The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the making of a mass public in France, circa 1860-1910

American Historical Review

Volumn 109, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 41-77

  Shaya, Gregory ^a  

^a The College of Wooster   (United States)

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EID: 44949231640     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/530151     Document Type: Review

References (191)

1. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York, 1958), 300.
2. Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1975);
3. Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn., 1981);
4. Serge Moscovici, L'âge des foules: Un traité historique de psychologie des masses (Paris, 1981).
5. See also Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871-1899 (Cambridge, 1992);
6. Naomi Schor, Zola's Crowds (Baltimore, 1978).
7. Le petit journal, October 13, 1866. "Faits divers" has both the particular meaning, rooted in nineteenth-century journalism, of "news items" (evident in a literal translation of the term) and a more general meaning, readily apparent in the late nineteenth century and today, denoting curious, violent, or shocking news. For my purposes here, I speak simply of news of crime and catastrophe.
8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, Thomas Burger, trans. (1962; Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 159-75, 181-201, esp. 194-95. He described it as the "refeudalization" of the public sphere. "The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only" (171).
9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry," Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. (1944; New York, 1972), 120-67.
10. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, 206.
11. Habermas has been more influential for his celebration of the rise of an idealized public sphere of rational-political debate in the eighteenth century than for his lamentation of its late nineteenth-century demise. But his interpretation of the fall of the public recapitulates and resonates with a long and continuing tradition of reading mass culture as an instrument of domination. I present it here as a point of orientation, although, as will be clear, I do not dismiss this critical view out of hand. Craig Calhoun, in the introduction to the volume he edited on Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), succinctly explains a central difficulty of Habermas's historical portrait: "Habermas tends to judge the eighteenth century by Locke and Kant . . . and the twentieth century by the typical suburban television viewer . . . his treatment of the earlier period doesn't look at 'penny dreadfuls,' lurid crime and scandal sheets, and other less than altogether rational-critical branches of the press or at the demagoguery of traveling orators, and glances only in passing at the relationship of crowds to political discourse. The result is perhaps an overestimation of the degeneration of the public sphere" (33).
12. For critical views on the decline of the public sphere, see the essays in the same volume by Nancy Fraser, Michael Schudson, Geoff Eley, and Michael Warner. See also Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1993);
13. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience (Minneapolis, 1993);
14. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002).
15. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
16. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 6.
17. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 16, 44.
18. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 202.
19. Schwartz strikingly conveys the fin-de-siècle commercialization of the real. But her explanation for the meanings of this new form of spectatorship is less than satisfying. It is not at all clear in what sense the consumers of this new culture were "able to be part of the spectacle and yet command it at the same time" (Spectacular Realities, 10). Nor is it clear whether this "new crowd" was a new form of sociability or the figurative construction of mass culture itself. The diversity of crowds seems a matter of ideology, not simple reporting. What is refreshing in Schwartz's account is the rejection of the bad old view of mass culture. Not satisfied with the long-running dump on mass culture as the worst that's been thought and said (to invert Matthew Arnold) and a distraction from more pressing political concerns, Schwartz invites historians to a thoughtful examination of the forms of commodified spectatorship that flourished in France at the end of the nineteenth century. But we might ponder the meanings of her portrait of the audience of mass culture. It is here, I will suggest, that understanding the associations of the badaud will help us.
20. French historians have been somewhat slow to approach mass culture as such. Whereas they have supplied many of the methods and concepts for the study of early modern popular culture, they have come only recently to serious engagement with the history of mass culture. But they have come to it with determination. One sign of this has been the growing number of works on media history. For an orientation to these issues, see Christophe Prochasson, "De la culture des foules à la culture des masses," in André Burguière and Jacques Revel, eds., Histoire de la France: Choix culturels et mémoire (1991; Paris, 2000), 181-232.
