French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

When Nicolas Sarkozy voluntarily exiled himself from France on a summer vacation in the United States less than three months after taking office as president of the republic, the minor furor that erupted in his country was widely attributed by the press to his vacation venue. But perhaps the stir was less about the place and its geographical distance from home than about what Sarkozy chose to do there and how he chose to do it, which together reinforced a mode of being and a pace of activity that his compatriots had already identified as psychologically and symbolically alienated from la France profonde even before he left it for the American wilds. Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, is admittedly well outside the Hexagon and even further removed from Gallic values and traditions. But the sins of Sarkozy’s villégiature on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee—judging by the nature of the press coverage it received—seem to be more significantly linked to his speed and frequency of locomotion than to the territory traversed. Whether paddling a canoe, leaping onto a photographer’s boat, shuttling between Paris and Wolfeboro, or—especially—jogging (whether in the company of friends, trailed by security attachés, or keeping up with his bicycling young son), Sarkozy was described by the New York Times as “visibly restless,” “a Frenchman in a hurry [who] maps his path.”¹ The French president’s preferred mode of ambulation of course preceded his American vacation: the iconography of his presidency was arguably set by a photograph taken in the first days of his incumbency that showed him bounding up the steps of the Elysées Palace in Nike shorts and sneakers. This was followed, just days later, by a photo on the cover of the weekly news magazine Le Point that featured Sarkozy with a jogging partner—his prime minister, François Fillon—together engaged in that very sport.²

The indignation with which the president’s Winnepesaukee sojourn was met by his people may then have less to do with the site than with the character of the vacation: less villégiature than tourisme, if we follow conventions of these terms. According to Guy Cogeval, “inherent in the concept of the villégiature is the idea of repose, in contrast to tourisme, which implies movement and activity. While both forms of travel are based upon the idea of displacement . . . unlike the touriste, who thrives upon mobility and novelty, the villégiateur is largely sedentary, preferring stability and routine.”³ Sarkozy might then technically be classified as a touriste rather than a villégiateur—despite his lodging in the American-style villa of his Microsoft friends—if the differentiating criteria have to do essentially with the comparative degree of movement and activity. An extended analogy may help to explain his constituents’ wrath: if tourisme is to villégiature as jogging is to walking, as American is to French, as novelty is to tradition, mobility to stability, and body to mind, then what is played out by Sarkozy’s Wolfeboro vacation is nothing less than an act of high cultural treason. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was quick to point out the cultural stakes in his appeal to the president to abandon a sport inherently unfitting to his cultural, intellectual and national heritage: “Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade. . . . Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging—it is management of the body.”⁴ And indeed, the New York Times article in which Finkielkraut is quoted illustrates the opposition, juxtaposing a photo of a jogging Sarkozy in shorts and damp polo shirt stuck to the visibly sweaty patches of his body, with another photo of a jauntily strolling François Mitterrand clad in beret and tweeds, Alpine walking stick in hand, surveying the (no doubt, French) countryside laid out in sweeping parcels of farmland at his feet. The caption under this photo reads, “Former President François Mitterrand loved literature and long walks.” The mode is clearly pastoral, and the reference is to a tradition that goes back to Montaigne and Rousseau. The first photo’s caption reads, “President Nicholas Sarkozy jogs in front of the pack, which some French see as undignified and—mon dieu!—vaguely American.”⁵

Before moving back to the nineteenth century, I want to flash some three hundred years farther back, moving the scene away from modern French discoveries of New England to reset it at the early French colonization of the South. In 1698, two French Canadian brothers, Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville, and Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville, left France with four ships containing two hundred settlers, a company of marines, considerable freight, and permission to establish a colony near the mouth of the Mississippi River. After founding settlements at Baton Rouge, Biloxi, and Ocean Springs, they built a fort that became the government seat in 1702. They called it Fort Louis de la Mobile, rather curiously combining the names of the indigenous Maubila people and the French king, Louis XIV. But the name Fort Louis de la Mobile, shortened to Mobile and echoed by the name of its location on the Mobile River, did not immediately endear itself to members of the early eighteenth-century French court, who evidently were not yet receptive to the local color it might have evoked through its derivation from the name of the Maubila tribe. Instead, they Gallicized it, and were dismayed by the suggestion of instability they found in the name of this colony.⁶ We might speculate that the connotation was not based on phonetics alone but had something to do with the early inhabitants of the settlements. Their ranks included Canadian fur traders and trappers, and prospective settlers from France, whose lifestyle was defined by even less reputable forms of wandering than the nomadic life of the fur trade would have entailed. Here is one historical account of the early French population of the Louisiana colony: “Debtors and vagrants, unaccustomed to the wilderness and to farming. In France, if a citizen was out of work three days, he was given a free trip to Louisiana. Women of the streets, thieves, smugglers, dealers in contraband, vagabonds . . . were sent to populate the colony.”⁷ It is reported that Bienville, who had become commander of the entire Louisiana Territory in 1701 and was therefore in the direct line of ire of the French court, contemplated changing the inauspicious name of the settlement to Immobile.

