Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France

TRAUMA AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS TRAUMA AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary Fran...

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TRAUMA AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS

TRAUMA

AND ITS

REPRESENTATIONS The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France

DEBORAH JENSON

The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London

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∫ 2001 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2001 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jenson, Deborah. Trauma and its representations : the social life of mimesis in post-revolutionary France / Deborah Jenson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-6723-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. French literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Mimesis in literature. 3. Mimesis. I. Title. PQ283 .J46 2001 840.9%12—dc21 00-012618 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

T O C O L E A N D E M E RY,

twins who bring mimesis into my life in singularly joyous ways

CONTENTS

ix

Acknowledgments

1

INTRODUCTION:

30

1. ICONOCLASM:

56

2 . T R A N S P O S I T I O N A L I T Y:

87

3. PLAGIARISM:

140

4 . ‘‘ H A R M O N Y ’’ :

183

5 . A N A L O G Y:

210

6. FETISHISM:

251

E P I L O G U E : French Romanticism: Posttraumatic Utopia/Post-Utopian Trauma

259

Notes

281

Index

On Social Speculation

Setting Wounds in Stone at the Musée des Monuments Français, 1795–1816

The Political Gets Personal in Constant’s Cécile Duras, Desbordes-Valmore, and the Scandalous Potency of the Woman Author Lamartine’s Social Pain

Slavery to Duplicity in Sand’s Indiana

Thinking with Things in Flaubert’s ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Does it ‘‘take a village’’ to write a book? I wish I could live in a ‘‘book village’’ populated by all those who, in many di√erent places and times of my life, have made French Studies an area of mimetic desire and inﬂuenced this book. During my doctoral work at Harvard and since then, Barbara Johnson’s teaching, writing, and mentorship have been a primary source of inspiration. I am grateful to such wonderful teachers as Susan Suleiman, Alice Jardine, and Svetlana Boym, as well as to colleagues including Lili Porten, Peggy Ackerberg, John Henriksen, Claudine Frank, Stuart Semmel, and Ron Schechter. The opportunity to coteach with Daniel Gordon in History and Literature was invaluable. My brief exposure at Harvard to the teaching of Naomi Schor enormously inﬂuenced the postdoctoral development of my work. My interest in the writing of Constant stems from lectures at Harvard by Tzvetan Todorov, and courses with Ross Chambers at Avignon and Charles Bernheimer at Harvard were deeply inﬂuential. Hélène Cixous’s teaching and writing will remind me throughout my career of why we read. Woodrow Wilson and Camargo Foundation grants were of great help in developing this research. My wonderful colleagues at the University of New Mexico, Pamela Cheek, Walter Putnam, Steve Bishop, Diana Robin, and others, created an atmosphere of stimulation and support crucial to this project. To Diana Robin I owe a special debt for her dynamic and immediate readings of more than one draft of some of this material, which helped to shape its substance. ix

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Valérie Putnam and Cala Beatty for their research assistance. My research was fostered as well by a University of New Mexico ‘‘RAC’’ travel grant and Junior Research Semester. Incisive readings of this manuscript by Naomi Schor and an anonymous reader generated many ideas, as did Barbara Johnson’s philosophically challenging comments on the manuscript. I thank Maura Burnett for coordinating these opportunities. I am grateful to the editors of Poetica for their permission to reprint the parts of chapter 1 that appeared in Poetica 39–40 (1994). Mary Carpenter’s conversations with me, and Ken Carpenter’s helpful reading of the introduction and chapter 2, went well beyond the bounds of parental duty. Finally, there is no way to adequately represent the reality of Jim Jenson’s enlightening, generous, and sustaining role in this book.

TRAUMA AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS

INTRODUCTION

ON SOCIAL SPECULATION Not only in philosophy but also in psychology, sociology, and literary criticism a mutilated version of imitation has always prevailed. —René Girard, ‘‘To Double Business Bound’’

Mimesis is a conditio humana. —Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society

MIMETIC FIT AND THE ROMANTIC MISFIT

In 1836 and 1837, a young Alfred de Musset published a series of four letters to the editor of the Revue des deux mondes by two ﬁctional country gentlemen named Dupuis and Cotonet. These delightful provincial precursors to Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet are preoccupied by the fact that despite all their journal subscriptions, they had ‘‘never been able to understand, neither I nor my friend Cotonet, what Romanticism is.’’∞ Their historically detailed misunderstandings constitute an apt summary of the often comically inchoate basic elements of French Romanticism. Dupuis and Cotonet dart from the medievalist fashion to the naturalist trend to the vogue for 1

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humanitarian angst to the phenomenon of the lyrical élan that refuses to explain itself to anyone: ‘‘Romanticism is the weeping star, the moaning wind, it is the tremulous night, the ﬂying ﬂower, and the fragrant bird’’ (830).* There is, however, a recurring motif in the hilarious jumble of associations: the suspicion that there is nothing original about Romanticism. ‘‘What then? When we have imitated, copied, plagiarized, translated, and compiled everything, what will be Romantic about that?’’ (827). Can Romanticism be deﬁned as ‘‘the naturalization of imitation’’ (826), they wonder?≤ Fast forward to Bouvard et Pécuchet in 1880, who take the problem of imitation literally and abandon their quixotic adventures in art, science, politics, and gardening to return to their original profession as copistes. Although little attention has been paid to the hapless Dupuis and Cotonet by contemporary critics, their Flaubertian cousins hit critical pay dirt. Their copying is ‘‘a perpetual cycle of autoduplication’’≥ through which binaristic oppositions of authenticity and reproduction engender endless play. ‘‘Opposition is a device for the production of meaning,’’ enthused Jonathan Culler, ‘‘—among the most powerful we have. . . . Bouvard et Pécuchet is, of course, the best example, for, as the title itself announces, it is truly an exercise in binarism.’’∂ What is the power of the binary opposition?—The ‘‘differences produced’’ in the process of its dismantling. The motif of the copy in Bouvard et Pécuchet has been heralded as ‘‘postmodern’’ and ‘‘ironic.’’ The di√ering critical receptions of these two texts about imitation, the second of which appears in some ways to be an imitation of the ﬁrst, illuminates a basic polarity in the intellectual history of responses to the Romantic and the post-Romantic. In the ﬁnal decades of the twentieth century, the ﬁeld of nineteenth-century French studies was arguably infatuated with all that was, again in Culler’s eloquent terms, ‘‘ ‘Beyond’ Romanticism’’ (68), meaning ‘‘beyond’’ the ‘‘unselfconsciousness’’ of the ‘‘solipsistic’’ and the ‘‘subjective.’’ This ambition to transcend Romanticism is related to what Naomi Schor calls the ‘‘fetishization of irony’’ in high modernism and postmodernism. In the second half of the twentieth century, Schor observes, irony stands as ‘‘the indelible marker of the elite,’’ while ‘‘on *Le romantisme, c’est l’étoile qui pleure, c’est le vent qui vagit, c’est la nuit qui frissonne, la ﬂeur qui vole et l’oiseau qui embaume.

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the other side of irony stand pathos, literalism, immediacy.’’∑ For some time now, Romanticism has played the fall guy to Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarmé, symbolism, decadence, realism, and a host of other post-1848 authors and ‘‘isms.’’ From Baudelaire’s homo duplex to the endless repetitions of decapitation/castration via Salomé in decadence, the part of the nineteenth century that was ‘‘beyond Romanticism’’ has been deeply mined in the interest of critical approaches privileging di√erence, including poststructuralism and deconstruction. Which is not to say that it began that way. Many of the critics now most a≈liated with methodologies of critical di√erence began their careers focusing on seemingly unlikely candidates, such as Rousseau and Plato, gradually transforming these authors into images of the critics’ own unorthodox concerns, such as the supplement or the pharmakon. In the face of groundbreaking readings, it is easy to forget that the works of Rousseau and Plato were ever viewed as alien to paradigms of binarism and irony. A mimetic analogy between critical concerns and literary or cultural subjects is produced and becomes established. Subsequent critics then arguably turn to authors and texts who present a clear-cut thematic likeness to the operative critical paradigms. If late-twentieth-century dix-neuvièmistes who were engaged with the paradigm of di√erence found a particularly friendly terrain for their endeavors in the ironic oppositionality of Baudelaire and his descendants, they were responding to a constructed mimetic ‘‘ﬁt’’ between critical approach and literary/cultural ﬁeld. ‘‘Dialogic’’ or mimetically intertwined relationships among discourses are familiar to us from Bakhtin, although primarily in terms of the way that ‘‘secondary (complex) speech genres,’’ such as novels or commentary, ‘‘absorb and digest primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communion.’’ Bakhtin gives as an example of this dialogism the imbrication of two characters’ speech acts in a scene from Gogol where one character’s identity as a copying clerk becomes linguistically embedded with the tone of another character’s condescending but literal statement that he is a copying clerk: ‘‘Why, what if I am a copying clerk, after all? What harm is there in copying, after all? ‘He’s a copying clerk!’ ’’∏ By contrast, the dialogism of critical approach and literary/cultural material occurs when one secondary genre, commentary, self-selects literary and cultural sources because of a perceived mimetic

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resemblance. Critics steeped in the productive ironies of binaristic di√erences might be dialogically drawn to all that has become encoded as ‘‘beyond’’ (more self-conscious, more radical, more avant-garde than) Romanticism. Soon it is a given that deconstructing Hugo is poor sport; and since the Romantic era itself, it has been observed that it would be hard to ﬁnd a less self-ironic ﬁgure than Lamartine. Critical dialogism contextualizes the critic as a seeker of productive specularity in his or her own right, rather than as a timeless mirror of all that is most enduring in literature and art. The text serves a mirroring function for the critic in the elaboration of the questions that render the critic’s philosophical, social, and aesthetic identity dynamic. This dynamism is subject to entropy through excessive mimetic identiﬁcation; as Barbara Johnson notes about the reception of deconstruction, ‘‘Nothing fails like success.’’ While Harold Bloom’s famous paradigm of the ‘‘anxiety of inﬂuence’’ concerns the anxiety felt by would-be literary progenitors about earlier generations of literary texts, the notion of critical dialogism conjures up a di√erent anxiety: anxiety about the inﬂuence of preexisting critical paradigms on the reception of literary and cultural texts. The often unwonted collectivity of critical concerns provokes mimetic anxiety. However, the high degree of intertextuality in a given critical group or generation bears witness to a profound sociability; this sociability determines and overdetermines critical trends, but it also conﬁgures questions of a more than personal signiﬁcance. It should go without saying that deconstruction, despite the disinterest of its founders in historical rather than philosophical questions, coincided with a historical period preoccupied by the politics of social and cultural di√erences and furnished epistemological tools for the study of those di√erences. French Romanticism, as a postrevolutionary period, in which a society of orders and privileges was attempting to conceive of itself as a society of dis-ordered social likeness, mirrors the political intensity of the late years of the twentieth century, but in opposite terms. In this book I argue that the politics of the social in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century were mediated by an ethos of social likeness, of learning to see past di√erences, rather than learning to see, respect, and accommodate di√erences. I demonstrate that French Romanticism was an astonishingly politicized literary and cultural moment but that its politicism eludes representation in terms of di√erence. What current critical approach might be in a dialogical relation to,

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rather than ‘‘beyond,’’ French Romanticism? Although the closing decades of the twentieth century arguably witnessed a degree of neglect of French Romantic studies as a separate ﬁeld within the nineteenth century as compared to the boom in post-Romantic studies, I argue that one current critical epistemology has an unusual resonance in relation to Romanticism. This is not the ironic self-resistance celebrated by Paul de Man and Geo√rey Hartmann in their rereadings of Romanticism, but a socially inﬂected epistemology of mimesis. LIVING THE ILLUSION: ‘‘SOCIAL MIMESIS’’

Recent developments in the possibilities for mimesis as a critical paradigm di√er both from the sense of mimesis canonized in Erich Auerbach’s 1953 Mimesis as ‘‘the literary representation of reality,’’ that is, realism, and from the ironic deconstruction of that project. In realist deﬁnitions of mimesis, the work of art mirrors, or fails to mirror, life. The most e√ective representation might be the one in which the real crow chooses to peck at the illusion of grapes or where the viewer of ‘‘Laöcoon’’ shivers at the represented experience of pain, but there is no passage ‘‘through the looking glass’’ from art to life and vice versa. Mimetic realism has been fundamentally critiqued in many di√erent ways throughout literary history, and especially prominently in the modern avant-gardes. Baudelaire, in The Painter of Modern Life, challenged, ‘‘Who would dare to assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?’’π This specter of conﬂating representation and reality has haunted the postmodern fetishists of irony. From Derrida’s celebrated (and savaged) ‘‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’’ to Richard Rorty’s ‘‘The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not,’’∫ viewing representation as real has taken on the status of a kind of primordial error. Discovery and rediscovery of the ‘‘mistake’’ of conﬂating reality and representation has yielded a great deal of critical capital from structuralism onward, as Robert Alter emphasizes in the exergue to his 1984 Motives for Fiction: ‘‘ ‘For doubting that the author meant what he said, or that what he said had any truth content of the remotest kind, you win ten points . . . you lose ten points if you suggest that he said it because he meant it, and twenty if you suggest he said it because it was true.’ ’’Ω But with the advent of cultural studies, a di√erent kind of understanding

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of mimesis has developed, one that makes mimesis applicable to socially and historically deﬁned ﬁelds, challenging any preordained segregation of representation and reality. In brief, the notions of imitation and representation in mimesis are being applied not to naive mirrorings of ‘‘reality’’ but to the constitution of reality. Scholars are drawing on complex Socratic deﬁnitions of mimesis in which representations are contextualized as ‘‘mere’’ likenesses on the one hand and condemned for their profound inﬂuence on social life on the other: they ‘‘settle down into habits and second nature in the body, the speech, and the thought.’’∞≠ Numerous scholars, including Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Judith Butler, Chris Bongie, and Michael Taussig, have recently anchored their practices of cultural theory not around the binarism of representation and referent but around the social dynamics connecting mimesis and life. This practice is not incompatible with a deconstructive methodology, and in fact it draws heavily on the theory and praxis of critical di√erence. When Butler says, ‘‘Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an e√ect and consequence of the imitation itself,’’∞∞ she uses a Derridean discourse to show that mystiques of gender authenticity rely paradoxically on patterns of social imitation. This paradox is not a resting place for Butler; she uses the paradigm of representation to articulate the relationship of bodies to identity in social existence. In her work, social science and Aristotle’s poetics meet and negotiate new terms. For Gebauer and Wulf, who coin the term social mimesis somewhat o√handedly in the chapter subheading ‘‘Literary Mimesis and Social Mimesis’’ in their brilliant 1995 Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, representation ‘‘is not the act of an autonomous mind but the product of a practice.’’∞≤ Mimesis is not just the transparency of the mirror; it is ‘‘interpersonal’’ and ‘‘material.’’ Gebauer and Wulf draw extensively on a sort of primal triumvirate of earlier twentieth-century cultural workers in the ﬁeld of mimesis: René Girard on the mimetic anthropology of violence and desire, Theodor Adorno on identity, and Walter Benjamin on sensuous and nonsensuous similarity. Later in the book they come back to a fairly speciﬁc Girardian deﬁnition of social mimesis: ‘‘ ‘Social mimesis’ designates the process in which rivalries arise between individuals and groups sharing the same goals of action’’ (318). But throughout the course of their ‘‘historical reconstruction of important phases in the development of mimesis’’ (1), the idea of social mimesis can be

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extended more broadly to their interest in ‘‘the mutual interpenetration of spheres’’ (3) such as ‘‘representation’’ and ‘‘reality.’’ Loosening the ties of mimesis to single authors or deﬁnitions, they argue that ‘‘as a concept, mimesis betrays a distrust of the instrumentalities and procedures of theory kept ‘pure’ of the contamination of human practice. The artiﬁciality, precision, and immobility characteristic of conventional deﬁnitions in scientiﬁc thought are hostile to mimesis, which tends toward action and is bound to time’s passage and human productive activity’’ (2). One can deduce that education, competition, peer pressure, gossip, fashion, and identity politics would all fall into the category of interpersonal mimetic modalities. Mechanical reproduction, genetic coding, commercial advertising, industrial monopolization, fashion trends, and so forth could all be united in the category of material mimetic modalities. Mimetic practices could include everything from speech systems to the performance of gender norms to religious or philosophical proselytizing to currency exchange. From Gebauer and Wulf ’s antipositivist deﬁnition it becomes clear that any domain of culture is mimetic where likeness is the basis on which we are able to perceive or act within overarching collectivities or systems. The term social mimesis can be recuperated from Gebauer and Wulf to denote culturally dialogic modalities of likeness currently endemic to a larger critical trend in cultural studies, the way that ‘‘di√erence’’ is virtually a synecdoche for deconstruction. The subjects of di√erence and likeness are clearly inseparable, two sides of the same coin. Problems of imitation and copying can be framed in terms of either likeness or di√erence, as is evident in the di√erence between the trope of the copy in Dupuis et Cotonet and Bouvard et Péchuchet. In The Feminist Di√erence, Johnson deﬁnes the use of di√erence in her earlier work as ‘‘on the one hand, an investigation of binary di√erences with a history of e√ects’’ and ‘‘on the other, the investigation of structures of self-di√erence, the repression of which allowed binary di√erences to maintain themselves.’’∞≥ She notes, however, that ‘‘recent feminists have found themselves working at the limits of the usefulness of di√erence as a governing structure,’’ and she cites Joan Scott’s fundamental observation that ‘‘when di√erence and equality are paired dichotomously, they structure an impossible choice’’ (5). Social mimesis is an ampliﬁcation, modiﬁcation, and inverse exploration of such problems of the politics of di√erence. But what happens when critics focus on likeness instead of di√erence? Social mimesis as a philosophical tendency analyzes reality itself as mi-

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metic production and reception—as mimetic self-representation. Specularity, or mirroring, becomes not a symbol for knowledge, the role it held in the medieval era, but a vehicle for social speculation, in which reproduction and reproducibility are central to questions of art, politics, and anxiety. So far, some of the most important contemporary philosophical forays susceptible to alignment with social mimesis have come at the intersection of the critical ideas of di√erence and ‘‘constructedness.’’ In structuralist and poststructuralist thought, all paths within the epistemology of di√erence lead to the idea of the constructedness of the social. Within these schools of thought, the arbitrariness of the sign and the textual nature of reality signal that if life can be ‘‘read’’ more directly than it can be lived, our identities and empirical adventures are on some level ﬁctions. ‘‘Nature’’ and ‘‘essence’’ are read as repressive deceptions generated to veil the ﬁctive foundations of social reality. A prophetic earlier formulation of this strategic linkage of di√erence and construction is of course Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’’∞∂ Butler, rather than reiterating that gender is not natural but constructed, reads de Beauvoir’s formula to ask, in e√ect, What is ‘‘becoming’’? If gender is ‘‘voluntaristic,’’ she writes, ‘‘then what do we make of gender as a received construction?’’∞∑ Who constructs gender—hegemonic ‘‘society,’’ or the creative individual? Furthermore, for Butler the idea that ‘‘we somehow choose our genders poses an ontological puzzle.’’ Such a thesis, she says, is not only tautological, but ‘‘it seems to adopt a Cartesian view of the self, an egological structure which lives and strives prior to cultural life’’ (37). What Butler advocates in place of the foreclosure of these di√erential problems of becoming with the all purpose notion of ‘‘construction’’ is decidedly not a gendered ‘‘essence’’ or ‘‘nature.’’ It is instead a license to work with gender as a self-representation that will trigger a mimetic response in others and which is itself inevitably imitative. ‘‘To what extent is the ‘construction’ of gender a self-reﬂexive process? ’’ (36). The magnetism of gender in embodied social experience begs the question: do we watch it, act it, or author it? If we watch it, is it possible for the spectator not to be the actor at the same time? If we act it, how did we choose the role? If we author it, how did our bodies precede it? How do we manipulate the likeness that manipulates us in the form of gender? These philosophical questions have a historical parallel in the recent

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political reinterrogation of the links between feminism and universalism in France. The lexicon of di√erence received crucial deﬁnition in the 1970s and 1980s in France from the writers known in the United States as ‘‘French feminist writers’’ (Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray). But the late 1980s and 1990s saw the alternative development of a political paradigm of parité (parity). Parity in France refers to women’s rights to elected o≈ce and constituents’ rights to choose from political candidates divided equally among men and women.∞∏ It is a politics of equal representation anchored in an ethos of likeness, in this case ‘‘universalism.’’ Political parity has been legislated in France through the constitutional amendment of June 28, 1999, and the law of May 3, 2000. Parity is clearly a mimetic construct. While the feminism of ‘‘di√erence’’ per se may not have directly generated mimetic models of social life, the paradoxical politics of di√erence in relation to goals of equality and parity have made feminism a critical catalyst for cultural epistemologies of likeness.∞π The paradigm of alterity or otherness in postcolonial theory is another important catalyst for explorations of likeness. Taussig suggests that while the idea of the constructedness of identity may serve diligently in the dismantling of overdetermined identities, it is an unsatisfactory endpoint for the exploration of the seduction of identity. The problem, he says, is that ‘‘what was nothing more than an invitation, a preamble to investigation, has, by and large, been converted instead into a conclusion—e.g. ‘sex is a social construction,’ ‘race is a social construction,’ ‘the nation is an invention,’ and so forth.’’∞∫ Though that conclusion is more critically satisfying than the conclusion that sex, race, nation, and so forth, are nature or essence, it does not account for the fact that they continue to exist or that we are drawn to the way that they exist. Taussig chooses to work at the fault line of Western civilization and imitative ‘‘primitivism’’ in order to repatriate mimicry as an active agent in the process of social construction. ‘‘I call it the mimetic faculty,’’ he says, ‘‘the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore di√erence, yield into and become Other’’ (xiii). Taussig’s ‘‘mimetic faculty’’ embraces sympathetic magic as a means of incorporating voluntarism and a mystical materialism into the neutral and neutered understanding of constructed reality. ‘‘We are forthwith invited if not forced into the inner sanctum of mimetic mysteries where, in imitating, we will ﬁnd distance from the imitated and hence gain

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some release from the su√ocating hold of ‘constructionism’ no less than the dreadfully passive view of nature it upholds’’ (xix). ‘‘Going primitive,’’ or working with the ways in which civilization is always already primitive, is, for Taussig, a refusal to accept identity and alterity in a stando√. Taussig’s and Butler’s otherwise entirely di√erent ‘‘social’’ recuperations of mimesis share an insistence that our identities and empirical adventures be treated not just as ﬁctions but also as context-dependent performances and artifacts. The fact that something is not ‘‘real’’ (veriﬁable, rational, a product of the autonomous will) does not prevent us from living it with real bodies in real time. We live the illusion: mimesis has a social life, and our social lives are mimetic. Social mimesis insistently invokes the impossibility of analyzing identity from a vantage point prior to or beyond identity. In Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature, Chris Bongie explores the history of mimetic identiﬁcations and rivalries in the nineteenth-century French abolitionist movement. He also considers the philosophical problem of identity as a modality of likeness that will inevitably repel di√erence in the process of its self-construction. For the postcolonial critic, it is poignant that identity repels di√erence even when it is based on an identiﬁcation with di√erence. ‘‘No matter how much we would like to, we cannot simply do away with the sort of nonrelational, exclusionary thinking that is at the basis of identity politics and its received wisdom: a≈rmations of ﬁxed identity are inevitable.’’∞Ω Social mimesis is not just a preoccupation of some of the most vital recent contributions to theory, however. This book demonstrates that at various historical moments, the irrepressibly social impact of mimesis bears the status of a cultural obsession. What are the factors that would lead one historical moment, or the e√ects of one historical event, to be more dynamically associated with problems of social mimesis than the next one, and thus to be particularly suited to a critical epistemology of likeness? It is easy to conﬁrm that postmodernism, for example, is a construct endlessly and uncharacteristically earnestly at grips with mimesis; postmodernism is virtually a symptom of the fascinating fear that the representation of reality has been run over by the artiﬁcial generation of reality. In theories of the postmodern, the social resonance of mimesis is omnipresent in the study of reproductive technologies of all kinds, from the cinematographic appara-

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tus to I.V.F. This is illustrated in Baudrillard’s famous reversal of the Borges tale of a map of the colonial Empire ‘‘so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory’’ and which, with the decline of the Empire, decays and returns to the soil. According to Baudrillard, this moral of the double ‘‘being confused with the real thing’’ now has ‘‘the discrete charm of secondorder simulacra.’’ In the postmodern revision of the story, the territory ‘‘no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory.’’ Hillel Schwartz’s copyright notice in The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles similarly shows that copying procedures can no longer be safely categorized as artiﬁce, phenomenologically separate from memory, teaching, writing, or even the genetic constitution of existence, all topoi in which originality and imitation collide: ‘‘No part of this book may be reproduced, replicated, reiterated, duplicated, conduplicated, retyped, transcribed by hand (manuscript or cursive), read aloud and recorded on audio tape, platter, or disk, lipsynched, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, including genetic, chemical, mechanical, optical, xerographic, holographic, electronic, stereophonic, ceramic, acrylic, or telepathic.’’≤≠ Neal Gabler’s 1998 Life, the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality makes this point within the discourse of popular culture. But if the twentieth-century ﬁn de siècle is primed for high-stakes recognition of social mimesis, it obviously did not invent it. THE REVOLUTIONARY LOOKING GLASS

If mimesis is indeed a conditio humana rather than just a representational operation codiﬁed and valorized in literature and art, then its deﬁnition as ‘‘likeness’’ is as important as its deﬁnition as ‘‘imitation.’’ Likeness serves as a conduit from the traditional segregation of representation and reality to a social domain largely organized around mimetically based tensions of resemblance, parity, and equality. Likeness can be political as well as literary or artistic. In the modern political imagination, the French Revolution is an inaugural moment in the development of the politics of likeness. An epistemology of social mimesis helps to articulate decisive tensions within this politics. By the late eighteenth century, liberty had become su≈ciently absolute

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as a value to render illegitimate the previously absolute value of monarchy. But what is liberty when chained to two social constructs that are as fundamentally mimetic as equality and fraternity? In the Revolutionary mantra liberté, égalité, fraternité, neither equality nor fraternity is accessible to understanding or institutionalization outside of an epistemology of likeness. Freedom, therefore, which should logically elude deﬁnition (freedom should be free to be what it will), is bound to the relationship to one’s fellow being along the axis of similarity or rights. Likeness in Revolutionary thought is a paradoxical utopian foundation for individual freedom. In The Social Contract, Rousseau describes a metaphorically genetic social unit in which the agency of freedom free-ﬂoats between the part and the whole. ‘‘The problem,’’ he summarizes, ‘‘is to ﬁnd a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.’’≤∞ This was clearly a pre-Revolutionary vision of Revolution. The Terror provided a historical model for the antagonism between liberty and equality. The political theorist Benjamin Constant wrote, ‘‘It is in the name of liberty that we were given prisons, sca√olds, countless persecutions.’’≤≤ But the particular liberty that allowed itself to be symbolized through the Terror was a liberty dominated by equality. The Romantic historian Pierre-Louis Roederer felt not only, as Mona Ozouf summarizes, that each of the three primordial values of the Revolution was prone to entering ‘‘into conﬂict with each of the others,’’ but also that Revolutionary citizens ‘‘showed for one of these values, equality, such a marked predilection that they were ready to pay for it with the renunciation of liberty.’’≤≥ Even the guillotine was perceived as an egalitarian death machine. Simon Schama notes that the marquis Lepeletier, in his militant Revolutionary career, ‘‘proposed that every person condemned to death su√er the same penalty of having their head struck o√.’’≤∂ Indeed, when King Louis XVI faced his execution, his request to have his hair shorn privately rather than on the sca√old was turned down; his death was staged to conform democratically to the Terror’s razing of privilege. I argue in this book that the uniquely charged relationship between liberty and likeness proper to the French Revolution—and its violent outcomes—went on in the post-Revolutionary era to determine key parameters

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of French Romanticism. In these parameters, the dynamics of representation are grafted onto the social sphere, above all in terms of a multifaceted fascination with the unrealized political dream of likeness, now functioning as a social wound. ROMANTIC OBSESSION WITH THE SOCIAL

It has often been assumed that French Romanticism came into being, in some sense, as ﬂight from the Revolution, especially since many of the major Romantic writers initially supported the restoration of monarchy. The lyric consciousness, identity, and voice of Romanticism, which predate the generally acknowledged resurgence of the Romantic lyric in 1820, can seem counterpolitical, a bid for personal freedom to the exclusion of dramas of social equality. E. S. Burt cites the hypothesis that ‘‘poetry allots itself a place in the Ivory Tower in a gesture of aristocratic retreat from the democratic crowds of the post-Revolution. . . . The emergence of the lyric might be nothing more than a symptomatic reaction to overpoliticized times, if not an outright reactionary scurry back to a prepolitical stance.’’≤∑ Burt counters that this ‘‘charge of formalism and nostalgic naturalism cannot be made to stick,’’ and with good reason—after all, the Romantic lyric poet par excellence, Lamartine, would become a leader of the ‘‘democratic crowds’’ in 1848 precisely through his lyrical oratory, and for the rest of his career he would insistently theorize that no form of political power could ever justiﬁably substitute itself for the voice of the democratic crowds. As Romanticism developed, from the end of the Restoration to the revolution of 1848, into the hyperpolitical phase known as ‘‘social Romanticism,’’ or, in Dupuis and Cotonet’s terms, ‘‘humanitarianism,’’ lyricism and early socialist politics made strange but inseparable bedfellows. As Henri Peyre observed in What Is Romanticism? ‘‘no romanticism in Europe was more intimately and more widely associated with socialism than French romanticism.’’≤∏ In social Romanticism, the dream of the representation of reality is as political as it is artistic. That dream retains its appeal today—its ‘‘romantic’’ appeal, an expression loaded with pejorative connotations of self-delusion. An epistemology of social mimesis helps to make sense of the fact that Romanticism could be on the one hand solipsistic and subjective and on the other hand almost anomalously social and political, in a vacillation between

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ideological extremes of personal liberty and social likeness. It is extraordinary that in case after case, we encounter these extremes within the career trajectories of individual Romantic writers, including Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Vigny, Sand, and Hugo, suggesting that what we see as ‘‘vacillation’’ they saw as legitimate or inevitable interrelation. The Revolution had provided a stunning model for the overlaying of questions of artistic and political representation. Recent historiography of the French Revolution by scholars such as Simon Schama and Mona Ozouf is noticeably fascinated with the degree to which the Revolution transpired as representation. A multimedia performance, it evolved as costume, as in the ‘‘bonnet rouge,’’ the red cap symbolizing the freed slave; as theater, for instance in the elaborately staged and choreographed funeral cortege of Marat; as anthem, notably in ‘‘La Marseillaise’’; or as painting, in the Revolutionary allegories encoded in the stoic subjects depicted by David. The classical construct of mimesis became socialized through Revolutionary upheaval and laid the foundations for early expressions of socialism in the post-Revolutionary literature of French Romanticism. Not only was the Revolution a form of representation; representation also was Revolutionized. But once the Terror had added its fatal theatricality, representation was Revolutionized traumatically. The languishing of Rousseau’s project of obeying oneself through obedience to all arguably went on to inform generations of textual, political, scandalous, and even monumental expressions of what I will call traumatic mimesis. Traumatic mimesis occurs as a textually palpable sense of a utopian ﬁeld of social mimesis—a politics of likeness—that has come to function instead as a social wound because of the failure of various aspects of the Revolutionary program. This kind of traumatic mimesis is rooted in the tragic enslavement of liberty to tropes of likeness such as resemblance, duplicity, and desire, whether in the state, the couple, or the work of art. French Romanticism in this sense repeats the failure of the Revolution to conjugate liberty and likeness harmoniously. Peyre rightly says that ‘‘it would be out of the question to draw too precise a parallel between revolution and romanticism in France’’ (59). But theories of trauma, grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis and now frequently applied to the history of the Holocaust, suggest that it should also be out of the question not to look for the recurrence of violent history as

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symptom. Symptoms are generally diagnosed in individuals rather than cultures or historical moments. But Cathy Caruth points out that the construct of trauma deviates from the psychoanalytic insistence on the individual role of the unconscious in its evocation of the question of historical reality. If trauma is a pathological symptom, ‘‘it is not so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a symptom of history.’’≤π But is the aftermath of historical reality readable as symptom? It is unlikely that one could read the history of the Terror in the posttraumatic symptoms of its witnesses if one were not already familiar with that history. Traumatized persons, Caruth asserts, ‘‘carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.’’ The readability of historical reality as symptom, already compromised by the role of the personal unconscious, is further compromised by its ‘‘latency,’’ the ‘‘peculiar temporal structure, the belatedness, of historical experience,’’ through which the traumatic event is ‘‘fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time’’ (8). The work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok further suggests that latent trauma may be inherited as a cryptic legacy, a ‘‘phantom,’’ from one generation to the next.≤∫ Revolutionary trauma cannot be manifested at the time of the events in which it originates; its temporal structure requires that it have a post-Revolutionary manifestation. Likewise, while Romanticism is certainly not ‘‘Revolutionary,’’ it is belatedly symptomatic of the Revolution as historical experience. Romanticism is especially symptomatic of the trauma of being belated, of coming after the ‘‘great’’ Revolution. Traumatic mimesis is partly, for the inheritors of Revolutionary history, simply the trauma of experiencing one’s own era as a secondary text. The French Revolution in its extraordinary, international, and enduring cultural importance is endowed with the status of the original—the Revolution, Revolution with a capital r. The Romantic era is therefore relegated to the status of that which comes after. Romantic cultural production superimposes the problem of mimesis—the gap between the original and the copy, the referent and the work of art, reality and representation—onto chronology as Revolution is replaced by successive and unsatisfactory sequelae. These include empire, monarchical restoration, bourgeois monarchy, and a smattering of lesser revolutions, suppressions, and returns.

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Writing precisely about one of those later repetitions, Marx sees all of history as botched mimesis. In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he writes, ‘‘Hegel remarks that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were twice. He forgot to add: the ﬁrst time as tragedy, the second as farce. . . . Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’’≤Ω Post-Revolutionary traumatic mimesis in turn engenders what I call mimetic trauma. This is a form of repetitive play with the conditions and signs of traumatic mimesis. Mimetic trauma, ‘‘borrowed’’ social su√ering, performs the seductions of empathy with the trauma experienced by the social ‘‘other.’’ It is a paradoxical Romantic aspiration to freedom from the political sterility of an individual social and class identity that necessarily fails to encompass other identities. Romantic writers such as Lamartine ﬁnd themselves living out a pale imitation of the Revolutionary ideal, unable to truly ‘‘walk in the shoes’’ of a proletarian class whose su√ering they interpret as more authentic than their own. In these circumstances, the imitation of trauma o√ers to ease the trauma of imitation. Although the Romantics did not employ a discourse of trauma,≥≠ Caruth notes that the term itself comes from ‘‘the Greek trauma, or wound, originally referring to an injury inﬂicted on a body.’’≥∞ The historical enigma of trauma is in a sense matched by ‘‘the enigma of the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound.’’ Although the social theater for traumatic mimesis and mimetic trauma in the France of roughly 1795 to 1848 can be very concrete, as in the historical phenomenon of vandalism and restoration, it is ultimately inextricable from a complex iconology of wounding in post-Revolutionary letters. Romantic expression is characterized by a lachrymose, often christological, crimson-tinged-if-not-stomach-turning pathos. ‘‘Oh! My wound! My precious wound!’’ incants Octave in Musset’s Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1835). ROMANTIC WOUNDS

What is the mimetic function of wounds that are a symptom of a postRevolutionary trauma centered on social likeness? If one accepts that these

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wounds are expressive of the problem of social mimesis, how do they represent it? On a rhetorical level, Romantic wounds as a discourse of pain traditionally are not associated with a groundbreaking lexicon of mimesis. On the contrary, symbolic wounds are generally taken to represent Romantic narcissism and melodrama, idealized wounds, and they are implicated in the sometimes derogatory reputation of French Romanticism. In the use of wound imagery to denote a ‘‘real’’ body with viscerally authentic experiences, Romanticism seems to draw attention to an ethos of mimetic literalism, in which representation is conﬂated with reality through the device of the authenticity of pain. What one might call the bad rap of Romanticism lies in part in this association with the traditional role of mimesis as the idealistic suturing of a wound that is actually incurable—the cut between reality and representation. Even the most innovative work on the Romantic image (but not necessarily the French Romantic image) by critics such as Paul de Man and Murray Krieger can seem complicit with the vocabulary of sonorous praise of nature and image that dates Romanticism in literary anthologies. What de Man names the cult of the ‘‘ontology of the image’’ in Romanticism, in which the literary ﬂower is intended by the poet to ‘‘grow,’’≥≤ does not contradict the impression that Romanticism deserves to be left to critics who cherish an idealistic cult of mimesis through naïveté or reaction. To try to invest the poetic ﬂower with the ability to ﬂower implies an ethos of truth in the representation of reality. Such an investiture is connected to creationist thought and to the positioning of the poet in a mimetic relationship to God, as analyzed by Sandra Gilbert: ‘‘Deﬁning poetry as a mirror held up to nature, the mimetic aesthetic that begins with Aristotle, . . . implies that the poet, like a lesser God, has made or engendered an alternative, mirror-universe.’’≥≥ The ﬁgure of the voyant or poetic ‘‘seer’’ in Romanticism performs this likeness to the original and divine maker of likenesses, as in Hugo’s connection of his poetic word to the Word of God in the poem ‘‘Suite.’’ The poet’s word is ‘‘a living being’’ whose name is ‘‘fiat lux,’’ alias ‘‘the Word,’’ and ‘‘the Word is God.’’≥∂ As discussed earlier, Romantic texts su√er when judged according to modernist aesthetics in which irony and artiﬁce are fetishized. But when Romantic texts are read as post-Revolutionary, they often reveal the mimetic wound of the social under the poorly sutured scars of the rupture

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between reality and representation. Hugo’s ‘‘Suite’’ takes on truer colors when read as the sequel or ‘‘suite,’’ which is how it is positioned in Les Contemplations, to the poem ‘‘Réponse à un acte d’accusation’’ (Response to a legal accusation). In ‘‘Réponse,’’ Hugo invents and embraces accusations against the political radicalism of his poetry. ‘‘I am that terrible monster,’’ he claims. He confesses proudly that he was a terrorist in the ancien régime of the lyric, that he installed the semantic fraternity of the vache (cow) where the génisse (a nicer word for cow ) previously had reigned. He had divided the alexandrine into a new multiplicity of equal parts and generally bloodied the snowy surface of the text in its glacial separation from cultural life. . . . et je criai dans la foudre et le vent: Guerre à la rhétorique et paix à la syntaxe! Et tout quatre-vingt-treize éclata. . . . . . . . . . . . Et j’ai battu des mains, buveur du sang des phrases, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oui, c’est vrai, ce sont quelques-uns de mes crimes. J’ai pris et démoli la bastille des rimes.

(67)

. . . I cried out to the wind and the thunder, / War on rhetoric and peace to syntax! / And all 1793 was unleashed. / . . . / I clapped my hands, drinking the blood of phrases, / . . . / Yes, it is true, these are some of my crimes, / I took and demolished the Bastille of rhymes. Hugo ultimately associates mimetic idealism not with the beauty of the verbe but with violent political critique, poetic terrorism. For Hugo, the poet must commit violence against the politics of mimesis itself if that mimesis commits violence against the social sphere by representing it in mutilated, censored form. MIMETIC WOUNDING IN NATURAL LAW

The ‘‘ontology’’ of the mimetic wound in post-Revolutionary letters reﬂects the ‘‘ontology’’ of the invention of the social ﬁeld in the period just before the Revolution. In Citizens without Sovereignty, Daniel Gordon argues that

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the ‘‘novel aspect of French social egalitarianism was not the a≈rmation of equality per se but the invention of the social as a distinctive ﬁeld of human experience.’’ Gordon points out that in the ancien régime, ‘‘defenders of royal sovereignty did not formally recognize the existence of a social realm in the sense of a sphere of activities separate from the supervision of the monarch. . . . The invention of the social ﬁeld required a demonstration that some meaningful activities are self-instituting; that in some situations, human beings can hang together of their own accord; that humans, in short, are sociable creatures.’’≥∑ As a product of Enlightenment thought, the invention of a social ﬁeld necessitated the projection of the ‘‘ecumenical function of reason onto a worldly object’’ (6), an object that Gordon, following Furet, conceptualizes in the framework of social ‘‘ontology.’’ The lexicon of ‘‘the social,’’≥∏ which according to the Encyclopédie of 1765 was of recent development, is notable not just for its characteristic hybridization of psychological and civil life but more importantly as a ‘‘ﬁeld’’ newly conceptualized in object terms inseparable from the human subject ’s ontological experience. The pre-Revolutionary French development of the notion of the social is inspired by the belief that one can extrapolate an ideal society from the human subject’s experience of the life of the body (an experience necessarily separate from the constructs of absolutist authority). The body is a universal that transcends the particularism of governments. In the ‘‘primitive’’ life of the body, theorists from Locke to Rousseau ﬁnd social paradigms uncorrupted by speciﬁc regimes. In d’Alembert’s 1751 Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, the human subject’s experience of bodily pain, in conjunction with the workings of the mimetic faculty, triggers the invention of the social ﬁeld. According to d’Alembert, the human subject’s ﬁrst education comes from the vulnerability of the body to pain (‘‘our most lively sensation’’).≥π Pain produces the desire to survive and to avoid pain by di√erentiating between ‘‘harmful’’ and ‘‘useful’’ objects. This determination leads the human subject to recognize other beings ‘‘whose forms are entirely like ours’’ (11). Since others share an analogous vulnerability, it is apparent that they also need to protect themselves; human beings therefore unite because of a perceived likeness and the corresponding notion that there is safety in numbers. D’Alembert theorizes that pain is a ‘‘natural law’’ of

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equality, which teaches people to work together to avoid pain. This preservative and empathic union, d’Alembert argues, is ‘‘the origin of the formation of societies.’’ The natural law of pain in e√ect provides a pedagogy of the social. In d’Alembert’s prehistory of politics, the mimetic understanding of pain underpins the ‘‘ontology’’ of a revolutionary social ﬁeld. In French Romanticism, the social life of mimesis cannot be severed from the life of the body because the ontology of the social is imitated from the life of the wounded political body. Wound imagery in post-Revolutionary French letters frequently encodes the vulnerability of the literary body as inseparable from that of the political body for the reason that readers and writers have bodies living in history, traumatized bodies symptomatic of history. Romantic wounding has this parabolic social status in Musset’s Confession. In the ﬁrst chapter, the narrator’s symbolic position for expressing his and his peers’ ‘‘abominable moral malady’’≥∫ is an animal trap in which the narrator’s foot is caught. The engineering of this trap is ﬁgured in the second chapter as the mechanical alignment of the historical past with the phenomenological present. The narrator asserts that the children of the Revolution and the Empire were born from the spilling of patriotic blood into the fecund earth: ‘‘All these children were drops of burning blood that had inundated the earth’’ (67). Coming to maturity in the Romantic era, these identical drops of national passion had to betray their own violent and sacriﬁcial collective conception in order to assimilate themselves to the reasonable and religious ennui of the Restoration as an obvious failure of the Revolution. The resulting social malaise can be put into words only through the self-mutilating extrication of the literary body from history. In telling the story of his time, says Musset’s narrator, ‘‘I will have gained this fruit of my expression: I will have cured myself, and, like the fox caught in the trap, I will have gnawed through my captive foot’’ (65). The intensely visceral quality of the image of chewing through one’s own ﬂesh and bone to escape from a trap is calculated not as an escape from history but precisely as a means of making historical experience contagious. Mimesis here is the inﬂiction of a democratic memory of pain. The ‘‘moral’’ of Musset’s ‘‘ontological’’ representation of experience is not that representation is the same thing as reality. Instead, ideal mimesis as the

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suturing of the cut between reality and representation is reconﬁgured as the reenactment of the cut, as the making public (and hence equitable and social) of the vulnerability of freedom to entrapment, liberty to likeness. In an earlier draft of the same passage, Musset worked with yet another, and more powerful, version of the image of narration as self-mutilation. Self-mutilation in this even more graphic earlier version leads not to escape but to the education of society through the didactic circulation of the mutilated part. Octave’s narration of the story of his time is ﬁgured as a gangrenous patient’s participation in a pathology class in a medical amphitheater. His sick limb is amputated and circulated (wrapped in white linen like the surface of a text) from hand to hand among the medical students. The narrator extrapolates that the representation of the likeness of the self in its sociohistorical existence is generally analogous to cutting o√ ‘‘a portion of himself, severing it from the rest of his life, and circulating it in the public square’’ (1046). This reference to the place publique evokes the role of the place publique in the etymology of the term allegory: to speak ‘‘otherwise’’ (allos ) in the public square or marketplace (agora ). For Musset, to speak otherwise in the public square is also to speak through a code, a parallel and veiled discourse, but it is a code of mutilation in the public square. Musset uses a discourse of wounds as a way of speaking otherwise—speaking woundwise—of what eludes communication, to a collectivity of interlocutors who will wince as one body. The Romantic discourse of trauma is, like all discourses of trauma, according to Caruth in Unclaimed Experience, ‘‘always somehow literary: a language that deﬁes, even as it claims, our understanding’’ (5). Romantic wounds often function, in e√ect, as the metaphorical site of a post-Revolutionary social contract mediated by trauma. This historical tendency necessarily begs the question of the politics of the representation of pain, especially in light of the desacralization of culture in the Revolutionary period and the subsequent political reconstruction of the relationship of France to the institution of Christianity. IMITATIO AS SECULAR MIMESIS

It is obvious that the construct of imitatio, the mimetic internalization of Christ’s ‘‘passion’’ or su√ering ( passio ), dominates the politics of the repre-

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sentation of pain in the post–New Testament Western tradition. The imitatio depends on the conﬂation of symbolic and bodily wounds, a conﬂation in turn doubled by that of body and food in the Communion ritual. The cult of the wound is therefore also the cult of what I call, in chapter 6, the literal metaphor, epitomized by the trope of the Word made ﬂesh. In the literary tradition, the cult of the wound as literal metaphor is secular as often as it is theocentric. Oddly, it is often preserved even in the corpus of the theories of representation that analyze the politics of pain. One could situate on a single, wildly incompatible historical continuum texts from the Gospel of John to Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (‘‘The Wound and the Voice’’) to Butler’s Excitable Speech. In ‘‘On Linguistic Vulnerability’’ Butler interrogates ‘‘the problem of injurious speech . . . of which words wound, which representations o√end.’’≥Ω On a common-sense level, the di√erence between representations that o√end and words that wound is absolute: representations can o√end, and words cannot wound; verbal signs cannot literally penetrate the body. Butler’s formulation depends on the erasure of the di√erence between o√ense (necessarily abstract, psychological) and wound (physical, or metaphorically physical), because in social existence, abstract o√enses often have physical consequences, as in police proﬁling or gang retaliations. Nevertheless, the operations of language cannot be made material without intervening steps between speech act and bodily vulnerability. So when Butler argues that ‘‘if language can sustain the body, it can also threaten its existence’’ (5) or that ‘‘the circumstances alone do not make words wound’’ (13), the trope of wounding or wounded words is only a particularly recent example of the infatuation with the point of intersection between mimesis as representation and mimesis as conditio humana. Just as theocentric Western culture holds that point of intersection to be sacred, secular Western culture holds that point to be metaphorically sacred. What is the meaning of the sacred as secular metaphor? A similarly secular mysticism of signiﬁcation is hinted at in Elaine Scarry’s 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Scarry holds that physical pain resists representation (‘‘Physical pain is di≈cult to express’’) and that pain, ‘‘by making overt precisely what is at stake in ‘inexpressibility,’ ’’ exposes ‘‘the essential character of ‘expressibility,’ whether verbal or material.’’∂≠ Who, from the politician to the lover,

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does not have something to gain from intimacy with ‘‘the essential character of expressibility’’? A√ective pain is more expressible than physical pain, according to Scarry, and therefore less revelatory: ‘‘Psychological su√ering, though often di≈cult for any one person to express, does have referential content, is susceptible to verbal objectiﬁcation, and is so habitually depicted in art that, as Thomas Mann reminds us, there is virtually no piece of literature that is not about su√ering’’ (11). Yet in a great deal of literature, and particularly in post-Revolutionary French letters, where the wound has the status of a cliché, it is striking that a√ective pain, which ostensibly ‘‘does have referential content,’’ is usually represented through the symbolism of physical pain, which ‘‘is di≈cult to express.’’ Physical pain generates ‘‘certainty’’ in the su√erer, ‘‘doubt’’ in the witness; it suggests an authenticity that is beyond language, and therefore it represents the ultimate mimetic challenge. For Scarry, to witness the movement from pain to description ‘‘is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself ’’ (6). This polyvalent paradox signals the fact that while literary wounds are not real wounds but rhetoric, they evoke two things: the uneasy relationship of language to the inexpressible and the capacity of the likeness that is at play in most forms of rhetoric to mime the senses. This does not mean, of course, that mimesis is the same thing as the sensual experience it imitates— the mimetic miracle, the triumph of language over the inexpressible. But it does suggest that the production and reception of the imitation is itself a dramatic form of (social) experience. THE ‘‘REAL’’ EXPERIENCE OF SYMBOLIC WOUNDS

Wound symbolism can trigger visceral physical reactions in those who receive it. An inner sense of cringing, a feeling of faintness or nausea, can be catalyzed by the rhetoric as well as by the sight of blood. In this sense the role of symbolic wounding can be compared to the role of fantasy or pornography in human sexuality. In sexual fantasy, where does memory or imaginative construction end, and where does physical experience begin? Wound symbolism, in other words, rearticulates the question of the cut between reality and representation as a question of the di√erence between mimetic agency and reception. If mimesis is pertinent to any and all opera-

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tions of reﬂexivity, if it indeed ‘‘makes it possible for individuals to step out of themselves, to draw the outer world into their inner world,’’ as Gebauer and Wulf claim (2), then the wound functions as a symbolic recapitulation, a mise en abyme, of the high stakes of mimesis itself. It might be possible to catalog symbolic wounds and their relationship to social problematics of likeness in post-Revolutionary French letters. But my conceptual framework for this study is not limited to wound symbolism by any means. The essays in this book focus on mimetic wounds that are more loosely categorized in terms of the haunting social recurrence of crises of likeness traceable to Revolutionary trauma in relation to speciﬁc dates, events, and relationships. I subordinate the circularity of specular logic in my investigation of mimesis to narratives of social speculation in which the tensions of who will represent what, imitating whom, to what e√ect, predominate. THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MIMESIS IN FRENCH ROMANTICISM

Representations of post-Revolutionary trauma, as I have stated above, express a fascination with the utopian potential and the violence produced by the Revolutionary linkage of liberty and likeness. Social likeness is, in the French Romantic imagination, a mimetic ﬁeld subject to some of the same dynamics of representation as literature and art. The dynamics of representation are themselves probed and anatomized through a rhetoric of wounding. The chronological framework of my ﬁeld of study extends from the Terror through the revolution of 1848, with the exception of chapter 6, on Flaubert’s 1876 ‘‘Un Coeur simple,’’ which nevertheless has a Romantic ﬁctional chronology. The chapters of the book discuss six di√erent tropes of social mimesis: iconoclasm, transpositionality, plagiarism, ‘‘harmony,’’ analogy, and fetishism. Chapter 1 speaks of the role of Revolutionary vandalism and the physical fragmentation of the state under the Terror. I argue that the drama of political iconoclasm inﬂuenced the later self-identiﬁcation of Romantic writers with architectural ruin. My analysis rests on the thirteen catalogs of the Musée des Monuments Français (1795–1816), founded by Alexandre Lenoir to house monuments (sculptures, sepulchres, architectural frag-

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ments, etc.) ‘‘mutilated’’ through Revolutionary vandalism. Lenoir’s catalogs are characterized by a variable political discourse that emblematizes the problem of monumentality in relation to discontinuity of regime. Symbolism of wounding dramatizes the visceral vulnerability of the historical subject. The museum’s collections were dismantled under the Restoration but served as a source of direct or indirect inspiration for many Romantic writers, including Chateaubriand, Michelet, Musset, and Hugo; Hugo lived across the street from the remains of the museum. These writers incorporated the Revolution, I argue, into a structural Romantic view of the self as architecture ruined not just by time but also by political upheaval. In this chapter I date the origins of French Romanticism not to the Revolution itself, nor precisely to ‘‘precursors’’ in Rousseau and other Enlightenment writers, but to a somewhat temporally free-ﬂoating traumatic memory of the Revolution and its symptomatic concrete transformations of the res publica, the public thing. The two authors who most typify continuity from the political idealism of the Revolution to the mal de siècle of early Romanticism, Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël, are the subject of chapter 2. De Staël is often credited with popularizing the term romantique in her 1810 De l’Allemagne; she is also, like Constant, an author who moved from Revolutionary political writings to intimate prose writings and psychological tropes considered typically Romantic. My analysis of Constant’s Cécile, in which a Staël-like character, Mme de Malbée, dominates, focuses on the ethos of substitutability between the political and personal spheres as a necessary foundation for the era of social Romanticism. The insistent transpositional logic that makes Cécile, a ﬁctionalized memoir, in some ways allegorical of the content of Constant’s political treatise De l’Usurpation would seem to put the integrity of both forms of letters into question. But Constant hams up this breach of disciplinarity, ironizing the personal as political and the political as personal. In Cécile Constant positions his autobiographical authorial je under the invincible empire of Mme de Malbée, whom he portrays as a kind of literary Napoleon in drag, at the same time that in his political writings he criticizes the Napoleonic Empire. The signiﬁcance of this transposition is not just misogynist. Close reading shows it to be imitative of analogies between the private and public spheres in de Staël’s own work, subordinating Constant’s

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own mimeticism to hers. It also represents Constant’s view of the defeat of civic agency by individual pleasure in modern governments of ‘‘representation.’’ Constant is unable to deliver this simultaneously radical and impotent message otherwise than mimetically. To articulate a nonimitative, authoritatively rational political theory would be to ﬂy in the face of his philosophy of the psychological and libidinal susceptibility of modern liberty to private pleasures. Constant’s transpositional discourse of mimetic liberties puts the notion of artistic representation into question through a parallel interrogation of representative democracy. The Revolution, and changes in printing technology and distribution, dramatically altered the economics of literary production and reception. The system of aristocratic patronage and mediation by institutions such as academies and salons gave way to a system of greater economic agency and mediation by popular and capitalist forces. If the equality and communality emblematized by the French Revolution was a source of trauma for aristocrats, why not also for writers, whose ambitions depended on concepts of the masterpiece and on practices of patronage? In chapter 3 I analyze the gender politics of authority in the querelle d’Olivier, in which ﬁrst Henri de Latouche and then Stendhal ﬂirted with plagiarism of Claire de Duras’s Olivier ou le secret. I frame this as a debate not just about male impotence, which was the putative subject of Duras’s novel, but about female authorial potency. I trace a previously unnoted dimension of the querelle d’Olivier: the coincidental or not so coincidental association of an ‘‘Olivier’’ character in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s poetry with her lover, Latouche, whom many critics viewed as the ‘‘author’’ of her emotions and therefore of her poetic pathos. The woman poet, presumed not to be original and therefore a kind of gendered double of the male plagiarist, plays intricately with the metaphors of her sexual relationship to her authoritative muse ‘‘Olivier.’’ The functioning of authorial secrets in the Olivier genealogy reveals the trauma of the post-Revolutionary literary potency of the Romantic woman writer. Although Lamartine is, as noted above, often associated with an apolitical Romantic lyricism, he became one of the most important political players in the Romantic era, not least through his popularization of the Revolution in his Histoire des Girondins. As such, Lamartine is emblematic, or symptomatic, of the paradoxes of Romantic politicism. In chapter 4 I

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make sense of the trajectory from lyricism to the political stage by analyzing the role of the Romantic concept of ‘‘harmony’’ in his movement from an inspirational model of poetic wounds to an inspirational model of social wounds. I focus on his mentoring of women poets from the working classes, the poètes ouvrières, such as Antoinette Quarré, Augustine Blanchecotte, and Reine Garde. His shift from the classically inspired muse Elvire in his earliest, most famous work, to the class-oppressed musa pedestris in the poetry coinciding with the two decades of his work as a legislator coincides with the increasing political viability of the discourse of social Romanticism. This transition from the lyrical to the social would seem consistent with the ethical idealism of early socialism except that Lamartine e√ectively reconﬁgures his classical mimetic praxis in terms of borrowed wounds. Lamartine’s attempts to bring social pain into language through the simultaneously glorifying and condescending patronage of writers from the lower classes was not just a quirk of his character but a passion shared with a wide range of his fellow romantics, including Sainte-Beuve, Sand, Sue, and Dumas. As the writers who attempted to carry out this phenomenological social transfusion were almost uniformly upper class, the results contrast René Girard’s theory of appropriative mimetic violence with the phenomenon of the mimetic appropriation of lack. The social Romantic championing of the ‘‘usefulness’’ of art continued to deﬁne the problem of the political agency of literature into the twentieth century. In chapter 5 I analyze the rhetoric of slavery in George Sand’s Indiana. Homi Bhabha theorizes that the colonial trope of mimicry is articulated on the axis of the metonymy of presence. Mimicry, which mediates the relation with an other deﬁned as ‘‘almost the same, but not quite,’’ performs the discomfort of the relationship between likeness and di√erence. In French Romanticism, utopian political thinkers quite consciously analyzed the politics of race and rhetoric. Fourier invested analogy, the rhetorical construction of likeness between otherwise dissimilar things, with politically metamorphic powers. Romantic feminism embraced this politics of the analogical bridging of di√erences. But in Indiana, the feminist analogy between the bondage of slavery and marriage creates a paradoxically narcissistic politics of alterity. The upper-class, married white Creole Indiana, ‘‘this slave woman,’’ not only uses the pronoun ‘‘we’’ to describe the su√ering of her own slaves, but she also is described as having more appeal than

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her Creole servant girl Noun because of the melodramatic seductiveness of her marital ‘‘servitude.’’ The denouement of this analogy in the novel on the one hand suggests the ‘‘harmonious’’ capacity of analogy to transform discrete things into relations and, on the other hand, problematizes the violence of empathic resemblance as the erasure of di√erence. Sand’s evocation of a duplicitous Romantic slavery to the utopian politics of analogy begs the question of the role of mimesis in gender and racial identity. If, according to Butler, one performs gender, can one also perform race? Can one perform gender through an imitation of race? How can one di√erentiate the mimetic underpinnings of race and gender? By the time of the revolution of 1848, which was, as Richard Terdiman has demonstrated, modeled after the Revolution of 1789, the French Revolution had arguably become a Romantic fetish, a magical object granted the power to heal the material divide between di√erent classes of French society. In chapter 6 I develop this hypothesis through analysis of the politics of fetishism in Flaubert’s ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ (A simple heart). Flaubert’s story draws an analogy between the Catholic relic and the ‘‘barbarous’’ fetish not only in order to dignify the thinking processes of the uneducated French peasant but also to respect the ‘‘primitive’’ logic of materialism and imitation as an inevitably post-Revolutionary legacy. Appreciation in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ of what Robert Darnton calls ‘‘thinking with things’’ rather than with abstract principles allows for the articulation of a new form of parity: representation of the illiterate peasant as conceptual peer. Flaubert’s interpretation of the ‘‘primitive’’ mimesis at work in fetishism is also a call or lament for a nonironic vision of social likeness. He obliquely mourns the Revolution in this hybridized discourse of sacred materialism. Mimetic logic underpins all these post-Revolutionary problematizations of the social—the state, liberty, gender, socialism, race, and class—within Romanticism. How does the Revolutionary state ‘‘see’’ itself, ‘‘remake’’ itself, and how do citizens identify with those metamorphic processes? In the post-Revolutionary state, how is political representation comparable to novelistic representation, in that both have to compete with the pleasure principle to gain an audience? In post-Revolutionary concepts of authorial roles, why are plagiarism and other forms of literary appropriation of women’s work urgently appropriated by male authors? Why does early socialism as articulated by the poet-politician Lamartine rely on mimetic parallelism

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between psychological and social wounds? In Romantic notions of Creole identity, why is racial/social di√erence contextualized as likeness? In postRevolutionary discourses of theological, ethnographic, and capitalist materialism, how do notions of the real coincide with those at work in realist mimesis? The broad, interdisciplinary applicability of mimeticism in French Romanticism demonstrates that politics can inspire new forms of artistic representation, and vice versa. Tensions between liberty, equality, and fraternity had a posttraumatic life on the Romantic page that rivaled the drama of their Revolutionary existence. To return to my opening reference to the Letters of Dupuis and Cotonet, French Romanticism can be seen as a naturalization of imitation or likeness, but perhaps only in the sense that in the post-Revolutionary era it became natural to pose the question of likeness. The question of likeness is no less or more ‘‘original’’ than the question of di√erence, despite its potentially synonymous relationship with imitation. More to the point for this project, likeness, like di√erence, opens onto the domain of the social, problematizing the distinction between mimesis and life and framing egalitarian anxieties as second to none.

ONE

ICONOCLASM Setting Wounds in Stone at the Musée des Monuments Français, 1795–1816 The resistance of artworks to destruction is a really extraordinary thing. Brutality, which isn’t able to create anything, is also unable to radically suppress anything. —Louis Courajod, ‘‘Les Débris du Musée des Monuments Français à l’École des Beaux-Arts’’

The Revolution thus inaugurates a new era of symbolic forms of violence. —Dominque Poulot, Musée, Nation, Patrimoine

THE NATION: A TRAGIC GENRE?

In Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy, the object of mimesis must be whole. The metaphor for this wholeness is the living organism, but anything presenting a wholeness parallel to organic integrity can also be a suitable object for mimesis: ‘‘As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one . . . the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.’’∞ A ‘‘beautiful object’’ deserving of representation, ‘‘whether it be a living object or any whole composed of parts,’’ must ‘‘have an orderly

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arrangement of parts’’ (31). Yet this mimeticism of organic wholeness and orderly parts has its work cut out for it, so to speak, since another thing essential to Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy is what he calls the ‘‘Scene of Su√ering’’: ‘‘The Scene of Su√ering is a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds and the like’’ (43). For Aristotle, the Achilles’ heel of mimesis—the disturbing wound—is also that which tragedy cannot do without. Aristotle’s paradox of a su√ering that is at once essential and denied resonates with the paradoxical role of su√ering in Ernest Renan’s seminal 1882 essay, ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ (What is a nation?). In that essay, Renan in e√ect argues that all nationhood is an e√ect of tragedy. He claims that historic investigation inevitably brings to light ‘‘those acts of violence that mark the origin of all political formations.’’≤ Renan uses a striking formula to describe the skeletons in the closets of nationhood: ‘‘Unity is always realized by brute force.’’* This precept refers not only to unity as the merging of languages, races, and religions but also to psychological unity. If a nation were conscious that its cultural unity was a product of brutality, that unity would be threatened. Therefore, Renan explains, unity requires, as a complement to the initial history of brutality, a subsequent establishment of collective forgetfulness bordering on historical error. The nation’s experience of violence and its forgetting of violence are of a piece for Renan: together, they are at the foundation of national unity. Strangely, Renan’s essay then goes on to perform this sequence of brutality, forgetfulness, and unity that it has just analyzed. Having in the ﬁrst two parts of the essay brutally exposed nations as histories of violent conquest and suppression, devoid of any coherent linguistic, racial, or religious logic, in the third part he waxes lyrical and states, ‘‘A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle’’ (903). This national spirituality is based, Renan tells us, on the collective experience of su√ering: ‘‘One loves in proportion to the sacriﬁces and the evils one has endured.’’ Renan forgets to remind us that according to his earlier analysis, this nation-soul must be an amnesiac spiritual principle, united in a su√ering now emptied of speciﬁc or accurate histori*L’unité se fait toujours brutalement.

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cal content. Su√ering or, by the terms of the ﬁrst two parts of the essay, forgetful su√ering, is according to Renan the best possible national glue, more unifying than joy itself: ‘‘yes, collective su√ering unites more than collective rejoicing’’ (904). The critique of nationhood in the ﬁrst two parts of the essay seems antinationalist, while the third part of the essay absorbs the earlier critique and employs it in a discourse of nationalism. What interests me in this schema of nationhood as spiritually unifying tragedy is the simultaneous requirement of and erasure of violence and the su√ering it engenders. Just as Aristotle neglects to explain how the mimetic object in tragedy can be a seamless and orderly whole while still exhibiting su√ering as a ‘‘scene,’’ Renan declines to clarify how forgetful su√ering is made manifest in national identity. If violence begets su√ering, but su√ering takes the form of forgetting, how is it represented ? The role of mimesis in the deployment of forgetful su√ering as a national glue is a deeply political mystery. In Renan’s poetics of national tragedy, trauma is a nationalist state’s best friend. Trauma, after all, is a phenomenon that is normally made manifest only through displacement of literal memories into symbolic or fragmented form. Trauma allows su√ering to be exhibited as symptom, even while the violence that occasioned the trauma is forgotten and unrecognizable. In Juliet Mitchell’s theory of trauma, the role of interpersonal recognition and communication in the aftermath of the trauma is critical to the genesis of screen memories and other phenomena of displacement (including conversion and psychosomatic illness). Social contact and dialogue in the wake of the traumatic event help to set the parameters for what Mitchell calls a ‘‘pseudostate.’’ As Mitchell uses it, the term pseudostate is psychological rather than political, having nothing to do with nation states: ‘‘Trauma makes a breach that empties a person out; probably after the gasp of emptiness, there is rage or hatred—an identiﬁcation with the violence of shock. This state cannot be lived with, and then a phony or pseudostate will be resorted to.’’≥ But I will appropriate the term allegorically for its applicability to Renan’s paradigm of a national genesis so violent and shocking that it cannot be lived with. In Renan’s schema, the state, in its ethos of forgetful su√ering, resorts to a kind of pseudo state. The brutality of the trauma that attends the birth of nations is replaced with a less violent

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pseudo state of reaction and coping, in which su√ering connotes spiritualism rather than history. In the ﬁrst paragraph of the essay, Renan o√handedly observes that at the time of the French Revolution, people failed to understand the violent hybridity underlying modern nation states, taking instead little independent cities such as Sparta and Rome as role models for Revolutionary France. Certainly the ‘‘ancient liberty’’ championed in the Revolutionary period took as its examplars small classical republics. But a more fundamental di√erence between the Revolutionary image of the nation state and Renan’s schema has to do with the determination of the French revolutionaries not to forget but rather to display the brutality at the origins of the new French state. The culture of the French Revolution challenged itself to make the trauma of its amputation from the ancien régime rational, accessible, present to the conscious mind, and visible to the eyes. It wrestled with the questions of how to make destruction demonstrative, desecration commemorative, rupture representative. The brutality that Renan saw as genetic to nationhood was actively and ritualistically portrayed, from the theatrically staged exhibition of the corpse of Lepeletier to the macabre bals des victimes in the aftermath of the Terror.∂ Revolutionary culture was determined to make violent mimesis indissociable from and formative of the citizen’s social existence. Forgetting the trauma constitutive of nationhood was not considered pro-nation but antirevolutionary. Much has been written about the myriad performances of the division of the ancien régime from the new one. Simon Schama recounts that ‘‘however repetitive and redundant these ceremonies may have been, conscientious citizens never seemed to tire of imitating David’s Horatii, their arms achingly outstretched, . . . celebrating the union of allegiances which, it was said, the old regime had kept artiﬁcially divided.’’∑ Not just division but the role of death in cementing the division of old and new regimes held, according to Mona Ozouf, ‘‘center stage’’ in the Revolutionary festivals of the year 1792. The violent deaths of Revolutionary heroes were made into public theater. Poets, dramatists, and artists helped to stage memorials to the reality of wounds. The deaths of the child martyr Joseph Bara, the judicial aristo-

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crat turned regicide deputy Michel Lepeletier, the ‘‘sanguinary’’ deputy Jean-Paul Marat, and others were made into revolutionary passion plays. Ozouf writes For the Lepelletier festival the elegiac Marie-Joseph Chénier himself wanted the ‘‘body of our virtuous colleague, exposed to all eyes, to reveal the mortal wound that he received ﬁghting for the people’s cause.’’ For the festival of Bara and Viala, David planned an equally impressive spectacle: ‘‘You, the incorruptible Marat, show the passage opened up to your soul by the murdering dagger; you, Pelletier, expose that ﬂank, ripped open by a satellite of our last tyrants.’’ Even François de Neufchâteau, . . . was to suggest ‘‘bloody ﬁgures, with dagger wounds, wandering around the public squares.’’ And it was not only in Paris but also throughout the provinces that, on the occasion of funeral festivals, bloodied shirts would be exhibited, the poplars around the altar of the fatherland broken and smeared with red, and ‘‘ornaments imitating the natural’’ would be shown.∏

At the four-day public wake for Lepeletier, mourners climbed steep stairs to see the wounded corpse and the engraved plaque with which it was glossed: ‘‘I am satisﬁed to spill my blood for the country, [for] I hope it will help to consolidate liberty and equality’’ (cited in Schama, 673). The revolutionary’s gaping chest exhibited a kind of secular Sacred Heart, with blood as the symbolic bridge between liberty and equality. To emphasize the signiﬁcance of the wound even further, the assassin’s bloody dagger was hung above the corpse, attached by human hair. The eerie suspension of the weapon symbolized not just the commemoration of violence, but also the attempt to suspend the di√erence between mimetic representation and traumatic experience. Pierre Nora says that the embodiment of memory in ‘‘lieux de mémoire’’ occurs when there are no longer any ‘‘milieux de mémoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.’’π But the Revolution made places and scenes of violence, like the events at the Place de la Concorde, into living monuments—to death. The guillotining of Louis XVI on January 20, 1793, which earlier would have been perceived as the severing of the bodily integrity of the French state itself, ﬁt into the traumatic ritualism of the Revolutionary state. In accordance with the protocol for executions, after the twelve-inch blade had fallen, the king’s head was displayed to the crowd. Simon Schama comments that ‘‘it was the relentless normality

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closing in around the spectacle that struck some witnesses as truly unbearable’’ (669). Blood, wounds, and severed heads were the actors in a muchrepeated Aristotelian ‘‘scene of su√ering’’ central to the representation of a new regime. In the Revolutionary era, the social life of mimesis was all about staging the sociability of death. INSTITUTIONAL ICONOCLASM

The Latin museum comes from the Greek mouseîon, which breaks down to the noun muse and a su≈x of place. The Muses were originally Mneme (memory), Melete (meditation) and Aoede (song); but in later mythology, memory acceded to the position of mother of nine Muses, including Clio (history). This genetic model posits history as the o√spring of memory— despite the fact that any relation of priority and ﬁdelity between the two terms yields endless ambiguities. In the aftermath of the Terror, the problem of historical memory was itself obliquely institutionalized in one museum. Alexandre Lenoir (1762–1839) founded the Musée des Monuments Français, which, from 1795 to 1816, provided a melancholy haven for monuments, tombs, and iconography vandalized in the wake of the Revolution. The beheading of the king had its analog in countless beheadings of statues; Revolutionary festivals of death kept pace with informal festivals of morbid desecration. The Musée des Monuments Français housed these traces of violence necessary to the representation of the nation as a tragic genre—and its catalogs chronicle the political tensions of institutionalizing iconoclasm. Iconoclasm, the smashing of icons, is a negative mimetic trope: while there can be no doubt that it is a form of representation, it works by unrepresenting, by rupturing representation. In the Revolutionary era as a crisis of likeness—the historical morphing of a new regime onto the ancien—iconoclastic mutilation of public spaces as a means of imprinting conﬂictual national identities was widespread. The term vandalism, a neologism referring to the ‘‘Vandal hordes’’ and their aggressions in Gaulish history, entered common usage. Dominque Poulot notes that it has not been established whether the Vandals and the Goths may have already incarnated the ‘‘destroyers of works of art’’ in the eighteenth century; but in any case the neologism has been attributed to the abbé Grégoire. It was so

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commonly used that it was ﬁtted to other parts of speech: ‘‘vandaliste,’’ ‘‘vandaliser,’’ ‘‘vandalique.’’∫ It signiﬁed a mode of semiotic metamorphosis that was at least periodically sanctioned by the state. The decree of August 14, 1792, on the ‘‘signs of feudalism’’ exhorted citizens not to ‘‘leave those monuments erected to pride, prejudice, and tyranny before the eyes of the French people any longer.’’Ω Even the abbé Grégoire, in his three reports on the ‘‘destruction wrought by vandalism, and the means of suppressing it,’’ acknowledged the inevitability of remaking the monumental identity of France into the image of the Republic. He conceded, ‘‘Undoubtedly everything must speak a republican language to the eyes.’’∞≠ What would republicanism ‘‘look’’ like? What did one have to break in order to make this image? As France heaved forth its troubled history from the inside of sanctuaries and from under the earth of graveyards into this scene of strangely civic violence, Lenoir, who began the notorious part of his career as an archaeologist, found himself with a macabre ﬁeld site: hegemonic France’s selfdesecrated past. Prior to the Revolution Lenoir had trained as a painter and art historian under Gabriel-François Doyen, ‘‘Peintre du roi,’’ but in January of 1791 he was authorized by the Comité d’Aliénation des Biens Publiques to gather vandalized sculptures, sepulchres, and iconography into the former Convent of the Petits-Augustins, which is now the site of the École des Beaux-Arts.∞∞ On the 29 Vendémiaire year IV (September 29, 1795), he was granted permission to o≈cially convert the depository into a museum, although he had probably admitted the public as early as 1792. During the existence of the museum, Lenoir wrote numerous di√erent catalogs. These catalogs chronicle not so much the changing content of the museum’s exhibits as the epistemological and political tensions between monumentality and vandalism as forms of mimetic mirroring of the state. Monumentality presents an obvious mimetic tension in relation to discontinuity of regime. When a regime has met its end, the function of its contemporary monuments shifts from a commemoration of the regime to a commemoration of the regime’s ideology of self-fashioning. When the monuments are vandalized, they also commemorate resistance to the regime. Not only was the France of the Musée des Monuments Français an ‘‘other France,’’ but the museum further bent the paradigm of the national collection by making damage, desecration, or amputation from context

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into implicit criteria for the inclusion of objects. James Cli√ord argues that culture is delimited and claimed for purposes of identiﬁcation or counteridentiﬁcation only through its status as a collection. ‘‘ ‘Cultures’ are ethnographic collections,’’∞≤ he writes. He cites a Canadian Historic Monuments Commission’s classiﬁcation of ‘‘cultural property’’ including ‘‘1) commemorative monuments; 2) churches and chapels; 3) forts of the French Regime; 4) windmills; 5) roadside crosses; 6) commemorative inscriptions and plaques; 7) devotional monuments; 8) old houses and manors; 9) old furniture; 10) ‘les chooses disparues.’ ’’ Such a classiﬁcation of identity ‘‘cannot be natural or innocent,’’ says Cli√ord; ‘‘It is tied up with nationalist politics, restrictive law, and with contested encodings of past and future’’ (218). The Musée des Monuments Français took a strikingly alienated approach to culture as collection. By making vandalized monuments collectible, it denaturalized the content of the collection and put the wholeness and continuity of French national identity into question. THE OTHER WITHIN

The museum’s institutional preservation of the concrete signs of France’s rupture with itself was consistent with the recent evolution of archaeological/orientalist epistemologies of the rise and fall of empires. While archaeology and orientalism would come to occupy separate geographical spheres of association under the inﬂuence of the ‘‘Aryan’’ model of Greek history developed later in the Romantic period,∞≥ in the late eighteenth century the marble ghosts of fallen empires mingled freely in the cultural imagination with oriental ‘‘otherness.’’ In Constantin-François Volney’s popular Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791), the monuments of Palmyra, a city at the crossroads of east-west trade routes in ancient Syria, bear a spectral prosopopoeic message concerning political change. ‘‘Interrogate these ruins!’’∞∂ urges a ‘‘pale phantom,’’ identiﬁed as the ‘‘Genius of tombs and ruins.’’ He pleads with the narrator to look away from the chimera of ‘‘fate’’ and instead turn his attention toward sepulchral monuments and the ‘‘ashes of legislators’’ (19). By studying and historicizing the ends of civilizations, as symptomatized by their monumental self-representations, the narrator will avoid rationalizing political change with a hypocritical nod to the heavens: ‘‘It was God’s will, it was fate’’ (17).

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Volney’s ‘‘Génie’’ in this sense serves as a personiﬁcation of the Latin root monere in monument, meaning ‘‘to remind,’’ ‘‘to warn.’’ Lenoir literally found himself in a position, through the October 1793 excavations of the ruined Abbey of Saint-Denis, to question the ‘‘ashes of legislators’’ for the dynamics of the fall of the ancien régime in France. This exhumation of ‘‘kings, queens, princes, princesses, and famous men’’ (1799, cvi) was carried out in accordance with a decree requiring the extraction of precious metals and militarily valuable lead. In what constitutes the museum’s primal scene,∞∑ soldiers dug up ‘‘lead hearts . . . coated with silver’’ (1799, cxiv). Poulot argues that the excavation of Saint-Denis also suited the need to appropriate monuments for Revolutionary iconic purposes, notably ‘‘as accessories for the festivals, thereby avoiding the fabrication of ever disappointing simulacra’’ (152). The tombs of kings and queens were needed for authentically grandiose Revolutionary stage sets. From the bowels of Saint-Denis, what did the French genius of tombs and ruins have to say, and in what discourse? With Lenoir as messenger, the message is elusive, although not for any shortage of information. On the contrary, because of intense public interest, Lenoir’s catalog of the museum, which contains the narrative of its founding, was reprinted in twelve editions between 1793 and 1816 and in addition translated into English; he also wrote numerous related texts on the collection and its origins.∞∏ CATALOG REGIMES

In what could serve as a metaphor for the polyphony of memories informing all historical syntheses, or of the inability of the nation to settle on a lasting reconﬁguration of its identity, each edition of Lenoir’s catalog di√ers dramatically from the preceding one. The wording, the ordering of the text, the subjects described, the inclusion of historical documents, and even the title of the museum vary from year to year. As the Revolutionary era became post-Revolutionary, Lenoir evidently was compelled to accommodate the founding myth of the institution to alternately Revolutionary, Napoleonic, and ﬁnally Restoration political sensibilities. In 1852 M. de Guilhermy in the Annales archéologiques noted that the oldest versions of the museum catalog were written ‘‘in pagan and democratic language; others in an imperialist and philosophical style; the most recent in devout and monarchical prose’’ (cited in Courajod, 2:207).

