[In the following essay, Kelly examines the critical reaction to the rise of both photography and the Realist aesthetic in mid-nineteenth century France.]

In May 1841, two years after François Arago's public announcement in Paris of the invention of photography, an anonymous critic compared Balzac's descriptive technique to the daguerreotype ("Les Lecamus"). Contemporary critics were more than reluctant to acknowledge photography as an artistic medium; they perceived it as a threat to aesthetics in general. Their reticence to accept realism as a valid literary form was equally strong. Negative comparisons between photography and the realist novel became an offensive tactic for conservative critics who sensed a battle looming between objective and subjective realities, a battle that would threaten the established order of art and aesthetics.

The early technical progress of the new graphic medium paralleled in chronology the transition from romanticism to the major period of production of the realist novel (1839 to the mid-1890s). Yet traditional literary historians of the nineteenth century in France, and most especially those who have focused on realism, have, for the most part, ignored any connections between literary realism and photography's rapid rise as an artistic and social phenomenon. At best, respected historians have seen the connection between photography and literary realism as nothing more than a "synchronisme douteux." But information about photography was widely available from the very beginning through the scientific, artistic, and journalistic circles that were so closely intertwined in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, circles in which the realist writers had an integral part. Writers were photographers, and photographers, writers. Contemporary literary critics quickly recognized the corollaries between the capabilities of the new graphic medium and the professed goals of the literary realists, so much so that those critics adopted and used the terms of the new graphic medium in their lexicon, assuming an influence on literary realism by photography, albeit a negative one.

The nineteenth century was increasingly a world of the real, real in its most basic etymological sense: the production, accumulation, and consumption of things. Auguste Comte's philosophy of positivism, of man's need to organize and explain his world by investigating what was accessible and by developing an objective knowledge of external phenomena was crucial to the philosophy of the realists. What man could sense, and primarily what he could see, isolate, and capture was all-important. Contemporaries believed that the surface of things, their external and primarily visible aspects, could convey to the beholder an understanding and appreciation of what lay beneath. Nature could be reproduced, objective reality captured. Truth was becoming tangible and conservable. Collecting evidence, documenting reality, recording and observing, the realists were part of a mindset that believed in induction, that patiently collecting one instance after another will gradually produce a correct image of nature, provided that such observations are not colored by subjective bias. Recording . . . observation . . . factual evidence—these obvious traits of the camera were traits that realist writers emulated, whether consciously or unconsciously.

In the realist novel as in photography, the subject itself is of primary importance, for each medium seems to reassure its audience that art is not hard; each medium seems to be more about its subject than about art, to paraphrase Susan Sontag. Each tends to focus our attention on that subject itself and not on the way the subject is rendered; the manipulations and transformations of the subject by the artist are not meant to be apparent. Photographs seem to be the reality we see with our eyes; the straightforward language of the novel seems to be the way we ourselves speak; and the lives portrayed in both seem to be recognizably like our own.

Contemporary reality is, of course, the only possible subject for a photograph; our belief in the photo's truthfulness is integrally tied to our acceptance of the fact that at the time the picture was taken, the subject actually existed in that place. The realist writers were not confined to such a narrow view of time by the fundamental characteristics of their medium, but they were similarly confined by the tenets of realism which dictated a preference for concrete observable reality. Instead of chronicling what they had experienced before or what they imagined had happened or could happen, the realist novelists concentrated on a scrutiny and a description of the world around them.

A primary task of early photography was to conserve the memory of grandiose events in a simple existence. The new graphic medium first did this through its presence at the rituals of christenings, first communions, weddings, and funerals. Then, as travel between the cities and the provinces as well as between countries and continents became easier, travelers became tourists wanting to preserve the memory of the occasion with tangible proof. As access to photography increased, more and more photos were taken of more and more events until as Paul Valéry remarked in 1939 at the Centenaire de la Photographie, "Chaque événement de l'existence se marque par quelque cliché," an idea we take for granted.

Chronicling the events of the lives of ordinary people was also a main thrust of realist fiction. For the archrealist Duranty, the most important goal of literature was to represent "le côté social de l'homme, ce qui est le plus visible." The significant happenings—birth, marriage, death—of common people were as important to record as those of the rich and famous. In that age of inductive reasoning, of serious scientific experimentation, and of a new fascination with history, these detailed recountings of the very ordinariness of daily life were a contribution to the new documentation. Champfleury and Flaubert took very seriously their efforts to enumerate the high and low points of provincial existence, while others like the Goncourts and the young Zola described city life. No event was too insignificant, no person too menial, no object too lowly to be included in the portrayal of reality. "Avec la photographie, tout ce qui se passe dans le monde devient spectacle." The same was true for the realist novel.

