Culture and Society in France 1789-1848

By F. W. J. Hemmings

This book, first published in 1987, complements the author's earlier volume on Culture and Society in France 1848-1898. It deals with the interaction of social history and cultural history, covering in succession the Revolutionary period, the Napoleonic Empire, the Restoration and the July Monarchy. The scope of the book embraces literature (the drama, poetry and the novel), the art of the Revolution and of Romanticism, and to a lesser extent music (including the opera), sculpture and architecture.

Influential figures such as Jacques-Louis David, Stendhal, Berlioz, Victor Hugo and others have their place in the survey, together with others prominent in their time hut less well known today. Attention is drawn to phenomena such as the rise of the commercial theatre, and the assembling under Napoleon's aegis of the first public art gallery in Europe, the Musée du Louvre. The survey brings together all the disparate strands to present a coherent picture of the cultural life of France as it evolved during the sixty momentous years between the French Revolution and the upheaval of 1848.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448204632

F. W. J. Hemmings

Frederick William John Hemmings was born in Southampton in 1920. Hemmings served in the Second World War, decrypting German codes in the Army Intelligence Corps, but in 1946 he returned to academic life in Oxford, completing his DPhil in 1949, a groundbreaking study that was published the following year by Oxford University Press: The Russian Novel in France 1884-1914. Hemmings made his mark as a pioneer of Zola studies and is known as the foremost Zola critic in the English-speaking world. Further studies on Zola and Stendhal were published in later years, as were books on two other major 19th-century French writers: The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas (1979) and Baudelaire the Damned (1982). This project of Balzacian and Zolaesque proportions was realised all the more remarkably during a busy nine-year term of office as head of the French department at Leicester University, where he was a hugely respected literary scholar. Hemmings was twice married and left behind one son and one daughter when he died in Leicester in 1997.

Book preview

Introduction

The word culture is customarily used in a passive sense, as in phrases like ‘a man of culture’ or in Matthew Arnold’s celebrated but question-begging definition of culture as ‘the acquainting of ourselves with the best that has been known or said in the world’. For present purposes, however, it is the active sense that concerns us, in other words culture as meaning the production of works of art, of literature, or of music. And the first point to notice is that the products of cultural activity are not intended for consumption or application in the same way as are the products of human activity in other spheres. The artist is not a grower of crops nor an inventor of machinery. What he does could be called useless, since the things we call useful are always the things that can be put to use. The shepherd of today who whistles his dog is using a musical note for a specific purpose. The shepherd of the legendary pastoral age who played on his pipes was engaging in this activity for its own sake, and the air he played was a cultural product. A policeman’s or a referee’s whistle is utilitarian, a flute is not.

But the flute was invented, fashioned and perfected by men, and one must therefore suppose that it came into existence in response to a human need. The need for cultural stimulus and aesthetic satsfaction has been with us ever since the struggle to stay alive ceased to be so overwhelming that it absorbed all man’s time and energy. From that point on, culture started to impinge on society, and vice versa; for it is one of the marks of a fully civilized society that the arts affect every activity, leaving their imprint on even purely utilitarian objects; the wine-jar is decorated, the sword is given a jewelled pommel; poetry, music and song turn mere mating into a congress of ravished spirits.

Strictly, the swordsman needs but a good smith to forge him a stout blade; in battle, the gold filigree work on the hilt might as well not be there. Because of the intrinsic uselessness of art, its practitioner always risks feeling himself to be, or even finding himself to be, an unassimilated outsider moving uneasily round the fringes of the society which supports him. In antiquity, and to some extent in medieval times, this fear of alienation was kept at bay by the religious significance that attached to cultural activities. Orpheus, the sweet singer, founded a sect of mystics; Apollo, a god, performed on the lyre and Athena, a goddess, was the patroness of the arts in ancient Greece. Later, Athena handed over to St Cecilia, and the cathedrals, providing unmatched opportunities for the gratuitous exercise of the architect’s gifts, were raised to the greater glory of God. Culture derives from cult, in more than just the etymological sense. Simply because original art is necessarily creation ex nihilo, it was always easy to link its practice with the mysteries of worship and ritual and to claim a divine source for its inventions. But as the centuries passed, religion loosened its hold over men’s minds, and as society grew increasingly secularized, those who practised the arts had to find some other way to justify their activities. Support was found to be forthcoming, during the Renaissance and the post-Renaissance period, from the great monarchs, the powerful prelates and the wealthy noblemen of what were then the civilized countries of Europe. Greatness, power and wealth can best be displayed by the accumulation of apparently useless, but beautiful objects or by indulgence in apparently useless, but delightful activities. So the court painter and architect, the court poet and musician found a new role in supplying princes and popes with what they needed to testify to their magnificence.

