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Known primarily as a jeweler in the vanguard of Art nouveau and an important collector of the Impressionists, Henri Vever (1854-1942), as his private diaries make clear, was also a foremost connoisseur of Japanese art in fin-de-siècle France, “the most passionate of all,” to Edmond de Goncourt. Well-connected to networks of dealers, museum officials, publications, and sites of sociability such as the dîners japonais, Vever figures among the most prominent members of a second wave of Parisian enthusiasts of Japanese art, active from approximately 1880 to 1900. Under the tutelage of the Japanese art dealers Hayashi Tadamasa and Siegfried Bing and the fine art printer Charles Gillot, Vever constituted a renowned collection of not only Japanese prints but also other art objects previously disregarded by collectors. Vever’s multiple and intersecting identities as luxury craft producer, leading member of professional associations, art historian and critic, collector, and Republican mayor placed him at the forefront of efforts to legitimate the collection and appreciation of Japanese art in France. His diaries also underscore the connections between the worlds of Japanese and Impressionist art collectors, and between proponents of japonisme and Art nouveau. Further, they highlight the importance of the 1900 Paris Exposition universelle as a triumphant moment for japonisme in France, just as they signal the shift on the part of some japonisants, at the same time, from Japanese art towards the decorative arts of the Islamic world.

The private diaries written between 1898 and 1901 by the French jeweler, art collector, and bibliophile Henri Vever (1854-1942) provide fresh evidence about how important late-nineteenth century esthetic ‘languages’ (japonisme, Symbolism, Art Nouveau) were appropriated by artists committed to renewing the decorative arts; the diaries also address the meaning and status of books. For Vever, his extensive collection of Japanese pattern albums served, above all, a utilitarian function, as design primers and sources of information about printing and engraving techniques for craft modernizers. At the same time, included in the physical space of his ‘Japanese library’ and in line with Symbolist esthetics, Japanese books were, to Vever, suggestive bibelots, whose evocative powers were enhanced through inclusion in harmonious decors. Vever’s experiments in Art Nouveau book design, finally, reveal his additional conception of the book as both surface to be decorated and space of artistic collaboration underscoring the equality of all arts.

The eight authors of this article, all historians or social scientists teaching in departments of French at American universities, assess the multidisciplinary field of “French Studies” today. The article elaborates on our experiences teaching and researching French and francophone history, society, politics, and culture. In particular, it addresses pedagogical challenges, study abroad, interdepartmental collaboration, institutional pressures, the impact of globalization, and graduate training. French departments can develop their role by promoting multidisciplinary dialogues about a French and francophone world whose literature, history, and social arrangements remain questions of wide import. These questions include postcolonial identities, territory and identification, multiculturalism and assimilation, the fate of the welfare state, and the future of a rich, idiosyncratic cultural and political tradition in a globalizing world.

Commissioned in 1913 by the noted print collector and bibliophile, Henri Beraldi, the 'Monument du costume, 1900–1910: La Vie mondaine a Paris', featuring seventy original watercolours by a popular illustrator of Belle Epoque high society, Pierre Vidal, is a single-copy edition de luxe, never published due to the outbreak of World War I. Beraldi and Vidal's 'monument' offers a detailed pictorial record of the relationship among fashion, society, and daily life in Belle Epoque Paris. At the same time, this work signals the unique role played during this era by amateurs such as Beraldi as privileged architects of the illustrated book.

L'A. se penche sur le discours misogyne du 19eme siecle critiquant les attitudes des femmes envers les livres, qui sont vus en tant qu'objets sexues. L'histoire nous montre que le livre etait considere comme l'institution eminemment masculine et l'expression du pouvoir et de l'autorite. Mais vers la fin du siecle, le double defi de la femme nouvelle, aussi bien sur le plan de l'instruction que sur le plan du temps des loisirs, a amene le crise de la masculinite. Dans ce contexte, la demonisation et la sexualisation des femmes en relation avec les livres ont servi un nouveau but, et le book love est devenu une metaphore pour decrire la passion des collectionneurs envers leurs possessions. La confusion sexuelle concernant la bibliophilie s'est repandue dans les dichotomies telles que texte versus livre, prive versus public, lecture passive versus chasse aux livres active ; ces discours avaient pour but d'exclure les femmes des hauts lieux des bibliophiles en deplacant les relations entre et a l'interieur des sexes et en legitimant les usages et les attitudes envers les livres et les textes

