1When Pierre-Jean de Béranger died on 16 July 1857, he was described by Sainte-Beuve in the Atlantic Monthly as “the most popular poet there has ever been in France”. [1] This popularity had endured for over a quarter of a century; as early as 1828 Béranger himself had boasted : “There can be no mistake about it, my friend—I am popular, and my popularity is great, to say the least of it.” [2] Béranger’s audience was not, moreover, confined to the usual class of poetry readers; his were “[real] popular songs :—not elegant ‘National Melodies,’ or ‘Songs of the Salon,’ printed on satin-paper, and warbled by fashionable lips alone; but hearty, bold, genial strains, written for, and sung by the people”. [3] Indeed, such was his popularity amongst “the people” that he was, according to Fraser’s, “the one and only poet since the invention of printing who might have dispensed with the services of the press. Never was there popularity so fervid and so universal”. [4]

2By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the name of Béranger had been more or less completely forgotten; the “great clamour” and “excessive admiration” of the first half of the century had given way to “complete silence” and “oblivion”. [5] It is difficult to find any mention of Béranger after 1870; some standard reference works on French literature fail to mention him at all; and only one full-length critical study has been devoted to him in France during the last fifty years. [6] The author of this study, Jean Touchard, sums up the critical reaction against Béranger in the words of Raymond Lebègue, Professor at the Sorbonne, speaking in 1962 : “Aujourd’hui… on aurait honte de lire Béranger et surtout d’en faire l’aveu”. [7]

3The disappearance of Béranger is not, moreover, a matter for French literature alone; it has also had a distorting effect on our understanding of the English poetry of the Victorian period. Writers like Balzac, Hugo and de Musset had a profound impact on many of their British contemporaries, but for a time Béranger’s name ranked alongside theirs; his poetry was, according to H.F. Chorley, “as well known… to most of our educated countrymen, as Molière’s best scenes”. [8] A study of the history of the reception of his poetry turns up such names as William Makepeace Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Walter Bagehot, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson. Moreover, as in France, Béranger’s appeal was not limited to the upper reaches of society. His poetry found a receptive audience amongst Chartist poets and activists such as Charles Mackay and Gerald Massey, and translations are to be found with some regularity in the pages of the Northern Star. Béranger became a focus for early nineteenth century Britain’s poetic and cultural dialogue with turbulent, licentious, revolutionary France, and his restoration to the British literary landscape reveals some hitherto unperceived connections and affiliations between very disparate figures.

Reviews

4Béranger’s first popular success as a songwriter was “Le Roi d’Yvetot”, a genial satire on the inflated aspirations of Napoleonic France. Such overtly political songs are described by Sainte-Beuve as Béranger’s most important innovation, [9] providing an outlet for popular patriotic and liberal sentiment in the days following France’s defeat in 1815. Goethe, who was a great admirer of Béranger, saw this ability to articulate a repressed national sentiment as the secret of the poet’s popularity :

5

Béranger has, in his political poems, shown himself the benefactor of his nation. After the invasion of the allies, the French found in him the best organ for their suppressed feelings. He directed their attention by various recollections to the glory of their arms under the Emperor;
whose memory still lives in every cottage, and whose great qualities the poet loved without desiring a continuance of his despotic sway. Now, under the Bourbons, he does not seem too comfortable. [10]

6During the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) Béranger helped keep alive the ideals of the Revolution and, as Goethe points out, the memory of Napoléon. He was credited by many of his contemporaries with helping to create the myth of a Napoleonic golden age of French prestige and military prowess which served as a focus of discontent in France for much of the nineteenth century. One manifestation of this nostalgia for the Napoleonic period is an unremitting hostility towards the British in his poetry; and it is, therefore, somewhat surprising to find that the title of poet (rather than mere “chansonnier”) was, as he himself admits in his Memoirs, first bestowed upon him in the pages of a British journal. [11] The review in question, which appeared in the Edinburgh of 1822, is in many respects typical of the British reception of the French poet’s work. It is, in the first place, prompted by the news of Béranger’s arrest and trial. The poet was imprisoned in 1821 for circulating seditious anti-Bourbon songs, and British reviews of Béranger’s work tend to cluster around his numerous conflicts with the authorities. In addition, the Edinburgh article uses Béranger’s work to help construct an inventory of social, cultural and political differences between Britain and France. Béranger is reviewed alongside his contemporaries Lamartine and Casimir de la Vigne, and the three poets are seen as representatives of the “Aristocratic, Constitutional, and Republican” strands in French society and politics. [12] Béranger belongs, of course, to the lastnamed party; he is “by everyone regarded as the poet of the People ”, especially after his arrest and trial. [13] As such, Béranger symbolizes an enduring strain of libertinism, scepticism and volatility in the French people which the reviewer can contrast with the British inclination towards morality, piety and social order. [14] Finally, the attitude adopted towards Béranger’s poetry is almost invariably a direct function of the political stance of the journal in question. As a Whig journal with liberal sympathies the Edinburgh was, like Béranger, deeply hostile to the restoration of the autocratic Bourbon monarchy; and the reviewers could single out an anti-Jesuit satire like “Les Reverends Pères” for praise without fear of offending the prejudices of their readers. Tory journals, in contrast, were much more likely to be hostile to Béranger’s work as a whole, while radical ones were willing to embrace his democratic politics as well as his opposition to the monarchy.

