The condottiere radicalizes the Bravo. Mentioned by Balzac in his Monographie de la presse parisienne (1843), he is the "literary gladiator", the executor of journalistic dirty deeds, the author of the anonymous cowardice of the bookshop war. Lucien de Rubempré is a case in point, as is Andoche Finot, a character in La Comédie humaine, alternately described as a "spiritue[l] condottier[e]", a "speculator", or a "literary pimp". The word was first used by Titian to refer to L'Arétin, inventor of literary blackmail, who made kings pay in exchange for safeguarding their reputations. Innineteenth-century France, two figures in particular epitomize it: Louis Veuillot (1813-1883) and Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac (1806-1880). The former, an ultramontane Catholic polemicist and editor-in-chief of L'Univers, was accused - notably by Sainte-Beuve - of waging a permanent war between small newspapers and the big ones, which slowed down literary progress rather than supporting it. The second, a virulent journalist under the July Monarchy who became a deputy under the Second Empire, is the model of the journalist who adapts to successive regimes. Just as Lucien exonerated Finot in the name of his courage in the duel, Barbey exonerates Granier de Cassagnac in the name of his constant avoidance of the Progressive party, from which he could have obtained the greatest advantages.
Balzac's Monographie also includes, as equivalents of the condottiere, euphemistic borrowings from a foreign language: the guerrilla, a reminder of the maquisard of the Spanish campaigns that Balzac uses to describe Alphonse Karr (1808-1890), editor of Les Guêpes; the matador, a man of the shadows with uncertain loyalty.Alongside the men you can't count on, there are those without whom you can do nothing. Literature is a sport, including in its collective dimension, where opposition to an adversary is the basis of a team's solidarity: it's the powerful dialectic of friend and foe. Not every adversary is an enemy, and those we fight in a duel are not those we fight in war; there is a certain adversity that comes close to friendship. Conversely, a poorly conducted friendship is the source of the greatest enmities.