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The result of this overtly politicized narration is that the ‘‘history’’ of the museum’s founding, in which the traumatic excavations of Saint-Denis are so prominent, reads as a narrative of the repression and the return of politically incompatible aesthetics. It is not just that Lenoir’s political rationalizations of the content of the museum are highly ﬁckle; the necessity in the catalogs of describing dislocation and fragmentation wreaks violence on the ordinary language of monumentality in the ﬁrst place. The separation of royal corpses from their monuments at Saint-Denis challenges the relation of authority to monumental representation. As a question of representation, the disinterment suggests the separation of the referent (the royal corpse) from the artwork (the sepulchral monument); and yet, perhaps what is most striking is that they were ever united. The creation of a monumental frame for this separation at the museum symbolizes the inevitability of doing an act of violence to the royal corpse if one does an act of violence to the sepulchral monument. The merger of ﬂesh with stone may be a common trope of desire in poetry—consider Baudelaire’s ‘‘La Beauté’’ or Banville’s ‘‘Vénus de Milo’’—and death might seem to allow the ‘‘great man’’ to merge with his monument. But this merger is precisely what the founding moment of the Musée des Monuments Français puts into question. In overturning the monarchical regime, it was not enough to behead the king; it was also necessary to behead the statue and overturn the grave. Lenoir’s description of the opening of the tombs implies that the sepulchre is simply a mask for a decomposition that mocks monumental ambitions, or for the ontological incompatibility of humanity with monumentality. Kenneth Gross, in The Dream of the Moving Statue, writes, ‘‘We recognize in the statue an image of the fate of bodies, a fate elected out of a desire to deny our vulnerable, penetrable, wasting, and dying physical persons, to provide ourselves with idealized stone mirrors. . . . Statues are bodies to which nothing can happen, bodies spared from pain or need, even in the face of their fragmentation, bodies in which we are spared from having to imagine need, the terrors (or pleasures) of touch or gaze.’’∞π The ‘‘terror’’ to which statues were exposed at Saint-Denis broke open the stone mirror to reveal bodies helplessly subject to time and historical judgment. The 1793 ‘‘Notes historiques,’’ supplemented by brief ‘‘procès-verbaux’’ in the early editions of the Description historique et chronologique des monuments de sculpture réunis au Musée des Monuments Français (Historical and

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chronological description of the sculptural monuments gathered at the Museum of French Monuments), narrate the scene in graphic detail. To keep the tombs and throw away the kings was clearly the reigning spirit of the excavation. Lenoir compares it to a prophecy in Jeremiah: ‘‘They will throw away the bones of the kings of Judah, the bones of princes . . . will be like manure on the earth’’ (1799, cvi). The bodies of the great were thrown into a common grave: ‘‘The entrails of princes and princesses were also in this cavern in lead seals . . . they took them into the cemetery and removed the entrails, which were thrown into a common grave with the cadavers’’ (1799, cxviii). But one corpse, that of Turenne, escaped reburial in a cemetery ditch because of its unusual state of preservation, which kept the body ‘‘perfectly like’’ artistic representations of it: ‘‘This body, in no way withered, and perfectly like the portraits and medallions we have of this great Captain, was in a dry mummiﬁed state, a light tan color’’ (1799, cvii). The consequence of the lifelike, which is to say artlike, state of Turenne’s mummy was that it remained in cultural circulation, with a value shifting from the grotesque to the sublime. First it was displayed for a fee for eight months by the guardian of Saint-Denis, who also permitted himself to sell Turenne’s teeth, individually. The mummy was then transported to the Jardin des Plantes; Poulot notes that it was exhibited there between the skeletons of a rhinoceros and an elephant (151). Then it was returned to its sarcophagus at Lenoir’s museum. Later Lenoir had it transported ‘‘in great pomp’’ to the Invalides, at Napoleon’s behest. Ultimately it was returned to Saint-Denis. The migrations of this mummy provide visceral evidence of the centrality of dead bodies as what Poulot calls the realia of the past (156) in the Revolutionary social life of mimesis. Another well-preserved corpse, that of Henri IV, provoked an act of admiring appropriation—violent mimesis—by a soldier who identiﬁed with the assassinated king’s valor: ‘‘A soldier who was present, moved by martial enthusiasm at the moment of the opening of the co≈n, threw himself on the cadaver of the conqueror of the League. After a long admiring silence, he drew his saber, cut o√ a long lock of the beard, which was still fresh, and simultaneously cried out, in energetic and truly military terms, ‘I too am a French soldier! Henceforth I will have no other mustache than this one’ ’’ (Lenoir, 1799, cxii).

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The more recent monarchs in the ‘‘Notes historiques’’ had no such odeur de sainteté. In a state of pronounced putrefaction, they emitted a ‘‘thick black vapor’’ (1799, cxvi) that gave many of the workers ‘‘diarrhea and fevers.’’ Of all the monarchs in the Enlightenment period, only the body of the ‘‘the last dead king’’ is described as ‘‘frais,’’ and he is obscenely fresh: ‘‘white skin, a violet nose and a bottom as red as that of a newborn infant’’ (1799, cxviii).* The 1810 edition suppresses description of pink royal cheeks in favor of a vaguely Rabelaisian recasting of the Revolution in the epic style enforced under the Napoleonic regime. Entitled Musée Impérial des Monuments Français: Histoire des arts en France (Imperial Museum of French Monuments: History of the arts in France), the catalog heralds the opening of a ‘‘nineteenth-century room’’ picturesquely called ‘‘la salle des faits héroiques de l’Empereur Napoléon le Grand’’∞∫ (room of the heroic deeds of the Emperor Napoleon the Great). The fact that the museum now had a political qualiﬁer (‘‘Impérial’’) is no less signiﬁcant than the erasure of the museum’s ‘‘historical’’ and ‘‘chronological’’ role in favor of the far more neutral notion of the ‘‘history of the arts.’’ As ‘‘art history,’’ in which art forms its own continuum isolated from national history, the museum takes on the political alibi of art for art’s sake. By the time the edition of 1815 appeared, as one might guess from the title, Musée Royal des Monuments Français, ou mémorial de l’histoire de France et de ses monuments, there is even less talk of the decomposition of royal cadavers. Instead, in this edition Lenoir reinvokes politics but positions himself in a role of martyred opposition to the Revolutionary excesses of an ‘‘overwrought multitude’’: ‘‘I will not mention here the di≈culties, the disgust, the obstacles, and even the dangers that I had to overcome to reassemble more than ﬁve hundred monuments from the French monarchy.’’∞Ω An introductory note from his editor does mention Saint-Denis, but only in terms of Lenoir’s heroic e√orts—to the point of throwing himself between a soldier’s bayonet and Richelieu’s remains—to preserve the Cardinal mummy of the ancien régime: ‘‘During the Revolutionary furor, Alexandre Lenoir tried, at the risk of his life, to save the tomb of Cardinal *La peau blanche, le nez violet et les fesses rouges comme celles d’un enfant nouveau-né.

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Richelieu as it was being vigorously attacked by the French army; he was wounded on the right hand by a Revolutionary bayonet. He managed to save the majority of the royal monuments from destruction’’ (1815, 6). Lenoir’s earlier archaeology of the alterity of the ancien régime is here reconﬁgured as the preservation of monumental relics. Vandalism in this catalog is described as an assault on religious establishments, leaving artworks without asylum: ‘‘He had the idea of reuniting in a depository all the monuments of the art that were then without asylum because of the suppression of religious establishments’’ (1815, 5). Because of such revisions, Lenoir’s ‘‘Genius of tombs and ruins’’ appears to voice not one political message but rather an indirect and pluralistic message about the politics of monumental representation. The Musée des Monuments Français creates a cult of the self-representations of state, of church, and of genius, but in a state of amputative detachment from their propagandistic contexts. Stephen Bann points out that the rooms representing each century in the Musée des Monuments Français were organized on the basis of metonymy rather than metaphor or synecdoche,≤≠ contiguity rather than condensation. This institutional layout exploited disjunctive historical association more than a fusion of identity. The catalogs were also motivated by a contiguous and chance relationship to political regimes in the wake of the Revolutionary era. In order to survive within di√erent political regimes, the museum reclassiﬁed its relationship to the discourses of power. Its fundamental metaphorical role is not to represent a regime but to represent the vulnerability of political regimes to the ravages of history. Lenoir’s salvaged monuments and their rationales were ultimately archaeological wounds in the self-construction of power. As symptoms of traumatic mimesis—in this context the inability of the French state to see a coherent self-image in the looking glass—the museum’s collections now risked becoming victims of a di√erent, antirevolutionary iconoclasm. In this sense, it is not surprising that the museum’s potential compatibility with the monarchy, owing to its preservation of an extraordinarily extensive collection of monarchical representations, instead led to its undoing. Whereas the cultures of the Revolutionary Commune, the Convention, the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire might all seem to have had political motivations for being threatened by the monarchical fragments

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housed in the museum, they were instead captivated by the haunting unreality of the monumental symptoms of the centuries, piled ‘‘pêle-mêle’’ at the Petits-Augustins. In contrast, the Restoration of the monarchy necessitated the seamless reunion of the referent—royalty—with its monumental role and image. The vogue for architectural restoration under the aptly named Restoration was very much at odds with the historical preservation of the monarchy’s desecration. MONARCHICAL ‘‘REALISM’’

The Restoration functioned in e√ect as the return of a monarchical ‘‘realism,’’ in which the statue or image is purported to be as one with what it represents. This necessitated the repression of Lenoir’s archaeological aesthetic, which had always capitalized on the ‘‘vandalique’’ breaches in the monumental, monarchical state. The Musée des Monuments Français seemed to make royalty a museum piece, rather than making the museum a shrine to royalty. Louis XVIII (or members of his entourage, since no one ever o≈cially accepted responsibility for the dismantling of Lenoir’s collection) was therefore open to criticisms of Lenoir and his museum of damaged goods.≤∞ This criticism was voiced partly by Quatremère de Quincy, who directed his ‘‘muséophobie’’ against the Musée des Monuments Français, but perhaps most forcibly by the sculptor Louis-Pierre DeSeine.≤≤ Lenoir had given Héloise’s skull to DeSeine so that he could make a bust of the famous lover for the Musée des Monuments Français, and DeSeine had found the gift alarming (Bann, 84–85). First in a publication that apparently went unheeded in 1801, then in a reedition of the same essay in 1814, DeSeine argued that the monuments in Lenoir’s museum needed to be returned to the sites of their original ‘‘cults’’ if they were to have any cultural power. ‘‘How will the strangers who crowd our cities believe that the French government has reestablished the Catholic religion, when the temples for the practice of the cult remain eternally in the state of degradation in which they were left by the Revolutionary furor?’’≤≥ DeSeine felt that Lenoir’s museum instead upheld the validity of the Terror—a historical moment in which ‘‘a handful of men, who wanted to reign over cadavers, had formed the mad project of transforming the French

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into a people without laws, religion, manners, or politics, foreign to the entire world, and hostile to all historically respected received ideas’’ (283). DeSeine formulated a marvelous metaphor of attack. Lenoir’s museum, he warned, was nothing more than an assemblage of disjointed body parts and sculptural accessories trying to masquerade as a classical statue: ‘‘I can just imagine a madman saying in a reasonable tone, Sirs, behold this old body, onto which I have grafted a bottom, pectorals, a neck, a head, arms, hands, thighs, legs, feet, accessories, and a stand. This, Sirs, is an antique statue!’’ (279–80).* In relation to this monumentality of composite body parts, DeSeine viewed Napoleon Bonaparte as a ﬁrst ‘‘reparative genius’’ (283). The museum was closed without ceremony on December 18, 1816 (Courajod, 2:44). Some of its contents were eagerly absorbed by other establishments, some were lost or used as construction material, and some were left to decay in a stony morass in the courtyard of the Petits-Augustins.≤∂ Much later in the century a new Musée Nationale des Monuments Français was founded. Its emphasis on national monuments did not privilege an aesthetic of mutilation. Its visitors did not need to imagine its statues experiencing Terror.

THE LITERARY AFTERLIFE OF THE MUSEUM

It is no coincidence that next door to the convent of the Petits-Augustins and its haunting junkyard, the man who would become the great patriarch of French Romanticism, Victor Hugo, would live out parts of his adolescence. Hugo’s mother lived in an apartment in a house sharing a wall with the garden of the former museum, and in 1818 Victor returned from the Pension Cordier and worked at a desk directly overlooking the courtyard and its sculptural remains. Perhaps one can gauge the degree to which Victor was fascinated by the view by the fact that his brother, Abel, published a book on the exhumed monuments from Saint-Denis in 1825.≤∑ The *J’imagine entendre un insensé dire d’un ton raisonnable: Messieurs, vous voyez ce vieux corps, auquel j’ai fait rapporter un derrière, des pectoraux, un cou, une tête, des bras, des mains, des cuisses, des jambes, des pieds, des accessoires, une plinthe: eh bien! c’est une statue antique.

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Hugos were, after all, relatives of the Count Volney who had written Les Ruines.≤∏ Adèle Hugo, in her 1863 account of her husband’s life, asserted that Victor, age 14 in 1816, personally witnessed the dismantling and partial removal of the museum’s collections, the carpenters chiseling, stones being wrapped, and tombs leaving the museum one by one. Victor was gripped, Adèle wrote, by ‘‘the emptiness of the tomb.’’≤π This view, this sense of the vide, would have a dramatic impact on the work of Victor Hugo and the Romantic ‘‘school’’ he helped to shape. But his experience of what Philippe Hamon, punning on the notion of Lacan’s ‘‘mirror stage,’’ calls ‘‘Le stade du musée,’’≤∫ was hardly isolated from the museumania of those who would be his Romantic peers. On the contrary, the young poet transﬁxed by the personal vision of the ruins next door was also imitating a preexisting vogue for mimesis as a theater of temporality. HISTORICIST AESTHETICS

One of the most salient motifs of French Romanticism is its historical inspiration. The aesthetics of history in the post-Revolutionary period are conventionally divided into two camps: neoclassicism and Romantic medievalism. The neoclassical aesthetic is aligned with republican morality, mimetic perfection, didactic intent, and, of course, the heritage of ancient Greece. Neoclassicism gives a visual form to the concept of ‘‘ancient liberty,’’ in which collective civic engagement supplants the validity of individual desires. Most prominently epitomized by the work and the cultural role of painter and statesman David, neoclassicism is linked to the Revolutionary era itself. The medievalist aesthetic, which is more properly post-Revolutionary but still dependent on the architectural and sculptural trauma of the Terror for its genesis, is aligned with Christian pathos, the lugubrious Gothic, and feudal and monarchical national heritage. These two aesthetics of passéisme bear in di√erent ways on the problem of the mimetic representation of su√ering. Lenoir, throughout the Revolutionary period and the Empire, praises the neoclassical aesthetic as ‘‘the philosophical spirit now regaining its former power, which will necessarily lead artists to the simple imitation of nature in

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its perfection, to the exact representation of moral and truly republican virtues. It will therefore further the goals of learning and public well-being’’ (1799, 44). He explicitly contextualizes this classical mimesis of public virtue as the civil opposite of what Heine would later describe as ‘‘the reawakening of the poetry of the Middle Ages . . . [in the form of ] a passion ﬂower which had blossomed from the blood of Christ. . . . [and whose] most aweinspiring charm consists in the voluptuousness of pain.’’≤Ω The morbid origination of the exhibits at the Musée des Monuments Français did nothing to mitigate Lenoir’s opposition to the martyrological su√ering endemic to Christian representations: ‘‘What a brilliant career is now available to our painters and sculptors! The history of the French Revolution is a vast ﬁeld they should explore with honor. They will no longer be representing the laurels and crowns of the martyrs of Christ, but those of victory, of liberty, of concord and peace. The laughing images of the sweet philanthropy now practiced in our temples will ﬁnally replace a sad religion whose mythology o√ered the arts nothing but torture, the sick, and the dead’’ (1799, 44). Lenoir and many of his compatriots in the Revolutionary era in e√ect accused Christian history of masochism, although the term itself was not invented until the work of Sächer-Masoch late in the nineteenth century. But the amputative atmosphere of Lenoir’s museum clearly presented an aesthetic of wounding as well. For Lenoir it appears that there were important divisions in the classiﬁcation of visual pain. The pain of the Terror, in which the old regime was amputated from the new, was good. The pain of Christian pathos, as something like the institutionalization of an abstract, forgetful su√ering, was bad. This distinction might have been viable for Lenoir, but his disavowal of the Christian mythology of su√ering and death was obviously undermined by the poetics of dismemberment and martyrdom suggested by his search for mutilated ﬁgurative monuments. These political and aesthetic contradictions inherent in the founding of the Musée des Monuments Français suggest that Romantic medievalism emerged not in stark opposition to neoclassicism but in a symbiotic or even parasitic rapport. Medievalism went on to gain ground in the post-Revolutionary era as the materialization, and the valorization, of ruptures in the republican ideal. Lenoir’s desire to exploit classical brokenness unintentionally fused with the aesthetics of medieval martyrdom, and the Musée des Monuments Français

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became a fertile imaginative resource for some of the most important early theorists of Romantic medievalism. THE WOUNDED ‘‘PUBLIC THING’’

Of course, Lenoir’s museum was far from the only source for the birth of French Romantic medievalism from the ashes of the Terror. The rhetoric of corporeality that generally dominated discussions of the new Republic during the Terror greatly enhanced the inevitable ‘‘performance’’ of rejected codes of martyrdom in the founding of the museum. The anthropomorphic poetics of the state in the Revolutionary era subliminally suggested that a republic in the etymological sense of res publica or ‘‘public thing,’’≥≠ when deﬁned by the people, constituted a collective ‘‘body politic.’’ This body politic had to be di√erentiated from the representation of the monarchy as a single, ‘‘humanly shaped organism.’’≥∞ Despite the coincidence of form between a body politic and a humanly shaped organism, Revolutionaries felt that the republican body politic would need to speciﬁcally resemble its own new monumental self-identiﬁcation. Monuments resembling the monarchy rather than the republic would negatively a√ect the people on an ontological level. A rhetoric of speciﬁc resemblance deﬁnes the rationalizations of vandalism: ‘‘When all the signs of feudalism and monarchy have been removed, these will lose, so to speak, their corporeal existence and cease to control the senses of the people,’’ argued the Révolutions de Paris.≥≤ Urbain Domergue, the head of the Bureau de la Bibliographie, discussed the fate of France’s libraries in terms of the need to ‘‘bring the Revolutionary scalpel into our vast depositories of books and cut o√ all the gangrened parts of the bibliographic body ’’ (Baczko, 262). A bodily poetics also characterizes arguments against vandalism, as in Lenoir’s description of his protection of mutilated sculptures from ‘‘the arms of idiocy’’ (1799, 3) and of his arrangement of them in rooms expressing ‘‘the exact physiognomy of the centuries they represent’’ (1799, 6). But the physiognomy of the new ‘‘public thing’’ overlapped with the physiognomy of Gothic medievalism. In the semiotic arena of scalpels and severed limbs and the corporeal existence of signs in the throes of Revolutionary iconoclasm, the pathos of debris from the ancien régime translated for the early Romantics into a

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concept of architectural Passio or su√ering. In the Gothic, problems of history, destruction or pain, and spatial form converged. Jules Michelet, the archetypal Romantic historian of medieval France and of the ‘‘blood of legend,’’ wrote that he had, as a young man, received ‘‘the vague desire to climb back through the centuries’’ from the Musée des Monuments Français. He characteristically mixed metaphors of blood, tears, and stone in his meditation on the Gothic: ‘‘One tear, one alone, spilling onto the foundations of the Gothic church, su≈ces to evoke it. Something human spurts out of it, the blood of legend, . . . From the inside to the outside, everything comes out in ﬂowers—of stone? . . . Should one sculpt them? Bring in the iron and the scissors? I would have been horriﬁed, sure that I was seeing blood come out! . . . In my blind enthusiasm for the Gothic I had seeded the stone with blood.’’*≥≥ In this richly poetic passage, Michelet’s tear expresses the blood of legend from the Gothic church, sowing ﬂowers of stone. To sculpt those stone blossoms would have been to violently transpierce them, drawing blood. But Michelet perceives his very love for the Gothic as a kind of organic sculpting, creating a miracle of architectural corporeality. Revolutionary iconoclasm was also the unwitting catalyst for a transgression of the neoclassical aesthetic in a more pragmatic sense. The policy of giving ‘‘alienated’’ national representations ‘‘asylum’’ in the Petits-Augustins because of their material value to the Republic resulted in an unprecedented collection of medieval monuments in one place. Louis Courajod, in his introduction to Lenoir’s Journal, heralds this as ‘‘the rehabilitation of the art of the Middle Ages.’’ The pejorative weight of the label ‘‘Gothic’’ prior to the Revolution, reinforced by the isolated institutional context of France’s medieval monuments, had guaranteed a certain cultural invisibility: ‘‘Without anything to link them together, scattered through the streets or in buildings, these withered monuments called gothics had not attracted much attention.’’ But with the ‘‘unexpected formation of this Museum of French *Une larme, une seule, jetée aux fondements de l’église gothique, su≈t pour l’évoquer. Quelque chose en jaillit d’humain, le sang de la légende, . . . Du dedans au dehors, tout ressortit en ﬂeurs,—de pierre? . . . Les sculpter? approcher le fer et le ciseau? j’en aurais eu horreur et j’aurais cru en voir sortir du sang! . . . J’avais dans mon aveugle élan pour le gothique, fait germer du sang la pierre.

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Monuments,’’ Courajod writes, ‘‘It seemed that a thunderbolt opened all eyes.’’ France’s medieval monuments arrived at the ‘‘banquet of history’’ like ‘‘the impious Don Juan’’ (Courajod, 2:6). (The impious Don Juan is not the guest of stone but the son of the guest of stone; Courajod seems to conﬂate Don Juan with the guest of stone in order to link monumentality and libertinage.) Ultimately, then, the suppression of monarchical and ecclesiastical signs in the interest of a neoclassicist aesthetic cast a distinctly Gothic light on the symbolic ruptures in the ‘‘corporeal’’ integrity of the ‘‘public thing.’’ These ruptures served to call into question many intersections: of past and present, animation and inanimation, individual body and body politic, ideal and failure, wholeness and wound, and old and new regimes. These are precisely the axes that inform the construction of the Romantic subject. Romantic medievalism would employ rupture above all to interrogate the permeable boundaries between trauma as an a√air of state and trauma as an a√air of the human subject. THE ROMANTIC BODY POLITIC AS RUIN

The primarily architectural inspiration of Romantic literary medievalism is widely acknowledged,≥∂ but generally in the sense that Romantic writers liked ruined buildings, not that they were like ruined buildings. Yet just as the cultural history of the Musée des Monuments Français indicates that the Gothic revival was largely a reaction against the morbid desecration of the Gothic,≥∑ Romantic literary medievalism frequently presents itself as an e√ect of morbid identiﬁcation with that Gothic desecration. In the early Romantic movement, the construct of Christian imitatio generated a rapport of empathic identiﬁcation between man and monument, with man’s ruptures representing the violent impermanence of political and religious ideals. While Hugo’s ‘‘Aux Ruines de Montfaury,’’ for instance, expresses his a√ective attachment to ruins (‘‘I love you, ô debris!’’),≥∏ a more complex identiﬁcation with the medieval ruin informs the structure of Notre-Dame de Paris. Here the cathedral is personiﬁed in terms of human decomposition: ‘‘An architect with good taste amputated it and believed it was su≈cient to mask the wound with a large plaster. . . . One can distinguish in its

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ruins three sorts of lesions that all reach di√erent depths: time ﬁrst, . . . then political and religious revolutions, . . . and ﬁnally, fashion. . . . They cut to the quick’’ (4:95).* The cathedral with its fantastical, bleeding corporeality then becomes the host organism for a Gothic human drama in which the body of Quasimodo, by contagion, must be deformed. The ‘‘monster’’ shares the etymon monere, to warn, with the monument. What does the monumental monster, the monster of the monument, communicate in his warning? In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it is no accident that the monster realizes his own monstrosity in the scene in which he overhears passages from Volney’s Les Ruines: ‘‘The book from which Felix read to Saﬁe was Volney’s Ruins of Empires.’’≥π It is in Volney’s text, as we have seen, that the ghost of tombs and ruins makes a dramatic apostrophic appeal to decaying monuments—‘‘Tell us, monuments of times past!’’ (Volney, 13)—in order to decipher their warnings concerning the fall of empires. In Shelley’s text, the ghost’s discourse gives the monster ‘‘insight into the manners, governments and religions of the di√erent nations of the earth.’’ This insight then causes him to reﬂect on the regrettable reasons for the existence of laws and governments in the ﬁrst place: man’s capacity for the deformation of natural laws of justice. From there it is only a short cognitive leap to his own grotesque mirror stage: ‘‘Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from whom all men ﬂed, and whom all men disowned?’’ (102). Similarly, for Hugo, the medievalist ‘‘prop’’ is the site of man’s ontological identiﬁcation with the mortality, the human frailty, of civilization—‘‘the brutality of unity,’’ as Renan says. Hugo addresses this more-than-romantic appeal of medieval ruins in his ‘‘Note to the Deﬁnitive Edition,’’ in which the term aesthetic is aligned not with visual appreciation but with ‘‘philosophie’’: ‘‘But there are perhaps other readers who have found it useful to study the aesthetic and philosophical thought hidden in this book, and who have found buried in the novel something other than the novel’’ (4:22). *Un architecte de bon goût l’a amputé et a cru qu’il su≈sait de masquer la plaie avec ce large emplâtre. . . . On peut distinguer sur sa ruine trois sortes de lésions qui toutes trois entament à di√érentes profondeurs: le temps d’abord, . . . ensuite, les révolutions politiques et religieuses, . . . enﬁn, les modes. . . . Elles ont tranché dans le vif.

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Hugo’s medievalist aphorism ‘‘Time is the architect, the people the mason’’ (4:95) could be the prototype for the architectural malady of temporality in Alfred de Musset’s La Confession d’un enfant du siècle. ‘‘The people who went through 93 and 1814 have two wounds to the heart,’’ writes Musset.≥∫ Wounded by the Terror, they are then redundantly rewounded by the Restoration of the Terror’s royal victims. As such, they are like a man whose house has fallen into ruin and who is given nothing but debris with which to rebuild: ‘‘Here is a man whose house is falling into ruin. . . . The debris is lying about in his ﬁeld, and he is waiting for new stones for his new building. . . . But they come to tell him there are no new stones’’ (78). This post-Revolutionary mason, as the narrator notes poignantly, ‘‘does not want ruins to make a nest for his brood’’ (79). But he is so immersed in a culture of debris that he ultimately becomes a ruin, he is ruined: ‘‘I had made for myself a vast depository of ruins, until at last, I had made myself a ruin too’’ (89).* Just as Musset’s romantic mason grafts the signs of temporality onto himself in a kind of political architectonics of being in time, he attributes signs of corporeality to temporality. The very idea of temporal upheaval— the notion that ‘‘this could be,’’ and ‘‘this has been’’ (70)—had constituted, according to Musset, the ﬁrst ‘‘dog bite’’ (morsure du chien ) in the body of the Empire. In the aftermath of the Restoration of the monarchy, the body of temporality is itself suspended between life and death. The future is like Pygmalion’s Galatea, ‘‘a lover of stone, and they were waiting for her to come to life, and for blood to color her veins’’ (69), while the present is ‘‘this ghost, half mummy and half fetus’’ (70). This metaphor of the mummiﬁed fetus is linked to Musset’s own articulation of two major generational categories of the Romantic maladie du siècle, synonymous in the Confession with ‘‘désespérance ’’ (74). According to Musset it was Chateaubriand, ‘‘prince de la poésie’’ (75) in the ﬁrst generation a∆icted with the malady, who had installed ‘‘despair’’ as an idol on a Christian ‘‘marble altar.’’ In the second category, ‘‘dés-espérance ’’ (dis-hope) takes the form of a fetid Marian ‘‘hope’’ that Musset’s contemporaneous ‘‘enfants du siècle’’ can only try to wrench from the embalmed womb of a *Je m’étais fait un grand magasin de ruines, jusqu’à ce qu’enﬁn, . . . je m’étais trouvé une ruine moi-même.

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mummy: ‘‘it was a matter of . . . pulling from the womb of the mummy a virgin as beautiful as the mother of the Redeemer, hope’’ (77). In both cases, however, the Gothic construction of the Romantic subject makes it clear that the maladie du siècle is more precisely a maladie des siècles. This rhetoric of the maladie des siècles strikingly echoes, in the work of both Chateaubriand and Musset, the rhetoric of descriptions of Lenoir’s museum. It is haunted by the repetition of the term ‘‘pêle-mêle,’’ as in this phrase by DeSeine: ‘‘a simple warehouse where everything had been brought in pêle-mêle’’ (DeSeine, 295). Chateaubriand saw the chaotic ‘‘gothicité’’ of Lenoir’s museum as representative of the ‘‘living debris’’ of the Revolutionary era: ‘‘I couldn’t depict the society of 1789 and 1790 better than by comparing it to the architecture of the time of Louis XII and François I, when the Greek inﬂuence had mingled with the gothic style, or perhaps by assimilating it to the collection of ruins and tombs from all centuries piled up pêle-mêle after the Terror in the cloisters of the PetitsAugustins. Except that the debris of which I speak were living and endlessly varied.’’*≥Ω Although Musset never directly referred to the museum (he was not of the generation to be inﬂuenced by it personally), his description of the ‘‘ruin’’ of the Romantic subject could nevertheless stand as a description of the museum: ‘‘The classical, the gothic, the taste for the Renaissance, for that of Louis XIII, everything is pêle-mêle. We have all the centuries, except our own. . . . such that we live o√ of debris, as if the end of the world was close’’ (89).† Why, after the closure of the Musée des Monuments Français, had the Romantic subject come to resemble it mimetically? In what way was the *Je ne pourrais mieux peindre la société de 1789 et 1790 qu’en la comparant à l’architecture du temps de Louis XII et de François Ier, lorsque les ordres grecs se vinrent mêler au style gothique, ou plutôt en l’assimilant à la collection des ruines et des tombeaux de tous les siècles, entassés pêle-mêle après la Terreur dans les cloîtres des Petits-Augustins. Seulement, les débris dont je parle étaient vivants et variaient sans cesse. †L’antique, le gothique, le goût de la Renaissance, celui de Louis XIII, tout est pêle-mêle. Enﬁn nous avons de tous les siècles, hors du nôtre. . . . en sorte que nous ne vivons que de débris, comme si la ﬁn du monde était proche.

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institutionalization of the historical and cultural ruptures born of the Terror mimetically constitutive of Romantic personhood? As in Renan’s schema of the nation, Romantic France ‘‘constructed’’ itself as the traumatic debris of changing political regimes and therefore saw the ruin as the apparatus of its mirror stage. It is no coincidence that the terms ‘‘vandal ism’’ and ‘‘Gothic’’ revival both refer to warring elements in the tribal culture at the origin of the French nation itself. In post-Revolutionary culture, the Vandal ancestors had become rhetorically emblematic of the ‘‘barbarous’’ desecration of the architectural legacy of France’s origins, while the Goths rhetorically heralded the valorization of that same legacy. But in either case, these architectural politics subliminally represented the French nation as an ediﬁce contested by the founding raiders of the state, putting up and tearing down a history of trauma. The Romantic engagement with the trauma of the nation’s political life belies the reading of Romantic medievalism as mere propaganda for the restoration of the monarchy. Admittedly, in the early phase of Romanticism, the majority of its major ﬁgures—Chateaubriand, Michelet, Hugo, Lamartine—were monarchists, and so it makes sense to consider the possibility that the Gothic might simply be a di√erent name for the resurrection of the ancien régime. Certainly the restorers of medieval monuments, such as Violet le Duc, were closely aligned with the project of refurbishing the monarchy for the new regime. But Romantic medievalist letters were not similarly involved in the suppression of the history of Revolutionary violence for the purposes of the preservation of what the Revolution had overthrown. On the contrary, the Romantic medievalist trend was obsessed with political history as a trope. The Romantics did not identify with the king’s well-built castle but with its abandoned ruin. The Romantics, unlike the monarchists who contributed to the closure of Lenoir’s museum, generally abhorred the restoration of ruins. The rejection of architectural restoration was illustrated under the July Monarchy by the bousingos, who belatedly admired the Revolutionary ‘‘chose publique’’ or Republic and nourished a penchant for the Terror. Creating a hybrid discourse, they actually attributed a patriotic value of the sacred to the Gothic desecrations committed by the Revolutionary crowd during the July Days in 1830. Petrus Borel, in his complex ‘‘Sur les Blessures de l’Institut, Sep-

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tembre 1830’’ (On the wounds of the Institute, September 1830), turns the tables on the rhetorical unity between royalist theocentrism and the preservation of French monuments, praising, instead, the stony wounds of the July Days as a ‘‘stygmate vainqueur.’’ The vandalism carried out by the Revolutionary crowds overthrowing the Restoration in favor of the liberal, Orleanist monarchy of Louis-Philippe was a new sort of stigmata—the conquest of restoration by a new terror. He therefore blasts the architectural restoration that later erased this stigmata as a royalist desecration of a republican Passion iconography: Il est donc vrai, Français! ô Paris! quel scandale! Quoi, déjà subir un a√ront; Laisseras-tu voiler, par une main vandale, Les cicatrices de ton front? Juillet, il est donc vrai qu’on en veut à tes fastes, Au sang épanché de ton coeur? Badigeonneurs maudits! nouveaux Iconoclastes! Respect au stygmate vainqueur!∂≠ Is it true then, Frenchmen! Ô Paris! What a scandal! / What, after already going through one a√ront, / Would you let a vandal’s hand veil / The scars on your front? / July, is it then true that they resent your splendors, / The blood spilled from your heart? / Cursed plasterers! New Iconoclasts! / Respect for the conquering stigmata! Restoration, as the making whole of ruined monuments, had, in e√ect, become encoded as the new vandalism by the 1830s. In Hugo’s ‘‘Note sur la destruction des monuments,’’ for instance, he attacks what he calls the new ‘‘Bande Noire’’ for its ‘‘ruin of all these ruins’’ (Oeuvres, 4:500). He complains, ‘‘Vandalism is an entrepreneur under government contract’’ (4:503). The paradox of restoration is the destruction of rupture: ‘‘Under the Restoration, they spoiled, mutilated, disﬁgured’’ (4:505). Not surprisingly, one case of this monarchical restoration of the earlier Revolutionary vandalism had particular martyr appeal: the Musée des Monuments Français. Charles Nodier, an ardent medievalist who called the respect inspired by medieval monuments ‘‘la religion du malheur’’ (cited in Dakyns, 2), uses the destruction of the museum as a prototypical example of

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Restoration vandalism. He speaks nostalgically, in his Romantic survey of the fate of the Gothic in France, entitled the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, of ‘‘our admirable little museum at the Petits-Augustins, formerly destroyed with such insouciant stupidity.’’∂∞ Such revolutions in the interpretations of the Musée des Monuments Français suggest that the museum was most valued by the Romantics precisely for its public exhibition of the signifying structures of political upheaval. The contagion between humanity and the metaphoric ontology of vandalism is crucial to the ‘‘Gothic’’ construction of the Romantic subject. Stimulated by the remarkably elastic legend of Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français, the Romantic medievalist maladie des siècles mimics, in a monumental discourse, the personal lament voiced by Musset’s Octave: ‘‘Oh! Poor scars, I said to myself, are you going to erase yourselves? Oh! my wound, my beloved wound!’’ (91).* Or, in the discourse of the nation, how can political collectivities remember their speciﬁc and conﬂictual su√ering, the brutal constitution of their unity, without reacting with rage or hatred? Without identifying, as Juliet Mitchell says, ‘‘with the violence of shock’’? Terror, after all, cannot remain the ‘‘order of the day.’’ As Mitchell says in her theory of trauma, ‘‘this state cannot be lived with’’ (129). However, the embracing of an ahistorical and nonspeciﬁc ethos of shared su√ering may help to establish a ‘‘pseudo state’’ in relation to which nationalist aggression serves paradoxically as a warm shoulder. Ultimately, Lenoir’s monument to the trauma of the mimetic rejection of the old regime by the new reﬂects the extreme di≈culty for the individual of founding a psychic territory that does not resemble the social life of the nation. How can the boundaries of subjecthood be closed to the imprint of national boundaries? And when ‘‘nation’’ is understood as a violent history, a tragic genre, how can the individual not remember—and mimetically remember—it? Fearful, all the while, of a repeat dismemberment? *Ah! pauvres cicatrices, me dis-je, vous allez donc vous e√acer? Ah! ma blessure, ma chère blessure!

TWO

TRANSPOSITIONALITY The Political Gets Personal in Constant’s Cécile

MIMETIC LIBERTY

The conﬂicts between mimetic and nonmimetic conceptions of liberty are palpable in article 4 of the Revolutionary ‘‘Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.’’ In the ﬁrst clause, the deﬁnition of liberty brings to mind the injunction ‘‘First, do no harm’’ in the Hippocratic oath. It begins, ‘‘Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not injure another.’’∞ In this deﬁnition liberty is private and individual; with the exception of the single taboo against harm, the individual man has the liberty to do ‘‘anything.’’ This ‘‘negative’’ liberty is deﬁned by what it is not. It is,

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in this sense, ‘‘beyond’’ representation, a mimetic mystery. The ensuing clauses, however, deﬁne liberty publicly and collectively, as a positive liberty of natural rights that can be enjoyed only if they can also be enjoyed by all members of society: ‘‘Thus the only limits upon man’s exercise of his natural rights are those that guarantee enjoyment of those same rights to the other members of society.’’* This liberty is given a positive mimetic representation; it is something, even if that something is as vague as the sharing of natural rights. It is also mimetic on a social level, since it is based on an ethos of likeness: liberty guarantees equal rights. The coexistence of these two kinds of liberty is not harmonious in the ‘‘Déclaration.’’ Through the ordering of the terms, public liberty e√ectively overturns private liberty. Public and legislated liberty ‘‘harms’’ the private abstraction of unrestricted liberty, the ‘‘anything’’ but harm. The binaristic tensions of Revolutionary liberty have been extensively and profoundly analyzed from the Revolutionary period to the current day, and they have been classiﬁed in several di√erent ways: as public and private, positive and negative, ancient and modern. They have not been classiﬁed as mimetic and nonmimetic. But in this chapter I argue that Benjamin Constant, a preeminent Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary political theorist, makes use of a vocabulary of mimesis that is crucial to his theories of liberty. Furthermore, Constant’s mimetic lexicon is most comprehensible in light of the mimetic transpositionality through which his ‘‘personal’’ and ‘‘political’’ discourses of liberty, in his ‘‘intimate’’ or ﬁctional/autobiographical writings and his political writings, come to mirror one another. At the end of the chapter, I discuss the relation between mimeticism in Constant’s work and the current debates about ‘‘liberalism’’ in France.

THE EMPIRE OF INCOMPREHENSIBILITY

The Constantian theories of liberty that I analyze here, in De l’Esprit de la conquête et de l’usurpation (published as two separate works in English, The *La liberté consiste à pouvoir faire tout ce qui ne nuit pas à autrui: ainsi, l’exercice des droits naturels de chaque homme n’a de bornes que celles qui assurent aux autres membres de la société la jouissance de ces mêmes droits.

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Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation ) and ‘‘De la liberté ancienne comparée à celle des modernes’’ (Ancient and modern liberty), had their historical genesis in the paradoxical transition from Revolution to Empire. Stephen Holmes, the foremost scholar of Constant’s political theory, explains that although The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation were published toward the close of the Empire in 1813, they actually were pieced together from writings dating to the dawn of the Napoleonic Empire: ‘‘With Bernadotte’s encouragement, Constant uncrated the sheaf of political papers he had composed between 1800 and 1806 and in great haste spliced together one of his most famous works.’’≤ Likewise, Constant’s best-known work on liberty, the 1819 lecture ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty’’ is largely reworked from excerpts of Usurpation, so its Restoration publication date masks its genesis in the years from the Consulate to the early Empire. During the years 1800 to 1806, in which these works initially took shape, Constant ﬁrst had an active political role as a member of the Tribunate, but he was expelled in 1802 when he contested Napoleon’s dismantling of the system of political representation. Banished from the political stage, Constant wrestled with the problem of how empire, a conquest-based model of statehood not aspired to in France since the days of Charlemagne, had come to follow Revolution. His own transition from the role of the liberal legislator deeply engaged in public life to the role of the civilian theorizing liberty in private is reﬂected in his resolution of the problematic relationship of Revolution to Empire. Constant hypothesized that the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, however dissimilar, could be conceptualized on a continuum of ideas about the popular psychology of liberty. Usurpation traces French tolerance for the reign of the Usurper (a common expression for Napoleon) to the trauma resulting from concepts of ‘‘public’’ liberty that had inﬂuenced the Terror. THE IMAGE MAKERS OF LIBERTY

Of the prismatic array of Constant’s associations between mimesis and liberty in Usurpation, the ﬁrst is that liberty, in order to be organized as a political ﬁeld in the Revolutionary era, had needed an image, a representation useful for public relations. That image was ‘‘empruntée des républiques anciennes’’≥ (borrowed from the ancient republics)∂ by ‘‘modern imitators’’

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(105) such as Rousseau and Mably. The term imitators ties Revolutionary liberty to a derivative modality. From the start, in other words, Revolutionary liberty was never ‘‘free’’ of the history of representation. The modern imitators imported from the ‘‘republics of antiquity’’ the trope of ‘‘ancient liberty.’’ ‘‘Ancient liberty’’ designated the notion that for the ancients, liberty was experienced as ‘‘active participation in collective power’’ (102). In privileging this role of everyman-as-legislator, the ancients, according to Constant, sacriﬁced their individual liberty to the greater public good. How did the ancient republics manage to make citizens into active political agents?—Through their limited populations, combined with an ethos of exclusion; neither women nor slaves wielded the political power reserved for small populations of free males. The small scale of the territory of these republics meant that even though individuals were subjected to ‘‘an almost unlimited social jurisdiction’’ (103), they nevertheless enjoyed, ‘‘politically speaking, a great personal importance’’ (104). Politics were fun as well, since civic and social life were indistinguishable for these citizens: ‘‘The exercise of the rights of citizenship represented the occupation and, so to speak, the amusement of all’’ (102). The ‘‘making of laws’’ and of ‘‘decisions on war and peace’’ exercised ‘‘the will of each individual.’’ The sovereignty involved in ancient liberty was fundamentally concrete and representable. It was a ‘‘real’’ pleasure, ‘‘at the same time ﬂattering and solid’’ (104). Although he is profoundly cognizant of the utopian appeal of ancient liberty, having ‘‘lived’’ a version of it himself during the Revolution and its aftermath, Constant argues that the Revolutionary ‘‘imitators’’ were in effect o√ering the people a form of liberty ‘‘to which it was no longer susceptible’’ (101). For Constant, the demographic infrastructure of modern states precludes the active political participation of all citizens: ‘‘Because their territory is much larger than that of the ancient republics, the mass of their inhabitants, whatever form of government they adopt, have no active part in it’’ (103–4). As a result of the impossibility of involving all citizens actively in the government of a large state, the exercise of sovereignty for the ‘‘moderns’’ can be achieved only through a government of indirect representation. In the ancient republics, each citizen, or so the theory went, actively represented himself in the public sphere. In the modern republics, this

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active, direct self-representation is necessarily transformed into more passive and indirect political representation by proxy.

GOVERNMENT BY FICTION

Constant is rightly known, through his political practice and his theory, as a champion of government by indirect political representation. In ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty’’ he spoke of ‘‘our happy revolution,’’ noting that it can be qualiﬁed as ‘‘happy’’ if one concentrates one’s attention ‘‘on its results’’ (309), especially the beneﬁts of representative government. But if one considers ‘‘representation’’ in its nongovernmental sense, as a synonym for ‘‘mimesis,’’ a di√erent nuance of his representational ideology emerges. Comparison of Constant’s ‘‘intimate’’ and ‘‘political’’ writings will demonstrate that he was fascinated by the nihilistic parallelism of mimetic and political representation. In Usurpation Constant qualiﬁes modern representative government, startlingly enough, as a ﬁction of sovereignty: modern citizens ‘‘are called at most to exercise sovereignty through representation, that is to say, in a ﬁctitious manner.’’* Participation in government through indirect representation is ‘‘an abstract supposition’’ (104). The ancient form of liberty had involved the nonabstract exercise of sovereignty, established through words, decisions, laws, and social interaction in general. But that same nonabstract exercise of sovereignty, when translated to the Revolutionary era, is a mimetic construct burdened by the psychology of artiﬁce. Rather than a ‘‘solid pleasure,’’ modern political representation is ‘‘a pleasure of reﬂection’’ (104).† So whereas the ancients sacriﬁced their individual liberty to political liberty for a ‘‘real’’ advantage, this same sacriﬁce for the moderns is of more abstract beneﬁt. Even the liberty of political representation to which the moderns are suited is experienced socially as a ﬁctional liberty—which in mimetic terms can construe a ‘‘fake’’ liberty. *[Ils] ne sont appelés tout au plus à l’exercice de la souveraineté, que par la représentation, c’est-à-dire, de manière ﬁctive. †Un plaisir de réﬂexion.

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Mimesis as ‘‘the representation of reality,’’ as Erich Auerbach puts it, guarantees the disjunction between the thing and what speaks for it.∑ The fact that successful mimetic representations may seem real attests to the vigor of the illusion. Does Constant employ a mimetic vocabulary in order to put the ‘‘realism’’ of political representation into question, to reveal its artiﬁce? Certainly the artiﬁcial quality of ancient liberty imposed in modern times does not mean for Constant that ancient liberty was true even in ancient times. On the contrary, he proposes that the ancients were simply impervious to the notion of political illusion: ‘‘The word illusion is to be found in no ancient language, because the word only comes into being when the thing has ceased to exist’’ (105).* This complex sentence can be read to mean that the word illusion comes into being either when the real thing has ceased to exist, or when the illusion has ceased to exist. In other words, if one believes in the illusion, it is not necessary to name it ‘‘illusion’’; but that does not mean that it is not an illusion. The evidence for this latter interpretation is the psychological rather than phenomenological cast of Constant’s description of ancient liberty. It is not ‘‘real’’ but rather a ‘‘real’’ advantage, a ‘‘ﬂattering pleasure.’’ Furthermore, that ‘‘real advantage’’ is speciﬁcally subjective: ‘‘as the ancients conceived it’’ (104). Even when Constant situates the ancients in ‘‘the full youth of their moral life,’’ he is speaking of the psychology of ‘‘conviction’’: ‘‘The ancients had complete conviction in all matters’’ (105). Conviction is a belief as opposed to proof, for instance a belief in the reality of a mimetic illusion to the point where the idea of illusion is superﬂuous. So although Constant sees the advantage, in a small ancient republic, of self-representation, that advantage does not confer onto self-representation the justiﬁcation of true representation. Citizens represent themselves, and what is conveyed is important, but the representation must not be conﬂated with a reality. What is the ‘‘real’’ thing being represented if not subjective needs and goals? Modern representation by a political representative is more secondhand than ‘‘ancient’’ self-representation; but even ﬁrsthand political representation, in the age of illusion, is not conterminous with the real. *Le mot illusion ne se trouve dans aucune langue ancienne, parce que le mot ne se crée que lorsque la chose n’existe plus (210).

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Constant frames the ‘‘ﬁctional’’ nature of representation, whether under ancient or modern liberty, as to some extent irreducible. Because Constant’s discussion of representation in Usurpation is so intricately bound to the psychology of politics, his framing of modern political representation as a ﬁction need not be taken as a rejection of representative government on the level of the state. Throughout the rest of his oeuvre, he champions political representation as a foundation of democracy. The proximity of the idea of ‘‘ﬁctional’’ representation in Usurpation to other speciﬁcally mimetic problematics such as ‘‘illusion’’ suggests that he is simply appropriating a literary and artistic lexicon to reframe the psychology of political experience for a generation that has been dis-illusioned by Revolution. Unlike the ancients, and perhaps unlike the pre-Revolutionary Rousseau, the survivors of the Terror needed a vocabulary of mimesis as artiﬁce. ‘‘Real ’’ equality had segued into ‘‘artiﬁcial’’ likeness, the likeness of illusion. MODERN, NONMIMETIC LIBERTY

Constant presents the modern ‘‘abstract’’ experience of liberty through ‘‘ﬁctional’’ representation as a disadvantage in relation to the potential assimilation of the ancient model of liberty. But he views the modern liberty to which post-Revolutionary citizens would be more susceptible as something that should be unrepresentable. Ancient liberty was ‘‘positive’’ liberty; modern liberty is ‘‘negative’’ liberty. Negatively deﬁned, in modern times ‘‘to be free is not to be prevented from pursuing chosen goals, not to be subject to constraints’’ (‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty,’’ 718). Mona Ozouf notes the historical antagonism between the ancient or positive liberty that ‘‘postulates an objective representation of human happiness, and a modern concept comprising no such postulate.’’∏ Although modern liberty depends on the ‘‘ﬁction’’ of sovereignty through indirect political representation, its characteristics or content should be freed from delimiting representation. It is well known that Constant made the subjectivity of doubt, rather than the alleged objectivity of conviction, into a political ethos. Holmes writes: ‘‘It is sometimes assumed that disbelief in the objectivity of values, or the knowability of objective values, disarms liberalism in the face of tyranny. In Constant’s case, liberal militancy was born out of the spirit of doubt. Convinced that no group of mortals can be certain about the nature

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of virtue or human good, he was ready to oppose any regime that claimed such certainty’’ (7). Constant thematizes the desirable abstraction of liberty as the ‘‘negative’’ or unknowable contrast to ‘‘positive’’ or delimited liberty through the problematic of privacy. Ancient, positive, public liberty contrasts with modern, negative, private liberty. BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Constant advocates for modern citizens a freedom that does not subject the individual to social jurisdiction but instead grants a space for a social life completely inaccessible to the eyes of the state. Since the moderns are unable to actually wield power themselves, they take only ‘‘a very passing interest’’ (104) in their public lives. This state of a√airs is economic as well as psychological. The modern citizen’s needs are inextricable from ‘‘the commercial tendency of the age’’ (104), which has ‘‘inﬁnitely multiplied and varied the means of individual happiness.’’ Constant was arguably the ﬁrst theorist to perceive that the industrial revolution, and the globalization of commerce, created an infrastructure antagonistic to the public political agency of citizens as erstwhile legislators. Yet while the modern citizen’s public liberty is greatly circumscribed by economic infrastructure, his or her private liberty undergoes a parallel expansion. The polis runs on the logic of the gora or market, and the market both de-politicizes citizens and grants them new freedoms. How does this work? Constant argues that private property in the industrial age—presumably from real estate to art objects—is practically an appendage to the self. It is reasonable, therefore, to organize social life around its protection: ‘‘Property is more intimately identiﬁed with man’s existence: all the shocks that it is made to experience are more painful.’’ Modern citizens therefore huddle close to the hearth of their property, in the private space that protects that property from external threats. The modern economy dictates that privacy in itself is a pleasure principle for the moderns: ‘‘Almost all the pleasures of the moderns lie in their private life’’ (104). In this modern consumer culture, the epitome of liberty is not the experience of active political self-representation, nor even an identiﬁcation with one’s ‘‘ﬁctional’’ representation under a government of representation, but rather an attachment to pleasure. The people are in fact most realistically

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‘‘represented’’ by their attachment to pleasure, in the sense that their attachment to pleasure is representative of their political psychology. When liberty is based on a pleasure principle, it will be upheld: ‘‘The people most attached to its liberty in modern times is also that most attached to its pleasures. It holds to its liberty above all because it is enlightened enough to see the guarantee of its pleasures’’ (105). Consumers will defend liberty to defend private pleasures. Although Constant’s modern liberty is delimited by pleasure, and specifically the material pleasures of commercial culture, it theoretically retains the good abstraction of negative liberty (the ‘‘anything’’ but harm of the ‘‘Déclaration’’) because it is private. Modern liberty is not entirely crass and material because of this association with the inﬁnitely free play of the signiﬁcation of pleasure. If pleasure is hidden from public eyes, it can be anything—it is the unknowable and the unrepresentable. Private liberty becomes a cult of a sort of antimimetic liberty, a nonderivative, nondelimited absolute possibility. It transcends existing models, like the God of the Old Testament who forbids the graven image and depicts himself simply as ‘‘I am’’ (Exodus 3:13–16). ‘‘Modern liberty’’ in its private ‘‘negativity’’ of pleasure is theoretically a liberty without a referent. The moderns are most susceptible to a liberty that is not susceptible to public representation but rather to private experience. MABLY AT THE BED CURTAINS

When ancient liberty became associated in the public imagination with the Terror, in which heads were severed in the name of equality and fraternity, it led to the rationalization of tyranny. When forced upon an unsusceptible population, ancient liberty ‘‘can only serve today to supply weapons and pretexts to all kinds of tyranny, that of one man, that of several, and that of all’’ (106), warns Constant. A particularly inﬂuential promulgator of this tyranny in the name of ancient liberty was for Constant the abbé de Mably. In the Revolutionary era, Mably spoke of sovereignty of the nation ‘‘so that citizens might be even more subjected, and of the freedom of the people, so that each individual might be totally enslaved’’ (107). Constant felt that Mably was determined to repress individuality and to violate pri-

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vacy to the point of establishing a voyeuristic regulation of the citizen’s inner life. Constant says that Mably expressed throughout his work the regret that the law can intervene only on the level of citizens’ actions, as he would have liked to establish a thought police: ‘‘He would like it to cover the most ﬂeeting thoughts and impressions; to pursue man relentlessly, leaving him no refuge in which he might escape from his power.’’ Mably was therefore infatuated with the Egyptian culture in which ‘‘l’amour même’’ was subject to law and where the law opened and closed the bed curtains: ‘‘It was the law that, in turn, opened and closed the curtains round the nuptial bed’’ (107). What would modern citizens do to protect the sanctity of private pleasure from the terror of ancient liberty? ANCIENT LIBERTY, MODERN EMPIRE

Constant theorizes that the historical result of the enforced Revolutionary cult of a public liberty to which the nation was no longer susceptible was the subsequent passive acceptance of the Napoleonic Empire. Constant believes that France rejected its imitated liberty under the Revolution in favor of a despot who would remove citizens from the public sphere and let them return to their private pleasures: ‘‘The nation did not feel that ideal participation in an abstract sovereignty was worth what they were su√ering. It was vainly repeated to them, following Rousseau, that ‘the laws of liberty are a thousand times more austere than the yoke of tyrants.’ . . . as it only knew the yoke of tyrants by hearsay, it thought it would indeed prefer that yoke’’ (109). Of course, Constant does not mean to imply that the tyranny of empire was an appropriate political shelter for private pleasure. On the contrary, he implies that under the framework of a judiciously established modern, negative liberty, the nation would not make the mistake of giving up its political power. The illusion of modern liberty under despotism is a ‘‘counterfeiting of liberty’’ (95). In ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty’’ he warns explicitly ‘‘that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we might surrender our right to share in political power too easily’’ (326).

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Usurpation clearly contains a metaphorical critique of the same private, negative liberty that it ostensibly champions. The private independence of pleasure is threatened not only by public exposure or regulation, Constant argues; it is threatened also by the human tendency to reﬂexivity itself. Even without an abbé de Mably peeking through the bed curtains, the modern citizen cannot stop watching himself. The self-consciousness of the modern citizen replaces the supervisory jurisdiction of the ancient republics: ‘‘We are always dragging behind ourselves some kind of afterthought, which is born from experience, and which defeats enthusiasm. The ﬁrst condition for enthusiasm is not to observe oneself too acutely. But we are so afraid of being fools, and above all of looking like fools, that we are always watching ourselves even in our most violent thoughts’’ (104–5). This self-consciousness, the unconquerable tendency to represent oneself to oneself, threatens to defeat privacy as the condition for the pure unknowability of negative liberty. Even when the doors to the inner sanctum are closed to the state, says Constant, ‘‘we seek in vain to make ourselves blind’’ (105). For the people deluded into a passive embrace of the Napoleonic regime because they mistook their lack of political agency for the privacy they really wanted, the thought police are in their heads. This tragic human inevitability of representing liberty and therefore constricting it is the foundational tension behind Constant’s writing of ﬁction. If liberty will be mimetic despite itself, then mimesis—literature or art as the mirror of life—is a natural arena for the perversity of liberty. TAKING LIBERTIES WITH LIBERTY: TRANSPOSITIONALITY IN CONSTANT’S OEUVRE

The ‘‘moral’’ of Constant’s theory of liberty is often read as a defense of an inviolable private sphere. John Isbell summarizes: ‘‘From the Consulate onward, Constant opposes this public liberty of the ancients, henceforth discredited by the Terror, to the private liberty of the moderns, which he celebrates: these ‘positive and negative’ liberties have since become the touchstone of modern liberalism.’’π Tzvetan Todorov asserts that liberty itself for Constant is the name given to the sacrosanct separation of public and private: ‘‘The existence of each human being is divided into two spheres, one public, the other private; society exerts its control over the ﬁrst,

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the individual manages the second himself. Liberty is the word given to the frontier separating these two spheres.’’∫ By this logic, the intrusion of either the public into the private or of the private into the public would constitute a transgression of the boundaries of sovereign states. The conventional division of the Constantian corpus into the écrits politiques and the écrits intimes initially seems to recapitulate the binarity of ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private.’’ Todorov maintains a strict distinction between Constant’s political and intimate writings: ‘‘Constant left a general and abstract philosophical doctrine of political and religious life; he did not theorize personal life’’ (24). But I argue that there is no absolute ‘‘frontier’’ separating the public and private spheres of Constant’s political and intimate work. On the contrary, these two segments of Constant’s oeuvre are in a strangely mimetic rapport to one another. Many of Constant’s écrits intimes—the category that includes Adolphe, Le Cahier rouge, Cécile, Amélie et Germaine, the Journaux intimes, and his correspondence—overlap with his political writings through an insistent transpositional logic evident in shared themes and vocabulary. Jean-Marie Roulin theorizes that Constant’s écrits intimes are located at a ‘‘point de rupture’’ between memory, where the subject emerges in confrontation with history, and autobiography;Ω my analysis situates the point de rupture at the mimetic similarity of the personal and the political. This transpositionality is symptomatic of what Constant’s autobiographical narrators in his écrits intimes criticize as his mobility: a ‘‘grande mobilité de caractère’’∞≠ in Amélie et Germaine, ‘‘cette mobilité funeste’’∞∞ (this nefarious mobility) in Cécile. ‘‘Mobilité’’ here implies a cross between mobility as movement or energy and mobility as ‘‘mutability’’—not just changeability but ‘‘fausseté’’ and ‘‘dissimulation,’’ a metamorphic facticity. There is an especially provocative breach of disciplinarity in the allegorical similitude between the theories of liberty in Usurpation, discussed above, and ﬁctions of liberty in the semiautobiographical narrative Cécile (probably written between 1810 and 1811, not published until 1951). In my reading, the common thematic and terminological ground between these two works is incontestable. In Usurpation, liberty and empire are the epistemological boundaries of the theorization of the state, whereas in Cécile, liberty and empire are the a√ective boundaries of the representation of the self.

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Both texts are also in a symptomatic relationship of overlay and doubling with others in their respective ‘‘political’’ and ‘‘intimate’’ groupings. The hybridity of Constant’s work on ancient and modern liberty in Usurpation and its o√shoot, ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty,’’ extends even to the possibility of dual authorship. Holmes notes that ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty’’ also had roots in a work by the political theorist, cultural critic, and novelist Mme de Staël, with whom Constant was involved in a notoriously turbulent relationship. ‘‘The original version of the ‘Ancient and Modern Liberty’ lecture can be found in chapter 3 of Staël’s Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution, a manuscript heavily inﬂuenced by and perhaps even coauthored by Constant around 1798’’ (34). Cécile represents the generic no-man’s-land between the psychological roman à clef (represented in Constant’s oeuvre by Adolphe, written ca. 1806, published in 1817) and the memoir (represented by Le Cahier rouge, also known as Ma Vie, ca. 1811). Cécile takes up chronologically in 1793, some years after the point where Le Cahier rouge leaves o√ the story of Constant’s life in 1788, and now with disguised names and partially disguised identities. Numerous passages from Cécile double accounts of events personally chronicled in the Journal intime or addressed to interlocutors through correspondence. Just as Le Cahier rouge aborts at an early stage of the narrator’s life story, Cécile ends abruptly, although arguably at a moment of conclusive crisis. Therefore, though it is a text that reveals the historical and experiential existence of Constant’s je, it does so only in the context of hybridity, intertextuality, comparativity, fragmentation, and disguised identity. Cécile itself has been neglected as an important work for the reading of Constant’s political theory. Some scholars have analyzed the way that the novel Adolphe mirrors political problematics; Holmes writes that ‘‘Adolphe is in many ways a prototype of the liberal individual, and his story is a commentary on the human emptiness of negative freedom’’ (13). But he only mentions Cécile once in passing, rightly noting that this text allows us ‘‘to penetrate deep to the psychological roots of liberal politics.’’ Like Holmes, Margaret Waller notes what appears to be Constant’s auto-critique of his political theories in his ﬁction, but again only in Adolphe: ‘‘In his political writings, Constant conceived the individual as an essentially free (male) subject for whom the major impediment to liberty is state interference. In his novel, however, the hero, a young aristocrat in contemporary Germany,

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is far from free and the state’s role is not his central problem.’’∞≤ Todorov, the scholar to whom we owe the reintroduction of Cécile and the other fragmentary intimate writings to the public’s attention, views them in traditionally literary and biographical terms, as can be seen in the subheadings of his analysis of Adolphe, Ma vie, and Cécile: ‘‘Impossible Love,’’ ‘‘Between Two Women,’’ and ‘‘Tears and Laughter.’’ The popular rather than scholarly reception of Constant’s work has always tended to dramatize the topos of transpositionality, but only through conﬂation of Constant’s intimate life and his writings. This conﬂation occurs on the axis of Constant’s intimate relationship with Mme de Staël. Since both Constant and Mme de Staël were political theorists, and both divided their work between political and intimate genres, and both were notable historical ﬁgures in their own right, the opportunity to conﬂate history, literature, and gossip has proved irresistible. The abundant literature on the relationship of Constant and Mme de Staël and their historical personae in fact suggests a new genre: not the roman à clef like Adolphe, but political theory à clef. Mme de Constant’s great-granddaughter insinuates in a preface to a collection of letters that when the couple ﬁrst met on a lonely road in 1794, the young Constant was irresistibly attracted and Mme de Staël promptly made a man of him—a statesman, that is.∞≥ Free speech was a bedroom issue for the two, according to Dan Hofstadter in The Despot and the Slave: ‘‘They embodied the plainest fault of liberalism in action . . . the doctrine of laissez-faire was translated into sexual gallantry, just as ‘free speech’ found its bedroom counterpart in the narcissistic monologue.’’∞∂ This is not surprising given Mme de Stael’s penchant for baring all in politics, as Napoleon’s memorialist Las Cases recalls it in an anecdote from the time of the Italian campaigns. Napoleon, wishing to convey to an overly enthusiastic Mme de Staël that her visit was inopportune, gave the excuse that he was barely dressed, to which she is alleged to have countered brightly that ‘‘le génie n’avait point de sexe’’∞∑ (genius has no sex). The boldness of such transpositions between the political and the personal in writings on Constant constitute on the one hand a parody of the biographical enterprise, consistent with the fallacious subtitle of Hofstadter’s study of Constant as Autobiography in Fact and Fiction. But on the other hand, they take their cue directly from the remarkably labile rapport

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of the political with the personal in Constant’s own work. Constant’s public/private mobilité puts into question the overall legitimacy of Todorov’s assertion that liberty is indeed for Constant ‘‘the name given to the frontier’’ separating the public and private spheres. CONSTANT UNDER THE EMPIRE OF MME DE STAËL IN CÉCILE

Cécile is an astonishing text. Wrenchingly honest, painfully emotional, the narrator’s subjectivity is also so factitious and perverse that the reader is required to suspend disbelief at each dizzyingly successive disclosure of an ironic reversal. It is a psychological narrative worthy of Freud’s own conﬂicted and symptomatic case studies, but Constant makes a nihilistic Freud—all of the talk, none of the cure. In its ironic extremism, Cécile ultimately resembles the melancholic philosophical exaltation of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. It is closely based on Constant’s own political and personal experiences, yet Constant manages to render autobiographical details allegorical of tensions in the construct of ‘‘modern’’ liberty, as though he had lived his life to illustrate and problematize his theory or had written his theory to analyze himself. The reader of this obsessive text shadows the experiences of the character Cécile, who knows and trusts the narrator so intimately that she again and again submits to his earnest duplicity, until, by the last page of the book, she is ready to expire—and there it ends, with the narrator apparently having abandoned the text in order ﬁnally to go to the aid of the patient. Liberty is problematized from the ﬁrst paragraph as a question of the affective and legal ‘‘ties’’ and ‘‘bonds’’ that adults contract in their ‘‘private’’ lives—the precontractarian version of social contracts. The vocabulary throughout this text is in fact so loaded with liens, noeuds, and enchaînements that the narrator and his cohorts might best be described as escape artists, constantly reemerging raw but unfettered from unconquerable snarls of rope and desire. The text opens on the eleventh of January, 1793, but while the decapitation of the monarchy is debated in regicidal France, the narrator is exclusively concerned with issues of self-governance and spousal authority in his existence as a member of the minor German Cour de Bronsvic. The character of Cécile de Walterbourg, representing Constant’s second wife,

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Charlotte von Hardenberg, is introduced ﬁrst, suggesting, like the title, her ostensible priority in the text. She is identiﬁed as ‘‘aujourd’hui ma femme’’ (185) (today my wife),∞∏ although within the text itself her marriage to the narrator is always deferred to a future beyond the conﬁnes of the plot. The plot of the entire text is organized around the deferrals, disruptions, and betrayals of the narrator’s marital intentions toward Cécile over the span of no less than ﬁfteen years. (Although the text is so short, Cécile rivals Richardson’s Pamela in plot foreplay.) Both Cécile and the narrator are unhappily married to others when the text opens. Cécile has been tricked by her married sister into marrying that sister’s lover. The narrator is married to a woman representing his ﬁrst wife, Minna von Cramm, who is engaged in an increasingly open dalliance with a ‘‘little prince.’’ The narrator has ‘‘no authority’’ (26) over his wife, primarily because he is chronically alienated from his own will. As someone who is deeply unmotivated, especially with regard to misogynist customs of masculine dominance, but who has some concern for appearances, being cuckolded puts him in an embarrassing position: it threatens to reveal his lack of emotional investment in a social order to which he nevertheless belongs. Wondering whether he will ever experience the happiness his wife seems to be enjoying in her a√air, he surveys the women of the court for a suitable candidate as a mistress. Someone mentions Cécile, and he promptly goes to see her. Finding her ‘‘agreeable,’’ that same night he sends her ‘‘a positive declaration.’’ Had she responded positively, he would have continued his charade, but her negative response actually stimulates feeling in him, feelings exaggerated out of all proportion to the stimulus: ‘‘When I dispatched it, I was by no means in love with her. But when I received her reply, which was seemly, witty, cool, and polite, and ended with an absolute refusal to see me in the future, I felt, or thought I felt, the most violent passion’’ (28). Cécile later begins to reciprocate, her husband gets jealous, the narrator’s wife becomes more brazen in her adulterous relationship with the little prince, and the narrator, his ardor now much cooled, worries that events are leading him in the direction of divorce. He ﬁnds it worrisome to break ‘‘the bonds that I, for my part, found in no way irksome’’ (29). He and his wife sign a sort of ‘‘treaty,’’ reminiscent of article 4 in the ‘‘Declaration of the Rights of Man,’’ to live as separately as possible while acting in such a way as to not harm one another: ‘‘that we would always act, . . . as best we

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could in order not to do injury one to the other but also not to see one another’’ (32).* This ﬁrst episode is in many ways the story of the whole text. The narrator’s experiences follow a simple formula: as Corrado Rosso notes, ‘‘love depends on the obstacle.’’∞π The narrator needs obstacles to pleasure in order to be willing to sacriﬁce his ‘‘liberty’’ to that promise of pleasure. Once those obstacles have been surmounted, he tries to escape the object of his former desire in order to regain his liberty, although that liberty always takes the form of a return to preexisting bonds. The genesis of this circular desire for liberty is framed repeatedly as a question of ‘‘artiﬁcial emotion’’ (31). Liberty in the abstract is contextualized as a misogynist cultural ﬁction of masculine autonomy: ‘‘Mme Marcillon gave me so lively a description of the misery that would be brought upon my life by a liaison which would make me again dependent upon a woman; she so exalted my imagination concerning the bliss of complete liberty, that I suddenly formed the resolve not in any way to renew my association with Cécile’’ (45). In more concrete terms, liberty is the interlude in the transition from one partner to another, as actual withdrawal from society is outside of the realm of possibilities in this text. The cycle of this openly factitious play of domination and liberty in a sort of ancien régime of love and contractual engagement appears poised to go on indeﬁnitely when ‘‘by a chance’’ (48) the narrator makes the acquaintance of Mme de Malbée, who represents Constant’s lover Mme de Staël. This changes everything, because with Mme de Malbée, Revolutionary liberty enters the equation. The genius of Mme de Malbée is to simulate the appeal and repercussions ﬁrst of Revolution and then of empire in the narrator’s heart—as in the psychology of the French public between 1793 and 1804. Throughout the text Mme de Malbée is depicted, through the endlessly reiterated vocabulary of her ‘‘empire,’’ ‘‘ascendancy,’’ ‘‘imperiousness,’’ ‘‘power,’’ ‘‘despotism,’’ ‘‘violence,’’ as a kind of Napoleon in high heels. When the narrator ﬁrst meets her in 1794, she immediately (‘‘at the end of one hour ’’) establishes an empire of speciﬁcally historical proportions: ‘‘per*D’agir toujours . . . de la manière la plus propre à ne pas nous nuire, mais aussi à ne pas nous voir mutuellement (191).

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haps the most absolute empire that any woman has ever exercised.’’ (The French term empire can be translated as ‘‘inﬂuence’’ or ‘‘authority,’’ but the political connotations of Mme de Malbée’s power over the narrator are hard to escape.) Initially her conversation also has an astonishing revolutionary political potency, suspending ‘‘all those secret restrictions, invisible barriers which nature has set between man and man.’’ The narrator recounts that he spent ‘‘the whole winter’’ presenting his love to her (52). Then, literally without transition, from one sentence to the next, the narrator switches from his courtship of Mme de Malbée to two problems: her tyrannical hold over him, and his new passion for political involvement in Revolutionary France. Somehow, Mme de Malbée’s ‘‘empire’’ has politicized the narrator even as it subjugated him, in a radical departure from his previously all-passive, prototypically ancien régime court existence: ‘‘Ambition seized hold of me.’’ In his absolute infatuation with Mme de Malbée, the terms of desire are projected onto the civic realm: ‘‘Now I could see only two desirable things in the world—to be a citizen of a republic and to be the head of a party.’’ This new passion, compatible with ancient liberty, is initially consistent with the terms of Mme de Malbée’s power over him: ‘‘Mme de Malbée’s ascendancy over me was not, however, diminished by this ambition, although the two things were sometimes in conﬂict’’ (52). The revolution of Mme de Malbée’s inﬂuence makes the narrator a citizen of the Revolution, fervent in his wish for a share in collective political power. But his political ambitions and his subjugation to Mme de Malbée soon come into practical conﬂict through her ‘‘e√orts to captivate’’ the ‘‘chiefs of Republican France, violent and coarse-grained men’’ (53). These political leaders view the cult of her ‘‘esprit’’ with a suspicion that rebounded back upon the narrator himself, though ‘‘I was perhaps the only partisan in good faith.’’ He says that he would have given ‘‘half of my fortune and ten years of my life’’ to assuage the doubts of the Revolutionaries. ‘‘Nevertheless Mme de Malbée retained her power over me,’’ he explains, and he therefore accompanies her into exile (52). Upon their return from exile, Constant returns to his ‘‘meddling’’ with politics. The Directory has become the Consulate. ‘‘I was a member of the Tribunate which for several months endeavoured to set limits to the despotic power which had been permitted to establish itself amidst the convul-

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sions of a shamefully governed Republic’’ (57). It is almost parodically obvious that Constant himself is a ‘‘shamefully governed Republic’’ in which a despotic power—Mme de Malbée—has been permitted to establish itself. Within the Tribunate, Constant experiences the ‘‘threats hurled at those Tribunes who were not in favor of the Dictatorship then in preparation,’’ just as Mme de Malbée now frequently treats him with ‘‘that tone of violence and menace which had so often caused me to rebel against her empire and my weakness’’ (71–72). Despite his resistance to Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘‘the struggle we sustained against an immense power was so unequal that it was bound to end to our disadvantage’’ (57). When in 1802 the Tribunate ‘‘allows itself ’’ to be ‘‘mutilated’’ of numerous members, including the narrator, he says, ‘‘I returned into private life’’ (58). But that private life is a microcosm of the Empire soon to be established. His attempts to sever his bonds with Mme de Malbée and to honor his commitments to Cécile lead again and again to the renewal of Mme de Malbée’s ‘‘ascendancy over me’’ (74). He describes it as ‘‘impossible for me to oppose Mme de Malbée with any prolonged resistance’’ (82). The despot uses her insight into the uncolonized corners of the narrator’s heart ‘‘only to cause me pain, without giving herself any pleasure’’ (85). Her ascendancy makes his volition ‘‘useless. It was necessary to obey’’ (87). Mme de Malbée’s power reﬂects Constant’s description of despotism as a ‘‘government in which the will of the master is the only law’’ (114). MALBÉE / MABLY

The fact that Mme de Malbée represents both Revolution—and speciﬁcally the ancient liberty of civic life under the Revolution—and empire is confusing until one recalls Constant’s historicization of the Napoleonic Empire in Usurpation as an e√ect of the contractarian theory that took ‘‘ancient liberty’’ as its model. Napoleonic usurpation, according to Constant, grew up precisely in the breach to modern liberty wrought by such attempts after the Revolution to impose an authoritarian regulation of human existence compatible with the ancient form of collective and civic liberty. The dates of Mme de Malbée’s dominance in Cécile conﬁrm her role in explicating the transition from Revolution to the tyranny of Empire as diagnosed in Usur-

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pation. Prior to her appearance in the narrator’s life in 1794, and after the increasing misery of her inﬂuence over the narrator from 1803 until the ﬁnal end of the relationship many years later, the narrator’s emotions are invested in Cécile. But under the inﬂuence of Mme de Malbée, the narrator’s relationship with Cécile goes dormant from 1794 until the eve of the Empire: ‘‘Cecile was completely e√aced from my memory . . . here begins a vast gap in our story’’ (45). This historical lacune between Terror and Empire becomes a diagnostic sphere for the transition between Revolutionary (‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘ancient’’) liberty and Napoleonic usurpation. Now, as we know, for Constant, one ﬁgure of the Revolutionary demagoguery of ancient liberty was more exemplary than even Rousseau: the abbé de Mably. Mably’s discourse of ancient liberty was a form of the classical ‘‘empire of the legislator.’’ In Cécile, Mme de Malbée’s anagrammatical link to the name of the abbé de Mably, combined with her Napoleonic persona and usurpation of the space of the narrator’s private existence, makes her allegorical of the complicity between the ‘‘virtuous’’ authoritarianism of Mably and the virtuosic usurpations of Napoleon. If Constantian criticism has so far failed to note the allegorical relationship between Mme de Malbée and the abbé de Mably, it may be because of a tendency to believe that the strong-willed Mme de Staël was in fact all too Napoleonic. Alfred Roulin characteristically found the portrait of Mme de Staël to be ‘‘of a striking truthfulness,’’ whereas ‘‘Cécile’s angelic traits’’ were less convincing.∞∫ In his depiction of Mme de Staël as Napoleonic, Constant was undoubtedly playing with her reputation as an ‘‘imitator’’ not of ancient liberty but of Napoleon’s world-conquering genius and appetites. The mysterious Virgilian epigraph to Cécile, ‘‘Italiam, Italiam ’’ has been linked to a trip Constant took to Rome. But it also suggests a conﬂuence between Mme de Staël’s novel title Corinne ou l’Italie, in which a protagonist and a country are enigmatically interchangeable, and the fundamental role of the Italian campaigns in the founding of Napoleon’s political reputation. A complex mythological history holds that Mme de Staël both emulated and competed with Napoleon despite her critique of his inﬂuence (a critique that in turn greatly inﬂuenced Constant’s critique of Napoleon).∞Ω A characteristic example of this occurs in the portrait of Mme de Staël in Visages de femmes, where André Beaunier plays with the poetics of mimetic combat between

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Mme de Staël as the ‘‘Empress of ideas’’ and Napoleon as the ‘‘Emperor of realities.’’≤≠ Despite the fact that for Beaunier Mme de Staël ‘‘governs with vigor the people she animates with her genius,’’ she ‘‘languishes in this unequal emulation.’’ To Napoleon’s labeling of Mme de Staël as an ‘‘ideologue,’’ Beaunier would have us believe that she countered ‘‘ideophobe!’’ Does this account seem suspiciously symmetrical? Where Freud commented of Napoleon that ‘‘anatomy is destiny,’’ meaning that he developed a huge political persona to compensate for his small stature, Mme de Staël is read as compensating for the small cultural stature of her gender by developing a Napoleonic persona. Further evidence for the intentionality of an allegorical doubling of the intimate and the political in Cécile lies in the lack of such a structure in other accounts of the Constant’s relationship to Mme de Staël, such as that in Amélie et Germaine. Written in 1803, this text presents a di√erent strategic locus of the narrator’s desire to extricate himself from the unsatisfying relationship with Mme de Staël. Here it is a question of the relative advantages and disadvantages of marrying a young girl, Amélie Fabri, who has been proposed to him by friends and family. She is distinguished by her habitual snickering, her routine silliness, her thoroughly average demeanor and understanding. The text presents no trace of a character based on Charlotte von Hardenberg, which is perhaps not surprising as nine years have elapsed since Constant last lost interest in her; she will resurface in 1804. But of more signiﬁcance to the present analysis is the conventionality of the vocabulary of Constant’s depiction of his relationship with Mme de Staël. ‘‘The longer our liaison goes on, the more we risk ﬁnding ourselves old, isolated, dissatisﬁed with ourselves and without resources from others’’ (30). In this text Mme de Staël is not a political analogy. TRANSPOSITIONALITY IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

Transpositional logic in Constant’s work—even when it is at the expense of Mme de Staël—also represents dialogue with Mme de Staël’s work to a striking degree. De Staël has been acknowledged as a founder of the ﬁeld of comparative literature, and her inﬂuential work De la Littérature dans ses rapports aux institutions sociales suggests a blueprint for study of the mimetic relationship between literature and culture, including, of course, politics.