But where is nineteenth-century France in this discussion? It has in fact been hovering between the lines all along, not only in the sense that the “long nineteenth century” is ever lengthening, stretched here from 1698 to 2007, but also because my subject is part of a continuum. I have enclosed nineteenth-century travel writing between two anecdotes marking a period of roughly a century and a half on either side, with the intent not to bracket it, but to frame it within an abiding anxiety about spatial and temporal mobility: an ambivalence about crossing borders and thinking “awayness,” an apprehension about changing the rhythms of civilization and recalibrating the pace of its flow.

From there I move on with a twofold intent. I want first to explore the threat conjoined with the thrill of mobility in the text of the voyage. We are familiar with the lure emblematized by such nineteenth-century figures as the poet “with the wind at his heels” (Rimbaud, “le poète aux semelles de vent,” as Verlaine called him); the travel journalist driven to return to his almée redolent of the scent of bedbugs crushed with sandalwood (Flaubert in Egypt); the solitary novelist who strolled the streets obsessively in order better to collect eavesdropped stories (Balzac, whose fictionalized rendition of the author as flâneur appears in “Facino Cane” and La fille aux yeux d’or)—or collectively, “those who leave for the sake of leaving” (Baudelaire’s evocation, in “Le voyage,” of true voyagers, “ceux qui partent pour partir”). Here I am interested instead in the particular forms of ambivalence departure and estrangement came to wear in a literary period characterized by voyager-writers much better known for expressing the thrill. Second, I want to tease out of this golden age of travel and travel writing stereotyped as exoticizing and colonialist some prefigurations of a more modern approach: beyond orientalism—by which I mean a mode of reading and writing rather than a designation of destination—a receptivity to and humility before the other.⁸ What traces can we detect, in the nineteenth century, of the “great conversation” theorists of world literature see as fundamental to its practice today?⁹ Might travel writing back then be said to have done any of the cultural work (in the sense of engagement and exchange) that Charles Forsdick has in mind when he qualifies travel literature today as “a transcultural form . . . a changing figure and practice to explore ways in which one might move beyond any exclusive focus on France itself in order to explore the culture and cultural production of a more complex network of French-speaking spaces”?¹⁰

Though my primary mobile subject is the literary voyager (whom I will more simply refer to as “the voyager” in superficial contradistinction to other travelers or tourists), I want first to explore the larger scene of mobility. One of the most persistent discursive responses to mobility in nineteenth-century France is categorization and hierarchization, an approach that lingers in discussions of the subject today. Medical diagnosis is one form this response has traditionally taken, and fugue a late-century example. Briefly defined, the fugue diagnosis (as opposed to age-old occurrences of fugue episodes) corresponds to a gender and class-keyed transient mental illness that emerged for approximately two decades in late nineteenth and turn-of-the-twentieth-century France. It induced uncontrollable bouts of impulsive locomotion, primarily in lower-class men, who would emerge from an episode with no memory of the logistical details of their journey. In Mad Travelers, Ian Hacking places fugue in an “ecological niche” within a larger cultural environment useful for understanding the pathology in its general context.¹¹ Hacking situates fugue between a higher and a lower cultural variant: mass tourism on one hand and vagrancy on the other, which is to say somewhere between normative bourgeois culture and cultural deviancy.

