Pioneering women’s rights during the French Revolution: Marie-Madeleine Jodin

Marie-Madeleine Jodin is surely amongst the most neglected figures in the history of eighteenth-century political thought. Primarily considered as a correspondent of the philosopher Denis Diderot, of whom her father had been a collaborator, her biographical profile and the prominence of her intellectual contribution have only been rediscovered by historians over the past twenty years. In 1790, Jodin addressed to the French National Assembly a legislative proposal to ensure women’s political rights. My book, Donne in Rivoluzione. Marie-Madeleine Jodin e i diritti della citoyenne provides the first critical edition of Jodin’s Legislative Views for Women (Vues législatives pour les femmes) and frames her political contribution to the history of women’s rights and the participation of women in the French Revolution.

Title page, Marie-Madeleine Jodin, Vues législatives pour les femmes adressées à l’Assemblée nationale, Angers, Chez Mame, 1790.

But first, who was Marie-Madeleine Jodin?

She was born in 1741 in Paris, where her family had moved so that her father could further his watchmaking studies, which, in 1754, resulted in his presentation of a project for a two-pendulum clock at the Académie des sciences. In 1761 Marie-Madeleine’s life was thrown into turmoil when after her father’s death, her paternal uncle accused her mother of prostituting her daughter and had the two women locked up at the Salpêtrière. This institution, part of the Hôpital général de Paris, had been in operation since the late seventeenth century, and was intended to hold women accused of prostitution or scandalous behaviour. We do not know much about the time that Marie-Madeleine spent at the Salpêtrière but it was certainly an experience that deeply affected her life and the development of her political thought.

In the aftermath of her liberation from the Salpêtrière, presumably between 1763 and 1764, Marie-Madeleine embarked on a career as an actress outside the borders of France, in Warsaw and Dresden, perhaps to escape the stigma that marked the women who had been interned in the hospital-prison. After a somewhat bumpy career – which was followed by Diderot, who regarded her with paternal esteem – she moved to Bordeaux, where she met the magistrate Jean-Baptiste Lynch, to whom she would later send her legislative opinions, and thence to Paris, where she was present at the outbreak of the French Revolution. When the Estates General opened, and, later, the Constituent Assembly met, Jodin invoked the need to also call French women citizens to reform society with her Legislative Views for Women. This 86-page text was addressed to the deputies of the National Assembly and to the whole French nation, and outlined the characteristics of a new legislative plan that would restore ‘the rights which are ours by Nature and by the social compact’ to women.

Significantly, the text opened with the dedication ‘To my sex’, followed by the eloquent statement ‘And we too are Citizens’. At a time when the French people were committed to regenerating society and founding the future happiness and glory of the nation, Jodin claimed for women the honour and the right to contribute to public prosperity by breaking the silence to which politics seemed to have condemned them. Jodin called for ‘an independent legislative code’ that would eliminate the source of the excesses that had tainted the glory and virtues of women and called for a new political organisation that would free Frenchwomen ‘from that kind of protection’ that had kept them out of public interest.

Jodin remarked that the state of degradation in which her sex found itself did not derive from any imperfection of the female nature, but from the neglect of laws that had allowed a scandalous licence to be introduced into customs. The first point of Jodin’s reform was the abolition of prostitution. Beyond the current of reformists and punitives, she, who had known very closely the reality of the femmes publiques locked up in the Salpêtrière, observed that ‘the ignominy to which your police seem to devote part of our sex to the incontinence of yours, outrages the Laws and destroys the respect belonging to the sacred titles of citizenesses, wives and mothers’. While claiming equality between men and women – underlining, as François Poulain de La Barre had already done a century earlier, that ‘the mind has no sex, any more than virtues do’ – Jodin argued, from the point of view of complementarity between the sexes, the need for ‘a jurisdiction of women’ which would contribute to the restoration of the public good, starting from a reform of morals. For this reason, the plan included, in addition to the abolition of prostitution, the closure of gambling houses and the censorship of obscene prints. For the realisation of her proposal, Jodin therefore envisaged the creation of a national tribunal ‘concerned exclusively with, and presided over, by women’ consisting of a chamber of conciliation and a civil chamber. Cases of marital separation, family disputes regarding inheritance and any other discussion involving both sexes would be examined in the chamber of conciliation, while the civil chamber would deal only with matters of public scandal.

Chérieux, Club des femmes patriotes dans une église, 1793.

Following the example of the National Constituent Assembly, Jodin proposed a national women’s assembly. She stated that ‘we must proceed to establish our Laws, as the nation proceeds to reform its own. The King, who summoned in his paternal goodness the enlightened men who are now carrying out this great task, cannot forget that we women are part of his great family. He cannot ignore the fact that fathers take charge of the education of their sons and leave that of their daughters to the mother. We demand, with the confidence that his justice inspires in us, to be subjected to the same maternal authority, the one assigned to us by Nature and implicit in the relations of the sexes’.

