Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (review)

For all its harking back to the supposedly glorious era of the First Empire and its resolute political conservatism, the Second Empire is renowned for its progressive enterprise, its advocacy of change, and its modernist zeal, at least, as Anne Green's fine book demonstrates, in word if not always in deed. This study focuses on six significant features of Second Empire life, supposed tokens of advancing civilization: its exhibitions, with their utopian vistas; its transport systems, notably its rail network with its sensations of speedy progress and its inherent dangers; its culinary inventiveness; its controversial advances in the art of photography; its ostentatious women's costumes; and its fondness for ruins. But this is not at all a straightforward social history of the regime, for the author, both systematically and skilfully, switches the focus of her demonstration between a delineation of these trends to their reflection, confirmation, and frequently their deprecation in the works of contemporary writers. Most interestingly, this book reveals how certain specific features of literary texts, many already familiar to the reader, shed their particularity or their peculiarity and gain a new general, illustrative significance in the light of the various trends that were part of the culture of the age. Thus, to take a famous example, the narrator's impassioned imploratory invocation to Paris at the end of the Goncourt brothers' Germinie Lacerteux can be read as a parody of the rhetoric of the exhibitions of the Empire. Such contextualization is perhaps the major contribution of this thoroughly documented book. The author makes revealing use of a wide variety of sources, including recipes and guide books. But the literary perspective tends to prevail. Flaubert is a constant source of reference as a commentator on the age, somewhat to the exclusion of such equally perceptive observers and interpreters as Zola and the Goncourt brothers, who seem to be underrepresented. Nevertheless, the author's expertise on Flaubert and his works is very well exploited. Indeed, it might well have been tempting to have used the immortal words of the master of the cliché, M. Homais, 'Il faut marcher avec son siècle' as an ironic epigraph for the book, with, as a further caption, the very title of Flaubert's unwritten work Sous Napoléon III. One wonders at times about the specificity of these trends and features to the particular time and place to which they are attributed, for they invite revealing comparisons across frontiers. But the book is greatly to be recommended and a pleasure to read, as much — perhaps even more — for its telling details than for its general theme.