French Literature: A Very Short Introduction
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These issues are not always raised with the intention to challenge tradition, since, after all, many French writers argued in favour of the established order. At first glance, the plays and novels of Pierre de Marivaux (1688-1763) appear to have little to do with `nature'. His comedies of manners are known for their highly artful banter, so characteristic of his style that it gave us the word marivaudage for witty, flirtatious dialogue. Yet when we consider the enthusiastic audience for his plays, for instance The Game of Love and Chance (Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard, 1730), we can see that Marivaux and his contemporaries were keenly aware of the possible divergence between nature and culture within a social system based on what we would call `class' and what was then called `condition'. A young woman, wishing to learn the true personality of the young man to whom her father has arranged to marry her, disguises herself as her maid. Little does she know that the young man has made the same exchange of identity with his valet and for the same purpose. Two couples form, in both cases assembling a man and a woman of the same real, but not apparent, condition - the disguised upper-class characters fall in love with each other.
This was a reassuringly conservative conclusion for Marivaux and his public, and conveyed the message that rank in society is not a superficial convention (as some of the more daring passages of Pascal's Pensees a hundred years earlier seemed to suggest) but rather has deeper roots, whether purely inherited or based on long cultivation. But the very fact that the subject of an entire play could be made out of this experiment - and in fact, not only one play, for similar issues appear throughout Marivaux's work - implies that the fear of a misalignment between one's natural characteristics and one's condition was quite present in the first half of the 18th century. Plays highlighting such possible social misalignment continued to have great success in the following years, as Beaumarchais's The Barber of Seville (Le Barbier de Seville, 1775) shows. It is at least partly in order to accommodate the more serious and less conservative development of these social thematics that French theatre created new genres in the course of the century, including `tearful comedy' (la comedie larmoyante) and the `drama' (le drame).
Enlightenment and the philosopher
While Marivaux was entertaining spectators by showing that, in the end, the social system was secure, a group that he particularly scorned, the philosophes, was raising serious questions about birth, rank, and the `natural' basis of civilization. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) published his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Discours sur l'origine et lesfondements de l'inegalite parmi les hommes, 1755), arguing that humankind had been happy in the original state of nature prior to the institution of private property, laws, and the social superstructure that maintains inequality. Denis Diderot (1713-84) and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-83) organized the Encyclopedie (1751-72, most of it published clandestinely), to which they and approximately 150 other writers contributed anonymous articles. The philosophes, a heterogeneous group rent by quarrels, were less `philosophers' in the modern sense, or even in the sense that Descartes was a philosopher, than they were public intellectuals committed to undoing superstition and ignorance and advocating pragmatic or technocratic solutions to problems of human life in society. Much of their work consisted of promoting a deeper and demystified understanding of the material world as it can be perceived through the senses. This aspect can be seen in Diderot's On the Interpretation of Nature (1753-4) concerning sense perceptions, but the encyclopedists also promoted contractual monarchy based on natural law and free enterprise. Their theory of knowledge is empiricist and rationalist and, accordingly, their treatment of knowledge about God is squarely within philosophy rather than within a revealed religion.
One of the best examples of the efforts of the philosophes to reach a wide audience through entertaining yet didactic works is Voltaire's Candide, a contephilosophique (philosophical tale) published anonymously in 1759. The immediate target of this satirical tale is Gottfried Leibniz's Essais de theodicee (1710), in which the philsopher argued that God has created the best of all possible worlds, the `optimal' world. In such a system, there is no objective evil. It was to describe Leibniz's position that the term `optimisme' entered the French language in 1737. The full title of Voltaire's tale is Candide ou l'optimisme, traduit de l'allemand de M. le Docteur Ralph [...]. The well-known story (the basis of the 1956 operetta Candide with score by Leonard Bernstein) follows the adventures of Candide, a German from Westphalia who was educated in his youth by Dr Pangloss (the Greek roots suggesting that he can speak about anything, probably a dig at Leibniz's prolific polymathic output) who teaches a teleological optimism: everything was created providentially for the best and could not be otherwise. Pangloss's assertions immediately appear absurd to the reader but not to Candide:
everything being made for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Consider that noses were made to wear spectacles: therefore we have spectacles. Legs were clearly made to be in hose, and we have hose.
As a literary creation, Candide is a highly successful character in both common meanings of the term: as a narrative `person' and as the possessor of a certain `character' (or personality trait) taken to its extreme. Voltaire describes him at the outset by saying `He had reasonably good judgment along with complete simplicity; that's why, I think, they called him Candide' (Il avait lejugement assez droit, avec l'esprit le plus simple; c'est, je crois, pour cette raison qu'on le nommait Candide). For Voltaire's satire of Leibnizian optimism and of all those who cling to ideologies in order to avoid facing unpleasant realities, it is important that the personage we follow around the globe be a mixture of perceptiveness and exceptional persistence within the rigid doctrine that Pangloss taught. Thus Voltaire was able to continue accumulating examples of natural horror (the Lisbon earthquake of 1755), Roman Catholic hypocrisy and intolerance (the autodafe in which the Portuguese priests burned three men to prevent further earthquakes; the grand inquisitor's sexual activities; the Jesuit kingdom in Paraguay), the murderous cruelty of European kingdoms and the empire, the mutilations of African slaves in Surinam, and various examples of venality and corruption, while Candide only very slowly gives up his reassuring Panglossian certitude that there must be a good reason for all this. By the time he sees the slave whose leg has been amputated as punishment for attempting to escape and whose hand has been cut off to get it out of the way of the sugar grinder, Candide does, however, exclaim `Oh Pangloss! ... you did not know of this abomination. That's it - I will have to renounce your optimism: When asked at this point what `optimism' is, Candide replies, `It's the mania of claiming that everything is all right when you are suffering' (c'est la rage de soutenir que tout est Bien quand on est mal). If Leibniz had been Voltaire's only target, and if he had not so perfectly matched his hero to the road show of horrors to produce such comic dissonance, Candide would not have survived in the popular imagination. But what Voltaire does here provides a microcosm of the work of the plzilosoplzes in setting reason against deep-seated cultural habit, against all the institutions that extinguish both the capacity for judgement, the responsibility for clear perception of the world, and a natural empathy.
The tension between social facade and inner nature
One of the most enduring literary successes of the century, an immediate best-seller with continued broad appeal (and the basis of at least four films), was Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). One of the characteristics of the epistolary form makes it particularly hard to locate a message or intention in any simple way, since there is no overall narrative voice. The book has variously been seen as anti-aristocratic (this is how the book was perceived by many of Laclos's contemporaries), feminist, anti-feminist, moralistic, and immoral. As a collection of letters set mostly in chronological order, the work at first seems to offer neutrality in point of view, but the letters written by the two highly self-conscious dominant characters, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil (dominant both in the
number of letters they write - though there are twice as many from Valmont - and in their clever manipulation of the other letter writers), essentially take up the functions of the narrator in a conventional single-narrator novel. They not only tell what happens, but analyse motivations and predict outcomes. We can consider the novel as having, therefore, two non-omniscient narrators who are competing with each other not only to present a certain view of what happens but to make things happen. Both are cynical rationalists with a keen understanding of human nature (that is, patterns of behaviour) but with blindspots that lead them both to ruin. We can see echoes of La Rochefoucauld in this psychology; Merteuil explicitly states that she learned about life by reading the works of `the most severe moralists', and La Rochefoucauld was especially acute in noting that people are blind to their own susceptibilities and motivations. Although Valmont and Merteuil consider themselves completely emancipated from religion and morality, they need to adjust appearances in order to function within the codes of their society, codes that are different for men and for women. For Valmont, as a male libertine, a public reputation as a successful seducer of women is a source of pride and has little negative impact on him. For Merteuil, it is quite different. She needs to seduce imperceptibly and always in circumstances that maintain for her a public reputation as a pious young widow. Even the men she seduces must not know that she has seduced them but must believe that they have seduced her. The unequal status accorded to men and women by society is thus an important theme and one that, along with the portrayal of a corrupt and idle aristocracy, is representative of the contemporary questioning of social convention and education.