Jodin did not live to see the publication of the French Constitution in September 1791, nor could she applaud the institution of divorce in 1792. She died in 1790, at the age of 49, shortly after publishing her Legislative Views for Women.

– Valentina Altopiedi

9 Thermidor Year II: the best-documented day in the French Revolution?

La Prise de la Bastille (1789), by Jean-Pierre Houël (1735-1813), Bibliothèque nationale de France. At the centre is the arrest of Bernard René Jourdan, marquis de Launay (1740-1789).

Was 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) the most copiously documented day of action in the French Revolution? It saw the overthrow of Maximilien Robespierre, most high-profile member of the Committee of Public Safety which had for more than a year ruled through terror – and is one of the pivotal days of action (or journées) around which the Revolution developed. The most influential journée in terms of French national history was 14 July 1789, which saw the storming of the Bastille and which is conventionally viewed as marking the beginning of the Revolution. Another day, 18 Brumaire Year VIII (9 November 1799), witnessed the coup d’état by which Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and effectively ended the Revolution. The overthrow of Louis XVI and the monarchy on 10 August 1792 and the 9 Thermidor journée mark the third and fourth journées which structure the revolution in most historical narratives.

There are numerous accounts all of these individual days, for each was a kind of ‘lightbulb moment’ that stayed in the minds of participants. But in writing my book, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 hours in Revolutionary Paris, I gained a strong impression that the ‘best-documented’ accolade must go to 9 Thermidor. After 18 Brumaire only the heroic Napoleonic narrative was allowed and censorship closed down on discordant stories. There was much to celebrate after 14 July 1789 and 10 August but celebration was not investigation. And what marks 9 Thermidor off from all others is that the day was followed by extraordinarily detailed attempts to recapture exactly what had happened in all parts of the city.

The Execution of Robespierre and his supporters on 28 July 1794, artist unknown (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, Réserve QB-370 (48)-FT 4).

The reason for this was the determination of government to root out and to punish those individuals within the State, in public life and across the city who had supported Robespierre. Actions might relate to events over the previous two years of terror, but the litmus test of what began to be called ‘Robespierrism’ was invariably what individuals actually did on the day of 9 Thermidor. The city government, the Commune, had tried to mobilise Parisians to offer armed resistance to the national assembly in Robespierre’s cause. So the key question was, had an individual shown support for Robespierre and his supporters in the Paris Commune in their attempt to overthrow the government and purge the national assembly? Or did they remain loyal to the national assembly and the rule of law? Those found guilty of ‘Robespierrism’ could face expulsion from public life, imprisonment and even death at the guillotine.

Newspaper reports, political pamphlets and later memoirs invariably contain accounts of the day. Yet this was only the tip of the iceberg. A few days after the event, Paul Barras, the deputy whom the government charged with the security of the city on the night of 9 Thermidor, initiated a punctiliously thorough review of everything that had happened within each of the 48 Parisian sections on 8, 9 and 10 Thermidor.

Exit libertè a la Francois! – or – Buonaparte closing the farce of Egalitè, at S^t. Cloud near Paris Nov^r. 10^th. 1799, by James Gillray (1756-1815) (public domain).

‘Gather together all details’, he instructed sectional authorities. ‘A fact that seems minor may illuminate a suspicion or lead to the discovery of a useful truth. Inform me of all orders that you gave and all that you received; but above all, be precise on the dates and the hours; you will appreciate their importance.’

(‘Recueille donc tous les détails: un fait minutieux, en apparence, éclaire un soupçon, ou conduit à la découverte d’une vérité utile. Fais-moi part de tous les ordres que tu aurois donnés, de tous ceux que tu aurois reçus; mais surtout précise les heures et les dates: tu en sens toute l’importance.’ Archives nationales W 500, dossier 4. Note the Revolutionary ‘tutoiement’.)

This call engendered nearly two hundred micro-accounts of at least part of the day from vantage points all over the city containing millions of the called-for ‘details’. Many of the individual accounts were broken down for key periods of the day into quarter-hourly chunks.

Apprehension of Robespierre 27 July 1794, engraving by Michael Sloane (active 1796-1802) after a painting by G. P. Barbier (active 1792-1795) (Gallica digital library, public domain).

Besides this capital source, the Convention also set up a special official commission to make a report on the day, which was presented in the assembly exactly a year later. And finally, literally hundreds of individual police dossiers over the next year or so also provide similar micro-accounts of episodes and moments of the day as ordinary citizens were pressed to prove their loyalism.

Most of these extremely rich sources – never before tapped by historians in quite this way – are to be found in the French National Archives, particularly in series relating to policing and judicial affairs. Taken together, they allow us to see the city in close-up during these 24 hours through a mosaic of thousands of narrative micro-fragments, as its inhabitants confronted and grappled with a decision that would affect not only their own futures but also the future of the Revolution.

