Œuvres, xiv: Le Mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900, Dictionnaire des principaux poètes français du xixe siècle by Catulle Mendès (review)

So vital were literature and culture to national identity in nineteenth-century France that successive regimes commissioned reports charting their progress: Napoleon tasked Marie-Joseph Chénier with writing a history of French literature after 1789, while Napoleon III ordered a review of poetry since 1830 from Théophile Gautier. It is little surprise, then, that the architects of the Third Republic invited Catulle Mendès, poet, journalist, and founder of the Revue fantaisiste, to pick up the story where Gautier, his former father-in-law, had left it in 1867. Although Mendès missed his original deadline — the Paris Exposition universelle of 1900 —, his report was published by the Imprimerie nationale in 1902, coinciding with Victor Hugo’s centenary celebrations and earning Mendès the title of Officier de la Légion d’honneur. As Ida Merello observes in her Introduction to this critical edition, Mendès was chosen for this state-sanctioned project precisely because he was unfashionable as a poet. By the early 1870s, the poetic avant-garde had moved away from tradition and national values, idolizing instead Baudelaire, who was considered such a dangerous influence on young people that he was not yet on the school curriculum, and barely mentioned in similar literary histories. Merello highlights Mendès’s devotion to Hugo, whose poetry several of his contemporaries saw as frustratingly conservative. Reviewers criticized Mendès for focusing on the Parnassians, ‘imbus de l’âme nationale’ (p. 184), to the detriment of other, bolder, movements, and for articulating middle-of-the-road, bourgeois tastes; he summarily dismisses Rimbaud and Laforgue, and Mallarmé is written off as obscure. In contrast to the cosmopolitan outlook of Gautier’s report, which recognized foreign influences, notably English and German, Mendès defends the literary nationalism which was central to the early Third Republic’s educational project. Vers libre, he claims, is not really French, but, rather, an aberration produced by a young Polish Jew, Marie Krysinska, and a Peruvian, Pedro Della Rocca de Vergalo, ‘féru, comme beau-coup d’étrangers, de transporter dans notre langue les règles prosodiques et même grammaticales de sa langue natale’ (pp. 217–18). Mendès does manage to go beyond the cliché of Leconte de Lisle impassible, and professes admiration for Baudelaire the poet, if not the man. Yet despite attention to French-language poets outside France — notably the Belgian symbolists — some blind spots remain: ‘Il semble que la poésie des femmes ne devrait être, comme leur grâce, comme leur belle humeur, [. . .] qu’un charme de plus dans la maison’ (p. 265). Throughout, literary landmarks are mapped onto historical ones — ‘La préface de Cromwell se parallélise avec le serment du Jeu de Paume’ (p. 137) — as Mendès traces ‘la prodigieuse lignée de chefs-d’oeuvre’ (p. 69) from the medieval troubadours, ‘notre primitif instinct lyrique et épique’ (p. 61), via a sterile, royal eighteenth century, to the Romantic renaissance. Such is his insistence on national roots that half the report — a hundred pages — has passed before he reaches his start date of 1867. The final thousand pages feature Mendès’s near-exhaustive index of nineteenth-century French-language poets, with press cuttings, reviews, and excerpts from correspondence. As well as illustrating how poetic value was negotiated through continuous critical dialogue, this precious resource sheds fascinating light on the fate of countless also-rans who could well be due rediscovery.