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In all French dictionaries, blague means ‘bag’ (from Dutch balg, a sack), and secondarily, a joke. By association, blague came to signify windbag, joker. The blague is polysemous, jack-of-all-trades. Probably his most sustained blague, Vallès began on the slant with his provocative text L'Argent. If rhetoric is the art of persuasion, Vallès's variety is seldom hidden persuasion. To bridge, perhaps shakily, the gap between oblique and straight-up modes of the blague, this chapter passes to sentimentality, which is both head on (it assails our emotions) and devious (it has designs on us). It is the other side of the would-be hard-faced blague. In caricature, that visual blague usually isolates a part of a whole and amplifies it, not always with cruel intent. Black (or sick, gallows, calamity, graveyard, doomsday) humour is thumbscrew humour. In the medical sense, ‘sardonic’ refers to a death-grimace, a rictus. Gallows humour is the last laugh.

Chapter Four studies Émile Zola’s legendary support of the Jewish officer wrongly accused of treason in the 1890s, as well as Zola’s writing about Jews both before and after the Dreyfus Affair. Scholars have long acknowledged that Zola’s pre-Dreyfus novel L’Argent [Money] (1891) contains antisemitic elements, but this chapter shows that his essay Pour les Juifs, written during the Affair, and his post-Dreyfus novel Vérité [Truth] (1902), also voices a desire to see the Jews disappear as a people. In Zola we see how the defense of the Jews, and of republicanism, against opposition from the right resulted in the formulation of a hard-line universalism hostile to all forms of particularism. Zola’s brand of militant laïcité would reach its apotheosis in the 1905 law separating church and state and would become synonymous with French republicanism.

This essay engages two strains of Tolstoy’s writing. In the first, the sight of death is the foundation of ethical understanding; in the second, if ethical understanding is practiced, there is no death of any consequence. The latter half of the essay turns to Bresson’s L’Argent, a filmic adaptation of Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon” which transforms Tolstoy’s gospelized ethics to an immanent ethics, raising the question of whether ethics is phenomenal and embodied (as in Levinas and Derrida) or whether it is evental (as in Badiou). An examination of aspects of Wittgenstein’s writing on ethics, T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, and Tolstoy’s fable “Alyosha Gorshok” sharpen the consideration of whether ethics is natural or supernatural.

This chapter examines Robert Bresson’s last film of his career, L’Argent, in which he makes the turn from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy. This turn is an evidence of Bresson’s sensitivity to a relation between film form and the world. Of all of Bresson’s late work, L’Argent is especially direct in its political address. In L’Argent, characters’ reflections on their situation and place in the world or with each other are kept to a minimum, which allows Bresson to make a systematic argument, representing the chain of exploitation at work in a capitalist economy as opposed to how various members of that chain feel about it.