21. e siècle (Paris, 1991);
22. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Une histoire des médias, des origines à nos jours (Paris, 1996);
23. Frédéric Barbier and Catherine Bertho-Lavenir, Histoire des médias de Diderot à Internet (Paris, 1996);
24. Marc Martin, Médias et journalistes de la République (Paris, 1997);
25. Christian Delporte, "Presse et culture de masse en France (1880-1914)," Revue historique, no. 605 (January/March 1998): 93-121;
26. Jean-Yves Mollier, La lecture et ses publics à l'époque contemporaine: Essais d'histoire culturelle (Paris, 2001),
27. Dominique Kalifa, La culture de masse en France, Vol. 1: 1860-1930 (Paris, 2001);
28. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli, eds., La culture de masse en France de la Belle Epoque à aujourd'hui (Paris, 2002);
29. Christian Delporte, Histoire des médias en France de la Grande Guerre à nos jours (Paris, 2003).
30. Dominique Kalifa, L'encre et le sang: Récits de crimes et société à la Belle Epoque (Paris, 1995), 283. Kalifa quickly puts aside the notion that this mass culture of crime created a mass of duped readers. On the contrary: these tales of crime - in the press, in popular literature, in early cinema - formed a "common discourse" (283); "recalling readers to their community, to its norms and values," tales of crime built "real . . . cohesion" (284). Emile Durkheim is a more important reference here than Habermas. Kalifa, it must be said, is also attuned to the ways in which the turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture of crime could be taken up by the mass press to exploit public insecurities - broadcasting fears of an urban criminal class or mobilizing opinion in favor of the death penalty.
31. Jean-Yves Mollier, "Le parfum de la Belle Epoque," in Rioux and Sirinelli, La culture de masse en France, 73, 114. Driven by the commercialization of everyday life, with millions of readers reading the same reports of a new mass press, this new culture, Mollier argues, served to integrate the isolated individual into French society and the French nation (114). It was no less than "a silent cultural revolution." This new mass culture was a "steamroller" crushing and smoothing the particularities of French culture (112 and following).
32. Christian Delporte, "Presse et culture de masse en France (1880-1914)," Revue historique, no. 605 (January/March 1998): 120. Delporte presents the French press in the years between 1880 and World War I - that is, after the press law of 1881, which eliminated restrictions on the freedom of the press - as the vanguard of an emergent mass culture in France. He points to the faits divers as one of the pillars of a new formula of news.
33. I go on to suggest that this debate is as old as mass culture itself. For some markers of the scholarly debate, see Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill., 1956);
34. Frederic Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (1979): 94-190;
35. Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the 'Popular,'" in Raphael Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981);
36. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley, Calif., 1991);
37. James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger, eds., Modernity and Mass Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1991);
38. Lawrence W. Levine, "The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences," AHR 97 (December 1992): 1369-99;
39. the responses in the same issue of Robin D. G. Kelley, Natalie Zemon Davis, and T. J. Jackson Lears; and John Hartley, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (New York, 1996).
40. Hartley, Popular Reality, 47.
41. Hartley's study is idiosyncratic, exuberant, and thought-provoking. With forays into the pamphlet literature of the French Revolution, late twentieth-century tabloids, war photojournalism, and much more, Hartley explains popular media as a sense-making system that has little in common with an idealized rational-critical public sphere. See also John Hartley, The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media (New York, 1992).
42. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002), 8. He adds, and I follow him here as well, "a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and very potent life at that." Warner is also helpful in explaining the appeal of disaster. "Disaster is popular," he argues, speaking of American mass media in the 1970s and 1980s, "because it is a way of making mass subjectivity available, and it tells us something about the desirability of that mass subject" (177).
