The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field

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THE RULES OF ART Genesis and Structure

ofthe Literary Field

Translated by Susan Emanuel

Stanford University Press Stanford California I995

Pierre Bourdieu

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C'est en lisant qu'on devient liseron.

RAYMOND QUENEAU

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©

1992 Editions du Seuil

This translation and Introduction © Polity Press First published in France as by Editions du Seuil

1996

Les Regles de I'art

Originating publishers of English edition: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers First published in the U.S.A. by Stanford University Press,

1 996

Printed in Great Britain Cloth ISBN Paper ISBN

0-8 047-2568-3 0-8047-2627-2

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

Translator's Preface �a Acknowledgements PROLOGUE

Xlll �

XXI

Flaubert, Analyst of Flaubert: A Reading of

Sentimental Education

1 4 9 20 25 28

Places, Investments, Displacements The Question of Inheritance Necessary Accidents The Power of Writing Flaubert's Formula Appendix 1 :

Summary of Sentimental Education

35

Appendix 2:

Four Readings of Sentimental Education

37

Appendix 3 :

The Paris o f Sentimental Education

40

PART I

Three States of the Field

1 The Conquest of Autonomy: The Critical Phase in the Emergence of the Field

A Structural Subordination Bohemia and the Invention of an Art of Living

'

47 48 54

Contents

x

The Rupture with the 'Bourgeois' Baudelaire the Founder The First Calls to Order A Position to be Made The Double Rupture An Economic World Turned Upside Down Positions and Dispositions Flaubert's Point of View Flaubert and 'Realism' 'Write the Mediocre Well' R�turn to Sentimental Education The Imposition of Form The Invention of the 'Pure' Aesthetic The Ethical Conditions of the Aesthetic Revolution

2 The Emergence of a Dualist Structure The Particularities of Genres Differentiation of Genres and Unification of the Field Art and Money The Dialectic of Distinction Specific Revolutions and External Changes The Invention of the Intellectual . The Exchanges between Painters and Writers For Form

3 The Market for Symbolic Goods .

Two Economic Logics Two Modes of Ageing Leave a Mark The Logic of Change Homologies and the Effect of Pre-established Harmony The Production of Belief

PART IT

Contents 57 60 68 71 77 81 85 87 91 94 100 103 105 109

1 13

1 14 1 17 121 126 127 129 131 138

141

142 146 154 159 161 1 66

Foundations of a Science of Works of Art

1 Questions of Method

A New Scientific Spirit Literary Doxa and. Resistance to Obj ectification The 'Original Project', Founding Myth Thersites' Viewpoint and the False Rupture

1 77

178 1 84 1 87 191

The Space of Points of View Bypassing the Alternatives To Objectify the Subject of Objectification Appendix:

The Total Intellectual and the Illusion of the Omnipotence of Thought

2 The Author's Point of View: Some General Properties of Fields of Cultural Production The Literary Field in the Field of Power The Nomos and the Question of Boundaries The Illusio and the Work of Art as Fetish Position, Disposition and Position-taking The Space of Possibles Structure and Change: Internal Struggles and Permanent Revolution Reflexivity and 'Naivete' Supply and Demand Internal Struggles and External Sanctions The Meeting of Two Histories The Constructed Trajectory The Habitus and the Possibles The Dialectic of Positions and Dispositions Formation and Dissolution of Groups A Transcendence of Institution 'The Impious Dismantling of the Fiction' Appendix:

Field Effect and Forms of Conservatism

PART ill

To Understand Understanding

Xl

193 205 206 209

2 14

215 223 227 23 1 234

239 242 249 252 256 258 261 264 267 270 274 278

1 The Historical Genesis of the Pure Aesthetic

2 85

2 The Social Genesis of the Eye

313

Analysis of Essence and Illusion of the Absolute Historical Anamnesis and the Return of the Repressed Historical Categories of Artistic Perception The Conditions of Pure Reading Poverty of Ahistoricism Double Historicization

