Stealing Things: Theft and the Author in Nineteenth-Century France by Rosemary A. Peters (review)

This book traces the evolution of the notion of property and theft in nineteenth-century French literary works and non-fiction. For the contemporary author, a drastic societal shift after the Revolution led to a rethinking and redefining of these concepts. Whereas in the Ancien Régime property referred mostly to land and was reserved for the nobility, major social changes during the nineteenth century resulted in a broadening of the discussion of property and theft to include larger sections of society and go beyond physical objects. Bourgeois anxiety in respect of objects increased, and intellectual property became a real concern for the majority of authors. Urban development caused thieves to adapt to their new environment and focus their activity on the city. Rosemary A. Peters’s use of both canonical texts and paraliterary genres to explore and analyse such changes reveals a broad and original approach to these issues. She starts by examining three thefts described in Rousseau’s Confessions, showing how these autobiographical episodes serve to underline and criticize Ancien-Régime power structures. Peters then uses an early work of Balzac, Le Code des gens honnêtes, to show that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thieves proved capable of adapting to the many changes that affected their environment, particularly with regard to surveillance, punishment, and the urban space, and learned to infiltrate public and private spaces without being recognized. She thus presents Balzac’s work as a way to educate and warn inhabitants of urban areas. There is very little mention of works by other major authors such as Victor Hugo or Eugène Sue. Although Peters recognizes that these writers described ‘an underworld’ (p. 11), it would have been helpful if she had defined this milieu by making a comparison with Balzac’s ‘invisible thief’. With regard to Eugène François Vidocq and the comtesse de Ségur, Peters treats both figures in the same section. She explains the specificity and impact of Vidocq on criminal fiction and on the popular perception of crime, raising the question of the inauthenticity of published works. In the comtesse de Ségur’s work, theft is as much a tool for reaching young female readers and teaching them a moral lesson as it is a way of introducing the discussion of feminine transgression, which becomes essential in the fin de siècle. The final section deals with the question of gender, in which Peters discusses the rise of the middle-class kleptomaniac female as parallelling the development of the department store. While the legal system considered shoplifting to be the result of a mental handicap or disease rather than a crime, literary works such as Zola’s Au bonheur des dames portrayed female thieves stealing out of necessity; these women were therefore difficult to classify and punish. Throughout her study Peters strives to consider both the historical and social context, as well as take into account the development of sciences such as criminology or graphology. The result is a work that offers an extensive and complete understanding of the representation of theft in nineteenth-century France.