In 1851, while in the midst of composing Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert noted that he was experiencing difficulties in his writing and worried he might “tomber dans le Paul de Kock.”1 A year later he lamented, “Ce que j’écris présentement risque d’être du Paul de Kock si je n’y mets une forme profondément littéraire.”2 The Paul de Kock so repeatedly maligned by Flaubert was actually a best-selling and prolific novelist, who had a long and lucrative career spanning nearly fifty years until his death in 1870. Despite or perhaps because of this commercial success, de Kock had already in his own day come to embody the very idea of lowbrow literature, exactly the type from which Flaubert hoped to distinguish himself. The author of Madame Bovary was hardly the only one to employ “Paul de Kock” as shorthand for “bad” literature in order to expose hierarchies in his contemporary literary field. Honoré de Balzac, who initially enjoyed a friendly relationship with the popular novelist Eugène Sue until sales of Sue’s serialized fiction began to dwarf his own, accused the well-known dandy of being “Paul de Kock en satin et à paillettes.”3 Effectively charging Sue, the author of the best-selling serial novel Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43), with being a philistine disguised in fancy trappings, Balzac later admitted, as he wrote of the disfigurement of his character Vautrin in Splendeurs et misères de courtisanes, “Je fais du Sue tout pur.”4 By using Sue’s name to signify excessively violent description, Balzac evinced his familiarity with but also his contempt for Sue’s work.
These examples from Balzac’s and Flaubert’s correspondence reveal the overlapping and often interconnected nature of the burgeoning literary marketplace of early to mid-nineteenth-century France. Now-canonical authors and mass cultural impresarios collaborated with, borrowed from, and positioned themselves against one another in the particularly dynamic literary environment of this period, a battleground of cultural and economic value productively viewed as the birthplace of our own modern mass-media culture. This was a cultural field in the process of undergoing radical changes due to a rise in literacy rates, the proliferation of lending libraries and reading rooms, the explosion of literary journals and political newspapers, the rise of the figure of the publisher, the development of advertising techniques in the press, and the advent of the serial novel, among other factors. At this time authors faced the challenge of developing sophisticated tactics for selling their books, working with the new figure of the publisher, and situating themselves within what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has theorized as “the literary field.” In this postrevolutionary period, itself one of great social and political upheaval, the author became, more and more, a professional who wrote for a living and had to negotiate the delicate balance between aesthetic concerns and popular tastes. These commercial demands effectively changed how authors wrote about and altered their conceptions of literary practice. For authors and their critics, in other words, this nascent marketplace generated opportunities for aesthetic and generic innovation as well as demands to meet rapidly changing preferences. My study demonstrates how the material, commercial, and cultural pressures of this new media environment manifested not just in the correspondence or explicit statements of authors, critics, and publishers but in the form of the literary texts themselves. In tracking how these material changes shaped the literary artifacts of this early media environment, we gain access to a more nuanced picture of literary practice during this key period, one that challenges the still powerful categories of “high” and “low” literature. What we see, ultimately, is a world in which Flaubert and de Kock, Balzac and Sue, were not opposite figures so much as rival players on the same stage.
Book and cultural historians, including Yves Mollier, Martyn Lyons, James Smith Allen, and more recently Christine Haynes, have scrupulously studied the material changes to France’s literary marketplace across the early to mid-nineteenth century. A brief overview of this history helps establish how literature was produced, marketed, and sold and provides a framework for the literary analysis constituting the main contribution of this study. Mechanical presses and ink rollers, paper from wood pulp now produced in continuous rolls rather than sheets, the mechanization of book binding: these and other improvements in press and paper technology enabled books to be printed and disseminated more easily and cheaply than ever before.5 National literacy rates had risen, thanks in part, but not exclusively, to educational reforms such as the 1833 Guizot Law, requiring an elementary school in each commune, and the Falloux Law of 1850, requiring a girls school in each commune as well.6 Yet as Martyn Lyons reminds us, especially in urban areas, literacy had already been climbing by the eighteenth century; in fact “expanding opportunities for female employment . . . did [even] more to raise the level of female literacy.”7 The growing reading public in any case stretched the demographics for authors’ works and helped establish the author as a professional who, due to declining literary patronage, increasingly had to sell his or her works in this expanding market to make a living.8