The concept of ecological niche that Hacking borrows from biological and environmental studies to interpret medical culture is particularly useful for my own purposes. The “rich bio-complex” space suggested by the term “niche” is opened by four vectors, or forces, which an illness must fit in order to merit diagnosis: medical taxonomy (existing systems of classification), cultural polarity (in this case, romantic tourism and criminal vagrancy), observability (a behavior must be noticed as eccentric or aberrant if it is to become a disorder), and release (the potential to offer a zone of escape for the dysfunctional). But it is the arresting significance of the extended metaphor itself that especially draws my attention. In Hacking’s words, the value of the idea of ecological niche lies in its being “not just social, not just medical, not just coming from the patient, not just from the doctors, but from the concatenation of an extraordinarily large number of diverse types of elements which for a moment provide a stable home for certain types of manifestation of illness.”¹²

The reinforcement of “ecological niche” by “stable home” in the discussion of an illness precisely constituted by taking flight repeatedly and compulsively is extremely revealing of the paradoxical nature of this illness. As Hacking elsewhere points out, despite all his sudden departures and random wanderings, the fugueur is precisely not a homeless person, not a vagrant: “A fugueur is someone who leaves home or place of work . . . so you must have a home or place of work [in order to be a fugueur].” This is confirmed by Dr. Albert Pitres’s rather lyrical 1891 characterization of the generic fugueur: “Swearing by all the gods never again to quit his Penates, he returns home but sooner or later a new attack provokes a new escapade.” The characteristic fugueur would apparently rather stay home in his slippers, according to the following description of Albert Dadas in the first documented case, who begins to sound a bit like a would-be bourgeois: “He wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when the need took him; he deserted family, work, and daily life to walk as fast as he could, straight ahead, sometimes doing 70 kilometers a day on foot, until in the end he would be arrested for vagrancy and thrown in prison.” With only a small leap, one can follow the path of the individual fugueur as a conceptual trajectory from the pole of bourgeois stability to that of vagrant marginality. And in fact, in a clinical observation of Albert, his doctor Philippe Tissié describes what sounds like a grotesque parody of the bourgeois tourist: “Albert can forget his age, that he had his first communion . . . that he had been imprisoned as a nihilist in Moscow . . . but he always remembers the fine landscapes that he has seen and the monuments that he has admired.”¹³

Within the more general context, the fugueur’s ecological niche, influenced by a combination of overarching medical and social factors (the obvious factor here being the rise of popular tourism), and elements varying with individual patients and doctors, can be understood on a microcosmic and macrocosmic scale. For the microcosm, we can look to Albert’s case, that of “a bicycling physician and his patient, a demented gas fitter who obsessively and uncontrollably takes off for days or months or years, often walking 40 miles a day, losing his papers, his identity, but not his demand to go, go, go.”¹⁴. As Hacking points out, Tissié, the physician who put fugue on the diagnostic map, had a vested interest all his life in mobility, having worked as an adolescent in the Toulouse railroad station before shipping out of Bordeaux as a young man on the steamer Niger that did the Bordeaux-Senegal run. Later in life he was involved in the institutionalizing of biking and was a leader in the physical education movement in France; he made all his house calls on a bicycle. He may have been especially susceptible to the case of a compulsive walker who had grown up in provincial Bordeaux, a city known for its staid immovability, but also home to the main port of departure for sub-Saharan Africa and South America. Although Albert hated the way his compulsive traveling interfered with a normal life, he had since childhood been fascinated by stories of travel to distant lands. I cannot do justice to the literariness of this case history without teasing out one minuscule filament: Albert, we recall, was by occupation a gas-fitter, the issue of a long line of gas company workers. Gas, the dictionary says, is a substance that possesses “perfect molecular mobility and the property of indefinite expansion.” Is there not some poetic logic in the fact that the prototypical fugueur was allied by trade with such a volatile substance, and—ironically for this man who could not contain his own volatility—with the process of channeling it?