The Quattrocento Eye The Foundation of the Charismatic Illusion

286 290 295 302 306 309

315 319

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Contents

3 A Theory of Reading in Practice A Reflecting Story Time of Reading and Reading of Time

322 324 326

DA CAPO Illusion and the Illusio

331

POSTSCRIPT For a Corporatism of the Universal

337

Notes Index of Names Subject Index

349 397 404

Translator's Preface

Tackling a major opus by Pierre Bourdieu is particularly daunting since he has been so well served by many previous English translators. lowe a debt to my predecessors; even if I have not always followed their precedents. The Rules of Art is a complex book which spans too pJ.any academic fields for any one translator to claim particular expertise. In the Prologue, a reading of Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Edu­ cation, and in the first part, about the conquest of autonomy in the field of cultural production, Bourdieu invites us on a 'walk through the woods' of the literary and artistic fields in the second half of the nineteenth century, including byways forgotten even by those well versed in French literary history. Portions of part II, which lays the foundation of what he calls a 'science of works of art' and of part III, an analysis of the pure aesthetic and alternatives to it, have appeared previously in a variety of contexts, but they have since been revised in the writing of this work. I have respected Bourdieu's 'hierarchy of text', in which he complements the main argument with illustrative text in smaller type, afid both are supported by a network of footnotes, many of them pithy, now moved to the end of the text. Several chapters have appendices which furnish concrete examples or push an argument in a polemical direction. His footnotes are so rich that I have hesitated to add to their number, except for occasional glosses of his key theoretical terms for those new to his thought, and of literary or

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Translator�s Preface

artistic movements where these seemed essential. For his citations, I have endeavoured to discover English editions, and if I could not find one, I have reproduced his reference and translated the quoted passages myself. In general, his style in French has a willed 'literari­ ness' about it, which I have attempted to preserve, sometimes keeping his plays on words by putting his French in italics and parentheses after English renderings which cannot do them justice. Readers will be aware - and Bourdieu's self-reflexiveness does not allow us to forget - that this book is written within a charged intellectual field both in France, where sociology often struggles within a hierarchy that puts philosophy at the pinnacle of thought, and in Europe, where a basis for collective action by scholars and artists, such as he tries to provide in his Postscript, is rendered more difficult by competitiveness within their fields and threats to their autonomy emanating from outside. I wish to thank Armand Mattelart for daring me when I first read the book to contact Bourdieu, who patiently answered the queries I brought to him. This project would have been impossible without the selfless patience of Shoggy Waryn of MIT, a second reader who accompanied me through every page, Ann Bone, whose contribution extended beyond simple copy-editing, and Kerry Emanuel, whose soft heart and customized software took much of the pain out of a labour of love.

Preface

Angel. Eminently suitable for love and literature. G U S TA V E FLA U B ERT,

Dictionary of Received Ideas

Not everything appears in the collection of foolish quotations, so there's hope. RAY M O N D Q U E N E A U

" 'Shall we allow the social sciences to reduce literary experience - the most exalted that man may have, along with love - to surveys about our leisure activities, when it concerns the very meaning of our life?'l Such a question, lifted from one of the innumerable timeless and nameless defences of reading and of culture, would certainly have unleashed the furious mirth that the well-meaning cornmonplaces of his day .inspired in Flaubert. And what to say of such shopworn tropes of the scholastic cult of the Book, or of such supposedly Heideggerian-Holderlinian revelations, each worthy of enriching the 'Bouvardo-Pecuchetian anthology' (the phrase is Queneau's) as these: 'To read is first of all to be torn out of oneself, and of one's world';2 'It is no longer possible to be in the world without the help of books';3 'In literature, essence is revealed at a stroke; it is given in all its truth, with all its truth, like the very truth of the being which reveals itself' ?4 If it seems to be necessary to begin by evoking some. of these vapid reflections Oll art and life, the unique and the common, literature and science, the (social) sciences which may well elaborate laws but only by losing the 'singularity of experience', and literature which elabor-

XVI

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ates no laws but which 'deals always with the individual person, in his absolute singularity',s it is because, indefinitely reproduced by and for scholarly liturgy, they are also inscribed in all minds fashioned by the School. Functioning as filters or screens, they continually threaten to block or confound the understanding of scientific analysis of books and of reading. Does the claim for the autonomy of literature, which found its exemplary expression in Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve, imply that the \ \�' reading of literary texts should be exclusively literary? Is it true that scientific analysis is doomed to destroy that which makes for the :/ speCih�'ity-uf- ·,-the- literary work and of reading, beginning with f'!' aesthetic pleasure ? And that the sociologist is wedded to relativism, \ to the levelling of values, to the lowering of greatness, to the abolition of those differences which make for the singularity of the 'creator', always located in the realm of the Unique ? And all because the sociologist is thought to stand on the side of the greatest number, the , average, the mean, and thus of the mediocre, the minor, the minores, '_J):rc� t\le mass of petty, obscure actors, justly unrecognized, and to be an " \'" d Jly of what is repugnant to the 'creators' of an era, the content and ) ;i 5 � Ji' ,,_(i� i�he context, the 'referent' and the hors-texte, beyond the pale of t "(/\['$"' literature? " For a good number of accredited writers and readers of literature, ))ot to mention philosophers,or greater or lesser standing, who, from ,�. )-iBergson to Heidegger and beyond, intend to assign science a priori limits, the case is already made. And countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. We might cite . Gadamer, who places at the outset of his 'art of understanding' a postulate of incomprehensibility or, at the very least, of inexplicabil­ ity: 'The fact that the work of art represents a challenge to our understanding because it indefinitely escapes all explanation, and offers an ever insurmountable resistance to whoever would translate it into the identity of a concept, has been precisely for me the point of departure for my hermeneutic theory.'6 I will not debate this postulate ( but does it even bear debating? ) . I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational , understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the 'work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence. Why such insistence on conferring upon the work of art - and upon the understanding it calls for - this status of exception, if not �J'

