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  • Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture
  • Michael Tilby
Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture. Edited by David Evans and Kate Griffiths. (Faux titre, 363). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 322 pp., ill.

This illuminating and highly readable collection of essays derives from the 2007 conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes. It combines unity of focus with a fascinating diversity of subject. Nicole Mozet's potentially important presentation of the conflict in Balzac between novelist and ideologue suffers from a relaxed and sketchy treatment that betrays its origins in a plenary lecture, but it contains some choice examples and a number of interpretative nuggets. Somewhat more sharply, Damian Catani reads Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize in parallel with Confiant's late twentieth-century treatment, in L'Archet du colonel, of Napoleon's reintroduction of slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Francesco Manzini persuasively argues that Stendhal's paradigms of abusive medical power in Lucien Leuwen and Lamiel represent a rejection of the attempts by Cabanis and the Ideologues to regulate French society. Elisabeth Gerwin presents a powerful reading of Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or in terms of de Marsay as Benjaminian flâneur. In what will surely become a landmark essay, Jean-Marie Seillan identifies in Huysmans's writings the presence of an adherence to conspiracy theory. Gilles Bonnet, with the aid of some fine close reading of À vau-l'eau as well as of L'Art moderne, shows the same author's art criticism to constitute a sophisticated reaction against the institutionalization of art. Cassandra Hamrick goes behind the surface of Gautier's account of the lacklustre Salon of 1844 to tease out his profound perception of the limitations of institutionalized art. Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini usefully analyses the neglected provincial volumes of Les Français peints per eux-mêmes as an attempt to construct national identity. Both Mary Orr and Juliet Simpson show that the inscription of institutional power can be identified very effectively at the microcosmic level, through, respectively, an extraordinary Rouen museum guide of 1859 that nonetheless raises important questions regarding the ideological intent behind the museum's natural history exhibits, and two examples of art-historical writing from the 1870s that illustrate a clear movement towards the institutionalization of art history. Rosemary Lloyd imaginatively revisits the Cuvier-Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire debate in the context of a lecture on molluscs given by two of their junior colleagues. Noteworthy are four genuinely informative investigations: Claire O'Mahoney's reconstruction of the 'decoration, inauguration and critical reception' of the Capitole in Toulouse; Janice Best's examination of the polemics surrounding the hundred and fifty bronze statues erected in Paris between 1871 and 1914 in an attempt to create a founding myth for the Third Republic; Leonard Koos's well-documented account of the building of colonial Algiers; and Scott Gavorsky's revelation of the unexpected importance attached to the ownership of school buildings in nineteenth-century France. Sonya Stephens's incisive demonstration of Rodin's promotion of himself as an institution is appropriately positioned last. The editors provide a judicious Introduction that highlights the century's widespread and relentless commitment to institutionalization. They, perhaps understandably, stop short of raising questions of theory and methodology, but so too do most of their contributors. Strikingly, the latter make, for example, only occasional (though invariably apposite) reference to Foucault.

Michael Tilby
Selwyn College, Cambridge
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