The camera captures reality in successive instants and in minute detail. Contemporaries were astounded by the perfection of the image, by the magic fidelity with which even the smallest details were rendered. (In fact, as an accurate representation of reality, the glass daguerreotype with its more difficult and expensive process was preferred over the calotype, or paper print, because the former demonstrated a much greater clarity and intricacy of detail.)

Details served a similar function in realist fiction. Descriptive details were used to convince the reader that the picture being verbally painted was true to life. Such detailing helped anchor the writing to a specific time and place—local color, if you will—and was pushed to almost astonishing limits by the realists. The more details about the physical objects in a character's environment, for example, the more complete the picture; the more complete the picture, the easier for the mind's eye to see and accept it. Details were intended to persuade the reader that the object could be rendered in words in a way that would rival reality.

The realist writers chose as their technique the most direct presentation possible, relying on a heavy use of external, visual details in description in order to transfer the reality they saw to the page; these writers hoped to get everything down on paper, to approximate [according to Harry Levin in The Gates of Horn, 1963], a "one-to-one correspondence between language and reality." For the most part, this approximation of reality was done through descriptive passages in which the writer evoked images of detailed visual objects and environments for the mind's eye. Of course, this one-to-one correspondence between art and reality that the realist writers were seeking had already been accomplished by photography. Since the very beginning, we have seen photographs as the truth since we can intellectually equate that small paper image of an object with the tiny retinal image that our eyes communicate to our brain.

A further association with the truth stemmed from the seeming impersonality of the photographic process. Early practitioners [according to Edward Lucie-Smith in The Invented Eye: Masterpieces of Photography, 1839-1914, 1975] thought of photography as a kind of "collaboration with nature . . . a means whereby natural forces could be allowed to speak for themselves, instead of having to filter their message through an individual temperament." To contemporaries, early photography appeared to produce immediate copies of the real world, copies distorted only by the rapidly decreasing mechanical flaws of the apparatus, copies uninfluenced, as were other visual forms, by the mind or hand of the artist. For realist writers, a similar idea was clear. Zola described it thus: "L'Ecran réaliste est un simple verre à vitre, très mince, très clair, et qui a la prétention d'être si parfaitement transparent que les images le traversent et se reproduisent ensuite dans leur réalité."

Photography was born into the same world in which the French realist novel grew up, a world that wished to see reality as though in a mirror, a world where much of science and most of history were descriptive, a world where radical artists were reacting against an art that seemed to them excessively personal. Realist writers sought a direct reflection of reality, a reflection evident not only in the transparency of Zola's screen but also in the frequent use of mirror analogies in describing both media. The nineteenth-century writer and critic Edmond About declared that the camera was a "miroir qui se souvient" and Stendhal had already declared at the beginning of Le Rouge et le noir that "(u)n roman: c'est un miroir qu'on promène le long d'un chemin." The author's impartiality and rigor of observation were imperative; these traits, of course, were built into the photographic process.

Jules Champfleury declared in 1856 that every serious novelist was an impersonal being who did not judge, condemn, or absolve; all he did was expose the truth. This is the essence of the truthfulness of photographic representation. The reality of photography lies in its visual depiction of the exterior of contemporaneous objects in all their detail: this seemed to be the professed goal of the realist writer. The camera was an accurate and seemingly completely objective observer: this was what the realist writer seemed to want to be. Literary critics of the time were not slow to see these connections.

Comparisons between literature and the visual arts had, of course, long been an effective tool for the literary critic. Such comparisons were particularly widespread during the height of romanticism, when artists and writers deliberately grouped together to articulate an aesthetic theory. Comraderie among the realists was not uncommon either, perhaps more common than many realize, as artists and writers sought each other out as often to exchange technical information as to exchange aesthetic theories.

For the critic to move from discussions of literature in terms of visual art to discussions of literature in terms of photography was a small step, not only because photography and painting were visual media but also because the framed pictorialness and realism of detail in both were things sought after in realist painting and in the trompe-1 'œil art of the establishment. (Rather ironically, the technique of some of the more accepted painters was more photographic in its precise clarity of form and tone than the more impressionistic work of the realists.) But this mattered little, for "photographic" was becoming an increasingly loaded word.

