French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (9 page)

The heroism of the battlefield, the exotic locations, the very visible
hostilities that pit the protagonists against one another in tragedy,
epic, and the huge romance novels of earlier in the century, have
here been replaced by the subtle decoding of glances, details of
dress, and presence or absence at balls and other social gatherings.
But what gives the Princess a status equivalent to the protagonists
of these other texts is her problematic uniqueness. With her
mother's initial guidance, the Princess formed and then executed a
heroic project: to be different from all other women. Some of this distinction is visible to a few of the members of the court. One of
the queens says that the Princess is the only woman who tells her
husband everything. In fact, the Princess confesses privately to
her husband that she loves someone else, while keeping that man's
name secret and promising never to be unfaithful - this avowal
was one of the most shocking and controversial aspects of the
novel when it appeared. But the Duke himself is the only person
in the novel who knows the full extent of her heroic resolve. After
her husband's death (of a broken heart, because he has improperly
decoded a set of appearances and wrongly believes his wife to be
unfaithful - this is a novel in which misinterpretation is lethal),
in a brief conversation, the Princess admits to her lover that their
passion is mutual, but that she will never marry him. She intends,
as she tells him, to act according to a duty that `only exists in
my imagination' not to marry the man who was, indirectly and
unwittingly, the cause of her husband's death. Throughout the
novel, and particularly in its conclusion, the Princess is described
as being unparalleled, unique, and exceptional. The last sentence
of the novel ends: `her life, which was rather short, left examples
of inimitable virtue'.

With The Princess of Cleves, Lafayette showed the cost of being
exceptional and not following the prevailing model of conduct -
in this, the story fits the model we saw earlier in tragedy and
comedy - but she also shows how changes in French culture and
in the status of women modified the standard for what is worthy
of attention and for what constitutes exceptional achievement.
For 17th-century feminists, a woman's decision to be independent,
not to remarry, and to form her own ideal of conduct constituted
a story at least as interesting as that of a male military hero.
Starting with her mother's lesson that a happy marriage was the
only worthy goal for a woman, the Princess ended with a very
different achievement.

The problem of `nature'

Given the intense focus on society and its norms that
characterized the 17th century, it is perhaps not surprising that
the 18th century should react in part against this exclusive focus
and shift the discussion to the question of nature. The opposition
between nature and culture (or between physis and nomos) is
very ancient, but it took on a new vitality in the 18th century.
17th-century French thought, particularly in literary circles, was
not kind to nature. It seemed clear that the world was defective
and that religion and art had the mission of correcting things or,
at the very least, of filtering out the naturally occurring errors.
Left to himself - to his temperament, since that was determined
by the imbalance in his humours - Moliere's Alceste would be
miserable and unfit for society. His friends try to counterbalance
that tendency by teaching him manners. In a more serious vein,
Pascal taught that mankind's nature had been fundamentally
altered by Original Sin, so that what we call `natural' is only a
perverse illusion - Pascal is here very close to Thomas Hobbes, a
long-time resident of Paris, who had nothing good to say about the
`state of nature'. Finally, by the literary doctrine of vraisemblance,
the French Academy and others taught that dramatists should
not portray what happens in the ordinary course of things but
rather what should happen, if the world were not imperfect. In short, any 17th-century writer who used the term `nature' in a
positive way meant something that was far removed from the
world of experience. Writers often praised the `natural' manner of
speaking, only to point out that such a style could only be achieved
by careful imitation of the best models; in other words, le naturel
was the best form of artifice. As for the relatively modern notion
that one could go `into nature' (dans la nature) by leaving the city,
such a sense of a privileged unspoiled space would have appeared
complete nonsense to the subjects of Louis XIV.

This uniformly dismissive view of nature began to change in the
18th century. Society was still at the forefront of intellectual and
literary discussions, but now nature became a component of
that discussion in a much more varied and less predictable way.
Indeed, for the Enlightenment, Nature - both human nature and
the wild forces of the earth - was, broadly speaking, at the core
of most important questions. Was nature good but somehow
concealed and distorted by social institutions and habits? Or was
nature indifferent, or even hostile, to mankind, and should people
therefore cease to appeal to nature as the source of concepts of
`good' and `rights'? Was nature composed of spirit and matter,
or was nature purely material and fully available to us through
sensations? Nature no longer seemed inaccessible to experience.
The earlier, more optimistic views of Montaigne and Rabelais now
returned in a very much amplified and better documented way.
While Montaigne found much to praise (and many things that
shocked him) in what he learned of the indigenous Americans,
exploration, commerce, and colonialism brought much more
information about life outside of Europe. It was not simply that
the peoples of Brazil or of the South Pacific islands were closer
to `nature' (in the sense that their settlements were smaller and
seemed less urban and technologically advanced), but also that
the multitude of customs and fundamental laws, things that seem
entirely self-evident, was found to be so different from one culture
to another that what French people took for granted as `nature'
no longer seemed secure. The quest to discover, or rediscover, nature and to refound society on the basis of this surer knowledge
was perhaps the major theme of the Enlightenment, l'&ge des
Lumieres.

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.