In the opening chapter of hisMimesis,Erich Auerbach draws a famously sharp distinction between legend and history. In legend, he writes, thinking of Homer: “All cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the actors, has disappeared” (19). Legend thus “detaches [its material] from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it” (19). To legend’s essential simplification, Auerbach opposes the complex richness of historical narrative, approximated by the stories of the...

Confusion, I have suggested, is both this study’s principal subjectandits historiographical limit. How and why, we will be asking, were the events most central to the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 perceived as confounding by contemporary participants and commentators? How did these forms of confusion differ from those felt to be endemic to French society under the Second Empire or, later, the Third Republic? How did the confusion diagnosis as applied to the Commune come to serve a progressivist vision of history? What were theusesof confusion, from a revolutionary point of view or from...

If there is anything on which contemporary readers of Zola’sLa Débâclehave tended to agree, it is that the novel evinces an ideological complexity which belies the relative simplicity of its characterization. Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, for example, shows how competing conceptions of national identity in Zola’s 1892 novel on the Franco– Prussian war and subsequent Paris Commune reemerge as an “oscillation” between a pacifistic acceptance of the other and a call for purificatory retribution (“Guerre,” 180 ).

Sandy Petrey speaks ofLa Débâcleas imprisoned in an interstice insofar as it chooses both natureandartifice, natureandhistory (94,...

Reading the two literary works of Victor Hugo most marked by the events of 1870 and 1871—the 1872 poem cycleL’Année terribleand his 1874 novelization of the Terror,Quatre-vingt-treize—involves a markedly different set of frustrations than does the reading ofLa Débâcle. Where Zola’s novel mimics the anxieties of war by holding war’s onset in maddening abeyance, all the while claiming precise understanding of the root causes of the coming disasters,L’Année terribleandQuatre-vingt-treizetend to withhold synoptic cultural diagnosis as they threaten to submerge the reader in undigested detail and prophetic bombast.

Yet many of...

Flaubert speaks often in his letters of a desire to make criticism, literary style, and even politics “scientific.” Yet critics habitually assume that the meaning of Flaubert’s “science” lies elsewhere than in the practices of the natural sciences as he and his contemporaries would have known them. When Raymonde Debray-Genette writes, for example, “All that Flaubert truly takes from science is the idea of a probable generality,” she implicitly subsumes science to an aesthetic category, to a “documentaryverisimilitude” that justifies—or, better,authorizes—prior acts of the imagination (“Science,” 44).¹ Likewise, there has long been a tendency among Flaubert’s...

To set us on the track of the elusive Bouvard and Pécuchet, I have chosen a series of quotations whose subject ison.¹ The first is from a letter that Flaubert wrote to his niece, Caroline Commanville, shortly before his death in May 1880: “From the moment you lift yourself up,on(that eternal and execrableon) knocks you down. That is why authority is essentially hateful. . . . Moreover, your good-natured uncle is revolutionary to the bone” (Corr.[Conard], 8:335). In a second quotation he laments to Edma Roger des Genettes, “On is an enormous collective fool. And...

Unlike the literary texts with which I began this study, Émile Zola’sAu Bonheur des damesis notaboutthe Paris Commune, either directly (La Débâcle , L’Année terrible) or indirectly (Quatre-vingt-treize). Nor is its relation to the Commune essentially reactive and symptomatic, as I have argued for Flaubert’sLa Tentation de saint Antoine and Bouvard et Pécuchet. Rather,Au Bonheur des damesevokes a revolutionary violence recently evidenced by the Commune largely through its portrait of that specificallycommercialrevolution operated by Octave Mouret’s eponymous department store.

Of the many commonalities that allow Zola to suggest political revolution behind...

In the course of the preceding chapters, I have twice had occasion to reference a felicitous turn of phrase from Dominick LaCapra’s analysis of posttraumatic acting out. In scenes marked by the compulsive return of a traumatic past, LaCapra writes, “the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop” (Writing,21). That sense of revolutionary futurity which one finds so strongly in Henri Lefebvre’s reading of the Paris Commune, with its insistence on the self-constitution of the “people” in the festive experience of spontaneous and creative life, finds its limit, thus, in the persistence of a...