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Photography and Other Menaces to Nineteenth-Century French Literary and Artistic Traditions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
When the news of the invention of the daguerreotype left the halls of the French Academy of Sciences in 1839, it fell on the ears of an eager and receptive public, spellbound by the miracle of such an invention. The rapid popularization of the daguerreotype, and subsequently, of less time-consuming photographic processes, forced critics and artists alike to vehemently defend a definition of art that either categorically excluded the new medium or open-mindedly included it within the ranks of a modern or industrialized art. If one maintained, as many did, that the nature and essence of art/literature can be clearly defined and that this definition must be grounded in tradition, coming to terms with what photography was and where it rightfully belonged required either a staunch reaffirmation of one's beliefs about aesthetics or a reassessment of those beliefs. In either case, photography functioned as a disruptive element that did not cause but contributed to an (already existing) artistic movement in which the integrity and solidity of aesthetic definitions and orthodoxies were being questioned and tested. In the minds of those apprehensive and suspicious of the new medium, industrialization, as well as political and social change, had already begun to sound the death knell for art as it had traditionally been conceived. If art/literature had become contaminated by industry, technological advancement and democratic principles, the conservative French nineteenth-century thinker saw it as his duty to save the former from certain destruction. “Saving” art/literature required a fundamental reinforcement of the belief in the closure and soundness of aesthetic definitions whose truth tradition had supposedly guaranteed. Uncovering the presuppositions behind aesthetic definitions that claim to speak in the name of tradition, self-evident truths, and even the nature of man is an endeavor worth pursuing because this manner of thinking leads to a kind of tyranny that has as its goal the suppression of questions, critical inquiry and thus, independent thinking. This study seeks to examine a small part of French aesthetic theory during a period in which change, instability and revolution became almost commonplace. The reactions of conservative artists and critics to post 1840s literary and artistic practices will be scrutinized in order to unveil the deep-seated fears and beliefs that found conservative backlashes to that which is referred to as “new” or “progressive.”
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- Copyright © 1993 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
Notes
1. Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: The Penguin Press, 1968): xiv.
2. One striking exception to this is Maxime du Camp. Fully agreeing that litera ture was indeed in a state of decay, he sought to revitalize it by advocating its mod ernization : "While science creates wonders, while industry accomplishes miracles, we remain impassive, indifferent, scornfully plucking the warped strings of our lyres and closing our eyes so as not to see, or persisting in looking only toward a past for which we have no real reason to yearn…. Its (literature's) job will be to for mulate the new dogma; it will have to displace science from the clouds in which it delights, it will direct industry, because - and the dreamers be damned - the centu ry is in the hands of planets and machines." "Les Chants Modernes: Préfaces d'un volume de poésies," Revue de Paris 24 (1855): 324, 335.
3. Gaschon de Molènes, "Revue littéraire," Revue des deux Mondes 28 (1841): 1002.
4. de Molènes, 1002.
5. Amédée Pommier, "Les Trafiquans littéraires," Revue des deux Mondes 8 (1844): 896.
6. Paulin Limayrac, "De l'ésprit de désordre en littérature," Revue des deux mondes 6 (1844): 805.
7. Charles de Mazade, "Des oeuvres littéraires de ce temps," Revue des deux mon des 2 (1846): 1016.
8. Sainte-Beuve, "Quelques vérités sur la situation en littérature, Revue des deux mondes 3 (1843): 13 and 14.
9. Louis Peisse, "Le Salon," Revue des deux mondes 6 (1844): 340. Rosalind Krauss makes the following observation about what Walter Benjamin has called the "exhi bition value," of the work of art: "Aesthetic discourse as it developed in the nine teenth century organized itself increasingly around what could be called the space of exhibition. Whether public museum, official salon, world's fair, or private show ing, the space of exhibition was constituted in part by the continuous surface of wall, a wall increasingly unstructured for any purpose other than the display of art. … It was also the ground of criticism, which is to say, on the one hand, the ground of a written response to the works' appearance in that special context, and, on the other, the implicit ground of choice - of either inclusion or exclusion - with every thing excluded from the space of exhibition becoming marginalized with regard to its status as Art." ("Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," Art Journal 42.4 (Winter 1982)).
10. Louis Peisse, "Salon de 1841," Revue des deux mondes 2 (1841): 10-11.
11. Gustave Planche, "L'Art et l'Industrie," Revue des deux mondes 10 (1857): 203.
12. Pommier, 898.
13. Charles de Mazade, "De la démocratie en littérature," Revue des deux mondes 5 (1850): 904.
14. Emile Montégut, "La Littérature nouvelle," Revue des deux mondes 32 (1861): 1010.
15. A.A. Cuvillier-Fleury, "Madame Bovary," Journal des Débats (May 26, 1857). Cited in Jill Kelly, "Photographic Reality and French Literary Realism: Nineteenth-Century Synchronism and Symbiosis," The French Review 65.2 (December 1991): 202.
