Figaro is also the amusing barber of The Barber of Seville (Le Barbier de Seville, 1775), in which work it is debatable whether he is the central figure or in a supporting role, and the very fact that he is the eponymous character and yet working for the benefit of another points to tensions in both the literary and the more broadly social context. In that earlier play, he helps the count defeat the machinations of the ageing Dr Bartholo and marry Bartholo's beautiful and wealthy young ward. The intricate and extremely amusing goings-on in these two comedies are at least in part responsible for the many works based on them, ranging from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro only two years after the play to one of the early French films of Georges Melies, Le Barbier de Seville (1904), as is the resourcefulness of the protagonist. It is worth noting that the titles of both comedies refer to Figaro.
Who is Figaro? The structure of The Marriage ofFigaro places this question somewhat unexpectedly in the middle of the play, the third of the five acts, which consists of a judicial proceeding to enforce a contract. Figaro had borrowed a large sum of money from a much older woman and had promised to marry her if he failed to repay the loan. In centring his play on this moment, Beaumarchais emphasizes the themes of finance, contract, law, birth, and class power - all themes that were central to the Revolution. Figaro's employer, the count, who is also trying to seduce Figaro's fiancee, is also the presiding judicial authority, and this arrangement calls into question the foundation of any just law. The only reason that Figaro is able to avoid this marriage is the chance discovery that he is the long-lost son of the woman from whom he borrowed the money. Figaro turns out to be of `higher' birth than he had seemed, yet there is still a disparity between rank and talent. Figaro's question `What did you do for so many riches?' remains a valid one, for it is clear that the powerful count is neither smarter nor more energetic than his valet and considerably less moral. Where Marivaux played with the idea that a person's intelligence, sensitivity, and talent might be at odds with his or her class (birth) origins, only to conclude in each case that, when the true identity of each is established, inherited privilege is justified, for Beaumarchais this is no longer the case.
When Figaro reclaims his birth identity in The Marriage of Figaro, Beaumarchais does more than reflect the political and social controversies of the day. He also points to the parallel agitation in literature itself. As Victor Hugo was to show a few decades later in the preface to Cromwell, the division of dramatic genres into comedy and tragedy no longer seemed to keep pace with perceptions of human society. The 18th century had burst out of this binary structure, inherited from 17th-century neoAristotelianism, and had produced many plays called drames. Beaumarchais himself had written a drame, Eugenie, that was performed at the Comedie Francaise in 1767, and on that occasion he also published his Essay on the Serious Dramatic Genre (Essai sur le genre dramatique serieux). He again brought up this question in a'Moderate Letter' (Lettre moderee) that he published as a preface to the printed version of Le Barbier de Seville. In this often sarcastic letter, he notes the classical distinction between comedy and tragedy and the traditional exclusion of anything in between. Aristotle had defined comedy as the representation of men lower than ourselves and tragedy as that of men superior to ourselves. Beaumarchais exclaims:
To attempt to present people of a middle condition, overwhelmed and in wretched situations, shame on you! One should only show them ridiculed. Ridiculous citizens and unfortuante kings - those are the only real and possible theatrical works.
(Presenter des hommes d'une condition moyenne, accables et Bans le malheur, fi done! On ne doitjamais les montrer que bafoues. Les citoyens ridicules et les rois malheureux, voila tout le theatre existant et possible.)
The shift in dramatic genres corresponds, then, to a change in the type of person who can be the central figure, the hero, like Figaro.
One extreme of the `nature' debate
The century-long questioning of the basis of the social order and growing scepticism about the claims that the social order was founded on nature, itself based on divine providence, led to far more radical expressions. The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) published Justine on les Malheurs de la Vertu (1791) anonymously, the year after the Revolution brought about his release from a long imprisonment. Justine was an instant success. Although this novel, like most of his copious writings, is known for its depiction of the kind of sexual activity that gave us the adjective `sadistic', Sade's writing concerns much more than `unnatural' sexual practices. Anyone reading Sade primarily for titillation is likely to be disappointed: much of the narrative is interrupted by philosophical reflections on the permanence of evil and the pleasure that it gives the perpetrators. Although Sade took the side of the Revolution and was, despite his aristocratic origins, elected to the National Convention in 1790, he differed from the philosophes of the Enlightenment by not believing that society could bring about improvements in man's lot.