On the macrocosmic level, we remember that Hacking situates the fugueur between the cultural polarities of virtue and vice incarnated in the popular tourist and the vagrant, each of whom attained heightened social visibility in France in the second half of the nineteenth century. But the sociocultural landscape of mobility was also marked by a motley array of other players, including not only producers of travel guides, railroad timetables, and maps (emblems of the tourist industry) but also Gypsies, wandering Jews, immigrants, geographers, archaeologists, monument inspectors, soldiers, military deserters, flâneurs, and painters, along with literary voyagers—not to mention a host of other figures whose tasks were not to wander but to patrol borders, check passports and livrets militaires, and apprehend transgressers: in short, to control or arrest mobility.¹⁵ So in displacing Hacking’s focus on the fugueur to my own on the flight of the writer, I want to retain the concept of ecological niche while thickening it. Rather than try to place the literary voyager along with all these other figures in particular subdivisions within or beyond Hacking’s poles of tourism and vagrancy—smaller and smaller niches that inevitably imply a feeding chain—I prefer to imagine a vast cultural ecosystem in constant circulation (a bit like a mobile version of the Douanier Rousseau’s painting The Dream). Thinking about the voyager as part of a swarm that includes vagabonds, nomads, Gypsies, deserters, bourgeois tourists, flâneurs, fugueurs, and hysterics—to name but a few—might broaden our understanding of the complexities at play in nineteenth-century travel writing. Let us then leave in place a wide cultural landscape, just imagining the possibility that the picture in which voyager, tourist, vagrant, and fugueur coexisted in their distinct imposed niches might have been differently jigsawed.

While it is tempting to subdivide the background cultural environment I refer to into three fields: institutional tourism, deviant (pathological and criminal) tourism, and antitourism, it is inevitable that categorizing in this way, like assigning niches or establishing diagnoses, works to multiply lateral and hierarchical boundaries in a cultural system more realistically subject to flow. Similarly, efforts to distinguish the voyager from (for example) the tourist and the fugueur and the vagabond risk reconstructing the system of boundaries and borders inherent within the discourse of any of these classifications and impeding their interinvolvement. I turn now to examples from two fields: tourism and medicine.

In a study of French travel guides, Michael Rowland takes note of “the principle of excluding all but the foreseen as one ventures onto unfamiliar ground.” The Michelin guide vert, for example, takes pains not to let the reader wander through the book or the countryside: it gives detailed instructions for the use of the guide’s contents and for the appropriate exploration of sites; it partitions a region’s sites into three well known categories of descending interest (the three-star “vaut le voyage,” the two-star “mérite un detour,” and the lone-star “intéressant”), and it fixes the proper amount of time to be spent at each. Of paramount importance is avoiding “situations of uncertainty”—which means ensuring that a site be easily found—and allaying “the apprehension . . . of getting lost” that is emblazoned in the title of a chapter in the Michelin guide to the United States, “Comment ne pas se perdre [How Not to Get Lost].”¹⁶ The extreme organization of French tourism as epitomized in the guide vert is in fact reproduced in a good deal of scholarly work on tourism, which also attempts to measure, classify, and organize all aspects of its subject. A case in point is the triage of different kinds of travelers one finds in a typical article that distinguishes excursionnistes, “[those who] do not stay over” from touristes “who spend a night outside their principal residence,” and vacanciers, “[who spend] at least four nights away from home” with further distinctions made among the categories of “leisure tourism,” “business tourism,” séjour (“stay”), and villégiature (“country stay”).¹⁷ Such fine distinctions provide rigid boundaries that forestall the anxiety of getting lost on the road or in thought, but diminish the accidents of discovery.

I find my second example at the crossroads of nosology and ideology. When fugue became an epidemic, it was simply not a diagnosis culturally available to women. For Hacking, it is “the bodily expression of male powerlessness,” the counterpart to hysteria, which is generally accepted as “the bodily expression of female powerlessness.”¹⁸ I believe, however, that such a nosological equation invites more questions than it answers: questions about fugue, hysteria, and the gendering of mobility. While it is true that a woman could not easily or safely travel for days in a state of dazed and shabby penury (the state of men classified as fugueurs), it is also true that some women did travel compulsively, sometimes obsessively (albeit often in disguise, and always with extreme difficulty and at great risk.) Here, for example, is Alexandra David-Néel’s response to a letter from her husband calling her home from Asia: “Si je m’arrache, c’est ma vie que j’arracherai [If I tear myself away (from traveling), it is my life that will be torn]”; and here, Isabelle Eberhardt describing the uncontrollable impulse to take off on the slightest suggestion: “Il me semble que, quand j’ai revêtu un burnous blanc et quand j’ai enfourché quelque bouillant cheval . . . que je cours au hasard ventre à terre dans l’immense plaine [It seems to me whenever I’ve put on a white burnoose and mounted some steaming horse . . . that I’m racing full speed without direction over the immense plain].”¹⁹ We can compare this to descriptions of Albert Dadas, the archetypal fugueur: “Overhearing a place-name, Albert felt compelled to set out. At some point he was astonished at where he had got to. . . . Thus once someone spoke of Marseille; when he got there, people talked of Africa, so he took ship for Algeria.”²⁰ Thinking along the tracks laid by critics including Catherine Nesci, Ross Chambers, Griselda Pollock, and Janet Wolff, who have drawn our eyes to the possibility of the flâneuse, I wonder whether women like Isabelle Eberhardt, Alexandra David-Néel, and Ella Maillart could be classified as fugueuses. Or, to pose the question in a more useful way, how might a consideration of their compulsion to travel and their unbounded flights, alongside those of casebook fugueurs, help to expand the boundaries of fugue and to survey its gendered terrain? On another note, what does it mean to analogize fugue and hysteria as gender-specific expressions of powerlessness? Aren’t long-distance locomotion (uncontrollable episodes of travel) and body-bound locomotion (involuntary contortions, convulsions, and tics) very different manifestations of impotence, so much so that the difficult if not impossible choice of the first for women might increase susceptibility to the second? One might argue that being a fugueuse is not much to aspire to, and that claiming this status rather than that of hysteric for woman is not worth the ink it takes. But thinking about whether fugue could include women helps to understand that the very knowledge system that worked against this possibility probably also contributed to creating the imploded mobility that was called hysteria. One can only imagine what it might be like to contain inside the body the agitation and force that led to walking seventy kilometers in a day and still be raring to go on.