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XVll

in order to stamp with prejudicial discredit the (necessarily laborious and imperfect) attempts of those who would submit these products of human action to the ordinary treatment of ordinary science, and thereby assert the (spiritual) transcendence of those who know how to recognize that transcendence ? Why such implacable hostility to those who try to advance the understanding of the work of art and of aesthetic experience, if not because the very ambition to produce a scientific analysis of that individuum ineffabile and of the individuum ineffabile who produced it, constitutes a mortal threat to the preten­ sion, so common (at least among art lovers) and yet so 'distinguished', of thinking of oneself as an ineffable individual, capable of ineffable experiences of that ineffable? Why, in short, such resistance to analysis, if not because it inflicts upon 'creators', and upon those who seek to identify with them by a 'creative' reading, the last and perhaps the worst of those wounds inflicted, according to Freud, upon narcissism, after those going under the names of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself? Is it legitimate to invoke the experience of the lover, to make of love, as an astonished abandon to the work grasped in its inexpres­ sible singularity, the only form of understanding which accords with the work of art? And to see in the scientific analysis of art, and of the love of art, the form par excellence of scientistic arrogance, which, under cover of explaining, does not hesitate to threaten the 'creator' and the reader in their liberty and their singularity? Against all those defenders of the unknowable, bent on manning the impregnable ramparts of human liberty against the encroachments of science, I would oppose this very Kantian thought of Goethe's, which all natural scientists and social scientists could claim as their owni 'Our opinion is that it well becomes man to assume that there is something unknowable, but that he does not have to set any limit to his inquiry.'7 I think that Kant expresses well the image that scientists have of their enterprise when he suggests that the reconciliation of knowing and being is a sort of focus imaginarius, the imaginary from which science must measure itself without ever being able to reach it (despite the illusions of absolute knowledge and the end of history, more common among philosophers than among scientists . . , ) . As for the threat that science might pose to the liberty and singularity of the literary experience, it suffices, to do justice to the matter, to observe that the ability, procured by science, to explain and under­ stand that experience - and thus to give oneself the ,possibility of a genuine freedom from one's determinations - is offered to all those who want to and can appropriate it. A more legitimate fear might be that science, in putting the love of

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art under its scalpel, might succeed in killing pleasure, and that, capable of delivering understanding, it might be unable to convey feeling. So one can only approve of an effort like that of Michel Chaillou, when - basing himself on the primacy of feeling, or emotional experience, of aisthesis - he offers a literary evocation of the literary life, strangely missing from the 'literary' histories of literature. 8 By contriving to reintroduce into an apparently self­ contained literary space what one may call, with Schopenhauer, tbe parerga et paralipomena, the neglected 'margins' of the text, all that ordinary commentators leave aside, and by evoking, by the magic virtue of nomination, that which made ( and was) the life of authors - the humble domestic details, picturesque if not grotesque or 'crotesque' [squalid], of their existence amid its most ordinary setting - he subverts the ordinary hierarchy of literary interests. Armed with all the resources of erudition, not in order to contribute to the sacralizing celebration of the classics, to the cult of ancestors and of the 'gift of the dead', but to summon and prepare the reader to 'clink glasses with the dead', as Saint-Amant said, Chaillou thus tears fetishized texts and authors from the sanctuary of History and academicism, and sets them free. How could the sociologist, who must also break with idealism and literary hagiography, not feel an affinity with this 'carefree knowl­ edge' [gai savoir], which relies on the free associations made possible by a liberated and liberating usage of historical references in order to repudiate the prophetic pomp of the grand critiques of authors and the sacerdotal droning of scholarly tradition? However, contrary to what the common image of sociology might lead one to believe, the sociologist cannot be completely content with the literary evocation of literary life. If attention to the perceptible is perfectly suitable when applied to the text, it does lead to neglect of the essential when it bears on the social world within which the text is produced. The task of bringing authors and their environments back to life could be that of a sociologist, and there is no shortage of analyses of art and literature whose purpose is the reconstruction of a social 'reality' that can be understood in the visible, the tangible, and the concrete solidity of daily experience. But, as I shall try to demonstrate throughout this book, the sociologist - close in this respect to the philosopher according to Plato - stands opposed to 'the friend of beautiful spectacles and voices' that the writer also is: the 'reality' that he tracks cannot be reduced to the immediate data of the sensory experience in which it is revealed; he aims not to offer (in)sight, or feeling, but to construct systems of intelligible relations capable of making sense of sentient data.

