Socit (12), and refers to himself as le secrtaire of
French social history, as if the role of the writer were to document and systematize
observable facts. In fact, Balzac writes that his work has amounted to accumulating tant

Deborah Jenson has read this passage as an example of an ambiguous democratization

of literature (Trauma, 150). Balzac states that il ny a quun animal, basing his theory
on thinkers like Swedenborg and Buffon who, likewise, conceive of a unit de
composition, positing that each organism pertains to it [this one animal], differentiated
not by essence but by the milieux in which it develops (150). Jenson labels this
concept organic environmentalism, and imagines its implications for Balzacs literary
project: the writer must find points in common, a shared animality, between the classes
made different by divine design (150).
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de faits [pour] les peindre comme il sont (16); writing, in other words, is an act of
reporting discernible phenomena. Distinguishing his work from other dry historical
nomenclatures which ignore the history of a societys mores, the author describes the
method he has used in painting Frances histoire des moeurs once again as a sort of
literary stock-taking. En dressant linventaire des vices et des vertues, writes Balzac,
en rassemblant les principaux faits des passions, en peignant les caractres, en
choisissant les vnements principaux de la Socit, en composant des types par la
runion des traits de plusieurs caractres homognes, peut-tre pouvais-je arriver crire
lhistoire oublie par tant dhistoriens, celle des murs (11). In so doing, Balzac
continues, he would create an accurate portrayal of nineteenth-century French
civilization. This depiction of the writer as secretary, the writer as chronicler of fact, the
write as classifier of types, as well as Balzacs focus on the amassing of traits and facts in
order to produce typological descriptions of characters, points to the theories of Auguste
Comte, if not directly, then at least to the theories of the previous thinkers who influenced
Comte and who advocated rigorous scientific observation as the means of mastering a
social subject. Balzacs words here may not make him a positivist, but they prove an
engagement with the discourses of positivism that were particularly prevalent as he wrote
in July of 1842.
Yet if the author alludes to an observational, scientific approach in this
introduction to his work, it is nonetheless immediately clear that he differs greatly from
thinkers like Comte and Saint-Simon on a methodological level. In fact, in the paragraph

91

succeeding the above citation about the author as the chronicler of society, Balzac
exposes his belief in causes or virtues beyond observable fact:
[Ne] devais-je pas tudier les raisons ou la raison de ces effets sociaux, surprendre le
sens cach dans cet immense assemblage de figures, de passions, dvnements. Enfin,
aprs avoir cherch, je ne dis pas trouv, cette raison, ce moteur social, ne fallait-il pas
mditer sur les principes naturels et voir en quoi les Socits scartent ou se
rapprochent de la rgle ternelle, du vrai, du beau ? (Avant-Propos, 11-12)
Balzac writes here about searching for a moteur social, for the reasons behind these
social effects, after having observed them, investigating the natural principles and aims to
study these principles as they relate to la rgle ternelle, du vrai, du beau. In doing so,
the author implies a belief in what Comte would call abstract principles outside of the
realm of observable, tangible facts. As such, his conceptualization might be characterized
by Comte as metaphysical. In other words, Balzacs self-described interest in
contemplating the principes naturels and the raison de ces effets sociaux recalls the
positivist scholars definition of the metaphysical stage: the more matured effort of
reason to explain things, and is an important modification of the former stage [the
supernatural stage], but its defect is that it reasons without proofs, and reasons upon
subjects which transcend human capacity (Lewes, 26). In his search for the reason
behind social phenomena, as opposed to merely documenting the phenomena themselves,
Balzac distinguishes his project from that of his contemporary Comte.
In the lines that precede this call for the study of the moteur social, we see that
Balzac, in fact uses this scientific/metaphysical binary to draw a distinction between the
role of the writer and that of the artist:
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Ce travail ntait rien encore. Sen tenant cette reproduction rigoureuse, un crivain
pouvait devenir un peintre plus ou moins fidle, plus ou moins heureux, patient ou
courageux des types humains, le contour des drames de la vie intime, larchologue du
mobilier social, le nomenclateur des professions, lenregistreur du bien et du mal; mais,
pour mriter les loges que doit ambitionner tout artiste, ne devais-je pas tudier les
raisons ou la raison de ces effets sociaux. (11)
Not only does the author allude to causes behind social phenomena, but he explains that
any writer is more or less capable of creating a faithful depiction of social types and
occurrences. This work, however, is simply not a sufficient approach for Balzac. The
true artist takes it upon himself to search for the reasons at the origins of these
phenomena. A purely positivist literary project, in other words, would not afford Balzac
the depth of social analysis to which he aspired, not to mention the critical praise he
sought. It will be interesting to keep in mind this position when we study the novels of
Paul de Kock in the following chapter, a writer whose work, I argue, contains more
methodological overlap with that of Comte. Indeed, de Kock is a forgotten figure in
nineteenth-century literary history, while Balzac, of course, remains one of its most
canonical authors, having achieved les loges que doit ambitionner tout artiste (11).
For now, however, it is simply worthwhile to call attention to Balzacs specific evocation
of his dual scientific/metaphysical approach. The author lifts key elements from the
sciences in his attempt to create a definitive chronicle of nineteenth-century French
society, yet he nonetheless values the investigation of the forces behind these same social
systems.
In her study of optics and narration in nineteenth-century fiction, Andrea Goulet
has also underscored Balzacs dual observational/metaphysical methodology. As
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indicated in its Avant-propos of 1842, Goulet writes, La Comdie humaine aims to

combine precise descriptions of the contemporary world with an intense interest in the
mystical essences underlying visible appearance (20). Goulet attributes this binary
approach to the fact that Balzac is writing at a moment when a tension between
empiricism and idealism pulls the scientists eye in what may seem to us to be two
directions at once: toward the ephemeral details of the visible world as well as toward the
eternal truths that subtend them (20). Indeed, Balzac alludes throughout the AvantPropos to mystical and spiritual forces or theories that have been central to the writing
of La Comdie Humaine. He begins the essay by evoking the work of Christian mystic
Swedenborg (whose influence on Balzac has been well-documented by critics, especially
in his novel Seraphita) and concludes it by praising the study of Mesmers magntisme
animal, the miracles duquel je me suis familiaris depuis 1820 (Avant-Propos, 17).9
Throughout the Avant-Propos, the author also invokes the insitution of religion: he
claims at one point that le Christianisme, et surtout le Catholicisme [] est le plus
grand lment dOrdre Social (12); he explains at another point that he writes la lueur
de deux Vrits ternelles: la Religion, la Monarchie, deux ncessites que les vnements
contemporains proclament, et vers lesquelles tout crivain de bon sens doit essayer de
ramener notre pays (13). Balzac is not necessarily pointing to a god, Christian or
otherwise, as the driving force behind the society he describes, and thus it would be
incorrect to argue that he should be classified, in Comtian terms, as a supernaturalist.

See Goran Blix, The Occult Roots of Realism: Balzac, Mesmer, and Second Sight.
94

Nevertheless, the two Vrits ternelles at the center of his project, as well as Balzacs
allusions to and serious consideration of mystical forces, differentiate his approach to
French society still further from Comtes approach to social physics. While the author of
the Comdie humaine unquestionably employs a certain type of internal, scientific
approach to his social subject, the significance he places on other abstract forces would
seem to categorize Balzac, in Comtes view at least, as someone who sought to find the
external causes beyond phenomena and not merely to document the phenomena at hand.
Balzac himself, in this introduction written in the same year as the publication of the last
volume of Comtes Cours de philosophie positive, explains that for him, the
observational method is necessary in his project, yet not sufficient. Let us turn now to
several examples of Balzacs technique of depicting French society, as revealed in his
passages modeled after the tableau de Paris, to understand better how the authors
particular relationship to positivism takes shape.
3.2 Tableaux dans les Treize: Panoramic Literature and Positivist Social Thought
In the preface to the Histoire des Treize, a trilogy comprised of Ferragus, La
Duchesse de Langeais and La Fille aux yeux dor and written between 1833 and 1834,
the narrator explains that the stories his reader is about to encounter were confided to him
by a member of the Treize, an underground band of thirteen men. These short novels,
which all tend toward the macabre and the occult and whose main narratives occur in
predominantly interior, intimate spaces, are nonetheless distinctly urban novels.10 The

10

See David Harvey, pp. 44-45.

95

narrator, in fact, claims to have chosen these three stories from the many recounted to
him in secret, because they were pisodes qui [] lont plus particulirement sduit par
la senteur parisienne des dtails, et par la bizarrerie des contrastes (Histoire des
Treize, 793). Indeed, it is not surprising that Balzac chose to classify these novels
among the Scnes de la vie parisienne, because they are replete with descriptions of
Parisian culture, people and phenomena which counterbalance, and in some sense
explain, their more obscure underground plots. Many of these descriptions take the form
of tableaux de Paris and even openly engage with the tradition of panoramic literature,
beginning to take shape in the early 1830s. Analyses of these particular passages will, in
what follows, serve to explore Balzacs relationship with the sociological discourses of
his contemporaries.
3.2.1 Ferragus: Tableaux and Typologies
That Ferragus is a novel inextricably tied to Paris is in no way a new observation.
Critic Sren Pold, for example, has called this work a novel which at the same time
reads and writes the text of Paris (Panoramic, 48), echoing Patrice Higgonets
assertion that the central character in Ferragus [] was Paris (264). What is more, for
Henri Mitterand, the space of Paris and the narrators text itself work in tandem to
produce what the critic has called a thorie de Paris: [lespace parisien] est tout la
fois reprsent et comment: dun ct, il se trouve inclus dans lunivers racont, au
moins en qualit de circonstant des actions narres; dun autre ct, il fait lobjet dun
discours, explicite ou implicite, sinscrivant dans une conception, une vision, une thorie
de Paris (Formes, 5). Indeed, from the opening words of the novel, Paris imposes
96

itself as central to the intrigue, both in the descriptions of the city and daily Parisian life
found within the narrative and in the relationships, encounters, mysteries, and actions the
space of the city engenders.
The first pages of Ferragus have consistently been read as a typology of Parisian
streets a veritable outline of the streets and the moral and social implications they
connote: Il est dans Paris certaines rues dshonores [] rues nobles [] rues
simplement honntes (793).11 The narrator, whom David Bell has likened to the figure
of the flneur, effectively draws up a socio-cartographic representation of the streets of
Paris as a sort of introduction to the plot, meandering about until he happens upon one of
the novels protagonists.12 This character, Auguste de Maulincour, who also wanders

11

Dabord, begins Paule Petitier in her article La mlancholie de Ferragus to which

we will return presently, une typologie des rues de la capital introduit lide dune
diversit presquinfinie, fixe cependant dans un cadre spatial (45). For David Bell, the
narrator of Ferragus begins his story with a series of remarks in which he attempts to
create a typology of Parisian streets [] The typology of streets constructed by the
narrator as Ferragus opens is directed toward a specific type of reader (118). These are
only two examples of critics evaluation of this section as a typology.
12
Bell has linked the narrator of Ferragus to the figure of the flneur, both occupied with
leisurely strolling the Parisian streets, and has focused in Circumstances on the flneur as
a locus of chance: The flneur, that category of idle observer invented by Balzac,
Baudelaire, and their contemporaries, is not only a Parisian, he is the very embodiment of
the potential for chance encounters (118). The connections, then, between the flneur
and Ferraguss narrator become clear later, when this critic argues that the narrator
presents himself as one who knows the streets of the city as any flneur does, but also as
one who [] repeats the same kind of activity at another level, namely, within his own
textual work. He too must wander in search of the beginning of his own story, and he
encounters it only after an incipit which allows him to speak of other things before he
happens on his subject. Thus there is an intimate connection established between the
artistic work of the narrator and what appears to be his own propensity in his idle hours
of Parisian life (119). In his descriptive meanderings about the streets of Paris, the
97

about these same streets, is surprised to espy one of Pariss most beautiful and virtuous
women une chaste et dlicieuse personne de la quelle il tait en secret passionnment
amoureux (796) in a dark and narrow street infamous for criminal activity.13 This
chance encounter provides the catalyst for the narrative, which is itself composed of
Parisian typologies and chance encounters only possible in the French capital.
This notion of typology in this particular novelistic context evokes the tradition of
the classification and cataloguing of daily life central to the movement of panoramic
literature. As we saw in the introduction, Schor writes that nowhere was this obsessive
desire to expose and inventory the real more active than in Paris. [] These inventories
take the form of the famous physiologies, the equally famous guides [] [and] much of
Honor de Balzacs Comdie humaine and mile Zolas Rougon-Macquart (215). For
Schor, then, Balzacs fiction participates in this enthusiasm for cataloguing modern Paris;
the taxonomy of Parisian streets in Ferragus is in dialogue with contemporary Parisian
inventories. Richard Terdiman writes of the intricate mapping of a cultural system in
nineteenth-century Paris and the texts which sought to codify the world of dominant and
desirable values for a population unprepared for the complex hierarchies of the capital
including the curious subgenres providing orientation within this mysterious world of
social signs the Codes, Tableaux, Dictionnaires, Traits, Monographies, Physiologies

narrator of Ferragus mimics the work of the flneur, who also walks about in search of a
story.
13
Balzacs narrator describes the Rue Soly as having pas un mur qui ne rptt un mot
infme (796).
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and so on which flourished in the 1820s and early 1830s (93). In other words, the
introduction to Ferragus, in its attempt to catalogue and decode social implications of the
streets of Paris, can be viewed rather unequivocally as part of this urban discourse. This
same trend of observation and classification, as we have already seen, coincides with the
incipient stages of positivism, also focused on observing, decoding and classifying
worldly, and later social phenomena, in order to understand networks and relationships
among these phenomena and, ultimately, control them.
Without establishing a correlation between the term typology and the trend of
panoramic literature, many critics nonetheless have made explicit the connection between
the Tableaux de Paris and Ferragus. In her book Balzac et la provinciale Paris: le vice
et la vertu, Aure dEsneval qualifies Balzacs treatment of linfluence que peut avoir
une rue sur ses habitants in Ferragus as a testament that the author ne fait que suivre
une tradition vivante depuis le Tableau de Paris de L.S. Mercier (25). DEsneval in fact
makes Balzacs relationship to Mercier all the more specific when, in a later chapter on
Balzacian depictions of the working class, she describes Balzac as a lecteur des
nombreux Tableaux de Pais, crits sur le modle de la clbre uvre de L. S. Mercier de
1791 (88). Despite the context of dEsnevals comment she is referring to both Balzac
and Merciers interest in the figure of the foreigner in Paris it is nonetheless pertinent
when trying to establish a textual link between the opening descriptions of Paris streets
and the blossoming mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon of the re-workings of Merciers
original text. Paule Petitier also evokes the tradition of Mercier in Ferragus, stating that
son ouverture en tableau de Paris [] dresse une image mythique de la capital (45).
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The introduction serves to avertir des rgles de ce nouvel univers quest la ville moderne
et dont va dpendre le sort des personnages (45). Petitier not only seriously engages
with the intertextuality between Ferragus and the tableaux de Paris, but she aptly
demonstrates this tropes function within the novel, namely, to set the scene of the
modern city, but also to lay out the social and moral codes of the city which, along with
the urban topography, will dictate events of the ensuing narrative.14
Petitier is correct when she points out that Ferragus is punctuated by tableaux:
De faon constante, le rcit jouera de ruptures, interrompant le fil narratif par des
tableaux, des typologies, des portraits de types (47). Balzac inserts, for example, a
lengthy description of a porte cochre into the second chapter of the novel to set up the
second chance encounter which will enable him to get closer to the mystery of Madame
Jules. As Maulincour is out in the streets of the city, a heavy rain begins, and walkers,
including Auguste, are forced to take refuge as they can under an umbrella, in a caf or
under a nearby awning.15 Before Maulincour arrives on the scene, however, the narrator
takes the opportunity to expound upon existing Parisian customs when it comes to
shielding oneself from the rain:
Un fantassin de Paris est alors oblig de sarrter tout court, de se rfugier dans une
boutique ou dans un caf sil est assez riche pour y payer son hospitalit force; ou,

14

Judith Weschler speaks of the connection between Mercier and Balzac in A Human
Comedy as well, when she writes that Balzacs descriptions of mtiers are at least
partially based on Louis-Sbastien Merciers picturesque Tableaux de Paris (1781) which
was reissued several times in the nineteenth century (23).
15
Here, Maulincour will retrieve a dropped envelope addressed to a certain Ferragus
whose address corresponds with that of the building he saw Mme Jules entering and
which contains an incriminating and vaguely illegible letter from the grisette Ida.
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selon lurgence, sous une porte cochre, asile des gens pauvres ou mal mis. Comment
aucun de nos peintres na-t-il pas encore essay de reproduire la physionomie dun
essaim de Parisiens groups, par un temps dorage, sous le porche humide dune
maison ? O rencontrer un plus riche tableau? [] Selon son caractre, chaque
membre de cette socit fortuite contemple le ciel, sen va sautillant pour ne pas se
crotter, ou parce quil est press ou parce quil voit des citoyens marchant malgr vent
et mare, ou parce que la cour de la maison tant humide et catarrhalement mortelle, la
lisire, dit un proverbe, est pire que le drap. Chacun a ses motifs. Il ne reste que le
piton prudent, lhomme qui, pour se remettre en route, pie quelques espaces bleus
travers les nuages crevasss. (814-815)
The reader is immediately alerted to the status of this passage as a tableau de Paris by the
narrator who, surprised that no other painter of Parisian life has chosen to depict this
phenomenon, sets up his own passage as a rich tableau.16 The nouns peintres and
physionomie reinforce both the idea that the narrator is painting an urban portrait and
underscore the language of cataloguing social types scientifically.17 The narrator does
not merely engage with the physical description of the urban landscape: le fond gristre
de latmosphre or les capricieux dgorgements des tuyaux ptillants. He also
addresses urban types as well: le piton causeur qui se plaint et converse avec la portire
quand elle se pose sur son balai comme un grenadier sur son fusil; le piton industriel,
arm dune sacoche ou muni dun paquet, traduisant la pluie par profits et pertes; or le
vrai bourgeois de Paris, homme parapluie. Balzacs narrator effectively weaves

16

In her study Balzac: archologue de Paris, in a section on Balzacs depiction of

Parisian houses, Jeannine Guichardet has labeled this passage a tableau de genre:
laverse diluvienne de la rue Coquillire.
17

Balzac, as Judith Weschler has aptly demonstrated in A Human Comedy, was

influenced by the developments in the science of physiognomy around the turn of the
century. We will discuss this topic with more depth presently in relation to La Fille aux
yeux dor.
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together a physical description of the city, typologies of social types, and a

characterization of urban customs, as well as setting a scene pregnant with potential for
an aleatory encounter. The narrator seeks no outside, causal explanation for the
appearance of these particular types in this particular place; the relationship among the
social typologies and the urban setting is discerned through observation.
In addition to this tableau and the one that opens the novel, Ferragus contains a
third explicit socio-urban portrait: that of Ida, the woman enamored of Ferragus. This
portrait is found later in the novel, after mysterious accidents begin to befall Auguste, and
after Mme Juless husband becomes suspicious of her outings. During a particularly
tense moment between the two spouses, Ida bursts into their home. Cette demoiselle
tait le type dune femme qui ne se rencontre qu Paris, explains the narrator, before
commencing a page-long physical and social description of this individual. Ida falls
under the category of the grisette de Paris and, for this narrator, la grisette dans toute sa
splendeur (851). This working womans portrait, whose physical description becomes
what the narrator dubs a caricature parisienne, and which prefigures Louis Huarts
1841 Physiologie de la grisette, interrupts an intimate confession between Mme Jules and
her husband and exposes the class imbalance at the heart of Mme Juless mystery. In
addition, as with the tableau de la porte cochre, the narrator is once again in dialogue
with the tradition of panoramic literature by incorporating a commentary on the inability
of the urban artist to capture and appreciate fully the nature of this Parisian creature:
Vingt fois saisie par le crayon du peintre, par le pinceau du caricaturiste, par la
plombagine du dessinateur, elle chappe toutes les analyses, parce quelle est
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insaisissable dans tous ses modes, comme lest la nature, comme lest ce fantasque Paris
(851). This type [] qui ne se rencontre qu Paris is one in a series of Parisian
typologies in the tradition of the tableaux de Paris and which, far from serving as mere
description, play an integral role in the establishment of character and the development of
plot in Ferragus. The detailed physical description coupled with the description of this
types social function in Paris works, as well, as a positivist approach to the phenomenon
of the grisette. Comtes impulse toward scientific observation in the study of society is
unconsciously illustrated in this description, and we can imagine this passage as one
piece of the puzzle of understanding contemporary society and, ultimately, gaining
mastery of it goals shared by Balzac and Comte alike.
Petitier argues that these typologies interspersed throughout Ferragus function as
a stratgie de digression and that this criture typologique, coupled with the
movement of the city and what she sees as the blurring of character, actually serves to
undermine the project of classification so pervasive in the mid-nineteenth century (47).
According to her, laccentuation du mouvement entrane limpossibilit de la taxinomie,
la disparition des repres (47). In other words, the juxtaposition of the fixed urban
taxonomies with the imprecise, aleatory nature of the city demonstrate a sort of
subversion of the notion of fixed categories undertaken by the narrator. I would argue
that Ferragus does contain these contradictory tendencies, but that within this text of
typologies and chance, the narrator accounts for these contradictions by writing a city
composed of both the stable and the unstable. In other words, if the text itself is directed
by a narrator/flneur who, according to Bell, is the very embodiment of the potential for
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chance encounters (119), and if the form of the text mirrors that of a flnerie,18 then the
novel itself functions not only as a highly complex Physiologie du flneur avant la lettre,
but as a text whose form mirrors the aleatory content of its narrative. The citys dual
nature, on the one hand fixed and decoded and on the other left to chance, come to bear
on the actual form of the narrative, which in turn is made up of these (stable) typologies
and these (unstable) meanderings. The passages that take part in the tradition of the
tableaux de Paris provide a stable platform from which the less stable elements of the
text can take flight. In this sense, to quote David Harvey, we learn to understand the
city from multiple perspectives. It is on the one hand an incomprehensible labyrinth of
kaleidoscopic qualities: twirl the kaleidoscope around, and we see innumerable
compositions and colorations of the urban scene. Yet there are persistent nodal points
around which the image of the city coalesces into something more permanent and solid
(42).
If, however, as we saw before, Ferragus is a text both grounded in concrete
studies tableaux of urban phenomena and social types and yet simultaneously
structured by narrative meanderings, we might read this second aspect of the text as

18

Here I return to Bells observation that the narrator/flneur of Ferragus must wander
in search of the beginning of his own story, and he encounters it only after an incipit
which allows him to speak of other things before he happens on his subject. Thus there is
an intimate connection established between the artistic work of the narrator and what
appears to be his own propensity in his idle hours of Parisian life (119). Bell also calls
attention to the fact that the novel includes not one, not two, but three endings which
correspond directly to the delay at the onset of the story. Like the flneur, the reluctance
to begin or to end is provoked by the haphazard interests of the narrator: his fascination
for the city struggles against the need to get on with his story (142).
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indicative of a more metaphysical virtue or essence at play: namely, that of chance.

In other words, if there are parts of the city and of the plot that can be observed in a
scientific fashion, there are still elements that cannot be explained through observation,
through discernable fact. Balzacs narrator in Ferragus does not employ a purely
positive approach in his treatment of Paris. Rather the narrative is also grounded in an
abstract force chance. This interplay between the positivist tableaux and the less
tangible chance results in a dual narrative, whose ending Bell says defies normal
classifications (139), in which the order attained within the main body of the narrative
disintegrates at the end, and the reader is thrust back into a domain where chaos (absence
of order) reigns, where the only law is chance (139). This tension between order and
chaos governed by chance can be read, in the context of our study, as a sort of back-andforth between emerging positivist theories and the previous metaphysical stage in which a
cause, regardless of its abstract nature, is at the root of phenomena.
3.2.2 Le Faubourg Saint-Germain and La Duchesse de Langeais
A novel often linked to Balzacs own love life,19 La Duchesse de Langeais depicts
the love affair between the Marquis de Montriveau and the Antoinette de Langeais, an
affair that Carl Weiner has characterized as a Gothic melodrama of sexual frustration,

19

According to Carl Weiner, Balzacs bitterness at the unsatisfactory outcome of his

love affair with the Marquise de Castries, an aristocratic grande dame of the bluest blood,
is commonly held to have inspired him to write it (111). He goes on further to explain
as follows: Late in the summer of 1832 the twin trajectories of Balzacs political and
emotional life suffered a fatal disjunction. On what he had hoped would be a tender
voyage of romantic exploration, the Marquise coldly rebuffed his physical attentions. The
shock to his self-esteem, to his fragile confidence in his own powers and expectations,
was enormous (112).
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thwarted ambitions, domination and revenge (111). This affair is deeply rooted in the
historical context of the Bourbon Restoration, a world in which, according to Harvey,
women protect themselves from intimacy by resorting to evasions, flirtations, calculated
relationships, strategic marriages and the like (45). This second novel in the Histoire
des Treize trilogy begins with a sea-swept description of an Andalusian Carmelite
convent and the constrained and illicit meeting between Montriveau and the Duchesse
(now known as Soeur Thrse) within its walls, before the narrator whisks the reader
back to Restoration Paris to explain how this encounter came to transpire.20 However,
before delving into the back story between these two platonic lovers Montriveaus
passion for the Duchesse, her flirtatious but consistent refusal to consummate their love
or commit publicly to him, the ultimate intervention of the violent fraternity of the Treize
the narrator launches into a fifteen-page explanation and denunciation of the aristocracy
under the Restoration, or, as he calls it, the faubourg Saint Germain. He begins by
establishing the faubourg Saint Germain as the locus of upper-class Parisian life,
clarifying that the proper noun faubourg Saint-Germain can connote aristocratic lifestyle
outside of the geographical confines of the faubourg itself:

20

According to critic Francesco Fioretino, it must be noted, the description in the first
pages of the novel of the Mediterranean setting and the convent are already at work
establishing the relationship between Montriveau and the Duchesse: Par la description
de lle, le dbut du roman nous instruit dj de la nature des rapports entre les deux
protagonistes [] Les images du paysage opposent Napolon et un couvent avec, en
contraste, les constellations mtaphoriques qui sy rapportent: la guerre contre la prire,
le changement contre la tradition, le mouvement contre la rsistance. Ces images
voquent aussi deux espaces qui seront les espaces des deux protagonistes tout au long
du roman: lespace ouvert du gnral [] et celui, ferm, de la duchesse (Duchesse,
224).
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Ce que lon nomme en France le faubourg Saint-Germain nest ni un quartier, ni une

secte, ni une institution, ni rien qui se puisse nettement exprimer. La place Royale, le
faubourg Saint-Honor, la Chausse dAntin possdent galement des htels o se
respire lair du faubourg Saint-Germain. Ainsi, dj tout le faubourg nest pas dans le
faubourg [] Les manires, le parler, en un mot la tradition faubourg Saint-Germain
est Paris, depuis environ quarante ans, ce que la Cour y tait jadis, ce qutait lhtel
Saint-Paul dans le quatorzime sicle [] Cette singularit priodique offre une ample
matire aux rflexions de ceux qui veulent observer ou peindre les diffrentes zones
sociales. (923-924)
Moving from this almost topographical commentary on the quartier and its customs, the
narrator goes next into a lengthy excursus on the social and moral shortcomings of those
who inhabit the faubourg Saint-Germain and on the existing geographical separation
between classes in Paris. The narrator, in other words, cues his readers into the social
implications of this geographical space and its meaning within that particular moment of
Parisian history, painting, as his own language implies, a textual tableau of this Parisian
phenomenon.
Critics of La Duchesse de Langeais have traditionally focused on this section as
an explicit political introduction to the ensuing novelistic treatment of the faubourg, a
treatise in accord with Balzacs own opinion of the Restoration. Weiner, for example,
ties this section to Balzacs budding friendship with the Duc de Fitz-James, a legitimist
politician who clearly saw the futility of the aristocratic disdain for politics Balzac had
forcefully criticized in his political essays and would again dissect mercilessly in the first
pages of the second chapter of Langeais (112). For Weiner, then, this section of the
novel functions as a discourse developing from political discussions in Balzacs personal
life. Bell, too, has highlighted this political criticism as it functions to delay the main
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action of the narrative explaining that after a mysteriously unexplained preliminary

incident, La Duchesse de Langeais lingers for a while on a discussion of the weaknesses
in the position of the French aristocracy within Restoration society and politics before
getting onto the narration meant to explain that incident (118). Similarly, for Peter
Brooks, this lengthy passage depicts both the narrators and Balzacs condemnations of
the Restoration.21 Brooks highlights the narrators dismay that the Restoration failed to
reach out to include the young intellectuals who could have given it dynamic life []
[that] the governing elite chose to combat young talent if it didnt have aristocratic
credentials, and, channeling Balzac, credits this exclusion as the cause of the collapse
of the legitimist monarchy in 1830 (128). Brooks himself agrees with this denunciation
of the post-Empire regime, claiming one could indeed analyze the Revolution of 1830 as
the direct product of such a failure: as an attempted absolutist coup dtat by a ruling elite
that did not know the country it was governing (129). Regardless of whether we agree
with Balzac and this historical reading of the Revolution of 1830, it is clear that, within
the novel, this treatise can be read as a set-up for the rest of the novel, itself an indictment
of the aristocratic class, and the plot itself seems born from the narrators thesis. As
Brooks argues, The plot of La Duchesse de Langeais could be said to illustrate Balzacs
sociopolitical analysis throughout (129).

21

Brooks writes, the Monarchy and the Faubourg Saint-Germain thought only in terms
of consolidating their own power, riches, and privileges, and did not establish roots in the
hearts and minds of the whole nation (127-128)
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The portrait of Saint-Germain does contain (albiet infrequently) some physical

description of this section of the city: [P]our premier trait caractrisque, le faubourg
Saint-Germain a la splendeur de ses hotels, ses grands jardins, leur silence jadis en
harmonie avec la magnificence de ses fortunes territoriales (926). Later, the narrator
returns to this description of luxury, enumerating the grandiose des chteaux et des
palais aristocratiques, le luxe de leurs dtails, la somptuosit constant des ameublements,
laire dans laquelle sy meut sans gne, et sans prouver de froissement, lheureux
propritaire, riche avant de natre (927). The rather non-specific physical description is,
of course, politically inflected, for the narrator has already launched into his treatise on
the post-revolutionary flaws of the aristocracy. In other words, the narrator does not
appear to want to create an accurate or even realistic portrait of the faubourg SaintGermain, eschewing proper nouns (street names, names of htels particuliers,
landmarks) or even extensive details of the physical space (the interior of the htels, for
example, the appearance of the streets, shops, carriages). This trope recurs in the rare
descriptions in this section of the individuals living in the faubourg Saint-Germain:
et l, dans le faubourg Saint-Germain, se rencontrent de beaux caractres, exceptions qui
prouvent contre lgosme gnral qui a caus la perte de ce monde part (927). The
narrator remains on the level of general description he does not enter into details about
a particular character or even construct typologies as did the narrator of Ferragus and
from these general descriptions he extracts general conclusions. Rather than serving as a
faithful portrait grounded in particulars, the geographical space of the faubourg and its
inhabitants serve instead to underscore the narrators political critique.
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Despite this avoidance of a more detailed physical rendering of the faubourg

Saint-Germain based on particular geographical traits, some critics have chosen to focus
on this passage as an accurate (and at times inaccurate) physical description of the
faubourg. Though she refers to this passage as une brillante et solide tude sur le
faubourg Saint-Germain (42), Jeannine Guichardet contends that this section, a
copieuse digression historique, mixes le vrai, le faux et dapproximatives vrits
pour expliquer le peuplement du noble faubourg (135). Guichardet seems to take this
passage seriously as historical, topographical account, taking the author to task for
associating the place Royale with the 16th century and for the approximation of his dates.
Critic Camille Laparra as well, in her article on Balzacs depiction of the aristocracy, is
inspired by the passage to mention certain key historical htels particuliers from the time
period, which would have fallen under the category of faubourg Saint Germain, as well as
the expansion du faubourg Saint-Germain sur la rive droite (605). Balzac scholars, in
other words, have underscored both the passages political commentary and its historical
and physical description of this location in Paris. Although in my reading of this passage,
the accuracy of the physical description of Paris is far from crucial, I do believe that
reading the confluence of topography and political criticism in this description of
faubourg Saint-Germain can help scholars achieve a better understanding of Balzacs use
of the trope of the tableaux de Paris in his urban descriptions.
In addition to its topographical classifications and its comments on social mores,
La Duchesses fifteen-page introduction to its second chapter certainly displays traits of
the tableaux de Paris as it attempts to capture a specific moment in Parisian history
110

accurately. Of course, Balzac, writing about the early Restoration period from his 1834
July Monarchy vantage point, does not claim (like his contemporary literary guidebook
authors) to outdo all preceding tableaux by representing the most modern aspect of
Paris (Stierle, 361). Instead he depicts a moment from the recent past. Yet the fact that
critics have chosen to engage with this text on the level of its urban description places the
section in the group of Balzacs other panoramas of Parisian life. Most important,
however, is the narrators own language when describing the purpose of this passage, a
passage he calls cet aperu semi-politique (932). By beginning this passage evoking
ceux qui veulent observer ou peindre les diffrentes zones socials and closing the
passage mentioning the scnes partielles du drame national appel les Moeurs (924,
934), the narrator makes reference to multiple aspects of contemporary panoramic
literature: observation of social life, painting, short scenes, moeurs (as in the similar
tradition of the Tableaux de Moeurs) and, most importantly, drame. Unlike its
panoramic counterparts which, when collected into chapters, formed social guides to the
city, this topographical, semi-political Parisian treatise provides the moral, political and
historical background necessary to comprehend the passionate and ultimately violent
narrative of the Duchesse (firmly entrenched in aristocratic Restoration social norms) and
Montriveau (a relic of Napoleons Empire).
While the critique of the weakening aristocracy in this tableau would certainly
mesh with some of Saint-Simons political beliefs, it is difficult to view this passage as
purely positivist. It does provide a detailed observation on the phenomenon of the
faubourg Saint-Germain; the clearly retrospective look at this moment in Restoration
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Paris functions almost as the dynamic approach which Comte posits in his Cours, and the
precise description of the faubourg studies character types whose relationships and
networks are thereby better understood in the ensuing narrative. And yet, the intercalated
political commentary departs from the realm of the purely positivist. This more nuanced
political, moral, social and physical description of the faubourg and its essences
prefigures, rather, Taines notion of milieu: Balzac effectively captures the geographical
and political situation of the aristocracy under the beginning of the Restoration, depicting
the specific circumstances out of which the Duchesse and Montriveau emerge. This
passage in the form of a tableau, as opposed to those we studied in the previous chapter,
is thus inflected with a metaphysical sense that is absent from typical tableaux de Paris.
3.2.3 La fille aux yeux dor: une vraie physionomie parisienne?
As with the other texts in the Histoire des Treize trilogy, La fille aux yeux dor of
1835 also begins with a lengthy excursus on contemporary Parisian life, which Bell has
labeled a veritable treatise on the class structure of Parisian (and French) society (118).
This seventeen-page section describes laspect gnral de la population parisienne
(1039) and is part of the novels first section entitled Physionomies Parisiennes. In fact,
it has appeared in critical readings of Balzac more than the other tableaux we have

112

discussed here and is quite often linked to the tradition of the tableaux de Paris.22 Yet
despite the critical association of the tradition of the tableaux with this passage, whose
narrator has often been compared to Dante in his mapping out of the various spheres of
Paris, there is little evidence in the passage, I would argue, to indicate this connection.23
In this section, I plan first to read the passage closely in order to determine its divergence
from the tradition of the tableau de Paris and its relation to the passages from the
Histoire des Treize which we have already examined. Finally, I hope to locate Balzacs
narrative strategy in describing Parisian class structure within the context of the theories
of positivism.
A brief word about the plot at the outset. The last novel of the trilogy concerns
dandy Henri de Marsay, illegitimate son of the marquise de Vordac and a certain Lord
Dudley, who disappears after marrying his pregnant lover to an old man, de Marsay. An