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De l’Inﬂuence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (On the inﬂuence of the passions on the happiness of individuals and nations) notably proposes study of the a√ective impact of governments on individual psychology: ‘‘Passions inﬂuence life’s outcome as much as governments, . . . it seems to me that it should not be more di≈cult to analyze with exactitude ambition, love, or any other passion that has decided your existence than to speak philosophically about the advantages or problems of republics and monarchies.’’*≤∞ This is a challenge that Constant clearly accepts in both Cécile and Usurpation. Mme de Staël’s deﬁnition of passion aptly summarizes its representation in the intimate writings of Constant: ‘‘Passion, that impulsive force that carries man along independently of his will, is the real obstacle to individual and political happiness.’’ Without the inﬂuence of the passions, according to Mme de Staël, governments would work like well-oiled machines, necessitating little in the way of analysis. But in a world of politics and passion, analysis must be two-pronged: ‘‘One kind of analysis studies man in relation to himself; the other kind studies the social relationships of all individuals among themselves; some analogy can be found in the main ideas of these two treaties, because a nation presents the character of a man, and the force of government is brought to bear upon that life, like the power of an individual’s reason upon himself ’’ (3:13).† The structural ‘‘analogy’’ at work between man and nation in Mme de Staël’s theory of political passion not only provides reinforcement for interpretation of the relationship between Constant’s intimate and political writings; it also evokes the possibility that Constant may be the anthropomorphic model for Mme de Staël’s ‘‘nation.’’ For Mme de Staël, the role of constitutions is to know ‘‘to what degree one can stimulate or suppress *Les passions inﬂuent autant que les gouvernemens sur le sort de la vie, . . . il me paroît qu’il ne doit pas en coûter plus pour parler philosophiquement des avantages ou des inconvéniens des républiques et des monarchies, que pour analyser avec exactitude l’ambition, l’amour, ou telle autre passion qui a décidé de votre existence. †L’un étudie l’homme dans ses rapports avec lui-même, l’autre dans les relations sociales de tous les individus entre eux; quelque analogie se trouve dans les idées principales de ces deux traités, parce qu’une nation présente le caractère d’un homme, et que la force du gouvernement doit agir sur elle, comme la puissance de la raison d’un individu sur lui-même.

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passion, without compromising public happiness.’’ Among her deﬁnitions of ‘‘happiness’’ one ﬁnds ‘‘love without inconstancy’’ (3:12). It is not only the critics who enjoy constant punning; both Constant and Mme de Staël sprinkle the notion of constancy liberally and paradoxically through their writings in an apparent nod to the degree to which Constant poses the problem of Constancy. In Cécile, for instance, the forgotten Cécile writes the narrator a letter from her location in ‘‘Constance’’ (202). In Constant’s last collection of his political writings, the hybrid Mélanges de littérature et de politique, he problematizes the merit of his own work with the deadpan proposal that ‘‘if this publication has some merit, it is its constant unity of viewpoint’’ (Écrits politiques, 623).* Any analogy between Constant and the psychology of the nation in Mme de Staël’s work would of course parallel Constant’s anagrammatical analogy between Mme de Malbée and the abbé de Mably in the intertexts between Cécile and Usurpation. Given the key role assigned to Mably in Usurpation of making Empire palatable to the French as a haven for private life, the nature of the narrator’s experience of his return ‘‘into private life’’ in Cécile has important implications for Constant’s personal view of the politics of modern liberty. Usurpation, after all, posits that the return to private life after the despotic suppression of individual to collective existence in the Revolution would be a good thing, that private life would permit the reign of an ‘‘individual happiness’’ under which the attachment to pleasure would guarantee an attachment to liberty. ‘‘To be happy,’’ Constant asserts, ‘‘men need only to be left in perfect independence in all that concerns their occupations, their undertakings, their sphere of activity, their fantasies’’ (104). In Cécile, we ﬁnd instead that the narrator’s inability to ﬁnd pleasure in liberty and liberty in pleasure is chronic and unresolvable. As stated earlier, the narrator is able to conceptualize liberty and pleasure only in terms of polarity, and he moves between those two poles with the regularity of a ping-pong ball. The mechanism for this mobility is the obstacle, without which the narrator might be unable to conceptualize either liberty or pleasure. He says, ‘‘I felt what I had experienced several times before: the approach of my freedom lessened the bitterness of my slavery’’ (104). The *Si cette publication a quelque mérite, c’est celui d’une unité constante de vues.

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scene of the masked ball is a particularly emphatic illustration of this perverse mechanism. The narrator and Cécile, who have been forbidden to see each other both by Cécile’s second husband and by Mme de Malbée, surmount all the obstacles that stand before their meeting. Disguised from the multitude, they experience a profound sensation of private pleasure: ‘‘The feeling of being alone in a huge crowd, unknown to all, sheltered from curious eyes, surrounded by people from whom it was to our advantage to hide ourselves, and separated from them by a barrier so feeble and yet invincible: this manner of existing solely for one another, in the midst of the waves of the multitude, seemed to us yet a closer union, and ﬁlled our hearts with pleasure and love’’ (86).* In this scene they discover a negative liberty of utterly private pleasure through the immediate and real juxtaposition of public and private, intrusion and refuge. But the problem is that as soon as they realize the genius of the formula of this privacy, they are unable to repeat the experience of the pleasure because they no longer fear the crowd; they now desire the crowd as a means of feeling their contrasting privacy. ‘‘We were both so much charmed with our experience that we wished to enjoy it a second time. We returned to the ball the next week. But our expectations were let down, probably because they had been too high. . . . The crowd now became tiresome because we no longer feared it’’ (my translation).† Ultimately, the dominance of the obstacle in this ﬁctional conceptualization of modern liberty explains the odd priority given to the character Cécile in the title, introduction, and conclusion of the text, despite the *Le sentiment d’être seuls au milieu d’une foule immense, inconnus à tout le monde à l’abri de tous les curieux, environnés de gens auxquels nous avions intérêt à nous cacher, et séparés d’eux par une barrière si faible, et pourtant invincible, cette manière d’exister uniquement l’un pour l’autre, à travers les ﬂots de la multitude, nous semblait une union plus étroite, et remplissait nos coeurs de plaisir et d’amour (220–21). †Nous fûmes tous deux tellement charmés de ce que nous avions éprouvé que nous voulûmes en jouir une seconde fois. Nous retournâmes au bal la semaine suivante. Mais notre attente fut déçue, probablement parce qu’elle avait été trop vive. . . . La foule nous devint importune parce que nous ne la craignions plus (221).

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more appreciably charismatic presence of Mme de Malbée. The union with Cécile is most consistently prevented by obstacles from becoming consummated, either sexually or maritally. It is only after many years of interrupted foreplay that the sexual relationship between the narrator and Cécile is actually consummated, in the absence of the marriage sacrament. This consummation occurs haphazardly, simply because the narrator is reminded by some friends of the convention of male sexual exploitation of women. ‘‘The conversation turned to women, and was typical of conversation among men. I was seized by a sort of fatuous remorse’’ (214, my translation). The narrator proceeds directly to see Cécile and has his way: ‘‘Finally she was mine, as much from surprise as from rapture, without having thought to resist, because she was not suspecting the attack’’ (79). The result of the sexual act is unexpected: the narrator suddenly duplicates the role of emperor, which has previously been played only by Mme de Malbée. Cécile says, ‘‘I therefore regard you for ever as my husband, as my lord. From now on it is for you to dictate my least movements. I will obey you in everything. All that you command me, I will do’’ (80). Cécile is playing a risky game: she has ‘‘put herself under the empire’’ of a man who is already under the empire of another (104). Shortly after his unwonted establishment of his own empire over Cécile, in a Voltairian episode the narrator gives himself up to the philosophy of a religious sect based in Lausanne. This philosophy entails giving up all personal will, and he ﬁnds in this passivity a release from su√ering: ‘‘It was then that for the ﬁrst time I breathed without pain’’ (98). His complete abnegation of ‘‘all faculties’’ and ‘‘reason’’ comes under the heading of a ‘‘revolution.’’ Even this revolution, however, is powerless to put an end to the empire of Mme de Malbée, to whom the narrator resubmits himself with renewed resignation. By now, however, this resignation puts Cécile in a certain social and moral peril. In the most ‘‘romantic’’ scene of the text, Cécile and her maid trudge through a severe winter storm to meet the narrator as he passes in a carriage by the inn where she has been waiting for him. In the carriage, the narrator has been reﬂecting to himself that Mme de Malbée had long been ‘‘my life’s tyrant, but she had also been its purpose’’ (109–10). Then he perceives Cécile and her maid coming through the snow. When he greets her heroism

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as scandalous, she refuses to enter the carriage and instead returns on foot through the storm, later falling mortally ill. She becomes so sick that he questions her very existence. But then she improves ever so slightly, and the last line of the book is this: ‘‘She could not utter a word or lift her head, and we had great di≈culty in succeeding in making her swallow a few drops of milk’’ (118).* The pathetic poetry of this last line shows the exquisite crafting of Cécile as a literary text. Although there is historical evidence to suggest that Cécile is indeed a fragment, the lyricism of the last clause also serves as an oblique answer, in the form of a visceral contrast, to the deprivations and cyclical torments of everything that precedes it. ‘‘Quelques gouttes de lait’’ is the only mention of anything approaching the banality and concreteness of food in the text, and it is the pearly, essential drink of respite for the patient perishing from, among other things, the relentlessness of irony. Milk, which suggests the presence of the absent mother in the work of the orphaned Constant, also evokes the need for the nourishment of human kindness. It is the alliterative, maternal, perfect ﬁnal hemistich in a text too bitter to ‘‘drink.’’ THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

For Constant, ‘‘politics do depend on imagination,’’≤≤ to borrow Lynn Hunt’s formulation from her work on the Revolutionary family romance; his work illustrates the applicability of ‘‘the social life of mimesis’’ to a political sphere. But imagining liberty involves a double bind. In Usurpation, the ultimate challenge of politics for a dis-illusioned post-Revolutionary generation is to imagine liberty so ‘‘privately’’ that it eludes the constraints of established representations. The citizens of a modern and negative liberty would, like Cécile and the narrator at the masked ball, experience pleasure and love through the inﬁnite riches of deferred identity. But in Cécile, liberty cannot be imagined in the absence of represented constraints; without the fear of the crowd at the masked ball, the mask has no special powers. *Elle ne pouvait ni prononcer un mot ni soulever la tête, et ce fut avec beaucoup de peine qu’on parvint à lui faire avaler quelques gouttes de lait.

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In the transpositionality of Constant’s political and intimate writing, public and private become overly intimate and invade one another’s boundaries. The private realm hosts the mimetic duplication or even multiplication of despotic public institutions such as empire. The personal is exaggeratedly political in Cécile, which is, from the standpoint of Usurpation, a betrayal of private liberty. The overdetermined repetition of a vocabulary of freedom and bondage in Cécile suggests that the psychological self-representation of threatened liberty is a consuming human preoccupation, almost a component of psychic life. This gives new signiﬁcance to the idea of the ‘‘susceptibility’’ to liberty as a mysterious bridge between private imagination and the historical existence of states. If the private and public spheres resemble one another, how can priority in various senses—importance, anteriority, authenticity— be granted to one sphere or the other? Which comes ﬁrst, the chicken or the egg? If people reﬂexively replicate models of politics in the sphere of private pleasures and models of intimacy in the sphere of politics, then negative liberty is delimited from the outset—at the very least as a resistance to our implacable generation of models of liberty. Cécile ’s mimetic schematization of personal and political tyrannies frames liberty in the end as a hapless, almost animal resistance to the inevitability of refractory and analogical structures in the power relations that structure pleasure: ‘‘There was the obstacle, unexpected and insurmountable’’ (37). The personalization of the political in Cécile in its rapport with Usurpation brings to mind Constant’s comparison, in ‘‘De la Perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine’’ (On the perfectibility of the human species), of the inﬂuence of sensations and the inﬂuence of ideas. Constant theorizes that ideas, ‘‘s’associant, se reproduisant’’ (Écrits politiques, 703) are the real property of the thinker. But man cannot ‘‘govern’’ himself with sensations, with which he is in perpetual battle. Although Constant in that particular essay associates the subjugation of feeling with human perfectibility, this championing of the sovereignty of the cogito contradicts his description of modern liberty as the reign of private pleasures. In ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty,’’ when he writes, ‘‘Citizens of republics, subjects of monarchies, all want pleasures, and indeed no one, in the present condition of societies can help wanting them’’ (319), he makes sensation the cornerstone of governance, if not self-governance.

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MODERN LIBERALISM

The dystopia of private life in Cécile inevitably casts a self-critical light on Constant’s theory of modern liberty. As such it also invokes the basis for the ongoing critique of the liberalism ‘‘founded’’ or cofounded by Constant.≤≥ Holmes notes that liberals are blamed for their ‘‘one-sided focus on private rights,’’ ‘‘ahistorical abstractness,’’ ‘‘blindness to social context,’’ and ‘‘deﬁnition of man as an economic animal’’ (3). The politics of modern liberty can seem to verge almost on the apolitical—a sanctiﬁcation of the political passivity of the private sphere in a global commercial culture. This is in fact the crux of a current intense debate about liberalism in France. This debate dates to the early 1990s but has come to American attention more recently through the scope of the reaction to an allegorically political novel, Les Particules élémentaires, by Michel Houellebecq, which thematizes the future of unbridled capitalism as a cyborg society. Hardly an unfamiliar postmodern vision, but in France, as Adam Gopnik notes, the novel echoes ‘‘an anti-liberal plaint that has become prevalent in France since the Christmas strikes of 1995. By ‘liberalism’ the French mean, of course, what Americans would call conservatism: the Thatcher-Greenspan belief in free enterprise and free markets, in material prosperity as a gauge of value, and, above all, in the absolute virtue of economic freedom even at the cost of social equality or cultural continuity.’’≤∂ This ‘‘liberalism’’ that Americans would call ‘‘conservatism’’ is also frequently called ‘‘neoliberalism.’’ Pierre Bourdieu asserts that neoliberalism is made possible by ‘‘the politics of ﬁnancial deregulation’’ as orchestrated by global economic organizations;≤∑ but it also exists as a ‘‘utopia.’’ The fundamental mechanism of the utopian logic of a pure free market is to ‘‘put into question all the collective structures capable of opposing the logic of pure capitalism,’’ including nation, work groups, unions, and family. According to Bourdieu, neoliberalism steadfastly ignores social inequities and institutionalizes a ‘‘Darwinian world . . . of su√ering and stress ’’ (112). Free-market neoliberalism has no respect for the socialist ethos of equality and fraternity. The historical transition from Constant’s democratic liberalism of private pleasures to Bourdieu’s economic neoliberalism of inequality, su√ering, and stress is anxiety-provoking. Troubling also is the paradoxical recuperation of Constant’s work from the far right. Pierre Lemieux, a rightist politi-

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cal commentator in Canada with an antiregulation agenda, cites Constant’s portrait of the abbé de Mably as a double for the forces of ‘‘political correctness’’ who would hinder the free trade in tobacco or arms. He writes, ‘‘Benjamin Constant said that the abbé de Mably had ‘mistaken the social collectivity for liberty’ ’’ and then warns that today ‘‘we are surrounded by ﬁgures of the abbé de Mably.’’*≤∏ From the extremes of the critique or defense of neoliberalism, however, comes the possibility of a new cultural relevance or urgency for Constant’s theories and ﬁctions of liberty. ‘‘Modern liberty’’ lends itself as a paradigm for analysis of the politics of pleasure in modern consumer culture. Consumer culture did not exist under the terms of ancient liberty. In ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty,’’ Constant theorized that the modern role of commerce was played in the ancient republics by war. Constant’s work, which foresees global capitalism, suggests that consumption should be theorized as a form of neopolitical (postpolitical?) representation. How is the consumer represented by the ﬁctions of desire? How is liberty represented in the free market? How should citizens respond to commerce-as-war? Commerce is, according to Constant in ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty,’’ ‘‘the true life of nations’’: ‘‘Commerce was then a lucky accident, today it is the normal state of things, the only aim, the universal tendency, the true life of nations’’ (314). Unlike Bourdieu, Constant sees commerce as a force that limits despotism because even authority is dependent upon it: ‘‘The e√ects of commerce extend even further: not only does it emancipate individuals, but, by creating credit, it places authority itself in a position of dependence’’ (325). He further points out that in the ancient republics, a slave economy subsidized the rational public sphere: ‘‘Without the slave population of Athens, 20,000 Athenians could never have spent every day in the public square in discussions’’ (314). Furthermore, even in a modern social collectivity that votes for solipsistic jouissance and does not ‘‘buy’’ equality, private life is inevitably structured politically. The illusion of the freedom of the consumer in dis-illusioned democracies nevertheless represents traceable modalities, ideals, and failures of political agency. *Benjamin Constant disait de l’abbé de Mably qu’il avait ‘‘pris l’autorité du corps social pour la liberté’’. . . Nous sommes entourés d’abbés de Mably.

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Constant’s notion of private liberty particularly problematizes the political marginalization of the traditional denizens of private consumer culture and its domestic applications, notably women. His work poses the question of the hybrid discourse that would be necessary to political theorization of the lives and loves of the citizens of ‘‘pleasure’’ in global consumer culture. Isbell has already pointed out that Constant’s political theory of modern liberty has di√erent implications for women, habitually already constrained to the private sphere, than for men: ‘‘The modern man of liberal discourse may very well wish not to be tied up at home, when he leaves the public square; but has anyone consulted his wife? The Revolution founded a public sphere from which women were excluded’’ (440). But in Cécile, where the personal is political and love has its own regimes, the private sphere becomes a place with political battles to ﬁght and stories to tell. The post-Revolutionary liberalism associated with Constant is inspired by the a√ective, libidinal, and material desires of the private sphere, rather than active, reasonable engagement in the public sphere, in a way that is also highly reminiscent of the poetics of the Romantic era in France.≤π The great ﬁgures of Romantic liberalism, such as Lamartine and Hugo, merged sentiment and politics to an unprecedented extent, making the political uncomfortably personal. Posterity has tended to condemn the emotivity and personal baggage of Romantic politicism. Romanticism is, after all, so identiﬁed with irrational individualism that it transgresses the parameters of the polis. Nonmimetic liberty in Usurpation and Cécile provides a negative mirror image of the rational public sphere that serves as the backdrop for the political idealism of the Enlightenment. Jürgen Habermas portrays publicness and reason in an almost tautological relationship within the protoRevolutionary public sphere: ‘‘At one time publicness was intended to subject persons and things to the public use of reason.’’≤∫ This trope of subjecting rather than subjective public reason contrasts with the private sphere as the traditional site for the quarantining of politically subversive personal irrationalism behind closed doors. For Constant in Usurpation, by contrast, liberty lives behind closed doors, impervious to rationalism, a jouissance of private property and relationships, most abstract and absolute precisely when its advantages are most material and pleasurable, least subjecting when it is most subjective. In Cécile, of course, the private sphere is also the

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locus of the irrational failure of modern liberty, precisely through its paradoxical mimetic attachment to the public sphere. Constant’s shift from public rationalism to private pleasure and its failures during the industrial revolution exempliﬁes the clichéd denouement of the Enlightenment cult of reason in the intimate irrationalism of Romanticism. In the introduction to the Age of Reason Reader from the 1950s, Crane Brinton says bluntly, ‘‘Our Age of Reason will then be, roughly, the period . . . from about 1630 to the end of the eighteenth century, when the Romantics took over.’’≤Ω This trope of reason kidnapped by Romanticism is picked up like a baton by Howard Hugo, editor of the Romantic Reader, who laments, ‘‘How can we account for the reaction against such a beautiful rationalism that developed during the Romantic movement?’’≥≠ But Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, in Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, recuperate that same Romantic irrationalism as a necessary problematization of the dynamics of relationships in ‘‘mimetic modernity’’: ‘‘While modern rational thought refers to the single isolated cognitive subject, mimesis is always concerned with a relational network of more than one person.’’≥∞ Constant’s mobilité precisely navigates between the agency of solipsistic reason as the political voice on the one hand and the mimetic agency of relationship as the literary voice on the other. The politics of the personal and of mimetic liberties in the intertext between works such as Usurpation and Cécile should help us to read not only the politics of Romanticism but also the politics of modern commercial democracies in their literary life.

THREE

PLAGIARISM Duras, Desbordes-Valmore, and the Scandalous Potency of the Woman Author

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE AUTHOR

How does the social life of the author ﬁt into the paradigm of the social life of mimesis? In itself, the social dimension of mimesis, in forms such as the likeness between human beings, is independent of any individual author or artist, although any author or artist may of course represent it. But one case in which the social life of an author overlaps with the social life of mimesis is when that author is credited not just with having authored or theorized a given representation but with being in some way socially representative of the workings of mimesis. An example of this is Constant’s personal association with the inconstant mobility he theorized as a feature of private liberty, 87

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and his own framing of the permeable boundaries between his personal life and political writings. When the author becomes a representative of representation itself, social life in the ordinary biographical sense of the term becomes allegorical of mimesis. In the cult of the great author or voyant in French Romanticism, many authors welcomed the idea that their personal experiences of history were allegorical of mimesis. The ﬁrst ode in the young Victor Hugo’s Odes et ballades, the 1821 ‘‘Le Poète dans les révolutions,’’ is an argument between the poet and his muse on the proper degree of Orphic violence in the poet’s lyrical and political engagement. The poet wants to brave the dangers of a revolutionary poetry associated not with avant-gardism but with history and Terror. He is willing to be wounded and to have a poetic oeuvre inscribed with those wounds. Certainly when Hugo died, the size of his funeral cortège would have beﬁtted the death of nonironical poetic mimesis itself. But not all Romantic authors welcomed their social status as mimetic representatives, especially when they were unable to control the nature or content of the allegory. Social life thrives on cycles of gossip, secrets, and innuendo; forms of mythmaking in which myth provides contrast for the idea of truth. In connecting the social life of the author to the social life of mimesis, my focus is not on the biographical transparency of the author, but instead on the literariness of social life. How did Romantic readers and critics contribute to the mythmaking through which a given author became representative of some aspect of mimesis? Mimetic cohesion is of course necessary to the life of myth; readers and critics must imitate and develop myths that are already extant, if in embryonic form. To explore such questions, I have chosen the cases of two women authors whose literary reputations in the Romantic era were dominated not by their status as voyants but by gossip, secrets, and innuendo. Derogatory epithets for women writers abounded throughout the nineteenth century, from the unappealing bas bleu to the bellicose amazone, and so the readerly creation of the woman representative of mimesis was necessarily a complex a√air. The somewhat tormented social lives of Claire de Duras and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, and the di√erent but related means through which they became representative of mimesis as plagiarism and impotence, at-

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test to the richness of even false biography as cultural record and literary resource. THE ACTRESS AND THE DUCHESS

Duras and Desbordes-Valmore have been much studied in the past twenty years, but not in tandem. As authors, although Duras wrote prose and Desbordes-Valmore is much better known for her poetry than her prose, they have a certain history in common. Both came to prominence in the early years of the 1820s when the neologism Romanticism was entering common usage. They became established in a sensational way during the 1820s, and their work, despite long eclipses of visibility, has proven to have a particularly enduring literary legacy. Both were associated with painful ‘‘secrets’’ that overdetermined the reception of their work. Nevertheless, the social di√erences between the two women have almost deﬁed comparison and help to account for the lack of it. Duras’s work harks back to the privileged salonnière tradition in the ancien régime, while Desbordes-Valmore’s work inaugurates a modern tradition of women writing from a position of social marginality, analogous, as Verlaine would later comment, to that of the poète maudit.∞ The di√erence in their social status is evident in the fact that Duras is generally referred to as ‘‘Madame de’’≤ and Desbordes-Valmore is often familiarly referred to as ‘‘Marceline.’’≥ Duras was an extremely wealthy duchess whose husband was at the center of Restoration power. Desbordes-Valmore was a well-known actress accustomed to a lifestyle of bohemian vagabondage and the mother of two illegitimate children before she was a wife. Desbordes-Valmore was only nine years younger than Duras. Nevertheless, the di√erence between the duchess’s intensely private life in the interior spaces of the aristocratic infrastructure of France and the actress’s public exposure not only in the theater but in the relentless commercial publication of works by and about her,∂ creates the illusion of women from two entirely di√erent eras. Probably because of their social di√erences, it has been overlooked that Duras and Desbordes-Valmore have something more speciﬁc in common than the history of women’s literary production under Restoration Romanticism. In the context of Duras’s life and work, what Denise Virieux calls the ‘‘querelle d’Olivier ’’ is well known, and Margaret Waller’s interpretation of

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the querelle has broached its symptomatic rapport with French Romanticism as a whole. What is much less acknowledged is that DesbordesValmore endured a twin ‘‘Olivier’’ scandal, which is to say a scandal devolving from her literary works featuring a protagonist named Olivier. The same man, Hyacinthe (later called Henri) de Latouche, was the key ﬁgure in both scandals, but for very di√erent reasons. The hidden interrelatedness of these two ‘‘Olivier’’ scandals reveals not only how Romantic women authors could be seen as mimetic of mimesis, but also how Romantic authority, despite Hugo and his exaggerated, propagandistic virility, could be conceptualized as mimesis emptied of originality and potency. THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR OR THE LIFE OF THE FALLACY

L’homme et l’oeuvre criticism in the most traditional sense suggests not a social but a realist mimetic praxis, in which the text mirrors the author. Roland Barthes’s notion of the death of the author is a critique of the realism through which the text is alleged to represent the transparency of the author. For Barthes, the drama of authorial identity should be eclipsed by the drama of writing as ‘‘the black and white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.’’∑ After the death, the heir to the estate of the deceased author, the scriptor, ‘‘no longer contains passions, moods, sentiments, impressions’’ (1132) or other catalysts for biographical speculation. The author’s living replacement is the newly born reader or critic. Barthes’s only allusion to the ‘‘circumstances’’ of the actual ‘‘death’’ oddly suggests the metaphor of the author as a mother who dies in labor: ‘‘The birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author’’ (1133). In the history of criticism, the birth of the ‘‘Death of the Author’’ paradigm was requited by the death of the Romantic ‘‘Tel arbre, tel fruit’’∏ (The fruit does not fall far from the tree, or The text does not fall far from the author) paradigm popularized by C.-A. Sainte-Beuve. For Sainte-Beuve, the text is mimetic of the author, although in ‘‘Romantic’’ rather than realist ways. Sainte-Beuve’s paradigm has been tarred as the mother not of the critic but of biographical fallacy, and its death has not been particularly mourned. But it did tie the concept of the life of the author to Romanti-

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cism, and in its wake, questions of Romantic authority are arguably epistemological orphans. One could go so far as to theorize that French Romanticism was a culture of biographical fallacy. Sainte-Beuve’s popularization of a lyrical, personal, yet positivist reliance on biography was so inﬂuential that Adorno theorizes that from it ‘‘the genre of the modern essay derives.’’π Madeleine Ambrière’s Précis de la littérature du 19ème siècle describes Sainte-Beuve in these terms: ‘‘Biographer, historian, essayist, moralist, Sainte-Beuve, who dominated the criticism of his century, paved the way for all the tendencies of criticism in the twentieth century.’’∫ Those ‘‘tendencies’’ include not only the reﬂexive biographicity evident in the critical tradition on Duras and DesbordesValmore but also the reﬂexive resistance to authorial biography evident since structuralism. Sainte-Beuve refused to separate literary from biographical production: ‘‘Literature, literary production, as I see it, is not distinct or separable from the rest of mankind’s character and activity.’’Ω The literary and historical meaning of a work depended for Sainte-Beuve on its placement in the framework of the circumstances of its creation: ‘‘Every work of an author seen in this way, after it has been situated in its framework and studied in the light of all the circumstances that attended its birth, takes on its full meaning—historical and literary’’ (Selected Essays, 287). Those circumstances had to do with familial, ethnographic, and class lineage as well as with the author’s relationship to religion, the spectacle of nature, women, money, daily regimen, and vices. The ‘‘history’’ in Sainte-Beuve’s literary history is identiﬁed not so much with culture, however, as with natural history; through it, the critic would discover ‘‘the great natural divisions in which the various families of minds belong’’ (Selected Essays, 283). Sainte-Beuve’s simultaneous emphases on the individualism of nurture on the one hand and the classiﬁcations of nature on the other, combining in the service of a natural history of writerly types, help to explain the trend toward endless repetition and straitjacketing of speciﬁcity in biographical literary studies. The individual details of an author’s circumstances, worldview, and social persona should lead, for SainteBeuve and his followers, to something far more general and objective, resembling a species classiﬁcation. Sainte-Beuve’s paradigm greatly contrib-

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utes to the phenomenon of mimetic overdetermination in readers’ mythmaking about authors. Because of this, Proust in ‘‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’’ railed against the oxymoronic quality of such a creative typology. But the debate about Sainte-Beuve’s reductionism sometimes tends toward a reduction of the complexity of the problem of social life. Witness the note under ‘‘Sainte-Beuve’’ in an English edition of the essays of Proust: ‘‘Proust contested his [Sainte-Beuve’s] mistaken view that to understand works of literature we need to understand their authors as social beings.’’∞≠ Romanticism was an era of peculiar refractivity between biography, gender, and mimesis. The biographical fallacies that emerge from mimetic myths about authors are parables of life in the larger social sphere. They invoke the problem of gender in numerous ways. ‘‘Personal’’ life arguably has feminine connotations of domesticity, frivolity, sentimentality; SainteBeuve’s social emphases beg the question of whether French Romanticism was inevitability linked to the ‘‘feminine’’ domain of the personal simply by virtue of the fact that the author’s putative social life was ﬁgured as the lifeblood of literature. Where Barthes wants to exclude the ‘‘very identity of the body that writes,’’ Sainte-Beuve seems to view mind itself as a kind of body, ﬁgured in naturalist terms. Study of the Romantic social life of the author within the paradigm of social mimesis encourages the critic to read with an eye to the many environmental and physical factors for which ‘‘nature’’ is a metaphor. AUTHORS ON THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY MARKET OF SYMBOLIC GOODS

Authors and readers are of course ‘‘born’’ not only in the critical paradigms of their roles but in the socioeconomic conditions of literary production and reception. In ‘‘The Market of Symbolic Goods,’’ Pierre Bourdieu asserts that the industrial revolution in post-Revolutionary France changed the demographics of literary culture, turning ‘‘new classes (including women) into consumers of culture.’’∞∞ This burgeoning growth of a diverse consumer public guaranteed more independence for the producers of symbolic goods. Literary institutions such as academies and salons now competed for cultural power with mass media such as serialized ﬁction, melodrama, and vaudeville. Most importantly, writers were no longer dependent on their

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patrons, who traditionally had provided not only funding but also legitimation. All of this heralded the liberation of artistic life ‘‘from aristocratic and ecclesiastical tutelage as well as from its aesthetic and ethical demands’’ (112), a liberation Bourdieu calls ‘‘autonomization.’’ Was ‘‘autonomization’’ the same for the female author as for the male author? In practice, women writers thrived during the period of the Restoration when Desbordes-Valmore and Duras became well known. Female authorship of novels exploded, as Denise Virieux notes: ‘‘Under the Restoration, novels were often women’s work; we know of more than a hundred and ﬁfty female novelists.’’∞≤ In fact, women’s literary production in all genres greatly increased; among the Romantic women authors whose names continue to have some recognition value are not only Desbordes-Valmore and Duras but also Hortense Allart, Eugénie Foa, Sophie Gay, Delphine de Girardin, Elisa Mercoeur, Antoinette Quarré, Juliette Récamier, George Sand, Anaïs Ségalas, and Mélanie Waldor. Their numbers were so great in the 1820s that on the rue Saint-Jacques three publishers specializing in books by and for women, Marcilly, Janet, and Lefuel, set up shop. Numerous publications were dedicated to the concept of the feminine muse: Muses françaises, L’Album des muses, La Corbeille des muses, La Journée des muses, and Le Réveil des muses. In theory, however, in post-Revolutionary France women writers remained associated with the defeated politics of the ancien régime salon. As DeJean has demonstrated, women’s access to the public domain in the ancien régime was largely a question of ‘‘salon politics,’’ an environment that illustrated the axiom that ‘‘gender is class’’ (159). In the 1880 essay ‘‘Money in Literature,’’ Émile Zola traced the sexual politics of literary autonomization, arguing in e√ect that the pre-Revolutionary e√eminization of male writers had been replaced by the post-Revolutionary prostitution of salonnières. The writer in the ancien régime had been a luxurious object of patronage: ‘‘a luxurious gift a lord gives himself.’’∞≥ His status had depended on ‘‘belonging’’ to a lord: ‘‘It was beautiful to belong to a powerful lord; it gave one stature’’ (190). Therefore even the most ‘‘audacious’’ works, such as Racine’s Phèdre, were ﬁrst subjected to the precious and e√eminizing constraints of the salon; ‘‘the ladies listen, the academicians nod their heads’’ (204). The only real exceptions to what Zola viewed as the social prostitu-

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tion of the ancien régime writer were the writers who were themselves su≈ciently rich and powerful to turn the paradigm on its head by treating ‘‘literature as a mistress’’ (202). After the Revolution, the massive destabilization of privilege and hierarchy altered the social position of the writer, that erstwhile literary courtesan, even more radically than that of most other citizens: according to Zola, ‘‘in the new state, the writer was certainly one of the citizens whose situation was most radically changed’’ (191). The writer was liberated by the agency of money in post-Revolutionary industrial society: ‘‘Money emancipated the writer, money created modern letters’’ (201). The promotion of groups such as women into the masses of consumer culture (‘‘la foule’’) meant for Zola that male writers no longer had to serve as de facto cultural mistresses, pets, or fools for the ruling classes. The mechanism of the liberation of the writer was, conversely, a death sentence for the aristocracy and the aristocratic salon: ‘‘The nobility was mortally wounded’’ (191). As the post-Revolutionary writer, whom Zola depicts in exclusively masculine terms (‘‘le jeune homme’’ [194]), became autonomized as ‘‘his own master’’ (195), he also regained sexual autonomy, his ‘‘virilité’’ (194). Conversely, the only women who had had literary power and agency under the ancien régime, the salon hostesses or salonnières, suddenly descended to the rank of second-string mistresses: First o√, the salon is no more. I am well aware that ambitious women, the agitated bluestockings of our democracy, still pride themselves on hosting writers. But . . . one lingers there among the e√usions of the second-string mistress who has read the classics. . . . None of it counts; these are women chatting about clothes and makeup. This disappearance of the literary salons is of grave import, for it indicates the diversiﬁcation of taste, the ever-greater expansion of the public. As soon as opinion is not in the hands of small chosen groups, of cénacles each pushing their own god, the crowd of readers judges and bestows success (198–99).

In an industrial democracy, as Zola sees it, the writer is a virile young man, his own master, and the salonnières of yesteryear are a sad amalgam of agitated feminists and distracted demi-mondaines, mixing up classics and the latest fashions. The prostitution of the literary salon frames the new prowess of the male author, who, liberated from the earlier prostitution of patronage, sells his books in great numbers to ‘‘the crowds’’ but sells himself to no one.

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For Zola, as his novelistic oeuvre makes clear, women’s access to the public domain should more properly be a question of street politics, through the potent disruptive contagion of female sexuality on social hierarchy. Women with the traditional social power of money and class, like Duras, were, for Zola, of no public import unless they too tra≈cked in the communal sexual infatuations contracted within that ediﬁce of licentiousness and voyeurism, the theater, where Desbordes-Valmore was at home. Speculation in the theater replaced the arbitrage of taste in the salon: ‘‘As for literary subventions and orders, they rarely take place outside of the theaters, where, furthermore, they are a function of dramatic speculation and are not related directly to the work of the writer’’ (197). The reversal of the politics of the ancien régime style is, for Zola, particularly traceable to the Restoration. Absolutist privilege and hierarchy were to some degree restored under the Empire, but much more so under the Restoration. Under the Restoration, in Pierre Miquel’s succinct description, ‘‘it was a matter of restoring, with the concessions of form inscribed in the ‘Charter,’ the France of the Old Regime, a ‘theocracy’ in which ‘throne and altar’ were the cornerstones of social construction. In a word, it was a matter of denying and obliterating the civil society produced by the Revolution and the Napoleonic Code.’’∞∂ How would this reactionary moment ﬁt into the post-Revolutionary process of male authorial autonomization? Zola argues that even under the leadership of the brothers of the Bourbon king who had been decapitated during the Revolution, ﬁrst Louis XVIII (1816–24) and then Charles X (1824–30), the ideology of restored monarchical power was belied by ongoing transformation in the material conditions of cultural production. ‘‘It wasn’t noticeable right away. Under Napoleon, under Louis XVIII, under Charles X, things seemed to take up where they had left o√; but with a slow momentum, everything began to be transformed, ways of being were no longer the same, and every day the new literary spirit made itself up from the changed material conditions of letters in this new society’’ (191). Zola’s hypothesis of an imperceptible material continuation of the Revolution contextualizes the Restoration not as a step backward for the autonomy of writers but as an era of unconscious forward momentum in the cultural and material transformation of writers’ roles. The aristocratic salon may have seemed to reign over letters once more, but the materially autonomized writer remained free and at large.

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Zola’s formulation is arresting because in fact the literary culture of the Restoration is a hotbed of political ambiguity, making it di≈cult to align literary and political trends. Romantic literary legitimation seemed, at least initially, to be primarily coextensive with the paradigm of monarchical legitimacy.∞∑ Many of the most lauded ﬁgures of early Romanticism, such as François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, initially championed the monarchy. They were dependent on the inﬂuence of royalist salons and the support of monarchical prizes and pensions. Chateaubriand and Lamartine beneﬁted from diplomatic posts granted by the government. And yet the Restoration as an era of the return to monarchical power continued to generate narratives of fateful postRevolutionary powerlessness. POTENT IMPOTENCE

What Margaret Waller calls ‘‘ﬁctions of impotence’’ in her foundational study of the ‘‘male malady’’ had been endemic to the post-Revolutionary mal du siècle from the opening years of the nineteenth century, notably from Chateaubriand onward: ‘‘In the beginning was René [1802].’’∞∏ Waller deﬁnes the mal du siècle in terms of ‘‘a crisis of authority symbolized by the decapitation of the king—the ultimate father ﬁgure’’ (2). By their social class and their politics, the writers of the mal du siècle ﬁnd themselves ‘‘outside the inner circle of power in postrevolutionary France’’ (21). While they are tormented by ambition and desire, their ‘‘impotence’’ lies in their inability to act upon them. But under the Restoration, the return of the Bourbons should logically have restored the beheaded psychic father, the lost monarch, resolving the crisis of authority. Instead, just when ‘‘ﬁctions of impotence’’ should have been replaced, according to Zola’s logic, by ﬁctions of virility, they paradoxically continued to proliferate. As Waller notes, the subject positions from which writers articulated ﬁctions of impotence were varied: ‘‘From the 1800s to the 1830s, writers of each marginalized group in turn told the story of an alienated hero in the interests of very di√erent, even opposing, political agendas’’ (20). The fact that Restoration Romantics perpetuated the discourse of a crisis of kingly authority even under the restoration of kingly authority, rather

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than identifying with ‘‘mastery’’ and ‘‘virility,’’ suggests to me that impotence had become associated with either monarchical critique or a more free-ﬂoating political independence. Once the monarchy had been made ‘‘virile’’ once again, the production of ‘‘ﬁctions of potency’’ would have indicated identiﬁcation with the king. Instead, now that royalist salons again seemed omnipotent, writers could symbolize their material autonomy through continued ﬁctions of impotence. In e√ect, for commercially autonomized writers, the theme of impotence might signal an unwillingness to play the role of court mistress. This unwillingness preludes the widespread emergence of political critique in the last phase of Romanticism. The period from 1830 to 1848 was often referred to as the ‘‘Bourgeois Monarchy,’’ a neologism that announced the fragile marriage of those intractable Revolutionary enemies, the bourgeoisie and the monarchy. LouisPhilippe, scion of the Orléans branch, a line that legitimists viewed as illegitimate, introduced a small number of liberal reforms when he was ﬁrst carried to power by revolution (the ‘‘July Days’’ of 1830). These minor concessions to the spirit of the Revolution of 1789 unexpectedly opened a Pandora’s box of other possible reforms, leading to the gradual radicalization of virtually all domains of political culture. As Miquel notes, ‘‘The movement of protest against an unyielding society was not limited to artists and writers. Even business had its share of rebellion. Young executives from banking and industry read Saint Simon and Fourier’’ (351). By 1848, most Romantic writers were irremediably alienated from ancien régime social paradigms. They were instead deeply engaged, as I demonstrate in chapter 4, in attempts to democratize literary and social hierarchies. Fictions of impotence during the Restoration in this sense were cryptic signs of the approach of the more deﬁnitive ﬁnancial ‘‘emancipation’’ and political ‘‘virilization’’ of the male author. The political speciﬁcity of the literary uses of impotence under the Restoration are especially relevant in the ‘‘querelle d’Olivier.’’ This episode, in which a ﬁction of impotence was appropriated by two other writers, overlaying the themes of impotence and plagiarism, at ﬁrst appears to skew the model of ﬁctional impotence as political virility under the Restoration. This is because the querelle centers around a book, Olivier ou le secret, written by a woman who was a salon hostess in the most privileged inner circles of the Restoration: the duchess of Duras. I hope to show, however, that Duras’s

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literalization of le mal du siècle as (hinted) physical impotence was precisely a gesture of political autonomy, of mimetic counteridentiﬁcation with the potency of the monarchy. MIMETIC AND BIOLOGICAL ‘‘REPRODUCTION’’ OF THE MARRIAGE PLOT

Male sexual impotence was not the overtly announced theme but the ‘‘secret’’ of the unpublished text Duras read aloud in her salon in 1825; as a plot element, it is embedded in the traditional novelistic drama of what DeJean, Nancy Miller, and others have called the ‘‘marriage plot.’’∞π The post-Revolutionary industrialization of culture inevitably had helped to unseat this ‘‘marriage plot’’ from its belles lettres throne in the ancien régime. The dominance of dramas revolving around marriage in early modern French literature, whether treated subversively or complicitly, had reﬂected the centrality of what Luce Irigaray theorizes as the market not of symbolic goods but of women, ‘‘Le Marché des femmes.’’∞∫ In the ancien régime, women’s marital roles were essential to the perpetuation of patrilinear socioeconomic power. Heirs are born, not made—without women and the marriage sacrament, aristocracy would be impotent. In Restoration France, the aristocracy may brieﬂy have regained economic and cultural power, but changes in the ‘‘market of symbolic goods’’ continued to erode the economic and cultural fecundity of the absolutist ‘‘market of women.’’ Rivalry between the nobility surviving from the ancien régime and the nobility made by Napoleon Bonaparte was only one social threat to the power of a ‘‘good’’ marriage. The ‘‘querelle d’Olivier’’ presents a parable of the decreasing symbolic power of the aristocratic marriage plot and the increasing symbolic power of threats to it. As the ‘‘secret’’ of Duras’s novel spread, it had scandalous repercussions far beyond the conﬁnes of the salon. It triggered a surge of what René Girard calls la mimésis d’acquisition (appropriative mimesis), in which writers became rivals for the power of impotence. The fact that impotence is ‘‘negative’’ does not protect it from mimetic appropriation as long as its use constitutes a model of desire—for instance, a model of desire for a replacement of the ‘‘marriage plot’’ with a society in which women would have more autonomy. As ‘‘ﬁctions of impotence’’ pro-

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liferated in the Romantic period, the contestatory meanings associated with them, from mourning for the king to mimetic counteridentiﬁcation with royal power, inevitably proliferated in turn. Girard explains the change of initial meanings inherent in cycles of mimetic appropriation: ‘‘The model is likely to be a√ected by the desire of his imitator. He becomes the imitator of his own imitator, just as the latter becomes the model of his own model. As this feedback process keeps reinforcing itself, each constitutes in the other’s path a more and more irritating obstacle and each tries to remove this obstacle more and more forcefully. . . . Violence is mimetic rivalry itself becoming more violent as the antagonists who desire the same object keep thwarting each other and desiring the object all the more.’’∞Ω By this logic, Duras can be seen as a rival already imitating a model of desire presented by earlier ‘‘ﬁctions of impotence,’’ wrestling its meaning away from that earlier model and toward her own. Her own nonplagiaristic appropriation of the theme of impotence would now be appropriated from her in plagiaristic terms. Duras had already published two admired novels by the time she read Olivier ou le secret, both with ardently liberal political plots, revolving around race and class oppression. Ourika in 1824 narrated the fatal misery of a freed Senegalese slave in an Enlightenment salon, and Édouard in 1825 was about the tragic love between a commoner and an aristocrat. In an indication of her awareness of the force of mimetic rivalry in the literary sphere, Duras had claimed that she had been pushed to the decision to publish these books by her fear of fraudulent publication. My use of the overarching term plagiarism is a twenty-ﬁrst-century translation of what Duras herself described as literary contrefaction, ‘‘counterfeiting.’’ In 1825 she wrote to her friend Rosalie de Constant, ‘‘I fear nothing more than counterfeit editions and publicity against my will’’ (cited in Virieux, 35). But by that time she had already experienced the widespread and in some ways uncontrolled dissemination of her work. DeJean notes that at least four new editions and reprints [of Ourika ] appeared in 1824 alone. The second edition was released in three printings of one thousand copies each. It sold out so quickly that, scarcely a month later, two thousand additional copies were printed. Two other editions that same year—the ﬁrst a pirated one, the second an edition published in French in Saint Petersburg—conﬁrm that, in a few months, Ourika had gone from being a story told privately in Duras’s salon to being one of the most widely circulated novels of

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the day, a true best-seller. The year 1824 also saw the performance of no fewer than four plays based on Ourika and the publication of two poems based on the novel.≤≠

Both Ourika and Édouard, like Olivier ou le secret, were written during the brief period between December of 1821 and March of 1822. Virieux considers this time period to have been ‘‘a true self-analysis in the psychoanalytic sense’’ (12), in the course of which this chronically angst-ridden grande dame nursed her physical ills and her psychic wounds. A paragon of privilege, Duras, born Claire-Louise-Rose Bonne de Kersaint in 1777, nevertheless su√ered from the social position she had attained via her real-life experience of the ‘‘marriage plot.’’ Her father, a Breton aristocrat and a successful naval admiral, had met her mother, a wealthy Creole from Martinique, in the course of his colonial military career. Claire was an only child, and her parents’ unhappy marriage ended in 1792, shortly after the Revolution had legalized divorce.≤∞ Her much-adored father was a fervent follower of Enlightenment intellectual debates. A. Bardoux’s detailed chapter on Admiral Kersaint reports that he had even tried, unsuccessfully, to engage Rousseau in a correspondence.≤≤ Did Kersaint’s profoundly Revolutionary engagement alienate his daughter from the politics of the émigré and royalist society into which she married in the postRevolutionary period? It is interesting to consider Admiral Kersaint’s Revolutionary role in the light of the egalitarian political themes of Duras’s novels. Early in the Revolution, the count of Kersaint published a pamphlet, Le Bon sens (Common sense), in which, according to Bardoux, he violently attacked the three estates into which French society was divided and the maintenance of the system of privileges (18). He was a cofounder in 1790 of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution and of Liberty (19). He participated in the work of the National Assembly. But as the Revolution progressed, he joined the Girondins and voted against the execution of the captive king, saying, ‘‘I am revolted by the inequality of this ﬁght’’ (29). He also criticized the role of Marat. In 1793 he had the chance to emigrate but chose to stay. He was apprehended and brought before the Comité de Sûreté Générale in September of 1793, accused of ‘‘belonging to the caste of the nobility that had slit the throat of Marat, friend of the people, by means of the hand of Corday’’ (39). After his interrogation he was condemned by the Revolution-

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ary tribunal on December 4, 1793, to be executed on the Place de la Révolution. He was guillotined the next day. Claire and her mother ﬂed France, reportedly learning of the death of the count from a town crier in Bordeaux. The biographical record on their subsequent itinerary is conﬂictual. Virieux believes that at this point Claire de Kersaint’s experiences brieﬂy paralleled those of Desbordes-Valmore: ‘‘How can one not think of the youth of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, who, like Claire de Kersaint, left at the age of ﬁfteen for the Caribbean, was also brutally orphaned [her mother died of yellow fever in Guadeloupe], and was then forced to make her way back to France alone?’’ (66). The idea that Claire had traveled to the Caribbean in the post-Revolutionary period and lost her mother there is in fact mentioned in some nineteenth-century sources, such as G. DuPlessis’s Oeuvres de Madame de Duras (Paris: Passard, 1851), and is reiterated not only by Virieux but also by Hermann; but it is apparently erroneous. When Claire left France to establish claim to her Creole mother’s inheritance in Martinique, she did so in Philadelphia (Bardoux, 49) which was a center of colonial legal commerce. She then proceeded to England with her mother, who did not die for many years, although her mental and physical health was said to be poor. In 1797 Claire married a royalist with no connection to her own liberal Enlightenment heritage. In sharp contrast with the experiences of her father, at the beginning of the Revolution the Duke of Duras had been employed by Louis XVI as a gentilhomme de la chambre (Gentleman of the Chamber) (64). After being sent on a secret mission to the Austrian royal court, the king ordered Duras to emigrate. He proceeded to London and later lost most of his family to the guillotine. Claire de Kersaint became the duchess of Duras in London in 1797. She felt out of place in the company of fellow émigrés and later among the ultraroyalists who were her husband’s peers under the Restoration. Her marriage appears at the very least not to have lessened her need for creative and emotional fulﬁllment elsewhere. The elder of her two daughters married into an even more ultraroyalist family and isolated herself from her mother. Duras was beleaguered by physical distress and frequently expressed the belief that she would die prematurely, like her novelistic protagonists, as in fact she did.≤≥ By the 1820s, Duras was literally famous for her su√ering. Sainte-Beuve noted her dedication to melancholy: ‘‘She

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put almost a kind of passion into it, truth be told, a ﬁnal and sublime passion’’ (cited in Virieux, 21). Like the title of her novel Olivier ou le secret, Duras has consistently been interpreted as a woman with a secret, a secret responsible for her infamous su√ering. This ‘‘secret’’ has long been diagnosed as a frustrated love for Chateaubriand, the writer she called ‘‘mon frère.’’ G. Pailhès, in his 1910 La Duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand, insists that the two were never lovers (contrary to Sainte-Beuve’s implications), but he frames their social intimacy as the focus of Duras’s life. Since Duras was never satisﬁed with the apparently ﬁckle and brusque nature of Chateaubriand’s devotion to her, critics have developed the notion of Duras’s frustrated friendship into a myth of a global antinarcissism, a fatal lack of self-esteem, that dominated her psychic and literary existence. Claudine Hermann says that Duras loved her daughter Félicie ‘‘the way Madame de Sévigné had loved Madame de Grignan,’’≤∂ which is to say with frustrated obsession. She implies that this frustration is mirrored in the unhappy plots of Duras’s ﬁction. When Duras’s Senegalese heroine Ourika suddenly sees her black skin with the eyes of a racist society, Hermann sees this as a sign of Duras’s dissatisfaction with her own looks, explaining it as ‘‘another manifestation of the su√ering Mme de Duras endured from feeling ugly’’ (67 n. 14). By using Chateaubriand as the key in biographically oriented interpretations of Duras’s work, critics see the theme of self-loathing in Duras’s life masquerading as social protest in her novels. Before she could consider printing Olivier ou le secret, Duras’s work was co-opted in two anonymous imitations, more than justifying her phobia of counterfeit publication. The ﬁrst Olivier, written by Henri de Latouche, was published in either December 1825 or January 1826. The second, eventually titled Armance rather than Olivier as originally planned, by Latouche’s friend and collaborator Henri Beyle,≤∑ known by the pseudonym Stendhal, was conceptualized at the same time or earlier than Latouche’s version but was not published until 1827. Both of these apocryphal versions were published in a specialized format intended to convince readers that Duras was the author, and both were accompanied by anonymous journalistic publicity to that e√ect by Latouche, Stendhal, and possibly others. If the unspoken secret of Duras’s Olivier ou le secret was sexual impotence, an unspoken secret of Latouche and Stendhal’s versions was the plagiaristic appropriation of another’s authorial identity, superimposing the

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themes of impotence and plagiarism. Duras was apparently so traumatized by the fraudulent invocation of her work and authorial persona that she abandoned her novelistic enterprises. In 1828 she died at the age of 51. For a century and a half, the two Olivier simulacra not only preceded but also supplanted the original; Olivier ou le secret was not actually published until 1971. What could have motivated this counterintuitive competition for the aristocratic female authorship of a ﬁction of male impotence? What could be further from Zola’s schema of the young male writer playing the market to become his own master? For Waller, it illustrates that ‘‘male writers in particular and their protagonists as well are learning to take advantage of the ‘powers of the weak’ (silence, withdrawal, and refusal), which are traditionally associated with women, as underhanded means of empowerment’’ (3). Imitation of the persona of the duchess of Duras was not just a means of taking advantage of the powers of the weak, however, as Duras obviously also represented the position of class and political strength from which many salonnières had traditionally operated. Waller also notes Stendhal’s apparent association of Duras’s work with that ur-texte both of the marriage plot and of the ‘‘feminine’’ origins of the novel, Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. She suggests that Stendhal’s participation in the querelle d’Olivier stemmed from competitive feelings about Duras’s social and literary status and its analogy to the cherished literary legacy of Lafayette: ‘‘Stendhal resented the success and social privilege that made her, rather than himself, the heir apparent to Lafayette’s literary mantle’’ (116). Did Stendhal see himself as a literary Mme de Lafayette, draped in the mantle of the salon queen? Since Stendhal also represents the social phenomenon of the emergence of the economically ‘‘virile’’ middle-class male writer, a social stranger to the ultraromanticism of the young Lamartine, any straightforward struggle of authorial identity between Stendhal and Duras would have to be paradoxical. A divergent if complementary possibility is that both Stendhal and Latouche were seduced, so to speak, like Duras herself, by the idea of the marriage plot’s becoming impotent and by the symbolic impossibility of the salon queen’s producing an heir to that tradition. The attraction of the impotence of the marriage plot in this case would be strongly based in a political critique of aristocracy. ‘‘Reproduction’’ in this interpretation of ‘‘ﬁctions of impotence’’ would point to the refusal to mimetically

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reproduce a traditional plot component, as well as to the failure to reproduce biologically. Latouche, from a wealthy bourgeois family, was, according to Frédéric Ségu, ‘‘a fervent and courageous republican.’’≤∏ He enjoyed resisting authority in its various guises, notably Church and Crown. This resistance is evident in his polemical publication in 1827 of an invented correspondence, Clément XIV et Carlo Bertinazzi, in which the pope’s suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 is given newly scandalous resonance (22–23). The middleclass Stendhal was also republican but had a more ambivalent relationship to the aristocracy, one of both resentment and aspiration. Claudine Hermann notes that the love a√air between a commoner and an aristocrat in Duras’s Édouard appears to be the model for Julien Sorel’s simultaneously venomous and passionate relationship to the aristocracy in Le Rouge et le noir.≤π Given the Restoration tensions between old and new versions of the ‘‘culture industry,’’ there is ample reason to analyze the political nature of Latouche and Stendhal’s interest in Duras’s Olivier ou le secret. The fact that this problem has been neglected reﬂects the dearth of close readings of the politics of Duras’s own text. Virieux’s biographical introduction and extensive notes are the closest thing to a sustained reading of any kind of Olivier ou le secret on its own terms, although Ivanna Rosi has also done a detailed analysis of the way in which the play of double meaning in Olivier ou le secret displays a pattern reﬂected throughout Duras’s oeuvre.≤∫ Chantal Bertrand-Jennings also analyzes Olivier ou le secret for motifs in common with Ourika and Édouard. Stendhal’s now canonical Armance of course has attracted the attention of a virtual pantheon of modern critics, including Peter Brooks, Shoshana Felman, Françoise Lionnet, and many others, but the majority of these critics make no reference to its genesis in the querelle d’Olivier at all. Those critics who do refer to the querelle d’Olivier generally make use not of Duras’s text but of her persona as a frame for the signiﬁcance of Stendhal’s now canonical text, as in the analyses by Waller and by George M. Rosa.≤Ω THE POTENCY OF DURAS’S OLIVIER

Waller’s category of Romantic ‘‘ﬁctions of impotence’’ is metaphorical in all cases except Stendhal’s Armance through its imitative relationship to

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Duras’s Olivier ou le secret. It was a woman author, in other words, no matter how much she may have imitated established themes of melancholy and powerlessness, who provided the original Romantic text of male sexual impotence. In Olivier ou le secret Duras had made the most innovative literary use of male sexual weakness since the Lettres persanes, and her handicapped hero was not a foreigner or an opera singer but a French aristocrat, a representative of contemporary empowerment. The originality or greatness of the male writer has traditionally been symbolized as virility, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have amply demonstrated. Latouche and Stendhal’s imitative response to Duras’s ﬁction of male sexual impotence suggests not only anxiety about impotence but also a desire to capitalize on the alignment of impotence and imitation as a rebellious literary experimentalism. Duras, in a description of the book to her friend Rosalie de Constant, contextualized the appeal of impotence as the challenge of articulating a taboo: ‘‘I don’t dare tell you the subject. It’s a dare, a subject people said couldn’t be done. I will only tell you the title; it’s called Olivier or the Secret.’’*≥≠ Stendhal’s much-quoted 1826 letter to Mérimée uses an identical vocabulary of the ‘‘déﬁ’’: ‘‘I chose the name Olivier, without thinking, because of the dare it represents.’’≥∞ Stendhal was intrigued not only by the challenges of impotence as a literary subject but also by the way that impotence challenges its ‘‘victim’’ to discover compensatory skills:≥≤ ‘‘Olivier, like all the Babilans, has great strengths when it comes to auxiliary means. . . . an adroit hand, an e≈cient tongue’’ (230).† Since imitation, and especially in a ﬁrst novel, would seem to associate its author with literary impotence, one can assume that Stendhal was particularly interested in the development of literary ‘‘moyens auxiliaires’’—the compensatory reinvention of originality as an experimentalism born of lack. Originality was never the strong point of Romanticism. I have already pointed out that in Alfred de Musset’s farcical Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, where two country gentlemen attempt in a letter to the editor of a literary *Je n’oserai vous dire le sujet. C’est un déﬁ, un sujet qu’on prétendait ne pouvoir être traité. Je vous en dirai seulement le titre; cela s’appelle Olivier ou le Secret. †Olivier, comme tous les Babilans, est très fort sur les moyens auxiliaires. . . . une main adroite, une langue o≈cieuse.

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review to reach clariﬁcation on the meaning of the word ‘‘romantisme,’’ they are puzzled as to the ‘‘inventive’’ potential of imitation. ‘‘But, said Cotonet, how does the naturalization of imitation qualify as invention?’’≥≥ Plagiarism is after all, he reﬂects, a poor platform for innovation as it is not new. ‘‘When we have imitated, copied, plagiarized, translated and compiled everything, what will be Romantic about that? There is nothing less new under the sun than to compile and plagiarize’’ (827). They come up with no answer; Cotonet becomes depressed. ‘‘Then Romanticism is nothing but a plagiarism, a simulacrum, a copy; it is shameful, Sir, it is degrading’’ (829). Perhaps the only way that literary imitation could not be degrading would be if it were employed to avoid the reproduction of the status quo. If one wanted to demystify the mystique of greatness as originality, as in ‘‘found art,’’ for instance, imitation would be a handy ‘‘moyen auxiliaire’’— the modern avant-gardes in general have been drawn to interrogations of originality. Likewise, perhaps the only way that sexual impotence could not be degrading to a literary protagonist would be if it were a means of avoiding the physiological reproduction of the social in the status quo. The impotent hero is not complicit in the sexual reproduction of a patrilinear and authoritarian society. PREGNANT SILENCE

In Duras’s text, of course, impotence is a secret. The title Olivier ou le secret, parallel in its syntax to Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie, makes the character Olivier synonymous with or interchangeable with the secret: he is a personiﬁcation of the secret. For Duras, what are the mechanisms, the aesthetics and the politics, of secrets? Are secrets potent or impotent? Bertrand-Jennings suggests that Olivier’s secret serves to isolate him, to exclude him from communication: ‘‘Olivier is the most isolated of all. He has no more place in the world than Ourika or Édouard, but he is the only one who cannot even conﬁde the secret of his su√ering’’ (42). As such, the burden of the secret parallels the social isolation of nineteenth-century women: ‘‘There again one can see the interdiction of social activity that is characteristic of the feminine condition in the nineteenth century’’ (42–

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43). By this logic, the secret is symbolic of women’s socially mandated silence. But secrets are also strongly associated with the stakes of possession and exchange. Duras’s Olivier cannot be entirely identiﬁed with lack. He ‘‘has’’ something: he’s got a secret, which can mean that he is in possession of something hotly desired by others. The sexual desirability of the secret is illustrated by Freud’s remarks about women’s love of secrecy to heighten desire. The secret establishes a society of those who are ‘‘in the know’’ and those who are ‘‘out of it’’; although it is based on exclusion, the secret is an intensely social force. Through the motif of the secret, Duras puts the socially mandated silence not just of women but also of the politically disfranchised into literary circulation. Stendhal and Latouche’s ‘‘plagiarisms’’ of the secret of that silence are not comparable to the plagiarizing of known speech. The secret is a dare, a challenge to society’s determination to keep some subjects unsaid. As such, it stretches the limits of literary language. The representational challenge of the secret is to express something not by revealing it but by revealing that it is hidden. In Duras’s novel, Olivier’s secret is literally well known as something that has eluded public knowledge: ‘‘Lord Exeter said to me: ‘What could be the cause of Olivier’s melancholy?’ ’’ (130). The character Adèle, the heroine’s sister, represents the social irresistibility of the secret. ‘‘Olivier, eh quoi!’’ she writes; ‘‘Olivier, Olivier!’’ as if the mere repetition of his name would tease out his secret. Rather than believe his own description of his su√ering, she would rather ‘‘ﬁgure him out,’’ she says, as though he were a riddle on two feet (149). The heroine, Louise, the countess of Nangis, is by nature less inclined to try to pry out the secret than is her sister. Nevertheless, for Louise the secret is also all-important: it endows Olivier with a quality of originality. While others live for and through formalities and games, the melancholic Olivier has something that is not a matter of form. Olivier’s mysterious spirit creates ‘‘links among all objects,’’ and ‘‘reﬂection makes him see things in an inﬁnite variety of ways’’ (136). In contrast, for Rieux, Louise’s suitor, love is ‘‘played like a game of chess, with spectators judging the moves and two or three mistresses in reserve’’ (165). In an astonishing passage, Louise describes the secretive Olivier as being

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endowed with an originality that is ‘‘fertile,’’ that has ‘‘the touch,’’ whereas Rieux is only an attractive copy: ‘‘Something vital and original makes itself felt in everything he says; his speech is a fertile ground that produces everything one asks of it; one never recognizes the property of others in his conversation; everything belongs to him either by the content or by the form that he knows how to give it. What Monsieur de Rieux says is agreeably articulated, there is correctness, elegance, and even something piquant in his manner of speaking, but the touch is not there. It is like a beautiful copy. It pleases as long as one has not seen the original’’ (141).* The secret paradoxically renders Olivier fertile through the originality of his su√ering. The virile Rieux lacks ‘‘the touch’’; the impotent Olivier presumably has the touch of the fertile original. Louise’s description of Olivier reads strangely like a challenge to readers/ listeners such as Henri de Latouche to show that they have ‘‘la touche,’’ that they can be original, even if they are not so original and unique as to be impotent. The odd coincidence of this overlaid vocabulary of ‘‘originality’’ and ‘‘touch’’ in fact makes one wonder whether Latouche had heard a very detailed account of the novel and seen himself symbolically invoked— unintentionally, of course. After Latouche had published his own Olivier, a reader who guessed the text’s authorship punned in a newspaper that he did not see in it ‘‘la touche’’ of the duchess of Duras: ‘‘I suspect the touch of an anonymous writer in this work! Despite all the author’s talent, I don’t see it as the doing of the duchess of Duras’’ (cited in Virieux, 38).† The alignment of impotence and originality within Duras’s novel begs a fundamental question: What is ‘‘good’’ impotence? The ordering of material in the novel suggests that Duras uses impotence as a critique of the male reproductive power that legitimates patriarchal social hierarchy. Duras’s *Quelque chose de vif et d’original se fait sentir dans tout ce qu’il dit; c’est un terrain fertile qui produit de lui-même tout ce qu’on lui demande; on ne reconnaît jamais le bien des autres dans sa conversation; tout lui appartient ou par le fond ou par la forme qu’il sait lui donner. Ce que dit monsieur Rieux est agréablement tourné, il y a de la correction, de l’élégance, de piquant même dans sa manière de dire, mais la touche y manque. C’est comme une belle copie. Elle peut plaire tant qu’on n’a pas vu l’original. †Je soupçonne cet ouvrage de la touche d’un anonyme! Malgré tout le talent de l’auteur, je n’y reconnais pas le faire de la duchesse de Duras.

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aristocratic father had written in favor of the abolition of the privileges; Duras, I argue, writes against the privileging of reproduction in the feudalist culture of the ‘‘marriage plot.’’≥∂ LITERARY ESTATES

The beginning of Olivier ou le secret jumps straight to the problem of inheritance as the underpinning of a feudalist state. In the ﬁrst letter, from Olivier (the count of Sancerre) to his cousin Louise (the countess of Nangis), Olivier reminds Louise that their mothers had chosen not to divide their lands and that their union had set a ‘‘sweet’’ example (127) for the children. Olivier’s allusion to a maternal and communal past rather strongly recalls the famous mother-child idyll in Paul et Virginie (1788). In Bernardin de St. Pierre’s novel, two single mothers, one unmarried with an illegitimate son, the other widowed with a daughter born after the death of the father, separately escape the patriarchal social prejudices that would have put them in a precarious position in France and take refuge together in a valley on an East Indian island. There they are able to eke out a pure and happy communal existence. The love of the boy and girl, who are raised to have no secrets, to share everything, is at once fraternal and spousal. We learn later in Duras’s Olivier ou le secret that Louise likewise had loved Olivier ‘‘like a brother and more than a brother’’ (140) and that Olivier had ‘‘lived’’ for Louise. Louise at one point evokes a youth lived ‘‘without reserve, without secrets, in the simple abandon of the heart, you, me, Olivier, our two mothers!’’ (153). The love of Louise and Olivier for each other had been so well established that, as Adèle says, their future marriage ‘‘was almost not a secret.’’ But after a terrible fever at the age of seventeen (presumably the physical basis for the otherwise ﬁgurative impotence), Olivier had inexplicably removed himself from the assumed marriage pact. Now, after the mothers’ deaths, Louise’s husband, the count of Nangis, has demanded the division of the estates that Louise and Olivier had jointly inherited from their mothers into separate portions. Olivier had preferred the maternal ‘‘community of interests’’ (127) but is resigned to the necessity of Louise’s obedience to her husband’s wishes. He ends his reﬂection on the divisive nature of inheritance with an oblique

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allusion to English as a language appropriate for the expression of feelings that are ‘‘profound, sad, and hidden’’ (128). This odd conclusion at once gives a deﬁnition of the secret and presents the problem of the ‘‘foreign’’ language of the secret—the language of the unsaid and the unspeakable. In the next letter, presenting a startling contrast to Olivier’s discourse, Louise’s husband makes a cut-and-dried case to Louise for the elimination of ‘‘these reﬁnements of feeling’’ (128) from marriage. He reminds Louise that he is not ‘‘a hero in a novel’’ (129). To drive the point home, he also states that he is not ‘‘romanesque’’ (novelistic), that he does not like ﬁction (‘‘je n’aime pas les ﬁctions’’), and, perhaps most importantly, that he does not put a great deal of store in ‘‘femmes d’esprit’’ (women of wit/intelligence/literary reﬁnement). All he wants is the freedom to devote himself to his three ‘‘penchants’’: society, the hunt, and the theater. Whereas Olivier had associated England with novelistic profundity and subtlety, the count of Nangis requests at the end of his letter that Louise remind Olivier to bring him back an English hunting horse. In the space of the ﬁrst two letters of the novel, we are therefore provided with a neat typology. Louise’s patriarchal husband wants no truck with novelistic originality or women of letters but would very much like a hunting horse from England to pursue the typical pleasures of the aristocratic seigneur. Olivier would rather preserve the matrilineal succession of values, not ﬁefdoms, and appreciates English as a language of an almost novelistic reﬁnement, a language appropriate to the expression of secrets. Before we even hear a word from the heroine’s own lips, we have learned that her existence is structured by the tension between these antipodal identities. Soon after this, Louise goes to take possession of her domain in Picardie. Approaching the property, she reﬂects democratically on the greater ‘‘delicacy’’ of feeling demonstrated by ‘‘poor people without education’’ than by people of cultured wit (134). What follows, in this scene set in 1787, two years before the Revolution, is a description of a shockingly feudal tradition. As Louise approaches the castle, all the inhabitants of the territory run to greet her, shouting ‘‘Vive Madame!’’ and presenting her their homage. Many of the peasants from the land that now belongs to Olivier are there too. Olivier reminds Louise that these people have to be there; it is their ‘‘devoir’’ or obligation as ‘‘vassels,’’ since Olivier’s own ‘‘ﬁefdom’’ is subordinate to hers. Both Olivier and Louise feel the sadness of taking possession of

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‘‘a land one would have wished never to possess!’’ The message is clear: both Olivier and Louise are reluctant participants in the feudal system; they are reluctant inheritors of their privileges. Louise’s husband sees a source of patriarchal power; Louise sees the loss of the mother: the land is hers only because she ‘‘has lost a mother!’’ (135). The absence of paternal reference, by contrast, is absolute. Later, when Adèle continues her energetic proddings of Olivier to discover his famous secret, he describes the disgust of possession: ‘‘I attach a profound disgust to everything I possess, and I envy everything that I don’t have: I watch the laborer who peacefully cultivates his ﬁelds, I would like to take his place and give him everything I possess. Believe me, Adèle, I would be getting a good deal!’’ (146). This angst of possession and valorization of lack serves as part of the larger critique of aristocratic society in the book, and it also foregrounds the implicit critique of the marital ‘‘possession’’ of women. Within Duras’s text, Olivier’s secret is kept safe from the reader: the closest we come to learning the secret is that it is about ‘‘possessing’’ and ‘‘obtaining.’’ (We do also learn, however, that the secret is not about virtually anything one might think of except impotence.) Olivier speaks of the torment ‘‘of not being able to possess you’’ (187), and his rival mocks the cowardice of aspiring to that which ‘‘one can never obtain’’ (178). These identiﬁcations clarify that here, just as a secret is something we possess or fail to possess, something we keep or give away, a woman’s body is something a man ‘‘possesses,’’ or fails to possess, or gives away (or even ‘‘loses’’ by dispossessing her of her virtue). The possession of a secret is analogous to the sexual possession of a woman. Olivier’s secret takes on a fatal consequentiality: he would choose death over the transfer to his beloved of the burden of his impotence. Olivier says to Louise, ‘‘I stretch out my arms to you like the wretch in a shipwreck, but you cannot save me’’ (186). This is another oblique allusion to Paul et Virginie, where Virginie reaches out her arms to Paul from a shipwreck but refuses to jump into the water and be pulled to safety because it would mean taking o√ her clothes and dishonoring her modesty. Olivier’s sensibility rebels at revealing his ‘‘funeste secret’’ because it would mean ‘‘unveiling’’ his misery. He repeatedly insinuates that only death can ‘‘remedy’’ the secret.

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Louise, sensibly enough, tells him to go ahead and keep his secret if he must: ‘‘Keep your secret, Olivier, I renounce knowing it’’ (189). The problem is that since his secret is the obstacle to their marriage, she o√ers herself to him outside of the sacrament of marriage. More speciﬁcally, she o√ers to immolate her virtue for him. ‘‘Louise who has never lived for anything but you will immolate her virtue for your happiness’’ (193). She will ‘‘lose herself ’’ in order to ‘‘save him.’’ She o√ers to divorce herself from society and essentially to live a secret life: ‘‘Hidden, unknown, I will live for you alone, and the world will never see me.’’ She uses a tragic double entendre that clariﬁes that though the master has mastery, the sexual mistress is a slave: ‘‘I will be your mistress, your slave’’ (194). Olivier, after much desperate soul-searching and burning of letters, arranges to meet Louise at the ‘‘Croix de Beauval.’’ There, he kneels at her feet and shoots himself. Louise is found by her vassals in a catatonic state. Her sister rushes to her bedside and takes her in her arms, but ‘‘I wept over a statue’’ (196). An epilogue to the text informs us that Louise develops a ghostly habit: she walks like a ghost each morning to the Cross of Beauval, sits motionless all day, and returns at the setting of the sun. ‘‘Soon the world forgot her very existence’’ (201). The text ends in the spring of 1789, just weeks before the outbreak of the Revolution. This raises the specter of the aristocratic woman continuing her ghastly peregrinations while ﬁrst her relatives leave her and then, surely, many of her ‘‘vassals.’’ While trauma had created a mechanical compulsion to repeat, the aristocratic social structure that facilitated that trauma would fall away, leaving Louise repeating a behavior rooted in a nulliﬁed reality— perhaps a metaphor of the Restoration. Olivier ou le secret interweaves the politics of the possession of secrets, aristocratic property, and women’s bodies. Duras suggests that for a nobleman like the count of Nangis, a wife is both metaphoric and metonymic of feudal property, in that she is a metaphorical possession and she literally brings an inheritance of property. Olivier aspires politically and socially not to possession but to honest lack, which puts him in a position of fatal compromise with regard to the politics of ancien régime society. Bertrand-Jennings points out that Duras’s three novels are structured by the binarisms of black and white, commoner and noble, normal and abnormal, which frame the ‘‘norm’’ as ‘‘white, noble, male, and reproductive’’

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(41). Duras’s novels chart alterity in relation to that norm. Olivier’s inability to possess is a form of social impotence, a refusal of the patriarchal power invested in him by society. This refusal is a secret, original and fertile in implications, but one that isolates him from society. Olivier describes himself as being separated from others as through a wall of crystal: ‘‘There are beings from whom one feels separated as if by those walls of crystal depicted in fairy tales: you can see each other, speak to each other, approach each other; but you can’t touch’’ (147).*

BIRTH CONTROL FOR FEUDALISM

If Duras’s thematization of impotence amounts to a suggestion of birth control for the whole aristocratic system, Latouche and Stendhal would have been enthusiastic proponents. Their imitations of Duras may be symbolic of literary impotence, but they also implicitly champion a politics of ‘‘moyens auxiliaires.’’ Impotence in Duras’s novel is a≈liated with the stakes of inherited possessions. What would society be like if it were not structured by the di√erence between inheritors of property and titles and noninheritors? Why should power be based on inherited possessions? How are individuals damaged by their exclusion from power? How can a society be healthy when the desire for power does not correlate to the ability to pursue power? Olivier’s impotence indirectly speaks for the cause of bourgeois political impotence under the Restoration. I am not suggesting that Latouche and Stendhal planned their prank out of political solidarity with Duras, but rather that they were impressed by and wanted to appropriate this aristocrat’s unlikely take on the politics of potency. When Duras died in 1828, Stendhal praised her as a ‘‘a hyphen between the liberal ideas that are being developed every day and the prejudices that are still widespread in the upper classes of society’’ (46). Both Virieux and Waller view tensions of literary succession as the heart of the mimetic transference to Duras; Waller speaks of Stendhal’s ‘‘desire to replace Duras as the successor to a female novelistic tradition’’ (27). But the *Il y a des êtres dont on se sent séparé comme par ces murs de cristal dépeints dans les contes de fées: on se voit, on se parle, on s’approche; mais on ne peut se toucher.

