Tuesday 1 November, 5:15–6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Hestia Zhang (St. Peter’s) — ‘Display in Parisian Parks: Assertion of Bourgeois Identity, 1848-1914’  

Throughout the nineteenth century, French regimes kept renovating the newly democratised royal gardens in Paris to tackle the growing concerns of public health, urban scenery and political tensions. Particularly, the Second Empire and the Third Republic created new parks and squares, redesigned the suburban woodlands, and installed various outdoor entertainment in the rapidly urbanizing metropolis, marking the second half of the century as the prime era of public gardens and outdoor leisure. This public space frequently featured in literary and visual works of the period as a perfect setting for Parisian drama, staging all the “corruption, glamour, political manoeuvring, and false pretence”. In this presentation, I will examine the representation of green space in nineteenth-century French novels and paintings, especially Zola’s La Curée (1871), which opens with a carriage congestion in the Bois de Boulogne, and contemporaneous paintings of modern life by Manet, Degas, et cetera. Analysing the importance of displaying fashion, wealth, and social connections in the social game of looking and being seen, I argue that the public parks and gardens catered to the emerging middle class’s need to affirm their bourgeois rites and identity. 

Becky Short (St. Hilda’s) — ‘Just a Spoonful of Sugar? Horatian Satire in Le Livre de quatre couleurs (1760)’    

In 1759 and 1760, Catholic moralist Louis-Antoine Caraccioli published a visually-striking series of chromatic texts. The first was printed in green ink, the second in pink, and the third – Le Livre de quatre couleurs – in red, yellow, green, and brown. The works’ ludic form complements their content, which gives a whimsical depiction of French society and its frivolous concern with outward appearances. Many scholars have interpreted the function of colour in the texts as strategic, arguing that it serves to seduce a worldly readership before exposing them to the ‘true’ moralising message of the texts. Such a view places Caraccioli’s work in the Lucretian didactic tradition; the colour, it is suggested, is a honeyed veneer concealing the text’s bitter medicine. This interpretation has been supported by scholars’ engagement with the epigraph to Le Livre de quatre couleurs – a quotation from Horace’s Sermones in which he alludes to Lucretius: Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat? ‘What prevents a person from speaking the truth while smiling?’ Caraccioli, however, changes the first word of the question to Ridendo, rendering its translation ‘What prevents a person from speaking the truth by means of smiling?’ This alteration, which has been overlooked until now, demands a new reading. The author is not subscribing to Lucretian didacticism here, but rather is challenging it. This paper will argue that colour does not function as an accidental disguise, but rather is itself a vector of meaning. In interrogating how this interpretation changes our understanding of the texts, I will in turn assess Caraccioli’s contribution to the broader reception of Epicurean moral philosophy and Horatian satire in the long eighteenth century, along with thinkers such as Shaftesbury and La Rochefoucauld.