Studying these accounts, collating them and analysing them at the micro-level not only gives us an extraordinarily vivid picture of a city at a pivotal moment in its history. It also allows us to present a new narrative of the day and a new analysis of what was at stake within it. What emerges – in a way that cuts against conventional narratives – is a profile of a moment at which Parisians took their political futures in their hands and overthrew Robespierre.

Researching and writing the history of these 24 hours, I have often pondered whether there is another day in the whole Revolutionary decade when we can see what was  happening up close at such a moment of drama. Indeed we might even ask: was 9 Thermidor the best-documented day in the whole of the eighteenth century?

– Colin Jones, Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London

That unfortunate movement

Olympe de Gouges, pioneer of women’s rights, here pictured handing Marie-Antoinette a copy of her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne. Engraving by Desrais and Frussotte, c. 1790. (BnF/Gallica)

The French Revolution: A very short introduction was one of the earliest titles to be commissioned in what has become a very successful series – the nearest equivalent in English to the celebrated Que Sais-je? volumes published by Presses Universitaires de France. It appeared in 2001 and has enjoyed very healthy sales, both in English and in translation into a number of other languages. For this reason alone, after half a generation of new research a second edition to bring readers up to date seemed increasingly overdue. The problem with any new edition is how much to change, short of rewriting the whole thing. A lot of new research, though impeccably scholarly, is at a level of detail impossible to reproduce in a short volume, although some can be silently incorporated. A revised bibliography can point in the direction of more. But the most updating that a very short introduction can do is to indicate some overall trends.

The first edition, written in the aftermath of the Revolution’s bicentennial in 1989, was able to conclude and neatly culminate with the great debates among historians and others which that occasion provoked, and which were still echoing when the new millennium began. Historiographical discussions since then have been far less acrimonious and more nebulous. While the mid-twentieth-century obsession with the so-called ‘popular movement’ of the sans-culottes has faded, the Revolution has increasingly been studied as a symptom of deep cultural changes. Feminist scholarship has brought extensive reappraisal of the role of women, and the failure of overwhelmingly male revolutionaries (and historians!) to give them their due.

Toussaint Louverture, hero of Haitian independence. Artist unknown, c.1796-1799. (BnF/Gallica)

There has also been renewed interest in links with other contemporary revolutionary movements on both sides of the Atlantic, and above all with the overthrow of black slavery in the former French colony which became Haiti. These changed perspectives are introduced and appraised in the concluding historiographical chapter. With a largely English-speaking readership in mind, the first edition also gave plenty of space to the supposed contrast between a violent, unstable France and a peaceful, evolutionary England. The second edition expands on that perception with more on the clash between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine. Recent years have brought curious echoes of this in the debate over Brexit, reminding us that issues first raised by the French Revolution can still resonate.

And whereas a prime function of an introduction is to impart accurate and reliable knowledge, another is to dispel misinformation. Nothing is more difficult. The world will always want to remember that Marie-Antoinette said, ‘Let them eat cake’ – even though she didn’t, as I emphasise in the book’s very opening pages.

Zhou Enlai: ‘Too early to say?’

The world is also in danger of remembering that in 1972 Chinese premier Zhou Enlai declared that it was ‘too early to say’ what the consequences of the French Revolution had been. I invoked this myself in the preface to the first edition. But in the intervening years it has emerged that Zhou was referring to the French upheavals of 1968, not 1789. The second edition makes this clear. Whether it will stop people invoking the old version is perhaps too early to say.

– William Doyle

(‘That unfortunate movement’ – from act I of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, speech by Lady Bracknell.)

Voltaire, the most alive of dead white males

Voltaire’s afterlife is complex, his reputation changing with successive regimes. The French Revolution looked back to him as a heroic precursor of its struggle, and in 1791 his remains were brought back to Paris and with great ceremony placed in the Panthéon. For much of the nineteenth century the name of Voltaire was synonymous with anticlericalism, and the philosophe was widely, if implausibly, seen as an Antichrist. In the wake of the Dreyfus affair Voltaire’s reputation as a crusader for tolerance was re-emphasised, and in the latter years of the Third Republic, under the influence of the Sorbonne literary historian Gustave Lanson, Voltaire became a fixture of the republican school and university curriculum. The latter half of the twentieth century has taken a more nuanced approach to Voltaire’s religious views, especially in the wake of René Pomeau’s La Religion de Voltaire (first published in 1954), which stresses the depth of Voltaire’s deist convictions.

Ordre du Cortège pour la Translation des Manes de Voltaire le lundi 11 Juillet 1791 (unknown artist, 1791). Image: BnF.

