A Short History of French Literature

A considerable number of names of writers of fiction during the later republic and the empire have a traditional place in the history of literature, and some of their works are still read, but chiefly as school-books. Madame de Genlis, the author of Les Veillées du Château, and also of many volumes of ill-natured, and not too accurate, memoirs and reminiscences, continued the moral tale of the eighteenth century, and in Mlle. de Clermont produced work of merit. Fiévée, a journalist and critic of some talent, is remembered for the pretty story of the Dot de Suzette. Madame de Souza, in her Adèle de Sénanges and other works, revived, to a certain extent, the style of Madame de la Fayette. Ourika and Edouard, especially the latter, preserve the name of Madame de Duras. Madame Cottin, in Malek Adel, Elizabeth or Les Exiles de Sibérie, etc., combined a mild flavour of romance with irreproachable moral sentiments. A vigorous continuator of the licentious style of novel, with hardly any of the literary refinement of its eighteenth-century contributors, but with more fertility of incident and fancy, was Pigault Lebrun, the forerunner of Paul de Kock. Madame de Krudener, a woman of remarkable history, produced a good novel of sentiment in Valérie.

Xavier de Maistre.

Two novelists, singularly different in idiosyncrasy, complete what may be called the eighteenth-century school. Xavier de Maistre, younger brother of the great Catholic polemist, Joseph de Maistre, was born at Chambéry, in 1763. He served in the Piedmontese army during his youth, and his most famous work, the Voyage autour de ma Chambre, was published in 1794. The national extinction of Savoy and Piedmont, at least the annexation of Savoy and the effacement of Piedmont, made Xavier de Maistre an exile. He joined his brother in St. Petersburg, served in the Russian army, fought, and was wounded in the Caucasus; attained the rank of general, and died at St. Petersburg, in 1852, at the great age of eighty-nine. His work consists of the Voyage, an account of a temporary imprisonment in his quarters at Turin, obviously suggested by Sterne, but exceedingly original in execution; Le Lépreux de la Cité d'Aoste, in which the same inspiration and the same independent use of it are noticeable; and Les Prisonniers du Caucase, a vivid narrative rather in the manner of the nineteenth than of the eighteenth century, with a continuation of the Voyage called Expédition Nocturne, which has not escaped the usual fate of continuations, and a short version of the touching story of Prascovia, which contrasts very curiously with Madame Cottin's more artificial handling of the same subject. The important point about Xavier de Maistre is that he unites the sentimentality of the eighteenth century, and not a little of its Marivaudage, with an exactness of observation, a general truth of description, and a sense of narrative art which belong rather to the nineteenth. Although he was not a Frenchman, his style has always been regarded as a model of French; and the great authority of Sainte Beuve justly places him and Mérimée side by side as the most perfect tellers of tales in the simple fashion.

Benjamin Constant.

Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, 1815, is a very different work, but an equally remarkable one. It may be a question whether it is not entitled to take rank rather as the first book of the nineteenth-century school than as the last of the eighteenth. But its author (better known as a politician) published no further attempt to pursue the way he had opened; and though he himself denied its application to the persons who were usually identified with its characters, there is every reason to believe that it was rather the record of a personal experience than a deliberate effort of art. It is very short, dealing with the love of a certain Adolphe for a certain Ellénore and his disenchantment. The psychological drawing, though one-sided, is astonishingly true, and though sensibilité is still present, it has obviously lost its hold both on the characters represented and their creator. Deliberate analysis appears almost as much as in the work of Beyle himself. It is in every respect a remarkable book, and many parts of it might have been written at the present day. What distinguishes it from almost all its forerunners is that there is hardly any attempt at incident, far less at adventure. The play of thought and feeling is the sole source of interest. It is true that the situation is one that could not support a long book, and that it is thus rather an essay at the modern analytic novel than a finished example of it. But it is such an essay, and very far from an unsuccessful one.

CHAPTER IV

HISTORIANS, MEMOIR-WRITERS, LETTER-WRITERS

Characteristics and Divisions of Eighteenth-century History.