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appropriation of novelistic succession in the querelle d’Olivier was also an appropriation of Duras’s democratic critique of aristocratic succession. The aesthetics of ‘‘moyens auxiliaires’’ in the Latouche and Stendhal imitations also touch on the question of originality in the domain of pleasures. They renounce traditional literary originality in order to innovate in the pleasures of the reception and transmission of texts. Both men worked in an imitative framework in order to exploit the mimetic and interpersonal seductions of the secret, gossip, and scandal. The secret in Olivier ou le secret is eroticized as a potent temptation to explore or reveal the suppressed. Throughout the querelle d’Olivier, the rapport between author and reader is sexualized through the reader’s desire to know and the author’s desire to show. The Latouche and Stendhal hoaxes show the allure of the secret that is too good not to ‘‘give away,’’ or that has to be given away just enough to clarify its status as a possession. In publicity for Latouche’s ‘‘anonymous’’ Olivier in the Mercure, the journal he edited, Latouche wrote, ‘‘We will even ask the initiated to help us a bit to explain to those of our [female] readers who remain ignorant the particular character and singular misfortune of the hero.’’≥∑ If the secret is a matter of ‘‘initiation,’’ then the original bearer of the secret is the high priest, the master of ceremonies. LATOUCHE’S OLIVIER

Latouche’s Olivier overtly thematizes the sexualization of other people’s secrets and the fetishization of written documents of those secrets. Latouche seems to confess his own plagiaristic authorial role through two men in the text who double the author by playing fast and loose with other people’s writing: the narrator and Olivier’s best friend, César. Early on in Latouche’s Olivier, the heroine who is parallel to Duras’s Louise, here the comtesse de R. or ‘‘Émilie,’’ had promised someday to inform the narrator of the secret that haunts her existence. On her deathbed, too weak to fulﬁll her promise verbally, she passes him a ‘‘box of papers.’’≥∏ After having read the papers with ‘‘inexpressible astonishment,’’ the narrator resolves to ‘‘forever keep the secret of which she had made me the repository’’ (11). The mischievous Latouche, of course, was also a ‘‘repository’’ of the secret of Duras’s Olivier, and the narrator’s handling of the

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secret in Latouche’s novel parallels Latouche’s handling of Duras’s secret. In the very next line the narrator explains that owing to his concern about how she would be remembered, and also to an unspeciﬁed court case that had become unfortunately ‘‘trop célèbre,’’ he had had to conﬁde in various people and even give some documents to the court. Since the documents were out of his hands, however brieﬂy, he says that it was only natural that excerpts were secretly published. And since those publications were marked by a ‘‘manifest inﬁdelity,’’ he felt compelled to publish the whole lot himself, in order to ‘‘rectify errors’’ (10). This incredible rationalization of the narrator’s wholesale betrayal of his friend’s secret has a sexualized parallel in the behavior of César, the character analogous to Duras’s Rieux. César is an ultravirile womanizer who has all his intimate correspondence o≈cially copied, with dates, tables, and notes. This record puts him in a position of security whenever ‘‘he had to put an end to things.’’ Not only is he able to threaten to expose any woman who threatens to expose him, but he fetishizes the collection, to the point where he also sometimes appropriates anecdotes of other people’s romantic misdeeds as ‘‘his property ’’ (21). César thus bears out the contrast constructed by Duras between the speech of Olivier, in which everything is his own ‘‘bien,’’ and the speech of Rieux, which is imitative. But in Latouche’s version, César is not the only one to get a sexual thrill from the illicit maintenance and public dissemination of other people’s private love letters. ‘‘Some of the women who had most loudly exclaimed on the horror of it said to themselves that he must have rather special merits to be allowed this behavior. We are even assured that several of them, after having exhibited noisy indignation against ‘the ledgers and the certiﬁed copies,’ came to fatten the volumes of these amorous archives’’ (22). In Olivier, the fetish for public exposure of personal letters is a vice shared even by the victims of the act. It testiﬁes to the virility of the author of the infamous exposure and to the voyeuristic or exhibitionistic seductions of ‘‘open’’ secrets. Olivier may be impotent in Latouche’s text, but César’s sexual pleasures are not ‘‘real’’ either: he lies between sheets of paper and ink, and the more his prowess is ‘‘certiﬁed,’’ the less it is distinguishable from tall tales. César therefore problematizes ‘‘originality’’ in desire. In César’s correspondence, a woman’s pleasure may have been hers originally, but now it is

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his—unless she decides knowingly to ‘‘fatten the archives,’’ in which case it is shared. The transmission of desire inevitably problematizes origins, which frames sexuality itself as a mimetic construct. The mimeticism of desire parallels the problem of the mimeticism of lack. Latouche’s Émilie, despite her ignorance of the exact nature of Olivier’s secret, nevertheless feels a mysterious displacement of his lack onto her own person: ‘‘When you are far away, I feel that I lack something, and it is you; when you are near me, my soul is happy, ravished, intoxicated; yet it seems to me that I still lack something, even though you are there’’ (85).* Throughout the querelle d’Olivier, there is a similar cross-gendered transmigration of lack. When Duras undertook to represent the originality of impotence in Olivier ou le secret, her own secret was arguably her mimetic rivalry with the patriarch of literary impotence, Chateaubriand. As an author, she became representative of the potency of mimesis as impotence. But before she could even publish the work in which she had tried to realign impotence with revolutionary social concerns, the plagiaristic appropriation of her work made her a cipher of innovation. Plagiarism replaced her authority. Latouche’s Olivier, which shared the subtext of impotence and originality, did not disseminate Duras’s political reappropriation of impotence, and her authorial impotence was literalized.

LATOUCHE’S LITERARY IMPOTENCE

In the history of French literary criticism, Latouche is presented as a man with a secret. His secret has been diagnosed quasi-medically as a plagiaristic pathology, a neurosis concerning a lack of originality. Henri d’Alméras, who reedited Latouche’s Olivier for the ‘‘Society of Bibliophile Doctors,’’ writes that Latouche ‘‘su√ered from not being able to live up to his expectations and felt superior to his books. He lacked both the scriptural gift and creative potency.’’†≥π Alméras attributes Latouche’s ‘‘taste for mystiﬁcation’’ *Lorsque vous êtes éloigné, quelque chose me manque, et c’est vous; lorsque vous êtes auprès de moi, mon âme est heureuse, ravie, enivrée; pourtant il me semble que quelque chose me manque encore, et pourtant, vous êtes là. †[Latouche] sou√rait de n’avoir pu donner sa mesure et se sentait supérieure à ses livres. Le don scriptural et aussi la puissance créatrice lui manquaient.

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(x) to that lack of creative potency. His ﬁrst mystiﬁcation, published in 1817, was the spurious story of a victim of a notorious crime, the Mémoires de Mme Manzon. The ‘‘least innocent’’ of his mystiﬁcations, according to Alméras, was Olivier. His mystiﬁcations also included the fraudulent papal correspondence in 1827. Like Alméras, Latouche’s contemporaries considered his plagiaristic pathology to be a problem of creative potency, according to Michel Crouzet. He writes, ‘‘It was the unanimous opinion of his contemporaries . . . that Latouche, that great paralyzed talent, was unable to do what he conceived of doing.’’ This notion of Latouche’s problem with ‘‘conception’’ segues into a vocabulary of impotence: ‘‘Unanimously they saw in him the artist betrayed by art, the soul ‘devastated’ by impotence. . . . with a ‘charity’ hailed even by Sainte-Beuve, the women who knew him and loved him gave the capital diagnosis. He didn’t have the gift of doing; he only had the gift of gab.’’≥∫ For a writer ‘‘devastated by impotence,’’ Latouche had an astonishingly productive publishing career, with a number of lucrative successes, not least his mystiﬁcations. He also is known for having introduced, in the Romantic era, subjects that would be much imitated by other writers. This was especially true of Fragoletta, Latouche’s novel about a hermaphrodite, which seems to have launched a trend of literary representations of gender deviance,≥Ω including Théophile Gautier’s far more famous Mademoiselle de Maupin. Latouche himself is quoted on the cover of Ségu’s Un Romantique républicain as saying ‘‘I’ve created, as people say, more authors than works.’’ Latouche’s reputation for e√ective literary mentoring, editing, and publicity is remarkable. If he was really as important in shaping the careers of Chénier, Balzac, Stendhal, Desbordes-Valmore, and Sand as legend would have it, then one could say that this impuissant was a progenitor, or at least a midwife, of Romanticism itself. This mythology of Latouche—and such an overdetermined symbolic vocabulary could only be a mythology—identiﬁes him as a kind of bidirectional mimetic force ﬁeld. An imitator, he is imitated by others; impotent, he creates authors. The vocabulary of imitation even extends to the idea that he resembled some of the authors he created. Alméras says that he and Stendhal ‘‘resembled each other in their characters, their tendencies, their opinions, the one and the other liberal, antireligious, skeptical to the point

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of cynicism, and they resembled one another in their facial features as well, as George Sand notes’’ (xix). One might add, however, that in the querelle d’Olivier he was potent in his ability to ‘‘uncreate’’ Duras as an author. Latouche’s social life as an author, however—the love life of this author—generated another, very di√erent, round in the querelle d’Olivier. Desbordes-Valmore’s readers would measure the originality of her work by the potency of her love for Latouche as ‘‘Olivier.’’ MARCELINE DESBORDES-VALMORE, OR THE SECRET

In the mysterious process through which the representer is represented into existence as an author, secret pain plays a crucial role in the myth of Desbordes-Valmore, even more so than in the case of Duras. Lucien Descaves, in La Vie douloureuse de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, went so far as to suggest that her martyrdom in love made her a candidate for canonization (vii). ‘‘Dolori sacrum!’’ ‘‘Amori Sacrum!’’ raved Boyer d’Agen. Anne E. McCall’s essay ‘‘Monuments of the Maternal’’ considers the clichés of Desbordes-Valmore as the mater dolorosa of French poetry as a kind of lieu de mémoire, almost comparable in its materiality to the statues of her ﬁn de siècle commemoration.∂≠ Desbordes-Valmore’s celebrated angst coincided with the establishment of a Romantic prototype of woman herself as a poem authored by pain. Jules Michelet, author of the famous formula ‘‘Woman is not only sick, but wounded,’’ also writes in L’Amour, ‘‘It is her weakness and her su√ering that renders her moving and poetic.’’∂∞ Since the adjective ‘‘poetic’’ can be understood in active or passive senses in this formulation—su√ering either grants woman poetic faculties, or it makes her poem-like—it is not clear whether woman’s voice is being privileged or contextualized as paradox. Can woman be an author, or is she simply mimetic of literature? The evidence Michelet provides for his assertion only deepens the ambiguity. On the one hand, woman’s response to the physiological pain of womanhood, her a∆iction with the cyclical and reproductive ‘‘blessure d’amour’’ (18:64) causes her to cry out ‘‘No, I am a soul!’’ (18:48). This rebellious articulation of spirituality gives her a natural a≈nity with literature: ‘‘The greatest prose writer of the century is a woman, Mme Sand. Its most passionate poet is a woman, Mme Valmore.’’ But then, no woman is without the poetry of her feminine pain, making the exalted literary

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achievements of Sand and Desbordes-Valmore utterly relative on the scale of the poetry of their nonliterary but equally pathetic female cohorts: ‘‘Even the most common woman is not without poetry’’ (18:63). The su√ering of love ultimately makes woman not into a poetic subject but into ‘‘the object of love’’ (18:60). Furthermore, as a love object she must be created by man, as Michelet details in the chapter ‘‘Creation of the Loved Object.’’ Love’s pain therefore represents, for Michelet, both the condition for and the impossibility of poetry by women. Barbara Johnson, in her essay ‘‘Gender and Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,’’ notes that ‘‘when men employ the rhetoric of self-torture, it is read as rhetoric. When women employ it, it is confession. Men are read rhetorically; women, literally.’’∂≤ Christine Planté likewise describes the traditional view of Desbordes-Valmore’s work as ‘‘artless art’’ in ‘‘L’Art sans art de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.’’∂≥ This literalism has often resulted in a transfer of authority away from DesbordesValmore and onto the source of her pain. When Benjamin Rivière queries, ‘‘What does it matter to know the name of the man to whom we owe the most beautiful cries of love that our century has heard?’’*∂∂ he is not evoking an anonymous male writer of genius, as one might logically infer. He is evoking the anonymous ‘‘male’’ authorship of the work of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, that female Philoctetes of her time, the chronically wounded enigma of secondhand literary production. If Desbordes-Valmore’s art is her sentiment and her sentiment is her art, then whoever stimulates her sentiment is the author of her poetry. This substitutive operation is a dominant construct in Valmorian criticism. Her pain is original, but the poetry of her pain is derivative. Her pain is her own—pain is sensory and demands a subject for its phenomenological occurrence—but it is animated by the male lover to the point where the muse becomes the poet. Through this biographical logic, the woman author’s agency is replaced by the more powerful mimetic agency of the secret. The possibility of originality for the woman poet is replaced by the mystery of the biographical riddle. This is why, for critics such as Jacques Boulenger, in Marceline *Qu’importe de connaître le nom de l’homme à qui nous devons les plus beaux cris de l’amour que notre siècle ait entendus?

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Desbordes-Valmore: Sa Vie et son secret, the ‘‘secret’’ identity of DesbordesValmore’s lover matters a great deal: ‘‘Don’t we experience the verses of Mme Valmore much more vividly when we know her painful story? . . . Mme Valmore herself moves us and touches us more for having su√ered so cruelly’’ (11). Boulenger cites the poet’s ‘‘À Qui me l’a demandé’’ (To the one who asked me) as evidence of the essential role of a secret male factor: Quoi! vous voulez savoir le secret de mon sort? Ce que j’en peux livrer ne vaut pas qu’on l’envie: Mon secret c’est un nom; ma sou√rance, la vie; Mon e√roi, la pensée, et mon espoir, la Mort!∂∑ What? You want to know the secret of my fate? / The secret I can give up is not worth your desire: / My secret is a name; my su√ering is life; / My horror is thought, and my only hope is death! The pursuit of the secret has generated an odd amount of critical work on Desbordes-Valmore’s husband, such as Armand Praviel’s book Le Roman conjugal de Monsieur Valmore ∂∏ (The conjugal story of Monsieur Valmore). The marital relationship is not really the point of interest, however, because the husband made her relatively content. The marriage is the ‘‘honorable’’ way for critics to broach the secret of the extramarital lover who authored her pain. Desbordes-Valmore’s pain has conventionally been assigned the name Olivier, allegedly that of the poetic muse representing her lover in her work. Bertrand e√uses, ‘‘Next to Lamartine and Elvire, Petrarch and Laura, Aragon and Elsa, singers and their muses, there is room for Marceline and Olivier, even if the roles are reversed!’’ (5). Yet it may be far from obvious to the contemporary reader why Desbordes-Valmore’s ‘‘secret’’ conventionally has been ‘‘found out’’ and ‘‘told’’ as ‘‘Olivier.’’ ‘‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’’ might be a more apt analogy for ‘‘Olivier’’ than Petrarch and Laura. The ‘‘Olivier’’ legend has probably caused more than one scholar to lose conﬁdence in his or her ability to read Desbordes-Valmore because of a failure to see Olivier, in the poet’s life or in her work. Up until Francis Ambrière’s voluminous and meticulously researched Le Siècle des Valmore: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore et les siens, 1786–1892,∂π crit-

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ical work on Desbordes-Valmore was not only obsessed with her life but also utterly inconsistent and mystifying as to the nature of that life. It is almost comical to compare the chronology at the end of Ambrière’s work with the typical pre-Ambrière chronology included by Marc Bertrand in Desbordes-Valmore’s Oeuvres poétiques. In addition to listing di√erent numbers of children and names of her lovers, Bertrand’s chronology suggests, notably, that all Desbordes-Valmore’s extramarital liaisons were premarital. Johnson, in ‘‘Gender and Poetry,’’ notes the legitimation provided by the ‘‘mythology of the great love followed by the reasonable marriage,’’ in which lovers ‘‘coalesce into one great love in order for her not to appear to be a ‘free woman’ ’’ (112). Desbordes-Valmore was not just complicit with the legend of a heart wounded by one great love. According to Ambrière, she was an innovator of the mystiﬁcation: ‘‘If one adds what she necessarily saw and knew with what she said and what she left unsaid, one must admit that she often dissimulated, and sometimes deliberately lied’’ (1:25). Desbordes-Valmore was apparently an adept manipulator of the same biographical secrets that have been used so repetitively to take her rhetoric literally. Her secret was in part her ability to play the secret for all it was worth—or for what it was worth. The myth of the secret has generated an astonishing degree of mimetic cohesion in the mythmaking concerning Desbordes-Valmore, depriving readings of the author’s life and oeuvre of biographical speciﬁcity in the very name of scandalous disclosure. Witness the phenomenon of univocality linking Boyer d’Agen’s ‘‘Un Secret de la vie douloureuse de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’’ (Nouvelle revue, April 15, 1921), Gérard Bauër’s ‘‘Sur Hyacinthe de Latouche: Le ‘Secret’ de Marceline’’ (Écho de Paris, Nov. 11, 1926), André Bellasort’s ‘‘Le Secret de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’’ (Débats, Nov. 17, 1926), and Alphonse Ponroy’s ‘‘Le Secret de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’’ (Mercure de France, Feb. 1, 1929). But the vocabulary of the secret is ubiquitous not only in critical work but also in Desbordes-Valmore’s own poetic discourse. Her poetics in general are characterized by the use of the secret to work between the lines of what is known and to privilege subjectivity and interpersonal speculation. In ‘‘Le Secret perdu,’’ the secret is the resource that heals pain, the part of emotional life that one cannot know or purposely access, the a√ective unknown that can cure the unthinkable. In ‘‘Secret de jeune ﬁlle,’’ the secret is

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the property of girlhood, the nexus of discovery, invention, and the love of expression and shared emotion. ‘‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it!’’ crows one girl. But the secret is never literally subject to possession, because the most personal thoughts and associations are always metamorphosed into representative objects or ﬁgurations. Secrets are not riddles. With great drama the ‘‘jeune ﬁlle’’ reveals the nature of the secret she has learned from peeking at Anna’s ‘‘album’’: ‘‘une ﬂeur.’’ Since ﬂowers and bouquets are perhaps DesbordesValmore’s favorite poetic image, endlessly invoked to describe love’s pleasures as well as the perils of giving or keeping love, the reader must take seriously that secrets cannot be ‘‘solved’’ any more than ﬂowers. Secrets are, by their nature, parallel to poetic images. They do not have a one-to-one correspondence to a hidden referent. Instead they signal the parts of human experience so personal as to elude delimitation in conventional terms, as well as the fate of that incommunicability in the semiotics of the social. Desbordes-Valmore apparently wished to keep some of the fundamentals of her biography ‘‘secret.’’ But in order to analyze the signiﬁcance of the way the critical tradition has ‘‘found out’’ those secrets, it is paradoxically necessary to review the facts that Ambrière has found to be in the public and private record. Born in 1786, Desbordes-Valmore was married only once, to her fellow actor Prosper Valmore. The marriage began in 1817, when DesbordesValmore was 31, and continued until her death in 1859. But by the time the marriage began, she had a ‘‘past’’ (that quickly merged with a future), to a degree that ﬁrst threatened to suppress her work and then gave it a scandalous notoriety. Desbordes-Valmore’s life could hardly present a more dramatic contrast to Zola’s association of the woman writer with the upper-class status of the salonnière. She was born in Douai, where a Flemish ‘‘patois’’ was the language of her childhood. Ambrière reports that her mother, Catherine Desbordes, was unable to sign her name on the marriage certiﬁcate (although she later learned to read and write) (1:30). Her father, Antoine-Félix Desbordes, an artisanal painter who came to shun his craft in favor of a variety of unfortunate business schemes, ﬁled for bankruptcy in the wake of the economic turbulence of the Revolution, in 1790. In the following years his dubious business ventures probably included paid false testimony and counterfeiting (1:46). In 1796 Desbordes-Valmore’s mother abandoned the impoverished household to join her lover, Saintenoy. Of the four children

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in the family, Catherine took only the youngest, Marceline, with her; Ambrière speculates that Marceline may in fact have been the child of an extramarital union (1:65). By the age of 12, Marceline was employed in a theater. At 13, she was a full-ﬂedged actress. Through 1801, Marceline and her mother worked for various acting troupes, traveling often. But in 1802 the two women set sail for Guadeloupe, where Catherine had long hoped to receive ﬁnancial help from a more fortunate relative. They arrived at Pointe-à-Pitre in the middle of the slave rebellion of May 1802, and soon afterward Catherine died from yellow fever. By the fall of 1802, the orphaned and still penniless Marceline had made her way back to France. She reestablished contact with her surviving family in Lille, where they had ﬂed to escape their debts, and then established a successful career at a theater in Rouen. An increasingly successful actress, Desbordes-Valmore in 1805 became the mistress of Louis Lacour, a former colonial administrator and businessman, with whom she conceived her ﬁrst child in 1806. By the end of the pregnancy Desbordes-Valmore was employed not as an actress but as an embroiderer (1:144). That ﬁrst baby, a girl, died under a wet nurse’s care at the age of three weeks, by which time Lacour had left Desbordes-Valmore for military employment under the Empire. Marceline wrote poetry regularly from 1806 onward (1:146). She began to publish occasional individual pieces of writing in popular literary venues catering to women beginning in 1808. Also in 1808, she began a serious and long-lasting relationship with Eugène Debonne. During this relationship she left the theater and was supported by Debonne (1:154). Their happy union produced a much-loved little boy, Marie-Eugène, in 1810. But Debonne’s upper-class bourgeois family increasingly opposed the possibility of marriage, and in 1812 Desbordes-Valmore left him, in part to spare him the hardship of disinheritance (1:166), and returned to the theater. In 1815, during the economic and political turbulence of the transition from the Empire to the monarchy, she became involved with Hilarion Audibert, a minor writer and political fonctionnaire, who abandoned her later that year. In 1816 in Belgium, where she was working as an actress, her beloved 5 1⁄2-year-old son died. A year after her marriage to Valmore in 1817, she published her ﬁrst literary collection, Élégies, Marie et romances. She also lost the ﬁrst child of her union with Valmore that year. So at the age of 31 Desbordes-Valmore had had three serious failed rela-

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tionships, was married, and had lost three children by three di√erent men. The transformation of this eventful past to a single secret—code word ‘‘Olivier’’—is a tour de force of biographical re-creation. Ambrière demonstrates that after the publication of Élégies, Marie et romances in December of 1818, Desbordes-Valmore’s reputation remained conﬁned to ‘‘the narrow circle of the authors of keepsakes and the little world of the theaters’’ (1:270). Within the world of the theaters, DesbordesValmore’s love relationships and maternal losses were already well known, as is documented in a few pieces of verse written by others about her (1:271– 72). It was not until after her second collection, Poésies, in 1820, that a reviewer in the Constitutionnel, who considered Lamartine’s overwhelmingly popular 1820 Méditations to be ‘‘antiphilosophical,’’ took readers to task for ignoring her. He felt that her amorous reputation was canceling out her literary reputation. And although ‘‘Mme Desbordes has no doubt heard the groans and complaints about her,’’ he argues that her work was inspired by a ‘‘grateful delicacy’’ and that it showed her ‘‘compassion for those she has made wretched’’ (1:271). This last turn of phrase is striking in its inversion of the terms that would later dominate her literary myth. Rather than being martyred by one man, here it is Desbordes-Valmore who is maker of martyrs, in the plural. In the face of the ‘‘horriﬁed silence of the high-minded journals’’ (1:273), Ambrière asserts that it was other women writers, notably Sophie Gay and Mme Dufrénoy, who ﬁrst gave her good press, scrupulously avoiding any mention of her personal life. Young male reviewers also began to voice their admiration, but with frank reference to her licentious past. In 1821, in the Annales de la littérature et des arts, a critic named Ancelot went out on a limb in praising the Poésies for their continuity with the elegiac tradition that celebrates a variety of lovers: ‘‘Constancy is not de rigueur in elegiac passions. Tibullus sang of three mistresses: a woman can claim at least an equal privilege. The diversity of lovers introduces variety into the somewhat monotonous descriptions of the elegy’’ (1:273). Desbordes-Valmore’s reputation as a ‘‘femme libre’’ at the beginning of her poetic success is actually seen by Ancelot as a legitimation of her art in both its diversity and its relation to the masculine poetic tradition of female muses. Ambrière also presents evidence that Desbordes-Valmore remained associated with the seductive prowess of the actress even after her literary career

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was well established, for instance in this letter by Amaury Duval: ‘‘The young man formed by Mme Desbordes surely has a conqueror’s knowledge of the secrets of love’’ (1:274). It is also clear that the ﬁgure of ‘‘Olivier’’ was understood by some during Desbordes-Valmore’s lifetime to refer to a plurality of lovers. An apocryphal anecdote from Frédéric Soulié’s 1841 Dictionnaire du bas bleu has the cuckolded spouse, Prosper Valmore, respond to a comment on his wife’s dreamy mood with the pun ‘‘She’s probably wandering in her grove of olive trees’’ (1:274–75).* With time, however, the grove of Oliviers would be reduced to a single one—Henri de Latouche—in the popular and critical imagination. The nineteenth-century progression of the legend that Latouche stimulated Desbordes-Valmore’s poetry segued from the posthumous publication of Desbordes-Valmore’s correspondence by Sainte-Beuve, her husband, her son, and later the Douaisian archivist Benjamin Rivière. Like Sainte-Beuve, who had ‘‘guessed’’ that Olivier represented Latouche when he received an emotional letter from Desbordes-Valmore on the occasion of Latouche’s death in 1851, the few late-nineteenth-century critics who appeared to be in on the association of Olivier with Latouche had tried to remain discrete. That discretion was abandoned toward 1909 when critics including Georges Montorgeuil (‘‘L’Amant de Marceline,’’ Éclair, July 27, 1909), Eugène Vial (‘‘L’Amant de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,’’ Mercure de France, Aug. 16, 1909), and Jacques Boulenger (see note 44) again broached the subject. As André Beaunier would say of Olivier in 1913, ‘‘The discovery of his name was, some years ago, the enthralling little problem to which many of the brightest of our critics dedicated their subtle and impertinent ingenuity.’’∂∫ By the 1920s, when the trope of the Valmorian ‘‘secret’’ was spreading like a contagion, Boulenger forcefully rationalized the disclosures he had made more timidly in 1909: ‘‘Today it is really all the same to Marceline whether or not we tell the public that she had had an illegitimate child before her marriage’’ (11). By the middle of the twentieth century, critics remained strangely unconcerned about parroting each other’s terms to describe the responsibility of Olivier, alias Latouche, for the poetry of Desbordes-Valmore. The mimetic cohesion of the myth of the author’s social life remained intact. Émile Hen*Sans doute elle se promène dans son bois d’oliviers.

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riot presented his insider knowledge in his essay ‘‘Marceline DesbordesValmore et son mari’’: ‘‘We know what Phaon is hidden in her heartrending verse under the name Olivier: it is Hyacinthe de Latouche.’’ Henriot reiterates the already well-established notion of the woman poet for whose work a man is actually responsible, questioning whether ‘‘without him, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore would have uttered some of her most rending cries.’’∂Ω Jeanine Moulin similarly describes Olivier’s critical role in stimulating the woman poet’s voice: ‘‘This lover she calls Olivier tore from her the most passionate cries any woman poet has uttered since Louise Labé. But she jealously guarded his name, to such a degree that her ‘secret’ continues, a hundred years later, to make ink ﬂow copiously and unquenchably.’’∑≠ The more Desbordes-Valmore’s poetic pain was identiﬁed with a male persona, ‘‘Olivier,’’ and then the more ‘‘Olivier’’ was equated with the male writer Latouche, the more the woman poet was framed as a secondhand mouthpiece of her own poetry: a sanctiﬁed plagiarist. Her art conceals the fact that she ‘‘copies’’ from her emotions. As an overly literal transcriber of work authored by another, the role of Desbordes-Valmore in this sense shares a strange analogy with the roles of Latouche and Stendhal with regard to Duras. The association of Latouche with impotence through the publication of his Olivier made him an odd candidate for the virile authorship of Desbordes-Valmore’s poetic pain—except that it too was associated with the tension between impotence and potency, between imitating and being imitated. The scanty actual evidence for Desbordes-Valmore’s ‘‘Olivier’’ muse suggests that the ‘‘Olivier’’ myth, which on the one hand contextualized the woman author as a ‘‘plagiarist’’ of her pain, was on the other hand a cover for the scandal of the sexual potency expressed in her life and her poetry. That potency was too threateningly ‘‘original’’ not to be reconﬁgured as a text authored by an impotent plagiarist. THE LATOUCHE AFFAIR

For Ambrière, there is no rational basis for the quasi-universal identiﬁcation of Olivier with Latouche: ‘‘After nearly a hundred years of fallacious suppositions and controversial hypotheses, virtually everyone today agrees that this lover [‘Olivier’ ] was named Latouche. It must be said: everyone is wrong’’ (1:180). Ambrière does not mean, however, that Latouche was not

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Desbordes-Valmore’s lover. On the contrary: ‘‘Let’s be clear. Latouche certainly was Marceline’s lover.’’ According to Ambrière, it was in 1819 that Desbordes-Valmore, two years into her marriage with Valmore, and now pregnant with her second child with Valmore, began her relationship with Latouche. Latouche mentored the publication of the second edition of her work, and Desbordes-Valmore would subsequently establish a long-term union with him, possibly lasting on and o√ until a deﬁnitive rupture in 1839. Many critics, from Ségu to Sainte-Beuve and Ambrière, believe that this rupture occurred because Latouche, who either was or thought he was the father of DesbordesValmore’s second surviving child, Marceline-Junie-Hyacinthe (known as ‘‘Ondine’’), was trying to establish an openly paternal relationship. Desbordes-Valmore herself appeared to have believed that in 1839 Latouche was stalking her daughter with pedophilic intent. Ondine showed promise of becoming a notable poet herself before her early death in 1853.∑∞ Prior to the work of Ambrière, it was generally assumed that DesbordesValmore’s liaison with Latouche dated to the Empire, at least to 1809, and had ended prior to 1817. The early date marks the fact that DesbordesValmore wrote two love notes to a lover whom she called ‘‘Olivier’’ beginning in 1809. But Ambrière establishes convincingly that DesbordesValmore could have had no relationship with Latouche before 1819. Since Olivier as a character in the love notes, and also in a few poems, predates the appearance of Latouche in Desbordes-Valmore’s life, Ambrière concludes that Olivier cannot be Latouche. But this sensible biographical answer does not preclude the possibility of games and biographical manipulation on the part of either Latouche or Desbordes-Valmore concerning a Latouche/Olivier correlation in 1825, the year of Latouche’s Olivier. A brief analysis of Desbordes-Valmore’s ‘‘Olivier’’ work reveals the ﬂexible nature of its genesis. Ambrière makes a convincing case that the two (otherwise uninteresting) love notes to ‘‘Olivier’’ were actually addressed to Audibert, who is an unlikely ﬁgure for the idea of a lifelong poetic cult. In a sign of the early date at which ‘‘Olivier’’ had become identiﬁed as a major ﬁgure in DesbordesValmore’s work and life, the Audibert notes had somehow already been found and documented in 1837 by a contemporary who believed that their addressee was also the ‘‘Olivier’’ of her poetry (1:187–88). But oddly enough in light of the staying power of the legend of an Oliv-

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ier who extracted tortured poetic cries from Desbordes-Valmore throughout her literary career, there are very few poems in which an ‘‘Olivier’’ ﬁgures at all. Ambrière asserts that ‘‘she almost always calls her beloved Olivier in her ﬁrst works’’ (1:274), but he gives no support for this contention. Out of the vast array of Desbordes-Valmore’s love poems, Olivier appears in ‘‘Le Rendez-vous’’ (published in L’Almanach des Muses in 1815), ‘‘L’Abandon’’ (published in the Souvenir des menestrels, 1815), ‘‘L’Aveu permis’’ (published in the Chansonnier des grâces, 1818), ‘‘L’Orage’’ (published in 1819), ‘‘Philis’’ (published in 1820), ‘‘Le Chien d’Olivier’’ (also published in 1820), ‘‘Le Cloître’’ (published in the Chansonnier des grâces in 1821), ‘‘Le Secret’’ (published in 1825), and ‘‘Les Serments’’ (also published in 1825). To make Olivier into a muse representative of an enduring passion from such a small sample of poems requires the assumption that the extremely numerous poems that speak of ‘‘il’’ (he) or ‘‘lui’’ (him) or ‘‘son nom’’ (his name) are in all fact addressed to a single person, and to the same one referred to as Olivier. It is doubtful that there is any biographical referent for Olivier in the early poems. Virieux points out that early in the nineteenth century the name Olivier was popular simply for its medievalist overtones, for instance through its association with Roland’s best friend Olivier in La Chanson de Roland: ‘‘The name was then fashionable for its medievalist color’’ (93 n. 126). In some of Desbordes-Valmore’s early poems (and unfortunately the date of publication does not necessarily reﬂect the date of composition), she uses Olivier as a stock pastoral character, a staple in the pre-Romantic women’s literature that Sainte-Beuve describes as ‘‘that sentimental generation nourished on Mme Cottin, Mme Montolieu, . . . that Twenty-Four Hours of a Sensitive Woman did not exaggerate.’’ Although ‘‘Le Rendezvous’’ (The meeting) and ‘‘L’Abandon’’ (Abandonment) were published prior to 1818 in journals, they are also featured in the pastoral prose story ‘‘Marie’’ from the 1818 Élégies, Marie et romances. In this tale, full, as SainteBeuve notes, of ‘‘sheep à la Des Houlières, of ﬂighty or groaning lambs tied by ﬂowered ribbons,’’ Marie and Olivier are two young shepherds who nearly prove that contrary to an old saying, one can die of love.∑≤ In ‘‘Philis,’’ Olivier is a cheerful and virtuous 14-year-old shepherd boy, singing the virtues of the modest little Philis to an old shepherd whom he has brought in from a storm. ‘‘L’Aveu permis’’ (Permission to tell) is a poem about a very

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young girl’s plan to make an innocent and maternally sanctioned avowal of a√ection to an illiterate boy. The avowal escalates into a hot-blooded if childlike encounter, as she is too shy to pronounce the words and asks him to ‘‘take them’’ from her lips. The poem ‘‘Le Chien d’Olivier’’ (Oliver’s dog) turns the pastoral motif to comic purposes. The use of ‘‘Olivier’’ in these poems is comparable to the repeated use of other pastoral names. The name Daphnis, for example, appears in ‘‘Les Roses,’’ ‘‘Le Ruisseau’’ (The stream), and ‘‘Une Jeune ﬁlle et sa mère’’ (A young girl and her mother). Of the few Olivier poems prior to those published in 1821 and 1825, after the beginning of the sexual relationship between Desbordes-Valmore and Latouche, only ‘‘L’Orage’’ (The storm), published in 1819, is darkly sensual and speaks of the passion of forbidden love in a manner that might correlate to the critical tradition on ‘‘Olivier.’’ ‘‘L’Orage’’ is also set in a pastoral context, however, and the narrator is still a girl, living at home with her father and sister. ‘‘O quelle accablante chaleur!’’ (Oh what overwhelming heat!) is the suggestive ﬁrst line of the poem, and as a storm builds, so does the sexual tension: ‘‘On dirait que le ciel va toucher la montagne. / Vois ce nuage en feu qui rougit la campagne’’ (One might say that the sky is about to touch the mountain. / See the ﬁery cloud that reddens the land). The narrator pleads, ‘‘Reste, mon bien aimé! Reste, je t’en conjure; / le ciel va s’entr’ouvrir’’ (Stay, my beloved! Stay, I beg of you; / The sky is about to open up) (1:29–30). The 1821 ‘‘Le Cloître’’ (The cloister), though still pastoral by virtue of the trope of two lovers lamenting to one another on opposite sides of a river bank, otherwise begins to come into alignment with the themes and complexity of Desbordes-Valmore’s elegiac love poems. Olivier may have a ‘‘timid mouth’’ like his shepherd compatriots in some of the earlier Olivier poems, but here he is also the source of the poet’s ‘‘secret su√ering’’ (2:616). But although each of the early Olivier poems in its own fascinating way works from simplicity to complexity, none of them would seem to justify the myth of a love story of Petrarchean dimensions. Traces of such a love story can be found primarily in Desbordes-Valmore’s elegies, such as ‘‘Son Image,’’ of which Johnson writes in ‘‘Gender and Poetry,’’ ‘‘ ‘Son Image’ surrenders not to a man but to Amour, a ﬁgure for the whole rhetorical conﬁguration of canonical love poetry’’ (124). Only one of the Olivier poems speaks directly to the possibility of a Latouche connection: the 1825 poem to Olivier called ‘‘Le Secret.’’ In the

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early years of their relationship, Latouche and Desbordes-Valmore had been somewhat careless with their own ‘‘secret,’’ as Victor Hugo complained when Latouche wrote on Desbordes-Valmore’s behalf to turn down an invitation. And by 1825 the subject matter and characters of Duras’s Olivier ou le secret were already well known through hearsay, and Latouche would have been under way with his own Olivier. Latouche himself had become familiar with Duras’s Olivier ou le secret in the context of literary salons sometime between 1824 and 1825, and we know that DesbordesValmore also frequented, along with Latouche, Charles Nodier’s literary salon at the Arsenal in the 1820s and 1830s (see Ambrière, 1:260, 1:270, 1:274, 2:16). As Virieux notes, Duras’s private salon reading of Olivier ou le secret had immediately stimulated an unwonted notoriety in all the salons of Paris. The Pandore wrote that ‘‘jokes and epigrams circulated already in all the salons’’ (cited in Virieux, 36). By 1826 Latouche’s friend Stendhal, who would contribute another version of the story, Armance, was able to write to his friend Prosper Mérimée that the name Olivier now actually functioned as a code word for ‘‘le Babilanisme,’’ or impotence.∑≥ Given Latouche’s penchant for mystiﬁcation, it seems unlikely (although of course not impossible) that in 1825 Desbordes-Valmore had no awareness of the changing connotations of the name Olivier and of the preparations under way for what would be the querelle d’Olivier. Had Desbordes-Valmore taken a page from Latouche’s evident talent for self-promotion by publishing the 1825 poem to ‘‘Olivier’’ called ‘‘Le Secret’’? THE SECRET LIFE OF THE ‘‘CORPS SAGE’’

‘‘Le Secret’’ is typical of Desbordes-Valmore’s poetry in that it o√ers itself for two distinct readings: one fairly anodyne and suitable for ‘‘feminine’’ domestic consumption in journals such as the Chansonnier des Grâces and the Guirlande des dames, the other experimental and daring in its evoked subject matter. The di√erence between the ﬁrst and the second kinds of reading is constructed out of the subtle ways in which the poem simply does not quite make sense. One of Desbordes-Valmore’s most steadily employed techniques is a subtle grammatical slippage that permits contrasting literal interpretations. A ﬁfteen-line poem divided into three ﬁve-line stanzas with a simple rhyme scheme of AABAB, BBCBC, DDEDE, ‘‘Le Secret’’ can be read as a

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woman speaker’s coquettish yet straightforward admonition to her suitor to keep their feelings for one another a secret. It can also be read, however, as a meditation on the nature of the secret and on the relation of the secret to sensual transgression. LE SECRET

Dans la foule, Olivier, ne viens plus me surprendre; Sois là, mais sans parler, tâche de me l’apprendre: Ta voix a des accents qui me font tressaillir! Ne montre pas l’amour que je ne puis te rendre, D’autres yeux que les tiens me regardent rougir. Se chercher, s’entrevoir, n’est-ce pas tout se dire? Ne me demande plus, par un triste sourire, Le bouquet qu’en dansant je garde malgré moi: Il pèse sur mon coeur quand mon coeur le désire, Et l’on voit dans mes yeux qu’il fut cueilli pour toi. Lorsque je m’enfuirai, tiens-toi sur mon passage; Notre heure pour demain, les ﬂeurs de mon corsage, Je te donnerai tout avant la ﬁn du jour: Mais puisqu’on n’aime pas lorsque l’on est bien sage, Prends garde à mon secret, car j’ai beaucoup d’amour!

(1:109)

Olivier, don’t come to surprise me anymore in the crowd; / Be there, but try to let me know it without speaking; / Your voice has accents that make me shiver! / Don’t show the love that I can’t return to you, / Other eyes than yours will see me blush. Seeking each other out, seeing each other, isn’t that as good as telling all? / Don’t ask me anymore, by a sad smile / For the bouquet that I keep despite myself while dancing; / It weighs on my heart when my heart desires it, / And it shows in my eyes that it was gathered for you. When I ﬂee, stand in my way; / Our time for tomorrow, the ﬂowers of my corsage, / I will give you everything before the day’s end: / But since one doesn’t love when one is very good, / Be careful with my secret, for I have lots of love!

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In the ‘‘virtuous’’ reading, the narrator’s tone in her direct address of Olivier is distanced; several phrases in the imperative, when culled from their context, are even stern or rejecting: ‘‘Ne viens plus me surprendre’’ (Don’t come to surprise me anymore), ‘‘Ne montre pas l’amour,’’ (Don’t show love), ‘‘Ne me demande plus, par un triste sourire’’ (Don’t ask me anymore, by a sad smile), and ‘‘Prends garde à mon secret’’ (Be careful with my secret). Virtuous refusal is hinted at in the phrase ‘‘l’amour que je ne puis te rendre’’ (the love that I can’t return to you). The narrator seems in the second stanza to propose harmless substitutions for this denied love, urging ‘‘Se chercher, s’entrevoir, n’est-ce pas tout se dire?’’ (Seeking each other out, seeing each other, isn’t that as good as telling all?) As a reward for his restraint, Olivier will see that her bouquet was ‘‘gathered for’’ him, and before the ‘‘day’s end,’’ the narrator will give him both the ﬂowers from her corsage and an assignation for the next day. A quick glance at the last couplet seems to present an inherent incompatibility between loving and being good; ‘‘On n’aime pas lorsque l’on est bien sage’’ (One doesn’t love when one is very good). But it is also this last couplet that shows the entire ﬁrst reading to be misleading, a ‘‘fausse piste,’’ or at the least no more than a variant. The causal relationship in the couplet is double and contradictory: ‘‘Mais puisqu’on n’aime pas lorsqu’on est bien sage, / Prends garde à mon secret, car j’ai beaucoup d’amour!’’ (But since one doesn’t love when one is very good, / Be careful with my secret, for I have lots of love!). Here ‘‘puisque’’ (since) and ‘‘car’’ (for) both express a causal relationship, but while ‘‘puisque’’ seems to apply the same interdictive logic to both the statement ‘‘On n’aime pas lorsqu’on est bien sage’’ and ‘‘Prends garde à mon secret,’’ the ‘‘car’’ clause undoes that logic. The phrase ‘‘car j’ai beaucoup d’amour’’ (for I have lots of love) cannot be read as reinforcement for the parallel ideas of not loving when one is being good and of being careful with a secret. The incoherence of this syntactical doubling suggests that the two causal clauses may not reinforce but undo one another. A reading of the couplet in which priority is given to the aberrant ‘‘Car j’ai beaucoup d’amour’’ gives the following, strikingly di√erent e√ect: ‘‘For I have lots of love’’ and because ‘‘one doesn’t love when one is very good, be careful with my secret.’’ In other words, ‘‘Hush! Let’s be bad.’’ From there one must begin again from the beginning. Looking at gram-

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matical inconsistencies and culling phrases or word patterns out from the whole, several preoccupations emerge. In the ﬁrst stanza, a command to Olivier functions almost as a description of the secret: ‘‘Sois là, mais sans parler’’ (Be there, but without speaking), as though Olivier were the personiﬁcation of a secret. Is she asking Olivier to play the role of the secret, in a charade of the title Olivier ou le secret? The imperative is deployed here not in defense of virtue but in the name of amorous authority, creating a tension between command and submission. Then numerous other phrases can be read as characterizations of various attitudes toward secrets: ‘‘Tâche de me l’apprendre’’ (Try to let me know it); ‘‘Ne me demande plus’’ (Don’t ask me anymore); ‘‘Il pèse sur mon coeur’’ (It weighs on my heart); and ‘‘Prends garde à mon secret’’ (Be careful with my secret). Complementary to this vocabulary of the secret, a subtext of voyeurism is established: ‘‘sans parler, tâche de me l’apprendre’’ (without speaking, try to let me know it); ‘‘D’autres yeux que les tiens me regardent rougir’’ (Other eyes than yours will see me blush); ‘‘s’entrevoir, n’est-ce pas tout se dire’’ (seeing each other, isn’t that as good as telling all); and ‘‘l’on voit dans mes yeux’’ (it shows in my eyes). The desire to hoard private knowledge or to protect from exposure creates a community of intimacy and heightens the senses, sexualizing the rapport between the objects and subjects of the gaze. Desbordes-Valmore also creates a strong parallelism between the secret and the bouquet by means of the verb ‘‘garder’’ (to keep). One keeps or gives away a secret and one keeps or gives away a bouquet, and here the question of whether to keep or give away the bouquet/secret clearly has connotations of sexual self-possession or o√ering. This is particularly clear in relation to other poems by Desbordes-Valmore such as ‘‘Les Roses de Saadi.’’ In that poem, the narrator cannot give her beloved the roses because she has too many tied into her ‘‘belts’’ and the knots have burst, sending roses ﬂowing in an orgasmic wave to the sea. In ‘‘Le Secret’’ the narrator teases Olivier by allowing the corsage the corporeal intimacy forbidden to him. Olivier must not ask for her bouquet, but when she dances, the bouquet ‘‘weighs on my heart when my heart desires it.’’ The ﬂowers are allowed to press sensually on the woman’s heart; Olivier is allowed to watch. Although the ﬁrst two stanzas thematize the narrator’s prudent attempt to escape from Olivier, in the ﬁrst verse of the last stanza she escapes not Olivier but the dance (‘‘je m’enfuirai’’) and goes to him, reversing the

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direction of the resistance in the poem. In this reversal, Olivier is told to ‘‘stand in my way’’ and ‘‘Je te donnerai tout avant la ﬁn du jour’’ (I will give you everything before the day’s end). Although in the virtuous reading of the poem, ‘‘everything’’ simply means the corsage and an assignation for the next day, in the transgressive reading the connotations of sexual o√ering are unavoidable. The bouquet/secret in the second stanza now also serves as lexical preparation for the play of the ‘‘corsage’’ in the last stanza. In relation to the nextto-last line, ‘‘Mais puisqu’on n’aime pas lorsqu’on est bien sage,’’ a homophonous double entendre is established between the ‘‘corsage’’ and the idea of the corps sage, the good or prudent body. For the narrator, keeping the secret becomes the condition for giving away the prudent body, for the free play of the abundance, the force, the potency of love: ‘‘car j’ai beaucoup d’amour.’’ Through grammatical doublings that reverse each other, ‘‘Le Secret’’ can be read either as an example for young girls or as a lesson in the art of subversive love. The same can be said of the life and work of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. As Edward Kaplan notes, in her poetry Desbordes-Valmore ‘‘commands ardor with a certain type of sexual freedom, a woman’s right to experience pleasure and to write about it.’’∑∂ That pleasure threatens to subvert the sanctiﬁed secondhand nature of her work. The Romantic woman poet, according to Michelet and his confraternity of pious misogynists, is supposed to be not an active writing subject but rather the lyrical personiﬁcation of the pain of love. In this context, the greatest ‘‘secret’’ that the woman poet would have to maintain is not that of her lover but of her own authorial subjectivity. In ‘‘Le Secret,’’ Desbordes-Valmore’s feminocentric sexuality makes it hard to keep that ‘‘secret.’’ Ultimately, Desbordes-Valmore’s ‘‘Olivier’’ scandal reveals not Latouche but the sexual autonomization and the poetic ‘‘virilization’’ of the Romantic woman author. THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE ‘‘OLIVIER’’ FALLACY

How have contemporary scholars reacted to the fact that, as Michael Danehy puts it, ‘‘it is now clear, from the discoveries that Ambrière made in archives throughout France, that the mysterious Olivier of DesbordesValmore’s poems cannot refer exclusively to Latouche or to any one man, for

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that matter’’?∑∑ Without exactly being a person, ‘‘Olivier’’ had lived a long and sensational life as a biographical fallacy. With the beneﬁt of hindsight, how does current Valmorian scholarship frame the usability of fallacy? Critical responses to the problem have been diverse. Occasionally a critic, such as Louis Simpson in his introductory note to translations published in the ‘‘New Criterion’’ in 1995, baldly continues to mimic the pre-Ambrière ‘‘Olivier’’ refrain: ‘‘In 1808 Marceline met Henri de Latouche. . . . In Desbordes-Valmore’s poems Latouche appears as ‘Olivier,’ who did not reciprocate her love. He came and went—in her poems one can almost hear him saying, ‘I won’t be tied down.’ And yet she loved him . . . he was charming. Two years after their meeting she had a child by Latouche. . . . Her experience of Latouche gave her poetry about love its realism.’’∑∏ But even prior to Ambrière’s book, few critics from the era of feminism and poststructuralism were interested in committing to a suspiciously histrionic biographical cliché. The high road with regard to Valmorian biography was pioneered by Christine Planté, who as early as 1987 (possibly before her reading of Ambrière, whom she does not mention) used the problem of autobiography in Desbordes-Valmore’s work to interrogate the critical gendering of poetic self-revelation in general. For Planté, Desbordes-Valmore’s alleged poetics of autobiography mirrors not Desbordes-Valmore, nor an abstract ‘‘any woman,’’ but the gender biases of the critics: ‘‘What is the meaning of the critical determination to make reading a feminine oeuvre an exercise in autobiographical deciphering?’’∑π Planté holds that any biographical disclosure made in Desbordes-Valmore’s work reveals above all the working of language in its relation to chronicity: ‘‘No revelation, no biographical anecdote can o√er the ultimate truth, the last word on her: because, as a work of language, it is unending’’ (49). Since 1987, many feminist critics of Desbordes-Valmore, such as Kaplan and Laurence M. Porter, have chosen to boycott the question of biography. Kaplan protests its dominance of Valmorian scholarship: ‘‘The putative life usurps the texts’’ (261). Putatively nonbiographical feminist readings, however, often continue to concentrate on Desbordes-Valmore’s thematizations of gendered romantic and familial relationships, but in abstracted terms like ‘‘male control’’ (264) or, in Porter’s words, ‘‘an ‘écriture féminine’ where bearing and raising children and nurturing a family are given a prominent place.’’∑∫ Kaplan’s ‘‘pragmatic’’ approach to ‘‘highlighting the originality

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of her so-called ‘female themes’ ’’ (262) in e√ect treats the confessional or autobiographical dimension of Desbordes-Valmore’s work as central to its use in feminist literary studies but divorced from speciﬁc questions of referentiality. Others have used the phenomenon of what Planté calls Valmorian critical ‘‘méconnaissance’’∑Ω or misunderstanding in order not only to critique but to historicize the literalism with which women’s lyrical interventions in the poetic tradition are read. Working with the apparent falsity of Desbordes-Valmore’s traditionally received ‘‘unthreatening poetics of sincerity,’’ Johnson proposes in ‘‘Gender and Poetry’’ that ‘‘Marceline Desbordes-Valmore o√ers her reader the chance to re-examine the relations between poetic convention and the construction of gender’’ (114). Articles by Danehy, Rosemary Lloyd, and Simone D. Ferguson, as well as the recent works by Gretchen Schultz and Aimée Boutin,∏≠ similarly explore poetic convention and gender construction through tropes such as ‘‘confraternity,’’ ‘‘maternity,’’ and ‘‘subjectivity’’ in relation to Desbordes-Valmore’s work. Beyond the condemnation of l’homme et l’oeuvre criticism in postAmbrière Valmorian scholarship, have any methodologies been developed with a view to replacing the unwonted speciﬁcity of biography and its potential for fallacy with a more legitimately exploitable historical or cultural speciﬁcity proper to a dead woman author’s oeuvre? Desbordes-Valmore’s case epitomizes the trickiness of commemorating the death of the author when that author wrote a great deal about the life of femininity (whether one interprets ‘‘femininity’’ as an entirely imposed cultural construct or as an area of experiential praxis delimited by the life of the gendered body) in a culture to which we have no contemporaneous access. Even Sainte-Beuve, in ‘‘Mme Desbordes-Valmore. 1833,’’ used the metaphor of an unknown plant to describe the challenge Desbordes-Valmore represented to his positivist classiﬁcations: ‘‘A new element comes to unsettle our formulae and trouble our methodical arrangements. It’s a ﬂower, a plant that doesn’t correspond to the described families; it is a poet whom our poetics didn’t admit’’ (91).* *Quelque composé nouveau vient déjouer nos formules et troubler nos méthodiques arrangements. C’est une ﬂeur, une plante qui ne rentre pas dans les familles décrites; c’est un poète que nos poétiques n’admettaient pas.

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One approach to replacing the ‘‘death of the author’’ with a more culturally sensitive approach is laid out in Ross Chambers’s recent work on the death of the author in the context of AIDS narratives. Chambers theorizes, instead of the death of the author and the birth of the reader, a kind of mimetic substitutability of author and reader. Once the reader, in the terms of Barthes’s paradigm, has displaced the author, how, Chambers asks, does he or she ‘‘claim responsibility toward that lost authorial sense?’’∏∞ How does the reader, as a substitute for an author who has su√ered pain and death, which is the case not only with AIDS narratives but with Romantic women authors, become a ‘‘witness’’ whose mimetic pact with the author will be ‘‘a shared, social responsibility’’ (70)? Readers and critics of the ‘‘social lives of authors’’ in the Romantic period can likewise make mimetically constituted authorial texts into readable aporias of the social life of mimesis. MIMETIC LACK

The historical conjunction of the querelle d’Olivier and of the mythical construction of Desbordes-Valmore’s ‘‘Olivier’’ marks a phenomenon of Romantic mimetic rivalry with the ‘‘originality’’ of the woman author. The post-Revolutionary ‘‘autonomization’’ of the woman author on the market of symbolic goods is traumatic in a male-dominated literary culture. This trauma manifests itself in obsessive representations of women authors as the representatives of mimetic impotence and plagiarism. But the potency of Duras’s and Desbordes-Valmore’s engagement with those tropes converts them into models of desire. Since Freud it has been established that the gendering of lack is mimetic. In Freud’s theory of fetishism, the little boy peers up the woman/mother’s skirt and experiences ‘‘the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals,’’∏≤ a terror based on the interpretation of the female sex as wound. But the fear of contagion from this ‘‘wound’’ of femininity so profoundly marks the male psyche, according to Freud, that it begs the question of who is really wounded by the ‘‘wound’’ of femininity. Since woman’s physical ‘‘wound’’ actually represents normal anatomical health, it is unreal, whereas the castration complex is posited by Freud as so essential to masculinity that it takes on the status of a gender reality. The

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castration complex is proper to the in-between space of the male/female dichotomy. In the Duras and Desbordes-Valmore ‘‘Olivier’’ scandals, the subject of impotence arguably takes its phantasmic power from the related specter of castration with its blurring of the lines between male and female injury. The conjunction of the tropes of impotence and plagiarism is organized around the mimetic gendering of lack, as Alméras shows: plagiarists and women writers are similarly ‘‘emasculated.’’ Waller suggests that in order to ‘‘inherit’’ the potency of the ‘‘feminine’’ genre of the novel, Stendhal had to emasculate himself through imitation. But that emasculation had its own political potency as an ‘‘auxiliary means’’ of problematizing the reproduction of aristocratic authority. For Latouche, the potency of desire is inevitably appropriative in itself, and hermaphroditic authorial identity contextualizes imitation as a modern form of originality. The construction of the Desbordes-Valmore/Latouche ‘‘secret’’ of Olivier encodes the sexually potent woman writer as a ‘‘natural’’ fraud whose emotion is ‘‘authored’’ by the male lover. Ironically, Latouche’s only role as a classically ‘‘original’’ and ‘‘virile’’ author was the role he played as ‘‘Olivier’’— a mystiﬁcation quite possibly facilitated not by himself but by DesbordesValmore to suppress her damaging reputation as a ‘‘free woman.’’ In the Romanticism of Restoration France, the name Olivier exposes not just ‘‘le Babilanisme’’ but also the impossibility of nonmimetic authorial stakes of virility and lack. Alméras, in his preface to the reedition of Latouche’s Olivier, shares a piquant verse that he found handwritten into his copy of the original edition of the book by its ﬁrst owner, the baron of Rei√enberg:∏≥ Le sexe de l’auteur est-il donc un mystère? L’écrivain se trahit par ses propres défauts. On voit qu’il lui manque pour plaire Ce qui manquait à son héros. Is the sex of the author really a mystery? / The writer is betrayed by his/her shortcomings. / One sees that he/she lacks in order to please / What his/her hero lacked. Because the gendering of possessive pronouns refers not to the subject in French but to the noun, there is a fundamental sexual obscurity in this

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epigram. When the reader questions whether the sex of the author is actually a mystery, does he mean that he knows the novel is by Duras, a woman novelist? Or that he knows it is by Latouche, a male plagiarist? The last three lines of the inscription and their triple presentation of the problematic of lack could rationalize either possibility. The sex of the writer is betrayed by ‘‘his’’ or ‘‘her’’ ‘‘défauts,’’ a term that can be read simultaneously as ‘‘lack’’ and ‘‘shortcomings.’’ These shortcomings mean that the writer lacks something in order to please readers. And what the writer lacks in order to please readers is precisely what the hero, Olivier, lacks in order to please women: male sexual potency. A woman writer lacks male sexual potency and could therefore be thought, metaphorically, to lack an analogous literary potency essential to the reader’s pleasure. But conversely, a male plagiarist lacks literary potency and could therefore be thought, metaphorically, to lack an analogous sexual potency. In the twin ‘‘Olivier’’ scandals, lack ‘‘acts’’ like a secret—it is passed on from person to person, revealed and hoarded and altered, until it is unrecognizable. By the time Duras and Desbordes-Valmore became mimetic of mimesis as impotence and plagiarism, the complex meanings of impotence and plagiarism had themselves become ‘‘secret’’; which is to say coveted, unstable, and eloquent of the politics and fallacies of social life.

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‘‘HARMONY’’ Lamartine’s Social Pain

UT POESIS POLITICA

The career of the poet-politician Alphonse de Lamartine challenges unidirectional hypotheses of the mimetic relationship between literature and politics. George Armstrong Kelly notes that Lamartine ‘‘was widely accused of causing’’ the revolution of 1848, ‘‘notably by publishing his Histoire des Girondins, ‘whose crude colors,’ in Tocqueville’s uncharitable language, ‘besmeared every imagination.’ ’’∞ This literary causality represents something of a taboo. Kelly describes the reluctance of political theorists to accept ‘‘the notion that literature might cause history to happen’’ (159), rather than that history might cause literature to happen (in the form of historical novels 140

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or social allegories). ‘‘Ut pictura poesis [like painting, poetry], perhaps,’’ says Kelly; ‘‘ut poesis politica [like poetry, politics], never’’ (160). In this chapter I examine, rather than the historical question of the actual mimetic rapport between Romantic poetry and politics, the role of pain in Romantic conceptions of the harmony between poetry and politics. The development in Lamartine’s thinking of a parallelism between the metaphorical wounds of poetic inspiration and the metaphorical wounds of social problems such as poverty is symptomatic of the larger Romantic tendency to poeticize political engagement. ‘‘Harmonious’’ theories of the poetry of politics led Lamartine and many of his literary peers to welcome and nurture poetry by the socially disadvantaged—notably workers, including women workers—as a ﬁrst step in the articulation of a nineteenthcentury Republic of letters. Worker poets soon came to be seen not as autonomous speakers, however, but as parrots of a Lamartinian discourse, as I discuss in this chapter. (This charge of submission to the mimetic seductions of Lamartine’s poetic language was also leveled against poets from the early decades of the Haitian Republic.)≤ That same Lamartinian discourse eventually became suspect as a political medium after the failure of the revolution of 1848. Lamartine, in framing poverty as an issue central to the social life of mimesis, had opened a can of worms concerning the social agency both of poetry and of pain. These literary questions whose pathos and grandeur Lamartine personally symbolized have continued to haunt egalitarian political movements. I begin this chapter with an account of the tensions between poetry and politics in the Surrealist relationship to socialism and work backward to their Romantic antecedents. THE POVERTY OF POETRY AND THE POETRY OF POVERTY

Poverty, André Breton implied in the title of his 1932 essay ‘‘Misère de la poésie’’ (The poverty of poetry), a∆icts not only classes but also classes of discourse. The poverty particular to poetry is rooted in the dichotomous relationship between its poetic side and its social side. Poetry is impoverished by the reductive binarity of its deﬁnitions as either ‘‘revolutionary propaganda, in which art is used only as a means,’’ or ‘‘art for art’s sake,’’ which invalidates action for any reason other than ‘‘the production of the beautiful.’’≥

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Breton developed this notion of poetic poverty in response to the ‘‘A√aire Aragon,’’ the prosecution by the French government of Louis Aragon’s poem ‘‘Front rouge’’ (Red front). ‘‘Front rouge’’ had been read as a primer for political violence because of lines such as ‘‘Camarades / Descendez les ﬂics’’ (Comrades / Take down the cops) (24). It was indicted for inciting ‘‘military disobedience’’ and ‘‘murder’’ (16). The government’s legal ‘‘reading’’ of ‘‘Front rouge’’ implied that poetry was deﬁned by and constrained to literal social uses, with a clear relation of cause and e√ect between poetry and social action. Breton had been outraged, especially given the nonliteral content of other lines from the condemned poem, such as ‘‘les astres descendent familièrement sur la terre’’ (the stars descend familiarly to earth) (24). Initially, the Surrealists had responded to the case with a petition against ‘‘all attempts to interpret poetic texts for judiciary purposes’’ (3). But this approach was severely castigated by socialist writers such as Romain Rolland. Rolland blamed Breton for taking shelter behind the screen of ‘‘poetic interiority’’ or ‘‘symbolism.’’ Poetry should be considered a weapon, urged Rolland: ‘‘Our writings are our weapons. We are as much responsible for our weapons as are our military or proletarian companions’’ (30). The protection of poetry from legal action would frame ‘‘Front rouge’’ as a politically useless poeticization of violence, ‘‘ ‘an ino√ensive bit of rhetoric’ ’’ (7). Legally untouchable, poetry would conﬁrm what Svetlana Boym calls ‘‘the conﬂict between artistic and social revolution.’’∂ Breton felt that ‘‘the poem shouldn’t be judged by the successive representations within it but rather by its ability to incarnate an idea’’ (10). He considered that Rolland’s notion of the poem as a frank and accountable weapon in political battles overlooked the fundamental distinction between poetry and prose, a distinction without which poetry would long since have been replaced by prose. He regretted that the two ‘‘extremes’’ in the Aragon debate could meet only long enough to frame poetry as a sordid rendezvous of the decorative and the murderous. But Rolland had created a sensation with his implication that the prosecutors of ‘‘Front rouge’’ paradoxically represented a more utopian view of the mimetic power of poetry in society than did the Surrealists. The epic and oral nature of Western poetry may have suited it originally to ritual, political, and communitarian ends, but a tragic denouement of modern print culture is that, as W. H. Auden says, ‘‘poetry makes nothing happen.’’∑

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Surrealism had always been self-identiﬁed with revolution: a major journal was called Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. At the time of Breton’s writing of ‘‘Misère de la poésie,’’ however, the ability of Surrealist literature to inﬂuence, to trigger imitative enactments of its content or form, seemed especially threatened by the need for a plain language of ideological contestation through which ‘‘the masses’’ could participate in cultural revolution. Many of the members of Breton’s literary and artistic community felt that a Surrealism at the service of the revolution should be a Surrealism at the service of the ‘‘people.’’ The proletariat, in other words, had become the thorn on the rose of the Surrealist ‘‘revolution.’’ Breton was shocked that anyone would question the ‘‘honorable’’ aspiration of the Surrealists to ‘‘wage the revolutionary battle at the sides of the proletariat and to run all the risks of that struggle’’ (6). But at the same time he rejected the notion that the power of poetry would be conﬁrmed or enhanced by the coaxing into existence of a ‘‘littérature prolétarienne’’ (20). Breton implied that the revolution should take place at the level at which content merges with form. It would then, in e√ect, trickle down to the level of the unschooled because, as the slogan went on one of the Surrealist calling cards, ‘‘the unconscious is within the reach of all.’’* Breton was unconvinced by the socialist ideal of a curative chiasmus between the poverty of poetry and a poetry of poverty. To this end, Breton revisited a passage by Lenin warning against the circumscription of the intellectual participation of the ‘‘masses ouvrières,’’ or the working masses, to an artiﬁcially limited category of ‘‘littérature pour ouvriers’’ (7). Lenin stresses that it is not workers who box themselves into the constraints of ‘‘workers’ literature,’’ but intellectuals who do so for them: ‘‘On their own, they read and want to read everything that is written for intellectuals, and it is only some pitiful intellectuals who think that to talk ‘to workers’ it su≈ces to talk about factory life.’’ Outside of this artiﬁcially specialized idea of workers’ literature, Lenin hails the work of Proudhon as an example of a broader literary participation. Following the example of Proudhon, workers can open themselves to the world of ‘‘general literature.’’ As Michel Ragon notes, this passage is evidence of Lenin’s disapproval of the dangers of l’ouvriérisme or workerism.∏ Breton’s citation of Lenin, with Lenin’s reference to Proudhon, is also an *L’inconscient est à la portée de tous.

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indirect way of pointing to the intertextual relationship between his own essay and the speciﬁcally Romantic debate on the susceptibility of poverty to literary intervention. The title ‘‘Misère de la poésie’’ was in fact the third generation in a querelle of titles pairing the term poverty with terms for the di√erent classes of epistemological discourse that might remedy it. In 1846 the economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, of ‘‘property is theft’’ fame, had attempted to merge metaphysics and economics in one of the earliest theorizations of poverty as a social issue. He called his book Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (A system of economic contradictions, or the philosophy of poverty). Wary of existing economic systematizations, Proudhon rejected both capitalist and communist solutions, opting instead for a complex and not always coherent philosophical foregrounding of the problem of poverty. Proudhon’s ironies aroused the anger of one of his previously staunch admirers, Karl Marx. In 1847 Marx published the derisively entitled Misère de la philosophie, ou Réponse à la philosophie de la misère de M. Proudhon (The poverty of philosophy, or answer to the philosophy of poverty by Mr. Proudhon). In reversing the subject/object positioning of ‘‘misère’’ and ‘‘philosophie,’’ Marx implied that philosophy is itself a form of poverty: the poverty of a metaphysical, rather than an economic, discourse to adequately address the problem of poverty. Breton’s version substitutes ‘‘poésie’’ for ‘‘philosophie’’ in a syntax parallel to Marx’s Misère de la philosophie. But Breton was not criticizing poetry’s ability to address the social realm. On the contrary, his essay expresses an important solidarity with Proudhon’s implications of a restitutive relationship between an epistemological discourse and a social problem. Breton believed that poetry can have socially useful mimetic power, a power to address such problems as poverty and class struggle, but only through the qualities proper to poetry as a distinct literary form. The problem was how to have a poetic revolution for all without ‘‘impoverishing’’ poetry by harnessing the operations of rhetoric to a prosaic populism. Does poetry have to be ideological if it wants to be revolutionary? If poetry is not revolutionary, can it still have social power? Ultimately in ‘‘Misère de la poésie,’’ the poverty of poetry denotes not only the absence of a poetry that speaks to the problem of poverty, but also the problematic di√erence between the power of poetry and the power of ideology in class struggle. The non-working-class or working-class a≈liations of poetry put

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it in a vulnerable cultural position between the extremes of irrelevance and ideological overdetermination. The fact that Breton’s intertexts for the metaphor of discursive poverty date from the 1840s is much more than coincidence. Historically in France, the di√erence between the power of poetry and other powers has never been more problematized than in the era between the July revolution of 1830 and the short-lived ‘‘republic of poets’’ after the February revolution of 1848. This last French monarchical era, framed by revolution at its start and its end, earned its characterization as ‘‘social Romanticism’’ because of the burgeoning social consciousness leading up to the formulation of a more modern and recognizably Marxist ‘‘socialism.’’ SOCIAL ROMANTICISM’S USEFUL ART

Assessing the history of workers’ literature, Michel Ragon allows himself a scathing commentary on the pleonasm of the ‘‘great bourgeois writer’’: ‘‘Forgive me the pleonasm, in France the Great Writers are always bourgeois’’ (9). Proletarian literature for Ragon is historically deﬁned by its incongruity: ‘‘Proletarian literature has always been an incongruity’’ (10). The notion of ‘‘social’’ ‘‘Romanticism’’ is likewise a phenomenon of incongruity, not least in the relationship of its exalted styles to the ideal of a poetry of poverty. Théophile Gautier’s 1835 preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin reveals the unsettling mechanisms through which the ‘‘social’’ and the ‘‘romantic’’ became mutually descriptive under the reign of Louis-Philippe. Breton’s contextualization of the ‘‘misère de la poésie’’ as the polarization of the ‘‘face poétique’’ and the ‘‘face sociale’’ of art referred back to Gautier’s attempt to construct precisely such an epistemological opposition. Where Breton wanted to unite the poetic and the social, Gautier wanted to dichotomize them, because he felt that his epoch was deﬁning them as indissociable. The social function of art, according to Gautier, was overwhelmingly privileged in 1835 under the rubric of useful art, ‘‘l’art utile.’’ Gautier would have preferred to decisively sever the useful from the beautiful in art: ‘‘Nothing is truly beautiful except for that which has no use.’’π He presented his own novel as a gauge of the uselessness of art for social intervention: ‘‘What is the use of this book? How can it be applied to the moral development and

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the well-being of the poorest and most populous class?’’ (44). How could ‘‘utilitarian critics,’’ ‘‘utilitarian style,’’ ‘‘utilitarian novels,’’ and even poetry actually contribute to the progress of ‘‘civilisation’’? Ultimately Gautier questions the usefulness of the term ‘‘usefulness’’ itself (44). The history Gautier provides in ampliﬁcation of these questions details the profound transformation that had taken place in Romantic social consciousness between the end of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Gautier’s preface must be contextualized within the early industrial period that Proudhon called ‘‘feudal industrialism.’’∫ The culture of Romanticism had become enamored of what Gautier called ‘‘spiritual utility’’ (43) as ‘‘the rehabilitation of virtue’’ in a utopian conception of art as ‘‘progressive’’ (42). Gautier presents a proﬁle of the artist ‘‘mordu’’ (bitten) by this bug of social utilitarianism, inﬂuenced by Saint-Simonian utopian thought and by the social Catholicism of Lamennais. The artist’s discourse is characterized by the ﬂuid transposition from the poetics of Catholicism to the poetics of liberal republicanism. In the interest of the ‘‘sanctity of art’’ and the ‘‘poetry of Catholicism,’’ the social Romantic artist couples Robespierre with Jesus Christ and the Acts of the Apostles with the decrees of the ‘‘holy’’ Revolutionary Convention (27). These transpositions treat the theological, the political, and the social as metaphorical of one another and conterminous in their utopian aspirations. Likeness reigns where the ethos of di√erentiation had once held sway. Gautier would have liked to entirely suppress the social life of mimesis, the lived dimensions of mimetic production and reception, as a parody of the antimaterialist potential of art. To critique the anomalous amalgamation typical of the discourse of social Romanticism, Gautier developed a protosurrealist chain of absurdist similes hitching literary genres and elements of rhetoric to industrial production: ‘‘A novel is not a pair of seamless boots, nor a sonnet a continuous-stream syringe; a drama is not a railroad, although all these things are essentially civilizing and help humanity to march along the road to progress. . . . You can’t make a cotton bonnet out of a metonymy or put on a comparison like a slipper; antitheses don’t work as umbrellas’’ (42–43).* The ‘‘poverty of poetry’’ for Gautier is rooted not in *Un roman n’est pas une paire de bottes sans couture; un sonnet, une seringue à jet continu; un drame n’est pas un chemin de fer, toutes chose essentiellement

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the breach between the poetic and the social as diagnosed by Breton, but instead in the conﬁdence of the Romantic poets and critics that their product could be sold to, used by, and even made by workers in the postRevolutionary industrial state.

‘‘L’OUVRIÉRISME ROMANTIQUE’’

Enﬁn, plus ou moins, nous sommes tous ouvriers. —Dambreuse after 1848, in Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale

The July Monarchy was in fact characterized by a remarkable phenomenon of ‘‘coming to writing’’ by workers. Jacques Rancière dates the phenomenon of workers’ poetry to this period: ‘‘The social and literary phenomenon of working-class poetry in France is strictly circumscribed in time. Born of the July Revolution of 1830, it had its hour of glory and scandal at the beginning of the 1840s, only to disappear, like so many other things, in the wreck of December 1851.’’Ω The ‘‘ouvrier poètes’’ were bakers, seamstresses, smiths, washerwomen, shopkeepers, milliners, and printers whose advent on the cultural landscape, according to Edmond Thomas, constituted ‘‘a true proletarian literary movement.’’∞≠ Their ranks included Augustine Blanchecotte, Pierre Dupont, Jacques Jasmin, Jules Mercier, Hégisippe Moreau, Agricol Perdiguier, Charles Poncy, Jean Reboul, Olinde Rodrigues, and Antoinette Quarré. Their numbers, especially in what Thomas describes as the striking absence of other forms of artistic expression by the class of ‘‘ouvriers,’’ indicate the sudden overwhelming valorization of ‘‘written expression,’’ ‘‘which is surely not without signiﬁcation,’’ comments Thomas, since ‘‘from the moment in which the working class is constituted and discovers its historic identity, it is not abnormal to see it seek out a voice, to see it—or hear it—speak’’ (19). The works of the ouvriers poètes did not, of course, spring forth unascivilisantes, et faisant marcher l’humanité dans la voie du progrès. . . . On ne fait pas un bonnet de coton d’une métonymie, on ne chausse pas une comparaison en guise de pantouﬂe; on ne se peut servir d’une antithèse pour parapluie.

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sisted. Many of the major literary ﬁgures of Romanticism, including René de Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, Sophie Gay, Pierre-Jean Béranger, Prosper Mérimée, C.-A. SainteBeuve, and Alphonse de Lamartine shared a common literary/political project of helping workers to enter the domain of literary production. Lamartine in particular was so closely identiﬁed with this cause that by the close of his life, a woman worker poet, Augustine Blanchecotte, would refract the romanticization of the worker poet back onto him with redundant emphasis: ‘‘Lamartine, like an obstinate worker and needy worker, has harnessed himself to his labor and is up at dawn—however harsh the season—to write.’’*∞∞ What had inspired the Romantics to throw themselves into ‘‘l’ouvriérisme’’? Their involvement in mentoring worker poets exempliﬁes some of the more contradictory representations of the term Romantic in Musset’s Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet. After all, in addition to the notion of Romanticism as imitation, the two country gentlemen considered a hyperlyrical and exaggeratedly apolitical sentiment as central to Romanticism: ‘‘It is the unexpected spurt of languorous ecstasy, the oasis under the palm trees, crimson hope and its thousand loves, the angel and pearl, the white robe of the willows, ô the beautiful thing!’’†∞≤ Dupuis and Cotonet are unable, ultimately, to create a satisfying correlation between these ecstatic and ‘‘useless’’ spasms of pathetic fallacy in Romantic diction and the additional identity of Romanticism as ‘‘a system of philosophy and political economy. . . . of the future, of social progress, of humanity and civilization’’ (828). Yet this double incongruity of ‘‘social Romanticism’’ and the role of the ‘‘worker poet’’ within it signals, historically, something quite distinct from the paradox it apparently sets into motion. It signals the centrality of the Romantic topos of congruence, or, in the terminology of the epoch, harmony. *Lamartine, ainsi qu’un travailleur obstiné, s’est attelé à son labeur et, comme fait un ouvrier besoigneux, debout dès l’aube—quelque rude que soit la saison— il écrit. †C’est le jet inesperé, l’extase alanguie, la citerne sous les palmiers, et l’espoir vermeil et ses milles amours, l’ange et la perle, la robe blanche des saules, ô la belle chose!

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THE SOCIAL MIMESIS OF HARMONY

The interdisciplinary construct of ‘‘les harmonies’’ in Romanticism represents a valorization of analogical thinking, not only in poetry, as the basis of metaphorical rhetoric, but in such diverse ﬁelds as economics, as in Bastiat’s Les Harmonies économiques (Economic harmonies), or even mathematics and theology, merged in Lacuria’s Les Harmonies de l’Etre exprimées par les nombres (The harmonies of the Divine Being expressed in numbers). The syncretist élan of the harmonies privileges unity on the scale of a kind of divine organicity. As Frank Paul Bowman notes, ‘‘the harmonious analogy reveals and makes real, materializes, the profound unity of divine creation.’’∞≥ This is reﬂected in ‘‘the recourse to organic metaphor, but also in the conception of an intimate relation between human beings, nature, and God’’ (126–27). This fusional epistemology of the harmonies creates a virtual cult of rhetoric and ﬁgures; according to Bowman, ‘‘the image was redeﬁned, the image serving not to illustrate and decorate, but to express the meaning inherent in the immanent, often doing so by a metaphor which becomes metamorphosis, where that metamorphosis creates a harmonious link between two realms of being’’ (154). Harmony deﬁnes the entire social ﬁeld as productively mimetic and tries to harness mimeticism for social and political activism. It is inspired by Revolutionary likeness, readapted to the neo-Catholic inspiration of Romanticism. Harmony was attributed a ﬁguratively political power to create new relationships, particularly class relationships; conversely, in the light of harmony, the political became ﬁguratively poetic. The political was seen as representative of the poetic, and vice versa. It is in the context of this recasting of social life as a mimetic sphere that early French sociology by writers like Fourier and Saint-Simon reﬂects an imperative toward the formation of new class interrelations, often through exchanges of socioeconomic subject positions. Saint-Simon urged, ‘‘One must . . . go through all the classes of society, placing oneself personally in the greatest number of di√erent social positions, and one must even create, for others and for oneself, relationships that have never existed.’’∞∂ The poet is in the vanguard of the transformative ranks in ﬁguratively forging the spaces for these new political, spiritual, social, and industrial interrelations: ‘‘In this enterprise, artists, men of imagination, will lead the

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march; . . . to reach their goals they will make use of all the modalities of the ﬁne arts, eloquence, poetry, painting, music; in a word, they will develop the poetics of the new system ’’ (131). For Saint-Simon, the socio-industrial ‘‘coup d’état’’ could only begin with a ‘‘poetic phase’’ (40) reﬂecting its social mimetic imperative and its mimetic arms. The harmonies bring social groups rather than individuals to the forefront as key players on the stage of culture, as exempliﬁed in the social ontology of Balzac’s ‘‘Avant-propos’’ to the Comédie humaine. This text begins with an analogy between the thinking of mystics such as Swedenborg and of natural historians such as Bu√on because both proclaim ‘‘the unity of composition,’’∞∑ a precept illustrated in the idea that ‘‘the animal vegetates like the plant.’’ In other words, according to Balzac, ‘‘there is only one animal.’’ Each organism pertains to it, di√erentiated not by essence but by the ‘‘the milieux in which it develops.’’ This organic environmentalism leads to the idea of the social species: ‘‘There will always exist social species, just as there are zoological species.’’ The novelist can therefore act as natural historian to ‘‘the di√erences between the soldier, the worker, the administrator, the lawyer, the idler, the scholar, the statesman, the sailor, the poet, the priest.’’ The harmonious imperative suggests an ambiguous democratization of literature: the writer must ﬁnd points in common, a shared ‘‘animality,’’ between the classes made di√erent by divine design (1:2). Likeness is the basic principle, with environment as the force of species individuation. But in reaching out to other ‘‘types’’ with the forgiving embrace of analogy, there is a risk that social di√erences will be confounded, either through an overarching humanism or through a rigid naturalization as ‘‘species.’’ The crucial social as well as poetic question for the harmonies is therefore, as Bowman puts it, ‘‘What are the modalities between unity and diversity?’’ (127). The balance of unity versus diversity runs like a fault line through the social domain of mimesis. The question of unity versus diversity in the theory of harmonies problematizes not only what can be represented, but also who can represent, and how. ‘‘The whole of the Romantic esthetic doctrine of inspiration,’’ as Bowman notes, ‘‘was recast in terms of the theory of harmonies’’ (154). In this aesthetic doctrine, ‘‘le sou∆e,’’ variously translatable as inspiration, breath, and voice, comes to function as a model of social agency.

