6 - Painting, politics and architecture

Summary

Combien je vous plains, mâles épaissis,

Rongés d'Hébétude et bleus de soucis,

Dont l'âme se vautre en de viles proses!

The reactionary and regressive forces embodied in a figure such as des Esseintes stand at the opposite pole to those texts which embrace the imbrication of the private and the political, such as Hennique's Un accident de Monsieur Hébert and Zola's Paris. Both of these novels are informed by systems of analogy which suggest, in the first case, the politically corrosive force of adultery amongst the bourgeoisie, and in the second, a metaphorical link between the implosion of the decadent aristocracy by incest and the explosions of the anarchist movement in fin de siécle Paris. By taking us, in the first instance, outside the city, and in the second, into its subterranean depths, these novels refuse to allow the self reflections of indulgent erotic desires to expel marginal radical politics beyond a yet wider perimeter. Hennique's novel in particular highlights those moments of ideological blindness around which this bourgeois political map is charted. By the same token, though, this underlining of the psychosexual dynamics of what might be termed the politics of rupture ultimately serves to hold these marginal discourses within the figurative and formal self-satisfaction of bourgeois realism. As such they ultimately fail to rise to the provocative challenge set by L'Education sentimentale's melding of sexual and political polarities.