De Scribe à Hugo: la condition de l’auteur (1815–1870) by Jacques Boncompain (review)

Jacques Boncompain’s account of the establishment and early history of three literary and artistic professional associations in a key period of the French nineteenth century casts light on a number of less well-known aspects of French literary history. Boncompain studies the condition de l’auteur through the prism of the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (SACD), the Société des gens de lettres (SGDL), and the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM). Owing to its senior status, and the author’s position as a leading light of the association, it is the SACD that receives the greatest attention, and the work’s main focus is on the history of the theatre. Boncompain situates his account within the context of the political, social, and cultural changes under the four regimes he covers, allowing him to deal with the popularization of the theatre (the rise of the café-concert, for example, is often alluded to) and the growth of the market in all types of literature over the period. He covers to varying degrees such matters as intellectual property and the legislation surrounding it, censorship, and the associations’ establishment of benevolent funds, and he incorporates into his narrative relevant historical incidents such as the assassination of the duc de Berry and the Fieschi incident, with their effects on the censorship regime. All this notwithstanding, there is less detail than one would expect on the changes in the market for literature, and, although censorship is covered to some degree, the absence, for example, of any reference to the trials of Baudelaire or Flaubert is surprising. Of the two authors named in the book’s title, Scribe is more fully and perhaps more sympathetically covered; Hugo is presented as a less altruistic rival, somewhat eclipsed during the Second Empire, under which Scribe prospered politically. Indeed, Boncompain openly presents Napoleon III’s regime, which he sees as largely benevolent towards authors, as deserving of sympathetic reassessment. The sheer detail of the bureaucracy and politicking within the professional associations (especially the SACD, to whose archives Boncompain had extensive access) is at times overwhelming, and the reader may sympathize with the Goncourts’ observation that ‘[c]’est décidément plus difficile de distribuer une pièce que de former un ministère’ (quoted on p. 225). Conversely, Boncompain is at his most engaging when presenting telling anecdotes or informative details: his account of the status of the claque during the period and his brief sketch of the historical fortunes of French drama in England are good examples. Perhaps inevitably in such a substantial work, there are a number of editorial issues — not only typographical errors, but occasional sentences mangled beyond intelligibility, and certain of Boncompain’s stylistic tics (notably his overuse of the infinitif de narration) and outright grammatical mistakes can be distracting. However, in its scale, its ambition, and the thoroughness of its research, this is a significant scholarly contribution, albeit most appropriate to a rather specialist market.