How readers learned about and accessed literary works changed too. In the earlier part of the century, publishers tasked sales assistants with disseminating their products. Some of them eventually worked independently, on commission, for multiple publishers; colporteurs, whom John Barberet calls the “traveling salesmen of the literary market,” typically sold these books outside of urban centers.9 The development of and increase in lending libraries and the cabinet de lecture granted access to books and newspapers, for a small fee, to those readers not otherwise able to afford their own copies.10 These developments, among others, illuminate the growing accessibility of literature alongside the rising reading public.11 Another way literature gained a larger audience during this period was through the press. In 1836 Emile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq launched, respectively, La Presse and Le Siècle, both of whose subscription prices (40 francs) were half those of the most widely read political daily newspapers (80 francs).12 What these publications lost from subscriptions they made up for in paid advertisements, ushering in what Marc Martin calls the massive “entrée de la publicité dans la presse” at a time when, around the early 1830s, “le marché des annonces s’organise.”13 This presse à bon marché (penny press) sought to be seen as “information-based and politically neutral,” no doubt a strategy for these money-making machines to alienate as few readers as possible, though rarely did their neutrality remain constant over the course of publication.14 Newspaper readership surged: by 1858 “the Parisian dailies could claim sales of 235,000 copies,” even if these less expensive quotidiens (dailies) did not always sell as consistently as their counterparts that kept subscription prices elevated.15
Another factor contributing to these newspapers’ readership was the development of the roman-feuilleton (serial novel), whose success was related to these newspapers’ high readership. The feuilleton was a space initially at the bottom of the newspaper—included to expand the size of the publication without paying extra taxes—and was conceived as an area “in which the era’s journalistic conventions did not apply.”16 There, in 1836, Girardin published France’s first serial novel, “un roman publié par tranches dans le ‘feuilleton’ des quotidiens,” in this case Balzac’s La Vieille fille.17 Balzac’s text did serve to promote and sell Girardin’s La Presse, but the most famous writer of the roman-feuilleton of this period was Sue; his Mystères de Paris was published in the Journal des débats, whose subscriptions “increased by many thousands in the early months of [Sue’s] publication.”18 Though readership of the roman-feuilleton was remarkable, it is important to remember that the subscription rates of these journals were still prohibitively expensive for many working-class readers.19 Nevertheless, as we will see in detail, in addition to generating new readers and sales for the newspapers in which it appeared, the roman-feuilleton sparked intense debate among literary critics and politicians alike, who feared the dangers of its mass dissemination. The advent of the serial novel provoked the transformation of the newspaper from a political publication to one more accessible to a general public; in turn serial publication transformed the shape of the novel itself. The recent work of critics on the press and media culture, notably that of Marie-Eve Thérenty, Alain Vaillant, and Gillaume Pinson, has generated new understandings of the importance of this medium in sponsoring overlap between the press and literature, news and fiction, authors and journalists.20
It was not, however, merely these social and technological forces that altered the business of selling books. As Haynes has recently argued, “the literary marketplace was a contingent outcome of political struggle, on both the professional and national levels,” and at the heart of this struggle was the éditeur, a figure “who specialized in commissioning, financing, and coordinating the creation, production, and marketing of books by others.”21 These new professionals, who ultimately formed the trade association Cercle de la Librairie in 1847, lobbied for fewer state regulations of the book trade, a stance that clashed with the position of what Haynes calls the corporatist camp: “largely printers and booksellers who were descended . . . from members of the old guilds.”22 Decades-long debates about the state’s regulation of publishing ultimately led to the liberalization of the marketplace. Debates were also waged throughout the century over laws dealing with literary property rights, or droits d’auteur, laws that had financial implications for both the author and the publisher. As a consequence, the term of authors’ rights was prolonged a number of times throughout the century: in 1793 rights were given to an author over the course of his or her lifetime, and then for the ten years following the author’s death to his or her family; under Napoleon, in 1810 rights were given for twenty years after the death of the author; under Napoleon III they were further extended in 1854 to thirty years after the author’s death and in 1866 to fifty years.23 The importance of the political debates associated with publishing, which crystallized in no small part around the new figure of the éditeur, cannot be overstated in developments of the industry in the nineteenth century.
If the figure of the publisher emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the end of the century these successful entrepreneurs of l’édition (publishing) had established the maison d’édition (publishing houses): “Ces fabriques de best-sellers deviennent peu à peu de véritables entreprises, gérées intelligemment ou négligemment selon les cas . . . l’artisanat et l’amateurisme cèdent souvent la place à la direction attentive et fine d’une grande affaire.”24 In other words, the impact of a growing capitalist economy on the profession of publishing was palpable, as it was in the case of other industries. Throughout the century, not just in the second half, publishers were responsible for major innovations in the way books were formatted and sold. For example, in 1838 the éditeur Gervais Charpentier debuted volumes sold in what became known as the “format-Charpentier”: a book in octodecimo format (in-18), which contained the length of a book in octavo format (in-80; this was a more standard format) and was priced at 3.5 francs, much less than the more typical 7.5 to 9 francs. At a price that represented “le salaire quotidien d’un bon ouvrier,” this size offered a cheaper option to engage a wider readership, and the cabinets de lecture often purchased volumes of these economical works.25 Charpentier would then launch his series La Bibliothèque Charpentier, which boasted contemporary authors (Balzac, Hugo, Musset) but also classic French and foreign writers—Shakespeare, for example.26 This series was one of a number of collections from this period popularized by these entrepreneurial publishers who repackaged works for profit and significantly shaped the new marketplace.27 If the mass marketplace was more fully formed by the end of the century, we can nonetheless see traces of it in the century’s beginning decades.
