Book Reviews

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influenced by the work of Robert Bresson, and shares his mentor’s conception of a bleak,
grim and violent universe, presented in an austere and minimalist style. He is unim-
pressed with orthodox theology, yet he highly values the Bible for its powerful poetic
expression and, as Caruana puts it, the way in which it ‘captures the sacred dimension of
the intersection between our finite, embodied selves, and our desire for transcendent
experiences that might transfigure and dignify our existential forlornness’. Like some of
the other directors featured in this book, Dumont has no embarrassment in using such
words as ‘sacred’, ‘mystical’, ‘spiritual’ or ‘transcendent’, while removing them from
their usual context in standard religious belief. His initial feature film, the misleadingly
named The Life of Jesus, is discussed at some length in the final chapter of this uneven,
but, at its best, original and enlightening collection.

Graham Petrie

French Studies
The Censorship Effect: Baudelaire, Flaubert and the Formation of French Modernism. By William
Olmsted. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp xii + 226. £41.99.

‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) – /
Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.’ So begins Philip
Larkin’s ‘Annus mirabilis’, which laconically dates the birth of sex in Britain to those
halcyon days bookended by the verdict of R v. Penguin Books and the Fab Four’s debut.
A side-swipe at the hypocrisies of the twentieth century’s most notorious literary obscen-
ity trial, no doubt, but the genealogy of Larkin’s reference is a complex one. For if the
Earth did indeed move in 1960s Britain, the tremors in the literary landscape had truly
begun a century earlier, with their epicentre situated firmly across the Channel. Playing
host to the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire on charges of offending religious and public
morality, 1857 was the undisputed ‘annus horribilis’ of the history of literary censorship.
The problematic interplay between the legal and the literary in 1857 and its aftermath
provides the thematic crux of William Olmsted’s The Censorship Effect. Building on the
work of scholars such as Dominick LaCapra, Nicholas Harrison and Elizabeth Ladenson,
Olmsted’s comparative study makes a bold re-evaluation of the ways in which Flaubert
and Baudelaire sought to negotiate a censorial Second Empire regime that criminalized
objectionable writing. Following the obligatory opening observation that the renegades
now inhabit the fortress, ‘having won canonization and a place not only within the patri-
mony of France, but within the worldwide modernist pantheon’ (p. 1), the author goes on
to develop a highly readable account of the relations between formal innovation and
cultural subversion that occupy the zone of contention proper to literary censorship.
Working against the theoretical Manichaeism that would situate the repressive official
and the literary freedom-fighter at opposite polarities, pitting, in the words of Robert
Darnton’s recent study, ‘the children of light against the children of darkness’ (2014,
p. 17), Olmsted sketches a nuanced picture that does justice to the grey zones of the
author–censor relationship. The image of a censor who emerges, Janus-like, as both
‘impediment and impetus to stylistic innovation’ (p. 42) necessarily entails a re-evalua-
tion of the metaphoricity via which this relationship is imagined, with Olmsted’s
386 Journal of European Studies 46(3/4) 

challenge to the incisory imagery of les ciseaux d’Anastasie articulated in his evocative
‘waltz’ of censorship and its multiple dance partners (‘official censors … friends, editors,
critics, fellow writers, and publishers’, p. 3).
The innovative import of this study, however, lies in its argument that the principal
features of the formal revolution that heralded the advent of literary modernism are, in
fact, the product of anticipated censorship. Baudelaire’s fragmented poetic personae
and Flaubert’s free indirect discourse accordingly emerge as ‘tactics of evasion or misdi-
rection’ (p. 16), signs of ‘prudent self-censorship’ (p. 2) at once provocative and self-
protective. If much ink has been spilled over the first of these two terms, the ‘ideological
crime[s]’ that LaCapra (1982, p. 8) detects in transgressions of a stylistic order, Olmsted’s
persuasive account seeks to redress the balance through attention to the second, where
opposition to the censorial shades into complicity. This proceeds via a sustained critical
engagement with the Bourdieusian thesis that modernity in cultural production begins
with ‘the conquest of autonomy’ (1995, pp. 47–112), the starting-point of a narrative of
the autonomous artist’s refusal to submit to the demands of ‘commercial and institutional
control’ (p. 181). That Flaubert’s and Baudelaire’s concessions – crucially, self-imposed
as well as externally enforced – to cultural and legal proprieties make this independence
less than Bourdieu would have it is an important conclusion of Olmsted’s rich analysis,
which will deservedly spark debate amongst literary critics and historians alike.
The author is swift to anticipate the most obvious criticism that might be levelled at
his book, namely the imbalance in space and attention accorded to Baudelaire over
Flaubert. This disparity nonetheless emerges as justified in light of the outcome of the
two trials: where the hermit of Croisset was (miraculously) acquitted, the ‘pointillist
practices’ (p. 101) and decontextualizing efforts of prosecutor Ernest Pinard and his aco-
lytes resulted in Baudelaire’s condemnation and the suppression of six poems from the
1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Flaubert duly forms the subject of Olmsted’s second
chapter, which adopts a genetic approach in its examination of how the series of revi-
sions to Madame Bovary, from initial scenarios and sketches to finished work, belie a
concerted strategy of ‘immoral moralism’ (p. 23). This is enriched by a rich discussion of
illustrators’ and film-makers’ responses to the challenges posed by ‘masterpieces of
ambiguous insinuation’ (p. 41) such as the infamous scène du fiacre. The bulk of the
analysis (chapters 3–5) is, however, reserved for consideration of the manner in which
censorship ‘actively reshaped and fragmented’ (p. 180) Baudelaire’s texts, paratexts and
poetic personae before, during and after the 1857 trial. Attentive to the importance of the
ideology of l’art pour l’art and enhanced by a wealth of close readings, Olmsted’s book
presents an intriguing new take on the homo duplex motif as it bears on Baudelaire’s
posthumous reputation. Through the exploration of his simultaneous compliance with
the 1857 judgement and clandestine publication of the condemned poems, Olmsted pos-
its a historically sensitive underpinning, derived from the censorship effect, to
Baudelaire’s dichotomous image as a Satan-loving ‘lesbian poet’ (Wittig, 1979, p. 117)
and reactionary moralist. The result is an impressively researched and carefully argued
study which feeds into the ongoing debate on free speech and which, while happily
eschewing desperate assertions of this kind of contemporary relevance, merits an audi-
ence of hypocrites lecteurs beyond the intimate circles of the academy.

Rebecca Sugden