In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism

"With imagination and panache, Sandy Petrey teases out subtle connections between the literature of nineteenth-century French realism and the politics of the July Monarchy. Taking seriously the 'pear' caricature of Louis-Philippe, the citizen-king, Petrey treats the fundamental contradiction in terms of Louis-Philippe’s revolutionary monarchy (or illegitimate legitimism) as a symptom of an impossible dualism. The pear comes to embody a nascent aesthetics of modernity, as shapeless and pulled apart as Balzac’s famous unknown masterpiece, as elusive as his Colonel Chabert’s undeadness. It symbolizes, as well, a nation in search of a coherent political form at a time when none was available; a nation caught in the grip of post-revolutionary value reversal and cross-dressed power typified by Aurore Dudevant’s taste for sartorial travesty, experiments with the masquerade of literary masculinity and adoption of George Sand as her nom de plume. Petrey marshals the critical armature of contemporary identity theory--essentialism and constructionism--to explain how realism took hold as a genre of artistic expression that mediated the anxiety over the loss of revolutionary idealism besetting the worlds of the Salon and the performing arts. As the representational mode, par excellence of "socialized reality" realism in Petrey’s ascription, emerges not just as the aesthetic dominant and equivalent for its time, and not just as a caricature of the revolution that failed, but most importantly, as a narrative strategy of historical constructedness, revelatory of a sham world. In this guise, realism continues to exert its demystifying charm to this day; naturalizing and denaturalizing the real."—Emily Apter, New York University