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Abstract
This chapter explores the early works of Guillaume Dustan and looks at the city of Paris and the Marais neighborhood as loci of extremes. Following a short history of the Marais, I explore the notion of ghetto. The term has strong historical connotations of oppression, but Dustan calls the Marais “le ghetto,” which is a shorthand way of referring to both the Marais neighborhood and the Parisian gay community. The chapter then looks at what can be considered by some as extreme sex practices that Dustan and his partners engaged in: barebacking, use of sex toys and drug consumption at a time when HIV was still a deadly virus. The Lacanian principle of the death drive emerges as one of the guiding principles of Dustan’s search for pleasure.
Abstract
This chapter examines Claus Drexel’s Au cœur du bois (2021), a documentary featuring a community of sex workers living and practicing their profession in the Bois de Boulogne. Being for the most part a male-to-female (MTF) transgender, the sex worker of the Bois de Boulogne challenges not only normative forms of gender identity and sexual behavior sanctioned by the French Republic but also the political ideologies that regulate them. The first part of the chapter establishes the historical context of sex work in the Bois de Boulogne, which became associated with dangerous transgender immigrants. It is argued that the state’s linking of urban insecurity and street prostitution to illegal immigration influenced the last two decades of repressive legislation that has marginalized this group. The second part examines Drexel’s documentary approach and its impact on the visual and narrative representation of sex workers, the Bois de Boulogne, and their symbiotic relationship. The third part analyzes the film’s opening, main narrative, and ending, focusing on the sex workers’ testimonies. The final part considers the ways in which Drexel’s documentary offers a platform for these individuals living on the margins of Paris to find their voices and speak on the behalf of their community.
Abstract
A time and space of alterity, the Parisian nightscape undergoes fundamental changes during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), most notably due to the advent of gas lighting and the city’s transformation from a medieval landscape into a modern metropolis. Many authors and chroniqueurs seek to record these changes in texts ranging from social realism to the fantastic, praising or criticizing, mocking or lamenting the transformation of the Paris night. Going beyond the canonical works that represent nocturnal Paris during the July Monarchy, this chapter analyzes the female author’s perspective on the Parisian nightscape. Drawing from George Sand and Delphine de Girardin, as well as lesser-known or forgotten authors, I consider the writing strategies adopted by women of the period to represent nocturnal Paris. The prevailing idea in well-known literary depictions of July Monarchy Paris at night is that of the nocturnal street as a masculine space where women generally feature as objects of the male gaze. From shadowy figures in doorways to scenes of exhibition under the boulevards’ streetlamps, such evocations of the Parisian night typically include the representation of the sexualized female body alongside a discourse of control and containment. This chapter examines a variety of female-authored texts, extracting recurring themes and motifs and the ways in which these writers seek to differentiate themselves from their male counterparts. Janet Wolff and Griselda Pollock have argued the impossibility of the figure of the flâneuse, but this chapter demonstrates the solutions women writers offered to the difficulties presented by female nightwalking, analyzing scenes of companionable nocturnal flânerie, as well as representations of the night-time street from a window or balcony.
Abstract
Despite his fascination with the aristocratic elite, the microcosm of finance, and the rising bourgeoisie, it is above all in the most sordid neighborhoods of Paris that Honoré de Balzac finds an unprecedented laboratory of creativity. But as they are fundamentally unclassifiable, the margins defy the unitary coherence of the taxonomic pattern by which the novelist intends to make the changing city more intelligible. The observation of urban life therefore mixes the realistic purpose with a more lyrical approach based on flânerie, initiated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782). By adopting a writing style that is itself hybridized, privileging poetic contemplation over the efficient march of the plot, Balzac can apprehend the mystery of these dregs of society. Prefiguring Charles Baudelaire, the representation of the margins in La Comédie humaine is thus remarkable by a fusion of the “hideux dans le joli,” which breaks with the traditional canons of ideal beauty. This is how this treatment of the underworld differs from that of Victor Hugo or Eugène Sue. Designating himself as an “observateur poète,” Balzac proposes a paradoxical poetization of the prosaism of the gutter, an aestheticization of depravity.
Abstract
Self-described as an ULO (Unidentified Literary Object) or “OLNI” (objet littéraire non-identifié), Yémy’s 2005 four-hundred-page long novel/prose poem Suburban Blues is characterized by its blending of multiple, very recognizable literary styles of canonical French literature, ranging from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Balzac, Darrieussecq and even La Fontaine. The scope of this book chapter is to first examine the notion of “postcolonial romanticism” as a way to aptly represent marginal postcolonial Paris, and marginal postcolonial France at large. In addition, this chapter questions the conditions of literary “canonization” in terms of incorporation of pre-existing French, and Paris-centered literature. Instead, it contends that in Yémy’s case, heteroglossy between African oral tradition and the French literary canon is what confers value to the text. As a result, it is the derisive dissonance brought to typical Paris-centered French superiority discourse that is being studied here—a shift which enables important conclusions related to topics of assimilation and post-slavery reparations.