7One feature that unites British reviewers of almost all political persuasions, however, is a professed distaste for Béranger’s licentiousness. Béranger lived for most of his youth in Paris during what Sainte-Beuve calls “une époque licencieuse”, [15] and this “licentiousness” is amply reflected in the poetry. Béranger’s sexual explicitness was, indeed, so notorious that his work acquired something of the status of pornography during his lifetime. It is not, then, surprising to find an early review in the ultra-Tory Blackwood’s repudiating an implicit comparison with Thomas Moore on the grounds of Béranger’s immorality :

8

Moore, too, whatever he writes, is a gentleman, a perfect gentleman, and
a man of taste—Béranger is a brute—What shall we say to such disgust-
ing and abominable nonsense as the following ?—
N’attendez plus, partez mon âme,
Doux rayon de l’astre éternel !
Mais passez des bras d’une femme
Au sein d’un Dieu tout paternel. (514) [16]

9But it is a little unexpected to find Helen Maria Williams, a distinguished poet and supporter of revolutionary France, regretting that he has produced work “which religion and morals are, alas, compelled to put on their index ”. [17] This censorious attitude continues throughout the nineteenth century. In an otherwise sympathetic article in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine J.R. Chorley regrets “the tone of more than poetical license” which prevents him saying too much about Béranger’s “ Lisettes and Margots ”, though he does admit “that it is impossible to avoid loving, even while we condemn them”. [18] And as late as 1863 the London Quarterly Review describes the Chansons Morales et Autres of 1815 as “filthy staves in honour of drunkenness and impurity”. [19] This tendency to “offend prudery”, as “Grimm’s grandson” puts it in the London Magazine, becomes the principal stumbling block to the appreciation of Béranger’s work in Britain. [20] The semi-serious hope expressed by the author of an 1833 review in the Edinburgh that it might be possible to produce a “family Béranger” purged of indecent elements is fairly typical of the British inability to accept the sexual openness and casual infidelity of Béranger’s poetic world. [21]

10As is usually the case in nineteenth-century reviews there is very little technical analysis of the poetry itself, though the second Edinburgh Review article mentioned above notes Béranger’s use of the refrain to “[embody] the leading idea of the whole composition : ‘Pauvre soldat je reverrai la France; / La main d’un fils me fermera les yeux ’”. [22] It is, on the other hand, quite common for reviewers to compare Béranger with other poets, and in these comparisons two names occur more frequently than others : Horace and Robert Burns. The author of the London Magazine article of 1825, for instance, states that “[Béranger’s] life, like his genius, has a considerable resemblance to that of the sublime Robert Burns, whom your Edinburgh pedants suffered to die of poverty”, and compares one of his poems to Horace’s “Integer vitae scelerisque purus”. [23] Walter Bagehot sees analogies with both Burns and Horace in his lengthy review-essay on 1857, discussed at greater length below. And the Cornhill Magazine compares the lives and works of these three great “lyrists”. [24] These comparisons are primarily based on the ability of all three poets, in the words of the Cornhill, to “[gain] the multitude without losing the cultivated classes”, to combine technical virtuosity and sophistication with an appeal to popular tastes and sentiments. [25] The comparison with Burns is, moreover, particularly insisted on by those who emphasize Béranger’s radical and democratic political stance. In a laudatory article the Chartist poet Gerald Massey writes : “Between Burns and Béranger, the likeness is very striking. They have the same withering contempt of mere wealth and state; both find inspiration in dear woman’s charms; both evince the same hearty and keen zest for conviviality”. [26] And in his entry on Béranger for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Robert Louis Stevenson notes the “socialistic spirit of indignation and revolt” in the French poet’s work, adding : “It is by this socialism that he becomes truly modern and touches hands with Burns”. [27]

