Delphine de Girardin: la Muse de Juillet (review)

Delphine de Girardin is one of those minor literary figures who are more truly representative of a period than some greater writers whose works outlive it, and she therefore deserves the compliment paid her by Claudine Giachetti in this biography. It is true that Giacchetti sometimes overstates the literary merits of her subject, as is the way with biographers, though Delphine's weekly column, published from 1836 to 1848, can still be read with interest by historians and a selection has recently been resurrected by Anne Martin-Fugier. The young Delphine, brazenly promoted by the novelist Sophie Gay, her ambitious mother, achieved a certain celebrity in the aristocratic salons of the Restauration, where she dramatically recited her poems. These early productions are full of cliché and truly awful, being but a pale imitation of her friend Lamartine. Her verse is also very inferior to that of her contemporary Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, whose works have suffered a less-deserved literary death, after a long period of admiration. However, the sentimental and religious content Delphine's verse was enough to earn the approval of the establishment. She was a privileged young person who had easy access to publishers, and she moved from poetry to plays and novels, a more lucrative area, but one in which she produced nothing of lasting value. Her triumph was the creation of an entertaining column on current events, a type of journalism that was quite new at the time. It appeared in La Presse, the newspaper created by her husband that was to change the nature of journalism by the introduction of new subjects. Giachetti rightly asserts the interest of these articles and could have quoted more of them. They cover plays, operas, street scenes, fashions, balls, literary events and political happenings. The comments on political matters show that Delphine remained an admirer of the old aristocracy, despite being married to an upwardly mobile industrialist, and that she tended to denigrate the regime that began in 1830. Like many others, she failed to see that Louis-Philippe was one of France's best rulers, perhaps the first who understood that national prestige could be achieved by prosperity and peace, not war, and her articles make some silly comments about a bourgeois court. In her final chapters, Giachetti narrates the impact on Delphine's life of the chaotic first months of the Second Republic, a time of riots and insurrections which led to the imposition of a stricter censorship of the press. It was in September 1848 that the need to submit articles before publication made her decide to give up her celebrated column. Giachetti does not always show the sequence of events with clarity and she could have done more to stress the unreliable nature of some sources, but her account of the life of France's first major female journalist is informative and readable.