Abstract
What made the sketch industry flourish on a European scale was the transnationality of developments in publishing and of the social type reproducible as printed type. Sketches were able to draw on various aspects of an iconographic tradition of printed types, for example, the ‘city Cries’ which will be dealt with in my next chapter, and it is important to bear the existence of such a tradition in mind for a discussion of the physiological type developed by sketches. The precision of their observation, much though it may have in common with photographic accuracy, derives from an artistic view of ‘type’ which is a cartoon-like abstraction. ‘Draughtsmanship’ therefore plays a particular ‘informative role’ in sketches, a role which is eventually ‘undercut’, according to Judith Wechsler, by the introduction of photogravure in the 1870s.1 The cognitive function of the sketch is that of developing ‘typical’ physiognomies, interpreted in the light of physiology and through an interplay with written portraits. This function lives off the impetus to capture ‘the impress of the present age’ (Douglas Jerrold) in graphic images so that, according to Jules Janin’s introduction to Les Français, posterity will possess a complete visual record of contemporary mores.2 Another driving force is the need to expose the age’s invisible face, ‘its virtues, its follies, its moral contradictions, and its crying wrongs’, to quote Jerrold once more.3
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Notes
Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy. Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth-Century Paris (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), p. 14.
Karlheinz Stierle has called the totality suggested by physiological sketches a ‘Funktionszusammenhang’: Der Mythos von Paris. Zeichen und Bewußtsein der Stadt (Munich, Vienna: Hanser, 1993), p. 181.
See Ruth Amossy, Les idées reçues. Sémiologie du stéréotype (Paris: Nathan, 1991), particularly pp. 49–64.
It has been pointed out that Fourier nevertheless dynamises ‘balanced and static’ concepts of the Enlightenment according to a set of ‘increasingly complex and sophisticated […] social situations’: I.D. Lloyd Jones, ‘Charles Fourier: the Faithful Pupil of the Enlightenment’, in Philosophers of the Enlightenment, ed. by P. Gilmour (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), pp. 151–78 (p. 155).
See Pierre Ansart, Saint-Simon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), pp. 75–6.
See Nathalie Preiss, Les Physiologies en France au XIX e siècle: étude historique, littéraire et stylistique (Mont-de-Marsan: Éditions InterUniversitaires, 1999), pp. 238–42.
Saint-Simon, ‘Mémoire sur la science de l’homme’, in Œuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, 47 vols (Paris: Dentu, 1865–78), XL; extract printed in Ansart (note 9), pp. 75–6.
Cabanis belonged to the group of liberal philosophers known as the ‘idéologues’ assembled around Destutt de Tracy, who developed a ‘science of ideas’ on the basis of human sensual faculties and the ideas about them, shaped by social interaction. Cabanis’s friend and ‘medical ally’ (‘medizinischer Mitstreiter’) Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert, a dermatologist, established a direct connection between the condition of the human body and the political environment in his article of 1795, ‘De l’influence des causes publiques sur les maladies et la constitution physique de l’homme’; he was also the author of a two-volume medico-moral ‘Physiologie’, Physiologie des passions, ou nouvelle doctrine des sentiments moraux, which appeared in 1825. See Günter Oesterle, ‘Das Komischwerden der Philosophie in der Poesie. Literatur-, philosophie- und gesellschaftsgeschichtliche Konsequenzen der “voie physiologique” in Georg Büchners Woyzeck’, in Georg Büchner Jahrbuch, 3 (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1983), 200–39 (pp. 231–2). The relationship between medical science and the genre of fashionable Physiologies becomes evident, for example, in the introduction of the doctor Morel de Rubempré to Physiologie de la première nuit des noces;
see Hans-Rüdiger van Biesbrock, Die literarische Mode der Physiologien in Frankreich (1840–1842) (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1978), p. 121. Morel de Rubempré also authored several works which adapted Lavater’s physiognomics to broader typological and social study: Le Lavater des tempéramens et des constitutions (1829) as well as Le Nouveau Lavater complet, divided into a Réunion de tous les systèmes pour étudier et juger les hommes et les jeunes gens and a Réunion de tous les systèmes pour juger les dames ou les demoiselles (1838).
See editors’ note in Œuvres diverses, II (note 17), p. 1530. In the ‘Préface’ to the French edition of his Lutezia (May 1855), Heine, expressing his fears of a communist future without poetry, had recourse to the same joke: ‘[…] hélas! mon Livre des Chants servira à l’épicier pour en faire des cornets où il versera du café ou du tabac à priser pour les vieilles femmes de l’avenir.’ Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. by Manfred Windfuhr, 16 vols (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973–97) XIII,1 (1988), 163–9 (p. 167).