I turn now to a third perspective, manifested in a series of cases, on the boundary-setting we practice when we mark off voyagers in nineteenth-century France—travel writers—within the spectrum of travelers, and in this way confine them to the caste of French high travelers. If it is true, as Hacking proposes, that we cannot think of the fugueur without the tourist and the vagabond, then neither, I suggest, can the voyager be thought of without the fugueur and the tourist (to give emblematic examples of a much broader sociocultural landscape); nor, to return to my second area of inquiry, can the voyager justifiably be the scapegoat of a twenty-first-century global dialogue seeking to define itself against a retrospectively fixed nationalist monologue. The cases that follow (of necessity evocative rather than exhaustive) will begin to illustrate that the seduction of displacement that emerges in the literary voyage has as its less obvious counterpart an anxiety about physical and metaphysical mobility and they will also show that the literary voyager can no more plausibly be relegated to a nationalist, imperialist, orientalist attitude and discourse than catapulted anachronistically into a transnationalist conversation. The evidence is more nuanced and more ambiguous.

As Adrien Goetz has remarked, literary and operatic spin-offs of Carmen dispense with the narrator and so forcibly with the narrative frame.²¹ But it is precisely the delicate equipoise of frame and embedded story that makes of Mérimée’s Carmen (1845) more than a tale of seduction, more than a burst of local color or a poem of the femme fatale, but rather a parable of the nineteenth century’s confrontation with mobility. Carmen, we recall, is the Gypsy without roots, the bohémienne; and bohemians as a group, we are told, “comme n’étant d’aucun pays, voyageant toujours, parlent toutes les langues, et la plupart sont chez eux . . . partout [since they are not from any country, and are always traveling, speak all languages, and most of them are at home everywhere].”²² Carmen, prefiguring Passepartout, the harlequin antihero of Jules Verne’s Le tour du monde en 80 jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), simply passes everywhere, crossing borders, passing for anyone of any nationality. She is as fluid as her tongue, which is to say, as treacherous in body as in language, translating her words and her person freely, literalizing the dictum traduttore, traditore. She is a great equalizer, a circulator—a dark anticipation of Nana, Zola’s “golden fly.”²³ Her brigand boyfriend Don José is similarly adept at border crossing, having deserted the army and a brilliant military career to become a contraband agent and a highway robber.

