Social Types in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Journalism: The (Un)Making of National Identity in France

2017 | Business & Finance

Focusing on social types during the July Monarchy, Pauline de Tholozany argues that they played a role in the construction of a national ideal in France during the period. As Tholozany shows, types such as the dandy, flA neur (including the child flA neur), and grisette abounded, both in plot-driven literary genres and in journalistic sketches. At the same time, in classifying and describing these types, writers such as Jules Janin and Honore de Balzac in collaboration with graphic artists insisted on the impossibility of establishing a stable social taxonomy. This paradoxical gesture, Tholozany claims, has larger consequences, since the social type's resistance to a stable classification ultimately points to the difficulty of defining national identity as the sum of its typological parts. Reminding us that character, type, and stereotype are all words borrowed from printing technologies, Tholozany suggests that the types in what Walter Benjamin called panoramic literature signal a fear of obsoleteness that continually evolving printing technologies cast on social thought, a response that inaugurated a new way of thinking about society.

Pauline De Tholozany (Author)