6. Napoleon Bonaparte throwing a book of the Marquis de Sade into the fire, in a drawing attributed to P. Cousturier (1885)
The liberation from revealed religion that permitted the Revolution to found a state on human reason was taken by Sade as the opportunity for complete freedom in the service of pleasure in a world in which the strong use and destroy the weak One of the heroine's persecutors calmly explains the process by which primitive men invented a transcendent being to explain natural phenomena that frightened them. In its structure, Justine combines the loose, open-ended picaresque plot with the atmosphere of the gothic novel. Justine as heroine is a female Candide, but where Candide represents common sense at last freeing itself from a doctrine that is obviously ridiculous, in Justine, more daringly, the central tenets of religion and the traditional state are presented as absurd, while Justine tries vainly to resist on behalf of religion and virtue. In a dedicatory letter, Sade presents the triumph of vice as a literary innovation, saying that novels almost always show good rewarded and evil punished, but:
to show an unfortunate woman wandering from one calamity to another, a plaything of wickedness, target of every debauchery, exposed to the most barbarous and monstrous appetites [...] with the goal of drawing from all that one of the most sublime lessons of morality that mankind has every received - this is [... ] to reach the goal by a road little travelled until now.
Sade's atheistic libertinism was always out of step with the Revolution as a whole, with its emphasis on civic virtue and equality (both in short supply in Sade's novels) and became more so as time passed. Arrested by Napoleon under the Consulate, Sade died in the Charenton mental hospital just before the Bourbon Restoration.
From `heroes' to great men (and women)
`Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be based solely on what is useful to all' (Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et egau,x en droits. Les distinctions sociales ne peuvent etre fondees que sur l'utilite commune), proclaims the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (La Declaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen, 26 August 1789). This brief and eloquent official document, adopted by the National Constituent Assembly, demonstrates that the central issue of the struggle that lasted from 1789 until the Bourbon Restoration in 1814 was the status of each individual man (two years later Olympe de Gouges pointed out the omission of women's rights in her proposal for a Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne - her text was rejected and she died on the guillotine in 1793).
Figaro had prefigured this demand for equality, and Justine suffered as eternal victim of an aristocratic libertinism. Looking forward and backwards from these representative literary figures, we can see (with help from Beaumarchais's Moderate Letter) that all works reveal ideas, usually implicit and taken for granted, about which people are worth writing about, about whose stories are important. The choice of central figure can fall on a hero, as in the case of Roland, who represents the highest aspirations of society as perceived by the author; on an eccentric, like Mol
iere's misanthropic Alceste; or on a villain or anti-hero, consummate example of some deep vice, like the hypocrite Tartuffe in another comedy of Moliere, Le Tartuffe. The Revolution broadened the spectrum of those whose stories were considered worthy of attention - following the line advocated by Beaumarchais, but not far enough for de Gouges - and it would continue to broaden in the following centuries. Nonetheless, it would be a vast simplification to say that French literature had simply become more `egalitarian' and shifted from Roland to Figaro, from Gargantua to Candide. There had always been central characters who represented those of modest condition, from the street-smart self-taught lawyer Master Pierre Pathelin (in La Farce de Maistre Pathelin, c. 1464) to the police officers of Lyon in Francois de Rosset's Histoires tragiques de nostre temps (1614). However, these people were generally presented as either comical or shocking in a society within which literature reflected the unchanging assignment of people to life-long places within class (or `condition'). While they might be protagonists, they were not `heroes' if we mean by this term those who are held in highest esteem.
