"Ring out the Old, Ring in the New": The Symbolism

of Bells in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

AIMEE BOUTIN

The bells, which were once part of the holidays,

have been dropped from the calendar,

like the human beings. They are like poor souls

that wander endlessly, but outside of history.

Walter Benjamin

In a now-famous gloss on the furious tintinnabulation in Baudelaire's fourth

"Spleen," Walter Benjamin recognized a relation between bell imagery and the
"modernist" crisis in memory. His reference to bells being "dropped from the
calendar" is somewhat puzzling, if one not does know that the revolutionary
calendar altered the liturgical year by modifying how and when parishes could
use church bells. As a result, the image of church bells in nineteenth-century
French poetry reflected the historical break between pre- and post-revolu

tionary culture, or between the pastoral nostalgia of Romanticism and the

urban alienation of modernists like Baudelaire. After the French Romantics

invested the bell with renewed nostalgic significance, Baudelaire reclaimed the
Romantic bell as a sign of an epochal crisis in meaning and memory. Moreover,
the transformations of bell imagery in nineteenth-century poetry, in effect,
reveal how the modern lyric evolved from a descriptive form in which signs are
referential to Symbolist poetry with its meaningless tintinnabulation, and from
an assured resonant tone in the work of Hugo to a rasping voice like a knell in
Baudelaire's poetry.
Social historian Alain Corbin and others have shown that the bell is a "lieu de
mmoire,"' the site of nostalgia for the French countryside's "ringing towns." In
Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19,h-CenturyFrench Countryside, Corbin

266 Aime Boutin

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
describes how France's "ringing towns" were threatened during the French
Revolution, firstby the surrendering of bells to make coinage (summer 1791),
then by the confiscation of bells to be recast as cannons (Law of July 23,1793),
and finally by a ban on the religious use of church bells (Laws of February 21,
1795 and April 11, 1796). This ban attempted to restrict the influence of the
Church on daily life in order to republicanize the identities of the parishioners
and their towns.2 As Corbin argues, bells were markers of a community's spatio

temporal boundaries. Although the right to ring church bells was restored with
the Concordat in 1802, parishes did not revert to the Ancien rgime of bell
ringing (Corbin 34-35). The sound environment, which gave villagers a sense of
place, had been forever altered. What Corbin refers to as a "revolution in the
culture of the senses" had begun and is evident in the evolution of bell imagery
from the eighteenth-century pastoral to Baudelaire's tableaux parisiens.
Bells appear in many pastoral poems as mere religious or rustic imagery; as

such, they rarely hold our attention on their own. One of the best-known
examples is Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which
was very popular in France.3 We remember the elegy as a pastoral work, but its

bell imagery, although prominent, remains a picturesque detail on a larger

canvas. Bells and belfries are little more than a device that situates the reader

within a stylized landscape, as befits the genre of "topographical poetry" in

which the description of a landscape gives rise to a set of reflections. Bell imagery
thus exemplifies the referential and descriptive quality of eighteenth-century
verse. In fact, the meaning of bells as topographical markers goes back to the
ancient history of the word "bell." In the Middle Ages in France, the word for
bell was signum or sing (meaning "sign") hence the term tocsin.4 Bells used to be
the ultimate referential "sign" indicating the time and place to congregate.
In French Romantic discourse, however, bells increasingly take on figurative
meanings and appear less often as referential signs. The new emotional and
spiritual significance of bells is evident in Chateaubriand's Le Gnie du Chris
tianisme, whose publication on April 14, 1802 coincided with the adoption of
the Concordat and the restoration of the right to ring church bells. In his essay
on bells in Catholic ritual, Chateaubriand emphasizes the religious emotions
and sense of morality elicited by bells, their ability to give birth to a single feeling
in a thousand different hearts and the secret moral relations bells orchestrate

within us. Yet, his character Ren, overwhelmed by the affective power of bells,
gives more weight to their sentimental value than to their religious significance.
Ren what the sound of bells can retrieve of the past: "Tout se trouve
ponders
dans les rveries enchantes o nous plonge le bruit de la cloche natale:

religion, famille, patrie, et le berceau et la tombe, et le pass et l'avenir" (34).

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 267

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Emulating Ren, Romantic poets would later evoke bells as acoustic symbols
of a lost identity. In Lamartine's "La Cloche," for instance, the image of the
village bell ushers in memories of the past, especially of childhood and of rustic
life:

Dans le clocher de mon village

Il est un sonore instrument

Que j'coutais dans mon jeune ge

Comme une voix du firmament.