In the three branches of literature included in this chapter the interest of the eighteenth century is great, but unequally divided. In history proper, that is to say, the connected survey from documents of a greater or lesser period of the past, the age saw, if not the beginning, certainly the maturing of a philosophical conception of the science. Putting Bossuet out of the question, Vico in Italy, Montesquieu and Turgot in France, are usually and rightly credited with the working out of this great conception. But though pretty fully worked, or at least sketched out, it was not applied in any book of bulk and merit. The writings of Montesquieu and Turgot themselves are not history – they are essays of lesser or greater length in historical philosophy. Nor from the merely literary point of view has France any historical production of the first rank to put forward at this time. The works of greater extent, such as Rollin's, are of no special literary value; the works of literary value, such as Voltaire's studies, are of but small extent, and rather resemble the historical essay of the preceding century, which still continued to be practised, and which had one special practitioner of merit in Rulhière. But nothing even distantly approaching the English masterpiece of the period, the Decline and Fall, was produced; hardly anything approaching Hume's History. Nor again do the memoirs289 of this time equal those of the seventeenth century in literary power, though they are useful as sources of historical and social information. No man of letters of the first class has left such work, and no one, not by profession a man of letters, has by such work come even near the position of the Cardinal de Retz or the Duke de Saint Simon, the latter of whom, it is fair to remember, actually lived into the second half of the century. On the other hand, the letter-writers of the time are numerous and excellent. Although no one of them equals Madame de Sévigné in bulk and in completeness of merit, the letters of Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, of Madame du Deffand, of Diderot to Mademoiselle Volland, and some others, are of very great excellence, and almost unsurpassed in their characterization of the intellectual and social peculiarities of the time. The absence of regular histories of the first merit would be more surprising than it is if it were not fully accounted for by the dominant peculiarity of the day, which is never to be forgotten in studying its history – the absorption, that is to say, of the greater part of the intellect of the time in the philosophe polemic. Almost all the histories that were written, except as works of pure erudition, were in reality pamphlets intended to point, more or less allegorically, some moral as to real or supposed abuses in the social, ecclesiastical, or political state of France. This peculiarity could not fail to detract from their permanent interest, even if it did not (as it too often did) make the authors less careful to give a correct account of their subject than to make it serve their purpose.

Rollin.

The first regular historian who deserves mention is Charles Rollin, who perhaps had a longer and wider monopoly of a certain kind of historical instruction than any other author. He was born at Paris in January, 1661, of the middle class, and, after studying at the Collège du Plessis, he became Professor at the Collége de France, and, in 1694, Rector of the University; a post in which he distinguished himself by introducing many useful and much-needed reforms. He was a Jansenist, but was not much inconvenienced in consequence. Rollin's book (that is to say the only one by which he is remembered) is his extensive Histoire Ancienne, 1730-1738, the work of his advanced years, which was the standard treatise on the subject for nearly a century, and was translated into most languages. Although showing no particular historical grasp, written with no power of style, and not universally accurate, it deserves such praise as may be due to a work of great practical utility requiring much industrious labour, and not imitated from or much assisted by any previous book. The Histoire Romaine, which followed it, was of little worth, but Rollin's Traité des Études was a very useful book in its time.

Dubos.

Boulainvilliers.

Two historians, who hardly deserve the name, are usually ranked together in this part of French history, partly because they represent almost the last of the fabulous school of history-writers, partly because their disputes (for they were of opposite factions) have had the honour to be noticed by Montesquieu. These were Dubos and Boulainvilliers. The Abbé Dubos was a writer of some merit on a great variety of subjects; his Réflexions sur la Poésie et la Peinture being of value. His chief historical work is entitled Histoire Critique de l'Etablissement de la Monarchie Française dans les Gaules, in which, with a paradoxical patriotism, which has found some echoes among living historians, he maintained that the Frankish invasion of Gaul was the consequence of an amicable invitation, that the Gauls were in no sense conquered, and that all conclusions based on the supposition of such a conquest were therefore erroneous. It is fair to Dubos to say that he had been in a manner provoked by the arguments of the Count de Boulainvilliers. According to this latter, the Frankish conquest had resulted in the establishment of a dominant caste, which alone had full enfranchisement, and which was lineally, or at least titularly, represented by the French aristocracy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These reckless and baseless hypotheses would not require notice, were it not important to show how long it was before the idea of rigid enquiry into documentary facts on the one hand, and philosophical application of general laws on the other, were observed in historical writing.

