Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture: Time, Politics and Class by Claire White (review)

The opposition between work and leisure was a pertinent problem for artists and socialists alike in the nineteenth century. For socialists it was clear that the technological and industrial future would have to be organized by and designed for the working class, who manned the machines and factories that would produce unprecedented wealth and progress for humanity. Yet the grinding drudgery and subhuman toil of such environments meant that any socialist future would have to transform and revalorize work from the subordinated and gruesome labour of the bourgeois factory or mine, so memorably captured in Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series. Zola’s naturalist novels are the focus of Claire White’s first chapter, which analyses the straitjacketed, or sometimes corseted, bodies of Zola’s workers at leisure, whose precious time away from the alienation of the factory floor or coalface is filled with a second, more insidious alienation—the ‘pseudofreedoms’ (p. 72) of escapism, hedonism, and consumer-focused distractions from the mundane working week. For Zola, the very distinctions between the work of the capitalist society and the time given over for leisure within it are at once arbitrary and repressive. Yet while Zola would eventually address the woes of naturalist society in his novel Travail (the subject of White’s final chapter), White also notes the Zolian critical reflection awoken by capitalist leisure’s false sense of liberty. This latter would cause a rupture between the spaces of work and play in what White terms an ‘aesthetics of alienation’ (p. 72). The artificial divisions of capitalist work and leisure, and the artistic questions and crises they cause, are also found in Jules Laforgue’s ‘Dimanches’ poetry, whose pessimistic appraisals of the repetitive cycles of bourgeois labour and leisure (which in White’s nuanced and exciting reading owe much to the sabbatical philosophies of Pascal and Schopenhauer), provide a self-reflexive political critique to go hand in hand with the poet’s formal experimentation. Indeed, the divisions of work and leisure permeate into an artist’s own practice, whose notions of labour and productivity do not always sit easily within the frameworks of an industrial society. For neo-impressionist painter Maximilien Luce, art had to continue to engage with working-class politics, the painter creating a body of work whose depictions of the everyday routines and action of the worker provide a radical alternative to the more utopian or bourgeois depictions of the workingclass experience of work and leisure. Where Luce was to find a naturalism in his tender paintings of the working class, Zola’s Travail discarded it in favour of a sentimental prediction of the harmonization of work and leisure but in so doing created a paradox whereby work was elevated as a supreme value in order to transcend the work-centric, capitalist society. White’s study contains intriguing new readings — particularly on Laforgue and Luce — that will help frame the French cultural response to the socialist future so eagerly anticipated in nineteenth-century society.