7. Voltaire's remains are transferred to the Pantheon, 1791, engraving after Lagrenee
The Revolution, following developments throughout the Enlightenment, changed that. On 4 April 1791, the Constituent Assembly ordered the transformation of the just-built church of the abbey of Sainte Genevieve into a'Pantheon of Great Men' (Pantheon des Grands Hommes). This was a decisive shift, from the older concept of the `hero' to the new idea of `great man'. Henceforth, not only exceptional military valour but also outstanding merit in non-military service would be recognized as earning a place at the pinnacle of society. Heretofore, the highest aristocracy, from whom the monarch came, had been fundamentally a military caste (the noblesse d'epee), and one of the highest functions of the poet had been to sing the glory of the military hero. The physical monument known as the Pantheon (where today the writers Rousseau, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Andre Malraux are buried) marks the culmination of this shift in the conception of greatness, and it has been shown that the Enlightenment idea of the `great man' and of a national Pantheon preceded the architectural site that we now associate with that name.
Literature and its epoch
Literature concerning the Revolution continued to be written long after the Bourbon kings returned. On this point, two observations should be made, one obvious and the other less so. It is obvious that in the quarter-century between the Etats Generaux of 1789 and the installation of Louis XVIII as king in 1814, less could be written about the events of those years than in the centuries that have followed. France thus has many novels, plays, and poems about the Revolution from the following period. A less obvious observation is that whenever we write about literature within an historical framework, it is difficult to resist the (false) idea that the French people of the past had available to them the same range of texts that we do. Of course, for the most part, they had more; they had the many books that were printed once and never reprinted or that were best-sellers at the time and then disappeared into the depths of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. It has been said that there were well over a thousand plays produced during the Revolution - but (as Villon might have asked): where are the plays of yesterday?
On the other hand, in some instances we have works that contemporaries did not have. De Gouges's Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne was printed in 1791, but how many people actually saw this proposal, which now figures in many university courses about Revolutionary France? In the case of Sade, his manuscript Les Cent Vingt Journees de Sodome, which he wrote in the Bastille and lost on his release, was not widely available in print until the 1930s. Should this work by Sade be considered part of the history of the literature of the 18th century, or of the 20th? Such questions, of course, are not limited to this particular period, nor even to unpublished or little-circulated works. Montaigne's Essais (first edition 1580; revised editions in 1588 and 1595) are routinely viewed as part of the literary culture of the 16th century. Yet the third book of the Essais, containing some of the most important chapters, could only have been read during the last 11 years of the 16th century, whereas Montaigne was a hugely important author during the century after his death. And Irene Nemirovsky's novellas, written before the author died in Auschwitz, were published more than sixty years later as Suite Francaise (2004). They belong in one sense to the culture of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and in another sense to the literary culture of the early 21st century.
Looking back at the Revolution
So the Revolution continued to inspire literary works in various and sometimes paradoxical ways, and to focus on characters who could not have been imagined prior to this great upheaval. Claire de Duras's short story Ourika (1823) appears in many ways as a very modern text that has affinities both with the anti-slavery and pro-woman writings of Olympe de Gouges and with today's feminism and interest in non-European cultures. On the other hand, the narrative Ourika emerges out of a highly conservative point of view that ends by condemning both the progressive aristocracy of the Enlightenment and the Revolution for creating excessive hope for emancipation. In her own terms, the central figure of the story, Ourika, is a kind of monster created by the Enlightenment and by an incomplete Revolution. Her firstperson narrative (which is presented as committed to paper by an attending physician) relates her arrival in France as an orphan from Senegal who was bought as a slave at the age of two by a kind-hearted colonial governor and given to his aunt, who raised her as a beloved child. Ourika lives happily in luxury and is given a'perfect education', learning English, Italian, painting, and reading the finest authors. She knows that she is une negresse but is far from considering this a defect. Everyone finds her charming, elegant, and beautiful. She is an outstanding dancer. In short, everything seems wonderful to Ourika until the day when she overhears a conversation in which her generous patroness tells a friend about Ourika, `I would do anything to make her happy, and yet, when I think about her position, I see it as hopeless. Poor Ourika! I see her as alone, forever alone in life!'
