French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (10 page)

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 an 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.