Voltaire’s legacy in the wider world is ubiquitous. His name has become a byword for tolerance, justice and the power of reason whenever fanaticism, tyranny and superstition rear their ugly heads. Famously, portraits of him spontaneously appeared on the walls of the French capital in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in 2015. Several years before the attack, in 2008, then editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine, Philippe Val, had published a book entitled Reviens, Voltaire, ils sont devenus fous!, and philosopher André Glucksmann’s last book, published in 2014 (one year before he died), is called Voltaire contre-attaque.

Voltaire is undoubtedly the most widely quoted of all French writers past and present. Everyone is familiar with his ‘il faut cultiver son jardin’, ‘le meilleur des mondes possibles’, and ‘si Dieu [which can be replaced with anything deemed to be of value, no matter how trivial] n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer’. These three quotations happen to be genuine and traceable; interestingly, however, we at the Voltaire Foundation often receive queries from scholars and members of the public alike asking about the provenance of various Voltaire quotes which, after diligent research, turn out to be apocryphal. It is as if witty and wise pronouncements in search of an author were routinely attributed to him by default.

Paris, January 2015.

Ironically, what must be the most famous and oft-repeated quotation by Voltaire does not appear anywhere in his writings or his correspondence. Elizabeth Knowles picks up the story:

“A column in the Daily Telegraph of February 2006 on freedom of speech referred to ‘Voltaire’s famous maxim – “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” ’

“In De l’esprit (‘On the Mind’), published in 1758, the French philosopher Helvétius put forward the view that human motivation derives from sensation: a course of action is chosen because of the pleasure or pain which will result. The book was seen by many as an attack on religion and morality, and was condemned by the French parliament to be publicly burned. Voltaire is supposed to have supported Helvétius with these words. In fact, they are a later summary of Voltaire’s attitude to the affair, as given in S. G. Tallentyre’s The Friends of Voltaire (1907). What Tallentyre wrote was:

“‘What the book could never have done for itself, or for its author, persecution did for them both. “On the Mind” became not the success of a season, but one of the most famous books of the century. The men who had hated it, and had not particularly loved Helvétius, flocked round him now. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. “What a fuss about an omelette!” he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” was his attitude now.’

“(The comment ‘What a fuss about an omelette!’ had been recorded earlier, in James Parton’s 1881 Life of Voltaire.)” [1]

We will end this short blog article on this culinary note. Readers who are curious about the origin of this particular quote are invited to consult Lettres à Son Altesse Monseigneur le prince de *** (letter 7) or the article ‘Athéisme’ in the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie.

– Nicholas Cronk and Georges Pilard

[1] Excerpt reprinted from What they Didn’t Say – A Book of Misquotations, edited by Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford University Press, 2006), p.55. By permission of Oxford University Press.

Le discours radical en Grande-Bretagne (1768-1789): réformisme anglais ou sortilège à la française?

Tous les 4 novembre, la Revolution Society, une société patriotique de Londres, célèbre la ‘Glorieuse Révolution’ anglaise de 1688, porteuse de liberté religieuse et politique. En 1789, le pasteur Richard Price modifie cette célébration purement anglaise en incorporant à son sermon un éloge vibrant de la Révolution française, couronnement selon lui de la Révolution américaine de 1776 et annonciatrice de paix universelle. Ce sermon mémorable constitue la première prise de parole publique en faveur de la Révolution française en Angleterre et y provoque une immense controverse.

Regardons un instant la caricature de William Dent, brillante illustration du réquisitoire d’Edmund Burke contre le fameux dîner mais que Dent applique à une autre célébration, celle du 14 juillet 1791 à Londres. Quatre hommes dansent autour d’un chaudron, tels les sorcières de Macbeth. Leurs paroles, calquées sur le texte de Shakespeare, annoncent la subversion des institutions et des valeurs. Ils attendent avec impatience de niveler les conditions sociales, mais aussi de s’enrichir grâce au trafic des assignats:

‘Around! around in Chaotic Dance,
We step to tune of free-made France;
And when the Hurly-burly’s done,
And all Ranks confounded in One;
Oh! how we will Sing and Caper,
If Cash we can make with Paper.’

‘Revolution Anniversary or, Patriotic Incantations’, print by William Dent (1791). ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

La monarchie et les corps constitués sont distillés dans ‘l’esprit français’ (à la fois alcool et idéologie enivrante), la couronne renversée annonce la chute de la monarchie britannique. La caricature croque la fine fleur de l’opposition ‘radicale’. On reconnaît Joseph Priestley à son habit de pasteur ainsi que Charles James Fox, bedonnant et hirsute, tribun whig et éternel ennemi du premier ministre Pitt. Un autre pasteur, Joseph Towers, et le dramaturge Richard Brinsley Sheridan les accompagnent: pas des sans-culottes donc, mais un aristocrate, des bourgeois, des hommes de lettres. Priestley tient à la main le pamphlet de Tom Paine sur les droits de l’homme, tandis que les tableaux renvoient à des épisodes traumatiques de l’histoire anglaise, au ‘fanatisme’ et au ‘républicanisme’. Si la caricature renvoie au contexte de la Révolution française, elle est aussi une dissection visuelle du discours radical qui se répand depuis la fin des années 1760 et se fonde à la fois sur les droits de l’homme et sur l’histoire anglaise.

