Cosmopolis Reading Order

Cosmopolis (1893) by Paul Bourget is his most international novel, set in Rome's expatriate aristocratic and artistic world — the 'cosmopolitan' milieu of wealthy English, American, Russian, and French residents who have detached themselves from any particular national culture and live in the placeless luxury of international society. Bourget uses the cosmopolitan setting to extend his conservative Catholic argument: rootlessness in space corresponds to rootlessness in moral culture, and the characters who have abandoned their native countries have also abandoned the moral traditions that sustained them. The American heiress Fanny Hafner, who becomes the center of the novel's love intrigues, is Bourget's most complex creation: she belongs to no moral tradition (neither American Puritanism nor French Catholicism) and is therefore genuinely free in a way that the European characters are not — but her freedom is also a vulnerability, since she has no resources against the cynicism and manipulation of the Roman social world. Cosmopolis was enormously popular on publication — it was one of the first novels to address the international society that was emerging with the opening of the grand hotels, the casino circuit, and the cosmopolitan luxury culture of the 1880s and 1890s — and it defined the 'international novel' genre that Henry James would later develop in The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors.