Abstract:The Salt Smugglers tells of Nerval’s quest, on the brink of the Second Empire, to track down a book on a seventeenth-century opponent to absolute monarchy. The censorship that came down hard on the press in 1850 led him to write a work in the spirit of the “petits journaux”. These newspapers provided a satirical take on literary, political and social issues of the day. They were intentionally whimsical, personalised, digressive and characterised by a dry humour. Nerval adopted both their form and substance and adapted them to literature.