Quand, aprs une longue absence,

Je revenais au toit natal,

J'piais dans l'air, distance,

Les doux sons du pieux mtal.5

The village bell in the poem, no longer a topographical or referential sign but
rather a temporal and emotional one, recalls the pleasure once felt hearing its

sound. The poem's regular, predictable rhythm conveys the assurance that verse,

like the sonorous instrument it describes, can bring the joyful past alive again.
For Lamartine, as for Ren, the sound of bells is celestial, holy, gentle and sweet;
hearing them induces a nostalgic pleasure and sweet sorrow for the lost voices

and sounds of their birthplace. Indeed, the sound of bells carries the listener
back not just to the familiar past, but to childhood, the idyllic past. That may be
why a name like "Clochegourde" in Balzac's Le Lys dans la valle is so appropriate
to the home of Flix's surrogate mother, Henriette de Mortsauf. The valley in
which church bells resonate connotes a womb-like - the ultimate "terre
space
natale" - in the Romantic imagination. The bell broadly evokes the pleasure of
feeling rooted to the land, "la terre natale," as the bell that strikes identical
feelings in the hearts of all the villagers becomes the symbol of the community.
Lamartine's poems use the bell as such a symbol of rootedness. In fact, it is
because Lamartine evokes an image of la France profonde, of a France replete
with "ringing towns" and solid rural values, that he has been considered a "pote
du terroir."6 The sense of place recollected and recreated in poems about bells is

not limited to Lamartine or to poetry; it has a parallel in the paintings of the

Barbizon school. Landscape paintings of Corot or Millet such as "Le Beffroi de
Douai" or "L'Anglus," immortalize what is commonly recognized as a
"typically French" landscape: "un paysage lgrement vallonn o serpente
une route, un clocher de village dans le fond, et un pr derrire un rideau

d'arbres demi tir."7

Hugo goes further than Lamartine and Chateaubriand in his endeavor to
transform the bell into a symbol of the poet's communion with the universe,

268 Aime Boutin

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
and models his theory of poetry on the image of the bell. On the one hand,
Hugo's comparison of the poet to a bell is clichd. As one of his contemporaries,
Henri de Lacretelle, eloquently wrote: "l'me du pote est pleine de cloches."
On the other hand, Hugo uses campanarian imagery in a unique way to help
articulate his relation to a larger community. Hugo expands on the idea of the

poet's soul as a bell in his theory of the "sonorous echo" put forth in three lyrical
collections from the 1830s {Chants du crpuscule, Voix intrieures and Les Rayons
et les Ombres), and takes it yet further in the 1832 novel Notre-Dame de Paris, in
which the cathedral and its belfrey embody the values and history of the pre
modern city. A similar nostalgia for old-fashioned values informs the poem
"Ecrit sur la vitre d'une fentre flamande" (Les Rayons et les Ombres XVIII)
which begins: "J'aime le carillon dans tes cits antiques, / O vieux pays gardien
de tes murs domestiques." "A Louis B." {Les Chants du crpuscule XXXII)
develops a more sustained discourse on the symbolism of bells.8 In the poem, a
bell that passers-by have defiled by writing on it symbolizes the soul of the poet.
Despite this defilement, the bell preserves its solemnity and, as the unifying
voice of totality, it can absorb, transform and transcend the sullied voices of the

multitude:

Oui, le blasphme inscrit sur le divin mtal

Dans ce concert sacr perdra son cri fatal;

Chaque mot qui renie et chaque mot qui doute

Dans ce torrent d'amour exprimera sa goutte;

Et, pour faire clater l'hymne pur et serein,

Rien ne sera souillure et tout sera l'airain! (775)

The bell symbolizes the poet whose voice is at once the voice of an individual
speaker and that of the universe. Like the bell whose functions are multiple, the
poet is made "de verre pour gmir, d'airain pour rsister." The bell in Hugo's
poetry of the 1830s articulates the intimate with the infinite, the personal with
the political, to figure poetic creativity as the echo inside the poet of voices
outside him. Like the lamp or the wind-harp that M.H. Abrams discusses as
analogues of the poetic mind in The Mirror and the Lamp, the bell as metaphor
for poetic imagination figures the reciprocation of internal and external.
Indeed, the bell, with its clapper surrounded by a resonant dome, gives shape to
the relation of inside to outside, of the intimate with the cosmic. In Hugo's
poetry, the bell represents poetic voice as resonant, confident and unified, even

in its multiplicity. As an echo of God's voice, the poet's voice is assured of its
central place in the universe and the poem-as-bell remains the sign of such
certainty.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 269