43. This has commonly been described as the golden age of the press in French, from the founding of Le petit journal, the pioneer of a new popular press, in 1863, to the 1881 press law that removed most legal restrictions on newspapers, to the development of weekly illustrated supplements like the Supplément illustré du petit journal and the Supplément illustré du petit parisien, in 1890, and through the expansion of circulations at the turn of the century. In 1860, all French dailies combined sold 150,000 papers in a day. By 1870, the circulation of the Paris daily press alone would reach 1 million; by 1880, 2 million; by 1910, 5 million. By 1914, the French press had a total circulation of 9,500,000. In 1887, Le petit journal claimed a circulation of 950,000 newspapers, "the highest circulation of all the newspapers of the world." In 1914, Le petit parisien sold 1.5 million copies a day. It advertised "the highest newspaper circulation in the world." The illustrated supplements of the two papers had circulations around 1 million through the 1890s. See Pierre Albert and Pierre Guiral in Claude Bellanger, ed., Histoire générale de la presse française, 5 vols. (Paris, 1969-76), vol. 2: 258-60, 311,
44. Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3: 682;
45. Michael Palmer, Des petits journaux aux grandes agences (Paris, 1983), 320-42.
46. For the history of the French press in this period, see Bellanger, Histoire générale de la presse française;
47. Palmer, Des petits journaux;
48. e siècle (Paris, 1993);
49. Christian Delporte, Histoire du journalisme et des journalistes en France (Paris, 1995);
50. Martin, Médias et journalistes de la République;
51. Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M, Przyblyski, Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst, Mass., 1999);
52. Patrick Eveno, L'argent de la presse française des années 1820 à nos jours (Paris, 2003).
53. For crime and disaster in the French press, see the very wide-ranging literature on crime and the faits divers. In addition to the works of Kalifa and Schwartz mentioned above, see Roland Barthes, "Structure du fait divers," in Essais critiques (Paris, 1964);
54. Georges Auclair, Le mana quotidien: Structures et fonctions de la chronique des faits divers (1970; Paris, 1982);
55. Le fait divers: Musée national des arts et traditions populaires, 19 novembre 1982-18 avril 1983 (Paris, 1982);
56. e siècle," Annales: E.S.C. 38 (1983): 911-19;
57. Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J., 1984);
58. Jean-Claude Baillon, ed., Faits divers: Annales des passions excessives (1988; Paris, 1993);
59. Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Cailloux (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), esp. chap. 6;
60. Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, N.C., 1992): 578-603;
61. David H. Walker, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the "Faits Divers" (Oxford, 1995);
62. Ann-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford, Calif., 1996), esp. chap. 1;
63. Thomas Cragin, "Cultural Continuity in Modern France: The Representation of Crime in the Popular Press of Nineteenth-Century Paris" (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1996);
64. e siècle" (thèse, Université de Paris I, 1997);
65. Annick Dubied and Marc Lits, Le fait divers (Paris, 1999);
66. Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 2000);
67. Marine M'Sili, Le fait divers en République: Histoire sociale de 1870 à nos jours (Paris, 2000).
68. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 9.
69. Robert Darnton, "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris," AHR 105 (February 2000): 1.
70. See Michael Schudson, "News, Public, Nation," AHR 107 (April 2002): 481-95.
71. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992);
72. Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (New York, 2000);
73. Stuart Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (New York, 1978).
74. ème siècle, s.v. "flâneur" (1872).
75. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Harry Zohn, trans. (London, 1983), 54.
76. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 185-87, 304-07, devotes close attention to Benjamin's flâneur;
77. Janet Wolff, "The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity," in Theory, Culture and Society 2 (1985): 37-48, argued that the flâneur was male and, by necessity, that this kind of idling was unavailable to women;
78. the essays in Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), return to the flâneur as to a touchstone.
79. See also the essays in Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (London, 1994);
80. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, "The Flâneur: The City and Its Discontents," in Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley, 1994);
81. Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1992);
82. Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," New German Critique 39 (1986): 99-140;
83. Richard D. E. Burton, "The Unseen Seer or Proteus in the City," French Studies 42 (1988);
84. Mike Featherstone, "The Flâneur, the City and Virtual Public Life," Urban Studies 35 (1998): 909-25.
85. Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 5.
