Contrasting Characters as Images of Progress in Nineteenth-Century French Novels

I show that nineteenth-century French novelists respond to rapid economic, technological, and social changes with a narrative strategy that reflects at once enthusiasm and concern. They represent progress with two protagonists, one dangerous and the other altruistic. Thus, there are two scientists in Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and Bourget’s Le disciple; two revolutionaries in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize; and two capitalists in Madame de Ségur’s Fortune de Gaspard. Revealing the danger of progress in the ominous character (who dies or changes for the better at the novel’s end), writers let the idea of progress survive in the other character.