Moralistes of Modern Life: the Subjectivization of Moralist Discourse in Eighteenth-Century France

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Title:

Moralistes of Modern Life: the Subjectivization of Moralist Discourse in Eighteenth-Century France

Author:

Creedon, Orlaith Catherine

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2012

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Ph.D., FrenchUC Berkeley

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Paige, Nicholas D

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Maslan, Susan, Lucey, Michael, Khan, Victoria

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Moralistesof Modern Life: the Subjectivization of Moralist Discourse in Eighteenth-Century France

Byrlaith Catherine Creedon

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor in Philosophy

in

French

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Nicholas Paige, ChairProfessor Victoria KahnProfessor Michael LuceyProfessor Susan Maslan

Fall 2012


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Abstract

Moralistesof Modern Life: the Subjectivization of Moralist Discourse in Eighteenth-Century France

by

rlaith Catherine Creedon

Doctor of Philosophy in French

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Nicholas Paige, Chair

This dissertation studies the breakdown of classical moralist discourse in the post-absolutist moment and traces the newly flexible forms of this self-defined literature ofsocial observation over the course of the eighteenth century. Tied to the specific contextof absolute monarchy, moralist literature had analyzed the world in function of analyticalgrids and rigid codes, and hence generated a literature of closed forms: maxims, portraits,caractres. I argue that the static completeness of moralist literature reached its limits ofpossibility under the Regency, when the migration from the closed system of the court tothe open system of the city radically destabilized the finite and fixed nature of socialcategories and their codes presuming this had ever been a social reality, though it had in

fact been represented as such in moralist texts. Analyzing generically diverse texts whichhave never before been put into dialogue Le Spectateur franais(Marivaux),Le Neveude Rameau(Diderot), and the Tableau de Paris(Mercier), I study a feature of theemergence of urban modernity that has heretofore remained overshadowed byBenjaminian studies of the nineteenth-century capital: the figure of the urban spectator.Informed by eighteenth-century aesthetics and drametheory, my dissertation argues forthe figure of the urban spectator as the mediator and model of a public in the making. Nolonger an implied, disembodied narrator, the spectators emergence produced not onlynew ways of writing, but also of knowing, what La Rochefoucauld referred to as leschoses de la vie. This dissertation focuses on narrative texts that stage the spectator inthe act of beholding; that is to say, narratives in which moralist discourse is subjectivized.


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For Mum, who walked every step of this journey with me.


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments iii

Introductioni. From Spectacle to Spectator ivii. Modern Moralist Discourse? viiii. The Urban Modern Moralist xii

I. Staging the Sociable Spectator in Marivauxs Spectateur franais 1II. The Social Spectator Speaks: DiderotsNeveu de Rameau 33III.The Tableau de Parisand the Project of Moral Physiognomy 61Bibliography 155


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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to a community of colleagues, family, and friends without whom thisproject would have remained in perpetuity a work in progress. To my dissertationcommittee, I owe my most sincere thanks. I thank Nicholas Paige for overseeing this

dissertation, and, in the final analysis, for teaching me about far more than eighteenth-century French literature. I thank Susan Maslan for encouraging and supporting me at aparticularly challenging moment in this project; for the ways in which she has alwaysunderstood that writing a doctoral thesis involves more than just setting words to paper, Iwill always be grateful to her. Above all, I thank Dr. William Hanley mentorextraordinaire for never once doubting that I could do this.

I was blessed in my time at Berkeley to cross paths with Hlne Bilis and David Divita.With Hlne, a great friendship was forged over chats (lattes in hand) about thechallenges and triumphs of both teaching and research, and everything else. Alwayswalking two steps ahead of me on this early modern journey, she has taught me more

than she knows about discipline, dedication, and the merits of being able to shake it alloff. Without my queridoDavid, the halls of Dwinelle would have been far less colorful.I could not have wished for a more inspiring colleague and genuine friend, and in David Ifound just that and much, much more. For the laughs that carried me through Berkeley,and far beyond, I will never be able to thank him enough.

To Mum, Dad, and Conaire, always just a phonecall away. All of this, I owe to you. Debharr an toraigh seo, de bharr gach uile n, nl insint bhil chun buochas do thabhairtdbh.

And to Paolo, for waiting so patiently for me at the finish line.


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Introduction

i. From Spectacle to Spectator

This dissertation engages a strain of moralist literature in eighteenth-centuryFrance which struggled both aesthetically and politically with the urban fabric it soughtto describe. Studying the ways in whichLe Spectateur franais,Le Neveu de Rameau,and the Tableau de Paris stage not only the spectator, but the very act of beholding, Iexamine the increasingly subjetictivized discourse of moralist literature in eighteenth-century France. The publication of Addison and Steeles Spectator (1711), ShaftesburysCharacteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times(1711) and DubosRflexionscritiques sur la posie et la peinture (1719) catalyzes the reconfiguration of the role andcentrality of the figure of the spectator. These reflections on the receptive and creativecapacities of the spectator of theater, the beholder of painting, the proto urbanethnographer, are doubtless inflected by Lockean empiricism and bear the marks of

sensualist philosophy. The opening up, within the new model of beholding, of a spacefor the spectator, necessarily accounts for contingency in new ways. Drawing newattention to the experience and the aesthetics of the moment, to borrow ThomasKavanaghs term, the itinerant narratives generated by the figure at once literary andsocial of the spectator both engage and represent a public in the making, a public insearch of its identity and voice a public that will, at the close of the century, becomecohesive and identifiable.

While heretofore the authority to judge a work of art had been relegated to lesgens de mtier(that is, learned, specialized men), Dubos reflections in particulartransfers authority to the individual, feeling subject. Firstly, this move democratizes theact of spectatorship. Secondly, it relocates the primacy of the act of spectatorship on thelevel of the spectator rather than on that of the work of art. No longer respecting the rulesof classical poetics but rather responding to an aesthetic experience, the spectator accruesnew importance not only in the field of painting but also in that of theater.

The role of the spectator becomes increasingly radical over the course of theeighteenth century. At the confluence of theoretical reflections on painterly andtheatrical reforms, DiderotsEntretiens sur le Fils naturel(1757) and hisDiscours de laposie dramatique(1758) are the first to theorize the emerging drame bourgeois. Thisnew theatrical model would move from the constraints (visual and representational) ofthe classical stage, giving way to linvention dun thtre de limage.1The artificialityand theatricality of the stage both in what it represents and how is dismissed in favorof naturalness and harmony. Kings and courts are replaced by fathers and families. Thetheater remains an institution of moralizing instruction, but one that engages the spectatordifferently; the dramewould morally instruct the spectator by moving him to action. Inother words, the individual, feeling subject is moved and responds to the scene.

In the paradigm shift from poetics to aesthetics we note the emergence of afeeling subject who, placed before the work of art, affectively responds to and is absorbed

1Pierre Frantz,LEsthtique du tableau dans le thtre du XVIIIe sicle(Paris: Pressesuniversitaires de France, 1998), 6.


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by the object. Conversely, under the neoclassical model, there is a rigidly demarcatedseparation between the work of art and the spectator. Indeed, as Bryson has suggested,

authority is no longer defined as what is outsiderepresentation, in the place of the spectator. Rather,it has been diffused, redistributed, both outside and

within the object: its very nature has changed. In theneo-classical tradition, it was the idealized society asa whole (the City) that judged, by the rules of art, awork of art. Here, if society continues to be presentin the respect the critic shows for the rules of art, thedoxa, it is nevertheless also the critic as a feelingindividualwho judges the object of imitation, basedon his emotional, aesthetic response, his identificationwith and absorption into the object.2

If the spectator emerged in this particular way at this particular moment, it wasdue to greater social reconfigurations as well. Regency France is characterized by

seismic mutations of the cultural imaginary. This period of uncertainty and changeallowed for greater social participation and change, bringing to the fore the figure of theurban spectator in the wake of the Sun King.

The absolutist culture propagated by Louis XIV strove to eliminate thecontingencies that would make its semiotics upon which its culture machine relied less than entirely coherent. Part of this guarantee of semiotic coherence depended on theexclusion of the spectator position from the sovereign spectacle, and from the act ofmeaning-making more generally. For Louis XIV occupied the entire space ofrepresentation; he was the sun around which all things and people gravitated. In thisway, the spectator of the sovereign spectacle was relegated to the margins, at a distancefrom princely displays. Indeed, in the move of royal spectacles to Versailles in 1664, allof Paris became a distant onlooker to royal performance. The absolute monarch istherefore to be imagined as a uniform organizational principle, the central point ofreference. This is articulated explicitly, for instance, in the manuels de civilit,propagated by Richelieu, which outline the rigidly complex, hierarchized (andhierarchizing) code of ritual at court. Such well-known manuelsas CourtinsLe NouveauTrait de civilit(1672) detail the highly visible and symbolic gestures performed atcourt, perhaps most importantly where one is to position oneself in relation to the king.3As Russo observes, courtly life is always and already mediated by the king; everything isstaged and hierarchized in function of the sovereign and his diverse figurations, thissingle point of reference.4

2Scott S. Bryson, The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power(Saratoga: ANMA Libri, 1991), 24-25.3Elena Russo,La Cour et la ville: de la littrature classique aux Lumires(Paris: Pressesuniversitaires de France, 2002), 15.4Russo,La Cour et la ville, 18.