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The trope of the revolutionary potency of poetic voice often dominates prefaces to collections of poetry by worker poets. In one such preface, Roget de Belloquet heralds the appearance of poetry among the working classes as evidence that ‘‘inspiration . . . knows no social distinctions.’’∞∏ He correspondingly depicts revolution itself as ‘‘a prodigious poetry, all in action’’ (iii). In another preface to a worker poet’s collection, Amable Tastu develops the trope of the ‘‘sou∆e’’ into that of an orchestra ﬁlled with the ‘‘harmonious’’ sounds of the di√erent ‘‘instruments’’ representing social classes: ‘‘Just as in some of Beethoven’s works the harmonious phrase runs through the entire orchestra, repeated by each instrument in turn, the gift of poetry runs through all the classes of society. . . . The creative role in poetry now belongs to the proletariat, the people; after the nobility, up until the seventeenth century, and then the magistrature and the upper classes, and then the middle classes, it is now the people’s turn.’’∞π Such tropes, conforming to the model of Bowman’s ‘‘metaphor becoming metamorphosis,’’ suggest the transformation of the poetic ‘‘sou∆e’’ into a source of social dynamism. The solipsistic individualism of Romantic lyric identity became transfused through the ﬁgure of the worker poet with social group identity. Simultaneously, an ethos of a greater underlying likeness as the transcendence of class di√erence began to replace the alienation that had been central to Romanticism as le mal du siècle. The social life of mimesis in the Romantic harmonies was so social as to be socialist. It was primed to take advantage of the post-Revolutionary sense of traumatic mimesis, by which I mean a utopian ﬁeld of likeness that had come to function instead as a social wound, by giving the wound its own socially utopian powers. LAMARTINE AND THE POWER OF PAIN

Of all the Romantic writers who were su≈ciently inspired by harmony to seek out and enable literary expression on the part of the ‘‘people,’’ Lamartine was not only the most inﬂuential but also the most representative of the social Romantic trajectory. Lamartine is, on the one hand, ﬁxed in the cultural imagination as the patriarch of a certain apostrophic melodrama, as in Barbara Johnson’s observation that ‘‘to be French is apparently to be able to raise one’s eyes heavenward and intone: ‘O Temps! Suspend ton vol.’ ’’∞∫

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On the other hand, a steady trickle of scholarship continues to document Lamartine’s historical prominence with regard to workers’ causes, abolitionism, cultural literacy projects, historiographical popularization of the French Revolution, and political reform in areas such as universal su√rage and the abolition of the death penalty. Articles with titles ranging from ‘‘Prenez et Lisez! Lamartine et le livre populaire’’ to ‘‘Lamartine et l’émancipation des noirs’’ are published regularly in journals ranging from Daedalus to Romantisme. Straddling this opposition between what Gautier called the literary ‘‘metaphysics of the heart’’∞Ω and the societal ambitions of his political career, Lamartine has utterly lost the panache that prompted Flaubert to worry on behalf of his protagonist in L’Éducation sentimentale that ‘‘historical characters are more interesting than ﬁctional characters, especially when the latter have moderate passions; people will be less interested in Frédéric than in Lamartine.’’≤≠ Lamartine, whose lifetime (1790–1869) ﬁts neatly into the turbulent space between the Revolution and the Commune, was a son of the rural ‘‘noblesse de robe.’’ His father was temporarily imprisoned during the Terror, and his family subsequently, like so many other royalist nobles, remained somewhat culturally disfranchised. Lamartine seemed destined ﬁrst for idleness and then for a minor military role in association with the French court when the publication in 1820 of his Méditations poétiques took the French literary scene by storm. A teenage Victor Hugo would pronounce, ‘‘You are one of those whom Plato would have wanted to shower with honors and banish from the republic,’’≤∞ but in fact Lamartine’s royalism put him in a very comfortable relationship to the powers of the time. Privileged diplomatic assignments to Italy soon followed. In June 1830, Lamartine published his Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, an inﬂuential collection that exempliﬁes the genesis and importance of the theory of the harmonies in French Romanticism. A month later, Lamartine’s diplomatic career came to end with the fall of the Restoration after the July revolution. In contrast to Chateaubriand, however, Lamartine’s a≈liation with the Bourbon regime in no way limited his political activities under the July Monarchy. The Harmonies show that Lamartine was already moving in the direction of democratic liberalism before Charles X was removed from power, and in 1831 he ran for election as a deputy to the National Assembly in the city of Bergues. He narrowly lost that election,

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but he succeeded in 1833, beginning one of the most astonishing political careers in French history. Between 1833 and 1840, in various elected positions, Lamartine problematized the existing party structure in the National Assembly, refusing to accept a≈liation. He founded his own antiparty, ‘‘le parti social,’’ the ﬁrst organized governmental voice for what would become socialism in France. By the early 1840s Lamartine had become a powerful oratorical opponent of the July Monarchy. Between his renown as an orator and then the stunning success of his Histoire des Girondins in 1847, in which he called for a Christianized reenactment of the Revolution, Lamartine had a key role in bringing about the February revolution in 1848. As a leader in the provisional revolutionary government, Lamartine had an active hand in such momentous acts as the legislation of universal male su√rage, the abolition of the death penalty, and the emancipation of slaves in the French colonies. As the utopian turbulence of the revolution degenerated into the politically polarized emergence of organized class conﬂict in France, Lamartine fell from power. Permanently politically marginalized, he was blamed for causing the revolution by those on the right, and for causing it to fail by those on the left. Throughout Lamartine’s literary oeuvre, the power of poetry is associated with—virtually deﬁned as—the power of pain. In his early, politically conservative work, that pain was framed as the ‘‘wounding’’ of inspiration. As he moved toward political liberalism, however, the pain of inspiration crossed and merged with the problem of class pain. In the poetics of Lamartine’s early work, any ‘‘harmonious’’ analogy between inspiration and social or political agency rests on negative rather than positive axes. The ‘‘sou∆e’’ is presented in terms of a quasi-generational conﬂict between the divine voice responsible for the animation of Creation in Genesis and the competing attempts of the mortal poet to gain a ‘‘voice.’’ In the Byronesque ‘‘Le Désespoir’’ (Despair), Lamartine justiﬁes Lautréamont’s later characterization of him as ‘‘the black swan of Romanticism’’ with a dark drama of the Creator’s disdain for his human ‘‘oeuvre’’: Lorsque du Créateur la parole féconde, Dans une heure fatale, eut enfanté le monde Des germes du chaos,

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De son oeuvre imparfaite il détourna sa face, Et d’un pied dédaigneux le lançant dans l’espace, Rentra dans son repos.≤≤ When God’s fecund word, / In a fatal hour, had birthed the world / From the seeds of chaos, / He turned his face away from his imperfect work, / And, launching it into space with a disdainful kick, / Returned to his rest. In this scenario, the world of the young poet is inscribed as an ancient production of God’s verbal powers. But God has abandoned his imperfect creation to ‘‘the evil’’ of an abdicated intentional fallacy, with the result that ‘‘Dès lors tout ce qui pense et tout ce qui respire / Commença de sou√rir’’ (21) (From then on everything that breathes and thinks / Began to su√er). Miraculously, this su√ering of sentient Creation obtains for man what God has refused to grant: voice, in the form of irrepressible ‘‘cris du sang, voix des morts, plaintes inextinguibles’’ (cries of blood, voices of the dead, inextinguishable complaints). This voice of pain is democratically distributed. It is the one thing possessed by all creatures: ‘‘la douleur donne à toute créature / Une voix pour gémir’’ (23) (Pain gives to all creatures / A voice with which to groan). Human pain is simultaneously in Promethean competition with and christological extension of the divine Logos, as suggested by Lamartine’s alternating references to Prometheus’s vulture and the cruciﬁxion of the Word made ﬂesh. In his poetic formulation of the universality of su√ering as the origin of voice, Lamartine showed a strong debt to Enlightenment theories of the politics of pain. The coincidence between pain and voice in the Méditations has an obvious, if unmarked, political potential: pain is ‘‘naturally’’ expressive, and so political ills could, logically, be self-expressive. These social dimensions of su√ering can be traced to the Enlightenment ‘‘discovery’’ of the relationship between body and society, notably in the construct of ‘‘natural law.’’ Natural law as a form of organicist politics is particularly viscerally represented in Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s ‘‘Discours préliminaire’’ to that great democratization of knowledge, the Encyclopédie. The ‘‘Preliminary Discourse’’ presents, in Robert Darnton’s terms, ‘‘a morphological picture of knowledge,’’ ‘‘an account of the genesis of knowl-

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edge within individual minds,’’ as well as ‘‘an account of its development in society.’’≤≥ In other words, it presents an epistemology embracing the problem of the relation of subjectivity to society. It is marked by an inversion of the conventional priority of external over internal forces in the constitution of culture. Not only is ‘‘ideation’’ the key to knowledge for d’Alembert, but ‘‘ideation’’ is produced by ‘‘sensation,’’ in what Ernst Cassirer describes as the ‘‘libidinal desire’’ to know external objects, the libido sciendi characteristic of the Enlightenment.≤∂ For d’Alembert, the ﬁrst thing taught by sensation is ‘‘the existence of external objects,’’ which includes, counterintuitively, ‘‘our own bodies.’’≤∑ Though sensation will go on to teach such complexities as the distinction between bodies and space, it begins with a pedagogy of vulnerability: ‘‘But hardly do we become aware of the existence of our body before we become aware of the attention it demands of us in warding o√ the dangers that surround it. Subject to endless needs, extremely sensitive to the action of external bodies, it would soon be destroyed were it not for the care we take in preserving it’’ (10). Consciousness of the need for self-preservation is made acute and chronic by the ever-renewed possibility of pain: ‘‘But such is the misfortune of the human condition that pain is our most lively sentiment.’’ The human being, forcibly motivated by the desire to avoid pain, begins a study of objects external to the body for those that are ‘‘useful or harmful to us, in order to seek out some and shun others.’’ The sentient being comes to recognize, in the process, other beings ‘‘whose forms are entirely like ours’’ and who seem to have the same basic sensations of susceptibility to pain. The universality of pain leads people to recognize a fundamental equality of sentience and stimulates them to join together, the better to sort out the forces of bodily conservation and destruction. This preservative and empathic union, d’Alembert proposes, necessarily requires ‘‘the invention of signs’’; and this, he concludes startlingly, is ‘‘the origin of the formation of societies, with which must have come the birth of languages’’ (11). By d’Alembert’s logic, pain not only ‘‘inhabits’’ but also constructs a social realm and its signs. ‘‘Natural law’’ is not a naturalization of any given legislative system but ‘‘the cry of Nature, resounding in all men’’ (12)—the voice of pain, the law of the formativity of hurt. Lamartine’s insistence that pain ‘‘makes man’’ in ‘‘Hymne à la douleur’’ (‘‘ô douleur! Tu fais l’homme’’) is just one way in which his work parallels

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d’Alembert’s theory of the primal role of pain. Pain leads inexorably from the individual to society for d’Alembert, however. By contrast, in his early work, Lamartine is only interested in exploiting the ﬁgurative capacities of the poetic rhetoric born of pain for one purpose: to give voice, make present, resuscitate, and unify what is silenced, lost, dead, fragmented. The genre of this gloriﬁed poetic agency is the elegy; its object, the feminine muse. THE GHOSTLY PLEBIAN MUSE

In ‘‘À Elvire,’’ the poet thematizes this poetic form, cautioning the muse, ‘‘Vois-tu comme tout change ou meurt dans la nature?’’ (Do you see how all things change or die in nature?). But then he jubilates, disconcertingly, ‘‘Tu peux, tu peux mourir!’’ (You can, you can die!). Why should Elvire feel free to expire when the death of any other thing in nature is presented tragically? Because ‘‘dans la postérité / Il lègue à ce qu’il aime une éternelle vie’’ (12) (in posterity, / he [the poet] gives the legacy of eternal life to what he loves). Johnson points out that the poetic death of Elvire actually precedes the death of the woman with whom she is most commonly identiﬁed, Julie Charles: ‘‘Lamartine anticipates Julie’s death in order to resurrect her voice as one that exists only in memory’’ (628). The pain-born ‘‘sou∆e’’ resuscitates a timeless poetic feminine; the poet breathes his elegiac ‘‘sou∆e’’ into the morbid body of woman, and in turn, from her dying kiss, as Marcel Bouteron enthused, ‘‘a poet is born.’’≤∏ If the poet is born from the dying kiss of a woman who is only ﬁctionally dead, the poet does not owe his voice to an actual woman but to the powers of his imagination; pain is so important to poetics that the beloved becomes an excuse for grief. In a covert sense, however, even this early elegiac mythology of Elvire does lead from the poetics of pain to the poetics of the social.≤π Johnson has discussed the fact that Julie Charles was an inﬂuential salon hostess who helped to ‘‘launch’’ Lamartine’s diplomatic and literary careers: ‘‘The Beloved woman was thus also an inﬂuence broker, although no trace of this role has accompanied her romantic legend’’ (630). Johnson also notes that ‘‘the poetic name ‘Elvire’ by which Julie has come to be known actually predates, in Lamartine’s writing, his acquaintance with her’’ (629). In fact, in her correspondence, Julie Charles grappled openly with her own uneasy relation to a preceding ﬁgure of Elvire. Marveling at her place in the geneal-

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ogy of a composite poetic personage, Charles writes uncannily, ‘‘Oh my Alphonse! Who will ever restore Elvire to you? Who was ever loved as she was? . . . That angelic woman will inspire me to my grave with a religious terror.’’*≤∫ Who was this pre-Julie Elvire? Charles queries, ‘‘Is it actually possible, Alphonse, that Elvire was an ordinary woman?’’ In fact, Elvire was modeled originally on a very ‘‘ordinary’’ woman, a Neapolitan servant girl, Mariantonia Iacomino, whom Lamartine had loved during a trip to Italy in 1812. This servant/mistress, who died in 1815, the year in which the ﬁrst Elvire poem was composed, is the original ﬁgure of the musa pedestris ≤Ω or plebeian muse in Lamartine’s work. She would later serve as the inspiration for what was Lamartine’s best-seller in his lifetime, the 1852 Graziella, and for Antoniella, as well as for the prototype of the ‘‘ouvrière’’ in the Nouvelles conﬁdences, not to mention the humble heroine in Jocelyn. While the public identiﬁcation of Elvire with Julie Charles seems unconnected to Lamartine’s later concern with the ouvrière, her earlier, private identiﬁcation with Mariantonia connects Lamartine’s elegiac pain to problems of social pain. But the poetics of pain in Lamartine’s early work seem to conspire to disguise referential speciﬁcity of social class for purposes of the narcissistic creation of the ﬁgure of the poet. The social abjection of the muse, like her death, might seem calculated to highlight the poet’s powers of poetic gloriﬁcation. But to explicitly deviate at this early point in Lamartine’s career from the socially unmarked characteristics of such archetypal muses as Petrarch’s Laura or Parny’s Eléonore would be to deviate from his own identiﬁcation with the great poets. Lamartine emphasizes this necessary parity in ‘‘Enfants trop négligés . . . ,’’ a poem about Parny written ten years before the publication of the Méditations poétiques: ‘‘Donnez-moi de sa voix l’accent mélodieux, / Mais surtout . . . une Eléonore!’’ (Give me the melodious accent of his voice, / But above all . . . an Eleanor!). By the time of the publication of the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses in 1830, Lamartine’s poetics of pain had shifted. In this collection he highlights pain not as something for the poet to overcome, as in the use of the elegy to *Oh, mon Alphonse! qui vous rendra jamais Elvire? qui fut aimée comme elle? . . . Cette femme angélique m’inspire jusque dans son tombeau une terreur religieuse.

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master loss, nor as the human cry competing for articulation with the sacrosadistic ‘‘parole’’ of God, but as the very principle of human animation. Pain is not only divine in origin; it is mimetic of the poetic process. PAIN AS THE MIMETIC EMBODIMENT OF POETRY

In Lamartine’s ‘‘Hymne à la douleur,’’ for instance, pain is portrayed as animating the human subject by vibrating the ‘‘ﬁbres sonores’’ (359) of his sentience. The poet’s ‘‘animation’’ of pain through personiﬁcation (‘‘tu’’) or apostrophe (‘‘ô douleur’’) cannot compete with his own animation by pain. As the initial giver of language, pain continuously stimulates ‘‘quelque cri plus profond et plus inespéré’’ (some more profound and more unhopedfor cry) and makes man, the human instrument, yield a ‘‘musique ravissante’’ (ravishing music). Pain also functions as the teacher of all knowledge: ‘‘Qui ne t’a pas connu ne sait rien d’ici-bas’’ (Whoever has not known you knows nothing of this life) (359–60). Although the potential social applicability of this paradigm of pain is undeﬁned, there is a virtually unlimited ‘‘harmony’’ between pain, speech, knowledge, and action. Lamartine’s paradigm of the creative agency of pain curiously contradicts Elaine Scarry’s powerful theory of the unmaking of language by pain. Scarry holds that physical pain ‘‘does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.’’≥≠ Furthermore, the resistance of pain to language is not ‘‘simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes, but essential to what it is’’ (5). Whereas Scarry argues that language cannot coexist with pain, Lamartine raises the question of whether language can in fact exist without pain; pain, for Lamartine, creates language. What Scarry describes as the nonlinguistic vocalization caused by pain, akin to the ‘‘sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned,’’ is for Lamartine exemplary of what language is (a cry of distress) and why it is acquired (to cry in distress). Prelinguistic ‘‘language’’ for Lamartine is therefore conterminous with language in a more developed sense. Language is used to represent the self, but nothing represents the self more than the nonlinguistic cry of su√ering. (The importance of this Romantic theory of language is also evident in the critical reception of the work of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, where

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the term ‘‘cris’’ is conventionally used by nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury critics as a substitute for the term ‘‘vers.’’) Lamartine’s and Scarry’s semiotics of pain do share an underlying epistemology, however, in that neither neglects the interest that the destruction of language by pain sheds on its construction. Scarry writes, ‘‘To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself ’’ (6). Indeed, ‘‘Whatever pain achieves,’’ according to Scarry, ‘‘it achieves through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language’’ (4). The notion that pain ‘‘achieves’’ something suggests that it has an important role as a philosophical catalyst. Lamartine similarly feels that the unsharable aspects—deﬁned as the most painful aspects—of human experience have the greatest expressive potential and therefore the greatest potential for sharing. The earliest of Lamartine’s ‘‘poèmes épîtres’’ from this period in which he identiﬁes pain as his cult—‘‘Mon culte est l’agonie’’ (‘‘Gethsémani’’)—are remarkable for their valorization of the undoing of language. In the 1829 ‘‘À Mlle Delphine Gay,’’ for instance, addressed to the woman poet and journalist who would write the Ouvriers de Lyon in 1831, Lamartine privileges the writer solely for the grief that destroys her voice. She is a ‘‘victim’’ of genius: ‘‘je te vis, jeune et belle victime / Qu’un génie éclatant choisit pour ton malheur’’ (I saw you, the young and beautiful victim / Of a brilliant genius which chose you, to your own misfortune). The only poetry produced by this victim is an ‘‘a lovelorn lament’’ sung to the tiny cadaver of her nephew. This grief has stripped the lovely Delphine of her ‘‘crown’’ and ‘‘lyre’’: ‘‘Without a crown and without a lyre, and bending your face / Over a bed of pain!’’ But the same words which ‘‘pain teaches to whoever is able to feel,’’ and which ‘‘the most humble woman expresses the best,’’ stimulate Delphine to sigh, ‘‘ ‘Oh! périsse la lyre!’ ’’ (Oh! Perish the lyre!) (523–24). The silencing of poetry more than competes with the productions of the lyre; it mimics the birth-through-death of language. This same structure organizes the 1831 poem ‘‘À Mme DesbordesValmore’’ even more explicitly, and this time it connects the problematic of pain and language to social positioning. The poem was written under the

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mistaken apprehension that this poetic peer well known for her various misfortunes had addressed her poem ‘‘A. de L.’’ to him (it was actually dedicated to the Lyonnais poet Aimé de Loy). Lamartine in this poem uses the problematic of the voice of ‘‘misère’’ as a descriptive device for the pain of the economic hardship of Desbordes-Valmore’s childhood, when for a time the poet’s mother sustained the family with her weaving. The poet attaches himself to the fortune of a wind-tossed ski√ in which DesbordesValmore travails with an industrious family, ﬁghting o√ disaster with an exaggerated vocabulary of labor: Debout, le père de la famille Labourait les ﬂots divisés, Le ﬁls manoeuvrait, et la ﬁlle Recousait avec son aiguille La voile ou les ﬁlets usés.

(525)

Upright, the father of the family / Labored the divided seas, / The son worked with his hands, and the daughter / Repaired with her needle the sail or the worn-out nets. This scenario of material ‘‘malheur’’ is recuperated for the overarching project of depicting the production of voice by pain: Ainsi le coeur n’a de murmures Que brisé sous les pieds du sort: L’âme chante dans les tortures, Et chacune de ses blessures Lui donne un plus sublime accord.

(527)

Thus the heart makes no murmurs / Except for when it is broken under the feet of fate: / The soul sings in its tortures, / And each one of its wounds / Gives it a more sublime harmony. Desbordes-Valmore’s eloquent wounds manifest the mystery of poetry: pain is ‘‘the mystery of the poet.’’ Lamartine goes on to make a parable out of this mystery in a scene in which the ‘‘the lute maker who creates a voice’’ hurls his instrument to the ground, breaking it underfoot and shattering it like glass. He then

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reassembles it, ‘‘rajustant les fragments meurtris’’ (readjusting these damaged fragments), and coaxes a new music from his broken lyre, ‘‘plus sonore dans ses débris!’’ (more sonorous broken than whole!) (527). DesbordesValmore’s poetry is literally, in Lamartine’s metaphor, made of its own unmaking. It is a construction of the fragmentation of instrumentality, of the violence of creation. This evocative Lamartinian theory of the poetic clearly has perilous applications to the domain of the social. Reinforced by its mainly metaphorical vocabulary of the travails of the ‘‘ouvrière,’’ the poem exhibits a disturbing congruence between the inspirational and social models of pain. Traumatic mimesis as the wound of a failed Revolutionary likeness was merging with mimetic trauma, in which the su√ering of the other was exploited for poetic gain. ‘‘À Mme Desbordes-Valmore’’ implies that if the making of language is only observable in the context of its unmaking, then the poem and the person who is silenced in relation to culture—a characteristic of the ‘‘ouvrier’’ implicit in Ragon’s ‘‘pleonasm’’ of the bourgeois writer—share the same drama of the vulnerability of linguistic agency. The su√ering social being and the poem of su√ering share the same object status. Lamartine’s gloriﬁcation of inspirational pain continuously risks functioning as a gloriﬁcation, rather than a critique, of social pain, however. Pain has the ultimate power of expression, but what it expresses is the glory of poetic language. In the poems of his early attempts to attach pain to existing women writers, is Lamartine practicing an exploitation of social distress for a bourgeois model of inspiration in which, as articulated in Musset’s ‘‘La Nuit de mai,’’ ‘‘Rien ne nous rend si grands qu’une grande douleur’’≥∞ (Nothing makes us as great as a great sorrow)? Lamartine’s poetics from the early years of the July Monarchy romanticize social problems in the larger project of an aestheticization of pain. As such they exemplify the political risk Scarry perceives in any attempt to use the ‘‘unmaking’’ quality of pain for purposes of ‘‘making.’’ As Scarry notes of her discussion of the di≈culty of expressing pain, ‘‘at every moment lingering nearby was another subject, the political complications that arise as a result of that di≈culty’’ (11). What could challenge both language and politics more than speaking for the pain of the other? The temptation to accept such a challenge is calibrated to its di≈culty:

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Because the person in pain is ordinarily so bereft of the resources of speech, it is not surprising that the language for pain should sometimes be brought into being by those who are not themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are. Though there are very great impediments to expressing another’s sentient distress, so there are very great reasons why one might want to do so, and thus there come to be avenues by which this most radically private of experiences begins to enter the realm of public discourse. (6)

The challenges to the sharing of language-resistant pain include the inability of cultural production to be mimetic of pain without fundamentally transforming it. If, as Scarry asserts, the nature of pain is so unsharable that ‘‘to have pain is to have certainty, to hear about pain is to have doubt’’ (13), then to speak for another’s pain would risk transforming it from unshared certainty to shared doubt. Worse, there is ‘‘the danger that because artists so successfully express su√ering, they themselves collectively come to be thought of as the most authentic class of su√erers, and thus may inadvertently appropriate concern away from others in radical need of assistance’’ (11). There is also the potential for the reproduction of pain to overlap with its inﬂiction: ‘‘The verbal sign is so inherently unstable that . . . the language of agency has on the one hand a radically benign potential and on the other a radically sadistic one’’ (13). Yet, in Lamartine’s case, we will see that the political complications of his poetics of inspirational pain are coincidentally expressive of the worker’s mutilated cultural agency. Scarry, drawing on the writings of Marx, uses the paradigm of the worker’s lack of rights and ownership with regard to industrial production as an illustration of the peculiar shattering of agency and object relations brought about by pain: ‘‘The nineteenth-century British factory world is one in which work is described as approaching the condition of pain, not only in the extensive writings of Marx but in the British parliamentary bluebooks on which he relied so heavily. The proximity of work to pain is here speciﬁcally attributed to the massive hunger, sores, disease, airlessness, and exhaustion su√ered by the industrial population, but these conditions are in turn attributed to the more fundamental shattering of the essential integrity of act-and-object in the human psyche; for the body at work was separated from the objects of its work’’ (170). The industrial relation of ruptured sovereignty between the maker and what is made parallels the poetic exploitation of the unmaking of language by pain for purposes of linguistic making.

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USEFUL ART, USELESS SUFFERING

The mimetic relationship between pain and poverty is present in the synonymous linguistic relationship between ‘‘misère’’ as poverty and ‘‘misère’’ as pain; both are a kind of wretchedness, from the Latin miser, ‘‘wretched.’’ The wretchedness of poverty manifests itself in the same passivity that the philosopher Émmanuel Lévinas theorizes as fundamental to pain. ‘‘The least one can say about su√ering is that in its own phenomenality, intrinsically, it is useless, ‘for nothing.’ ’’ It is precisely the uselessness of su√ering that stimulates empathic and curative ambitions in the beholder: ‘‘the fundamental ethical problem which pain poses ‘for nothing’: the inevitable and preemptory ethical problem of the medication which is my duty.’’≥≤ Social Romanticism exempliﬁed the ideal of redeeming useless su√ering by making it into useful art. Su√ering was made ‘‘useful’’ in Romantic art in several ways, one of which was the mechanism of mimetic appropriation. Romantic poets sometimes ‘‘borrowed’’ the metaphorical wounds of the poor to enhance their own poetic and political agency. This borrowing e√ectively merged what René Girard has since theorized in terms of three distinct tropes: mimetic desire, mimetic appropriation, and the association between violence and the sacred. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf summarize Girard’s conception of ‘‘the mimetic structure of consciousness’’ as something that ‘‘constrains people to act according to models.’’≥≥ Slaves to models, people are stimulated to act on the basis of ‘‘ ‘acquisitive mimesis’ (mimésis d’appropriation ),’’ in which goals are desired because they are desired by someone else. The attempt to appropriate what has been modeled by the Other’s desire frequently leads to violence. Models of the sacred in turn work toward the ‘‘amelioration’’ of this common mimetic violence by establishing a ‘‘scapegoat’’ for purposes of ‘‘order-establishing violence.’’ But although ‘‘the goal of religion is to prevent the occurrence of violence,’’ it has the ‘‘congenital defect of having arisen through the sacriﬁce of an innocent victim and being permeated by ambivalent violence’’ (259). The Romantic appropriation of the wounds of the worker poet’s misère present a kind of circular mise en abyme of Girard’s theories. Romantic poets search for models of redemptive religious violence in ordinary social life, and then they act to appropriate them, to create new mimetic models of violence. A particularly perverse

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element of this appropriation is that it makes a cult not of the Other’s desire but of the Other’s lack. This is because the association of violence with the sacred has created a desirable model of lack: ‘‘wounds’’ are good, as evidenced by the fact the scapegoat’s su√ering is endlessly gloriﬁed in the mimetic arena of art. Thus the development in the July Monarchy of ‘‘l’ouvriérisme romantique’’ (Ragon, 123) is driven by fascination with the post-Revolutionary historical revelation of what Chateaubriand called ‘‘the secret wound eating away at the social order’’: ‘‘the secret wound that has been eating away at the social order since the beginning of the world, the wound that is the cause of all malaise and all popular agitations. The too-great inequality of conditions and fortunes was tolerated as long as it was hidden on the one hand by ignorance and on the other hand by the factitious organization of the state; but as soon as this inequality was generally perceived, it delivered a mortal blow.’’≥∂ Lamartine, in his political career as a deputy for Bergues starting in 1833, was inspired to draft a legislative program of ‘‘wounding’’ and ‘‘healing’’ in order to make this ‘‘coup mortel’’ palpable, and therefore treatable. From his own gradual metamorphosis from the allegiance with constitutional monarchism to an ambiguously radical liberalism informed by ‘‘the social question, particularly the problems of urban poverty,’’ Lamartine had shaped the determination to maintain what he called an ‘‘enigmatic independence’’≥∑ in the chamber. Enigmatic independence required antagonism toward all static polarities; Lamartine explained that he would have to ‘‘wound deeply’’ the existing political parties (‘‘j’ai à les blesser profondément’’).≥∏ In his own turn he would then have to bear the honorable ‘‘scars’’ of the ‘‘volleys of injury’’ from these parties. In a letter to his friend the comte de Virieu in 1834, he likewise says that he is forced to engage in political wounding: ‘‘I must wound everything and alienate everything from me.’’ He is poised, utterly alone, on a gaping political ‘‘breach’’: ‘‘Je n’ai que moi avec moi sur la brèche’’ (In this breach, I have only myself with me) (2:8). Lamartine’s political ‘‘brèche’’ is a position from which to inﬂict political wounds so as to heal social wounds. He complains about ‘‘les misérables qui assiègent ma porte de poète et de député’’ (the poor people who stake out my door as a poet and a deputy) (2:18). But he also explains his views on public instruction with the fervor of the apostle Thomas: ‘‘We are the ﬁrst

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ones to put our ﬁnger on this open wound and we will know how to cure it; it concerns popular education in its political rapports’’ (2:42). Lamartine’s political breach is inscribed in the body politic itself, which should, he says in his 1834 essay ‘‘Des Destinées de la poésie,’’ ‘‘incarnate’’ the fusion of poetic ideation and political action: ‘‘Poetry is the idea; politics are the act; . . . this ideal must be incarnated . . . in social institutions.’’≥π Since Lamartine’s political activity was predicated on poetic ideas, it is not surprising that his inspirational wounds had found mimetic incarnations in the public arena. There were also multiple cultural inﬂuences on his ideology of political wounding and healing. These included the popularization of Saint-Simonianism, the socialist, feminist, and messianic cult that Lamartine described as an ‘‘heureux symptôme,’’≥∫ and his 1831 service in the National Guard during a popular insurrection in Lyon. The Lyon insurrection prompted him to write, in ‘‘Les Révolutions,’’ ‘‘Et chaque vérité nouvelle ici-bàs saigne / Du sang d’un prophète ou d’un Dieu’’ (511) (And each new truth here below bleeds / With the blood of a prophet or a God). Such ‘‘harmony’’ between political and religious revolution, according to Bowman, had in fact taken on the status of an ‘‘idée reçue’’≥Ω between 1830 and 1848 and was intricately imbricated in all the varying manifestations of pre-Marxist socialism. Lamartine wrote to the count of Carné in 1835 that the e√ect produced by ‘‘le socialisme ’’ (‘‘socialism’’ here denoting Lamartine’s founding of the ‘‘parti social’’) ‘‘is immense and popular.’’∂≠ All political poetry would therefore also have to be popular, populist (1:81). This poetry geared to the people would more than complement politics; it would be a powerful form of agency itself: ‘‘The word is the only form of agency for these times’’ (1:319).* It was very much as a politician as well as a poet, therefore, that Lamartine assumed a role as mentor, in an important sense, to Jean Reboul, Antoinette Quarré, Reine Garde, and Augustine Blanchecotte, as well as, less prominently, to numerous other ‘‘ouvriers poètes.’’ Lamartine, in an 1836 letter of poetic advocacy to his publisher Charles Gosselin, which would later be published in the baker Jean Reboul’s (1796– 1864) Poésies, précédées d’une préface par M. Alexandre Dumas et d’une lettre à l’éditeur par M. Alph. de Lamartine, heralds the emergence of the worker’s *La parole est le seul agent d’action pour ce temps-ci.

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‘‘parole’’ as the sign of a utopic ‘‘république des intelligences’’ (republic of intelligences). In this republic, disparities between ‘‘low’’ social class and ‘‘high’’ art are fused into a poetic democratic mean: Like the public and before the public, I was struck by this disparity between the man and the art, the social position and the noble exercise of the highest poetic faculties. I saw, furthermore, one of the ﬁrst symptoms of this beautiful social phenomenon that politics and custom are bringing about in the world; . . . The equality of intelligences . . . raising the general level, confusing classes, making those who live on the same daily bread also live on the same intellectual bread, and bringing about in the domain of thought this republic of intelligences, . . . where the only dictatorship is that of genius. And I am overjoyed.*∂∞

Reboul’s employment as a baker widely inaugurates the metaphor of a new cultural breaking of bread through society’s consumption of an ‘‘intellectual bread’’ conterminous with its ‘‘daily bread’’—and leavened by the public valorization, as a kind of sustenance, of the worker’s pain. THE REPUBLIC OF PAIN

Unlike the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters, the nineteenth-century ‘‘republic of intelligences’’ is consistently theorized as a republic of pain, one in which Lamartine’s ability to make pain heard constitutes the only system of ‘‘political’’ representation. In an early poem dedicated to Reboul, the 1829 ‘‘Le Génie dans l’obscurité,’’ Lamartine emphasizes that the miracle of the ‘‘poésie de la misère’’ lies in the oxymoronic ‘‘glory in obscurity’’ (423), the paradox of the voice that no one hears. This inaudible voice will be ‘‘awakened’’ by Lamartine, who, as the author of the Harmonies, plays the role of the ‘‘angel of harmony,’’ the im*Comme le public et avant le public, je fus frappé de cette disparité entre l’homme et l’art, entre la position sociale et le noble exercice des plus hautes facultés de la poésie. J’y entrevis de plus un des premiers symptômes de ce beau phénomène social que la politique et les moeurs commencent à opérer dans le monde; . . . L’égalité des intelligences . . . élevant le niveau commun, confondant les classes, faisant vivre du même pain intellectuel tous ceux qui vivent du même pain du jour, et réalisant dans le domaine de la pensée cette république des intelligences . . . où la dictature n’est que du Génie; et je me réjouis.

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plicit inscriber of sacred poetic wounds on the thigh of the sleeping worker: ‘‘Ne t’étonne donc pas qu’un ange d’harmonie / Vienne d’en haut te réveiller, / Souviens-toi de Jacob!’’ (Don’t be surprised if an angel of harmony / Comes from on high to wake you up, / Remember Jacob!). Su√ering ﬂesh is likewise the homophonic ‘‘pulpit’’ (‘‘chair’’ or ﬂesh / ‘‘chaire’’ or pulpit) ‘‘from which to speak’’ in a variant stanza of another poem by Lamartine in the Harmonies, ‘‘Aux Chrétiens dans les temps d’épreuves’’ (To the Christians in the times of trials). Here the poet urges, ‘‘Redescendez du monde et montez au calvaire! / Héritiers d’une croix, voilà, voilà la chaire / D’où vous deviez parler’’ (Come down from the world and step up to Calvary! / Inheritors of the cross, here, here is the pulpit / From which you should speak) (1844). Not surprisingly, then, Reboul’s 1830 ‘‘Réponse à M. de Lamartine’’ shows him inspired to poetic ‘‘sacriﬁce’’ by Lamartine’s encouragements: ‘‘C’est toi qui, faisant naître dans mon âme ravie / Cet espoir de laisser un noble souvenir / Me fais sacriﬁer chaque jour de ma vie / Sur les autels de l’avenir!’’∂≤ (It is you who, awakening in my ravished soul / This hope of leaving a noble memory / Cause me to sacriﬁce every day of my life / To the altars of the future!). The writing of poetry equals self-sacriﬁce when ‘‘the ﬂesh / pulpit from which you should speak’’ is the Romantic social institution of the—metaphorical—body in pain. Lamartine publishes his ﬁrst poem to a woman worker poet, the linen worker Antoinette Quarré (1813–47) from Dijon, in 1842, the year of his decisive political swing to the left. Biographical accounts of Quarré tend to contextualize her primarily as an example of what Lamartine’s approval could signify for the intellectual future of the working classes. The Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français says, ‘‘She wrote poems that earned her the praises of Lamartine and thus contributed to drawing attention to the possibilities of worker milieux.’’∂≥ Early in her career she had won third place in a contest held by the Académie de Versailles for a poem commemorating the death of Princess Marie, and this juxtaposition of social personae of antipodal ranks, the author as worker and the subject as royalty, was obviously considered of greater interest than the poem itself. The Biographie universelle speaks of the contest in terms of the ‘‘noble princess whom nature had made an artist like the poor seamstress.’’∂∂ Quarré herself, in the ‘‘Avant-propos’’ to her 1843 Poésies, presents her engagement

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with poetry as a question of learning to speak a Lamartinian language: ‘‘Chance led me to open a volume of those celebrated poetic meditations, . . . It seemed to me that a new world revealed itself to my thought, and I abandoned myself with delight to the intoxication of this reading, which completed, in some sense, my intellectual existence. This precious book never left me again, and by dint of rereading it, I soon learned all the pages. This is how, accustomed to this harmonious language of verse, I naturally came to speak it myself.’’∂∑ Roget de Belloquet, in his preface, further develops the myth of this inﬂuence by suggesting that the language of the Méditations poétiques had a simultaneously didactic and healing power: ‘‘She felt the need to speak in her turn this melodious language that seemed to have secrets for calming her su√ering, and the rhymes, creating themselves, fell from her lips e√ortlessly and almost without her knowledge’’ (vi). In his ‘‘A Une Jeune Fille poète’’ (To a young woman poet), reprinted in Quarré’s Poésies, Lamartine reveals a fascination with the paradox of the poet with no public role, the voice with no audience: ‘‘Nul ne verra briller cette étoile nocturne! / Nul n’entendra chanter ce muet rossignol?’’ (No one will see this nocturnal star shine! / No one will hear this mute nightingale sing?). Quarré’s poverty and obscurity make her poetry a form of lyrical solipsism, produced and received by the heart. The fruits of this unconsumed production will be reserved for God’s altar, in a sacriﬁce of verse: ‘‘Non, Dieu ne brise pas sous ses fruits immortels / L’arbre dont le génie a fait courber la tige, / Ce qu’oublia le temps, ce que l’homme néglige, / Il le réserve à ses autels!’’ (No, God doesn’t break under the weight of his immortal fruits / The tree whose stem is bent by genius, / What time has forgotten, what man neglects, / God reserves for his altars!). Quarré’s poetry is represented as so culturally silenced that Lamartine does not even bother to depict the act of writing in his ‘‘epistle’’—the young woman’s distress simply signiﬁes, producing meaning the way ‘‘blood’’ oozes from a tree after the blow by an ax: ‘‘Comme l’arbre d’encens que le fer a fendu / Verse en baume odorant le sang de sa blessure!’’ (As the incense tree, split by the axe / Lets ﬂow in a scented balm the blood of its wound!).∂∏ Such images of passive, bodily su√ering underscore the importance of the woman worker poet in transforming what Bowman calls in Le Christ romantique ‘‘the classical invocation of the Muse’’ into a Christianized ‘‘appeal to the precious Blood’’ (84). The power of the metaphor of divine

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sacriﬁce as an act addressed to both the expression and the redemption or curing of social ‘‘wounds’’ makes the image of blood disturbingly ubiquitous in the era of social Romanticism. Bowman notes, ‘‘Religious blood circulates in the Romantic era; it ﬂows, spurts, bursts, runs down the surface of the skin of the stigmatized, comes out pulsating from the Sacred Heart. It circulates also in another and deeper sense: religious blood, a salutary element of Christian caritas, is infused in erotic discourse, in poetry and the novel, and in medical and political discourse.’’∂π The circulation of this ‘‘liquid’’ metaphor is surprisingly stable and repetitive in the interactions between Lamartine and the worker poets. Lamartine is a wounding and healing angel; the worker poets are wounded but heal through the redemptive nature of their sacriﬁce. The worker poets absorb and ooze in their turn the Lamartinian language of social wounds. The concordance between inspirational and social wounds performed by Lamartine and the worker poets in this schema leaves it unclear whether social wounds should actually be ‘‘healed’’ or whether they should be preserved and even re-inﬂicted for their expressive potential. The usefulness of social wounds is such that their healing would seem to dry up a poeticopolitical source. The power of pain to galvanize understanding forces the hand of society. The power of the worker poet to plead in ideological terms for the necessity of change pales, in the Romanticization of social pain, next to the naturally poetic resonance of the worker poet’s su√ering. The only description that suggests poetic or political agency on Quarré’s part comes in the subtly mingled metaphors of poetry and public sphere in the trope of the ‘‘urne,’’ not just a vase but the traditional French version of the ballot box: ‘‘Car l’urne de la gloire et de la poésie / Ne se remplit que de nos pleurs!’’∂∫ (For the urn [or ballot box] of glory and poetry / Is only ﬁlled by our tears!). The poetry of su√ering is here, for Quarré as for Lamartine, a form of political su√rage. In Quarré’s own poetic response to Lamartine, she speaks, like Reboul, of having made her sentience into an altar. At times she consciously echoes Lamartine’s vocabulary in his poem to Reboul, taking comfort in her ‘‘obscure asylum’’ so far from the ‘‘the pomp . . . of the city’’ (240). In stanzas addressed to Christ, Quarré expresses faith that her social su√ering makes her one of the chosen: ‘‘ ‘Come to me, he says, you the forgotten of the

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earth’ ’’ (239). This casts Lamartine’s poetic mentorship in an explicitly Christlike light. It is important to keep in mind that despite the ghoulishness of the lyricization of class injustice, Lamartine’s concept of a poetic / political su√ering / su√rage leading to revolution was commonly held to be nothing less than revolutionary. This is spelled out as well in Belloquet’s preface to Quarré’s work, in which he claims that ‘‘Our poetry, this proud patrician from Rome or Athens, formerly so disdainful of the people, is now, like all of us, obeying the irresistible momentum carrying us toward democracy’’ (iv). This conﬁdence in the revolutionary nature of the poetic exhibition of the worker’s wounds is further developed in the documents of Lamartine’s second major engagement with a woman worker’s literary aspirations. The preface to Lamartine’s 1851 Geneviève: Histoire d’une servante, recounts the author’s encounter, during the summer of 1846 in Marseille, with Reine Garde (1810–87), ‘‘Couturière et servante à Aix-en-Provence’’ (Seamstress and servant in Aix-en-Provence). The encounter serves for Lamartine as an allegory of his own immersion in the idea of revolution. He recounts, ‘‘I was writing the history of a revolution [The History of the Girondins ] without suspecting that another revolution was already looking over my shoulder to grab the barely ﬁnished pages from my hand, and to put in its place another drama of France, not under my pen, but in my hand.’’∂Ω Who better than a would-be woman worker poet to concretize this fateful impulsion toward revolution? The very metaphoricity of the landscape presages the signiﬁcance of Lamartine’s encounter with Reine Garde; his summer villa is in the shadow of ‘‘Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde.’’ Geneviève thus begins with a series of parallelisms: Garde-Garde, and revolutionrevolution; in each case, one is historical, monumental, and the other is real, ‘‘dans la main.’’ These revolutionary analogies yield for Lamartine the concept of a literary revolution, ‘‘the era of popular literature’’ (44), marked by journalistic publication of the ‘‘popular narrative.’’ This idea would lead to his founding of Le Conseiller du peuple (The counselor of the people) in 1849, a collection of political essays on democracy and popular narratives, in which Geneviève was published, and which would end abruptly with Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état in December 1851. This would be followed by another populist publication, the monthly Cours familier de littérature (Popular literature course),

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which began in 1856 and continued until Lamartine’s death in 1869; the famous provençal poet Mistral was ﬁrst published in the Cours familier. (The terms of Lamartine’s praiseful introduction of Mistral read like an ampliﬁcation, or a parody, or the terms of his poem to Reboul.)∑≠ Other publications addressed to the working classes included the serial Civilisateur, 1852–54, and the 1854 Lamartinian anthology Lectures pour tous. As told in Geneviève, the conception of these organs of cultural literacy was based on Lamartine’s observation, in the course of his conversation with Garde, of the cultural breach between popular and elite thinking. Garde’s unpublished poetry represented for Lamartine the inability of the working classes to ‘‘own’’ higher thought, given the deﬁcit of a literary tradition addressed to and accessible to the poor: ‘‘Now this intelligence, this perfected, delicate, and capricious taste cultivated in the upper classes; this language, these manners, couldn’t be yours, you, the poor people’’ (30). Lamartine makes Garde’s poetry an example of what one might call the ‘‘poverty of the poetry of poverty.’’ He describes her poetry in the grossly condescending terms that haunt this text and indeed his entire project of a literature by, about, or to the people:∑∞ ‘‘It was the poetry of a ﬁrst instinct, popular poetry as it is wherever it begins among the people, even when one does not yet lend it the voice of art’’ (21). He tells her that in her case, ‘‘I was far from counseling her to print yet another collection of poetry.’’ The strength of her verses was not poetic but spontaneous and contextual: ‘‘Like some waters, they were only good to drink at the source’’ (22). Garde concurs with Lamartine’s harsh assessment, agreeing that her poetry functions simply as a sort of lyrical cogito, the proof that she exists: ‘‘Quand on vit seule comme moi dans sa chambre, on a quelquefois besoin de se parler tout haut pour se convaincre qu’on vit’’ (21) (When one lives alone like me in a room, one sometimes needs to hear oneself speak out loud to convince oneself that one lives). In 1851, Garde did nevertheless publish a volume of poetry, a collection that includes, along with poems of by now ritualistically rank ﬂattery to Lamartine and his wife, a poem called ‘‘L’ouvrière-poète—À Mlle Césarie Bontoux, ouvrière en modes, à Marseille’’ (The woman worker poet—to Miss Césarie Bontoux, fashion worker, in Marseille). In this poem, written in response to Bontoux’s own poem ‘‘L’ouvrière’’ (The woman worker), Garde stresses that, in relation to a world that holds the worker to be nonsentient, only another worker poet can sound the depths of her ‘‘misère’’:

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Car je suis ouvrière et comprends ses douleurs. Oui, bien loin d’adoucir son existence amère, Nul mortel jusqu’ici n’a sondé sa misère. On la croit insensible, elle sent vivement.∑≤ For I am a worker and I understand her su√ering. / Yes, far from sweetening her bitter existence, / No mortal till now has plumbed the depths of her misery. / They believe that she has no feelings, but she feels acutely. Lamartine’s exploitation of the worker’s su√ering, for all its sensational images, remains compatible with this notion of a class misery comprehensible only to those of the same class in the context of a larger world which deanimates, de-personiﬁes the worker. The public refusal to grant subjectivity to the worker parallels, for Garde, the concrete social oppression through which the worker cannot ‘‘a√ord’’ to be a poet. Her industrial production or ‘‘making’’ literally prevents her from that ‘‘making’’ which is really the poetic account of the ‘‘unmaking’’ of her language through pain. The muse may come and perch at her hearth, Garde says, but she must be ignored by day in the interest of the making of objects, emphasized by italics in the poem, that will keep her and Bontoux from the early deaths of other worker poets such as Hégisippe Moreau: ‘‘Laissons-la, mais faisons du matin jusqu’au soir / Toi des chapeaux, moi des corsets, des chemises ’’ (42) (Let us leave her now, but let us make from morning till night, / You the hats, me the corsets, the shirts ). In the 1846 conversation between Garde and Lamartine, she asked questions about the accessibility of literature to workers: ‘‘When will there ever be a publishing series for poor people? Who will ever give us the charity of a book?’’ (Geneviève, 32). These questions are crucial to Lamartine’s manifesto of popular literature. He predicts, ‘‘Within ten years, if the new institutions are not eclipsed . . . , you will have a book industry for the people, science for the people, journalism for the people, philosophy, poetry, history, and novels for the people’’ (44). This in turn informs his political manifesto of a ‘‘government of thought’’ led by poets: ‘‘The popular journal thus conceived would be the code of this government . . . the top writers of the century would be the prime ministers’’ (68–69).

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THE POLITICAL FAILURE OF REVOLUTIONARY POETRY

These speculations catalyzed by the encounter with the woman worker poet turn out—not surprisingly, given the beneﬁts of the hindsight with which the 1851 preface is written—to be prophetic. Not long after the episode with Reine Garde, Lamartine did of course come to hold extraordinary power in government. Lamartine’s presence dominates descriptions of the unfolding of the revolution in many newspaper accounts. The front page of the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires from February 25, 1848, recounts that King Louis-Philippe had barely had time to escape Paris before the royal residence was plundered, with furniture hurled from the windows, the wine cellars and storage rooms emptied, and carriages burned in the courtyards. In the meantime, in the Tribunal, Odilon Barrot was arguing that the people wanted a regency by the duchess of Orléans. While he spoke, the room and the corridors ﬁlled with armed citizens from the crowd outside. They took the stage and interrupted the orations by energetically ‘‘waving ﬂags over the head of M. de Lamartine.’’ After this symbolic performance of the people’s choice, the duchess lost her ‘‘sangfroid’’ for the ﬁrst time and had to leave the scene. Lamartine and the other members of the provisional government then left to take charge of the Hôtel-de-ville, ‘‘carried in triumph’’ on the shoulders of the crowd. Little wonder that Lamartine, on the fourth of March, 1848, described the February Revolution as the ‘‘most sublime poetry’’: ‘‘What are we doing, Sirs, what is our country doing today, if not the most sublime poetry!’’ (cited in Fortescue, 151). The government seemed almost to be a poetry authored by him as a politician; Sainte-Beuve referred to his orations as the political version of the sirens’s song, while Sarrans hailed his exercise of ‘‘poetic sovereignty’’ (186–87). E√ectively the leader of the provisional government at the beginning of the revolution, on April 23 Lamartine was elected to the ministry with 1,283,501 votes from ten departments. But by the May 15 his power had crumbled; the reign of the ‘‘word’’ over the ‘‘crowd’’ came to an unscripted conclusion. The violent repressions of June 1848 and the subsequent rise of Louis-Napoléon III left little doubt that ‘‘poetic sovereignty’’ had been supplanted. The failure of Lamartine’s political interventions in 1848 has been variously linked to foreign policy mistakes based in part on conciliatory ap-

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proaches to royalist diplomacy (208–9), an insistence on integrating the radical Ledru-Rollin into a more moderate government (187), the poet’s own notorious and inescapably elitist vanity (174), the acute concern among commercial sectors about the abolition of slavery in the colonies, which Lamartine had helped to bring about (170), and proletarian rage at the failure of the ‘‘National Workshops,’’ a system of producers’ cooperatives established to revolutionize the lives of workers (181–83). Other critics surmised that Lamartine’s fundamentally moderate liberalism was incompatible with the reemergence of party extremism after June 1848. Lamartine’s previously celebrated reputation for poetic utopianism could only su√er when the socially ‘‘Romantic’’ Second Republic went down in history as the origin of an unappeasable national consciousness of class conﬂict. Richard Terdiman notes that ‘‘the interclass conﬂict of June 1848 transformed the fraternal allies of the previous February into mortal enemies.’’ Marx describes the revolution of 1848 as ‘‘the ﬁrst great battle . . . between the two great classes which divide modern society.’’∑≥ Indeed, Lamartine’s serene conﬁdence in the fundamental isomorphism of wounding and healing, which had rationalized his attempts at reopening or deepening what Chateaubriand called the ‘‘secret wound eating away at the social order’’ as a gesture of political homeopathy, was recontextualized in 1848 as bad medicine. From the very start of his political career, in his unsuccessful bid for election to the National Assembly in 1831, some of his readers had criticized the mechanisms of the connection between the poetics of pain and the politics of social pain. The poet-satirists Auguste Barthélemy and Joseph Méry had written acerbically on this subject when Lamartine ﬁrst ran for elected o≈ce. In their ‘‘Némésis,’’ dedicated to ‘‘M. de Lamartine, candidat à la députation de Toulon et de Dunkerque,’’ they suggested that the ‘‘suicidal poet’’ try to win election from the citizens of Jericho rather than France: Quelle vie! et toujours, poète suicide, Boire et boire à longs ﬂots une existence acide; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Va donc, selon tes voeux, gémir en Palestine Et présenter sans peur le nom de Lamartine Aux électeurs de Jéricho.∑∂

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What a life! And always, suicidal poet, / Drinking and drinking in long draughts from the bitterness of existence, / . . . / Go o√ then, as you always say you want to, to moan and groan in Palestine / And present the name Lamartine fearlessly / To the voters in Jericho. After 1848, the newly embittered consciousness of class ‘‘misère’’ could only render any ideology based on the ‘‘harmonies’’ discordant. The postRomantic literary generations of Parnassians, Symbolists, and Decadents would all implicitly or explicitly champion the segregation of the ‘‘face poétique’’ from the ‘‘face sociale’’ in favor of a kind of narcissism of art, an art that narrates its own seduction by the very artiﬁciality of its links to the referential world, scandalized and repulsed by ‘‘l’utilité.’’ This dichotomization can be witnessed after 1848 in the divergent approaches of the former literary elite from the Romantic era and postRomantic writers to the case of one of the last of the woman ‘‘ouvrier poètes’’ from the Romantic era, Augustine Blanchecotte, who really came of age in the Second Empire. The aging Romantics continued to make a cult of the integration of manual labor and the textual ‘‘oeuvre.’’ They did this through pragmatic interventions, for instance in the petition to the Emperor by Lamartine, Sand, Sainte-Beuve, Mérimée, and Béranger for a subsidy for Blanchecotte.∑∑ They also continued to rally on the level of rhetoric, as in Sainte-Beuve’s response to Blanchecotte’s Rêves et réalités with the line ‘‘The poets are at work, and their labor and inspiration are unending.’’∑∏ Théodore Banville, by contrast, preached a ‘‘pudeur’’ with regard to social wounds, praising Blanchecotte’s stoicism: ‘‘This poet’s face . . . has something . . . almost divine that God accords to those of his servants who humbly forge straight ahead, without thinking for a moment of decorating themselves with their su√ering.’’∑π Blanchecotte herself used as an epigraph for Rêves et réalités the following quotation from Lamartine: ‘‘After his blood, the most that man can give of himself is his blood.’’∑∫ This ‘‘blood’’ is clearly the blood of metaphor. Lamartine did, in the second half of the nineteenth century, give both abundant ﬁnancial support and an increasingly redundant blood of metaphor to the cause of ‘‘la poésie de la misère,’’ to the point, it seems, of being bled dry. In the 1867 pamphlet Lamartine (Lettre à mon temps), Blanchecotte, consciously departing from the passive glory of the muse—‘‘I am no Elvire’’

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(2)*—protests the double misery of the poet’s ﬁnancial disgrace and his much-diminished literary reputation. She depicts Lamartine’s critics and creditors as mutually engaged in a process of ‘‘renewing the biblical legend of the sons of Noah’’: ‘‘[Ils] ont soulevé le manteau de ses misères et ont dit: Voici la plaie, venez frapper!’’ ([They] lifted the mantel of his miseries and said: Here is the wound, come and strike!) (8). So deep, according to Blanchecotte, are the wounds of Lamartine’s ‘‘misère’’ that any cultural renewal of veneration for his poetic politics would have to constitute ‘‘a veritable revolution’’ in ‘‘the spirit of the times’’ (2) to lighten his a∆iction. LAMARTINE AND THE LITERARY CORRUPTION OF WORKERS

Posterity has hardly credited Lamartine with reducing the ‘‘poverty of poetry.’’ On the contrary, he is credited with putting workers under the thrall of a dominant rhetoric and the elite identity of ‘‘gens de lettres.’’ In the 1983 issue of the Revue des sciences humaines dedicated to popular literature, Jean Marie Goulemot and Arthur Greenspan warn that Lamartinian inﬂuence in e√ect corrupted the ‘‘popular’’ status of the worker poets: ‘‘As literary historians, we are in danger of taking literally these writers who have voluntarily identiﬁed themselves as being of the peuple, believing that they are liberated from an ideology of gens de lettres, people of letters. Analysis of the worker poets shows the fascination exerted over them by Lamartine and the most traditional versiﬁcation. One looks in vain for something resembling contestation of the dominant rhetoric and culture.’’∑Ω Lamartine in this description plays a role something like that of the missionary who ‘‘ruins’’ the natives for the anthropologists. By the time the ‘‘literary historians’’ have arrived on the scene, the ‘‘people’’ are already aping the Romantic poets. The problem with the criticism of Lamartine for taking the ‘‘worker’’ out of the ‘‘worker poets,’’ of course, is that a literature condemned to a certain iterative ideological contestation, like socialist realism in the former Soviet Union, would also be impoverished. Jacques Rancière in ‘‘Ronds de fumée’’ says that for workers as for aesthetes, ‘‘verse is the anti-tool’’ (36). Poetry for worker poets under the reign of Louis-Philippe was an ‘‘initiation to a *Je ne suis pas une Elvire.

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sacred language, the forbidden and fascinating language of others’’ (33). Ideological contestation would be the emancipatory strategy of writers from the working class after the Commune, but in the era of social Romanticism, discursive appropriation was a more dominant strategy. Lamartine’s poetics of the powers of pain meant that not only did he ‘‘borrow’’ the wounds of the oppressed for his own poetic and political inspiration, but the oppressed borrowed his discourse of wounding to make themselves heard. Lamartine was charged, as noted in the opening of this chapter, with making politics ‘‘like’’ poetry, in a transgression of the more acceptable mimetic inﬂuence of politics over literature. If literature is taken as the realist mimetic portrayal of life, in other words, history and political life are ‘‘natural’’ subjects for literature; but history and political life are not supposed to provide mimetic representations of the social life of literature. The pattern of mimetic inﬂuence in the case of Lamartine is arguably more circular than inverted, however. Lamartine used poetic paradigms to catalyze revolution; but his revolutionary paradigms in turn had contextualized the political as something traditionally theological rather than political: a poetics of pain. Lamartine made poetry politically powerful, but he handicapped politics by circumscribing political meaning to the powers of pain. Lamartine’s pragmatic ‘‘politics of the breach’’ nevertheless raise enduring questions about the uses and abuses of social su√ering in art. Above all, Lamartine’s example begs the question of how it might be possible to reconcile the prominence of the trope of su√ering in the social Romantic ideology of ‘‘useful art’’ with what Elaine Scarry calls ‘‘the certainty of doubt’’ about the other’s pain or what Émmanuel Lévinas calls the phenomenological ‘‘uselessness’’ of su√ering. For Lévinas the uselessness of pain condemns the su√erer to the experience of submitting, a submission that arguably operates in poverty also: pain is not ‘‘the performance of an act of consciousness, but, in its adversity, a submission; and even a submission to the submitting’’ (157). Su√ering represents such extreme passivity, according to Lévinas, that it is ‘‘unassumable’’ (156). The powerful Romantic mentor could not, in other words, assume the worker poet’s submission to submitting, no matter how much he or she identiﬁed mimetically with the worker’s pain. A crucial test of the ethical basis of the Lamartinian exploitation of the powers of pain, then,

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would be its success in making the worker’s ‘‘production’’ of su√ering ‘‘assumable,’’ knowable, active in a society’s self-identiﬁcation. Lamartine and the other poets of social Romanticism did in fact strive to make class pain assumable, not only through a poetry mimetic of the worker’s ‘‘misère’’ but also by restoring some form of what Scarry calls ‘‘integrity of act-and-object’’ to the workers’ own literary engagement. This integrity rested on the explicit connection of the worker poet to the poem of pain, voice to listener, text to reader, reader to society—whether to alleviate some of the ‘‘misère de la poésie’’ or, disquietingly, to share the literary wealth of the ‘‘poésie de la misère.’’ Lamartine’s exploitation of the silenced voice for its superior expressivity is inevitably paradoxical. But Lévinas claims that it is in the very uselessness of su√ering that the paradoxical possibility of an ethical usefulness does present itself. The ‘‘fundamental ethical problem which pain poses ‘for nothing’ ’’ is, according to Lévinas, ‘‘the medication which is my duty’’ (158). He posits that ‘‘wherever a moan, a cry, a groan or a sigh happen there is the original call for aid, for curative help, for help from the other ego whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation.’’ The person broken o√ from the world of object relations and agency by pain is the person who, through isolation and helplessness, contextualizes alterity as aid and thereby rescues alterity from the status of alienation. The power of pain is the power to open ‘‘the ethical perspective of the interhuman’’ (159). Apparently, then, for Lévinas, su√ering is useless for the su√erer, but useful in its ability to render human relations or the interhuman visceral and empathic. In Lamartine’s work, the romanticization of the other’s su√ering may seem not only antipolitical but even antisocial. But Lévinas’s deﬁnition of the realm of the ethical as that ﬁeld deﬁned by ‘‘the other’s calling on the subject for a response’’ makes su√ering an unavoidably social question. Poésie ouvrière is in this sense a kind of empathic call and response genre. David Morris, in The Culture of Pain, concurs that ‘‘pain inhabits a social realm.’’∏≠ In society, the uselessness of su√ering brings a useful awareness of self and other as a potential collectivity with its own health: the representation of su√ering ‘‘awakens useful attention to the health of the collective body’’ (Lévinas, 160). The conﬂation of the ‘‘cry for help’’ with the aesthetics of voice is problematic, however. Lévinas notes that pain involves the unpleasant gratu-

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itousness of non-sense and that as such it cannot be integrated ready-made into poetic meaning. This pain-ful non-sense reveals itself most unavoidably in history—not only the Holocaust and the Terror, but also the failure of 1848 and the repression of the Commune: ‘‘But behind the rational administration of pain in sanctions distributed by the human courts, immediately dressing up dubious appearances of repression, the arbitrary and strange failure of justice amidst wars, crimes and the oppression of the weak by the strong, rejoins, in a sort of fatality, the useless su√erings which spring from natural plagues as if e√ects of an ontological perversion. Beyond the fundamental malignity of su√ering itself, revealed in its phenomenology, does not human experience in history attest to a malice and a bad will?’’ (160). Theodicy alone, according to Lévinas, can account for ‘‘the meaning of this scandal,’’ and yet theodicy, in attributing signiﬁcance to su√ering, easily becomes ‘‘the justiﬁcation of the neighbour’s pain’’ (163), a justiﬁcation that is paradoxically immoral. The uses of the uselessness of su√ering are in e√ect only susceptible to politicization with the greatest e√ort and vigilance: ‘‘The inter-human perspective can subsist, but can also be lost, in the political order of the City where the Law establishes mutual obligations between citizens’’ (165). How, then, to use su√ering in a political art, without collapsing it into the religiosity that made the progressivism of social Romanticism a form of mysticism? Flaubert, in researching his novel on the revolution of 1848, L’Éducation sentimentale, concluded that socialism in French Romanticism had been muddled and mystiﬁed by mysticism. No one would have called socialism an area calling out for the separation of church and state, because it had no formal a≈liations with religion, yet its inspiration was relentlessly mystical: ‘‘The book that I am ﬁnishing now has forced me to do some study of socialism. I think that a part of our woes come from neo-Catholic republicanism. I have taken from the works of the alleged men of progress, beginning with Saint-Simon and ending with Proudhon, the strangest quotes. All take religious revelation as their point of departure.’’∏∞ Speaking for the other’s pain is, in the end, so risky that perhaps the only greater risk is letting it go unsaid. As a discourse, it is undoubtedly most benign when constrained to what Lévinas sees as its simplest basis: human nonindi√erence. The sharing of a speciﬁcally unsharable su√ering contex-

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tualizes nonindi√erence in an empathically physical sensitivity. That physical empathy is itself resistant to desensitization by intellectual familiarization. Lamartine’s poetics of pain as voice, misery as poetry, anesthetize by the stasis of symbolic convention itself. THE POST-LAMARTINIAN DIFFERENTIATION OF ‘‘SOUFFRANCE’’ AND ‘‘MISÈRE’’

It was not until the aftermath of the revolution of 1848 that the political problem of the metaphorical slippage in French between physical pain and social distress was problematized. While Lamartine retreated to the private sphere, his fellow voyant Victor Hugo was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1849. Hugo had been elected on the right; in fact, his political trajectory contrasts diametrically with that of Lamartine. Hugo had been a supporter and an intimate of the ‘‘bourgeois monarchy,’’ and in 1845 he was named a pair de France and therefore assumed a position in the Chamber. Graham Robb comments that this trajectory, ‘‘from labourer to lord in two generations,’’ was perceived by his nonaristocratic peers as a transgression of the radicalism of poetry that Hugo had himself popularized; as Alphonse Kerr put it, ‘‘What was the point of going to all that trouble to become Victor Hugo?’’∏≤ Hugo was among those calling for a Regency in February 1848, unsuccessfully, as we have seen. But like Lamartine, he gained unprecedented political inﬂuence in the wake of the revolution. In Robb’s words, ‘‘The Hugo who shot to political fame in the February Revolution was one of the fantasy ﬁgures thrown up by the cauldron of mysticism and political philosophy broadly labeled socialism. A typical example of 1848 idealism—a tract explaining how the world should be governed by ‘sages,’ ‘sacerdotal souls,’ and ‘poets’—paints a portrait of the perfect ruler which corresponds almost exactly to Hugo’’ (265). Lamartine o√ered Hugo the Ministry of Education in February, but he refused. He also refused to be a candidate in April, but he received more than ﬁfty-nine thousand votes anyway. Not until June was he formally elected a representative; one of his ﬁrst acts was to oppose the National Workshops established by Lamartine and others to assist unemployed workers. Paris rebelled, and Hugo voted to overthrow the provisional gov-

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ernment and give General Cavaignac full authority. As a representative, Hugo then took on a military role in the June Massacre, ﬁghting the insurgents. Robb proposes that ‘‘anyone with a taste for extreme symbolic events might relish the thought that Baudelaire also took part in the June Days, but on the other side of the barricades. He ﬁred at the troops with his brand new riﬂe. The possibility thus arises that the last great poet of Romanticism might have been murdered by the ﬁrst great poet of Modernism’’ (278). It seems more likely, however, that Hugo would have murdered Baudelaire; Cavaignac’s regime put a decisive end to the rebellion and instituted martial law. Hugo initially supported the rise to power of Louis-Napoléon. Surrounded by politicians much more conservative than himself, however, he soon turned to the left. Robb notes that Hugo in 1849 ‘‘rematerialized on the other side of the barricades,’’ a radical position he would maintain for the rest of his career. He inaugurated this long and brilliant career of ideological contestation with his famous July 1849 speech on ‘‘La Misère.’’ This speech was organized around the politics of the distinction between ‘‘la sou√rance’’ (su√ering) and ‘‘la misère’’ (poverty). Lamartine’s political stardom had arguably been founded in the mimetic conﬂation of these two terms; Hugo would establish a leftist di√erentiation between metaphor and the life of the social. The mimetic regime of ‘‘harmony’’ was coming to an end. Fearing another tyrannical governmental repression of the continued socialist calls for justice, in his speech Hugo ﬁrst reiterated the typically social Romantic paradigm of social pain: ‘‘There is at the heart of socialism a part of the painful social realities of our time and of all times; there is the eternal malaise proper to human inﬁrmity. . . . There is very great, very deep, very poignant, very curable human distress.’’ So far there was nothing in the speech that departed from a harmonian discourse of social pain. But then Hugo began to historicize rather than preach harmony: ‘‘There is also, and this is particular to our own era, this new exaltation that is a product of our revolutions; . . . with the result that today the man of the people su√ers from the double and contradictory feeling of the misery that is a fact and the greatness that is a right.’’∏≥ Hugo then proceeded to di√erentiate between the ‘‘sou√rance’’ (su√ering) that is a part of divine law and can never be eradicated and the misère

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(poverty) that is social. He argued that misère must not be accorded any more theocentric inevitability than the ‘‘leprosy’’ that is in itself a metaphor for poverty: ‘‘Poverty is a malady of the social body the way that leprosy was a malady of the human body.’’ And here was the clincher: if poverty was not a divine wound but an illness of the social body, ‘‘poverty can disappear the way leprosy disappeared.’’ In this one neat formulation, Hugo banished both the magic and the quackery of Romanticism’s poetics of the wound. Poverty would be more ‘‘curable’’ if it was treated for what it was, rather than for its poetic resemblance to divine pathos. Did Hugo’s readjustment of the balance between unity and di√erence necessarily diagnose a limitation of the political powers of poetry? Perhaps one could argue that it did not take a poet to read the literalism of poverty; Marx’s Misère de la philosophie had been published two years earlier. And certainly the Second Empire did not encourage the poetic activism that had thrived under the Romantic epistolary regime of harmony. The perceived mimeticism of poetry, pain, and misère in the July Monarchy had brought poverty into the broader social life of the time—no small achievement. If la misère had not also been culturally positioned as submissive to pain, which Lévinas describes as ‘‘submission to submitting,’’ and if poverty and pain in turn had not been submitted to the operations of poetry, social Romanticism might still signify mimetic revolution rather than the chiasmic relationship between traumatic mimesis and mimetic trauma.