22

Jean Larose, in his article on melancholy, refers to the tableau de Paris qui ouvre la
Fille aux yeux dor (18). Petitier includes an almost identical assessment in her more
recent article on the notion of the center in post-1830 literature: Le tableau de Paris qui
ouvre La Fille aux yeux dor (1835) se rattache cette dynamique spiriforme de la
rverie aboutissant au nant (14). In her own article on Taines edition of M.
Graindorges Notes sur Paris, Lucette Czyba explains that les Notes sur Paris
reprennent le leitmotiv du tableau qui sert douverture la Fille aux yeux dor (167).
Judith Weschler, too, places the passage not only in the tradition of the tableau de
moeurs, but in that of early-nineteenth century scientific writing as well: This portrait of
the moeurs of the petit bourgeois derives in form both from Buffons descriptions of
animal species and the characterizations of La Bruyre. It is a report on the physiology,
habits and inclinations of the genus (29).
23
As a small aside, as opposed to the porte cochre scene from Ferragus in which the
narrator employs the word tableau, or to the passage on the Faubourg Saint Germain,
which is closed by the words scnes partielles du drame national (934), making implicit
reference to both the short scenes of the tableaux de moeurs and the tableaux de Pariss
origins in 18th century theater, this long passage from La Fille aux yeux dor contains
none of the customary terms such as drame, scne, or tableau.
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exquisitely handsome man with strikingly feminine qualities, Henri is doomed from the
beginning of the novel because of his pouvantable vice: not only does he not believe
in God or the devil, but also he has no faith in women or men. His fancy is struck by one
woman in particular, however, an exotic, catlike woman with piercing golden eyes whom
he encounters on a walk in the Tuileries. De Marsay sets out to make this woman, whom
his valet discovers is named Paquita Valds and is housed in the hotel of the marquis de
San Ral, his lover. After another electric encounter in the Tuileries, letters are
exchanged, an arrangement is made and Henri is secreted away to an intimate boudoir for
the lovers first encounter. Though the two are clearly attracted to one another, Paquita
makes it clear that their time together is brief and dangerous. At their next encounter,
Paquita mysteriously dresses Henri like a woman before their physical interaction, and
again explains how perilous her situation really is. After she calls him by the name of
Mariquita during their ultimate sexual encounter, de Marsay plots to murder Paquita and
returns a week later with three colleagues (including Ferragus) to finish the job. They are
too late. Paquitas lesbian lover, the marquise de San Ral, whom Henri discovers is his
sister from Lord Dudley, has already stabbed her to death.
If we consider Ferragus to contain the most physical of these novelistic
tableaux de Paris and La Duchesse to contain a mixture of moral, political and physical
description, this third and final novella falls, perhaps, at the other end of the spectrum.
In La Fille aux yeux dor, Balzacs narrator provides almost no concrete physical
description or tangible social typology, but rather, he weaves a complex narrative of
metaphor and allegory to paint what we might call a moral thesis about the city. While
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the introductory typology of Parisian streets in Ferragus certainly ascribes moral values
to the streets of Paris it describes and that of La Duchesse forms ethical judgments based
on the physical and social descriptions of the faubourg Saint Germain, the narrator of La
Fille aux yeux dor concentrates more on the spectacle that is the Parisian social scene,
focusing on the general rather than the particular.24 He begins by offering quelques
observations sur lme de Paris [qui] peuvent expliquer les causes de sa physionomie
cadavreuse (1039), yet these observations come less in the form of an urban typology
or even a scene and more as a totalizing vision of Paris: what Christopher Prendergast has
called Paris as a total system, like Dantes circles, an ordered stratified public and
general (53). Beginning with the ouvrier and touching on the commerant, the haute
bourgeoisie, the artist and the nobles, the narrator mixes the analogy of the sphres
parisiennes with that of the Parisian apartment building to show that regardless of class,
only one thing matters in Paris: lor et le plaisir (1039).25 He does enter into some
detail about the daily lives of these various classes of people the worker who returns to

24

Christopher Prendergast has underscored the importance of the first words of this
novella un des spectacles, linking them both to the motif of artifice and maquillage
in the novel, as well as, more importantly, the positioning of the observing subject at a
point sufficiently distant from its object for it be taken in as a whole, at a single view
(53). By speaking of the aspect gnral de la population parisienne as a spectacle,
the narrator implies a totalizing view of the urban landscape and, therefore, a mastery of
this landscape. While full collections of tableaux de Paris, found in literary guidebooks
such as La Grande Ville: Nouveau Tableau de Paris of 1842 and 43, as well as countless
other examples, do set for themselves the goal of total mastery over the city, individual
examples of tableaux, such as the porte cochre scene in Ferragus, are merely a piece of
the puzzle.
25
He writes, for example, Cette ambition introduit la pense dans la seconde des sphres
parisiennes. Montez donc un tage et allez lentresol; ou descendez du grenier et restez
au quatrime (1044).
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his conjugal bed at midnight after attending a play; the petit-bourgeois couple who only
pay for one cook, but who give their daughter 150,000 francs for a dowry; the
businessmen obliged to attend the opera and balls in order to find clients. Yet at no point
is the reader treated to a lengthy typology of any of these figures, nor does any of the
description serve any function other than to prove the narrators original thesis: money
and pleasure, or, more generally la Ncessit, are the cause of every classs actions.
This over-arching vision of Paris, therefore, differs from the smaller, fragmented
tableaux, which treated individual phenomena and, only when combined as in the literary
guidebooks, formed a more comprehensive vision of the city.
The narrators heavy reliance on metaphor also takes this passage out of the
traditional realm of the tableau de Paris, especially considering that the metaphors deal
with Paris as a whole entity, rather than a particular aspect of the city. As both
Prendergast and David Harvey have noted, this introduction to the novel is almost
entirely constructed upon metaphor and analogy. According to Harvey, Balzacs narrator
deploys an amazing mixture of metaphors to describe this class structure. Dantes
vision [] of spheres in the descent into hell is first invoked [] Balzac rapidly shifts
metaphors and we find ourselves first ascending through the floors of a typical Parisian
apartment building, noting the class stratification as we go up, then viewing Paris as a
ship of state manned by a motley crew, and then, finally, probing into the lobes and
tissues of Paris considered as either a harlot or a queen. (36)
Indeed while the narrator does at times cite particular examples from the level of the
urban quotidian (as we saw above), most of the passage is composed of literary tropes

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and maintained at a level which is far away from the streets of Paris.26 Within the first
three pages, the narrator notes that ce nest pas seulement par plaisanterie que Paris a t
nomm un enfer (1039), and he labels the city cette grande cage de pltre, cette ruche
ruisseaux noirs (1040). This overlapping of metaphor continues for seventeen pages
until we are at last introduced to de Marsay. The effect of this almost hyperbolic use of
metaphor to describe all of the city one image on top of the next only underscores the
mythical, all-inclusive characteristics of Balzacs treatment of Paris, so different from the
smaller, more fragmentary urban tableaux or physiologies.
Along the same lines, Prendergast acknowledges the texts prodigious figural
input, explaining, metaphor is eclectically chosen and promiscuously mixed (58).
Indeed, there is little continuity among the images evoked in a passage, where one passes
from Paris as field, then as theater (the motif of the mask), then as workshop, then as
hell, then as volcano (58). Still further, the somewhat disjunctive nature of this series of
metaphors is employed in conjunction with sentences composed chiefly of enumeration,
for example, the following: L [ Paris] tout fume, tout brle, tout brille, tout
bouillonne, tout flamb, svapore, steint, se rallume, tincelle, ptille et se consume
(1039-1040). They elaborate upon the metaphors used to describe the city, once again

26

Once again this points to Prendergasts argument about Balzacs desire to achieve a
totalizing view of the city. He evokes the famous quasi-demiurgic Balzacian gaze,
looking out, over and down the universe seen from the point of view of the universe
(53).
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moving the description further and further beyond mere factual observation.27 Finally,
the repetition of the words lor et le plaisir, which return not only to remind the reader
of the narrators argument on Paris, but also serve as a poetic refrain, create lyric
continuity to this otherwise rather unwieldy text. These tropes call attention to the
highly literary nature of the passage and distinguish it from a traditional tableau, even
those found in the two preceding novellas of the Histoire des Treize trilogy. While
authors of the nineteenth-century tableaux de Paris strove for the most up-to-date and
accurate typologies of social phenomena, Parisian people and sections of the city, La
Fille aux yeux dors narrator seems to anchor this description in more literary, rather
than pseudo-scientific, realistic terms.28 These terms are, of course, problematic,
because no realistic description is ever truly realistic nor is a purely literary passage
without realist accuracy. Yet by calling attention to its figurative nature, the text reads

27

Another sentence whose enumeration serves to underscore its literary qualities rather
than to describe an actual Parisian type is the following: Le fabricant, le je ne sais quel
fil secondaire dont le branle agite ce peuple qui, de ses mains sales, tourne et dore les
porcelaines, coud les habits et les robes, amincit le fer, amenuise le bois, tisse lacier,
solidifie le chancre et le fil, satine les bronzes, festonne le cristal, imite les fleurs, brode la
laine, dresse les chevaux, tresse les harnais et les galons, dcoupe le cuivre, peint les
voitures, arrondit les vieux ormeaux, vaporise le coton, souffle les tulles, corrode le
diamant, polit les mtaux, transforme en feuilles le marbre, lche les cailloux, toilette la
pense, colore, blanchit et noircit tout; et bien, ce sous-chef est venu promettre ce
monde de sueur et de volont, dtude et de patience, un salaire excessif, soit au nom des
caprices de la ville, soit la voix du monstre nomm Spculation (1041). The narrator,
in one large breath, describes all the labors of this world of sweat and will, and despite
the number of actions mentioned in this one sentence, the piles upon piles of professions
encompassed in this sentence underscore its non-typological nature. We readers are
given a lengthy list of what all members of an entire class do, rather than a lengthy
description of one of these individuals.
28
See Karlheinz Stierles Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris.
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more as a universal, novelistic treatment of the city, rather than as a short scene, a
succinct observation or even a theatrical tableau of a Parisian phenomenon.29
The beginning of the passage, according to Prendergast, is replete with references
to science zoology, physiology, physiognomy in an attempt, the critic believes, to
invoke a promise of intelligibility, a promise which for Prendergast is never fulfilled
because of the very frenzied, intense nature of the writing we studied above.30 This
may very well be the case, and the totalizing vision of the city, which the narrator strives
for in this passage, the vision which distinguishes it from an individual tableau parisien,
remains unattained, as is often the case in Balzacs novels. Though it is beyond the scope
of this study to examine all of the scientific references and influences on Balzac at play in
this novel, we must nevertheless call attention to the title of this section, Physionomie

29

Despite my contention that this passage represents a more novelistic treatment of

Paris, as opposed to the fragmentary tableau, I take seriously Andrea Goulets argument
about the inconsistency of Balzacs vision of Paris in this section: Grammatically, there
is no clear movement between specific and general, example and group. The working
class appears variably as a singular type [] as a plural subject [] and as a collective
[] each granted its own long list of active verbs, while descriptions of the other classes
just as inconsistently jumble grammatical plurals and singulars into a thematic
hodgepodge of collectives and individuals. Why is this notable? Because it
problematizes, within the scope of narrative description, the methodological tension
underlying Balzacs proposed constructional unity. If, indeed, the world is composed
of a hidden unified structure and a manifest plurality of forms, how does one go about
knowing and describing it? Does one observe, inductively, its multiple parts and add
them up to form a sense of the whole, or does one deduce the individual forms from a
preexisting theory of the whole?(63).
30
Prendergast further elaborates, after his reading of the lengthy sentence on Paris as a
burning Hell: But one thing that is certainly burnt here, ravaged by the intensities of the
writing itself, is the project of a settled and coherent scientific representation of the city
undertaken from some serene point above and beyond, and hence untouched by the
frenzy of the scene represented (56).
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Parisienne, and note that the term physionomie is evoked no fewer than eight times
throughout the passage, providing, in a sense, a counter refrain to lor et le plaisir.
In addition to denoting the face or the traits of a face, the term is also defined,
according to a dictionary published in the same year as the 1835 novel, as Lart de juger,
par linspection des traits du visage, quelles sont les inclinations dune personne.31
Indeed, Judith Wecshler, who has studied the influences of the science of physiognomy
in Balzac, characterizes the science in the following way: the correspondence of
physical appearance and moral character: [leading physiognomer Lavatar] taught the
science or knowledge of the correspondence between the external and internal man, the
visible superficies and the invisible contents (23). The title, then, implies that what will
follow in the section will be an inspection of the exterior traits of the city and its people
in order to arrive at an understanding of its inner workings, of its tendencies. In fact, the
title posits an almost positivist approach to the section in the sense that through
observation of the visible, the the laws of phenomena can be determined. Yet the next
use of the term physionomie does not fully support this reading: Quelques observations
sur lme de Paris peuvent expliquer les causes de sa physionomie cadavreuse (1039).
While the narrator still couches the passage in scientific terminology observations,

31

In this chapter I do not aim to tackle the history of the science of physiognomy further
than noting the fact that both Saint-Simon and Comte claim to have been influenced by
early physiognomists. For a historical study of the development of physiognomy and the
manner in which it was taught in the early nineteenth century, see Martin Staums
Physiognomy and Phrenology at the Paris Athene. For an in-depth art historical study
of developments in the study of physiognomy, and in particular the work of Lavatar in
Art de connatre les hommes par la physionomie and their effect on Balzacs oeuvre, as
well as early-nineteenth century caricature, see Judith Weschlers A Human Comedy.
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physionomie (though this time in the sense of the face) the goal of the passage has
now switched from exterior observations which might explain the interior to reflections
on the interior of the city (lme), which will shed light on the exterior. This is
manifestly contrary to Comtes notion of positivism, which advocates the study of
observable phenomena (obviously excluding the study of lme), as are the second and
fifth uses of physionomie in this passage. Peut-tre avant danalyser les causes qui font
une physionomie spciale chaque tribu de cette nation intelligente et mouvante,
explains the narrator, doit-on signaler la cause gnrale qui en dcolore, blmit, bleuit et
brunit plus ou moins les individus (1040). Once again, the narrator does not take a
positive approach in that he names the cause before delving into observable fact;
searching for a cause, as we have seen, is also incompatible with what Comte imagined to
be a post-supernatural, post-metaphysical positivist method.
The culmination of this counter-positivist approach can be found, perhaps, in the
moment in which the narrator justifies the absence of urban physical description in this
passage, implying that the moral description suffices to understand the topographical
description of the city: Cette vue de Paris moral prouve que le Paris physique ne saurait
tre autrement quil nest [] Sa physionomie sous-entend la germination du bien et du
mal, le combat et la victoire (1051). According to the narrator, in other words, the moral
explication of the city is the definitive proof of why physical Paris is what it is the
superficial side of the city implies its more complex underside. Yet we, the readers, have
not seen the superficial, physical, visible side of the city, and so we are left with the cause
(lor et le plaisir, la Ncessit) as its explanation. In fact, the narrator couches the
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cause of the physionomie parisienne in theological terms of sorts. After weaving yet
another metaphor of the city as vessel, filled with all types of human beings all desirous
of pleasure and gold, he launches into the following conclusion:
Donc le mouvement exorbitant des proltaires, donc la dpravation des intrts qui
broient les deux bourgeoisies, donc les cruauts de la pense artiste, et les excs du
plaisir incessamment cherch par les grands, expliquent la laideur normale de la
physionomie parisienne [] Paris, Petits, Moyens et Grands courent, sautent et
cabriolent, fouetts par une impitoyable desse, la Ncessit: ncessit dargent, de
gloire ou damusement. (1052, my emphasis)
While this theological incarnation of ncessit, is literary Balzacs narrator does not
believe in this particular supernatural deity the isolation of an underlying cause, in this
case Need (financial, physical, social), signifies in Comtes terms that the narrator is still
hovering in the metaphysical stage. This abstract force Ncessit therefore functions
in this introductory thesis on Parisian society as the underlying cause, the unseen power,
at the root of Pariss physiognomy. Despite gestures toward a positivist method through
his attempts at observation, and in spite of persistent use of the word physionomie
throughout the section implying a study of the exterior to comprehend the interior,
Balzacs narrator is ultimately not faithfully adhering to a positivist method, a method
whose main text, Comtes Cours de philosophie positive, had been in circulation for five
years at the moment of the publication of La Fille aux yeux dor and whose main tenants
had been in place, as we have seen, since before Saint-Simon.
The three novels which comprise the Histoire des Treize are by no means
Balzacs only novels containing lengthy descriptions of the city. Despite their focus on
interior spaces and on underground Parisian society, these novels contain numerous
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examples of urban discourse from social typologies, to totalizing visions of the city, to
tableaux de Paris similar to those found in the literary guidebooks contemporary to the
novels.32 Ferragus includes the most physical examinations of the city and its inhabitants
(the streets, the porte cochre, the grisette), conforming in part to the positivist method of
observation. Through the typological description of the grisette, for example, Idas
interactions with the other characters are better understood. Yet the texts betrays a
tendency toward what Comte would call the metaphysical in that an abstract force,
chance, drives a part of the novel. Though it is highly moralistic and veers toward
political commentary, the passage in La Duchesse de Langeais does provide a typological
description of the faubourg Saint-Germain (a physical, social, moral and political
typology) and once again, an inductive initiation to this urban phenomenon. Nonetheless,
this passage, in its fully comprehensive political, moral, social and physical description is
better characterized as what Taine, in his own theories on the scientific approach to
literature, would later call milieu. La Fille aux yeux dor, as we have just seen, provides,

32

It is not entirely clear why these particular three novels contain these lengthy excurses
on Paris only to be followed by almost supernatural narratives. Because of the
bizarrerie so prevalent throughout the tales, we might argue that the tableaux de Paris
serve, especially in Ferragus and La Duchesse de Langeais, to provide a familiar
counterpoint to the unusual plot line a sort of point of recognition for readers amid the
uncharted territory of the underground group. In addition, and once again predominantly
with the first two novellas, these physical and moral observations, these typologies of
exterior signs, might lay the ground for readers to comprehend the more murky and
interior scenes which follow. Borrowing from them the familiar trope of the tableau de
Paris might help readers situate themselves more easily in these tales of Paris
underground. Perhaps, to return to the question of science, the more scientific,
intelligible descriptions provide not only a sense of legibility but also a sort of
verisimilitude to the texts.
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through a deductive process, an explanation of the cause of the Parisian populations

desires without the direct observation. It offers what Comte might deem a metaphysical
explanation for a social phenomenon. Balzacs three urban texts function at a crossroads
between incipient pre-sociological theories and older theories of description, and while he
never seems to settle on one particular method of narrating the Parisian social scene,
Balzacs narrator borrows tropes from panoramic literature to explore his own theories of
sociological representation.
As we come to the close our study of the Histoire des Treize, it is important to
mention one other small tableau found in La Fille aux yeux dor, namely the typology of
the young Parisian man. It begins, after de Marsay has already been introduced, in the
following way: En effet, les jeunes gens de Paris ne ressemblent aux jeunes gens
daucune autre ville. Ils se divisent en deux classes: le jeune homme qui a quelque chose,
et le jeune homme qui na rien; ou le jeune homme qui pense et celui qui dpense
(1059). The reader is then treated to a more general explication of the divisions among
the moneyed youth, both educated and mediocre, and to a description of the relationships
that exist among the different divisions. The general description serves to explain further
de Marsays relationship with his friend Paul de Manerville and, as was the case of the
typology of the grisette in Ferragus, to provide a broad representation of a particular
character. The scene is in a contrast to the more all-encompassing portrayal of Parisian
society at the beginning of the novel, but it stands apart from this introductory scene for
another reason as well. An editors note in a recent Flammarion edition of the text
informs us that Balzac reuses these same words in a different context: Ici commencent
124

les pages de La Fille aux yeux dor dont Balzac sest servi pour composer larticle intitul
Les jeunes gens de Paris, paru en septembre 1834 dans le Nouveau Tableau de Paris au
XIXe sicle (333, n44). The text is thus made to function both in a novelistic and nonnovelistic context. Balzacs involvement in the genre of the literary guidebook and the
physiologies has been well documented. According to Weschler, he is, in fact, at the
origin of the genre of the physiologies,33 and he made important contributions to the
larger panoramic projects such as the second volume of La Grande Ville: Nouveau
tableau de Paris, which includes an excerpt on publishing from Illusions perdues,
namely, Monographie de la presse parisienne. The overlap between the typologies
Balzac wrote for non-novelistic projects and those which appear almost verbatim in his
Parisian novels, especially as they concern Balzacs place among contemporary early
sociological thinkers, will be the subject of our next section. This confluence of genres is
most complexly located in the 1838 novel Les Employs, where, through the various
tableaux and physiologies inserted into the novel, the author appears to test out a number
of early sociological principles circulating at the time of publication.
3.3 Les Employs as Literary Laboratory
First published in 1837 as a feuilleton in La Presse under the title La Femme
suprieure, Les Employs was, according to early twentieth-century literary historian

33

Weschler writes, as we saw in the introduction, that Balzac claimed paternity of the
physiologie as a genre his own Physiologie du Mariage had been published eleven
years before the Aubert series appeared. Balzac acknowledged Brillat-Savarins
Physiologie du gout ou meditation de gastronomie transcendante (1826); but his own
book certainly was the direct model for the genre (32).
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Mary Scott, greatly altered before the definitive edition was published in book form as
Les Employs ou la Femme suprieure in 1844.34 In her 1926 article entitled Variations
between the First and the Final Edition of Balzacs Les Employs, Scott cites Balzac:
[J]ai une prface coudre, en forme de collerette, la Femme suprieure, et une
quatrime partie en forme de tournure, car les soixante-quinze colonnes de la Presse
nont fourni quun petit volumeVous ne saurez imaginer comme ces raccommodages,
ces repltrages mennuient; je suis excd par ces travaux aprs coup (315, 12 October
1837). The seventy-five columns which made up La Femme suprieure in 1837 were
transformed six years later into a much lengthier novel, whose main focus shifted from
the tale of a woman who attempts to secure her husband a position in the ministry to a
study of the world of bureaucrats under the Restoration. Balzac himself addressed this
difference in the preface to an 1838 edition of the novel, stating that for him La Femme
suprieure was a title qui n'exprime plus le sujet de cette tude o lhrone, si tant est
qu'elle soit suprieure, n'est plus qu'une figure accessoire au lieu de s'y trouver la

34

According to the Muse de Balzacs website, the novel parat en proriginale du 1er
au 14 juillet 1837, and then was collected into a two volume edition by the editor
Werdet, [p]resque identique la proringinale. Six years later, a third edition
appeared, celle de septembre 1844, chez Furne, dans le tome III des Scnes de la vie
parisienne. (see http://www.parisfrance.org/Musees/Balzac/furne/notices/employes.htm). Although the editor of The
Bureaucrats, the English translation of Les Employs, proposes a slightly different
timeline for the books publications, Mary Scott also concurs with the chronology
proposed by the Muse de Balzacs website: Les Employs, or, as it was first called, La
Femme suprieure, was written in June, 1837, and first appeared in La Presse between
July 1 and 15 of that year. [] Balzac allowed fifteen months to elapse before La Femme
suprieure appeared (October, 1838) in the two-volume edition published by Werdet
(315).
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principale. He then elaborates further upon the disparity between the subject matter and
the title, explaining that si vous trouvez ici beaucoup d'employs et peu de femmes
suprieures, cette faute est explicable par les raisons sus-nonces: les employs taient
prts, accommods, finis, et la femme suprieure est encore peindre.35 This 1844
change in title indicates a definitive shift in the focus of the novel, from a moral tale of a
woman and her bureaucrat husband to an analysis of the phenomenon of the early
nineteenth-century bureaucrat. It also represents a generic shift in the novel. From a
simple story as Scott dubs it, Les Employs is transformed into a sociological study,
and the plot of the novel is peppered with tableaux and physiologies-like passages. In
fact, Balzac (like his bureaucrats) is openly pirating segments from an 1841 Physiologie
de lemploy written after the feuilleton was released but before the definitive edition of
Les Employs was published in 1844. The author, therefore, not only blends together two
of his own generically disparate texts, but he also implicitly suggests that the tableau and
physiologies are better suited to fulfill a specific need in the novel. In what follows, I
will examine several of these passages, Balzacs direct citation of the movement of
panoramic literature (which reached its peak in the early 1840s), as well as the ways in
which Balzac employs these passages to grapple with contemporary positivist theories of
sociology, much more established as he writes nine years after the publication of La Fille
aux yeux dor.

35

This citation is found both on the Muse de Balzacs website on Les Employs and in
the introduction to the English translation of the novel by Marco Diani.
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Despite the change in title, a large portion of the novel is still dedicated to the
narrative of a femme suprieure: Madame Clestine Rabourdin, wife of Xavier
Rabourdin, an office manager. At the origin of the plot is the death of Monsieur de La
Billardire, which has left a vacancy in the ministry for the high-ranking position of chef
de division. Rabourdin, having worked his way up the bureaucratic ladder, is the obvious
choice for this position, a promotion that would allow his wife the high society life of
which she has always dreamed. On the other end of the spectrum, Elizabeth Baudoyer,
the wife of another office manager schemes to have her husband, Isidore, a clearly inept
candidate, elected to this position. Both wives become the driving forces behind the
plans to advance their husbands careers. Clestine is aided by the ministers secretary
general, le Comte de Lupeaulx, who is in love with her, yet her husbands cause is
damaged when it is discovered that he has been planning a major overhaul of the
administrative system in which hundreds of unnecessary positions would be eliminated
and the remaining employees would be better compensated. The news of this secret plan
leaked by Rabourdins employee Dutocq, who finds a copy of the outline carelessly left
in the office by supernumerary Sebastian incites many office workers to back
Baudoyer. He ultimately wins the position. Rabourdin resigns and promises his wife a
better future, despite their debts, and the incompetent Baudoyer, the reader is told, is
demoted shortly after achieving the coveted post.
The various species of bureaucrats, as well as the office itself, are described in
painstaking detail in this novel, as are the backgrounds of each of the characters.
Balzacs narrator takes great care to describe the familial relationships among the
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employees so that, for example, certain nepotistic tensions are understandable (Elisabeth
Baudoyers father, Saillard, is, for instance, the cashier at the ministry who supports the
promotion of his son in law over Rabourdin). Such relationships also explain the
characters pasts, so that the stakes in the promotion at the heart of the text are clear
(Clestine Rabourdin, despite her non-noble birth, is well educated and desirous of social
standing largely because her mother avait donn de fausses esprances sa fille sur son
avenir) (900). Yet in addition to these biographies that flow logically from the narrative,
the text is frequently interrupted by lengthy passages providing typologies of certain
posts in the office. One such instance is the three-page passage on the supernumerary.
At one of Madame Rabourdins Wednesday receptions early on in the novel, the narrator
remarks, en ce moment, [Rabourdin] causait confidentiellement avec un surnumraire
qui devait jouer un rle dans l'intrigue engendre par la mort certaine de La Billardire, il
pia donc d'un regard fort distrait Clestine et des Lupeaulx (946). Before putting into
action the crucial role this supernumerary will play, the narrator launches into a
description of this particularly dated Parisian phenomenon:
Ici, peut-tre doit-on expliquer, autant pour les trangers que pour nos neveux, ce qu'est
Paris un surnumraire.
Le surnumraire est l'Administration ce que l'enfant de chur est l'Eglise, ce que
l'enfant de troupe est au Rgiment, ce que le rat est au Thtre: quelque chose de naf,
de candide, un tre aveugl par les illusions. [] Or, il a foi en l'Administration, le
surnumraire! il ne la suppose pas froide, atroce, dure comme elle est. Il n'y a que deux
genres de surnumraires: les surnumraires riches et les surnumraires pauvres. Le
surnumraire pauvre est riche d'esprance et a besoin d'une place, le surnumraire riche
est pauvre d'esprit et n'a besoin de rien. [] Les employs savent qu'il ne les menace
point, le surnumraire riche ne vise que les hauts emplois de l'administration. [] Le
surnumraire pauvre, le vrai, le seul surnumraire, est presque toujours le fils de
quelque veuve d'employ qui vit sur une maigre pension et se tue nourrir son fils
jusqu' ce qu'il arrive la place d'expditionnaire, et qui meurt le laissant prs du bton
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de marchal, quelque place de commis-rdacteur, de commis d'ordre, ou peut-tre de

Sous-chef. Toujours log dans un quartier o les loyers ne sont pas chers, ce
surnumraire part de bonne heure; pour lui, l'tat du ciel est la seule question d'Orient!
Venir pied, ne pas se crotter, mnager ses habits, calculer le temps qu'une trop forte
averse peut lui prendre s'il est forc de se mettre l'abri, combien de proccupations!
(946-947)
This lengthy description breaks down the category of supernumerary into the rich worker
and the poor worker, and it then continues elaborating upon the backgrounds, aspirations,
living situations, career trajectories and even dress of this person. In other words, the plot
of the novel is interrupted in order for the narrator to expound upon this Parisian
phenomenon, so that readers unaccustomed to this type will be able to decode this
character. In fact, we the readers receive all of this general information before we are
told anything about Sebastian, the actual character, le jeune homme qui parlait
Rabourdin tait un surnumraire pauvre nomm Sbastien de La Roche (949).
This typology, a brief, comical social portrait of the supernumerary, is clearly
influenced by the panoramic literature movement booming during the early 1840s. Judith
Lyon-Caen has described la vogue immense que connurent autour de 1840 les tableaux
de Paris, illustrs ou non, et autres sries de physiologies, petits portraits de types sociaux
illustrs publis en particulier par la librairie Aubert (171). As we already saw in
chapter one, the early 1840s saw the publication of over one hundred physiologies as well
as the larger literary guidebooks, Les Franais peints par eux-mmes and La Grande
Ville, both of which contain contributions from Balzac. This connection is made all the
more evident when we learn that the supernumerary typology is pulled almost word for

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word from Balzacs own 1841 Physiologie de lemploy.36 According to Scott, in the
later version of the novel, there are [] twenty-four pages (exclusive of illustrations)
out of the total two hundred and eighty inserted to develop the sociological study of the
genus government clerk. [] [T]hey were adapted from an article called the Physiologie
de lemploy published in 1841 (322). The novels passage closes logically with the
introduction of Sbastien, while the Physiologies chapter closes with an additional
summarizing sentence, but in other respects, these two sections are exactly the same.37
Despite being sandwiched between sentences providing context for the novels narrative,
this somewhat abrupt typology seems to call attention to itself as being outside the

36

The 1838 version of La Femme suprieure does contain a small passage on the
supernumerary which overlaps the description found in the Physiologie as well as the
1844 version of the novel, yet is approximately one third the length of the typology found
in the definitive version and is not set apart as abruptly from the rest of the narrative. It
briefly touches upon the differences between the poor and the rich supernumerary, but
includes fewer details on the daily lives and the social situations of these individuals nor
does it give a more general overview of the position. The 1844 version is thus highly
influenced by the genre of the physiologies written three years before its publication.
37
The narrator concludes his section by writing that [s]ur trente surnumraires il en est
donc sept qui se sont faits lair du bureau, qui ont si bien accoutum leur main crire,
leur tte ne plus penser, leur esprit ne sexercer que dans le cercle administratif, quils
deviennent les uns commis, les autres chefs en esprance (71).
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narrative flow.38 The author, therefore, relies on the genre of panoramic literature as a
source for shifting the focus of his novel from the tale of a superior woman to the
sociological study of the bureaucrat.39
The passage on the supernumerary is hardly the only one of its kind. In fact, Scott
informs us that in estimating line by line the proportion of the Physiologie to be found in
Les Employs, I find that Balzac used 641 lines and discarded 101 (323). Without
enumerating each of these overlaps, I will nonetheless cite one other example of a short
typology from Balzacs 1844 novel. After the first portion of the plotline establishing
Madame Baudoyer and Clestine as rivals is completed, the narrator explains that he will
now set up the life of the bureaucrat in the office or, more colorfully put, aussi voici
venir le moment de montrer les tarets qui grouillaient dans les Bureaux o se sont passes
38

Mary Scott has examined the va-et-vient between Balzacs novel and the Physiologie
de lemploy, as well as the sections borrowed from La Femme suprieure in the
Physiologie de lemploy. She posits that the authors copying went largely unnoticed
because of the lack of critical attention paid to the original version of his novel: If
Sainte-Beuves reaction to it can be taken as representative, we may suppose it aroused
little interest. [] Perhaps he suspected his readers had skipped the longueurs in the
numerous dossiers of employees, so that he might use that part of the novel again (322).
Scott, a philologist, also examines the verb and pronoun transformations between the
novel and the physiologies noting that when [the passages] pass into the Physiologie
these portraits are still further generalized: names are suppressed, tenses changed to the
present, connections between different employees eliminated (323).
39
Scott notes, as well, that though several of the typologies from the Physiologie de
lemploy are omitted from the novel, many of the novels characters bear a striking
resemblance to people described in the physiologies: There are in the Physiologie de
lemploy a number of passages besides the parallel ones listed that suggest in varying
degrees parts of Les Employs. The cumulard (Physiologie, 349), for instance, has several
traits in common with Colleville as pictured in the Furn and Conard editions (325).
Detailing the development of the character from La Femme suprieure to the
physiologies and Les employs, Scott insists once again on the way in which the
Physiologie de lemploy enriched this study of a class (325).
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les principales scnes de cette Etude (954). He then begins by describing, in

observational fashion, the particularly Parisian phenomenon of the bureau:
A Paris, presque tous les Bureaux se ressemblent. En quelque ministre que vous erriez
pour solliciter le moindre redressement de torts ou la plus lgre faveur, vous trouverez
des corridors obscurs, des dgagements peu clairs, des portes perces, comme les
loges de thtre, d'une vitre ovale qui ressemble un oeil, et par laquelle on voit des
fantaisies dignes de Callot, et sur lesquelles sont des indications incomprhensibles.
Quand vous avez trouv l'objet de vos dsirs, vous tes dans une premire pice o se
tient le garon de bureau; il en est une seconde o sont les employs infrieurs; le
cabinet d'un Sous-chef vient ensuite droite ou gauche; enfin plus loin ou plus haut,
celui du Chef de bureau [] Carrele comme le corridor et tendue d'un papier
mesquin, la pice o se tient le garon de bureau est meuble d'un pole, d'une grande
table noire, plumes, encrier, quelquefois une fontaine, enfin des banquettes sans nattes
pour les pieds-de-grues publics; mais le garon de bureau, assis dans un bon fauteuil,
repose les siens sur un paillasson. Le bureau des employs est une grande pice plus ou
moins claire, rarement parquete. Le parquet et la chemine sont spcialement affects
aux Chefs de Bureau et de Division, ainsi que les armoires, les bureaux et les tables
d'acajou, les fauteuils de maroquin rouge ou vert, les divans, les rideaux de soie et
autres objets de luxe administratif. Le bureau des employs a un pole dont le tuyau
donne dans une chemine bouche, s'il y a chemine. (954-956)
This description, exceeding three pages, encompasses at once the physical description of
the office, the hierarchies that exist within it, and the daily activities of the various
workers, and it is once again followed by a transition leading to a character in the story:
Peut-tre suffira-t-il de peindre la Division de monsieur La Billardire, pour que les
trangers et les gens qui vivent en province aient des ides exactes sur les moeurs intimes
des Bureaux, car ces traits principaux sont sans doute communs toutes les
administrations europennes (957). The reader notes once again an extensive
observation of a Parisian phenomenon, which interrupts the plot before it is resumed with
the introduction of a character, whose particular milieu is now better understood. An
analogous though not identical passage from the Physiologie de lemploy beginning
with A Paris, presque tous les bureaux se ressemblent (40), and which similarly details
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the ins and outs of the typical Parisian office provides another bridge between the novel
and this example of panoramic literature. The prominent place of this passage, as the
narrative transitions from Mme Rabourdin to the bureaucrats, once again calls attention
to this generic shift and to the influence of the tradition of panoramic literature in the
novel.40 These lengthy observations on various Parisian phenomena stand out, both
generically and thematically, as sociological studies within the body of the novel and
serve to demonstrate Balzacs use of the trope of the tableaux/physiologies in a
positivistic observational mode.
These typologies, as they stand apart from the rest of the plot in Les Employs and
in the context of the Physiologie de lemploy, provide an example of an inductive

40

A third example of these social and professional typologies can be found later in the
novel when the narrator elaborates upon the differences between the bureaucrat from the
city and the one from the country: Distinguez surtout l'employ de Paris de l'employ
de province. En province, l'employ se trouve heureux: il est log spacieusement, il a un
jardin, il est gnralement l'aise dans son bureau; il boit de bon vin, bon march, ne
consomme pas de filet de cheval, et connat le luxe du dessert. Au lieu de faire des dettes,
il fait des conomies. Sans savoir prcisment ce qu'il mange, tout le monde vous dira
qu'il ne mange pas ses appointements ! S'il est garon, les mres de famille le saluent
quand il passe; et, s'il est mari, sa femme et lui vont au bal chez le receveur gnral,
chez le prfet, le sous-prfet, l'intendant. On s'occupe de son caractre, il a des bonnes
fortunes, il se fait une renomme d'esprit, il a des chances pour tre regrett, toute une
ville le connat, s'intresse sa femme, ses enfants. Il donne des soires; et, s'il a des
moyens, un beau-pre dans l'aisance, il peut devenir dput. Sa femme est surveille par
le mticuleux espionnage des petites villes, et s'il est malheureux dans son intrieur, il le
sait; tandis qu' Paris un employ peut n'en rien savoir. Enfin, l'employ de province
est quelque chose, tandis que l'employ de Paris est peine quelqu'un (968). While this
typology does not exist verbatim in the Physiologie de lemploy, the text contains a
digression on the difference between the two (Nous distinguons lemploy de Paris de
lemploy de province) and includes among its many maxims and axioms the following
statement: 7e axiome: Lemploy de province est quelquun, tandis que lemploy de
Paris est quelque chose(34).
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method. Through observation of a phenomenon a supernumerary, an office patterns

and trends are established among the specific supernumeraries and offices being
observed, and ultimately rules about and portraits or typologies of the phenomenon can
be established. The poor supernumerary is often supported by his mother and is the only
real kind of supernumerary; the rich supernumerary works despite his own wealth; the
office boy sits in a room with dreary wallpaper; the division chiefs office is set apart
from the others. Rather than testing a hypothesis about supernumeraries, for example,
this process arrives at these hypotheses/generalities about supernumeraries through
observation. George Henry Lewes reminds us that, in the positive state, as opposed to the
theological and the metaphysical one, man explains phenomena by adhering solely to
the constancies of succession and co-existence ascertained inductively and recognized as
the laws of nature (9, my emphasis). This form of study, applied to the world of the
bureaucrats, demonstrates an engagement with the positivist method on the part of the
narrator.
Yet what happens when we consider these typologies in the context of the novel
rather than as isolated interruptions in the narrative? In the case of the supernumerary,
once the narrator has completed his study of the type, he proceeds by naming Sbastien,
categorizing him as a poor supernumerary, and directly applying the traits he has just laid
out to the character: Le jeune homme qui parlait Rabourdin tait un surnumraire
pauvre nomm Sbastien de La Roche, venu sur la pointe de ses bottes de la rue du RoiDor au Marais, sans avoir attrap la moindre claboussure. Il disait maman et n'osait
lever les yeux sur madame Rabourdin, dont la maison lui faisait l'effet d'un Louvre
135