This material history of the early to mid-nineteenth-century marketplace for culture enables us to see the many and competing factors generating literary innovation in this period. Nowhere are these changes more obvious than in the Feuilleton du journal de la librairie, a short publication dedicated to professionals in the book trade. The publication’s subtitle elucidated the wide array of topics this short publication encompassed: Tout ce qui se rattache aux intérêts de l’imprimerie et de la librairie, fonderie, papeterie, gravure, musique, etc.28 Created in 1825 as a supplement to the Bibliographie de la France—France’s official record of all printed works—the Feuilleton appeared weekly from 1834 until the acquisition of the journal by the Cercle de la Librairie in 1857, when its format changed.29 Issues of this supplement dedicated to professionals in the book trade included, among other matters, advertisements for new works spanning several different genres, announcements of book acquisitions, job offers, and rulings on legal matters relating to the industry in the column “Décisions judiciaires en matière de librairie” (Legal Decisions related to Bookselling). This small emporium for the sharing of professional knowledge among a newly linked set of cultural producers is a kind of microcosm of the literary field at this period. The Feuilleton served as an important professional resource, and its existence and hybrid form restores visibility to the dense network of actors at the center of nineteenth-century literary production. Here the names of popular writers mingled with those of now canonical ones, debates over publishers’ rights played out, and professional readers tracked developments in and general practices of their evolving industry.30 Seemingly a minor detail in the history of print culture, the Feuilleton nonetheless gives evidence of the dynamic and increasingly interconnected marketplace that took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The Feuilleton’s “Décisions judiciaires” column is particularly revealing of how this publication mediated a changing literary field. This subsection featured coverage of the many legal debates occasioned by the new marketplace, disputes over authors’ rights, increasing problems with foreign and domestic counterfeiting, developments in print technology, and the changing role of the publisher. On the topic of counterfeiting, consider a March 21, 1835, case in which the publisher Eugène Renduel, then proprietor of Victor Hugo’s work, brought charges of partial counterfeiting against the publisher M. Guérin, who had included four excerpts of poems from Hugo’s Les Feuilles d’automne in his lengthy Livres des Jeunes personnes without Hugo’s or Renduel’s consent. Since the reproduction of Hugo’s poems represented “une partie si minime” of this work, the case was ultimately dismissed.31 Among recurrent debates concerning the extension of literary property laws is a case from January 31, 1835, involving de Kock and the publisher Gustave Barba (just one instance in an ongoing struggle between the two). Barba had announced the forthcoming publication of the Oeuvres complètes de Paul de Kock; de Kock objected to the use of the word “complètes” (complete), arguing that Barba lacked the rights to a number of his works. The column details how the Court Royal determined that Barba contractually possessed these rights until 1835 and was therefore not guilty of counterfeiting, for he had not yet printed the collection with the offending title. These two legal cases demonstrate that, while we would not consider them professional peers today, de Kock and Hugo in fact worked within and negotiated the same shifting rules of the market at a moment when the profession of the publisher and even that of the author became more clearly defined. While the Bibliographie itself catalogued the rise of this commercial literature, the Feuilleton and within it the “Décisions judiciaires” served as sites where professional knowledge of the modern commercial book trade was made and consolidated.
The formal composition of these short legal accounts also had larger implications for the developing marketplace. Like their counterparts in the Gazette des tribunaux and other journals, the “Décisions judiciaires” column often began by stating the general legal question being debated or by noting a ruling before delving into the details of the related case.32 “Un libraire peut-il publier, sous forme de receuil, les articles insérés dans un journal périodique?” asks a report from a December 21, 1833, issue, ending not with the answer but with the promise “Nous rendrons compte de la décision qui interviendra.”33 A March 8, 1834, report is preceded by the question “Les dépôts ordonnés à l’imprimeur ou à l’éditeur par le décret du 5 février 1810 suffisent-ils pour conserver à l’auteur le droit de propriété? (Oui).”34 In this case the outcome is stated. Read in the larger context of the Feuilleton, this dialogic format—an alternation between question and answer depending on each case—can be seen to mirror the changing nature of the book trade of this period. Still other columns were prefaced by a legal judgment that set up new terms for the supplement’s readers, such as “Il est interdit à un sténographe de publier les leçons d’un professeur; un pareil acte est considéré judiciairement comme une contrefaçon” from March 20, 1841, or, from May 6, 1837, “L’auteur qui a traité avec un libraire pour la composition d’un ouvrage est obligé de livrer une copie lisible et de corriger lui-même les épreuves, à peine de résiliation des conventions.”35 These legal proclamations are more definitive than the question-and-answer format. Yet whether through definitive statements or interrogatives, these cases show even at the level of their composition the process of redefining the trade. As Haynes suggests, the Feuilleton facilitated publishers’ ability to “undertake collective activities”; it also explored, defined, and, in a sense, demonstrated in real time the contemporary developing literary marketplace. Close readings of such cultural artifacts, seen alongside the material historical contexts that produced them, form the basis of Mastering the Marketplace’s method.