This phase too came to an end, and the Revolution of 1789 in France, ushering in as it did a new age in which princely courts and aristocratic assemblies became an anachronism, and the accumulation of wealth and power a much more diffuse activity, posed two new problems for the purveyor of cultural artefacts. Who was he to work for? What purpose was his work to serve? In the absence of satisfactory answers to these questions, the danger of a new and disastrous alienation from society threatened to become acute.

In fact, as this book and its sequel (already published) will try to show, this alienation did not manifest itself immediately, but only several decades later, after the revolution of July 1830 and increasingly and more acutely after the 1848 revolution. For the first ten years following the fall of the Bastille, the men who found themselves in control of the country’s destinies realized that, depending as they did in the last resort on the backing they had in public opinion, anyone who might help them direct and mould it could be very valuable to them. As the pictorial masterpieces of earlier times were transferred from inaccessible palaces to public museums, thus providing the rudiments for popular education in the fine arts, as authors grew accustomed to addressing themselves to every class of people instead of to a limited élite constituted by ‘polite society’, so those who specialized in creative cultural activity acquired a stronger influence than ever over broader areas of the national consciousness. A powerful political ruler like Napoleon regarded the painters, architects, dramatists and even musicians with a new respect, but also with a wary eye. Artists and writers found themselves liable to political persecution, a new and unpleasant experience but one which at least gave them a fuller understanding of the social role they might aspire to. After Napoleon’s fall, the part to be played in the society of the future by its culturally productive members was defined and codified by Saint-Simon and his followers.

In this way culture, over the period covered by this book, found itself caught up in a crossfire of encouragement and suspicion. Few artists had received more public honour than David; yet he was imprisoned after Thermidor and went into lifelong exile after the Restoration. Few writers - certainly no woman writer - had ever acquired the political influence wielded by Mme de Staël; but every copy of her most important book was seized and destroyed by the police of the First Empire. Throughout these 60 years the theatres and opera houses were crowded, as were the art galleries whenever an exhibition of contemporary painting was held. On the other hand, simply because culture was recognized to be so powerful a social force, crude methods of control such as the censorship were never more tyrannously applied.

But there were those who refused to commit brush or pen to any cause, preferring to stop their ears to the siren call of statesmen and religious leaders. Their talents, they thought, had been given them to be exercised for the benefit of all humanity; could it be right to devote time to the furtherance of this or that political programme? Was a ‘social role’ compatible with the purity of their mission? Literature might be, as Bonald had said in 1806, ‘the expression of society’, but if that society was vulgar, materialistic, greedy and selfish, should not literature, should not art in general be on guard against contamination? This seems to have been the thinking behind a separatist, ‘art for art’s sake’ movement which emphasized the permanent and universal values of cultural activity and rejected the attempts of well-meaning philosophers to foist on it a dubiously ‘useful’ social role. But however useless the artist may proclaim, proudly or humbly, his product to be, it needs an exceptional character to labour alone and ignored throughout his life, trusting in eventual posthumous recognition. Hence, in the absence of an immediate popular demand for certain innovative works of limited appeal, we shall find, before and immediately after 1830, the emergence of small groups or ‘cénacles’ whose function it was to act as a self-contained association of producers and consumers isolated from, and by implication superior to the profanum vulgus outside.

A feature of these small cells was that they included practitioners of all the different branches of culture. Poets, painters, musicians, novelists, even artists commingled, criticizing but more often applauding one another’s efforts. The breaking down of the barriers between the various arts, the federalization of the world of culture, is in fact one of the most interesting and significant features of the whole of the period under review. During the Revolution it permitted the launching of such unprecedented co-operative enterprises as the ‘national festivals’, and its later manifestations included the extensive use of literary material by painters and composers, as well as the popularization of a new operatic form which owed almost as much to the art of the set-designer and scene-painter as to that of the musician.