11The universal popularity enjoyed by Béranger in France was never, of course, replicated in Britain; but the emergence of reviews in the (usually short-lived) publications aimed at the working classes during the 1840s provides some evidence that his work attained a certain level of popularity amongst the Chartists and their successors. There are studies of and references to Béranger in a number of democratic and radical newspapers during the 1840s and early 1850s. The People’s Journal for 1847 contains, alongside articles by Giuseppe Mazzini and analyses of Fourierism and Communism, a piece on “The Literature of the French Working Classes” by Julie Kavanagh in which Béranger is placed “at the head of French popular literature”. [28] Dr. Samuel Smiles’s lengthy and extremely favourable review of Béranger’s life and work appears in Howitt’s Magazine as part of series on “Poets of the People”. [29] But perhaps the most interesting of these manifestations of popular interest are clustered around two of the most important figures in the later phases of the Chartist movement, Gerald Massey and George Julian Harney. Massey’s article, mentioned above, appeared in Harney’s journal The Friend of the People (formerly the more pugnacious Red Republican and Friend of the People ) and was rapturous in its praise of Béranger, the “Shakespeare of France”:

12

To trim the divine lamp of poetry in the hearts and homes of the poor, and elevate the standard of humanity for all—to war with all oppressions that retard the reign of love and the bond of brotherhood—to utter the people’s social and political aspirations—to turn the mask that Falsehood wears into crystal, so that its hideous features may be seen— to tear down the veil from all established shams and grinning hypocricies [sic] that sit in high places—such is the work of the People’s Poet !
And such a poet is Béranger, the greatest Lyrist of the age—Béranger, the poet, patriot, and philosopher. [30]

13This article also, however, reveals one of the reasons for the limited dissemination of Béranger’s work amongst the working classes, as it quickly becomes apparent that Massey’s knowledge of the French poet’s work is based entirely on secondary material. He borrows extensively (and without acknowledgement) from Smiles’s essay in Howitt’s Magazine, even repeating the latter’s mistranscription of Sainte-Beuve as “Saint-Beauve”. And in a follow-up article a few weeks later he uses translations borrowed from earlier articles, again without acknowledgement, rather than venturing his own, and introduces Béranger’s famous anti-Jesuit satire as “La Morte des Diable” [ sic ]. [31] This lack of direct acquaintance with the French originals left Massey and his fellow enthusiasts wholly dependent on the translations offered to them in earlier reviews and books, translations which systematically avoided the more contentious elements of Béranger’s output.

14George Julian Harney’s interest in Béranger is strikingly illustrated by his response to the poet’s death in July 1857. Harney was at this time editor of the Jersey Independent, and gave the news of Béranger’s death extensive coverage :

15

Notice of Béranger’s serious illness appeared in The Jersey Independent on July 8 and again on July 18; the death was prominently noted in a black-bordered announcement, terminating with lines from Byron, on July 22; a satirical editorial, “The Imperial Undertaker”, appeared on July 25; a biographical notice of over three columns, some letters from the poet to Madame Hugo, and a full-page portrait of Béranger, ready for framing, were printed on August 1; and in each of the issues of August 5, 8, and 12 similar space was devoted to Béranger’s poems, together with English translations. [32]

16This coverage was designed to antagonize the government of Napoléon III, which had attempted to suppress popular reaction by organizing and carrying out a heavily policed “state funeral” within twenty-four hours of the poet’s death. Harney also tried to persuade Victor Hugo, a refugee from the reign of “Napoléon le petit” in Guernsey, to write a eulogy for publication in the newspaper. Harney and Hugo had become friendly due to Harney’s support for Hugo at the time of the “Jersey coup” which resulted in Hugo’s expulsion from the island at the behest of the French government. Hugo refused Harney’s request, however, in spite of his personal friendship with Béranger; and the reasons for this refusal are explained in part in a letter from his son to Harney’s friend Philippe Asplet refusing a similar request to publish the family’s private correspondence with the poet :

17

Il est bien vrai que Béranger était opposé au Coup d’État, mais cette opposition n’est pas marquée dans ses lettres par des phrases suffisamment énergiques pour être reproduites. Je viens de relire, exprès pour Harney, toute sa correspondance. J’y trouve beaucoup de vœux pour notre bonheur à tous, pour notre prompt retour en France... mais je ne rencontre pas une attaque directe contre l’homme de Décembre. [33]

18It is clear from this that Béranger’s lifelong association with the Buonaparte family was beginning to damage his reputation amongst republican and democratic activists. Although a sincere republican and democrat to the end of his life, Béranger could not bring himself to issue a straightforward condemnation of the latest representative of the family which had brought glory and honour to France, and created thereby a slight “reserve” (to use Hugo’s word) in the admiration of his successors.