In the opening frame, the narrator, a scholar and a Frenchman, crosses stories with Don José (and later with Carmen) while he is in Spain on a mission to find the historical origins of the ancient city of Munda (as if the archaeological-geographical task of locating this cosmically named city could symbolically settle the threatening ontological questions stirred up by the unresolved question of Gypsy origins). The closing frame puts the living story aside (Carmen and Don José are both dead) for a pedantic excursus on Romany grammar: the use of the preterit and the infinitive, and a survey of archaic forms that have slipped into other European languages, as if to check the mad circulation of Gypsy feet, sex, and tongues. The idea of Gypsy “nation” invoked by the narrator in reference to this nomadic people spread over the globe—a denationalized nation, menacingly mobile and uncontained in the very age of nation-building—is put in its place, that of potential scholarly treatise, arid and trifling, and returned to the status of idea: “une idée avantageuse de mes études sur le Rommani [a favorable idea of my studies of the Romany language],” says the narrator in his very last paragraph.²⁴

At the time he wrote Carmen, Mérimée was working as inspector of monuments for the government, ranking their varying states of preservation and deciding which warranted protecting and refurbishing ; so he was at least in form a protector of the patrimony, literally a nation-builder or rebuilder. He also took notes and made sketches for his writing during these official trips. Like Mérimée, the narrator of Carmen is neither vagabond nor fugueur nor tourist but voyager: a traveler-scholar who works with language in very controlled ways, and who travels with a mission, unlike Carmen, who double-crosses the boundaries of nations and language with equal disrespect and impulsiveness. Yet, in the course of the novella these categories break down, as the narrator loses his watch, his judgment, and his course and is ready to follow Carmen on her trans-European vagabondages, to use the conventional term for the wanderings of a bohémienne—a term readily translatable, in the case of Carmen’s compulsive mobility, as “fugues.”

An important question is whether Carmen broaches the idea of a protoglobalism with its Gypsy nation spread around the world, and a fable of Egypt in the place of roots. The question lingers, I believe, even when Carmen is killed and planted in the woods like a tree, as Elizabeth Carter has suggested²⁵—as if to put roots where rhizomes once were, and to force her vagabond narrative into the constraints of an archaeological, etymological, and grammatical discourse as risibly unsettling as it is pedantically grounded.

Flaubert’s Correspondance and travel notes speak volumes to both questions that concern me here: first, the thorny (and artificial) separation of the literary traveler from the fugueur and the tourist, and second, the shifting identity of this voyager between what we would today call a national and a global axis—a vacillation that in the process perhaps undoes our contemporary tendency to think of these terms as binaries. A judicious reading of the documents pertaining to Flaubert’s travels through the orient (including his letters, his travel journals, and the comments of his travel companion, Maxime Du Camp) reveals, first, significantly intermingled features of the literary traveler, the fugueur, the tourist and the antitourist, making any classification tenuous. It is worth noting that his Voyage en Egypte was composed after the fact and offsite: unable to compose a narrative of his travels while he was on the spot, Flaubert took sporadic notes and wrote the oriental journey once he was ensconced again at home in Normandy.²⁶ One is tempted to put the accent in the compound concept “travel writer”—at least for this particular specimen—emphatically on the “writer” element, which seems always to mediate and so de-emphasize the travel. Flaubert nonetheless characterizes his traveling as compulsive (and thereby re-emphasizes it) in a formulation that anticipates Albert’s expression of his insatiable and immediate need to take off. Here first is Albert: “I continued to be tormented by a need to travel . . . what should I do now, I asked myself ? Go . . . !”²⁷ And here is Flaubert, back in Paris from the orient. He writes to Louise Colet, “Je lis en ce moment un livre . . . sur les chevaux du Sahara . . . Pauvre Orient, comme j’y pense! J’ai un désir incessant et permanent de voyage [I’m reading a book about horses of the Sahara. How much I think about the Orient! I have an incessant and permanent desire for travel].”²⁸

Throughout his eastern travels, Flaubert was driven by an archaeological impulse, yet his passion for ruins was often doubled by the fear of becoming a mobile spectator—a tourist—as he expressed in this letter to Louis Bouilhet written on the road: “Nous allons la semaine prochaine commencer nos courses, aux Thermopyles, Sparte, Argos, Mycènes, Corinthe, etc. Ce ne sera guère qu’un voyage de touriste (oh!!) [Next week we will begin our whirlwind trip to Thermopyles, Sparta, Argos, Mycenae, Corinth, etc. It will hardly be more than a tourist journey (oh!!)].”²⁹ Touring the orient, Flaubert often deprecated tourism, even the kind Biasi calls “scholarly” (tourisme savant), exemplifying the torn consciousness of the Western world that Jean-Didier Urbain summarizes so: “If Europe invented tourism at the dawn of the nineteenth century, it very quickly repudiated this invention.”³⁰ In a striking prefiguration of Huysman’s Des Esseintes, who preferred turning the pages of a Baedeker guide to London to touring the city himself, Flaubert in Egypt, to the exasperation of his travel companion Maxime Du Camp, would sit in an ancient temple reading or stay behind on the boat doing nothing: “Le mouvement, l’action lui étaient antipathiques. Il eût aimé voyager, s’il eût pu, couché sur un divan et ne bougeant pas, voir les paysages, les ruines et les cités passer devant lui comme une toile de panorama qui se déroule mécaniquement [He had an aversion to motion and action. He would have liked to travel, if he could have, reclined on a sofa and not budging, watching landscapes, ruins, and cities pass before him like a panoramic canvas mechanically unfolding].”³¹ Where Flaubert differs from the run-of-the-mill occidental tourist and antitourist alike is in the ironizing, demystifying gaze he casts sporadically on both, and on himself alternately playing one or the other role, so that the image of a westerner come—with curiosity or repugnance—to watch indigenous sites unfold is (sometimes) shattered.

