A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  In addition, Figaro attacks the judicial system: why is it that the unscrupulous count and his handpicked doltish judge have been chosen to administer justice? After all his own unhappy run-ins with courts and judges, it seems that Beaumarchais could not resist representing the utter corruption, venality, and stupidity of ancien régime justice. And Figaro’s stint in the Bastille raised one of the central issues of the prerevolutionary years: arbitrary imprisonment without due process. (The word “Bastille” was ultimately suppressed by the censor, but the revised evocation of the “castle’s drawbridge being lowered for me, and as I entered, [I] abandoned any hope and freedom” was immediately clear to readers and spectators.)

  Pressure for the play mounted. Public opinion, a new and far from fully understood force at this time, backed Beaumarchais and Figaro. The king granted permission for the play to be performed only to suddenly withdraw it. He looked weak and indecisive; it seemed that if the public pressed a demand, the monarchy might have to respond. The play was finally performed on April 27, 1784. Crowds burst past the ticket windows and swamped the theater. Every seat was filled, and spectators stood everywhere they could fit. The play ran for sixty-eight consecutive performances after its premiere; it earned more in ticket sales than any other play of the century. But immediately after the play’s rapturous reception, the king decided to have Beaumarchais arrested and thrown, not into the Bastille, but into the humiliating Saint-Lazare prison, where those accused of sexual crimes were immured. Everyone was laughing, except Louis XVI. The Saint-Lazare prison was meant to be more sensational and more shaming than the usual dungeon. But public reaction was swift—in the form of anonymous pamphlets, complaints from many of Beaumarchais’s highly placed friends and from the supporters of the Comédie-Française’s troupe, as well as just plain ordinary resentment against the king’s ham-handed and capricious action. Once again, the king capitulated; his authoritarian gesture failed. Beaumarchais was released.

  Perhaps Louis XVI could not see something that we see clearly today: the work succeeded not because of its pointed critiques, but because it is a great and very funny play. Beaumarchais showed that a play could be absolutely timely, deeply connected to the circumstances of its creation, and yet remain alive, touching, and meaningful. He accomplished this feat, in part, by drawing on comedic tradition—the play relies on class and gender cross-dressing and a good deal of physical comedy—and infusing it with modern sensibility. The Marriage of Figaro, like Marivaux’s comedies, has the relation between master and servant at its core. But if Marivaux’s masters and servants were tied to each other with what seemed to be an existential bond—so much so that they were often each other’s only real social bond—Beaumarchais’s Figaro shows the bond utterly betrayed, without ethical or moral content, hanging by a thread. Nor is the servant’s primary bond with his master; Figaro makes his own bonds with the woman he loves, with friends, and with allies.

  Of course, the title immediately announces one central revolutionary aspect of the play. For the first time, the marriage at the heart of the play is the servant’s, not the master’s. The servant’s life takes center stage. The Marriage of Figaro asked spectators for something unheard of: that they identify with and root for a servant against his master. For the obstacle to Figaro’s marriage and to his happiness is none other than the count. The count is so morally bankrupt and his lust so insatiable that despite the fact that Figaro helped him in his own quest for marriage, he seeks to ruin Figaro’s. The count, because he alone is the ruler, imagines himself outside of and above all bonds of fidelity or reciprocity: he owes nothing to Figaro (who believes himself to be the count’s friend), just as he has no obligation to his wife.

  The Marriage of Figaro tells a sort of early modern sexual harassment story. The count, long unfaithful to his sad, betrayed wife, the former Rosine, desires Figaro’s fiancée, Suzanne. As far as the count is concerned, he has a kind of property right in the body of every woman who lives in his domain. The name for this so-called right is the “droit de seigneur.” And although the droit de seigneur may have been mythical (this point is uncertain), by referring to this particular “right,” Beaumarchais manages to bring the whole complex system of “seigneurial rights” up for scrutiny. Seigneurial rights were very much in force at the end of the ancien régime in France: they were the principal means by which the nobility extracted their income from the countryside. These were the small, everyday obligations and taxes that peasants paid to the lord. For example, in some domains, peasants were required to bake their bread in an oven owned by the seigneur, and of course to pay for the privilege; they often owed the lord a certain number of days of unpaid labor; they might owe their lord a percentage of their harvest; and some peasants were required to pay a fee to the lord upon the death of the tenant-farmer so that the land could be transferred to a member of the family. All these were profit sources for the nobility, but they were also a means by which the lord symbolically asserted his power over the lives of the peasants who lived in his territory. In exposing the count’s sexual predation, Figaro exposes the nobility as exploiters rather than protectors of ordinary people.