86. Priscilla Ferguson describes the flâneur as "an emblematic representative of modernity and personification of contemporary urbanity"; "The Flâneur on and off the Streets of Paris," in Tester, The Flâneur, 22.
87. Anne Friedberg, Windowshopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
88. All of these interpretations are made possible (and to some degree, too, they are undermined) by the multiplication of meanings inherent in the word. Indeed, the nineteenth century itself clung to no strict definitions of the term. For Benjamin, the department store was the death of the flâneur. Anne Friedberg, by contrast, Windowshopping, sees it as the transcendence of flânerie. By some accounts the flâneur is passionate and sensitive, by others he is distracted and insensitive. Baudelaire presented the flâneur as the "man of the crowd," an equation Benjamin would reject. All these possibilities are evident in the multiple ways in which nineteenth-century writers used the term. For the historical specificity of the flâneur, see Ferguson, "Flâneur on and off the Streets of Paris."
89. Vanessa R. Schwartz, "Walter Benjamin for Historians," AHR 106 (December 2001): 1732. She goes on to argue for the continuing relevance of the term to describe "a historically specific mode of experiencing the spectacle of the city in which the viewer assumes the position of being able to observe, command, and participate in this spectacle all at the same time" (1733).
90. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, Jonathan Mayne, ed. and trans. (New York, 1986), 9.
91. The essay was written in 1859-1860 and published in Le figaro, November 26, 28, and December 3, 1863.
92. Baudelaire's flâneur was not so self-assured. It is hard, in fact, not to read the essay as ironic, or as the work of fantasy. The modernity of "The Painter of Modern Life" was no more than a fashion show, a military parade, a convoy of fine carriages and proud horses. It seems to fly in the face of the jarring urban experience fathomed in Baudelaire's poetry. Why would Baudelaire choose to champion Guys and his watercolors of bourgeois life? There is no evidence here of the Baudelaire that Benjamin described as a "secret agent - an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule" (Charles Baudelaire, 104n).
93. "Les foules," Petits poëmes en prose, Jacques Crépet, ed. (Paris, 1926), 33 and following.
94. "Rêve parisien," Les fleurs du mal, Jacques Crépet, ed. (Paris, 1930), 176-78.
95. The translation of this stanza is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Flowers of Evil, Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, eds. (New York, 1955), 7. "En rouvrant mes yeux pleins de flamme/J'ai vu l'horreur de mon taudis,/Et senti, rentrant dans mon âme,/La pointe des soucis maudits . . ."
96. "Les sept vieillards," Les fleurs du mal, 153-55,
97. trans. by Roy Campbell, in Flowers of Evil, 83, 85.
98. "À une passante," Les fleurs du mal, 161.
99. "Mon coeur mis à nu," Juvenilia, oeuvres posthumes, reliquiae, vol. 2, Jacques Crépet and Claude Pichois, eds. (Paris, 1952), 92.
100. Quoted in Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 142.
101. ème siècle, s.v. "badaud" (1867).
102. The line between them, however, could be blurry. "The badaud," wrote Boitard, "is simply the caricature of the flâneur." Grand dictionnaire universel, s.v. "badaud." Victor Fournel compared the two, even as he would distinguish them two pages later. "Quelle bonne et douce chose que la flânerie, et comme le métier de badaud est plein de charmes et séductions." Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (1855; Paris, 1867), 261.
103. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 62.
104. Compare Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 54.
105. ème siècle, s.v. "badaud" (1867).
106. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam, 1782), vol. 1: 74 and following.
107. Voltaire made the same point in the Dictionnaire philosophique (Amsterdam, 1764), s.v. "badaud."
108. V.-J. Etienne de Jouy, L'hermite de la Chaussée d'Antin, ou observations sur les moeurs et les usages parisiens au commencement du XIXe siècle, vol. 1 (1815; Paris, 1997), 140.
109. ème siècle, s.v. "badaud" (1867). He blamed the reputation on the many foreigners in Paris.
110. Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris, 263.