This, then, is the somewhat complicated story we have to unravel. At the end of it all we shall have achieved something less than a history of the total intellectual life of the country between the two revolutions, for this intellectual life, which was remarkably rich, extends into areas not immediately relevant to our central theme. All kinds of crucial advances, for instance, were made in chemistry, physics, astronomy and palaeontology. Lavoisier, guillotined in 1794, Laplace, Sadi Carnot, Lamarck, Gay-Lussac, Cuvier, Le Verrier, all ensured that France remained in the forefront of scientific progress throughout this period. But no mention of their achievements will be found here, and similarly the work of the great philosophers, economists and political thinkers will concern us only in so far as their ideas impinged on the cultural scene as we have defined it.

It is necessary in conclusion to touch on one of the principal difficulties in tracing the relationships between cultural change and social development within a given period. This arises from the frequently observed fact that there are vast differences between the importance an artist or writer assumes for posterity, and the importance he was credited with at the time his works were first set before his contemporaries. Cultural values are independent of contemporary fashions, but temporary fashions may be all-important for the understanding of the cultural climate of a particular historical epoch. For this reason we shall be found to have devoted as much space, for instance, to Marie-Joseph Chénier as to his far more gifted brother André; Horace Vernet will loom larger than Camille Corot, because in his time Vernet was a prominent painter and Corot a relatively obscure one; and there may be more to say about Scribe’s forgotten vaudevilles than about Musset’s perennially lively comedies. Of course it is impossible, and would in any case be undesirable, to try to exclude from consideration the real aesthetic value of a cultural product when attempting to assess its historical significance. The two things act and react on one another; Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir made their impact at the time partly because of their significance as social comment, but partly also because they were aesthetic masterpieces. Nevertheless, the picture we shall be drawing of the cultural scene in France between 1789 and 1848 will not accord in all respects with the picture that a literary historian, an art historian, or a musicologist, preoccupied as they rightly are with what is of permanent value, would draw if they chose to write about the same era. We shall necessarily be more concerned with the immediate impact of the works and their authors on their contemporary public than in their ultimate value in the eyes of posterity. An analogy with the work of cartographers will help to explain why there should be this difference. The same area of the earth can be charted using different map projections: the size and shape of islands and continents will be found to vary considerably, but only because there is more than one way of representing a portion of the globe on a flat sheet of paper.

[1]

On the Eve of the Revolution

Les livres libertins commentent donc et expliquent la Révolution. (Baudelaire)

Writers and artists are, in general, no surer prophets of what is to come than ordinary men, but it sometimes happens that, on the eve of some dramatic or cataclysmic revolution in the state, certain of their works become charged with a kind of premonitory electricity; their contemporaries may have been only indistinctly aware of its presence but posterity, wise after the event, not only professes to detect it but hastens to draw from it conclusions which nothing in the known facts strictly warrants. To later generations, this or that work of fiction seems to sum up definitively the essential rottenness of a doomed order; a play pinpoints, with an acuteness and audacity never before attained, the grievances of a whole class simmering with revolt; a celebrated canvas seems already to breathe the puritan ardour of fanatics waiting darkly in the wings to seize power. There is some degree of illusion in such interpretations, but a measure of truth also. The creators of these works may never have suspected that they were helping in the destruction of a way of life which by and large suited them well enough; but effects do not always correspond to intentions, and if Stendhal was right when he said that the arts are nothing more than the froth on the fermenting vat of society, then it follows that these artists could not avoid giving expression to the discontents and conflicting aspirations of their age.

In the decade which was to end with the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos published his first and only novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses; Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, after endless vexations and difficulties, succeeded in staging his satirical comedy Le Mariage de Figaro; and Jacques-Louis David painted and exhibited, first in Rome and then in Paris, his first revolutionary masterpiece, Le Serment des Horaces. Each of these works made an extraordinary impact on the public at the time; and each conveys through the particular medium adopted something of the guilt feelings, the resentfulness and the quest for a new moral purpose that marked the 13 feverish years between the Declaration of American Independence and the assembly of the Estates General at Versailles. But whether any of these masterpieces made a positive contribution to the march of events is another question; one frequently argued over but probably impossible to settle, given the inevitably intangible nature of cultural influence on the social and political evolution of a nation.

