The moorlands of Gascony are often considered one of the most dramatic examples of top-down rural modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. From an area of open moors, they were transformed in one generation into the largest man-made forest in Europe. Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century France explores how these changes were experienced and negotiated by the people who lived there, drawing on the immense ethnographic archive of Felix Arnaudin (1844-1921). The study places the songs, stories, and everyday speech that Arnaudin collected, as well as the photographs he took, in the everyday lives of agricultural workers and artisans. It argues that the changes are were understood as a gradual revolution in bodily experiences, as men and women forged new working habits, new sexual relations, and new ways of conceiving of their own bodies. Rather than merely presenting a story of top-down reform, this is an account of the flexibility and creativity of the cultural traditions of the working population. William G. Pooley tells the story of the folklorist Arnaudin and the men and women whose cultural traditions he recorded, then uncovers the work carried out by Arnaudin to explore everyday speech about the body, stories of werewolves and shapeshifters, tales of animal cunning and exploitation, and songs about love and courtship. The volume focuses on the lives of a handful of the most talented storytellers and singers Arnaudin encountered, showing how their cultural choices reflect wider patterns of behaviour in the region, and across rural Europe.

The moorlands of Gascony were a place of dramatic rural modernisation in 19th-century France, transforming in one generation from open moors to the largest man-made forest in Europe. This study draws upon the immense ethnographic archive of F elix Arnaudin (1844-1921) to explore how these changes were negotiated by the people who lived there.--

Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

The first Yale French Studies issue on photography, examining French photography's place in art, identity, and society through a lens of diversity and interdisciplinary investigation In its first issue on photography, this volume of Yale French Studies presents multiple avenues of interdisciplinary investigation designed to intersect and open up new areas of inquiry in the twenty-first century. These intersections push beyond traditional geographic and gender boundaries, exploring women's photography, new cultural contexts, trans orientalism, and minority and marginalized bodies. As they do so, they ask us to reconsider the way that we conceive of photography's place in the past and in our lives today.

Examines nineteenth-century hairstyles and their cultural associations, and analyzes the social and symbolic roles that hair played in literary representations of the new body ideal of the era in fashion magazines, and as clues to social status, sexual availability and character in the fiction of major French authors including Baudelaire, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola.

Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city—in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.

The essays in this volume contribute diversely towards a revision and a reconceptualization of nineteenth-century France, with many adopting interdisciplinary methodologies attentive to the interplay between literature, history, art, popular and high culture, politics and science.

Ubiquitous in the streets and brothels of nineteenth-century Paris, the prostitute was even more so in the novels and paintings of the time. Charles Bernheimer discusses how these representations of the sexually available woman express male ambivalence about desire, money, class, and the body. Interweaving close textual analysis with historical anecdote and theoretical speculation, Bernheimer demonstrates how the formal properties of art can serve strategically to control anxious fantasies about female sexual power. Drawing on methods derived from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, social history, feminist theory, and narrative analysis, this interdisciplinary classic (available now for the first time in paperback) was awarded Honorable Mention in 1990 for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the Modern Language Association for the best book of criticism.

In late nineteenth-century France, when Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had finally begun to permeate French culture and society, several academic artists turned to a relatively new sub-genre of history painting, the prehistoric-themed subject. This artistic interest in Darwin’s theories was manifested as paintings and sculptures of prehistoric humanity engaged in physical conflict with each other or other animals, struggling for food, or hunting—all nineteenth-century popular understandings of “survival of the fittest.” This book examines how this sub-genre captured the imagination of French Salon painters from the 1880s to early 1900s, in particular that of Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), one of the foremost academic painters during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. A central argument of this book concerns the unique interpretation of prehistoric humanity that Cormon visualized in his paintings. While the vast majority of prehistoric-themed images made by his salon colleagues focused on violence, combat, and sexual conquest, Cormon’s paintings depict a conflict-free humanity, in which collaboration and cooperation dominate, rather than physical struggle. This study probes the French intellectual understanding and appropriation of Darwin’s theories and considers how the French (mis)translation of The Origin of Species by Clémence-Auguste Royer, the first French translator of the text—along with Neo-Lamarckism and republican ideology in Third Republic France—may have collectively shaped Cormon’s representation of early humanity. The art press overwhelmingly favored Cormon’s visualization of the prehistoric world over that of his Salon peers. Through extended analysis of the art criticism concerning Cormon’s work, Shalon Parker argues that critics’ very clear preference for Cormon’s paintings was rooted in their awareness that he utilized the sub-genre of the prehistoric as a forum in which to reimagine and revive academic figurative painting at a time when the critical reception of Salon art had reached its nadir. Additionally, this study provides a broad overview of the visual models, in particular the anthropological and ethnographic texts and imagery, most readily available to Cormon as sources for shaping his vision of the prehistoric world.