The Micropolitics of Home Decorating in 19th Century France

During the 19th century in France, the qualifier "artistic" often served to describe, judge, and market home furnishings. This essay shows how the idea of the artistic interior becomes entangled in class and gender politics, and how this social politics of taste was criticized by various 19th-century novelists even as they also aided its dissemination. Scholarship confirms what consumers and advertisers commonly presume: to decorate the home is to display one's taste through objects, which thus become endowed with meanings both personal and social. Roland Barthes, for example, has shown that home furnishings are social in the same way that language is social, just as lean Baudrillard maps out correlations between the social system and the system of home furnishings. Home decor has also been analyzed in terms of the "sociology of taste," understood as the social determination of taste as well as the differences in taste among different social groups. The most important early study of this kind was that of Pierre Bourdieu, whose 1979 Distinction includes numerous case studies involving the selection of home furnishings, which, along with studies of preferences in music and painting, he used to demonstrate correlations between aesthetically informed taste and the sociological factors of social origin and education. More recently, Jukka Gronow has extended this now traditional view of "the sociology of taste" to a consideration of the "aestheticization of everyday life" a process by which the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure comes to serve as a basis for socialization in modern societies. Widespread recognition of the social signification of home furnishings has thus transformed interior decoration not only into a profession and an industry, but also into an object of interdisciplinary scholarly study, engaging art and cultural historians, as well as scholars of consumer and material culture. One historical period which has of late attracted particularly close investigation is 19th-century France, where "les arts decoratifs" represented a significant sector of the nation's industrial output. In her study of the French furniture industry, for example, Leora Auslander explores the politics of domestic furnishings, from the organization of production to the class and gender politics of taste, framing the discussion within a larger political shift from "the courtly stylistic regime" to "the bourgeois stylistic regime"(141-3). Similarly, focusing on the consumption of artisanal products in mid-19thcentury France, Whitney Walton explores the decorating choices of the French bourgeoisie, especially female consumers, who demanded high quality furnishings with artistic merit. What requires further attention, as ! see it, is precisely how "artistic" operates as a qualifier in regard to the 19th-century home interior. By the 1880s, the terms "art," "artist," and "artistic" were routinely evoked to describe, judge, and market home furnishings, and in both commercial and literary writing these terms served to evaluate taste according to aesthetic and social criteria. In the following essay, therefore, I will draw upon both literary and commercial documents with a view to showing how the idea of the artistic interior evolved out of an interchange among many discursive domains, and how the socio-politics of taste allowed literary authors to embed dramatic conflicts within their descriptions of home furnishings. Beginning with a quick overview of the status of the decorative arts within the arts hierarchies, I will then explore the theme of collecting, showing how it came to be associated with the artist. In the two subsequent sections, finally, I will discuss how claims to the "artistic" interior are disputed on the basis of class and gender distinctions, revealing a surprisingly combative micropolitics of home decorating. Describing an interior as artistic (or in many cases, as less than artistic) is complicated by changes in the usage of the word "art. …