Avez-vous lu Paul Bourget? (review)

Avez-vous lu Paul Bourget? The editors of this collection of thirteen essays know their titular question is rhetorical. In their Avant-Propos, Michele-Ange Fougère and Daniel Sangsue describe how the work of Paul Bourget (1852-1935) languished in obscurity after his death. Although a prominent intellectual figure in his time, Paul Bourget became a posthumous nobody, even a cultural pariah. The "reactionary" ideology that informed Bourget's late works may account for this exclusion. As the editors explain, Bourget was an "evolving" thinker who shifted, over the years, from agnosticism to Catholicism, and from liberalism to monarchist nationalism. To condense Bourget's evolving ideas is no simple task, but to summarize his abundant and diversified œuvre is the greater challenge. Paul Bourget was a widely read and admired fiction writer, the respected author of poem La Vie inquiète, an occasional art critic, and an insightful literary critic. He was also an indefatigable columnist whose texts appeared in numerous newspapers and literary magazines. Bourget is chiefly remembered today - if at all - as the critic of Essais de psychologie contemporaine and the author of Le Disciple, a novel that stirred heated discussions at the time of its publication in 1889.

Philosophies aside, another reason for Bourget's obscurity may be the fact that Hubert Juin, the celebrated editor of the "fins de siècle" series published in the eighties and nineties of the Twentieth century, did not include Bourget's fiction in his vast editorial project. Hubert Juin aimed to familiarize his contemporaries with the rich literature written between 1871 and 1914. According to Juin, this period may have been the most dynamic, diverse, and intriguing in the history of literature in France. The republication of fin de siècle in an affordable paperback series made these works available to modern audiences. Several minor authors reached a larger reading public than they had done in their lifetime. In consequence, academic audiences became interested in Decadence as a literary phenomenon worth studying. Despite this trend, until recently, scholars have generally ignored the fact that Decadent fiction, for all its inventiveness and originality, was not created in a vacuum. Jean de Palacio has shown in his pioneering work that scholars can gain much insight from studying Decadent fiction in conjunction with novels and short stories written by popular fin de siècle authors. Indeed, fiction written by Adolphe Belot, René Maizeroy, and Jane de la Vaudère shares many features with the works of the most prominent Decadent writers (e.g. Remy de Gourmont, Jean Lorrain, Marcel Schwob). This new broader view of what is worth reading and studying in fin de siècle literature was well served in 1999, when Guy Ducrey edited for Robert Laffont's Bouquins series, Romans fin-de-siècle: 1890-1900, a thirteen-hundred-page volume in which Ducrey presented eight novels that were long out of print.

With the notable exception of André Guyaux, who reedited Essais de physiologie contemporaine in 1993, Paul Bourget was largely ignored by fin de siècle scholars. The authors of the volume now under review assume the task of introducing Paul Bourget to the contemporary public. Jacques Poirier traces Bourget's slow descent into a literary limbo that lasted through the one hundredth anniversary of Bourget's birth in 1952. In an essay comparing Bourget's brief columns published in Le Parlement with longer pieces written for La Nouvelle Revue (subsequently published as Essais de psychologies contemporaines), André Guyaux describes how Bourget became a sharp and insightful critic of the literature of his time. Laurent Dubreuil examines Paul Bourget's criticism, in particular the relation between Bourget's "subjectivity" as a reader and his "objective" knowledge of society. In her informative essay, Silvia Disegni recounts Bourget's relationship with Count Primoli, Princess Mathilde's nephew, who served as Bourget's Cicerone in Rome. Four essays offer different views of Paul Bourget, the writer. Jean Borie's...