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Baudelaire, in contrast, breaks with the connotations of the Romantic bell. In
his poems, we find the bell neither as the harmonious bond between individual
and community, nor as familiar echo of "la terre natale." Baudelaire displaces
the bell as emblem of traditional, rural France by bringing into being the poetry
of modern urban life. Significantly, the progressive erosion of the Romantic
bell's resonance and significance in Baudelaire is consistent with the evolution
of the modern lyric from a unified, descriptive and affirmative form to one that
questions the nature of the self and the ability of language to represent the world.
Nevertheless, it is helpful to read Baudelaire's poems on bells in the city against
their Romantic counterparts, for bells in "La Cloche fle" and "Paysage"
remain "lieux de mmoire" in keeping with the Romantic tradition. The
difference lies in the parameters, since Baudelaire's bells in the city cannot
remember what they stand for. They ring out the old, but they cannot yet ring in
the new.

As nostalgia turns more acute in the second half of the century, the bell
continues to play a key role in the iconography of spleen. Bell imagery pervades
the Spleen series (in which I include "La Cloche fle") although it is not
especially prevalent elsewhere in Les Fleurs du Mal.9 Throughout the Spleen
poems and "La Cloche fle," bells are personified; following a folkloric
tradition that anthropomorphizes bells, Baudelaire endows them with souls,
and compares their peals to human sounds of distress.10 The first Spleen poem

(LXXV), for instance, describes the bell echoing the lamentations of the be
reaved: "le bourdon se lamente." The bourdon also tolls in general lamentation

for the inhabitants of the rainy, dark, morbid city; perhaps, it laments as well for
its own fate as death-bell. This lack of a clearly demarcated referent (for whom
does the bell toll here?) has the effect of de-regulating the bell, since it is no
- - but instead it is
longer fulfilling its purpose namely to toll a specific death
overrun with emotion. Paolo Budini has even suggested that the bourdon refers

not to church bells at all; instead, this rare word was chosen for its onomatopoeic

qualities. In this vein, one could add that "bourdon" denotes nothing literally,
but rather signifies figuratively: "avoir le bourdon" means "avoir les ides
noires." The bourdon joins the rank of other ineffectual and de-literalized
objects in the poem, such as the "bche enfume" that produces smoke but no

fire, or the "pendule enrhume," too sick to tell time properly."

Pursuing the combined process of de-literalization and personification, the
bells appear once again as figures of human emotion when their peals are
compared to "un affreux hurlement" in the fourth "Spleen":

Des cloches tout coup sautent avec furie

Et lancent vers le ciel un affreux hurlement,

270 Aime Boutin

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Ainsi que des esprits errants et sans patrie

Qui se mettent geindre opinitrement. (74-75)

Unlike the self-mourning "bourdon," this bell is not associated with pain and
loss. As if to make the new meaning of bells more clear, between 1857 and 1861,
Baudelaire changed his initial choice of words from "gmissement" to
"hurlement." Later poems about bells, like Verlaine's "Anglus du Matin,"
sometimes use a stronger word, such as "injures." In Laforgue's "La

Complainte rhymes with "reproches." The sound of

des cloches," "cloches"
bells is no longer merely whimpering and annoying, but injuriously loud.
Nadar would complain in similarly extreme terms in 1882 in "Le Cas des
cloches":

A toute autre heure du jour et plusieurs fois par jour, inopinment, brutalement et

sans provocation, clate le vacarme en mineur et en majeur qui tinte, geint, brme,

beugle ou mugit. Par instants, tous ces airains diaboliques semblent se surexciter

les uns les autres, et, comme enrags, se mettent hurler ensemble dans le plus

effrn des tintamarres et en vrit comme s'ils voulaient nous exasprer au comble

et par dfi. (15)

Such virulent rhetoric is a far cry from Romantic bell imagery, in which bells
gently chime (the preferred word is "tinte") and are frequently described as
"argentine." For Romantics such as Lamartine, the bell symbolized rootedness

and patriotism (or, from another perspective, parochialism and fear of

difference-hence, the pejorative expression "l'esprit de clocher"), whereas now
the bells are errant and homeless. Baudelaire alludes in the fourth "Spleen" to

the way church bells once functioned as spatial markers of the village, thus
creating what Corbin describes as an identity bound to the land for those living
in range of its sound (95). The "errant" bells symbolize the sense of exile
- -
experienced by homeless city-dwellers clochards and bourdons who have lost
the territorial framework to which they were accustomed in the village.12 Now

the bells are stubborn complainers (as the word "opinitrement" suggests),
their relentless ringing is like griping ("geindre"). This moaning "sans
tambours ni musique" is reflected in the rhythm of the fourth "Spleen," so that
the poem itself sounds like a funeral bell. Likewise, the strongly accented
seventh and twelfth syllables in the firstline - "Quand le ciel bas et lourd pse
comme un couvERcle" - weight the line down in imitation of the oppressive
atmosphere under the lid, as it were, of a bell jar. In short, the proliferation of
bells frames acoustically the disorienting experience of walking in the city, what
De Certeau has referred to as a kind of displacement: "L'errance que multiplie
et rassemble la ville en fait une immense exprience sociale de la privation de
lieu" (155).

