FRENCH LITERATURE: THE 18TH CENTURY

The 18th century: from Louis XIV to the Revolution The Enlightenment The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch; the date of 1715 is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. But the beginnings of critical thought go back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions. The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic dogma and, beyond that, upon rationalist ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was constructive, however, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas alike for the 18th century. Bayle's contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes's wake to make knowledge, especially of science, more accessible to the educated layman. His Entretiens sur la pluralit des mondes (1686; A Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe in simple terms, the author expounding his lessons with characteristic gallantry to an attractive marquise on six moonlit evenings in the park of her chteau. The Histoire des oracles (1687) complements this popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth. Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of evil, which seemed to him a mystery in which philosophical speculation was gratuitous and understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows. Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error, arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human love of mystery. Though both thinkers shared a pessimistic view of human nature, they also saw ways in which the human condition could be improved. The Baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a liberal approach to the world fitting in with a pluralist view of society. His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) were at once successful and established his reputation. Purporting to be letters written to and by two Persians visiting France, they depict a contemporary Paris full of vitality and movement but precariously vulnerable to possible despotism. His interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the Considrations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur dcadence (1734; Reflections on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decline of the Romans). To explain Rome's greatness and decline, Montesquieu invokes the notion of an esprit gnral (general spirit), a set of secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the seeds of De l'esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of Laws), the preparation of which took 14 years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its insistence upon the need, in whatever form of society, to maintain liberty as prime object of concern. Voltaire (Franois-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (172628) led to the Lettres philosophiques (1734), which, taking England as a polemical model of philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, and respectful patronage of arts and science, offered a program for a whole civilization. In later years Voltaire's onslaught upon the power of the Roman Catholic Church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; The Philosophical Dictionary), the vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most notably Le Sicle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756; Essay on Customs), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of metaphysical optimism (all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds) that reveals a world of horrors and folly. In Candide's characters the instinct of survival remains uppermost, however, and provides a ray of hope in an otherwise sombre scene. Candide at last renounces absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of cultivating his garden. The conte (tale) called L'Ingnu (1767) continued this lesson; Voltaire turned from metaphysics to social satire upon the corrupt French government (set with prudence retrospectively in Louis XIV's reign). Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire's writings in his last 20 years, as he protested against such outrages as the executions, religiously motivated, of Jean Calas and the Chevalier de La Barre. Another universal genius of the age was Denis Diderot. He occupied a somewhat less exalted place, however, essentially because most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his encylopaedic range is undeniable. Theorist of the bourgeois drama, author of the greatest French antinovel of the century (Jacques le fataliste, 1796), and the first great French art critic (Salons), Diderot seized on the vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the unexpected. Jacques le fataliste captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing is ever quite clear-cut or totally under control. Jacques represents it suitably by believing in fatalism yet acting with decisiveness when he wishes, just as if he possessed free will. Diderot's interest in the plasticity of matter, where categories such as animal, vegetable, and mineral never seemed as distinct as conventional thought suggested, combined with an interest in biology, nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rve de d'Alembert (written 1769, published 1830; The Dream of d'Alembert). This work is written in the characteristic form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt firm answers. In his own day Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopdie, a vast work in 17 folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert inaugurated the undertaking in 1751, and Diderot edited alone from 1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of knowledge rather than a radically polemical enterprise, the Encyclopdie is, however, the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating information to improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot's words from his key article Encyclopdie, change the common way of thinking. Drama Tragedy and the survival of Classical form Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire, which dominated the Comdie-Franaise from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pity reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abb Dubos, should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire's Zare (1732) does just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine, torn