In the beginning, literary critics commonly confused the terminology in their allusions to the various media. Such seemingly disparate processes as stenography and photography became interchangeable terms for describing the transcription of reality in realist literature, just as photograph and daguerreotype were interchangeable terms for the product of the new graphic medium. What became important to the literary critic was not the definition of a particular term but its possible association with a mechanical, objective, materialist philosophy, so much so that strict distinctions would eventually be made between descriptive "painterly" techniques and those that were photographic. This, I shall show, was not surprising because for the conservative critic a painterly description in literature could be acceptable since it retained at least a little bit of the author's own personality and therefore held at least a faint glimmer of a personal, subjective ideal. Photographic descriptions, on the other hand, were not acceptable because they represented only the grossly material, the surface reality; they represented the objective philosophy of writers who, the critics staunchly maintained, denied the ideal. As realism moved into a more demanding position in artistic considerations, photography and the realist novel found themselves allied on the wrong side of a realist/idealist debate. The use of photographic comparisons when speaking of a novel lay at the heart of a fundamental clash in values and mirrored the threat that critics felt realism posed to aesthetics.

In the beginning "photographic" was not a pejorative term. It meant real, true-to-life accuracy, and few of the critics denied the importance of a truthful depiction of the real world. Nor did they deny the importance of the study of contemporary life and mores that this depiction implied or the helpful use of observation. Indeed, most of them applauded a return to the concrete, contemporary world as subject because it meant a return from the lyrical, imaginative, and exotic intemperances of the late romantic period. An early cautious evaluation in 1860 [by Armand de Pontmartin in Union, 18-19 May, 1860] summed it up thus: "quand le réalisme se prend au sérieux, quand il se propose de ramener au réel et au vrai l'art que nous avions égaré sur les vagues hauteurs du romantisme, il mérite que l'on compte avec lui."

Skill at visual observation was a good thing, as various journalists of the day pointed out. Hippolyte Castille in 1846 appluaded Balzac's ability to describe: "Chez M. de Balzac, la réalité occupe une grande place au point de vue matériel; il décrit un intérieur avec autant d'exactitude que le daguerréotype." Louis Enault wrote some years later of Prosper Mérimée: "un de ses plus vrais mérites, c'est la sagacité de l'observation. Nul ne voit plus finement et ne dit mieux comme il a vu. Il daguerréotype ses personnages." The camera could reproduce exactly what it saw; as a tool, photography could provide a more accurate and impersonal rendering of some of the essential external reality needed to make physical descriptions believable. By using his powers of observation as a comparable tool, an author could give verisimilitude to his descriptions of the external world; he could obtain or retain factual information. As Baudelaire had commented in his "Le Public moderne et la photographie" in the Salon of 1859, the use of photography as a "servant" was acceptable because keen visual perceptions of external reality were valuable to art and keen visual perceptions of external reality were what the camera did best.

But for Baudelaire photography was not content to remain a servant. Nor, according to the critics, were realist writers content to use photographic tools as a technique. Most of the critics echoed Baudelaire's fears about photography's encroachment on art and they gave those fears a literary interpretation. Photography as a part of literary realism was becoming an end in itself. Armand Barthet lamented that same year: "Il faut, en vérité, que l'art soit en décadence, pour que l'on prenne au sérieux et que l'on discute une littérature qui ne vit que de procédés.—Et quels procédés! la loupe qui grossit l'objet, mais qui rapetisse le cadre; le détail, toujours le détail, et le détail mal choisi." Arthur Arnould stated the case even more bluntly: "le réalisme n'étant point de l'art, est simplement un procédé . . . c'est un travail mécanique exigeant de l'exactitude et de la patience." There was process but no substance.

Although the critics could not agree as to what realism was, they could agree as to what it was not. At the center of their negative definition, and their subsequent increasingly pejorative use of photographic terminology, was an author's idealism, or rather lack thereof. What Bernard Weinberg said about Balzac and his relationship to his contemporary critics [in French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830-1870, 1936] was generally applicable to realist writers of the period: "It was a critic's estimate of Balzac's idealism which determined, usually, his opinion on Balzac as a realist. If he regarded the novelist as lacking in idealism or even in imagination, he was apt to classify him as a realist." In a split between forme and fond, forme was winning and the forme of literary realism bore a strong resemblance to photography.

Because of its inherent limitations, the camera could not cross the all-important border between the visible and the invisible, the real and the spiritual; it could only reproduce the exterior aspect of things; it was an eye with no intelligence. Writers bent wholeheartedly on using this technique were no better. Like a photographer, a realist writer needed only skill and patience, not talent or genius. Anyone could become a realist.