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XIX

Is this to say that one is once more returned to the old antinomy of intelligible and the sensible ? In fact, it will be up to the reader to e th judge if, as I belie:: (having experienc � d it myself), s�ientific analysis of the social condItIOns of the productIOn and receptIOn of a work of art, far from reducing it or destroying it, in fact intensifies the literary . experience. As we shall see with respect to Flaubert, such analYSIS seems to abolish the singularity of the 'creator' in favour of the relations which made the work intelligible, only better to rediscover it at the end of the task of reconstructing the space in which the author finds himself encompassed and included as a point. To recognize this point in the literary space, which is also th� point f�om which is formed a singular point of view on that space, IS to be In a position to understand and to feel, by mental ide��ification with a constructed position, the singularity of that pOSItIOn and of the person who occupies it, and the extraordinary effort w�ich� at least in the particular case of Flaubert, was necessary to make It eXIst. The love of art, like love itself, even and especially of the amour (au kind, feels founded in its object. It is in order to convince oneself of being right in ( or having reasons for) loving that such love so often has recourse to commentary, to that sort of apologetic discourse that the believer addresses to himself or herself and which, as well as its minimal effect of redoubling his or her belief, may also awaken and summon others to that belief. This is why scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d'etre, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompan­ ies it with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfil itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of th� subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission) . But i s this not paying too high a price for the intensification of experience, to have to confront the reduction to historical necessity of something that wants to be lived as an absolute experience, freed from the contingencies of a genesis? In reality, to understand the social genesis of the literary field - of the belief which sustains it, of the language game played in it, of the interests and the material or symbolic stakes engendered in it - is not to surrender to the pleasure of reduction or destruction (even if, as Wittgenstein, suggests in his 'Lecture on ethics' / the effort to understand no doubt owes some­ thing to the 'pleasure of destroying prejudices' and to the 'irresistible seduction' exercised by 'explanations of the type "this is only that" ',

xx

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especially by way of antidote to the pharisaical complacencies of the cult of art). To seek in the logic of the literary field or the artistic field paradoxical worlds capable of inspiring or of imposing the most disinterested 'interests' - the principle of the work of art's existence in what makes it historic, but also transhistoric, is to treat this work as an intentional sign haunted and regulated by something else, of which it is also a symptom. It is to suppose that in it is enunciated an expressive impulse which the imposition of form required by the social necessity of the field tends to render unrecognizable . Renounc­ ing the angelic belief in a pure interest in pure form is the price we must pay for understanding the logic of those social universes which, through the social alchemy of their historical laws of functioning, succeed in extracting from the often merciless clash of passions and selfish interests the sublimated essence of the universal. It is to offer a vision more true and, ultimately, more reassuring, because less superhuman, of the highest achievements of the human enterprise.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marie-Christine Riviere for her help in the preparation and organization of the original manuscript of this book.

Pierre Bourdieu

The author and publishers are grateful for permission to quote from Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick (Penguin Classics, 1964), copyright © the Estate of Robert Baldick, 1964.