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 271

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Bereft of their literal significance, like the "pendule enrhume" in the first
"Spleen," the bells in the fourth "Spleen" are no longer connected to their
function of ringing on the hour or for any particular reason. Walter Benjamin
calls this removal of purpose "being dropped from the calendar." Such de
literalization as the bells are emptied of their raison d'tre corresponds to the
modern lyric's turn away from referential language; in consequence, the

evolution of bell imagery in nineteenth-century poetry provides insight into the

transformations undergone by modern lyricism. Indeed, Baudelaire's best
known evocation of the bell, "La Cloche fle," is also a superior example of the
fragmentation or flure of modern lyric subjectivity, as well as its morbid
sensibility and its preoccupation with the loss of an ideal. "La Cloche fle," in
effect, plays out a tropology of an existential crisis related to the lost sense of
time, routine, or history. The sonnet revolves around an opposition between "La

cloche au gosier vigoureux" that sings in the mist ("carillons qui chantent dans
la brume") in the quatrains and, in the tercets, the soul of the poet whose voice
progressively weakens until silence and paralysis prevail. The healthy voice of
the bell in the quatrains is opposed to the "voix affaiblie" and "rle pais" of the
poet in the tercets.13This parallel structure mimics the peals of bells, alternately
on the up- then the downswing, so that the poem itself, like the poetic speaker,
becomes bell-like. Furthermore, "La Cloche fle" conveys the affective power
of listening - hence the emphasis on the verb "couter" in the rejet in line 2 -
and its bittersweet effecton the listener ("Ilest doux et amer... / D'couter"). It
speaks to the self-awareness produced by listening, as the poet identifies with a
personified cracked bell, his alter-ego, and inscribes this split lyric subjectivity
in a knell-like rhythmic structure.
The personification of the bell begins in the firststanza with a reference to the
singing carillons, but is carried much further in the second stanza in which it
draws on the ways in which identity can be shaped acoustically:

Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux

Qui, malgr sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,

Jette fidlement son cri religieux

Ainsi qu'un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente! (72)

The poem emphasizes that, despite its age, the bell is healthy ("bien portante"),
even vigorous; its mental state is happy and alert. "Alerte et bien portante" have

a double meaning here, since they are equally characteristics of bells and people;
"alerte" may refer to the bell's function as alarm bell and "bien portante" to its

carrying power.14 The bell, indeed, functions as a spatial marker by delimiting

the village (if you can hear the bell, you are part of the village); bells would ring
in the fog, so that travelers on foot or by sea could orient themselves by following

272 Aime Boutin

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
the direction of the sound (hence an additional layer of meaning in the
reference to "cloches de brume" in "carillons qui chantent dans la brume"). In

any case, the bell knows what its functions are even if we postmodern readers do

not. A sense .of purpose fills the bell, as it does the soldier on guard duty evoked
in the last line of the stanza. "Un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente" has a
counterpart in the sonnet's last tercet, in "le bless qu'on oublie ... sous un tas

de mort."15 The injured man attempts to attract attention with a "rle pais," but

the groan is ineffective, unlike the cries of the bell or watchman. In addition, the
impression that no one is faithful to this injured man's memory contrasts
sharply with the bell's function of remembrance, namely the celebration of the
dead and the commemoration of other events. "La Cloche fle," like the Spleen

series, relies on bell imagery to figure the flure of the modern subject displaced
from meaning and history. Furthermore, the history of bells informs more than
this one sonnet, since it refracts the history of the nineteenth-century lyric genre?
itself, increasingly bent on cracking the codes of expression and representation
that once where its mainstay.

