The French Review

realist and mimetic strands in art and literature are in accord with Marxist aesthetics , whereas anarchism favors an art of rupture and singularity. He was echoing the novelist George Darien, who in his short-lived journal L’Escarmouche had made the same argument in 1891. Since then many critics and historians have been excavating the culture of the last two decades of the nineteenth century— the formative period of modernism and the most renowned period of anarchist history—in order to refine and nuance the relationship between the two. Febles’s study brings precious insight to the role played by anarchism in Zola’s work: he adds to, and complicates, the perspectives provided by Uri Eisenzweig (Fictions de l’anarchisme, 2001) and Vittorio Frigerio’s anthology (Émile Zola au pays de l’anarchisme , 2006), among others. Febles attempts to show the links that unite the realist paradigm to anarchy by examining the figures of anarchists in three of Zola’s novels: even though they undergo a re-education and “abandon their violent critiques of society or are even recuperated by the dominant discourse, their mere presence serves as a revolutionary voice in these works” (20). This project, noteworthy as it is, remains at the level of content and what Febles calls the ‘political message’ of the novels, and therefore is firmly rooted within the mimetic paradigm . More interestingly, Febles analyzes the relations between anarchism and the concept of entropy and its links to Zola’s novels. Building on Jacques Noiray’s Le romancier et la machine (1981), Febles shows through insightful readings of Germinal (1885), Paris (1898), and Travail (1901) the transformation of Zola’s work and aesthetic practice (as well as his worldview) in the course of his life. Briefly put, despite his final disappearance from the novel, the character of Souvarine in Germinal is at once threatening yet essential for the naturalist text’s attempt to master and portray reality: “The regulatory power invested in realist representation also has an unconscious situated in an anarchic subtext which constantly threatens coherence with fragmentation” (61). By contrast, Zola’s grandiose plan to condense every aspect of social life in one novel (Paris) results, according to Febles, in an instability that can be mastered only by the exclusion of entropic decay (and hence the anarchist) and its replacement by an overcompensatory optimism in the power of electricity, which no longer depends on surplus waste and decay, as the steam engine did in Zola’s earlier novels. In Travail, the naturalist method is replaced by a self-enclosed narrative that has purged all pessimism and violence, as the demand for an authentic social transformation is supplanted by a romantic and idyllic vision of a happy factory fueled by everlasting electricity. And what of anarchism? Was it essential to, or at least compatible, with realism? Febles refuses to conclude affirmatively, claiming on the one hand that anarchism was of central importance in the dissolution of realism in its refusal of the mimetic principle, and yet, on the other, “anarchism provides an interesting instance of plenitude between content and form” (173). Baruch College (NY) Ali Nematollahy JACOB, FRANÇOIS, éd. Voltaire à l’opéra. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0221-0. Pp. 239. 36 a. This collective work comprises an introduction and twelve essays as well as a list of the operas for which Voltaire composed the libretto or which were inspired by his work (231–33). The catalogue is impressive and provides ample 1032 FRENCH REVIEW 86.5 justification for the essays. These are divided into three segments: eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The first grouping explores Voltaire’s dramatic art and his work as a librettist (Rameau, Grétry). The second concentrates on nineteenth-century grand opera (Bellini, Rossini), and the adaptation of a number of Voltaire’s dramatic works to that medium. The final section looks at modern renditions of Voltaire’s contes for the operatic stage (Candide and Micromégas). Voltaire’s reputation as an ironist adds piquancy to this volume, devoted to an art form to which the philosophe was never completely reconciled: “L’opéra est un spectacle aussi bizarre que magnifique, où les yeux et...