Laclos: Les Liaisons dangereuses

In the course of an astonishingly bitter denunciation of Les Liaisons dangereuses, which constitutes one of the most frequently quoted passages of his autobiography, Count Alexandre de Tilly called Laclos’s novel ‘one of those disastrous meteors which appeared beneath a fiery sky at the end of the eighteenth century’. Elsewhere, varying his metaphors, he described it as ‘one of the revolutionary waves which fell into the ocean that submerged the court. It was one of the thousand flashes of lightning accompanying that thunder, though nobody saw it as such.’ However Tilly, who was 18 when the book appeared, wrote these words long after the dissolution of the royal court for which he here holds Laclos as being in part responsible.¹ The French Revolution struck Tilly as an irretrievable personal disaster of the worst kind. In the 1780s he had tasted to the full the delights of the douceur de vivre reserved at the time for the privileged few of his age and rank. Sent to court at 15 as page in the suite of Marie-Antoinette, this Chérubin soon revealed himself in his true colours as a Vicomte de Valmont, graduating, in other words, from precocious womaniser to ruthless libertine. But the fall of the monarchy in 1792 put an end to this life of gilded vice. Tilly fled from France and thereafter, together with so many others of his class, led the painful existence of the émigré forced to shift for himself in a friendless foreign country. He had every reason to regret the passing of the ancien régime; and once he had persuaded himself that the author of Les Liaisons dangereuses was in some measure responsible for its break-up, necessarily he judged the book to be pernicious, ‘the work of an intelligence of the first order, of a gangrened heart and of the spirit of evi’.

Even so, Tilly makes no attempt in these memoirs to gloss over the passionate admiration with which he devoured the book when it first appeared, nor his eagerness to share his enthusiasm particularly with his women friends. Here again he was typical of his class and generation. In 1782, when it was published, the book caused a major sensation; its success eclipsed even that achieved by the first volume of Rousseau’s Confessions which appeared later the same year. Laclos’s original contract with his publisher was for an edition of 2,000 copies which, for a first printing of a novel by an almost completely unknown author, was sizeable. But only five weeks later he was treating for a second impression of 2,000. After that, pirated editions (contrefaçons) began to flood the bookshops: six or seven in 1782 and another half-dozen, at least, before the year of the Revolution. Mme Riccoboni, a sentimental novelist of an older generation who was horrified by the book, nevertheless paid Laclos an unwilling compliment when she wrote to him in April 1782: ‘Everyone in Paris is eager to read you, everyone in Paris is talking about you.’

The excited reception given to Les Liaisons dangereuses must be attributed up to a point to the very real literary merits of the book, which the highly cultivated reading public of the late eighteenth century was well equipped to appreciate. Laclos had chosen to write his novel using the epistolary form which Richardson and Rousseau had popularized and which Goethe too had experimented with. It is perhaps the most difficult fictional form of all, which is one reason, no doubt, why it has fallen into almost complete abeyance since the end of the eighteenth century. The epistolary novelist is debarred from providing his own appraisal of his characters or his own interpretation of the sequence of events; characterization, in fact, is at the mercy of the judgements passed on third parties by two characters exchanging letters, except in so far as the author is clever enough to convey the moral qualities of his various characters by the tricks of style used in their letters; Laclos was particularly adept at this. The creation of environmental atmosphere is almost automatically ruled out, while dramatic irony can only arise from the events as they develop; it can never be highlighted by narrative devices. In fact, the epistolary novel is very nearly fiction without narrative, an almost inconceivable tour de force; what narrative there is has to be provided, in fits and starts, by the different letter-writers communicating with one another.

A modern reader may well appreciate first and foremost the extraordinary technical mastery of the form that Laclos displayed, surpassing at his first attempt the most famous of his predecessors. And, as we have suggested, this virtuosity no doubt made its appeal to the more discerning of his contemporaries; it is difficult, for example, to account for Schiller’s enthusiasm² unless one supposes that he was as much taken by the technical as by any other aspect of the Liaisons. But for the French reader of the period, particularly if he or she belonged to the class of society and type of individual represented in the novel by the two central characters, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, the immediate attraction of the book lay in the uncanny accuracy with which the author had captured the very spirit of the heedless, hedonistic court- and salon-society of the day.