"Tableaux parisiens," especially the opening poem "Paysage," also rely on

changes in perception of the sensory environment to convey the disorientation
produced by the modern city. Rather than represent the modern city

realistically, "Paysage" indulges in a fantasy that juxtaposes the urban with the
pastoral, the old with the new.16 Indeed, the point of view in "Paysage" is
reminiscent of the detached perspective in the Romantic pastoral, for example
in Lamartine's "L'Isolement": "Je promne au hasard mes regards sur la plaine,
/ Dont le tableau changeant se droule mes pieds."17 The poem thus stands out

in the work of anti-naturalist Baudelaire as one of his few "pastorals."18 In many

ways, however, "Paysage" negates the landscape, whether pastoral or urban, in

favor of a landscape recreated by the imagination as both idyllic and futuristic;
the poet looks into the future ("je verrai," "je rverai") while at the same time
nostalgically looking back in time to his childhood ("enfantin").
Since the bell signifies spatial and temporal displacement elsewhere in
Baudelaire, reference to les clochers in the first stanza of "Paysage" is far from
innocent; bells on the contrary seem key in making sense of the tension in the

poem between regression and progression:

Je veux, pour composer chastement mes glogues,

Coucher auprs du soleil, comme les astrologues,

Et, voisin des clochers, couter en rvant

Leurs hymnes solennels emports par le vent.

Les deux mains au menton, du haut de ma mansarde,

Je verrai l'atelier qui chante et qui bavarde;

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 273

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mts de la cit,

Et les grands ciels qui font rver d'ternit. (82)

The solemn hymns of bells, in this poem as in "La Cloche fle," inspire the poet
to dream. But what does he dream of? Not of the modern city that he looks out

on. Rather, he contemplates a city of dreams, in which the bell towers are the

masts of the city-ship.19 He looks at city smog and haze, but he dreams of seeing

"Fleuves de charbon monter au firmament / Et la lune verser son ple en

chantement." The sound of bells is inspirational in part because it figures

elevation, traditionally a trope of creative fervor, but also a sign of detachment.20

The bell-tower image at the beginning of "Paysage" motivates subsequent

references to the Idyll. It exemplifies, for instance, the distance and abstraction
from history and the urban environment required by the creative poet in
"Paysage." Looking out his garret window, he is located at the same height as the
belfries, and well above the fray: "L'Emeute, temptant vainement ma vitre, /
Ne fera pas lever mon front de mon pupitre."21 Bell-towers and the pastoral
tradition they embody thus represent the "depoliticized" poet's desire to reject
modern urban reality. Bell imagery also motivates later references in the poem
to "tout ce que l'Idylle a de plus enfantin," for bells are frequently associated
with childhood.22 Yet, this very tension between old and new may well be the
most provocative way of introducing the "Tableaux parisiens."
"Tableaux parisiens," as a whole, describes an "auditory landscape" as well as
a visual picture. The most gripping description of the sound environment
occurs in "A une passante," which begins: "La rue assourdissante autour de moi

hurlait." The noise level renders any communication difficult, thus making the
speaker and the passantes fleeting encounter that much more poignant. "Les

Aveugles" also addresses how the sound level in the city has changed the nature
of human contact, making the speaker as "hbt" as the blind men who live in
eternal silence. Urban sounds are frequently compared to those of animals, as if

the city were itself a large beast:

[...] O cit!
Pendant qu'autour de nous tu chantes, ris et beugles,

Eprise du plaisir jusqu' l'atrocit

("Les Aveugles" 92)

On entend a et l les cuisines siffler,

Les thtres glapir, les orchestres ronfler.

("Le Crpuscule du soir" 95)23

274 Aime Boutin

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 - not cities - and - not
Usually, cattle bellow ("beugler") dogs yelp ("glapir")
theaters. Noise in the city is so bestial that the poet in "Crpuscule du soir"
invites his soul to shut out these roaring sounds ("ferme ton oreille ce
rugissement"). In contrast, "Rve parisien" qualifies the silence of the
fantasmagorie city as "terrible nouveaut! / Tout pour l'il, rien pour les
oreilles!" The sound environment of the city - either stupefying or eerily silent
- has been
radically altered. Baudelaire's "Tableaux parisiens" attest to what
Georg Simmel described in these terms: "Someone who sees without hearing is
much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. In this there is

something characteristic of the sociology of the big city" (Benjamin 37-38).

Noise has not only increased to a deafening level, but sounds in the envi
ronment no longer make sense - they are just noise. Unlike the church bells of
yore that gave rhythm to daily life and defined the community in space and in
time, sounds in the city are chaotic and ineffectual. In this way, bells in the city
undermine the highly regulated scopic regime of Hausmann's Paris by
marking the absence of the rootedness that once shaped the community's

spatial identity. Ultimately, the dislocation embodied by bells in the city reflects
the larger crisis in poetic representation, since the noisy bell signals an
unregulated sign-system freed from its grounding in denotation.
Baudelaire marked the turning point for the modern poetic evocation of
bells. The Symbolists, who exploited bell images as markers of a crisis in
meaning and memory as Baudelaire had done before them, used the knell to
show the depersonalization of lyrical voice, to evoke the poet's alienation vis-
vis the general community or the past, to signify the Ideal and finally to question
further the meaning of poetic representation. Mallarm's 1862 sonnet "Le