(949). This description of Sbastien nervous about going on foot lest he damage his
clothing, doting on his mother is very much in tune with the description of the poor
supernumerary we have just read in the typology. It appears that Sbastien serves to
confirm the general characteristics studied previously by the narrator; as if because of his
nature, identical to that of the type poor supernumerary, the thesis laid out by the
narrator has been confirmed. This would be an example of a deductive approach. In
other words, outside the context of the novel, the typology functions as an observation
after which we can arrive at a general understanding of the supernumerary in an inductive
approach. Once this generalization is taken as fact and applied to this specific character,
Sbastien, the approach is reversed. General information a maxim, a hypothesis is
applied to Sbastien employing the following sequence: because all supernumeraries are
a certain way, Sbastien, a supernumerary, is that way as well.
Similarly, in the case of the typology mentioned in a footnote above of the
city/country worker (his habits, dress, and social life), the positivist inductive approach
achieved when the typology is considered on its own is also reversed when seen in the
context of the novel as a whole. This argument notwithstanding, the passage begins with
a character, an older office boy Antoine, performing an act of observation: Antoine se
plaa sur le palier, un endroit d'o il pouvait voir dboucher les employs de dessous la
porte cochre; il connaissait tous ceux du Ministre et les observait dans leur allure, en
remarquant les diffrences que prsentaient leurs mises (967). The reader thus expects a
study of the characters through the point of view of this particular bureaucrat, who stands
on the landing watching his colleagues file in to the office. Yet the narrator immediately
136

cuts away from Antoine and inserts the following caveat and typology before once again
returning to the arrival of the bureaucrats in Antoines office:
Avant d'entrer dans le drame, il est ncessaire de peindre ici la silhouette des
principaux acteurs de la Division La Billardire qui fourniront d'ailleurs quelques
varits du Genre Commis et justifieront non-seulement les observations de Rabourdin,
mais encore le titre de cette Etude, essentiellement parisienne. En effet, ne vous y
trompez pas! Sous le rapport des misres et de l'originalit, il y a employs et
employs, comme il y a fagots et fagots. Distinguez surtout l'employ de Paris de
l'employ de province. En province, l'employ se trouve heureux: il est log
spacieusement, il a un jardin, il est gnralement l'aise dans son bureau; il boit de bon
vin, bon march, ne consomme pas de filet de cheval, et connat le luxe du dessert.
[] Enfin, l'employ de province est quelque chose, tandis que l'employ de Paris est
peine quelqu'un. (967-968, emphasis in the original)
The narrator explains here that the silhouette, to be painted below of those who figure
most prominently in La Billardires office, will both justify Rabourdins previous
statements about the bureaucrats (in terms of his plan to overhaul the administration) and
the title of the specifically Parisian novel at hand.41 The study he is about to conduct, in
other words, will prove these statements and theories which have already been posited,
the reverse of an inductive method. The narrator concludes the passage by asserting that
while the country bureaucrat is quelque chose (as he has just demonstrated to his
readers the small typology), the Parisian bureaucrat is hardly quelquun. As opposed to
the conclusion about the country bureaucrat, which is arrived upon after a study of this
type, the narrator puts forward this statement about the Parisian bureaucrats before
delving into the silhouette. The narrator foregoes the expected observation and jumps
41

The narrator does reemphasize the validity of Rabourdins plan after the lengthy
descriptions of the various workers is complete, stating Rabourdin avait donc
profondment raison en rarfiant les employs, en demandant pour eux et de forts
appointements et d'immenses travaux (989-990). Yet because he posited this argument
before launching into the study of these employees, the logic is deductive.
137

to a conclusion deductively. This shift to a deductive approach is rendered all the more
evident by its placement in the text, not only after the inductive study of the country
bureaucrat, but as an interruption to Antoines act of observation.42
The text also contains a form of deductive typological description, a typology
which does not commence with in-depth observation. As the narrator transitions from
describing the Rabourdin family to the Baudoyer family, he characterizes Elisabeth in the
following way: Elisabeth Baudoyer, ne Saillard, est une de ces figures qui se drobent
au pinceau par leur vulgarit mme, et qui nanmoins doivent tre esquisses, car elles
offrent une expression de cette petite bourgeoisie parisienne, place au-dessus des riches
artisans et au-dessous de la haute classe, dont les qualits sont presque des vices, dont les
dfauts n'ont rien d'aimable, mais dont les murs, quoique plates, ne manquent pas
d'originalit (933). The expression une de ces figures indicates immediately that the
character in question will not be examined in order to understand this particularly vulgar
Parisian type, but rather that this type exists and this woman is merely representative of
42

It should be noted that Balzac takes a more consistently positivist approach to the
bureaucrat in the Physiologie de lemploy as well. We have already seen that many of its
chapters are indeed typological studies of different types of bureaucrats (le
bibliothquaire, le collectionneur, le cumulard), observations on the habits and social and
professional lives of these individuals. In addition, the author also includes various
axioms and laws about bureaucracy in Paris, which he establishes at end of the sections
after he has concluded his observations. For example, in the passage from which the
typology of the city/country employee is extracted, the chapter concludes with the
following pronouncement: 7e Axiome: Lemploy de province est quelquun, tandis que
lemploy de Paris est quelque chose. Oui, quelque chose de merveilleux, de commun et
de rare, de singulier et dordinaire qui tient de la plante et de lanimal, du mollusque et de
labeille (34). The narrator arrives at theses about the particular phenomenon, but only
after lengthy observation.
138

it. Put another way, as opposed to the typologies of the supernumerary, the country
bureaucrat and the Parisian office, which were all outlined before the introduction of a
specific character or element of Les Employs, Elisabeth is introduced here first before
the generalizations are provided. Rather than use observations of Elisabeth and others
like her to form theses about the vulgar petite bourgeoise, the narrator, through his choice
of the expression une de ces figures, puts forward a theory about this woman without a
preceding inductive cataloguing of this fictional character. The occurrence of this form
of presentation throughout the novel gives further evidence of Balzacs inconsistent
reliance on a positivist approach to the study of the Parisian bureaucrat and implies a
certain type of experimentation on the part of the author with various conflicting
sociological methodologies.
To return to the connection between Les Employs and the movement of
panoramic literature, it is important to underscore that other scholars, in particular, early
twentieth-century literary critic G. M. Fess, have pointed to the intertexuality between
Les Employs and Scnes de la vie bureaucratique, a work by popular playwright and
preeminent caricaturist Henri Monnier, published in 1835.43 Fess remarks of Monniers
Scnes that its qualities always exercised great fascination over Balzac (237), although
he offers little proof to back up this claim other than the close publication dates of the
two texts. The critic sees parallels between the descriptions of and conversations among
bureaucrats in Monniers earlier text and Balzacs novel, ultimately concluding that
43

Fess actually cites other authors who believe Monnier himself to have served as a
model for the portrait of Bixiou, the office prankster in Les employs (236).
139

much of the ground-work for Balzacs novel derives from the Scnes de la vie
bureaucratique, though, in expanding his work and enriching it with concrete and living
material, the creator of the Comdie humaine has maintained a certain amount of
individuality and originality (242). Whether or Monniers Scnes is exclusively at the
origin of Les Employs, or whether Balzac based his characters on Monniers, the
correlation between the earlier piece of panoramic literature and Balzacs text are evident
from once glance at the titles.
A more productive way to think about the similarity between these two studies on
bureaucracy, however, might be to point out the dialogical, or even theatrical aspects
present in both texts. As the title of Monniers work seems to announce, the text is
comprised of various dramatic scenes, as well as prose narrative, effectively making it a
hybrid. Indeed, according to Fess, the Scnes de la vie bureaucratique consists of two
parts, a prose introduction containing a series of pen-portraits descriptive of the officials
and workers in a French government office at Paris, and a dialog section of forty scenes
in which these same characters are interpreted through action and speech (237). This
generic hybridity is also characteristic of Les Employs, which is composed not only of
prose narrative interrupted by pseudo-scientific typologies, but of lengthy scenes of
dialogue as well. Inserted into the novel are ten scenes, exclusively situated in the offices
of Baudoyer and Rabourdin, in the form of a theatrical tableaux, including stage
directions. The first of these scenes, for example, involves a group of men in Baudoyers
office discussing the death of La Billardire:

140

BIXIOU (debout devant le pole, la bouche duquel il prsente alternativement la

semelle de chaque botte pour la faire scher.): Ce matin, sept heures et demie, je suis
all savoir des nouvelles de notre digne et respectable Directeur, chevalier du Christ,
etc., etc. Eh ! mon Dieu, oui, messieurs, le baron tait encore hier vingt et coetera;
mais aujourd'hui il n'est plus rien, pas mme employ.
[]
GODARD: Moi, j'estimais les talents de monsieur de La Billardire mieux que qui que
ce soit.
BIXIOU: Vous vous compreniez!
GODARD: Enfin, ce n'tait pas un mchant homme; il n'a jamais fait de mal
personne.
BIXIOU: Pour faire le mal, il faut faire quelque chose, et il ne faisait rien. Si ce n'est
pas vous qui l'aviez jug tout fait incapable, c'est donc Minard.
MINARD (en haussant les paules): Moi! (992-993)
Each of the ten interactions that occur in the space of the offices is structured this way, a
dialogue among the colleagues. Every actual instance of a bureaucrat in action in his
professional milieu is thus captured not in prose narrative, not in typological form, but
instead staged as a theatrical scene, giving the reader the impression of overlooking or
observing a particular species in its natural habitat without the instructional intervention
of the narrator. The author incorporates these scenes in his work, it seems, to allow the
reader himself to perform an act of observation after which, ostensibly, an understanding
of the phenomenon of the bureaucrat can be reached. Of course these scenes are chosen
for the reader by the narrator and are thus not quite credible objective portrayals, but
their persistent repetition and the fact that they ostensibly defer to the reader as observer
of a staged scene reproduces an observational structure akin to a positivist approach to
141

the study of social types. Given the dramatic origins of the tableaux de Paris discussed
previously and given this texts connection to Monniers Scnes, it is clear here that
Balzac has chosen to structure the passages serving as sociological analyses of the world
of the bureaucrat on the model of the various genres of panoramic literature and here
again to use these scenes to work through questions of sociological method.
Yet lest the reader believe that the novel ultimately adheres to a purely positivist
method, the second to last of these theatrical scenes exposes the narrators skepticism
toward this perspective. As Poiret, the highly regimented bureaucrat about to retire after
thirty years of work, struggles to make sense of Baudoyers nomination and Rabourdins
resignation, Bixiou, the double talking office prankster, attempts to extract from Poiret a
definition of the word bureaucrat:
BIXIOU: (Il prend Poiret par le bouton de sa redingote.) Avant de vous en aller d'ici,
peut-tre serez-vous bien aise de savoir qui vous tes. [] De dfinir, d'expliquer, de
pntrer, d'analyser ce que c'est qu'un employ... le savez-vous ?
POIRET: Je le crois.
BIXIOU : (tortille le bouton): J'en doute.
POIRET: C'est un homme pay par le gouvernement pour faire un travail.
BIXIOU: Evidemment, alors un soldat est un employ.
POIRET : (embarrass): Mais non.
BIXIOU: Cependant il est pay par l'Etat pour monter la garde et passer des revues.
Vous me direz qu'il souhaite trop quitter sa place, qu'il est trop peu en place, qu'il
travaille trop et touche gnralement trop peu de mtal, except toutefois celui de son
fusil.

142

POIRET : (ouvre de grands yeux): Eh ! bien, monsieur, un employ serait plus

logiquement un homme qui pour vivre a besoin de son traitement et qui n'est pas libre
de quitter sa place, ne sachant faire autre chose qu'expdier.
BIXIOU : Ah! nous arrivons une solution... Ainsi le Bureau est la coque de
l'employ. Pas d'employ sans bureau, pas de bureau sans employ. Que faisons-nous
alors du douanier [] O cesse l'employ ? Question grave ! Un prfet est-il un
employ ?
POIRET : (timidement).C'est un fonctionnaire.
BIXIOU : Ah! vous arrivez ce contre-sens qu'un fonctionnaire ne serait pas un
employ! [...] Je voulais vous prouver, monsieur, que rien n'est simple, mais surtout, et
ce que je vais dire est pour les philosophes (si vous voulez me permettre de retourner
un mot de Louis XVIII), je veux faire voir que: A ct du besoin de dfinir, se trouve
le danger de s'embrouiller.
POIRET : (s'essuie le front): Pardon, monsieur, j'ai mal au coeur... (Il veut croiser sa
redingote.) Ah! vous m'avez coup tous mes boutons !
BIXIOU: Eh! bien, comprenez-vous ?...
POIRET : (mcontent): Oui, monsieur... Oui, je comprends que vous avez voulu faire
une trs-mauvaise farce, en me coupant mes boutons, sans que je m'en aperusse!
(1106-1110)
After spending his entire career in the milieu of bureaucracy, Poiret is unable to produce
a cogent, comprehensive definition of what it means to be a bureaucrat, and Bixiou
chides his colleague for underestimating the complexity of the definition. This
abbreviated version of the interaction between the two men, ending with the humiliation
of Poiret, depicts not only the comical idea that a man could spend thirty years of his life
dedicated to a profession that he cannot define, but also exposes the precarious nature of
a study which itself attempts to come to a definition of the bureaucrat. Bixiou, inhabiting
the role of the wise joker, proves that one can never arrive at a fixed definition of a
bureaucrat, regardless of ones level of expertise; there will always be exceptions and
143

contradictions. The narrator, too, proves through the medium of social observation, that
irrespective of the method of study and the level of familiarity with a subject, true
mastery of a social type is not without risk. It is certainly not by accident that this
incident is situated less than ten pages before the end of this sociological study, forcing
the reader to question whether a scientific, positivist approach is plausible in the eyes of
the author.
The question of what precisely a bureaucrat is runs throughout the novel,
appearing for example at another moment in the text when Gabriel, a rather lowly worker
and the nephew of Antoine, has the following exchange with his uncle: Pre Antoine, dit
Gabriel, puisque vous tes causeur ce matin, quelle ide, l, vous faites-vous de
l'employ? Cest, rpondit gravement Antoine, un homme qui crit, assis dans un
Bureau. Qu'est-ce que je dis donc l ? Sans les employs, que serions-nous? (967). This
exchange takes place only a few lines before Antoine assumes his vantage point and
begins to observe the office, which, as we have seen, is further interrupted by a
typological description of the country worker. If the remainder of the text can be
considered as a more detailed and complex elaboration upon Antoines initial response
a thorough description and study of the Parisian office the final pages of the novel
prove that comprehensive mastery, or total knowledge of the type may not be attainable.
Balzac engages with contemporary positivist methods throughout this work, using
scientific observations of phenomena in order attain comprehension, classification and
mastery over the subject. He inserts both typological descriptions (based on the model of
144

contemporary panoramic texts) and theatrical scenes into the novel which provide
thorough observations on this social type and transform the text from the story of a wife
striving for her husbands promotion into a full-blown sociological study of the
bureaucrat. The text is even peppered with blatant examples of scientific language
genre, espce, ordre all appear numerous times in the novel a trait found throughout the
Comdie humaine. 44 Yet despite this engagement with the positivist method and the
narrators overt attempts to employ a scientific approach toward the description of a
social type, the text subverts a purely positivist approach. Inductive methods are
counterbalanced by deductive methods. Scenes of observation are interrupted or contain
dialogue concerning the inefficacies of classification and definition. Balzac gestures
toward an interest in positivist theories circulating at the time of the publication of La
femme suprierue and more established as a method by the time of the publication of Les
Employs. Nonetheless he also explores other approaches toward the study of the social
type in his novel and employs approaches that destabilize established methods. In effect,

44

Some examples of this scientific language in Les employs include the following
sentences: Il n'y a que deux genres de surnumraires: les surnumraires riches et les
surnumraires pauvres (946); or Avant d'entrer dans le drame, il est ncessaire de
peindre ici la silhouette des principaux acteurs de la Division La Billardire qui
fourniront d'ailleurs quelques varits du Genre Commis et justifieront non-seulement les
observations de Rabourdin, mais encore le titre de cette Etude, essentiellement
parisienne (967-968); or, finally, L'employ serait l'Ordre et le fonctionnaire un Genre
(1108). To name only one of many, the famous description of Poiret in Le Pre Goriot is
an example of Balzacs use of overt scientific terminology to classify his characters.
145

he uses this novel as a sort of laboratory in which to experiment with different ways of
presenting social facts.
While it is evident that we cannot label the author a positivist, it is also
unproductive to ascribe to him a definitive school of thought on the matter of sociological
analysis. Balzac engages with pre-sociological discourse as understood by Comte and
Saint-Simon, but he also employs contradicting methods and thereby creates a sort of
hybrid mode of social analysis. In the passage following the lengthy description of the
various characters in La Billardires office, the narrator speculates on whether these
bureaucrats are cretins because of their job or whether they hold these positions because
they are cretins. He is reminded of an anthropological study and compares it to the
situation of the bureaucrats in the following way:
Les villageois, a dit un inconnu, subissent, sans s'en rendre compte, l'action des
circonstances atmosphriques et des faits extrieurs. Identifis en quelque sorte avec la
nature au milieu de laquelle ils vivent, ils se pntrent insensiblement des ides et des
sentiments qu'elle veille et les reproduisent dans leurs actions et sur leur physionomie,
selon leur organisation et leur caractre individuel. [] Or, la Nature, pour l'employ,
c'est les Bureaux; son horizon est de toutes parts born par des cartons verts; pour lui,
les circonstances atmosphriques, c'est l'air des corridors, les exhalaisons masculines
contenues dans des chambres sans ventilateurs, la senteur des papiers et des plumes;
son terroir est un carreau, ou un parquet maill de dbris singuliers, humect par
l'arrosoir du garon de bureau; son ciel est un plafond auquel il adresse ses billements,
et son lment est la poussire. L'observation sur les villageois tombe plomb sur les
employs identifis avec la nature au milieu de laquelle ils vivent. Si plusieurs
mdecins distingus redoutent l'influence de cette nature, la fois sauvage et civilise,
sur l'tre moral contenu dans ces affreux compartiments, nomms Bureaux, o le soleil
pntre peu, o la pense est borne en des occupations semblables celle des chevaux
qui tournent un mange, qui billent horriblement et meurent promptement. (989)

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The notion of Nature might be construed as a metaphysical concept in Comtes terms,

since it is presented as an underlying cause for the phenomenon of the bureaucrat and yet
is somehow beyond analysis. Balzac is not yet at the point where he can begin to specify
exactly what rules this nature might impose on human behavior, that is, he cannot quite
decide how social interaction might internalize this notion and bring it into the system as
an explanatory mechanism and he thus falls short of what Comte would have seen as a
positivist analysis. Nevertheless, the influence of milieu on the development and
outcome of an individual, as it is meticulously described in the passage above, is a
sociological perspective to which Balzac consistently returns throughout the Scnes de la
vie parisienne. The concept will eventually be theorized by Taine, who saw the notion of
milieu as characteristic of Balzacs oeuvre, an operational realization of how rules and
influence are internalized, that is, become mechanisms of social formations located
within the system and not beyond it.

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4. De petits chefs-duvre de vrit et dobservation: Comte and the Novels of

Paul de Kock
Thirty years after the self-publication of his first novel, LEnfant de ma femme,
and well into his career as a best-selling novelist, Paul de Kock found himself caricatured
in the April 15, 1842, issue of Le Charivari in the journals infamous Panthon
Charivarique. A short poem satirizing the prolific novelists work completed the image,
which depicted de Kock as an enormous head with a beak atop a roosters body and
surrounded by his masses of readers:
Vnr des portires et chri des grisettes
Pour qui ses gais romans ont dimmenses attraites
Paul de Kock est de plus admir des Anglais
Et cela se comprend car ses uvres compltes
Ne sont pas dun trs bon Franais. (Le Charivari, 12 avril, 1842, 4)
This was hardly the first or the last time the author would be caricatured or that literary
journals would poke fun at his work. In the Charivari alone, reviews of de Kocks plays
and novels underscoring their petit-bourgeois subject matter and mediocre style were so
omnipresent even from the journals first publications in the early July Monarchy that de
Kocks name ultimately became synonymous with lower-class, prosaic narratives. An
October 1835 issue contains the account of an overly-complicated and ultimately nondramatic court proceeding described as a scne la Paul de Kock (2). A January 1836
issue characterizes usherettes working in theatres on the Boulevard du Temple as often
appearing avec leurs chaufferettes et leur roman de Paul de Kock (2). A July 1842
reviewer of the authors Les Marocains, a play set in Northern Africa, laments: Quel

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dommage que, pour voir ces Marocains, il faille entendre la prose de M. Paul de Kock !
(2).
Nineteenth-century literary critics, as well as the handful of twentieth-century
scholars who studied Paul de Kock after his death, energetically agree on two readings of
the author and his work.1 First, the authors unsophisticated, humorous style earns him
the rank of philistine writer, no more intellectual than the masses who eagerly consumed
his work throughout the century. Second, although the author produced several hundred
works of fiction during his career, they are hardly distinguishable from one another. The
first evaluation of the prolific novelist is hardly worth analyzing: thinkers from SainteBeuve to Gerard Genette have consistently used de Kock as the butt of literary jokes, and,
as we have seen, his name is consistently used as synonymous with bad, petit bourgeois
literature. The second, however, provides us with a productive entry way into a more
serious consideration of de Kocks work. 2
A critic of his 1837 Moeurs parisiennes remarked: Quand on a lu un roman de
Paul de Kock, on peut dire quon connat, non seulement tous ceux quil a faits, mais
encore tous ceux quil fera. Jamais imagination de romancier ne fut moins fconde que la

De Kocks name and works have appeared more frequently in literary and historical
criticism recently, as we shall see.
2
To cite only two examples, a 1901 New York Times article quotes Sainte-Beuve as
saying the following about de Kock: He may have some merit; he probably has, but one
cannot say for certain, as one does not read him (NYT, October 6, 1901). Similarly,
Genette makes the following jab in Paratexts: I read somewhere that a novel by Paul de
Kock entitled Le Cocu [...] contained a preface to explain the title; not having checked it
out myself (for the Bibiothque Nationale is closed on Sundays), I do not know what
there is about this apparently lucid title that called for an explanation (213).
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sienne (Revue Critique des Livres Nouveaux, 295). This contemporary of de Kock
decries the repetition he finds in the authors work, attributing this trait solely to an
uninspired mind. Written in the heyday of de Kocks career, such harsh evaluations of de
Kocks repetitive style were everywhere. In a more recent and perhaps more charitable
assessment, Lucien Minors 1975 monograph on the hack writer in the nineteenth
century, the critic nevertheless echoes the previous reviewer, claiming that although de
Kock produced nearly three hundred volumes in his career, [o]rdinary mortals are
reassured, if a bit disappointed, when they learn that de Kocks novels are really just the
same novel written and rewritten, repeated endlessly with only small changes of dcor
and accessories (18). While Minor refrains from criticizing de Kocks imagination, he
does underscore once again this notion of repetition. One cannot help but wonder
whether Minor might be trying to avoid a thoroughly comprehensive study of de Kocks
work, given its repetitive nature, instead of allowing the reading of one novel to stand
metonymically for all of it.
The idea that de Kocks works are one novel endlessly repeated, whose plot was
incessantly tweaked and reissued, becomes perhaps a definitive critical doxa in the entry
on de Kock in the 1994 volume of the Dictionnaire de biographie franaise, which
asserts the following about the novelist:
A vrai dire, Paul de Kock na jamais fait quun seul roman, dont il a vari linfini le
cadre et les dtails accessoires, en y faisant mouvoir les mmes physionomies, en
racontant presque les mmes aventures. Doit-on dire le roman ou les romans de Paul
de Kock ? dit ce propos M. B. Jouvin. Si jadditionne ce que le romancier populaire
a produit, baptis, publi de grivoiseries de 1820 1867, en moyenne six volumes par
anne, cest au pluriel que je dois compter et cest les romans quil faut crire; mais si,
dans ma mmoire, je rapproche ces types, je compare des personnages, je saisis des
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procds dont lemploi invariable donne invariablement les mmes effets de scne, et
noue presque toujours une action identique [] jen conclus quil faut parler au
singulier et dire: le roman de Paul de Kock. (1236)
Unlike La Comdie humaine, the literary project of de Kocks contemporary, de Kocks
own project seems unable, according to these accounts, to provide a cohesive, intertwined
representation of early-nineteenth-century Paris, and instead consists of a series of
recycled anecdotes in which the Parisian setting and cast vary only slightly. Whether this
is the case is not the subject of the present analysis, because regardless of whether de
Kock merely wrote one book throughout his many books, it seems more productive to
highlight the fact that despite the perception of his literary shortcomings, the author was
able sell an extraordinary number of copies of these publications, becoming one of the
wealthiest writers of his time. In other words, regardless of critics insistence upon the
repetitive nature of de Kocks works, he was able to convince his public of the variety in
his texts and create a type of writing for which there was a lucrative commercial demand.
De Kocks frequent use of certain stock characters, his repetition of similar plotlines, and
his use of other recurring narrative patterns can be considered as a deliberate
manipulation of the literary market a literary product based on an understanding of the
publishing world and of the reading public, a group obviously drawn to literary texts
structured on repetition if one is to account for de Kocks success.
What exactly are the patterns and repetitions that annoy critics but attract readers?
An analysis of these narrative patterns and structures in order to identify the
characteristics of de Kocks style will be my first focus. In addition to the similar
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plotlines and characters that emerge in the work of de Kock, one literary trope appears
consistently in the authors novels: extradiegetic description, or, put simply, digression.3
By examining several novels, including Le cocu (1831), Un homme marier (1837), La
jolie fille du faubourg (1840), La demoiselle du cinquime (1857), and Un mari dont on
se moque (1867), and using these texts to represent de Kocks larger body of work, I want
to demonstrate that although this extradiegetic description might initially be dismissed as
a characteristic of the authors poor literary skills, its constant presence has two purposes:
first, it makes his fictional narratives longer and thus has a clear commercial purpose, and
second, it signals his engagement with the genre of the tableaux de Paris or, more
generally, with the burgeoning movement of panoramic literature.4 The majority of the
digressions in de Kocks novels take the form of tableaux de Paris the typological
observations on urban social phenomena which we have analyzed in previous chapters.
In de Kocks work, these tableaux serve as detached yet necessary studies of everyday
petit bourgeois Parisian life within the novel, disconnected from the rest of the plot.
Close readings of these tableaux the only aspects of de Kocks novels which
critics consistently praised show a strong connection with the positivist social theories

Mid-nineteenth-century American critic Francis Bowan addresses the informal structure

of de Kocks novels more generally when he writes that [m]ost of his novels are mere
sketches of contemporary manners, put together on a slight framework of incident, which
can hardly be called a plot (281). I will be attempting to locate the reoccurring tropes in
the novels of the author and to determine why he might rely on these tropes, rather than
to determine what is and is not a plot.
4
By choosing to examine these six novels, merely a fraction of de Kocks work, I hope
both to avoid what critics like Minor have done making one novel stand for the whole
while preventing my own study from devolving into an extended list of the authors texts.
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proposed by de Kocks contemporary, Auguste Comte. De Kocks work, in other words,

engages in an emerging sociological discourse, employing inductive, observational
methods to depict early- to mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Neither de Kock nor his critics
recognize the connection between the comical depictions of Paris and the work of Comte.
Yet it is through the lens of the proto-sociologist, whose work outlines a search for an
internal theory about how society is formed and worked, that we can articulate the
impulse on the part of the popular novelist to include these descriptions of Parisian life
and the impulse of his critics to signal these passages as praiseworthy. Through these
literary readings, I hope to both expose the shortcomings of positivism as a sociological
and literary approach, but also to also provide insight into de Kocks overarching literary
project, providing a way for French literary scholars to rethink the authors work. He
may have been a hack writer, but de Kock was also master of the nineteenth-century
literary market.
4.1 Paul de Kock in Recent Criticism
Literary historians, especially in the past twenty years, have mentioned Paul de
Kock and his novels with some frequency in studies on reading and publishing in the
nineteenth century. Martyn Lyons, for example, in his 2001 Readers and Society in
Nineteenth-Century France, refers repeatedly to de Kocks works and their popularity
both in Paris and in the provinces, as texts distributed by colporteurs, the itinerant
booksellers who made their way around towns and small villages in France He writes,
for instance, that in a compilation of surveys sent to rural prefects by the Ministry of
Education in 1866, de Kocks Oeuvres were listed among the thirty principal titles
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which [had] a side sale by peddlers or at local fairs (Lyons, 164), a list which also
included Bernardin de St. Pierres Paul et Virginie, La Fontaines Fables and Eugne
Sues collected works. For Lyons, then, de Kock and his novels are primarily important
in the context of literary successes with high circulation rates during the historical
moment he studies.
James Smith Allen, also a literary historian, focuses more closely on de Kocks
writing and self-positioning strategies within the mid-nineteenth century literary market.
He writes the following:
[Paul de Kocks career] exemplifies the response of minor literati to their new
commercial context []. From the subsequent sale of more than 200 plays and 400
volumes of novels, Kock managed a comfortable, bourgeois standard of living in Paris
[]. He depended on his clerical position to survive his first years as a novelist. But
once his reputation was established, his understanding of circumstances enabled Kock
to profit by his writing, however poorly rewarded he considered his talents [].
Kocks successful literary career owned not only to his talent as a writer, but also to his
acceptance of the risks inherent in the market for books. (Allen, 94)
Allen establishes de Kock as a writer cognizant of the historical shifts in the status of the
author especially in the July Monarchy literary market, and above all as a writer who was
able to capitalize on this market for his own financial gain. It is the historical position of
the writer and the reader in this new market and the figure of the minor literati" which
interest Allen here, not the literary content of de Kocks hundreds of works.
This historical approach is also seen throughout Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean
Martins edited volume on the nineteenth century in Histoire de ldition franaise. In
this collected edition, we see de Kocks novels topping lists of best-sellers, we read his

154

name mentioned among other authors able to make novel writing a lucrative business,5
We learn, for example, that his novels were among the first to be included in newspapers
as des supplments littraires susceptibles dtre detachs et relis pour former un livre
(Chartier, 181). Yet in each case, as in the Lyons and Allen studies, the historians do not
focus on the content of the work, nor even on de Kock as a singular literary figure. They
see him as an example or even an embodiment of a historical phenomenon: the author
whose works were consumed hungrily by the new class of readers,6 the bourgeois author
who sustained himself with his writing, the author whose work was published in different
forms in conjunction with the newspaper. In other words, de Kock and his work become
for these critics the site of a historical development, a change in the literary market. I
have drawn on the insights of these scholars as I shape my understanding of the role of
Paul de Kock in the nineteenth-century literary market, yet I would like to focus more in
depth here on a literary reading of the authors work not merely on what the author
symbolized as the Parisian literary market developed, but also on the overlapping
between his work and other authors of the time period and on the narrative choices he
made while assembling his corpus.
Recently, historian Judith Lyon-Caen, in her multiple studies on the social
implications of literature under the July Monarchy, has studied the work of Paul de Kock,

Between 1835 and 1840, for example, de Kock commanded 5,000 francs per novel,
drastically less than the 26,500 francs Eugne Sue earned for his Mystres de Paris, but
more than Balzac earned for the first edition of Le Pre Goriot (Chartier, 152).
6
See Lyons on literacy rates and increases in the literate population in early nineteenthcentury France.
155

pushing beyond the purely historical studies of de Kocks role in the mid-century literary
market to explain the social effects of his writing and the writing of others like him.
Lyon-Caen focuses on the links between the enqutes sociales of the early century (such
as Parent-Duchtelets1836 De la prostitution de la ville de Paris), panoramic literature
and popular urban novels.7 For this critic, all of these varied works, which attempt a
mise en texte du social, are similar in their attempt to depict and decode Parisian social
life. She writes of these urban novels:
Il faut en effet replacer ces romans au sein de cette production textuelle aux formes
multiples qui entend, sous la monarchie de Juillet, reprsenter le monde social. Non
seulement laffirmation de lopacit du monde social issu de la Rvolution et de la
Restauration est un thme trs diffus, mais cette opacit semble tre au principe dun
certain nombre de textes qui visent dchiffrer, dcrypter, dvoiler, reprsenter le
monde social comme un texte lisible, un paysage visible. On peut ainsi associer les
romans sur la socit contemporaine la littrature nombreuse des tableaux de
moeurs et des descriptions de Paris parmi lesquelles les Physiologies ou la srie des
Franais peints par eux-mmes, publie chez Curmer entre 1840 et 1842 , comme aux
enqutes sociales suscites par lAcadmie des Sciences morales et politiques la fin
de la dcennie 1830. Malgr la varit des lieux et des milieux dont ils manent, des
registres sur lesquels ils se dploient, des publics et des usages quils visent, tous ces
textes ont en commun de constituer la socit en objet opaque, mystrieux, inconnu
ou simplement illisible pour la dployer, la classer, lexplorer, la dvoiler. En bref,
linquitude ou la curiosit que suscitent les brouillages de la socit postrvolutionnaire et industrielle nourrissent une sociographie multiforme du monde
contemporain. (Lyon-Caen, Romancier, 5)
Echoing the work of Richard Sieburth on panoramic literature in the 1980s, which we
have already discussed in previous chapters, Lyon-Caen sees the proliferation of work on
Paris as an attempt to render the city readable, to divulge for Parisians the more totalizing

For Parent-Duchatelets own positivist approach to his work, see Ann Elizabeth Fowler
La Berges Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health
Movement.
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systems and patterns that lay beneath their chaotic urban space. What is novel about
Lyon-Caens work, however, is that she brings the panoramic texts into conversation with
both the enqutes sociales and the work of popular novelists and discusses the effects of
these texts on contemporary readers as well as the effect of readers on these texts.8 I
have drawn on Lyon-Caens insights into the crossover among the more sociological
guides to Paris and the literary texts produced by novelists like de Kock. However, I
focus here less on the influence of these texts on the July Monarchy reader and more,
once again, on closer literary readings of the novelists work, as well as their intersections
with a different sort of sociological text that is, pre-sociological theories of
positivism.
For Lyon-Caen, Paul de Kock is to be included among the novelists whose work
aims to decipher Paris for their readers. In Le Romancier, lecteur du social dans la
France de la Monarchie de Juillet, the critic characterizes his urban novels in the
following way: [l]e plus populaire des romanciers de lpoque, Paul de Kock propose
des intrigues qui sont autant de guides dans un univers social que le lecteur apprend
dchiffrer (5). In Saisir, dcrire, dchiffrer: les mises en texte du social sous la
monarchie de Juillet, she explains this concept further, stating that in de Kocks novels,
la socit prsente un visage brouill par les faux-semblants et les hirarchies
concurrentes de largent et de la naissance. Au terme de chaque intrigue, les imposteurs

She writes, for exemple, of les enjeux de cette proximit du pittoresque et du srieux,
du littraire et du non- littraire dans le discours social des dcennies 1830 et 1840
(Lyon-Caen, Saisir,305-6).
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sont dmasqus, et chacun trouve la place qui lui convient: le roman-guide parcourt le
monde contemporain, identifie les types, dcrypte les appartenances, et dessine un ordre
social (Lyon-Caen, Saisir, 311-12). Like the nouveaux tableaux de Paris genre to
which he also contributed, de Kocks novels, for Lyon-Caen, functioned as guides to the
city not merely insofar as they identified social types within these novels, but also as the
plots served to unmask and classify characters, rendering Parisian society legible to the
readers.9
My own work here has been quite obviously influenced by Lyon-Caens studies
on ces phnomnes de frottement, de circulation, de concurrence entre domaines
textuels, qui tiennent galement la mobilit des producteurs de tous ces textes entre
littrature, journalisme, et enqute sociale [qui] suggrent [] un questionnement
commun aux tudes littraires et historiques (Romancier, 7). I believe, like Lyon-Caen
(and Sieburth and others before her), that on some level, these texts functioned to
interpret urban society for Parisians in some senses this accounts for their popularity
among nineteenth-century readers. In addition to establishing the connection between
Comtes proto-sociological theory and de Kocks works, something which these other
critics do not address, my work on de Kock is also more literary in its approach. Taking

While many of these novels do contain the unmasking of mysterious characters and the
reinstating of people in their proper social order, I would argue that amid these
conventional intrigues that Lyon-Caen describes, other narrative tactics are at play,
which, while they do help to identify and order urban types and social phenomena, also
create a sort of narrative disorder in the process. In other words, while the plot, in some
cases, may work to organize characters into social types, the lengthy digressions
peppering these novels create a sense of formal disorder, and a chaos within the text
which, according to Lyon-Caen, has a its mission to organize social groups.
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its methodological cues from cultural studies criticism such as Margaret Cohens 1999
The Sentimental Education of the Novel and, to a certain degree, Janice Radways 1984
Reading the Romance, I try to move beyond the reading of de Kock as one in a series of
decoders of modern life and to focus on recurring tropes in his work which can point to
literary intersections with panoramic literature and with positivism. As Cohen surveys
the sentimental novel in her study, and as Sharon Marcus explores the apartment-house
plot in the context of popular realism in Apartment Stories,10 I have taken seriously the
structure of de Kocks novels (which for Cohen fall under the category of the roman gai)
from a literary perspective, focusing on consistent narrative digressions, omnipresent
urban description, superfluous character description, and recurring moral endings.
Although I will not center my remarks on the topic of gender, I do take a historical
interest in de Kocks reading public, often thought to be predominantly grisettes, and in
his critical reception throughout his career.
4.2 Panoramic Digression in Paul de Kock
The following conclusion was drawn in a review of the 1837 novella Un homme
marier: LHomme marier, de Paul de Kock, est un pisode qui, renferm dans les
troites limites dune scne de 5 ou 6 pages, aurait pu tre fort plaisant, parce que lauteur

10

Marcus, too, studies de Kock from a literary perspective, using his texts as an example
of highly episodic novels, which she labels the apartment-house plot which, followed
a strict narrative sequence: the conversion of strangers into kin, either by marriage or the
revelation of prior relationships, and the corollary transformation of randomness into
structure (11). From these close readings, she understands the apartment-house plot to
combine the salon novels emphasis on domestic interiors and microscopic social
networkswith the urban novels emphasis on chance encounters, the interplay between
isolation and community, and the sudden transformation of strangers into kin (11).
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excelle peindre les ridicules et les travers de la bourgeoisie parisienne; mais dlay dans
un volume, il perd tout son prix et nest plus que trivial sans gat (Revue Critique des
livres nouveaux, 77). Though perhaps overly ungenerous with the popular novelist, as
the majority of mid-century French critics tended to be, this critic is certainly correct:
when one examines the actual plot of this novel, it can be boiled down to a very simple
narrative. A fifty year old bachelor (Thophile Girardire), who has decided it is time to
be married but has had no success finding a bride, finally discovers a potential love
interest in Mlle Augustine. Though this young woman appears at the onset to be attracted
to the protagonist, M. Girardire is discouraged to hear her mention the name of another
man (M. Frontin) and abandons her for a months time. He ultimately returns to her and
learns that M. Frontin was actually the name of a cat, but in his absence Mlle Augustine
has become betrothed to another man, despite her initial feelings for Girardire.
Distraught, he dies. This uncomplicated story is nonetheless extended into a novel in
excess of one hundred pages, including many the recounting of many anecdotes of
Girardires failed pursuits before meeting Mlle Augustine. These provide background to
the character but do little to advance the central narrative.
If we consider the plot of Un homme marier to be Girardires attempt to woo
Mlle Augustine, then the account begins when M. Girardire11 arrives at the restaurant
where he is to encounter Mlle Augustine. The action takes place (after a brief mise en

11

The protagonist Girardires name is actually M. La Renardire for the first nine pages
of the novel, recalling the frequent errors in serial publications which peppered the works
of many nineteenth-century authors including, famously, Balzac
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scne) on the fourth page of the novel with this explanation from the narrator: Il tait
prs de cinq heures lorsque M. La Renardire entre dans le salon du restaurant (4).
Readers might expect the plot to remain focused on the protagonists experience in the
caf. Instead, however, the narrator immediately launches into a multi-chapter
background narrative in the next sentence, which takes us through Girardires
childhood, his philandering as a twenty-something, his mid-life decision to find a bride,
and his exploits and misfortunes while unsuccessfully wooing women. We then see him
rejected in chapters whose titles reflect the reasons for the series of rejections Trop
Pauvre, Trop Laid, Trop Vieux, Trop Bte anecdotes recounting the lengths to
which Girardire will go to marry. In fact, only on page 90 does the narrator bring the
reader back to M. Girardires initial caf setting: Maintenant que vous connaissez
suffisamment les prcdents de M. Girardire, ayez la complaisance de revenir avec lui
chez le traiteur (90). In other words, though partially relevant to the story of the
bachelor and his ultimate quest to find a wife, over two-thirds of the text is comprised of
the narrators off-topic musings. These narrative meanderings are vaguely reminiscent of
a Voltarian conte or even a picaresque novel, yet unlike the texts of de Kocks literary
predecessors, such anecdotes do not build upon one another to create a cogent story line.
We might think of them, instead, as a lengthy digression masked as essential background
information on the protagonist. They are all, technically speaking, movable (and
removable) pieces of text, with very little bearing on the actual diegesis at the center of
de Kocks novel.

