In The French Generation of 1820 Alan Spitzer writes, using an image from Balzac, of “hungry young provincials competing in the Paris arena like fifty thousand spiders in a pot . . . all tortured by the discrepancy between boundless ambition and constricted opportunity.” He quotes a translation of le Comte de Rambuteau’s warning to Louis Philippe — that the French King should beware of: the déclassés, the doctors without patients, the architects without buildings, the journalists without journals, the […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, Balzac, Bourdieu, employment, France, Freud, pastry, revolution