19There was, however, one popular journalist and activist who was able to read and appreciate Béranger in the original French. Charles Mackay, editor of the Morning Chronicle and later of The Illustrated London News, sees in Béranger’s songs a perfect refutation of “the assertion that the Muses are alien to politics”: “It would be hard indeed were poetry, which sympathizes so deeply and so truly with all that concerns humanity, to be debarred from touching on those grand questions which involve the happiness or misery of nations, and the progressive improvements of the human race.” [34] Mackay supports his case with a paraphrase of “La Sainte Alliance des Peuples”, the song Béranger was commissioned to write to celebrate the departure of foreign troops from French soil in 1818. The title is, of course, an allusion to the “Holy Alliance” which had defeated Napoleon, and, as Mackay’s version makes clear, it foresees an international alliance of the poor against their masters :

20

Should millions fall in their unholy strife,
Still monarchs think their battles cheaply won;
What do they care for wasting human life ?—
They’ve gained a province, and the thing is done !
Then up to heaven their haughty heads they rear,
And prate of glory to the bleeding lands.
Form an alliance, holy and sincere,
And join, join hands ! [...]
Yes ! free and happy, let the world repose;
Sheathed be the sword, and be the cannon dumb;
And let the memory of your former woes
Make you the wiser for the days to come !
Then shall ripe corn-fields all your labours cheer,
And the red vintage gladden all the lands !—
Form an alliance, holy and sincere,
And join, join hands ! [35]

21Mackay, indeed, made the most successful attempt to emulate Béranger in English; his radical song “The Good Time Coming” sold nearly half a million copies during the high tide of Chartist activity in 1846, and was later adopted by the Union side in the American Civil War. The similarities between this song and “La Sainte Alliance des Peuples” are immediately apparent :

22

There’s a good time coming, boys,
A good time coming :
War in all men’s eyes shall be
A monster of iniquity
In the good time coming.
Nations shall not quarrel then,
To prove which is the stronger;
Nor slaughter men for glory’s sake;—
Wait a little longer. (19-27)

23This song was also unusual in forming a link between the popular and elite responses to Béranger in England. Its far from incendiary refrain— “Wait a little longer”—made it an appropriate hymn for radical opinion in the aftermath of the defeats of 1848; and it is cited at the end of both Arthur Hugh Clough’s The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (1848) and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) in connection with the emigration of the disappointed but still idealistic hero.

24The failure of the revolution of 1848, and Béranger’s subsequent association with the coup d’État of December 1851 which brought Louis Napoléon to power, signalled a cooling of relations between Béranger and his British admirers; but his death in 1857 called forth another flourish of reviews in the British press, including a lengthy essay by Walter Bagehot in the National Review for October of that year. [36] Bagehot continues the British tradition of seeing Béranger as “the essential Frenchman” whose poetry is “the poetry of equanimity, that is, the world’s view of itself; its self-satisfac-tion, its conviction that you must bear with what comes, not hope for much, think some evil, never be excited, admire little, and then you will be at peace”. [37] Such poetry is peculiarly the province of France’s “café and theatre” civilisation. Part of this equanimity is, as we have seen, an un-British openness about sexual relations, but Bagehot is characteristically reticent about this aspect of the poet’s work, citing (but not translating) the fairly innocuous “Cinquante ans” to represent what he calls the “grisette” poems. He is, however, much more voluble on the subject of Béranger’s political allegiances. In France, he argues, “[a] certain égalité may pervade its art as its society. There is no such difference as with us between the shoeblack and the gentleman”. [38] This equality creates the possibility of an “essentially democratic” poetry like Béranger’s. [39] Bagehot also praises the judiciousness of Béranger’s political judgements, especially during the Napoleonic era. He does not, however, cite any of the poet’s more inflammatory songs, and ultimately characterizes the political dimension of Béranger’s work as ephemeral and transitory : “No Englishman will now care for many of Béranger’s songs which were once in the mouths of all his countrymen, which coloured the manners of revolutions, perhaps influenced their course.” [40]

