Le Dandysme

Author: Françoise Coblence

Publishing House: Klincksieck

Publication Date: 17 Mai 2018

Description :“What is the consistency of a character that fashion makes and breaks?” Françoise Coblence asks from the outset of her meticulous investigation of dandyism. The term itself is already an etymological enigma: whether English or French in origin, no one knows for sure. And the uncertainty remains about the character invented by the “beautiful Brummell” at the end of the eighteenth century. Is this much-celebrated “monarch of fashion,” both adored and feared in his heyday, a superficial and pretentious socialite, literally inimitable, reduced to the “androgynous man of history” described by Barbey d’Aurevilly? Or should he be elevated to the rank of “hero of modern times” as Charles Baudelaire, a connoisseur, would have it, ready, incidentally, to call him also “Hercules without a job”?However, this elegant, insolent and impertinent man, affected in his maintenance and his spirit, fascinating fashionable and indefinable personality, is something else than a simple gandin or a ridiculous muscadin. In the course of the portraits meticulously sketched by Françoise Coblence, other characteristic types emerge, after Brummell, such as those of the worldly, literary, or political dandy. But it is not certain that such figures, apparently more consistent, manage to totally erase the confused and shifting image of these characters whose main quality is precisely to have none.