There is no shortage of evidence for this.³ One of the oddly few reviews of Les Liaisons dangereuses to appear in the public press was printed in the Année littéraire for 1782. The writer refers to it as ‘a detailed picture of society which, alas, is only too faithful’. By comparison, the account of the vices of society found in earlier novels will strike any reader as superficial. ‘The author of Les Liaisons dangereuses has summoned to the bar of virtue the majority of those men of our day who, sheltering behind their rank and wealth, profit from their impunity with scandalous effrontery and spread in every sphere the contagion of their moral perversity.’ The same warmly approving note was struck by the Jesuit Journal de Littérature, des Sciences et des Arts which alluded briefly to Les Liaisons dangereuses as ‘a new novel giving the most frightful and most truthful picture of the corruption of our morals’. The curious silence maintained by most reviewers was most likely due to the very scandal the book had provoked; but writers in the clandestine press (the so-called ‘nouvelles à la main’) were less inhibited. The barrister Moufle d’Angerville, who in those days was editing from London the periodical Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres en France, makes a preliminary reference to the book - which he had evidently not read at the time - in the issue dated 29 April 1782. He reports that Laclos had been accused of creating characters copied too closely on his models; a point confirmed in a further note printed in the Mémoires secrets a fortnight later: ‘The novel Les Liaisons dangereuses has caused such a sensation, on account of the allusions people have claimed to detect in it and of the maliciousness with which every reader has applied the portraits it contains to well-known personalities, that in the end a general key has been put together, designating so many heroes and heroines of high society that the police have stopped its sale and forbidden its inclusion henceforth in the catalogues of the public rooms where people came to consult it’ - a reference to the cabinets de lecture, the forerunners of public libraries which had been a feature of the French literary scene since 1762.

The existence of a printed ‘key’ and the measures allegedly taken by the authorities to prevent its sale have been called into question, since Moufle d’Angerville’s statements cannot be corroborated from any other source. But there can be little doubt that manuscript ‘keys’ were circulating - indirect evidence of the closeness with which Laclos had represented a scandalous reality, and also of the anxiety of a certain section of society to limit the damage caused by his revelations: if it was accepted that he was being indiscreet about certain persons who could be named, the general application of his novel to the morals of the upper classes lost some of its force. Tilly mentions the existence of keys; another memorialist, Count d’Allonville, stated boldly that ‘there is no one who cannot name a number of the originals’, while the anonymous author of a Biographie universelle et portative des contemporains published as late as 1830 remarked in his entry for Laclos that ‘today, many people still possess and can produce the key to this novel, and know perfectly well who Mme de Merteuil was’. Stendhal, certainly, thought he knew who she was; in his autobiographical Vie de Henri Brulardhe names her (Mme de Montmaur), tells us where her house stood and recalls how she used to offer him pickled walnuts when he visited her, as a child of nine or ten. Although Stendhal is wrong in stating that Les Liaisons dangereuses was written at Grenoble, he may well be right in suggesting that Laclos drew on his memories of the society of that town when composing his novel. As a career officer in the artillery, Laclos had not spent very much of his life in the capital but had moved around France from one garrison town to another, and it so happens that the place where he was stationed for the longest period of time - between 1769 and 1775- was Grenoble. There is, therefore, every chance that les Liaisons dangereuses depicts a provincial rather than a metropolitan society; not that the differences, among people belonging to the privileged classes, were very marked under the ancien régime.

Laclos himself never admitted to having written a roman à clefi but he freely confessed that he had drawn on inside knowledge of the exploits of rakes in the society he was depicting, and that none of the villainies he recounted was altogether without factual basis. ‘Were that not so’, he told Mme Riccoboni, ‘it were wrong of me to write … But who will dare deny the everyday truth?’ In his preface he said much the same thing, only more circumspectly, veiling his innuendoes under a light screen of irony. And, of course, the reputation this society had gained for graceful licentiousness, ever since the Regency period, was richly deserved; literature apart, the gaily erotic canvases of the rococo period, commissioned or purchased by members of the court aristocracy and their emulators, amply confirm one’s suspicions about the degree of latitude these people permitted themselves both in thought and deed. Moralists had hoped that the accession of Louis XVI in 1774 would inaugurate a reform in the behaviour tolerated of the social élite, since the new monarch was known to be a man of exemplary private life; but he lacked the force of character to impose changes, and all that happened was that a premium was now put on hypocrisy. Noblemen and noblewomen alike considered themselves too grand to be virtuous; the remark attributed to the Duchesse de Grammont, ‘les mœurs ne sont faites que pour le peuple’ (morals are for common people only), epitomizes the attitude of a large section of the pre-revolutionary upper classes.

