| This dissertation studies the evolving phenomenon of theft in literary and legal representations, reading canonical texts through the lens of this often overlooked crime. It takes the French Revolution as a point of departure and examines the development of property law and its relation to bourgeois anxiety in the post-Revolutionary period. Authors from Rousseau to Balzac, Vidocq to the Comtesse de Ségur, Dickens to Zola, treat theft alternately as unavoidable fact of life, lamentable moral lapse, economic necessity or proof of genetic degeneration.; The thesis concentrates on novels but also uses non-fictional texts in its argument. Among the latter—which include Léon Paillet's and H.A. Frégier's treatises on thieves in the mid-century, along with Vidocq's Mémoires and underworld dictionary—can be found a fulcrum for understanding a certain nineteenth-century conception of crime and identity, which lies in the interstices of legality and self-representation. An 1889 court case about pseudonymity, the case of Colombine, provides an entry-point into these in-between spaces, where definitions blur and criminality becomes conflated with authority, crime with authorship. This definitional confusion extends to the fin-de-siècle period, with its growing interest in pathology—a shift in focus that lets “common thieves” fade into the background while uncommon thieves, kleptomaniacs, take center stage. As the crime is medicalized, it is also depenalized, and theft slides out of the realm of crime and into that of specifically female weakness and illness.; Over the course of the century, both theft and thief undergo redefinition. From the earliest years of the Napoleonic era to the closing years of the nineteenth century, theft is represented in ways that increasingly remove it from the lexicon of crime. The thief therefore disappears from the stage of his own action. He begins as a flagrant character, marginal but remarkable, and passes through the decades, becoming gradually less remarkable as he crosses the borders out of the margins. He experiences highly publicized textual representation in the mid century, only to wane into classificatory exile at the end. |