Les radicaux dénoncent l’influence exorbitante de la Couronne et de l’exécutif, le caractère oligarchique et non-représentatif des Communes, la corruption endémique. Ce réformisme parfois modéré explose sous le coup de la Révolution française, d’un nouveau ‘jacobinisme’ anglais et de la réaction conservatrice.

Dans mon livre Le Discours radical en Grande-Bretagne, 1768-1789, j’examine les points communs et les différences entre les divers tenants du ‘radicalisme’ pour montrer que l’unité de ce discours, réformateur et soi-disant loyal mais aux accents parfois révolutionnaires, tient au recours à la tradition historique anglaise combiné à l’appel aux droits de l’homme et à un universalisme des Lumières.

– Rémy Duthille

Apocalypse then

‘The Contrast, 1793…’ , engraving by Rowlandson, following Lord George Murphy (1793, pub. by S.W. Fores, London). Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.

The concepts of ‘crisis’ and ‘apocalypse’ have reappeared rather abruptly on our secularized horizons, yet they have never been completely absent: merely, one could argue, in retreat from our prevailing belief in ‘progress’. From meditations on a ‘last man’ in Victorian England to Günther Anders’ writings on the nuclear threat in the 1950s, from eighteenth-century literature on ruins to ISIS today, these themes seem to be inextricably bound up with Modernity and our experience of it.

‘Crisis, extremes and apocalypse’ is a new research network at the University of Oxford that seeks to shed light on and engage with themes that are more timely than ever. Indeed, these themes have a long history and include events from the French Revolutionary period. After hosting a workshop on ‘Rousseau, Freedom and the French Revolution’ in March, in April the network welcomed Marisa Linton from the University of Kingston to discuss the French Revolution and the ‘politics’ and ‘language’ of virtue in a talk on ‘Robespierre and the politician’s terror’. The Revolutionary era’s diffusion of power and obsession with transparency led all political members to fashion themselves as men of virtue.

Marisa Linton.

As Camille Desmoulins boasted on 14 December 1793 to the Jacobin Club: ‘I was always the first to denounce my own friends; from the moment that I realized that they were conducting themselves badly, I resisted the most dazzling offers and I stifled the voice of friendship that their great talents had inspired in me.’ (Original French: François Aulard, ed., La Société des Jacobins: recueil des documents pour l’histoire de club des Jacobins, 6 vols, Paris, 1889-1897, vol.5, p.559.)

This pursuit of a ‘Republic of virtue’ thus compelled all political members to give constant performances of virtue that threatened to spiral out of control and into violence at any moment: every action was scrutinized and could be interpreted as suspicious, leading to a pervasive fear.

The network will be hosting Marisa Linton once again in late autumn 2017, alongside Olivier Tonneau and Sophie Wahnich, for a workshop on Saint-Just. Visit the network’s homepage or our Facebook page for updates!

– Audrey Borowski

An overview of Marisa Linton’s spring talk

‘Robespierre guillotinant le boureau après avoir fait guillot.r. tous les Français… : cy gyt toute la France’, engraving, [Hercy ?], (1794, s.n., Paris[?]). Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.

Over 220 years since his death, Maximilien Robespierre continues to generate controversy over his role in the traumatic events of the French Revolutionary period known as the ‘Terror’ (1793-1794). Historians have repeatedly sought in Robespierre’s personality and motivation an explanation of the Terror. Marisa Linton argues that such interpretations can offer only a limited understanding: in order to comprehend both Robespierre and the Terror, we need to place his actions within the wider context of Revolutionary politics in the National Convention, paying close attention to the atmosphere in which politics were conducted. Most importantly, we need to take into account the extent to which political choices during the Terror were influenced by intense emotions on the part of the Conventionnels themselves – above all, the emotion of fear.

Marisa Linton uses ‘the politicians’ terror’, a term she first identified and used in her book Choosing terror: virtue, friendship and authenticity in the French Revolution (OUP, 2013), to throw new light both on Robespierre’s role in the Terror, and on the nature of the Terror itself. The politicians’ terror was the form of terror that Revolutionary leaders meted out to one another. The Revolutionary leaders were themselves ‘subject to terror’. This took two forms. Firstly, Revolutionary leaders were liable to arrest under the laws that enabled terror, as successive laws removed their parliamentary immunity and criminalised the ‘wrong’ political opinions. Secondly, they were subject to the emotion of terror. From the outset of the Revolution there was an expectation that Revolutionary politicians should be able to demonstrate authentic political morality (virtue). During the heightened atmosphere of 1793-1794, and against the backdrop of fears that France faced military defeat, any failure of Revolutionary politicians to demonstrate their political virtue could be seen as an indication that they were secret conspirators, motivated by financial and political corruption, and in league with the royalists and foreign powers to undermine the Revolution from within.