Other novelists and story-tellers before Laclos had depicted this ‘permissive society’ but, whatever pretence they may have made to denounce it, in reality they were interested only in the amusing aspects of the adventures of the raffish gentlemen and randy ladies who figured in their fiction. One is rarely, if ever, amused in this way as one reads Les Liaisons dangereuses. There is far too much pain in the book for anyone to mistake it for a light-hearted voyage à Cythère. Its wit is always cruel, its irony corrosive. Its morality runs very deep, as Baudelaire saw,⁴ much deeper than Laclos’s contemporaries realized. They were concerned merely with the way the wicked were punished at the end of the novel, and felt that Valmont, who meets his death in a duel, got off too lightly, while Mme de Merteuil’s punishment - loss of beauty and fortune - was, although heavy enough, inappropriate; for, as La Harpe said, ‘the most respectable woman can be disfigured by smallpox and ruined in a lawsuit’. It has taken nearly two centuries to see that Laclos’s moral strictures are directed not against this character or that, but against the society to which they all belong. It was a corrupt society, not because it was ‘permissive’, but because it was one-sidedly permissive. Both sexes were pleasure bent, but in a male-dominated society only the men could freely admit to this; for women to do the same was to invite disgrace. The convention, so deeply rooted that no one seriously questioned it, was expressed flippantly by Beaumarchais in Le Mariage de Figaro: ‘sois belle si tu peux, sage si tu veux, mais sois considérée, il le faut’; in other words, it’s a help for a girl to be pretty, it’s optional for her to be virtuous, but it’s essential she keeps her reputation.

Men and women, moved by the same instincts, pursue the same ends; but what for a man - for a rake, for a roué - is a victory, spells defeat for the woman; what enhances Valmont’s reputation ruins Cécile’s and Mme de Tourvel’s. Thus, the moral standards of society are regulated in accordance with an artificial system of attack and defence, an unending and unnecessary cold war between the sexes; and one can with every justification speak of a perverse society, perverse because it has ‘arranged its rules to valorize a kind of behaviour which finds ultimate expression in the erotic, then publicly decreed that such behaviour is immoral’.⁵

Only one woman in the book - Mme de Merteuil - refuses to accept this social embargo on the free indulgence of the instincts; this is what made her Laclos’s most striking creation and so ‘monstrous’ not just in the eyes of his contemporaries but in those of every critic until the present century. The marquise is no frigid coquette, no late eighteenth-century reincarnation of Celimene, but an ardent sensualist who privately repudiates the rules imposed by a hypocritical society and exercises her undoubted intelligence in devising ways to circumvent them. Since men regard members of her sex as enemies to be triumphed over, she will turn the tables on them and, abandoning the self-defeating tactics of defence, pass over to the attack. Her aggressiveness is implicit in every letter she writes to Valmont, but it can perhaps be best illustrated in a subsidiary episode, an adventure involving the minor character Prévan which she relates with relish in letter LXXXV.

Prévan shares with Valmont the reputation of being irresistible, and Mme de Merteuil, in order to prove to Valmont her superiority over even the most dashing of gallants, decides to checkmate him. But merely to refuse his suit would be weak - ‘womanly’, to use the proper word. It would be shameful, as she says, ‘to fear a man to the point of only seeking my salvation in flight’. So she decides to ‘have’ Prévan, but in such circumstances that he will never be able to boast that he has ‘had’ her. With the help of a chambermaid devoted to her interests she achieves this seemingly impossible feat. Having allowed Prévan to believe that she is touched by his protestations of love, she invites him to a supper party and secretly instructs him to pretend to leave with the rest of the company, but to return to the house unseen and make his way to her bedroom. Everything passes off as planned; the chambermaid prepares her mistress for bed, leaves her, Prévan leaps forth from his hiding-place and the marquise enjoys every satisfaction his ardour can afford her. She then seizes the bell-rope, the maid darts in and in feigned horror screams for the rest of the servants. Prévan, bewildered and outraged, draws his sword, is disarmed by a stalwart footman and chased out of doors. Accused of house-breaking and attempted rape, he is utterly disgraced, ostracized by society and placed under arrest by the colonel of his regiment. Mme de Merteuil has ‘had’ him, as she swore she would, and the usual penalty, loss of reputation, is paid for once by the man and not the woman.