By the end of the novel, Valmont's and Merteuil's rivalry (the smouldering remains of an earlier love affair between them) leads them to take vengeance on each other. Merteuil does this in the more subtle fashion by exploiting the gap between Valmont's gendered self-perception as publicly successful libertine seducer, on the one hand, and his real and passionate love for Madame de Tourvel, his most difficult conquest to date. Valmont, as Merteuil saw, is blind to his own nature. Confident in his rationalist stance, he believes that physical pleasure and virtuosity in seduction are his only motives. By exploiting the vanity that is indissociable from this form of male self-image, Merteuil provokes Valmont to destroy his only chance at emotional fulfilment. Valmont's subsequent revenge upon Merteuil is much cruder and easier and is also based on the gender disequilibrium created artificially by society. He simply leaves the packet of letters to be published, thus making her a pariah. The discrepancy between Valmont's deepest emotion and his socially determined vanity marks Les Liaisons dangereuses as valorizing nature over the social norms that alienate people from their deeper, hidden selves.
Flora, fauna, and `nature'
Laclos's novel is concerned with human nature in the form of what we would call psychology. What counts is the social world, and the changes of place from Paris to a country manor are only described as they inflect the interactions among groups of people - in this respect, Laclos's work is closer to novels of the preceding century. But many writers of the 18th century reflect an explosively growing interest in non-urban spaces and contextualize human behaviour and perception along a city/country divide. By mid-century, the work of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had reached France, and it became increasingly fashionable to herboriser, that is, to look for plant specimens. Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon) published the first volume of his Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere in 1749. Flora and fauna from a wide variety of climates became of interest to the general public, and alongside the new importance accorded to plants and animals were the people who lived among them. Country dwellers were no longer seen exclusively as persons deprived of the advantages of the city, for the life of the fields and the forests now seemed to offer protection from the artifice and corrupting influences of the city. This is a significant extension of the image that Jean de La Bruyere, in his Caracteres, on les moeurs de ce siecle (1688), drew of the pitiless and soul-less artificiality of Parisian and court life. La Bruyere portrayed the culture of his time as corrupting and created caustic images of the artificiality of the upper classes, but did not go so far as to suggest that things are really better outside the court and the city. Rousseau extended his critique of urban civilization, already set forth in the Discourse on the Origins oflnequality, in his Letter to d'Alembert on Spectacles (J.J. Rousseau Citoyen de Geneve, a Mr. d'Alembert sur les spectacles, 1758), in which he denounced the corrupting Parisian theatre in favour of the honest festivities of the `happy peasants' in the small cities of the provinces. Childhood took on a new importance with Rousseau - it continues to be a significant interest for the Romantics, starting with Chateaubriand. Rousseau devotes a great deal of attention to his own childhood in his autobiographical Confessions (finished in 1769, but published in 1782). And in Emile ou De l'education (1762), an exemplary narrative of a radically new form of upbringing, Rousseau, in the role of tutor, permits his young pupil only one book, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, in the hope that Emile will model himself on the self-reliant Crusoe living in a state of `nature'.