Sonneur" presents an opposition similar to that in "La Cloche fle" between

the strong, clear "anglus parmi la lavande et le thym," and the bell-ringer's own

inability to "sonner l'idal" to make sound of equal clarity. The bell figures the
Ideal again in "L'Azur" - "En vain! L'Azur triomphe, et je l'entends qui chante
/ Dans les cloches" - which ends by imitating the repetition of peals of bells.
Adolphe Rett's collection Cloches en la nuit (1889) uses Baudelairean imagery
to depict a desolate, ruined city, haunted by the sound of bells tolling: "C'est la
ville de pluie, c'est la ville de nuit /La lugubre cit si croulante l'automne / Des
cloches en cadence et par les rues d'ennui / Un morne dfil de cercueils
monotones" ("Sillages" 15). Even in this short passage, the knell pervades the
texture of each line as it halts at the hemistich, as a bell on the upswing, only to
-
slowly bear down at the ending. A sign of the city's or the poem's splenetic
landscape's- general decay is "la cloche [qui] agonise ululante et fbrile" (Rett
29). Emile Verhaeren evokes the bell tower as stolid symbol of lost tradition
most when he describes "[les] tours de mille ans" as "tragiques et
hauntingly

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 275

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
muettes, porteuses d'une douleur silencieuse et symboles de la foi ancienne,
tendues comme de dsespoirs" ("Les Tours"). Georges Rodenbach and Jules
Laforgue favored the representation of "le bruit endimanch [de] cloche[s] trs
vieillefs] et valtudinaire[s]," but unlike the bells of yesteryear that rang on
Sundays to bring the community together, bells in the fin-de-sicle city, whose
tolling are like hiccups, have become meaningless.24
Moving from sign to symbol, the bell over the course of the nineteenth
century shed its literal meaning and gained in symbolic resonance. Even the
most banal poetic reference to bells at the century's end can hardly help but

evoke the bell as a symbol of a modern crisis, both existential and repre
sentational. Dropped from the calendar, bells become a timeless clich, a mark
er of history's absence rather than a call to participate in its social rituals. At the
same time, however, it is in the history of this now vacant sign that we can most
readily hear the transformations of the modern lyric.

Department of Modern Languages

Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1540

NOTES

'The belfrey commands its own chapter by Philippe Boutry in Pierre Nora's Lieux de

mmoire, see Boutry,"Le Clocher," in Lieux de mmoire 3:2, 56-89.

2Bells rang at the beginning, middle and end of the day, and marked feast days,

Sunday offices and rites of passage (baptisms, weddings, funerals). Bells also rang to

alert one to the threat of fire, storm or attack, to observe the beginning and end of

war, or to celebrate a coronation or royal birth.

"Translated as "Le Cimetire de campagne," Gray's poem attracted much attention

among the French and was translated and imitated repeatedly by Mme Necker,

Chnier, Krivalant and Chateaubriand, among others.

4In the Middle Ages, bells were referred to as "signum," "pource que leur son servoit

de signe se trouver l'glise" (C. Fauchet, 314). This meaning persists in the old

French proverb "on ne fait pas les signes sonner."

"Lamartine, uvres potiques compltes, 799. "La Cloche" originally appeared in the

Journal de Sane et Loire in 1835 and, in 1837, was added to the fourth tome of

Lamartine's uvres compltes.

6For a portrait of Lamartine as pote du terroir, see an edition such as Pomes du

terroir et du cur edited by Emile Magnier.

7Cachin, 435. This landscape also corresponds to Lamartine's "L'Isolement."

Moreover, it was this type of image that was used in Ptain's 1940 and Mittrand's

1981 campaigns.

276 Aime Boutin

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
"Bells in Hugo are also closely tied to "l'airain," the symbol of Napoleonic glory. For

more on the myth of bells in Hugo, see Albouy, 158-64.

9"La Cloche fle" first appeared under the title "Spleen" in March 1851 in Les Limbes,

a collection of eleven poems that also included "Spleen (Pluvise irrit)." Like the

Spleen series, "La Cloche fle" addresses the fragmentation or "flure" of the

modern subject.
l0The personification of bells follows a folkloric practice. Blavignac remarks that bells

were frequently anthropomorphized; they were baptized, given names and ascribed

throats, necks, even souls (448-49). The word "cloche," whose etymology is

uncertain, rapidly gained figurative meanings. See La Cloche. Etude sur son histoire

.. . (1877), 448-49.
"In Baudelaire and the Second Republic, Burton comments on these three objects to
"
argue, 'spleen' is in its first instance the collapse of systems of meaning" (see

Baudelaire and the Second Republic, 307).

