Paul-Louis Courier, a former officer turned journalist, would be at the forefront of these literary combatants: he invented the modern pamphlet and died murdered. After him would come Armand Carrel, himself a lieutenant before becoming a journalist, killed in a duel with Émile de Girardin in 1836; then Henri de Latouche, author of Fragoletta, known for his gall; then Béranger, the Republican chansonnier; Lamennais and Montalembert, Catholic militants; Louis de Cormenin, etc. Barbey d'Aurevilly could form the end of the list, unless, deciding to include Chateaubriand at the outset, we find ourselves tempted to complete it on the other side as far as Léon Bloy.
These combatants can often be arranged in pairs: Latouche and his "literary camaraderie" are countered by Gustave Planche and his "literary hatred"; Nisard and Janin clash on the question of easy literature; while Granier de Cassagnac attacks in a "straight line", Janin prefers the "curved line"; Veuillot opposes Granier de Cassagnac, like the sacred and the profane, but he also opposes Proudhon like right-wing violence differs from left-wing violence.
At the center of this network is Sainte-Beuve, who knows all these combatants and has written important articles on all of them. The relationship between Sainte-Beuve and Balzac, rather than that between Sainte-Beuve and Hugo, is a model of literary warfare. In fact, as he himself admits, all the critic's writings turn out to be about revenge.
Paul-Louis Courier (1772-1825) was a great writer of the Third Republic, who died with it and with the end of the anticlericalism he had championed. It fell to Janin to describe him as a pamphleteer: but the word, then, taking on the meaning we know today, is a neologism that Courier himself seldom uses. He was an artillery officer during the Revolution and the Empire, as well as a Hellenistic scholar. His military career was less than stellar, due to his indiscipline. He described himself as a gunner and winegrower, very attached to his identity as an Indre-et-Loire landowner. Having left the army in 1809, he rejoined it again for Wagram, but deserted during the battle. He lived in Italy until the end of the Empire, returning to Paris in 1824 and marrying the daughter of Étienne Clavier, who had been professor of Greek at the Collège de France. In 1816, he wrote a Petition to the two chambers in defense of a peasant who had refused to remove his hat in front of a priest: the start of his career against royalist reaction, against the alliance of the Throne and the Altar. Three years later, he wrote his first pamphlet against the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, in revenge for not having been elected to succeed his father-in-law. In 1821, he wrote a Simple Discours de Paul-Louis vigneron, to protest against the national subscription launched for the Petit Duc de Bordeaux to acquire the Château de Chambord. His trial was famous, and he became one of the first to be convicted under the 1819 libel law. Sent to Sainte-Pélagie, he took the opportunity to write up his trial. His greatest work was his 1824 Pamphlet des pamphlets, in which he reappropriated the term pamphlet, which had first been used against him. Albert Thibaudet assigned him an essential place in his 1936Histoire de la littérature française, as a representative of a left-wing pamphleteer tradition with Béranger and Stendhal, before the pamphlet turned to the right.
