9 - Scheherazade's snapshots: Lutetia

Summary

I have already written down a large part that is new, I might almost say added it creatively (which remains just between ourselves) …

(12 August 1852)

I am conscious that in my book Lutetia, which consists almost exclusively of facts, I have not communicated a single fact without tested witnesses and guarantees.

(17 August 1855)

POLITICS AND FASHION

In the early 1840s Heine returned to writing about Parisian politics and culture in a series of reports for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. It was a field in which he had worked a decade earlier. Französische Maler had described paintings in the Salon of 1831; and Französische Zustände presented the leading personalities and parties in Paris after the July Revolution, in a context which increasingly aspires to social and historical generality. By comparison, Lutetia often seems weighed down with detail: this later journalism stays close to the political events of the day – Guizot's ministry, the position of the King, and the condition of the urban proletariat – but also records personal impressions of the culture and economy, and even individual encounters with prominent figures of the time. The combination of historical and personal material in Lutetia appears to justify Karl Kraus's complaints about Heine's legacy to modern ‘impressionistic journalism’. In his scorn for the Insel Verlag's description of the Paris prose as the ‘still vital achievement of modern journalism’, Kraus quotes Heine's letter to Campe of 7 March 1854, describing Lutetia as a ‘chrestomathy of prose’ (i.e. like an anthology of selected passages used by students of a foreign language) which will be ‘very beneficial in the formation of a style for popular topics’ (B 5, 958).