  But the play is remarkable too in that Suzanne is not simply an occasion for rebellion. She is a central participant. From the play’s very first scene, we see Figaro and Suzanne’s shared happiness: they talk, they share confidences, they worry, they laugh. Suzanne takes the intelligent course of confiding to the countess the count’s attempts to coerce her into sex. In so doing, Suzanne rightly counts on the countess’s solidarity, and they, with Figaro, form the nucleus of what will be a formidable team that will work in concert to foil the count’s plan. Another important member of the team is added when Figaro, who had been kidnapped as a child, discovers that the countess’s seemingly disagreeable former governess, Marceline, is in fact his mother. Marceline, who up to that point had been a bitter, disappointed woman, immediately becomes a loving, supportive mother. She takes Suzanne into her affections as well, displaying how important female solidarity is in a world in which men make the rules.

  Marceline’s subplot helps lend the play its feminist hue. In the past, we learn, she had been seduced and betrayed by Bartholo (Rosine’s curmudgeonly former guardian); Figaro is their long-lost son. But instead of accepting shame as her lot when her status as unmarried mother is revealed, Marceline grows in dignity as her former seducer, Bartholo grows ever more ridiculous. More important, Marceline becomes the advocate for a crucial new value—personal happiness—that, she argues, is more meaningful than socially imposed norms. Bartholo refuses to marry Marceline, despite his former promises to do so should their son ever be found, because of her “deplorable youth”: that is, because of her sexual indiscretion with him thirty years earlier. “What do the refusals of an unjust man mean to us, my son?” she announces, “Your origin is not important, it is where you are going that matters to each of us. … Live among a tender wife and mother who will cherish you, be indulgent toward them, happy for yourself, light-hearted, free, and good to everyone.” Figaro immediately perceives Marceline’s wisdom: “[Y]our words are priceless, mama” (act 3, scene 16). Figaro, Suzanne, and Marceline together embody a new, sentimental model of the family that trumps the formal, sterile, aristocratic family of the childless and miserable count and countess.

  Just as Figaro winds up assembling an unlikely but happy family, so too he assembles a seemingly unwieldy, yet effective team to oppose the power of the count. It includes the protean page Cherubin, Suzanne’s startlingly sexually precocious cousin Fanchette, and wittingly or not, all the peasants who often crowd the stage without speaking a word. Suzanne and Figaro are wed. Suzanne manages to collect several dowries along the way. The count is humiliated before his wife and forced to admit his wrongs. But there is no reason at the play’s close to believe that the count’s beliefs or habits will change. Indeed, he has lost to his own subjects only because of their great intelligence and their mutual devotion. The count is an
absolute ruler; the other characters cannot oppose him openly. They must scheme, devise, and plot. The powerless act indirectly, because the count possesses all the real power. He has the monopoly on economic resources; he embodies judicial and sovereign authority; he can refuse to allow Figaro and Suzanne to marry; he can consign his wife to a convent.

  On the one hand, Figaro shows the triumph of feeling and fidelity over official power, but it also shows that Figaro, like his creator Beaumarchais, has an inkling that despite its utter lack of official status, there might be a form of power that could be effectively opposed to that of the count: the power of public opinion. At the end of each of the play’s acts, Figaro (and the countess) force a concession out of the count: they make him beg his wife’s pardon, they trick him into a symbolic approval of Figaro and Suzanne’s wedding, and more. Each time, the count lets the audience know that does not intend to keep his word and that he makes his acknowledgment grudgingly. Yet each time, Figaro arranges to have the stage crowded with peasant and servant characters who, each one an insignificant person, together act as a sort of witnessing public to the count’s words and actions. What does it matter to the count if a shepherd or shepherdess knows he is a liar? Gathered together as a community, they serve as a kind of moral authority—a force before which the count does not wish to be shamed. And so he, regretfully, accedes to his subjects’ desires. Figaro, the wily stage manager who is also sensitive to the pulse of the community, forces the count into such concessions over and over again and in so doing points to a new direction for politics.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, Figaro shows a world in which the notion of duty and faithfulness between master and servant, between superior and subordinate, is worn out and empty. The lower classes now have their own desires, their own kin, their own loves. They might even, as in the case of Figaro, have a lot more wit than the powerful but bumbling superiors. Writing about the relation between masters and servants was always a way to write about the composition and logic of society itself. It was a way to explore what the social bond is, how we are related to one another and what our mutual obligations should be. In the trajectory from Marivaux to Beaumarchais, from Harlequin to Figaro, we see the emergence of the individual and the beginnings of the triumph of the middle class. But Beaumarchais’s brilliance was to make a group of misfits—a valet; a spurned countess; an unwed, middle-aged housekeeper; a drunken gardener’s niece—the sympathetic voices of a new world of wit, love, and even a new notion of honor.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  All translations of passages quoted in this chapter are my own, although excellent English translations of both Beaumarchais and Marivaux are available in the following editions: The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, in The Figaro Trilogy, trans. David Coward, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Marivaux Plays, trans. John Bowen, Michael Sadler, John Walters, Donald Watson, and Nicholas Wright (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama), 2004. Before suggesting further reading, I would recommend further listening and viewing. Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), Mozart’s adaptation of Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro, is spectacularly successful in expressing the joyousness that is at the heart of the play. The opera’s libretto was even more heavily censored than was the play, yet all the elements—the celebration of love rather than power, and the privileging of sentiment rather than hierarchy and of community in the place of the exalted ego of the individual—are fully present. Abdellatif Kechiche’s film L’esquive (2004), which appeared in US cinemas under the title Games of Love and Chance, is a fascinating reflection on the role of classical French culture in today’s society. The movie depicts a group of high school students, living in a dreary exurban Parisian housing project, who rehearse and ultimately perform Marivaux’s eponymous play. Kechiche explained that he was drawn to Marivaux both for his linguistic virtuosity (which he sees paralleled in the adolescents’ mastery of their idiosyncratic language), and for his unusual attention to and sympathy with characters from the lower social classes.