" ... que furent les volumes/Par moi vetus d'etoffe et mis en un ecrin?" -- Robert de Montesquiou, "Priere du Relieur," Prieres de tous (1902) "O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!" --Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" (1931) In the image of its legendary owner, the poet, aesthete, and dandy extraordinaire Robert de Montesquiou, the posthumous sale of his library in April 1923 and April 1924 at the Hotel Drouot became a notorious literary and society happening. As its three-volume sale catalog, prefaced by Maurice Barres and embellished with engravings of Montesquiou's distinctive bat emblem, attests, the collection of 3727 volumes, manuscripts, and bindings belonging to this "bibliophile distingue" (Lievre 369) featured many gems. (2) These included, for example, a five-volume, 1678 edition of La Fontaine's Fables (31, first sale; N.a.f. 15229), which fetched one of the sale's highest prices? What created an even greater stir, however, was the insertion of letters and dedications to Montesquiou in several hundred of the volumes by contemporary authors, and their subsequent sale. Some of these items revealed highly personal, often embarrassing details of authors' lives, as with the 95 letters and other documents describing the final years of Verlaine. (4) Others exposed the attitudes of exaggerated obsequiousness and delirious admiration often bestowed on the count by those in the rarefied salons and cenacles he frequented. A notable bibliophilic, literary, and society event, then, the sale also occasioned public reflection on the possible deeper significance of this library. What, as Pierre Lievre mused in the columns of La Revue Hebdomadaire, did Montesquiou's library show? One set of answers to this question, in fact the one most frequently developed by Montesquiou's contemporaries, leads into the domain of literary relations and literary history. In this view, the many volumes in the library by Marcel Schwob, Remy de Gourmont, Georges Rodenbach, Pierre Louys, Stephane Mallarme, and others in their circle, all bearing laudatory inscriptions from the authors, are revealing indicators of Montesquiou's importance as a poet and esthetic guide for the Symbolists. A related set of answers to the question of the library's documentary significance opens onto literary biography. Focusing exclusively on the numerous dedicaces to Montesquiou, this approach attempts to tease out, as one critic suggested, their layers of "courtoisie ... bienseance ... interet ... toutes sortes de convenances et d'obligations ..." as well as their "moquerie secrete" and their "ironie deguisee" (Lievre 370), in order to probe the complex poses that Montesquiou and many of those in his literary, artistic, and society orbits adopted toward one another. The study of Montesquiou's library may thus hold great value for literary historians and biographers seeking to study his position within a literary network or to clarify the nature of his relations with other writers. (5) However, it is also possible to propose a less traditional "reading" of Montesquiou's library from the combined perspectives of both the history of the book and esthetics. For book historians, especially those interested in one of its crucial components, the history of reading, the catalog of a personal library can be a privileged document. It can serve, as Robert Darnton suggests, as a "profile of a reader," allowing us to "inspect the furnishings" of a reader's mind ("History of Reading," 162)--even if readers rarely read all the books in their libraries, as the many volumes with uncut pages in the Montesquiou catalog attest. Personal libraries such as Montesquiou's, in conjunction with other documents, may also help clarify hot only what, where, and when individuals read, but also how they were affected by their readings (Darnton, "History of Books," 134). In Montesquiou's case, these questions of social practices and mentalites cannot easily be separated from a consideration of his esthetics. …

This essay explores the complex literary and personal relationship between the writers Marie de Mirabeau and her daughter, known as Gyp. The rarity of such mother-daughter couples in the male-dominated literary field of nineteenth-century France raises questions about mothers, and women, as literary mentors during this period. To what extent did the literary relations between Marie de Mirabeau and Gyp conform to, or stray from, the codified behavior expected of them in society? Given that both women were breaking with class and gender codes in pursuing a remunerative profession, what types of compensatory strategies did each develop to avoid further social and sexual marginalization? In furnishing a 'maternal' example to her daughter in the professional realm, did Marie supply her with certain advantages that men could not? How important, finally, was Marie's influence on her daughter's success? These questions are addressed through a comparison of the literary itineraries of these two " bas-bleus ."

Although the career of Thierry de Martel, one of France's most illustrious neurosurgeons, would seem primarily of interest to historians of medicine, his life and self‐inflicted death can be inscribed into different contexts. De Martel can be considered representative of what Jean Touchard calls ‘l'esprit des annees trente’, a spirit both of malaise and revolt which prompted many among the First World War generation to seek new political and intellectual alternatives to replace what they deemed the morally bankrupt ones of the Third Republic. Both because of his connections with Parisian literary and political circles, and the paradoxical nature of his ideological itinerary between the wars (encompassing both proto‐fascism and Germanophobia), de Martel's case is particularly interesting. This biographical portrait of a previously unstudied ‘nonconformist’ in turn serves as a prism through which to view the ferment of the interwar period.