Voltaire.

Montesquieu himself will come in for mention under the head of philosophers, but Voltaire's ubiquity will be maintained in this chapter. His strictly historical work was indeed considerable, even if what is perhaps the most remarkable of it, the Essai sur les Mœurs (which may be described as a treatise, with instances, on the philosophy of history, as applied to modern times), be excluded. Besides smaller works, the histories of Charles XII. and Peter the Great, the Age of Louis XIV., the Age of Louis XV., and the Annals of the Empire, belong to the class of which we are now treating. Of these there is no doubt that the Siècle de Louis Quatorze, 1752, is the best, though the slighter sketches of Charles, 1731, and Peter, 1759, are not undeserving of the position they have long held as little masterpieces. Voltaire, however, was not altogether well qualified for a historian; indeed, he had but few qualifications for the work, except his mastery of a clear, light, and lively style. He had no real conception, such as Montesquieu had, of the philosophy of history, or of the operation of general causes. His reading, though extensive, was desultory and uncritical, and he constantly fell into the most grotesque blunders. His prejudices were very strong, and he is more responsible than any other single person for the absurd and ignorant disdain of the middle ages, which, so long as it lasted, made comprehension of modern history and society simply impossible, because the origins of both were wilfully ignored. These various drawbacks had perhaps less influence on the Siècle de Louis Quatorze than on any other of his historical works, and it is accordingly the best. He was well acquainted with the subject, he was much interested in it, it touched few of his prejudices, and he was able to speak with tolerable freedom about it. The result is excellent, and it deserves the credit of being almost the first finished history (as distinguished from mere diaries like those of L'Estoile) in which not merely affairs of state, but literary, artistic, and social matters generally found a place.

Mably.

The third and fourth quarters of the century are the special period when history was, as has been said, degraded to the level of a party pamphlet, especially in such works as the Abbé Raynal's Histoire des Indes. This was a mere vehicle for philosophe tirades on religious and political subjects, many if not most of which are known to have proceeded from Diderot's fertile pen. Crevier and Lebeau, however, names forgotten now, continued the work of Rollin; and meanwhile the descendants of the laborious school of historians mentioned in the last book (many of whom survived until far into the century) pursued their useful work. Not the least of these was Dom Calmet, author of the well-known 'Dictionary of the Bible.' But the chief historical names of the later eighteenth century are Mably and Rulhière. Mably, who might be treated equally well under the head of philosophy, was an abbé, and moderately orthodox in religion, though decidedly Republican in politics. He was a man of some learning; but, if less ignorant than Voltaire, he was equally blind to the real meaning and influence of the middle ages and of mediaeval institutions. He looked back to the institutions of Rome, and still more of Greece, as models of political perfection, without making the slightest allowance for the difference of circumstances; and to him more than to any one else is due the nonsensical declamation of the Jacobins about tyrants and champions of liberty. His works, the Entretiens de Phocion, the Observations sur l'Histoire de France, the Droits de l'Europe fondés sur les Traités, are, however, far from destitute of value, though, as generally happens, it was their least valuable part which (especially when Rousseau followed to enforce similar ideas with his contagious enthusiasm) produced the greatest effect.

Rulhière.