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ANALOGY Slavery to Duplicity in Sand’s Indiana

THE COLONIAL SOCIAL LIFE OF MIMESIS

In recent years, Homi Bhabha, Michael Taussig, Chris Bongie, and others have made the case that (what I would call) the colonial social life of mimesis is a drama of mimicry. The English literary ﬁgure of the ‘‘Mimic Man’’ stages the desire for ‘‘a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of di√erence that is almost the same, but not quite.’’∞ Bhabha traces the line of descent of the mimic man through Kipling, Orwell, Naipaul, and Benedict Anderson. The mimic man is for Bhabha a feature of the post-Enlightenment English colonialism in which the civilizing mission typically yields texts rich in irony, repetition, and mimicry. 183

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Taussig, examining naturalist and ethnographic texts of Euramerican encounter, focuses on a di√erent dimension of mimicry, not the ‘‘native’’ mimic of colonial manners but the ‘‘mimicry by the colonizer of the savagery imputed to the colonized.’’≤ In this ‘‘colonial mirror of production,’’ colonizers who have already diagnosed the inhabitants of the New World as possessing only rudimentary linguistic and cognitive skills (best suited to mimicry rather than language and thought) go on to ‘‘mimic’’ what they perceive as ‘‘savage violence.’’ Taussig says, ‘‘The imaginative range essential to the execution of colonial violence in the Putumayo at the turn of the century was an imagining drawn from that which the civilized imputed to the Indians, to their cannibalism especially, and then mimicked’’ (65). These two categories of colonial mimicry may have broad applicability, but they are drawn from speciﬁc historical contexts. The mimic man in English literature is a ﬁction of the subaltern in the late-nineteenth- and early-to-mid-twentieth-century imperial bureaucracy and Christian missions. The colonial mirror of production is the rationalization of a type of refractive ‘‘savagery’’ proper to frontiers into even the late twentieth century, when the extraordinary apparatus of Empire may have fragmented, yet localized conﬂicts between Indians and ‘‘poor peasant colonists’’ (63) persist. Colonial mimicry, in other words, is not just one game of charades, played by the same rules everywhere. How does mimicry play out in the post-Revolutionary French social life of mimesis? In Islands and Exiles, Bongie, who reads mimicry in Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, theorizes that the post-Enlightenment ‘‘forked tongue’’ of the discourse of colonialism is particularly self-conscious in the French post-Revolutionary context. He argues that Hugo ‘‘globalizes’’ the ‘‘already well-established critique of colonial populations or primitive peoples as prone to imitation,’’≥ extrapolating from the critique of imitation in colonial populations to the critique of representation itself. Bongie ties this extension of the paradigm of colonial mimicry to the lingering idealism of the French Revolution: ‘‘This postrevolutionary awareness of a contaminatory mimesis that cuts across supposedly ﬁxed (e.g., racial) boundaries is the monstrous double of the Enlightenment belief in a commonly shared human nature into which we can all be educated and thus be (in Bernardin’s phrase) ‘reunited’ despite all our di√erences’’ (245). This hypothesis that the French Revolution left the legacy of a more than usually ‘‘contaminatory’’

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colonial mimesis is central to my reading in this chapter of Creole identity in George Sand’s Indiana. I argue, consistently with Bongie’s remarks, that the trope of colonial mimicry, hybridized with the post-Revolutionary trauma of likeness, spawns a colonial mimesis that pervades the spectrum of subject-object relations and makes French Romantic colonial texts more than usually duplicitous and self-contestatory. But instead of focusing on the paradigm of mimicry, I deﬁne my ﬁeld rhetorically, as the Romantic interrogation of the mimetic politics linking analogy and slavery. RHETORICAL POLITICS

Rhetoric has played such a primary role in late-twentieth-century theorizations of colonialism and race, from Henry Louis Gates through Toni Morrison and Bhabha, that one might wonder whether rhetoric provides a kind of linguistic parallel for mimicry itself. The key to this parallelism lies in the capacity of both rhetoric and mimicry to overdetermine or undermine essentialist identities. Mimicry has a paradoxically anti-essentialist potential, in that, according to Bhabha, in the chapter ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man,’’ in The Location of Culture, it is ‘‘constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be e√ective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its di√erence’’ (86). Mimicry thus destabilizes the notion of mimesis as the representation of reality or nature, casting mimesis as the performance of the clown or the mime. Similarly, rhetoric can be used to transform any nonironic formulation of identity by means of exaggeration or cliché or countersymbolism; any essentialism of colonial or racial identity is subject to the operations of rhetoric. Bhabha deﬁnes the desire of colonial mimicry along one particular rhetorical axis: the ‘‘metonymy of presence ’’ (89). Metonymy contrasts with metaphor, where, as Barbara Johnson explains, ‘‘the substitution is based on resemblance or analogy’’; in metonymy, the substitution is based ‘‘on a relation or association other than that of similarity (cause and e√ect, container and contained, proper name and qualities or works associated with it, place and event or institution, instrument and user, etc.).’’∂ For Bhabha, mimicry as the metonymy of presence relies on the contiguity of plural and contradictory beliefs about such things as ‘‘the di√erence between being

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English and being Anglicized’’ and ‘‘the identity between stereotypes which, through repetition, also become di√erent’’ (89–90). These contiguous associations have an accidental rather than a meaningful quality; Bhabha says that mimicry as the metonymy of presence is ‘‘an erratic, eccentric’’ strategy of colonial discursive authority. But of course the traditional colonial discourse of mimicry ostensibly serves the purposes of domination, and rhetoric is also frequently associated with the creation of illusions of essentialist identity. James Snead, in Figures of Division, takes a startling approach when he subordinates racism itself to the purposes of rhetorical domination, as if the desire for rhetorical domination came ﬁrst and racism then lent itself particularly well to the rhetorical project: ‘‘Racism might be considered a normative recipe for domination created by speakers using rhetorical tactics.’’∑ Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, likewise argues that the deployment of race as a ﬁgure is more threateningly politically consequential than ‘‘race’’ as biology: ‘‘Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological ‘race’ ever was.’’∏ Both mimicry and rhetoric, in other words, represent the paradox that the mimetic construction of reality can easily be turned to the construction of essentialism. Artiﬁce is required for the representation of authenticity. Critics and writers have long been fascinated with the politics of the capacity of rhetoric to design thought, to create a linguistic infrastructure of philosophical implication and a≈liation. As a case in point, Bhabha’s association of colonial mimicry with the politics of metonymy is hardly an isolated contemporary use of the paradigm of metonymy to conﬁgure an important problem of social reality. Johnson, in ‘‘Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God,’’ problematizes the anomalous importance of metaphor and metonymy in the poststructuralist worldview: ‘‘How did it happen that such an arcane rhetorical opposition was able to acquire the brief but powerful privilege of dividing and naming the whole of human reality, from Mommy and Daddy or Symptom and Desire all the way to God and Country or Beautiful Lie and Sober Lucidity?’’ (155). While rhetoric always has the privilege to ‘‘divide and name’’ the whole of human reality, di√erent elements of rhetoric may be especially privileged

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in di√erent eras and contexts. With regard to the mimetic treatment of colonialism in the racially conscious era of French social Romanticism, in the late 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, Johnson’s question could be phrased differently: How did it happen that analogy acquired the privilege of comparing and naming the problem of slavery? I broach this question through Charles Fourier’s bizarre but inﬂuential paradigm of the politics of analogy. THE ROMANTIC POLITICS OF ANALOGY AND THE RHETORIC OF SLAVERY

Analogy is conventionally deﬁned as the rhetorical construction of correspondence between otherwise dissimilar things. But in Fourier’s fantastical 1829 vision of Le Nouveau Monde industriel (New industrial world), analogy also has didactic, metamorphic, political, and material powers. Consider the example of the humble beet, which o√ers itself for consumption under Fourier’s system as a ‘‘vegetal hieroglyphic.’’ Its vermilion juices make it a ‘‘fruit de sang ’’ or ‘‘blood fruit,’’ a status that evokes in turn ‘‘the image of slaves forced to the simple unity of action by torture.’’π Not only does the juice of the beet o√er analogy to the expression of blood from slaves’ tortured bodies, in other words, but the exploitation of that juice/blood in the making of beet sugar is analogous to the corruption of collective work (‘‘l’unité simple d’action’’) by force. ‘‘The knotted leaf of the beet depicts the violent work of slaves and workers,’’ he asserts. Sugar from the beet is therefore ‘‘a caricature of true sugar, just as the material unity of action in our colonial slave labor camps is a caricature of the passionate unity of harmonian works.’’ In relation to the caloriﬁc ‘‘work’’ (analogous to the body at work in harmonian society) of the sugarcane, which yields a more concentrated sweetener, the beet’s sugary violence is a contre-sucre or ‘‘countersugar’’—superﬁcially nutritive but fundamentally inferior to noncoercive and unbloodied unities of action. The example of the beet illustrates Fourier’s surreal use of analogy to transform simple things into intertexts, serving as a vast natural resource to be tapped for e√ective exegesis of the previously inscrutable ‘‘great book of nature ’’ (366). As the poetico-industrial foundation of the new economy of ‘‘Harmony,’’ the inauguration of ‘‘this new true, useful, and beautiful science’’ (358) would lead even naturalists to condemn their existing epis-

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temological systems. ‘‘Everyone,’’ claims Fourier, ‘‘will rally to the analogy that marries two classiﬁcations.’’ The inhabitants of the globe would exist in a ﬂurry of impatience to learn analogies because of their ‘‘hidden properties’’ (357). The prominence of slavery analogies in Fourier’s formulation of the economy of the harmonian industrial world has its own complex rhetorical ‘‘unity of action.’’ For Fourier, analogies have a homeopathic role as the ‘‘natural antidotes’’ to the maladies of civilization. ‘‘The logic of analogy . . . unveils all hypocrisy; it tears o√ civilized masks and proves that our alleged virtues are actually vices in the order of nature: Bernardin de St.-Pierre rightly named them ‘frivolous and theatrical virtues ’ ’’ (366). Analogy in this sense serves as an extreme example of the Romantic trend toward what Théophile Gautier criticized as ‘‘useful art.’’ Fourier’s vision of analogy as the foot soldier of the ‘‘harmony’’ at the center of Romantic social philosophy illustrates, if parodically, the stakes of ‘‘the social life of mimesis.’’ Rhetoric, a foundational ingredient of verbal representation, was attributed revolutionary power in everything from patriarchal love relations to colonial subject relations in the utopian deliriums of France in the 1830s. Analogy is the comparative structure at the foundation of metaphor; it unites two di√erent terms by likeness in such a way that their relative di√erence or likeness is more deﬁning than the qualities of either term by itself. Quintillian’s famous example is ‘‘Peter is as strong as a lion.’’ Analogy, like metaphor, is organized, as Roman Jakobson notes, by ‘‘various degrees of similarity,’’∫ whereas metonymy operates on the axis of contiguity. Metaphor involves ‘‘selection and substitution’’; metonymy involves ‘‘combination and contexture’’ (109). Unlike metaphor and metonymy, metaphor and analogy cannot be deﬁned through opposition. The distinction between metaphor and analogy derives largely from the fact that in metaphor, the comparative basis of analogy is ﬁnessed, condensed; metaphor is a kind of abridged or elliptical form of reasoning by analogy. Quintillian deﬁnes metaphor as ‘‘a comparison without a comparative tool. Instead of saying ‘Peter is as strong as a lion,’ one says, ‘Peter is a lion.’ ’’Ω Jakobson established that ‘‘Romanticism is closely linked with metaphor, whereas the usually intimate ties of Realism with metonymy usually go unnoticed’’ (114). Not all of Romanticism can be a≈liated with meta-

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phor, however. Metaphor is a dominant epistemology in Romantic lyricism, for instance in the early work of Lamartine or Musset, and in the prose genres most closely related to metaphoric lyricism, notably the genre intime (intimate writings). But as Romanticism in France became social, Quintillian’s ‘‘comparative tool’’ became essential to literary construction. The social consciousness of Romanticism could not derive its examples and identiﬁcations from the space of solipsistic consciousness; it relied, instead, on comparisons between rich and poor, male and female, and master and slave. Jakobson considered poetic language to be privileged over everyday speech in the exercise of linguistic freedom: ‘‘In the combination of linguistic units, there is an ascending scale of freedom. In the combination of distinctive features into phonemes, the freedom of the individual speaker is zero: the code has already established all the possibilities which may be utilized in the given language. Freedom to combine phonemes into words is circumscribed; it is limited to the marginal situation of word coinage. In forming sentences with words, the speaker is less constrained’’ (98). The activities of selection or substitution, combination and contexture, allow the speaker to play with the elements of the ‘‘code’’ and thereby achieve a limited degree of linguistic autonomy. But analogy, which by this description would be a strong manifestation of linguistic freedom, is nevertheless characterized by the ‘‘chaining’’ of one term to another. In comparative formulas, one term cannot get free of the other, even though one may dominate the other. Such dramas of freedom, comparativity, and dominance are common to the analogical literature of social Romanticism. Analogy is, after all, the construction of a sort of paradoxical double subject. If Peter is as strong as a lion, the lion is presumably as strong as Peter. But even if the lion takes Peter’s place as grammatical subject, the lion only exists in the phrase to describe Peter. Fourier’s choice of the beet and slavery to illustrate the powers of analogy resonates with this drama. The politics of slavery are in a sense metaphorical of the politics of analogy. Slavery compels analogy. The negative transformation of human existence into a walking exchange value signiﬁes that the yoke of comparison, the insertion of the slave into a system or at least a pairing of values, is necessary to the constitution of slavery as a value. In Marxist terms, slavery is to analogy as the commodity is to exchange; both the slave and the commodity depend on their harnessing to other, dissimi-

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lar, terms, such as freedom, for their entry into a system of value. Or in Hegelian terms, the master consciousness depends on the consciousness of the slave. However, even if slavery depends on another term, such as freedom, for its freedom from the negation of total abstraction, this animation of value through comparison is not in itself identiﬁcatory. The identity conferred upon slavery through analogy is also the subordination of identity to comparison. Slavery, in this sense, may compel analogy, but analogy also contains slavery; analogy yokes slavery to another term. Discussions of Fourier’s analogical thought often return to such problems of rhetorical politics. Michael Spencer writes in ‘‘A(na)logie de Fourier’’ (Fourier’s a(na)logy) that ‘‘Fourier, enemy of hierarchies, democratizes metaphor.’’∞≠ In Fourier’s philosophy, ‘‘everything is linked to everything else and everything is explained by analogy,’’ especially the relationships between ‘‘the social movement and other movements.’’ Analogy in Fourier’s work is a metaphor for ‘‘association,’’ ‘‘association being founded on the properties of the passions’’ (31). Analogy is the rationale for social linkage, in which hierarchy dissolves in intimacy. This ‘‘democratization’’ has to do with the equality Fourier ascribes to both terms in any given analogical identiﬁcation. Spencer notes that ‘‘the pitfall of traditional metaphoric practice is the subordination of the comparant (the comparing term) to the comparé (the compared term). In the case of the metaphor ‘this man is a lion,’ the lion is ‘used’ by the man, the seme ‘courage’ is extracted from the comparison, and the animal, who has no further utility, is rejected from the comparison.’’ Spencer argues that Fourier’s analogies avoid the sacriﬁce of one term to the constitution of value in the other, even if it is an avoidance based on chaos, on a-logic, and on the arbitrary proliferation of analogical signiﬁcance: ‘‘This never happens with Fourier, ﬁrst of all because the dissemblance between the comparant and the comparé is such that it guarantees their independence and prevents this type of exploitation; and secondly because, even as independent ‘agents,’ they participate in the creation of other analogies. The subordination of one term to the other is impossible’’ (42). Fourier’s use of ‘‘root’’ analogies like the ‘‘slave’’ beet are meant to function as ‘‘natural antidotes’’ to colonial slavery by making it accessible to consciousness, giving it a new cognitive circulation. ‘‘Let us perform the

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drama of the beet,’’ proposes Fourier. ‘‘This plant will explain to us one of the methods to follow in the search for analogies, the rule of the contact of extremes’’ (355). The notions of race and racine or ‘‘root’’ may not be etymologically linked, yet the implied parallel between the philological, the political, and the organic in the example of the beet suggest that something in language and its relation to the mute world, the world devoid of linguistic representation, is responsible for generating a mutually exegetic ﬁeld. Fourier’s democratization of metaphor through analogical thought can only go so far, however, as he gives each analogy a scientiﬁc stability. Analogy, for Fourier, is a form of knowledge. The beet is enslaved to its colonial identiﬁcation,∞∞ and in a sense, slavery is overshadowed by the beet. Once the beet has become the slave hieroglyphic, the historical association of sugarcane with the blood of slaves in the colonies can never become ‘‘emblematic.’’ Even in the chaotic profusion of images, there is tyranny and tradition in many of Fourier’s analogies: ‘‘The rose depicts the modest virgin; the carnation depicts the girl harried by the need for love’’ (354). Fourier’s cult of analogical knowledge is also profoundly challenged by the modern psychological ﬁnding that in scientiﬁc experiments, ‘‘subjects can solve randomly generated analogies.’’∞≤ Michael Johnson and Tracy Henley ‘‘had subjects solve incomplete randomly generated analogies of the form ‘Horse is to girl as sun is to ——’ ’’ (56). The subjects generally were able to ‘‘generate valid analogy solutions.’’ The researchers were left with the ‘‘unresolved antinomy in which the demonstrated fact of ‘almost inﬁnite ﬂexibility’ clashes with the need for some form of structural stability.’’ Randomness is a ‘‘freedom’’ Fourier did not want to grant to analogy. Although Fourier had noticed the ability of people to solve analogies, he contextualized this ability in terms of the discovery of knowledge essential to the new harmonian industrial society. He was convinced that analogy could actually produce wealth—for anyone, slave or freeman, one might add, endowed with the power of analogical thought. Since the book of established analogies would be a bestseller into perpetuity, ‘‘devoured ’’ (377) at each printing, men and women would have only to contribute a single analogy, written up in say forty lines, to the deﬁnitive gloss on the rhetoric of the world, in order to earn ‘‘500,000 francs’’ (357). Analogy would therefore supply an abundant epistemological and ﬁnancial capital, and a proliﬁc creator of analogies would live very well indeed.

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THE RHETORICAL POLITICS OF ‘‘CREOLE’’ IDENTITY

George Sand was powerfully drawn in the late 1820s and 1830s to the Fourierist and Saint-Simonian visions, above all for their articulations of women’s rights and the legitimacy of free love. She was also chronically concerned as a single mother with issues of revenue per page; perhaps she had the model of the analogical ‘‘slave’’ beet in mind when she made the seductions of slavery by analogy—slavery as an analogy for marriage—a recurrent characteristic and theme of her ﬁrst novel, Indiana. Published in 1832, Indiana tells the story of the life, loves, and protests of an upper-class Creole woman, Indiana, in relation to a social hierarchy in which she was simultaneously the dominated (husband/wife, seducer/fallen woman) and the dominator (mistress/servant or slave). The term ‘‘créole’’ is a particularly obscure signiﬁer in nineteenthcentury France. Christopher Miller describes its complicated history: ‘‘A ‘Creole’ in its original meaning was ‘a person born or naturalized in the country [usually the West Indies or other tropical dependency] but of European (usually French or Spanish) or of African Negro race: the name having no connotation of color, and in its reference to origin being distinguished on the one hand from being born in Europe or Africa and on the other hand from being aboriginal’ (OED; emphasis mine). The word thus speaks of a double di√erentiation or exile and opens the question of race while distinctly providing no answer to it.’’∞≥ It is supposed to derive its meaning metonymically, which is to say, following Jakobson’s classiﬁcations, along the axis of contiguity: to be Creole ostensibly signiﬁes nothing more than association with a place—being born in the colonies, notably the Antilles, the West or East Indies. In fact, the term Creole initially designated speciﬁcally persons of white European descent. But because these places were under colonial rule, and because they relied on slaves as tools in their economy of agriculture and trade, race comes to elbow place in the semantic axis of contiguity. Because of this secondary metonymical association of place with slavery, the axis of contiguity yields to the axis of the condensation of meaning, and point of origin—place—becomes metaphorically colored—colored as race. This slippage between the identiﬁcation of master and slave, which seems historically anomalous, nevertheless parallels the rhetorical politics of ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black’’ neighborhoods as analyzed by Johnson in ‘‘Metaphor,

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Metonymy, and Race’’: ‘‘The tendency of contiguity to become overlaid by similarity, and vice versa, may be summed up in the proverb ‘Birds of a feather ﬂock together’—‘qui se ressemble s’assemble.’ One has only to think of the applicability of this proverb to the composition of neighborhoods in America to realize that the question of the separability of similarity from contiguity may have considerable political implications’’ (157). As Miller says in his analysis of work by Baudelaire, ‘‘The surprise . . . is that there is no question of a real racial distinction to be made between white Frenchmen and white Creoles, yet every sign points in that direction’’ (94). These signs include the ‘‘ ‘physical personality’ of the Creole,’’ including ‘‘ ‘fragility,’ the shape of the forehead, the quality of the gaze’’ (95), ‘‘ ‘velvet eyes’ ’’ (94), and a ‘‘ ‘black and yet luminous’ ’’ (100) quality, apparently in reference to hair or eyes, or both. Such descriptions of the non–biologically based observation of mixedrace attributes in the white Creole in nineteenth-century French literature may be rooted above all in the racialization of the mimetic faculty. Miller notes the importance of Baudelaire’s description of ‘‘a natural faculty of imitation, which they share with Negroes.’’ The truism of the imitative primitivism of the ‘‘savage,’’ when extended to the white of non-European birth, suggests either that imitativeness is environmentally derived or that ‘‘racial’’ imitativeness has a mimetic contagion that extends to others in the same environment and transcends race. In either case, the inhabitants of the colonial dependencies are irresistibly imitative; they live under the mimetic spell of a mimetic land. The condensation of similarity at work in this notion of Creole mimeticism means that the comparative axis of analogy is necessarily destabilized in analogies involving créolité. Analogy, conventionally deﬁned as the rhetorical construction of correspondence between otherwise dissimilar things, is problematized by créolité because one cannot tell exactly what créolité is dissimilar to. If créolité in nineteenth-century France is e√ectively the metaphoricization of race, it should be an analogy buster, since analogy relies on a stable nonmimetic relation between the terms in question. Ironically (or perhaps it is not so surprising given that the Creole in nineteenth-century literature seems to ﬁgure the fascination with ﬁguration), George Sand uses créolité as the backdrop for obsessive ﬁctions of analogical identity in Indiana. The plot of Indiana makes central use of the slippage inherent in the

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term ‘‘créole.’’ On the one hand, the two major female characters seem virtually to divide up between themselves the disjunctive extremes of the clichés of Creole identity, along the axes of Indiana’s unhealthy psychological susceptibility (encoded as white) and Noun’s sexual red-bloodedness (encoded as mixed race). Indiana is described as ‘‘une créole nerveuse et maladive’’∞∂ (a nervous Creole in poor health),∞∑ while her servant, Noun, is characterized as ‘‘overﬂowing with the full-blooded ardour and passion of a Creole’’ (25). Nevertheless, as the text progresses, even the man who is intimately involved with them both will not always be able to tell them apart, putting their racial di√erence into question. Naomi Schor notes, ‘‘No more than it can be ascertained whether Indiana is a virgin or not, can one assert that Noun is black or white.’’ And yet, she says, most readers ‘‘assume that she is black.’’∞∏ Of course, by the terms of Christopher Miller’s analysis of the Creole, it should also be clear that Indiana’s whiteness may be mimetic of blackness, adding to the confusion. Doris Kadish points out that ‘‘toward the end of the novel, Indiana’s cousin and eventual soul mate Ralph Brown refers in passing to Noun as ‘créole dans l’acception la plus étendue,’ but without spelling out this more extended sense of the term.’’∞π Sand deepens the ambiguity of racial di√erence within the category of the Creole by referring to Noun as the ‘‘soeur de lait’’ (60) or ‘‘milk sister’’ of Indiana. Although this expression is often translated as ‘‘foster sister’’ (25), it also suggests that Indiana and Noun were nursed by the same woman, who, as Kadish notes, is identiﬁed as black in the novel. Noun, says Kadish, ‘‘may have been the daughter of the wetnurse and thus black or of mixed race . . . Indiana was nurtured with the non-white, racially ‘other’ milk of her wet nurse and is thus partially nonwhite, too . . . the suggestion that milk was connected with racial purity is not without historical precedent’’ (24). The category of the ‘‘milk sister’’ could also explain the text’s ambiguity concerning Noun’s legal status as servant or slave. Moreau de Saint-Méry in his 1797 Description of the French part of Haiti described the prevalence of wet nursing of Creole children by slaves. He conﬂates ‘‘blood’’ and ‘‘milk’’ in his description of the wet nurse’s sacriﬁce and notes that wet nurses were commonly freed in payment for their services: ‘‘Creole women are reduced to soliciting from a slave the sacriﬁce of her blood to conserve the being to whom they were only able to

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give life. But their children are fed under their very eyes; the Creoles have to win their children’s caresses away from the nurse who is almost always emancipated as the price of this good deed.’’∞∫ In the same measure that the di√erence between Indiana and Noun is both proposed and deconstructed in the text, the likeness between them is both highlighted and problematized through an endlessly reiterated analogy between marriage and slavery. Just as both women are ‘‘Creole’’ in Indiana, even though one is white and one is probably not, both women are ‘‘slaves,’’ even though one is the daughter of a slave-owning family and the other had probably been either a slave herself or the daughter of former slaves. ‘‘LE SANDISME’’ AND RHETORICAL BONDAGE

Because she is married, Indiana sees herself as ‘‘this enslaved woman who was only waiting for a sign in order to break her chain’’ (52). The oppressiveness of marriage makes marital resistance ‘‘sweet and legitimate to the oppressed slave.’’ She complains that she cannot ‘‘patiently endure the yoke which is crushing me,’’ the yoke of a marriage in which ‘‘I am his servant; he asks nothing more of me’’ (159). Indiana’s husband, Monsieur Delmare, is, as Schor writes, the ‘‘instantiation of an idea, the Law, which reduces women to the status of objects of exchange, to the abjection of virtual slaves’’ (xiii). In this Sand, as an ‘‘emancipated muse of love,’’ echoed not only the Fourierist cult of analogy in general but also the speciﬁc Saint-Simonian analogy between both free love and free labor and marriage and slavery. As Claire Moses and Leslie Rabine note, the feminist exploitation of the ideas of the comte de Saint-Simon, as interpreted by Enfantin, had by the late 1820s ‘‘begun to emphasize the more romantic elements of his work and especially his ideas for a ‘new religion’ based on love. Woman and the sociosexual relationship between the sexes then emerged as the movement’s chief concern.’’∞Ω For a time, Sand gained notoriety as a kind of informal spokesperson for this socialist utopia. The early-twentieth-century critic Marcel Bouteron summarized, for the entertainment of his readers, the scandal of Sand’s ﬁctionalization of social utopian theories: ‘‘Enfantin’s completely wild theories on love and mar-

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riage, passing via the pen of George Sand, sowed great disorder in feminine souls. . . . Saint-Simon wanted to reform society, the human race; he wanted to deliver women, the proletariat, the oppressed, and to inaugurate on this lowly earth the reign of happiness through communal work and love.’’≤≠ Bouteron called the wide-ranging inﬂuence of Sand’s association of ‘‘l’amour libre’’ with the cause of freedom from marital slavery ‘‘le Sandisme.’’ The expression dates to an article by Balzac in the Muse du département in which Balzac criticized his friend Sand for propagating legions of a feminine type he labels ‘‘ ‘le bas-bleu du coeur’ ’’ (cited in Bouteron, 178). Sandism was a ‘‘sentimental leprosy’’ in which women make their marital complaints into a ‘‘claim to genius.’’ So widespread was the critique of le Sandisme in the nineteenth century that Sand’s husband, Casimir Dudevant, on whom the ﬁgure of Monsieur Delmare is partly based, felt justiﬁed in asking Napoleon III for the cross of the legion of honor on the basis of his endurance of ‘‘ ‘conjugal woes of historical dimensions’ ’’ (179). The 1830s were in fact an era of remarkable feminism. Feminist journals, including the Journal des femmes, L’Opinion des femmes, La Mère de famille, Le Conseiller des femmes, La Gazette des femmes, Le Globe, La Femme libre, La Phalange, and the Phalanstère theorized that a new politics of love was necessary to the revolutionary transformation of the social order. George Sand, along with writers and politicians such as Jeanne Deroin, Flora Tristan, and Pauline Roland,≤∞ was an important theorist of the meaning of domestic politics for the questions that had previously been deﬁned only in terms of the ‘‘public’’ sphere. Many women were inspired by the insistence of utopian theorists that economic ills and social injustices could not be remedied until a fundamental corruption of gender relationships had been redressed. Fourier’s community of the Phalange was intended to undo the perﬁdious e√ects of patriarchal hierarchy on society by instituting free love. Enfantin, the primary disseminator of the ideology of Saint-Simon, wrote in 1829, ‘‘The Saint-Simonian era will be announced by the complete enfranchisement of women.’’≤≤ Within this climate of utopian upheaval, an 1832 debate in the SaintSimonian Journal des femmes, whose contributors included not only Sand but also many of the other leading femmes de lettres of the day, demonstrated the new analogical currency of the terms slavery and liberty with regard to marriage. Suzanne Voilquin, in a letter to the editor, rages against a previous

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article that she views as having been ‘‘dictated by the genius of the feudal centuries, . . . [telling us] in the 19th-century, after two great revolutions, ‘Women, let us keep our slavery as it is.’ ’’ If the writer of that article had been ‘‘from the proletarian ranks, like my sisters and me, she would know this slavery that weighs on woman!’’≤≥ Voilquin illustrates the literal applicability of the term slavery to marriage in an anecdote from her own social experience. ‘‘The husband of one of my friends, outraged to hear talk of liberty, of the emancipation of women, formally declared to his wife that he regarded her as ‘his thing, his property, and that he would punish in her all women who might wish to escape from a too oppressive yoke’ ’’ (215). Another writer, Marie Reine, also invokes the backlash against the ideological prominence of the notion of marital slavery: ‘‘We are told that we have not demonstrated su≈ciently clearly how it is that we are slaves.’’≤∂

THE MIMETIC TRAUMA OF SLAVERY

In Indiana, this theme of marriage as a form of slavery by analogy recurs with such numbing force that it produces a political mutation: the term slavery virtually sacriﬁces its meaning to the term marriage. The referential mutability or subordination of slavery through the vehicle of the marriage analogy is troublingly exempliﬁed in Indiana’s use of ﬁrst-person plural personal and possessive pronouns when she describes the su√ering of her own slaves on the Île Bourbon: ‘‘Living in the midst of slaves, for whom she had no other aid, no other consolation than her compassion and her tears, she had become accustomed to saying, ‘A day will come when everything will be changed in my life, when I will do good for others; a day when someone will love me; . . . while waiting, let us su√er, let us keep our silence; let us save our love for whoever will deliver me ’ ’’ (89, from French text; my translation and italics). *Vivant au milieu des esclaves, pour qui elle n’avait d’autre secours, d’autre consolation que sa compassion et ses larmes, elle s’était habituée à dire: ‘‘Un jour viendra où tout sera changé dans ma vie, où je ferai du bien aux autres; un jour où l’on m’aimera, . . . en attendant, sou√rons; taisons-nous; et gardons notre amour pour récompense à qui me délivrera.’’

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Indiana’s helpless empathy for her father’s slaves involves the substitution of her own emotional agency for theirs. The slaves operate as a kind of Greek chorus for her own dramas of emotional liberation. Indiana exhibits the Romantic ‘‘pathology’’ of mimetic trauma, in which the su√erings of the social ‘‘other’’ become the paradoxical stu√ of narcissism. In this part of the text, slaves are referred to in e√ect to ‘‘perform’’ Indiana’s own sense of oppression and su√ering. It is an unequal mimetic analogy, however, a potentially traumatic form of mimesis for the ﬁctional slave who might be unable to accept the mistress’s marital woes as a proxy for his or her own experiences. Indiana’s very name suggests an identity more ‘‘Indian’’ than that of the residents of the Île Bourbon themselves; Noun refers to herself once as ‘‘la pauvre Indienne’’ (99), but the white Creole’s name appropriates Indianness. By contrast, the name Noun suggests the proper name in the abstract, the English noun that is the French nom, homophonous with the negative non, no. Throughout the novel, Indiana creates a communal identiﬁcation through introjection and projection of slave characteristics, but she incidentally renders race unreadable. The married white woman becomes a sort of master slave. Appropriation of the term slavery to describe other, less drastic, forms of oppression had been popularized during the Revolution. Srinivas Aravamudan, in Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, notes that Jean-Paul Marat’s best-seller Les Chaînes de l’esclavage (The chains of slavery) ‘‘uses the word esclavage to discuss metropolitan politics—while being completely oblivious to the colonial referent of the word.’’≤∑ French deputies used the term esclaves to describe the status of the French until colonial issues arose, at which point the term was sporadically replaced by the euphemism ‘‘unfree persons.’’ The politics of slavery in Sand’s use of the term are crossed with the trope of being a ‘‘slave to love.’’ It is intuitive that any analogy in which slavery is a term would have two negative poles, as in ‘‘marriage is like slavery,’’ but Sand alternatively uses slavery as an analogy for Indiana’s willing subjugation to desire in love: ‘‘It’s me, it’s your Indiana; it’s your slave, whom you recalled from exile . . . to love and serve you’’ (231). The interchangeability of the positive and negative connotations of slavery (‘‘you would have loved me too and would have blessed your chains’’ [56]) in regard to love is

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emphasized in the ironic reversibility of master and slave subject positions in Raymon’s amorous paradoxes: ‘‘On awakening, Indiana, you would have found me at your feet, guarding you like a jealous master, serving you as a slave’’ (56). Through these constructions and deconstructions of likeness, of the psychology of mimesis, the novel problematizes the e√ect of empathic resemblance on di√erence. The erasure of race through the marriage/slavery and love/slavery analogies is dramatized with many twists and turns in the novel through the obscurities of the resemblance and identiﬁcation between Indiana and Noun. The development of this doppelgänger structure symbolizes both the violence and the altruism of analogy in social and literary relations with the cultural other. Both women, Indiana and Noun, love the same man, Raymon, who embodies racial, gender, and class prejudices and whose speech veils the violence of prejudice with linguistic seductions. He seems to savor the drama of Indiana’s language of marital abolitionism, and he certainly knows how to talk the talk: ‘‘Indiana! Men and their iron laws have disposed of you’’ (57). But in considering the two women’s attraction to him, he ruminates to himself on the greater deliciousness of an upper-class wife’s selfimmolation in love: ‘‘The wife of a peer of France who sacriﬁced herself in that way would be a prized conquest; but a lady’s maid! What is heroism in the one becomes impudence in the other’’ (38). The novel reminds us again and again not to trust Raymon’s ability to use Indiana’s sincere speech for his own selﬁsh purposes: ‘‘She had ﬁts of anxiety and terror, thinking that perhaps all these grand, noble sentiments, so well expressed, were only a pompous display of words, the ironic ﬂuency of a lawyer’’ (126). Raymon’s speech is attributed more mastery over the Creole, white or not white, than over the European woman who is in a less mimetic rapport to slavery: ‘‘Women of France, you do not know what [being] a Creole is like. No doubt you would have been convinced less easily, for you are not the one who is being deceived and betrayed!’’ (103). In contrast to Raymon, when Indiana discourses on her ‘‘slave’’ status to her husband, saying, ‘‘I know I’m the slave and you’re the lord. The law of the land has made you my master. You can tie up my body, bind my hands, control my actions’’ (176), he responds, interestingly enough, ‘‘Be quiet. . . . Your novelistic language annoys us’’ (177). The fact that Raymon, who rep-

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resents only a duplicitous a√ective and sensual investment in the cultural other, is occasionally moved by the slave/wife analogy, while Indiana’s unpleasant husband identiﬁes it as the stu√ of literary cliché, signals the depth of the novel’s ambivalence toward the politics of its own identiﬁcations. The novel’s problematization of the slavery/marriage analogy is developed through the doubling of Indiana and Noun in relation to Raymon. Noun, who is pregnant with Raymon’s illegitimate child, is unaware of Raymon’s growing interest in her mistress, just as Indiana is unaware that Raymon has seduced Noun. This love triangle plot becomes a triangulation of mirroring among the three characters. The mimetic trauma of the marriage/slavery analogy is developed as a trauma of specularity. THE COLONIAL MIRROR STAGE

Noun, in this humiliating innocence of her real competition, dresses up virtually as Indiana one night: ‘‘Noun thought of a way of making herself more attractive to him. She decked herself out in her mistress’s ﬁnery’’ (60). She leads her lover to Indiana’s room for their tryst and Raymon, at the sight of her there in Indiana’s mirror, is momentarily unable to distinguish between mistress and servant: ‘‘The cloaked woman . . . was perhaps Indiana herself. This absurd idea seemed to be conﬁrmed when he saw a white, bejeweled ﬁgure appear in the mirror in front of him, the ghost of a woman, who, entering a ballroom, casts aside her cloak to reveal herself, radiant and half-naked in the brilliant lights’’ (62). The suggestion here that Noun’s nakedness is ‘‘white’’ may be paradoxical, particularly given that once Raymon has recovered from his confusion, Noun is no longer described as white but as an exotic, and therefore dark, creature: ‘‘She put her young, brown arms around him, she covered him with her long hair, her large black eyes looked at him with the burning languor, the ardent temperament, and the oriental sensuality which can overcome all e√orts of the will’’ (64). Yet perhaps Noun is white in her radiance after all, since after Raymon has succumbed, against his best intentions, to Noun’s dark charms, his confusion is renewed and ampliﬁed, made into a prism of conﬂicting identiﬁcations. ‘‘The two mirrored panels reﬂected Noun’s image endlessly from one to the other and seemed peopled by a thousand phantoms. In the depths of this double reﬂection he espied a

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more slender form, and in the last dim, blurred shadow, which was Noun’s reﬂection in it, he thought he could see the slender, willowy form of Madame Delmare’’ (64). Or conversely, perhaps Indiana’s often-reiterated paleness is not entirely an e√ect of whiteness, since Raymon, who no longer sees in Noun anything more than the charm of Indiana’s clothing—‘‘all that Raymon saw of her was Indiana’s dress’’—goes on to confuse Noun’s dark traits with those of Indiana: ‘‘When he kissed her black hair, he believed he was kissing Indiana’s black hair’’ (64). If Indiana and Noun are in fact of di√erent racial backgrounds, as the novel suggests, this cross-racial prism presents an interesting twist on the Lacanian mirror stage, which, in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks becomes a colonial mirror stage. Fanon, unlike Lacan, is intrigued by the problem of psychology (‘‘internalization’’) conceptualized on the level of skin (‘‘epidermalization’’).≤∏ Homi Bhabha’s reading of Fanon’s colonial mirror stage insists that epidermalization should not function as a ‘‘ﬁxed phenomenological point’’ but rather as ‘‘the necessary negation of a primordial identity’’ that ‘‘enables the ‘cultural’ to be signiﬁed as a linguistic, symbolic, historic reality.’’≤π Henry Louis Gates notes that Bhabha ‘‘wants Fanon to mean Lacan rather than, say, Jean-Paul Sartre,’’ meaning that he is more interested in ﬁnding a poststructuralist critique of identity in Fanon than an existential colonial alienation. In Sand’s Indiana, the colonial prism raises questions of psychological ‘‘epidermalization’’; however, any Manichean distinctions are blurred not only by Creole ambiguities but also by the refraction of gender and class in the love triangle. We do not know how Noun sees herself or how Indiana sees herself; we only know how Raymon sees and desires the one when he thinks he is seeing the other. Noun’s resemblance to her mistress and Indiana’s resemblance to her servant is also a device that serves as the double of the marriage/slavery analogy. In the eyes of the man who is attracted to both women, Noun’s race *Les deux panneaux de glace qui se renvoyaient l’un à l’autre l’image de Noun jusqu’à l’inﬁni semblaient se peupler de mille fantômes. Il épiait dans la profondeur de cette double réverbération une forme plus déliée, et il lui semblait saisir, dans la dernière ombre vaporeuse et confuse que Noun y reﬂétait, la taille ﬁne et souple de Madame Delmare (104).

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becomes literally undecipherable in the text. What is decipherable is that Indiana’s ‘‘slavery’’ as a married upper-class woman is far more potent in its seductions than Noun’s more literal servitude. Incredibly, the text informs us that Noun would have been more appealing than her mistress had Indiana not had, ‘‘to make her more beautiful, her slavery and her su√ering’’ (103, my translation). Lacking ﬁgurative slavery to redeem her literal servitude and make her appealing to Raymon, Noun, in an Ophelia-like scene, drowns herself. The poignancy of the Shakespearean quotation is rendered much more bitter by the fact that Indiana’s dog is actually named Ophelia. The binding of tragic heroine to dog is yet another marker of Sand’s resistance to her own analogies. The dog Ophelia, the dogness of the abandoned woman, the creature quality of the feminine, is hard to kill: much later in the text Indiana, ﬂeeing her husband’s abuse, watches sailors crush the dog’s skull as she tries to swim after her mistress. Noun drowns like Shakespeare’s Ophelia; the dog Ophelia drowns like Sand’s Noun. After the self-immolation of her unprivileged double, Indiana, in an accusing reversal of Noun’s attempt to seduce through resemblance to her mistress, puts her own seductiveness to the test by imitating her dead servant to Raymon. It is a scene that underscores her status as both a Creole and the double of Noun: ‘‘She risked her whole fate on a strange, subtle test that Raymon could not be on his guard against’’ (138). She cuts o√ Noun’s black hair and puts it on the ﬂoor in front of her as though she had just cut her own hair, and she dresses in the same mantle that Noun had worn to a meeting with Raymon just before drowning herself, the meeting at which Raymon had earlier confused Noun with her mistress. When Raymon ﬁrst perceives Indiana in this guise, he ﬂashes back to his earlier confusion, which is now transformed into the inverse confusion—he now believes that Indiana is the drowned Noun: ‘‘I don’t know if you remember that Raymon had had then, for a moment, the improbable idea that the woman wrapped up and concealed in the cloak was Madame Delmare. Now, . . . he drew back involuntarily. He stayed at the door, ﬁxing his frightened gaze on the motionless ﬁgure and trembling like a coward in case, when it turned around, it would reveal the livid features of a drowned woman’’ (139). The relation of Raymon’s ‘‘horriﬁed gaze’’ to the myth of the Medusa’s

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head is underscored by what happens next, but this is a Medusa of crossracial likeness as well as phallic castration: Indiana ‘‘had tied a scarf of Indian silk loosely round her head in the Creole manner. It was Noun’s usual head-covering’’ (139). Because of the scarf, it is plausible to Ramon that Indiana has cut o√ her own hair. He picks up the fallen hair and ‘‘he experienced, too, an indeﬁnable nervous shudder when he felt it was cold and heavy, as if it had already been cut a long time’’ (140). Death is added to the brew of sex and race in the ‘‘castrated’’ locks: ‘‘And then he examined it closely and sought in vain for the blue sheen which made it look like a crow’s blue-tinged wing. This hair was completely black, like Indian hair, heavy and lifeless.’’ While Indiana watches him, Raymon becomes aware of the deception, crying, ‘‘It’s not yours!’’ and tears the scarf o√ her head to conﬁrm that her hair is intact. Indiana continues to show him the cut locks and demands, ‘‘Don’t you recognize that hair, then? Have you never admired it, never caressed it?’’ (140). Raymon faints dead away onto the ﬂoor. When he awakens, a contrite Indiana is kneeling beside him, begging his forgiveness. But having passed through this not-so-fun hall of mirrors, the text informs us, ‘‘Raymon no longer loved her’’ (141). As a woman humiliated in love through the drama of her morbid resemblance to a rejected rival, Indiana’s recuperative identiﬁcation with slaves suddenly reverses and becomes ‘‘une e√rayante parité’’ (200), an appalling parity: ‘‘In such a future I can see only a frightening equality with Noun’’ (147), she writes to Raymon. It is ironic that it is in the shift from marital to adulterous relationships that the politics of slavery by analogy shift from the emancipatory to the exploitative. Marriage as a legal construct privileging patriarchy is critiqued in the analogy with slavery, but Indiana’s own tyranny emerges in the context of illicit love. The referential mutability of slavery in Indiana through the operations of analogy—who is really the slave? is the slave the master or the slave? does the slave love slavery? and is the slave black or white?—casts doubt on the ‘‘harmonious’’ Fourierist capacity of analogy to transform discrete things into relations. The omnipresent vocabulary of ‘‘chains’’ in Indiana not only liberally links the problem of slavery to the problems of love and marriage; it also performs what is arguably the violence of harnessing di√erence to

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likeness. As Schor notes, the reader’s typical assumption that there is a racial di√erence between Indiana and Noun is subtly informed by the obviousness of class di√erence between the two: ‘‘They are reading a series of cues in the novel that would lead them to read blatant indications of class di√erence as signs of a repressed racial di√erence’’ (xvii). But the omnipresent signs of class di√erence are masked by Indiana’s rhetoric of analogical bondage. Critics of Indiana have seen ethical conundrums in the novel’s depiction of race but not in the novel’s analogical identiﬁcations of marriage with slavery. Kadish divides Sand’s attitude toward race in the novel into a ‘‘negative, conformist side,’’ which consists of ‘‘seeming at an explicit level to make all of her major characters white,’’ and a ‘‘positive, resisting side,’’ which consists of ‘‘the novel’s strong, albeit implicit, identiﬁcation with and appeal on behalf of persons of color’’ (22). But this dichotomy of negative conformism that erases di√erence and positive resistance in the identiﬁcation of di√erence begs a question: Can’t identiﬁcation be a form of resisting resistance? Can’t it be ‘‘negative’’ resistance of threatening tensions, in the psychoanalytic sense? Rather than ‘‘positive’’ resistance in the World War II sense? Which raises another question: What is signiﬁed by the pervasive critical identiﬁcation with Indiana rather than Noun? Or at least, by the critical identiﬁcation with Indiana’s analogies? For critics have consistently reproduced her analogies. Kadish states, ‘‘Nancy Rogers rightly concludes that ‘Indiana joins the other rebellious runaway slaves so often depicted in the literature of the times. . . . Indiana is branded as blatantly as any runaway slave recaptured by his master’ ’’ (25). Kadish’s use of the term ‘‘rightly’’ to qualify Rogers’ extension and exaggeration of Indiana’s analogy to the slave is questionable given that Indiana’s ‘‘branding’’ is the wound of an abused wife—she is marked on the forehead by the heel of her husband’s boot—but it is not a permanent proprietary trademark legally identifying another person as a possession. ‘‘Rebellious runaway slaves,’’ by contrast, are branded in a ‘‘blatantly’’ literal and permanent sense. Indiana, unlike the branded slave, immediately receives help from a ship captain who is dismayed that a man would hurt a pretty woman. And isn’t it pertinent that Indiana feels free to discourse to her husband, to his face, on his analogical relation to the ‘‘slave master’’?

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Implicit critical identiﬁcations with Indiana reﬂect an elision similar to what bell hooks, in her introduction to Ain’t I a Woman?, diagnoses as a rhetorical politics of borrowing and exclusion in white feminist analogies between ‘‘women’’ and ‘‘blacks.’’ Like many people in our racist society, white feminists could feel perfectly comfortable writing books or articles on the ‘‘woman question’’ in which they drew analogies between ‘‘women’’ and ‘‘blacks.’’ Since analogies derive their power, their appeal, and their very reason for being from the sense of two disparate phenomena having been brought closer together, for white women to acknowledge the overlap between the terms ‘‘blacks’’ and ‘‘women’’ (that is the existence of black women) would render this analogy unnecessary. By continuously making this analogy, they unwittingly suggest that to them the term ‘‘woman’’ is synonymous with ‘‘white woman’’ and the term ‘‘blacks’’ synonymous with ‘‘black men.’’≤∫

‘‘Women are like black women,’’ in other words, would make no more sense than ‘‘Black women are like women’’; to make an analogy between ostensibly like terms in order to create equality between those terms is tautological, paradoxical. One would see the likeness between both groups of women without the recourse to analogy if one were not seeing skin color and on that basis excluding some races from the category ‘‘woman.’’ By contrast, the idea that ‘‘women are like blacks’’ derives its meaning from the notion that white women and black men are two similarly marginalized but di√erent groups. In Sand’s pervasive analogy between ‘‘black slaves’’ and ‘‘white married women,’’ there is no space for black women slaves or black married women to participate in the identiﬁcation. Sand’s Indiana is, paradoxically, not just a drama of slavery by analogy but also a drama of slavery to analogy. None of the problematic uses of analogy in Indiana are separable from Sand’s thematization of the possibility that slave chains can be reduced to symbols of analogical ‘‘bondage.’’ Not only the Creole heroine but the narrator(s) of the text are tremendously anxious about being the dupes of language: ‘‘Nothing is so easy or so common as self-deception when one does not lack intelligence and is familiar with all the subtleties of language. It is like a queen turned into a prostitute who, demeaning and raising herself, plays all parts, who disguises herself and decks herself in ﬁnery, dissembles and conceals herself; it is like a

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litigant who has an answer to everything, who has always foreseen everything, and has a thousand ways of being right’’ (85). One can hypothesize that Sand, like the Saint-Simonians in the Journal des femmes, wanted her use of the slavery analogy to be emancipatory but had a premonition of the same anxieties that would haunt the ﬁelds of feminism and African American studies in the wake of identity politics: the anxieties of authenticity, of a realism of identity, of ‘‘ﬁrsthand’’ phenomenological experience. Indiana is concerned with the problem of ‘‘ﬁrsthand’’ altruism and the second- and third-hand removes of language: ‘‘Who believes in poverty when he has no experience of it?’’ (85). Indiana believes—falsely—that she knows the misery of slavery ﬁrsthand, just as Raymon is repeatedly seduced by his own admittedly insincere language of love. But if one refrains from any politics that are not ﬁrsthand, politics become a form of slavery to the self. The case of the wife is, after all, not irrelevant for the case of the slave; many slaves were wives. Why study culture if one cannot look beyond the domain of the proper—beyond what is proper to oneself, to the proper name, to the ‘‘noun,’’ to the ‘‘no’’ to the other? Sand goes to acrobatic lengths to illustrate the impossibility of a nonmystiﬁcatory language. She does this especially through the trope of mystiﬁcatory trauma: trauma that is threatened but not sustained, or trauma that was sustained but is denied, or physical trauma transposed into a discourse of ﬁgurative trauma. This begins in the opening pages of the book when Indiana and her husband terrorize each other in what becomes a predictable pattern in the book. His behavior suggests an impending violence that will not in fact be realized, even though there are some precedents to expect it. Indiana then reproaches him by begging him not to carry out an action far more violent than the one that was threatened. She begs his mercy when he threatens to hit the dog, Ophelia, saying with ‘‘indeﬁnable fear,’’ ‘‘Don’t kill her’’ (19). Shortly after this scene, the colonel does ‘‘shoot’’ an unknown intruder, and the intruder collapses, but *Rien n’est si facile et si commun que de se duper soi-même quand on ne manque pas d’esprit et quand on connaît bien toutes les ﬁnesses de la langue. C’est une reine prostituée qui descend et s’élève à tous les rôles, qui se déguise, se pare, se dissimule et s’e√ace; c’est une plaideuse qui a réponse à tout, qui a toujours tout prévu, et qui prend mille formes pour avoir raison (130).

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the colonel protests that the gun was loaded only with salt and that the intruder has collapsed from fright. Indiana responds, ‘‘But this blood, Monsieur, . . . was it fear that made it ﬂow?’’ (27). But she later excuses her husband’s violence to his victim, Raymon, with a transposition of the vocabulary of mortal blame into a vocabulary of ﬂirtatious exchange: ‘‘You would pardon him for unintentionally wounding you, for his heart certainly bled more than your wound’’ (45). Raymon forgives him ‘‘with all my heart’’ because of her ‘‘hands which poured balm on my wounds.’’ As he says this, he presses her hand gently and ‘‘all the young woman’s blood surged gently back to her heart.’’ Raymon is less a√ected because ‘‘he had the ease of manner that comes from some experience in a√airs of the heart.’’ Yet, ‘‘his heart did not belie his tongue’’ (46). And on it goes, a long ri√ on the troubling mimetic divide between rhetoric and the real. Sand seems to point to the terror of the fact that, in the space of representation, we cannot dependably distinguish between blood and emotion, heart and body, one person’s body and the next person’s body. The blood of language may ﬂow, but can it ever express the other’s social wounds? The only character whose authentic altruism is tried and tested in the novel is Ralph, but his altruism is shackled by his quasi-autistic inability to put thoughts and feelings into words: ‘‘I don’t know the subtleties of your language’’ (22), he says in the beginning of the novel when distressed by his inability to comfort Indiana. At the end of the novel we learn, in his sudden accession to linguistic self-revelation, that in his childhood ‘‘it was decided that no one would love me because I couldn’t express my a√ection to anyone’’ (248). His characterization is both extremely awkward and a literary tour de force: the expression of altruistic empathy without recourse to rhetoric and its ethical deceptions. Is the slippage of referentiality in language a source of Fourieresque wealth—the ability to walk in another man’s shoes, to be a talk-traveler of di√erent psyches and spaces? Is it freedom, or is it the betrayal of the slave? In analogy, the bondage of two nouns by the ‘‘comparative tool,’’ does the analogist become a slave to the politics of mirroring? Schor argues that ‘‘Indiana is centrally concerned with the lure of narcissism, the impossibility of escaping the prison of self-reﬂection characteristic of the romantic ego and replacing it with a mimesis that strives to accommodate the other’s otherness, but which more often than not is simply a more perfect

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model of the primary mirror of narcissism’’ (xviii). That mirror of otherness/narcissism is ﬁgured in Indiana as analogy, and it is a particularly powerful model because of the exaggerated mimeticism associated with créolité. COLONIAL MIMICRY AND GENDER PERFORMANCE

In Sand’s marriage/slavery analogy, the subject is female. But what it means to be female is plotted on the axis of race. The essential ambiguity of Creole ‘‘race’’ correspondingly undermines any essential gender identity, for all Indiana’s almost parodically ‘‘feminine’’ weakness and wiles. Judith Butler theorizes that the gendered body is a performative construct, constituted by ‘‘acts, gestures, enactments’’ including ‘‘words’’ and ‘‘desire.’’ The rule of the performativity of essentialist gender identities is best illustrated by its most theatrical exceptions, such as drag. ‘‘In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself. ’’≤Ω Gender parody does not imply the presence of an original; ‘‘Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original’’ (138). Drag and other forms of gender ‘‘parody’’ can be seen as forms of mimicry that parody the relationship of mimesis to the real. As such, the paradigm of gender performance has obvious parallels with the paradigm of colonial mimicry. But the signiﬁcance of those parallels is less obvious. Is colonial mimicry the equivalent of racial ‘‘drag’’? Is race a performance the way that gender is a performance? What is the di√erence between the mimetic underpinnings of race and gender? What Bongie calls ‘‘endemic’’ or ‘‘contaminatory’’ mimesis in the speciﬁcally French Romantic treatment of colonialism is used in Indiana to dramatize not only the instability of racial identity but also the emotional attachment to a nonimitative identity. Indiana wants to experience interpersonal mimesis in analogical terms, meaning that she will create likeness where dissimilarity reigns; she will break free of marital inequity and free slaves. But despite the fact that she valorizes likeness above all else in her political vision of the world, she fears parity with Noun in her relationship with Raymon. And despite her commitment to the politics of analogy, she fears the ability of language to produce seductive mimetic slippage and

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confusion. In the French colonial social life of mimesis, both race and gender are performative, and the question of what gender is, is performed through mimicry of race. Yet Indiana, prototypical Romantic heroine and speaker of ‘‘novelistic language,’’ courts the ﬁction of originality—if only by analogy.

SIX

FETISHISM Thinking with Things in Flaubert’s ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’

THE ‘‘REVOLUTIONARY’’ FLAUBERT

One could almost call Gustave Flaubert ‘‘post-Romantic’’ simply because in contrast to ﬁgures such as Constant, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Sand, he was not an overtly political animal. Burned by the conservative censorship policies of the Second Empire under which Madame Bovary was brought to trial, Flaubert, rather than writing his own Napoléon le Petit like Hugo, became an intimate of the Princess Mathilda. His politics were not necessarily conservative; they were disengaged and panoptic, as attested by the ‘‘revolution cam’’ quality of his representation of virtually all sectors of the revolution of 1848 in L’Éducation sentimentale.∞ 210

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Flaubert was more interested in religion than politics: ‘‘What attracts me above all is religion,’’ he wrote.≤ Laurence Porter has pointed out that Flaubert’s writing of the Tentation de saint Antoine (The temptation of Saint Anthony) spanned nearly his entire literary career, from 1848 to 1872, and that in many ways the eccentric mystic was ‘‘an alter ego of the author.’’≥ Religion is a preoccupation not only in the Tentation but in Salammbô and the Trois Contes. Throughout these works, Flaubert was particularly attracted by the logic of religious materialism. In fact, one can discern some of his most ‘‘political’’ and democratic impulses in his attraction to religious materialism, because it was sustained by his desire to equalize di√erent forms of what Robert Darnton calls ‘‘thinking with things.’’ For Darnton, the discipline of cultural history complicates the distinction between intellectual thought—‘‘the formal ﬁliation of thought from philosopher to philosopher’’—and the way that ‘‘ordinary people’’ elaborate their own ‘‘cosmologies’’: ‘‘Instead of deriving logical propositions, they think with things.’’∂ Flaubert’s ﬁctional cultural histories of everything from ladies who shop (Madame Bovary ), to gentlemen who hunt (‘‘Saint Julien’’), to peasants who consecrate their own religious icons (‘‘Un Coeur simple’’) kept him in the thick of the problem of materialist epistemologies. Fickle cultural valorizations of religious materialism, notably the positive valorization of the Catholic Sacred Heart versus the negative valorization of the ‘‘primitive’’ fetish, o√ended his belief that thinking with things constituted a primordial, creative form of philosophical outreach: ‘‘I respect the Negro kissing his fetish as much as the Catholic at the foot of the Sacred Heart’’ (2:570).* The paradoxical class politics of ‘‘acceptable’’ bourgeois materialism and ironic or pathetic ‘‘peasant’’ materialist beliefs also pervade his work. In this chapter I argue that Flaubert’s story ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ (A simple heart) from Trois Contes contextualizes fetishism as a ‘‘revolutionary’’ form of social mimesis. Fetishism as a form of ‘‘thinking as things,’’ representing materially, is ‘‘revolutionary’’ ﬁrst because it deﬁes the abyss between representation and reality, bringing the ‘‘thingliness’’ of representation into the social space of material transactions. It is also ‘‘revolutionary’’ politically *Je respecte le nègre baisant son fétiche autant que le catholique aux pieds du Sacré-Coeur.

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because it problematizes the di√erences between the thought processes of the literate and those of the illiterate, the Western and the non-Western, and the ‘‘realist’’ and the mystic. Furthermore, as I demonstrate here, Flaubert’s use of the discourse of religious materialism is part of a striking postRevolutionary development, from Comte early in the century through Marx and later Binet, of philosophical and ethnographic discourses comparing di√erent materialist epistemologies, such as the relic and art, or the relic and the fetish, or the fetish and the commodity. In addition to the Sacred Heart, the relic, the fetish, and the di√erences between them are shown repeatedly, throughout the post-Revolutionary era, to be excellent things for thinkers to think about, if not with. In ‘‘Un Coeur simple,’’ because fetishistic mimesis and revolution are, I argue, used to interrogate one another, when Félicité invents her own relics and fetishes, she herself ultimately comes to serve as Flaubert’s relic or fetish of failed, and mourned, Revolutionary likeness.∑ The term likeness here denotes equality, but speciﬁcally equality in the domain of mimetic procedure, the making of likenesses. This compounded mimeticism of equality in the making of likenesses highlights a crucial political tension in the social life of mimesis. Religious materialism in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ is also ‘‘post-Revolutionary,’’ because the various losses in relation to which Félicité works the magic of her materialism unfold in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. The ﬁrst description in the narrative is temporal: ‘‘Pendant un demi-siècle’’∏ (for a half century). Mme Aubain, Félicité’s employer, had been widowed, the mother of two small children, at the height of the Empire in 1809. When Félicité, age 18 or 19, loses her ﬁancé to a wealthy old woman whose money will protect him from being drafted into the voracious armies of the Empire, and enters service with Mme Aubain, Mme Aubain’s children are 7 and 4 years old. This suggests that the date is sometime between 1809 and the fall of the Empire. By this timeline, Félicité’s ﬁctional birth would have taken place between the early Revolutionary period and the Directory, quite plausibly during the Terror, in 1793 or 1794. Since one implicit goal of the Revolution had been to di√erentiate peasants from things, in the spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Revolutionary or just post-Revolutionary origins of this peasant who thinks with

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things are of interest. Most of the important dates and events in Félicité’s life, however, do not coincide with the important dates of nineteenthcentury French history, with a few exceptions. She provides care for the terminally ill Père Colmiche, an outcast suspected of having ‘‘committed fearful attrocities in ’93’’ (2:612), and the parrot Loulou arrives in Pontl’Évêque following the naming of a new subprefect just after the July Revolution of 1830. But the ‘‘revolutionary’’ import of Flaubert’s conceptualization of the mimetic politics of religious signs in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ is actually anchored in a larger time frame. It extends from Félicité’s ﬁctional Revolutionary origins to the real time of the composition of the story in the mid-1870s, when the Commune was being analyzed as a revisiting of Revolutionary trauma in the context of the resurgence of the cult of the Sacred Heart.

THE MATERIALIST HEART OF REALISM

In ‘‘Un Coeur simple,’’ there are only two usages of the word ‘‘simple.’’ Egalitarian love that permits Félicité to love her mistress’s child like her own is ‘‘simple.’’ We learn, following Mme Aubain’s indignant insults when Félicité compares the wait for letters from Virginie to the wait for letters from her nephew Victor, that ‘‘it struck her as utterly simple to lose her head over the little girl. The two children were of equal importance; one bond of her heart united them’’ (2:606).* The supernatural is likewise ‘‘simple.’’ When Félicité later watches over the corpse of Virginie, she would not have been surprised to see her mournful kisses revive her little charge, because ‘‘for such souls, the supernatural is utterly simple’’ (2:609).† Flaubert’s choice of the words ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ for his title is also ‘‘simple’’ in the sense established by the above examples within the text: the title is spare, apparently direct, and yet outrageously complex in its association with the ‘‘simplicity’’ of nothing less daunting than egalitarian love and the supernatural. Since ‘‘simple’’ qualiﬁes the word ‘‘heart’’ in Flaubert’s title, its *Il lui paraissait tout simple de perdre la tête à l’occasion de la petite. Les deux enfants avaient une importance égale; un lien de son coeur les unissait. †Pour de pareilles âmes le surnaturel est tout simple.

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juxtaposition with the other ‘‘simple’’ things in the story begs a question: how is the heart as simple, or, ultimately, as resistant to simpliﬁcation, as egalitarian love and the supernatural? The ‘‘heart’’ has been explored with almost surgical precision in the many superb critical analyses of ‘‘A Simple Heart,’’ but with the surprisingly consistent conclusion that all ﬁndings refer to the narrative anatomy or pathology of Flaubert’s text itself—speciﬁcally, to the workings of literary realism as a cult of mimetic simplicity. The ‘‘heart’’ is taken to codify the ‘‘tender’’ cult of a simple, nonparadoxical convergence between representation and reality in realist mimetic praxis. In ‘‘A Simple Heart,’’ many critics have seen the representation of reality, in an Auerbachian sense, as the drama of a deep, but guilty, love. In his expert ‘‘Invitation to Love,’’ Ross Chambers treats the simplicity of Félicité’s heart—the ‘‘ ‘mystic’ potential’’π of this woman who is ‘‘ ‘all heart’ ’’ (143)—as emblematic of her method of reading the world around her. Her simple-heartedness yields the rogue hermeneutics through which at the end of the story Félicité identiﬁes the Holy Ghost as the spitting image of her embalmed parrot, Loulou: ‘‘At church, she always contemplated the Holy Ghost, and noticed that it resembled the parrot. . . . it was really the image of Loulou’’ (2:617). Félicité’s analogy upsets the metaphysical pecking order according to which the abstract is more valuable than the concrete. For Chambers, the cult of objects evident in Félicité’s understanding of the supernatural has ‘‘something in common with the middle class (its materialism) and something in common with the uneducated classes (her literalism).’’ Félicité’s bourgeois materialism and peasant literalism form ‘‘a model of competence for a type of reading that does not look beyond the signiﬁer for an intended meaning, a signiﬁed, but is content to read the meaning of the signiﬁer itself ’’ (145). Her literalism and materialism, in other words, combine to create a worldview anchored in something very similar to the semiotic methodology of literary realism. Roland Barthes describes the ‘‘reality e√ect’’ as exempliﬁed in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ as a narrative submission to a presumed literal reality, conveyed by the lavish use of ‘‘useless’’ details that denote ‘‘the collusion of referent and signiﬁer’’ and the expulsion of the signiﬁed.∫ Interpretations of Félicité’s role in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ typically navigate between the extremes of irony and pathos; does Flaubert depict her ironi-

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cally, or tenderly?Ω As Chambers notes, the irony/pathos binarism is equally applicable to the parallelism between Félicité’s mimetic praxis and that of literary realism. On the one hand, her semiotic concreteness ironizes realism as the attempt to conﬂate reality with the sign. Along these lines, Je√erson Humphries argues that Flaubert pursued ‘‘with relentless rigor’’ the implications of realism as trickery or truquage: ‘‘the manipulation of the reader’s senses, desire, through language, aiming to sustain the ‘hallucination’ of no di√erence between the text and the real.’’∞≠ On the other hand, Félicité’s semiotic materialism conveys the pathos of the ‘‘tender-hearted dream’’ of representational indivisibility in literary realism—an ironically sacralized treatment of the sign that can be summed up in Nathaniel Wing’s expression ‘‘the word made parrot.’’∞∞ The parrot in ‘‘A Simple Heart,’’ the object of Félicité’s most striking formulations, has in fact become a new transdiscursive metaphor in what Philippe Hamon calls the critical metadiscourse on realism, keeping company with the mirror, the screen, and the speculum.∞≤ Chambers writes that Loulou is ‘‘a ﬁgure, then, of ‘realist’ mimesis’’ (140). Hillel Schwartz, in The Culture of the Copy, devotes a chapter to Loulou and other talking parrots in literature as the ‘‘active echo,’’∞≥ the doubles of human language that put into question the di√erences between ‘‘imitation and repetition’’ and ‘‘a higher ordering’’ (152). Félicité’s relation to signs and objects, as Wing says, ‘‘appears to allow no room for di√erence whatsoever, thus actualizing the realist’s desire for the mot juste, the perfect representation’’ (92)—even while threatening to frame realism as a mere parroting of the material world. But the mimetic problematics to which the reader’s attention is drawn by the combination of Félicité’s simple-hearted literalism and her sacralization of a dead parrot are not conﬁned to problems of literary realism. Problems of how we understand the coupling of signiﬁed and signiﬁer, meaning and what signals its potential presence, pervade existence. To claim that something has meaning ‘‘naturally,’’ not through human construction but through inherent structure, has always been powerful in relation to people wary of manmade meanings. When Flaubert wrote ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ in 1876, the problem of how the heart signiﬁes was very much ‘‘in the air’’ (to borrow Félicité’s ornithological inspiration), but in terms of the sacred life of signs. If one considers the set of terms qualiﬁed by ‘‘simple’’ in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’—the heart, egalitarian love, and the super-

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natural—in the light of this historical period, they appear to constitute a kind of code for the Sacred Heart. THE 1875 BICENTENNIAL OF THE CULT OF THE SACRED HEART

On June 16, 1875, the bicentennial of the o≈cial founding of the cult of the Sacred Heart was celebrated in Paris. This celebration was an inescapably prominent cultural event, merging themes of divinity, organicity, politics, and monumentality. It was the occasion for the much-disputed founding of the votive Église du Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre—that still gleaming white national monument (now the Basilique du Sacré Coeur) to what Jules Michelet derisively called a ‘‘bit of bleeding ﬂesh.’’ A ceremony hailed by one theologian as ‘‘one of the grandest events recorded in history’’∞∂ accompanied the laying of the ﬁrst stone for the new church. But controversy raged about this consecration of what a journalist in Le Siècle described as the ancient religious terrors slumbering ‘‘in the minds of the ignorant and the simple.’’∞∑ He summed up the bicentennial events as ‘‘this outrageous, desperate e√ort to personify the ideas of the cult with material precision.’’ The themes of the Sacred Heart and of popular simplicity—poverty, femininity, rurality, ignorance—were for a time inextricably merged in 1875, in nearly hysterical embrace or rejection of the powers of religious mimesis. The di√erence between the religious life of signs for the rural and the illiterate versus the urban and the educated was under scrutiny. The idea of the Sacred Heart in itself is as old as the legend of the wound inﬂicted near Jesus’ heart by a soldier during the cruciﬁxion. Victor Alet, in his 1889 work La France et le Sacré Coeur, asserts that the devotion to the Sacred Heart ‘‘began at Calvary where this divine heart, opened by the iron of the lance, received the tender adorations of Mary.’’∞∏ Alet in fact asserts that the devotion to the heart was initially a devotion to the wound: ‘‘From the fourth to the thirteenth century, the devotion focused on the wounds of the Savior, particularly on the wound in the side. The devotion to the wound led . . . to the devotion to the Sacred Heart’’ (390). This wound through which the heart is accessed is the same wound explored by ‘‘Doubting Thomas’’ in his tactile veriﬁcation of the resurrectibility of God: ‘‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my ﬁnger in the mark of

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the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe’’ ( John 20:25, Revised Standard Version). From the start, the Sacred Heart is a kind of sacred wound through which mystics test the phenomenological nature of the sacred. As a cult of the wound, the symbolism of the Sacred Heart is especially relevant to posttraumatic historical periods like the aftermath of the Commune. There were numerous manifestations of the heart as an object of worship by di√erent saints and orders through the centuries prior to the o≈cial origin of the formal cult of the Sacred Heart. As Michelet notes, these earlier manifestations include a vision of the Virgin’s heart received by none other than a peasant woman from Normandy, like Félicité: ‘‘The Virgin appears to a peasant woman from Normandy and orders her to adore the heart of Mary.’’∞π The o≈cial origins of the cult in 1675 consecrate the apparition of Jesus’ heart to the mystic Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, a member of the Visitandine sisters located in Paray-le-Monial. Alacoque received the title of ‘‘victime de la charité’’ (victim of caritas [love]) for her submission to the Sacred Heart’s demands, as articulated by Jesus in her visions: ‘‘I seek a victim for my heart who will allow herself to be sacriﬁced like an immolated host for the realization of my designs.’’∞∫ Alacoque’s visions included prolonged body-to-body contact with Jesus’ heart: ‘‘He had me rest for a very long time on his divine chest, where he revealed to me the marvels of his love and the inexplicable secrets of his sacred Heart, which he had always kept hidden from me until now for the ﬁrst time he opened it up to me, in a manner so e√ective and accessible to my senses that he left me no room to doubt it’’ (2:325). The anticlericalist thinkers of the Third Republic generally viewed this resurgence of the cult of the Sacred Heart as a hoax at the expense of the people’s intellectual integrity and autonomy. They were indignant at the call from Joseph-Hippolyte Guibert, Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, for the French to respond to Pope Pious IX ‘‘by uniting ourselves to him on June 16th in this unanimous consecration that must lift up the whole universe’s homage toward the adorable heart of Jesus Christ.’’∞Ω To their dismay, the humblest classes of France had responded enthusiastically to the plan for the Church of the Sacred Heart. Alet listed the ﬁnancial support of rural

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‘‘subscribers’’ who had sent in such homely o√erings as the proceeds from the sale of a little lamb: ‘‘10 francs. A shepherdess from Isère who had raised a little lamb for the Sacred Heart, sends the proceeds from its sale’’ (364). The anticlerical Le Siècle responded on June 15 to the popular support for the bicentennial with a review of the critical republication in L’Avenir du Gers of fragments of an eighteenth-century book called L’Excellence de la dévotion au sacré-coeur adorable de J.C. The fragments told of Alacoque’s mystical self-abasement before Jesus’ heart through acts like licking up pestilential vomit. They also recounted the vampirical felicities of the threehour-long kiss planted by Alacoque on Jesus’ wound: ‘‘The next night, he kept me for two or three hours with my mouth glued to the wound of his Sacred Heart.’’ Le Siècle presents these anecdotes as evidence of the depravity of the cult, concluding that ‘‘it is this poor crazed hysteric that they dare to give us today as an example of ediﬁcation.’’ The di√erent points of view on the Sacred Heart created divergent accounts of the objective happenings of June 16, the day of the bicentennial celebration. The Paris-Journal simply announced the schedule for the ceremony, which was to begin with a mass for the Holy Ghost at the Église St.-Pierre and continue with a procession of Catholic dignitaries from the world over to see the new church.≤≠ Police guidelines for crowd control would be in e√ect. Le Temps on June 17 jubilantly recorded the day as the successful ‘‘consecration of the universe to the Sacred Heart.’’ It estimated the crowd at eight thousand worshipers and enthused that everything had gone without the ‘‘slightest incident.’’ Even the weather had cooperated; everyone had returned to the Église St-Pierre before a brief rain began to fall, ‘‘in torrents,’’ as if in harmony with Madame de Guyon’s famous work on the Sacred Heart, Les Torrents. For Le Siècle on June 17, on the contrary, the events had culminated in ‘‘a real failure,’’ with out of all of Paris, a meager ‘‘2,500 ﬂâneurs’’ in attendance. Even that crowd, in which ‘‘women dominated, naturally,’’ had dispersed in great disarray when ‘‘a diluvian rain’’—like the ﬂood sent as punishment to disobedient humanity—began its onslaught. Whether the crowds had numbered twenty-ﬁve hundred wanderers or eight thousand worshipers, whether the rains had fallen during or after the consecration, in mystical torrents or punishing ﬂoods, whether the day had seen the dedication of the universe to the Sacred Heart or the awakening of

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ancient terrors in the hearts of the ignorant and the simple, the bicentennial celebration of the cult of the Sacred Heart had revived questions about the politics of Catholic popular culture. The intensity of these questions had arguably not been seen since the attempt to replace Catholicism with the cult of reason during the French Revolution. The front-page editorial by an unnamed writer in Le Siècle on June 16, 1875, recounts the history of the momentum that had gathered around the bicentennial celebration. In 1873, after a year of wrangling over the religious phraseology of various proposals to build a temple on the hill of Montmartre, a majority of France’s National Assembly ﬁnally had voted in favor of the ‘‘public utility’’ of the Church of the Sacred Heart. The deputies in the National Assembly had been so impressed by the pilgrimages of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of citizens to the site of Alacoque’s vision at Paray-le-Monial that they had been inspired to exploit the political power of the Sacred Heart themselves. On the Feast of St. Peter, June 29, 1873, a large number of deputies arrived at the train station in Paray-le-Monial with the emblem of the Sacred Heart on their chests and a ‘‘magniﬁcent banner’’ o√ering on one side ‘‘the image of Christ revealing his heart’’ and on the other side ‘‘the tables of the law.’’ The mingling of the discourses of positivism (as in the ‘‘public utility’’ of the Church of the Sacred Heart) and of mysticism could only be paradoxical, as the author of the June 16 article in Le Siècle noted, ‘‘in this era of cold reason, of experimental and positive life.’’ How had the Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart come to overlap politically and culturally with the positivist cult of utility under the Third Republic? The editorial goes on to argue that this odd imbrication of motifs could be deciphered only in the context of the trauma of the Commune, the civil war that had ﬂared up in the spring of 1871 in Paris, pitting workers and immigrants against the powers of Church and government. During this bloody insurrection, which had led to the execution of thirty thousand communards, the archbishop had been assassinated. Le Siècle accounted for the new enthusiasm for the Sacred Heart as an attempt to calm a cycle of cultural vertigo. That cycle had reached a peak in the Commune but had earlier roots dating all the way back to the Revolution and the defeat of the unity of king and Church in the ancien régime. ‘‘The faith which lay calm and cool in the ancient order of things, under the government of the king

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and the pope-king, rose up, horriﬁed, beside itself at the loss of its object, at the defeat of its gods.’’ The Commune, in other words, had been an attempt to reawaken the proto-Marxist spirit of the Revolution, but it had instead triggered the reawakening, through resistance to the Commune, of elements of the spirit of the ancien régime. This resistance called not for the reestablishment of the institutions of the ancien régime per se but for the taming of the masses through the making real, the material precision, of Catholic ideas. Fascinated by the object life of divine love in the cult of the Sacred Heart, the ‘‘people’’ would turn their eyes away from spectacles of revolutionary wounding. The traumatic mimesis of revolutions ine√ectively parroting the Revolution gave way to the mimetic trauma of citizens and legislators identifying with the wounds of the Sacred Heart. (UN)HOLY MATERIALISM

Since the author of the editorial in Le Siècle believed that the resurgence of the cult of the Sacred Heart in 1875 was a reaction against the revolutionary spirit of the Commune, he probably also thought that the Bicentennial was an orchestrated distraction of the ‘‘people’’ away from concrete social change. The notion that the cult of the Sacred Heart was an abuse of the people can be found in Michelet’s Le Prêtre, la femme, et la famille (ﬁrst published in 1842 but with numerous references to the ﬁrst centennial celebration of the Sacred Heart in 1775 and frequently reprinted in the latter part of the nineteenth century). Michelet’s critique of the sexual, class, and epistemological politics of sacred signs within the culture of Catholic materialism exempliﬁes a political protectiveness toward the uneducated classes while nevertheless deﬁning the mentality of those classes as utterly devoid of analytical and creative agency. Michelet was obsessed by the mimetic power of the Sacred Heart, which he saw as a sign wielded by the church to represent divine love as a real, concrete, and erotic ‘‘thing.’’ He believed that this ‘‘very carnal, very material’’ ‘‘mute sign’’ (165), palpitating and streaming in the open breast of ‘‘a living man, who, showing you his wound with his hands, signals you to come and plumb this opened breast’’ was fraudulently sanctiﬁed. The Jesuits had recognized that the heart was no ordinary sign; it had always been

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‘‘powerful’’ as the ‘‘organ of the a√ections,’’ easily portrayed by the Church as ‘‘swollen, heaving with sighs.’’ For Michelet the word ‘‘heart’’ ‘‘blurs the distinctions between all kinds of love,’’ lending itself to a ‘‘language of double meaning’’ (165–66). The Sacred Heart for Michelet embodied the tricky ideal of concrete representation, the sign magically made to beat. And who, Michelet asks, ‘‘will understand it best? Women: for them the life of the heart is everything. This organ, through which all blood passes, highly inﬂuenced by the revolutions of blood, is no less dominant in women than the sexual organs.’’* The Sacred Heart, for Michelet, was a veiled sentimental and pornographic manipulation of the victims of the human heart. In semiotic terms one could say this manipulation lay in the fact that the heart was represented as a pure signiﬁer/referent, from which human signifying processes had been expelled, but that it had a God-given signiﬁcation inherent to the signiﬁer. Michelet considered the Sacred Heart to be a papal betrayal of abstract and sublimating epistemologies, a seduction of the naive or materialist classes of society: ‘‘The popes, who at ﬁrst were very worried by the vulnerability of this materialism to philosophers’ attacks, have now come to understand that materialism is extremely useful to them in addressing a world that hardly reads the philosophers and that, for all its devotion, is no less material. They . . . forbade explanation of whether the term ‘Sacred Heart’ designated the love of God for man or some bit of bleeding ﬂesh. In reducing the thing to the idea, they would have stripped it of the passionate attraction that was responsible for its success’’ (180–81).† In making it logical to speak of the ‘‘reduction’’ of the thing to the idea, rather than of the *Et qui le comprendra mieux? Les femmes: chez elles la vie du coeur est tout. Cet organe, passage du sang, et fortement inﬂuencé par les révolutions du sang, n’est pas moins dominant dans la femme que le sexe même. †Les papes, qui d’abord s’étaient inquiétés de la prise qu’un tel matérialisme donnait aux attaques des philosophes, ont mieux compris de nos jours qu’il leur était fort utile, s’addressant à un monde qui ne lit guère les philosophes, et qui, pour être dévot, n’est pas moins matériel. Ils ont . . . défendu d’expliquer si le mot de sacré Coeur désignait l’amour de Dieu pour l’homme ou tel morceau de chair sanglante. En réduisant la chose à l’idée, on lui ôtait l’attrait passionné qui en a fait le succès.