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The hold of the absolutist model waned long before September 1, 1715, Caplan argues,but its yoke is thrown off definitively with the death of the Sun King.5 The portrait of theking becomes just that: the portrait of the now-absent monarch. This semioticdisentanglement (the king is no longer his portrait, the portrait is a portrait of the king)does not in itself engender the semiotic crisis that shakes Regency France; along with the

dismantling of previously stable systems of signification wraught by Laws system andby fiscal mobility more generally the post-absolutist moment witnesses the challenge ofthe very possibility of signs as transparent containers of Being, a doubt in semioticcoherence.6

ii. Modern Moralist Discourse?

Classical moralist literature, in France, is tied to the specific context of theabsolute monarchy: its codes, its cosmography, its sovereign epicenter. The emblematicworks of this literary tradition La RouchefoucauldsMaximes(1664) and La Bruyres

Caractres (1688) coincide with the zenith of the French monarchical (absolutist)regime.7The rigidly codified culture under the Sun King both provided a grid throughwhich the moralist read that which he observed, and provided fixed categories into whichhe classified his observations. Indeed, classical anthropology studied the world infunction of finite, preordained codes and reproduced these variables in a number ofclosed forms caractres, maxims, portraits. Eliminating difference and perpetuatingfixed categories, each person and thing bore a mark a character; that is to say,everything bore a sign which made it socially visible. Classical characterology was basedon the assumption that human nature is immutable, universal, and therefore free of thecontingencies of time and place.8

Yet what happened to moralist discourse when the apparatus to which is had beenyoked began to falter? More specifically, how does the moralist observe and write thesocial within the cultural climate of subterfuge which defines the Regency socialmobility, Laws system, the move from Court to city? This dissertation takes as its pointof departure a moment when the alphabet of classical anthropology no longerarticulated what La Rochefoucauld termed les choses de la vie. The staticcompleteness of the moralist tradition reaches its limits of possibility, I argue, in the post-absolutist moment, when the fixed and absolute nature of social categories and theircodes presuming this had ever been a social reality, though it was in represented assuch in the moralist texts becomes radically destabilized. For indeed, under theRegency, Paris became the locus of semiotic confusion; new economic potential

5Jay Caplan,In the Kings Wake:Post-Absolutist Culture in France (Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 1999),1.6Caplan,In the Kings Wake, 7.7Cyril Le Meur,Les moralistes franais et la politique la fin du XVIIIe sicle: le princede Ligne, Senac de Meilhan, Chamfort, Rivarol, Joubert, Hrault-Sechelles devant lamort dun genre et la naissance dun monde(Paris: Champion, 2002), 12.8Daniel Acke, La Notion de caractre dans lesJournauxMarivaux subversif? ed.Franck Salan (Paris: Desjonqures, 2003), 211.


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engendered a blurring of previous markers of difference. In this way, the alphabet ofthe classical moralist no longer provided either a perceptual and descriptive grid, or anadequate vocabulary of representation. Confronting an urban fabric which nowdemanded to be decoded, a new figure became at this point visible within moralistliterature: that of the spectator. As Ketcham has noted, the self can be preserved in the

securely bound realm of the estate, but it can only be lost in the multifarious encountersof the city with its profusion of signs and social symbols, mere tokens which turn all meninto merchants.9 In between words and images, and the things they had previouslyrepresented, a space of interpretation was opened, a space in which a new figureemerged: that of the spectator. The seeing, speaking subject became visible within thenarrative frame, an embodied observer and describer of les choses de la vie. I tie therise of the spectator to the migration from the closed system of the court to the opensystem of the city, and will analyze, in what follows, this feature of the emergence ofurban modernity.

The particular strain of moralists included in this study are set apart from theircontemporaries in three specific ways: they are generically innovative, they are visible

within their text, and conceive of a cohesive public rather than of a swatch of society (inother words, they imagine a public rather than la socit). Though classical moralistliterature wanes throughout the eighteenth century perhaps in favor of such emerginggenres as the novel and the drame such moralists as Veuvenargues, Chamfort, Duclos,Snac de Meilhan, Schelles, publish works which respect the conventions of classicalmoralist literature. In his 1787 Considrations sur lesprit et les moeurs, Snac deMeilhan echoes La Rouchefoucaulds claim that the maxim serves its moral purpose bestsince the reader can commit it to memory easily. Snac in fact reveals himself to becompletely at odds with the moralists considered in this study; not only does he championthe fragment form of moralist literature, but condemns the attempt to establish relations.In the Encyclopedic and taxonomic age, it is difficult to think of anything as detaches,much less les penses:

Les ouvrages sont pour la plupart trop longs. On veutdfinir, diviser, lier, et le ciment tient plus de place queles pierres qui composent ldifice les penses dtaches,lorsquelles sont bien exprimes, font plus deffet et segravent mieux dans la mmoire que si elles taient noyesdans un chapitre. Elles rveillent lattention du Lecteuret lui pargnent, ainsi qu lAuteur, de longs et inutiles circuits.10

Similarly, Hrault-Schelles, in his 1788 Codicille politique et pratique dun jeunehabitant dEpne, alludes to contemporary scientific thought while missing the markentirely. Like the classical moralists and Snac, Schelles believes in the primacy ofmemory and repetition/reproduction rather than understanding:

Lutilit des classifications est dindiquer les groupes

9Michael Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in theSpectator Papers. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 45.10Snac de Meilhan, Considrations sur lesprit et les moeursin Cyril Le Meur, Trsordes moralistes du XVIIIe sicle: Maximes, penses, portraits, anecdotes, bon mots,carts, propos(Paris: Le Temps des cerises, 2005), 138.


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o nous devons chercher les choses dposes dans notremmoire; le jalonnement des chelles sert marquerles limites entre lesquelles il faut chercher une quantit.Ces deux mthodes resserrent le champs du ttonnement,diminuent lincertitude et pargnement du temps.11

The examples I provide above may falsely imply that eighteenth-century moralists arelargely preoccupied with contemporary scientific reforms; this is largely not the case, andthese examples serve to illustrate how differently they understand and observe the socialand scientific worlds. Highly political, Chamfort assumes a much different view of themonarchy than his moralist predecessors, one according to which he defines themonarchy as that sous quoi le peuple est cras depuis quatorze sicles. I haveillustrated ways in which a certain strain of eighteenth-century moralist literaturepreserved the generic specificity of the genre (the fragment form) and narrative positionof the narrator relegated to the margins of the text. Reading ChamfortsProduits de lacivilisation perfectionne, maximes, penses, caractres, anectodes reveals the extent towhich the moralist point of view is outside of ever-changing urban reality and attracted to

a particular swatch of society. Indeed, Chamforts fragments read as a gallery of portraits(of Mme de Pompadour, Louis XV, Mme Denis, Mme la comtesse de Boufflers, le ducde Choiseul, M. de Barbanon, among many others).

Moralist literature can be identified by three distinctive feature, van Delft hassuggested: the proliferation and preservation of thematic topo, in function of theassumption that tout est dit (that there is nothing new to say about the world)12; acommitment to brevity, or in other words, the art of the essential; and finally, a refusal offiction and fable. Originating in the tradition of classical characterology (Theophrastus),moralist literature relies to a large extent on character-writing. The notion of character,central to our discussion here, has both a social and a literary veilance: it refers at once toa particular conception of the individual, and relies on typology. Simultaneously, it refersto both a literary discourse and genre (la forme brve du caractre).13 The social worldis perceived to be a constellation of types (characters), translated into a characterologicaldescription that fragments the social according to these types. This fixist andclassificatory anthropology sought to create the illusion of social coherence and stability.

In his study of the figure of the moralist and classical moralist literature, van Delftarticulates The Spectator of Addison and Steele as the culminating point of moralistliterature in France. I, on the other hand, take it and Marivauxs imitative Spectateurfranais as the point of departure for this study. Van Delft declares that une seulechose tait sre: sa vie entire tait concentre dans son regard. Cet homme tait un

11Hrault-Schelles, Codicille politique et pratique dun jeune habitant dEpne in LeMeur, Trsor des moralistes du XVIIIe sicle,157. We could recall here Diderotsfamous exclamation that il faut aller en ttonnant!12Playing on La Bruyres famous declaration (tout est dit), Dagen writes that cestparce que tout est dit quil y a plaisir se faire moraliste. Jean Dagen,Entre Epicureet Vauvenargues: principes et formes de la pense morale (Paris: Champion, 1999), 12.13Acke, La notion de caractre, 142.


