Taming the Gypsy: How French Romantics Recaptured a Past
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Taming the Gypsy: How French Romantics Recaptured a Past The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Carter, Elizabeth Lee. 2014. Taming the Gypsy: How French Romantics Recaptured a Past. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064929 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Taming the Gypsy: How French Romantics Recaptured a Past A dissertation presented by Elizabeth Carter Hanrahan to The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Romance Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts September 2014 © 2014 – Elizabeth Carter Hanrahan All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Janet Beizer Elizabeth Carter Hanrahan Taming the Gypsy: How French Romantics Recaptured a Past Abstract In this dissertation, I examine the evolution of the Gypsy trope in Romantic French literature at a time when nostalgia became a powerful aesthetic and political tool used by varying sides of an ideological war. Long considered a transient outsider who did not view time or privilege the past in the same way Europeans did, the Gypsy, I argue, became a useful way for France’s writers to contain and tame the transience they felt interrupted nostalgia’s attempt to recapture a lost past. My work specifically looks at the development of this trope within a thirty-year period that begins in 1823, just before Charles X became France’s last Bourbon king, and ends just after Louis-Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France in 1852. Beginning with Quentin Durward (1823), Walter Scott’s first historical novel about France, and the French novel that looked to it for inspiration, Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), I show how the Gypsy became a character that communicated a fear that France was recklessly forgetting and destroying the monuments and narratives that had long preserved its pre-revolutionary past. While these novels became models in how nostalgia could be deployed to seduce France back into a relationship with a particular past, I also look at how the Gypsy trope is transformed some fifteen years later when nostalgia for Napoleon nearly leads France into two international conflicts and eventually traps the French into what George Sand called a dangerous “bail avec le passé.” In new readings of Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (1845) and iii George Sand’s La Filleule (1853), I argue that both authors personify the dangers of recapturing the past, albeit in two very different ways. While Mérimée makes nostalgia and the Gypsy accomplices, George Sand gives France an admirable Gypsy heroine, a young woman who offers readers a way out of nostalgia’s viscous circle. I conclude by arguing that nostalgia and this Romantic trope found their way back into France at the dawn of a new millennium, and the Gypsy has once again been typecast in art and politics as deviant for refusing to dwell in or on the past. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………….……………… vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………..…………… 1 Chapter One…………………………………………………………………………………18 The Literary Gypsy’s French Bonne Aventure Toward the Nineteenth Century Chapter Two…………………………………………………………………………………55 From Hayraddin to Esmeralda: How Victor Hugo Unpacked Walter Scott’s Gift to France Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………...…103 The Danger in Claiming Carmen as Homeland: Mérimée’s Warning to France Chapter Four…………………………………………………………………………….…147 George Sand’s La Filleule: When the Gypsy Becomes France’s Path to the Future Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………..…193 A Late Twentieth-Century Resurgence of a Nineteenth-Century Plot Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..…204 v Acknowledgements The completion of this project would not have been possible without the encouragement and patient support of friends, family and colleagues who helped me strike out on the many adventures, academic and other, that led to the fleshing out of my first thoughts on the Gypsy in Romantic French literature. It is with a twinge of nostalgia that I thank Anne McCall, whose early guidance helped me onto la bonne piste. It was her enthusiasm for this project that pushed me to continue, even when the winds of a hurricane tried to blow it off course in 2005. I also owe much to the faculty I knew at Tulane University between the years of 2002 and 2005, and to Ian Hancock who allowed me to sift through the literature, movies and other important historical and cultural documents he has compiled in the Romani Archives. It is also thanks to the hospitality of Harvard’s Romance Languages and Literature Department that I found a new intellectual home in 2005 and Janet Beizer, whose guidance through this sometimes overwhelming journey is much appreciated. I was also lucky enough to cross intellectual paths with Verena Conley, whose mentoring emphasized the importance of opening the borders of this study to more than one time, space and medium, forcing it to speak a language that transcends nineteenth-century French literature. I am also thankful to Frannie Lindsay for all of her precious advice and help through the many administration quandaries and quagmires that come with completing and turning in a dissertation. Through trips to Bourges, La Chatre, Paris, the Camargue, Strasbourg, Reims and Spain, I have been accompanied and assisted by many friends eager to help me understand what was playing out in these texts. My enduring gratitude goes to Charles Hall, Veronique vi Philippe, Anmol Mehra, Georgina Loya Gomez, Natalia Byrdina, and many, many others. The friends I made at Dartmouth’s 2011 Institute of French Cultural Studies were also important to this intellectual journey, so I thank them, especially Lawrence Kritzman, for taking precious time to chat about and think through time and its place in French culture and writing. I owe much to my mother, Frances Parish Carter, who has always reminded me that finishing a journey is just as gratifying as beginning one. And of course, I could never have done this without the love and support of my best friend and husband, Jeffrey Hanrahan, who is always quick to remind me that the past is the past and that the future is here. vii Introduction France made international news in September 2010 after an internal memo from the Minister of the Interior was leaked to Le Monde, and Sarkozy’s detailed plan to rid France of more than 300 Roma camps was revealed to the world. This expulsion, as the August memo states, would be different from previous, less successful attempts to rid France of its Roma population. Instead of simply asking camps to pick up and leave, which the memo complains only leads to the dispersion or displacement of Roma communities, it calls for camps to be torn down and their residents sent back to their country of origin. Roma who are “non-expulsables” (those the reader can assume to be French) would have to deal with France’s court system which, the memo states, should prevent them from setting up illegal camps again. In the following weeks, France’s gendarmerie and police successfully followed through with the memo’s orders, escorting numerous Roma families to France’s borders with one-way tickets home to their supposed countries of origin.1 French intellectuals and human rights organizations denounced Sarkozy’s mass deportation as a sad attempt to gain voter support from the xenophobic far right. However, they failed to ask why the French president announced his plans to expulse the Roma in a speech addressing the growing unrest in France’s banlieus, peripheral urban spaces where first, second and sometimes third generation immigrant populations have been consigned since the 1960s. If one revisits the July 30, 2010 speech where Sarkozy first announced his plans to rid France of its Roma population, it becomes clear that the president’s decision has little to 1 In many cases, they were sent to Bulgaria or Romania, two countries that are now members of the European Union and whose citizens should have the right to travel freely through the EU. 1 do with the Roma themselves.2 In fact, Sarkozy’s speech came shortly after two dozen or so young men from Villeneuve, one of Grenoble’s troubled banlieues, spilled out of their cité and threatened the “security” of those living in the city center. The Grenoble riots began on July 17, 2010 as a protest to police shooting and killing one of Villeneuve’s residents, Karim Boudouda, whose family, friends and neighbors denounced the act as yet another example of police violence toward France’s Maghreb and beur communities. But as the riots turned violent, escalating from burning cars to shoot-outs with police, the French began to ask themselves if the Grenoble riots were not a frightening repetition of the émeutes that shook France for three weeks in October and early November 2005 – riots that began in Clichy- sous-Bois, but quickly turned into a nationwide revolt of France’s young and frustrated banlieue population. 3 In his attempt to give meaning to the Grenoble riots, Sarkozy opened his speech by placing blame not on France’s police or current administration, but on the parents of the wayward youth who failed to enforce what he believes are the defining valeurs of French society. As he put it, La délinquance actuelle ne provient pas d’un mal être comme je l’entends dire trop souvent: elle résulte d’un mépris pour les valeurs fondamentales de notre société.