Arguments about the prominence of literary figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Sand, and Hugo and movements like romanticism, realism, and idealism during the first half of the nineteenth century have been well rehearsed. Moving beyond such discussions, newer scholarship has been devoted to what were once considered more marginal genres of this period—that is, works that were widely read but that would not go on to form part of the literary canon at the end of the century. Whether writing on the concept of para-littérature, the “roman populaire,” “littérature frénétique,” crime fiction of the bas-fonds (slums), or sentimental fiction, scholars such as Marc Angenot, Anne-Marie Thiesse, Anthony Glinoer, Dominique Kalifa, and Margaret Cohen have offered alternative interpretations of the most dominant genres and tastes of the period. While, for example, the historical novel as practiced by Walter Scott was in fashion in the early part of the century, Judith Lyon-Caen has also shown that readers craved a contemporary “représentation du social” in their works.36 The roman gai (comic novel) enjoyed popular readership alongside the roman noir (Gothic novel).37 This study focuses predominantly on the novelistic form, but the same decades also saw a rise in the prevalence of popular theater, notably vaudeville and melodrama, and a number of authors I focus on (in particular de Kock) were heavily involved in this scene. These popular theatrical forms, which, as Jennifer Terni explains, were associated with commercial bourgeois culture and “infused with . . . stereotypes, situation-based plots, reversals of fortune, mistaken identities, and of course happy endings,” resemble in many ways the varied novelistic productions that emerged during the period and represented shifting contemporary tastes.38 My aim is not to recover another popular genre or reimagine the major literary movements of the period in the context of popular literature but rather to build on the work of these literary critics to show, first, how the varied responses to market pressures helped shape the literature of these authors itself and, second, how such pressures occasioned a dramatic blurring of the hierarchical and generic boundaries that later criticism has often unconsciously worked to enforce.
Along with the proliferation of popular literature during the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a parallel explosion in literary criticism, in literary journals as well as in the newly formed literary press. Some of the most famous critics—Jules Janin, Sainte-Beuve—were themselves writers of literature and saw criticism as a more stable and lucrative profession. Many of the major critics of the July Monarchy became experts of the literature of previous centuries and national traditions; as Lyon-Caen explains, this assured them a certain professional authority, which often coincided with a tendency toward “le dénigrement du roman moderne et le recours à l’histoire . . . comme l’un des moyens les plus efficaces de disqualification du roman.”39 These critics were often professionally or personally connected to the authors they reviewed, and these biases (both positive and negative) became legible in their critiques.40 In the end, however, much like the commercial authors they disdained, moralizing critics toed the line between providing an intellectual service and staking a claim for themselves within the same market; as Glinoer puts it, the critic was a professional “homme de lettres,” required to sell “le produit de son travail aux éditeurs et aux journaux.”41 These caveats about July Monarchy critics—their biases, personal and professional connections, and concerns—are all important to keep in mind as this study mines nineteenth-century reviews to understand the tastes of the period.
Toward the end of the 1830s and the beginning of the 1840s, the concerns and even fears critics had about the rise of popular literature, especially the serial novel, became manifest. These took the form of vigorous debates about and negative campaigns against this literature, waged principally by critics who yearned for a past “grandeur littéraire” in their critique of contemporary literary production, mostly taking up “les positions esthétiques et morales les plus conservatrices.”42 In one of the best-known contributions to this period’s considerations of literary value, “De la littérature industrielle” of 1839, Sainte-Beuve addresses the issue of commercial, or “industrial,” literature, which, though it may have existed before, had become for him a corrupting force needing to be reined in.43 He uses mixed metaphors of contamination and militarism to describe what he views as the unprecedented takeover of the literary field by unqualified authors: the literary world had never been “envahi, exploité, réclamé à titre de juste possession, par une bande si nombreuse, si disparate et presque organisée comme nous le voyons, aujourd’hui, et avec cette seule devise inscrite au drapeau Vivre en écrivain.”44 He laments the dearth of conscientious and educated writers, claiming that everyone now believes himself capable of becoming a celebrated writer: “Pourquoi pas moi aussi? Se dit chacun.”45 These authors were part of an alarming trend, according to Sainte-Beuve, who also disparages the commercialization of the press and links advertising with the corruption of literature; the execution of sound criticism was impossible, he believed, when, in the same publication, one could find an advertisement for the work in question. Sainte-Beuve insists that this evil (“mal”) was neither new nor likely to be totally eliminated, yet he issues a rallying cry to his readers: “Tâchons d’avancer et de mûrir ce jugement en dégageant la bonne [littérature] et en limitant l’autre avec fermeté.”46 By establishing this category of industrial literature, Sainte-Beuve also specifies its opposite: “une autre littérature, vouée à la rareté, à l’inspiration, au travail assidu et à l’excellence esthétique.”47 The critic thus situates the hierarchies of the literary field in absolute terms: intellectual and commercial, high and low, good and bad.