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Oeil.14 What interests me in Addison and Steeles Spectatorjournal is the ways inwhich Mr. Spectator is self-declared and imagined by the public to be a participatingmember of the public he describes. Though he never identifies himself by name, heincludes himself in the social observations and descriptions he provides.

The figure of the moralist was not a moral philosopher, but rather a describer of

moeurs. In his Considrations sur lesprit et les moeurs, for instance, Snac definesmoralist discourse as la partie de la morale qui a pour objet lhomme vivant en socit,dans la cour ou la capitale, and Duclos affirms that il sagit donc dexaminer lesdevoirs et les erreurs des hommes; mais cet examen doit avoir pour objet les moeursgnrales, celles des diffrentes classes qui composent la socit.15If classical moralistliterature had sought to provide a description of fixed social categories, unchanginghuman nature, and anonymous universals, the moralist texts I study imbricate both thefigure of the spectator-narrator and his descriptions in the very social fabric he seeks todescribe.

This study emerges out of an interest in the puzzling effacement of the figure ofthe moralist from his social descriptions. Though critical scholarship qualifies the figures

of the moralist in highly visual terms, he is never himself visible within his text. Suchexpressions as loeil du moraliste, le mtier du moraliste, les spectateurs de la vieaboundin contemporary criticism, invoking both a descriptive reliance on the visual, and anexplicit spectator-narrator position. There is a moment, however, when the spectator-narrator does become visible in his text, and this is the starting point of our discussion. Iam interested in the literary instances of spectators who both generate and organize themoralist observations proffered to the reader which, I argue, advances an argument aboutindividual agency in the face of a newly emergent public sphere, and challenges theethics of scientific observation (taxonomy) in an age defined Foucault has suggested by the drive to classification. Indeed,

character books suggest that this order can simply beseen, that it could be randomly encountered, since everyonecan be read and put in the proper slot. Such a structureimplies a spectator. The Theophrastian character booksdid not, however, offer a portrait of the implied spectator;nor did they show him at work.16

We will be concerned in the explicit spectator-narrators that populateLeSpectateur franais,Le Neveu de Rameau, and the Tableau de Paris. More importantly,we will call to the fore the ways in which these spectator-narrator figures reflect onobservational methodologies; in other words, what will be of interest to us here is not besolely whatthese characters look at, but more importantly again, howthey look howthey engage the social world they describe. Marivauxs eponymous Spectateur, DiderotsLui and Moi figures, and Merciers observateur attentifserve, in this study, as instances

14Louis van Delft,Les Spectateurs de la vie: gnalogie du regard moraliste (Laval:Presses de lUniversit Laval, 2005), 237.15Charles Pinot Duclos, Considrations sur les moeurs de ce sicle ed. Carole Dornier(Paris: Chamption, 1996), 26.16Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 78.


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of the subjectivized moraliste. That is to say, in each of the works studied in the chaptersthat follow, descriptions of the social world and its moeursare generated by a spectator-narrator who is conscious of himself associal spectator, and equally conscious of hisrelationship to the world he describes.

Grand narratives of the Enlightenment make much of the drive toward

classification and taxonomy that defined the age, championing what Darnton qualifies asthe diagrammatic impulse a tendency to map, outline, spatialize segments ofknowledge.17 It is by this impulse to catalogue and inventory that is, to master knowledge of the people, places, and things of the natural and moral world that we havecome to characterize the classical episteme. In the face of this totalizing narrative ofsystematicity, however, I locate works by Marivaux, Diderot, and Mercier asrepresentative of a critique of order. By their self-termed libertinage dides, Marivauxand Diderot, for instance, refuse the very possibility of classification; order andcategorization impede movement, so central to the authors considered in this study. For,as Diderot affirms, le mouvement est essentiel la matire.18 While modern critiquesof Enlightenment brought to the fore questions about the implications of the totalizing

and disciplining function of the synoptic gaze, the move toward abstraction, and thesystematization of knowledge, I argue that these questions are already self-consciouslyarticulated inLe Spectateur franais,Le Neveu de Rameau, and the Tableau de Paris.Undoing the very principles that define the classical episteme as well as the tradition ofmoralist literature, these works challenge what it might mean generically, ethically, andpolitically to order knowledge of the natural and social worlds.

It is most notably in their conception of an emerging public that the works studiedhere differ from earlier works of moralist literature. I argue that Marivauxs Spectateurfranaisplays on both moralist and journalistic conventions in order to translate themovement and incertitude of the post-absolutist moment in Regency France. At theintersection of moralist and journalistic traditions,Le Spectateur franais challenges theexhaustive description of contemporary types proffered by La Bruyre; his is a static,closed conception of society. By inscribing the date on each loose leaf, the Spectateurnecessarily qualifies his observations as temporally limited, anticipating what Baudelairerefers to as les mutations journalires. Periodical publication is both inherently modernand urban; by extension, it is necessarily discontinuous and punctual. The periodicalform of the moralists observations serves to reinforce his reflections on time; thepersistently discontinuous and fragmentary form of the Spectateurs feuilles and socialobservations translate the social incoherence he confronts. Rather than attempting toimpose a false order and constraint upon a social space in perpetual flux, Marivaux givesshape to this movement of perpetual change itself. Like Diderot and Mercier after him,Marivaux manipulates rhetorical and generic devices in order to give shape to thechanging social world, and refuses to seek out continuity. Rather, incongruities reformulating the editorial and spectatorial traditions of both Addison and SteelesSpectatorand of theMercure de France Le Spectateur franais displaces the discourse

17Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French CulturalHistory (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 278.18Denis Diderot,Le Neveu de Rameaued. Jean Varloot (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 125.


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of authority by proliferating the narrator position and multiplying the first-person position(in its inclusion of fictitious letters to the editor). In my close reading of La CinquimeFeuille I argue that Marivaux turns the sovereign spectacle inside out; in the eponymousSpectateurs description of lEntre de lInfantewhat figures at center stage are not thesovereign figures, but rather the crowd of spectators who generate the meaning of the

scene. This is congruous with contemporary reconfigurations of the role of the spectatorin pictorial terms. Indeed,description does not begin directly with the works of art;it attempts first to characterize and ascertain the mode ofaesthetic contemplation. It is no longer primarily a matterof artistic genres, but of artistic behavior, that is, of theimpression which the work of art makes on the spectator andof the judgment he passes on his impression for himself andfor others.19

In other words, informed by the new authority transferred to the figure of the spectator,Marivaux proffers reflections not only on the social scene, but on the spectatorial modes

by which meaning is both generated and communicated. In thisfeuillethe Spectateurreflects on the very act of spectatorship in terms both perceptual and socio-political; thatis to say, in terms of both the individual and the crowd. I extend my analysis of theSpectateurs reflections on social observation to the Sixime Feuille in whichmodern reading practices are reconsidered. I link the twofeuillesin order to advancean argument about reading the social. ReadingLe Spectateur franaisthrough the lensof contemporary aesthetic debates that accord a new primacy to the generative anddeterminant role of the spectator in relation to painting, we ascertain that the authority ofthe judging public in matters aesthetic is easily transposed in social and political terms.

Like Marivaux, Diderot tests the limits of genre inLe Neveu de Rameauwhich,by its generic hybridity, refuses classification itself. I argue that Diderotsreappropriation of the classical forms of dialogue and promenade serves to generate a textwhose form mimics the perpetual movement of the social space it seeks to describe. Thisgenerically unclassifiable work gives shape to the inconsistencies and incongruities of thesocial world and the individuals lived experience in this world, rather than imposing astabilizing grid upon this space. Deviating sharply from the conventions of classicalmoralist literature, Diderot seeks to destabilize the very possibility of both narrative andsocial order for, as Lui states, il n'y a rien de stable dans ce monde.20 For indeed, inmoralist discourse, the ease with which everyone could be placed in ones propercubicle may also have contributed to a sense of the fixed and absolute nature of socialcategories. Such a book would offer the illusion that the organization of society is naturaland visible.21 This is challenged in and byLe Neveu de Rameau, however, whose veryform mimics the reflections advanced by Moi and Lui, especially in terms of the ethics ofclassification. Lui engages a lengthy critique of order both scientific and social whereby the very act of taxonomy is called to task. To taxonomize the natural and the

19Annie Becq, Gense de lesthtique franaise moderne de la Raison classique lImagination cratrice: 1680-1814 (Pisa: Pacini editore, 1984), 298.20Diderot,Le Neveu de Rameau, 135.21Brand, The Spectator and the City, 87.


