CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Excessive reading by young men was seen as a cause of declining virility and a national threat in late 19th-century France.
In a new book, “Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France,” French professor François Proulx of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign looks at attitudes toward young men’s reading habits and uncovers a forgotten sub-genre of novels geared toward them that reflected those national concerns.
Apprehension about the dangers of reading and its potential to corrupt young readers was not new but it had been directed mostly toward women, with the 1856 novel “Madame Bovary” the most prominent example. The subject shifted to young men in the late 19th century.
A profusion of novels sought to address underlying cultural concerns that young male readers at a critical, impressionable age would be led astray and become unemployed, anarchist, criminal or sexually deviant. Reading was characterized “as an emasculating illness afflicting French youth at the turn of the century,” Proulx wrote in his book’s introduction.
The novels proliferated at the fin-de-siècle, or turn of the century, from about 1880 to 1914. France had recently lost the Franco-Prussian War, and it was a time of perceived national decline.
“It was a crushing military defeat and the end of the Second French Empire. It was a troubled time in France, especially in terms of masculinity. The French thought they were a powerful empire, and they lost in this really quick and humiliating way against the Germans,” Proulx said.
At the same time, print took off as a mass media, books became more available and reading rooms were common. Excessive reading by French youth was one of the factors blamed for the country’s decline.
“(Adolescents) were distracted by all this fiction and poetry they were reading,” Proulx said. “This explanation was found in novels, journalism, medical texts and texts about pedagogy and school reform.”
Proulx – who specializes in 19th- and 20th-century French literature, including the writings of Marcel Proust, and who is affiliated with the department of gender and women’s studies – read more than 100 little-known novels from the time period and noticed several patterns.
“They are about the same thing – the central character is a young man who is too bookish. The plot is usually quite moralizing. Bad things happen to the main character because he reads too much. He ends up dead or goes down the wrong path,” Proulx said.
The novels usually had a secondary character who is athletic, clearly heterosexual and ends up on the right track.
“They are ideological novels. They are didactic,” Proulx said. “All these novels are clearly directed at young men, and they’re addressing that reader with a moralizing message that is really contradictory: They are novels about the dangers of reading novels.”
Proulx argues in the book that the later generation of writers who grew up reading those novels, including Proust, used that paradox in their own work to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity. Nobel Prize-winning French author André Gide “takes the idea of a book being dangerous and engaging in the seduction of young male readers, and he embraces it,” Proulx said.
He compared the attitude toward books at the time to concerns since the mid-20th century over children watching TV and movies, playing video games and spending time on the internet and their phones.
“The way we talk about reading with children and teenagers now is that it’s to be encouraged. That it was considered dangerous for young people is a really unfamiliar idea for us,” Proulx said. “But if we think about the way that TV, video games and the internet are talked about with children and teenagers, and the frequency and intensity of their usage, we can see how books used to be considered really dangerous.”
The attitudes about young men and reading lived on even after the turn of the century, Proulx said.
“Around World War II, movies started to take more of the blame,” he said.