It would be absurd to make Laclos out to be a champion of ‘women’s rights’ long before these rights were formulated even as desiderata. He probably could, on the strength of his two unfinished and posthumously published essays on women’s education, count as a feminist; in the first of them he correctly diagnosed the condition of women in the society of his time as one of slavery. But it would not be correct to interpret Les Liaisons dangereuses as an exposure of the contradictions inherent in a society whose principal business appeared to be the pursuit of pleasure, and which organized this pursuit in terms of conflict rather than association. The Revolution did nothing, of course, to resolve this particular social contradiction; it would never have occurred to the men who made it that to do so was in any way their concern. The Declaration of Rights voted by the Constituent Assembly on 27 August 1789 proclaimed the legal equality of all men; women were not, even by implication, included. But although Les Liaisons dangereuses made not the slightest difference to the course of history at this juncture, still it is possible to see how it might have reinforced certain popular trends and, in particular, how it could be said to have swollen the current of middle-class resentment against the perfumed, elegant and corrupt minority who occupied the most envied position in French society. The one character in the book who attracted universal sympathy was Mme de Tourvel, seduced and then brutally discarded by the Vicomte de Valmont. Now Mme de Tourvel, although by marriage a member of the noblesse de robe, very clearly subscribes to middle-class values; she is pious and something of a sentimentalist. Worsted though she is by Valmont and finally driven to a miserable death, her standards are shown to be immeasurably purer than those of the vainglorious court aristocrat to whom she gave herself in good faith. Though it is certainly not a work of social propaganda, it can scarcely be doubted that Les Liaisons dangereuses played its part in discrediting the Second Estate, and that Alexandre de Tilly had some reason for his retrospective rage against the book.⁶

Beaumarchais: Le Manage de Figaro

The second of our representative witnesses to the immediate pre-revolutionary cultural climate, Caron de Beaumarchais, forms in most respects a complete contrast to Choderlos de Laclos. Laclos came of aristocratic stock, though his family had been only recently ennobled. The Carons were watchmakers in Paris, and our author’s adoption of the ‘handle’, de Beaumarchais, no more denoted accession to the nobility than did Honoré de Balzac’s similar self-promotion in the following century. Laclos had been commissioned in the army at the age of 21 and had pursued his military career, receiving steady promotion, all through the years preceding the publication of Les Liaisons dangereuses. During the Revolution he is thought to have served as private secretary to the Duc d’Orléans (‘Philippe Égalité’) until his patron was executed, but he remained on the army list; Napoleon made him a general. He was, in short, a distinguished if not a brilliant soldier in an army which, after reverses earlier in the century, had been remoulded into perhaps the finest fighting force on the continent; but his life was on the whole, and in spite of his experiences during the revolutionary turmoil, a largely uneventful one. Beaumarchais, on the other hand, led that of an adventurer, which is possibly why he has been made the subject of more biographies than any other literary figure in eighteenth-century France. His skill at his father’s trade brought him into contact with members of the court aristocracy; his musical talents earned him a post in the royal household; his good looks, ready wit and business acumen did the rest. In the course of his life Beaumarchais engaged in a fantastic number of ventures, some of them of a distinctly shady nature, most of them highly profitable. He was employed as a confidential agent in semi-diplomatic missions and travelled widely. He was heavily involved in the business of supplying arms to the insurgent American colonists during the war of independence. He fought several lawsuits, winning them thanks to his talent for composing wickedly satirical memoranda to discredit his opponents.

His career as a playwright started in 1767-70, when he produced two rather indifferent plays; then, in 1775, his dazzling comedy Le Barbier de Seville put Beaumarchais in the front rank of those who wrote for the stage. Almost immediately he made up his mind to exploit this success by writing a second play in which the same cast of characters would be shown at a slightly later point in their careers. Count Almaviva, whose wooing of Rosine in Le Barbier de Seville had been so ably seconded by his valet and right-hand man, Figaro, is shown back in his ancestral castle, lording it over his vassals and making fresh conquests among the village maidens. The countess, now a disillusioned and neglected married woman, is in a frame of mind to be touched and even a little troubled by the shy adoration of her husband’s page, Chérubin. As for Figaro, his forthcoming marriage to Suzanne, the countess’s maid, stands in jeopardy: his master intends, before or after the ceremony, to claim his feudal right to enjoy her. The play shows how the count’s design is foiled by a plot hatched first of all between Figaro, Suzanne and the countess, then after modifications rendered necessary by an unexpected turn of events, by Suzanne and the countess acting in concert and without taking Figaro into their confidence. A great nobleman is thwarted and made to look ridiculous in front of his dependants. ‘I planned to trick them and they have treated me like a child’, grumbles the count in a mortified aside at the end of the play. But, since in the last two acts Figaro shows himself quite as suspicious of Suzanne as Almaviva of his wife, Beaumarchais may be said to have written a light-hearted satire of men’s tendencies always to believe the worst of the women they love or whom they regard as the repository of their honour.

