Literary Periodicals and the Politics of Genre Creation in Restoration Paris

In 1819 the French government passed a law that required that periodicals receive prior

government approval and pay a caution payment in order to print political content. Any

periodical not authorized to discuss politics, but found to be doing so by the men employed by

the censor to monitor the periodical press, could then be shut down, and their printer and

publisher fined, imprisoned, or both. This new law simultaneously encouraged the production of

new non-political literary periodicals and brought those same journals under increased scrutiny

of the censor. These new literary journals, prohibited from discussing politics, turned to literature

as a seemingly non-political avenue to debate French society. Yet these purportedly apolitical

literary debates masked important proposals for how to remake France in the wake of revolution

and dictatorship, even as they altered the landscape of French literature.

The Restoration was not only a period of intense political conflict between liberals and

royalists, it was also the moment of the bataille romantique – the literary conflict between

romantics and classicists. These literary debates about what was or was not ‘French’ became

entangled with political debates, and the periodical press helped to crystalize and advertise those

conflicts, by publishing criticism, reviews, and reflections on the bataille. This paper explores

the crucial role played by the literary press in the development of romanticism and classicism as

increasingly circumscribed literary genres, while considering how the legal framework in which

these periodicals were produced helped to politicize literary debate. This politicization was

neither consistent nor straightforward – romantic periodicals could be either liberal or royalist, as

could classicist journals, and both liberal and royalist journals could print pro-romantic or pro-

classicist pieces. This political malleability lies both in the nature of the literary conflict, and in

the nature of literary journals themselves as multi-authored, periodical texts.