White on Foley (2023)

The establishment in recent decades of French cultural history as a recognized sub-discipline and the post-post-structuralist historical turn in French literary studies might seem to point towards a union between the domain of French history (with its own annual conferences and journals) and the domain centered around this journal and the annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies conference (with their largely aesthetic, and often literary concerns). It is hard, though, to conceive of this as an equal marriage. We might imagine that literary critics focus in detail on the intricacies of creative writing whilst historians read more broadly but in less detail. Sometimes, however, the book titles of historians advertise a breadth which conceals their eye for detail.

Behind the expansive claims of this book title lies a highly focused study on the relationships of family and friendship which framed the political career of one Léon Laurent-Pichat (1823–86) who would become a Deputy and Life Senator in the early Third Republic. This name, hardly likely to have customers clamoring at the doors of bookstores as they open, does not even make it into the book’s subtitle. But Laurent-Pichat emerges in these well-researched and lucidly composed pages as an emblematic figure of the republican movement during the Second Empire and the opening decade and a half of the Third Republic. Indeed, he appears to be emblematic precisely because of the modesty of his celebrity: “His individual history highlights that many bourgeois activists, not only the handful of most prominent leaders, played vital roles in implanting republicanism in the community” (2).

The introduction and conclusion frame nine chronologically defined chapters in this well-organized book which take us from his illegitimate childhood, “born alone and sad” (17), to the triumph of the “Republic of republicans” (225). Indispensable to the project is Foley’s access to the Archives privées de la famille, courtesy of Mme Caroline Lesieur Flury, who also provides the seven photographs of Léon and his family dispersed across the volume. In 1987 Mme Lesieur Flury’s mother, Mme Catherine Lesieur, gifted a major collection of family papers to the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris which underpins this study. Other figures include a black and white reproduction of Ernest Hébert’s 1865 portrait of Laurent-Pichat which captures well his contemplative quality. Though the reproduction is as functional as most black and white print reproductions in many academic books, it is worth recalling that the colors of the original painting already capture only too well the colorlessness of frock-coated nineteenth-century masculinity, or what John Harvey’s 1997 book calls Men in Black. The front matter closes with a two-page family tree designed by Sharon Harrup entitled “Léon Laurent-Pichat and his family networks” which will prove indispensable to readers of the subsequent chapters.

Born outside wedlock under the Restoration and later officially adopted by his father who left him his fortune, Laurent-Pichat only found his mother in adulthood, establishing close bonds with her and his four half-siblings. He never married but fathered Geneviève Laurent-Pichat whom he legitimized when she was five years old (as his father had recognized him). During the Second Empire, networks of family and friendship sustained the republican movement when political activities in the public domain were prohibited. Laurent-Pichat and his daughter formed a joint household with his half-sister Rosine (and her family). Foley argues that, in so doing, the family around Laurent-Pichat, beset by illegitimacy, “replicated the ‘chosen-ness’ that made friendship superior to family ties in post-Revolutionary thinking” (4). Over time his family circle expanded through marriage to include many of the republican elite. In 1875 his niece, Clémence Beaujean, married Abel Hovelacque, who would be elected as a Parisian Deputy in the 1880s. In 1877 Laurent-Pichat’s daughter married Charles Risler, grandson of Charles Kestner and brother-in-law of Jules Ferry.

Underpinning the methodology of a book, which is in many ways the biography of one single (and in some senses, singular) politician, is recent scholarly interest in the history of intimacy, the emotions, and sociability. On the one hand, this nuances the received gendering of nineteenth-century political history: “Republicanism was not just ‘men’s business’ but also the business of women, who hosted salons and political dinners, and actively engaged in political discussion and alliance building” (4). This reviewer is drawn to literary exemplars of such heterosociability from the 1880s such as Maupassant’s Madeleine Forestier, and beyond politics, in the world of commerce, Zola’s Caroline Hédouin. On the other hand, the affective lives of men such as Laurent-Pichat no longer look so colorless: “Men’s lives, like women’s, were marked by family events as well as political events; they attended dolls’ tea parties as well as political meetings; their emotional lives reflected personal joys and sorrows as well as political ones, and those personal emotions affected their political actions” (5). They were not just gray men, or the proverbial men in black. What emerges is an embedding of male friendships inscribed within, and not just homosocially exterior to, family structures. Foley argues persuasively that “male friendships spanned both the homosocial world and the family: men encountered their friends in the drawing room with their families as well as among other men in the republican cercle” (7). Citing Matthew McCormack’s definition of “heterosocial environments such as salons, dinners and civic ceremonials” (9), Foley’s research gives us one very rich example of early Third Republic heterosociability, where “the boundary between the political and the domestic was [...] constantly negotiated” (8). The limits implicit in such a heterosociability of complementary roles are nevertheless made clear: “women in these circles accepted that electoral politics were the preserve of men. They demonstrated little interest in the emerging feminist movement, despite the feminists’ republican sentiments” (8). If feminists were republicans, these republicans were not, it seems, feminists.

The history of emotions, which has come to the fore in recent decades in books such as this, is now embedded in cultural history and the history of intimacy, thanks not least to the richness of resources such as these private family archives, personal diaries and letters between intimates. Such histories allow us to know how people felt, and how these informal expressions of feeling interacted with the animating drives of institutional life (in this instance, the institutions of political parties and of government) which historians might also seek in the public record of political meetings (such as newspaper reports) and the written records of parliaments and governmental committees and cabinets. Literature and art (be they novels by Sand or Maupassant or paintings by Manet or Morisot) move us beyond such knowledge. For in organizing the emotions of characters and figures in forms (by which I mean the shapes of literary plotting and pictorial figuration) that are affectively legible to readers and viewers in patterns of empathy and ironic distance, such novels and paintings of the Second Empire and the Third Republic allow us, as reward for the patient labor of interpretation, not only to know how people of the Second Empire and Third Republic felt but also to feel how they felt. And that much is gold dust.