  For further reading about theater, theatricality, and the relationship among theater, painting, and the novel, see the important studies by Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). To learn more about servants and masters, see Sarah Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Maza has also written a wonderful book that explores the importance of private lives, and specifically private scandals, to public, political life in eighteenth-century France; Beaumarchais is an important figure in her analysis: see Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau, and the Figure of the Philosophe in Eighteenth-Century Paris

  KATE E. TUNSTALL

  Diderot is the central figure of the Enlightenment. True, he is not as well known as either the older Voltaire or his exact contemporary, Rousseau, both of whose self-promotional strategies made them into public figures and causes célèbres. However, insofar as he edited, with the mathematician and physicist, d’Alembert, the single most ambitious publishing enterprise of the period, the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des arts, des sciences et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or Reasoned dictionary of the arts, sciences and crafts, 1751–72), and, moreover, given that when d’Alembert left the partnership in 1759, he continued to edit that work single-handedly, there can be no question but that Diderot played the crucial role in shaping and disseminating Enlightenment ideas and values. The Encyclopédie, it should be noted, comprises twenty-eight folio volumes, seventeen of which are text, and eleven of illustrations. It contains seventy-four thousand entries, written by more than 130 contributors, including Voltaire and Rousseau; Diderot, in addition to his editorial responsibilities, wrote more than five thousand of the entries himself.

  This alone accounts for the importance of Diderot in the French and European Enlightenment. In his lifetime, it was for this work that he was primarily known to the public, and not for the works of literature that we read today—La religieuse (The Nun, 1760), Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew, 1761– or 1772–74), Le rêve de d’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream, 1769), and Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fatalist, 1778–80). The latter were only published posthumously. One explanation for this is that Diderot could not afford to repeat the experience of the summer of 1749, when, following the anonymous publication of his Lettre sur les aveugles (Letter on the Blind, 1749), he was arrested and then imprisoned for three months. The Lettre was not his first publication, and, in fact, he had already acquired something of a reputation: the Paris Parlement (the supreme court) had condemned his Pensées philosophiques (Philosophical Thoughts, 1746) almost as soon as it was published, also anonymously, and decreed that it be “shredded and burned,” while at a more local level, his parish priest had been secretly informing on him to the police, reporting that, in addition to the atheistic Lettre sur les aveugles, he was also the author of the teasingly erotic Les bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels, 1748), a tale in which female genitalia are endowed with the power of speech. And so, during the period of unrest in Paris in 1748–49, following the unsatisfactory outcome of the peace negotiations after the end of the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), Diderot found himself included in a general roundup of known subversives and thrown in prison at Vincennes—the Bastille, it seems, was full.

  A few years earlier, in 1746, when the libraires (the term covers both booksellers and publishers) had first approached Diderot about their encyclopedia, which, at that stage, was to be a rather more modest enterprise, a simple translation of Ephraim Chambers’s two-volume Cyclopœdia (1728), it had been because he was known to them
not as a subversive writer but rather in the more modest guise of translator of such works as Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1699; French translation 1745) and, more important for their purposes, Robert James’s three-volume Medical Dictionary (1743–45; French translation 1746–48). Though it is not impossible that, as their project evolved, the libraires were moved to offer Diderot the more notable editorial position owing to the succès de scandale of Pensées philosophiques, there can be no doubt that they were very far from predicting his incarceration. It seriously jeopardized a project that represented a significant commercial investment on the part of the libraires, who wasted no time putting that case, along with that of the indispensable nature of Diderot’s editorship, to the comte d’Argenson, minister of state and directeur de la librairie (a kind of minister for censorship, responsible for the publishing and distribution of books in France).

  After three and a half months, Diderot was finally let out, though not without having sworn that he would never again publish anything contrary to religion or morality. It was an oath that, strictly speaking, he cannot be said to have kept—Pensées sur l’Interprétation de la nature (Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, 1753), though no doubt rather technical for many readers, and perhaps deliberately so, nonetheless made the atheist implications of some recent scientific theory perfectly clear. However, it cannot be denied that he did not publish many of his manuscripts, notably his attack on convent life that is La religieuse, a first-person narrative in which the eponymous heroine recounts how she was forced against her will to take the veil, or his comic novel, much of it in dialogue, Le neveu de Rameau, which offers, among other things, a devastatingly hilarious and rather disconcerting image of the social, political, and cultural affairs of mid-eighteenth-century Paris.