Batailles d'écrivains: littérature et politique, 1870-1914 (review)

Géraldi Leroy's volume surveys the political debates in which writers intervened in France in the period between 1870 and 1914, in order to build up a picture of the ways in which literary figures of the time began to delineate features of what has since become the classic role of the French intellectual. The volume is organized thematically, each chapter focusing on the issues and events which Leroy considers as characteristic of the period. These include Franco–German relations; the Paris Commune; the Dreyfus Affair; the debate over political regimes and over the separation of Church and State; colonial expansion; and the debate over the rights and conditions of the working classes. Each chapter opens with a brief summary of the historical and political events with which the intellectual debates are concerned, which is followed by an overview of the opinions of well-known literary figures commenting at the time. The volume provides a reliable panorama of the major debates of the time and of the constellation of opinions generated around them. As Leroy states, however, the study is an 'ouvrage de synthèse' (p. 5), aimed mainly at students of French history who are not familiar with the literature of the period, and students of French literature who are not familiar with the politics and history of the period. Much of the ground covered is therefore well known, particularly in the chapters on the Paris Commune and the Dreyfus Affair, where the standard scholarly works on the period have been well used and duly referenced. On the other hand, Leroy's chapters covering less well-trodden ground for literary historians, such as the intervention of writers in debates around the colonial expansion of the 1880s and around workers' rights and welfare from the 1890s onwards, provide an original and informative complement to the more familiar topics. Overall, the study is clear and scrupulous in siting writers in relation to political parties and public opinion of the day, and in charting the complex shades of opinion that a writer such a Flaubert displayed when faced with, for example, the cataclysm of the Franco-Prussian War (pp. 20–22). The Conclusion provides useful links to the present day, pointing to the modernity of late nineteenth-century France as it reminds the reader of the extent to which a number of the vital debates accompanying the founding of the French Third Republic continue to have currency today. Leroy's approach is more pedagogical than scholarly, each chapter providing a stand-alone guide to its topic of study. There are useful sections of further reading and a chronology of the period, but the lack of any index makes it difficult to use the book effectively either as reference volume or research tool. Further, the cultural premises of the volume are fairly traditional ones, such that the uninformed reader could be left with the impression that the cultivated writers of the day were the main opinion-formers of the period. For, while Leroy amply demonstrates that between 1870 and 1914 'L'idée d'une responsabilité propre des écrivains à laquelle ils ne pouvaient se soustraire ait été largement partagée' (p. 325), there is little mention of the circuits by which the views of this 'fraction cultivée de l'opinion' were themselves modelled by the opinions expressed in, for example, the vast printed press and popular culture of the period.