Tuesday 31st October, 2017

5.15-6.30pm All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

William Clement (St. John's College)

'A bar crawl, a scandal, and fake news: tracing a religious outrage from Northern France to the international press in 1874'

On 21 April 1874, four workers from the French industrial town of Roubaix took a wooden statue of Christ on a bar crawl of several of the town’s cabarets, culminating in a series of scandalous events at the final cabaret that they visited. They were arrested, the cabaret was shut down, and the men were tried the following month for ‘Outrages to the Catholic religion’, despite there being no French law against sacrilege at the time.

This paper will take a microhistory approach to trace the way the events of this night were told and retold over the following months, both in France and abroad. The first part of the paper will examine the bar crawl itself, tying it into the fabric of working-class sociability in early Third Republic Roubaix. The second part will show how the court prosecutor turned this bar crawl into a religious scandal that attacked the central tenets of early Third Republic French identity. The final part of the paper will show how and where the events of the night and the trial were retold in newspapers through France, Belgium, Britain, and even North America. By analysing which features are preferred or even drastically altered in each retelling, we can see the role of editors in shaping narratives to fulfil their readerships’ prejudices.

Khalid Lyamlahy (St. Anne's College)

‘Un Désir d’écriture: Flaubert, Barthes et la pratique de la notation dans le Voyage en Italie'

Dans le long voyage littéraire et critique de Roland Barthes, Flaubert a été un compagnon utile, une présence dans l’écriture, jusque dans les derniers cours au Collège de France, sur le chemin qui mène à la Vita Nova. En relisant les fragments du Voyage en Italie de Flaubert à la lumière du projet barthésien de la préparation du roman, cette contribution cherche à montrer que dans la notation flaubertienne réside un désir, une volonté, un élan vers le Roman comme pratique absolue de l’écriture.

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Throughout his critical and literary work, Roland Barthes considered Flaubert as a helpful companion, a presence in writing, including in his late lectures at College de France dedicated to the preparation of his desired novel Vita Nova. By reading Flaubert's fragments from Voyage en Italie in light of Barthes's reflections on the preparation of the novel, this paper aims to demonstrate that Flaubert's practice of notation reveals his desire for the Novel as an absolute form of writing.