Rulhière, who was really a historian of excellence, and who might under rather more favourable circumstances have been one of the most distinguished, was born about 1735. His Christian names were Claude Carloman. He was of noble birth, was educated at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, and served in the army till he was nearly thirty years old. He then went to St. Petersburg as secretary to the ambassador Breteuil, whom he also accompanied to Sweden. He returned to Paris and began to write the history of the singular proceedings which during his stay in the Russian capital had placed Catherine II. on the throne. The Empress, it is said, tried both to bribe and to frighten him, but could obtain nothing but a promise not to print the sketch till her death. He continued to live in Paris, where he was distinguished for rather ill-natured wit and for polished verse-tales and epigrams. For some reason he devoted himself to the history of Poland. In 1787 he was elected to the Academy. Then he wrote some Eclaircissements Historiques sur les Causes de la Révocation de l'Édit de Nantes, and is said to have begun other historical works. He died in 1791. His 'Anecdotes on the Revolution in Russia' did not appear till 1797; his Histoire de l'Anarchie de Pologne not till even later. The Polish book is unfinished, and is said to have been garbled in manuscript. But it has very considerable merits, though there is perhaps too much discussion in proportion to the facts given. The Russian anecdotes deserve to rank with the historical essays of Retz and Saint-Réal in vividness and precision of drawing.

These are the chief names of the century in history proper, for Volney, who concludes it in regard to the study of history, is, like many of his predecessors, rather a philosopher busying himself with the historical departments and applications of his subject than a historian proper. Still more may this be said of Diderot in such works as the Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron. The creation of a school of accomplished historians was left for the next century, when the opportunity of such a subject as the French Revolution in the immediate past, the stimulus of the precepts and views of the great writers on the philosophy of history, and lastly the disinterring of the original documents of mediaeval and ancient history, did not fail to produce their natural effect. The number of historians of the first and second class born towards the close of the eighteenth century is remarkable.

Memoirs. Madame de Staal-Delaunay.

Duclos.

Bésenval.

Madame d'Epinay.

The first memoirs, properly so called, which have to be mentioned as belonging to the eighteenth century, are those of Mademoiselle Delaunay, afterwards Madame de Staal. Mademoiselle Delaunay was attached to the household of the Duchess du Maine, the beautiful, impetuous, and highborn wife of one of the stupidest and least interesting of men, who happened also to be the illegitimate son of Louis XIV. The Duke du Maine, or rather his wife, for he himself was nearly as destitute of ambition as of ability, was at the head of the party opposed to that of which the Duke of Orleans (the Regent) was the natural chief, and Saint Simon the ablest partisan. The 'party of the bastards' failed, but the duchess kept up a vigorous literary and political agitation against the Regent. The court (as it may be called) of this opposition was held at Sceaux, and of the doings of this court Madame de Staal has left a very vivid account. The Marquis d'Argenson, a statesman and a man of great intelligence, concealed under a rough and clumsy exterior, has left memoirs which are valuable for the early and middle part of the reign of Louis XV. The memoirs, properly so called, of Duclos are of small extent, but he has left impersonal memoirs of the later reign of Louis XIV. and the beginning of that of his great-grandson, which are among the best historical work of the time. His account of the famous 'system' of Law is one of the principal sources of information on its subject, as is his handling of the Cellamare conspiracy and other affairs of the regency. Duclos was a man not only of considerable literary talent, but of wide historical reading, which appears amply in his work. The gossiping memoirs, attributed to Madame du Hausset, bedchamber-woman to Madame de Pompadour, give many curious details of the middle period of Louis XV.'s reign; and in the vast collection of tittle-tattle, often scandalous enough, called the Mémoires de Bachaumont, much matter of interest, and some that is of value, may be found. Among the most valuable memoirs of this kind are those of Collé, which have been only recently edited in full. Collé, who, though a time-server and an ill-natured man, had much literary talent, was an acute observer, and enjoyed great opportunities, has left important materials for the middle of the century. The Baron de Bésenval, half a Savoyard and half a Pole, who played an important part in the early days of the Revolution, and who had previously encouraged Marie Antoinette in the levities, harmless enough but worse than ill-judged, which had so fatal a result, has left reminiscences of the later years of Louis XV., and a connected narrative of the outbreak of the Revolution. The memoirs concerning the Philosophes form a library in themselves, even those which concern Voltaire alone making a not inconsiderable collection. Those of Madame d'Epinay (the friend of Grimm, of Galiani, and of Rousseau), of Marmontel, of Morellet, are perhaps the principal of this group. Marmontel's memoirs are among his best works, and Madame d'Epinay's are among the most characteristic of the period. There is a certain number of interesting memoirs of actors and actresses, which dates from this time, including those of the great actress Mademoiselle Clairon, the tragic actor Le Kain, and others.