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Even more jarring for the reader is another prolonged digression inserted into the
remaining third of the novel. Once we return to Girardire in the caf, the narrator
immediately begins to describe his surroundings at length: the obese gentleman seated
next Girardire who takes up most of the protagonists space, for example, or the
bourgeois family of four who enter noisily. This family will chiefly occupy the thoughts
of the narrator for the next fourteen pages, as they loudly and ungracefully settle in, make
inappropriate demands on the waiter and, ultimately, leave without paying the bill in its
entirety. This digression is different from the previous one, because although Girardire
interacts with those in his physical space and is present in the setting, he is not the
principal character in this scene. The narrator notes Girardires annoyance with his
obese neighbor as an aside, and even veers back toward the protagonist as he briefly
interacts with an acquaintance who happens to be in the restaurant and as he notes the
arrival of two obviously non-Parisian women (Mlle Augustine and her aunt, we discover
later). Yet in both cases, the narrator returns unfailingly to the inappropriate family until
they depart: Et la respectable famille qui sest fait donner des cousins, des ronds en cuir,
et une chaufette, sloigne, aprs avoir eu soin demporter tous les cure-dents quon a mis
sur la table(108). While it is true that temporarily shifting focus away from a
protagonist or concentrating on minor characters as they enter and exit the lives of a
protagonist is hardly anomalous in narrative, it is remarkable that this lengthy anecdote
should transpire in the novel both so quickly after the narrator returns to the central
plotline and in a way that has little bearing on the protagonist. Neither Girardires
interactions with Mlle Augustine nor his life, more generally, is affected by the presence
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and the actions of these characters, and when they leave, the narrators next words betray
no evidence that their existence as characters in the novel carried any weight within the
broader context of the novel itself: La vieille dame [la tante dAugustine] et sa nice
avaient aussi achev leur diner; elle paient, Girardire en fait autant, et ils sortent
ensemble de chez le restaurateur (108). The narrative unfolds as Girardire
accompanies the women to a play, the family is never mentioned again, and the reader
discovers that characters present for nearly one-tenth of the novel were inconsequential.
Un homme marier is written relatively early in de Kocks long career, yet it is
nonetheless a rather typical example of the authors digressive style. While it is somewhat
unusual for his method is to interrupt the narrative with a lengthy, analeptic passage,
passages which do not advance the plot and which depict scenes of everyday Parisian life
are omnipresent in the novelists writing. The avaricious and misbehaved petit bourgeois
family is only one of many descriptions of urban phenomena (and in particular petit
bourgeois phenomena) that pepper de Kocks works. This particular study of the family
can be read, therefore, as a comical tableau de Paris, unessential to the progression of the
intrigue of Un homme marier, but which nonetheless provides trenchant observations
on urban occurrences.
Published six years before Un homme marier, Le Cocu, is a three hundred-pluspage novel, which, with minor exceptions, follows a more linear narrative than its
successor and depicts characters who recurr throughout the novel, and who, moreover,
have an impact on the trajectory of the plot. Despite the length of Le Cocu, which
successfully sold an estimated 14,000 copies in its first years in print, its plot is rather
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narrow and can be summarized in the following way: M. Blmont, a twenty-six year old
lawyer and former playboy, is told a cautionary tale about adultery at the beginning of the
novel by his close friend Blan, and the theme of cheating is present throughout the work.
Around the same time that Blmont befriends a couple in his apartment building (Ernest
and Marguerite, who are cohabitating but unmarried), he falls in love with a certain
Eugnie, and they are quickly married. Things go well initially, but the reader is not
surprised to learn that Ernest and Marguerites presence drives such a wedge between the
husband and wife that Eugnie has an affair with her music teacher and Blmont, too, is
unfaithful to his wife. She leaves Blmont, taking their children, and over the years their
communication is fraught with jealousy and lingering feelings. Ultimately, Blmont
remarries and Eugnie dies, but not before the two former spouses mutually forgive one
another. The novels rather tepid moral lesson is the importance of fidelity, good
marriage, and forgiveness, and the text itself functions as a detailed study of one such
marital case.12

12

In fact, the majority of de Kocks novels can be said to be full of these basic moral
lessons. In Un mari dont on se moque, the cruel wife Clorinde is killed off and her kind
widower Adolphe is able to love his generous benefactress Laurentine freely fidelity
and generosity are rewarded. In Mon voisin Raymond of 1849, the exceptionally
bothersome and meddling neighbor of Dorsan, the protagonist, dies in an egg eating
contest after trying to interfere in others affairs one last time curiosity, envy and
intrusiveness are punished. An exhaustive study of these endings in de Kocks works is
beyond the scope of this study. But it is worth pointing out that, to some degree, these
moral endings function do quell existing anxieties surrounding the classes about whom
they are written. Critics often reproached the author for his subject matter the word
licencieux crops up frequently in reviews of de Kocks novels yet the fact that at the
end of these novels the virtuous characters are usually rewarded and the questionable
characters punished might be said to have tempered any real disgust about the subjects
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Le Cocu differs structurally from its 1837 successor in its lack of digressions, with
the exception of the first chapter of the novel, Un Cabinet de lecture. The chapter
begins with the imperative, Madame, donnez-moi le Constitutionnel, and continues
with the mise en scne of a bustling lending library. The narrator is present in the scene
and, in fact, establishes his own position vis--vis the other clients: Moi, je suis debout
lentre du salon, o je fais rarement une longue station (3). He will eventually pick up
a newspaper, but rather than read in the lending library, he prefers to watch the other
characters: Je tiens encore mon journal, mais je ne le lis plus. Je mamuse considrer
toutes ces figures penches sur ces feuilles de papier imprim. Ce serait un joli tableau
faire pour un peintre de genre (6). This aside from the narrator gives great insight into
the rest of this thirty-four page chapter, because the narrator then dedicates his time to
painting lively descriptions of the comings and goings of a large cast of characters within
the cabinet what they look like, which newspapers and books they chose, their
comments on what they read in the newspaper, and their complaints to the owner. There
is the fastidious reader for whom [i]l faut que la lampe soit juste devant lui, que ses
pieds aient une chaise pour sappuyer et que sa tabatire soit place ct de son

being described. In other words, perhaps one of the universally appealing qualities of
these novels the reoccurring moral lessons at the end of the narrative served to attract
readers as well as reassure them about the lower classes who make up the majority of de
Kocks characters. Bowan seconds this idea as he writes about de Kocks novels,
[w]hatever grossness and immorality, whatever licentious speculations upon society,
politics, and religion they may contain, they reflect but too faithfully the moral and
intellectual condition of those who read them; and, in proportion to the energy and ability
with which they are written, they heighten the very evils which they reveal (300).
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journal(7). There is the man known as the pouvantail des cabinets de lecture who
routinely takes four hours to read the newspaper. There is the sleepy client who reads in
bed and who desires quelque chose qui lendorme tout de suite (21). These three
examples, among many others, form part of the panoramic representation inside the
lending library, the joli tableau de Kock evokes.
Like many of the caricatures which illustrated de Kocks works, these characters
are relatively superficially drawn, and there is no attempt at further development. Once
identified, despite the length of the narrators descriptions, they receive no further
mention, and the narrator presses on to depict the remaining clients. In fact, the only
thing linking the characters together, in addition to their physical presence and activity at
the lending library, is the narrator himself. The narrator soon takes leave of the cabinet,
however, when his friend Blan arrives at the end and whisks him away from his post as
observer to update him on a pressing matter: Et prenant M. Blan sous le bras, je
lentrane loin du cabinet de lecture (34). Blmont, the first-person narrator, thus exits
the lending library, never to return again and never to make mention of those whom he
observed. Even more curious are the arrival of Blan from outside of the cabinet, the
narrators insistence upon their immediate departure, and the fact that throughout this
lengthy chapter, the reader learns little about the narrator which can be used to
understand him as the protagonist of the narrative which follows. From a structural
standpoint, then, this chapter has no proper function within the narrative: it does nothing
to advance the plot, it contains many characters but no character development, and it is

166

never evoked in the remaining chapters. In theory, the plot of Le Cocu would be the
same, with or without this chapter.
Are we to read this chapter as another digression or, perhaps more precisely, as a
false start to an otherwise structurally sound novel? A short passage from this chapter (a
passage which was cut from later editions) can provide key insight into de Kocks larger
aims. As the narrator observes his surroundings, he eavesdrops on a conversation
between the owner of the library and a young client, expressing his agreement with this
avid bibliophiles interests in les tableaux de moeurs, les scnes contemporaines (14).
Un roman qui a plus de vingt ans, explains the woman, ne peut pas peindre les moeurs
actuelles (14). The narrator, like the client, prefers to read recent descriptions of modern
life, and by evoking the particular literary trend of the tableaux de Paris, he situates his
own text within this category. This reading of de Kock is hardly revolutionary his short
stories and guides to Paris are often placed under this literary classification, and critics
such as Judith Lyon-Caen have mentioned the overlap between de Kocks urban texts and
panoramic literature.13 Yet a meta-discourse on contemporary literature in the context of
this anomalous chapter invites the reader to understand the first chapter as a necessary
depiction of modern Parisian life, whether connected to the main narrative or not. Simply
put, the author creates a hybrid text: not merely a novel on his contemporary Paris, but

13

See Saisir, dcrire, dchiffrer: les mises en texte du social sous la monarchie de
Juillet and Le romancier, lecteur du social dans la France de la Monarchie de Juillet.
Margaret Cohen finds yet another parallel between panoramic literature and the
sentimental novel. She writes that the sentimental social novel shares its interest in the
social type with realism as well as with contemporary nonfictional genres of popular
ethnography like panoramic literature and with the physiognomies (Cohen, 150 n72).
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also sketches of everyday Parisian life similar to those found in rewritings of Merciers
Le Tableaux de Paris, the Franais peints par eux-mmes (which were not to be
published for another fifteen years), the Physiologies (gaining popularity by 1831), or the
literary guidebooks from the mid-July Monarchy, a genre in which de Kocks work
figured prominently and which I have analyzed in previous chapters. The first chapter of
Le Cocu, as well as the rest of the novel, contributes to this literary movement, blending
fictional narrative with a modern tableau de Paris, fulfilling the interests of his narrator
and character. Given this notion that a more than twenty-year old novel cannot depict
current mores it is unsurprising that later twentieth-century editions of this novel have
whittled the cabinet de lecture chapter to nearly one third of its original length.14 This
chapter also implicates the theories of Comte, beginning to circulate at the moment of Le
Cocus publication. The purely observational account of the lending library shows de
Kocks narrative attempts, whether explicit or implicit, to study and represent social
phenomena, in this case the urban lending library, without theorizing about the origins or
the meanings of this phenomenon.
I have just described digressions in the form of lengthy musings on the
background of a character (which I will call digressive character establishment) or of
whole chapters which are disconnected from the central narrative yet which furnish
sequences of urban scenes (which I will call panoramic digressions). I now will look at

14

The 1925 edition (published by M-P Trmois) reduces the chapter to 10 pages,
substantially shorter than its original 34 pages. A reading of the two chapters side by side
shows obvious omissions in the more recent edition.
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another example of both types of digression in de Kocks 1857 La demoiselle du

cinquime, a novel that was also made into a vaudeville play. This novel takes as its
subject the interactions between three young men (Gaston, Alexandre, Alcibiade) living
on the fourth floor of a Parisian apartment building, and the young lady (Flicie) who has
recently moved onto the fifth floor. Not surprisingly, all three men fall in love with
Flicie, and they fall over themselves trying to outshine their friends. A meddling
neighbor on the fourth floor intervenes, and ultimately Flicie chooses none of the suitors
but accepts them all as her friends. The novel unfolds strictly within the confines of the
apartment building, with the exception of a brief trip to an elementary school. The work
could thus be seen as an example of what Sharon Marcus has called the apartment-house
plot. Marcus, in fact, writes about this novel in Apartment Stories, claiming that the
apartment house [] provided realist novels with an emblem of the reconciliation of
multiplicity and unity, which in the apartment took the form of containing numerous units
within a single building, and in realist works such as [...] de Kocks La Demoiselle du
cinquime took the form of gathering the multiple threads of an urban narrative into a
single yet multifarious plot (11). As opposed to other apartment-house novels,
however, Balzacs Le Pre Goriot or Zolas Pot Bouille for example, in which the lives
of the tenants are deeply entwined and in which the building and tenants represent a
microcosm of Parisian society, La Demoiselles characters and plot are much more
disconnected and less exemplary.

169

While he by no means weaves together the lives of the various Parisian types
living in hierarchically structured floors into one diverse, complex plot, the narrator of La
Demoiselle does nonetheless begin with a lengthy description of each of the characters on
each of the levels of the building. After taking pains to describe the recent phenomenon
of the female concierge as well as the particular one found in this apartment, the narrator
winds his way from the fabriquant de plaqu on the first floor to the doctor and famous
ballerina on the second to the two widows on the third floor, and finally to the fourth and
fifth floor where the narrators attention will remain. As was customary of nineteenthcentury urban life, the climb up the floors of the apartment building reflects a climb down
the social ladder the richest tenants live on the lower floors while the poorer tenants
reside on top. De Kocks narrator paints the entire building at length, person by person,
floor by floor, but there is no recurrence of any of the characters except for those on the
fourth and fifth floors. The five principle characters, the three young men, the meddling
fourth-floor neighbor, and the female love object, will go about their business without
ever interacting with their co-renters.
The tactical digression here (digressive character establishment) involves an
elaborate set up of characters that ultimately have no bearing on the rest of the narrative.
This is similar to both the digressions we saw in Le Cocu and Un homme marier, yet so
embedded within a well-established literary trope that the reader is not immediately
aware that the characters are dispensable. In other words, readers familiar with the
apartment-house plot might be initially unconscious of the fact that many of the renters

170

being described at length by de Kock in the context of the apartment space will not form
part of a more complex social network. Sharon Marcus is nonetheless correct, in my
view, when she argues that in La Demoiselle, sexual liaisons among the tenants
transform physical vicinity and social ties from casual distance into purposeful
connection. The apartment-house plot thus combines the salons novel emphasis on
domestic interiors and microscopic social networks [] with the urban novels emphasis
on chance encounters, the interplay between isolation and community, and the sudden
transformation of strangers into kin (11). To call the interactions between the characters
sexual is stretching things, yet it is clear that the apartments interior engenders contact
and thus intrigue among many of the tenants. Despite the narrators intense focus on the
domestic interior and the interactions forced upon the characters through the tight
proximity imposed by this space, de Kocks immeuble lacks genuine microscopic social
networks, especially among its secondary tenants. De Kock, therefore, exploits the
genre of the apartment-building plot by taking advantage of the textual space afforded
him to detail the lives of and anecdotes about characters who do nothing to push the plot
forward. Once again, the narrator has infused his novel with observations on specific
urban social types, adding more and more images to his overarching joli tableau of
Parisian life. These short social studies which interrupt the advancement of the plot also
reflect the positivist approach to the study of society.
In the same vein as Le Cocu, Un mari dont on se moque, a novel from the end of
de Kocks career (1867), is formally quite tightly structured, but nonetheless begins with
a long, unconnected depiction of a Parisian scene. This novel, like the rest of de Kocks
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novels we have seen, is made up of a rather simple narrative, though it is perhaps slightly
more developed than the three texts we have been studying. A nave young man,
Adolphe Corniquet, arrives in Paris and, after being swindled and robbed, ends up at his
god mothers home (Laurentine). She offers him a position in her maison de commission
which he accepts, having no other prospects. At first, the whole house believes him to be
a dullard, but after many months, he begins to chat with the other commis and with his
god mother, and she discovers he has been taking fencing lessons in order to protect her
honor. This interests her greatly, and they develop a strong passion for one another, but
both decide it is in their best interests not to act upon their feelings. Adolphe is
ultimately married off to a young woman named Clorinde, yet it is evident from their
courtship and their wedding that this is not a great match. Their children, whom Clorinde
noticeably hates, are looked after by Laurentine, who has remained a close confidante of
Adolphe but who steers clear of Clorinde. Adolphe ultimately receives an anonymous
letter claiming that Vaudeville, the godfather of his daughter, is having an affair with
Clorinde, which he confirms before killing Vaudeville in a duel. Clorinde leaves Paris
for Italy, after which Laurentine and Adolphe profess their love for one another and
maintain a married lifestyle for two years. Clorinde returns and is very sick, and
despite Laurentines financial aid, she dies. Laurentine and Adolphe ultimately live
together as husband and wife.
Though the rest of the novel takes care to develop the relationship between
Adolphe and his romantic interests and business partners, and though the reader is left
after the novel with an understanding of Adolphes development from a nave young man
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to a mature husband and father, the first two chapters of this book are once again entirely
unrelated to the rest of the narrative and contain descriptions of scores of characters who
are left undeveloped. The first chapter revolves around a scene on a public bench: five
pages are devoted to explaining the social phenomenon of public benches, and the final
thirteen pages report the conversations of people who sit on the bench and interact with
one another. Crucially, there will be no recurrence of these characters they leave the
narrative as soon as they leave the bench. Similarly, the next six-page chapter, Scnes
du soir, is comprised of a squabble between two young grisettes and one middle-aged
woman waiting for her diminutive husband on the bench. In fact, it is not until fully
twenty-six pages into the novel, in the third chapter entitled Un nouveau dbarqu, that
we finally meet the protagonist Adolphe, who chats with his friend Augustin for the
better part of the chapter. And because of the way in which the narrative has unfolded
until this point, it is unclear whether Adolphe will figure prominently in the story, for we
have no way of distinguishing this interaction from that of the other irrelevant characters.
What is more, it takes ten additional pages describing the friends discussion for the
protagonist to pronounce his full name we can surmise only at this point that the novel
will be about him.
This beginning is the classic de Kock digressive introduction (panoramic
digression) which we have seen already in Le Cocu. It is true that an important event in
the development of the plot occurs on the park bench a neer-do-well on the bench takes
the information he has gleaned from eavesdropping on the two friends conversation and
immediately goes to Adolphes hotel to rob him, underscoring the protagonists naivet.
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The public setting of the park bench, in this sense, is more integral to the plot than the
cabinet de lecture in Le Cocu. Yet the nearly thirty pages of recounting the conversations
and bickering among the characters who occupy the bench can only be read as the
aforementioned panoramic digressions, as tableaux de Paris, rather than as any serious
character development within the novel itself. In Un mari dont on se moque, De Kock
creates once again a hybrid text, combining an unremarkable novel about the personal
and romantic development of a young man, with a disconnected study of everyday social
life in Paris.
Do these tableaux de Paris exist in the texts of de Kock not situated in his
contemporary Paris? De Kocks Le Barbier de Paris, for example, written in 1827 but
set in 1632, reveals an absence of these urban digressions. In this lengthy mystery about
hidden identities and the overlapping and confusion of social classes, the historical
distance seems indeed to have inhibited de Kocks typical digressions on contemporary
Parisian types and scenes of petit bourgeois life in Paris. If the narrator does pause
frequently to remind the reader that what he is reading is not set in nineteenth-century
Paris, he nonetheless permits himself far fewer urban descriptions than in other novels,
and the digressive tableaux de Paris are definitely not present in this lengthy novel.15 A

15

The narrator notes, for example, that Dans ce temps-l, Paris tait bien different de ce
quil est aujourdhui (2) and explaining that though he does not purport to provide a full
history of Paris, nous avons pens quil tait ncessaire de rappeler au lecteur ce qutait
Paris lpoque o notre barbier existait (5). The narrator goes as far even, in typical de
Kock fashion, as to draw a distinction between 16th century social types and those from
his own period: maintenant nous avons Paris des artistes en cheveux, des coiffeurs et
des perruquiers, mais nous navons plus de barbiers (5).
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few prolonged digressions can be found throughout this 800 page novel the idle
blathering of a gossipy maid; the drunken exploits of a comical knight yet they
consistently serve to advance the plot or to develop characters rather than as disconnected
urban tableaux as in the other works we have studied. It seems, then, that by setting the
novel in a previous century, de Kock allows himself to focus more fully on the plot,
creating a tighter and more intricate narrative, and less on his tangential observations on
everyday Parisian life. The absence of these observations on contemporary Parisian life
in Le Barbier, a novel set exceptionally outside of mid-nineteenth-century Paris,
underscores the authors otherwise omnipresent focus on studying and chronicling his
own modern city.
The author seems, in fact, to have been so incapable of avoiding these digressions
in his works situated in his contemporary Paris that even de Kocks memoirs, Mmoires
de Paul de Kock, crits par lui-mme, contain a similar deviation from the plot line of his
own life: notably, a thirteen-page story about a philanderer who was cheated on by his
wife. He does state that this story is one which he modified for a novel, presumably Le
Cocu, yet this digression is one of the lengthiest tales in his entire autobiography.16 It is
especially telling then, that in his shorter works of fiction the contes found in Moeurs
Parisiennes, for example de Kock is able to control these digressions and hone them
into one single and connected narrative. In Une soire bourgeoise, a twenty-six page
tale of a botched dinner party, the narrator excels at depicting the party guests and the

16

A good story which I heard from Perpignan, and which I have used with certain
modifications in one of my novels, is the following(de Kock, Mmoirs, 188).
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individual mishaps that take place over the course of the evening. In Une partie de
plaisir, a thirty-four page story of a man who is forced into spending a weekend in the
country, the narrator recounts the hilarious frustration of the unfortunate friend on whom
a get-away with a cast of excruciating characters is imposed. These short stories
function, too, as studies of particular Parisian phenomena and, it seems, de Kocks
particular narrative style actually lends itself to producing sharper short fiction than long
fiction, a reading with which the authors contemporaries would agree. As the 1837
reviewer of Moeurs Parisiennes remarked, Murs Parisiennes, renferme plusieurs
morceaux qui me semblent tre ce que lauteur a fait de mieux. Ce serait l, je crois, le
vritable caractre de son talent, qui excelle peindre certaines scnes grotesques de la
vie commune (Revue Critique des livres nouveaux, 295). His talent lay then, according
to critics, in his more fragmentary work, in particular, in his depictions of everyday
Parisian life.
De Kocks work testifies to his strategic inclusion of these digressive anecdotes or
sketches throughout his longer texts. In a historical moment when the novel was the most
popular genre, it is not surprising that the market-savvy de Kock published them more
prolifically than his short stories and plays.17 In addition, adding textual bulk to his short
stories and thereby turning them into novels earned de Kock more money. Many of
his publishers, notably Gustave Barba, paid him hefty sums in advance for novels, and it

17

As James Smith Allen remarks, de Kock published twice the number of novels and
collected volumes than he did plays: From the subsequent sale of more than 200 plays
and 400 volumes of novels, Kock managed a comfortable, bourgeois standard of living in
Paris (94).
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is not unthinkable that many of the digressions we have described added not only length
but value to the texts. In this respect, de Kock can be said to have understood something
fundamental about the literary market during his lifetime, namely, that despite digression
from the plot, despite the introduction of characters who were left by the wayside once
the narrative took off, despite the hybridity of many of the novels he produced, his
readers were nonetheless willing and eager to purchase his works. It is also clear that,
throughout his novels, de Kock remains committed to creating sketches that depict
everyday Parisian life, through extraneous character description or detailed tableaux.
Whether de Kocks omnipresent literary digressions can be attributed to his commitment
to the genre of the tableaux de Paris, as implied by the first pages of Le Cocu, or to his
desire to highlight the style of writing which best showcased his talents, these digressions
prove that his novels, not merely his literary guidebooks and physiologies, draw on and
contribute significantly to the mid-nineteenth century movement of panoramic literature.
In these scenes, we can also locate de Kocks engagement with the early sociological
theories of his contemporary Auguste Comte.
4.3 De Kock and His Critics
Sainte-Beuve, quoted here in English in an October 1901 New York Times article
on Paul de Kock, claimed that [de Kock] may have some merit; he probably has, but one
cannot say for certain, as one does not read him. Yet the author and his work did
nonetheless figure quite prominently in reviews and journals throughout the nineteenth

177

century.18 This is not to say that his work was reviewed favorably: the majority of his
critics, as we have already seen, portrayed the writer as an author of the lower classes
(and of grisettes in particular), as an author who wrote purely for profit, as an author
whose style was light, humorous but obtuse.19 Yet the inclusion of de Kock in reviews
such as an 1841 study of his Lhomme aux trois culottes alongside George Sands Le
Compagnon du tour de France demonstrates critical engagement with this comical
writers oeuvre and an acknowledgement of his prominent role in the nineteenth-century
literary market. In this review, published in the Revue Critique des livres nouveaux, the

18

Reviews of de Kocks work appeared at least four times in the Revue Critique des
livres nouveaux under the July Monarchy, a high number considering that the journal was
not established until 1837. A survey of Le Charivari under the July Monarchy shows de
Kocks work (theater, novels, and occasional writing) was reviewed, announced and
alluded to prolifically.
19
For example, an October 28, 1836 review of the novel Julienne Petit by Marie
Aycard in which the critic refers to the increasingly large population of lower class
readers qui na nul souci des mrites du style ou de la pens; qui ne demande au roman
que des motions fbriles ou une gat burlesque, evokes Paul de Kocks connection to
this particular readership: Cette classe qui exalte Paul de Kock au-dessus de
Chteaubriand, nest peut-tre pas trs comptente pour dcerner la palme du mrite
littraire; mais elle est plus fructueuse quelquefois pour les auteurs, et presque toujours
pour les diteurs. The lower classes may not have been discerning in their tastes,
according to this critic, but they proved nonetheless that the type of literature produced
by Paul de Kock was lucrative for both the author and his editor. A December 25, 1839,
review of a performance of de Kocks vaudeville La famille Fanfreluche at the Thtre
de la Gat remarked that on y trouve [dans la pice], comme dans la plupart de ses
romans, un mlange continuel de grosse gat et de petit sentiment. Par malheur le verbe
comique, qui ait rarement dfaut au romancier, manque assez souvent au vaudevilliste.
Son rire nest pas toujours franc et ses personnages de thtre sont plutt des caricatures
que des portraits. For this critic, then, though de Kocks humor in his novels does not
translate as well into theater, both versions lack emotional gravitas and depth of
character.
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critic acknowledges the fact that placing de Kock and Sand in dialogue with one another
is, to say the least, unorthodox. He writes: De Paul de Kock Georges Sand la
transition paratra brusque sans doute, et lon ne voit pas dabord ce quil peut y avoir de
commun entreux (Revue, 1841, 2). Yet he continues by comparing de Kocks usually
reproachable work with Sands novel, exploiting this juxtaposition to denounce Sands
work in the strongest of terms.
Cependant il est un point de contact qui les rapproche; cest le ton leste du romancier
qui se plat reproduire des tableaux licencieux, conduire lamour jusqu la
jouissance. Sous ce rapport, on peut dire mme que le premier de ces deux crivains
[de Kock] est le plus chaste, car il ne sarrte pas en gnral sur de semblables scnes,
il se contente de les indiquer en passant, tandis que lautre ne nous fait pas grce des
dtails. (Revue, 1841, 2)
The critic, in other words, relies on the reputation of de Kock as the writer of tableaux
licencieux to underscore the immoral content he finds in Sands text. By setting up de
Kock as the more modest of the two authors, his condemnation of Sand is all the more
severe. Regardless of the fact that his text functions here as a foil to Sands, De Kocks
work participates, nonetheless, in critical literary discourse and is not simply disregarded
as Sainte-Beuve would have us believe.
This 1841 critics characterization of de Kocks oeuvre as tableaux licencieux
is not without precedent. In fact, descriptions of the popular authors work as tableaux,
scnes or observations were almost omnipresent in reviews throughout his career, as
was the use of verbs describing de Kocks act of writing as observer and peintre,
tying his texts both to the movement of panoramic literature and to his contemporaries
developing theories of positivism. The repetition of the words tableaux and scnes
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as descriptions of the genre of the authors work, in other words, underscores de Kocks
relationship to the phenomenon of the tableaux de Paris, while the recurrence of the
notion of observation echoes Comtes method of social analysis. Before turning to
Comte, it is worthwhile briefly considering the relationship between the passages marked
as tableaux, scnes or observation in de Kocks novels and his positive critical
reception.
We have already seen, in our study of his 1842 literary guidebook La Grande
Ville, nouveau tableau de Paris, that de Kock is relying on the trope of Merciers 1781
Tableau de Paris and also that the author consistently received praise for his ability to
capture scenes of certain populations in Paris accurately and light-heartedly, in particular,
in his contributions to literary guidebooks. A November 14, 1842, critic in the Charivari,
for example, describes the author as having rpandu toute la gaiet, tout le naturel qui en
ont fait le peintre de la bourgeoisie parisienne, le Hogarth de la littrature moderne in La
Grande Ville. De Kock, like the incisive British artist of modern moral subjects, has
translated perceptive social commentary from painting into textual tableaux of the city in
the eyes of this critic, and, manifestly, excels at his depictions. These chapter-length
tableaux, grouped together to form a panoramic representation of the city, were described
as we saw as un amusant et fidle panorama de Paris and as comprising un rcit vif,
piquant, anim, tel quon devait lattendre de la plume de M. Paul de Kock (Le
Charivari, August 30, 1842). They serve as de Kocks most explicit observations on
urban phenomena, function collectively as an attempt to depict and understand Paris at its
most modern moment, and represent some of his most well received work.
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The proliferation of critically successful tableaux is not restricted to de Kocks

literary guidebooks. The authors plays, which dominated the July Monarchy vaudeville
scene, were often lauded, not for their profound content, but for their realistic and comic
urban depictions. We see evidence of this most clearly in a September 14, 1845,
Charivari review of de Kocks Place Ventadour, performed at the Thtre du Vaudeville:
Lide de cette pice est originale quoique bien lgre; mais, sous peine de dgnrer
en quelque chose de commun, elle demandait tre traite fort dlicatement; or la
dlicatesse nest pas le fort de M. Paul de Kock, qui le commun ne dplat pas. Il y a
mis en revanche du comique et pas mal de ces petits tableaux de murs dans lesquels
il excelle; il en a mme trop mis, car il a fait deux actes avec un sujet qui nen
comportait quun, et cela dans le seul but de peindre un intrieur de grisettes partant
pour Passy. Le tableau nest pas neuf, mais il est gai. (2, my emphasis)
Here the critic identifies de Kocks strengths ces petits tableaux de murs dans
lesquels il excelle but also brings up the notion of unnecessary tableaux-style
digression we saw earlier in de Kocks novels. Indeed, the reviewer chides de Kock for
his excessive use of the urban tableaux, explaining that the author stretched material
sufficient for one act into two, yet he is still willing to concede that this superfluous
tableau des grisettes is nonetheless pleasant to watch. In other words, the author is
talented enough at painting Parisian bourgeois life that even when structurally
unnecessary within the plot of a play (or a novel), it is still worthy of praise. The positive
reception of de Kocks theatrical tableaux is echoed in another Charivari review, this
time from July 6, 1843, of Les Fumeurs, vaudeville en deux actes, co-written and directed
with M. Varin and performed at the Thtre des Folies-Dramatiques: Rien que le tableau
de lestaminet o nous passons en revue toutes les varits de fumeurs, depuis le
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culotteur de pipes, jusqu lamateur novice qui a des dsagrments de cur vaut la peine
quon aille voir le vaudeville de MM Varin et Paul de Kock, qui est bien lun des
ouvrages les plus spirituels et les plus amusants donns depuis longtemps aux FoliesDramatiques (Le Charivari, July 6, 1843, 4). The critic is describing an act from the
play, but might as well be describing an excerpt from de Kocks Nouveau tableau de
Paris or a Physiologie du fumeur of sorts, as he writes of this thorough typology of the
varieties of smokers. De Kock is once again relying on tropes from panoramic literature
in his theatrical text and once again receiving praise exclusively for these passages.
There is much overlap in the subject matter of de Kocks novels, plays and
literary guidebooks.20 Yet it is nonetheless noteworthy that in each genre the author
produces, regardless of the topic, he is celebrated unequivocally for his urban
observations. His novels, therefore, are no exception. In the aforementioned review of
his 1841 parody of post-Revolutionary France, lHomme aux trois culottes, the critic,
bemused by the three pairs of politically-inflected underpants which structure the plot of
the novel, claims that [l]auteur la traite avec son esprit habituel, toujours un peu
trivial, mais habile observateur, sachant trs bien peindre les scnes populaires (Revue,
1841, 2). 21 This critic, like others, has a tendency to characterize de Kocks work as
scnes and speaks of the authors skill not as a writing skill, but as a kind of painting
and observing. De Kock does not weave complicated narratives in his novels, they are on

20

For example, his 1842 La Grande Ville contains a chapter entitled Les Bains
domicile which is reworked and performed as a play in 1845.
21
The three pairs of culottes represent respectively the First Republic, the Empire and the
Restoration.
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the contrary trivial plots, but he has a keen eye for observing and documenting urban
phenomena and, in addition, does so with a comic edge.
Most notable, perhaps, is an 1840 review in the Revue Critique des Livres
Nouveaux of de Kocks lengthy novel La Jolie fille du faubourg. This critic is put off by
the novel because not only does he feel that the authors subject matter is crude [il]
semble nadmettre aucun terme moyen entre la pruderie et la licence but he finds it
distasteful that de Kock limits himself to depicting one social class in particular: Il est
vrai que ses tableaux sont toujours emprunts une seule classe de la socit (107, my
emphasis). The critic, who also classifies parts of de Kocks novels as tableaux, dislikes
the topics that are necessarily raised when accurately depicting the life of a grisette, such
as her loose morals and her frequent love affairs without interest in marriage.
Nevertheless, the critic admits:
Il sy trouve trois ou quatre scnes qui sont, dans un genre un peu trivial sans doute, de
petits chefs-duvre de vrit et dobservation. Entre autres, une distribution de prix
dans un pensionnat et une soire chez une grisette mritent dtre cites comme
chantillons du talent vritable de M. Paul de Kock. Un peu plus de respect pour le
bon got et les convenances permettraient cet crivain daspirer occuper une place
leve dans la littrature. (Revue, 1840, 107, my emphasis)
For this critic, were it not for the licentious nature of the subject matter of de Kocks
novels, the authors observational writing would surely earn him a higher literary ranking
than the one to which he is currently relegated. The critic cites these few scnes which
for him are masterpieces of vrit and observation once again linking de Kocks

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work to the observational method of Comte as the only praise-worthy aspects of his
novel.22
The two scenes evoked by the critic, one depicting a lengthy ceremony in which
prizes are distributed in front of friends and families to girls attending a Parisian boarding
school and the other an extended observation of the typical night of a group of grisettes,
are similar to the panoramic digressions we saw earlier. In the first, we see the narrator
set up the phenomenon of the distribution des prix in a typical Parisian pensionnat,
stating maintenant une distribution de prix est une espce de spectacle auquel on invite
non seulement les parents, amis et connaissances, mais encore des notabilits dans les
arts, dans les lettres, dans les sciences [] Cest un moyen comme un autre davoir
beaucoup de monde; peut-tre en est-ce un aussi pour exciter encore plus lmulation des
lves (52). The narrator takes this opportunity to describe the beaucoup de monde
who are present at the event: among them are Alexis, the cousin of the most popular girl
in school (Hlne), the poor Marguerite who will win no prizes but who will become the
focus of Alexiss love life later on in the novel, and Hlnes charming sidekick Thnas,
whose father, and the troupe of absurd individuals who accompany him, cause a stir upon
arrival and disrupt the ceremony. In one sense, de Kocks narrator merely employs this

22

This review of de Kock is echoed, almost verbatim, in an 1843 review in an American

journal, The North American Review, when Francis Bowan writes of de Kock: [h]e is a
fellow of keen observation and infinite humor, whose pictures of vulgar manners and low
life, always coarse and too often licentious, are still drawn with so much liveliness and
truth, and presented with so much ease, gayety, and nonchalance, that the sternest reader
cannot fail to be amused, and even to acknowledge some obligation to the writer, for
imparting information respecting persons and scenes which one would hardly wish to
visit and observe for himself (281).
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passage to introduce recurring characters. Thnass father has not been seen at this
point, and he will return to provide comic relief throughout the novel. Alexis first
appears in this passage as well. Yet in keeping with his typical literary patterns, de
Kocks narrator also takes this opportunity to describe multiple characters and anecdotes
which will have no bearing on the plot, in particular the antics of Thnass father and the
description of and anecdotes about multiple minor characters.
The second of these highlighted scenes takes place five years later. Alexis has
returned to reunite with his cousin Hlne, but she is married to an older, wealthy man
and, because of her new social standing, mocks her cousins awkwardness. On the brink
of depression, Alexis seeks help from his friend Durozel, who suggests they spend the
evening with a group of grisettes. Alexis, shocked at first, allows Durozel to escort him
to the apartment of Mademoiselle Julienne who is hosting an evening of crafts and
conversation with six other grisettes. Alexis quietly takes his place in the corner and
observes the entire evening without interacting with the women: Alexis va se placer sur
une chaise qui est contre un lit, lautre extrmit de la chambre. Au bout dun moment
la conversation et les chants reprennent comme avant larrive de ces messieurs (171).
The protagonist is thus present in the scene, but much like M. Blmont, the first person
narrator of Le Cocu in the lending library scene we analyzed above, this scene is entirely
observed by Alexis, but he does not participate in it. Until their departure, Alexis is
merely a witness to the narrators lengthy description of the evening experienced by the
grisettes.