Less than a decade later the conservative critic Alfred Nettement published “Études critiques sur le roman feuilleton” (1845), a treatise that reiterates some of Sainte-Beuve’s points but specifically targets the serial novel. For Nettement the commercialization of the press, that is, the lowering of subscription fees and the addition of publicity, was just one of many factors contributing to what he saw as the contemporary “désordre littéraire.”48 This critic attributes the roman feuilleton (or “roman immoral, deux mots pour la même idée”) to contemporary “atheistic” politics and maintains that as society descended “au-dessous du niveau de la civilisation,” it would logically become “inondée par ses égouts.”49 Nettement criticizes the serial novel’s depravity, addictive nature, and lack of the good and beautiful qualities he so highly valued, in addition to its style.50 Though his critique of the genre focuses more on the morality of the content and the dangers to society that such works might engender, and less exclusively on commercialization, Nettement echoes Sainte-Beuve’s sentiment that the literary world has been contaminated, and he reiterates its high/low divide. Nettement and Sainte-Beuve, among other vocal critics during this period, railed against developments in popular culture while firmly asserting themselves in hierarchical opposition to the producers of industrial literature.
Bourdieu picks up on the alleged antinomy between industrial literature and a “purer” sort of artistic production in his theorization of the literary field, a space of relations “organized around the opposition between pure art . . . and bourgeois art.” For Bourdieu the literary field ultimately “organize[s] itself according to two independent and hierarchized principles of differentiation: the principal opposition, between pure production, destined for a market restricted to producers, and large-scale production, oriented towards the satisfaction of the demands of a wide audience.” Relying on the work of Flaubert, Bourdieu describes a space where commerciality and purity are at odds; we might think of this in terms of what he calls “commercial success” and “cultural capital” (the social and symbolic but not financial elements that connote class and distinction), a field that was “constituted as such in and by opposition to a ‘bourgeois’ world which had never before asserted so bluntly its values and its pretension to control the instruments of legitimation.”51 Bourdieu’s binaristic approach has proven to be a powerful critical tool. In the chapters that follow, however, I draw on his key terms but insist on a more complex view of the works that, for Bourdieu and Flaubert alike, appear in stark opposition to a “purer” cultural production. As we will see, close analysis of the aesthetic properties of literature from the early moments in the mass marketplace—and the reception of those works—discloses more ambivalence on the part of authors and their readers and critics than is suggested by the clear distinctions of value that Bourdieu shares with his nineteenth-century critical precursors.52
As becomes clear from the work of Sainte-Beuve and Nettement and, later, Bourdieu, what emerges from this period is a distinction between high and low literature, concepts that are still active in today’s literary field, if modified from their original meaning. Highbrow literature, as Sainte-Beuve defines it, places emphasis on “aesthetic” as opposed to “commercial” value; it incorporates figurative language, literary tropes (allegory and metaphor, among others), elaborate character studies, and extensive historical or metaphysical themes. Lowbrow, or industrial, literature is more plot-driven, tends to include stock characters, places less emphasis on figurative language, and reliably offers a simple moral lesson. The majority of authors that would become part of the literary canon at the end of the century fall into what the nineteenth-century critics who judged them would deem highbrow. This canonization process therefore reified the categories of high and low that in the earlier period were being actively redefined and contested. This book’s aim is to show that at the very time these notions were emerging, authors who now connote highbrow and lowbrow literature actually blurred the boundaries of these now seemingly static categories.
In Mastering the Marketplace I show how both high- and lowbrow authors together responded to the changing needs of the dynamic literary marketplace of early to mid-nineteenth-century France. To do so I examine those authors’ reception, reputation, and most especially the formal elements of their literary works (style, plot, characters, tropes: all of which I refer to here as “form”). I analyze the spectrum of literary production: the work of Balzac, de Kock, and Sue, as well as a literary phenomenon known as “panoramic literature,” a proliferation of short, typological texts that aimed at documenting and categorizing all types of Parisian phenomena throughout the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, written by well-known and unknown authors alike. By closely studying these texts as well as the advertisements, book reviews, publication history, sales tactics, and promotional tools associated with them, I expose a more nuanced picture of the relationship among these authors: a jumbled, interconnected sphere in which critics and authors grappled, in different ways, with the common task of coordinating commercial and cultural success. More specifically I demonstrate how popular authors in the late Restoration and July Monarchy understood and profited from the nascent literary market; how, for example, Balzac, now a canonical author, actually engaged in trends that placed him closer to commercial writers than his later critics, following the author himself, would have recognized. I show how the broader social and material conditions under which this literature was produced—the innovations in print technology, reading demographics, advertising campaigns, market competition—becomes manifest in the literature itself.
