How French modernists from Proust to Mallarmé were alarmed and inspired by the voracious dynamism of the newspaper world
is a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow in French at Trinity College Dublin and a theatre critic for The Financial Times. He is the author of Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust (2024) and the co-editor of The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern, a volume of essays about connections between Proust and Ireland (forthcoming, 2025).
The poet’s revulsion was widely shared in 19th-century France. Amid rapid increases in circulation, newspapers were depicted as a virus or narcotic responsible for collective neurosis, overexcitement and lowered productivity. Criminality was blamed on the suggestive effects of lurid crime reports. And many writers concluded that the newspaper would soon kill off the book and imaginative literature altogether.
These dismal appraisals yielded a series of fiercely pessimistic novels of journalism by authors such as Honoré de Balzac, the Goncourt brothers and Guy de Maupassant. Each portrayed the press as a corrupt and corrupting behemoth that was devouring art and culture within its predatory maw. ‘Newspapers are an evil,’ as one world-weary author remarks in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837-43). Another describes newspaper offices as ‘whorehouses of thought’, anticipating the degradation of the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, from idealistic young poet to unscrupulous hack as he falls for a glamorous courtesan.
