La Figure du bibliomane: Histoire du livre et strategie litteraire au XIXe siecle (review)

"Bibliomanie: Folie, manie d'amasser des livres . . . On ne peut s'en servir qu'en riant" (51). Thus did the 1708 Dictionnaire universel stigmatize the practice of collecting books for purposes other than reading. A century later, however, the ridicule once accorded the bibliomane was ceding to respect, even admiration. As Daniel Desor-meaux contends in his fascinating study, this transforming perception of an emerging esthetic, political and social phenomenon gave rise, in turn, to new literary stakes and strategies. Desormeaux proposes not a history of bibliomania (although his book is enlightening on this topic), but rather a highly original analysis of book-love as both literary theme and rhetorical strategy in the works of five nineteenth-century authors, all of them, in differing ways, bibliomanes.

In Part i Desormeaux chronicles the cultural discrediting of bibliomanes from the Renaissance through the Revolution. Initially devoid of opprobrious connotations - in his Philobiblon (1473) the English ecclesiastic Richard de Bury equated the love of books with love of divinity - bibliomania was soon presented far less flatteringly. Among the fools peopling Sébastien Brant's legendary ship (La nef des fous, 1494) is perhaps the first fictional representation of a book collector, whose obsession with the book as object and representation of knowledge contrasts unattractively with the Renaissance conception of the book as source of knowledge itself. The seventeenth century witnessed the constitution of the great princely and ministerial libraries of Richelieu and Mazarin, the founding of the Académie Française, and the installation in the Louvre of the Imprimerie Royale. However, these manifestations of an official culture of print pushed even further to the intellectual margins another variety of bibliomania, albeit a fashionable one, derided by La Bruyère in "De la mode" as a frivolous fancy for curiosités or, in Molière's work, as a laughable form of social posturing. As the Revolution approached, the denigration of bibliomania comported a more diffuse economic, social, and intellectual critique. Bibliomanes came under attack not only as speculators, whose inflation of book prices only reinforced social inequalities, but also as dissolute libertines in an era when the boudoir had replaced the monastery as a site of bibliophilic ecstasy. In the "subtil combat intellectuel" (65) waged by the Philosophes, bibliomania came to signify the antithesis of Enlight-enment ideals regarding the acquisition and use of knowledge: elite v. popular culture, superfluousness v. usefulness, detached v. engaged reading. To the author of the Encyclopédie entry for "Bibliomane," this outmoded creature "n'est donc pas un homme qui se procure des livres pour s'instruire: . . . Il a des livres pour les avoir" (54).

What changed in the nineteenth century? Desormeaux offers several explanations, although presented somewhat disjointedly, for the remarkable shift in the perception of bibliomania. The confiscation by the state of noble and clerical libraries put into circulation thousands of books designated in advance as rare both by collectors and, ironically, by the Revolutionary government itself, which revalorized these remnants of Ancien Régime culture as part of France's national patrimony. The increasing legitimation of the literary profession over the course of the nineteenth century, rising literacy rates and, after 1881, a free press, all further bolstered the culture of the book. With the founding, beginning in the 1820s, of bibliophile societies, revues, publishing houses and bookstores, bibliomania, for the first time, acquired its own institutions.

The five authors examined by Desormeaux in Part ii - Flaubert, Stendhal, Nerval, Barbey d'Aurevilly and France - appropriated the newly triumphant bibliomania in widely varying ways, both as literary trope and authorial strategy. In some cases, this strategy was indeed, as Desormeaux's subtitle suggests, literary, implying a sequence of premeditated moves by authors in response to the disposition of other agents in the literary field at...