La Femme chez Heinrich Heine et Charles Baudelaire: le langage moderne de l'amour (review)

Halfway through his Memoirs (1854) Heinrich Heine – a German Jew by birth, a Parisian by adoption – starts to badger the French on account of their stubborn habit of mispronouncing his name. First noting that its Gallicized version sounds something like Monsieur Enri Enn ("bei den meisten heiße ich Mr. Enri Enn"), he goes on to explain that more extreme mispronunciations include the infamous Monsieur Un rien ("von vielen wird dieses in ein Enrienne zusammen gezogen, und einige nannten mich Mr. Un rien.") While this side-note typifies the notorious sarcasm of the German poet, a deeper irony transpires in what can be read as the uncanny premonition of Heine's effacement from French literary memory. And yet, upon his arrival in Paris shortly after the events of July 1830, the thirty-three year old Heine, a fervent Republican sympathizer, had received an enthusiastic welcome not only as a political exile, but also as the author of the Reisebilder [Travel Pictures] (1824), an album combining fiction, essay, and journalistic gossip, and the much celebrated collection of lyric poems entitled Buch der Lieder [Book of Songs] (1827). He soon befriended the most renowned artists in the city, including Musset, Gautier, Hugo, Sand, Berlioz, and Meyerbeer, and his own work was praised by prominent critics such as Philarète Chasles and Nerval, who, in an issue of the Revue des deux mondes (July 1848), flatteringly portrayed Heine as "un Voltaire pittoresque et sentimental, un sceptique du xviii^e siècle, argenté par les doux rayons bleus du clair de lune allemand." Banville's Mes Souvenirs (1882) is perhaps one of the last books written in French to evoke the German poet's significant influence on the literary and artistic circles of the time.

Today Heine's work appears to be of interest almost exclusively to German, British, and North American scholars. While comparative approaches tend to concentrate on his affinities with contemporary practitioners of romantic irony (Blake, Byron, Carlyle, Schlegel, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, among others), Heine is typically likened to Baudelaire on account of his self-proclaimed anti-bourgeois aesthetics and his treatment of subversive themes such as revolutionary politics, the underworld of nineteenth-century Paris, and dangerously seductive women. Sophie Boyer's book, La Femme chez Heinrich Heine et Charles Baudelaire: le langage moderne de l'amour, attempts a synthesis of these trends. As such it assumes a familiarity with the poetry and critical writings of Baudelaire and Heine, and, in the latter's case, with the current state of critical debates (reference to recent scholarship on Baudelaire is lacking). Largely based on her doctoral dissertation (completed at McGill University in 2001), Boyer draws on a wide selection of the poets' works in verse and prose to examine the parallel modes in which both represent women as simultaneously fascinating and repulsive figures of otherness (the prostitute, the corpse, the vampire, the statue, and the sphinx). The purported aim of this study is at least double: from a rhetorico-poetic standpoint, it intends to elucidate the process of allegorical figuration of the female body and its inscription within what Boyer calls (in deliberate avoidance of the notion of lyric tradition?) "le discours amoureux de la modernité" – a language governed by the rules of eroticism and seduction; from a socio-historical standpoint, it looks at the gaze of the male beholder – "véritable baromètre des mentalités masculines" (10) – as the indicator of a more general shift in attitude towards love and death in the mid-nineteenth century.

Chapter 1 takes as its point of departure a damning letter Baudelaire had intended to send to Jules Janin in response to an article deriding the gloomy atmosphere of Heine's love poetry. Baudelaire's defense of his fellow poet is taken as a programmatic statement for a renewal of lyricism based on the figures of...