111. Benjamin quotes this passage in a footnote, Charles Baudelaire, 69n.
112. A word frequency search of the main FRANTEXT database shows, for 1750-1980: "badaud": 48 occurrences; "badauds": 185; "flâneur": 42; "flâneurs": 53. FRANTEXT database at the ARTFL Project, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/databases/TLF/ (February 16, 2003).
113. Le petit journal, March 13, 1863.
114. Le petit journal, September 21, 1866.
115. "Mademoiselle Bistouri," Petits poëmes en prose, 163.
116. Gazette des tribunaux, October 15, 1869. This was after Troppmann had been caught and imprisoned.
117. Le petit parisien, November 22, 1876.
118. It would come to be known as the Billoir Affair, after Marie le Manach's lover and murderer, Joseph Billoir. For more, see Allan Mitchell, "The Paris Morgue as a Social Institution in the Nineteenth Century," Francia 4 (1976): 581-96;
119. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 72-76.
120. Le petit parisien, November 13, 1876.
121. Paul Nourrisson, "La question des enfants martyrs et la protection des femmes à Londres," Le correspondant 187 (June 25, 1897): 1021.
122. L'univers illustré, January 23, 1897, 59 and following.
123. See the illustration by G. Redon, "L'enfant martyr de la rue Vanea: Les funérailles" (57), for a view of the crowd.
124. Le matin, January 20, 1897, counted "more than 20,000 people."
125. Le matin, February 15, 1907. See the front page for a photograph of the crowd in the streets.
126. Nourrisson, "La question des enfants martyrs." The interplay of newspaper and crowd is also clear in the example of the visitors to the Morgue and to Clichy in the case of the "femme coupée en morceaux" (1876). At least one newspaper provided a map of the site of the discovery, with notations marking where different parts of her body had been found. Le petit parisien, November 16, 1876.
127. Le petit journal, September 24, 1869.
128. Le petit journal, March 17, 1864.
129. e siècle, vol. 3 (Paris, 1900), 693.
130. The official function of the Morgue was the identification of the dead. Once identified, a body would no longer be displayed.
131. Gazette des tribunaux, September 22, 1869. It added, "nous nous bornons à dire que jamais hécatombe ne fut faite d'une main plus terrible et plus assurée: Pas un coup qui n'ait porté."
132. Presse illustré, October 2, 1869, portrait of Madame Kinck and five of her children, "Photographie des 6 victimes de Pantin." On the other side was an illustration of the field in Pantin where the bodies were discovered. A later edition of the same photograph included M. Kinck, the father, who had been killed and buried elsewhere. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Actualités 152, Troppmann.
