Bas-bleus, filles publiques, and the Literary Marketplace in the Work of Barbey d’Aurevilly

Barbey d’Aurevilly is renowned for his representation of women in Les Diaboliques and for his hostile criticism of women writers, particularly in Les Bas-bleus. This essay offers a reconsideration of this notoriety by investigating earlier portrayals of bas-bleus (in the work of Daumier and Nadar) in the context of the print industry and literary culture in nineteenth-century France. Barbey’s fiction and criticism contrast the figures of the bas-bleu and the sexually promiscuous woman and illustrate a pervasive resistance to changing gender and class roles in early bourgeois industrial culture. The idea that women who did not conform to traditional gender paradigms were either monstrous, criminal, or licentious is reflected in Barbey’s work in the juxtaposition of the woman writer with the promiscuous woman — from adulteress to prostitute. Similar representations are regularly featured in the literary, critical, and journalistic production in the decades that preceded Barbey’s publications. Les Diaboliques in dialogue with Barbey’s critical commentary of bas-bleus and the press exposes deep-rooted apprehensions towards a changing social climate and a scepticism of power relationships amid political instability and popular affinities for democratic ideals. Although Barbey is frequently singled out as a fierce misogynist, numerous textual and visual images of women resisting convention present a perversion of the newly accorded freedoms of a young consumer society and reinforce the suspicions and cultural reactions towards women and the expression of desire in public life.