“Émaux et Camées” and “Les Châtiments”: two ethical conceptions in the poetry of the nineteenth-century France

Abstract

Against the demand for a progressive and utilitarian attitude in the arts, Théophile Gautier refuses to sympathize with the ideas of the nineteenth-century social theories, and, in his prefaces, he attacks newspapers, critics, and the bourgeois society, defending the autotelic nature of Art. The purpose of this work is to point out how Gautier’s aesthetic positioning is manifested in his 1852 poetic work, “Émaux et Camées”, a work contemporary with “Les Châtiments”, a socially engaged book written by Victor Hugo. Some prefaces, such as that found in “Albertus” (1832) and in “Mademoiselle de Maupin’s” (1835), some metadiscourses present in “Spirite” (1866), and the poem-preface that opens “Émaux et Camées” will serve to illustrate this study. Using the testimony of Charles Baudelaire about his contemporary and Maître and resorting to criticism of some texts, such as Mário Faustino’s “Diálogos de oficina” and Theodor Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” we will try to discuss the meaning of this posture that characterizes the poetics of this writer who was important for the later aesthetics of the nineteenth century.