Baudelaire remarkably trashes Horace Vernet's Bataille d'Isly , exhibited at the 1846 Salon. He sees in it the transposition into painting of a certain military spirit that is contrary to art, denouncing "an agile and frequent masturbation, an irritation of the French epidermis". The harshness of the terms he uses is in keeping with what he calls the straight line. Justifying this frankness of speech is a whole generational identity, which stems from this literary war declared against the national war, particularly the one waged in Algeria.
In the years 1844-1847, Baudelaire drew up very precise lists of what he wanted to destroy. He cut his literary teeth in this permanent war of the small press: in the Mystères galants des théâtres de Paris, the Corsaire-Satan, the Tintamarre. Champfleury, in Les Aventures de Mademoiselle Mariette (1857), describes the milieu of Le Corsaire-Satan, its economic logic, the haggling to which glories are subjected, the fragile balance of laudatory and destructive articles, which always end up to the detriment of the naive. In 1847's La Fanfarlo, Baudelaire drew on his experience with Mystères galants, a publication aimed at destroying theatrical glories: only artists who subscribe can hope to escape the journal's ill graces, and any service rendered is rigorously billed. The actress Rachel, who sued the newspaper, ended up appearing on its frontispiece designed by Nadar.
The mid-nineteenthcentury invented the "éreintage", but fed it with older forms, including theepigram, inherited from the seventeenthcentury (Cyrano, Scudéry), a small satirical poem in verse, very often identified by the witticism that ends it: the point. In the 18thcentury , the meaning of the word broadened to include satirical traits, witty words tossed about in conversation. Lucien de Rubempré's epigrams were written in prose. The epigram is a genre of pointed, stylet-sharp, acerbic speech. In Illusions perdues, Lucien relishes the pleasure of "sharpening the epigram, polishing the cold blade that finds its sheath in the victim's heart, and carving the handle for the readers [...] [this] horrible pleasure, dark and solitary, savored without witnesses, [which] is like a duel with an absentee, killed at a distance with the tip of a feather". Elsewhere, Balzac praises the epigram as "the spirit of hatred": both its quintessence and what makes it spiritual.
On several occasions, Balzac describes the war of epigrams, a transposition into journalism of the reflexes and actors of past political wars. From the Restoration onwards, it took on new names corresponding to new ways of doing things: "coup de lancette", "de créquilles", "de piques", "d'épingles", or "bordée".
In this constellation of figures, personality enjoyed particular success from the 1830s onwards. The word, which first appeared in the 18thcentury , designates a hurtful remark aimed at a person: typically, this is the allegorical epigram that Lucien "sharpens" against Madame de Bargeton, where he compares her to a cuttlebone.
