Culture and Society in France 1789-1848

Frederick William John Hemmings was born in Southampton in 1920. Hemmings served in the Second World War, decrypting German codes in the Army Intelligence Corps, but in 1946 he returned to academic life in Oxford, completing his DPhil in 1949, a groundbreaking study that was published the following year by Oxford University Press: The Russian Novel in France 1884-1914. Hemmings made his mark as a pioneer of Zola studies and is known as the foremost Zola critic in the English-speaking world. Further studies on Zola and Stendhal were published in later years, as were books on two other major 19th-century French writers: The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas (1979) and Baudelaire the Damned (1982). This project of Balzacian and Zolaesque proportions was realised all the more remarkably during a busy nine-year term of office as head of the French department at Leicester University, where he was a hugely respected literary scholar. Hemmings was twice married and left behind one son and one daughter when he died in Leicester in 1997.

Introduction

1 On the Eve of the Revolution
Laclos: Les Liaisons dangereuses
Beaumarchais: Le Mariage de Figaro
David: Le Serment des Horaces

2 The Revolution
David and Talma
The Coming of the Commercial Theatre
Ideology and the Stage
Music and the Revolution
The Festivals
Painting during the Revolution
The Post-Thermidorian Reaction

3 The Napoleonic Age
The Founding of the Musée du Louvre
Art as the Spoils of War
Napolean, Patron of the Arts
Architecture under the Empire
Literature in the Provinces
The Novel of Terror
The Melodrama
The Literature of the Emigration
The Literature of the Opposition

4 The Restoration: Louis XVIII
The Social Background
The Aftermath of Waterloo: Delavigne and Beranger
Censorship under the Restoration
Stage Sets, Panorama, Dioramas
Gericault
The Anglo-German Cultural Invasion
Stendhal, Delecluze and the Liberal Romantics
Royalist Romanticism

5 Romanticism at Flood-Tide: The Reign of Charles X
1824: A Turning-Point
Ingres
Delacroix
The Arsenal Group
The Shakespeare Season at the Odeon
Berlioz and the Romantic Revolution in Music
Scribe and the Vaudeville
Talma, Taylor and the Reform of the Comedie-Francaise
Hugo's Cenacle
The Triumph of Romanticism on the Stage

6 The July Monarchy
The New Novel
Booksellers, Book-Buyers and Book-Borrowers
The Cultural Consequences of Saint-Simon
The Jeunes-France
Star Actos
The Decline of the Romantic Drama
Grand Opera
Public Concerts and Private Recitals
The Art World: Producers and Consumres
Commissioned Art
The roman-feuilleton

Notes
Bibliography