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This article is primarily concerned with the Dindenault episode (chapters V-VIII) of François Rabelais's Quart livre, which deals with economic and theatrical themes simultaneously. While previous studies have tackled these themes separately, I outline how they ought to be considered in tandem and, indeed, rely on one another for significance. I argue that in the Dindenault episode, Rabelais's use of common theatrical structures and motifs serves as a stage upon which to mount socio-economic critique, constituting a performance of theatrical economics, in the context of a broader example of economic theatre. I then turn to one of the nineteenth-century afterlives of Rabelais's texts – Théodore Labarre's and Henri Trianon's 1855 opera Pantagruel – claiming that the interdependence of the Dindenault scene's economic and theatrical themes is retroactively confirmed by its move into one of its 'downstream contexts': the shepherd's scandalous afterlife on the musical stage of Second Empire France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study focuses on the detailed account of the Parisian theaters daily receipts register from 1858 to 1867 during the Second French Empire time and on the role of the debate around receipts in the Second Empire theatrical life thanks to the analysis of different newspapers of the time. This debate first opens the way to the approval of the decree of January 6th 1864 on the abolition of the system of privileges and therefore on the "freedom of theaters". Then, it highlights the economic aspects linked to the theatre management, including some historical controversies such as the deduction on "Poor Laws” from receipts.

The article explores the role of Belgian publishers in shaping French Decadent aesthetics during the Second French Empire and its aftermath, focusing on how their progressive publishing practices influenced both Belgian and French literature. Topics include the contributions of publishers Albert Lacroix and Henry Kistemaeckers, the development of a unique Belgian literary style, and the interplay between Belgian and French literary traditions.

The article offers an analysis of three plays about Napoleon Bonaparte performed at the Cirque national theatre at the end of the Second Republic and in the early years of France's Second Empire. Topics discussed include Bonaparte en Egypte by Fabrice Labrousse and Narcisse Fournier, Le Consulat et l'Empire by Labrousse and Albert, and La Barriere de Clichy by Paul Meurice, Alexandre Dumas pere and Auguste Maquet.

