As Peter Sloterdijk writes, the development of mass media such as lowcost popular newspapers challenges radically the humanist conception of the book as letter generating friendship. Citizens of the newborn republic can no longer share the same values thanks to canonical, national, or universal readings. At the end of the 19th century, for that reason, journalists and writers attempt to create new opportunities which allow them to abolish the distance and meet their public. This dissertation examines and compares four different artistic journals – L’Hydropathe, Le Chat Noir, La Plume et Le Mur – whose creators organize literary gatherings or shadow theater shows in different venues designed for this purpose : cafés, small auditoriums in the Latin Quarter, and cabarets in Montmartre. Nomad students « settle down », create new texts, and decorate the walls, and this work becomes a very important part of their identity. However, one will be surprised to discover similar concerns in the work of a solitary writer, who did not particularly like to speak in public. Stéphane Mallarmé is indeed a writer, as Jacques Rancière says, « infinitely aware of his time ». We shall see that both Mallarmé and the avant-gardes studied in this dissertation produce democratic performances which atttempt to transpose the irreducible contradictions of modern times into exemplary figures. In a joyful, carnivalesque way mostly, the staging of fragmentary writing and of artistic frames invites us visibly to imagine communities.
