Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt’s Robinson Crusoe (1805)

Abstract

The French for a gamp is ‘un robinson’ and, if we must thank Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit for the former term, we should be duly grateful to Charles Guilbert de Pixerecourt’s Robinson Crusoé of 1805 for the latter.¹ Visitors to Paris travelling on the métro will no doubt also have noticed a tribute to Defoe’s hero in illuminated signs bearing the words ‘Sceaux-Robinson’. What we see here are so many reminders that in the nineteenth century an enterprising restaurateur decided to add to the attractions of the ‘commune’ of Plessis, a place then much favoured by Parisians for their Sunday outings to the nearby countryside, and had a luncheon room erected on planks high up above the surrounding land in the branches of a great tree. What is interesting for present purposes is that, looking for an appropriate name, he should have hit on that of ‘L’Arbre de Robinson’, that the public responded so warmly that his example was soon copied by others, and that before long the very spot came to be called ‘Robinson’. It is some indication, not only of the force of an example of nineteenth-century brand-image creation, but also, as with the familiar expression designating a large umbrella, of the eminence Robinson Crusoe had come to claim in the French popular literary pantheon.