133. Le petit journal, September 23, 24, 1869.
134. Le petit parisien, June 3, 1908.
135. Le journal, May 9, 1897.
136. Le petit parisien, January 16, 1909.
137. For the crowd outside the house of crime, see "Un crime à Grenelle," Le matin, January 7, 1906.
138. The badaud's view of the house of crime: "Une libraire assassinée," Le matin, February 4, 1906.
139. The view of the room of crime: "Cabaretière assassinée," Le matin, January 6, 1906.
140. How large was the place of such subjects in the press? Henri de Noussanne explored the question in 1902. On average, faits divers (crimes, accidents, and scandals) accounted for 8.80 percent of the total lines of Parisian newspapers. Together, they slightly exceeded the coverage granted to foreign news (8.35 percent) and domestic politics (7.15 percent), following advertisements (23.90 percent), domestic news (13.15 percent), and "frivolous" (inutile) literature (9.95 percent). Noussanne, "Que vaut la presse quotidienne française?" Revue hebdomadaire (1902): 1-26. The categories are those of Noussanne. The other entries from his Paris averages: politique extérieure: 1.80 percent; oeuvres morales: 2.65 percent; sciences: 1.80 percent; voyages-explorations: 0.80 percent; littérature utile: 3.90 percent; arts: 4.50 percent; spectacles: 6.45 percent; sports: 3.20 percent; réclames et annonces déguisées: 3.60 percent (4). These can only be a rough guide. It seems likely, for example, that Noussanne included the Chronique judiciaire under informations intérieures. How else does Le temps only have forty lines devoted to crime? There were, of course, large differences. The informational newspapers had a great deal more coverage of faits divers than the more respectable, political press. Le petit parisien devoted 23.99 percent of its space to faits divers vs. 2.45 percent in the staid Le temps. But this simple opposition overshadows a more uneven terrain. La lanterne, which gave 21.03 percent of its coverage to crime, accidents, and scandals, Le gaulois (16.63 percent), and Le figaro (14.10 percent) were all in the same range as Le petit journal (17.09 percent). And all of these vastly exceeded the attention to faits divers in Le journal (6.98 percent) and Le matin (7.11 percent). "What is the value of the French daily press?" Noussanne asked. These kinds of numbers led him straight to his answer: not great. "Subjects are treated and developed in such proportions that are not determined by care of national interests, nor the sentiment of the educational mission of the press, nor even the respect of simple good sense" (8).
141. See, for one example, Le petit journal, August 26, 1866. In speaking of executions: "La foule accourt où va la foule."
142. Le petit journal, September 9, 1864. He added anecdotes, stories of celebrities, and the recent work of artists.
143. Le petit journal, September 23, 1869.
144. Sample issue of Le petit journal, [February 23, 1863].
145. Regarding an assassination attempt on the Russian emperor. Le petit journal, June 21, 1867.
146. Le petit journal, September 23, 1869.
147. Trimm had said the very same of the public attention to the Armand Affair. "This fascination . . . is not a vain or lazy curiosity. It is not the brutal desire to observe the moral agony of the defendant." Le petit journal, March 19, 1864.
148. Supplément illustré du petit journal, June 19, 1898, "Terrible accident au bois de Boulogne," illustration by F. Méaulle.
149. Supplément illustré du petit journal, October 23, 1910, "Un acteur égorgé en scène," artist unknown.
150. Supplément illustré du petit journal, September 29, 1895, "Dévoré par un lion," illustration by Henri Meyer.
151. For the precise meaning of the outstretched arm, compare Supplément illustré du petit journal, June 1, 1902, "La France vient au secours de la Martinique," after the volcanic explosion from a few days before. Marianne, the tricolor beside her, stretches out her arm with her fingers wide apart, toward a burning Martinique across the sea.
152. Le petit journal, February 26, 1863. This is from the end of the first month of publication of the paper.
153. Le petit journal, June 12, 1864.
154. Supplément illustré du petit journal, September 27, 1908.
155. Le petit parisien, January 30, 1907.
156. Likewise, there were "these lamentable catastrophes that will move an entire city." Le petit journal, August 21, 1867. Trimm gave as examples a fire, a flood, an earthquake, the collapse of a building, a maritime disaster.
157. Le petit parisien, May 8, 1897.
158. Supplément illustré du petit journal, May 16, 1897, my emphasis.
159. Founded in 1863 as a non-political newspaper, Le petit journal was exempt from the 5-centimes tax on newspapers of opinion. After 1870, of course, the press could and did speak freely of politics. All through the 1870s and 1880s, Le petit journal would come to throw its lot in with the republican parties; it would celebrate the "little people" in more particular forms. Emile Zola, for example, who wrote for the newspaper early in his career, remarked: "Le Petit Journal flattered the people, personified by concierges, workers, the little people." Quoted in Henri Mitterand, Zola journaliste (Paris, 1962), 26.
160. At the end of the century, under the direction of Ernest Judet, the paper would take up the cause of the army and the nation against Dreyfus and Zola. In the early twentieth century, it was still pictured in the hands of coachmen and concierges but now as a reactionary rag. See, for example, Jules Grandjouan, "Concierges," L'assiette au beurre, January 28, 1905. The inclusive spirit of its beginnings was carried on by Le matin (founded 1884), a newspaper that represented the triumph of information over politics. Unlike nearly every other daily in France, Le matin had no political position of its own. It had a front-page editorial column that rotated among various political viewpoints. Here was another version of the logic of the mass. Conservative, socialist, radical, and monarchist could all read Le matin.