The worst offense was a blatant lack of concern for a balance between objective and subjective realities, between the real and the ideal. Since photography could only reveal external reality, it could not participate in the true purpose of Art as the critics saw it. Photography, or a literary technique derived from it, could perhaps reproduce reality with exact detail and precision; critics did not see how either medium could reveal the Ideal. Art that did not do so was not art but a debasement of traditional values. Photographic allusions thus served to define all that was wrong with a realist's writing and with literary realism in general. The realists lacked soul; they were as mechanical as the photographic device.

For this reason, Barbey d'Aurevilly was very much against l'école du daguerréotype, as he called it, and the man he saw as its leader, Flaubert:

Si l'on forgeait à Birmingham ou à Manchester des machines à raconter ou à analyser en bon acier anglais, qui fonctionnent toutes seules par des procédés inconnus de dynamique, elles fonctionneraient absolument comme M. Flaubert. On sentirait dans ces machines autant de vie, d'âme, d'entrailles humaines que dans l'homme de marbre qui a écrit Madame Bovary avec une plume de pierre.

Gustave Merlet, one of the chief anti-realist critics, felt much the same way. In a satirical review of the novels of Champfleury, the self-proclaimed head of the literary realism school, Merlet put these words into the mouth of the novelist: "J'ai vu ceci, j'ai entendu cela. Je suis le secrétaire du premier venu: mon imagination est une chambre obscure. Et Dieu me garde de retoucher les épreuves que je tire . . . je suis M. Champfleury, homme d'esprit et réaliste."

The realist writers were not only as mechanical as the camera. In their concentration on physical reality as truth, they focused on the visible surface just as the camera did. The camera as machine could be excused for this limitation; flesh-and-blood writers could not. Ferdinand Brunetière complained in Le Roman naturaliste that Flaubert and Balzac were both "peintres vigoureux de la réalité palpable, mais explorateurs moins que médiocres de la réalité qui ne se voit pas."

In another seeming imitation of the camera, realist writers tried to include as many details as possible since these details were essential for reproducing a complete reality. But realism's detractors saw those details as a smokescreen, a device that caused a loss of perception of any whole. Baudelaire called this anarchy, the loss of any hierarchy or subordination. Merlet remarked of Flaubert that each time any semblance of an ideal tried to express itself in Madame Bovary, it was shot down by a barrage of pointless trivial details.

For the critics, this use of excessive detail was itself a by-product of the realists' inability to make a choice. These so-called "democratic" authors included everything and anything in their writing. Just as the camera photographed everything within its visual range, so the realist writers were undiscriminating. Armand de Pontmartin criticized Flaubert in 1860:

J'assiste au progrès du réalisme ou de la démocratie dans l'art et [que] je me demande avec inquiétude où ces progrès s'arrêteront. . . . L'école dont Madame Bovary nous donne le dernier mot . . . décrit sans amour, sans préférence, uniquement parce que les objects matériels sont là, que l'appareil photographique est dressé, et qu'il faut tout reproduire.

Truth to the realists seemed to lie in the bringing forth of physical evidence: more was better, everything was best. Merlet satirically commented on the passage describing Dr. Bovary's arrival at the Rouault farm:

Le voilà qui arrive à la ferme dès le point du jour. Vous vous imaginez qu'il va sauter lestement en bas du cheval et aller droit au lit du blessé qui se morfond d'impatience, en jurant, criant, geignant et buvant des petits verres pour se donner du cœur? Non, le réalisme ordonne qu'on mesure la hauteur de la grange, la longueur de la bergerie, qu'on profite du lever de l'aurore pour photographier les paons, les dindons, les poules qui picorent sur le fumier, les oies qui battent des ailes près de la mare, les vaches qui ruminent nonchalamment de labour, jusqu'aux fouets, aux colliers et aux toisons de laine bleue que salit la poussière fine des greniers. . . . La jambe du bonhomme attendra.

Le démon du pittoresque possède tellement M. Flaubert, que parfois ses personnages ne paraissent plus que des machines à description.

The critics could find no reasoned choice for the details the realists used; anything seemed to be fair game to the novelists as long as it was objectively verifiable. The critics could find no logic to their decisions; there seemed to be no basis for their selections. Victor Fournel summed it up in his review of the novels of 1860: "Qui dit art, dit choix, et le réalisme ne se croit pas libre de faire un choix." Critics believed that the realist writer, like the camera, gave an equal emphasis to whatever came across his field of vision.

