French-Speaking Worlds: "After the Coup: Literature in an Age of Tyranny" by Maurice Samuels (Yale) 

Please join the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now for a talk entitled "After the Coup: Literature in an Age of Tyranny" by Maurice Samuels (Yale). 

Abstract:
Baudelaire declared in a letter that “Le 2 décembre m’a physiquement dépolitiqué,” but scholars have long refused to take him at his word. This paper reconsiders Baudelaire’s reaction to the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, in the light not only of his famously ambiguous political pronouncements but also of his repeated requests for subsidies from the Second Empire regime.  It concludes with a reading of the prose poem “Assommons les pauvres!” (1865) as a belated response—a response produced, as it were, après coup—to the violence of “le 2 décembre,” an event with uncomfortable but perhaps instructive parallels to our own political moment.

Bio:
Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University. He specializes in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century France. His broad interests include investigating the origins of our cultural modernity, and tracing how new forms of subjectivity—and new ideas about history, politics, race, and the novel—took shape in the period following the French Revolution. He is the award-winning author of five books and several edited volumes. His most recent book, a biography of Alfred Dreyfus, was published in the Jewish Lives series (Yale University Press) in February 2024. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and of the New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, he has published articles on diverse topics, including romanticism and realism, aesthetic theory, representations of the Crimean War, boulevard culture, and writers from Balzac to Zola. He served as chair of Yale’s Judaic Studies Program and has directed the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism since 2011.

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Hosted by the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now Focal Group, sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Research Unit and co-sponsored by the France-Stanford Center and Stanford Global Studies. This event is part of Stanford Global Studies’ Global Research Workshop Program.