See, for example, Physiologie de l’employé (first published with Aubert and Lavigne in 1841) and ‘Monographie de la presse parisienne’ (first published in Paul de Kock’s collection La Grande ville in January and February 1843); both in Honoré de Balzac, Œuvres complètes illustrées, 26 vols, ed. by Jean A. Ducourneau (Paris: Les Bibliophiles de l’originale, 1964–76), xxvi (1976), 190–233 and 234–94.
‘Un industriel est un homme qui travaille à produire ou à mettre à la portée des différents membres de la société, un ou plusieurs moyens matériels de satisfaire leurs besoins ou leurs goûts physiques […].’ Saint-Simon, ‘Catéchisme des industriels’, in Œuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, 47 vols (Paris: Dentu, 1865–78), xxxvii; extracts printed in Ansart (note 9), p. 93.
See Saint-Simon, ‘Du système industriel’, in Œuvres de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, 47 vols (Paris: Dentu, 1865–78), xxii; extracts in Ansart (note 9), pp. 94–95.
See E.M. Butler, The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 40 and p. 44.
For a concise and amusing overview of Saint-Simon’s philosophy and of the main tenets of Saint-Simonianism see Butler (note 34), pp. 4–50; the role of the ‘utopians’ in the emergence of the French intellectual is lucidly discussed by Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973–7), in his chapter ‘The Genius in Politics’, I (1973), 428–66.
J.H. Abraham, The Origins and Growth of Sociology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 92.
Graham Everitt, English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), p. 356.
‘La Société ne fait-elle pas de l’homme, suivant les milieux où son action se déploie, autant d’hommes différents qu’il y a de variétés en zoologie? […] Il a donc existé, il existera donc de tout temps des Espèces Sociales comme il y a des Espèces Zoologiques.’ Honoré de Balzac, ‘Avant-propos’, in La Comédie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81), I (1976), 7–20 (p. 8).
In fact, both the expression ‘type’ and ‘stereotype’ also derive from printing. See Ségolène Le Men, ‘Peints par eux-mêmes’, in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), pp. 4–46 (p. 45–6), and Amossy (note 7), pp. 25–6.
‘Gavarni est un portraitiste de types … ’; ‘Dans la création de ces hommes et de ces femmes, le crayon de Gavarni travaille […] avec les souvenirs d’humanité emmagasinés dans sa mémoire, et pareils à des amas de clichés superposés.’ Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Gavarni. L’Homme et l’ceovre (Paris: Fasquelle, 1925; first edn 1870), pp. 91–2.
See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Principes de philosophie zoologique’, in Goethes Werke, ed. by Erich Trunz, 14 vols (Munich: Beck; Hamburg: Wegner, 1973–6), XIII (1975), 219–50.
M.H. Spielmann, The History of Punch (London: Cassell, 1895), p. 303.
See Karl Gutzkow, ‘Zur Philosophie der Geschichte’, in Schriften, ed. by Adrian Hummel, 2 vols plus one vol. of materials (Frankfurt a. M.: Zweitausendeins, 1998), I, 553–728 (p. 594). On Gutzkow’s criticism of Hegel and on his own concept of an ‘anatomy’ of history see my own articles, ‘Englische “Anatomie” gegen deutsche “Konstruktion” der Geschichte’, Chroniques allemandes, 7 (Grenoble: Université Stendhal-Grenoble III, 1999), 57–68, and ‘Anatomie und Enzyklopädie als Muster literarischer Verfahrensweisen im Werk Karl Gutzkows’, in Zeitdiskurse. Reflexionen zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Roland Berbig, M. Lauster and Rolf Parr (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2004), pp. 43–54.
Ludwig Börne, ‘Monographie der deutschen Postschnecke’, in Sämtliche Schriften, ed. by Inge and Peter Rippmann, 5 vols (Düsseldorf [from vol. 4 Darmstadt]: Melzer, 1964–8), I (1964), 639–67 (p. 650).
See ‘Kamel’, in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 33 vols (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), XI, 95–96 (col. 96).
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© 2007 Martina Lauster
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Lauster, M. (2007). Physiology, Zoology and the Constitution of Social Types. In: Sketches of the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210974_4
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