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  • French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War by Nicholas White
  • Steven Wilson
French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War. By Nicholas White. (Legenda Main Series.) Oxford: Legenda, 2013. x + 196 pp.

The myriad philosophical and ethical questions posed by the dissolution of the marriage bond and the separation of would-be life-partners are an ongoing point of discussion among cultural and legal observers. Indeed, in some European countries debates on the fundamental principle of divorce legalization have been a source of bitter controversy over the last twenty years. Nicholas White’s impressive analysis of the discursive tropes of divorce in nineteenth-century France, and their literary treatment, reminds us that an initial law legalizing divorce in that country, reflecting the ideal of liberté, was passed as far back as 1792. As the title of his study intimates, the history of divorce then fluctuated according to the rhythms of revolution: suppressed at the time of the Bourbon Restoration, raised as a social concern during periods of democratic uprising (1830, 1848, 1871), and appropriated as a key issue by the nascent feminist movement of the 1860s, the law permitting divorce in restricted circumstances — what became known as the Loi Naquet — was definitively passed in 1884. A comprehensive Introduction and meticulously researched first chapter, running to over eighty pages and one hundred and forty reference notes between them, provide an elaborate philosophical and historical framework for later chapters, which turn their attention to French divorce fiction. Two contemporary sociologists, Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, offer conceptual paradigms for reading narrative representations of divorce; the latter’s metaphor of ‘liquid love’, by which divorce is seen as emblematic of modernity, is particularly instructive. The book’s literary chapters then examine different effects on plot trajectory triggered by the Loi Naquet, from the utopian motif that characterizes a number of female-authored narratives, to the atavistic force of jealousy that women with a sexual past inspired in their male lovers, to the pain and tragedy that divorce leaves behind. The originality of this important study is clear: it is the first book in English or French to focus on the divorce fiction that surrounds the Loi Naquet. The monograph’s ambitious breadth is reflected in the range of authors discussed: in addition to references to canonical figures such as Maupassant and Bourget, renewed consideration is afforded to the ‘Great Unread’, or what is termed ‘“minor” women writers and unfashionable patriarchs’ (p. 145), including André Léo, Claire Vautier, Marie-Anne de Bovet, and Camille Pert, and Anatole France, Alphonse Daudet, and Edouard Rod. While this means that some space is necessarily devoted to an element of storytelling, close readings and an appreciation of nuance reveal important details not only about the complex relationship between public and private spheres in France at the end of the nineteenth century, but also about how the novel is forced to negotiate a new revolution, this time of a social and sexual nature. In this way, the narrative possibilities contained within the divorce motif are shown to have profoundly influenced — arguably, more than the facts of the Loi Naquet itself — the development of modern French fiction during the early Third Republic.

Steven Wilson
Queen’s University Belfast
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