Marisa Linton then gave an extended account of the politicians’ terror, before going on to examine its role in one of the most iconic events of the Revolution – the arrest, trial and execution of Georges Danton and his group, the Dantonists, which took place just months before the fall of Robespierre himself. Listen to the full podcast of Marisa Linton’s talk, and look out for the workshop on Saint-Just.

 

La beauté du débris

André Chénier, par Gabriel-Antoine Barlangue (1950), d’après Joseph Benoît Suvée (1795) – Image WikiTimbres.

L’inscription des poésies d’André Chénier au programme de l’Agrégation de Lettres modernes relève du roman.

En 2006, avait été choisi le tome premier récemment paru (2005) d’une édition nouvelle des Œuvres poétiques entreprise par Édouard Guitton et Georges Buisson pour la maison orléanaise Paradigme. N’était jusque là disponible que la vieille édition Becq de Fouquières (1872) que les éditions Gallimard avaient choisi, en 1994, de reproduire dans leur collection « Poésie / Gallimard », volonté assumée – Chénier manquait à l’appel – mais choix par défaut, pour pallier précisément l’absence de projets aboutis d’édition moderne.

Ce choix du travail (par ailleurs considérable) d’Édouard Guitton et Georges Buisson s’était révélé fort problématique. Leur édition de Chénier affichait l’ambition d’être « scientifique » et définitive mais était étouffée par l’érudition (identification des papiers, spéculations sans fin sur les dates de composition de chaque pièce). Elle entendait revenir au texte premier mais se révélait assez interventionniste (ajout de titres fantaisistes pour L’Art d’aimer, modifications de la ponctuation avec mention du désaccord entre les deux éditeurs…). Sur le plan de l’interprétation, l’orientation était à la fois biographique et hagiographique, insistait sur le destin glorieux et tragique d’un poète sacrifié par l’Histoire. Enfin, le premier tome de 2005 regroupait pour l’essentiel les premiers essais de Chénier, ses « Préludes poétiques » et ne comprenait aucune de ses pièces reconnues par la tradition comme « majeures ».

Quand la rumeur a circulé que les poésies d’André Chénier revenaient l’année prochaine au programme de l’Agrégation – quand d’autres choix de poésies auraient pu être faits, mais c’est une autre question –, le premier réflexe fut de penser que serait inscrit le tome II des Œuvres poétiques paru en 2010 et comprenant, entre autres, les Bucoliques et L’Invention. Certes, l’opus second aurait réservé son lot de surprises, à commencer par le choix d’Édouard Guitton de « cess[er] de participer à cette édition, à l’occasion d’un différend sur la manière de rendre la ponctuation à la fois méticuleuse et anomale d’A. Chénier »…

Aurait réservé, car le choix des responsables du Ministère s’est porté pour ce « retour » de Chénier à l’Agrégation… sur la vieille édition Becq de Fouquières de la collection « Poésie / Gallimard ».

Inscription en hommage à André Chénier sur la tombe de son frère Marie Joseph au Père Lachaise.

Plutôt que de s’interroger sur et commenter plus avant les raisons d’un tel choix, on préférera rattacher ce « feuilleton » éditorial et institutionnel à l’histoire tragi-comique du corps poétique d’André Chénier qui fut, dès « l’origine », l’objet de toutes les attentions et de toutes les violences.

En 1872, Becq de Fouquières avait dénoncé la manière dont Henri de Latouche, maître d’œuvre de l’édition des Œuvres complètes d’André de Chénier de 1819, était intervenu sur le texte : pièces « altérées », « ïambes composés à Saint-Lazare […] disloqués, coupés, hachés ». La violence du propos était nourrie du sentiment que nombre de ces blessures étaient à jamais définitives : deux ans plus tôt en effet, en 1870, la maison de Latouche au Val d’Aulnay avait été pillée par les troupes allemandes et détruit l’ensemble des manuscrits de Chénier qui étaient en sa possession…

En 2006, après avoir déroulé l’histoire des atteintes ultérieures faites au corps poétique de Chénier (le classement par niveau d’achèvement par Paul Dimoff en 1908-1919 ; la distinction entre pièces finies et pièces ébauchées par Gérard Walter en 1940), Édouard Guitton et Georges Buisson proclamaient être parvenus à reconstituer le corps perdu, à réparer les dommages opérés par les précédents éditeurs : leur édition « réintègr[ait] résolument dans la trame d’une vie, afin de leur rendre mieux qu’un semblant d’unité, les œuvres du poète si souvent dépecées ou réduites à quelques pièces d’anthologie. » Quand on ne proposait de l’Art d’aimer jusqu’à eux que quelques « résidus épars que les éditeurs ont disloqué à qui mieux mieux », aveugles aux ruses du signifiant typographique, ils proclamaient : « Agissant à l’opposé, nous avons tenté de reconstituer l’A.A. d’A.C. ». Et de présenter plus loin un « remembrement ainsi substitué aux morcellements antérieurs », et une « réorganisation du corpus élégiaque. »

Gravure anonyme (probablement XIXème siècle) illustrant Caïus Gracchus, de Marie Joseph Chénier.