It was not, of course, this aspect of the play that made it a political bombshell when in 1781 Beaumarchais first tried to get it performed. The theme of the conflict between the sexes struck those who first read Le Mariage de Figaro or heard it read as far less portentous than the parallel theme of the relations between servant and master. In a broad sense, Figaro and Suzanne are the ultimate descendants of the stock valet and soubrette as they appear in so many of Marivaux’s and Molière’s plays. The work of Molière’s with which comparisons are most illuminating in this respect is that strange, untypical composition Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre. Molière’s Don Juan, like Beaumarchais’s Almaviva, is a proud aristocrat with a strong, if misplaced sense of honour and a great appetite for pretty women. But Sganarelle, alongside him, cuts a derisory figure compared with Figaro: slow-witted, timorous and quite lacking in resourcefulness, he is quickly and decisively put down whenever he ventures to remonstrate with his master. Even if he had Figaro’s gift of repartee, one would guess that in the more brutal seventeenth century he would have been too afraid of a sound thrashing to let his tongue wag as Figaro does. But Figaro, always hovering on the verge of impertinence, never seems worried about the consequences; all the count can do is to pretend not to have heard. A couple of exchanges from the long scene in the middle of the play (HI, 5) will show the kind of verbal audacity Figaro permits himself and gets away with. Being slow in answering his master’s summons, he excuses himself by explaining he has needed to change his clothes. Almaviva grumbles: ‘The servants here take longer to dress than the masters’ and, quick as a flash, Figaro retorts: ‘It’s because they have no valets to help them.’ Later the count, exasperated by Figaro’s feinting, passes a disobliging remark on his ‘detestable reputation’. ‘And what if this reputation is undeserved?’ asks Figaro. ‘Are there many nobles of whom one could say as much?’ This time the shaft is directed not just against Almaviva, as a typical aristocrat, but against the whole class indiscriminately. And this is not the only occasion on which Figaro exercises his sarcasms against the pretensions of the well-born. The cautious doctor Bartholo warns him against trying conclusions with members of the nobility. ‘They have the advantage over us, thanks to their station in life.’ - ‘Not to mention’, quips Figaro, ‘their industry.’ This is not just a piece of irony at the expense of the leisured classes. The word industrie has a secondary meaning in French, found for example in the expression chevalier d’industrie which refers to a man who lives by his wits, usually a card-sharper. Figaro has scant respect for court aristocrats either: earlier in the play he tells his sweetheart that there is no great mystery in the profession of courtier: ‘receiving, taking, and soliciting; that’s the whole secret in three words.’

The most subversive passage in the whole play is Figaro’s celebrated monologue in the last act. Figaro is half persuaded at this point that his bride has agreed to yield to the count’s importunities; he is sure, at least, that the count believes he has succeeded in corrupting her. Addressing him mentally, Figaro tells his master that if it comes to a battle of wits, the nobleman is bound to succumb to the plebeian.

No, sir, no, Count, you shall not have her, you shall not, you hear? Being one of the great doesn’t make you a great genius! Nobility, wealth, rank, position … all that’s so flattering to one’s self-esteem! What have you done to earn these advantages? you took the trouble to be born, that’s all [vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus]. Apart from that, you’re a fairly ordinary sort of man! whereas I - ‘sdeath! - lost in the common crowd, I have had to display more knowledge and ingenuity just to stay alive than has been expended in a hundred years to administer Spain and Spanish America. And you would tilt with me!

Figaro goes on to tell us, half humorously, half bitterly, about the ups and downs of his own life, his constant brushes with authority, with vested interests, the whole struggle for survival that has sharpened his wits and now makes him certain he will triumph over his rival who has never had to exert himself for anything.

The mixture of contempt for the privileged classes and irritation that everything should be made so easy for them is what turns this famous monologue into a kind of declaration of class war which went on reverberating all through the Revolution and for a generation or more afterwards. But there was more in the speech than this: allusions to the gagging of playwrights, the censorship of the press and - in the original version - to the obscurantism of the Church. There had even been a direct reference to the Bastille, for it was only at a later revision of the play that the scene of action was moved to Spain. In general, Beaumarchais’s first draft was both cruder, in some of the expressions used, and more nakedly subversive than the version that eventually constituted the received text.

At this period, any new dramatic