The Censorship Effect: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Formation of French Modernism by William Olmsted (review)

In his re-examination of the infamous 1857 trials of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal on charges of blasphemy and obscenity, William Olmsted offers his analysis as a corrective to the conventional reading of the triumphant rise of French modernism against the philistine censors of Second Empire France. Taking on Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that the ‘conquest of autonomy’ achieved by Baudelaire and Flaubert conditioned the emergence of modernism (see Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. by Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)), Olmsted argues that their breakthrough stylistic innovations were not purely disinterested, aesthetic matters devoid of socio-economic concerns, but rather ‘the products of intense struggle with the institution of censorship’ (p. 2). This nuanced and ambitious claim contends that crucial modernist techniques (free indirect discourse, dramatic monologue, fragmented speakers) emerged precisely out of the necessity of both complicity with and resistance to the censors, collusion and evasion, their equivocal, indeterminate nature thus bearing the marks of what Olmsted calls ‘the censorship effect’. Olmsted suggests that Flaubert and Baudelaire practised ‘immoral moralism’ (p. 23): the portrayal of immorality in a detached, impersonal style with no explicit moral condemnation, but one in which the overall moral judgement is clear enough (or so they argued) in the context of the work as a whole. The resulting uncertainty in the moral stance of their works ironically both attracted the attention of the censors and allowed the authors a measure of plausible deniability, which their lawyers asserted with varying degrees of success at trial. Olmsted argues that Flaubert’s lawyer successfully recontextualized the indicted passages of his novel in the larger moral frame of the work, and demonstrates that Flaubert pre-emptively resorted to euphemisms for Emma Bovary’s sexual corruption, forging an indirect, allusive style that superficially reveals nothing, but that the modern reader learned to decipher. Baudelaire’s lawyer was less successful in this strategy of recontextualization, and Olmsted understandably devotes considerably more attention to Baudelaire’s ‘waltz’ with the censors, given the verdict against six of his poems. One chapter examines Baudelaire’s precautionary rhetorical strategies in distancing himself from literary realism and from the blasphemous speaker of ‘Le Reniement de saint Pierre’; a second dissects the obscenity charges against the six condemned poems and Baudelaire’s futile attempts at pre-emptive self-censorship; and a third analyses his strategies of submission and defiance in subsequent editions of his poetry (in particular the foreclosure of female sexual agency in the substitution of ‘Le Masque’ for ‘Les Bijoux’). Olmsted’s claims are closely argued and meticulously documented with respect both to the scholarship on Flaubert and Baudelaire, and to the criticism on censorship, and he makes a convincing case in the relatively narrow instances he examines. The jury is still out, though, on the more ambitious assertion, since the broader motivations, aims, and significance of the aesthetic innovations of Flaubert and Baudelaire are inherently more difficult to prove and extend well beyond censorship concerns. Nevertheless, Olmsted’s work provides an intriguing new perspective on the two trials and convincingly demonstrates that future research will need to reckon with the undeniable role of the ‘censorship effect’ in the emergence of French modernism.