Sous ce qu’il faut bien appeler des fantasmes, dorment de nombreux mythes et une histoire familiale, dont je n’évoquerai pour finir qu’un fragment, littéraire. Deux ans avant la mort d’André dont il porterait sa vie durant le lourd poids, son frère Marie-Joseph avait fait jouer Caïus Gracchus (1792). Cette tragédie antique met en scène un héros romain, dont l’une des premières actions vise à récupérer le corps mort de son frère, égorgé sur ordre du sénat (« Je vis, je rassemblai ses membres dispersés / Ma bouche s’imprima sur ces membres glacés ») et de l’apporter à leur mère qui se remémorera douloureusement le moment « Où je vis à mes pieds le second de mes fils / De mon fils égorgé m’apportant les débris ». Plus avant dans la pièce, Caïus Gracchus ne ménagera pas ses efforts, dans une double résilience, politique et poétique, pour fédérer le peuple romain et retrouver le pouvoir : « Romains, ralliez-vous, rassemblez vos débris »…

– Jean-Christophe Abramovici
Université Paris-Sorbonne

The formation of a revolutionary journalist: Jean-Paul Marat

Nigel Ritchie is last year’s recipient of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Travelling Award. Please note that the deadline for 2017 is 17 Jan. 2017.

My thesis aims to link the experiences, influences and ideas gained from Jean-Paul Marat’s pre-revolutionary career as a doctor, scientist and political theorist to an analysis of the content, strategy and reception of his journalism during the first year of the French Revolution. This was a time when Marat reinvented himself, first as a pamphleteer reaching out to ‘advise’ the new parliamentary elite, and then, when that failed, as a popular journalist reaching out to ‘educate’ a much broader audience with the benefit of observations, conclusions and experiences accrued from earlier political and legal publications and his 10-year stay in England from 1765 to 1776.

Limbering up on the steps of the book-shaped TGB (“Très Grande Bibliothèque”) before a long session underground

I am very grateful to the Voltaire Foundation and BSECS for a generous research grant that allowed me to complete vital research Paris during July and August 2016, including accessing reports of legal actions and denunciations in the national, judicial and police archives. These included not only seizures of Marat’s manuscripts and correspondance – the only traces that survive of his personal papers and working methods – but also a unique collection of hand-corrected copies of his Ami du peuple newspaper intended for a later collected edition, and a comprehensive collection of contemporary pamphlets revealing early signs of engagement, often hostile, from other pamphleteers. The correspondance in particular, although a mere snapshot, is invaluable for attempting to trace the extent, and social standing, of his network of subscribers across France.

The Fuksas-designed Pierrefitte Archives currently houses around 180 km of records for the French state since 1789

There is an ongoing problem in the French Revolutionary historiography in understanding the extent of Marat’s contribution to the formation of public opinion in his role as a radical journalist. There is much disagreement between historians over his consistency, his strategy, his style, and even his sanity. However, a closer reading of his work reveals a far more coherent social and political vision, stretching back over twenty years, than previously credited, which allowed Marat to rapidly play an important role during the first year of the Revolution. In particular, the thesis will emphasize how, after switching his focus to journalism in September 1789, Marat’s subsequent persecution by the revolutionary authorities for his relentless critiques of leading figures and institutions – especially former ancien regime legal ones – helped to crystallize his transformation into the ‘Ami du peuple’ persona, a powerful symbol of freedom of expression and resistance to oppression. It will argue that this was largely the result of Marat’s strategy of continually pushing at the boundaries of press freedom and publicizing the consequences, a lesson inspired by the examples of the notorious polemicist Junius and raucous popular support for the politician-journalist John Wilkes, which he had witnessed during his earlier stay in England.

Sustained immersion in the Paris libraries and archives over a seven-week period helped me to build a much richer, composite picture of the nascent revolutionary environment in which Marat was operating, than would otherwise have been possible. As did the extended opportunity to visit and explore many of the places where Marat and his colleagues lived, worked and, occasionally were put on trial, adding spatial awareness and visual texture to an otherwise two-dimensional textual dimension.

– Nigel Ritchie, Queen Mary University of London

Hunting in the shadows of the French Revolution

Researching prints of the French Revolution can sometimes feel like ghost-hunting.

Unlike other forms of art, such as paintings, which are usually signed, the majority of etchings are authorless. Sometimes, sheer luck, or the right accumulation of clues, can lead you to an artist – a most satisfying conclusion.

