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Carpenter, Scott. Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France: Frauds, Hoaxes and Counterfeits. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. xiii+190 pp. ISBN 9780754668077. £55.00, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 48, Issue 4, October 2012, Page 488, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqs042
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This is an excellent study of the ways in which a growing preoccupation with falseness and the unstable nature of truth in nineteenth-century France asks searching questions of what we understand by the notion of authenticity itself, and reshapes certain forms of literary discourse. In a wide range of examples drawn from literature, satire, politics and society including Mérimée's literary hoaxes; caricature and the popular press; the faux Napoléon of the Second Empire; the memoirs of Eugène-François Vidocq, the chief of the Parisian police; and Sand's Gabriel, which explores notions of imposture, performance and gender, Scott Carpenter shows how ‘authenticity is not given but constructed’ (p. 63). While Baudelaire's prose poem ‘La Fausse monnaie’ has already been saturated with exegeses, the chapter devoted to his unfinished ‘Pauvre Belgique!’, which scornfully dismisses Belgium as a poor imitation of France, redresses the balance. Particularly impressive is an ingenious study of plagiarism and pastiche in Balzac's ‘Pierre Grassou’ and Les Chouans which reveals realism's hesitations between mimesis and originality: ‘Could it be that […] “originals” are, in fact, always copies – skilfully disguised?’ (p. 107). Weaving fruitful links between language, power, politics, economics, fiction and performance, Carpenter's subtle and sensitive analyses of one of nineteenth-century France's central dilemmas reveals that ‘it is less a question of pitting the fake against the authentic than of dismantling the difference between them’ (p. 173).