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idea to the thing, the Sacred Heart, for Michelet, threatened to make a monkey of divinity. The magical powers of the Sacred Heart as sign could be used to manipulate the people but could not be manipulated by the people; it was an education in things that foreclosed the possibility of an education in ideas. FÉLICITÉ, C’EST MOI

Flaubert, unlike Michelet, seemed to see something more reciprocal than a manipulation of the ‘‘simple’’ classes in the motif of the Sacred Heart. Legislators had made the Sacred Heart and the tables of the law into reversible images, suggesting that politicians wielding the authority of the Sacred Heart could govern the people. But Flaubert identiﬁed with the complicated agency of a simple conceptualization of the sacred. In a letter to Louis Bouilhet from Jerusalem in 1850, Flaubert presented a kind of empathic personal sketch of the ironic/pathetic tensions that would later structure Félicité’s encounter with religion. Jerusalem on the one hand aroused all Flaubert’s antipathy for Western religion. In his correspondence he describes the holy city in terms of hypocrisy (‘‘It is all a lie’’), religious rot (‘‘It all rots, the dogs in the streets, the religions in the churches’’), and religious bellicosity (13:67). And yet this invective serves as an ironic counterpoint for his appreciation of the tender, metamorphosing ﬁguration required to broach the sacred quality of love. He recounts that he was in the Holy Sepulchre when a priest opened a drawer and took out a rose to give to him. He experienced the strange feeling that men ‘‘like us’’ feel when ‘‘they sound with all the strength of their souls this abyss represented by the word love,’’ ﬁguring what it might be. Anticipating the cynicism of his correspondent, Flaubert adds that in this scene he was neither Voltairian nor mephistophelic: ‘‘I was on the contrary very simple’’ (13:67–68). Flaubert’s belief that simplicity in the face of religious love could be a greater imaginative challenge than Voltairian skepticism put him in a position to criticize the Church’s authority while admiring naive ﬁgurations of sacred love. In a letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, Flaubert distinguished between his scorn for religious dogma and his admiration for the ‘‘poetic’’ ﬁgurative processes that initially invent it: ‘‘Each particular dogma is repulsive to me, but I consider the sentiment that invents dogma to be the most

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natural and poetic of humanity.’’ Philosophical condemnation of these forms of cultural invention, along the lines of Michelet’s critique of the Sacred Heart, strikes Flaubert as a failure of philosophy: ‘‘I don’t at all like the philosophers who have seen in it nothing but trickery and idiocy’’ (2:570). And because it is the principle of invention that draws him, rather than any established tradition of religious belief, it is precisely the ignorant materialism derided by Michelet, the phenomenon of ‘‘the old doting child who makes some fetish, some palpable, touchable god’’ (Michelet, 164), that appeals to Flaubert’s imagination. Flaubert ascribed to religious materialism the same possibilities for inventive agency that were evident in his cult of narrative. Je√erson Humphries has argued that the unity of the three stories in Trois Contes hinges on the representation of types of religious experience ‘‘which may be read as allegories of the process of reading,’’ understood as ‘‘a sort of ‘religious’ suspension of disbelief, a ‘rational’ hallucination’’ (324). Was Flaubert making use of the discourse of the Sacred Heart as an allegory of reading? Its theological explanations bear sometimes astonishing parallels to the discourse of realism. This parallelism can be seen as simple coincidence, an arbitrary twinning e√ect between two discourses. Or it can be seen as a resource for understanding why the stakes of realism—mimetic simplicity threatening to evolve, as Chambers puts it, into a self-condemning mimetic duplicity—are supraliterary in scope. Just as it could be argued that Barthes’s ‘‘reality e√ect’’ is ‘‘sacred’’ to modern literary narrative, the supernatural in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ invokes the parallel problem of nonliterary valorizations of material representation, and with it, of ‘‘illiterate’’ forms of ‘‘reading.’’ THE ‘‘REAL SYMBOL’’

In 1922 A. Vermeersch, drawing on sources on the Sacred Heart from the Patristic era onward, wrote that ‘‘the love of God only touches us when we give it the features of human love. But this would be a pure ﬁction without the heart of Jesus Christ’’ (2:113). Fictions of divinely equalizing love will not sustain the people, who clamor for its reality: ‘‘Now, the taste for ﬁctions is passé. They want the real.’’ A semiotics of real tenderness promises to work magic on social tensions: ‘‘So let’s set a truly beating heart before the eyes of

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the faithful’’ (2:114), Vermeersch urges, and ‘‘the era of social peace will be, in this way, inaugurated’’ (2:115). This populist politics of the metaphorically real body part of God necessitates rhetorical argumentation. Vermeersch portrays widespread theological agreement that there would be no reason ‘‘to attach oneself to the physical and living heart of our Lord if the devotion to the Sacred Heart relied on a simple metaphor’’ (2:30). Instead of a metaphor, the Sacred Heart is ‘‘the real symbol of his love’’ (2:26). What makes Jesus’ heart a ‘‘real symbol’’? The ‘‘ties’’ that bind it to divine love. These ‘‘ties’’ are quite complex; they represent a reality founded on ‘‘analogies’’ (2:27), and yet these analogies are based not so much on resemblance as on ‘‘the ties that bind the cause to the e√ect.’’ The real symbol mediates, in other words, between two similar terms by showing the causal foundation for their similarity. Vermeersch writes that the real symbol simpliﬁes: ‘‘We have recourse to the symbol in order to simplify, synthesize, unify’’ (2:27 n. 1). The Sacred Heart as the sign of real love also ﬁgures the love of real signs. In the domain of textuality, the sign of the real can function as a lowercase word made ﬂesh, representation made referent. Conversely, the Sacred Heart is on a certain level a popular realist manifesto, leading not back to literature but to the lived belief in signs and their ability to challenge limitations imposed by social inequality and human mortality. Religious mimesis, like literary realism, challenges the perception that the ‘‘illusory’’ materiality of the sign is incapable of producing real e√ects in the domain of the social. PEASANT METAMORPHOSES

At the beginning of ‘‘A Simple Heart,’’ Flaubert’s peasant woman from Normandy is so thoroughly identiﬁed with her functions in the material world—‘‘she did the cooking and the housekeeping, sewed, washed, ironed, and knew how to bridle a horse’’ (2:591)—that she very nearly fails to achieve any di√erentiation from it. She seems like a ‘‘woman made of wood,’’ functioning ‘‘automatically.’’ Through this ‘‘thingly’’ status Félicité’s role as the epitome of a ‘‘useful’’ servant initially threatens to overlap with

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that of Barthes’s ‘‘useless detail’’ and its resistance to signiﬁcation as a guarantee of referential truth. Félicité also illustrates Michelet’s interesting usage of the term material in the phrase ‘‘a world that hardly reads the philosophers and that, for all its devotion, is no less material’’ (180). One might assume that the world that does read the philosophers would be no less ‘‘material’’ for it in any concrete sense, but for Michelet, its en-lightenment seems to be literal: he perceives an overdetermined physical materialism on the part of those who are not etherealized by respect for abstractions. In e√ect, the lack of a formally philosophical epistemology, for Michelet, is contagious on the level of human ontology. Those who are already more susceptible to ontological materiality—for instance, women, in the historical tradition of the Aristotelian precept that ‘‘woman is to man as body is to spirit’’—are correspondingly considered more susceptible to cultural materialism. The material world to which the Jesuits address themselves is therefore naturally, for Michelet, ‘‘that of women.’’ And ‘‘the more the cult is material, the more it immolates the spirit’’; the cycle is self-perpetuating (179). The more a woman like Félicité starts out as a basely material being, the more she will tra≈c in objects and feelings rather than ideas, and the more she will be metamorphosed through the thingly contagion of wood, becoming—quasi-automatically— an automaton. For Michelet, language is ine≈cient for inﬂuencing the inhabitants of the material world when compared with the ideational ambiguity, ‘‘indecision,’’ and pluralism of material objects, whose inanimation so signiﬁcantly mimes ‘‘material’’ human beings. Therefore he probably would assess Félicité’s ultimate formulation of very material ‘‘cosmologies’’ of the sacred in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ as the nail in the co≈n of her woodenness. And yet, when this servant who has been culturally metamorphosed on the basis of class, gender, and domestic materialism into a kitchen robot proceeds in her turn to metamorphose a bird of straw into god, haven’t the tables been turned on the dynamics of animation? Isn’t it precisely through Félicité’s transformation from ‘‘a woman made of wood’’ to the mystical assimilator of ‘‘religious objects’’ and ‘‘heteroclite things’’ that she gains human dimensionality for the reader?

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The extensive category of what one might call ‘‘peasant metamorphoses’’ in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ begins in the text with Félicité’s own metamorphosis away from automation. These rural reinventions, reanimations, metamorphose the peasant woman from Normandy who was the legendary founder of the devotion to that other, virginal/maternal Sacred Heart, into the peasant woman from Normandy who is the ﬁctional founder of a devotion to the sacred parrot. Félicité’s peasant-authored metamorphoses in the tale transform the cultural politics of the discourses of relics and fetishism into new ﬁgurations of love.

UNREAL CADAVERS

‘‘Let’s go now! Say good-bye!’’ Even though he was not a cadaver, he was being devoured by worms. —Flaubert, ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’

The above line from the end of ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ has prompted analogies between Flaubert’s project and the Parnassian ideal of beauty as whole form. Ross Chambers, citing the thought of Gautier, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, takes the worms as a sign that ‘‘there is a rivalry between the material meaning of things and the immaterial meaning that artistic writing can have when it is divorced from the material and ﬂies on its own wings, like some Loulou with outspread pinions, freed at last from the world of worms and lost stu≈ng’’ (147). Since decomposition cannot be a good sign, in other words, it must herald ﬂight from the material sign; it is the emblem of Loulou as the ideal of pure spirit, the paradisaic bird of art. But what if the worms are, on the contrary, the triumph of a certain material meaning? What if decomposition is, in this story of holy and unholy ghosts, a very good ‘‘sign’’ indeed? Three almost ‘‘libidinally’’ primal impulses—to love, to equalize, and to preserve—arguably organize Félicité’s characterization and agency in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’; and these impulses in turn converge, cumulatively, around the drama of the relic. Perhaps they evolve from her early loss of father, mother, the company of siblings, the pledge of a ﬁancé; certainly these losses function as a complication of the simplicity of the love she eventually lavishes on the bird to whose remains she has such trouble saying ‘‘adieu.’’

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The theme of relics is not conterminous with the theme of the Sacred Heart, but relics do represent the degree to which the keeper of relics holds his or her ‘‘heart’’ or love to be ‘‘sacred’’ and is therefore unwilling to ‘‘let go’’ of the beloved. Relics, like the Sacred Heart, had a special prominence in the 1870s, and the rise of the cult of the Sacred Heart was perceived by some analysts as an extension of the popularity of relics. Claudine Frank notes that ‘‘throughout the decade of the 1870s religious relics were all the rage, according to Paul Parfait’s satirical and anticlerical La Foire aux reliques (1879) which attributes to the political turmoil of 1870–71 a radical mise-enquestion of the national symbol [the Sacred Heart]’’ (59). In a psychoanalytic rather than a religious sense, relics are a means, according to Pierre Fédida, of reaching compromise with the absolutism of death. In ‘‘La Relique et le travail du deuil’’ (The relic and the work of mourning), Fédida theorizes that while the work of mourning leads the ego to accept ‘‘the rigorous verdict of reality,’’ the relic goes against this realityverdict. ‘‘The relic achieves the illusory compromise sought by man to resist the anguish of death. It allows him to avoid making a representation of death coincide with the necessity—now the destiny—of a no more.’’≤∞ By thinking with relics, Félicité elides the death verdict of material reality through its preservation, and love’s losses are eased through a material intermediary. Félicité’s relationship to little Virginie is the occasion for her ﬁrst invention of a mysticism of love. Since her time spent at church with Virginie is her ﬁrst education in religious observance, she gains access to Christian ritual through mimesis: ‘‘since her religious education had been neglected in her youth, . . . she imitated all the practices of Virginie’’ (2:601–2). This imitation of her small charge takes on the mystical connotations of the imitation of Christ. But since she is mystically imitating a little girl rather than Christ, the moment of the little girl’s ﬁrst Communion with Jesus through the eucharist becomes, ironically, the moment of Félicité’s own ‘‘Communion’’ with—Virginie. Félicité experiences a union of hearts and a complete loss of self in her identiﬁcation with Virginie-communing-withChrist, to the point of near loss of consciousness. The moment parallels the terms of mystical merging with the Sacred Heart: ‘‘When it was Virginia’s turn, Felicity leaned forward to see her; and with the imagination rooted in true tenderness, it seemed to her that she herself was this child; her face

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became hers, her dress clothed her, her heart beat in her chest; when it was time to open her mouth, she closed her eyelids and nearly fainted’’ (2:602, my italics).* This eucharistic ecstasy could serve as a ﬁctional paraphrase of Michelet’s description of a practice in the rural worship of the Sacred Heart: ‘‘I possess a manual, widely distributed in the countryside, where members of the sect are taught, in their prayers for each other, how to associate their hearts’’ (181).† But what makes it more interesting is that Félicité’s experience does not come from a religious manual. On the contrary, we know that the extent of her literary education is Paul’s explanation of the prints of jungle cannibals and desert nomads in a geography manual. This version of a literary education seems to function as Flaubert’s wink about the parallels between ethnographic study of the ‘‘savage’’ ‘‘other’’ and the ‘‘other’’ within France, the peasant outside of literate culture. Félicité has constructed the basis of her imitatio from the shards and leavings of a religious dogma that eludes her: ‘‘As for dogma, she understood nothing’’ (2:601). In a compact mise en abyme of the overlap between sacred and social imitation, Flaubert presents the peasant’s mimicking of religious observance as mimetic of the practice of imitatio. The simultaneous irony and pathos of this ‘‘parroting’’ (in French the verb would be singer ) of dogma, which is actually so original, is implicitly linked to a between-the-lines ethnography of Christian mysticism. Through its subtle transpositions and displacements, Félicité’s imitatio becomes pagan, but ‘‘pagan’’ as the term originated, during the Roman conquest of Gaul, from the Latin pagi or ‘‘country.’’ The inhabitants of remote country areas simply were the last to abandon local cults of domestic, agricultural, and geographical things and the ﬁrst to merge Christian institutions with noninstitutional devotions. But Félicité’s imitatio is also *Quand ce fut le tour de Virginie Félicité se pencha pour la voir; et, avec l’imagination que donnent les vraies tendresses, il lui sembla qu’elle était ellemême cette enfant; sa ﬁgure devenait la sienne, sa robe l’habillait, son coeur lui battait dans la poitrine; au moment d’ouvrir la bouche, en fermant les paupières, elle manqua s’évanouir. †J’ai dans les mains un manuel, fort répandu dans les campagnes, où l’on enseigne aux personnes de la confrérie, qui prient les unes pour les autres comment on associe les coeurs.

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properly non-Christian in the sense that the object of this homespun mysticism of the Sacred Heart is not Jesus but simply the activity of the heart in its a√ective reach toward another being. This is made plain in Félicité’s attempt to repeat the experience by taking Communion herself the next morning; ‘‘She received it devoutly but did not taste the same delights’’ (2:602). Félicité invents, through personal transliterations of the unreadable letter of scriptural practice, the sanctity of ordinary love. Félicité’s inventions of relics begin when egalitarian love and the supernatural, which she ﬁnds ‘‘utterly simple,’’ turn out not to be so simple after all. Her cult of the heart’s capacity is wounded by Mme Aubain’s refusal to consider Félicité’s nephew Victor in the same light as her own daughter Virginie, even though for Félicité ‘‘one bond of her heart united them, and their destiny should be the same’’ (2:606). When the destiny of the two children is equalized through death, Félicité applies her own vitality to the attempt to revive Virginie’s previously comparable, equal, organic existence: ‘‘For two nights after the little girl’s death, Félicité never left her side. She repeated the same prayers, tossed holy water on the sheets, came back to sit down, and contemplated her. . . . her eyes were becoming sunken.’’ This faith that love can resurrect the object of love is highly signiﬁcant in that it constitutes Flaubert’s implicit deﬁnition of the term ‘‘supernatural’’—the line that follows Félicité’s expectant kisses on the corpse’s sunken eyelids reads, ‘‘For such souls, the supernatural is utterly simple’’ (2:609). The ‘‘simple’’ quality of the ‘‘supernatural,’’ like the ‘‘simple’’ quality of egalitarian love, is immediately complicated by the fact that the expectation it describes goes unfulﬁlled; just as the simple equality of the heart’s objects—granted ‘‘life’’ through the vitality of the love that animates them for the lover—is threatened when some live and some die. Virginie’s sunken eyes do not reopen at Félicité’s touch; love does not conquer death or inequality. In the wake of this failure of the simplicity of the supernatural, Félicité has recourse to alternative resurrectional strategies of a√ect: instead of projecting a miracle, she creates a relic. The signiﬁcance of this mute episode is translated against the backdrop of Mme Aubain’s articulate, representative grief, which includes rebellion against the supernatural, against the injustice of being singled out for devastation, and a panoramic regret at all the steps not taken to foresee and forestall death. It takes place in the episode in

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which, after some years, Mme Aubain ﬁnally is able, with Félicité’s help, to sort through Virginie’s belongings. They ﬁnd that the little girl’s e√ects have begun to decay, in a strikingly corporeal way: ‘‘The sun illuminated these poor objects, showing up the stains and the creases made by the movement of the body.’’ The morbid suggestiveness of the clothing contrasts with a strangely euphoric atmosphere of warm blue air, chirping birds, and a ‘‘profound sweetness’’ of life. The two women then unpack another, even more corporeal object, a plush hat decomposing with the help of vermin. Félicité hastens to claim it: ‘‘They found a little long-haired, chestnut-colored plush hat; but it was moth-eaten. Félicité claimed it for herself ’’ (2:611).* Félicité claims the fur hat not in spite of its infestation but because of it, with no hesitation, no movement of repulsion. The insects are the point, as are the long chestnut-colored hairs, since both ﬁgure the unreal cadaver, the cadaver that is ﬁctional even in its function as the sign of the reality of decay. A relic does not have to be an actual body part, since Christian relics are properly deﬁned not only as body parts of venerated persons, but also as ‘‘objects that they once owned, and by extension, things that were once in physical contact with them.’’ By ‘‘the principles of sympathetic magic . . . any personal possession or part of a person’s body can be thought of as equivalent to his whole self, no matter how minute it may be, or how detached in time and space.’’≤≤ The relic-hat conjures up the little girl through the metonymy of her having worn it and displaces her death by replacing her decomposition with that of the plush. It therefore represents, gives back, through decay, the little girl as an object of love beyond the threat of decay. Through an imitative organicity, it resurrects the memory of deceased materiality. Since the plush hat has in a sense restored the ‘‘simplicity’’ of the supernatural, it is not surprising that egalitarian love also falls into place, given the earlier parallelism of these two ‘‘simple’’ concepts. The normally haughty Mme Aubain greets Félicité’s choice with a burst of tenderness; ‘‘they embraced, satisfying their pain with a kiss that made them equals’’ (2:611). Félicité promptly incorporates this kiss into her cult of equal love: *Elles retrouvèrent un petit chapeau de peluche, à longs poils, couleur marron; mail il était tout mangé de vermine. Félicité le reclama pour elle-même.

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‘‘Félicité was as grateful to her as if for a boon, and from this time forward she cherished her with bestial devotion and religious veneration.’’ This ‘‘bestial’’ devotion causes ‘‘the goodness of her heart’’ (2:612) to develop. Grief for the deceased in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ destabilizes the boundaries of the abyss between God and humankind, valorizing corporeality to the point of making creature equal to Creator. The relic is a signiﬁer of the stakes of equality, in that, as Patrick Geary notes in ‘‘Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,’’ ‘‘Like slaves, relics belong to that category, unusual in Western society, of objects that are both persons and things.’’≤≥ When manipulated by a person like Félicité whose own social di√erentiation from things is tenuous, the relic institutes a veneration of the body in between life and death, social personhood and social thinghood. It institutes a cult of love capable of producing transformative links between the slave and the nonslave. Félicité’s relics reveal subversions of the boundary between things and nonthings that are latent in the material tradition of the relic. Relics have long been associated with excess and controversy in Christianity. The cult of relics was literally built into the architecture of early Christianity: the Encyclopedia of Religion notes that early Christians often ‘‘decided to settle permanently in the vicinity’’ of saints’ tombs. ‘‘In this way, tombs became altars, and whole cities arose where there had once been cemetaries’’ (12:277). Conversely, saints’ bodies were often translated from cemeteries to existing settlements and enshrined in churches, so that ‘‘altars also became tombs.’’ The insertion of martyrs’ relics into altars was in fact mandated in 787, when ‘‘the Second Council of Nicaea declared the presence of such relics to be obligatory for the consecration of a church.’’ This truly structural veneration predictably had unleashed widespread tra≈cking in sacred body parts. As early as 386 c.e., the emperor Theodosius legislated restrictions on the ‘‘selling, buying, or dividing’’ of holy cadavers. By the late medieval period the cult of relics was ‘‘so widespread, popular, and intense that more than one scholar has called it the true religion’’ of the time (12:278). Since pilgrims were avid consumers in the commerce of relics, bits and pieces of saints increasingly constituted a signiﬁcant economic resource, and relic merchants and professional relic thieves conducted a booming transalpine business. This cultural hard-sell or commodiﬁcation of religious pain and death,

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extensively ‘‘advertised’’ through the ubiquitous visual iconography of Jesus’ Passion (from passio, ‘‘su√ering’’), the instruments of torture, the ﬁve wounds, and of course the dramatic mimetic morbidity of the saints, was especially inﬂuential in a largely illiterate society. Inevitably, it raised problems of veriﬁcation. How could one prove that someone else’s pain was real? How could one prove that someone else’s real pain was su√ered in the name of virtuous abstractions? Or that a given thumb, tongue, or vial of milk were concrete signs of a more-than-ordinary body? Geary writes that despite the universal acceptance of ‘‘person-objects as relics,’’ the ubiquity of normal mortal remains and an established pattern of fraud meant that ‘‘the problem of skepticism’’ was posed (187). The tra≈c in relics in this sense provided a model for Elaine Scarry’s axiom in The Body in Pain that to feel pain is to have certainty, whereas to witness someone else’s pain is to have doubt. In the medieval era, the certainty and doubt issuing from pain (i.e., martrydom) were attached to the fate of such major institutions as the Church, commerce, and relations with the Middle East. THE RELICS OF LIFE BEFORE ART

The relic became a liability for Catholicism in the sixteenth century when thinkers such as Jean Calvin questioned its authenticity. For Calvin, relics were signs of doubt, a doubt that could spread to other institutions of faith. In his Traité des reliques, Calvin ‘‘inventoried’’ the sacred bodies of Christendom. He tallied hybrid monstrosities with seven foreskins (Christ), nineteen jaws ( John the Baptist), multiple breasts (Saint Agatha), or duplicate beards and brains (Saint Peter). He complained that in turning from the spirit of religion to its representation in body parts, the ‘‘accessory’’ was idolized in place of the whole: ‘‘the world, . . . in doing this, has abandoned the main thing to follow the accessory.’’≤∂ Calvin also argued that the Old Testament rejected the epistemology of relics, quoting Isaiah that to separate a person of value from his tomb is to convert him into a useless object. Calvinist thought on the excessive and deceptive materiality of relics of course was instrumental in the development of the schism in the Church. The trade in relics diminished somewhat from the Reformation onward, losing its central economic role.

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By the post-Revolutionary period, many ethnographers and religious scholars had begun to analyze the phenomenon of religious materialism not as a standard for the ‘‘authenticity’’ of religion but rather as a primordial stage in the development of human ﬁgurative powers. Several scholars came to see religious materialism as a crucial step in the formation of the culture of the arts (even if they considered it to be primitive and despicable in itself ). Collin de Plancy, in the 1821 Dictionnaire critique des reliques et des images, in which Calvin’s Traité was also reprinted, theorized that art had emerged from the cult of relics. He speculated that the cult of relics predated the cult of saints’ images precisely because the worship of body parts produced a capacity and a passion for ﬁgurative representation: ‘‘The cult of images came only after that of relics; before there were artists, people had the remains of the dead.’’*≤∑ Plancy disapproved of this religious mimesis, however, concluding that ﬁgurative representation in itself is overly materialistic; art is tarred by the same brush as the relic. The ethnographer and theological scholar Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, in 1825, theorized attempts to preserve the physical presence of the dead in the mourning process as a superhuman impulse, a supernatural love, that demands to exceed the laws of nature. ‘‘People wish to elude the laws of nature and to rescue from decay these remains whose features recall a respected, cherished being; and this wish leads to the discovery of the art of embalming.’’≤∏ The emergence of the ‘‘cult of the dead’’ e√ects strange ‘‘metamorphoses’’ in which God is cut down to human size: ‘‘This transformative cult, which, in creating idolatry, humanized divinity, is the cult of the dead’’ (1:454). The humanization of divinity is, for Dulaure, subversive and yet creative. We owe to it the emergence of the imitative arts: ‘‘We also owe the birth and the progress of the imitative arts, and above all of statuary, to this cult’’ (1:41). Relics and imitation or mimesis were, throughout the nineteenth century, theorized on the same continuum of the historical development of civilizations. By this nineteenth-century logic of the relic, does Félicité’s creation of a relic in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ represent, on an individual scale, the birth of *Le culte des images ne vint qu’apès les reliques; on eut des restes de morts avant d’avoir des artistes.

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art? In her engagement with the problem of the ‘‘real’’ presence of the dead beloved, was she tra≈cking in the social life of realism? Flaubert apparently associated the ‘‘supernatural’’ likeness between the infested plush hat and the corpse of the little girl with the possibility of egalitarian love between servant and mistress. What, in the strange mimetic ‘‘likeness’’ of relic and cadaver could lead to the ‘‘likeness’’ of social equality? Had Félicité simply shown that she understood that Mme Aubain’s pain was as ‘‘real’’ as a decomposing object? Flaubert puts the worm at the heart of the composition of love in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ in the context of debates on authenticity and ﬁguration. The question of the meaning of Félicité’s relic then segues into the question of the meaning of the fetish she subsequently creates, just as, historically, the controversial prominence of the relic was displaced by the invention of the Western idea of the fetish.

THE FETISH: SLAVE TO THE RELIC?

Anthropologists tell us that the sacred is not a class of special things but a special class of things. —Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty

In the burgeoning nineteenth-century study of material epistemologies and worship, not only was art perceived as a later emanation of the ‘‘cult of the dead,’’ but also the Sacred Heart was perceived as a displacement of the cultural energy formally devoted to the relic after the Reformation. The Reformation had discredited materialist epistemologies of the sacred. Michelet traced the seventeenth-century emergence of the formal cult of the Sacred Heart to the repression of ‘‘outdated’’ earlier cults: ‘‘At the very moment when Catholicism should have prudently distanced itself from the idolatrous cults for which it was reproached by the Protestants, it instead manifested a new one, and the most shocking to date, the carnal and sensual devotion to the Sacred Heart’’ (175). According to Michelet’s synopsis, Protestantism may have emerged in protest against, among other things, Catholic materialism; but Catholicism, rather than being shamed into abstraction, moved, on the level of popular worship, even further in the direction of exploiting the seductive appeal of thinking with things.

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In early Western modernity, did one type of ‘‘thing to think with’’ replace another each time the original ‘‘thing’’ had become too politically problematic? What is the relation of the fetish to the relic? ‘‘Fetishism’’ traditionally describes materialism beginning in cultures both antedating Christianity and strongly di√erentiated from Christianity. Yet as ‘‘an idea and a problem,’’ as a recognizably new object ‘‘not proper to any prior discrete society,’’ it originated, according to the anthropologist William Pietz, ‘‘in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.’’≤π Pietz’s historical association of the emergent Western discourse of fetishism with early modern colonial trade in Africa belies ‘‘the relation of the notion of fetishism to Christianity’s internal conception of its false other (idolatry)’’ (6). Is it more than coincidence that the discourse of the ‘‘savage’’ fetish came into being at the same time that Catholicism, during and after the Reformation, sought strategies to defend itself against the protests of the Protestants concerning the monstrous materialism of the cult of relics? If fetishism also represents Catholicism’s ‘‘internal conception of its false other,’’ how does this discourse of otherness conceal cultural identiﬁcation with material worship? Did the discourse of the fetish serve as the fall guy for the relic? During the Reformation, the critique of the relic did not produce a recognition of cultural contagion between Christian and other material cults. Instead, by means of the development of the discourse of fetishism, the era produced an articulation of the ‘‘natural’’ dichotomy between Western and non-Western materialisms. This dichotomization born of parallelism can be analyzed in early ‘‘ethnographic’’ narratives, which are themselves symptomatic of a problem of economic and social history, since the Church’s attempts to stiﬂe the controversy of its own commerce in ‘‘personobjects’’ facilitated rationalization of the economic practices of that other tra≈c in ‘‘human things’’—slavery. The a≈rmation of cultural dominance through the discourse of the fetish is very complex, as can be seen in the post-Revolutionary work of Hegel. Hegel problematized the modern bifurcation of material and abstract apprehensions of God, according to Robert Williams: ‘‘Hegel observes that modernity creates a terrible dilemma for theology: either God (ens realissimum ) is not an object at all and cannot be known, or God becomes ‘a mere object,’ a block of wood or stone.’’≤∫ Yet he implies a certain

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‘‘slavishness’’ on the part of Africans because of their participation in a culture of fetishism, conceived of as the antithesis of a culture of universalizing abstractions. Pietz comments, ‘‘Hegel’s characterization of Africans and of the religion of fetishes that actualizes ‘the African spirit’ typiﬁes the accepted European understanding in the early nineteenth-century. ‘The peculiarity of the African character,’ according to Hegel, is that it lacks the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of Universality. The function of this view of Africans, which was far from being peculiar to Hegel, as an ideology justifying the slave trade by explaining Africans as slavish by nature is obvious enough’’ (7 n. 10). Charles de Brosses’s 1760 Du Culte des dieux fétiches epitomizes an earlier moment in the development of this epistemology of race. In this work, the ﬁrst to categorize the fetish as a cultural ‘‘ism’’ (‘‘le fétichisme’’), De Brosses relies on intellectual history as a methodology for his discussion of fetishism in ‘‘Nigritia’’ or Africa. He draws, however, on only one source for this history: the Bible. The result is a peculiar ethnographic mythology of reason. All the world’s peoples, according to de Brosses, were born from the Creator ‘‘in a state of reason and well instructed by divine goodness.’’≤Ω But subsequent widespread abuses of the faculty of reason brought on the ‘‘deserved punishment’’ (192) of the Flood. This deluge wiped out the ‘‘acquired knowledge’’ of all the inhabitants of Creation, with one exception: ‘‘the chosen race’’ (206), the Judeo-Christian race, which retained its rationality as a sign of God’s favor. Everywhere else on the ﬂooded earth, humanity yielded to ‘‘the empire of chance’’ (219), losing the capacity to di√erentiate cause from e√ect. This ‘‘disﬁguration’’ (19) of intellectualreligious capacity condemned these peoples to a state of perpetual childhood, a permanent inability to raise their minds above the rational potential of their own ‘‘dolls’’ (185), whom they took to be as animated as themselves. In this state of watered-down reason, humanity inevitably lost sight of ‘‘the order of things’’ (191) as characterized by the epistemological passage from ‘‘palpable object to abstract knowledge,’’ ‘‘near to far,’’ and ‘‘creature to Creator’’ (196). This biblical ‘‘history’’ serves, in de Brosses’s book, to explicate the colonial present. The perpetuity of barbarism reigns in Nigritia, where the e√ects of the Flood are symptomatized by the cult of ‘‘Certain Divinities that the Europeans call Fetishes, a term coined by our merchants in Senegal

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from the Portuguese word fetisso, which is to say an enchanted, divine, or fairy-like thing, or a thing giving oracles; from the Latin root Fatum, Fanum, Fari ’’ (18). De Brosses’s comparison of the denizens of the Old Testament with the denizens of Europe’s great new mercantile resource reveals that ‘‘the ancient peoples were savage and vulgar like the blacks and the Caribbeans,’’ because ‘‘the objects of their cult were the same’’ (237). The materiality of cult objects deﬁnes the cult’s worshipers as objects themselves. De Brosses’s idea of the fetish clearly lends itself to transhistorical schematization of the di√erence between the civilized and the barbarous worlds, despite his claim that ‘‘fetishism is a thing so absurd that even those who would like to combat it cannot ﬁnd a form of reasoning that will let them get a grip on it’’ (183). It may function as a kind of Medusa’s head of the intellect, turning reason to stone, yet it facilitates the displacement to Africa of the Catholic wound of religious materialism diagnosed by the Protestants. As if to contextualize this defensive use value of the fetish, de Brosses alludes to troubles in the paradise of reason, consisting of the schisms born of excessive subtlety and the consequent injury to religion. ‘‘From the habit of being overly subtle about beliefs, of dissertating on dogma, of stretching and subdividing the objects of the cult, Religion degenerates into puerile minutia’’ (198), he complains. Perhaps the parallelism between the relic and the fetish is one of these ‘‘puérilités minutieuses,’’ which distracts from the primary goal of religious enlightenment: the practical hierarchization of civilization over barbarism, the abstract over the concrete, the Creator over the creature. Descartes exempliﬁes this purity of rational aspiration toward the abstract, itself granted the status of a kind of religion by de Brosses: ‘‘A profound philosopher, . . . after having said ‘I think, therefore I am,’ raised himself suddenly from this one point to the knowledge of spiritualism and the conviction in the existence of a sole immaterial God’’ (196). We might now call the increasing sacralization of pure reason between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment the ‘‘fetishism’’ of reason, except that reason then had the status of an antifetish. In ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ Félicité, like the primitive fetish-thinkers of De Brosses’s mythology, exhibits an apparent cognitive simplicity that could be seen by her peers as a justiﬁcation of her servitude. But her cognitive simplicity is also consistent with the ‘‘saintly’’ cognition of numerous female

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mystics in the Christian tradition. Saint Julienne, the innovator of the ‘‘Fête-Dieu’’ or Corpus Christi holiday so central to Félicité’s eccentric observances, was known for having resisted her role as originator with the line ‘‘Je ne suis qu’une niaise’’ (I am nothing but a simpleton).≥≠ Félicité’s particular simplicity does allow her to conceptualize through a fetishistic epistemology, but in the end there is nothing simple about it. FETISHISM FLIES (IN THE ‘‘OPENED SKIES’’ OF POST-REVOLUTIONARY CULTURE)

The next example of Félicité’s inventions in the domain of religious materialism occurs after the death of her beloved parrot, Loulou. Loulou had become Félicité’s pet following the transfer of the subprefect away from Pont-l’Évêque. I will call the story of the afterlife of Loulou a case of fetishism, as opposed to the reinvention of the plush hat as a relic, because of Félicité’s worship of Loulou. Félicité’s grief at the loss of Loulou leaves her, for the ﬁrst time in her life, inconsolable. The story makes it clear that Félicité’s attachment to Loulou has to do with the analogy between the di≈culties shared by a talking bird and a peasant-born servant in carrying out speech acts of recognized communicative substance. Just as Félicité is attributed a thingly status through her links to the world of things, Loulou is expected to answer to the name of Jacquot for no reason other than that ‘‘all parrots are called Jacquot [or in English, ‘Polly’ ]’’ (2:613). Loulou’s standard repertoire of phrases bespeaks the subservience of Félicité: ‘‘Charming boy! Your servant, sir! Hail Mary!’’ His voice is received not as individuation or expression but as the reﬂexive sign of parrothood. As Félicité herself ages and grows deaf, speaking in a timbre inappropriate to conversational exchange, Mme Aubain makes a refrain of the comment ‘‘My God! How stupid you are!’’ (2:615). In the context of this disappointment in the egalitarian love she had brieﬂy shared with her mistress, Félicité goes on to establish a ‘‘bestial devotion’’ to a creature who precisely incarnates the noun ‘‘bête’’ to the same extent as herself. Félicité is learning to ﬁnd egalitarian love in creatures assigned her own object-status. Loulou, like Félicité in the beginning of the story, is compared to a block of wood, ‘‘une bûche’’ (2:613); the comparison cuts Félicité, the ‘‘woman made of wood,’’ to the quick.

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In e√ect, Félicité’s worship of Loulou, the parrot carried to Pont-l’Évêque on the winds of the July Revolution, links the theme of the quest for tender equality to the wresting of an autonomous voice from the mouth of dumb mimicry—both of which are eventually projected onto the problem of the cult of mute things. Although as a parrot, Loulou’s voice ﬁgures language emptied of language, Félicité takes Loulou’s enunciative powers extremely seriously. She views as bogus any representations of the Holy Ghost as dove rather than as parrot, since the enunciation of the divine to humankind would require a voice to be ‘‘heard’’: ‘‘The Father, to enunciate his will, couldn’t very well have chosen a dove, as those creatures have no voice, but rather one of the ancestors of Loulou’’ (2:618). This comparison of the suitability of the parrot to that of the dove as the vehicle of divine self-revelation metaphorically evokes two schemas of nonlanguage available to the popular addressees of the divine revelation, the unindividuated ‘‘faithful.’’ In the parrot school of the linguistic reception of the faith, representing the emptied language of dogma, principles are repeated, reproduced, mimicked, with endless possibilities for wicked, if unintentional, parody: ‘‘Hail Mary,’’ chortles Loulou. In the dove school, language is muted by the unquestioning, unspeaking behavior of goodness or ‘‘simplicity.’’ This mute simplicity is epitomized in Jesus’ advice to the disciples, highly resonant in the case of Félicité, to be ‘‘simple comme des colombes.’’ Clearly, neither parrotlike imitation nor dovelike simplicity represents a clear-cut language of agency. Yet there can be no doubt of the a√ective meaning of Loulou and Félicité’s dialogues: ‘‘They had dialogues, Loulou insatiably repeating the three phrases of his repertoire, Félicité responding without any greater coherence but in words in which her heart poured out’’ (2:615). Parroting with a parrot, Félicité plumbs the expressiveness of dumb materiality, the linguistic agency of a creature-language speciﬁcally deﬁned by its lack of agency. Like Félicité, Flaubert used the language of birds in his own life to signify love. ‘‘Loulou’’ was a pet name for his beloved niece, Caroline, whom he liked to ‘‘peck’’ rather than kiss; he wrote in his correspondence of his wish to ‘‘give my caro a peck upon her arrival’’ (16:359) and closed a letter to another friend with the phrase ‘‘who kisses you on the beak’’ (16:335). It would be a mistake to assume that Félicité’s parrot is trivialized as an object

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of love by its creature status, as for Flaubert love itself can be objectiﬁed in creature terms. When Loulou dies, Félicité cries endlessly until Mme Aubain suggests out of irritation that she preserve the bird by having it stu√ed. Félicité makes a long and perilous journey to Honﬂeur to take the bird’s body to the taxidermist, losing consciousness along the way when she is struck down by the whip of an impatient mail-coach driver. It is well known that Flaubert chose this scene to double a critical moment in his own life, when he experienced an epileptic seizure in a carriage on his way to Honﬂeur. Flaubert’s experience left him, by the medical logic of the times, unsuited to any public employment, and it was decisive in his commitment to writing. The loss of consciousness along the route to Honﬂeur also inaugurates a critical phase of Félicité’s life, as it brings back to her with full force the pain of all the previous losses in her life and endows the next, and longest, phase of her relationship with Loulou with particular emotional emphasis. Although she had been Loulou’s mistress for only three years, from the political upheavals of 1834 to his death in 1837, his role as a fetish in her life lasts from 1837 or 1838 to some years after the death of Mme Aubain in 1853, probably around 1860, when Félicité enters her death agony. During these twenty-odd years, Loulou metamorphoses for Félicité from a beloved object to an object of worship. After its eventual recovery from the taxidermist, the now splendid body of the parrot, no longer a cadaver per se but the self-identical or referential representation of the living bird, becomes the centerpiece of Félicité’s attic bedroom. This room comes to serve as a kind of shrine to the ambiguous di√erentiation between sacred signs and material things: ‘‘This place . . . seemed at once like a chapel and a dry goods store because it contained so many religious objects and heteroclite things’’ (2:617). The plush hat is still there, symptomatic of the exaggerated funereal ‘‘respect’’ that prompts Félicité to keep some of Mme Aubain’s deceased husband’s overcoats after the passing of that lady herself. It is in the midst of this expanding cult of the sacred qualities of material remains that Félicité begins to conceptualize the paradoxical resemblance of the Holy Ghost and Loulou, which she notices ﬁrst of all in a stained-glass representation of the Holy Ghost as a bird above the Virgin at church and then in a framed image by Épinal. This ‘‘personiﬁcation’’ or ‘‘précision matérielle’’ of the Holy Ghost as

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parrot, which may seem like ‘‘dottiness,’’ to use Wing’s term, is not as incongruent with religious tradition as it might appear. Plancy’s Dictionnaire critique des reliques conﬁrms that the Holy Ghost was not only represented iconographically in the form of a bird but was also legendarily thought to act in the form of a bird. Consider this entry for Aldegonde, the holy virgin of Haynaut: ‘‘Several churches keep the miraculous veil that the Holy Ghost placed on her head with his beak, the day that she made her vow of virginity’’ (1:11). Or there is the case of the pigeon who would perch on the shoulder of Saint Braule to dictate sermons inspired by the Holy Ghost (1:47). And not only have birds been sanctiﬁed as agents of the Holy Ghost in the history of Christianity, but also some of them, according to Plancy, ‘‘have left relics’’ (1:23). Nonetheless, it is highly iconoclastic to make the religious icon representative of its real-life symbolic counterpart. This analogy in which the Holy Ghost is like Loulou is implicit in the behavior of Félicité: she begins to pray to Loulou. But beyond the blasphemous impact of its audacity, through Félicité’s inversion, the beloved parrot gains metaphysical respectability: ‘‘They became associated in her thinking, and the parrot became sanctiﬁed through its rapport with the Holy Ghost’’ (2:617). And this works both ways: the Holy Ghost becomes positively materialized for Félicité to the same degree that Loulou is sanctiﬁed: ‘‘the Holy Ghost . . . became (in her eyes) more living and intelligible’’ (2:618). Rather than simply parroting pieties about the afterlife, Félicité has managed to parrot-ize theology in a transformative sense, rendering it intelligible, which is the essence of a language that has not been emptied of itself. The dead body of the pet makes God ‘‘vivant’’ for the servant, and caritas takes on new life. Through Félicité’s ‘‘parroted’’ dogma, Flaubert fetishizes a mimesis of things that is no more original than a block of wood or a stu√ed bird, but it ﬁgures the human ability to survive nothingness. THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FETISHIZATION OF MATERIAL LOGIC

Pietz notes that there was ‘‘a great deal at stake for post-Enlightenment philosophy in this formulation of fetishism as the nontranscendental religion of sensuous desire . . . because its discourse displaced the problem of

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religion from a theological to a materialist problematic congenial to the emerging human sciences and anticlerical activism alike.’’≥∞ The collision of secular thought with religious tradition in the various post-Revolutionary regimes yielded remarkably varied new political applications of the idea of the fetish and the nondit of the relic. Positivist thought, for instance, outlined by Auguste Comte in the Cours de philosophie positive (1798–1857), serenely reincorporates the cultural wound of thinking with things in the interest of a self-legitimating cultural evolutionism. Comte posits ‘‘fetishism’’ as the ﬁrst stage of all cultures (even, or especially, of ‘‘élite’’ Western culture), followed later by the ‘‘metaphysical’’ stage and culminating in the ‘‘positive stage.’’ The positive stage represents a vision of the end of history in the sense that evolution was not expected to extend beyond this utopic realization. Comte theorizes the fetishistic stage in cognitive rather than judgmental terms: ‘‘The theological period of humanity could begin no otherwise than by a complete and usually very durable state of pure Fetishism, which allowed free exercise to that tendency of our nature by which Man conceives of all external bodies as animated by a life analogous to his own, with mere di√erences of intensity.’’≥≤ This internalization within European culture—obviously very relative, since it is relegated to the distant past—of fetishistic thought is characteristic of post-Revolutionary developments of the problem, which typically borrow the cult of things as a tool for explaining personiﬁcation and depersoniﬁcation in domains ranging from art to capitalism to sexuality. On the most basic level, nineteenth-century theorists of the fetish not only insist on the complex form of identiﬁcation encoded by the fetish, but they also explore their own identiﬁcation with this relation of person to thing. Such identiﬁcation with the identiﬁcatory processes of the fetish clearly upsets the logic of the cogito so dear to de Brosses. In the mid–nineteenth century, the German scholar Fritz Schultze theorizes that the intellect has ‘‘no cognitions save those which come to it out of its world.’’≥≥ This formulation is fairly radical in its implication that cognition is neither a gift from god nor the exercise of thought in isolation from its objects. It is also considerably less kind to the ‘‘savage’’ fetishist than it ﬁrst appears, since Schultze goes on to state that ‘‘the number of objects (cognitions) di√ers. . . . Thus the savage has but few, while the civilized European has many. . . . The

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most fully developed intellect, therefore, is that which possesses the greatest number of objects’’ (4). (In e√ect, the one who has the most objects of cognition when he dies, wins.) Despite this holier-than-thou subject positioning so typical of the traditional European discourse of the fetish, Schultze’s formulation is characteristic of the post-Revolutionary recastings of the topic, in that it repeatedly borrows from the logic of the ‘‘savage’’ fetish to explain European epistemologies. For Schultze, the ‘‘world’’ that ﬁnds its way into the productions of cognition is ‘‘anatomized,’’ ﬁrst, according to the body of the cognitive subject. Humanity anatomizes nature in order to grapple on its own terms with the threatening ‘‘e√ects’’ of an unknown causality: ‘‘Could men anatomize nature . . . they would ﬁnd that these causes are nothing but the particular fabric and structure of their own bodies and external objects’’ (1). Because of the genuinely unclear boundaries between thought, the objects of thought, and the object world, the anatomization of nature cannot be dismissed as an epistemology. These unstable boundaries between cognition and its objects also account for the absence of any fundamental di√erence between the ‘‘savage’’ fetish and the Christian cults of miracles, images, and relics: ‘‘So soon as the working of miracles is associated with the image of a saint, that image of necessity becomes a fetich [sic]; and will receive from its worshippers precisely the same usage, which other fetiches receive at the hands of savage devotees’’ (63). Fetishism, in fact, is relevant for Schultze not only with regard to Christian objects of worship but also with regard to cultural production in general. He quotes David Hume’s theory of the ‘‘universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted’’ (2), in order to clarify the narcissistic projections of poetic rhetoric. ‘‘Hence the frequency and beauty of the prosopopoeia in poetry, where trees, mountains and streams are personiﬁed, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.’’ This fetishistic structuring of poetic rhetoric facilitates the acquisition of ever more world-objects of cognition. The association of material worship with artistic processes such as poetic rhetoric is common in nineteenth-century texts. Imitation, for Dulaure, is not supplementary or extraneous to intellectual progress; it is its very foundation: ‘‘L’esprit humain ne procède qu’en imitant, qu’en perfec-

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tionnant ses imitations’’ (The human mind proceeds only through imitating, through perfecting the nature of its imitations) (1:31). Philosophy itself is related to the mimetic fetishism to which culture owes art; Dulaure accordingly names it ‘‘philosophism’’: ‘‘To these three principal cults I could add philosophism.’’ Through their identical mimetic mechanisms, both the Enlightenment and the ancient cults meet in the space of philosophism: ‘‘I give this name to that multitude of metaphysical systems that produced the progress of the Enlightenment and the absurdity of the ancient cults’’ (1:41). The nineteenth-century reconsiderations of the fetish appropriate its logic in a history of mentalities. Aside from art and poetry and philosophy, a key domain illumined by the discourse of the fetish is the representability of the sacred. In various ways, theorists from Hegel onward seem to ask: How to ‘‘know’’ ‘‘divinity’’ as an object of cognition and a√ect without reducing it to thinghood? How to love the holy ghost of Loulou without making the Trinity into a strawman? COMMODITY LOVE

For Karl Marx, the question is reversed: How to know objects without approaching them through the fallacy of the divine? The 1867 essay ‘‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof ’’ uses the term fetishism as the foundation of a didactic analogy between the familiar nineteenthcentury theological contextualization of materialism and a new, strange materialism (which has now, interestingly, largely supplanted the theological and epistemological meanings of materialism). This materialism is rooted in the social value of the products of labor. Marx calls this new materialism ‘‘a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things.’’≥∂ The commodity, for Marx, is the materialist fetish-in-disguise of a society that, as illustrated by Michelet’s condemnation of the Sacred Heart, makes a ‘‘cultus of abstract man’’ (79). The passion and controversies of the theological model of ‘‘thinking with things’’ lend themselves to description of the metaphysical ghosts haunting bourgeois market relations. Capitalism may not actually be peopled by the individual ‘‘who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection’’—the precondition, for

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Marx, of the culture of the fetish—but this system of ‘‘social relations within the sphere of material life’’ is covertly transposed onto the culture of the products of labor. To reveal the theological investiture of the commodity is therefore to lift the ‘‘mystical veil’’ (80) from an infrastructure with causes and e√ects more justiﬁably knowable, according to Marx, than God: ‘‘The religious reﬂex of the real world can, in any case, only ﬁnally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life o√er to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations’’ (79). The commodity is fetishized through a complex transfer of properties. Labor, ﬁrst of all, is ‘‘related’’ to religion in its transformative, metamorphic capacities: ‘‘The form of wood, for instance, is altered by making a table out of it’’ (71). This ‘‘alteration’’ is not in itself transformative; it is in the process of its social construction as a commodity, rather than its real construction qua table, that the table is transformed: ‘‘Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.’’ Marx ‘‘imitates’’ this fetishistic animation by switching to a rhetoric of personiﬁcation and prosopopoeia: the table now ‘‘not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands, on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘tableturning’ ever was.’’ The notion of the ‘‘wooden brain’’—a metaphor ‘‘ontologically’’ related to the Flaubertian woman made of wood and the Hegelian divinity made of wood—illustrates the probably actual etymon of ‘‘fetish’’ (de Brosses had it wrong), which is the Latin adjective facticius, ‘‘made’’ or ‘‘manufactured.’’ Marx applies to the realm of ‘‘main-d’oeuvre’’ the magically animatory process by which to make a thing is to personify it, to endow it with disembodied ‘‘thing’’ thoughts: ‘‘the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life’’ (72). Next, in its ‘‘life’’ as a commodity, the thing turns the tables on its creation by creating, in turn, relations between the producers of labor. This transferential production by the thing, the grotesque ideas of a wooden brain, encapsulated by the notion of the ‘‘relation between persons expressed as a relation between things’’ (74 n. 1), participates in the domain of the ‘‘fantastic’’: ‘‘There it is a deﬁnite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’’ (72).

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The supernaturalism of the thing animated by its making and exchange is, for Marx, an example of the ‘‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’’ (71) of the concept of value. Value is animated not by the supernatural but by prosopopoeia, as Marx implies through his own abrupt shift to the rhetoric of personiﬁcation: ‘‘Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.’’ On the contrary, value is ‘‘just as much a social product as language.’’ The supernatural, by extension, is also for Marx ‘‘just as much a social product as language’’; and like value, it ‘‘stalks about’’ pretending that it is not a social product, not a language (74). PLASTIC LOVE

Although postdating Flaubert’s demise, Alfred Binet’s 1888 ‘‘Le Fétichisme dans l’amour’’ (Fetishism in love) is another essay in which the relation of the term fetishism to its nineteenth-century context of theological materialism has been overshadowed by the essay’s own innovations. Binet, a psychologist and neurologist, forcefully displaces the sphere of the relic’s agency away from religion and toward the psychology and sexuality of a√ective, rather than theological or capitalist, materialism. But the reference to theological materialism fundamental to this transposition may today be considered a mere distraction from the more familiar a≈liation of the fetish with the castration complex. As a result, Binet is often read and misread as a kind of Freudian primitive, despite the fact that he certainly did not set out to provide a sketchy account of the castration complex to which Freud’s notion of the fetish is a monument. Binet may end up problematizing shoes and hemlines and furs in ‘‘Le Fétichisme dans l’amour,’’ but he begins with the role of the (corporeal) trinket in the sacred—the ‘‘ ‘culte des brimborions’ ’’≥∑ —and its capital role in the development of religions. For Freud in 1905, the anthropological model for the relevance of the sexual fetish to the male subject would be that of the savage in love (with God): ‘‘Such substitutes are with some justice likened to the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied.’’≥∏ But for Binet it is the cult of the dead and the imitation of the dead body in the invention of art. Like Plancy, Binet implicates the relic as art in a concept he calls ‘‘l’amour plastique’’ (8)—plastic love. Love, like the arts, is ‘‘plastic’’ for Binet because it is a question of material construction. Passion, no matter how ‘‘elevated,’’ has material models,

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associations, and embodiments. The desiring subject, stimulated by the materiality of love, may raise the stakes of animation and inanimation and aspire to the powers of Pygmalion: ‘‘We know that many young people are seized with passion for sculpted or painted women’’ (36). Therefore nothing could more convincingly signal the psychological predisposition to ‘‘plastic love’’ (8) than the cult of relics, subsumed under the history of the ‘‘querelle des images’’: ‘‘The great battle of images, which began in the ﬁrst centuries of the Christian era, and which developed into an acute phase at the time of the Reformation, and which has produced not only discussions and writings but also wars and massacres, su≈ciently proves the generality and the force of our tendency to confuse divinity with the material and palpable sign that represents it’’ (1). The worshiper of relics tra≈cs in the materiality of the object of desire, the metaphorical ‘‘divinity,’’ whereas in ‘‘plastic love,’’ this religious adoration ‘‘is replaced by a sexual appetite’’ (3). This seductiveness of the inanimate, of pure matter, turns pathological in love when it shifts from a model of ‘‘contiguity’’ (17)—metonymical associations of objects such as jewelry, shoes, or hair with the beloved object—to a model of obsessive synecdoche. In this model, only the part can represent the whole: ‘‘love, instead of being excited by the whole of the person, is now only excited by a ﬁction. In this case, the part substitutes for the whole, the accessory becomes the principal thing’’ (84–85). The ‘‘part’’ takes on a mystical autonomy, representing an ‘‘independent whole’’ (18). The sexual appetite takes in its sights an animated body whose animation has been deconstructed by fragmentation: ‘‘most often it is a fraction of a living person, like a woman’s eye, a curl of hair, a perfume, a red-lipped mouth; the object is unimportant’’ (4). Fetishism as ‘‘l’amour plastique’’ therefore risks reducing the living person to a corpus of relics. This is the sense in which Binet refers to the ‘‘cult of material objects’’ as ‘‘the relics of love’’ (35); he likewise uses the image of the ‘‘reliquary of love’’ as a metaphor for the ‘‘pathology’’ represented by fetishism. The loving subject’s ideal of defending the beloved from the human inevitability of decomposition is at the heart of this pathology: ‘‘Imagine a man who adores whatever part of his wife’s body . . . for example her ear or her nose. Well! The idea that he can continue, even after the death of his wife, to see these adored objects, that he can protect them against decomposition, that he can even give them a semblance of life, will not seem in any way strange to him; on the contrary, it is logical; because he loves a material

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object’’ (22). The body, Binet reminds the reader, is not constrained to ‘‘irreparable death’’ since embalming serves as the corrective to organicity. It is precisely because the lover loves ‘‘un objet matériel’’—because of the slippery ontological distinctions between animate and inanimate material in the context of the mummy of love—that the preservation of love beyond death is plausible within the framework of ‘‘l’amour plastique.’’ Plastic love, in e√ect, chooses ﬁrst to fragment or deconstruct and then to reconstruct; the lover de-composes the composite beloved in order then to recompose it. Death is correspondingly eroticized in its function as the ‘‘real’’ double of the lover’s a√ective operations on the body of the beloved. Preservation of the body becomes a fascination not with the body but with preservation itself. ‘‘One sees the inert thing acquire a sort of independence; it is animated not for the person whose image it evokes, but for itself ’’ (36). Inertia is strangely moving in Binet’s psychosexual materialism; inanimate representation is more arousing than the object in the ﬂesh. Preserved tokens are tokens of resurrection, and so they are worthy of love. Binet’s construct of ‘‘l’amour plastique’’ therefore resembles the relic as a feature of imitatio, as well as the mystical ‘‘table-turning’’ of inanimation into animation in the commodity and the anatomizing of nature in fetishism. In all these cases, fetishistic practices are closely related to secular problems of embodiment and disembodiment in art. When Flaubert says of materialist worship that he is repulsed by any particular dogma but ﬁnds the principles of their invention ultimately poetic, his term poetic is not simply a random valorization. On the contrary, ‘‘the Negro kissing his fetish’’ and the ‘‘Catholic at the foot of the Sacred Heart’’ are mutually engaged in what one might call a bodily identiﬁcation with artistic mimesis. In the bodily identiﬁcation with artistic mimesis, the subject imitates, through personiﬁcation and corporeal projection, the stakes of his or her own animation. The fetishist, in this sense, whether ‘‘Catholic’’ or ‘‘savage,’’ presents an existential mise en abyme of mimesis as the imitation through which a subject is animated. SACRED REALISM

Félicité’s characterization and experiences resonate with the language of mute signs in the cult of the relic, the epistemology of the slave articulated

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through the paradigm of Christianity’s fetishistic ‘‘false other,’’ and the plasticity of love in Binet’s theory of fetishism, as well as the discourse of the Sacred Heart. Yet most important is the fact that when she parrots one of these materialist discourses, Loulou returns as the signiﬁer of mimesis. Flaubert’s ﬂeeting allusions to theological, capitalist, and amorous materialism in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ arguably bring the reader full circle, ﬁrst moving outward from the text to the problem of the cultural context for the ‘‘simplicity’’ of supernatural love, and then back inward to the problem of the ‘‘heart’’ as the sign of the narrative anatomy or pathology of the text. Love for the materialism of the literary ‘‘real’’ is in this sense the object of the subtexts of the Sacred Heart in ‘‘Un Coeur simple.’’ In the cult of the Sacred Heart, the wound opens the heart to the gaze and from there to representation. This in e√ect symbolizes the problematic relation of the sacred to the real: to prove that it is a real object, the sacred must allow itself to be dismembered; but to prove that its reality is sacred, dismemberment must not rupture the integrity of the object. The same paradox holds true for the relation of the realist text to the failure of mimesis to solder representation and reality together. In ‘‘Flaubert’s Parrot and Huysman’s Cricket,’’ Humphries asserts that it has become ‘‘a cliché of modern literary theory that realism . . . ﬁnally embraces the failure of its project’’ (323). Flaubert, of course, not only resisted identiﬁcation as a realist; he achieved the simultaneously impossible and inevitable project of writing ‘‘realist’’ texts about the failure of mimesis, the implications of mimesis as the ‘‘’hallucination’ of no di√erence between the text and the real’’ (324). The discourse of the Sacred Heart in many ways exempliﬁes this notion of realism as the ‘‘manipulation of the reader’s senses’’ to create the illusion of ‘‘no di√erence between the text and the real.’’ The collective hallucinations of the real in religion represent the height of the pathos of the realist ideal of semiotic-referential fusion. Religion in ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ appears to be used not as an alternative to the failure of the textual politics of the real but as a metaphor of their passion. If the failure of mimesis really has become a modern institution, then how does the writer ritualize the funereal project of ‘‘giving life’’ to the text? How does the writer mourn the real, if language cannot copy it, possess it, breathe its ‘‘sou∆e’’? How to grieve for mimesis? The parallelism between Félicité’s metaphoric ontology as a woman who

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is ‘‘all heart’’ and the text’s presentation of the anatomy of the realist text as ‘‘ensignement’’ is crucially mediated by her transformation of the beloved parrot into a ‘‘sacred’’ relic of love. This relation to signs and objects is epitomized by Félicité’s determined reﬁguration of what has ‘‘passed on’’ into what is still present, her retaming of the bird’s organic existence by means of a sign that is all too literally body. But instead of the transparency of the real, Félicité’s fetishization of the relic symbolizes grief for the real, home-concocted resurrection of the real. It symbolizes this grief as a form of powerful agency. Loulou the parrot may function as the ironic incarnation of mimesis as a form of parroting, and yet doesn’t the humble Félicité, through the ‘‘bêtise’’ of thinking with things, of naively resurrecting, manage to make the Holy Ghost mimetic of the parrot? Doesn’t this, by extension, mean that she manages to make the sacred mimetic of the mime? In this sense Félicité exceeds the reach of her own author, who wrote less radically, in his correspondence, that ‘‘the artist should be like God in creation’’ (13:367). The post-Revolutionary development of discourses equalizing Western and non-Western forms of ‘‘thinking with things’’ contextualizes Félicité’s mimetic inventions within a politics of cultural and class equality. Flaubert, as we have seen, was invested in deconstructing the hierarchy between the materialism of the ‘‘Negro kissing his fetish’’ and the Catholic kneeling before the Sacred Heart. Since peasants can be classiﬁed as internal rather than external ‘‘primitives’’ in relation to the nineteenth-century French mission civilisatrice, recognition of their epistemological inventiveness is a movement toward social likeness. In Félicité’s work with likeness, through her creation of relics and fetishes, she stands as a kind of literary relic for Flaubert, magically guarding against the inevitable duplicity of mimesis. In her representation of the equality of epistemologies, Félicité overlays mimetic likeness with social likeness. Through Félicité, Flaubert’s realism fetishizes social mimesis.

EPILOGUE

FRENCH ROMANTICISM Posttraumatic Utopia/Post-Utopian Trauma

The point of departure for this book is that mimesis was framed as a problem with a social life of its own by Revolutionary tensions between liberty, as something that resists deﬁnition by likeness, and equality, as something that depends on deﬁnition by likeness. Although in literature and art mimesis has to do with rhetorical and aesthetic representation, in social existence mimesis underpins questions of human interrelation. These two modalities of mimesis, representational and interrelational, were characteristically compounded under the French Revolution. On the one hand, the abstractions of political ideologies were performed and contested through competing representations to an unprecedented degree. From the ‘‘bonnet rouge’’ or red cap representing the allegory of the freed slave, to the elab251

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orately staged festivals of values such as secular reason, to iconoclastic vandalism, the French Revolution was self-consciously mimetic in the artistic sense (I analyze iconoclasm as an example of Revolutionary mimesis in chapter 1). But on the other hand, this Revolutionary mimeticism was oriented above all to problems of social likeness. The Terror itself was, as Mona Ozouf and others have demonstrated, intensely theatrical; it performed viscerally the paradox of violence in the name of likeness. This book is not about the Revolution, however, but about its Romantic legacies. Even chapter 1, which addresses the history of Revolutionary vandalism, does so only in the framework of the commemoration of the Revolution. In chapter 2 I examine the work of Benjamin Constant as a bridge between the Revolution and the modern liberalism that infused political engagement under French Romanticism. Constant, who in 1819 referred back to ‘‘our happy revolution,’’ was deeply interested in the psychopolitical consequences that had followed an idealistic Terror: ‘‘Who can be surprised that the people turned away from the goal towards which their rulers wanted to lead them by such a terrible path?’’∞ Constant held that the ‘‘infamous passion’’ (181) of the Terror had contributed to a conception of private life as a refuge, a refuge from the Revolutionary circumscription of liberty to a subcategory of equality. Although he valorized the sacrosanct domain of privacy, Constant also championed democratic representation, deﬁning politics actively and passively at the same time. Constant’s crucial contribution to modern liberalism is currently being critiqued in France as a foundation for what we would call conservatism rather than liberalism: a focus on private rights and the laissez-faire economics that privilege the private realm, at the expense of social context and collectivity. In the United States, by contrast, the politics of gender, racial, and class di√erence are commonly perceived as compatible with private rights, and our ‘‘liberalism’’ is popularly antagonistic toward global free markets. This incoherence of terminology and political orientation derives in the case of Constant from the incompatible strands of what the French Revolution had promised. The confusion in terminology from one country to another and one century to another is not accidental but fundamental. Constant had seen the utopian promise of egalitarian social collectivities tragically foreclosed by the tyrannical enforcement of equality under the Terror, with the guillotine as a symbol for the undercutting of privilege.

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The trauma of the Terror is implicated, in other words, in the crosscultural confusion of left/right, liberal/conservative polarities. Constant’s work compares the tyrannies of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire in terms that are subject to the slippage of ‘‘happiness’’ into ‘‘terror.’’ The tyranny of the tyrant was and is a familiar idea, but the French Revolution presents a more complicated idea of tyranny. In it, likeness functions not only as a utopia but also as a social wound. The Terror has the paradoxical status of the utopian wound, the traumatic utopia. Since I deﬁne French Romanticism as a post-Revolutionary phenomenon, this book attempts to understand it as something in between posttraumatic utopia and post-utopian trauma. French Romanticism had politically utopian aspirations, culminating in the attempted ‘‘repeat’’ of the French Revolution in 1848. The intensive political engagement of the stars of the French Romantic movement was, however, marked by typically posttraumatic ‘‘pathology’’ in the form of what Cathy Caruth calls ‘‘a pattern of su√ering that is inexplicably persistent.’’≤ This su√ering is generally symptomatic rather than self-explanatory; French Romanticism is inscribed with ‘‘the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’’ (4). I link the posttraumatic symptoms of Romantic utopianism not to direct experience of the Revolution but to the historical residue of the violent Revolutionary conﬂict between the ethos of social likeness and the free play of liberty. The long-standing associations of French Romanticism with the solipsistic cult of nature and genius belie the social and political dreams of French Romanticism. Conversely, the way that Romantic wounds ‘‘speak’’ is mystical and veils a lingering alienation from an egalitarian society. In chapter 3 I analyze the political unconscious of French Romanticism as a posttraumatic utopia through analysis of a new wrinkle in the querelle d’Olivier. By adding the link of the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore to the querelle, I elucidate further questions of the ambivalent embrace of women authors in a post-Revolutionary industrial society with increasing democratic momentum. Claire de Duras’s novel Olivier ou le secret, which was appropriated in other versions by Henri de Latouche and Stendhal, tells the story of male sexual impotence as a refusal to comply with the reproduction of aristocratic privilege. I argue that Latouche and Stendhal were drawn to that democratic story while resenting and ridiculing the role of

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Duras as an aristocratic woman author. On a separate plane of the same story, Desbordes-Valmore, the lover of Latouche and author of a number of poems ﬁguring a hero named Olivier, is contextualized by critics as an author whose poetic pathos originates not in her genius but in the pain caused her by Latouche. This myth, in which Desbordes-Valmore is couched as almost a plagiarist of emotions actually authored by a man, serves as a smoke screen for Desbordes-Valmore’s years as a self-supporting professional actress, lover of several men, and mother of illegitimate children. In any Romantic posttraumatic utopia, the dolorous poet-politician Alphonse de Lamartine ﬁgures somewhere, and chapter 4 is devoted to his transition from a vocabulary of solipsistic poetic wounds to one of social wounds. I align this transition in his writings to a parallel career transition: from the diplomat seeking exotic sentimental experiences in foreign lands, to the political deputy and eventual star of the revolution of 1848, to the scapegoat for the failure of that revolution. Lamartine’s brilliant and yet much-derided cultural role in Romanticism is implicated, I argue, in the rejection of an inspirational, lyrical, and utopian discourse of social equality under the Second Empire. This was a moment of post-utopian trauma, in which the trauma of abandoning the dream of utopia competes with the trauma of the utopia itself. The trauma of abandoning the dream of revolutionary utopia draws attention to the rhetorical sleights of hand through which social ills such as poverty or slavery had become ‘‘wounds’’ analogous to the Romantic writerhero’s narcissistic ills. George Sand, in Indiana, represented the trauma of colonial slavery but made that trauma representative of the oppression of marriage. The social building block of the human likeness binding people together in a hierarchically disarticulated society also blocks, in this novel, the representation of alterity. Post-utopian trauma is a subject of Gustave Flaubert’s ‘‘Un Coeur simple,’’ which is set in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. I argue that Flaubert contextualizes Félicité’s innovations in the sphere of religious materialism as ‘‘revolutionary’’ in the sense that her insistence on ‘‘thinking with things’’ provides a model for the recognition of intelligence across class and ethnographic divides. The peasant woman’s fetishization of the relic of her pet parrot creates blasphemous equivalences between the sacred and the secular in the name of egalitarian love. In this sense Félicité herself serves as

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a kind of relic, in a theology of secular values, with which to mourn the brief utopia of Revolutionary likeness. From brutal iconoclasm to political representation as illusion, to plagiarized ﬁctions of impotence, to the artistic exploitation of social pain, to analogies of marital ‘‘slavery,’’ to fetishes of a lost Revolution, the Romantic likenesses I study in this book are painful likenesses. Aside from the particular historical association with Revolutionary violence that I have examined here, is there some formal connection between social mimesis and trauma? In ﬁelds of the social sciences ranging from natural history to psychoanalysis, there are numerous paradigms in which likeness is aligned with fatality and failure. For Darwin, following Malthus, likeness is a sort of pathological precondition for evolution. Species, and the many subgrades of species classiﬁcation admitting of some variability, labor under the burden of a fatal similarity in which ‘‘many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive.’’≥ Unless they come to vary in a ‘‘proﬁtable manner,’’ rewarded by greater survival, they will die of likeness. This evolutionary responsiveness of likeness and variation conﬁrms, for Darwin, the ‘‘superiority’’ (148) of ‘‘Nature’’ to ‘‘Art.’’ Likeness is, through its own failures, an agent of di√erence, and in the ensuing creation of new forms of being, the ‘‘natural’’ life of mimesis outdoes artistic mimesis. In ethnography, Claude Lévi-Strauss addresses the eternal question ‘‘Where does nature end? Where does culture begin?’’∂ through analysis of the ultimate taboo against the overdetermination of likeness: the incest taboo. The prohibition of incest is a rule and thus obviously a cultural product, and yet, among all social rules, it alone, he claims, ‘‘possesses a character of universality’’ (9). ‘‘Nature’’ and ‘‘universality’’ are partially metonymic concepts, in that the one is often cited to prove the other. Why would the taboo against incest, as the threatened compounding of genetic similarity, be capable of representing that ﬁne line where nature ends and culture begins? Because ‘‘the prohibition of incest is the process by which Nature surpasses itself ’’ (31).* Without incest, in other words, human likeness will be enriched by genetic di√erence to the point where nature can evolve, through something akin to ‘‘natural selection,’’ into culture. *La prohibition de l’inceste est le processus par lequel la Nature se dépasse ellemême.

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Freudian theory similarly posits that without the fear of sexual di√erence represented by the castration complex, the self-su≈cient gendered likeness experienced by males would serve as an impediment to their sublimation of destructive desires. The Oedipus complex, in which the boy covets the mother and secretly plots to replace the father, ‘‘is not simply replaced, it is literally smashed to pieces by the shock of threatened castration.’’ Following the shock of the fear of being sexually ‘‘wounded’’ like women, the boy gives up the mother and invests his previously transgressive energies in the constitution of a punitive, monitoring superego. In Freud’s opinion, this sublimating mechanism makes men into superior contributors to culture: ‘‘the catastrophe to the Oedipus complex (the abandonment of incest and the institution of conscience and morality) may be regarded as the victory of the race over the individual.’’∑ For Freud, the trauma of feminine di√erence produces masculine likeness like a scar, but then that desire for masculine likeness must be overcome in the name of the perpetuation of culture through heterosexual reproduction. In each of the above examples, likeness is conceived as a ‘‘negative’’ catalyst for ‘‘positive’’ change. Likeness is not an endpoint: in the above paradigms it must be transcended, prohibited, sublimated. From the standpoint of poststructuralist semiotics, there are additional reasons to put wounding and the social life of representation together. If likeness should act like what it is, it would remain chronically undi√erentiated and would therefore fail to signify at all. In social life, the struggle to di√erentiate oneself, which paradoxically transpires through the mimetic rivalry that René Girard sees as the basis of social violence, is analogous to a struggle to participate in what Derrida deﬁnes as the chain of signiﬁcation. To establish communication, one must insert oneself into a shared alphabet or a lexicon, a mimetic model, but then one must di√erentiate oneself, if only by a vowel or a phoneme, a mimetic link in the chain, in order to be read or heard. In order to ﬁgure, in other words, one forsakes a certain likeness. Yet self-di√erentiation ﬂies in the face of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Conversely, in order to be equal, one forsakes di√erence. If you have to make ethical likeness into a rule, it just goes to prove the rule of ethical di√erence. Social mimesis may have a traumatic latency for the same reasons that it is idealistic: fellowship is desirable, but it is painful rather than liberating to

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deﬁne liberty as the freedom to be the same. The phenomenon of social mimesis therefore threatens to be engulfed in a protective wave of pragmatic inattention, as theorized in Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘‘practical mimesis.’’ In ‘‘practical mimesis’’ (a concept that contradicts the association of likeness with stasis), mimetic identiﬁcation ‘‘has nothing in common with an imitation that would presuppose a conscious e√ort to reproduce a gesture, an utterance or an object explicitly constituted as a model.’’∏ It is the unconscious discovery and creation of meaning through likeness. Even if it has little in common with conscious imitation, the mimesis through which social life is organized in patterns of conformity and resistance does have a great deal in common with the literary or artistic ‘‘imitation’’ of the ‘‘real.’’ In this book I have contextualized French Romanticism, because of its relationship to the Revolutionary problematization of likeness, as a privileged ﬁeld for an enterprise I might ironically call a Romantic biography of the social life of mimesis. In that ‘‘biography,’’ the subject is not Lamartine or Desbordes-Valmore but the object of mimesis— in its many magnetic appearances.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Alfred de Musset, Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, in Oeuvres complètes en prose, ed. Maurice Allem and Paul-Courant (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 820. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this book are my own. To avoid distracting blocks of quotes, I have retained the original French only to emphasize a particular word or turn of phrase or, in the case of longer quotes, to facilitate close reading. When the French is retained, it appears in footnotes. An exception is made for poetry, which I retain in the French because of its largely untranslatable fusion of rhetoric rhythm. Subsequent references to works cited more than once are made parenthetically in the text. 2. François Rigolot and others have noted that many manifesto-like documents in Romanticism energetically forswear imitation, even while establishing a close relationship to existing texts as models. Rigolot writes, ‘‘Oddly enough, the Romantics linked this canonless aesthetic to promotion of the Pléiade, the school that made poetic emulation, mimetic rivalry with the classical canon, the very center of its inspiration.’’ ‘‘The Invention of the Renaissance,’’ in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 639. 3. Jean-Jacques Thomas, ‘‘Poétique de la ‘bêtise’: Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues,’’ in Flaubert et le comble de l’art, ed. P. Cogny (Paris: SEDES, 1981), 129. 4. Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 131. 5. Naomi Schor, ‘‘Fetishism and Its Ironies,’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 17.1–2 (1988–89): 89. 6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson 259

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and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 62. Bakhtin’s example of dialogism quoted from Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 209. 7. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 23. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964), 34. 8. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5. 9. George Watson, cited by Robert Alter, Motives for Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3. 10. Plato, The Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 2:629. 11. Judith Butler, ‘‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination,’’ in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 306. 12. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 21. 13. Barbara Johnson, introduction to The Feminist Di√erence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 4. 14. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1952), 301. 15. Judith Butler, ‘‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex,’’ Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 36. 16. For a discussion of the current state of the debate and legislation, see Jane Kramer’s ‘‘Liberty, Equality, Sorority: French Women Get a Revolution of Their Own,’’ New Yorker, May 29, 2000. 17. The fact that the book Au Pouvoir, citoyennes: Liberté, égalité, parité, by Françoise Gaspard, Claude Servan-Schreiber, and Anne Le Gall (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), replaces the term ‘‘fraternité’’ (fraternity) with parity is symptomatic of the nongendered universalism invoked by the concept of parity. The special section ‘‘Parité in France’’ in Di√erences 9 (summer 1997) provides a detailed theoretical introduction to the question of parité. 18. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xvi. 19. Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11. 20. Jean Baudrillard, ‘‘Simulacra and Simulations,’’ in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996). 21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: Everyman, 1993), 191; my italics.

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22. Benjamin Constant, Usurpation, in Political Writings, trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 113. 23. Mona Ozouf, ‘‘Égalité,’’ in Dictionnaire critique de la révolution française, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, vol. titled Idées (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 139. 24. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 621. 25. E. S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3. 26. Henri Peyre, What Is Romanticism? trans. Roda Roberts (University: University of Alabama Press, 1977), 68. 27. Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5. 28. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘‘Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,’’ trans. Nicolas Rand, Critical Inquiry 13 (winter 1987). 29. Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15. 30. The term trauma is not contemporaneous to my ﬁeld of study; it came into usage in French medical discourse in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Instead, the term blessure, ‘‘wound,’’ was ubiquitous in post-Revolutionary discourses ranging from political theory to poetry. I use the anachronistic term trauma because its problematization of historical experience works with my reading of French Romanticism as post-Revolutionary. Today, the idea of a ‘‘post-Revolutionary wound’’ would be marked by rhetorical inﬂation, in e√ect suggesting a determination on my part to treat history poetically. Although I discuss the Romantic poetic contextualization of history, I do not mean to replicate that symbolism in my own discourse. The term trauma may be as overdetermined today as the term wound was in the post-Revolutionary era, but its psychological and historicist connotations are useful to the study of historical memory in French Romanticism. 31. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3. 32. See Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 1–17. 33. Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘‘Literary Paternity,’’ in Critical Theory since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1986), 488. 34. Victor Hugo, ‘‘Suite,’’ in Les Contemplations, by Victor Hugo (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1966), 71–74. 35. Daniel Gordon, introduction to Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5. 36. Gordon’s consideration of the di√erence between ‘‘society’’ and related terms

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such as ‘‘regime,’’ ‘‘nation,’’ ‘‘group’’ or ‘‘association’’ (7) does not directly address the question of the distinction between the society and culture. The nature of the relationship between social mimesis and culture is particularly important because at a time when cultural epistemologies dominate the humanities, the pertinence of literary mimesis is increasingly subordinated to the political exigencies of cultural life. In Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates, ed. Je√rey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Alexander o√ers that for the social scientist, the di√erence between society and culture is analogous to the di√erence between a mechanistic, ‘‘objective’’ ordering and a ‘‘subjective approach to action and order’’ that is ‘‘conceived as framework rather than intention, an idea held in common rather than an individual wish.’’ He aligns Marxian infrastructure with society and the Hegelian ‘‘spirit of the age’’ with culture. From the standpoint of mimesis, neither the objective infrastructure of society nor the subjective frameworks of culture can be cognitively or phenomenologically separated from the representations the one makes of itself to the other. More importantly, the term social in social mimesis destabilizes the boundaries between society as an overarching institutional framework and the social genius of humanity—the penchant for human outreach that operates through endless variations on imitative, performative, interpersonal praxis in social life. This social life, far from being mechanistic, overlaps with the functionalist identiﬁcation of culture, incorporating its characteristic symbolic phenomena, which Alexander lists as ‘‘ritual, sacralization, pollution, metaphor, myth, narrative, metaphysics, and code’’ (6). 37. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10. 38. Alfred de Musset, Confession d’un enfant du siècle, in Oeuvres complètes en prose, ed. Maurice Allem and Paul-Courant (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 65. 39. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 40. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 19. 1. ICONOCLASM

1. Aristotle, Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Dover, 1951), 35. 2. Ernest Renan, ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’’ in Oeuvres complètes de Ernest Renan, vol. 1 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947), 891. A translation is available in The Nationalism Reader, ed. Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995), but for purposes of close reading I have chosen to provide my own more literal translations of quotations from Renan. 3. Juliet Mitchell, ‘‘Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of Language,’’ Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 28.4 (1998): 129. 4. See Ronald Schechter, ‘‘Gothic Thermidor: The Bals des victimes, the

Notes to Pages 33–42

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Fantastic, and the Production of Historical Knowledge in Post-Terror France,’’ Representations 61 (1988). 5. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 502. 6. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 81. The three spellings Lepeletier, Lepelletier, and Le Pelletier are all in current usage. 7. Pierre Nora, ‘‘General Introduction: Between Memory and History,’’ in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, under the direction of Pierre Nora; English language edition edited and with a foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman; translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1:2. 8. Dominique Poulot, Musée, Nation, Patrimoine 1789–1815 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 177. Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900 (1937), 9:857. 9. Cited in Bronislaw Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur: Thermidor et la Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 258. 10. L’Abbé Grégoire, Oeuvres de l’Abbé Grégoire (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: KTO Press, 1977), 1:265. 11. The dates given here are those provided by Lenoir in the ‘‘Avant-propos’’ to the Description chronologique et historique des monuments de sculpture réunis au Musée des Monuments Français (Paris: Published by the author, An VIII de la République [1799]), 2–7. They di√er from the date of 1790 for the establishment of the museum set by Louis Courajod in Alexandre Lenoir: Son Journal et le Musée des monuments français (Paris: Champion, 1886), 2:34. 12. James Cli√ord, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 230. 13. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 14. Constantin-François Volney, Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (Paris: Garnier, 1876), 12. 15. Lenoir writes that the excavations inspired him with the idea to found ‘‘un Musée particulier, historique et chronologique, où l’on retrouvera les âges de la sculpture française dans des salles particulières’’ (1799, 6). 16. See Courajod, Journal, 2:212–14. Lenoir also wrote various works about the museum after its demise. 17. Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19. 18. Alexandre Lenoir, Musée Impérial des Monuments Français: Histoire des arts en France (Paris: Hacquart, 1810), xi. 19. Alexandre Lenoir, Musée Royal des Monuments Français, ou mémorial de l’histoire de France et de ses monuments (Paris: Published by the author, 1815), 22. 20. Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in

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Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 87. 21. ‘‘Cette mesure qui, en dispersant cette belle et riche collection, occasionna la perte de tants d’objets précieux, brisés dans le transport et non remis en place, ne fut avouée par personne. ‘Ce n’est pas moi, disait Louis XVIII en voyant les dessins des salles de l’ancien musée, ce n’est certainement pas moi qui ai donné ces ordres-là’ ’’ (This decision to disperse this beautiful and rich collection, which occasioned the loss of so many precious objects, broken in transport and never put back in place, was never owned up to by anyone. ‘‘It wasn’t me,’’ said Louis XVIII when he saw the sketches of the rooms in the former museum, ‘‘it certainly wasn’t me who gave those orders’’). Joseph Michaud, ed., Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne. . . ., 85 vols. (Paris: Michaud Frères, 1811–62), 24:133. 22. ‘‘Quatremère de Quincy devenu ‘Intendant général des arts et monuments publics’ (mai 1816) publia ses Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art. Il y manifestait avec une particulière virulence sa ‘muséophobie’ en mettant en lumière que l’oeuvre d’art était inséparable de son milieu. Il y a≈rmait qu’il n’existait pas d’art national au Moyen Age, celui-ci apparaissant sous la Renaissance’’ (When Quatremère de Quincy became the ‘‘General Overseer of Public Arts and Monuments’’ in May 1816, he published his Moral Considerations on the Destination of Works of Art. In it he manifested his ‘‘museophobia’’ with particular virulence in his argument that the work of art was inseparable from its milieu. He a≈rmed that there was no national art in the Middle Ages, that it did not appear until the Renaissance). Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, ‘‘Alexandre Lenoir et le Musée des Monuments Français,’’ in Le ‘‘Gothique’’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, 1979), 78. 23. Louis-Pierre DeSeine, Notices historiques sur les anciennes Académies Royales de peinture, sculpture de Paris, et celle d’architecture (Paris: Le Normant, 1814), 282. 24. Louis Courajod, ‘‘Les Débris du Musée des Monuments Français à l’École des Beaux-Arts,’’ Bulletin monumental 51 (1885): 4–5. 25. Abel Hugo, Les Tombeaux de Saint-Denis: Récit de la violation des Tombeaux en 1793 (Paris: Maurice, 1825). 26. See Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 68. 27. Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie, cited in Nicole Savy, ‘‘Victor Hugo et le Musée des Monuments français: Les E√ets d’une enfance au musée,’’ Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 1 ( January–February 1995): 18. 28. Philippe Hamon, ‘‘Le Musée et le texte,’’ Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 1 ( January–February 1995): 5. 29. Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School, trans. S. L. Fleishman (New York: Henry Holt, 1882), 6. 30. Lenoir, for instance, was initially employed to preserve ‘‘les biens du clergé [qui] appartenaient à la chose publique ’’ (the property of the clergy that belonged to the public thing ) (1799, 1).