Minor Memoirs.

Circumstances rather political than literary have given a place in literary history to the memoirs of Linguet and Latude concerning the Bastile. That celebrated building, however, figures largely in the memoirs of the time, and the experiences of Voltaire, Marmontel, Crébillon, and others show how greatly exaggerated is the popular notion of its dungeons and torments. The so-called memoirs of the Duke de Richelieu (the type, and a very debased type, of the French noblesse of the eighteenth century, as La Rochefoucauld was of that of the seventeenth) are the work of Soulavie, a literary man and unfrocked abbé of very dubious character: but they at least rest upon authentic data, and abound in the most curious information. The President Hénault, a man of probity and learning, has left memoirs of value.

Memoirs of the Revolutionary Period.

As might be expected, the collection of memoirs which have reference to the Revolution and the Empire is very large. The fortunes of the ill-fated royal family are dealt with in three sets of memoirs, on which all historians have been obliged to draw, those of Madame Campan, of Weber, and of Cléry, all three of whom were attendants on Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. The memoirs of the first-named are supposed to be the least accurate in matters of fact. The ill-natured and factious Madame de Genlis has left two different works of the memoir kind, the one entitled Souvenirs de Félicie, which is somewhat fictitious in form and arrangement, but is believed to be accurate enough in facts; the other, definitely called Memoirs, which was written long after date, and is much coloured by prejudice. The Marquis de Bouillé, whose gallant conduct during the Nancy mutiny set an example which the nobility of France were unfortunately slow to follow, and who would have saved Louis XVI. in the Varennes flight but for ill-luck and the king's incredible folly, has also left memoirs of value; and so has Dumouriez. The memoirs of Louvet, of Daunou, of Riouffe, of the Duke de Lauzun, of the Comte de Vaublanc, of the Comte de Ségur, may be mentioned. The unamiable but striking and characteristic figure of Madame Roland lives in memoirs which are among the most celebrated of the time. A group of short but striking accounts of eye-witnesses and narrowly-rescued victims remains to testify to the atrocities of that Second of September, which some recent historians have striven in vain to palliate. Many of the men of the Revolution, of the servants of the Empire and of their wives, have left accounts (of more or less value in point of matter) of the events of the time, some of which have been only very recently published. Among these latter special notice is deserved by the memoirs of Davout, of Madame de Rémusat, and of Count Miot de Melito. But with few exceptions (those of Madame de Rémusat are perhaps the principal) none of these memoirs are of great literary importance or interest. They are often very valuable to the historian, very curious to the student of manners or the mere seeker after interesting and amusing facts; but no one of them, named or unnamed, can be said to rank in literary interest with the work which is so plentiful in the preceding century, and which constitutes so large a part of that century's claim to a place of first importance in the history of French literature.

Abundance of Letter-writers.

It is otherwise with letters, of which the century contributes to literature some of the most remarkable which we possess. It is impossible even to give a bare list of those which remain from a time when almost every person of quality knew how to correspond either in the natural or the artificial style; but the most remarkable (each of which is in its way typical of a group) may be noticed with some minuteness. Among these the correspondence of Grimm, though one of the bulkiest and most important, may be dismissed with a brief reference; for it will be noticed again in the succeeding chapter, and most of it is not either the work of one man or real correspondence. The flying sheets which Grimm, largely aided by his complaisant friends, and especially by Diderot, sent to his august Russian and German correspondents, were in reality periodical summaries of the state of politics, society, letters, and art in Paris, not different in subject and style from the printed newspaper letters of the present day. They form in the aggregate a very important work, whether looked at from the point of view of history, or from the point of view of literature; but they are not, properly speaking, letters. Of the letter-writers proper three women and three men may be selected, – Mademoiselle Aïssé, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, and Madame du Deffand; Voltaire, Diderot, and Galiani.