185

Once again it is striking that the two scenes in this novel to receive critical
acclaim are those that do little to advance the plot, only feature the protagonists
tangentially, and are essentially purely descriptive. To account for this critical acclaim,
we might turn to Lyon-Caens argument that these urban novels, like panoramic
literature, functioned to dchiffrer, dcrypter, dvoiler, reprsenter le monde social
comme un texte lisible, un paysage visible (Romancier, 5). De Kocks descriptive
scenes from his novels could be said, then, to serve as guides to the city, as a means by
which readers could comprehend their urban surroundings and as moments to which
critics could point as accurate decodings of city life. On an important level, I believe, this
is the reason for their popularity and positive reception, but this already well-established
critical idea is not the only motivating factor. When the 1840 critic describes de Kocks
scnes as masterpieces of verit et observation, we see him identifying the
importance of these passages without fully articulating why they are significant. The
authors frequent and disconnected tableaux in his plays and novels are the only aspect of
the texts to be praised, not for their prose or their meaning, but rather for their accuracy.
The act of urban observation is what critics respond to positively and especially in
scenes with a sort of meta-observation in which the characters themselves are observing
urban phenomena.23 Therefore, De Kocks critics, as we can plainly see, communicate

23

Before entering the apartment of the grisettes, Alexis is surprised that his friend would
frequent such women. Durozel justifies his own interest by stating the following: Cest
justement parce que je suis raisonnable que jaime frquenter les diverses classes de la
socit. Les gens qui ne veulent en voir quune seule se privent de beaucoup de tableaux
de murs curieux et intressants; une foule dtudes philosophiques et morales. Cest
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the need for observation and meta-observation of social life in literature. And yet, they
are unable to articulate fully why it is that these scenes are so important. Comte, whose
philosophy seeks to systematize sociological knowledge and who was publishing his
work in the period when de Kocks texts were most popular, thus provides the social
theory which de Kocks critics were unable to articulate. The sociologist says what the
novelist and his critics could not, namely, why these petites scnes de vrit et
dobservation were necessary.
4.4 Observing the City: Comtes Positivism and de Kocks Novels
As we saw in the introduction, Auguste Comte published his influential Cours de
philosophie positive between 1830 and 1842 during the same time period during when
many of the novels and reviews we have been analyzing were published. Uninterested in
causal explanations for worldly phenomena (which for Comte were unknowable), the
early nineteenth-century French scholar theorized in his early writings that progress was
only achievable through an observational and experimental method he called positivism.
For Comte, the tat positif was to be distinguished from other, earlier stages of thought
theological and metaphysical during which humans sought the origins of all

comme quelquun qui voudrait vous faire une description de sites, de riants paysages, et
qui ne serait jamais sorti de sa chambre. Au reste, mon jeune ami, si vos yeux jai lair
dun philosophe, je ne me crois pas cependant plus sage quun autre (163). Durozel
describes de Kocks project in this citation. He advocates an observational approach to
the understanding of society, a methodology that requires the author to be present and
observe his subjects before reporting them back to his readers.
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occurrences. In Comtes own words, dans ltat positif, lesprit humain reconnaissant
limpossibilit dobtenir des notions absolues, renonce chercher lorigine et la
destination de lunivers, et connatre les causes intimes des phnomnes, pour sattacher
uniquement dcouvrir, par lusage bien combin du raisonnement et de lobservation,
leurs lois effectives, cest--dire leurs relations invariables de succession et de similitude
(4). He sought to systematize the sciences under this internal method, and, crucially, to
extend this scientific approach to the study of society: il [] reste terminer le systme
des sciences dobservation en fondant la physique sociale (17-18). In other words,
Comte posits a method to study and catalogue discernible occurrences and, through
observation, discover their relationships, networks and laws. Only through this inductive
method, Comte believed, could we come to a true understanding of this crucial scientific
category, social physics, and only then could society be understood and, ultimately,
perfected. He sought, in his words savoir pour prvoir et prvoir pour pouvoir (15).
De Kock gives no indication in his memoirs or elsewhere that he was familiar
with the work of Comte or Comtes contemporaries, nor does he give the impression that
his prolific body of work was organized around a coherent sociological project at all. And
yet, de Kock seems to cast in aesthetic terms Comtes scientific methodologyor at least
the need for it. The narrator of de Kocks Le Cocu, during the lengthy digression on the
lending library, stands and observes his surroundings and remarks, Je tiens encore mon
journal, mais je ne le lis plus. Je mamuse considrer toutes ces figures penches sur
ces feuilles de papier imprim. Ce serait un joli tableau faire pour un peintre de genre
(6). This narrator embodies de Kocks role as author/observer. He examines his
188

surroundings and takes note, often inserting these lengthy and light-hearted observations
into the unrelated plots of his novels. By incorporating these disconnected scenes, which
depict everyday urban phenomena but do not theorize these phenomena nor connect them
to the remainder of the novel, de Kock engages in a proto-sociological discourse,
employing inductive, observational methods to represent the minute particulars of earlyto mid-nineteenth-century Parisian life. Like Comte, de Kock shows us through these
digressive scenes his own interest in showing how the petit bourgeois lived at his own
modern moment, but not why they lived that way. The reader gains a clear picture of what
certain aspects of city life were and in that sense the digressions function, as Lyon-Caen
suggests, to decode and categorize urban types but the origins of these individual
phenomena are never explored. In relying on these descriptive passages, de Kock applies
an inductive approach to the study of urban occurrences, leaving us with humorous
observations of Parisian types nestled within his otherwise unremarkable narratives, the
petits chefs-duvre de vrit et dobservation his critics appreciated within his usually
condemned novels.
I have argued that de Kocks narratives, which focus on observation and
documentation, highlighted by its seemingly-disconnected place within the plot, realize
aesthetically the Comtes positivist observational method. De Kocks anecdotal
insistence on describing Parisian social life responds to what Comte describes as a need
for a comprehensive study and, ultimately, theory of society. The critics recognize this
impulse to synthesize society on the part of de Kock and praise him for it, but they lack
the theoretical language to put their own insight into explicit terms. Comte explains that
189

on remarque une lacune essentielle relative aux phnomnes sociaux, qui, bien que
compris implicitement parmi les phnomnes physiologiques, mritent, soit par leur
importance, soit par les difficults propres leur tudier, de former une catgorie
distincte (17). De Kock begins to supply these studies, in his own comical way, through
his descriptions of urban phenomena. His critics indentify these passages as
masterpieces, yet without connecting them to Comtes theoretical reflections, we cannot
understand why they did. As these early readers recognized, the popular authors novels
demonstrate the impulse toward the beginnings of a positive synthesis of how society
functions and the laws and systems which govern it. It is Comte who provides the
historical theoretical vocabulary for the aesthetic experiments of de Kock.
But if de Kocks literary perspective overlaps methodologically with positivism,
his work also highlights his distinction from Balzacs urban studies. Unlike the tableauxstyle Parisian observations found throughout Balzacs Comdie humaine, which are laden
with metaphysical musings and suppositions, de Kocks tableaux refuse us access to a
more abstract understanding of Parisian society. While Balzac does outline a literary
method involving observation, as we have seen, he also outlines in his Avant-propos the
importance of his search for the moteur social, the causes or virtues driving societal
actions. These unobservable causal explanations that he seeks in his works take Balzac
out of the realm of the purely positivistic and provide a metaphysical inflection which
Comte excluded from his own work. De Kocks novels follow a more Comtian method
and because of this, his representations of urban life are devoid of the philosophical and
mystical charge regularly found in Balzac.
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5. M. Zola nobserve plus: Positivism and the Bourgeois Type in Zolas PotBouille
5.1 Zolas Physiologies
As mile Zola began his prolific writing career, and especially between 1875 and
1880, the author contributed frequently to a Russian journal, Vestnik Evropy or Messager
de lEurope. Though he would publish his outline of the naturalist methodology, Le
Roman Experimental, at the end of this period (1880), a short series published in this
Russian journal in 1876, Comment on se marie, already hinted strongly at the naturalist
manifesto, as did a parallel series, Comment on meurt, published in 1883 in a collection
of short stories entitled Le Capitaine Burle. Labeled observations sociologiques,
tudes sociales, and even physiologies by the few critics who have examined them,
these two short texts can be read as pure examples of the positivist philosophy, and I will
read them as such here. They are observations on social life, which explore phenomena
throughout varying classes.1 Jol Gayraud writes of Comment on se marie, in fact, that
Zola procde en tant qucrivain comme le docteur Pascal en tant que physiologiste in
these works and describes sa mthode positiviste danalyse de la socit (54, 56).
Indeed, Zolas compilations of concise descriptions of death and marriage as they play
out in the lives of both peasants and the wealthy evoke the forms of the panoramic
literary texts published thirty years before, and like those earlier works, embody Comtes
scientific approach to the study of society.

See Sbastien Doubinsky, Comment on se marie, ou la traverse du miroir intentions

et perspectives dun crivain face lui-mme; and Jol Gayraud, Un fanatique du rel.
191

It is a curious fact that toward the end of his career Zola reworked and even
republished these two series: Comment on se marie was, in fact, reissued directly after the
publication of the final installment in the Rougon-Macquart series, Le Docteur Pascal.2
On the topic of this peculiar republication, Sbastien Doubinsky has speculated that il
nest pas courant pour un auteur de refaire paratre un texte, somme toute mineur,
quelques dix-sept ans de distance, sans en changer une ligne. Cela montre de la part de
lcrivain une revendication pleinement consciente de son travail, et la confirmation
dune ligne littraire et intellectuelle amorce depuis des annes (13). For Doubinsky,
then, Zolas reissuing of these short texts after the appearance of his twenty novels
dedicated to the histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire can be
seen as a reminder au lecteur, justement, comment les Rougon-Macquart se sont crits,
ou, pour tre prcis, comment Zola dfinit par lexemple son rle dcrivain naturaliste
(13). Put more simply, through the republication of these two studies distilled textual
examples of the naturalist project Zola reaffirms his naturalist manifesto at the close of
his Rougon-Macquart cycle.
Zola does not cite Auguste Comte in his 1880 essay Le Roman experimental and
neither does Claude Bernard in his Introduction ltude de la mdecine exprimentale
(1865). Yet Comtes positivist theories echo throughout both documents, and both the

The editor of Zolas Contes et Nouvelles 1875-1899: Tome 2, Franois-Marie Mourand,

writes the following of the subsequent reeditions of Comment on meurt : On verra que
Comment on meurt a donn lieu six rditions partielles entre 1881 et 1895. Les titres
choisis pour chacune de ces publications, Misre ou La Mort du pauvre, attestent la fixit
dune intention dmonstrative que Zola sefforcera au contraire deffacer pour dautres
textes, moins enchsss dans la ralit politique et sociale (13).
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novelist and the doctor have often been linked to the movement of positivism. While it
has been common to draw the connection between Zola and Comte, it is nevertheless
worthwhile to reemphasize the significant overlap between their respective projects in the
context of this study of positivism and the urban novel.3
Zola opposes his works to those of other idealist writers by placing the
experimental, naturalist novel within Comtes positive stage. He writes:
Nous, crivains naturalistes, nous soumettons chaque fait lobservation et
lexprience; tandis que les crivains idalistes admettent des influences mystrieuses
chappant lanalyse, et restent ds lors dans linconnu, en dehors des lois de la nature.
Cette question de lidal, scientifiquement, se rduit la question de lindtermin et
du dtermin. [] Certes, notre science est bien petite encore, ct de la masse
norme de choses que nous ignorons. Cet inconnu immense qui nous entoure ne doit
nous inspirer que le dsir de le percer, de lexpliquer, grce aux mthodes scientifiques.
(35)
In what can only be called a positivist sentiment, Zola declares that the naturalist writer
will only concern himself with observable phenomena that can be approached
scientifically. He thus distinguishes himself from those other writers qui sappuient sur

To give only two of many examples, Philip Walker quibbles with Henri Mitterands
definition of Zolas positivism in his book review of Mitterands seminal biography of
the naturalist author, writing that Zola's positivism, which [Mitterrand] leaves
undefined, was actually closer to what D.G. Charlton terms the positivist tat d'esprit
than to the pure positivism of Littr, for example, or Claude Bernard (183). Similarly,
Jol Gayraud, as we have just seen, refers to Zolas mthode positiviste danalyse de la
socit (56). Ross Shideler has written, too, that the framework for Zolas literary
universe came from a French intellectual and cultural generation that produced Auguste
Comte (1798), Ernest Renan (1832-92), Hippolyte Taine (1828), and Claude Bernard
(1813-78) (29). In terms of Bernard, for example, the biographer of Louis Pasteur,
immunologist Patrice Debr has written that Claude Bernard [] brought Auguste
Comtes thinking into medicine (347).
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lirrationnel et le surnaturel, et dont chaque lan est suivi dune chute profonde dans le
chaos mtaphysique (30). Zola is not openly quoting Comte, but his evocation of the
supernatural, metaphysical and scientific states certainly gesture toward the protosociologists work. Zolas comments thus situate naturalism in the positivist stage.
As the novelist expounds upon his method, the overlap between the two
nineteenth-century thinkers is once again clear. Citing Bernard (and ventriloquizing
Comte), Zola writes that the role of the experimental scientist consiste prendre les faits
dans la nature, puis tudier le mcanisme des faits, en agissant sur eux par les
modifications des circonstances et des milieux, sans jamais scarter des lois de la nature.
Au bout, il y a la connaissance de lhomme, la connaissance scientifique, dans son action
individuelle et sociale (8). For Zola, one must work at once as observateur and
exprimentateur, concentrating on discernable phenomena: la science exprimentale
ne doit pas sinquiter du pourquoi des choses; elle explique le comment, pas davantage
(4). If these are the goals of experimental medicine, Zola hopes to appropriate them for
his own literary approach:
Le but de la mthode exprimentale, en physiologie et en mdecine, est dtudier les
phnomnes pour sen rendre matre. [] Eh bien ! ce rve du physiologiste et du
mdecin exprimentateur est aussi celui du romancier qui applique ltude naturelle
et sociale de lhomme la mthode exprimentale. Notre but est le leur; nous voulons,
nous aussi, tre les matres des phnomnes des lments intellectuels et personnels,
pour pouvoir les diriger. Nous sommes, en un mot, des moralistes exprimentateurs,
montrant par lexprience de quelle faon se comporte une passion dans un milieu
social. (22-24)
Experimental science fully informs Zolas literary method. The novelist attempts to
renounce the search for supernatural and metaphysical explanations and instead works to
194

gain mastery over social milieu through a scientific approach to visible phenomena. He
is responding, if implicitly, to Comtes previous calls for a comprehensive scientific
study of society. The naturalist literary method, we can safely say, is a positivist one.
There have been, of course, numerous subsequent studies of Zolas works calling into
question the actual scientific nature of Zolas novels, examining the influence of
mythology on these texts and scrutinizing the critical move of studying Zolas work in
and out of the context of science.4 For our purposes, which will be to show Zolas
thematizing of the impossibility of pure observation throughout his novel Pot-Bouille, it
is necessary to take Zola at his word. Namely, in what follows, we will understand the
role of the naturalist writer to be observateur and exprimentateur, just as Zola
outlines it in the Roman experimental.
If Zolas literary manifesto calls for a positivist approach to the study of society,
then because of their form, content and publishing history, Comment on se marie and
Comment on meurt can be seen as exemplars of the naturalist methodology. In fact, the
word that both titles share comment recalls the authors assertion that la science
exprimentale ne doit pas sinquiter du pourquoi des choses; elle explique le comment,
pas davantage (4). Rather than explaining pourquoi on se marie or pourquoi on
meurt, the naturalist writer takes it upon himself, instead, to outline the phenomenon of
death and marriage throughout a number of social classes. As opposed to some of the

See, among others, Yves Chevrel, Le Naturalisme; David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction :
The Entropic Vision ; Henri Miterrand, Le Discours du roman, Le Regard et le signe ;
Michel Serres, Feux et signaux de brume.
195

digressive tableaux found in Paul de Kocks novels, which consisted merely of

description rather than intrigue, Comment on se marie and Comment on meurt
nonetheless call attention to themselves as sociological studies in their pared-down
literary style. They are reminiscent, in this sense, of some of the fictional vignettes in the
literary guidebooks we studied in the first chapter.5 Gayraud has noted the scientific
style of Comment on se marie, writing that [l]es signes formels de la littrature se sont
effacs au profit du style neutre et dpouill dun comte rendu dexpriences
scientifiques: prsent de lindicatif, usage du mot propre, absence Presque totale de la
mtaphore, simplicit de la syntaxe. Ce dpouillement visant la prcision et la
efficacit du message produit un curieux effet de grossissement comme si les tranches de
vie rapportes taient des prparations anatomiques tudies la loupe (58). Indeed,
these short social studies are all the more dpouill because of their repetitive structure,
for each of the five chapters of Comment on meurt and each of the four chapters of
Comment on se marie is organized in the same manner. In the latter, for example, the
narrator provides essential background information on the subject of study, outlines the
circumstances of his or her death. The reader is then treated to a description of the burial
and, ultimately, the details of the aftermath of the death, which, in most cases, involves
the finances of the deceased.

Both volumes of La Grande ville: nouveaux tableaux de Paris contain descriptions of

Paris in the form of fictional short stories and vignettes. See, for example, Marc
Fourniers and Eugne Briffaults short stories, Les Canotiers de la seine and Une
actrice de Socit: Chronique de lHtel Castellane, or any of Paul de Kocks stories
from Murs parisiennes.
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In all cases, within the first few sentences of the study, the narrator immediately
identifies the class to which the soon-to-die character belongs. The chapters are
structured hierarchically, beginning with a noble character and ending with a peasant. In
the first chapter, as early as the second sentence, we learn that the Comte de Verteuil
appartient une des plus illustres familles de France, et possde une grande fortune (3).
In the second chapter, we learn in sentences two and three that the deceased husband of
Mme Gurard, the subject of the chapter, tait magistrat and that she belongs to la
haute bourgeoisie et possde une fortune de deux millions (10). The third chapter
immediately outlines a tale of upward mobility in M. Rousseau and his bride: M.
Rousseau sest mari vingt ans avec une orpheline, Adle Lemercier, qui en avait dixhuit. A eux deux, ils possdaient soixante-dix francs, le soir de leur entre en mariage.
[] Maintenant, ils possdent un magasin de papeterie, rue de Clichy, qui vaut bien une
cinquantaine de mille francs (17). On the other hand, the fourth chapter begins by
stating that Les Morisseau ont crev la misre. La femme est blanchisseuse, le mari est
maon (24). The final character, Jean-Louis Lacour, a peasant, is connected to his land
as opposed to his finances: Jean-Louis Lacour a soixante-dix ans. Il est n La
Courteille, un hameau de cent cinquante habitants, perdu dans un pays de loups. En sa
vie, il est all une seule fois Angers, qui se trouve quinze lieues; mais il tait si jeune
quil ne se souvient plus. [] La famille vit sur cinq ou six arpents, juste assez de terre
pour manger du pain et ne pas aller tout nu (30). These short studies are composed
uniquely of essential information about these subjects organized into schematic form.
There is no room for extraneous anecdotes or the introduction of minor figures: the
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narrator sets up the social situation of each character and moves on quickly to recount the
circumstances of their demise.
Comment on se marie is structured almost identically. Of that text, Sbastien
Doubinsky has noted: tous les rcits sont effectivement construits sur la mme structure
narrative prsentation du personnage principale, origines de lide de mariage,
acceptation de la demande, description des crmonies civiles et religieuses, nuit de noce
et conclusion sur la vie de couple venir (13). Like its more morbid successor, Zolas
study of marriage is structured hierarchically, beginning with the marriage of the comte
Maxime de La Roche-Mablon. A bachelor of thirty-two years, Maxime appartient
lune des plus vieilles familles de lAnjou [] [qui] dailleurs, nont pas perdu un lopin
de terre pendant lmigration, et on les cite encore parmi les grandes propritaires de
France (13). Maxime, in a rather blas fashion, picks a bride with a fortune
considrable from ancienne noblesse de Normandie (14), entering into polite but
loveless marriage with Mlle Henriette de Salneuve. The next study focuses on M. Jules
Beaugrand, le fils du clbre Beaugrand, lavocat, le clbre orateur de nos assembles
politiques [] [qui] a fait une belle fortune (23), who decides to marry a wealthy but
relatively unattractive woman, Mlle Marguerite Desvignes. After all, he decides, une
fille de douze cent mille francs peut se permettre dtre laide (24). Two years into their
marriage, however, Juless work and Marguerites social obligations have made them
forget one another. The petite bourgeoisie is represented in the third chapter when Louis
Bodin, fille dun petit mercier de la rue Saint-Jacques [] o il na pu encore mettre de
ct quune dizaine de mille francs, decides to enter into both marriage and a business
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partnership with Alexandre Meunier (33). After a parsimonious celebration, the two have
a pleasant relationship, despite the fact that ils sont des associs honntes, pres
largent, qui continuent coucher ensemble pour viter un double blanchissage de draps
(42). The reader is not surprised to see that the final couple comes from the working
class: Valentin, menuisier de son tat and Clmence, une fleuriste de seize ans (4344). In a love story which prefigures that of Coupeau and Gervaise in LAssommoir,
Clmence and Valentin find themselves ten years after their inexpensive nuptials, in the
lente dgradation du mnage, as Valentin est tomb dans le vin (51).6 Once again,
these chapters, organized into descending order of social rank, contain nothing but the
bare structure of the circumstances of each couples marriage. They are set up to
function, in other words, as social studies of the phenomenon of marriage, rather than as
more elaborate love story narratives of the novelistic type.
Comment on meurt and Comment on se marie have been critically overlooked,
with only a few exceptions. Late-nineteenth-century poet Edmund Gosse, in his
introduction to a translation of Zolas LAttaque sur le Moulin, critiqued the lack of true
observation in Zolas Comment on meurt, a collection he called little death-bed
anecdotes. He writes:
[T]his latter is hardly in the writers best style, and suffers by suggesting finer and
deeper studies of the same kind which the genius of Tolstoi has elaborated. Of these
little sketches of death, one alone, that of Madame Rousseau, the stationers wife, is
quite of the best class. This is an excellent episode from the sort of Parisian life which

Of the overlap between Comment on se marie and LAssommoir, Robert Lethbridge has
written that the short study is virtually a synopsis of the courtship threaded through the
novels opening chapters (Visit, 42).
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M. Zola seems to understand best, the lower middle class, the small and active
shopkeeper, who just contrives to be respectable and no more. The others seem to be
invented rather than observed. (31)
Gosse praises Zola for the realistic depiction of the death of his petit bourgeois character,
but finds that the other episodes lack in verisimilitude. He believes, in other words, that
the author has undertaken an observational approach to the study of Mme Rousseau, but
that the others constitute invention on the part of the naturalist.
In the same vein, Doubinsky has attempted to debunk the veracity of Zolas
observations in his study of marriage, writing that [i]l faut peu de temps, en effet, pour
dmonter compltement lartifice naturaliste du texte: choix arbitraire du sujet,
prsentation fictionnelle de personnages, phantasmes personnels appliqus aux situations,
etc. (14). He criticizes the author, whom he argues was well versed in journalistic
practices, for not basing the work on four real life examples of marriages, claiming that
Zola, en dpit de son amour de la science et du vrai, prfre inventer des
situations (14). But the question of whether Zolas fiction is in part invented hardly
seems a productive entry into his work. Franois-Marie Morand responds to this critique
in his work on Comment on meurt, explaining that Zola ne pense pas que la mise en
rcit, dabord utile pour contourner les interdits, soit un handicap pour rendre compte du
rel; il adhre au contraire une esthtique de la reprsentation o le vraisemblable sert
mettre le vrai en lumire (12). Whether we can point to an actual non-fictional example
of the characters studied in both of Zolas physiologies is irrelevant, in other words,

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because for the naturalist, the act of fictionalizing his studies did little to make them less
real.
The author does, it must be said, include an introduction to Comment on se marie
in which he laments the state of fcheux marriages daujourdhui, which he blames on
le foss profound que lducation et linstruction creusent chez nous, ds lenfance,
entre les garcons et les filles (9), before proceding to the examples of marriage or, as he
calls it his exercices. Doubinsky points to Zolas intention pr-tablie et de nature
idologique in this study, which disproves the objectivity of Zolas project in his view.
Gayraud also highlights a pre-determined theory at the heart of this study, writing that
les personnages [] ne sont plus que des caricatures destines valider une thse (58).
Yet what both these critics forget is that while it may seem that the author is working
deductively to prove his hypotheses about marriage (and death, though Comment on
meurt does not contain an introduction), Zola addresses this very topic in his manifesto
where he states the following:
Mais une fois le fait constat et le phnomne bien observ, lide arrive, le
raisonnement intervient, et lexprimentateur apparat pour interprter le phnomne.
Lexprimentateur est celui qui, en vertu dune interprtation plus ou moins probable,
mais anticipe, des phnomnes observs, institue lexprience de manire que, dans
lordre logique des prvisions, elle fournisse un rsultat qui serve de contrle
lhypothse ou lide prconue. (7)
The experiment is nothing but an observation provoque, according to Bernard and
Zola, and thus through observation about how a hypothesis unfolds, the results are
interpreted. The experimental scientist and the naturalist novelist both enact this delicate
back and forth between observing and experimenting. The hypothesis Zola outlines in his
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introduction to Comment on se marie by no means makes him less of a naturalist on the

contrary, it fits rather nicely with the methodology he had developed.
I would argue, then, that Comment on se marie and Comment on meurt show us
distilled examples of the naturalist method: they are brief studies of social occurrences as
they play out among different classes. They use a repetitive structure and minimally
literary narrative style to describe these episodes of marriage and death and, through their
very titles call attention to the positivist method Zola outlines in Le Roman experimental.
In their attempt to master their respective phenomena, these texts both presume and help
establish the possibility of pure observation and the omniscient naturalist narrator able to
perform this act. As we will see now, later texts, specifically Pot-Bouille and Au
Bonheur des Dames call into question this very possibility. The fact that Zola republished these early short stories later, however after the completion of his RougonMacquart cycle opens the question of his relationship to the problem of observation
over the course of his career.
5.2 M. Zola nobserve plus
One of the most extensive reviews of the novel Pot-Bouille, appropriately titled
A propos de Pot-Bouille, was written in 1882 for the Journal des deux mondes by its
editor-in-chief, literary critic Ferdinand Brunetire. The critic writes an unfavorable
review of the novel, but nonetheless condemns other critics who find Pot-Bouille
exceptionally shocking. He states that in reading this novel, readers who had praised the
authors previous works (LAssommoir and Nana in particular) should find nothing new

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to deplore, because Zola does nothing in this novel that he did not do before. Writes
Brunetire:
Les mots seraient-ils plus gros dans le roman de murs prtendues bourgeoisies que
jadis dans le roman de murs soi-disant populaires? Ou les choses plus malpropres
aujourdhui dans ce Pot-Bouille, quelles ntaient autrefois dans cette Nana ? []
Pot-Bouille et Nana, cest tout un: qui a fait lun a fait lautre. [] M. Zola ne sest pas
surpass dans ce dernier chef-duvre: il ny a fait vraiment que sgaler lui-mme.
(455)
The reviewer accuses Zolas novel of being de mauvais got and horrible, but does
not see this as a difference between Pot-Bouille and his other works. For Brunetire, the
same public that made it possible for the naturalists grossiers novels to become so
successful is hypocritical to rail against him for depicting the interior of a bourgeois
apartment building in the same manner in which he represented Gervaise, Coupeau and
Nana in his preceding works.
Brunetire does, however, see Pot-Bouille, as a turning point in the RougonMacquart and identifies it as the novel that exposes Zolas naturalist methodology as
faulty. La discordance a clat, he writes, nous avons compris ce que signifiaient ces
grossirets inutiles [] et ces ignobles coups de gueule de LAssommoir (458).
Because this new novel treats a population which is familiar to its reading public, as
opposed to the working-class characters of LAssommoir or the demi-monde of Nana, the
critic claims to be able to recognize that the characters of Pot-Bouille and thus those of
the previous novels are superficial or even false: cest donc faire la caricature du
bourgeois, ce nest pas en faire le portrait (458). While the critic goes on to explain
what is un-bourgeois about these characters and why the novel is in poor taste, relatively
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unoriginal arguments, he does raise a crucial question about Zolas methodology in this
tenth novel of the Rougon-Macquart. Specifically, he asks what has become of the
lengthy descriptions of the characters customs and why Zola has chosen to create a cast
of bourgeois individuals, all of different professions, which he does not describe at
length, and all united in their cynicism.
Reproaching Zola for not including detailed descriptions of magistrates and
commissioners, and explaining the differences between these various bourgeois types,
Brunetire writes:
Au moins y faut-il de lobservation [] les qualits de lobservateur vont de roman en
roman saffaiblissant chez M. Zola. [] Ce qui me surprend [] cest de voir
comment tous ses personnages, indistinctement, obissent des impulsions
mcaniques. Cest o je reconnais que M. Zola nobserve plus. [] Il navait pas non
plus tudi la bourgeoisie parisienne quand il conut Pot-Bouille, mais il commena
par se faire une certaine ide de la bourgeoisie parisienne, et stant mis alors
ltudier, il nen changea pas. [] M. Zola nest pas un homme dimagination, mais
cest un homme de logique. Il ninvente pas: mais il nobserve pas davantage: il
dduit. (462-63, emphasis in the original)
Brunetire, in other words, accuses Zola of shirking his observational responsibilities as a
naturalist writer, instead beginning his study with a preconceived notion about the
bourgeoisie. If this is the case, as the critic suggests, Zola moves in Pot-Bouille from a
positivist, inductive approach to the subject to an anti-positivist, deductive approach.
Instead of observing phenomena and from these observations drawing conclusions, he
would then begin his study with an already set hypothesis about the topic, working
deductively instead of inductively in a way that is contrary to the naturalist project. For
the critic, Zolas bourgeois characters are nothing but superficial types, created without
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regard to observation because of a certain methodological laziness on the part of the

author, which, for Brunetire, smacks of la simplicit de linvention (465).
Brunetires reading of the novel, and of Zolas works in general is conservative.
He accuses Zola of lacking a sens moral, which for him is at the heart of this
impuissance dobserver (464). However, when he speaks of this impuissance
dobserver, the literary critic is picking up on, but not quite fully articulating, an
important theme in Pot-Bouille, namely, Zolas thematizing of the impossibility of pure
narrative observation at the heart of the novel. As I will argue, in this story about
Parisian bourgeois and their domestic lives, Zola confronts the limitations of his own
naturalist approach by incorporating scenes in which the characters and readers, but also
the narrator himself, are unable to have full access to the milieu of the apartment
building. With close readings of these scenes of non-observation, and with attention to
the way this novel seems to acknowledge the difficulty of capturing the bourgeois type,
we can expand upon Brunetires impulse. It is not, as Brunetire argues, that M. Zola
nobserve plus, but rather that Zola recognizes the problem of omniscient observation
and writes this very problem into the narrative. Put another way, Zola has not, as
Bruntire would have us believe, adopted an anti-positivist method of approaching his
subject matter. He has, in a more complex turn, both employed and problematized this
approach in Pot-Bouille. If in his critique of this novel Brunetire senses that Zolas
qualitis dobservateur [] saffaibliss[ent], this is not because the author is losing his
touch, but rather, he is calling into question the possibility of the true naturalist,
omniscient narrator.
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As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, in his 1880 Le Roman exprimental,

Emile Zola famously outlined the role of the naturalist writer as that of observateur as
well as exprimentateur. In doing so, he linked the naturalist project to Claude
Bernards theories of experimental medicine as well as to early nineteenth-century
positivist thought. Like his pre-sociological predecessors and many mid-century writers
of panoramic literature, the naturalist novelist posited a partially inductive approach to
the study of Parisian culture, exploring how things worked. His novels are the result of
meticulous studies of social phenomena, types and milieux a glance at the lists, notes,
outlines, maps and sketches behind each of Zolas novels, which have been collected
together and edited in Carnets denqutes, proves the author took seriously his role of
observer. Two years after the publication of Le Roman exprimental, however, in his
often critically overlooked domestic novel, Pot-Bouille, Zola confronts the limitations of
his own naturalist approach. In Apartment Stories, Sharon Marcus argues that though
Pot-Bouille relentlessly shows the impossibility of complete interiorization (167), this
interior novel also reveals the shortcomings of the naturalist project of total observation.
Marcus is correct that as the urban novels focus shifts from the exterior (the observable)
to the interior (the unobservable), the positivist method of documenting visible
phenomena becomes more and more difficult. However, in this chapter I would like to
move away from the problem of interiorization, to question whether the subject matter
itself challenges the naturalist project and whether Zola uses this domestic novel to stage
the problem of the naturalist omniscient narrator.