In 1788, the year before the meeting of the Etats Generaux at Versailles, which is customarily seen as the beginning of the Revolution, Rousseau's younger friend Bernardin de SaintPierre (1737-1814), an engineer, published one of the bestselling novels of the 18th century, Paul et Virginie. It is the quintessence of the nature versus culture theme of its time and created, in Virginie, a heroine whose abandonment of the simpler ways of her childhood upbringing in the wilderness leads directly to her death. The action of the novel takes place in Mauritius, then known as the he de France, where as children, Paul and Virginie grow up as best friends and almost siblings. At adolescence, their feelings change to romantic love, but Virginie is sent away to live in France with a wealthy and elderly aunt. When the aunt tries to force Virginie into a marriage, she refuses and is sent back to the island. As the ship nears land, a hurricane strikes and grounds the boat. The last sailor on the vessel tries to convince the heroine to take off her encumbering dress and swim to the land, but she refuses and accepts her fate. The author is emphatic on this matter of clothing and the quite dysfunctional modesty that Virginie brought from her European education. Modern readers may be tempted to laugh at the pathetic description of her corpse: `Her eyes were closed; but the pale violets of death intermingled on her cheeks with the roses of modesty. One of her hands was on her dress, and the other, clutched to her heart, was tightly closed...'. She grasps, of course, Paul's portrait.
5. A scene from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel Paul et Virginie (1787), in a 1805 engraving after Francois Gerard
Bernardin brought together, as did Rousseau, the concepts of human nature and of nature in the sense of flora and fauna, setting up the romantic idea that nature exists in a special way in certain places, that by leaving the city one comes closer to `nature', and by leaving Europe altogether one might find nature unspoiled - or one might, at the very least, come to a new understanding of oneself and of society by having a different vantage point. Paul and Virginie develop as upright, generous, frank, and somewhat austere young people not only because they are spared the corrupting social influences of their contemporaries in Europe but also, more mysteriously, because they are close to the earth of their tropical island. The contention that the basic trope of the novel as a genre is metonymic rather than metaphoric (that is, that it conveys significance by associating things in terms of spatial proximity rather than similarity) is useful for an understanding of the use of description in Paul et Virginie (and as it will be subsequently for the novels of Sand, Flaubert, and Balzac). Not only do the descriptions of plants and landscapes give an idea of the heroine's and hero's temperaments, but the interaction with these places shapes these temperaments. In the spirit of Rousseau's Emile, Paul is fully capable of felling a tree without an axe, making a fire without a flint, and making a warm meal from a palm bud. Paul, in short, seems a
n avatar of Robinson Crusoe. His greatness depends on what he can do, not on his birth.
`Because you are a great lord, you think you are a genius!... Nobility, wealth, rank, estates, all that makes you so proud! What did you do for so many riches? You simply took the trouble to be born, and nothing more: otherwise, a fairly ordinary man!'
(Parce que vows etes un grand seigneur, vows vows croyez on grand genie! ...Noblesse,fortune, un rang, des places, tout cela rend sifier! Qu'avez-vows fait pour taut de biens? Vous vous etes donne la peine de nitre, et rien de plus: du reste, homme assez ordinaire!)
With these words in a soliloquy, Figaro, the valet to Count Almaviva, describes his master, in Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais's masterpiece The Crazy Day, or The Marriage ofFigaro (La Folle journee, ou Le Mariage de Figaro), which was finally performed at the Comedie Francaise on 27 April 1784 after six years of censorship and intrigue. Less than five years later, in January 1789, the Plats Generaux were called into session for the first time since 1614 and, with hindsight, we perceive this as the beginning of the French Revolution.
Beaumarchais's comedy has become symbolic of the cultural ferment that led to the Revolution, though, like all historical events, there is a certain arbitrariness in choosing one single moment as the `beginning. The 18th century as a whole was full of signals of a growing disaffection for an absolute monarchy, a growing conviction that social institutions were based on an implicit contract rather than on divine authority or on an unquestioned nature of things. In the multi-talented Figaro, Beaumarchais created an internationally recognized personage who incarnates the wit, talent, and resentment of those who are not noble in title but who form the enterprising and successful tiers etat (the `third estate', as distinct from the aristocracy and the Church). Figaro has at one point the audacity actually to call himself a gentilhomme, explaining'If Heaven had wanted, I would be the son of a prince - and his references elsewhere in the play to chance (le hasard) make it clear that it is precisely a matter of pure chance that he and his master the count occupy their actual positions.