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social worlds is to partition a being that should be considered in its entirety, Lui argues.This line of argumentation will be taken up by Mercier in hisDu Thtre and Tableau deParis, as we shall see in Chapter 3. In Chapter 2, I argue that likeLe Spectateur franaisand the Tableau de Paris,Le Neveu de Rameauis generated and organized by twospectator-narrator figures; the dynamics of performance the define both the text and its

characters foreground both the figure of the spectator and the act of social spectatorship.Readings of Diderots theoretical texts on painting and theater (Salon de 1767 andDiscours sur la posie dramatique), as well as a reading ofLe Fils naturelsupport myreading ofLe Neveu de Rameau as a work in which the spectator-narrator generates andorganizes the narrative.

These figures, imbricated in the urban fabric that they describe, are a novelfeature of eighteenth-century moralist literature. I argue forLe Neveu de Rameauas thefirst and properly urban moralist work. The perspective of the moralist who observes anddescribes from street level, rather than abstracting from above, is insisted upon inDiderots work. Diderots reflections on both bodily and social organization aresupported by the fact that Lui and Moi inhabit the space they both observe and describe;

their urban practices are insisted upon and as such underscore their authority as urbanspectators of the Parisian scene. The public spaces that Moi and Lui inhabit (the caf dela Rgence and the Palais-Royal), I argue, advance Diderots reflections on sensibility,and articulate a complex relationship between the individual and an emerging literary andpolitical public sphere. While Diderot proffers no topographical descriptions of thecapital, what is underscored inLe Neveu de Rameau is the social symbolics of space.

The question of the ethics of spectatorship, classification, and genre is radicalizedby Mercier in his Tableau de Paris, in which both the spectator and the city come intosharp focus. Indeed, in his description of the capital, Mercier brings the people, places,and things of Paris into sharp focus (unlike Marivaux and Diderot) in order to give shapeto the capitals moral physiognomy. It is in the context of his reflections on the dramethat Mercier first articulates the project of writing un livre de Paris, and in Chapter 3 Iargue that MerciersDu Thtre, ou nouvel essai sur lart dramatique lays the theoreticalfoundation for the descriptive project that ultimately comes to fruition as the Tableau deParis. In order to collapse the vertical hierarchies that had been preserved by classicaltheater, Mercier democratizes the dramatic scene. Yet his ambitions exceed the potentialof the theater, I suggest, at which point he expounds a novel conception of the drame astableau the tableau of everyday life.

As with DiderotsNeveu de Rameau, I suggest that Merciers ambitions fortheatrical reform both generic and political far exceed the potential of the theater; hehas recourse to a new descriptive model, one that would be as temporally as it would bespatially expansive. Marivaux, Diderot, and Mercier alike struggle to give rise to ageneric form that would transcend generic constraint; for Marivaux it is the fragmentaryform of the loose leaf, for Diderot, the multiplicity of genres and the pantomime, and forMercier it is the tableau.

In the 1050 chapters of the 12-volume Tableau de Paris, written over the courseof eight years, the elaboration of the democratic disposition of the dramatic scene is miseen scne. We have, with the Tableau, a descriptive project in which the king and themarchande de modefigure equally, in which equal proportion is granted to the citysgreat monuments and to its prisons. Not only do the extremes of le grand luxeand la


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grande misrecohabit the capital in Merciers description, but they also touch. Thishorizontality is reflected in the Tableau, I suggest, by Merciers refusal of either thematicor chronological order imposed on the text.

In his attempt to provide an encyclopedic description of Paris, Merciers act ofwriting struggles to keep pace with the perpetually-shifting object it confronts; for

indeed, Mercier is not only writing space, I argue that is, physical Paris but, unlikeprevious topographical descriptions, also a rhythm of change. Writing a present whichfigures as such rapid succession of change that it is always already past, Mercier invents aliterary form which mimics the rate of change with which he grapples the temporallyand spatially expansive tableau. Comment peindre, Mercier queries, ce qui, dans sonextrme mobilit, chappe au pinceau? In response to this challenge, Mercier not onlyinvents a new way of writing the city, but necessarily, also, a new way of observing thecity. That is to say, Merciers new descriptive mode, I propose, requires a newobservational practice. Indeed, if the tableauis for Mercier a most dynamic descriptivemodel, so, too, is the observational practice it foregrounds; the ambulatory observerinvestigates one object Paris from various vantage points and perspectives: from atop

Notre-Dame, a balcony, a chair, from inside a moving carriage, or a cave-like cabaret. AsMercier claims, tout a droit dintresser lobservateur attentif. It is in fact the figure ofthe observateur attentifthat figures at the heart of our discussion of the Tableau de Paris.We will be interested in examining the ways in which the spectator-narrator gives shapeto the urban space he describes.

I argue that in bothLe Spectateur franais andLe Neveu de Rameauwhat isforegrounded is the (lived) experience of a moment, what Kavanagh refers to as theaesthetics of the moment. What is underscored by Merciers Tableau de Paris,however, is the urgency of the moment. The present figures in Merciers description asParis as ever-elusive. This gives rise to a descriptive practice in which the eye of thespectator and the pen of the narrator must work in tandem; for, indeed, one cannot traceParis fast enough, it would seem. This sense of descriptive urgency is transposed on thesocial, to be sure; Merciers Tableau de Paris, in its description of the insalubrity of thecapital and of tolerated injustices, attempts to communicate a sense of social urgency. Inhis attention to allelements of the Parisian landscape, the observateur attentifmust aimto render everything especially social inequity visible.

While I argue that Mercier expounds a novel conception of tableauthat is bothtemporally and spatially expansive in response to the perpetually shifting form of hisobject of knowledge I conclude that the Tableau de Paris is not hinged upon amonolithic model of time, and suggest that this description of the capital, in facts, unfoldsacross two temporal places, describing at once the hyper-accelerated rate of change of thesurface of the city while lamenting the lagging pace of social reform, revealing what Irefer to as the paradox of progress.

iii. The Urban Modern Moralist

In each chapter that follows, I analyze the figure of the spectator-narrator who isboth the generative and organizational principle of the work. In interrogatinglnonciationof the urban observer in eighteenth-century texts that have been never been


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considered together, this study adds to a body of scholarship on eighteenth-centuryliterature and the city which to a large extent thematizes the city without taking intoaccount the figure of the urban spectator. The title of this dissertation, Moralistesde lavie moderne, engages BaudelairesPeintre de la vie modernein order to foreground theways in whichLe Spectateur franais,Le Neveu de Rameau, and the Tableau de Paris

challenge the temporalit abstraite that typifies moralist literature.

22

The notion of amoralist like the painter of modern life engages two notions of prime concern to us inthis study: that of the spectatorship of everyday life and that of temporality.

In the chapter Croquis de moeurs, Baudelaire argues thatpour le croquis de murs, la reprsentation de la vie bourgeoiseet les spectacles de la mode, le moyen le plus expditif et le moinscoteux est videmment le meilleur. Plus lartiste y mettra debeaut, plus luvre sera prcieuse; mais il y a dans la vie triviale,dans la mtamorphose journalire des choses extrieures, unmouvement rapide qui commande lartiste une gale vlocitdexcution.23

In each of the chapters that follow I examine the ways in which Marivaux, Diderot, andMercier inscribe temporality in their works. I argue that they manipulate genericconventions in order to give rise to forms of urban observation that would mimic theperpetual movement that typifies the surfaces they describe. Here, Baudelaire insists onthe daily metamorphosis of the surface thingsof lifeand the challenge this poses to thepainter of modern life. Baudelaires insistence on the concomitant acts of observationand description echoes sharply with concerns that are very visible in Marivaux, Diderot,and Mercier but while Baudelaire is fascinating by the rapid rate of change of things,the topography of Paris and its things do not become visible until Merciers Tableau deParis. For this reason, in this study, I have sought to qualifyLe Spectateur franais,LeNeveu de Rameau,and the Tableau de Paris as moralist texts whose concerns deviatefrom classical conventions. The too-rigidly demarcated advent of modernity has, inFrench literary studies, effaced the antecedents of a (strain of) literature of moralobservation that sought to contend in terms both literary and social with the social andurban upheaval that defined eighteenth-century Paris. While the argument here is not ateleological one, tracing a direct lineage between Marivaux, Diderot, Mercier, andBaudelaire, it does create a space of dialogue between critical scholarship of nineteenth-century urban literature and its early modern antecedents.

22Jean-Charles Darmon,Le Moraliste, la politique et lhistoire, de La Rochefoucauld Derrida ed. Jean-Charles Darmon (Paris: ditions Desjonqures, 2007), 11.23Charles Baudelaire,Le Peintre de la vie moderne(Genve: ditions La Palantine,1943), 46.


