Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration by Keri Yousif (review)

The rivalry between authors and illustrators during the July Monarchy exemplified in the relationship between Balzac and the artist J.J. Grandville forms the basis of Keri Yousif’s thoughtful and fascinating examination of the changes in the cultural field of book production in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Taking as her point of departure Bourdieu’s articulation of the cultural field as a site of struggle to amass economic and symbolic capital, Yousif explores the aesthetic and financial tensions between writers and illustrators in a period that witnessed the primacy of the word challenged by the popularity of illustration. Her book is beautifully illustrated with two dozen black-and-white reproductions from collections at the Newberry Library and the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

Contemporaries who were both competitors and occasionally collaborators, Balzac (1799-1850) and Grandville (1803-1847) provide “a case study for the processes of change within the cultural field” (2) during the July Monarchy. Although not as well known today among the English-speaking public as Balzac, Grandville (pseudonym of Jean-Ignace-Isadore Gérard) enjoyed immense popularity in his time both as a caricaturist and as an illustrator of classic texts such as the Fables of La Fontaine. He was and remains particularly appreciated for his highly original half human/half animal characters and anthropomorphic plants; his satirical, fanciful Un autre monde (1844) foreshadowed the art of the surrealists.

In her introduction, “Out of Bounds: Book Illustration in France, 1830-1848,” Yousif briefly recounts the factors contributing to what she calls the “arranged marriage” (18) of writers and illustrators during this period: the rebirth of the satirical press in the early years of the reign of Louis Philippe; technological innovations, including lithography, that made the mass production of images possible; the rise of the serialized novel or feuilleton; the commercialization of the illustrated novel; and the restrictive press laws of 1835 that introduced prior censorship of images, thereby causing visual artists to shift from political to social satire and book illustration. These factors led to a restructuring of power relationships between writers and illustrators as the latter sought greater autonomy and recognition as artists in their own right. Although Balzac and Grandville directly collaborated only twice, first in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: encyclopédie morale du XIXe siècle (1840-42) and again in Grandville’s Les scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (1842), their competition throughout their respective highly prolific careers reflected broader changes within the literary marketplace in which the illustrated book became increasingly an object of commodification.

Yousif’s first chapter, “The Frames of Competition: Balzac, Grandville, and Caricature,” establishes the context in which the two men, early in their careers, sought to establish their credentials as author/visual artist as opposed to journalist/ illustrator but found themselves “framed” by the constraints of the popular press that produced their works and provided them with their financial livelihood. Yousif examines Balzac’s 1830 essay, “Les artistes,” several of his articles dealing with the literary marketplace (1830-1834) and the short story Gobseck from Les scènes de la vie privée (1830) in which Balzac established himself as a “verbal painter” (38) of the inner workings of society. In a similar fashion Yousif shows how Grandville used wordplay, self-representation, and animal tropes to differentiate himself from his peers and to critique the market system in his breakthrough Les métamorphoses du jour (1829). Throughout her book, Yousif provides insightful interpretations of Grandville’s illustrations, extending her analyses to the layout of pages and placement of illustrations in relation to text.

An author himself of verbal caricatures for the popular satirical press, Balzac published three reviews of works by Grandville that Yousif discusses: the album Voyage pour l’éternité (1830) and individual prints, “Moeurs aquatiques” and “Carnaval politique: les bacchanales de 1831.” In her analysis, Yousif argues that Balzac set out to demonstrate...