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31. Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, trans. Marian Rothstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 14. 32. ‘‘The Attack upon Religion,’’ Révolutions de Paris, no. 212, cited in E. L. Higgins, The French Revolution as Told by Contemporaries (New York: Houghton Mi∆in, 1938), 328. 33. Jules Michelet, ‘‘Préface de 1869,’’ Le Moyen Age (Paris: La√ont, 1981), 22–23. 34. Janine Dakyns, for instance, states that ‘‘any direct inﬂuence they [Romantic writers] received from the period itself was architectural rather than literary.’’ The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851–1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 6. 35. For a brief gloss on the meaning of the term Gothic revival with regard to nineteenth-century French culture, see Anthony Vidler, ‘‘Gothic Revival,’’ in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 609–13. 36. Victor Hugo, Odes et ballades, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Massin, 18 vols. (Paris: Club Français du Livre, 1967), 2:742–43. 37. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 101. 38. Alfred de Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle, in Oeuvres complètes en prose, ed. Maurice Allem and Paul-Courant (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 78. 39. François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant (Paris: Tallendier, 1948), 341. 40. Petrus Borel, ‘‘Sur les Blessures de l’Institut,’’ Almanach des muses (1831): 264. 41. Charles Nodier, J. Taylor, and Alphonse de Cailloux, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1833), 3. 2. TRANSPOSITIONALITY

1. ‘‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,’’ in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 238. 2. Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 18. 3. Benjamin Constant, ‘‘De l’Espèce de liberté qu’on a présentée aux hommes à la ﬁn du siècle dernier,’’ in De l’Esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation, in Benjamin Constant: Écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 206. 4. Benjamin Constant, ‘‘The Kind of Liberty O√ered to Men at the End of the Last Century,’’ in Usurpation, in Constant: Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 102. The Political Writings includes Constant’s lecture ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty.’’ Quotations in English cited parenthetically in the text are from this edition. The equivalent French, which occasionally appears in footnotes, is from the Gallimard edition, cited in note 3 above.

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5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 23. 6. Mona Ozouf, ‘‘Liberty’’ in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 719. 7. John Isbell, ‘‘Le Contrat social selon Benjamin Constant et Mme de Staël, ou La Liberté a-t-elle un sexe?’’ Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 48 (May 1996): 439–40. 8. Tzvetan Todorov, Benjamin Constant: La Passion démocratique (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1997), 37. 9. Jean-Marie Roulin, ‘‘Temporalité et construction du sujet dans les récits de Constant,’’ in Le Groupe de Coppet et le monde moderne, ed. Colloque de Coppet, 6th ed. (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 103. 10. Benjamin Constant, Amélie et Germaine, Ma Vie, Cécile, ed. Paul Delbouille (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1989), 30. 11. Benjamin Constant, Adolphe, Le Cahier rouge, Cécile (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 240. All quotations from the French text are from this edition. Cécile is often assumed to have been composed in 1810, although the manuscript is undated. Marcel Arland rationalizes the hypothesis of an 1810 date on the basis of highs and lows in Constant’s feelings for his second wife, Charlotte von Hardenberg. I hope that the present analysis will put into question the viability of a√ective evidence of a date of composition because of the narrator’s use of his relationship with Cécile to allegorize his relationship to revolutionary history. The distance from the subject implied by allegory might suggest some further passage of time between the dissolution of sentimental attachment and its recasting as a symptom of a relationship to history. 12. Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 94. 13. Baroness Elisabeth de Nolde, Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant: Unpublished Letters, trans. Charlotte Harwood (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907), 47. 14. Dan Hofstadter, The Despot and the Slave: An Autobiography in Fact and Fiction from the Writings of Benjamin Constant (London: Folio Society, 1986), 27. 15. ‘‘Il est très vrai, . . . que le général voulant le lui faire sentir, s’excusait un jour d’être à peine vêtu, et qu’elle avait répondu, avec sentiment et vivacité, que cela importait peu, que le génie n’avait point de sexe.’’ Emmanuel de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1961), 333. 16. Benjamin Constant, Cecile, trans. Norman Cameron (New York: New Directions, 1951), 25. Quotations from the translated text are from this edition unless otherwise noted. 17. Corrado Rosso, ‘‘Constant et l’acosmisme du bonheur, ou le bonheur ‘introuvable,’ ’’ in Actes du 2è Congrès de Lausanne à l’occasion du 150è anniversaire de

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la mort de Benjamin Constant et du 3è Colloque de Coppet (Lausanne: Voltaire Foundation, 1982), 121. 18. Cited in Walter Pabst, ‘‘Cécile de Benjamin Constant: Document autobiographique ou ﬁction littéraire?’’ in Actes du Congrès de Lausanne, October 1967 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1968), 145–52. 19. See, for example, Henri Guillemin, Madame de Staël et Napoléon ou Germaine et le Caïd ingrat (Bienne, Switz.: Le Pavillon, 1966). 20. André Beaunier, Visages de femmes (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1913), 205. 21. Mme de Staël, introduction to De l’Inﬂuence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations, in Oeuvres complètes de Mme la baronne de Staël (Paris: Chez Treuttel et Würtz, 1820), 3:8. 22. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), xv. 23. See Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 24. Adam Gopnik, ‘‘Noël Contendere: A Political Impasse Gives Way to a Literary Scandale,’’ New Yorker, December 28, 1998, and January 4, 1999, 65. 25. Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux (Paris: Liber-Raisons d’Agir, 1998), 110. 26. Pierre Lemieux, ‘‘Liberté: Le Même Combat dans tous les domaines,’’ July 9, 1996, Chronique française et iconoclaste, excerpted on the Internet, currently at »http://www.pierrelemieux.org/ch-rath.html…. 27. See Holmes (156–80) for the conﬂicting romantic and antiromantic sources of Constant’s thought. 28. Jürgen Habermas, ‘‘The Public Sphere,’’ in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 403. 29. Crane Brinton, ed., The Portable Age of Reason Reader (New York: Viking Press, 1956), 1. 30. Howard Hugo, ed., The Portable Romantic Reader (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 4. 31. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3.

3. PLAGIARISM

1. ‘‘Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is worthy, because of her obvious but absolute obscurity, of ﬁguring among our Poètes maudits.’’ Paul Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits, in Oeuvres en prose complètes, ed. Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 666. 2. See Joan DeJean’s commentary on the importance of the distillation of female authors’ names to ‘‘Madame de.’’ Introduction to Tender Geographies:

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Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1–16. 3. An interesting example of this occurs in Jean Lacassagne, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: Sa Famille et ses médecins, d’après des lettres inédites, étude médicopsychologique (Lyon: Albums du Crocodile, 1957): ‘‘Marceline—I can, I assume, permit myself this a√ectionate familiarity?’’ (4). 4. The peak of the popularization of the life of Desbordes-Valmore came in the early twentieth century, when even the members of her family became famous by extension. See Armand Praviel, Le Roman Conjugal de Monsieur Valmore (Paris: Éditions de France, 1937); Lucien Descaves, La Vie douloureuse de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (Paris: Éditions d’Art et de Littérature, 1910); Jean Lacassagne, Ondine Valmore lyonnaise (Lyon: Albums du Crocodile, 1948), among dozens of other biographical works. 5. Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Death of the Author,’’ in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 1130–31. 6. C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, Sainte-Beuve pour la critique, ed. Annie Prassolo√ and José-Luis Diaz (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 147. 7. Theodor Adorno, ‘‘The Essay as Form,’’ in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:5. 8. Madeleine Ambrière, ed., Précis de littérature française du XIXè siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 428. 9. C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, ‘‘On Sainte-Beuve’s Method,’’ in Sainte-Beuve: Selected Essays, trans. and ed. Francis Steegmuller and Norbert Guterman (London: Methuen, 1965), 281. 10. Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 339. 11. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 113. 12. Denise Virieux, ed., Olivier ou le secret, by Madame de Duras (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1971), 31. 13. Émile Zola, Le Roman expérimental (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1971), 185. 14. Pierre Miquel, Histoire de la France de Vercingétorix à Charles de Gaulle (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1976), 329. 15. A major exception to this pattern is the career of Pierre Jean de Béranger. This poet and chansonnier became wildly popular during his 1821 imprisonment for poems such as ‘‘L’Enrhumé’’ in which he poked fun at Louis XVIII. 16. Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 29. 17. DeJean is particularly interested in arguing against the ‘‘easy explanation for the relationship between the female literary tradition and absolutism [that] portrays its complicity: these women were either aristocrats or bourgeoises who frequented artistocratic milieus; they had no wish to disturb the political order that

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guaranteed their privileges’’ (11). DeJean believes on the contrary that women writers’ use of the marriage plot works toward ‘‘the subversion of bloodlines by playing on contemporary fears similar to the modern anxiety about miscegenation, the dread of misalliance and the fear that aristocratic bloodlines could be contaminated by the children of adultery’’ (13). My own use of the term here refers simply to the centrality of the stakes of marriage and bloodlines, whether they were freighted with subversion and anxiety or whether they upheld absolutist social infrastructure, in early modern literature by women or men. 18. See Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977). 19. René Girard, The Girard Reader (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 12–13. 20. Joan DeJean, introduction to Ourika, trans. John Fowles (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994), viii. 21. Claudine Hermann, ‘‘Madame de Duras et Ourika,’’ in Madame de Duras, Ourika (Paris: Éditions des Femmes, 1979), 8. 22. Agénor Bardoux, La Duchesse de Duras (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1898), 17–18. 23. Virieux leaves the question of Duras’s real or imagined health problems open, simply noting that Duras’s protagonists die of their sorrows (21). BertrandJennings interprets Virieux as saying that Duras’s symptoms ‘‘were probably of psychosomatic origin.’’ Chantal Bertrand-Jennings, ‘‘Condition féminine et impuissance sociale: Les Romans de la duchesse de Duras,’’ Romantisme 63 (1989): 48– 49. It is odd to assume that Duras’s life imitated her art, however, given the rarity of death by hypochondria. 24. Claudine Hermann, ‘‘Madame de Duras et Ourika,’’ in Madame de Duras, Ourika (Paris: Éditions des Femmes, 1979), 18. 25. For the history of the two writers’ collaborations, see Michel Arrous, ‘‘Stendhal et Latouche au ‘Mercure’: Publicité pour les ‘Promenades dans Rome,’ ’’ Revue internationale d’études Stendhaliennes 25.99 (1983): 411–23. 26. Frédéric Ségu, Un Romantique Républicain: H. de Latouche (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1931), 273. 27. Claudine Hermann, preface to Édouard (Paris: Mercure de France, 1983), 18. 28. Ivanna Rosi, ‘‘Il Gioco del doppio senso nei romanzi di Madame de Duras,’’ Rivista di letterature moderne e comparative 40 (April–June 1987): 139–59. 29. See George M. Rosa, ‘‘Byronism and Babilanism in Armance,’’ Modern Language Review 77 (October 1982): 797–814. 30. G. Pailhès, La Duchesse de Duras et Chateaubriand (Paris: Perrin, 1910), 462. 31. ‘‘Lettre de Stendhal à Mérimée,’’ in Armance, ed. Pierre-Louis Rey (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992), 229. 32. Interestingly, this is a possibility that Duras’s Olivier never considers, although Louise’s ﬂexibility about the secret and marriage suggests that she would be open to whatever allowed their love to be expressed. Olivier’s sense of honor, paradoxically a hallmark of feudal values, seems to preclude the recourse to moyens auxiliaires.

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33. Alfred de Musset, Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, in Oeuvres complètes en prose, ed. Maurice Allem and Paul-Courant (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 826. 34. I use the term feudalist because the term absolutist refers to the power of the monarchy; Duras is more interested here in the way that traditional aristocratic power is legitimated, which is to say within the remnants of a feudal economic and political system. 35. Mercure 11 (1825), 579. 36. Henri de Latouche, Olivier, ed. Henri d’Alméras (n.p., Pour la Société des Médecins Bibliophiles, 1924), 10. 37. Henri d’Alméras, ‘‘Henri de Latouche et son roman ‘Olivier,’ ’’ in ibid., ix. 38. Michel Crouzet, ‘‘Monstres et merveilles; Poétique de l’Androgyne à propos de Fragoletta,’’ Romantisme 45 (1984): 27. 39. For a discussion of the genealogical relationship between Fragoletta and other nineteenth-century myths of the androgyne, see M. Paul Pelckmans, ‘‘Androgyne et mythes familiaux: Une Lecture de Fragoletta (1829) de Hyacinthe de Latouche,’’ Orbis Litterarum 36.1 (1981). 40. J. A. B. Boyer d’Agen, ‘‘Avant-propos,’’ in Oeuvres manuscrites de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: Albums de Pauline (Paris: Librairie Alphonse Lemerre, 1921), 2. Anne E. McCall, ‘‘Monuments of the Maternal: Reﬂections on the DesbordesValmore Correspondence,’’ L’Esprit créateur 39.2 (1999): 41. Sainte-Beuve referred to Desbordes-Valmore as ‘‘la Mater dolorosa de la poésie’’ in Portraits contemporains (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1882), 151. 41. Jules Michelet, ‘‘La Femme est une malade,’’ in L’Amour, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 18:64. 42. Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Di√erence: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 123. 43. Christine Planté, ‘‘L’Art sans art de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,’’ Revue littéraire mensuel 697 (May 1987): 164–75. 44. Cited in Jacques Boulenger, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: Sa Vie et son secret (Paris: Plon, 1926), 11. 45. All references to Desbordes-Valmore’s poetry are to M. Bertrand, ed., Les Oeuvres Poétiques de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 2 vols. (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1973). Another manuscript variant on this line is ‘‘Mon secret c’est mon coeur’’ (see 2:685 n. 434). 46. Armand Praviel, Le Roman conjugal de Monsieur Valmore (Paris: Éditions de France, 1937). 47. See Francis Ambrière, Le Siècle des Valmore: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore et les siens, 1786–1892, 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 48. André Beaunier, Visages de femmes (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1913), 274. 49. Émile Henriot, Portraits de femmes: d’Héloïse à Katherine Mansfeld (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950), 318. 50. Jeanine Moulin, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (Paris: Éditions Pierre Seghers, 1955), 33.

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51. Two posthumous volumes of Ondine’s work have been published; see Ondine Valmore, Les Cahiers, ed. Albert Caplain (Paris: Chez Bosse, 1932); and Jacques Boulenger, Ondine Valmore (Paris: Bibliophiles Fantaisistes, 1909). Jean Lacassagne devoted a sentimental pamphlet to Ondine, Ondine Valmore lyonnaise (Lyon: Album du Crocodile, 1948), which appears to have been a magazine article of some kind initially, as virtually every other page is a commercial advertisement. Émile Henriot in Portraits de femmes also has an essay on ‘‘La Poésie d’Ondine’’ (321–27). See also Christine Planté, ‘‘ ‘Ondine,’ ondines—Femme, amour et individuation,’’ Romantisme 18.62 (1988): 89–102. 52. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, 104. 53. ‘‘Lettre de Stendhal à Mérimée,’’ 229. 54. Edward K. Kaplan, ‘‘The Voices of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: Deference, Self-Assertion, Accountability,’’ French Forum 22.3 (1997): 261. 55. Michael Danehy, ‘‘Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859),’’ in French Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, ed. Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 131. In this superb essay, Danehy does make a confusing assertion about ‘‘Olivier’’: ‘‘the theme of a mysterious lover, Olivier, was to run throughout Desbordes-Valmore’s poetry for the next forty years’’ (122). Although there are poems thought to have been written about Latouche toward the end of Desbordes-Valmore’s life, such as ‘‘Allez en paix,’’ the explicit naming of an ‘‘Olivier’’ appears to be limited to her early work. 56. Louis Simpson, ‘‘Four Poems by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,’’ New Criterion 14.3 (1995): 37. 57. Christine Planté, ‘‘Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: L’Autobiographie indéﬁnie,’’ Romantisme 17.56 (1987): 47. 58. Laurence M. Porter, ‘‘Poetess or Strong Poet? Gender Stereotypes and the Elegies of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,’’ French Forum 18.2 (1993): 185. 59. Christine Planté, ‘‘Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: Ni Poésie féminine, ni poésie féministe,’’ French Literature Series 16 (1989): 79. 60. See Michael Danehy, ‘‘Marceline Desbordes-Valmore et la fraternité des poètes,’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 19.3 (1991): 386–93; see also Ferguson’s treatment of the poetics of birth, in the biographical context of DesbordesValmore’s marriage but not of her premarital a√airs, in ‘‘Woman as Creator: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s Transformation of the Lyric,’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 21.1–2 (1992, 1993): 57–65; Gretchen Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Di√erence in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999); and Aimée Boutin, ‘‘Desbordes-Valmore, Lamartine, and Poetic Motherhood,’’ French Forum 24.3 (1999): 315–30. 61. Ross Chambers, ‘‘Reading, Mourning, and the Death of the Author,’’ Narrative 5.1 (1997): 69. 62. Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 216.

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63. See Waller on the ‘‘rhymed verse ridiculing her [Duras’s] talent’’ after the publication of her ﬁrst two works (119). 4 . ‘‘ H A R M O N Y ’’

1. George Armstrong Kelly, ‘‘Alphonse de Lamartine: The Poet in Politics,’’ Daedelus: Past and Present 116.2 (1987): 158. 2. Franck Fouche, in Guide pour l’étude de la littérature haïtienne (Port-auPrince: Éditions Panorama, 1964), writes that early Haitian poetry ‘‘teems with examples of poets who could make Lamartine’s word theirs’’ (25). 3. André Breton, Misère de la poésie: ‘‘L’A√aire Aragon’’ devant l’opinion publique (Paris: Éditions Surréalistes, 1932), 16. 4. Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 176. 5. W. H. Auden, ‘‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats,’’ in Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 176. 6. Michel Ragon, Histoire de la littérature prolétaire de la langue française (Paris: Albin Michel, 1974), 21. 7. Théophile Gautier, preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1966), 45. 8. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Manuel du spéculateur à la Bourse (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1857), viii–ix. 9. Jacques Rancière, ‘‘Ronds de fumée (Les Poètes ouvriers dans la France de Louis-Philippe),’’ Revue des sciences humaines 61.190 (1983): 31. 10. Edmond Thomas, Voix d’en bas: La Poésie ouvrière du XIXè siècle (Paris: François Maspero, 1979), 20. 11. A. M. Blanchecotte, Lamartine (Lettre à mon temps) (Soissons: Éditions Lallart, 1867), 6. 12. Alfred de Musset, Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, in Oeuvres complètes en prose, ed. Maurice Allem and Paul-Courant (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 830. 13. Frank Paul Bowman, French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 125. 14. Henri de Saint-Simon, Oeuvres, 6 vols. (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1966), 1:81–82. 15. Honoré de Balzac, ‘‘Avant-propos,’’ Scènes de la vie privée (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1869), 1:1. 16. Roget de Belloquet, preface to Poésies d’Antoinette Quarré, de Dijon (Paris: Ledoyen, 1843), v. 17. Amable Tastu, cited in Édouard Dolléans, Féminisme et mouvement ouvrier: George Sand (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 1951), 44. 18. Barbara Johnson, ‘‘The Lady in the Lake,’’ in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 628.

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19. Théophile Gautier, Fortunio et autres nouvelles (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1930), 48. 20. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Duplan, March 14, 1868, in Oeuvres complètes de Flaubert: Correspondance 1859–1871, 16 vols. (Paris: Club de l’Honnête Homme, 1975), 14:405. 21. Victor Hugo, ‘‘Méditations poétiques,’’ in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Massin (Paris: Club Français du Livre, 1967), 1:613. 22. Alphonse de Lamartine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Marius-François Guyard (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 21. All subsequent references to Lamartine’s poetry will be to this edition. 23. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays in Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 201. 24. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 14. 25. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8. 26. Marcel Bouteron, Muses romantiques (Paris: Le Goupy, 1926), 41. 27. See Paul Viallaneix, ‘‘La Fable d’Elvire,’’ Romantisme 3 (1972): 33–42, on the hybrid construction of Elvire, who ultimately is modeled not only after Mariantonia Iacomino and Julie Charles but also after ‘‘la troisième Elvire,’’ Lamartine’s wife Marie-Anne Birch. Elvire, therefore, spans the class positions of the servant mistress, the bourgeois mistress, and the aristocratic wife. 28. René Doumic, Lettres d’Elvire à Lamartine (Paris: Hachette, 1905), 29. 29. Lamartine uses this expression in his description of the reader reception of Jocelyn in Geneviève: Histoire d’une servante (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1851). 30. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. 31. Alfred de Musset, Poésies complètes, ed. Maurice Allem (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 308. 32. Émmanuel Lévinas, ‘‘Useless Su√ering,’’ trans. Richard Cohen, in The Provocation of Lévinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (New York: Routledge, 1988), 157. 33. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 256. 34. François-René de Chateaubriand, cited in J. M. Gros, Le Mouvement littéraire socialiste depuis 1830 (Paris: Albin Michel, n.d.), 5. 35. William Fortescue, Alphonse de Lamartine: A Political Biography (New York: Saint-Martin’s Press, 1983), 75. 36. Alphonse de Lamartine, letter to Monsieur de Lamartine (1834), Correspondance générale de 1830 à 1848, ed. Maurice Levaillant, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1848), 2:5. 37. Alphonse de Lamartine, ‘‘Des Destinées de la poésie,’’ in Oeuvres de Lamartine (Paris: Adar, 1836), 16.

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38. Cited in Henri Guillemin, Le Jocelyn de Lamartine (Paris: Boivin, 1936), 128. 39. Frank Paul Bowman, Le Christ romantique (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 13. 40. Lamartine, Correspondance générale, 2:145. 41. Ibid., 2:213. 42. Jean Reboul, Poésies par Jean Reboul de Nîmes, précédées d’une notice biographique et littéraire (Paris: H.-L. Delloye, 1842). 43. Jean Maitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 1966), 3:268. 44. Joseph Michaud, ed., Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne. . . ., 85 vols. (Paris: Michaud Frères, 1811–62), 34:602. 45. Antoinette Quarré, Poésies d’Antoinette Quarré, de Dijon (Paris: Ledoyen, 1843), xvi. 46. Lamartine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, 1120. 47. Frank Paul Bowman, ‘‘La Circulation du sang religieux à l’époque romantique,’’ Romantisme 11.31 (1981): 17. 48. Lamartine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, 1121. 49. Alphonse de Lamartine, Geneviève: Histoire d’une servante (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1851), 4. 50. See Berthe Gavalda, Lamartine et Mistral (Paris: Collection des amis de la Langue d’Oc, 1970). 51. The condescending quality of Lamartine’s approach to workers is far more evident in his post-1848 writings, such as Geneviève, than in those leading up to 1848. The reasons for this historical décalage of good faith are unclear. Perhaps the disappointment of 1848, in the wake of which Lamartine lost his credibility with virtually all sectors of the population except workers, diminished his own expectation that workers could ‘‘transcend’’ their social debasement. Since Lamartine’s own image was deeply tainted by the failure of 1848, it is possible that he projected his culturally diminished stature onto his protégés. 52. Reine Garde, Essais poétiques par Reine Garde, couturière à Aix-en-Provence (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1851), 40. 53. Richard Terdiman, ‘‘Class Struggles in France,’’ in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1989), 707; Marx quoted on 706. 54. Auguste Barthélemy and Joseph Méry, Némésis—Satire hebdomadaire (Paris: Perrotin, 1845), 179. 55. Sainte-Beuve’s correspondence documents the ‘‘indemnité littéraire’’ accorded to Blanchecotte through their e√orts in 1856. Charles-Augustin SainteBeuve, Correspondance générale, ed. Jean Bonnerot (Paris: Didier, 1865), 12:285–86, 14:285, 14:517. 56. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (Paris: Garnier, 1855), 15:327. 57. Théodore de Banville, Camées parisiens (Paris: René Pincebourde, 1873), 82; my italics.

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58. Mme M. B, Ouvrière et poète [Augustine-Malvina Blanchecotte], Rêves et réalités (Paris: Ledoyen, 1855), 3. 59. Jean-Marie Goulemot and Arthur Greenspan, preface, Revue des sciences humaines 41.190 (1983): 5. 60. David P. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 125. 61. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Jules Michelet of February 2, 1869, in Oeuvres complètes de Flaubert, 14:468. 62. Cited in Graham Robb, Victor Hugo: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 252. 63. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres politiques complètes, oeuvres diverses, ed. Francis Bouvet (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1964), 60. 5. ANALOGY

1. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86. 2. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 66. 3. Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 244. 4. Barbara Johnson, A World of Di√erence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 155. 5. James A. Snead, Figures of Division: William Faulkner’s Major Novels (New York: Methuen, 1986), x. 6. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 63. 7. Charles Fourier, Le Nouveau monde industriel (Brussels: La Librairie BelgeFrançaise, 1840), 356. 8. Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 99. 9. ‘‘C’est d’ailleurs sur cet aspect-là que Quintilien fonde sa déﬁnition de la métaphore: une comparaison sans outil comparant. Au lieu de dire que ‘Pierre est fort comme un lion,’ on dit ‘Pierre est un lion.’ ’’ Michèle Aquien, Dictionnaire de poétique (Paris: Libraire Générale Française, 1993), 177. 10. Michael Spencer, ‘‘A(na)logie de Fourier,’’ Romantisme 11.34 (1981): 42. 11. I mean here that within the terms of Fourier’s ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ methodology the beet would logically be constrained to one analogical identiﬁcation, but in fact, Fourier changed the terms of his analogies frequently. In Analogie et cosmogonie, the beet family represents robust republican familial happiness: ‘‘Les grosses raves républicaines ou espèces grossières et épaisses nous représentent le bonheur qu’on goûte sous le chaume’’ (The fat republican beets or the thick and vulgar species represent the happiness one tastes under the thatched roof of the cottage). On an illustrative chart, the ‘‘betterave rouge’’ is associated with ‘‘amitié’’ and the ‘‘bet-

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terave sucrée’’ is associated with ‘‘famille.’’ Oeuvres complètes de Charles Fourier (Manuscrits publiés par la Phalange) (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1968), 12:88–89. 12. Michael G. Johnson and Tracy B. Henley, ‘‘Finding Meaning in Random Analogies,’’ Metaphor and Symbolic Activities 7.2 (1992): 55. 13. Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 93. 14. George Sand, Indiana (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 58. Quotations from Indiana in French are from this edition. 15. George Sand, Indiana, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 24. Quotations from Indiana in English are from this edition, unless otherwise noted. 16. Naomi Schor, introduction to Indiana, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xvii. 17. Doris Kadish, ‘‘Representing Race in Indiana,’’ George Sand Studies 11.1–2 (1992): 23. 18. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description Topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia: Published by the author, 1797), 21. 19. Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 6. In the essay ‘‘ ‘Di√erence’ in Historical Perspective’’ in that volume, Moses argues that socialists from this period held that ‘‘the French Revolution’s espousal of universal rights had actually masked a policy of entrenched inequality’’ (27) and that Romanticism therefore valorized di√erence over equality. Though this is a very valuable account of the Romantic socialist relationship to history of the Revolution, it seems to me that the evidence presented by Moses highlights ongoing tensions between liberty, with its potential to be read as ‘‘di√erence,’’ and likeness, rather than signifying a decisive Romantic a≈liation with di√erence. 20. Marcel Bouteron, Muses Romantiques (Paris: Le Goupy, 1926), 143–44. 21. See Édouard Dolléans, Féminisme et mouvement ouvrier: George Sand (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 1951). 22. Père Enfantin, letter to Charles Duveyrier, August 1829, in L’École SaintSimonienne et la femme, ed. Maria Teresa Bulciolu (Pisa: Golliardica, 1980), 54. 23. Suzanne Voilquin, in ibid., 215. 24. Marie Reine, in ibid., 227. 25. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 306. 26. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 11. 27. Homi Bhabha, ‘‘Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,’’ cited in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘‘Critical Fanonism,’’ Critical Inquiry 17 (spring 1991): 461.

Notes to Pages 205–215

277

28. bell hooks, introduction to Ain’t I a Woman? (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 8. 29. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 137.

6. FETISHISM

1. Consistently with Baudelaire’s famous comment that he had been ‘‘physically depoliticized’’ by the aftermath of 1848, Flaubert presents a nihilistic paradigm of Romantic politics in L’Éducation sentimentale through the ﬁgure of Dambreuse. Richard D. E. Burton, in ‘‘The Death of Politics: The Signiﬁcance of Dambreuse’s Funeral in L’Éducation Sentimentale,’’ argues that Dambreuse’s funeral in 1851 represents ‘‘the death of politics tout court, an image of the failure of politicians of left, right and centre alike to counter the resistible rise of Louis-Napoleon.’’ French Studies: A Quarterly Review 50.2 (1996): 167. 2. Gustave Flaubert, Oeuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert: Correspondance 1850–1859, 16 vols. (Paris: Club de l’Honnête Homme, 1974), 13:570. 3. Laurence M. Porter, ‘‘Projection as Ego Defense in Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine,’’ in Critical Essays on Gustave Flaubert, ed. Laurence M. Porter (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 150. 4. Robert Darnton, introduction to The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 4. 5. Claudine Frank makes a case for the ‘‘peasant-as-relic’’ in ‘‘Commemorative Peasants: Sand, Turgenev, and Flaubert’s ‘Un Coeur simple,’ ’’ George Sand Studies 14.1–2 (1995): 59–73. Frank emphasizes the association of the relic with outmoded temporality, proposing that Félicité’s ‘‘reliquary mentality’’ echoes ‘‘romantic, elegiacal views of the 19th-century peasantry’’ (59). 6. Gustave Flaubert, ‘‘Un Coeur simple,’’ in Oeuvres, ed. A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 2:591. 7. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 142. 8. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 147. 9. See, among other sources, Edward J. Gallagher, ‘‘Heavenly Bodies: Dogmatic Parody in Flaubert’s Un Coeur simple,’’ New Zealand Journal of French Studies 12.2 (1991); and Naomi Schor, ‘‘George Sand Dies While Gustave Flaubert Is Writing Un Coeur simple for Her,’’ in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 10. Je√erson Humphries, ‘‘Flaubert’s Parrot and Huysman’s Cricket: The Decadence of Realism and the Realism of Decadence,’’ Stanford French Review 11.3 (1987): 323.

278

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11. Nathaniel Wing, ‘‘Reading Simplicity: Flaubert’s ‘Un Coeur Simple,’ ’’ Nineteenth-Century French Studies 21.1–2 (1992–93): 99. 12. See Philippe Hamon, ‘‘Un Discours contraint,’’ in Littérature et réalité, ed. Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 119–81. 13. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 173. 14. A. Vermeersch, Pratique et doctrine de la dévotion au Sacré Coeur, 2 vols. (Paris: Établissements Caterman, 1922), 2:107–8. 15. Anonymous front-page editorial in Le Siècle, June 16, 1875. The nineteenthcentury newspapers cited here have no pagination, named authors, article titles, or other relevant bibliographical information besides the name of the newspaper and the date. 16. Victor Alet, La France et le Sacré Coeur (Paris: D. Dumoulin et Cie, 1889), 93. 17. Jules Michelet, Le Prêtre, la femme, et la famille (Paris: Chamerot, 1862), 167. 18. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, Vie et oeuvres de la Bienheureuse MargueriteMarie Alacoque, 2 vols. (Paris: Poussielgue Frères, n.d.), 2:271. 19. Cited in the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, June 14, 1875. 20. The Holy Ghost is a manifestly prominent motif in ‘‘A Simple Heart,’’ because of Félicité’s repeated paradoxical attempts to come up with satisfactory symbolic associations for the immateriality it denotes. Less obvious for contemporary readers is the common association of the iconic symbol for the Holy Ghost, the dove, with the equally iconic Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart is often linked in visual representations with the dove because the Holy Ghost is the ‘‘author’’ of the incarnation, the Logos made body. In e√ect, the Holy Ghost puts the real into question in the same way that the Sacred Heart does, although from the extreme of immateriality rather than materiality. Representations of the Sacred Heart and the dove hovering together above the clouds recall Flaubert’s scene of the parrot/Holy Ghost ‘‘planant au-dessus’’ (‘‘hovering overhead’’) in ‘‘A Simple Heart.’’ 21. Pierre Fédida, ‘‘La Relique et le travail du deuil,’’ in ‘‘Objets du fétichisme,’’ Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse 2 (fall 1970): 249. 22. John Strong, ‘‘Relics,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 12:276. 23. Patrick Geary, ‘‘Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,’’ in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 169. 24. Jean Calvin, Traité des reliques, reprinted in Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire critique des reliques et des images miraculeuses, 3 vols. (Paris: Guien, 1821), 3:253. 25. Plancy, Dictionnaire critique, 1:xiii. 26. Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, Histoire abrégée des di√érens cultes, 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaume, 1825), 1:455. 27. William Pietz, ‘‘The Problem of the Fetish,’’ Res 9 (spring 1985): 5. 28. Robert B. Williams, ‘‘Theology and Tragedy,’’ in New Perspectives on Hegel’s

Notes to Pages 236–257

279

Philosophy of Religion, ed. David Kolb (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992), 44. 29. Charles de Brosses, Du Culte des dieux fétiches, ou parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (1760), 191. 30. Marie Gasquet, La Fête-Dieu (Paris: Flammarion, 1932), 24. 31. William Pietz, ‘‘Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,’’ in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 137. 32. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, trans. Harriet Martineau (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1855), 545. 33. Fritz Schultze, Fetichism [sic ]: A Contribution to Anthropology and the History of Religion, trans. J. Fitzgerald (New York: Humboldt, 1885), 3. 34. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 74 n. 1. 35. Alfred Binet, Études de psychologie experimentale (Paris: Octave Doin, 1888), 1. 36. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Words of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 7:153. EPILOGUE

1. Benjamin Constant, ‘‘The Kind of Liberty O√ered to Men at the End of the Last Century,’’ in Usurpation, in Constant: Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 113. 2. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1. 3. Charles Darwin, The Portable Darwin, ed. Duncan M. Porter and Peter W. Graham (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 110. 4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), 2. 5. Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 677. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 73.

INDEX

Abraham, Nicolas, 15 Adorno, Theodor, 6, 91 Agatha, Saint, 232 Alacoque, Marguerite-Marie, 217–19 Aldegonde, virgin of Haynaut, 241 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’: Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, 19–20, 154–55 Alet, Victor, 216 Alexander, Je√rey C.: Culture and Society, 262n36 Allart, Hortense, 93 allegory, 14, 21, 88, 223, 251 Alméras, Henri de, 116–17, 138 Alter, Robert: Motives for Fiction, 5 alterity, 9–10, 27–28, 113, 178, 254 altruism, 206–7 Ambrière, Francis: Le Siècle des Valmore, 120–24, 126–28, 134–36 Ambrière, Madeleine, 91 analogy, 3, 24, 27–28, 77–78, 183–209, 224, 275n11 Ancelot, Jacques-François-Arsène, 124 ancien régime, 18–19, 33, 53, 55, 72, 97–

98, 219–20; and privilege, 95, 111, 252–53, 269n17; and salonnière tradition, 89, 93–95; vandalism as transformation of, 24–25, 35–38, 41–42, 47 Anderson, Benedict, 183 appropriation, 27, 98–99, 114, 163–64, 198 Aragon, Louis: and ‘‘A√aire Aragon,’’ 142; ‘‘Front rouge,’’ 142 Aravamudan, Srinivas: Tropicopolitans, 198 architecture, 24–25, 35, 47–49, 52–54, 231, 265n34 Aristotle, 6, 17, 30–32, 35, 225 Arsenal (salon), 130 Auden, W. H., 142 Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis, 5, 60, 214 author: autonomization of, 93–97, 134, 137; and identity, 90–92, 102–3, 137; and l’homme et l’oeuvre criticism, 87–92, 136; and women writers, 26, 87–139, 161, 205, 253– 54, 268n17, 269n23 avant-gardism, 5, 88, 106

281

282

INDEX

Bakhtin, Mikhail: Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 3; Speech Genres, 3 Balzac, Honoré de, 117, 196; ‘‘Avantpropos’’ to the Comédie humaine, 150 Bann, Stephen, 42 Banville, Théodore de, 39 Bara, Joseph, 33–34 Bardoux, A., 100 Barrot, Odilon, 173 Barthélemy, Auguste, 174 Barthes, Roland, 90, 92, 137, 214, 223, 225 Bastiat, Frédéric, 149 Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 5, 39, 181, 193, 226, 277n1 Baudrillard, Jean, 11 Bauër, Gérard, 121 Beaunier, André, 75–76, 125 Beauvoir, Simone de, 8 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 151 Bellasort, André, 121 Belloquet, Roget de, 168, 170 Benjamin, Walter, 6 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 148, 175, 268n15 Berlin, Isaiah, 267n23 Bernadotte, Jean Baptiste, 58 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, JacquesHenri, 109, 184, 188 Bertrand, Marc, 120–21 Bertrand-Jennings, Chantal, 104, 106, 112, 269n23 Beyle, Marie Henri. See Stendhal Bhabha, Homi, 27, 201; and ‘‘Mimic Man,’’ 183; The Location of Culture, 183, 185–86 Bible, 153, 232, 236–37; Acts of the Apostles, 146; Gospel of John, 22 binarism, 2–4, 6–7, 29, 57, 67, 82, 214–15 Binet, Alfred, 212, 246–49; and ‘‘plastic love,’’ 246–48

biographical fallacy, 89–92, 124, 126, 134–37 Blanchecotte, Augustine, 27, 147, 148, 165, 175–76; Rêves et réalités, 175 Bloom, Harold, 4 Bongie, Chris, 6; Islands and Exiles, 10, 184, 185, 208 ‘‘bonnet rouge,’’ 14, 251 Bontoux, Césarie, 171, 172 Borel, Petrus, 53–54 Borges, Jorge Luis, 11 Bouilhet, Louis, 222 Boulenger, Jacques, 119–20, 125 Bourdieu, Pierre: Contre-feux, 83–84; The Field of Cultural Production, 92–93; The Logic of Practice, 257; ‘‘The Market of Symbolic Goods,’’ 92 Bouteron, Marcel, 156, 195–96 Boutin, Aimée, 136 Bowman, Frank Paul, 149–51, 165, 168–69 Boyer d’Agen, J. A. B., 118, 121 Boym, Svetlana, 142 Braule, Saint, 241 Breton, André, 141–47; ‘‘Misère de la poésie,’’ 141, 143, 144 Brinton, Crane, 86 Brooks, Peter, 104 Burt, E. S.: Poetry’s Appeal, 13 Burton, Richard D. E., 227n1 Butler, Judith, 10; Excitable Speech, 22; Gender Trouble, 208; ‘‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination,’’ 6; ‘‘Sex and Gender,’’ 8 cadaver/corpse: and excavations at Saint-Denis, 39–41, 43–44; of saints, 231–32; symbolism of, 49, 226, 230, 234 Calvin, Jean: Traité des reliques, 232–33 capitalism, 83, 242, 244

Index

Caribbean, 237. See also Creole Carné, Count of, 165 Caruth, Cathy: Trauma, 15; Unclaimed Experience, 16, 21–22, 253 Cassirer, Ernst, 154–55 castration, 3, 137, 138, 203, 246, 256 Catholicism, 104, 146, 149, 179; and anticlericism, 217–23; and cult of Sacred Heart, 211, 213–24, 226–29, 234, 244, 249–50; and materialism, 211–16, 220–25, 233–34, 237–38, 246, 250; and Protestant Reformation, 232, 234, 235, 247; and relics, 28, 54, 212, 226–38, 241–42, 255 Cavaignac, Eugène, 181 Chambers, Ross: ‘‘Reading, Mourning, and the Death of the Author,’’ 137; Story and Situation, 214–15, 223, 226 La Chanson de Roland, 128 Chantepie, Mlle Leroyer de, 222 Charlemagne, 58 Charles X (king of France), 95, 152 Chateaubriand, François-AugusteRené, 14, 25, 51, 148, 174, 210; and Duras, 102, 116; Mémoires d’outretombe, 52; as monarchist, 53, 96, 152, 164; René, 96 Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 34, 117 Christianity, 22, 46, 167–70, 184; and fetishism, 28, 211–15, 226, 235, 249, 254–55; and imitatio, 21, 49, 227; and mysticism, 179, 219, 227–29, 238; and relics, 230–31, 240–43, 247. See also Catholicism Cixous, Hélène, 9 Cli√ord, James: The Predicament of Culture, 37 cogito, 82, 86, 242, 243, 244 colonialism, 153, 183–84, 187, 190, 208– 9, 236, 254 commodity, 191, 197, 244–46

283

The Commune, 42, 152, 177, 179, 213, 219–20 Comte, Auguste, 212; Cours de philosophie positive, 242 Constant, Benjamin, 25, 210; and Minna von Cramm, 71; and Charlotte von Hardenberg, 71, 76, 266n11; and modern liberalism, 252–53; on politics of liberty, 11–12, 56–87; Mme de Staël, relationship with, 68–78; works about, 58, 62, 66, 70, 72, 83–84 Constant, Benjamin, works by: Adolphe, 67, 68–69; Amélie et Germaine, 67, 76; ‘‘Ancient and Modern Liberty,’’ 58, 60, 65, 68, 82, 84; Cécile, 25, 67–86, 266n11; ‘‘De la liberté ancienne comparée à celle des modernes,’’ 58; ‘‘De la Perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine,’’ 82; De l’Esprit de la conquête et de l’usurpation, 57–58; De l’Usurpation, 25; Journaux intimes, 67, 68; Le Cahier rouge, 67–68; Ma vie, 68, 69; Mélanges de littérature et de politique, 78; The Spirit of Conquest, 57– 58; Usurpation, 57–58, 60–62, 66– 86 The Consulate, 42, 58, 73 consumerism, 63–64, 84–85, 92, 94 contiguity, 42, 192–93, 247 The Convention, 42, 146 Corday, Charlotte, 100 Cottin, Mme, 128 Courajod, Louis, 30, 48–49 Creole, 27–29, 100, 185, 192–95, 198– 99, 201–8 Crouzet, Michel, 117 Culler, Jonathan: Flaubert, 2, 234 cults, 42–43, 65, 73, 159, 253; of egalitarian love, 213, 215, 229–30, 238, 254; of reason, 85–86, 237, 241–

284

INDEX

cults (cont.) 42; of relics, 227, 231–35, 243, 246– 47, 248; of Sacred Heart, 211, 213– 24, 226–29, 234, 244, 249–50 Dakyns, Janine, 265n34 Danehy, Michael, 134–35, 136 Darnton, Robert, 28; The Great Cat Massacre, 154–55, 211 Darwin, Charles, 83, 255 David, Jacques-Louis, 14, 33, 45 de Brosses, Charles, 236–37, 242 Decadents, 175 ‘‘Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.’’ See ‘‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’’ ‘‘Declaration of the Rights of Man,’’ 56, 71 deconstruction, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 DeJean, Joan, 93, 98–100, 267n2, 268n17 de Man, Paul, 5, 17 de Nolde, Elisabeth, 69 de Quincy, Quatremère: Moral Considerations on the Destination of Works of Art, 43, 264n22 Deroin, Jeanne, 196 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 6, 256 Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline, 87– 139, 253, 257; and Hilarion Audibert, 123, 127; biography of, 122–26, 160; and Eugène Debonne, 123; and Marie-Eugène Debonne, 123; and Antoine-Félix Desbordes, 122; and Catherine Desbordes, 122–23; and Louis Lacour, 123; and language of pain, 158–61; and Latouche, 125–30, 134–35, 254, 271n55; love poems of, 128–34; myth of, 118–21, 129, 254; as poète maudit, 26, 89, 119, 267n1; reputation of, 124, 138, 268n4; and Sainte-Beuve, 125, 127–28, 136,

270n40; and Nicolas Saintenoy, 122; secret of, 121; and Ondine Valmore, 127, 271n51; and Prosper Valmore, 122, 125, 127; works about, 89, 101, 118–28, 130, 134–36, 158–61, 268n4 Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline, works by: Élégies, Marie et romances, 123– 24, 128; ‘‘L’Abandon,’’ 128; ‘‘L’Aveu permis,’’ 128; ‘‘Le Chien d’Olivier,’’ 128, 129; ‘‘Le Cloître,’’ 128, 129; ‘‘Le Rendez-vous,’’ 128; ‘‘Le Secret,’’ 128, 129–34; ‘‘Les Roses de Saadi,’’ 129, 133; ‘‘Les Serments,’’ 128; ‘‘L’Orage,’’ 128, 129; ‘‘Marie,’’ 128; Oeuvres poètiques, 121; ‘‘Philis,’’ 128; Poésies, 124; ‘‘Secret de jeune ﬁlle,’’ 121; ‘‘Son Image,’’ 129; ‘‘Une Jeune ﬁlle et sa mère,’’ 129 Descartes, Réne, 237 Descaves, Lucien, 118 DeSeine, Louis-Pierre, 43–44, 52 de Staël, Madame. See Staël, Germaine di√erence, 3–4, 6–10, 27–29, 256, 276n19; of class, 150–51, 166, 174; of race, 27, 185, 194–95, 203–4, 236 The Directory, 42, 73 Dolléans, Édouard, 276n21 Domergue, Urbain, 47 Doumic, René, 157 Doyen, Gabriel-François, 36 Dufrénoy, Mme, 124 Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine, 233, 243– 44 Dumas, Alexandre, 27, 148 DuPlessis, G., 101 Dupont, Pierre, 147 Duras, Claire de, 87–139, 253–54; and Rosalie de Constant, 99, 104; and Duke of Duras, 101; and Félicie de Duras, 102; and Admiral Kersaint, 100, 101; and plagiarism, 26, 99–

Index

100; su√ering of, 100–102, 269n23; works about, 97, 99–104, 108, 112– 13, 130, 138–39 Duras, Claire de, works by: Édouard, 99–100, 104; Olivier ou le secret, 26, 97–118, 120, 130, 133, 253, 269n32; Ourika, 99–100 Duval, Amaury, 125 The Empire, 42, 58, 123, 127 Encyclopédie (1765), 19, 154 Enfantin, Prosper, 195, 196 The Enlightenment, 25, 41, 100–101, 244; and cult of reason, 85–86, 237, 241–42; and natural law, 19–20, 154–55, 184 Épinal, 240 equality, 3, 7, 12, 19–20, 29, 84, 254; and likeness, 9, 205, 208, 212, 234, 251–52 Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Masks, 201 Fédida, Pierre, 227 Felman, Shoshana, 104 feminism, 7–9, 27, 135–36, 192–209. See also gender Ferguson, Simone D., 136 fetish, 2–3, 5, 17, 115, 137–38; and Catholic relic, 28, 211–12, 226, 234– 38, 249–50; deﬁnition of, 236–37, 240–42, 245; in Flaubert, 213–15, 238–41, 248–50, 254–55; as precursor to art, 242–44, 248 fetishism, 24, 28, 210–50 feudalism, 36, 45, 109–12, 197, 269n32, 270n34 ﬁctions of impotence, 96–99, 103–4, 255 Flaubert, Gustave, 1–3, 24, 147, 152, 179, 277n1; and egalitarian love, 213, 215, 229–30, 238, 254; and Jeru-

285

salem, 222; and role of Loulou, 213– 15, 238–41, 244, 249–50; works about, 2, 211, 214, 215, 223, 226, 234, 241, 249, 277n1 Flaubert, Gustave, works by: L’Éducation sentimentale, 147, 152, 179, 210, 277n1; Madame Bovary, 210, 211; Salammbô, 211; Tentation de saint Antoine, 211; Trois Contes, 211, 223; ‘‘Un Coeur simple,’’ 24, 28, 210–50, 277n5 Foa, Eugénie, 93 Fortescue, William, 164 Fouche, Frank, 272n2 Fourier, Charles, 27, 97, 149, 207; analogies of, 187–91, 195, 203, 275n11; Le Nouveau Monde industriel, 187; and women’s rights, 192, 196; works about, 190 François I (king of France), 52 Frank, Claudine, 227 Frankenstein (Shelley), 50 French Revolution, 33–34, 58, 74, 85, 184, 213; and desacralization of culture, 21, 100, 219–20; and politics of likeness, 11–13, 35, 161, 253, 255; popularization of, 152, 153; and Romanticism, 4–5, 12–16, 19–20, 24–29, 251–52, 276n19 Freud, Sigmund, 14–15, 70, 76, 107, 137–38, 246, 256 Furet, François, 19 Gabler, Neal: Life, the Movie, 11 Gallagher, Edward J., 277n9 Garde, Reine, 27, 165, 170–73 Gasquet, Marie, 238 Gates, Henry Louis, 185, 201 Gautier, Théophile, 145–47, 152, 188, 226; Mademoiselle de Maupin, 117, 145 Gay, Sophie, 93, 124, 148, 159

286

INDEX

Geary, Patrick, 232; ‘‘Sacred Commodities,’’ 231 Gebauer, Gunter: Mimesis, 1, 6–7, 24, 86, 163 gender, 7–9, 28–29, 92–93, 135–38, 201, 208; and lack, 111, 137–39, 256. See also feminism Gilbert, Sandra, 17, 104 Girard, Réne, 6–7, 27, 98–99, 163, 256; ‘‘To Double Business Bound,’’ 1 Girardin, Delphine de, 93 Girondins, 26, 100, 140, 153, 170 Gogol, Nikolai, 3 Gopnik, Adam, 83 Gordon, Daniel: Citizens without Sovereignty, 18–19 Goths, 35, 53 Goulemot, Marie, 176 Greenspan, Alan, 83 Greenspan, Arthur, 176 Grégoire, Henri, abbé, 35–36 Grignan, Mme de, 102 Gross, Kenneth: The Dream of the Moving Statue, 39 Guadeloupe, 101, 123 Gubar, Susan, 105 Guibert, Joseph-Hippolyte, 217 Guilhermy, Ferdinand de, 38 Guillemin, Henri, 165 guillotine, 3, 101, 252; and Louis XVI, 12, 34–35, 39, 70, 95–96, 100 Guyon, Mme de: Les Torrents, 218 Habermas, Jürgen: ‘‘The Public Sphere,’’ 85 Hamon, Philippe: ‘‘Le Musée et le texte,’’ 45; ‘‘Un Discours contraint,’’ 215 Hardenberg, Charlotte von, 71, 76, 266n11 harmony, 24, 27–28, 203; and industrial economy, 187–88, 191; and Lamartine, 140–82; and social

mimesis, 4–8, 10–11, 17, 28–29, 262n36; works about, 149 Hartmann, Geo√rey, 5 Hegel, G. W. F., 16, 190, 235–36, 244– 45, 262n36 Heine, Heinrich, 46 Héloise, 43 Henley, Tracy, 190 Henri IV (king of France), 40 Henriot, Émile, 125–26 Hermann, Claudine, 101–2, 104 Hofstadter, Dan, 69 Holmes, Stephen: Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberty, 58, 62, 68, 83 The Holocaust, 14, 179 Holy Ghost, 226, 239, 240; as icon, 214, 241, 278n20; and Loulou, 244, 250 hooks, bell: Ain’t I a Woman? 205 Horatii (David), 33 Houellebecq, Michel: Les Particules élémentaires, 83 Hugo, Abel, 44 Hugo, Howard, 86 Hugo, Victor, 17–18, 44, 49–51, 55, 130, 148, 184; political career of, 53, 96, 180–82, 210; and political theory of pain, 180–82; and Romanticism, 4, 14, 25, 85, 88, 90, 152 Hugo, Victor, works by: ‘‘Aux Ruines de Montfaury,’’ 49; Bug-Jargal, 184; ‘‘Le Poète dans les révolutions,’’ 88; Les Contemplations, 18; Napoléon le Petit, 210; Notre-Dame de Paris, 49– 50; Odes et ballades, 88; ‘‘Réponse à un acte d’accusation,’’ 18; ‘‘Suite,’’ 17–18 Hume, David, 243 Hunt, Lynn, 81 iconoclasm, 24, 30–55, 241, 252, 255 iconography, 211–12, 232

Index

identity, 6, 42, 47, 81, 206; and alterity, 9–10, 256; authorial, 90–92, 102–3, 137; national, 31–33, 37; of Olivier, 124–39; racial, 28–29, 185, 194, 208; sexual, 8, 28–29 imitatio, 21–22, 49, 228, 248 impotence: ﬁctions of, 96–99, 103, 255; and lack, 103–7, 113–16; as plagiarism, 26, 88, 137–38; as secret, 106, 108, 111, 130, 253 incest, 255–56 industrial state, 63, 86, 94, 98, 253; and l’ouvriérisme, 143, 146–49; and slavery, 187–88, 191 Irigaray, Luce, 9; Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un, 98 irony: and binaristic di√erence, 4, 144; in Flaubert, 2, 211, 214–15, 222, 228; in post-Romanticism, 2–5, 17, 81, 183–84 Isaiah (prophet), 232 Isbell, John, 66 Jakobson, Roman, 188–89 Janet (publisher), 93 Jasmin, Jacques, 147 Jeremiah (prophet), 40 Jesuits, 220, 225 John the Baptist, Saint, 232 Johnson, Barbara, 4; A World of Di√erence, 185–87, 192–93; The Feminist Di√erence, 7, 119, 129, 136; ‘‘The Lady in the Lake,’’ 151, 156 Johnson, Michael, 190 jouissance, 84–85 Julienne, Saint, 238 July Monarchy, 53, 146–47, 152–53, 161, 164, 174, 182 July revolution (1830), 97, 145, 147, 152, 213, 239 Kadish, Doris, 194, 204 Kaplan, Edward, 134, 135

287

Kelly, George Armstrong, 140–41 Kerr, Alphonse, 180 Kipling, Rudyard, 183 Kramer, Jane, 260n16 Krieger, Murray, 17 Kristeva, Julia, 9 Labé, Louise, 126 Lacan, Jacques, 45, 201 lack: gendering of, 111, 137–39, 256; mimetic appropriation of, 27, 164; as mirror of impotence, 103–7, 116 Lafayette, Mme de: La Princesse de Clèves, 103 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 4, 257; biography of, 152–53, 273n27; and Marie-Anne Birch, 273n27; and Julie Charles, 156–57, 273n27; and Elvire, 120, 156–57, 175, 273n27; and Charles Gosselin, 165; and Mariantonia Iacomino, 157, 273n27; inﬂuence of, 120, 124, 151–52, 168, 173, 189; and language of su√ering, 166–72; and ouvriers poètes, 27, 148, 157, 164–72, 175, 176; political career of, 53, 96, 140–82, 210, 254; and popular literacy, 170–71; as socialist, 13–14, 26–28, 85, 141–72, 176–82, 274n51; works about, 140, 151–52, 156, 167, 169, 173–76 Lamartine, Alphonse de, works by: ‘‘À Elvire,’’ 156; ‘‘À Mlle Delphine Gay,’’ 159; ‘‘À Mme DesbordesValmore,’’ 159–61; Antoniella, 157; ‘‘À Une Jeune Fille poète,’’ 168; ‘‘Aux Chrétiens dans les temps d’épreuves,’’ 167; ‘‘Des Destinées de la poèsie,’’ 165; Geneviève, 170, 171, 172, 274n51; Graziella, 157; Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, 152, 157, 165–66; Histoire des Girondins, 26, 140, 153, 170; Jocelyn, 157; ‘‘Le Désespoir,’’ 153; ‘‘Les Révolutions,’’

288

INDEX

Lamartine, works by (cont.) 165; Méditations poétiques, 124, 152, 157, 168; Nouvelles conﬁdences, 157 Lamennais, Félicité Robert de, 146 language, 189, 215, 241, 246; in Indiana, 206–9; and ‘‘le sou∆e,’’ 150–51, 153, 156, 249; of Loulou, 238–39; of suffering, 22–23, 140–82 Las Cases, Émmanuel-Auguste, 69 Latouche, Henri de (Hyacinthe): and Desbordes-Valmore, 121, 125–30, 134–35, 254, 271n55; and moyen auxiliaires, 113–14, 138; as plagiarist, 26, 90, 102–4, 107–8, 116–17, 138–39; works about, 104, 108, 116–17, 126– 27, 130, 138–39 Latouche, Henri de (Hyacinthe), works by: Clément XIV et Carlo Bertinazzi, 104; Fragoletta, 117; Mémoires de Mme Manzon, 117; Olivier, 102–3, 108, 114–17, 126–27, 138 Lautréamont, Count of, 153 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre Auguste, 174 Lefuel (publisher), 93 Lemieux, Pierre, 83–84 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 143 Lenoir, Alexander, 38, 41–42, 46–47; and excavations at Saint Denis, 38– 41, 43–44, 263n15; and Musée des Monuments Français, 24, 35–43 Lepeletier, Michel, 12, 33, 34, 263n6 Lévinas, Émmanuel: ‘‘Useless Su√ering,’’ 163, 177–79, 182 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 255 liberalism, 57, 62, 66, 153, 164, 174; and Constant’s political theory, 83–86, 252–53; as laissez-faire, 69, 252 liberty: Constantian theories of, 56– 86; and French Revolution, 29, 45, 58–60, 74, 251–52; and likeness, 11– 12, 14–15, 253, 257

likeness, 10–15, 27, 29, 149, 161, 185, 199; and equality, 9, 205, 208, 212, 234, 251–52; and pain, 255; and the social, 24, 28, 252–53; and utopia, 146, 151, 188, 253–57 Lionnet, Françoise, 104 Lloyd, Rosemary, 136 Locke, John, 19 Louis XII (king of France), 52 Louis XIII (king of France), 52 Louis XVI (king of France), 12, 34–35, 39, 70, 95–96, 100–101 Louis XVIII (king of France), 43, 95, 264n21, 268n15 Louis-Napoléon III, 170, 173, 175, 181, 196 Louis-Philippe (king of France), 54, 97, 145, 173, 176 Loulou. See Flaubert, Gustave, works by: ‘‘Un Coeur simple’’ Loy, Aimé de, 160 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, abbé, 59, 64–65, 66, 83–84 le mal du siècle, 25, 51–52, 55, 96–118, 151 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 3, 226 Malthus, Thomas, 255 Mann, Thomas, 23 Marat, Jean-Paul, 14, 34, 100, 198 Marcilly (publisher), 93 Marie, Princess, 167 marriage, 192–209. See also slavery marriage plot, 98, 100, 103, 109, 268n17 ‘‘La Marseillaise,’’ 14 martyrdom, 41, 46–47, 54, 118, 124, 231–32 Marx, Karl, 220, 262n36; on materialism, 212, 244–46; and slavery, 189– 90; and socialism, 145, 162, 165, 174 Marx, Karl, works by: Misère de la philosophie, . . . , 144, 182; The 18th

Index

Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 16; ‘‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,’’ 244 materialism: a√ective, 246–48; Marx on, 212, 244–46; religious, 28, 211– 16, 220–25, 233–38, 250 Mathilda, Princess, 210 McCall, Anne E., 118 medievalism, 1, 45–55, 128, 232 Mercier, Jules, 147 Mercoeur, Elisa, 93 Mercure de France, 114, 121, 125 Mérimée, Prosper, 105, 130, 148, 175 Méry, Joseph, 174 metamorphoses, 149, 151, 164, 225–26, 240, 249–50 Michelet, Jules, 25, 48, 53, 223, 225, 234; on cult of Sacred Heart, 216– 17, 220–22, 228, 244; on women Romantic poets, 118–19 Michelet, Jules, works by: L’Amour, 118–19; Le Prêtre, la femme, et la famille, 220 Miller, Christopher, 192–94 Miller, Nancy, 98 mimesis, 20–25, 66; as conditio humana, 11, 22; and lack, 27, 164; as mirror of society, 4–8, 10–11, 17, 28–29, 262n36; practical, 257; primitive, 28; social, 5–7, 10–11, 13, 17, 149, 250, 255–57; and violence, 18, 27, 34, 39–40, 88, 184, 199 mimetic rivalry, 6, 99, 116, 120, 137, 207, 226, 256 mimetic trauma, 16, 182, 197, 198, 200 mimicry, 27, 56–57, 62–63, 183–86, 208–9 Miquel, Pierre, 95, 97 mirror stage, 45, 201 misère de la poésie, 145–47, 171, 175–76, 181–82 Mistral, Frédéric, 171

289

Mitchell, Juliet, 32–33, 55 mobilité, 67, 70, 78, 86, 87 Modernism, 181 monarchy: impotence of, 97–98; overturning of, 39–40, 96, 164; and restoration of Revolutionary vandalism, 42–43, 54–55; support for, 53, 96, 152, 164 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat: Lettres persanes, 105 Montolieu, Mme, 128 Montorgeuil, Georges, 125 monuments: excavation of, 40, 44–45; as mirror of regime, 36–39, 42, 45– 47, 50, 53, 55 Moreau, Hégisippe, 147, 172 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Elie, 194 Morris, David: The Culture of Pain, 178 Morrison, Toni, 185; Playing in the Dark, 186 Moses, Claire, 195 Moulin, Jeanine, 126 moyens auxiliaires, 105–6, 113–14, 138, 269n32 musa pedestris, 27, 156–57 muse, 35, 93, 120, 156–57, 168–69, 195 Musée des Monuments Français, 46, 48, 52; catalogs of, 24–25, 36, 38–43; Convent of the Petits-Augustins, 36, 43–44, 48, 52, 55; dismantling of, 43–45, 53, 264n21; École des BeauxArts, 36; and iconoclasm, 30, 35–37, 42; as inspiration for Romantic writers, 25, 47, 54–55 Musée des Monuments Français, works about, 30, 43–44, 48–49, 52; Annales archéologiques (Guilhermy), 38; Musée Impérial des Monuments Français (Lenoir), 41; Musée Royal des Monuments Français, . . . (Lenoir), 41

290

INDEX

Musset, Alfred de, 1, 25, 52, 189; La Confession d’un enfant du siècle, 16, 20–21, 51, 55; ‘‘La Nuit de mai,’’ 161; Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 7, 29, 105–6, 148 mysticism, 22, 179, 219, 227–29, 238 mystiﬁcation, 116–17, 121, 138, 206 myth, 88, 92, 117, 118, 121–26, 129, 254 Napoleon I (Bonaparte), 40, 41, 44, 253; as model for Mme de Malbée, 25, 72; regime of, 25, 58, 65–66, 95, 98; and Mme de Staël, 69, 75–76. See also Louis-Napoléon III Napoleonic Code, 95 narcissism, 17, 102, 198, 207–8, 243, 254 National Assembly, 100, 152, 153, 174, 219 National Guard, 165 National Workshops, 174, 180 nationhood, 31–34, 38, 53, 58 natural law, 19–20, 154–55, 255; of pain, 19–20 Neufchâteau, François de, 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 70 nihilism, 60, 70, 277n1 Nodier, Charles, 54–55, 130 Nora, Pierre: Realms of Memory, 34 Noun. See Sand, George Olivier, 124–30, 134–39, 271n55 Ophelia, 202, 206 originality, 90, 105–8, 116–17, 137 Orléans, Duchess of, 173 Orwell, George, 183 l’ouvriérisme, 27, 143, 147–48, 164, 167 ouvriers poètes, 27, 141, 147–48, 151, 157, 164–72, 175–78 Ozouf, Mona, 12, 14, 33–34, 62, 252 Pailhès, G., 102 pain, 23, 118–19, 126, 141, 154–63, 166,

169, 172, 174, 177–78, 180, 182, 230, 232. See also su√ering Parfait, Paul: La Foire aux reliques, 227 parité, 9, 28, 208, 260n17 Parnassians, 175, 226 Parny, Évariste-Désiré de Forges de, 157 parole of God, 154, 158, 278n20 passio, 48, 232 pathos: in Cécile, 81, 141; in Christianity, 45–46; in Romanticism, 3, 16, 26, 47–48, 254; in ‘‘Un Coeur simple,’’ 211, 214, 222, 228, 249 patronage, 26, 93–95 Paul et Virginie (Saint-Pierre), 109, 111 Perdiguier, Agricol, 147 Peter, Saint, 232 Petrarch, 120, 129, 157 Peyre, Henri, 13–14 La Phalange ( journal), 196 Le Phalanstère ( journal), 196 Philoctetes, 119 philosophism, 244 Pietz, William, 235, 241–42 Pius IX, Pope, 217 plagiarism, 24, 26–28, 87–139, 255 Plancy, Collin de, 233, 241, 246; Dictionnaire critique des reliques, 233, 241, 246 Planté, Christine, 119, 135–36 Plato, 3, 152 La Pléiade, 259n2 Poncy, Charles, 147 Ponroy, Alphonse, 121 popular literacy, 170–71 Porter, Laurence M., 135, 211 positivism, 219, 242 postmodernism, 2–3, 5, 10–11 poststructuralism, 3–7, 135, 186 potency, 87, 90, 103–7, 116, 253. See also impotence Poulot, Dominique, 35, 38, 40; Musée, Nation, Patrimoine, 30

Index

poverty, 141–45. See also misère de la poésie practical mimesis, 257 Praviel, Armand, 120 primitive mimesis, 28 primitivism, 9–10, 19, 28, 184 privilege: in ancien régime, 95, 111, 252–53, 268n17; of Duras, 97, 100, 103, 109, 111 Protestantism, 234 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 143–44, 146, 179; Système des contradictions économiques, . . . , 144 Proust, Marcel: ‘‘Contre SainteBeuve,’’ 92 pseudostate, 32–33, 55 Pygmalion, 51, 247 Quarré, Antoinette, 27, 93, 147, 165, 167–70 querelle d’Olivier, 26, 97–98, 114, 116– 18, 130, 253; and plagiarism, 89–90, 103–4, 137 Quintillian, Marcus Fabius, 188–89 Rabine, Leslie, 195 race, 27, 28–29, 185, 194–95, 203–4, 208–9, 236. See also slavery Racine, Jean: Phèdre, 93 racism, 102, 186, 205, 235–37 Ragon, Michael, 143, 145, 161 Rancière, Jacques, 147; ‘‘Ronds de fumée,’’ 176 Raymon. See Sand, George realism, 5–8, 176, 188, 213–16, 223–24, 234, 249–50 Reboul, Jean, 147, 169, 171; Poésies, 165–66; ‘‘Réponse à M. de Lamartine,’’ 167 Récamier, Juliette, 93 The Reformation, 232, 234, 235, 247 The Regency, 180

291

Rei√enberg, Baron de, 138 Reine, Marie, 197 relic, 54, 226–32, 255; and fetish, 28, 234–38, 240–42, 250, 277n5; as progenitor of art, 41, 232–34, 243–48 Renaissance, 52, 237 Renan, Ernest, 31–33, 50, 53; ‘‘Qu’estce qu’une nation?’’ 31 The Restoration, 25, 43, 51, 53, 89, 97, 113, 146, 152 revolution of 1848, 28, 145, 179–81, 210; and role of Lamartine, 140–41, 153, 173–74, 254 rhetoric, 47, 53, 185–97, 243, 246, 254 Richardson, Samuel: Pamela, 71 Richelieu, Cardinal de, 41–42 Rigolot, François, 259n2 Rivière, Benjamin, 119, 125 Robb, Graham, 180–81 Robespierre, Maximillien, 146 Rodrigues, Olinde, 147 Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 12 Rogers, Nancy, 204 Roland, Pauline, 196 Rolland, Romain, 142 Romanticism: and architecture, 24–25, 47–49, 52–55, 231, 265n34; and authority, 26, 87–91, 96, 118, 134, 137; and biographical fallacy, 90– 92, 134–37, 139; and Christian symbolism, 167, 168–70; and concept of wound, 20, 55, 88, 254, 261n30; deﬁnition of, 1–2, 25, 29, 105–6, 148, 253; and feminist journals, 196, 206; and French Revolution, 4–5, 12–16, 19–20, 24–29, 251–52, 276n19; and Gothic aesthetic, 45–55; and journals dedicated to the Muses, 93, 128, 130, 196, 218; and la maladie du siècle, 25, 51–52, 55, 151; and ‘‘le soufﬂe,’’ 150–51, 153, 156, 249; and Rousseau, 3, 12, 14, 19, 25; and theories of

292

INDEX

Romanticism (cont.) trauma, 14–25, 49, 151, 256; and useful art, 27, 144–47, 163, 169, 175– 79, 182, 188; and utopia, 27–28, 146, 151, 188, 195–96, 251–57 Rorty, Richard, 5 Rosa, George M., 104 Rosso, Corrado, 72 Roulin, Alfred, 75 Roulin, Jean-Marie, 67 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 59, 62, 65, 100; as precursor to Romanticism, 3, 12, 14, 19, 25; The Social Contract, 12 rupture, 35–37, 49–55, 67 Sächer-Masoch, Léopold von, 46 Sacred Heart, 218; cult of, 211, 213–24, 226–28, 234, 244, 249–50; Église du Sacré-Coeur, 216, 217, 219; as icon, 169, 212, 248, 278n20; secularization of, 33–34; works about, 216 Saint-Denis, abbey of, 38–41, 43–44 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 27, 148, 173, 175; and biographical fallacy, 90–92; and DesbordesValmore, 125, 127–28, 136, 270n40; on Duras, 101–2; Selected Essays, 91; works about, 91–92 Saint-Simon, Henri, Count of, 97, 146, 165, 179; and class interrelations, 149–50; on women’s rights, 192, 195–96 salon culture, 26, 89, 92–96, 98–99, 103, 122, 130 Sand, George, 14, 93, 117–19, 148, 175, 210; and Casimir Dudevant, 196; Indiana, 27–28, 183–209, 254; on marriage as slavery, 27–28, 183–85, 192–209, 254 le Sandisme, 196 Sarrans, Bernard, 173 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 201 scapegoat, 163–64

Scarry, Elaine: The Body in Pain, 22, 23, 158–59, 161–62, 177–78, 232 ‘‘Scene of Su√ering’’ (Aristotle), 31 Schama, Simon, 12, 33, 34–35 Schechter, Ronald, 262n4 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 70 Schor, Naomi, 2–3, 194–95, 204, 207 Schultz, Gretchen, 136 Schultze, Fritz, 242–43 Schwartz, Hillel: The Culture of the Copy, 11, 215 Scott, Joan, 7 Second Empire, 175, 182, 210, 254 Second Republic, 174 secret: of Marceline DesbordesValmore, 118–39; as feminine lack, 106–7 Ségalas, Anaïs, 93 Ségu, Frédéric, 104, 117, 127 Seidman, Steven: Culture and Society, 262n36 Sévigné, Mme de, 102 Shakespeare, William, 202 Shelley, Mary, 50 Simpson, Louis, 135 slavery, 59, 84, 99–101, 123, 183–87, 251; as analogous to marriage, 27–28, 192–209, 231, 254–55; Christian rationalization of, 235–36; rhetoric of, 187–92 slippage, 180, 185, 192, 207, 253 Snead, James: Figures of Division, 186 socialism, 13, 27, 28, 165, 181 social life, 87–88, 139, 163, 251; of the author, 87, 137; of mimesis, 24, 87, 141, 146, 151, 183, 209, 212, 257; of the nation, 55 social mimesis, 5–7, 10–11, 13, 17, 149, 250, 255–57 Society of the Friends of the Constitution and of Liberty, 100 Socrates, 6 ‘‘le sou∆e,’’ 150–51, 153, 156, 249

Index

Soulié, Frédéric, 125 Spencer, Michael, 190 Staël, Germaine (Madame de), 68–78; Corinne ou l’Italie, 75, 106; De la Littérature dans ses rapports aux institutions sociales, 76; De l’Allemagne, 25; De l’Inﬂuence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations, 77; Des Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution, 68; works about, 75–76 Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), 117, 130, 253–54; Le Rouge et le noir, 104; and moyens auxiliaires, 105–6, 113–14, 138; and plagiarism, 26, 102–4, 107, 126, 138 structuralism, 5, 91 Sue, Eugène, 27, 148 su√ering, 23, 31–35, 45–46, 80, 129, 154, 163, 168, 169, 172, 178, 180–82, 197; language of, 119, 140–82; and martyrdom, 41, 232; in Olivier ou le secret, 106–8; and trauma, 16, 19–21, 161, 198, 253; as useless, 163, 177–79, 182 supernatural, 213–16, 223, 229–30, 233–34, 246, 249 Surrealism, 141–43 Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution ( journal), 143 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 150 Symbolists, 175 Tastu, Amable, 151 Taussig, Michael: Mimesis and Alterity, 6, 9–10, 184 Terdiman, Richard, 28, 174 The Terror, 12, 47, 53, 62, 88, 179; trauma of, 14–16, 33, 43–44, 51, 152, 252–53; and vandalism, 24–25, 35 Thatcher, Margaret, 83 Theodosius (emperor), 231 Third Republic, 217, 219

293

Thomas, Edmund, 147 Thomas, Jean-Jacques, 2 Thomas, Saint (the apostle), 164, 216 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 140 Todorov, Tzvetan: Benjamin Constant, 66–67, 69–70 Torok, Maria, 15 transpositionality, 24–26, 56–86, 146, 148, 228, 246 trauma, 53, 185, 206, 261n30; and French Revolution, 25, 29, 34, 42, 55, 254; and Romantic wounds, 14– 25, 49, 151, 256; and su√ering, 16, 32–33, 161; and the Terror, 14–16, 43–44, 252–53 traumatic mimesis, 14–16, 182 The Tribunate, 58, 73–74, 173 Tristan, Flora, 196 Turenne, Henri, Viscount of, 40 tyranny, 65, 82, 84, 253 universalism, 9, 260n17 utopia, 11–12, 14, 19, 59, 83, 142, 166; and French Revolution, 24, 153, 184; in French Romanticism, 27–28, 146, 151, 188, 195–96, 251–57 Valmore, Ondine, 127, 271n51 Valmore, Prosper, 122, 125, 127 vandalism, during the French Revolution, 16, 24–25, 35–38, 41–42, 47, 54–55, 252 Vandals, 35, 53 Verlaine, Paul, 89, 267n1 Vermeersch, A., 223–24 Versailles, Académie de, 167 Vial, Eugène, 125 Viala, Agricol, 34 Viallaneix, Paul, 273n27 Vidler, Anthony, 265n35 Vigny, Alfred-Victor, 14 violence: and iconoclasm, 24, 30–55, 241, 252, 255; mimetic representa-

294

INDEX

violence (cont.) tion of, 18, 27, 34, 39–40, 88, 184, 199; as mimetic rivalry, 6, 99, 207, 256; as public theater, 14, 33–34, 252; as religious sacriﬁce, 163–64, 169 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Émmanuel, 53 Virieu, Count of, 164 Virieux, Denise, 89, 93, 101, 104, 128, 130, 269n23 Voilquin, Suzanne, 196–97 Volney, Constantin-François, 37–38; Les Ruines, . . . , 37, 45, 50 Voltaire, 222 voyant, 88, 180

d’Olivier, 89–90; The Male Malady, 68, 96–99, 103–4, 114, 138 William, Robert, 235 Wing, Nathaniel, 215, 241 women: as authors, 26, 87–139, 161, 205, 253–54, 269n23; rights of, 9, 85, 192, 195–96, 268n17. See also feminism wound: and Lamartine, 27–28, 141, 153, 164–66; in Romantic literature, 20, 55, 88, 254, 261n30; and Sacred Heart, 34, 216–17; and su√ering, 31–33, 46, 48, 137, 160–61, 177; and trauma, 14–25, 49–51, 151, 256 Wulf, Christoph, 1, 6–7, 24, 86, 163; Mimesis, 1, 6–7, 24, 86, 163

Waldor, Mélanie, 93 Waller, Margaret: and querelle

Zola, Émile, 103, 122; Le Roman experimental, 93, 96