"According to the Dictionnaire historique des argots franais, use of "bourdon" as

"prostitute" is attested to by 1848 (83). As for "clochard," the word seems to have

become more common at the end of the nineteenth century (170).

"For more on the dual structure of the poem, see Dorothy Roberts's reading.
"Gordon Walters remarks on this double meaning in "A Reading of 'La Cloche
"
fle' (52). Corbin comments on the meaning of the bell's carrying power as well.

The range of a bell defined rural sociability by circumscribing a "zone of hearsay" and

a "zone of mutual acquaintance."

"On the bloody imagery and allusions to 1848 in this final tercet of "La Cloche fle,"

see Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic, 321-22.

l6The opening poem of "Tableaux parisiens" in the 1861 edition, "Paysage," was first

published in 1857 under the title "Paysage parisien." In "Baudelaire and Lyon,"
Burton has argued that the scene is not of Paris at all, but of Lyon. There remains

much uncertainty as to the poem's original date of composition (1840s?), hence the

variety of memories that the poem may be based on. On the broader question of

reference, see Chambers, "Are Baudelaire's 'Tableaux parisiens' about Paris?"

""Paysage" is unlike other poems from "Tableaux parisiens," where the poet is

usually in, not above, the city. In this way, the poem adopts the same panoramic

viewpoint as Impressionist paintings such as Manet's View of the World's Fair (1867)

or Monet's The Garden of the Princess (1867).

l8If Baudelaire wrote any pastorals or eclogues at all they might be "Moestra et

errabunda" and "J'aime le souvenir de ces poques nues." On this issue, see Leakey,
17-18. Baudelaire defines "pastoral" in 1851 when writing about Pierre Dupont in

Rflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains (2: 169-75).

"Baudelaire evokes a complex metaphor, combining the image of the city-ship ("les

mts de la cit") with the image of the city as nave ("voisin des clochers"). As Fongaro

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 277

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
outlines, the metaphor may be motivated by the boat-like shape of l'Ile de la Cit or by

the coat of arms of Paris which contained a nave on the waves as well as the motto

"Fluctut nec mergitur" (It Floats But Does Not Sink).

20Elevation is a trope for creativity in Baudelaire's "Elevation" or in Rimbaud's "Une

matine couverte" (also known as "Fragment du feuillet 12"), in which the poet
exclaims: "J'ai tendu des cordes de clocher clocher; des guirlandes de fentre

fentre; des chanes d'or d'toile toile, et je danse" (271).

21lt is not clear what Emeute (capitalized in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal) refers

to: it maybe the revolution of 1848, the Coup d'tat (December 2, 1851) or, as Burton
has argued, the insurrectionary turmoil that Baudelaire witnessed as a boy in Lyon in

1834. Chambers has suggested that Emeute is a literary reference to Gautier's Emaux

et Cames-, "Sans prendre garde l'ouragan / Qui fouettait mes vitres fermes, / Moi,

j'ai fait Emaux et Cames" (Chambers, "Street Poetry," 254-55).

"Baudelaire makes explicit the nostalgie association of bells with childhood in his

review of Lon Cladel's Les Martyrs ridicules (Revue Fantaisiste, 1861) (2: 182).

Moreover, Burton suggests that childhood memories "subliminally" inform

"Paysage," given the similarities between its first version and "La Servante au grand
cur dont vous tiez jalouse" ("Baudelaire and Lyon," 33). Chambers, however,

argues that reference to the idyll is ironic and actually condemns any evasion of reality

("Trois paysages urbains," 381).

23"Au lecteur": "Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants . .

24Verhaeren refers to "anglus hoquetant" in the last "Chanson du fou" (Campagnes

hallucines, 69) and to "les derniers hoquets d'un anglus" in "La Plaine" (Villes

tentaculaires, 86). Rodenbach's Le Rgne du Silence contains a section entitled

"Cloches du dimanche" from which the line above is taken (127). Laforgue also

describes "les chimriques cloches / Du joli joli Dimanche" in "Dimanches" (Derniers

vers). Stylistically, bell imagery is well suited to the Symbolists' experimentations with

rhythm and free verse (Mallarm's translation of Poe's "The Bells" is one prominent

example).

WORKS CITED

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical

Tradition. 1953. London/New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Albouy, Pierre. La Cration mythologique chez Victor Hugo. Paris: Jos Corti, 1963.

Balzac, Honor. Le Lys dans la valle. Ed. Maurice Allem. Paris: Garnier, 1955.

