Lamartine and My Shoes: French Fashion, `la terreur et la sympathie'

This article argues for the importance of fashion's hold on the French cultural imagination in the nineteenth century. In particular, it addresses the significance of metaphors of shoemaking and footwear in the poetry and poetics of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and considers by way of contrast the "worker-poetry" of some mid-nineteenth-century shoemakers. Questions of footwear, like questions of fashion in general, the article concludes, despite their apparent frivolity, are utterly pertinent to the way nineteenth-century poets defined themselves and their art. (SG)