as she is between the religion of her French Catholic forefathers and the Muslim faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. Such pathos, often touching, is not the stuff of great tragedy. The Middle Ages Early Old French literature The origins of the French language By 50 BC, when the Roman occupation of Gaul under Julius Caesar was complete, the region's population had been speaking Gaulish, a Celtic language, for some 500 years. Gaulish, however, gave way to the conquerors' speech, Vulgar Latin, which was the spoken form of the non-Classical Latin used by the soldiers and settlers throughout the Roman Empire. In different regions, local circumstances determined Vulgar Latin's evolution into the separate tongues that today constitute the family of Romance languages, to which French belongs. This linguistic development was speeded by the empire's collapse under the impact of the 5th-century barbarian invasions. Gaul was overrun by Germanic tribes, in the north principally by the Franks (who gave France its name), and by the Visigoths in the south. But the Latin speech survived: it not only was the language of the majority of the population but also was backed by its associations with the old Roman culture and with the new Christian religion, which used Low Latin, its own form of the Roman tongue. Although it retained relatively few Celtic words, the developing language had its vocabulary greatly enriched by Germanic borrowings, and its phonetic development was influenced by Germanic speech habits. The 9th-century Norse incursions and settlement of Normandy, however, left few traces in the language. The Romans had introduced written literature, and until the 12th century almost all documents and other texts were in Latin. The first text in recognizable Old French is the Romance version of the Oath of Strasbourg (842), an oath sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald against their brother Lothair in the partitioning of the empire of their grandfather Charlemagne. A German version also survives. Only a few other texts, all religious in content, survive from before about 1100. By about the 9th century a broad division had emerged between the speech of the north of Gaul, which had suffered most from the invasions, and that in the more stable, cultured, and linguistically conservative south. The tongue spoken to the north of an imaginary line running roughly from the Gironde River to the Alps was the langue d'ol (the future French), and to the south was spoken the langue d'oc (Provenal or Occitan), terms derived from the respective expressions for yes. Vulgar Latin's development had not been uniform throughout the area of the langue d'ol; and, by the time a recognizable Old French had developed, various dialects had evolved, notably Francien (in the le-de-France, the region around Paris), Picard, Champenois, and Norman. From the latter stemmed Anglo-Norman, the French used alongside English in Britain, especially among the upper classes, from even before the Norman Conquest (1066) until well into the 14th century. Each dialect had its own literature. But for various reasons the status of Francien increased until it achieved dominance in the Middle French period (after 1300); and from it Modern French developed. Old French was a fine literary medium, enlarging its vocabulary from other languages such as Arabic, Provenal, and Low Latin. It had a wide phonetic range and, until the decay of its two-case system inherited from Latin, had syntactic flexibility. The context and nature of French medieval literature Whatever Classical literature survived the upheavals of the early Middle Ages was preserved, along with pious Latin works, in monastic libraries. By encouraging scholars and writers, Charlemagne had increased the Latin heritage available to educated vernacular authors of later centuries. He also left his image as a great warrior-emperor to stimulate the legend-making process that generated the Old French epic. There one finds exemplified the feudal ideal, evolved by the Franks to combat social fragmentation and insecurity. The warrior's code of morality, founded on loyalty, bolstered the entire political system. As stability increased under the Capetians, windows opened onto other cultures and elements: that of the Arabs in Spain and, with the Crusades, the East; the advanced Provenal civilization; and the legends of Celtic Britain. The Roman Catholic Church grew in wealth and power, and by the 12th century its schools were flourishing, training generations of clerks in the liberal arts. Society itself became less embattled, and the nobility became more leisured and sophisticated. The muscularity of the epics was tempered by the social graces of courtoisie: generosity, modesty, and consideration for others, especially the weak and distressed, and with love regarded no longer as a weakness in a knight but as an objective inspiring and not hindering chivalry. By the 13th century an additional source of patronage for writers and performers was the bourgeoisie of the developing towns. New genres emerged, and, as literacy increased, prose found favour as a less frivolous medium than verse. There is in much of the literature a rather irreverent spirit, a sometimes cynical realism, yet, at the same time, a countercurrent of deep spirituality. In the 14th and 15th centuries France was ravaged by war, plague, and famine. Alongside a preoccupation in literature with death and damnation appeared a contrasting refinement of expression and sentiment bred of nostalgia for the courtly, chivalric ideal. At the same time a new humanistic learning anticipated the coming Renaissance. Before 1200 almost all French literature had been in verse and had been communicated orally to its public. The jongleurs, professional minstrels, travelled and performed their extensive repertoires, which ranged from epics to the lives of saints (the lengthy romances were not designed for memorization), sometimes using mime and musical accompaniment. Seeking an immediate impact, most poets made their poems strikingly visual in character, more dramatic than reflective, and revealed psychology and motives through action and gesture. Verbal formulas and clichs were used by the better poets as an effective narrative shorthand, especially in the epic. Such oral techniques left their mark throughout the period.