Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France by Christine Haynes (review)

Baudelairean ideal of the voyage toward transcendence, culminating in the final liberation of death. Jane Mayo Roos’s contribution is an analysis of Manet’s Le chanteur espagnol, Le chemin de fer, and other paintings. She reveals the complexities and anomalies of pictures that seem at first glance to be realistic scenes taken from life. Disjunction , disconnection, and disunity characterize the works of an artist who embraced chance and contingency. Robert Lethbridge examines the curious personal and artistic interplay between Manet and Émile Zola. Manet’s 1868 portrait of the novelist and the latter’s critical writings on the artist were as much self-definitions as they were about the other. Zola found in Manet a positive model for his own aspirations at the same time that he rejected Cézanne as a negative model. He also transposed motifs from Manet’s paintings into his novels in his belief that writing had a greater capacity for expressivity than the pictorial. James H. Rubin’s analysis addresses Manet’s paintings and lithographs with a political message. Rubin says that, although Manet admired Delacroix as a defender of freedom, he rejected his predecessor’s optimism about the unity of workers and bourgeoisie in their revolt against monarchical tyranny. Manet adopted instead Daumier’s more pessimistic view on class conflict, injustice, and violence in contemporary France. Therese Dolan presents an in-depth study of the philosophy of synesthesia and its influence on Manet as revealed in his pastel portrait of the composer Ernest Cabaner, who was himself a practitioner in his music and verse of the Baudelairean concept of the analogies between music, poetry, and painting. Marylin R. Brown focuses on the mirror reflections in Bar aux Folies-Bergères. She shows how this work exemplifies the theme of the double, as an expression of psychological and social alienation, which developed in German Romanticism and later became a key concept of twentieth-century psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan). The final essay, by Steven Z. Levine, contrasts T.J. Clark’s socio-historical approach to Manet’s works, in which he interprets the hard edges between colors and flat surfaces to be expressions of class barriers and intersections, with Michael Fried’s emphasis on more purely artistic considerations. Fried finds in the struggle between artifice/ theatricality and authenticity/self-absorption the dominant feature of eighteenth and nineteenth-century French painting. Manet’s originality was to openly acknowledge the relationship of the picture with its beholder. University of Denver (CO) James P. Gilroy HAYNES, CHRISTINE. Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. ISBN 978-0-674-03576-8. Pp. xiii + 328. $45. This detailed analysis of the nineteenth-century book trade will be of interest to scholars of cultural and literary studies. Contrary to the accepted idea that the literary marketplace was “a natural concomitant of industrialization and modernization” (2), Haynes importantly claims that the marketplace was, rather, a “contingent outcome of political struggle, on both the professional and national levels” (3). While acknowledging the role of technological and structural developments in establishing the literary market, Lost Illusions focuses instead on the laws governing it. This book reanimates debates surrounding these laws, which, like the nature of literary “commodities” themselves, were vigorously disputed throughout the nineteenth century. Here, the “corporatist” camp of the book trade— Reviews 587 more traditional printers and book dealers who sought “limits on entry and property, in the name of public safety and education” (9)—opposed its “liberal” counterpart, which fought for the termination of licensing requirements for publishers and the extension of literary property rights for authors. Neither group’s desires were adequately fulfilled by Napoleon’s 1810 decree establishing new regulations over the post-Revolutionary book market. As Haynes shows, both sides lobbied for reform, and yet this legislation (for some too liberal, for others, too protectionist) remained unchanged throughout the first half of the century, despite regime changes. In fact, it was not until the Second Empire’s authoritarian regime that the “divorce between state and market” took place in the book trade (190). Haynes effectively demonstrates that this liberalization of the literary market in the 1860s occurred for two reasons: because publishers...