The digitization of large swaths of the nineteenth-century press and of popular texts previously difficult to access, as well as the creation of Médias 19, an online platform and database for scholars working on nineteenth-century media, have rightly aroused scholarly interest in these previously understudied domains. Yet while the roman-feuilleton and the press more generally have been the topics of important recent scholarly work, I offer sustained readings of once important but now neglected popular authors—de Kock, Sue (especially his work predating Les Mystères de Paris), and the authors of panoramic literary texts—read by so many in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Mastering the Marketplace restores visibility to these figures and therefore further revises well-established conventions of this period’s literary history. Such literary readings, alongside original archival research and coupled with attention to historical and cultural context, help us revise existing understandings of this crucial moment in the development of industrialized culture. Ultimately such readings enable us to link this formative period with our own, in which mobile electronic devices, Internet-based bookstores, and massive publishing conglomerates alter, once again, the way literature is written, sold, and read.
Mastering the Marketplace draws on a variety of fields often considered distinct from one another, including literary studies, cultural and material history, and cultural studies. This varied methodology is informed by a number of key works. I draw, for example, on Margaret Cohen’s The Sentimental Education of the Novel for a model of reading “literature hors d’usage” and for an understanding of this period in literary history as one in which canonical authors like Balzac “emerge as literary producers among other producers, seeking a niche in a generic market promising both economic and cultural return.”53 I use the cultural historian Judith Lyon-Caen’s La lecture et la vie: Les usages du roman au temps de Balzac, in which she studies the letters written to Balzac and Sue, to solidify my comprehension of the reading culture and practices of this period. I rely on Christine Haynes’s historical study, Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France, to establish my conception of the literary marketplace of this period as one shaped significantly by the political struggles among publishers. In its focus on individual authors and their texts, this study does not aim to intervene in the field of book history; it remains rather a work of literary and cultural criticism informed by the work of book historians.
Studies of book history that tackle the literary marketplace tend to focus on the material, empirical elements of the relationship of author and publisher. In their reconstruction of the historical phenomenon, these studies have helped offer specific details about the physical format of the works produced, the quality of the paper, and the print runs of the best sellers, among other important material matters. Such empirical studies do not therefore focus on the content of the literary works: the tropes that recur throughout an author’s oeuvre, the formal distinctions of different genres in which authors work, or the way the content of that work reflects the developing taste of the period. Literary scholars practicing methods of distant reading, influenced most notably by Franco Moretti and enabled by the mass digitization of literary works, advocate for an understanding of the totality of the literary field as opposed to the proportionally small fraction of canonical works we currently consume. Like the more synoptic studies of book historians, distant readers’ statistical analysis of literature examines the conditions of the literary field without using close literary readings to make their claims.54 On the other hand, literary studies that do focus on the content of literary works can at times overlook the important historical contexts of their production. Mastering the Marketplace draws from these dialectically opposed methods and thus is able to offer a new perspective on the wider-scaled analyses while opening up broader vistas for these closer readings more typically concerned with individual textual objects.
By analyzing writers who borrowed from and recycled elements of their own literary corpus across genres and who repurposed clichés and types from the works of others, I also draw on concepts that contemporary new media scholars have explored, namely recirculation and remediation. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s work on remediation, a term they study in the context of newer digital technologies, describes it as an act by which “media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other.”55 Any new medium thus appropriates or repurposes older ones. Ellen Gruber Garvey, writing on the medium of scrapbooking in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, notes that, in this context, “writing is understood as a process of recirculation, in which information is sorted and stockpiled until it can acquire value by being inserted into a new context. As often appears to be true on web pages, the origin of the material is less important than the new form it takes, resorted and made available in new ways.”56 Both nineteenth-century and contemporary critics often accused de Kock and other popular writers of the period of writing the same novel again and again and merely changing the title or of simply regurgitating clichés. These insights from new media studies, a field interested in the creation and consumption of cultural production, might enable us to see these processes of literary recycling across genres, so common in the works of these popular authors (and more elite ones for that matter), as fundamental to the creation of a new media environment. The novels and “panoramic literature” cited earlier—all of which were reworked, reissued, and remediated with great success in the literary market—might thus help uncover new understandings of the dynamic origins of the nineteenth-century literary market and establish links between nineteenth-century “new media” and that of the twenty-first century.