Copyright of Australian Journal of French Studies (Liverpool University Press / Journals) is the property of Liverpool University Press / Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the case of N'Guyen Van Binh, a South Vietnamese political prisoner exiled for his alleged role in "Poukhombo's Rebellion" in Cambodia in 1866. Although Van Binh's original sentence of exile was reduced to one year in prison he was nonetheless deported and disappeared into the maw of the colonial systems of indentured servitude and forced labor; he likely did not survive the experience. He was thus the victim of injustice and his case reveals the at best haphazard workings of the French colonial bureaucracy during the period of transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. While the documentary record is entirely from the perspective of the colonizers, reading between the lines we can also learn something about Van Binh himself including his fierce will to resist his colonial oppressors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues against the often-made connection between democratic reform and Union victory in the Civil War. Defining democracy narrowly as an electoral process, the article looks at France, the German states, a selection of Latin American countries, and Great Britain to illustrate that democratic reforms were an ongoing conversation started long before the Civil War. While the Second Empire of Napoleon III receives much scholarly attention because of its perceived autocratic tendencies, historians often forget that Napoleon retained universal manhood suffrage during his reign. More importantly, the article illustrates that the United States were a symbol of what to avoid during Great Britain's Reform Act debates as democracy was frequently equated with mob rule. Overall, the article illustrates that the countries discussed had ongoing conversations about democratic electoral reforms well before the 1860s and that debates surrounding democratic reforms did not focus on the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1858, the French metalworking firm Christofle presented an allegorical group of five putti cast in aluminium to Emperor Napoléon III. This surtout de table, or centrepiece, was dedicated to the Emperor in recognition of his personal support of the scientific project that resulted in aluminium, a new discovery of the 1850s. Together with another, slightly different, example for the investor Isaac Pereire, the composition suggests new ways of understanding mid-nineteenth-century goldsmithing, the uses of allegory and the imagery of modernity in the applied arts. This dynamic interplay between modern materials and artistic traditions, this essay argues, has much to tell us about the metallic surface and its role in the making of the French Second Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Napoléon III's attempt to reimagine the Second Empire during the early 1860s in the face of growing public frustration with France's domestic and foreign politics. It argues that Napoléon III sought to secure the Second Empire's popularity by associating it with the legacy of ancient Rome and the memory of Napoléon I. He also worked to expand the meaning of the empire's identity by defining it not only as a political program within France but also as an expansive, multinational structure. The article shows that this vision of empire came into focus in a series of political conflicts over the Mexican expedition and the ideal organization of Algeria. Its examination of this conversation surrounding empire and its meanings highlights how discourses of European racial superiority over colonial others intersected with arguments about the organization of the French state in nineteenth-century imperial thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My article focuses on theatrical representations of Napoleon and retired soldiers of the grande armée during France's Second Empire (1851-1870). I examine three plays: Une petite fille de la grande armée by Barrière and Perrot, Le porte-drapeau d'Austerlitz by Guénée and Marc-Leprévost, and Napoléon, ou Schoenbrunn et Sainte-Hélène by Dupeuty and Destourbets. Although based on historical fact, these works were subject to prior government censorship, as were all dramatic works at that time. My analyses show that changes made by the censors altered the historical narrative in order to reinforce the images of power these plays projected. My conclusion emphasizes the dual role of these plays as instruments of propaganda, as well as examples of censored discourse, showing how important a tool the retelling of the past was to those in power, and how much they feared any allusion to regime change or assassination attempts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key dimension of photomontage is the way that its formal features – and consequent debates about the probity of making a photograph out of multiple sources – illuminate some of the fundamental problems of representation in the late nineteenth century. Among these was the question of whether an account of the past was properly presented as an unmediated transmission of fact, or demonstrably fashioned by an author: whether the tools of representation were to be submerged or emphasised. This article examines the parallels between the strategies of authorial visibility in early photomontage and the rhetorical approaches adopted by historians to modulate their presence in their texts. In particular, this study investigates the convergences of historiography and photomontage around the collapse of the Second Empire, a moment that witnessed powerful shifts in the conception of the voice of the historian as well as the production of photomontages that grappled with – and even thematised – the problem of their constructedness. An important but little-known group of photomontages by Eugène Appert, depicting the Imperial family in exile as well as the emerging Third Republic from which they fled, registers these conjunctions in their full complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines doctors’ role in the spread of morphine addiction, or morphinomanie, in late nineteenth-century France and the impact of morphine’s use and abuse on medical professionalisation. Although in the 1860s and 1870s doctors had treated morphine as a sort of analgesic panacea, by the early 1880s they began to recognise morphine addiction as a serious social crisis. In a competitive medical marketplace, individual doctors used morphine’s analgesic power to enhance their own credibility in the eyes of their patients. However, this same substance also threatened the legitimacy of the medical profession, as doctors and patients alike succumbed to the new iatrogenic pathology of morphinomanie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a close reading of the only appearance in La Bête humaine of the term progrès enables a reading of the novel that integrates its two settings--the railways and the legal system--into a single perspective. Zola's narrative anticipates Heidegger's postwar reflections on technology and technocracy, and the philosopher's concepts of "Enframing" and "standing- reserve" in turn illuminate the novelist's writing. Zola's concern with showing the toxic effects of the Second Empire's corruption, on both abstract ideals and physical systems, produces a work in which the possibilities of both progress and justice are precluded. Consideration of other novels such as Son Excellence Eugène Rougon and Travail establishes the railways as a dialectical site of tension between corruption and utopia across Zola's œuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of Paris by Haussmann (1853–1870) is presented as a classic case of state-led modernization. What most accounts do not take into consideration is that Haussmann faced formidable opposition from property owners in his attempts to realize the emperor's ambitions for Paris, an opposition that centred on competing interpretations and uses of planning law. Based on heretofore unstudied archival material, this paper traces Haussmann's attempts to establish his (at times) creative use of planning law as legitimate in a context where planning was firmly in the hands of property owners. Haussmann's strategic use of the law, or planning practice, was able to lay bare the fact that planning law has no legitimacy in itself – only particular uses of the law can gain or lose legitimacy. Planning power can thus be defined as the possession of legitimacy in the use of planning law; and since the legal framework is a site of contest rather than a source of legitimacy, planning power depends on external legitimation. In the Haussmann case it is clear that state backing was central, even though (implicit) early support from the Parisian population cannot be ruled out until more research has been conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines George Sand's approach to labour both in her commercial negotiations and in her own texts. It argues that the increasingly fraught relationship within the literary market between work, art, and money is played out and reworked in Sand's novels. Whereas in her correspondence Sand oscillates between the practical and the aesthetic, in her narratives she creates utopian, ternary models of labour which resolve this binary. The article thus shows how Sand uses her writing as a tool to question the opposition between art and commerce, offering a vision of artistic work as both product and noble pursuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the works of novelist , Émile Zola in the "La curée" which is the second novel of the Rougon-Macquart series which establishes Paris, France as the center of Zola's Second Empire. Topics discussed include Zola as both an exemplar of Second Empire Paris and her own imaginative vision, dual mapping of characteristic of Zola's own conception of his aesthetic and establishment of the map of Haussmann's city.

The article offers information on the reassessment of the development of Second Empire capital and the temporal implications of the fiscal instruments. Topics discussed include the material or spatial impact of Haussmannization, modality of fictitious capital, and its dependence of futurity following Marx theory and complex nature of Haussmann's strategy of financing.