8. Bust by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, entitled `Why be born a slave?' (1868)
From that point onward, Ourika realizes that her race makes her unmarriageable in a society in which only marriage can confer station, respectability, and an honourable relationship with a man. In the words of one of the characters in the story, Ourika's upbringing has 'violated the natural order' (brise l'ordre de la nature). She could only marry an inferior, venal man who `for the sake of money, would consent perhaps to have negro children'. Ourika ends up in a convent, ashamed both of the African slaves who revolted in Haiti and at the executions and confiscations of the Revolution in European France. She fits in nowhere except in the convent, neither in the old French, white aristocratic order in which she was raised, nor in her native Senegal, nor in the supposedly egalitarian democratic society. Claire de Duras, who hosted a very influential Paris salon during the Restoration, shows in Ourika the conservative or reactionary face of French Romanticism. This short narrative incorporates some of Rousseau's and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's ideas of the harmful effects of society and the natural order - Ourika is like a Senegalese Virginie, lost when transported to Europe. But Duras's idea of the `natural order' is an anti-Revolutionary one, belonging to the world of the Restoration aristocracy which returned to France from exile.
Many of these exiled aristocrats wrote with decided nostalgia for the old order, often going far back into the past for their settings or continuing the 18th-century exploration of exotic locations, but with an anti-Enlightenment, Christian emphasis like that presented by Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, author of the very influential The Genius of Christianity (Le Genie du Christianisme, 1802). In his novella Rene, published originally as part of this longer work, he portrays the troubled hero Rene, a lonely, tormented, self-centred aristocrat, haunted by his incestuous love of his sister (here, again, the insistence on the tragic consequences of violations of
the natural order), who finds truth among the North American Indians. Rene's flight to Louisiana may have been suggested by the earlier and extremely popular Manon Lescaut, by Antoine Francois Prevost (1731), in which the courtesan Manon - a prototype for many a subsequent `femme fatale' - and her lover seek to live peacefully in the French colony, but where Manon dies of exposure and exhaustion in the inhospitable wilderness. Chateaubriand, a somewhat paradoxical follower of Rousseau, used the New World as the vantage point from which to criticize modern mankind: alienated, self-important, and without the humility to submit to tradition. With Chateaubriand, the ideas of the `modern' and of progress take on meanings quite different from the ones they had before the Revolution. The Enlightenment had largely accepted from the 17th century the promotion of classical antiquity as far superior to the intervening Middle Ages. Chateaubriand accepted the idea of progress, but attributed it to Christianity, and thus shifted emphasis from antiquity to the centuries of Christian dominance. He engaged in a public controversy with the important theorist and critic Germaine de Stael, author, among many other works, of On Literature Considered in its Relations with Social Institutions (De la ltterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 1800), in which he set out his strong opposition to any positive concept of modernity not based on Christianity. His revalorization of the medieval over the classical worldview had many followers in the 19th century.
On the other side of the political and cultural divide that issued from the Revolution is Stendhal (pen-name of Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783-1842), who served in the Napoleonic armies, and who created a kind of anti-Rene in Julien Sorel, hero of The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le noir, Chronique de 1830, 1830), an ambitious young man of very modest class inspired by Napoleon, yet living under the oppressive Bourbon monarchy. As an adolescent, his favourite books are Rousseau's Confessions and Le Memorial de Sainte-Helene, an account of Napoleon's conversations during his last years as a prisoner, after his defeat at Waterloo. Stendhal, considered the forerunner of the `realist' novel, both creates a fascinatingly complex character and evokes the long-lasting social tensions and turbulence that followed the Revolution up until the July Revolution (like Stendhal's novel, 1830). Although Julien's two dominant traits are hypocrisy and ambition, he is surrounded by women and men who love and help him during his social ascent and then his spectacular crime and execution. The contrast between his heroic aspirations - however anti-heroic the means he adopts to achieve them - and the philistinism, complacency, and greed of the society around him, is typical of the Romantic conception of the hero found soon after in Alfred de Vigny's play Chatterton (1835) and many works of the subsequent decades.
French Literature: A Very Short Introduction Page 7
