Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Leclercq, Benoit

Titel

Related offenses: Camouflage and criminals in the novel of the nineteenth century

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

Sociological Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation traces the different manifestations of the representation of criminals in novels by Eugene Sue, Honore de Balzac, and Victor Hugo. Middle-class men in nineteenth century France were under a growing pressure to be virtuous, upright citizens and family men. Coincidentally in 1804, Napoleonic France, in the vast reworking of the administration, made prostitutes register and undergo weekly health checks, while state-regulated brothels, the 'maisons de tolerance' enjoyed a booming popularity. At the same time, the number of prisons - and inmates - was increasing, part of a process that Foucault identified as an attempt by the bureaucratic state to shield the correctional system from public view. And yet, some major nineteenth century French novels are littered with criminals and their tormenters; the miserable Valjean and the dutiful Javert for Hugo, but also pleasure-seekers such as Vautrin for Balzac, while Sue, in Les Mysteres de Paris, casts Rodolphe, as a crime-fighting prince with a serious penchant for slumming and good deeds in seedy Parisian streets. Taken as a series of snapshots of nineteenth century criminals, I argue that these characters point to a changing historical and literary landscape. Against an administrative backdrop aiming at a greater camouflage of its corrective practices, the novel seems to be the last bastion of spectacular criminals is the literary world. My close textual analyses are supported by contemporary memoirs, legal documents, correspondence, and reviews. I examine the orchestration of fictional character, historical persons, and social scientific type in Les Mysteres de Paris, Les Miserables, and La Comedie humaine. Where Sue and Hugo's criminals suggest that a definition of criminality by the law is too rigid and should be humanized (Valjean stole a loaf of bread and subsequently spends many years at the bagne of Toulon), Balzac's villainous Vautrin highlights the insidious and viral quality of nineteenth-century criminality. Rather than operating on the margins of society, these criminals change the nature of spectacle, from public punishment to public performances which ultimately camouflage and render them more insidious and evasive. Thus, in these novels, government attempts at surveillance and control are ultimately thwarted because these criminals, each in their own way, take advantage of the very systems and institutions meant to regulate their behavior. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346. Telephone 1-800-521-3042; e-mail: disspub@umi.com