Like God in the universe or his ideal narrator molded on the same model, Flaubert seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once: at times his identity is national or regional and at others he considers himself a citizen of the world—at the most extreme, a world without national partitions and boundaries. In his early years of travel, he writes home his thoughts about the subjectivity of national identity, engaging in fantasies that suggest a “civic romance” analogous to Freud’s family romance. He imagines roots that might be closer to his sentimental and spiritual proclivities than to any attributed to the accident of residence: “Je hais l’Europe, la France mon pays. . . . Je crois que j’ai été transplanté par les vents dans ce pays de boue, et que je suis né ailleurs, car j’ai toujours eu comme des souvenirs ou des instincts de rivages embaumés, de mers bleues. J’étais né pour être empereur de Cochinchine [I hate Europe, France my country. . . . I think I was transplanted by the winds to this muddy land and that I was born elsewhere, for I’ve always had something like memories or intuitions of fragrant shores, blue seas. I was born to be emperor of Cochin-China].” Several years later, he speaks more firmly against the idea of birthright, fatherland, and rootedness in country: “L’idée de la patrie c’est-à-dire l’obligation où l’on est de vivre sur un coin de terre marqué en rouge ou en bleu sur la carte et de détester les autres coins en vert ou en noir m’a paru toujours étroite, bornée et d’une stupidité féroce. Je suis le frère de Dieu . . . et le concitoyen de tout ce qui habite le grand hôtel garni de l’univers [The idea of fatherland, that is, the obligation one has to live on a spot of the earth marked off on the map in red or blue and to detest the other spots in green or black has always seemed to me narrow, limited, and ferociously stupid. I am God’s brother . . . and the fellow-citizen of all that inhabits that wonderfully appointed hotel, the universe].” He frequently rejects the idea of a map-based sense of self and identifies instead with Bedouins and other nomadic peoples: “Je porte en moi la mélancolie des races barbares, avec ses instincts de migration . . . quant à l’idée de la patrie, c’est-à-dire d’une certaine portion de terrain dessinée sur la carte et séparée des autres par une ligne rouge ou bleue, non. La patrie est pour moi le pays que j’aime, c’est-à-dire celui que je rêve, celui où je me trouve bien [I carry within me the melancholy of barbarian peoples, with their migratory instincts. . . . As for the idea of fatherland, that is, of a certain piece of land drawn on a map and separated from others by a red or blue line, no. The fatherland for me is the country I love, that is, the one I dream of, the one where I feel comfortable].” He goes so far as to predict a future transnational world: “Le temps approche où toute nationalité va disparaître. La patrie alors sera un archéologisme comme la tribu [The time is coming when all nationality will disappear. Fatherland will then be an archaeologism like tribe].”³²