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PROLOGUE

Flaubert, Analyst of Flaubert A

Reading of Sentimental Education

One does not write what one wants. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

. � ,., ... -

Sentimental Education, that book on which a thousand commentaries have been written, but which has undoubtedly never been truly read, supplies all the tools necessary for its own sociological analysis: I the structure of the book, which a strictly internal reading brings to light, that is, the structure of the social space in which the adventur,es of Frederic unfold, proves to be at the same time the structure of the social space in which its author himself was situated. One might think perhaps that it is the sociologist, in projecting questions of a particular sort, who turns Flaubert into a sociologist, and one capable, moreover, of offering a sociology of Flaubert. And there is a risk that the method of proof itself, which is to be based on constructing a model of the immanent structure of the book - in order to re-engender and so to understand the principle at work behind the whole story of Frederic and his friends - may appear as the height of scientistic excess. Yet the strangest thing is that this structure - which strikes one as self-evident the moment it is spelled out - has eluded the most attentive interpreters.2 This obliges us to raise more particularly than usual the problem of 'realism' and of the 'referent' of literary discourse. What indeed is this discourse which speaks of the social or psychological world as if it did not speak of it; which cannot speak of this world except on condition that it only speak of it as if it did not speak of it, that is, in a form which performs, for the author and the reader, a denegation (in the Freudian sense of Verneinung) of what it expresses ? And should we not ask

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Prologue

Flaubert, Analyst of Flaubert

ourselves if work on form is not what makes possible the partial . of deep and repressed structures, if, in a word, the writer anamneSIS most preoccupied with formal research - such as Flaubert and so many others after hit? - is not actually driven to act as a medium of t� ase structure � (SOCIal or psychological) , which then achieve objec­ . tIfication, passmg through him and his work on inductive words.' 'conductive bodies' but also more or less opaque screens? Ab ?ve and beyo�d the fact that it compels us to pose these questIOns and examme them, in situ, as it were, the analysis of the b ?ok ought to allow us to take advantage of the properties of literary discou �s�� su�h a � its capa �it� to reveal w�ile veiling, or to produce � de-realIzmg rea lIty effect , m order to mtroduce us gently, with . Flaubert the socIOanalyst of Flaubert, to a socioanalysis of Flaubert, and of literature.

'thought of the plot of a play and of subjects for paintings', and at other times 'dreamt of symphonies', 'wanted to paint' and composed verses, begins one day 'to write a novel called Sylvia, a Fisherman's Son', in which he depicts himself, with Madame Arnoux; then he 'rents a piano and composes German waltzes'; then converts to painting, which brings him closer to Madame Arnoux, only to return to the writing ambition, this time with a History of the Renaissance.7 Frederic's entire existence, like the whole universe of the novel, is organized around two poles, represented by the Arnoux and the Dambreuses: on the one side, 'art and politics', and on the other 'p olitics and business' . At the intersection of the two universes, at least in the beginning, that is, before the revolution of 1 848, there stands, besides Frederic himself, only father audry, a guest at the Arnoux', but as a neighbour. The key characters, notably Arnoux and Dambreuse, function as symbols charged with marking and representing the pertinent positions in the social space. They are not 'caracteres' in the manner of La Bruyere, as Thibaudet believes, but rather symbols of a social position (the work of writing thus creates a universe saturated with significant details, and therefore more signifying than true to life, as testified by the abundance of pertinent indices it offers to analysis) .8 Thus, for example, the different receptions and gatherings are entirely signified, and differentiated, by the drinks served there, from Deslauriers's beer to Dambreuse's 'grand vins de Bordeaux', passing through Arnoux's 'vins extraordi. naires', lipfraoli and tokay, to Rosanette's champagne. One may thus construct the social space of Sentimental Education by relying for landmarks on the clues that Flaubert supplies in abundance and on the various 'networks' that social practices of co­ optation such as receptions, soirees and friendly gatherings reveal (see the diagram).

4

Places, investments, displacements This 'long-haired youth of eighteen', 'who had recently matriculated', �hom his mother, 'having provided him with just sufficient to cover hIS expenses, had packed . . . off to Le Havre to visit an uncle who she hoped, would be putting her son in his will', this bourgeoi� ad?lescent who thinks ' of an idea for a play, of subjects for a pa�ntI. �g, of future passionate affairs of the heart', 3 has come to the pom� m a career from which he can encompass with one gaze that totalIty of powers and possibilities open to him and the avenues to take him there. Frederic Moreau is, in a double sense an indetermi­ �ate being, �r b.etter yet, determined to indeterminati � n, both objec­ tIve and subJectIve. Set up in the freedom which his situation as heir to �roperty [rentier] assures him, he is governed, right down to the feelmgs of which he is apparently the subject, by the fluctuations of his financial investments [placements] , which define the successive orientations of his choices.4 !he indifference which he sometimes betrays for the common objects of bourgeois ambitionS is a secondary effect of his dreamed �ove for M �dam� Arn�ux, a kind of imaginary support for his . mdetermmatIOn. What IS there for me to do in the world? Others strain after wealt? , fame, power. I have no profession; you are my . occupatIon, my entire fortune, the aim and centre of my life exclUSIve a nd tho�ghts. '(; As for the artistic interests which he expresses from . tIme to tIme, they do not have enough constancy and consistency to offer a base of support for a higher ambition capable of positively . thwartmg vulgar ambition: he who , from his first appearance,

