The Politics of Authorial Subjectivity in Nerval’s <i>Les Faux Saulniers</i>

Gérard de Nerval’s 1850 serial Les Faux Saulniers is known for thematizing its obedience to the 16 July 1850 press law and its Riancey amendment, which effectively banned serialized novels, while simultaneously challenging the distinction between history and fiction on which the amendment was founded. This article draws out another instance of the oppositional submissiveness of Les Faux Saulniers , arguing that this anti-novel is marked by an unavowed engagement with the press law’s other major amendment, the Tinguy amendment, which effected an individualization of journalistic authorship by requiring signatures on all political articles. The article situates the Tinguy amendment within the repressive turn of the late Second Republic and argues that Nerval elucidates the politics of authorship during this period by critiquing the amendment as an attempt to restrict both political and authorial subjectivity. Through a poetics of misdirection, Nerval evades the law’s constraints and affirms the plural and collective subjectivities it aims to exclude.