Yet Flaubert’s panglobal discourse has as its counterpoint a recurrent note of regionalism: everything in the orient reminds him of Normandy. In Ipsamboul-Abdou-Simball he reflects, “Les chauves-souris font entendre leur petit cri aigu—pendant un moment, l’une d’elles criait régulièrement, et cela faisait comme le battant lointain d’une horloge de campagne—j’ai pensé aux fermes normandes, en été, quand tout le monde est aux champs, vers trois heures de l’après midi [The bats make their thin high-pitched cry—for a moment, one sounded steadily, and it was like the distant clapper of a country clock—I thought of farms in Normandy in the summer, when everyone is in the fields, around three in the afternoon].” While Maxime Du Camp railed against his friend’s lassitude and philistine nostalgia for his province, Flaubert came to understand travel as a constrictive mindset or a predetermined pose in which the sands of the Sahara could as easily be the fields of Normandy, and the Nile might flow into the Seine: “Les temples égyptiens m’embêtent profondément. Est-ce que ça va devenir comme les églises en Bretagne, comme les cascades dans les Pyrénées? . . . Etre toujours selon les circonstances . . . comme un jeune homme, comme un voyageur, comme un artiste, comme un fils, comme un citoyen, etc. doit être! [The temples of Egypt annoy me deeply. Will they become like churches in Brittany, like waterfalls in the Pyrenees? . . . To be eternally obliged, according to circumstances, to be like a young man, like a traveler, like an artist, like a son, like a citizen, etc.!]”³³ In this state of ennui, there could not only be very little conversation between the regional and the global, but also very little difference.

It is George Sand, in her midcentury romans champêtres—often dismissed as trivial, fairytale-like, and “regional”—who comes closer than any other nineteenth-century French writer I know to the dialogic and the global. In the rustic trilogy Les veillées du chanvreur (La mare au diable, 1845; François le champi, 1847; La petite Fadette, 1848) Sand writes her most radical conversation with the other, set paradoxically on the ground of the Berry deep within the French countryside. We find here a literally dialogic form and an embedded conversation that cuts across boundaries of geography, social and economic class, language, and culture. Though Sand didn’t write full-blown literary treatises like Zola’s Le roman expérimental, she articulates in the prefaces of these three novels—particularly the central one, François le champi—a theoretical program as avant-garde as it is complex.³⁴

The Avant-propos of François le Champi frames a dialogue between the narrator, a male-gendered G. Sand, and her Parisian friend R., about making Berrichon peasant patois and culture intelligible to the city-dweller while still keeping it faithful and open to the Berrichon people. The narrator presents this almost insurmountable task as an exercise of translation: a mediation between oral and written, agrarian and urban, instinct and knowledge, innate and cultivated, nature and art, Berrichon peasant speech and cultivated Academy French writing; many of these oppositions are destabilized in the course of transmitting local tales that, if formally naïve by Parisian standards, are innately artistic by the text’s internal standards. R. urges Sand on: “Tiens . . . raconte-moi l’histoire du Champi, non pas telle que je l’ai entendue avec toi. C’était un chef-d’oeuvre de narration pour nos esprits et pour nos oreilles du terroir. Mais raconte-la-moi comme si tu avais à ta droite un Parisien parlant la langue moderne, et à ta gauche un paysan devant lequel tu ne voudrais pas dire une phrase, un mot où il ne pourrait pas pénétrer [Why don’t you tell me the story of the Champi, but not the way I heard it with you. It was a masterpiece of storytelling for our native minds and ears. But tell it to me as if you had on your right a Parisian speaking modern French, and on your left a peasant before whom you wouldn’t want to speak an impenetrable sentence or word].”³⁵ True to its etymological meaning of “carrying across,” translation is an active, mobile process that involves shuttling back and forth between origin and end, working by trial and error to accommodate the sensibility and limitations of Parisian heads without shocking regional ears. It is an impossible but necessary art of negotiation.

This art is emblematized by the person of the “chanvreur,” who gives his name to the overarching title of the trilogy and who has a double calling: first, he is an itinerant artisan who supervises the harvesting and processing of hemp to transform it into cloth; second, he is an (illiterate) artist—repository of stories and archivist of songs—who tells tales while he crushes hemp through the night. As such he unites manual and cerebral labor, and so mediates the poles of a heritage that Sand (born to a dressmaker mother and an aristocrat father) sought to reconcile through her writing. All her life, she would replay such reconciliation attempts in often anguished scenes of social mobility. Let me make clear, however, that I am not referring to upward mobility. I speak instead about an ongoing negotiation or translation between two realms (as exemplified in François le champi by the Berrichon peasantry and the Parisian intelligentsia) that seeks communication, coordination, and reciprocal modulation rather than conquest and subordination. I propose that this straining toward a conversation dependent on translation, as it plays out on the regional level in Sand’s rustic novels, is what we are now calling globalism. With Sand as our referent, we might unfacetiously note that globalism is the new regionalism. Or in other words: regionalism, as Sand practices it, is a microglobalism.