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19th century French poetry
November 15, 2019 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Riots and Revolutions in 19th-Century French Poetry
Friday, November 15, 2019
4:00pm to 5:30pm
The French House
Catherine Witt, Associate Professor, Reed College
Poets and Riots, from Barbier to Baudelaire
The word émeute (meaning variously riot, uprising, rampage, or mob) abounds in mid-nineteenth-century French poetry, where it conjures visions of storms, political rage, revolutionary riff raff, and explosions of noise. The prevalence of this term in mid-century poetry seems unsurprising given that the period was rife with popular insurrections, including two major revolutions: the “Three Glorious Days” of July 1830 and the Revolution of 1848. It was also a period of intense change, marked by the rise of new political issues (civil liberties, women’s questions, social utopias, industrialism) as well as new political groups (the radicals and socialists) that would prevail over French politics for decades to come. Important literary figures of the time, such as the critic and journalist Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and the philosopher Pierre Leroux, were impassioned advocates for the production of politically committed poetry that would reflect the hopes and concerns of the time by making room for l’émeute. However, a closer look at the poets whom we still read and celebrate today, such as Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Baudelaire, reveals a circumspection with regard to l’émeute when it appears in their works. What lies behind this hesitation? Does it suffice to attribute poets’ reservations to an apolitical ideal of pure poetry? Why does l’émeute continue to knock at the surface of these poems? The talk will offer a few ways of thinking through the stubborn presence of this trope in nineteenth-century French poetry and what it might say about the relationship between writing and rioting.
Recommended Readings:
« L’Émeute » dans Iambes (1831) d’Auguste Barbier ainsi que « Paysage » et « Le Soleil » de Baudelaire dans Les Fleurs du Mal.
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Iambes_et_Po%C3%A8mes
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_mal/1861
Préface de Hugo pour Les Feuilles d’automne (1831) et sonnet que Gautier inscrit en préface à Émaux et camées (1852).
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Feuilles_d%E2%80%99automne/Pr%C3%A9face
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%89maux_et_Cam%C3%A9es/Pr%C3%A9face
Catherine Witt is an associate professor of French at Reed College, where she teaches nineteenth-century literature and theory as well as film studies. Her research centers on poetry, poetics of translation, and philological thought from the nineteenth century onwards. She has published essays on topics ranging from the anecdote and the epistemology of je-ne-sais-quoi to questions of memory, reading, plagiarism, and judgement in the works of Baudelaire, Hugo, Verlaine, and others. She has coedited two collections of essays: Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France: Critical Reflections (2015) with Joseph Acquisto and Adrianna Paliyenko, and Ententes––à partir d’Hélène Cixous (2019) with Stéphanie Boulard.
Nicolas Valazza, Associate Professor, Indiana University
Victor Hugo et la révolution à venir
Après une jeunesse royaliste, Victor Hugo a progressivement adhéré, à partir des années 1830, à la cause révolutionnaire et républicaine, jusqu’à se ranger à la gauche de l’Assemblée nationale dès 1850, sous la Deuxième République. L’adhésion de Victor Hugo à la Révolution s’est d’autant plus radicalisée, tout en se transformant, à la suite du coup d’État du futur Napoléon III le 2 décembre 1851, entraînant la proscription de l’écrivain. Le propos de cette communication est de montrer, en examinant un choix de poèmes écrits pendant l’exil, extraits des Châtiments, des Contemplations et de La Légende des siècles, comment l’œuvre du poète en est venue à se confondre avec l’action révolutionnaire, de sorte que le bannissement du corps politique a déterminé l’émergence, par une substitution métonymique, d’un corpus poétique mettant en œuvre une révolution par le livre. La poésie de l’exil s’est ainsi faite prophétie pour annoncer une révolution à venir qui devait consacrer le triomphe de la « Lumière » et de la « Liberté », en aboutissant à la création des États-Unis d’Europe. L’histoire en décida autrement.
Recommended Readings:
« Stella » ; « Lux » in Les Châtiments ; « Plein ciel » ; « Abîme » ; « Océan » in La Légende des siècles.
Nicolas Valazza is Associate Professor of French at Indiana University Bloomington and the US Correspondent for the Société des études romantiques et dix-neuviémistes. His research interests focus, on the one hand, on the relationship between painting and literature and, on the other hand, on 19th-century French poetry and book history. His first book, Crise de plume et souveraineté du pinceau. Écrire la peinture de Diderot à Proust, was published by Classiques Garnier in 2013 and his second book, La Poésie délivrée. Le livre en question du Parnasse à Mallarmé, was published by Droz in 2018.