Like the camera as well, the realist writer tried to maintain a strict impersonality by reproducing exactly what he observed and by imparting as little of his own self to the work as possible. This was in strict keeping with his belief in his participation in documentation, in seeking the truth. Yet this was not a virtue in the eyes of the critics. Choice and decision-making were essential to art; so was an obvious personal involvement on the part of the artist. The impartial, mechanical observer/camera did not make those choices or decisions. As A. A. Cuvillier-Fleury said in 1857: "Dans le roman tel qu'on l'écrit aujourd'hui, avec les procédés de la reproduction photographique, l'homme disparaît dans le peintre: il ne reste qu'une plaque d'acier."

Because there seemed to be no part of his own self reflected in his work and because he seemed to limit himself to the visual surface of external reality, to what his "camera" could record, the realist was dealing only with what was material and therefore crude and base. For the critics, the use of such subjects meant that the realist writer had again lost sight of the true goal of art: to uplift and enlighten the soul. Realism instead appealed to all the grosser instincts of humanity. In 1868 Victor de Laprade decried the materialism that he saw as the goal of realism: "photographier en quelque sorte la nature . . . reproduire le monde matériel avec toutes les qualités saisissantes de la matière." For his contemporary, Elme-Marie Caro, this technique could only lead to an immoral sensualism; realism dictated "l'imitation brutale de nos mœurs, une sorte de contr'épreuve daguérrienne de la vie de chaque jour." For Xavier Aubryet, it was "la fidélité goguenarde du procédé Daguerre appliquée à la reproduction du ridicule et de l'odieux."

This democracy of subject matter, when combined with the vulgarity of the photographic technique, led inevitably to a wider and cruder audience, one that would find such base subjects interesting but, of course, not edifying. Specific details of external reality could not by themselves educate or morally enrich the reader; moral implications had to be drawn and applied by the author. A vulgar audience was incapable of drawing the right conclusions from such details, a point much belabored by the prosecution in the morality trials of writers of the period, like Flaubert and Baudelaire, writers who revealed but did not appear to comment and who certainly did not overtly condemn what they revealed.

L 'Art, le Beau, l'Idéal . . . these were the things consciously or unconsciously ignored by the realist writers who had set their sights too low, if they had set them at all. For the critics, the realist's desire to find the truth in physical nature alone had little to do with true art or with being a true artist. True art was not the sad flat realism of black and white and grey of a Flaubert or a Jules Champfleury. True Art had a sense of illusion, not an insistent focus on the base and the crude.

And just as truth was found not in ugliness but in beauty, so it was not found in the here and now, in the reality capturable by the camera. Truth was eternal, not temporal. Only a sordid, dirty, shameful half-truth came from realism; this was nothing compared to the lofty, consoling, poetic truth of idealism. The ugly side of reality was to be ignored, not exalted to the status of art; hence, nothing symbolized the sad and sordid truth of the realists better than the mechanical, concrete products of technology.

The fundamental clash between the realists and their critics centered on definitions of beauty, truth and art. For the idealist, art was the expression of external truth and the beauty found in the sum of the outer and, more importantly, inner perceptions of the self. The external world was only a springboard to the ideal world that waited beyond. Truth and beauty were inexorably entwined, inseparable in artistic creation. By relying completely on a mechanical process, by focusing only on external reality, by eliminating the eternal and the internal, the personal and the subjective, the realists were denying art. They were reducing their brains to daguerreotype lenses, as Clément de Ris noted in 1862.

The daguerreotype, the photograph, were not art. Writing which stressed the concrete and the factual and which purposefully eliminated the moral and the ideal was not art. Authors who based their work on these negative, non-artistic tenets, filtering everything through an impersonal, objective process, were no better than machines. The camera objectified for the conservative critic all the sins of the realists: all the excesses of observation, of the use of the details of physical reality, of the indiscriminate cataloguing of the visible, of mechanical impersonality, of the immoral use of base materialism as subject. The dominance of a mechanical process was incompatible with true artistic goals; therefore, these literary "daguérreotypeurs" were not true artists.

While photography played a less ubiquitous role in mid-nineteenth-century French life than it does in ours, it was a dynamic part of the artistic and aesthetic world in which the realist writers lived and worked. Martino's "synchronisme" is not at all "douteux": photography developed in France in the mid nineteenth century and literary realism flourished then; the two were natural and inevitable products of their age. The many instances of photographic allusion in critical texts demonstrate that for literary critics of the time there was an equally natural and inevitable symbiosis.