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Chapter I

Staging the Sociable Spectator

in MarivauxsSpectateur franais

Marivauxs Spectateur franais, like both DiderotsNeveu de Rameau andMerciers Tableau de Paris, poses a challenge in terms of generic classification.Subsuming both the generic and discursive conventions of classical moralist literature, ofthe essay, and of journalism,Le Spectateur franaisarticulates something particularlynew about the subjective place of the social observer and describer. Published over thecourse of four years (1721-24) with an unreliable periodicity, the twenty-five sheets thatconstituteLe Spectateur franais foreground the act of beholding; that is to say, it is atext that stages the spectator. Marivauxs text narrated by the character known only asLe Spectateur franais,zl pour le public appears in the wake of ta moment when thefirst aesthetic texts articulate a new mode of beholding that transfers the role of the

spectator from one of reception to one of production. Both in France and across theChannel we witness a remapping of the relationship between seeing subject and object aesthetic, social, political in the writings of Addison, de Piles, and Dubos, for instance.These reflections on the receptive and creative capacities of the spectator of theater, thebeholder of painting, the proto urban ethnographer, are doubtless inflected by Lockeanempiricism and bear the marks of sensualist philosophy. The opening up, within the newmodel of beholding, of a space for the spectator, necessarily accounts for contingency innew ways. Drawing new attention to the experience and the aesthetics of the moment,the itinerant narratives generated by the figure at once literary and social of theSpectator both engage and represent a public in the making, a public in search of itsidentity and voice a public that will, at the close of the century, become cohesive andidentifiable.24 As Acke has suggested, la vie morale lpoque des Lumires ne sefocalise plus sur des types exemplaires ou ridicules, mais sur lindividu et la formation decelui-ci dans sa confrontation avec la socit; the emphasis as in the case ofMarivauxs Spectateur franais is on les individus prenant conscience deux-mmes etde leurs possibilits par rapport la socit.25

Writing the Experience of a Moment:

The Essay, Periodicity, and the Public

The Premire Feuille of Marivauxs Spectateur franaisopens with a reflectionnot only on the constraints of literary form, but more specifically on the ways in whichthought is subservient to form. Arguing that generic conventions produce an artificial

24I borrow the term aesthetics of the moment from Thomas Kavanaghs study,Esthetics of the Moment: Literature and Art in the French Enlightenment (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).25Daniel Acke, La Notion de caractre dans lesJournauxMarivaux subversif? ed.Franck Salan (Paris, Desjonquires, 2003), 211.


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and arbitrary liaison des penses, the eponymous Spectateur suggests that contrary to(literary) tradition it is in fact his thoughts will give shape to his journal.26 In turningfrom cet exercice forc [que lesprit humain] se donne en composant, the Spectateurinsists on the sinuosity and spontaneity both of his rflexions and of the shape thesewill take on the page.27 For indeed, it is not form that dictates his writerly project, but

rather le hasard:Je ne sais point crer, je sais seulement surprendre en moiles penses que le hasard me fait [] mon dessein nest depenser ni bien ni mal, mais simplement de recueillir fidlementce qui me vient daprs le tour dimagination que medonnent les choses que je vois ou que jentends, et cestde ce tour dimagination, ou pour mieux dire de ce quilproduit, que je voudrais que les hommes nous rendissentcompte, quand les objets les frappent.28

The question, then, is how to give shape to a project dictated by the aesthetics of themoment, by the imaginative response provoked within the spectator by remarkable

things seen and heard ? In outlining his project for his reader (whom he addresses directlyin the pages of his journal), the Spectateur underlines the contingency of his reflections;resisting regularity discursive, formal, narrative Le Spectateur franaisproceedswithout any preordained plan and depends solely on the contingency of experience. Byextension, both the object of inquiry (le tour dimagination produit par les choses vues etentendues) and the observer-narrator position (les hommes) are plural, which underscoresa conception of this discourse and form as subjective and heterogeneous.29 Just asMercier strives toward an ideal of formless form in his Tableau de Paris(1781-1788), so,too, does Marivaux draw attention to the ways in which his work resists form or at thevery least, to the ways in which the work provides a self-reflexive critique of the form itadopts, as we shall see presently. For these reasons, the essay was aptly suited toMarivauxs project of literary innovation by virtue of the fact that it was a remarkablyuntheorized genre, whose formal conventions remained relatively flexible.

Even some forty years after the publication of Marivauxs Spectateur franais,dAlembertsEncyclopdie et dictionnaire raisonn []article, Essai, makes evidentthe undefinability of the essayistic genre. The perfunctory nature of DAlembertstreatment of the literary essay stands in sharp contrast to his exhaustive development of

26Marivaux,Le Spectateur franais,Journaux et oeuvres diverseseds. Frdric Deloffreand Michel Gilot (Paris: Bordas, 1998), 114.27Marivaux,Le Spectateur franais, 114.28Marivaux,Le Spectateur franais, 114-115.29The Spectateur makes clear to his reader that it is not the objects observed but ratherthe effect provoked in the observer that will constitute the pages of his journal. Just asAddison and Steele had vowed to disseminate a Knowledge no longer bound up inBooks, and kept in Libraries and Retirements, but obtruded upon the Publick [] so,too, does the Spectateur declare that the matter of his reflections is made up of thingsseen and heard (les choses que je vois ou que jentends) in the world. Addison andSteele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965),1:507.


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the scientific essai(experiment) in the area of chemistry, in particular. Indeed,dAlemberts cursory discussion of the literary essay is indicative of the extent to whichthe essay is a genre unbound by formal rules of composition and undefined bycontemporary poetics.30 This generic fluidity and heterogeneity is reflected indAlemberts article:

Ce mot [essai] employ dans le titre de plusieurs ouvrages,a diffrentes acceptions; il se dit ou des ouvrages danslesquels lauteur traite ou effleure diffrens sujets, telsque les essais de Montaigne, ou des ouvrages dans lesquelslauteur traite un sujet particulier, mais sans prtendrelapprofondir, ni lpuiser, ni enfin le traiter en formeet avec tout le dtail et toute la discussion que la matirepeut exiger. Un grand nombre douvrages modernes portentle titre dessai; est-ce modestie de la part des auteurs? Est-ceune justice quils se rendent? Cest aux lecteurs en juger.

In accordance with eighteenth-century usage, the term essay regroups such varied sub-

genres as discours, enqutes, considrations, penses,andlettres. While casting itsgeneric net remarkably widely, the essay refers, primarily, to literary forms which bothdefine themselves in contradistinction to the trait, and articulate the figure of theessayist in contrast to that of the author as does Marivaux in the opening pages of hisSpectateur franais and in the Sixime Feuille which we will discuss later in thischapter.

In Marivauxs journal, the essay form seems to subsume les formes brves ofclassical moralist literature (caractres, maxims) insofar as it remains committed to thebrevity of form. The Spectateurs essays, however, reveal an aesthetics of the fragmentwhich disrupts the regularity of discourse as we shall discuss presently. The insistenceon the ideal of the formlessness of form in the opening pages of Le Spectateur franais isechoed in dAlemberts qualification of the essay as a work which takes up an area ofinquiry without le traiter en forme. Unlike the novel, for instance, which, as Lukcshas suggested in his Theory of the Novel, triumphs over the formlessness of theeveryday, the essay parallels in its form what Marivaux terms le libertinage dides;indeed, the essay gives shape to the kinetic observations and experiences of theSpectateur.31 That is to say, the essayist aims to mimic formlessness rather than totriumph over this or, in Adornos formulation, the essay proceeds methodically

30Peter France, Socit, journalisme et essai: deux spectateurstudes sur les Journauxde Marivauxed. Nicholas Cronk and Franois Moureau (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,2001), 47.31Libertinage dides, an expression used by Marivaux most remarkably in theCinquime feuille of his Spectateur franais, refers to the irregularity and movement ofthoughts: Je me sens aujourdhui dans un libertinage dides qui ne peut saccommoderdun sujet fixe (Spectateur franais, 132). Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel: AHistorico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. AnnaBostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 130.


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unmethodically.32 Resistant to the imposition of order, the essay therefore existsoutside any organization of knowledge.33 Indeed, the fluid form of the essay mimics themovement inherent in empirical observation; as Bense has asserted,

he writes essayistically who writes while experimenting,who turns his object this way and that, who questions it,

feels it, tests it, thoroughly reflects on it, attacks it fromdifferent angles, and in his minds eye collects what he hasseen, and puts into words what the object allows to be seenunder the conditions established in the course of writing.34

The essayistic enterprise accords primacy to the processes of observation, investigation,and judgment, and by its inherently discontinuous and indeterminate nature, gives shapeto the spontaneity and sinuosity of experience. As the Spectateur avows to his reader,

Je conclus donc du plus au moins, en suivant monprincipe: Oui! Je prfrerais toutes les ides fortuitesque le hasard nous a donn celles que la recherche laplus ingnieuse pourrait nous fournir dans le travail.

