Paris Fin De Siecle. Culture et politique (review)

Magazine Littéraire recently devoted an issue to Pierre Bourdieu, “l’intellectuel dominant.”¹ While the magazine strikes a skeptical note on the question of Bourdieu’s actual dominance within French intellectual life, there can be little question that he rules the pages of Christophe Charle’s social history of literary and intellectual life in fin de siècle Paris. Charle deploys Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus—the “champs” (“field”), cultural capital, strategies of domination—to “explore, by disjointed but convergent approaches, diverse aspects of this unique moment of a city ancient but nonetheless new, temple of different national memories, temporary shelter of what one designates as ‘modernity,’ but also the gathering point of all migrations and all exiles”(12). The premise unifying his kaleidoscopic explorations is that Paris’s febrile cultural activity was driven by the city’s power to attract both foreign and provincial intellectuals, which created a “cultural space where the struggle for survival... placed all producers of symbolic goods in a climate of extreme tension”(12).

Charle offers some valuable insights into the social setting within which intellectuals waged their symbolic struggles, beginning with an illuminating comparison between two cultural metropoles, Paris and Berlin, cities that he characterizes respectively as an “heir” and a “parvenu.” He shows convincingly that Paris retained its cultural hegemony, but that it attracted French provincial and foreign intellectuals and artists more by its heritage and fame than through new investments in education and research, measures in which the new German capital far outstripped it. He proceeds to analyze what he calls the “parallel structuration” of the “intellectual field” and Parisian “social space.” He argues that the location of specific literary institutions and of writers’ residences within the socially stratified quartiers of Hausmann’s Paris was one of the concrete ways by which writers gained an intuitive sense of their “position in the field, oriented themselves in the space of conflicts, and situated themselves by relationship to diverse factions of the dominant class”(49). Interesting as this excursion in cultural geography is, it leads to some rather unsurprising observations: The “dominant” writers lived in wealthier quartiers, while the avant-garde artists—“the most dominated”—inhabited poorer neighborhoods(65). Between these extremes, the naturalist novelists tended to live in middling quartiers, thus occupying a symbolically inferior position compared to opponents like the “psychological” novelist Paul Bourget. Charle traces this disparity to social circumstances, namely that the psychologues’ own social backgrounds and familial connections with Paris gave them greater access to the dominant classes. However, Charle does not in fact substantiate this by exploring in detail the social backgrounds of naturalists and psychologues. A table of origins does not help, given that only one of the three psychologues listed actually had a Parisian youth(80). Moreover, Charle’s adoption of a scientific, quantifying tone appears somewhat misplaced. What does it mean, for example, to speak of “the majority of naturalists” when there is no sense of the numbers involved? If he means to refer to the group around Emile Zola, then he is basing a quantitative claim on a population of, perhaps, six.

Stratified as the terrain of Paris was, Charle emphasizes that Paris was also the site of mixing, transgression and the effacement of cleavages(85). He attempts to illustrate this through the suggestive figure of the “homme double.” Such figures, he argues, were the culture brokers of their age, operating with equal ease in Paris’s exclusive social and intellectual networks and in the impersonal cultural space opened by an expanding, commercialized and increasingly differentiated literary sphere. The hommes doubles generated considerable resentment among cultural producers, because their ability to accumulate positions as editors, critics and owners of publishing enterprises gave them tremendous power as arbiters of taste. Charle claims that writers had either to accept these gate-keepers or “double” themselves in order to establish their independence. In part two of the book, Charle examines the efforts of Hippolyte Taine, Charles Seignobos and Léon Blum to move...