Social Types in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Journalism

Focusing on social types during the July Monarchy, Pauline de Tholozany argues that the popularity of typologies in France participated in the construction of a national ideal conceived as a sum of individual parts. Tholozany shows that types such as the dandy, flâneur, and grisette abounded in plot-riven literary genres and in journalistic sketches, signaling a fear of obsoleteness that continually evolving printing technologies cast on social thought, thereby inaugurating a new way of thinking about society.