16. In his book, Paraesthetics, David Carroll raises an important point: "… for the place given to art and the way the question of the aesthetic in general is approached affect not only theories of art (aesthetics in the narrow sense), but also the theories of all the fields art relates to, even if at a distance." (New York: Methuen, 1987): 24.
17. Sainte-Beuve, 12.
18. Sainte-Beuve, 12.
19. Charles de Mazade, 905-906.
20. Paulin Limayrac, 815-816.
21. M.L. Figuier, "Histoire et progrès de la photographie," Revue des deux mondes 24 (1848):128.
22. Alfonse de Lamartine, Cours familiar de littérature (Paris: Léopold Robert, 1858): 6: 410.
23. de Lamartine, 7: 43.
24. Gisèle Freund, Photographie et société (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974): 76-77.
25. La Revue française (1839). Cited in Gisèle Freund 209.
26. Planche, 205.
27. Henri Delaborde, "La Photographie et la gravure," Revue des deux mondes 2 (1856): 622.
28. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his essay, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," sees instead a relationship between photography and the art of printing: "Such are the stereoscope and the photograph, by the aid of which form is henceforth to make itself seen through the world of intelligence, as thought has long made itself heard by means of the art of printing." Cf. Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays and Images (New York: The Museum of Modem Art, 1980): 57.
29. Charles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859: Le Public moderne et la photographie," Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961): 1035.
30. Paul Gruyer, Victor Hugo photographe (Paris: Charles Mendel, 1905).
31. Paul Gruyer, 36.
32. Baudelaire, 1035. Because of Baudelaire's opinions on photography and on progress in general, I have categorized him, for the purposes of this study, as a "conservative thinker." Progress, for him, is a grotesque idea "that bloomed on the rotten ground of modern fatuity, releasing each person from his duty, delivering every soul from its responsibility, separating the will from all the ties to which the love of beauty bound it…." Baudelaire laments the fact that the superiority of the human mind is measured by the symbols of progress (electricity, steam) and not by the activity of the artistic imagination. As far as Baudelaire's poetic works are con cerned, however, he most certainly could not be considered conservative. The artist, according to him, must search for "la modernité": "… the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, this is half of art; the other half is the eternal and the immutable." His poetry, condemned by a conservative, conformist bourgeois society, seems far removed from traditional, aesthetic principles and in fact effectuates a rupture with that tradition.
33. Baudelaire, 1035-1036.
34. Had it not been for Jacques Derrida's well-known and often debated study of the supplement in De la grammatalogie, Baudelaire's use of this term may have passed almost unnoticed. There exists a rather bizarre parallel between Derrida's discussion of writing and Baudelaire's warning that photography cannot be permit ted to supplement art. Derrida points out that, in Rousseau for example, writing is considered to be a supplement to speech, the "natural" state of language, and is nec essarily dangerous because, by ruse or artifice, it makes present that which is absent. "But the supplementary replaces. It is only added in order to replace. It takes its place where "in place of" begins; if it fills, it fills a void. If it represents and creates an image, it does so because of a prior lack of presence. As replacement and accessory, the supplementary is an auxiliary, a subordinate instance that takes the place of. As a substitute, it does not simply add to the positive quality of a presence; indeed it produces no outline but is assigned a place in the structure by the pres ence of a void. Nowhere, nothing can be filled by itself; this can only occur when it allows itself to be filled with a sign and a procurement. The sign is always a supple ment to the thing itself." (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967) 208. Art itself is a supple ment (to nature). Photography, then, becomes the supplement of the supplement since it seeks to mechanically, and thereby artificially, replace a representational medium defined by the attainment or revelation of an ideal only the imagination, according to Baudelaire, has the permission to supplement (other mental faculties) since its origin is divine (Baudelaire 1039).
35. Jill Kelly, 203-204.
36. Charles Baudelaire, "Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains," Oeuvres Complètes 705.
37. Sir William J. Newton, "Upon Photography in an Artistic View, and its Relation to the Arts," Essays and Images 80.
38. Eugène Delacroix, "De l'enseignement du dessin," Revue des deux Mondes 7 (1850):1143.
39. See Disdéri, "L'Art de la photographie" (Paris: chez l'auteur, 1862) 53. "By his choice of types, by the way in which he illuminates them, he (the intelligent camera operator) endows a material image with the living trace of his personality…. Ultimately the photographer is permitted to translate, by the means inherent to the medium, a considerable number of phenomena in the external world…. Photography is thus a language."
40. Eugène Delacroix, "De l'enseignement du dessin," 1143.
41. Jean Sagne, Delacroix et la photographie (Editions Herscher, 1982): 92.
42. Charles Baudelaire, "L'oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix," Oeuvres Complétes 1119-1120.
43. Eugene Delacroix, Journal, 3 vols. (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1932): 3: 252.
44. Eugène Delacroix, Journal, 2: 58-59.
45. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990): 84, 72.
46. Eugéne Delacroix, "De l'enseignement du dessin," 1142.
47. Ibid. 1143.
48. Quoted in Jean Sagne, 27.
49. Quoted in Jean Sagne, 27.
50. Quoted in Jean Sagne, 27.