In French history textbooks published after France's defeat in the Franco- Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, the presentation of the war and its outcome frequently include the myth of France's revanche and depictions of the Prussian enemy as barbarians. Other textbooks presented a narrative of progress in which the French Third Republic is shown as the endpoint of a process of advancing civilization. While the idea of a French revanche can be regarded as a founding myth of the Third Republic, the narrative of progress can be seen as an echo of this myth, cleansed of the concept of the enemy as barbarian, which constitutes a national master narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the classification of Belleville as one of the cheapest quartiers on the French Monopoly board. Topics mentioned include international street signage and outward appearance of the Bellevillois inhabitants, map of the 20 arrondissements that comprise inner Paris, and the blood shed in defence of the quartier from the start of the Second Empire in 1852.

This article examines Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's critique of Napoleon III's strict control of the press, as expressed through the narrative discourse in Charles Demailly (1860-1868). The novel is informed by the brothers' brief career as journalists, which they abandoned after being censored. Their text suggests that political censorship under the Second Empire's authoritarian regime is responsible for contaminating literary criticism with covert political polemics and for turning the non-political petits journaux into trivial scandalmongers that debase the literary field and the public rather than building on the alleged intellectual and artistic gains of the 1830s. The narrator also blames the public for its complicity in the shameless but popular practices of such papers. Yet, through the authors' experiment with journalism as well as their critique of the press in the novel, we can discern an acknowledgement of their dependence on the public and a condescending but genuine desire to influence the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Ernest Renan's representation of the historical Jesus in the author's intellectual, personal and political trajectory. It traces the development of Renan's ideas about Jesus across a variety of texts, from his loss of faith at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in 1845 until the publication ofLife of Jesusin 1863. It particularly argues that Renan's best-selling book should be rooted in the cultural aftermath of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 to 1851. The violence of the June Days and the election of Louis-Napoléon bred in Renan a deep disillusionment with democracy and socialism. Where French writers of the 1830s and 1840s had offered a proletarian Christ promising social revolution, Renan therefore depicted a liberal Jesus who offered a non-violent ‘revolution’ of personal morality. This Jesus was an individualist who spurned the temporal realm with ‘transcendent disdain’, preferring instead to pursue a state of inner liberty and perfection. Furthermore, this article argues that this representation of Jesus reflected the self-justification of Second Empire liberals such as Renan, who had retreated from frontline politics into the realm of culture and ideas. Indeed,Life of Jesuswas itself a product of precisely this retreat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the connections between Second Empire fiction and journalism with particular reference to the Goncourts' Charles Demailly. A roman à clef, the Goncourts' novel of journalism (the first edition of which was published in 1860) sketches a portrait of the divided literary field under the Second Empire. Deeply pessimistic in its representation of the petite presse, the text stresses the gulf dividing literature from journalism and advances an argument about the media's invasive tendencies: the newspaper, it suggests, threatens to reconfigure the limits of private life. Such concerns prove problematic: not only do the innumerable connections which bind newspaper to novel undermine the literature/journalism dichotomy, but Charles Demailly in fact appropriates the privacy-invading tendencies associated with le petit journal--making covert references in its keys to leading figures of the Second Empire literary field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the dialogue between metropolitan political elites and Algerian activists that grew up during the Second Empire, revisiting an important moment in the making of France's "modern" republican democracy. Through an examination of Algerian newspapers and publications, it assesses the role that colonial public opinion played in the "republican renaissance" of the 1860s, detailing how colon polemicists consciously tailored an ideology of moderate republicanism to fit colonial society and elaborate a brand of republican colonialism that would, in time, provide the ideological basis for the colonial republic. In placing nineteenth-century French political history in a trans-Mediterranean framework, this article challenges the customary history of hexagonal France, indicating the vital role colonial activists played in the making of republican colonialism, influencing considerations of the French nation and citizenship that would, in time, encourage the conception of a French imperial nation-state supported under the Third Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Algeria under the rule of French leader Napoleon III during the Second Empire, focusing on issues of nationality and multiculturalism. A public announcement by Napoleon III in 1863 declared Algeria an "Arab Kingdom," not a French colonial possession, leading to a public outpouring of contradictory opinions in the Algerian press. Topics considered include French culture and civilization, citizenship, republicanism, religious toleration, imperialism, and racial and ethnic prejudice.

An essay that discusses the poetry work in Charles Baudelaire's poetry book "Les Fleurs du mal" is presented. It informs that the poetry in the book emerges as the nucleus around Baudelaire's prose poem collection "Le Spleen de Paris." Through his poetry Baudelaire creates a link between the bloody catastrophe of 1848 and the violence of French Second Empire's Government Propaganda.

An essay is presented on the expulsion of Germans from France during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Particular focus is given to debates surrounding the control of migration, the relationship between individual liberty and national security, and government policy towards civilians of enemy nationality. According to the author, the Franco-Prussian war set an important precedent for the identification of foreign nationals as enemies.

The article presents a study which focuses on the state of French military music and international relations from the Second Empire in 1850 to the beginning of World War I in 1914. The reform of military music composition and the development of a musician-soldier status during the reign of French Emperor Napoléon III are mentioned. Topics include the reception of Prussian music in France, the geopolitical role of French military music, and the diplomatic role of the French Garde republicaine (Republican Guard).