Given my desire to enter in depth into the intricacies of the style, genre, and reception of writers grappling differently with changing market pressures, I have limited myself to the works of three major figures (de Kock, Sue, and Balzac), in whose work and correspondence the relationship to the marketplace is made explicit, and the phenomenon of panoramic literature, to which many types of authors—popular, elite, male, female—contributed. In the case of panoramic literature, we see an urban genre with a common set of aesthetic and thematic goals that targeted a range of audiences and came to connote a literary formula that was sure to sell. De Kock too established a formulaic style of writing that drew in scores of readers and made him a domestic and international success, while Sue dabbled, with commercial and some critical success, across genres before achieving global stardom with the publication of Les Mystères de Paris. So central to the developing market were de Kock and Sue that even their names connoted meaning in the nineteenth-century literary field. Balzac offers a counterpoint to these more overtly lowbrow authors; while he promoted himself and came to be seen as a serious author, he also contributed to more commercial publications and incorporated these forms of writing into his more highbrow works.
This deliberately narrowed focus means a comparative neglect of other key best-selling authors like Frédéric Soulié and Alexandre Dumas, as well as writers, like George Sand, whom we would now consider canonical but who were intimately involved in the same literary networks as the authors studied here. Hugo also of course produced best-selling novels both at the beginning of the period I study here (Notre-Dame de Paris) and later in the century (Les Misérables). While the case of Dumas is a particularly pertinent one—he was associated with commercial literature to such a degree he was accused of running a “fabrique de romans,” or “novel factory,” with his collaborators—I have chosen authors for this study who, aside from Balzac, have received less scholarly attention.57 It is my hope that this book’s close engagements with the work of the popular authors I examine will serve as a jumping-off point for further study. I have chosen not to concentrate specifically on the question of popular women writers during this period, a topic studied in depth by Cohen, Catherine Nesci, Margaret Waller, and Thérenty, among others. Major authors like Sand, who wrote prolifically but did not consistently produce best-selling works, figured prominently in the literary field of the mid-nineteenth century; even after both of their deaths, Sophie Cottin and Madame de Staël’s works were best sellers; and as much as or more than her husband Emile, Delphine de Girardin was a major media figure who facilitated literary networks through her salons.58 While my study does not pay sustained attention to these or other significant female authors as female authors, their role and importance in the literary field of the early to mid-nineteenth century merits note and has already occasioned important studies.
The chapters of this book are organized according to individual authors and, in the case of so-called panoramic literature, a group of authors and publishers; they share a common focus on exploring the literary recycling, collaboration, and conscious self-positioning that grew out of this emerging literary market. In the first chapter I argue that while the phenomenon of panoramic literature is illustrative of early nineteenth-century readers’ taste for urban observation, it also exemplifies the fluidity of generic boundaries and the more openly commercial nature of the literary marketplace. Panoramic literature, a term coined retrospectively by the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, took the form of what was called the Physiologie series or of larger collections, such as Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un (1831), and was in part a phenomenon cooked up for profit by innovative publishers. These observations of Parisian life, often written in a comical tone and illustrated by famous caricaturists of the period, claimed mastery over their urban subjects (the flâneur, the working-class woman, or the student, for example) and promised to depict and decipher the city for their public. Especially during the later years of the July Monarchy, these inexpensive works were extremely popular, generating money for their authors and canny publishers and prompting cases of literary recycling. Analyses of these panoramic texts—in particular Physiologie du flâneur, Physiologie des physiologies, and de Kock’s 1842 La Grande Ville: Nouveau tableau de Paris—as well as an examination of the advertisements for these works as the phenomenon developed in real time, demonstrate their self-conscious commerciality, an awareness of their place in the marketplace. The typological descriptions so frequent in these panoramic literary texts also circulated throughout the novels of contributors to the movement and those of their contemporaries. Attention to the reuse of this trope across genres exposes a more connected literary field despite perceived differences of value.
Moving from panoramic literature to popular novels, the second chapter focuses on de Kock. Thanks to his inexhaustible production of vaudevilles, novels, and occasional writings on Paris, de Kock’s lucrative career spanned the better part of the nineteenth century. By the July Monarchy he had established himself as the bourgeois writer par excellence, to such a degree that by the 1830s his name itself carried a specific negative connotation. I chart the use of “Paul de Kock” as a brand name for “bad” literature through detailed reception history, exposing complexities that nineteenth-century and contemporary received ideas about de Kock overlook. Additionally I focus on his own literary recycling and on close readings of his work. De Kock republished passages of urban descriptions from one text to another and across genres. This recycling, as well as his frequent use of certain stock characters, repetitive plotlines, and recurring digressive passages, must be considered alongside his extraordinary commercial success. In other words, he and his publishers were able to convince his public of the variety in his texts and create a type of writing for which there was lucrative commercial demand. Through the keen manipulation of the forms and formats in which his work appeared, de Kock’s narrative and publishing practices challenge our understanding of literary form and teach us about nineteenth-century mass-media culture.
