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The Feuilleton
"The feuilleton provided a market for belles-lettres in the daily newspaper. The introduction of this section summed up the changes which the July Revolution had brought to the press...In 1824 there were 47,000 subscribers to newpapers in Paris... in 1846, 200,000. ...informative items required little space. They and not the political editorials or the serialized novels enabled a newspaper to have a different look every day, an appearance that was cleverly varied when the pages were made up and constituted part of the paper's attractiveness. These items had to be constantly replenished. City gossip, theatrical intrigues and 'things worth knowing' were their most popular sources. Their intrinsic cheap elegance. a quality that became so characteristic of the feuilleton section, was in evidence from the beginning."1938 "The assimilation of the man of letters to the society in which he lived took place on the boulevard in the following fashion. On the boulevard he kept himself in readiness for the next incident, witticism or rumour. There he unfolded the full fabric of his connections with colleagues and men-about-town, and he was as much dependent on their results as the cocottes were on their disguises. On the boulevards he spent his hours of idleness which he displayed before people as part of his working hours. he behaved as if he had learned from Marx that the value of a commodity is determined by the working time socially necessary to produce it. in view of the protracted periods of idleness which in the eyes of the public were necessary for the realization of his own labour power, its value became almost fantastic. This high valuation was not limited to the public. The high payments for feuilletons at that time indicate that they were founded in social condi tions." 1938
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"These books consist
of individual
sketches which, as it were, reproduce the plastic foreground
of these
panoramas with the ir anecdotal form and the extensive background
of
the panoramas with their store of information. Numerous
authors
contributed to these volumes. Thus these anthologies are products
of
the same belletristic collective work for which Girardin had
procured
an outlet in the
feuilleton. They were
the salon attire of a
literature which fundamentally was
