Art and Literature of the Second Empire — Les Arts et la Littérature sous le Second Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Edited by David Baguley. (Durham Modern Language Series). University of Durham, 2003. xv+182 pp., 17 b&w plates. Unlike many books based on conference proceedings, this interesting collection of essays has a sharp focus, thanks to the editor, David Baguley, a premier critic and bibliographer of Émile Zola. Like the author of Les Rougon-Macquart, Baguley limits his work to the Second Empire, thus giving it a definite compass despite a broad range of essays dealing with literature, art, and politics. Since Baguley provides a succinct summary of each of the ten fine essays, all erudite in scholarship and lucid in presentation, I will attempt to unravel some common threads that point to essential characteristics of this much-maligned period of French history. Perhaps the most pervasive feature emerging from the essays is the close relationship of the arts and politics of the time: Rémi Dalisson illustrates the contribution of various arts to public ceremonies; Catherine Vercueil-Simion details the appointment of artists as bureaucrats; Peter Whyte describes the poet-courtier Théophile Gautier's relations with the royal family; Marie-Cécile Levet analyses the philanthropic George Sand's letters of petition for clemency to government officials; and Laurence Brogniez traces the artist-critic Claude Vignon's ambivalent opinions of current issues. That both of the latter women authors would adopt masculine pseudonyms and write surreptitiously (and that women are subjugated by the male gaze in Zola's novels, according to Gaël Bellalou), underscores a second characteristic of the period, an overall aura of censorship, reflected in the 1857 obscenity trials of its two most famous literary works, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. Another aspect of the era is its famous eclecticism, often equated with mediocrity, but re-evaluated by Patricia Mainardi, who sees it rather as a sign of variety and vitality, embodied for her in the under-appreciated landscapes of Corot. Similarly Richard Hobbs calls for a distinction between a mediocre eclecticism based on a mild mixture of styles and a more vigorous brand stemming from the confrontation of conflicting identities that he finds in Thomas Couture's work and writings. A final thread running through this tapestry of the Second Empire is the use of subtle subversion to undermine the conservative values of Napoleon III's regime: Robert Lethbridge shows Manet's dispassionate and ludic stance, much like Flaubert's, to constitute a rejection and reversal of the status quo; just as traces of subversion are revealed by Hobbs in Couture's independent studio; by Dalisson in the reintroduction of republican elements into public ceremonies; by Levet in Sand's rhetoric; by Dousteyssier-Khoze in Ponson du Terrail's shady character Rocambole; by Whyte in Gautier's fidelity to the exiled Victor Hugo; and by Brogniez in Vignon's criticism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".