Choreographing the Urban Poor: Class and the Passage Through Public Space in Clémence Robert’s Social Novels

In Les Anges de Paris (Citation1856), Clémence Robert articulates her philosophy of the street, proclaiming it to be a space that is diverse in its usage and its users. Robert's idealized vision, however, is contradicted by numerous historical accounts and by her own writing, which shows the marked and inferior experience of the poor and working classes, even in theoretically egalitarian spaces. Whereas Les Mendiants de Paris (1848) is reflective of a prevailing distrust towards the working classes, La Misère (1860) acts as a corrective of, and apology for, this earlier work and for certain forms of spatial nostalgia.