[] je suis n de manire que tout me devient unematire de rflexion; cest comme une philosophie detemprament que jai reue, et que le moindre objetmet en exercice. Je ne destine aucun caractre mesides; cest le hasard qui leur donne le ton.35

Relinquishing both authorial authority and subservience to literary form, the Spectateurmakes of himself the observational and textual principle of his journal (Je conclus doncdu plus au moins, en suivant mon principe).36 Extending this notion of authorialinclusivity, DAlemberts mention of the role of the essayist points to two elementswhich are central to Marivauxs writerly project inLe Spectateur franais: the modernityof the project, and its inherent publicity. Indeed, as Scott Black has suggested,

32T.W. Adorno, The Essay as Form The Adorno Reader, trans. Brian OConnor(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 101.33Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay(London: Routledge,1988), 4.34Max Bense, ber den Essay und seine ProseMerkur 1:3 (1947), 418. Cited byAdorno in The Essay as Form, 104.35Marivaux,Le Spectateur franais, 117. Let us note here the idea of a temperament thatenables one to become a particular kind of observer and describer of the modern urbanconstellation. For Diderot this will be the figure of the marginalized philosopher and forMercier, that of the observateur attentif. Marivauxs formulation, je suis n de manireque tout me devient une matire de rflexion parallels Merciers assertion that tout adroit dintresser lobservateur attentif (Du Thtre, ou nouvel essai dramatique).36Indeed, establishing a distinction between un auteurand un homme, the eponymousSpectateur relinquishes from the outset any claim to discursive authority: Lecteur, jene veux point vous tromper, et je vous avertis davance que ce nest point un auteur quevous allez lire ici [J]e ne suis point auteur, et jaurais t, je pense, fort embarrass dele devenir (12).


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representing the contingent and the new, the essay was the means by which the moderncould apprehend itself.37

In what follows, I will argue that Marivauxs Spectateur franais emerges at thegeneric confluence of the moralist, essayistic and journalistic traditions. Reworking thefragment forms common to both moralist literature and the periodical press, Marivaux

adds to this an essayistic form. The essay allows Marivaux to give shape to a publicwhich, in the wake of seismic political, social, aesthetic transformations, is defined byperpetual flux. The essay provides Marivaux with a literary form suited to his ideal offormless form, one which shall be dictated by the spontaneity of a moment and thesubjective response it wakens in the observer-narrator. Writing a shifting space,however, Marivaux has recourse to both a genre and a public platform that necessarilyinserts an element of punctual time to his project: that of the periodical. The Spectateurfranais finds at its center a seeing, writing self the critical figure of the Spectator whose project of social description is defined by the contingency of the moment and themediation of a public in the making.

Some four years prior to undertaking his project of social description in Le

Spectateur franais, Marivaux publishes in theMercure a series of letters which are nowcollected under the titleLettres sur les habitants de Paris(1717-18). In their openingpages, he writes: Il est difficile de dfinir la population de Paris, mais je vais pourtanttcher de vous en donner quelque ide. Solicited by his fictitious interlocutor, Madame***, theLettresopen in the style of the lettre galante, while quickly shifting into that ofthe lettre critique. While the narrator opens with an avowal of obedience to his mistress,neither Madame *** nor the narrators affection for his mistress stand as focal point oftheLettres; rather, it is the people of Paris who come into sharp relief: Vous avez raisonde vouloir tre instruite des moeurs et du caractre des habitants de Paris, et de tout ce quise pratique dans cet abrg du monde.38 I engage MarivauxsLettres sur les habitantsde Parishere to articulate it as a point of interval between La Bruyres characterologyand Marivauxs Spectateur franaisin order to argue that in his project of spectatorjournalism, Marivaux reappropriates both moralist and journalistic conventions in orderto stage what is carried out by, for instance, Donneau de Vis and later Addison andSteele a project of publicity.

TheLettres sur les habitants de Parisappeared from August 1717 to August 1718in the pages of theNouveau Mercurewithout having been accorded a title by Marivaux;theLettreswere indexed, however, asLes Moeurs de Paris par le Thophraste moderne.Imposing both a literary and discursive filiation between MarivauxsLettresand theTheophrastian tradition of greatest import, La Bruyres Caractres(1688) labbBuchet, editor of theNouveau Mercure, positioned theLettreswithin a literary legacy I

37Scott Black, Social and Literary Form in the SpectatorEighteenth-Century FrenchStudies33:1 (1991) 26. Interestingly, dAlembert imagines the modern project of theessay in terms of a judging public (cest aux lecteurs en juger), which in fact parallelsthe opening line of Marivauxs Spectateur franais (discussed previously): Lecteur, jene veux point vous tromper, et je vous avertis davance que ce nest point un auteur quevous allez lire ici.38Marivaux, Lettres sur les habitants de ParisJournaux et oeuvres diverseseds.Frdric Deloffre and Michel Gilot (Paris: Bordas, 1998), 9.


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argue Marivaux himself may have been writing against. While throughout MarivauxsLettres and his journalistic writing more generally he writes against authority andauthoritative judgments, his rejection of these is most explicitly argued in his refusal ofthe epitaph, Thophraste moderne. Addressing himself directly to lauteur du MercureMarivaux launches une querelle against the editor, labb Buchet:

Moi qui [ne prtends rien au gnie des hommes de cetordre]; moi qui ny peux rien prtendre; moi dont tousles petits ouvrages sont ns du caprice; moi qui, sansmembarrasser des lecteurs quils auraient, voulus mesatisfaire en les faisant, et neus dautre objet que moi-mme, je me trouve charg du poids dun nom quicompromet, avec le public, le peu que jai de forces. 39

The insistent use of the first person (repeated seven times in the above passage alone)positions Marivaux in contradistinction to the weight of a tradition that compromises bothhis authorial individuality and the public, with which he aligns himself here. N[e]s ducaprice, his Lettres are new. In this way, Marivaux refuses not only the discursive

authority of those writing in the lineage of Theophrastus (for characterology was verymuch in vogue at this moment on both sides of the Atlantic) but also the narrative form closed and complete of this discourse. Marivauxs qualification of his observations asletters rather than caractressuggests a shift in the authorship and readership heenvisions.40In his resistance to being inscribed within the classical moralist tradition,Marivaux claims that one who has autant de gnie que les hommes de cet ordre needsnot have recourse to claiming their name or to calling upon their authority. Why, then,does Marivaux claim such distance from La Bruyre? Why does he refuse this epithet ofThophraste moderne?

While theMercuredesignates MarivauxsLettresas caractres, Marivauxhimself defines both his reflections and the position of his narrator-observer in altogetherdifferent terms. The moralist tradition in which theMercureinscribes theLettresstudiedthe world in function of finite, preordained codes and reproduced these variables in anumber of closed forms caractres, maxims, portraits. Reading the social in terms offixed categories, each person and thing bore a mark a character; that is to say,everything bore a sign which made it socially visible. Classical characterology was basedon the assumption that human nature is immutable, universal, and therefore free of thecontingencies of time and place. In contrast to the closed form of the caractre, however,Marivaux proposes a form of reflection defined by its variety and indeterminacy: Jecontinue au hasard, et je finis quand il me plat. Cet ouvrage, en un mot, est la production

39Lettre crite par M. de Marivaux lauteur du Mercure in Lettres sur les habitantssur Paris, 22.40Le Nouveau Thophraste ou rflexions critiques sur les moeurs de ce sicle. Ouvragedans le got des Penses de Pascal (1700),Le Thophraste moderne, ou Nouveauxcaractres sur les moeurs(1700),Apologie de Monsieur de La Bruyre, ou Rponse lacritique des Caractres de Thophraste(1701), Ouvrage nouveau dans le got desCaractres de Thophraste et des Penses de Pascal (1697),Portraits srieux, galands etcritiques(1696), Sentiments critiques sur les Caractres de Monsieur de La Bruyre(1701).


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dun esprit libertin, qui ne se refuse rien de ce qui peut lamuser en chemin faisant. 41This declaration underscores the movement and spontaneity that define the concomittantacts of observation and of writing, generated by the narrators fancy rather than apreordained project.

This insistence on the unfolding of a narrative free of any itinerary defines

Marivauxs Lettres and indeed his journalistic writing more generally as the writingof a moment. He qualifies his reflections as contingent upon the events of the presentmoment, announcing a commitment to contemporaneity which is, indeed, thejournalistic enterprise: je commence par [parler Madame ***] des choses qui sepassaient quand je fis cette relation, Marivaux declares.42 The assertion that hisLettres represent the transcription of current events and impressions (rather than things)chemin faisant that is, in reaction to the impressions of an unforeseen moment define both the observer and his narrative as itinerant.

