Fighting for the page : Balzac, Grandville and the power of images, 1830-1848
Abstract
The July Monarchy witnessed an influx of images, as improvements in
printing and engraving and the introduction of lithography facilitated the
production and combination of images and text. Used as a marketing and a
pedagogical tool for the growing literate population, the image permeated the
press, literature, advertising, schoolbooks and shop windows, destabilizing the
historic hegemony of the word. Indeed, writers now found themselves sharing
both the market and the pages of their novels with illustrators and caricaturists.
Representative of this shift, Honoré de Balzac lamented the popularity of
illustrated books, denigrating J. J. Grandville’s Les Scènes de la vie privée et
publique des animaux (1840-1842) as a visual bêtise. Yet, as the author notes, Les
Animaux sold a reported 25,000 copies, making it one of the bestsellers of the
1840s. Grandville’s work and Balzac’s dismissal testify to illustration’s market
stronghold and the ensuing rivalry between writer and illustrator.
Drawing on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu, this dissertation
examines the collaboration and competition between Balzac and Grandville,
investigating their commentary on the role of word, image, writer and illustrator
in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenthcentury
field of cultural production. Chapter 1 reads the artists’ early works
against the backdrop of the popularization of the press and the book. Chapter 2
looks at Balzac’s reviews of Grandville and their joint portrait of le rentier in Les
Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840-1842), outlining the writer’s competition
with caricature. Chapter 3 pairs Les Animaux with Balzac’s nascent La Comédie
humaine (1842-1848), charting Grandville’s revision of the rules of illustration
and Balzac’s own text. Chapter 4 reviews the first edition of La Comédie
humaine, focusing on its illustration and Balzac’s fictional caricaturist-illustrator
as dual means to contain the artist and the image within the author’s framework.
Concluding with Grandville’s Un Autre monde (1844), Chapter 5 explores the
artist’s break with illustration and his efforts to establish a hybrid visual-verbal
language that defies the period’s aesthetic boundaries. Throughout the analysis,
Balzac and Grandville serve as paradigmatic examples of writer and illustrator
and the emerging power of images.
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