This dissertation reframes current understandings of cosmopolitanism, focusing on its ideologically conservative strain, apart from its consecrated progressive and humanitarian characteristics. Using Valery Larbaud's novel A. O. Barnabooth: ses œuvres complètes (1913) as my main example, I reconstruct the type and the role of the cosmopolitan in the French novel around late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and show that the traveling cosmopolitan is a figure with conservative political and cultural leanings.

The first part of the dissertation is theoretical, while the second part is a literary analysis of Larbaud's novel, which showcases the theoretical points exposed in the first part. In the first chapter, I survey the idea of cosmopolitanism across history and identify a number of constitutive tensions that run across the concept, turning on tensions between particularism and universalism, for instance the tensions between egotism and collectivity, nationalism and world citizenship, or humanitarianism and class identity. In my second chapter, I sketch an ideal-type of the nineteenth-century cosmopolitan as a figure featuring a strong “caste” consciousness, and socially and politically conservative inclinations. I also draw a literary-historical genealogy of the cosmopolitan and highlight both its differences and similarities with other major literary and cultural types of French literature. The second part of my dissertation offers a political reading of Larbaud's cosmopolitan novel A. O. Barnabooth. The third chapter of the dissertation looks at the cultural foundations of reactionary cosmopolitanism and the spiritual points of reference of the reactionary cosmopolitan: the European geographical space, Ancient Roman and Greek culture, and traditional political and social hierarchy. The fourth chapter examines the relationship of the exclusive caste of the cosmopolitans with other social groups. Reactionary cosmopolitanism is simultaneously a gesture of human openness towards the world and a conservative impulse directed against democratization in politics, culture, and leisure. The fifth chapter focuses on the reactionary cosmopolitan's existential answer to cosmopolitanism in the form of an ineluctable need of attachment and ultimately of a symbolic return home. Finally, the Epilogue offers an overview of other turn-of-the-century literary discourses of cosmopolitanism and on the recuperation of the term by nationalist propaganda.