TheLettresreveal a preoccupation with order: the order of (the occurrence of)ones thoughts, the literary ordering of observations, but also and here, somewhatparadoxically in Marivauxs text social order, or rather orders. Expressing an ideal of

narrative form that would follow the movement of his thoughts, Marivaux declares thathe has point prtendu tablir dordre dans la distribution des sujets; cela [lui] a paru fortindiffrent, relinquinshing a project of definition.43 The urban observations of thenarrator of the Lettres presents a narrative contingent, then, upon both his fancy and thespontaneous moment: comme je nai dordre que le hasard dans cette relation, je ne feraipoint difficult de vous dire ici ce que jaurais pu vous dire ailleurs.44 In contrast to LaBruyres promise of exhaustive finitude inLes Caractres, Marivaux writes, toward theend of his letter entitled, Le Peuple, that his interlocutor is not to expect an exhaustiveportrait of les gens du peuple: ne vous attendez pas, madame, que jpuise la matire l-dessus; je nen dirai plus quun mot refusing the closed nature of the caractres, andinscribing an aperture within his narrative the space for dialogue and debate. 45Deferring the completion of his reflection, he declares to his interlocutor: une autre fois,madame, nous verrons le reste.46

I have qualified Marivauxs treatment of order as paradoxical because while heunable to categorically refuse order, he can all the while disrupt it. While articulating his

41Marivaux, Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, 9.42The use of the verbparlerrather than crirehere underscores the conversational natureof the epistle, here drawing on the conventions of both the lettre galanteand the lettrecritique. Conforming to the norms of polite sociability, but also in the spirit of dialoguerather than dissertation, the lettre galante is in fact, Scudry proposes, a conversationbetween absent persons. For more on this, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters:A Cultural History of the Enlightenment(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,1994), 143.43Marivaux,Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, 8.44Marivaux,Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, 15.45In his prefactory remarks toLes Caractres, La Bruyre promises his reader un projetde moeurs plus complet, plus fini et plus rgulier [pour] la postrit. Jean de La Bruyre,Les Caractres, ou les moeurs de ce sicle (Paris: GF, 2007), 79.46Marivaux, Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, 39.


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ideal of a formless form, he reads the urban text in terms of order; that is to say that whileMarivaux imagines the social constellation of Paris to be made up essentially of fourorders (le peuple, le bourgeois, les femmes, les [divers] esprits) his descriptions cannotcontain, define, the character of each. I would suggest Marivauxs aspirations toward anarrative order without order arise in response to a social space whose character he

qualifies as equally contingent upon time and place, as ultimately undefinable.

47

Therepresentation of le beau dsordre de la nature48is ensured by the posture of thenarrator, one whose esprit se moque de lordre.49 The observer of the people of Parisis, in fact, the organizing principle of this narrative. The first person dominates theseLettres, which serves to underscore these reflections as subjective impressions ratherthan authoritative maxims. Relinquishing all authority to judge, Marivaux insists not onthe definition of the object of knowledge itself, but rather on his observations asindividual judgments; such repeated introductory formulae as, voici la rflexion que jefais l-dessus, inscribe the observer within the frame, and thus underscore his refusal ofany position of authority. The narrative insistence the subjectivity of observation andjudgment is foregrounded by the persistence of such expressions as, je ne sais, je vous

dit, je peins, pour moi, and je regarde. Staging the act of critical socialobservation, Marivaux encourages within the pages of the Mercure hisnonprofessional readers to have faith in their personal judgment and to offer theiropinions on the question raised.50

The taxonomy of Parisiangens despritput forth in Suite des Caractres de M.de M*** is ordered analogically to a military corps: Paris fourmille de beaux esprits: ilny en eut jamais tant; mais il en est deux, peu prs comme dune arme; il y a peudofficiers gnraux, beaucoup dofficiers subalternes, un nombre inifi de soldats.51 Yetthe merits of each are probed not in function of the degree to which they conform toproscriptive poetics, but rather to the taste of a judging public.52 Indeed, Marivauxsdefinition of these literary players includes a description of the reading public; but just asthis reading public stands as tribunal of les esprits, so, too, is the reading public judged.Imaginez-vous, madame, the narrator writes,

un espace entre lexcellent et le mdiocre; cest celui[que les subalternes] occupent. Leurs ides sont

47Je naurais jamais fait, si je ne voulais rien omettre dans le portrait du gnie dupeuple, inconstant par nature, vertueux ou vicieux par accident; cest un vrai camlonqui reoit toutes les impressions des objets qui lenvironnent (Marivaux, Lettres sur leshabitants de Paris, 12).48Marivaux, LIndigent philosophe, 310.49Marivaux, LIndigent philosophe, 283.50De Jean,Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Sicle(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 60.51Marivaux, Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, 33.52Je vous aurais parl plutt dune autre sorte dauteurs, si je navais jug quilstiendraient injure de se voir au rang de ceux quon appelle beaux esprits: ce sont lesphilosophes et les gomtres. Jai quelquefois pens au peu de cas que ces messieurs-lsemblent faire des productions de sentiment et de got; aussi bien qu la distinctionavantageuse que le public fait deux (Marivaux, Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, 34).


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intermdiaires; ce nest pas que ce milieu quilstiennent soit senti de tout le monde; il nappartientquau lecteur excellent lui-mme de les y voir; et leurcaractre desprit, gnralement parlant, leur fait tour tour trop de tort et trop dhonneur: trop de tort parce

que bien des gens, machinalement connaisseurs dubeau, ne se sentant pas assez frapps du ton de leursides, les confondent avec les mdiocres: trop dhonneur,parce que bien des gens aussi, nayant quun got peusr, peu dcisif, les jugent excellents sur la foi du peu deplaisir quils prennent la lecture de leurs ouvrages.53

The narrator-observer of theLettresin fact stages this act of public and decisive judgmentwhich relies on no authority other than that of self. Indeed, a parallel is to be drawn, intheLettres, between those readers, machinalement connaisseurs du beau, and therigidity of thephilosophes gomtres. Unlike the bel esprit, architecte rather thangomtre, the philosopher proceeds by rigidity of system rather than by souplesseof

sentiment. Indeed,Le bel esprit, en un mot, est dou dune heureuse conformationdorganes, qui il doit un sentiment fin et exact de toutes leschoses quil voit ou quil imagine; il est entre ses organes etson esprit dheureux accords qui lui forment une manire depenser, dont ltendue, lvidence et la chaleur ne font quuncorps; je ne dis pas quil ait chacune de ces qualits dans touteleur force: un si grand bien est au-dessus de lhomme; maisil en a ce quil en faut pour voler une sphre dides,dont non seulement les rapports, mais la simple vue passele gomtre.54

The proliferation of social categories, and multiplication of nomenclatures, echoes theclimate of semiotic confusion which typifies the Regency moment, as discussed in theIntroduction of this dissertation. Marivauxs Lettres sur les habitants de Parisforeground the primacy of subjective perception, the description of a public in themaking, and the commitment to the moment.

By the time MarivauxsLettres sur les habitants de Parisappear in the pages oftheMercurethe public had accrued significant weight. While it is a widely acceptedtruism that the public came into virtual existence through the medium of print culture ineighteenth-century France, Donneau de Vis and theMercure Galantpropelled a certainconception of publicity which took hold in the 1670s. It will be my claim that criticaldebates about literature, as well as mutations in the configuration of aesthetic experience,

53Marivaux, Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, 33.54Le bel esprit, il est vrai, ne sest pas fait de la gomtrie une science particulire; ilnest point gomtre ouvrier, cest un architecte n, qui, mditant un difice, le voitslever ses yeux dans toutes ses parties diffrentes; il en imagine et en voit leffet totalpar un raisonnement imperceptible et comme sans progrs, lequel raisonnement pour legomtre contiendrait la valeur de mille raisonnements qui se succderaient avec lenteur(Marivaux, Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, 34).


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both engendered the relative democratization of judgment, taste, and spectatorship.Marivauxs project of social description in hisLettrespoints if not to a refusal of order at least to a disruption of this. Included within the pages of theMercure, theLettrescirculate among a critical, debating public which sees itself represented. In what followsI will argue that Marivaux reappropriates and plays on particular journalistic and

essayistic conventions in order to a provide a tableau of everyday urban life one whichis generated by a critical spectator.

Press and Publicity in Ancien Rgime France

Marivauxs rise on the journalistic scene is marked by the publication of hisLettres sur les habitants de Parisin the pages of theNouveau Mercure, as we havealready seen. Due in large part to Deloffre and Gilots 1988 editorial project, the termjournaux has come to designate Marivauxs Spectateur franais,Le Cabinet duphilosophe,LIndigent philosophe, as well as the various pieces produced for the

Mercure(theLettres contenant une aventureandLettres sur les habitants de Paris, forinstance).55 It is, however, neither historically nor generically accurate to employ theterm journal to designate this group of Marivaldian texts which by their generichybridity are difficult to categorize. For eighteenth-century usage ofjournalin fact refersto periodicals whose purpose was the dissemination of information pertaining toscientific and literary nouveautssuch as theJournal des savantsor theJournal demdecine.56 Destined for a less erudite public, the general information press wascomprised of thegazette(bi-weekly periodicity) and the mercure(monthly periodicity).The former treated mainly affairs at Court, while the latter engaged the arenas ofliterature and politics (both national and international). The periodical press was, underLouis XIV, controlled by a system of privilege; indeed, the state sponsored only threeperiodicals which ensured the diffusion of state-sanctioned information (read ideology)in the domains of politics (La Gazette), erudition and scientific progress (Le Journal dessavants), and what we might refer to as culture control (Le Mercure galant). TheMercure galantwas authorized by the state in order to rendre compte de lactualit et lamettre sous une forme socialement et idologiquement compatible avec limage duneFrance toute catholique.57

55The regrouping of these works under the rubricjournaux, a loose generic term, speaksto their generic hybridity and consequent resistance to generic classification (underlinedby the ambiguous nature of the term oeuvres diverses).56Franois Moureau, Journaux moraux et journalistes au dbut du XVIIIe sicle:Marivaux et le libertinage rocailletudes sur les Journaux de Marivauxed. NicholasCronk and Franois Moureau (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001), 25.57Franois Moureau, Journaux moraux et journalistes, 25. It should be noted that theopposition press was relegated to extra-territorial publication, almost exclusively inHolland. In contrast, the English free press had been active since 1695, at which pointrenewal of theLicensing Actwas refused. In response to the competition represented bymore active publication centers, France was forced, under the Regency, to loosen itsstronghold on the production laws pertaining to the periodical press.


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Literary criticism gradually transferred the authority to judge away from officialinstitutions and fostered lexercice diffus dun pouvoir transform en esprit critique.58Indeed, it was the act of talking about books that engendered the transformation fromsocittopublic.59 To be sure, theMercurealso played a decisive role in the generationof a new public, but also, as critics such as Merlin and DeJean have suggested, in the

democratization of readership connected, I will argue presently, to debates on thedemocratization of spectatorship (spear-headed by de Piles and Dubos, in particular, aswe shall see presently). With his publication ofLe Mercuregalants first issue in 1672,Donneau de Vis makes explicit his commitment to facilitating, in the pages of hisperiodical, public debate on literary matters by engaging his readers as active participantsas members of the republic of letters. Laying the stage for such public participation inmatters previously reserved for erudite dissertation, Doneau de Viss project ofparticipatory publicity was feared by members of the Ancients camp, most vociferouslyamong them La Bruyre, who condemned the ways in which theMercureencouragedunqualified readers to faire la critique as would a learned critic.60 Interpretation, hedeclares throughout the chapter Des Ouvrages de lesprit, should be left to the

professionals. Donneau de Vis, however, defended everyones right to judge. AsDeJean has argued,Donneau de Viss decision to use his newspaper toinvest readers with the authority to judge literary textssignaled a major turning point for criticism: from anivory tower discourse the classical age had inheritedfrom humanism and the pronouncements of scholarsspeaking for and to an audience of their colleagues,criticism began moving into the public sphere andbecoming something closer to a form of collectivejudgment. Donneau de Vis was promoting thedemocratization of criticism [and staged critical scenes]in the most public print forum available at the time.61

TheMercure, and print more generally, came to be understood as point ofmediation not just between members of this society become public, but between thepublic and the particular. Indeed, the point of intersection between public and particularis articulated in the form of epistolarity, by which Donneau de Vis invited his readers todebate on matters literary, and which will be taken up by Marivaux in his Spectateurfranais. While the case of Donneau de Vis and theMercurereveals a public culturalsphere in the making in 1670s France, Addison and Steele, with their Spectator, provide adifferent kind of model of publicity, with the Spectator figure who becomes not only aliterary but also social figure. It is in dialogue with the project of periodical publicity oftheMercureand The Spectator that I situate Marivauxs Spectateur franais. The

58Hlne Merlin,Public et littrature en France au XVIIe sicle(Paris: Belles Lettres,1994), 380.59Merlin,Public et littrature, 379.60For DeJeans discussion of La Bruyres project of publicity, seeAncients AgainstModerns, 58.61DeJean,Ancients Against Moderns, 64.


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journalistic genre, which inherently deals with the shifting surfaces of social life providesMarivaux with an established literary form which gives shape to the experience of themoment.62 Yet the conceit of Marivauxs Spectateur franaisis that its appropriation ofparticular journalistic conventions the loose leaf, periodicity, epistolarity arefictionalized, as we shall see presently. The public generated and given virtual shape by

Donneau de Vis and theMercure sees itself staged inLe Spectateur franais, whereMarivaux performs the literary and social projects of both the Mercureand Spectatortospecifically ethical ends. For the mobility of the loose leaf and capacity for circulationmakes of it both the product of the spectating, writing subject, but also makes of it achose publique.

The Spectatorof Addison and Steele,

and the Rise of Spectator Journalism

Despite the fact that its success hinges, to a large extent, on the conceit of a singlefirst-person narrator (Mr. Spectator) by whose hand each of the Spectator issues would

have been composed, The Spectatoris in fact at every level a collaborative project.Conceived of by Addison and Steele, it is the shared project of countless contributors. 63This society of sorts is mirrored in the fictional Spectator Club which Mr. Spectatorintroduces in No. 2. A group of six socially diverse men constitute Mr. Spectators ownclub.64 Mr. Spectator announces in the first Paper that he will publish a sheet full ofthoughts every morning, for the benefit of [his contemporaries]. Indeed, this is the case;for The Spectatoris published with regular periodicity. From March 1711 to December1712, one sheet is published daily, save Sundays. The reliability of The Spectatorsproduction contributed to its imbrication in the fabric of everyday (polite bourgeois)London life. The material object of the printed sheet was central in both thedissemination of the content and in the creation of actual Spectator Clubs; both mobile

62Indeed, journalism inherently deals with the changing surfaces of social life, withpublic events and political rumor, with fashions, changes in taste, and recent successes inthe arts. Michael Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form inthe Spectator Papers(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 135.63Contributors were many, and included Eustace Budgell, Laurence Eusden, lady MaryWortley Montague, Thomas Tickell, Alexander Pope, Ambrose Philips. In June 1714,Addison, with Eustace Budgell and Thomas, undertook a second series of The Spectator(Nos 556-635) without Steeles collaboration, which appeared three times per week untilDecember of that same year. Nablow has noted that these spectator club membersreappear in subsequent papers, interacting with other types yet unlike novelisticcharacters, the exist for their own sake rather than for the sake of plot. Ralph A.Nablow, The Addisonian Tradition in France: Passion and Objectivity in SocialObservation(Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1990), 49.64Wherever I see a cluster of people, I always mix with them, though I never open mylips but in my own club. He provides the portrait of the members of his Spectator Clubin No.2: Sir Roger de Cloverly, Sir Andrew Freeport, Captain Sentry, Will Honeycomb,and two men he does not refer to by name: a member of the Inner Temple and aclergyman.


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and financially accessible, the sheets constituted a focal point around which peoplecongregated in order to discuss. Conversation was, in fact, Mr. Spectators chief aim; toinfluence contemporary morals through the exercise of polite sociability (of whichconversation is, obviously, a form). It was said of Socrates, Mr. Spectator affirms,

that he brought philosophy down from heaven, to

inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to haveit said of me, that I have brought philosophy out ofclosets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwellin clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables, and in coffee-houses.

The readership of The Spectatoris, by No.10 (Monday, March 12, 1711), established atleast according to Mr. Spectator, who reports in his Paper of that day to be greatlysatisfied to hear this great city inquiring day by day after these [his] papers, andreceiving [his] morning lectures with a becoming seriousness and attention. Hispublisher, Mr. Spectator writes, assures him that there are three thousand sheetsdistributed daily, and twenty readers to one sheet bringing his readership to

approximately 60, 000 daily.Indeed, by virtue of its wide circulation and avid readership, The Spectatorsucceeded in assuming the role of arbiter, regulator, and prescriber in relation tobourgeois taste and ideals.65 The spectatorial essays take as their focus diverse elementsof a predominantly urban landscape, the commerce of its inhabitants and the mores of themiddle-class.66 As Mackie has noted, The Spectator, like The Tatlerbefore it, arepreoccupied with the stuff of everyday life in eighteenth-century England: dressing anddueling; visiting and conversing; reading and writing; love, courtship, and marriage;education and religion; commerce and finance; business and pleasure.67 The Spectatoressays, themselves commodities, aim not simply to itemize or comment on the things thatconstitute everyday urban life, but rather to become imbricated in its very fabric in orderto regulate and reshape it.68 It therefore played a crucial role in the determination andidentification of a newly recognized cultural class. The novelty of the Addisonianproject, as suggested by Habermas, was that for the first time the public was representedto itself in an unmediated way: in The Spectator,

the public held up a mirror to itself; it did not ye

Moralistes of Modern Life: the Subjectivization of Moralist Discourse in Eighteenth-Century France

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