This article examines a corpus of nineteenth-century French instructional texts offering guidance to bourgeois readers on the training and governance of domestic servants, and focuses on how these texts construct the relationship between servants and children in such a way as to sexualize both. Operating within a broadly Foucauldian paradigm, the article considers how masturbation appears as the ultimate symbol of sexual knowledge in the period. Like much of the contemporaneous medical writing previously examined by Michel Foucault and Thomas Laqueur, the instructional literature understands infantile masturbation as indicative of the contagious spread of sexual knowledge within the bourgeois home, the abject agent of which was often taken to be the servant, whose "bad example" was thought to have a corrupting effect on ignorant infants. Yet the interest of these texts lies in their simultaneous advancement of another, contradictory argument: servants, they suggest, are themselves impressionable, childlike innocents who are corrupted by the example of their degenerate bourgeois employers. In a significant deviation from the more familiar patterns of thought considered by Foucault, then, these texts ultimately elaborate a worldview in which the transmission of sexual knowledge by (bad) example is multi-directional and inescapable, and in which sexual "corruption" -that is, sexuality as such -appears as a fundamental part of the human condition. This in turn is related to an underlying ideological difference between this instructional literature and the better-known medical discourse: while the latter is pointedly secular and positivist, the former is Catholic in outlook, and consequently sceptical as to the value and even the possibility of scientific knowledge. As such, these texts represent an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century ideas on sexuality. Bad Examples: Children, Servants, and Masturbation in Nineteenth-Century France Andrew J. Counter Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Be it in the interest of Rousseauian frankness or in pursuit of a succès de scandale, André Gide opens his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt (1926), with a particularly provocative scene of child's play. The year is around 1874, and a five-year-old André and his little friend of the same age are hiding under a table covered with a tablecloth. Their activity is a cause of concern for André's nursemaid: 'What are you up to under there?' my nurse would call out.'Nothing; we're playing.' And then we would make a great noise with our playthings, which we had taken along for the sake of appearances [pour la frime]. 1 The word-choice of the nursemaid's enquiry, "Qu'est-ce que vous fabriquez là-dessous ?", suggests that the boys may be engaged in some form of pernicious yet purposeful work.André's response, meanwhile, is to assert on the contrary an absence of activity -the boys are doing "nothing" -which is apparently synonymous with play -"we're playing". Yet that play is, we quickly learn, a sham; the toys t...

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This article offers a synoptic reading of Émile Zola's fictional and journalistic writings from the mid-1890s to his death in 1902, considering these in light of the novelist's engagement with the Third Republic's politics of pronatalism, and with questions of reproduction more broadly. It explores Zola's particular conception of the problem of depopulation (the declining French birth rate at the end of the nineteenth century) as an aesthetic question demanding an aesthetic solution, before examining how he attempted to provide such a solution in his later fiction. The final novels are shown to be incessantly preoccupied, and at several levels, with an idealized figure of the child. The article finally considers the intolerance displayed by Zola in his last few novels towards all individuals -homosexuals, 'new women', priests, Catholics, decadent novelists, childless heterosexuals -who he imagined as failing to conform to his own reproductive ideal.

This article considers the figures of the anarchist and the homosexual in Oscar Wilde's play Vera, or the Nihilists (1880) and Émile Zola's novel Paris (1898) and argues that the two are ideologically associated and structurally analogous. In Zola's novel and French and English responses to the Wilde trials, the article identifies a peculiarly fin-de-siècle form of homophobia that denigrates an abstract notion of male homosexuality while denying the authenticity of homosexual tastes as they are professed by real individuals. Both this understanding of homosexuality and the politics of Paris are complicated by the structural and lexical associations the novel sets up between the homosexual and the anarchist, the latter of whom Zola treats sympathetically, if critically. The article goes on to consider how both Vera and Paris situate anarchism and, implicitly or explicitly, homosexuality in opposition to the idea of the family, which represents for Zola the only conceivable foundation of human happiness and social progress, and for Wilde's Nihilists an oppressive structure to be resisted or destroyed. Wilde's play is shown to offer an exploration of the tension between family and politics, sexual or otherwise, and of the possibilities and risks involved in “coming out” as anything other than normal; it thus provides a critique of the heteronormativity and familialism of Zola's ideological project.

This article explores the discursive afterlife of the 1822 murder of Marie Gérin by the Abbé Mingrat, who subsequently fled France and was never extradited. The crime, which the Restoration government attempted to conceal, is read here as a cause célèbre that acted throughout the Restoration as a watchword of anticlerical and otherwise oppositional opinion. The article examines pamphlets published by Marie's relatives and by Paul-Louis Courier, on the one hand; and on the other, official papers relating to the persecution of Marie's brother for his attempts to publicize the crime. It takes these texts as symptomatic of a broader early nineteenth-century dispute: a cultural and moral disagreement about the meaning of scandal, which might be imagined 'conservatively,' as a pathogenic spectacle that spreads corruption; or, as it was by the pamphleteers, 'progressively,' as a therapeutic revelation that brings that corruption to an end. It also contributes to our understanding of the modes of political participation available to those excluded from the Restoration political process. 2 Mingrat: Anatomy of a Restoration cause célèbre On 8 May 1822, in the Isère town of Saint-Quentin, a grisly crime was committed: the rape and murder of twenty-six year old Marie Charnalet, née Gérin, by the parish priest, Antoine Mingrat. Having lured the young woman into the rectory on the pretext of hearing her confession, Mingrat throttled her to death, evidently after sexually assaulting her. Dragging her body some distance through woodland, he then hacked it apart, first with a hunting knife, then with a meat cleaver, before scattering her remains in the river. Marie's absence was noticed almost immediately by her husband Étienne Charnalet, who began searching for her with the help of neighbours; patches of bloodstained grass were discovered hours later, at which point suspicion fell on Mingrat, whom locals believed to be sexually obsessed with the missing Marie. When on 16 May a woman's severed thigh was discovered by fishermen, Mingrat's servant finally revealed that she had heard sounds of struggle coming from the rectory on the night in question. Soon after, Mingrat took flight, escaping over the border to Piedmont, then in the Kingdom of Sardinia. There he was arrested and imprisoned by local authorities. Yet despite his having been convicted in absentia of rape and murder, and sentenced to death by the Cour Royale in Grenoble on 9 December 1822, Mingrat's extradition was never offered by the Sardinian government, nor was it ever requested by the French; 1 indeed, it is now clear that Foreign Ministry officials later advised Sardinian diplomats through back-channels that extradition would not be sought in this case, and the prisoner's maintenance costs were be met by the diocese of Grenoble for the duration of his detention. 2 Mingrat died in the Fenestrelle Fortress some time after the Restoration. This article addresses the discursive afterlife of this crime in Restoration politics: its persistence, that is, as an affaire or...