Lucien’s defection to The Awakening converts his precarious pursuit of literary and journalistic success into an unmistakable political alignment. After his friends warn that his recent attacks on the Right and the government make a royalist turn dishonorable, he joins the paper anyway. The announcement presents him as a prize; the ensuing press war recasts him as a turncoat and exposes how readily literary reputations become weapons in political combat.

From author to journalist

Before the political break, Lucien had already learned how difficult it was to reach readers without passing through commercial gatekeepers. He approached Vidal and Porchon with his historical novel, The Archer of Charles IX, describing its subject as the struggle between Catholics supporting absolute government and Protestants seeking a republic. Vidal dismissed the proposal: the booksellers were commission agents, not publishers, and their own publishing ventures depended on established names and certain kinds of serious books. Lucien’s conviction that his novel was serious could not open the door.

The same dependence on intermediaries shaped his poetry. When Lucien brought The Daisies to Dauriat, the bookseller’s attention and manner mattered as much as the manuscript itself. Later, Lucien coolly reclaimed the manuscript after Dauriat had read it, leaving without an open display of disappointment. These encounters form the commercial background to his turn toward journalism: a newspaper offered another route to visibility, but not freedom from editors, proprietors, or the calculations that governed what reached the public.

That route had already taught him how unstable an author’s control could be. After Lucien wrote a harsh review of a play at the Ambigu-Comique, he found that the published account had been softened overnight into a favorable judgment, one that might help fill the theatre’s box office. He had wanted to test whether his criticism could ruin a good production or promote a bad one; instead, the altered review showed him that the power he thought he exercised could be revised by others. His work for the press brought recognition from Étienne Lousteau, who praised Lucien’s lively article on Parisian particulars, but recognition and control were not the same thing.

The warning from his friends

When Lucien announced that he intended to exploit his new position in the royalist press and that The Awakening would begin publication the next day, Coralie responded to the promise in his words with affection. Their modest breakfast was interrupted by Daniel d'Arthez, Léon Giraud, and Michel Chrestien, who had come from Rue de Vendôme because they knew what he was contemplating. Their visit was more than an expression of political disagreement: d'Arthez appealed to a friendship he acknowledged had already weakened.

D'Arthez argued that Lucien could not pass into the ranks of the Ultras without staining his character. He had attacked the Romantics, the Right, and the government; he could not now turn around and defend those same forces. Lucien replied that his reasons belonged to a higher order of thought and that the end would justify his actions. His answer placed calculation above consistency without explaining away the contradiction his friends had identified.

Giraud widened the dispute beyond Lucien’s personal reputation. In his account, the government, the court, the Bourbons, and the absolutist party might disagree over how to suppress the Revolution, but they shared an interest in suppressing the press. He contrasted that political purpose with the founding of royalist newspapers, including The Awakening, which claimed to answer the calumnies and insults of the liberal press. Giraud wanted a dignified and serious paper; Lucien’s decision instead aligned him with a press campaign whose stated opposition to liberal journalism sat uneasily beside the larger threat he described.

The friends left without offering Lucien an affectionate handshake. He remained thoughtful and sad for a time, but Coralie urged him not to let their seriousness hold him back. She also tied his political opportunity to the promised title of Count of Rubempré, saying she would use her influence at the chancery if necessary. Her encouragement made the bargain personal as well as professional: political advancement and the hope of a title were bound to the life they were trying to secure together.

A publicized alignment

The next day Lucien allowed his name to be listed among the contributors to The Awakening. The prospectus announced his name as a conquest and was distributed through the ministry’s efforts in one hundred thousand copies. The scale of that circulation turned a private decision into a public declaration: the newspaper did not merely acquire a writer, but displayed his change of allegiance as evidence of its reach and prestige.

Lucien attended the paper’s triumphal dinner at Robert’s, near Frascati. The meal lasted nine hours and brought together leading figures of the royalist press, including Martinville, Auger, and Destains, alongside other writers who, in the narrator’s description of the period, made a vocation of monarchy and religion. The gathering culminated in a unanimous decision to wage a war of annihilation against liberal writers and classicists, without distinction of age or sex. The participants submerged their differences in flaming punch, making the launch a scene of both organized political purpose and theatrical conviviality.

A famous Romantic writer made a sardonic remark as he left the dinner, but the bookseller who had heard it disclosed it to The Miroir the next day, and the disclosure was attributed to Lucien. The mistaken attribution helped trigger a furious response in the liberal newspapers. Lucien became their principal target: they mocked the failures of his sonnets, reported that Dauriat would rather lose a thousand écus than publish them, and branded him the poet without sonnets. The defection thus produced the very public notoriety it promised, but as hostile ridicule rather than secure literary recognition.

Consequences for reputation and the press

The reaction exposed how quickly the press could manufacture and reverse a public image. Lucien had entered journalism hoping to exercise influence; now the papers used his literary disappointments as ammunition against his political choice. The humiliation was sharpened by the contrast between the prospectus’s presentation of him as a royalist conquest and the liberal papers’ portrayal of him as an unsuccessful poet whose publisher would not print his work.

The episode also completes a change in the terms of Lucien’s ambition. His earlier encounters with booksellers had shown that a manuscript could be refused before it reached the public, while his newspaper experience had shown that an article could be altered after he wrote it. By joining The Awakening, he accepted political affiliation as another condition of access and influence. The ensuing campaign made the cost visible: once his name served one faction’s publicity, it could be recast by its opponents as an instrument of ridicule.