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Because for Zola the bourgeois class represented the contrary of what it purported
to be, the author questions through his study of this subject whether the construction of a
bourgeois type is ultimately impossible. Does the bourgeois class, in other words, disrupt
the observational method? Zola still relies somewhat on the process of observation and
initially characterizes the individuals lodged on the rue de Choiseul in Pot-Bouille as
types they are each tied to a particular floor of the apartment building and therefore to a
specific class or profession. Yet he also shows, as he follows the spatial and sexual
transgressions of the protagonist Octave Mouret, that these same specific types, and the
very concept of a bourgeois type, break down. What I will suggest, after studying the
novel alongside Zolas own notes on this work and its subject matter, is that at the
interior of this urban novel of the interior, the theories of observation imagined by the
naturalist author (and by the first sociological thinkers too) prove at once indispensible
and impossible.
5.3 Pot-Bouille: un roman bourgeois
Zolas 1882 Pot-Bouille, which precedes Au Bonheur des Dames and follows
Nana, documents Octave Mourets arrival in Paris and the exploits of the residents of his
apartment building, combining, as Marcus has noted, the customary nineteenth-century
Bildungsroman narrative and both marriage and adultery plots (171). Mourets sexual
conquests are at the heart of this novel. In an effort to sleep his way to power, the young
man becomes involved intimately with three female residents on different floors of the
building (all of whom are married, one of whom bears at least one of his children),
unsuccessfully pursues others, and ultimately weds his former employer, Madame
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Hdouin, owner of the store Au Bonheur des Dames. In the meantime, numerous other
tenants are married, carry on extra-marital trysts and become implicated in various
financial and social scandals. Meanwhile, the buildings servants comment acerbically as
these events unfold. With the exception of Octaves marriage, the novel culminates with
multiple disastrous events: the death of the landlord, Vabre, whose vast debts are
discovered; the revealing of Octaves affair with the married Berthe; the death of the
long-suffering patriarch M. Josserand; the failed suicide attempt of Alphonse Duveyrier,
the landlords son-in-law who has been scorned by his mistress; and the graphic scene of
a servant woman giving birth to an illegitimate child whom she later abandons.
First serialized in Le Gaulois between January 24 and April 14, 1882, Pot-Bouille
was a commercial success, but was met with generally negative reviews. The novel was
published by Charpentier in volume format on April 12, 1882.7 Brian Nelson explains
that the majority of critics at the time of the novels publication denounced it for its poor
documentation and lack of realism (141), an amusing reproach given that an 1887
English translation of the novel was entitled Piping Hot! A Realistic Novel.8 Other
reviewers took issue, as was often the case with Zola, with the immoral nature of the

According to Marcus, the novel enjoyed great popularity during its serialization and
upon initial publication; 30,000 copies were in print in 1883, compared to 27,500 copies
of Nana in 1881 (169).
8
It is worth noting that during the serialization of Pot-Bouille, Zola was taken to trial for
slander by a magistrate by the name of Duverdy, who argued against the use of his name
in the novel. The author lost his case and was required to change the name of the
character: his character became Duvereyier. According to Marcus, the case did not stop
there: when he received other complaints, all from men, he initially responded by
altering one other name, then balked and refused to change any more (192).
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subject matter. In an analysis of Zolas reception in the Anglophone world, Herbert

Edwards points to negative reviews of Pot-Bouille from both inside and outside the
Hexagon. An 1882 review in the American journal The Critic labeled the book as
filthy, immoral garbage and the intervention of the Society of the Prevention of Vice
[] was called for. The Literary World was equally violent, labeling the book as
nauseously offensive, reeking with filth, a veritable hot-bed of indescribable grossness
which would besmear everyone who touched it (Edwards, 119).9 Though even the
most canonical of the naturalists works (Thrse Raquin, Nana, LAssomoir, etc.)
received similar reviews at the moment of publication, Pot-Bouille still remains largely
critically neglected today. In her introduction to a recent edition of the novel, MarieAngle Voisin-Fougre writes that la critique a toujours t fort svre lgard de PotBouille: roman trop systmatique selon les uns, pauvre dinvention selon les autres,
ou encore dot dune psychologie primaire, il serait exclure des meilleurs RougonMacquart (16). As I hope to show in this chapter, it is precisely the illusion of poor
documentation and the false observation evoked by these critics, woven throughout
the novel, which make Pot-Bouille worthy of critical reexamination.
All of the novels of the Rougon-Macquart cycle are structured around a certain
degree of repetition and symmetry, and Pot-Bouille is no exception. The novel begins

A New York Times review of the late 1883 theatrical adaptation of the novel echoed this
sentiment: It is painful to acknowledge that Zolas Pot-Bouille has been received with
expressions of delight by the audiences at the Ambigu. All the persons who have read
the novel know what a ponderous mass of corruption and false observation it contained
by the side of some strong scenes and truthful observation. The piece is not so vile as the
book, because the adapter [] has put aside most of the disgusting details (1).
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with Octaves arrival at the rue de Choiseuil and ends with his departure; the narrative is
punctuated by dinner gatherings at the Campardon home and soires at the Duveyrier
home; and many of the instances of great bourgeois hypocrisy are followed directly by
the servants cutting gossip about their employers.10 Yet despite the fact that Brian
Nelson has stressed the heightened structural repetition and circularity (Reading, 58) of
the novel, there is a certain sense of disorder that permeates the text. Resulting from the
milieu the naturalist author chose to tackle in this study urban bourgeois apartment life
this apparent lack of organization is even suggested by the title. According to Henri
Mittrand, in nineteenth-century vernacular, Pot-Bouille meant la cuisine de tous les
jours, lordinaire du mnage (Carnets, 119). Evocative of a large pot into which
ingredients are thrown pell-mell to stew, the title of what has been called one of Zolas
cruelest novels, mirrors the hectic cast of characters living in the apartment on the rue du
Choiseul whose lives are all socially, sexually, financially and chaotically intertwined. In
fact, in a February 23, 1881, article in Le Figaro on adultery and marriage, Zola offers a
rather imprecise definition of the subject matter of Pot-Bouille, the bourgeoisie: Par ce
mot bourgeoisie, jentends surtout cette classe vague et si nombreuse, qui va du peuple
aux intelligents et aux riches de ce monde. Ce sont les employs, les petits commerants,
les petits rentiers, tous ceux qui sagitent dans des situations mdiocres et qui se battent
furieusement pour la maigre satisfaction de leurs apptits (Carnets, 120). By labeling

10

Nelson has called these instances with servants the dramatic counterpoint,
occasionally appearing in order to exchange the latest tit-bits concerning the changing
state of sexual relations in the house (Reading, 62).
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this subject as vague and numerous, as a group containing all types of people and
professions, united only by their desires, Zola sets up the bourgeoisie as a category that is
too unwieldy to be contained within one novel or even to be mastered by his naturalist
methods even before he publishes Pot-Bouille. How, in other words, does one observe
and document such a vague and numerous class?
This representational challenge is further complicated by the fact that Zola sought
in this novel to expose the hypocritical morals of the bourgeois class, who held
themselves above the lower classes he had treated in his previous novel LAssommoir.
Nelson cites the authors intended goals in Pot-Bouille, to show la bourgeoisie nu,
aprs avoir montr le peuple, et la montrer plus abominable, elle qui se dit lordre et
lhonntet (Study, 129). If the emphasis of the novel is then to reveal the discrepancy
between what the bourgeoisie made itself out to be and what it actually was, the authors
naturalist colleague Paul Alexis further underscores these intentions when he wrote,
explaining the title of the novel, [a]ux bourgeois qui disent: nous sommes lhonneur, la
morale, la famille, [Zola] voulait rpondre: ce nest pas vrai, vous tes le mensonge de
tout cela (quoted in Nelson, 129). Because the subject of the novel, the bourgeois class,
was, in effect, the contrary of what it purported to be, Zola sets up his main task of
observing these individuals as a problematic one. In other words, in order to document
the bourgeois milieu, the naturalist writer is faced with the task of observing these
individuals; yet if these subjects are the contrary of what they say they are, then any
direct observations will be false. The novel attempts to stage these narrative problems by
showing the interior of these bourgeois households and thereby exposing the
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dishonorable activities that transpire behind closed doors, while nonetheless

incorporating the problem of bourgeois observation into the novel and showing the
difficulty of arriving at specific bourgeois types.
5.4 Misleading Observations
Several critics have commented on the disparity between the exterior of the
apartment building on the rue du Choiseul and its inhabitants on the inside, and so I will
touch on the topic only briefly here. Nelson has pointed out, for example, that the initial
description of the building as told by the architect Campardon as he guides the newly
arrived Octave through the building sets up a juxtaposition that runs throughout the
novel. He remarks, the ornateness of the main entrance implies falseness and deceptive
appearances (131). Marcus, too, has written that Pot-Bouille portrays architectural
faades as falsifying by underscoring the disjunction between the buildings imposing
faade and the unseemly actions that occur behind it (185), calling attention to be the
descriptions of the buildings dcor as honest and the narrators emphasis on the faux
luxe which permeates throughout the various apartments.11 Also deceptive are
Campardons initial descriptions of the residents of the house, and his insistence that it
is inhabited only by tenants of unimpeachable virtue: Tous bourgeois et dune moralit

11

Philip Solomon evokes even more specific architectural elements of the building and
their effect on the readers early understanding of the apartment house and its inhabitants:
The trompe loeil aspects of the building arouse the readers expectation that those
adventures will be merged with the revelation of the deceptive nature of appearances.
We discover that the marble lining the walls of the main stairway is faux and the
stairways balustrade imitait le vieil argent. Lining one of the walls of the courtyard are
fausses fentres peintes, aux persiennes ternellement closes (256).
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(Nelson, 131). Indeed, both these words and Campardons warnings that should Octave
bring a woman back to the building a ferait une revolution (Zola, 8) ring false when
the reader discovers thirteen pages later that the architect himself is carrying on a
relationship with his wifes cousin, Gaspardine, who will ultimately move into the
Campardon apartment where the two will continue their affair. This introduction to the
hypocrisies of the buildings inhabitants is only one of many examples of disparities
between exterior appearance and interior existence to be found throughout the novel.
According to Nicholas White, the well-worn theme of bourgeois hypocrisy is
reconfigured in this space between front and back, or in other terms between the irony of
the romanticized architecture and the metaphor of ordures (52). Zola, in other words,
writes this inconsistency between what the bourgeois says he is and what he is in
actuality, into the physical space of the building, thus exposing the difficult task of the
narrator/observer.
Many characters in Pot-Bouille struggle financially inwardly and take great pains
to keep their fiscal woes secret. Some of these pecuniary difficulties, namely those of the
Josserand family, which we will discuss shortly, are observed by the narrator from the
onset of the novel, while others come as a surprise. For example, Vabre, the landlord,
who was characterized as a wealthy man, obsessed with statistics and stingy with his
money (even raising his own familys rent), is revealed upon his death to have been a
gambler and in financial ruin: il ny avait pas un sou des six ou sept cent mille francs
esprs, ni argent , ni titres, ni actions [] des lettres dagents de change apprirent aux
hritiers, blmes de colre, le vice secret du bonhomme, une passion effrne du jeu []
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quil cachait sous linnocent manie de son grand travail de statistique (Zola, 220-221).
Not only does he turn out to have been penniless, but because Vabres masquerade as a
financially secure man was such an integral part of his character, all of the buildings
residents who coveted his wealth are thrown into a state of turmoil by the revelation of
this deception. According to Gran Blix, the novel unambiguously unmasks him as a
supreme con artist, enthroned within a fictitious fortune [having] secured the reverence of
all the tenants, whose eyes are fixed on his sizable posthumous fortune (93). Indeed,
even the safe box which Vabres family believed to contain their inheritance is full
instead of broken odds and ends, once again bringing to light the conflict between interior
and exterior at the heart of this narrative.12
Vabres deceptive approach to finances, as the proprietor of the immeuble, can be
read as emblematic of the falseness of the building in general, yet it is the Josserand
familys monetary troubles and secrets, presented to the reader at their introduction,
which play the biggest role in this novel. M. Josserand, a clerk whose decent salary is
still not enough to support the grandiose desires of his wife and two daughters, is forced

12

Blix points to an even deeper level of fraud in Vabres real estate dealings, namely the
deceptive nature of Second Empire property speculation. The seemingly solid
apartment building of Pot-Bouille consists, when examined closely, of a very dubious
capital, offering an image of usurped wealth not unlike Pierre Rougons inaugural
fortune. [] Just like the real estate speculator in La Cure, Aristide Saccard, M. Vabre
therefore also owes his fortune to the great modern transformations of the city, to the
newly created arteries, and to the dubious expropriations of the imperial regime. The
building was by his own admission une speculation superbe (92). The untrustworthy
real estate market of the Second Empire coupled with the false capital tied to the property
itself reinforce the inherent deception at the heart of both the landlord and the bourgeois
building.
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to stay up in the evenings doing paperwork for a newspaper editor in secret: Comme ses
appointements de caissier ne suffisaient point, il passait ses nuits entires ce travail
ingrat, se cachant, pris de honte lide quon pouvait dcouvrir leur gne (Zola, 25).
The father is unable to keep up payments on his wifes efforts to sustain a bourgeois
lifestyle and to marry off their daughters, yet his greatest fear is that their true social and
financial status will be disclosed. Mme Josserand is less fearful of being discovered and
not only believes firmly in financial deceptiveness, but also teaches it as a philosophy to
her daughters. Her maxim moi, lorsque jai eu vingt sous, jai toujours dit que jen
avais quarante (35) is repeated on four occasions throughout the narrative both by her
and her daughter Berthe, underscoring the inherent falseness in the image of financial
success she and her family project. The pattern of this refrain spoken first by Mme
Josserand to her husband, next by Berthe to Auguste, then by Berthe to Octave and once
again by Mme Josserand to her husband before his death shows both the cyclical nature
of this financial philosophy (a mother passing down wisdom to her daughter) and the
static nature of these characters (Mme Josserands philosophy does not evolve throughout
the novel, regardless of events which transpire). The deception reaches its apogee when,
after Berthe secures Auguste Vabre, the landlords son, as her husband, the family sets up
a spurious dowry arrangement whereby a wealthy alcoholic uncle, Bachelard, will
guarantee the payments in installments, installments which he never intends to pay.
Because Augustes own wealth is revealed to be non-existent after the death of his father,
the narrator exposes the disparity between the projected and the actual bourgeois

215

characters which once again makes it nearly impossible to pin down a precise bourgeois
type, at least from a financial perspective.
One of the ways in which the Josserand family misleadingly projects their wealth
is through Berthes and Hortenses wardrobe. Before even entering into a deceptive
dowry contract with Auguste, Mme Josserand encourages her daughters to dress above
their means in order to dupe and seduce men with their lavish garments. According to
Heidi Brevick-Zender, the Josserand sisters gowns attract and seduce men with their
soft fabrics, expansive crinolines and lace ornamentation, signifying their status as
middle-class women on the market for husbands. [] Yet the luxuriousness of the
Josserandsgarments is deceitful, their family is not as wealthy as they wish to appear.
[] Indeed, the girls and their mother spend their days re-sewing last seasons dresses,
hoping to hide their financial struggles behind an outward show of false prosperity
(206).13 Chantal-Sophie Castro, also writing about the role of clothing in Zolas novels,
would agree, writing les toilettes des filles Josserand savrent un moyen de cacher une
misre qui empcherait de conclure tout mariage (18). The familys (and especially
Mme Josserands) financial philosophy is therefore demonstrated outwardly through the
clothing that their daughters wear and the fathers secret night-time paperwork is

13

Brevik-Zender points to this particularly exemplary quote from the novel to illustrate
the sartorial deceptiveness of the Josserand: Mme Josserand portrait sa robe feu de la
veille; seulement, afin de dpister les gens, elle avait pass la journe coudre des
manches au corsage, et se faire une plerine de dentelle, pour cacher ses paules; tandis
que, prs delle, ses filles, en camisole sale, tiraient furieusement laiguille, retapant avec
de nouvelles garnitures leurs unique toilettes, quelles changeaient ainsi morceau
morceau depuis lautre hiver (46).
216

mirrored in the womens day-time mending: both attempts at hiding their true social and
financial status. In fact, for Brevick-Zender, the economic philosophy to which the
Josserands ascribe is one that promotes the illusion of affluence, because the appearance
of wealth is the greatest means by which to eventually achieve it (208). Clothing
provides this illusion of affluence and underneath the clothes are the lower-classed
bodies afraid of being unveiled. To the observer, then, the clothed bodies of the
Josserand women deceptively place them into a class higher than that to which they
belong, complicating the possibility of a true external reading of this particular bourgeois
type.
Alhough, as we have seen, Zolas narrator dedicates himself to portraying the
duplicitous nature of his bourgeois characters, and as such the difficulty of representing a
bourgeois type, he is nonetheless at pains to show that he is capable of seeing and
observing certain aspects of the characters lives that they themselves do not see. The act
of unmasking the characters as hypocritical, by juxtaposing their outward and inward
behavior, is not, it seems, enough for the narrator, and he revels in scenes in which the
characters themselves are unable to witness or to realize the deceitfulness present in their
own lives. The same evening that Berthe and Octave commence their affair, for example,
they are both present at a dinner with her husband Auguste and the Josserand family. Not
only does Octave play footsies with his mistress under the table, but M. Josserand,
heartbroken that his daughter might have marital problems due to her excessive spending,
slips Berthe money under the table. Alors, Zola writes of Berthe, entre son pre qui
lui poussait le genou, et son amant, qui frottait doucement sa bottine, elle se sentit pleine
217

daise (247). Only Berthe is aware that both her father and her lover are communicating
with her secretly, while the rest of the family, and in particular Auguste, carry on
obliviously. Similarly, after a dinner hosted by the Campardons at which they tout the
innocence and moral education of their daughter Angle (at the same time, of course, that
Campardon has installed his mistress in his own home), the narrator reveals to the reader
that Angle is far less naive than her parents suspect. Toutes deux [Angle et la bonne
Lisa] se vengeaient de la soumission hypocrite de la journe, et il y avait, chez Lisa, une
jouissance basse, dans cette corruption dAngle, dont elle satisfaisait les curiosits de
fille maladive, trouble par la crise de ses quinze ans (Zola, 277). Lisa, we learn,
indulges the young Angle by talking explicitly about and mocking her parents, in
particular, her fathers romantic escapades, effectively undoing the bourgeois education
provided by the Campardons directly under their noses. Scenes such as these are
sprinkled throughout the novel, underscoring the importance the author places on the allobservant eye of the naturalist narrator he alone is able to see and expose the inner
workings of this insincere bourgeois domicile.
In additional, the overarching structure of the novel seems to suggest, at first
glance, the achievements of this comprehensive study of observing and exposing the
bourgeoisie. The work begins with Campardons guided tour of the building inhabited by
tenants who are tous bourgeois et dune moralit (Zola, 8) and ends with Adles
excessively graphic birth scene, juxtaposed cleverly with Duveyriers public railing
against unwed mothers and general sin in Paris (he has undoubtedly fathered her child,
we should add). The novels final words, spoken by a servant, Julie, serve to condemn all
218

bourgeois households, and not just that of the rue de Choiseul, as havens of hypocrisy:
Mon Dieu! mademoiselle, celle-ci ou celle-l, toutes les baraques se ressemblent.
Aujourdhui, qui a fait lune a fait lautre. Cest cochon et compagnie (386). In this
sense, Zolas narrator has succeeded in denouncing not only the bourgeois characters in
this building, progressively uncovering each layer of hypocrisy, but in exposing the entire
Second Empire bourgeoisie. He has achieved his goal, which he set forth at the
beginning of the project, of showing la bourgeoisie nu (Nelson, 139). Zola thus
thematizes both the difficulty of narrating the bourgeois type and the success of the
naturalist method that he employs to do so.14

14

Zola does narrate bourgeois typologies in an extra-novelistic forum. Nicholas White

has shed light on a series of three articles Zola wrote for Le Figaro before Pot-Bouille
was published on the topic of marriage, adultery and, in particular, adulterous women.
The first, Le divorce et la littrature, published interestingly on Valentines Day 1881
was, according to White a satirical piece [] in which Zola describes the crisis in
subject matter that writers would undergo if those reformers promulgating a fresh divorce
law were successful (27). The second, LAdultre dans la bourgeoisie, which we have
already studied, was published two weeks later and outlines the subject matter of PotBouille as it treats adulterous behavior among the middle class and compares it to lowerclass prostitution. In the third, published on April 18th and entitled Femmes honntes,
as White explains, Zola describes alternative scenarios to the cases of the adulterous
women mentioned in the previous articles, who have their literary counterparts in PotBouille in Valrie, Berthe and Marie, the first woman Octave seduces. These women are
not attracted to consumption, but are rather hardworking, moral and sensible women;
they are able, because of their virtues, to stave off adulterous desires and to sustain
positive heterosocial partnerships (both commercial and marital). White suggests that
because of these publications which preceded the appearance of the novel, [t]hese
female types [] can be mapped onto characters in the novel. As such Zolas moral and
social typology of women is culturally sanctioned in the press before publication of the
novel (30).
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5. 5 On ne connut jamais les dtails

Despite these instances of successful study and description, Zolas narrator
nevertheless takes on the task of showing the near impossibility of omniscient
observation throughout Pot-Bouille and the challenges of the naturalist project more
generally. Although the narrator is able to expose many of his characters effectively, by
juxtaposing their public and private behaviors, by focusing on the deception inherent in
their nature, and by depicting scenes in which he is the only one able to observe
duplicitous behavior, he is himself nonetheless incapable of observing all of the
phenomena that occur at the rue de Choiseuil and, in fact, incorporates these
methodological difficulties into his narrative. As if to inscribe fully the difficulty of
observation into this novel, Zolas narrator shows us numerous instances of
imperceptibility or rather events that cannot be documented or observed. The reader is
given summaries of or hints at crucial conversations and interactions that take place
between characters, yet is not made privy to the details of these incidents.
The initial failure of observation occurs at the Josserands first soire during
which Octave and a non-resident Trublot become close friends. As they exchange
thoughts and gossip about the others present, the topic of Mme Campardons illness
arises as they witness her husband consulting the doctor Juillerat:
A propos, puisque vous savez les choses, demanda [Octave] Trublot, dites-moi
quelle est la maladie de Mme Campardon. [] Mais, mon cher, rpondit le jeune
homme, elle a Et il se pencha loreille dOctave. Pendant quil coutait, la figure
de ce dernier sourit dabord, puis sallongea, eut un air de stupfaction profonde. Pas
possible! dit-il. Alors, Trublot jura sa parole dhonneur. [] Du reste, reprit-il, la
suite des couches, il arrive parfois que Et il se remit parler bas. (53)
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It is easily decipherable from their hushed conversation that Mme Campardon is suffering
from a sexual illness an editors note at the bottom of the page in the Livre de Poche
edition of the novel explains as much, saying [o]n devine que la maladie de Mme
Campardon lui interdit tout rapport sexuel (81). Therefore, the secret tone of the young
mens conversation is understandable, given both the authors publishing concerns as
well as his desires to depict an accurate conversation these bourgeois characters would
surely have addressed this matter only in the most cautious of ways. Yet the fact that the
reader is prevented from hearing the conversation between the two also underscores the
limits of the novel as a faithful documenting of its subject matter. In other words, by
consciously restricting the readers access to key information about a character even if
the reader is able to infer some of the information herself the narrator explicitly calls
attention to the fact that he is not able to observe and report on each and every detail of
his bourgeois subject. The omniscient third-person narrator, in other words, is not fully
omniscient.
This scene, which deprives the reader of information, is hardly exceptional for
this tenth novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle. In the following chapter, as Octave dines
at the Campardon residence, the narrator recounts a conversation about the marriage
troubles of Valrie and Thophile Vabre, the landlords other son, initially a coded
conversation to avoid corrupting the Campardons innocent daughter Angle:
Au dessert, Octave, plac entre larchitecte et sa femme, en apprit plus quil nen
demandait. Ils oubliaient Angle, ils parlaient demi-mot, avec des coups dil
soulignant les doubles sens des phrases; et quand lexpression leur manquait, ils se
penchaient lun aprs lautre, ils achevaient crment la confidence loreille. En
somme, ce Thophile tait un crtin et un impuissant, qui mritait dtre ce que sa
221

femme le faisait. Quant Valrie, elle ne valait pas grand-chose, elle se serait tout
aussi mal conduite, mme si son mari lavait contente, tellement la nature lemportait.
(61)
Once again the narrator supplies the background for the conversation as well as the gist
of what was said, but the reader is prohibited from fully witnessing the details of the
discussion. Instead of documenting the expressions and double entendres, we are given
only a summary of what was said. This narrative tactic of paraphrasing is not anomalous
in literature, but given the previous example when the narrator hid certain parts of
discussions, it becomes clear that this is a pattern in Pot-Bouille.15 The narrator is again
staging the limits of omniscience.
In some cases, the narrator is even more explicit about his inability to observe
conversations and scenes that occur among characters. After the death of the buildings
landlord, his family is shaken to the core by the discovery that their supposedly wealthy
patriarch squandered away their inheritance and mortgaged their apartment building
multiple times over. The reader does witness segments of the familys fights and their

15

This scene is also in direct opposition to a later scene in the novel during which
Octave, once again dining at the Campardon family apartment, participates in a coded
discussion about the neighbors private lives in front of the innocent Angle. This time,
however, the narrator makes explicit the codes used to hide the potentially troubling
information. Campardon scria A propos, mon cher, vous savez que Duveyrier a
retrouv Il allait nommer Clarisse. Mais il se rappela la prsence dAnglle, et il
ajouta, en jetant un regard oblique vers sa fille: Il a retrouv sa parente, vous savez. Et,
par des pincements de lvres, des clignements dyeux, il se fit enfin comprendre
dOctave, qui ne saisissait pas du tout (275). This time, no information is withheld from
the reader. The openness of the conversational tactics also functions to expose Angle,
who clearly understands everything, thanks to nightly lessons from the maid, and the
naivet of her parents who believe that her moral education is sound.
222

desperate struggle to find his money stashed away throughout the apartment, but once the
final blow is delivered the building only sells for 149,000 francs the reader ceases to
be able to witness the familial interactions. As the narrator reports:
[o]n ne connut jamais les dtails de la terrible scne qui se passa, le soir mme, chez
les Duveyrier. Les murs solennels de la maison en touffrent les clats. [] Mais si
lon ignora toujours comment la famille en arriva sallonger des calottes, ainsi que le
bruit en courait, on entendit les dernires paroles changes sur le seuil, des paroles qui
sonnrent fcheusement, dans la svrit bourgeoise de lescalier. (222)
The walls of the apartment seal off the readers access to this familial dispute and the
narrtors own limited boundaries are highlighted by the use of the personal pronoun on,
as well as his use of verbs like ne jamais connatre, ignorer, touffer.

It was

never to be known by the public what transpired among the family members, but the
narrator is also in the dark. The words exchanged on the stairs are the observers only
entry point into documenting this family drama.
One of the most striking examples of the narrators inability to access all the
characters actions comes at a climactic moment in the novel: when Berthe and Octave
are surprised by her husband Auguste in Octaves room. Berthe flees the scene and is
subsequently locked out of her own apartment, her lovers apartment and her parents
apartment, and forced to wander the stairs hoping to avoid her enraged husband. The
narrator focuses on her plight, but does not reveal to the readers the scene that transpires
between the spurned husband and the lover:
Pendant leur courte lutte, Berthe stait enfuie en chemise par la porte reste grande
ouverte; elle voyait au poing sanglant de son mari, luire un couteau de cuisine, et elle
avait le froid de ce couteau entre les paules. Comme elle galopait dans le noir du
corridor, elle crut entendre un bruit de gifles, sans pouvoir comprendre qui les avait
223

donnes ni qui les avait reues. Des voix, quelle ne reconnaissait mme pas, disaient:
A vos ordres. Quand il vous plaira. Cest bien, vous aurez de mes nouvelles. (286)
Berthe then flees, and neither she nor the reader is able to witness this crucial scene. Her
last observation is the kitchen knife in Augustes hand, and so she forced to imagine
and not see what has taken place between the two men. The narrator underscores her
confusion and inability to comprehend the event by highlighting the blackness in the
hallway, using the expression crut entendre rather than the more certain entendit.
Berthe thinks she hears the men come to blows, but is not completely sure were she
fully able to rely on her hearing to tell her that blows had been exchanged, she would still
have been unable to see who had attacked whom. And even when Berthe is able
definitively to discern male voices, the voices of both her husband and lover, she is
incapable of recognizing them. Because the event is told through the lens of Berthes
perspective, she, the reader and the narrator, are all left grasping for clues and forced to
put together the only known facts.16 In part this is a problem of interiorization, as Sharon
Marcus would argue, for once the narrator shifts the focus away from the interior of
Augustes apartment, an all-encompassing view of the events transpiring within becomes
impossible. Nonetheless, these scenes in which the characters, the readers and the

16

Later, after Augustes family dissuades him from dueling against Octave and the matter
is resolved, and after Berthe seeks refuge at her parents apartment, she finally learns the
details of the events from the familys servant Adle. We readers have now witnessed
some of these events in the preceding chapter, which describes Augustes attempts to
secure witnesses for the duel. Adles descriptions are nonetheless quickly passed over
by the narrator [Berthe] interrogea Adle, qui, longuement, conta la journe entire, le
duel manqu, ce quavait dit M. Auguste, ce quavaient fait els Duveyrier et les Vabre
(319) underscoring once again the difficulty this character, and the readers, have had
accessing the specifics of these events.
224

narrator are prevented from seeing occurrences illustrate the naturalist narrator
thematizing the impossibility of total observation as a literary method.
The dnouement of the intrigue between Auguste and Berthe takes place after the
death of M. Josserand, and once more the narrator is quick to hide the details of their
reconciliation from the reader. After the funeral, a pitiful-looking Berthe and her sister
and mother appear on Augustes doorstep. Despite his previous plans to turn them away
(they had been living separately since he found her with Octave), Auguste quickly
concedes to welcome Berthe back into his home. The only thing that momentarily gives
Berthe pause before entering the apartment is the sight of the servant Rachel, whom she
believes betrayed her:
Mais, attire par le bruit, Rachel venait de paratre dans lantichambre; et, devant
lexaspration muette qui plissait le visage de cette fille, Berthe eut une courte
hsitation. Puis, svrement, elle entra, elle disparut avec le noir de son deuil, dans
lombre de lappartement. Auguste la suivait, la porte se referma sur eux. (354)
The reader will witness Auguste and Berthe in the last chapter, during a soire held by
Mme Duveyrier at which Octave is present, yet no information about the couples
reunion is divulged. By focusing on the blackness of her mourning clothing and the
shadows of the apartment, the narrator builds on the spectators and the readers inability
to observe this crucial interaction. It is as if, even if the apartment door had remained
open for all to see in, the somberness of the space would have blocked out any
observation. The possibility of viewing this scene disappears for all as Berthe herself
disappears into the apartment; the narrator highlights for a final time the impossible task

225

of documenting everything about these bourgeois characters and of the naturalist project
more generally.
5.3 Notes on Pot-Bouille
As we have seen, Brunetires instinct to question Zolas observational
methodology in Pot-Bouille is correct. The critic picks up on Zolas narrative experiment
(both to employ and expose the naturalist approach), yet he is unable to articulate fully
what it is that Zola is doing. There is a small grain of truth, however, to Brunetires
statement that M. Zola nobserve plus, for the amount of research performed by Zola
before writing Pot-Bouille is remarkably less detailed and sustained than for any other
novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. A glance at his Carnets denqutes demonstrates
that unlike the voluminous maps, lists, descriptions and sketches compiled to prepare
novels from La Cure, Le Ventre de Paris, La Bte humaine and Germinal, the authors
notes on Pot-Bouille are noticeably scant. Indeed, the notes include only a single page of
details on [l]a maison. La rue et le quartier, and three pages on the church, Saint-Roch,
featured in the novel. In addition, Zola sketches out [u]n plan dappartement and a
diagram of ltage des bonnes. This is conspicuously less documentation than for his
other novels. On the other hand, the Carnets include thirteen pages of descriptions of
anecdotes recounted to him by his fellow naturalist Henry Card about the social,
financial and sexual scandals of his acquaintances. Editor Henri Mittrand has
commented on this anomalous collection of observations: dans le dossier de Pot-Bouille,
on trouve, dune part, fort peu denqutes personnelles sur le motif [] et dautre part,
quantit danecdotes ou de schmas danecdotes provenant des mdisances des compres
226

de Mdan (120). As opposed to Brunetire, Mittrand attributes this noticeable lack of

documentation to the choice of subject matter. Ce nest pas un milieu aussi nettement
dfini, he writes, que celui des mineurs ou des calicots, ou mme des paysans. Par l
mme il tait difficile Zola de circonscrire un espace social et topographique denqute
(Carnets, 120).
The lack of documentation is certainly not proof of Zolas incapacity to perform
the task of the naturalist writer. It is entirely possible that the author was so familiar with
this milieu that he chose to rely on anecdotal evidence and his own personal experience,
rather than to carry out his usual meticulous studies. Yet this lack of documentation is
nonetheless important to consider in the context of the authors narrative experimentation
in the novel. This study of un milieu [pas] aussi nettement dfini (120), in fact, further
enables him to stage the problems of omniscient narration. By tackling the subject matter
of the vague bourgeoisie and their interior spaces, Zola picks the ideal topic for
exposing the difficulties of his own naturalist project. His following novel, Au Bonheur
des Dames, appears to return to a more traditional positivist approach, at least in its
depiction of the employees of the department store. Once again, as we shall see shortly,
in his depiction of the bourgeois clientele of the department store, Zola both appropriates
and exposes the limitations of the positivist method and demonstrates that the bourgeois
class, at least as he understands it, is impossible to describe as a discrete class.

227

6. Consumer Reportage: Narration and (Impossible) Omniscience in Au Bonheur

des Dames
6.1 Loeil toujours sur elle

During the last of three great sales to occur in Au Bonheur des Dames, a work
dedicated to the emerging phenomenon of the department store, the Bonheurs inspector,
Jouve, apprehends an aristocrat who has been quietly stealing from the store for a year.
After the countess, Mme de Boves, dispatches a salesman named Deloche to fetch her
more fabric, she furtively stashes pieces of luxurious Alenon lace into her coat. No
sooner does she pocket the material, however, than Jouve confronts her and calmly asks
her to follow him. She protests. Bourdoncle, the director of the Bonheurs surveillance
team arrives, sends for two salesgirls to search the countess and ultimately, despite her
outraged pronouncements, discovers that the countess is, in fact, guilty: Outre les
volants de point d'Alenon, douze mtres mille francs, cachs au fond d'une manche,
[les vendeuses] trouvrent, dans la gorge, aplatis et chauds, un mouchoir, un ventail, une
cravate, en tout pour quatorze mille francs de dentelles environ (793). Depuis un an,
the narrator explains, Mme de Boves volait ainsi, ravage dun besoin furieux,
irresistible (793). Throughout this scene and the entirety of the novel, Zolas narrator
places great emphasis on inspector Jouves suspicions and on the sharp observation of

228

this unlikely thief which eventually lead to her detention, underscoring his ability to
decode even the most elusive of clients.1
This final chapter of the novel, a chapter dedicated to both the ultimate great sale
and the climax of the love story between the stores director, Octave Mouret, and Denise
Baudu, is frequently punctuated with references to the quiet inspector Jouve. At the
beginning of the chapter, as the narrator describes in typical naturalist excess the
flamboyance of the Bonheurs white sale, he pauses to mention the women who have
entered the store to shop there and their attempts to navigate the suffocating chaos of the
space. Amid the womens conversation, however, the narrator signals the presence of the
inspector and his careful attention to Mme de Boves. Depuis qu'elle tait entre, he
writes, l'inspecteur Jouve, debout prs de la porte, ne la quittait pas des yeux. Lorsqu'elle
se retourna, leurs regards se rencontrrent. Puis, comme elle se remettait en marche, il lui
laissa quelque avance, et la suivit de loin, sans paratre s'occuper d'elle davantage (770).