The third chapter turns to the figure who, for Balzac, embodied commercialized literature: Eugène Sue, author of, among other works, Les Mystères de Paris, a media phenomenon of unparalleled proportions. This serial novel, published in the Journal des débats, not only generated huge numbers of subscribers for the Journal and sold unprecedented numbers of copies once it was published in volumes but also occasioned the publication of many international adaptations of the urban mystery genre. Multiple translations, editions, and interpretations of Sue’s work were produced in the years following its initial appearance. While I address Les Mystères as a literary phenomenon by examining the publicity surrounding its publication, this chapter departs from recent criticism on Sue as part of the network of “mystères urbains” in its focus on Sue’s oeuvre as a whole. With few exceptions virtually all scholarship on Sue focuses exclusively on Les Mystères. I maintain instead that Sue was a market-savvy author who made multiple attempts to achieve commercial success by exploiting his literary network and by writing in disparate, already established novelistic genres—maritime novels and romans de moeurs (novel of manners)—before he attained his exceptional success with Les Mystères. His serialized fiction became a blockbusting phenomenon in part because of his previous literary and professional strategies. For example, tropes, subplots, and types reappear in his novels throughout his career, demonstrating that he recycled elements of his work and modified them according to the relevant subgenre. Through analyses of his lesser-known (and critically unexamined) works leading up to Les Mystères (Kernok le pirate [1830], Mathilde [1841], and Paula Monti [1842]), as well as an examination of their marketing, publishing, and promotion, I argue that Sue made tactical, profitable moves in his choice of literary genres. This chapter ultimately illustrates that Sue’s mega–best sellers, as well as his more minor commercial hits (and failures), inform us about the changing marketplace and contemporary literary tastes.
In the fourth chapter I analyze Balzac’s complicated relationship to the literary marketplace, a milieu he famously depicted in his novel Illusions perdues (1837–44). He envied the commercial success of authors like Sue while at the same time consciously positioning his works against those of popular authors. Balzac was both a contributor to and a critic of the early commercialized mass market, in particular the movement of panoramic literature. I explore how Balzac adopts and overtly repurposes text from his contributions to panoramic literature, exploiting a marketable trope that he elsewhere disdained. Accordingly, after the 1841 publication of Physiologie de l’employé, he transformed his serial novella La Femme supérieure (1837) into the 1844 version titled Les Employés, a more lengthy sociological study of the world of bureaucracy during the early nineteenth century. Through close readings I demonstrate how this ambiguous stance toward popular contemporary literary tropes is also evident in his trilogy Histoire des Treize (Ferragus, La Duchesse de Langeais, La Fille aux yeux d’or [1833–34]). In these three short novels the author openly reuses passages from other, nonfiction panoramic publications. At the same time he renders other examples of his typological urban writing extremely figurative and thus more overtly focused on aesthetics than the panoramic texts. Critics have deemed Balzac a more serious writer than his popular contemporaries, whose works purportedly connoted less cultural capital. Balzac’s works and correspondence evince too his own preoccupations with literary value in the emerging midcentury literary marketplace. My examination of Balzac’s engagement with the tropes of panoramic literature focuses less on his publishing practices or sales figures. Instead, through these close readings of works spanning a decade of his career, a more complex picture of the author emerges, blurring lines between high and low literature that are often replicated in past and current scholarship on Balzac.
I conclude my study with a brief overview of developments in the twenty-first-century French literary market and a short analysis of a contemporary best-selling novel, L’Elégance du hérisson by Muriel Barbery (2006), which, like its nineteenth-century predecessors, addresses and challenges extant definitions of high and low literature. This contemporary surprise best seller, though published by the elite publishing house Gallimard, both straddles the line between what we would now call a literary best seller and commercial fiction, and exposes tensions between high and low culture throughout the novel itself. By comparing Barbery’s novel to novels more clearly identifiable as highbrow or lowbrow published that same year, I offer a recent example of a work that like my nineteenth-century examples self-consciously negotiates the balance between the commercial and the critical. I draw parallels between the early nineteenth-century literary market in France, which saw the changing status of the writer, the boom in the literate population, the mass democratization of literature, the rise of the novel, and the birth of the modern publishing industry, and the market of the global twenty-first century, in which e-readers and the Internet have once again altered the shape of the literary field. If the scope and scale of the market have changed drastically since the period studied in this book, we can nonetheless read in the very form of contemporary cultural productions how writers—and their works—continue to respond to and adapt within the always changing literary field.