This was the case with ‘Dupuis, peintre’, an artist commissioned twice by the Comité de Salut Public to create prints central to my book, Satire, prints and theatricality in the French Revolution. His identity evaded me for several years. I had several candidates for him, and my original thesis, the basis of my book, included this footnote:

‘Chûte en masse: ainsi l’étincelle electrique de la liberté, renversera tous les trônes des brigands couronnés’, by François Marie Isidore Queverdo (Stanford University Libraries).

‘The identity of Dupuis remains mysterious. He could be issued from an illustrious family of engravers, including Charles and Nicolas-Gabriel Dupuis. He could also be related to the painter Pierre Depuis. Yet again, he could be François-Nicolas Dupuis who exhibited at the Salon from 1795 to 1802. It is probably a coincidence that he is related by name to the scientist Charles François Dupuy, a deputy whose interests were more astronomical and sociological than artistic. The lack of a first name suggests that he was only known as Dupuis, which could be a nickname or a deformation of his original name. Without clear evidence on this matter, there is only speculation. Regardless, he is described as a painter, and that he was trained academically is apparent in the depiction of the Republican in the print “Chûte en Masse” with his anatomically precise legs, as if he’d been first sketched naked before clothes were added.’

‘Je suis comme le temps au gagne petit’, 1789-1792; etching and engraving on light blue paper, hand-coloured in watercolour and bodycolour; 260 × 185mm; Waddesdon Manor, Rothschild Collection (National Trust), bequest of James de Rothschild, 1957; accession number 4232.1.62.123. Photo: Imaging Services Bodleian Library © National Trust, Waddesdon Manor.

I had however missed a crucial clue in the Comité de Salut Public documents: his physical address, ‘rue d’Orleans, porte St Martin’, which corresponds to the address of Pépin Dupuis, a genre painter who exhibited at the Salon of 1793.[1]

One ghost satisfyingly identified in time for the publication of my book.

There are also more literal ghosts to be found in prints of the French Revolution. In particular, a trend towards ‘hiding’ the profiles of the deceased in prints. A practice we, as twenty-first century viewers, have to train ourselves to look for, but which were quite the trend from the Terror onwards.

If you want to see one example of this, watch this video about Waddesdon Manor’s collection of French Revolutionary prints.

– Claire Trévien

[1] See the Comité de salut public: esprit public, arts, caricatures, costume national. 1793 an III, AF II 66 489 EXTRAIT 1 (ancien dossier 232), Fol.29 (24 June 1794); Description des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravures, exposés au salon du Louvre (Paris : Imprimerie de la veuve Hérissant, 1793), p.87.

Stagestruck: the making of a theater industry during the late Old Regime

The theater at Lille.

During the decades preceding the French Revolution, city-dwellers in France became swept up in la théâtromanie, a cultural phenomenon that extended far beyond Paris to include cities throughout France and its empire. In my recent book, I set out to write a socio-cultural history of the profound transformations that marked the French stage during the era in which, I argue, the theater emerged as the most prestigious and influential urban cultural institution of the age of Enlightenment.

Stagestruck lifts the curtain to take readers behind the scenes of the rapidly commercializing world of eighteenth-century French theater, when many dozens of cities in provincial and colonial France opened their first public playhouses. An evening at the theater was a commodity that came to be produced and consumed in new ways. To bring the classics of Molière, the musical comedies of Favart, and the tragedies of Voltaire to life evening after evening and to generate enough revenue to keep the operation in the black was no easy business. These enterprises required a diverse cast of characters ranging from actors and actresses to directors (a position that was in fact an eighteenth-century invention) to shareholders who invested in the business of entertainment to a growing base of paying customers.

An audience in the theater at Reims.

These theater spectators came to conceive of themselves as a community with rights and prerogatives, one that should have an important say in urban cultural life.

During the later Old Regime, the public adopted an explicitly consumerist language to defend its prerogative to comment on the show. In 1787, one contemporary summed up this prevailing spirit as: ‘I paid to enter the theater… so I acquired the right to state my way of thinking and to reject what displeases me.’ As audiences recognized the power they wielded, their growing sense of entitlement was manifested in rather extraordinary ways. They became very clever about leveraging consumer pressure – including even the use of organized boycotts – to ensure that their demands would not be ignored.

During the 1780s, in cities from Bordeaux to Rouen to Le Cap, Saint-Domingue, clashes between theater directors and police authorities and spectators escalated into full-scale public protests that crossed definitively from the aesthetic to the political. Perhaps most astonishingly, these consumer boycotts almost always succeeded in the sense that directors and authorities felt compelled to respond to audience demands for fear that if they refused, these prestigious cultural institutions might go bankrupt.

Inside and outside new public playhouses, the French were able to rehearse the civil equality and participatory politics that they would demand – and receive – in 1789.

– Lauren R. Clay