5

At the three dinners hosted b y the Arnoux/, w e meet, besides the stalwarts of L'Art Industriel - Hussonnet, Pellerin, Regimbart and, at the first, Mlle Vatnaz - regulars such as Dittmer and Burrieu, both painters; Rosenwald, a composer; Sombaz, a caricaturist; Lovarias, a 'mystic' {present twice}; and, finally, occasional guests like Antenor Braive, a portrait painter; Theophile Lorris, a poet; Vourdat, a sculptor; Pierre-Paul Meinsius, a painter; to whom should be added, at such dinners, a lawyer, Maitre Lefaucheux, and two art critic friends of Hussonnet's, a paper maker and father Oudry. At the opposite extreme, the receptions at the Dambreuses,lo the first two separated from the others by the revolution of 1 848, gather together, besides generically defined characters, such as a former cabinet member, the cure of a large parish, two civil servants, 'proprietors' and famous personalities of the worlds of art, science and politics {'the great Mr A. , the famous B., the intelligent c., the eloquent Z., the wonderful Y., the old stagers of the centre left, the

Flaubert, Analyst of Flaubert

paladins of the right, the veterans of the middle way' ), Paul de Gremonville, a diplomat; Fumichon, an industrialist; Mme de Larsillois, the wife of the prefect; the Duchesse de Montreuil; M. de Nonencourt; and finally (besides Frederic) Martinon, Cisy, M. Roque and his daughter. After 1 848, we shall also see at the Dambreuses' M. and Mme Arnoux, Hussonnet and Pellerin, converted, and lastly Deslauriers, introduced by Frederic into the service of M. Dambreuse . At the two receptions I given by Rosanette, one at the time of her liaison with Arnoux, ll the other at the end of the novel, when she plans to marry Frederic, 12 one enco unters actresses, the actor Delmar, .Mlle Vatnaz, Frederic and certain of his frie nds, Pellerin, Hussonnet, Arnoux, Cisy and, lastly, the Comte de Palazot and characters also encountered at the Dambreuses', Paul de Gremonville, Fumichon, M. de Nonencourt, and M. de Larsillois, whose wife frequents the salon of Mme Dambreuse. The guests of Cisy all belong to the nobility (M. de Comaing, present also at Rosanette's, etc. ) with the exception of his tutor and of Frederic. 13 At the soirees of Frederic, one finds once more Deslauriers, accompanied by Senecal, Dussardier, Pellerin, Hussonnet, Cisy, Regimbart and Martinon (these last two being absent from the last soiree ) .14 Finally, Dussardier assembles Frederic and the petit-bourgeois fraction of his friends, Deslauriers, Senecal, as well as an architect, a pharmacist, a wine merchant and an insurance employee.15

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The pole of political and economic power is marked by the Dambreuses, who are from the start constituted as the supreme goals of political and amorous ambition ( 'A millionaire - just think of it. Make sure you can get into his good books! And his wife's too! Become her lover!'16) . Their salon receives 'men and women knowl­ edgeable about life', that is, about business, totally excluding, before 1848, artists and journalists. Conversation there is serious, boring, conservative: the Republic is declared impossible in France; journal­ ists ought to be gagged; decentralization is urged, with the redistri­ bution of the surplus urban population to the countryside; the 'lower classes' are castigated for their vices and needs; people chat about politics, elections, amendments and further amendments; prejudices against artists are voiced. The rooms are overflowing with art objects. The rarest delicacies are served there: brearn, venison, crayfish, accompanied by the best wines, in the most beautiful silver dishes. After dinner, the men talk among themselves, standing up; the women are seated in the background. The opposite pole is marked, not by a great revolutionary or established artist, but by Arnoux, an art dealer, who, in this function, is the representative of money and business dealings at the heart of the universe of art. Flaubert is perfectly clear on this in . his notebooks; M. Moreau (the original name of Arnoux) is an 'industrialist of art', then a 'pure industrialist' .17 The oxymoron of words is there to emphasize, as much in the designation of his profession as in the title

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