Scholars like Naomi Schor have looked at the character of Mme de Boves as
embodying a pathology occasioned by the rise of modern commerce: kleptomania.
Schor writes, for example, cest la signification de la kleptomanie, nouvelle perversion
presque exclusivement fminine dont la monte accompagne le dveloppement des
grands magasins. Or, ce qui fascine les cliniciens et les juristes de lpoque, cest que
cette nouvelle perversion qui est lquivalent fminin du ftichisme masculin est non
seulement rserve aux femmes, mais surtout aux femmes bourgeoises. Cest
prcisment parce que la kleptomane ne vole pas par ncessit conomique quelle se
distingue des simples voleuses, que son vol relve de la clinique et non de la cour
dassises (Schor, Chteau, 184). Rita Felski, too, comments on the phenomenon of
kleptomania in late nineteenth-century France represented in Zolas novel, writing, that
the emergence of kleptomania, a disease that was codified as both feminine and
modern, was a striking instance of the sexual disorder that was seen to lie at the very
heart of consumer culture [] Contemporary doctors and psychologists sought to make
sense of this puzzling new phenomenon by linking femininity, hysteria, and the
dangerous freedoms of the department store (68-69).
229

Jouves keen eye allows Mme de Boves to know that he is watching, yet he knows to
keep his distance so as not to arouse her suspicions. After the group of shoppers
discusses the innovations at this great sale and their course of action for shopping, Mme
de Boves and her daughter Blanche head to the first floor but not without attracting the
careful stare of Jouve: Et elle monta, suivie de sa fille, pendant que linspecteur Jouve,
toujours sa suite, allait prendre un escalier voisin, pour ne pas attirer son attention
(771). Once again, Jouve maintains his distance yet continues to keep a careful watch on
this shopper. Finally, at the moment before she is apprehended, Mme de Boves finds
herself incapable yet again of escaping Jouves gaze. As she presses Deloche to show her
the most expensive pieces of Alenon lace, the narrator confides that dans un coin du
rayon linspecteur Jouve, qui navait pas lch Mme de Boves, malgr lapparente
flnerie de cette dernire, se tenait immobile au milieu des pousses, lattitude
indifferente, loeil toujours sur elle (790). Loeil toujours sur elle, indeed. After the
countess is apprehended, the narrator confirms both Jouves ostensible omniscience about
the Bonheurs clients and the inspectors omnipresent gaze, focused here on Mme de
Boves, writing Depuis longtemps, Jouve [] guettait celle-ci (792). The reader is thus
reminded of an earlier scene in the novel, during the first sale, when Jouve appears as
Mme de Boves gains a joie sensuelle from handling a piece of lace:
Linspecteur Jouve se promenait de son allure militaire, talant sa dcoration, gardant
ces marchandises prcieuses et fines, si faciles cacher au fond d'une manche. Quand il
passa derrire Mme De Boves, surpris de la voir les bras plongs dans un tel flot de
dentelles, il jeta un regard vif sur ses mains fivreuses (494). Since the beginning of the
230

novel, Jouve has perceptively observed this character. Jouve is thus heralded in this final
chapter as having all-encompassing knowledge of the store and its clients, as well as
being a master decoder of social types. Specifically, he has seen past Mme de Bovess
class status and her outward appearance to identify her as a shoplifter. Because the novel
ends shortly after this episode with Jouve, the inspector is solidified in the readers mind
as a master observer of this commercial space. The narrators persistent mention of
Jouves presence and intuition about this particular thief (not to mention about other
clients and employees throughout the novel) reflects on Zolas own project of studying
and deciphering the milieu of the Parisian department store. In this way, Jouve the
inspector, the keen, all-knowing observer of the department store, mirrors the naturalist
narrator himself.
And yet, despite the final, perfectly orchestrated ultimate arrest and the other
displays of his superior surveillance skills to be examined shortly, Jouve is not infallible.
Though he ends the final chapter with the arrest scene that epitomizes the inspectors
abilities, the narrator will ultimately and rather subtly reveal that Jouve is in fact
incapable of tracking all thieves and decoding all social types. He sometimes fails. In
what follows, we will explore not only Mouret and Jouves successful and unsuccessful
attempts at mastering the store, its employees and its clients, but the narrators attempts
as well. I will argue, first, that the inspectors role is to observe, understand, and police
various social types within the Bonheur and that this shows him to be a reflection of the
naturalist narrator of the novel. But because Jouve makes mistakes and is unable to
decipher certain characters, this suggests that the supposedly omniscient naturalist
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narrator is also incapable of rendering a milieu and its social types consistently and
faithfully. This theory is borne out, I suggest, by the narrators inability to depict the
distinct typologies of the shopping women he aspires to describe. Put more simply, my
argument is that the power of the inspector and the naturalist narrator are both called into
question by Jouves errors. These errors, in turn, question the accuracy and the efficacy
of the positivist method, so influential in early sociological approaches at the time of
Zolas writing and in the authors writing itself.
In her work on sight and French detective fiction, Andrea Goulet argues that the
role of the fictional detective is to illuminate the dark corners of crime, exposing webs
of murder and deceit to the light of rationality, morality, and law (112). Yet she points
out that, for all its apparent mastery, the eye of the detective is not omnipotent. The
work of the detective (and the narrative structure that engenders him) [] is gradual,
confused, and complex [] Truth in this genre [of detective fiction] appears not innately
or immediately, but at the end of a search, through an a posteriori reconstitution of the
facts (112). While this may no doubt be true in detective fiction, and I am convinced by
Goulets argument that it is, I do not believe this argument is applicable to Zolas Jouve.
More specifically, Jouve is not charged with using reasoning and clues to interpret and
resolve a crime. He, like the positivist, is to observe, to watch, and to report back on
what he sees, intervening when he suspects a crime is in progress.2 Later-century fiction

The late-nineteenth century definition of surveiller in the Dictionnaire de la langue

franaise of 1872 as Veiller particulirement et avec autorit sur quelque chose seems
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in which pure omnipotence is not assumed in the detective/inspector characters may in

fact be positioning itself against this more rigid positivist ideal. But in Zolas novel, I am
arguing, inspector Jouve and the narrator himself ostensibly boast omniscience, while at
the same time the narrator writes subversion of this omniscience into the text.
6.2 Mastering Au Bonheur des Dames
As opposed to his limited research and reliance on anecdotes for Pot-Bouille, Zola
returns to his traditional meticulous research patterns for the novels 1883 successor, Au
Bonheur des Dames. Henri Mitterand, editor of Zolas Carnets denqutes, points to the
large quantity of research material accumulated by the author, writing that the dossier
documentaire dAu Bonheur des Dames est exceptionnellement charg de matire (148).
And though it is problematic to rely entirely on these Carnets for proof of the authors
research (the Carnets itself is merely a compilation of documents chosen by an editor,
Mitterand), we can nevertheless see that Zola dedicated far more time to documenting the
particulars of the geography of the department store and the lives of its employees than
he did to those of the immeuble on the Rue de Choiseuil and its inhabitants. Kristin Ross
explains Zolas research for the novel in the following way:
In his customary fashion Zola researched the lives and habits of the inhabitants and
habitus of the department stores, writing three preparatory articles between 1878 and
1881 on the psychology and sociology of department store employees. Zola spent four
to five hours a day for a month at the Bon March and the Louvre before he began his
novel, compiling over 380 pages of notes on the demoiselles of the stores and their

particularly apt to describe Jouves business at the Bonheur.

(http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=surveiller)
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environs: their rooms, overhead conversations, love life, clothing, hours, and
salariesBut the hundreds of pages of notes and the early sketches, the
correspondence between the author and architect Jourdain, and such things as the
descriptions of floor layouts indicate that Zola was at least as interested, if not more so,
in the physical circumstances of the lives of his calicots, as the clerks were called, than
in those lives themselves. (ix)3
Zola also conducted scrupulous research into the architecture, the layout, the
organization, and the general machinery of the department store before writing his novel:
a comprehensive, immersive methodology very much in line with the naturalist project.
Yet his research here exceeded even his own impressive standards. Of the quantity of
pages dedicated to research on the department store, Rita Felski writes that [t]he
preliminary notebooks for Au Bonheur des dames were exhaustive; encompassing
hundreds of pages, they contained excerpts from shopping catalogs, sketches of
architectural features, and numerous other annotations on the mechanisms of retailing
(67). Composed of more than eighty pages of documentation, the carnet denqute,
according to Mittrand, perfectly embodies the naturalist methodology of study : [il] est
par sa composition et son abondance un des plus caractristiques de la mthode de travail
de Zola, et de lintrt quil porte aux sociologies professionnelles (149-50). If I have
allowed myself to linger on critics insistence upon Zolas enormous body of background

An online exposition organized by the Bibliothque Nationale Franaise dedicated to

Zolas novel elaborates further upon his work, claiming that he observed la disposition
des rayons, l'architecture, relve les plans tage par tage, visite les chambres des
vendeuses, amoncelle les notes. Zola interviewe vendeurs, vendeuses et personnel
d'encadrement, s'informe sur l'organisation gnrale, les techniques de vente, les
systmes d'intressement des employs. Nourri de ces observations, le roman s'loigne
toutefois du ralisme (http://expositions.bnf.fr/zola/bonheur/expo/salle1/index.htm).
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work for this novel, it is in order to establish both the critical doxa that the author was
truly able to master the milieu of the department store and to show contrast with the
comparatively scant amount of research on Pot-Bouille. One might conclude, in light of
this difference, that this return to a more stereotypical, even exaggerated, naturalist
methodology in the succeeding novel indicates that Zolas questioning of the positivist
approach in Pot-Bouille was merely an aberration among the other more meticulously
researched and documented works. It could indicate that Zola surges forward in his next
novel with renewed vigor for the naturalist research project. I want to argue, however,
that despite his spectacular attempts to depict the observable nature of the department
store, its employees and customers, Zola nevertheless hints once again at the difficulty of
capturing certain social types in his novel on new bourgeois commerce. He reveals, in
the process, the impossibility of a pure naturalist and omniscient narrative and the
weaknesses inherent in the system of positivist sociology.
Unlike the apartment building on the Rue de Choiseuil featured in Pot-Bouille, the
eponymous department store is, ostensibly, a fully transparent building on every level:
one that does not allow for scenes or characters to remain hidden, one which can be
constantly monitored and observed, one which becomes a sort of panopticon of modern
commerce. In Pot-Bouille the narrator underscored the interplay between interior and
exterior, denying his reader access to certain aspects of the lives of the bourgeois
characters occupying this urban space and highlighting the impossibility of complete
observation. In Pot-Bouilles successor, the tables appear, at least initially, to have been
turned. Not only is the store constructed with the newest architectural tools (glass, iron)
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that will make it as large and as transparent as possible this in contrast to the Vieil
Elbeuf, the epitome of the old system of commerce. The store and its employees are also
constantly supervised by members of Mourets team, regardless of where they go in the
building, and Mouret himself conducts daily inspections of the store to ensure he
maintains full mastery of the space and all its interworking parts.4 And, even though
there exist areas of the store arranged to confuse clients and coerce them into buying
items they did not initially intend to purchase, these seemingly unclear or confusing
elements of the store are also organized by Mouret: chaos is manufactured to manipulate
consumers. Mouret attempts to observe, police, and control the store scrupulously, this
attempt is embodied by the figure of Jouve, and together they mirror the naturalist
narrators own drive to see and to render everything transparent.
It has been well documented by critics that the Vieil Elbeuf the shop maintained
by the Baudu family for generations serves as a foil to Au Bonheur des Dames. While
Mourets store is the incarnation of modern commerce and newness, the Vieil Elbeuf, as
its name indicates, embodies all that is old, outmoded, and destined to fail. As Robert
Niess explains, Zola establishes in the first pages of the novel the elements of the
struggle for life that his book will contain, posing on one side of the street the dark,
gloomy, damp and discouraged fabric shop, Le Vieil Elbeuf, owned by Denises uncle,

Rachel Bowlby notes that this architectural practice was common during the late
nineteenth-century, writing that like the exhibition palaces, they utilized new inventions
in glass technology, making possible large expanses of transparent display windows.
Visibility inside was improved both by the increase in window area and by better forms
of artificial lighting, culminating in electricity which was available from the 1880s (2).
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and on the other, the second incarnation of the department store which will eventually
kill him as it will kill every other merchant around the lot (133). The differences
between the two stores are evident from the beginning of the novel, when Denise and her
two brothers arrive in Paris and are immediately confronted by both. Au Bonheur des
Dames radiates light and clarity: la haute porte, toute en glace, montait jusqu
lentresol, au milieu dune complication dornements, chargs de dorures [] les vitrines
senfonaient, longeaient la rue de la Michodire et la rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin []
avec les talages du rez-de-chausse et les glaces sans tain de lentresol, derrire
lesquelles on voyait toute la vie intrieure des comptoirs (390, my emphasis). The Vieil
Elbeuf is suffocatingly obscure : ce fut la boutique du rez-de-chausse, crase de
plafond, surmonte dun entresol trs bas, aux baies de prison, en demi-lune. Une
boiserie, de la couleur de lenseigne, dun vert bouteille que le temps avait nuanc docre
et de bitume, mnageait, droite et gauche, deux vitrines profondes, noires,
poussireuses, o lon distinguait vaguement des pices dtoffes entasses. La porte,
ouverte, semblait donner sur les tnbres humides dune cave (393-394, my emphasis).
The narrator describes the ability to discern the details of the Bonheur as well as the
difficulty one has making out the piles of cloth in the Elbeuf. Whereas the Bonheur
boasts high doors and walls, the Elbeuf is confined to the ground floor with a stunted
ceiling. The Bonheurs clear glass door and its extensive windows allow both light and
the gaze of passersby into the store; the Elbeufs two windows are dark and dusty,
blocking them both out. Put simply, one can see all in the Bonheur and almost nothing in
the Elbeuf.
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Such comparisons recur throughout the novel, becoming ever more exaggerated
as it progresses: as the Bonheur expands to physically dominate the neighborhood and
acquires more and more open space, the Elbeuf becomes more dark and cramped.5 They
become so explicit and have been so thoroughly examined by previous critics that further
exploration is unnecessary here. But the juxtaposition between the two stores is
nonetheless worthwhile pointing out briefly, especially when studying the department
store in relation to the apartment building in Pot-Bouille. The narrator, through his
comparison of the two stores, places great emphasis on the (increasing) transparency of
the Bonheur and, therefore, on the ability to capture it thoroughly in the novel. Next to
the Elbeuf, the Bonheur is a place of lucidity and becomes an exemplary object of
observation. As opposed to both the immeuble Mouret occupies in the previous novel
and the small business across from his store, the department store which he runs is a
model of open space and clarity able to be scrupulously observed by its owner,
passersby and readers, and able to be meticulously described by the narrator.6

The renovations of the Bonheur, which involve creating a new ossature en fer, served
to ameliorate the level of clarity in the store. Partout on avait gagn de lespace, laire et
la lumire entraient librement (612) bathed in la lumire blanche des vitrages (626).
At the same time, the narrator notes that [] mesure que le Bonheur des Dames
slargissait, il semblait que le Vieil Elbeuf diminut. La jeune fille [Denise] trouvait les
vitrines plus noires, plus crases sous lentresol bas, aux baies rondes de prison (588).
6
David Bell, in Models of Power, has argued that Mourets quest to build a new faade
throughout the novel also participates in this attempt to render clear all the space in the
store both inside and outside. He writes As Octaves undertaking gathers momentum,
his use of space encompasses a domain even larger than the store itself. The faade, with
its resulting connection to the projected thoroughfare, participates in a logic of space that
permeates the search for increasing profits throughout the novel (105). Mourets
manipulation of the store, from the surrounding boulevards and the entrance to the layout
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Mouret constructs an observable commercial space, but also, it seems, achieves

complete mastery of the store with his thorough daily rounds. In the second chapter,
dedicated to outlining the machinery of the Bonheur, the reader learns that Mouret
conducts painstaking inspections of the store: from the different counters to the basement,
from the mailroom to the heating units. As opposed to the first chapter of Pot-Bouille in
which Mouret is lead on a tour of the apartment building, the stores owner is now fully
in command of his own space: Tout devait lui passer sous les yeux, absolument tout; et
il briserait comme une paille quiconque rsisterait (560). The entire novel is in fact
peppered with references to Mourets inspection quotidienne des magasins (707),
including a five-page description of his tourne in the twelfth chapter of the text.
These daily walks in the Bonheur are the mechanism by which the storeowner
scrutinizes and thus controls his space, committing to memory all the stores details from
the ground up. But he also observes the entirety of the store from a totalizing viewpoint.
During the three grand sale scenes (chapters 4, 9 and 11) in particular, Mouret assumes a
birds eye vantage in the store to take in everything at once. Before the first sale of the
novel begins, il reparut en haut du grand escalier qui descendait au rez-de-chausse; et,
de l, il domina encore la maison entire (482). And after the first sale, [i]l tait revenu

of the products themselves betray, then, an insatiable attempt to organize and control this
commercial space. Historian Michael Miller suggests that the work of Haussmann
actually laid the ground for such manipulation of space in The Bon March, writing that
as they [Haussmann and Napoleon III] cut through the tortuous back alleys of the city,
laying down the long, wide boulevardsthey created the very conditions by which the
new stores could tap the vast Parisian market (36).
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 son poste favori, en haut de lescalier de lentresol, contre la rampe ; et, devant le
massacre dtoffes qui stalait sous lui, il avait un rire victorieux (500). Octave is, in
other words, mastering both the minute interworking parts of the store, as well as the
store in its totality. He sees it all. The narrators insistence on Mourets dual rituals of
observing his store (his daily rounds and these totalizing views), coupled with the open,
clear architectural space of the store contrast the Bonheur with the immeuble in PotBouille in the sharpest possible terms. The Mouret of Au Bonheur des Dames, then,
embodies the theoretical ambitions of a positivistic observational methodology. He is
successfully able to cover (and uncover) all of the ground of the store without any
difficulty and seemingly process and comprehend the details of this space while the
narrator in Pot-Bouille questions whether this type of methodology is in fact possible at
all.
6.3 Jouve: The Bonheurs Watchdog
Mourets observational powers extend beyond his own daily inspections of the
store, and, we might say, beyond his person. The director entrusts various members of his
staff with the task of monitoring both the customers and the other workers at the
Bonheur. Bourdoncle is the director of surveillance gnrale alongside the inspector
Jouve, who keeps tabs on the clientele and monitors employees to enforce the stores
strict policies upon their private lives. The inspector carries an air of great integrity for, as
we learn, he is an ancien capitaine retrait who wears his military decoration as une
enseigne de vieille probit (470). It is Jouves presence that permeates the store and the

240

text, giving the shoppers, the employees, and the readers the sense that the commercial
space they inhabit is permanently under surveillance.
Zolas narrator takes care to insist on Jouves keen detective work and to suggest
subtly the correspondence between the inspectors omniscience and Mourets own power.
As we have seen, during the first sale scene at the Bonheur, Mouret stands at the head of
the great stairway from which il domina encore la maison entire (482), taking in the
view of the shoppers, who, to his relief, have now arrived in droves to shop at his store.
The paragraph describing Mourets panoramic perch begins with the sentences [d]epuis
longtemps, Mouret ntait plus lentresol, debout prs de la rampe du hall.
Brusquement, il reparut en haut du grand escalier qui descendait au rez-de-chausse
(481-482). This establishes the directors dominance as well as his positioning vis--vis
the customers. The narrator goes on to describe the animated crowd, their actions and
noises; he concludes the paragraph, in a style typical of Zola, by depicting Mouret atop
the machine that is the Bonheur, and sensing its innerworkings beneath his feet: Il
sentait, ses pieds, la machine se mettre en branle, schauffer et revivre, depuis les
caisses o lor sonnait, depuis les tables o les garons de magasin se htaient
dempaqueter les marchandises, jusquaux profondeurs du sous-sol, au service du dpart,
qui semplissait de parquets descendus, et dont le grondement souterrain faisait vibrer la
maison (482). Here Mouret presides over the store, a properly functioning machine,
whose coffers ring out with the sound of money, whose employees perform their jobs
correctly, and whose rumblings are the sign of its proper functioning. The comparison
between the store and a machine can be found throughout the novel, as are evocations of
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Mourets dominance, as we have already noted, and this lengthy paragraph might not be
noteworthy for our purposes were it not for a throw-away line at the end: Au milieu de
la cohue, linspecteur Jouve se promenant gravement, guettant les voleuses (482). The
narrator, in other words, brings this paragraph on Mourets all-seeing perspective on the
store and its success during this first sale to a crescendo by depicting the director atop the
well-oiled machine. And yet it is Jouve who is singled out in the ultimate focal point of
the paragraph. In opposition to the highly perched Mouret, Jouve is, significantly, on the
lower level of the store, doing the groundwork in the middle of the inscrutable crowd (la
cohue), circulating among the shoppers, seeking out shoplifters.
The function of this concluding sentence is threefold. In the first place, by
shifting rapidly from the hyperbolic depiction of Mourets power over the store to
Jouves detective work, the narrator establishes a contrast between Mourets high and
Jouves low position and reminds us that Mouret does not act alone. Rather it is his work
coupled with that of his skilled surveillance team that allows the store to function so
smoothly, enabling him to achieve almost perfect omniscience over the space. Mouret
appears all-powerful from his birds eye perch, but without Jouve working at the ground
level, the narrator reminds us, his mastery would be impossible. Second, this rapid shift
between Mouret and Jouve recalls Jouves pervasiveness throughout the store. The
inspectors presence looms heavy in the Bonheur, panoptically policing the employees
even when he is not physically there. The abrupt reminder of his existence at the end of
this crucial paragraph mirrors the danger he represents to misguided employees and
thieving customers. Jouve is always there, always watching. Finally, this last sentence
242

offers a window into Jouves observational method. Like Mouret, who conducts daily
rounds of the store, Jouve paces gravement amid the crowd, waiting to spring on his
prey. The fact that the inspector guett[e] les voleuses implies a deft understanding of
the type of woman who steals Jouve is armed with the tools to observe and distinguish
possible shoplifters, and so he paces, ready to identify them. This seemingly unimportant
sentence thus establishes Jouves critical assistance in Mourets mastery of the Bonheur,
while reinforcing the fact of his ominous presence throughout the store and his success as
the key member of the stores surveillance team.7
Two chapters later, Jouve pops up suddenly as Denise and her fellow salesgirl
Pauline furtively discuss the formers money woes, effectively policing their
conversation and reaffirming his omnipresence. Soudain, we are told, la lingre
[Pauline] eut un geste de fuite: elle venait dapercevoir la cravate blanche dun
inspecteur, qui sortait des chles (539). Pauline goes on to explain her disgust with the
detective and warns Denise of potential problems Jouve might cause for her: cest le
pre Jouve [] Je ne sais ce quil a, ce vieux, rire, quand il nous voit ensemble
votre place, jaurais peur, car il est trop gentil pour vous. Un chien fini, mauvais comme
la gale, et qui croit encore parler ses troupiers (539). The reader is left with the
impression that this is not the only time Pauline has taken note of Jouves lurking and of
his particular interest in Denise. Jouves presence, we understand, weighs heavy on the

At the end of the novel, the narrator takes care to note that as the faade and the space
of the Bonheur have expanded, so too has the size of the surveillance team.
Aujourdhui, son personnel [celui de Mouret] aurait peupl une petite ville: il y avait
[] mille autres employs de toute espce, dont quarante inspecteurs (710).
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minds of the salesgirls. It is enough for Pauline to see the rustle of a white tie behind a
display to know Jouve is observing her. The narrator confirms that this white cravat did
indeed belong to Jouve, and that he is in fact engaged in his typical surveillance routine:
C'tait l'inspecteur Jouve. Il rdait ainsi volontiers, vers la fin des repas, du ct de ces
demoiselles. D'ailleurs, il avait la surveillance de leurs salles. Les yeux souriants, il
entrait, faisait le tour de la table; quelquefois mme, il causait, voulait savoir si elles
avaient djeun de bon apptit. Mais, comme il les inquitait et les ennuyait, toutes se
htaient de fuir (552-553). Both the narrator and Pauline call attention to Jouves
animalistic nature, employing terms like un chien fini, la gale, rder and guetter
to imply the inspectors predatory temperament, his almost innate instincts to watch and
police, and the impulse of the salesgirls to escape him (toutes se htaient de fuir).8
Mouret has employed the ideal inspector, and the narrator underscores once again in this
section that the detective is seemingly everywhere at once, watching the employees as
well as the clients, policing them even when he is not physically present. By establishing
an all-encompassing surveillance system with an almost literal watchdog at its helm,
Mouret, the narrator would have us believe, attains perfect mastery over the store.
During the second great sale, the narrator at last fully reveals Jouves method of
deciphering the types of shoppers who enter the Bonheur. As the clients become
overwhelmed by the stores displays, exactly according to Mourets plan, Jouve vint
leurs secours and points them in the correct direction. The narrator takes this

In less flattering terms, Jouve is also associated with animals when Pauline scoffs him
in a conversation with Denise, labeling him Ce vieux singe dinspecteur (511).
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opportunity to explain the inspectors habits during the sales: Il se tenait sous le
vestibule, grave, attentif, dvisageant chaque femme au passage. Charg spcialement de
la police intrieure, il flairait les voleuses et suivait surtout les femmes grosses, lorsque la
fivre de leurs yeux l'inquitait (620). The narrator once again evokes Jouves animal
instinct for detection with the term flairait as he describes the method by which the
inspector sniffs out thieves, waiting in anticipation to track and detain offenders. In
addition to his biological impulse, Jouves social sense is so attuned that merely by
observing these female clients, he is able to intuit the minutest indications of their desire
to steal from the Bonheur. In this section as in the others, Jouves natural social policing
talents highlight the seemingly perfect level of observational mastery achieved in the
Bonheur.
Additionally, in the Bonheurs system of surveillance, there is the relatively
unthreatening Mme Cabin who both cleans the shop girls attic accommodations and who
veill[e] la stricte observation du rglement (510). Though she is to ensure that the
young women return to their quarters by their curfews and refrain from comingling after
hours, Mme Cabin can be easily persuaded to look the other way: Rien ntait plus
facile, on donnait cinq francs Mme Cabin, toutes ces demoiselles en usaient (531).
Mme Cabin herself is clearly somewhat lax, yet the allusion of continual observation
imposed on the employees, especially female, in the Bonheur is part of the power
structure established by Mouret in order to have complete dominance over the store.
Because of this system of surveillance, and despite the large, open space of the
department store, the Bonheurs employees have difficulty finding privacy. It is easy, in
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fact, for them to spy on one another. When Denise attempts to meet secretly with her
brother Jean in the basement of the Bonheur, she chooses the most dark and clandestine
location possible droite et gauche, au fond des caveaux obscurs (556). Yet even
there, Denise knows she is liable to be caught, and, indeed, she is: Puis, les pas se
rapprochrent; et, en allongeant la tte, elle reconnut linspecteur Jouve qui venait de
sengager dans le corridor, de son air raide. Passait-il par hasard? quelque autre
surveillant, de planton la porte, lavait-il averti? (557). Jouve has once again sniffed
out the employees indiscretion and not only does her report her, but Denise is fired from
her position. Mourets system of surveillance works both implicitly (Denise is fearful
even before she knows she is being watched) and explicitly (Denise is caught by Jouve
and punished). Later in the novel after Denise returns to the Bonheur, she and Deloche
rendezvous in what the narrator describes as a coin perdu du vaste monde o sagitait le
peuple du Bonheur des Dames (716). Although their meeting is strictly platonic, Denise
is still concerned that she will be caught. As she and Deloche speak about their
childhood memories they are both from nearby towns in Normandy Denise cannot
help but sense that she is being watched: Malgr le profond silence, Denise se
retournait avec inquitude, ayant cru voir passer une ombre sur les murailles nues (717).
She has indeed been spied upon by Hutin, one of the Bonheurs top salesmen, who then
reports this secret encounter to Bourdoncle and Jouve, who in turn report Denise to
Mouret. Even in this supposed coin perdu, Mourets has succeeded in imposing a
network of observers so that every occurrence in the store could lui passer sous les
yeux (560). And although it is not Jouve himself who catches Denise, the fact that news
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of her encounter with Deloche reaches him almost instantly emphasizes the watchful eye
he keeps on the store, even when he is not physically present in the space of surveillance.
The system of surveillance put in place by Mouret (and actively managed by
Jouve) ostensibly transforms the Bonheur into a space with no hidden recesses one that
can be thoroughly observed, comprehended and controlled. In this sense, the department
store is similar to Jeremy Benthams panopticon, famously studied by Michel Foucault in
Surveiller et punir, for there appear to be no unobservable areas of the store, which is
entirely subject to the gaze. Jouves (and by extension Mourets) power lies in his
potential ability to be watching at all times or at least to have his subjects believe he is
watching at all times. In Benthams own words, the advantage of the panopticon is
the apparent omnipresence of the inspector [] combined with the extreme facility of
his real presence (Letter VI). So too does Jouves presence, or the mere thought of his
presence, impose order and (in most cases) elicit proper behavior from the employees; it
also (in most cases) regulates theft among the clients.9 Through his own daily
inspections, his frequent panoramic perusals of the store, and the delegation of his gaze to

Irene Gammel, too, has drawn the comparison between the Bonheur and the panopticon,
writing that Mourets Au Bonheur des Dames is based on the principle of Foucaults
Panopticon, bathing the merchandise in light through new architectural designs: Partout
on avait gagn de lespace, lair et la lumire entraient librement, le public circulait
laise (65). Though I agree with Gammel that the architectural layout of the store and
the light it lets in facilitates the owners ability to observe the space, I would argue that
the system of surveillance imposed by Mouret the threat the employees face that they
may be watched at all times by Jouve likens the store even more strongly to Benthams
panopticon.
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Jouves talents, Octave attains what would seem to be an omniscient position in the
department store.
6.4 Ordered Disorder
In spite of all this apparent clarity, there are elements of the department store that
prove inscrutable to the shoppers, but even these paradoxically reaffirm Mourets
comprehension of the store. Among his tactics for seducing women with his goods,
Mouret implements a controlled chaos within his store: he insists on noise, crowdedness,
and a general state of lively confusion. He packs the entrance with mounds of sales items
[pour faire] penser que les magasins craquaient de monde, lorsque souvent ils ntaient
qu demi pleins (613-614); he crowds the aisles with out-of-season items; he forces the
client traffic through otherwise unpopular departments; he dismantles and reorganizes
displays before each sale, in an attempt to throw the shopper off her course. As the
director explains to Bourdoncle:
Premirement, ce va-et-vient continuel de clients les disperse un peu partout, les
multiplie et leur fait perdre la tte; secondement, comme il faut quon les conduise
dun bout des magasins lautre, si elles dsirent par exemple la doublure aprs avoir
achet la robe ces voyages en tous sens triplent pour elles la grandeur de la maison;
troisimement, elles sont forces de traverse des rayons o elles nauraient pas mis les
pieds, des tentations les y accrochent au passage, et elle succombent. (615)
David Bell has described this process succinctly: Octave inaugurates the second sale by
destroying the logic of the store and rending space opaque once more (103). In other
words, although the layout of the store, like the buildings architecture, is initially
structured in a legible fashion, Mouret purposely demolishes this legibility for
commercial profit and thus broadens the logic of his comprehension of the space. This
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implies a deductive approach to his commercial tactics, because through his study of the
store and the clients behavior as they circulate through it, Mouret concludes that their
purchasing will be greater if he imposes a state of confusion upon them.
Mourets keen comprehension of the Bonheur and sales is exemplified by the
frequency with which the clients do indeed lose their course in the store and purchase
unnecessary items, fulfilling the prediction of the original premise. As soon as the
shoppers entered the store during the scene following the one in which Mouret explained
his plan (the second sale of the novel), they begin to comment on the state of chaos found
within, frequently likening it to a bazaar.10 To evoke only a few examples, the narrator
explains that Mme Marty, who has come to purchase a piece of lace but who is derailed
by the umbrella display, tch[e] de sorienter (619) she eventually impetuously
purchases an overpriced umbrella.11 Mme Desforges struggles to find her way through
the crowd of salespeople offering her garters and other such items elle voulut

10

The term bazar appears prominently in the novel to describe the store. At the beginning
of the second sale, for example, the narrator describes the store as ce colossal bazar
(611), and later that day Mme Desforges complains of the chaotic state of the store,
lamenting ces bazars o il fallait faire deux lieues pour mettre la main sur le moindre
article (636). Mme Marty exits the store after the same sale, terrified of the large bill she
has accumulated still reeling from le dtraquement de cette nvrose des grands bazars
(644). The repeated term highlights Mourets tactic of creating confusion throughout the
store and testifies to the success of his methods the women, thrown into a state of
frenzy by the dizzying arrangement within the store, purchase more than they need and,
at times, can afford. It is also worth mentioning that the narrator/Mouret refers to
department stores as bazars modernes in Pot-Bouille, anticipating the topic of the
following novel.
11
Bell further describes Mme Martys confusion and the power of the stores space:
Mme Marty, the archetypal victim created by Mourets scheme, unwittingly testifies to
its success first by spending too much and then by remarking : There is no order in this
store. One gets lost; one ends up doing stupid things (103).
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sorienter (628) and, though she does not succumb to any impulse purchases, this lady
is nonetheless overwhelmed by the chaotic scene surrounding her: the narrator describes
her yeux aveugls par le ple-mle clatant des couleurs (631).12 Because of Mourets
sales tactics, the clientele, as the narrator underscores, constantly have to reacquaint
themselves with their surroundings in order to find the department for which they are
searching. Despite the open architecture of the store, the Bonheur is a tremendously
difficult physical space for the customers to negotiate, and Mouret makes sure that
mastery of the store by its users remains unattainable. According to Rachel Bowlby, these
same methods were also employed by Aristide Boucicault, the owner of the Bon March,
the department store upon which the novel is based. Labeling this tactic organized
disorder, Bowlby writes that Boucicaut explicitly announces his aim to make his
female clientele lost, driven crazy, as in Zolas seduced, driven crazy (II, 76). He
intends them to be diverted into departments they had no intention of visiting to be
deprived of all planning capacity by the master plan which controls their confusion (75).
Both the fictional and historical department store directors wield their commercial power
by disorienting their clients, reinforcing their own mastery through the spacial illegibility
of the store imposed upon those who shop there. Ultimately, Octaves omniscience

12

Later in the novel, however, at the final sale, Mme Desforges becomes so taken by the
displays, which surprise her as she tries to make her way through the store, that she is
finally unable to resist making a purchase. Cette fois, Mme Desforges elle-mme,
malgr sa rancune qui lui avait fait jurer de ne rien acheter, succomba devant un ivoire
dune finesse charmante (789).
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mirrors that of the naturalist narrator: he is able to master the entire space, to
comprehend, represent, and manipulate it.
Yet, despite the fact that the narrator, like Mouret, is able to present, document
and control these sale scenes, which prove to be very disorienting for the clients, there are
moments during the sale which even he is incapable of encompassing the entire the store.
I want to claim that such moments point to flaws in the project of the omniscient
naturalist narrator. Take, for example, the culmination of the Bonheurs first sale, when
the narrators gaze seems unable to penetrate fully into the scene. He begins the passage
by describing how difficult movement has become in the store: Ce ntait plus chose
facile que de gagner lescalier (491). Specifically, Hutin and Henriette Desforges are
unable to move around in the silk department. Henriette is able to discern Mouret in his
usual birds eye perch on the stairs do il voyait la victoire (492), yet despite his
commanding viewpoint, Mourets gaze cannot pierce the crowd below: Mais il ne
distinguait mme pas [Henriette] dans la cohue (492). Mouret, although he is able to
sense his commercial triumph by observing the mass of shoppers, is incapable of
distinguishing individuals. Like the director, the narrator too becomes unable to embrace
the scene completely, switching from the perspective of Henriette and Mouret to an
impersonal third person. In order to relate the difficulty of fully observing the sale he
writes, Maintenant la trpidation intrieure touffait les bruits du dehors; on nentendait
plus ni le roulement des fiacres ni le battement des portires [] Et, sous la fine
poussire, tout arrivait se confondre, on ne reconnaissait pas la division des rayons []
On ne voyait mme plus les toilettes, les coiffures seules surnageaient (492, my
251

emphasis). Though the narrator has spent numerous pages recounting the details of the
preparation for the sale what is being sold, how it is arranged, how the sales team is
structured he reaches a point beyond which his gaze can no longer penetrate. The
switch from the perspective of individual characters to the impersonal on implicates the
narrator in the chaos experienced by the clients, rendering him in an important way as
disoriented as they are. Like Mouret, the narrators overarching view of the scene does
not enable him to see and describe the event entirely, and this key moment raises doubts
about the apparent narrative mastery promised by the naturalist project.
The director returns to his panoramic post at the conclusion of the sale and,
despite the post-sale massacre dtoffes, he is able to view clearly the space now
vacated by the crowd. He once again gains mastery over it: il regardait les caissiers
penchs sur leurs registres, additionnant les longues colonnes de chiffres (501). The
presence of the crowd is clearly a fundamental factor in Octaves (and the narrators)
ability to observe details of the scene. Yet there are other crowd scenes during which the
narrator does not succumb to the costumers feelings of confusion.13 Rather than simply
arguing that the crowd is what prevents the two spectators from fully embracing the
scene, without yet evoking late-nineteenth-century theories of the crowd (to which we

13

See, for example, the beginning of the second sales scene, when the narrator captures
the disoriented shoppers. Mais, ds la porte, ces dames taient perdues. Elles tournrent
gauche; et comme on avait dmnag la mercerie, elles tombrent au milieu des ruches,
puis au milieu des parures [] Alors elles revinrent devant la porte, o stablissait un
courant de sortie, tout un dfil interminable de femmes et denfants (620). In this case,
the narrator remains at the level of the individual shoppers and, by not employing the
impersonal on does not involve himself in their confusion.
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will return), I want to note now that this depiction of the crowded stores impenetrability
hints at the impossibility of a pure naturalist narrative, where the milieu might be
perfectly captured and rendered by the narrator. As in Pot-Bouille, Zola writes the
difficulty of his project into the novel itself.
6.5 Mistakes are Made
In addition to scenes which highlight the inability of the gaze to penetrate fully
the space of the store, the narrator also uses the ever-present Jouve as a tool for
thematizing the impossibility of omniscience, both in the stores surveillance system and
in the naturalist novel. This impossibility is revealed during the second great sale as
Mouret tours the space with his childhood friend, Paul Vallagnosc. During the tour, he
boasts of what the store and the machinery of modern commerce have to offer to the new
economy being created. Mouret pauses along the tour to point out the fine work of Jouve,
who, Mouret believes, has caught a thieving shopper in the act:
Il sinterrompit pour montrer linspecteur Jouve, qui prcisment filait une femme
enceinte, en bas, au comptoir des rubans. Cette femme, dont le ventre norme souffrait
beaucoup des pousses du public, tait accompagne dune amie, charge de la
dfendre sans doute contre les chocs trop rudes; et, chaque fois quelle sarrtait devant
un rayon, Jouve ne la quittait plus des yeux, tandis que lamie, prs delle, fouillait
son aise au fond des casiers. (632-633)
Jouve is performing his usual tracking of the women he suspects of malfeasance, yet he
has uncharacteristically identified the wrong perpetrator. Mouret, whether he has faith in
his inspector or wants to keep up appearances in front of his friend, assures Paul Oh! il
la pincera [] il connat toutes leurs inventions (633) confirming his trust in Jouves
intuitions. Unfortunately, for the store, Jouve and Mouret, this thief is never pince: when
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the inspector approaches the pregnant shopper, her friend has flown the scene. Tout dun
coup, il comprit: la femme enceinte ntait l que pour loccuper, cest lamie qui volait
(641). Jouves keen instincts are ultimately correct in deciphering the womens ploy, yet
his initial misreading of the pregnant shopper/thief type troubles his analysis, and an error
makes its way into the structure. Though this incident of theft is relatively minor in the
greater scheme of the store and the novel, its implications for comprehending the efficacy
of Jouve, the ability of the Bonheur to read its clients, and the possibility of a true
omniscient naturalist narrator, are crucial. This particular robbery apparently does no
serious damage to the store, since it is a minor flaw in Jouves habitual consistency in
putting thieves in their place. Nevertheless, a flaw is a flaw, minor though it might be,
and Jouves inability to decode the shoppers ploy carries serious implications: the
perfectly-oiled machine that is the department store canand doesbreak down.
Despite its larger implications, Jouves mistake is all but negligible in terms of the
Bonheurs profits and the functionality of its surveillance system. The scandal that erupts
at the end of the novel around Albert Lhomme, the son of cashier Lhomme and Mme
Aurlie, the head of confections is considerably more serious. Before the final great sale
of the novel, an unnamed inspector suspects Mignot the glove salesman of theft. When
the situation is investigated, a web of criminal activity is discovered, exposing great flaws
in the network of Mourets policing powers. When Mignot and the client caught stealing
gloves are pressed, Albert is named and the inspectors and Mouret learn of
toute une srie de vols extraordinaires: des marchandises enleves par des filles, qui
allaient les attacher sous leurs jupons, dans les cabinets luxueux, installs prs du
buffet, au milieu des plantes vertes; des achats quun vendeur ngligeait dappeler
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une caisse, lorsquil y conduisait une client, et dont il partageait le prix avec le caissier;
jusqu de faux rendus, des articles quon annonait comme rentrs dans la maison,
pour empocher largent rembours fictivement; sans compter le vol classique, des
parquets sortis le soir sous la redingote, rouls autour de la taille, parfois mme pendus
le long des cuisses. Depuis quatorze mois, grce Mignot et dautres vendeurs sans
doute quils refusrent de nommer, il se faisait ainsi, la caisse dAlbert, une cuisine
louche, tout un gchis impudent, pour des sommes dont on ne connut jamais le chiffre
exact. (713-714)
In one paragraph, the narrator dispels any notion of a functional surveillance system and
of any sort of mastery over this commercial space. Although the wayward employees are
dismissed and otherwise on touffa le scandale, (714), the radical extent of the
incapacity of Mouret, Jouve and the entire group of inspectors to master the space of the
store is stunningly revealed to the reader. The narrator prefaces this scene by explaining
that Mouret does not usually trouble himself with the petty thievery that regularly takes
place in the store: il prfrait ne pas se mler de ces sortes daventures, qui taient
frquentes; car, malgr le fonctionnement de machine bien rgle, un grand dsordre
rgnait dans certains rayons du Bonheur des Dames, et il ne se passait pas de semaine,
sans quon chasst un employ pour vol (712-713). This offhanded comment surprises
the reader, who, up to this point has heard only of the prowess of Jouve and the control
Mouret wields over the store: in sum, of the ability of the surveillance team to keep an
almost ever-present watch over the employees and clients. Explaining that la direction
aimait mieux faire le plus de silence possible autour de ces vols, (713), the narrator is
himself complicit in the administrators discretion regarding theft on the stores premises.
Mouret does not have full control over his store, Jouve is not an omnipotent inspector,
and the narrator himself admits that he (and Mouret) have remained silent until the
255

regular deception taking place in the store became explicit. Although the novel ends with
Jouves triumphant arrest of Mme de Boves, and although the other sections of the text
are permeated with scenes of Jouves omniscience and prowess, the short scene of
Jouves mistake, tucked in the center of Au Bonheur des Dames, and Lhommes criminal
scheme, suppressed by the administration, betrays gaping holes in the project of Mouret
and the narrator: their efforts to dominate entirely the space of the modern department
store appears to fail at crucial moments.
6.6 Les Clientes identifies
The space and inner workings of the department store are not the only elements
over which both the director and the narrator attempt to wield their dominance the
stores authority figures also strive to comprehend fully the distinct social types
associated with the store. In late 2002 and early 2003, the Bibliothque National de
France held an exposition entitled Au Bonheur des dames: autour dune oeuvre, since reexhibited on the BNF website, which studied both the historical and fictional social types
connect to the Bonheur. In a section of this exposition virtuelle entitled nouvelle
socit, the curator remarks that Zola rend compte des mutations sociologiques et
conomiques de son poque travers une typologie de personnages chargs de
reprsenter symboliquement l'mergence d'une nouvelle classe sociale.14 The author
attempts to capture a moment of transition in Parisian social history in which class
boundaries are blurred and in which the possibility of reinventing oneself is plausible.

