This is a book about writing and change – about changes affecting everyday life in Second Empire France, about the extraordinarily diverse and creative responses of writers to those changes, and about ways in which writing itself evolved during this period. It raises questions about how the material world impinges upon literature, and how writers, in turn, use that world as a way of negotiating change.

France had been rocked by momentous changes for more than half a century before the Second Empire came into being in December1852. After the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, the country had gone through a series of revolutions, lurching from Republic to Empire to Monarchy and back to Republic again with the revolution of 1848, when the monarchy was finally abolished. But the failure of that short-lived Second Republic was seen by many as a particular betrayal. On 2 December 1851 Parisians woke to find that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, President of the Second Republic, had dissolved the Legislative Assembly and proclaimed martial law. Over the next few days several hundred protestors and a number of innocent bystanders were killed by troops, and many thousands were subsequently deported to North Africa or exiled elsewhere. Although a plebiscite indicated that a majority of Frenchmen approved the move, for many the violence of Louis Napoleon's coup d'état and his overthrow of the 1848 constitution he had sworn to uphold was to be a long-lasting and bitter source of resentment.