25The last substantial review of Béranger’s work in English appeared in 1868, around a decade after his death and just before his catastrophic fall into oblivion. [41] There are, however, a few intriguing footnotes which suggest that his work might have remained something of a rallying point in Britain at least for people in revolt against the conventional pieties of the Victorian period during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Robert Louis Stevenson, as we have already seen, praises Béranger’s Socialism in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article; and, even more intriguingly, Oscar Wilde betrays a substantial familiarity with the French poet’s work in his 1886 article entitled “Béranger in England”. This short piece, a review of some recently published translations, begins with some characteristically Wildean regrets about the absence of the political ballad in England; when the English “have grievances against the capitalist or the aristocrat, they prefer strikes to sonnets, and rioting to rondels”. [42] Toynbee’s translations, however, “may be the herald of a new school”; they demonstrate that Béranger “can wear our English dress with ease and grace”, and retain much of the “music and mirth” of the originals. Wilde concludes that “Béranger is not nearly well enough known in England”. It is easy to see why the witty, amoral and politically radical Béranger would have appealed to Wilde, but his call for a “new school” based on Béranger was doomed to remain unanswered.

Translations

26As a republican, libertine and atheist, at least by reputation, Béranger was in many respects the very incarnation of all nineteenth-century England’s lurid fantasies about France. It is not, therefore, surprising to find that translations of his work were slow to appear, and that most of those that did appear carried a kind of health warning. John G.H. Bourne, the author of a lively 1837 translation of some of the poet’s work, notes in his Preface that “the favourite poet of France has as yet found no one to try on him an English dress”. [43] Bourne inscribes his effort to Thomas Campbell, “one who holds the same distinguished position in our country” as Béranger does in France, but adds, perhaps not entirely seriously : “I wish that the parallel had been preserved entire, and that Béranger had never written one immodest line !” [44] Bourne goes on to admit that his selection excludes those poems “whose warmth and freedom would not suit the greater strictness of our taste on this side of the channel; and, indeed, many of those that are retained are in this respect a good deal chastened.” [45] William Young, in his 1850 translation, sees fit to “disavow, at the outset, any sympathy whatever with the political doctrines that [the songs] so broadly inculcate,” and doubts that “the entire works of Béranger [can] ever be translated into our tongue—at least with a due regard for decency. Some are too licentious, and some treat things sacred with a levity that would be deemed intolerable.” [46] Translating Béranger was clearly an act fraught with political and cultural implications, a tentative identification with someone whose life and work were the very antithesis of respectability.

27There was, moreover, no need to translate Béranger. The respectable classes in Victorian Britain habitually used French as a way of excluding the lower classes, and were quite happy to enjoy the pleasures offered by French literature and culture so long as these did not fall into the hands of the more impressionable members of society. Under these circumstances translating Béranger became a political gesture, a way of breaking the code and allowing the masses access to information previously reserved for the elite. The political significance of translation is very clear in the 1829 Westminster Review article, which contains some of the earliest translations of Béranger’s poetry into English I have been able to find. [47] The author of the Westminster article, identified in the Wellesley Index as T.P. Thompson, dwells on the circumstances surrounding the poet’s second arrest and condemnation by the authorities in 1828. He accurately interprets the arrest of Béranger as the harbinger of revolution in France—“[a] ballad-maker prosecuted,—is a clear proof that France will be a republic with the Bourbons in the Tuileries”—and lists and translates the songs that “shook the frame of monarchy in France”: “Le sacre de Charles le Simple”, “Les Infiniments Petits”, “La mort du Diable”, and “Turlupin”:

28

– Du roi viens voir la personne
– Non, répondait-il, non pas
Ôtera-t-il sa couronne,
Quand je mettrai chapeau bas ?
Ma foi, s’il faut crier vive,
Ah !
Vive l’ami qui cuit mon pain !
Que l’on suive, suive, suive
L’exemple de Turlupin.
Come let us go « le Roi » to see -
Not I—he said—I won’t do that;
Will he take off his crown to me,
When I to him take off my hat ?
If I for somebody must cry,
Then, Here’s for him that makes my bread,
And men will answer-I-I-I-
Say just what Merryman has said ! [48] (207)

29This translation is clear and unambiguous, but does betray a certain residual nervousness, not least in the superfluous retention of the French phrase “le Roi” for “the king”, and indeed in the decision to provide the French king with the added dignity of a capital letter. The stuttering refrain, though an ingenious device, also mitigates the force of the original’s injunction to his fellow countrymen to follow the example of Turlupin.

30Review articles thereafter customarily included a few translations, but the rate at which Béranger’s copious output appeared in English remained extremely slow, with (as we have already seen) negative consequences for those amongst the English working class who would like to have gained a better understanding of his poetry. [49] There remains a fairly clear link between political radicalism, or at least opposition to the pieties of conventional society, and the translation of Béranger. In May 1837 Alfred Domett, a close friend of Robert Browning (and the original of his “Waring”), published translations of four songs in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. [50] His is a fairly representative cross-section of Béranger’s work, and includes the kind of radical and faintly licentious material which a more squeamish translator might well have omitted. In addition to “Ma Vocation”, Béranger’s apology for his art, Domett translates “Le Prisonnier”, a sentimental piece about a woman waiting for her husband, a prisoner-of-war in the hands of the British, to return; a carousing song called “Bon Vin et Fillette”; and “Le Vilain”, a song in which Béranger reaffirms his identity with ordinary people in the face of sneers about his aristocratic-sounding name. In “Le Vilain” Domett retains Béranger’s image of the aristocracy as a millstone grinding the poor like grain. This is not, however, to say that Domett was completely fearless in his translation. “Ma Vocation” substitutes “my good angel” for the potentially offensive “le bon Dieu” of the French original; and there is an analogous softening of anti-British sentiment in “Le Vilain”. Where Béranger refers to aristocrats causing civil war and destruction by inviting the “English leopard” into France, Domett refers to the altogether more noble but no less destructive “English lion”. Domett’s translation is also fairly representative in its approach to the licentious portion of Béranger’s poetic output. He translates the epicurean “Bon vin et fillette”, but occasionally disguises the plain sense of Béranger’s text under decorous euphemism :

31

Sur un trône est-on heureux ?
On ne peut s’ y placer deux :
mais vivent table et couchette !
Turlurette,
turlurette,
bon vin et fillette !
Who is happy on a throne ?
Thereon one must sit alone !
Social meal and couch be mine;
What surpasses pretty lasses
And full glasses of good wine !

32This is not an inaccurate translation, but it is one that deftly omits the implications of the original. Béranger states that two cannot share a throne, implying of course that they can share a “couchette”. Domett’s version removes this suggestion; the solitary figure on the throne is contrasted with those enjoying their “social meal”; and the “couch” is presumably there for post-prandial relaxation.

33Some translators were a little bolder. William Makepeace Thackeray produced English versions of four songs by Béranger in his Paris Sketch-Book of 1840, including a faithful translation of “Le Grenier”:

34

Lisette ici doit surtout apparaître,
Vive, jolie, avec un frais chapeau ;
Déjà sa main à l’étroite fenêtre
Suspend son schal, en guise de rideau.
Sa robe aussi va parer ma couchette ;
Respecte, Amour, ses plis longs et flottans.
J’ai su depuis qui payait sa toilette.
Dans un grenier qu’on est bien à vingt ans ! (17-24)
And see my little Jessy, first of all;
She comes with pouting lips and sparkling eyes :
Behold, how roguishly she pins her shawl
Across the narrow casement, curtain-wise;
Now by the bed her petticoat glides down,
And when did woman look the worse in none ?
I have heard since who paid for many a gown,
In the brave days when I was twenty-one. [51]

35It is interesting to compare this with a translation of the same stanza which appeared in the Northern Star for June 22 1844 :

36

And, first, my Lisette should arise at my call,
With her dear little hat and her freshness and bloom :
Already, methinks, she has hung up her shawl
O’er the small narrow window to curtain the room.
She wore her nice robes with such elegant ease
I respected each fold set so gracefully on;
Since then I found out who paid for all these.
O, sweet is a garret at gay twenty one !

37This Chartist newspaper regularly carried translations of poems by Béranger—there are four in 1844 alone—but it tended to choose the more sentimental pieces rather than the political poems; and also, as this translation makes clear, to share the general British repugnance for the more sexually explicit aspects of Béranger’s poetry. “Lisette”, Béranger’s occasionally unfaithful but always beguiling mistress, here becomes something like a Dickensian heroine, full of “freshness and bloom”; one might imagine if one did not know the original that she had come to tidy up the garret. There is, that is to say, no connection between endorsement of Béranger’s politics and toleration of his moral shortcomings in British versions of his work; and there seems, indeed, to be some evidence that political radicalism is usually linked in the reception of his work to moral conservatism.

38The Victorian period saw some attempts at more systematic translation of Béranger’s work. Another friend of Robert Browning’s, William Young, whom we saw earlier distancing himself from the licentiousness of the poet’s subject matter, published an undistinguished translation of two hundred of the songs in 1850; [52] while Robert Brough projected a complete edition of Béranger’s work but only got as far as the early political songs. [53] Such enterprises were, however, doomed in advance by the pressures of social and political respectability. Both Young and Brough betray their nervousness through their tortuous syntax and stilted vocabulary; here, for example, is Young’s translation of another of the songs to “Lisette”:

39

What, is it you, Lisette ?
You a rich robe can wear ?
You mounting an aigrette
And jewels, I declare !
Ah ! never, nay never -
You’re Lizzy no more :
Nay, nay, Lizzy, bear not
The name that you bore !
In satin shod, your feet
Dare not the herbage try;
Your rosy hue is sweet -
Its tints where did you buy ?
Ah ! never &c (“Ce n’est plus Lisette”)

40The retention of French terms like “aigrette” and the inverted syntax at the beginning of the second stanza make this remote from ordinary speech and unimaginable as popular song. Brough, in turn, produces a lively and in some ways quite daring version of the “Marquis de Carabas”, but leaves the chorus in French, thereby reminding the reader of the French origins of the text and limiting its potential resonance in the British political context.

41Of more interest than these efforts are the smaller scale translations of the latter part of the century. The appearance of these translations throughout the 1880s suggests that the eclipse of Béranger’s reputation in France following the events of 1870 was not immediately paralleled in England, while the bias of the selections suggests that a subtly different understanding of the poet was emerging. William Toynbee, whose translations were reviewed by Wilde in the Pall Mall Gazette, produces an elegiac, almost bucolic Béranger, contrasting the frenzy of city life with the simple pleasures of rural living in “Les Champs”, and anticipating Yeats’s version of Ronsard in “La Bonne Vieille”. [54] Similarly Robert Offley Ashburton (Lord Houghton) concludes his privately printed parallel-text selection with the Baudelaire-esque “Voyage Imaginaire”, in which the poet articulates an intense fascination with the landscape and atmosphere of Greece. These translations come close to giving us a “decadent” Béranger, no longer an immoral or licentious poet but an aesthete and cultivator of precious emotion. There is an oblique confirmation of this suggestion in Du Maurier’s Trilby, the novel which embodies the English fantasy of Parisian garret-life. One of Svengali’s pupils, Mimi la Salope, is depicted moving her hearers to tears with her renditions of some of Béranger’s sentimental songs. She follows this up with some “vile” songs in Parisian argot, much to the dismay and “vicarious shame” of her English admirer. [55] This characterisation of Béranger’s songs would no doubt have surprised the reviewers who decried them as “disgusting and abominable nonsense” earlier in the century.

Conclusion

42It is clear from the foregoing that the Puritanism and class divisions of nineteenth-century Britain prevented the emergence of a British Béranger, or even of an adequate British understanding of the French poet’s work. Béranger appealed to dissident voices within the cultural and political establishment, such as Thackeray and Clough, and to radical and revolutionary working-class writers like Harney and Massey, but the rigid stratification of British intellectual life precluded the possibility of significant contact between these groups. As a result, the image of Béranger atrophied for both. Middle-class writers found it increasingly difficult to justify his seemingly amoral and hedonistic approach to life, while working-class writers, starved of adequate education and full translation of the French poet’s work, found it impossible to place him securely in the British social and political context. Cutting across these class lines was the antipathy and misunderstanding caused by the different standards of personal and sexual morality prevailing in Britain and France. It was possible for British writers to admire the personal integrity of a Victor Hugo, even if his politics were deprecated; but the louche, insouciant (only French words will do) Béranger seemed to undermine the very causes he supported by his failure to endorse the Victorian fetishisation of marriage and family life. The response to Béranger, the “essential Frenchman”, provides the best illustration of what nineteenth-century Britain both feared and desired in its nearest and most problematic neighbour.