Abstract
This chapter compares how Paris-based poets Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Jacques Prévert (1900–1977) represent the experience of the Parisian lower class in their works. My analysis relies on an indirect debate that I reveal between the two authors on issues related to the condition of the underclass as witnessed in the city’s streets. In this “conversation,” Prévert responds to Baudelaire’s views via intertextual references. By examining this implicit dialogue, I demonstrate the way the two poets articulate the literary trope of the disinherited Parisians parallels larger societal changes occurring in the West between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, I show how Baudelaire’s and Prévert’s depictions of the underprivileged bear witness to the establishment of a new aesthetic perspective, economic logic, and epistemic system. First, I explore how representing the lower class of the French capital fits the definition of a modern aesthetics. I also look at how these depictions comment on modern capitalism, and more generally on industrialization and technical progress at the root of this new economic model. Finally, as I highlight Baudelaire’s and Prévert’s diverging opinions regarding possible existential contentment for the Parisian poor, I reveal how the two authors’ opposing views mirror the progressive shift toward secular episteme that happens in Western thought starting in the nineteenth century.
Abstract
The banlieue constitutes a leitmotiv in Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, Histoire naturelle d’une famille sous le Second Empire. For Zola, this arithmo-maniac writer, these shifting suburbs were unreadable and impossible to categorize. Defining Paris’ banlieue during the second part of the nineteenth century is a difficult task as intertwined influences shaped Parisians’ perceptions and habits. After briefly sketching out how painters and writers depicted the banlieue, this study will focus on Zola’s multilayered and conflicting representations of the Parisian outskirts of the Second Empire in his Rougon-Macquart cycle. Zola both influenced and inherited the aesthetic visions of his time while also liberating himself from them, as creativity and modernity seem to emerge from this very chaotic space that is the banlieue of Paris. This space of margins acquired symbolic meaning as Zola elaborated an in-between space where texts and images could be deconstructed and reconstructed to reveal new art forms. These creative margins acquire a unique dimension for Zola as, for each novel, he developed an extensive preparatory dossier, where the genesis of his work unfolded as a sort of banlieue of his text.
Abstract
This chapter endeavors to portray the somber Paris of the Rosny brothers, the underworld of society relegated to the dark fringes of the capital, in a corpus of five novels published between 1887 and 1913. The pair depict the margins of the city by setting their stories in the outer arrondissements of the capital, in places situated between the center and the fortifs, between the city and its suburbs. These parts of Paris have their own rules and customs, as well as a well-established hierarchy amidst the vacant lots, construction sites, and dilapidated buildings. The novels studied here shed light on these urban facets in which misery coincides with violence. Prostitutes, outcasts, and terrorists frighten the bourgeois, as do the Apaches, gangs of idle young people from the early twentieth century who turn the peripheral arrondissements into their own playgrounds. This study explores how these marginal areas of the city, described by Marc Augé as “non-places,” which are both areas in their own right and “the relationship that people have with these areas,” embody another reality of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, that of an interstitial world between the lights of the center and the shadows of the fortifications.
Abstract
In his serial novel, Les Mystères de Paris (1842–1843), French writer Eugène Sue lures bourgeois readers into the depths of the Parisian underworld, while warning them of the horrors that await. Initially set apart from an overworld ruled by ostensibly law-abiding upper classes, Sue’s nineteenth-century Parisian underworld constitutes what geographer Edward Soja terms a “thirdspace,” which is a space that is simultaneously “real and imagined.” In this underworld “thirdspace,” the social mobility it provides its criminal inhabitants reveals bourgeois attitudes about the ontology of the dangerous classes as inherently violent. The lower-class violence of the counterspace works further to transform both upper-class domestic and professional spaces into ultraviolent sites of human brutality that are inscribed over scenes of criminal savagery. A geocritical analysis of the ubiquity of ultraviolence in Sue’s Paris reveals the transformation of the criminal space into one that allows for upper-class perpetrators. Furthermore, the mass consumption of lower- and upper-class violence in Sue’s novel suggests an ideological shift in the literary preferences of nineteenth-century French readers for a Paris inhabited by both lower-and upper-class evil-doers which, ultimately, reveals a modern twist on the criminal type.