Baudelaire, Charles. uvres compltes. Ed. Claude Pichois. 2 Vols. Paris: Gallimard,

Plaide, 1975.

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism.
Trans. Harry Zohn and Quintin Hoare. London: Verso, 1983

278 Aime Boutin

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Blavignac. La Cloche. Etude sur son histoire et sur ses rapports avec la socit aux dif

frents ges. Geneva: Grosset et Tremblay, 1877.

Boutry, Philippe. "Le Clocher." Lieux de mmoire. Tome 3. Les France. Vol. 2. Ed.

Pierre Nora et al. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. 56-89.

Budini, Paolo. "Sul 'bourdon' del primo Spleen." Studi Francesi (Autumn 1981): 105

18.

Burton, Richard. Baudelaire and the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution. Ox

ford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

. "Baudelaire and Lyon: A Reading of Paysage." Nottingham French Studies 28:1

(1989): 26-38.
Cachin, Franoise. "Le Paysage du peintre." Lieux de mmoire. Tome 2. La Nation.

Vol. 1. Ed. Pierre Nora et al. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. 435-86.

Certeau, Michel de. "Marches dans la ville." L'Invention du quotidien. Vol. 1. Arfs de

faire. Paris: Gallimard, Folio-Essais, 1990. 139-64.

Chambers, Ross. "Trois Paysages urbains: Les pomes liminaires des Tableaux

parisiens." Modem Philology 80: 4 (May 1983): 372-89.

. "Are Baudelaire's 'Tableaux parisiens' about Paris?" On Referring in Literature.

Ed. Anna Whiteside and Michael Issacharoff. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 95

110.

. "Baudelaire's Street Poetry." Nineteenth-Century French Studies 13 (1985): 244

59.

Chateaubriand, Franois-Ren de. "Des Cloches." Le Gnie du Christianisme.

uvres compltes. Paris: Pourrai, 1832. Vol. 12: 259-62.

. Ren. Ed. J.M. Gautier. Geneva: Droz, 1970.

Corbin, Alain. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19"'-Century French

Countryside. Trans. Martin Thom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Trans, of Les Cloches de la terre. 1994.

Esnault, Gaston. Dictionnaire historique des argots franais. Paris: Larousse, 1965.

Fauchet, C. Dclin Maison de Charlemagne. Paris: J. Perier, 1602.

Fongaro, Antoine. "'Les Mts de la cit.' Mlanges offerts Guy Sagnes." Voix de

l'crivain. Ed. Jean-Louis Cabans. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail,

1996. 73-78.
"
Hartweg, Jean. "Commentaire compos d'un pome de Baudelaire: 'Paysage' L'in

formation littraire 32 (1980): 94-96.

Hugo, Victor. uvres compltes. Posie I. Ed. Claude Gly. Paris: Robert Laffont,

Bouquins, 1985.

Lacretelle, Henri de. Les Cloches. 2"d ed. Paris: Delloye, 1841.

Leakey, F. W. Baudelaire and Nature. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1969.

Laforgue, Jules. uvres compltes. Vol. 1. Posies. Geneva: Slatkine, 1979.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2002 279

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Lamartine, Alphonse de. uvres potiques compltes. Ed. Marius-Franois Guyard.
Paris: Gallimard, Plaide, 1963.

. Pomes du terroir et du cur. Ed. Emile Magnier. Bourg-en-Bresse: Editions de la

Taillanderie, 1996.

Nadar. "Le Cas des Cloches, soumis par Nadar Monsieur le Ministre des Cultes."

Chambry: Menard, cl882.

Rett, Adolphe. Cloches en la nuit. Paris: Lon Vanier, 1889.

Rimbaud, Arthur. uvres. Ed. Suzanne Bernard and Andr Guyaux. Paris: Bordas,

Classiques Garnier, 1991.

Roberts, Dorothy. '"La Cloche fle': Duality in Image, Structure and Theme."

Romance Notes 16 (1975): 312-17.

Rodenbach, Georges. Le Rgne du silence. 1891. Paris: Charpentier/Fasquelle, 1911.

Sand, George. La Petite Fadette. Ed. Maurice Toesca. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1984.

Verlaine, Paul. uvres potiques compltes. Ed. Yves-Grard Le Dantec. Paris: Gal

limard, Plaide, 1948.

Verhaeren, Emile. Les Villes tentaculaires prcdes des Campagnes hallucines. Paris:

Mercure de France, 1949.

"
Walters, Gordon B. "A Reading of'La Cloche fle.' Romance Notes 11 (1969): 51-56.

280 Aime Boutin

This content downloaded from 95.246.250.97 on Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:18:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions