1857 1857 is the annus mirabilis for students of obscenity. In Britain the first formal legislation on the offence (the Obscene Publications Act, known as ‘Lord Campbell’s Act’) was enacted in that year. In France, there were three high-profile trials in 1857: against Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, against Baudelaire’s poems Les Fleurs du Mal, and (more forgettably, despite its runaway popularity at the time) Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères du Peuple.
The newly introduced law in Britain and the French prosecutions defined two quite distinct ideas about the means by which dangerous books (worse than cyanide or prussic acid, according to Lord Campbell) should be controlled by the well-meaning state.
The Anglo-Saxon approach, soon adopted in the US, took as its defining criterion that obscenity was to be defined by its inherent tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt’ (this test was officially clarified as a handy slogan in the judge Sir Alexander Cockburn’s definition of obscenity in 1868).
Especially, that is, works with the tendency to deprave and corrupt the vulnerable ‘young’. Would it, in Dickens’ sarcastic formulation, bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek? If so, it was offensive and could be proceeded against. In fact the vagueness of the definition (how did one measure ‘depravity’?) induced a spirit of excessive caution and self-censorship in the book trade. British publishing became institutionally timid for a hundred years.
In France, as established in the courts in the same year, 1857, the criterion was outrage aux bonnes moeurs – public indecency. The question asked in France had nothing to do with mademoiselle’s cheeks. Did a work, by its encouragement to moral disorder, threaten the stability of the state?
After its serialisation in La Revue de Paris between October 1856 and December 1856, Madame Bovary was prosecuted as a threat to public order and religion and duly cleared on that score on 7 February 1857. Refined descriptions of adultery, it was determined, offered no risk to the republic. Inevitably the novel went on to be a best-seller.
The difference between the French and Anglo-Saxon regulations led to markedly different literary cultures. Zola, for example, was a heroic author in France and a purveyor of filth in Britain. The publisher of his translated works, Henry Vizetelly (see 21 January), was imprisoned for depraving the English public with Zolaism – he had, The Times said, thrown a vial of acid in the face of the great British public.
This dualism attained its absurd height in the 20th century when a whole succession of English literary ‘classics’ (e.g. Ulysses, Henry Miller’s ‘Tropics’, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, Naked Lunch) could be published only in Paris.
The anomaly was belatedly cleared up by reform of the obscenity law in the US in 1959 and in the UK a year later.