161. Le petit journal, September 13, 1869, "La boite aux lettres du petit journal."
162. Le petit journal, January 31, 1864.
163. Le petit journal, March 29, 1864
164. Le petit journal, January 27, 31, May 22, 1864, September 13, 1869.
165. Le petit journal, January 1, 1865.
166. Le petit journal, October 15, 1864.
167. Trimm would also write of "cette foule immense qui se nomme le peuple." Le petit journal, June 23, 1864.
168. Le petit journal, March 29, 1866;
169. Trimm introducing Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la mer in Le soleil.
170. Le petit journal, September 26, 1864.
171. Le petit journal, September 18, 1864, March 15, 1863, May 9, 1864.
172. "To read one's newspaper is to live the universal life, the life of the whole capital, of all the town, of all France, the life of all nations . . . It is thus that in a great country like France, the same thought, at one and the same time, animates the whole population . . . It is the newspaper which establishes this sublime communion of souls across distances." Le petit parisien, October 13, 1893,
173. quoted in Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945: Taste and Corruption (1977; Oxford, 1980), 181.
174. René Mazedier, Histoire de la presse parisienne (Paris, 1945), 139.
175. For background on the journal, its illustrators, and its subject matter, see Elisabeth and Michel Dixmier, L'assiette au beurre: Revue satirique illustrée, 1901-1912 (Paris, 1974).
176. Dictionnaire de Paris (Paris, 1964), 290 and following.
177. On feminine mass culture, see Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in After the Great Divide (Bloomington, Ind., 1986).
178. Together with a flower market and an extension to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. See David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995).
179. Each day, 950,000 copies of Le petit journal sold, "the highest circulation of all the newspapers of the world"; 200,000 copies of the Supplément littéraire du petit journal sold every Friday, "the most widely read literary newspaper of the entire world"; 200,000 copies of Le journal illustré, "the most widely read and widely viewed of illustrated newspapers."
180. Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic, 1879-1992 (Oxford, 1993), 493;
181. Charles Sowerwine, France since 1870 (New York, 2001), 86 and following.
182. The year 1906 also saw the appearance of Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence, heralding the mythic power of the general strike.
183. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modem France, 180.
184. See, more generally, the chapter, "The Politics of Social Defense: Violent Crime, 'Apaches,' and the Press at the Turn of the Century," 171-226.
185. Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 314.
186. Trimm, Le petit journal, October 15, 1864.
187. Especially true of the illustrated supplements of Le petit journal and Le petit parisien.
188. "Les responsabilités de la presse contemporaine," Revue politique et littéraire 8 (December 26, 1897): 802.
189. Indeed, the press accounts of youth crime and of youthful victims of crime, the many "martyred children," coincided with a wide expansion of the role of government in watching over children's well-being. The most far-reaching legislation was the law of July 24, 1889, which set out the situations where police or medical authorities could step in, in the interest of the child, to strip parents of their rights. It was extended by the law of 1898. For a closer look at the legislation on the protection of children, see Sylvia Schafer, Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third Republic France (Princeton, N.J., 1997).
190. Jules Guesde, Des lois protectrices de travail: Ce qu'elles sonts, ce qu'elles devraient être; Discours à la Chambre des Députés (séances des 15, 22, et 24 juin 1896) (Lille, 1896), 35-37, 36, 27.
191. The debates over the protection of work would lead to the Law on the Responsibility of Work Accidents of April 9, 1898. It was a profound innovation, even if it built on earlier laws. The most far-reaching of a spate of factory laws in the 1890s governing the conditions of work, it introduced the concept of professional risk to French labor law. See François Ewald, L'état providence (Paris, 1986).