14

http://expositions.bnf.fr/zola/bonheur/expo/salle4/index.htm
256

One need look no further than the protagonists Mouret and Denise to see that in Zolas
modern Paris, social transformation is possible. But if Zola is able to pinpoint this
moment of a new classs emergence accurately, a question remains: is he successful at
drawing a precise typological description of this new class?
As we have seen, Zola meticulously researched the individuals associated with the
department stores as he crafted his fictional types the calicots; the shop girls, the
management thereby emphasizing his desire to embrace and describe the social
networks of the store.15 Mitterrands presentation of the Carnets denqutes highlights
the authors fascination with these employees, both at the Louvre and at the Bon March:
their daily schedules, their backgrounds, their living quarters, their interpersonal rivalries,
and so on. Mitterand does writes in a synopsis of the chapter on the Louvre that [Zola]
sintressera surtout aux rouages humains de la mcanique commercial: la vie, les murs,
les rivalits des employs, les vols commis par certaines clients, les rapports parfois
ambigus des vendeurs et des clientes, la cohue du magasin un jour de foule (177).
However, the naturalists observations are much more focused on the lives of the

15

In regards to Zolas research on the types of department store employees, Mitterand

writes [Zola] eut sur ce point trois informateurs: Lon Carbonaux, chef de raon au Bon
March, Beauchamp, ancien chef de comptoir au Louvre, et Mlle Dulit, employee au
magasin Saint-Joseph. Le premier lui dcrivit les divertissements des employs, leurs
conditions dembauche, leurs procds de vente et leurs gains. Le second, avec plus de
dtails, lui parla dabord des vendeuses, puis il lui expliqua les habitudes professionnelles
et prives des vendeurs et des cadres, et la lutte entre le grand commerce et le petit []
Mlle Dulit, enfin, lui raconta sa carrire, lui exposa le sort douloureux des demoiselles de
magasin, et lui expliqua quelques mots de largot du mtier (149).
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employees than on those of the clients.16 Zola treats the precarious relationship between
the clients and the employees in the Louvre in one section of the Carnets, writing that
[o]n nie absolumment les bonnes fortunes entre vendeurs et clients (184).
Observations about the types of women who shop at department stores are nevertheless
significantly absent from these otherwise detailed accounts of the store. Once again, it is
worth noting that the Carnets represent Mitterrands edited compilation of Zolas notes
and are not the entirety of his observational corpus, yet it is nonetheless revealing that, in
the novel succeeding Pot-Bouille, a careful study of the (mostly) bourgeois shoppers is
missing from the documentation. But both Mouret and Zolas narrator almost
obsessively try to create typologies the female clientele of the store, drawing neat
distinctions among the categories of class, shopping habits and theft into which the
clients can be placed. At the same time, the narrator repeatedly reveals his and Mourets
difficulty in pinning down distinct social types by demonstrating blurring among these
categories. It is, then, through his attempt to create a typologie de personnages chargs
de reprsenter symboliquement l'mergence d'une nouvelle classe sociale that Zola once
again demonstrates the difficulty of capturing a bourgeois type.
Naomi Schor has suggested that the traditional portrait of the shopper as upperclass woman is undone in this novel. Schor writes, il ny a concidence parfaite ni entre
la clientle et les classes aises ni entre le personnel du magasin et les classes

16

In addition to the living and working conditions of the employees, we see, in chapters
of the Carnets entitled Le Quartier and talages et Catalogues, Zolas attention to
both the interior of the store, its set up and the commerce housed within, and its exterior
surroundings.
258

dfavorises, puisque lon rencontre des femmes de condition modeste dans la foule des
clientes et que les vendeuses, quant elles, constituent une classe vague, flottant entre
louvrire et la bourgeoise (183). Indeed, there is much social confusion among the
clients and the shop girls, who, with the clothing they wear and the power they wield
within the Bonheur, blur the distinctions between the working and bourgeois classes. At
the same time, there are impoverished noblewomen like Mlle de Fontenailles employed
by the Bonheur. This reversal of class roles within the department store, the confusion of
class signs due to fashion and the ultimate, almost utopian class model resolved at the end
of the novel have all been well documented by critics. Zolas narrator himself alludes to
this blurring of classes: Presque toutes les vendeuses, dans leur frottement quotidien
avec la clientle riche, prenaient des grces, finissaient par tre d'une classe vague,
flottant entre l'ouvrire et la bourgeoise; et sous leur art de s'habiller, sous les manires et
les phrases apprises, il n'y avait souvent qu'une instruction fausse, la lecture des petits
journaux, des tirades de drame, toutes les sottises courantes du pav de Paris (536537).17 Despite, or perhaps because of, the emergence of this new, indistinct female

17

Critics have often noted the reversal of class roles women shoppers experienced when
entering Zolas department store. David Bell writes, for example, Once within the store,
the salespersons word gains almost unquestioned authority. Class rules are as if
reversed. Generally, those hired to do the selling in Mourets store are taken from the
lower classes, whereas the clients are from the bourgeoisie or upper bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, the salesperson occupies the position of the other within the confines of the
store and thus reigns supreme (117). Heidi Brevik-Zender notes class confusion among
Mourets staff: Even within Mourets department store, traditional class boundaries are
frequently reversed and distorted. Ruined noble woman deux comtesses et une
baronne (656) from formerly prosperous families, work in Octaves advertising
department, forced to find employment in order to survive. Mlle de Fontanailles, of a
259

class, Mouret seems able to seduce universally all of his clientele. This topic has been
central to scholarly works on fashion and cultural and gender studies, which tend to note
the sexual language evoked in the layout of the store, the manner in which the women
make purchases and Octaves commercial strategies.18 But I would like to move away
from these familiar topics to focus not on the universal ability of these women to be
seduced by the store or on the class confusion within the store, but rather on the
narrators repeated attempt to classify them. The narrators recurring endeavors to fit the
women into typologies of female shoppers (and thieves) and his insistence on stores
employees astute ability to decode these typologies would suggest that Zola is
employing and endorsing a positivistic methodology in depicting the Bonheurs clientele.
However, by focusing on recurrent moments in the novel in which these female shoppers
blend together, as well as on the scenes in which the Bonheurs employees make
mistakes when decoding the shoppers, the reader can perceive the naturalist narrators

vieille noblesse du Poitou (656), accepts a position at the Bonheur for three francs a
day, her fine white hands the only discernable trace of her former aristocratic distinction
(228).
18
Many critics have pointed to the narrators overt sexual language when describing
Mourets art of commercial seduction. Hannah Thompson writes that the pervasiveness
of the sexual metaphors employed by Zola is striking; [] Buying clothes in Mourets
show is likened to the act of undressing, the preparation for the sexual act itself, as the
purchase becomes the natural consequence of the seductions of window shopping (83).
Brevik-Zender, too, underscores the sexual language of shopping in the novel, writing
Zola inscribes women with a surplus of sexual desires, and fabrics are the trigger that
sets them off to performing irrational acts beyond their control (216).
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subtle undoing of these rigid social types and, by extension, of the truly omniscient
narrator.
Zola may in fact wish to destabilize the traditional portrait of the wealthy
shopping women, as Schor suggests. During the readers first real introduction to the
Bonheurs clientele when Octave attends a weekly social gathering in the home of his
occasional lover Mme Desforges in the third chapter of the novel (Zolas first attempt to
classify his shoppers), the narrator does present an outline of these various types of
shopping women, suggesting a range of clients. Because this specific list of women
stands in emblematically for the clientele as a whole, it does not go unnoticed, however,
that true working class shoppers are notably absent and the majority of the clients are,
ultimately, well-to-do bourgeois women.19 In this episode, the narrator sketches the
portraits of the multiple female types who frequent the department store, each
representing a different stratum of Parisian social life.
The hostess, Mme Desforges, daughter of a member of the Counsel dtat, is the
widow of a stockbroker, and therefore a combination of both bourgeois wealth and state
power. The women assembled in her home are defined chiefly through the professions or

19

The disparity between the wealthy shoppers and the working-class shop girls is made
most evident in the scene in which Mme Desforges invites Denise, of whom she is
jealous, into her home in order to humiliate her before Mouret. As Schor points out, Ce
qui tend toutefois renforcer la diffrence entre les deux grandes catgories sociales
reprsentes par Denise et Mme Desforges, cest que pour la grande dame bourgeoise le
grand magasin constitue un espace public protg au sein de la mtropole, tandis que,
pour la petite-bourgeoise quest Denise, il ny a quune diffrence minime entre les
agressions quelle subit dans la rue et celles dont elle est victime sur son lieu de travail
(184).
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backgrounds of their husbands. Mme Bourdelais, the wife of the second in command to
the Finance minister, is de vieille famille bourgeoise and runs son mnage et ses trois
enfants, avec une activit, une bonne grce, un flair exquis de la vie pratique (445). She
is a true middle class bourgeoise de naissance. There is the aloof Mme Guibal, whose
purportedly unfaithful husband is a well-known lawyer at the Palais; she is therefore
another well-to-do bourgeoise. Conversely, the countess, Mme de Boves, whose husband
is the general inspector of the national studfarm, typifies the Second Empires dissolute
aristocrats: la famille vivait dune dernire ferme hypothque, au mince produit de
laquelle sajoutaient heureusement les neuf mille francs touchs par le comte comme
inspecteur gnral des haras. Et ces dames [Mme de Boves et sa fille] trs serres
dargent par celui-ci [] en tait parfois rduites refaire leurs robes elles-mmes (452453). Despite her name, the countess is among the least wealthy of the group of friends
and certainly exemplifies a society in transition. Representing the petite bourgeoisie is
Mme Marty, perhaps the greatest victim of the department store. She is the fille dun
petit employ, who is married to a professeur de cinquime au lyce Bonaparte, qui
devait doubler ses six mille francs dappointements en courant le cachet, pour suffire au
budget sans cesse croissant du mnage (447). In spite of constrained financial
circumstances, Mme Marty is unable to control her spending, quickly depleting her
husbands meager salary. United by their friendship with Mme Desforges, these women
are depicted twice at their weekly meetings in her salon, as well as throughout
department store during the Bonheurs three sales scenes. Yet no matter the location of
their meeting, their topic of conversation is always on some level related to the goods for
262

sale at the Bonheur. The reader quickly becomes aware that Mourets keen knowledge of
commerce and women enable him to seduce these clients, regardless of social standing,
into purchasing his wares. But crucial here is the fact that in these scenes, the narrator is
intent on arranging the clients into neat class-based categories.20
After categorizing the women gathered together in Mme Desforgess salon
according to their social class, Zolas narrator complicates his typologies by introducing
their disparate shopping habits. A discussion about the new and well-advertised silk
made specifically for the Bonheur named, appropriately, the Paris-Bonheur occasions
a lengthy catalogue of these various types of female consumers:
Et, sous la curiosit bavarde dont elles accablaient le jeune homme, apparaissaient
leurs tempraments particuliers d'acheteuses: Mme Marty, emporte par sa rage de
dpense, prenant tout au Bonheur des dames, sans choix, au hasard des
talages; Mme Guibal, s'y promenant des heures sans jamais faire une emplette,
heureuse et satisfaite de donner un simple rgal ses yeux; Mme de Boves, serre
d'argent, toujours torture d'une envie trop grosse, gardant rancune aux marchandises,
qu'elle ne pouvait emporter; Mme Bourdelais, d'un flair de bourgeoise sage et pratique,
allant droit aux occasions, usant des grands magasins avec une telle adresse de bonne
mnagre, exempte de fivre, qu'elle y ralisait de fortes conomies; Henriette enfin,
qui, trs lgante, y achetait seulement certains articles, ses gants, de la bonneterie, tout
le gros linge. (463-464)21

20

See, for example, chapter three when, as he attempts to entreat the Baron into helping
finance the expansion of the store, Mouret outlines his theories on the art of modern
commerce, stating Ayez donc les femmes [] vous vendrez le monde! (461).
21
As Elizabeth Erbeznik has argued in a 2010 conference paper at the Interdisciplinary
Nineteenth-Century Studies colloquium, Zolas female shopping types contain, more
often than not, an element of disease: By pathologizing [the womens] shopping habits
[] Zola adds a new (albeit diseased) dimension to the bourgeois persona, thereby
implying that a woman is only interesting to the urban observer insofar as she is weak
and out of control [] Among Henriette Desforges group of female friends, for
example, the spectrum of consuming types veers strongly towards the abnormal (5).
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The women are all alike in their attraction to the department store, but for Mouret and
Zola, these women emerge with tempraments particuliers. In the same way he takes
care to categorize the women by their distinct social standing, the narrator also
meticulously distinguishes among the shoppers, describing the out-of-control shopper
(Mme Marty), the look-but-not-buy shopper (Mme Guibal), the envious shopper (Mme
de Boves), the practical shopper (Mme Bourdelais) and the elegant shopper (Mme
Desforges). These typologies clearly foreground a drive to comprehend and classify
types, on the part of Mouret, of course, but also, through him, on the part of the narrator.
This typological information can thus be disseminated and used to gain
commercial advantage at the Bonheur. For example, no more than twenty pages later in
the text, the salesman Hutin is able to correctly read and pick out a certain type of
shopper. As Hutin chats with his fellow salesmen about weekend plans and his desperate
need for money, he recognizes a certain type of client:
Ctait une dame couperose, avec un chapeau jaune et une robe rouge. Tout de suite
Hutin devina la femme qui nachterait pas. Il se baissa vivement derrire le comptoir,
en feignant de rattacher les cordons dun de ses souliers ; et, cach, il murmurait : Ah !
non, par exemple ! quun autre se la paie [] En effet, elle voulait simplement des
chantillons, avec les prix; et elle retint le vendeur plus de dix minutes, elle laccabla
de questions. (480)
Precisely because he is able to identify a specific type of shopper, Hutin avoids wasting
his time with her. Though his plan ultimately backfires when he is made to go to the end
of the line of salesmen, Hutins deft capacity to read types of shoppers reflects the
novels interest in categorizing and manipulating these women. Deloches unfortunate
misreading of the thieving Mme de Boves at the final sale shows, however, the
264

impossibility of correctly deciphering all the Bonheurs clientele. As Mme de Boves is

lead away by Jouve, Deloches shocked exclamations at discovering her crime
comment? celle-l aussi! cette dame si noble! ctait les fouillir toutes ! (791) point
to the impossibility of complete accuracy in reading and cataloguing this population.
Not only does the narrator classify the types of women who make purchases at the
Bonheur, but through Mouret he also establishes typologies of the stores thieves. As the
director and Paul Vallagnosc tour the department store, just before Jouves
misinterpretation of the pregnant shopper, the two discuss the totalizing effect of the
Bonheur on its clientele. Vallagnosc points out, however, detecting a more sinister side
of the crowd, [o]n doit rudement vous voler (632). Mouret readily concedes that the
theft at the Bonheur dpasse limagination, hastening to add that on tche darranger
cela (632). Yet he also takes the opportunity to enumerate a series of types among the
thieves encountered at the store:
[E]nchant davoir un sujet, [Mouret] donnait des dtails intarissables, racontait des
faits, en tirait un classement. Dabord, il citait les voleuses de profession, celles qui
faisaient le moins de mal, car la police les connaissait presque toutes. Puis, venaient
les voleuses par manie, une perversion du dsir, une nvrose nouvelle quun aliniste
avait classe, en y constatant le rsultat aigu de la tentation exerce par les grands
magasins. Enfin, il y avait les femmes enceintes, dont les vols se spcialisaient: ainsi,
chez une delles, le commissaire de police avait dcouvert deux cent quarante-huit
paires de gants roses, voles dans tous les comptoirs de Paris. (632)22

22

Hannah Thompson has evoked this passage as she argues that the prevalence of
shoplifting within the novel is evidence of womens increasingly intense desire to subvert
the male dominant order by stealing back something of that which has been denied to
them (90).
265

In positivist fashion, the storeowner lays out a classification of the women who steal from
his store, and in doing so, he demonstrates that though these shoplifters abound, he
nonetheless maintains control over the store by comprehending the types. In other words,
by recounting innumerable details and examples of these thieves that he and his team
have presumably observed, Mouret is inductively able to draw typologies of these
criminal women. The professional thief, the neurotic thief, and the pregnant women are
all read as sociological types studied by Mouret and, by extension, by Zola through his
narrator. This passage reads like another attempt by the narrator to demonstrate a
complete understanding, not only of the space and the inner workings of the Bonheur, but
of the social types who frequent it. It functions as an archetypal example and deployment
of the naturalist approach. Even so, the narrator further underscores his simultaneous
utilization and questioning of this positivist methodology by placing Jouves misreading
of the pregnant shopper two paragraphs below the typology of thieves. The stores
director and surveillance team may know enough to categorize the shoplifters into
readable types, but they are not capable of consistently employing this knowledge
effectively.
6.7 Les Clientes mlanges
While this interplay between the repeated classification of the shoppers and the
concurrent miscalculations of the clientele plays out the narrators complicated
relationship with the naturalist methodology, the physical and metaphorical blending
together of these same women also underscores the texts difficulty in representing the
consumers it depicts. In other words, at the same time that he consciously draws
266

distinctions among the women shopping in the Bonheur, the narrator also shows that
these contrasts are in flux the types that previously seemed rigid actually blend together
and distinctions are lost. Nowhere is this blurring more evident than in the same initial
salon scene in which the first two typological descriptions of the women are drawn. As
we have already seen, the narrator is quick to identify the different classes into which the
Bonheurs clients fall. But as much as the narrator tries to distinguish these women,
marking them each with a different social standing and shopping habit, he also brings
them together physically in the salon mere pages later in a confined space where they are
linked by skirts that seem to be touching: [C]es dames staient rapproches, faisaient
l, au milieu un troit cercle de jupes, do montaient des rires, des paroles chuchotes,
des questions et des rponses ardentes, toute la passion de la femme pour la dpense et le
chiffon (458). 23 Not only do their interests in the fabrics and spending figuratively
merge here. The tight circle their skirts form also figures a physical merging together of

23

Erbeznik argues that what first appears in Henriettes Salon to be an inchoate mass of
women joined figuratively by a common passion for affordable luxury as well as
literally by the lace and silks that get passed between them as the pieces were
unwrapped, and passed back and forth, making the circle tighter still, linking the ladies
with slender threads is, after careful and scientific observation, eventually recognized
and divided into disparate temperaments, ranging from the benign to the pathological.
[] By drawing distinctions between healthy and diseased consuming behaviors, Zola
depicts a commercial universe centered on women who are, nevertheless, never fully in
control of their passions or their purchase (3). Erbeznik links Zolas classification of
these women to the early-century physiologies and argues that this enables the writer, and
Mouret, to control them in the realm of the department store. Instead of passing from the
inchoate mass of women to the more neatly classified types, I am attempting here to
perform the opposite critical move, arguing that it is precisely the moments of inchoate
masses of female clientele that put into question the naturalist methodology.
267

their bodies and clothing (not surprising, given the topic of conversation), and the laughs
and whispers, the questions and answers which rise up from the circle of skirts are
similarly fused. These noises are the auditory manifestation of the disparate women
merging into a blended and more difficult-to-categorize group. They become a crowd.
The womens words blend together once again at Mme Desforgess salon. As
Mouret discusses his plans with the Baron, their conversation is interrupted by the words
of Mme Guibal, Mme de Boves and Mme Desforges, discussing Alenon lace. Tiens!
Vous me donnez une ide remarks Mme Desforges, Jai dj quelques mtres
dalenon Il faut que jen cherche pour une garniture (459). Rather than follow the
rest of her conversation, the narrator comments that the womens voices blend together
once more: Et les voix tombrent, ne furent plus quun murmure (459). Again the
women become indistinguishable from one another and rather than learning their
different opinions on the matter of the lace, we learn instead that they have merged to
form one. They ultimately become so frenzied that their thoughts and words fuse
together for Mouret, the narrator and the reader:
Mais ces dames parlaient maintenant toutes la fois, tellement excites, quelles ne
scoutaient mme plus entre elles. Mme de Boves achevait la description de la toilette
de soire: une tunique de soie mauve, drape et retenue par des nuds de dentelle ; le
corsage dcollet trs bas, et encore des nuds de dentelle aux paules. Vous verrez,
disait-elle, je me fais faire un corsage pareil avec un satin Moi, interrompait Mme
Bourdelais, jai voulu de velours, oh! une occasion! Mme Marty demandait: Hein ?
combien la soie ? Puis, toues les voix repartirent ensemble. (460)

268

This moment perfectly captures the narrative tension created by attempts to classify
characters: the narrator simultaneously identifies the women speaking and frames these
interjections by depicting their voices blending together.24
This figurative blending of the womens voices toward the beginning of the novel
prefigures the larger-scale crowd scenes during the Bonheurs sales in which the women
will lose their individual identities. There are so many instances of this blurring that I
will only mention a few examples and limit myself to the final sale scene. As the narrator
describes the chaos within the store during the great white sale, he writes that au rez-dechausse, il y avait une houle assombrie, agite dun reflux, o lon ne distinguait que les
visages dlicats et ravis des femmes (770, my emphasis). Here the characters bodies are
indistinguishable only a swell of indiscriminate faces are discernable. As the narrator
presses on, he describes Denises counter which is populated by une cohue de mres,
tranant des bandes de fillettes et de petits garons (775, my emphasis), as well as the
fact that her brothers Jean and Pp find themselves among ce flot dbord de femmes
(779, my emphasis). Finally, in another department, the le dballage indiscret, la
femme retourne et vue par le bas, depuis la petite bourgeoise aux toiles unies, jusqu la
dame riche blottie dans les dentelles (781). The series of metaphors describing the

24

In the second and final salon scene, Zola highlights once again the blending together of
the Bonheurs clients voices. As a humiliated Mme Desforges and the Baron Hartmann
discuss creating a store to compete with the Bonheur, Mouret presides over a
conversation among the women about the clothing in his store. As the director cheerfully
discusses the economic benefits of shopping chez lui, the narrator comments: A ce
moment, la vaste pice semplissait de voix (701).
269

jumbled mass, torrent, crush of women in the Bonheur continues. The chaotic blending
of the individual women into one stream of shoppers is an image evoked throughout this
and the other sales scenes, emphasizing the tension between the narrators desire to create
individual social types and his depiction of uncontrollable masses of shoppers.25
Naomi Schor famously studied Zolas crowd fiction in Zolas Crowds, and Au
Bonheur des Dames figures prominently in her study. Compared to earlier novels in the
Rougon Macquart, Mourets relationship with and dependence on the crowds in his store
represents a move away from exalting the individual to describing the collective. As
Schor puts it: Au Bonheur des dames [] announces the advent of a new power
relationship: a dedication to pleasing the crowd (153). She claims that Mouret is
unique among Zolas leader figures in that he enjoys a physical, even sensual relationship
with the crowd; he experiences an irresistible urge to plunge into the crowd (154). For
Schor, Zolas challenge in this transitional novel is to depict individual members of the
band, that is, the small, limited group of characters known to the reader, who will later
be injected into the crowd. Citing the example we have studied of the narrators
depiction of the clients tempraments particuliers, Schor writes that with these
thumbnail sketches, Zola has completed the preliminary step in his two-step method: the

25

Bell has written about these moments which mark the loss of individuality on the part
of those who enter into the store, explaining that the physical forcing together of so
many bodies transforms them into one and chalking this up to the idea of fashion which
necessarily implies mediation by a collective other that easily assumes the form of a
crowd. Mouret assembles that crowd in order to tap the potential of the fashion
mechanism within his store (114).
270

introduction of the nucleus of the known clients, those known to each other and then to
Octave. In the course of the novel, these characters will become as familiar to the sales
personnel as to the reader of Au Bonheur (156), and, by extension, they will make the
larger crowd recognizable. And yet, as we have seen here, these characters are not as
familiar to the sales personnel as Zola and Mouret might hope mistakes are made in
deciphering these known shopping styles, and this leads to a breakdown in Mourets
mastery of the store and the crowds of shoppers who populate it.
Schors larger argument is that the crowd scenes in Au Bonheur des Dames the
passing from the individual, known characters who make up a small band into a larger,
amorphous group demonstrate the painful process whereby an individual divests
himself of his highly prized difference and autonomy to become a (mere) part of the
collective. To enter the portals of this modern, profane temple, one must renounce all the
prerogatives of individualism (157). This argument does not exclude my own. Where
Schor sees the emphasis on the individual types comprising the band as an attempt at
synecdoche by which the members stand in for a larger abstract class, I have argued that
the focus on individual type demonstrates Zolas overt showcasing of the positivist
method. Where Schor sees the integration of the band into the crowd as a sort of modern
abdication of individualism, I see the narrator complicating the notion of type itself by
pointing to the fluidity of the very tight classifications he strives to establish. In both
cases, nonetheless, we can see Zolas desire to draw all-encompassing types through an
inductive approach toward the shoppers. Schor quotes the following passage in his
preparatory notes: For clients I will start out with the women met, shown at the home of
271

Octaves mistress But I will need five or six other women, named and known to the
salesmen on sight, to personify the clientele (Crowds, 156). In both cases, the blending
of this individual type into a larger amorphous mass reveals Zolas preoccupation with
representation whether with the tension between the individual and the crowd which
reoccur throughout the Rougon-Macquart or the tension inherent in the naturalist
narrative method.
6.8 Zola and Durkheim
Critics who have written on Au Bonheur des Dames would have us believe that
the vast collection of documents dedicated to the observation of the department store
testifies to Zolas success in depicting this commercial milieu. Both the narrator and the
director of the store strive for total mastery of this shopping space, the organization of the
business and the lives of the employees. Schor points to Zolas own notes on these
employees, indicating his desire to create an assortment of such typologies, such as the
following remark: As for the salesladies, they must represent all the varieties. []
Shadow them all and give each one a typical ending (quoted in Schor, 155). For all
intents and purposes, the narrator is successful in his almost excessive description and
categorization of everything associated with the Bonheur. Yet Jouves slip up,
Lhommes crime, the impenetrable moments in the crowd, and the merging of the clients
voices are indications of a larger problem in the naturalist narrative the absence of an
all-seeing gaze that can describe and decode social types completely. The very character
whose role it is to read social types, the stores inspector, and who is emblematic of the
omniscient naturalist narrator, turns out to be prone to mistakes, revealing that the
272

consistent and full representation of social types is extremely problematic. Typologies are
repeatedly undone in ways that undermine naturalist narrative omniscience and call it into
question.
This tension, in turn, raises the question of the validity of the positivist method so
influential in the early sociological movements at the time of Zolas writing and in the
authors writing itself. Influenced by Taine and Claude Bernards Introduction la
medicine exprimentale, Zola is, of course, often categorized as a positivist writer, as we
saw at the beginning of the previous chapter. And yet his own active questioning of the
purely observational, scientific approach to the study of human behavior, as proposed by
Auguste Comte, brings Zola a step closer to the sociological methodology proposed by
Emile Durkheim, for whom mere observation was insufficient for attaining an
understanding of the social fact, the cornerstone of the discipline of sociology. The social
fact, as Durkheim defines it, is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of
exerting over the individual an external constraint [] which is general over the whole of
a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual
manifestations (59). This is because for the sociologist, social facts are not to be found
wholly in the application made of them by individuals, since they can even exist without
being applied at the time (54). The positivist method, depending on individual
observation, in the absence of reflection about what Durkheim called the notion of
external constraint, becomes inherently inadequate. When Durkheim writes the
following, however, we see that he is proposing a method that both employs and shows
the inadequacies of the observational method:
273

A social fact is identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or is
capable of exerting upon individuals. The presence of this power is in turn
recognizable [sic] because of the existence of some pre-determined sanction, or
through the resistance that the fact opposes to any individual action that may threaten
it. However, it can also be defined by ascertaining how widespread it is within the
group, provided that, as noted above, one is careful to add a second essential
characteristic; this is, that it exists independently of the particular forms that it may
assume in the process of spreading itself within the group. (59)
Observation is necessary to comprehend a society in which the social fact is pervasive,
yet the social fact itself is external to the observable individual since it can only be
understood collectively and not in the actions of any single individual. Therefore mere
accumulated observation of individuals is not enough to study the way a society
functions.
Durkheim was writing later in the century than Zola: his crucial work on suicide,
which established him as a groundbreaking researcher and innovator of sociology, was
not published until 1897. And Zola, as we have seen, certainly does not imagine the
existence of the social fact in his works. He foregrounds the difficulty of a purely
positivistic approach in the examples of the two novels I have just analyzedin some
sense against his own will. Comtes social physics, a first attempt to imagine a
scientific sociology, had discernable effects on Zolas novelistic vision. Durkheim was to
carry sociological reflection beyond the notion of observation and toward a broader, more
abstract perspective on how individual actions fit into social structures.
6.9 Concluding Remarks
As we have seen throughout this project, an understanding of the developments in
early sociological theory can enrich our knowledge of nineteenth-century literary culture.
274

Through an exploration of Comtes positivist theories, the movement of panoramic

literature, the urban novels of Balzac, Paul de Kock, and Zola, and their multiple
methodological similarities, I have wanted to enrich our perspectives on literary works
that arose from a very particular historical and cultural context. I have situated the
panoramic literary texts as points of intersection between Comtes work, which proposes
a comprehensive theory of society, and the novelists work, which explores various
modes of realist representations of society. By reading panoramic literature from a
historical, social and literary perspective, I have sought to move beyond the usual critical
understanding of these texts as mere encyclopedias of nineteenth-century culture, whose
comical and pseudo-scientific pretentions were devoid of genuine social insight
(Sieburth, 186). Instead, as my study of the nineteenth-century generic classifications
demonstrates, these works, which focused on social classification, were not as easily
classified as contemporary critics have tended to think. Instead, they are hybrid texts
whose generic porousness accurately represents their historical moment.
Mine is, of course, not the first study to examine Zola and Balzacs novels in the
context of sociological thought. Critics have frequently explored the two authors novels
as tools of social analysis, most likely because both Balzac and Zola repeatedly call
attention to their own synoptic aims of representing society, the former in the AvantPropos and the latter in Le Roman experimental. Paul de Kock, who has been generally
ignored in criticism, does not explicitly address broader sociological aims in his works,
but he does, as I have shown, attempt related comprehensive representations of the
Parisian petite bourgeoisie. As opposed to other studies of realism, naturalism and
275

sociological thought, however, mine has worked to highlight the overlap between the
literary methodologies of the nineteenth-century urban novelists and the work of Comte.
By framing certain literary works in the context of proto-sociology, I have attempted to
offer a new understanding both of prominent nineteenth-century literary movements and
of less well-known aspects of the contemporary literary culture.
Throughout their novels, Balzac, de Kock and Zola rely on the tropes of
panoramic literature tableaux and typology and in this project I have shown that
during those moments of novelistic engagement with panoramic literature, the authors
establish their relationship to Comtes positivist methodology. Balzac employs an
observational approach to the study of post-Napoleonic society in his attempt to copi[er]
toute la Socit (32), and he openly incorporates typological descriptions from his own
earlier contributions to panoramic literature. Yet throughout both his Avant-Propos and
his novels, Balzac searches for a moteur social (the causes and impulses behind societal
effects), considers mystical and metaphysical forces, and stages, in Les Employs, the
destabilization of the mastery of type. This distinguishes him from his contemporary
Comte. In his best-selling works on the lives of Pariss petit bourgeois, Paul de Kock
interrupts his narratives with lengthy and disconnected observations on urban
phenomena. While these novels were met with harsh reviews, literary critics consistently
praised their digressive passages. Such passages, I have argued, show de Kocks
connection, implicit as it might be, with Comtes proposals concerning sociology. His
contemporary critics positive reactions to these aspects of his writing, their implicit
valorization of a sociological approach to novelistic fiction, demonstrate their recognition
276

of the attempt to construct a more complex synthesis of urban social life at the heart of
the novels. Zola, who never mentions Comte by name in his naturalist manifesto,
nonetheless clearly aligns himself with the positivist methodology as he expounds upon
the need to move beyond the theological and metaphysical stages to explain society
through a scientific approach. His novels Pot-Bouille and Au Bonheur des Dames do
show the results of his naturalist methodology, but they simultaneously thematize the
difficulties of omniscient narration, of fully capturing social types, and of the naturalist
project more generally. By questioning the possibility of individual observation, Zolas
novels show, in spite of themselves, a shift away from Comtes theories, a shift that is
related to the sort of theoretical steps taken by Emile Durkheim at the end of the
nineteenth century.
Positivisms purely inductive method proved incapable of providing a lasting
approach to the understanding of a social system. The cornerstone of Durkheims own
positivist sociology was the social fact, unobservable in the individual alone, because
it transcended the individual. Turn of the century sociologists such as Max Weber and
Georg Simmel also proposed anti-positivist approaches to the study of society. Despite
these later advances beyond positivism, positivisms effects on literary forms make it
essential for scholars of the nineteenth century to comprehend its influence on the urban
texts that have been so central to critical and historical work on nineteenth-century
France in the past decade and a half. Recalling Auguste Comtes project to systematize
the approach to social phenomena in the form of a theory of sociology, what he often

277

called la physique sociale, can help nuance our views of nineteenth-century literary
culture in the aftermath of his work.

278

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Biography
Anne ONeil-Henry was born on February 7, 1980 in Walla Walla, Washington to
Patrick Henry and Mary Anne ONeil. After graduating from Walla Walla High School
in 1998, she attended the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, where she majored
in French and minored in Spanish. There she was awarded the Clifton Cherpak award for
her honors thesis and graduated Magna cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2002. She
completed an MA in Spanish from Middlebury College in 2004 after spending a year in
Madrid, and began the PhD program in Romance Studies at Duke University that same
year. After completing her coursework at Duke, she spent a year at the cole Normale
Suprieure in Paris. She was awarded the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Teaching
Fellowship as well as a Fred and Barbara Sutherland Summer Research Fellowship in
2009. Her article La Grande Ville: Parisian Observations in the Urban Guides and
Novels of Paul de Kock appeared in Dix-Neuf in 2010.

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