Abstract
In the scholarly library at the end of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as represented by the private studies of Montaigne and La Bruyère and that great public enterprise entrusted by the Revolution to Chamfort, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the core remained the same collection of humanist classics, that bore witness to the intellectual and political empires of Greece and Rome. Writers in such a library might well feel that having a hold on the classical inheritance amounted to having a hold on the world, as texts continued to address one another across that continuum. But as Renaissance evolved towards Revolution, the context of the library changed radically, and with it, the nature of what one text could say to another. The classical originals were no longer alone on the shelf: they addressed the eighteenth-century reader from alongside those other very different texts they had already helped generate within the French context. In the landscape outside the study stood new readers with other preconceptions. When modern critics describe culture as intertextual, they mean that it is constantly woven and rewoven not only out of the interchanges of ideas in books but also out of the social and historical discourses out of which books and ideas are generated.
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Notes
For intertextuality see Judith Still and Michael Worton, Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), especially the Introduction.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (New York: Social Studies Association, 1944), trans. John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso Editions, 1979);
Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979);
Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), trans. Frederick Lawrence, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987).
For a discussion of the relationship of Foucault and Habermas to the Enlightenment see Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).
For overviews of Enlightenment thought see Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1932), trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951);
Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne (Paris: Boivin, 1935); La Pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle: de Montesquieu à Lessing (Paris: Boivin, 1946);
Jacques Roger, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963);
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols (London: Wildwood House, 1967, 1973).
On Voltaire see Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (Harlow: Longman, 1969);
René Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire (Paris: Nizet, rev. edn, 1969);
Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969).
See Ira O. Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, and London: Oxford University Press, 1938);
Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Régime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), Édition et sédition: l’univers de la littérature clandestine au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).
See Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu, a Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961);
Jean Starobinski, Montesquieu par lui-même (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963).
See Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972);
Peter France, Diderot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Galvano Della Volpe, Rousseau e Marx e altri saggi di critica meterialistica (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1956), trans. John Fraser, Rousseau and Marx (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978). See also
C. E. Vaughan, The Political Writings of Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915);
Ronald Grimsley, Rousseau and the Religious Quest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968);
Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris: J. Vrin, 2nd edn 1970);
Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971);
Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (London: Allen Lane, 1983), and The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754–62 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
See Jean Ehrard, L’Idée de nature en France dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981).
See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
See Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Manfred Tietz (eds), Lectures de Raynal. ‘L’Histoire des deux Indes’ en Europe et en Amérique au XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991).
For a short account of the development of economic theory in the period, see the chapter ‘“Moeurs”, “Lois” and Economies’, in Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, vol. I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 465–515.
See Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1755–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979); ‘Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie’, in The Great Cat Massacre (USA: Basic Books, and Great Britain: Allen Lane, 1984; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
See also John Lough, The ‘Encyclopédie’ (Harlow: Longman, 1971).
See, on theatre, Henri Lagrave, Le Théâtre et le public à Paris de 1715–1750 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972);
Martine de Rougement, La Vie théâtrale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris and Geneva: Champion/Slatkine, 1988);
Pierre Larthomas, Le Théâtre en France au XVIIIe siècle, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). On Marivaux see
Henri Coulet and Michel Gilot, Marivaux, un humanisme expérimental (Paris: Larousse, 1973);
on Beaumarchais, René Pomeau, Beaumarchais, ou la bizarre destinée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987).
John Lough, Writer and Public in France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
See Angus Martin (ed. and intro.), Anthologie du conte en France 1750–99: philosophes et cœurs sensibles (Paris: UGE, 1981).
Robert Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’, in The Great Cat Massacre (USA: Basic Books, and Great Britain: Allen Lane, 1984; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
See Georges May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle (New Haven: Yale University Press/Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). See, for the development of the French novel,
Henri Coulet, Le Roman jusqu’à la Révolution, 2 vols (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967–8). See also
Peter Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon, Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969);
Vivienne Mylne, The Eighteenth-Century French Novel: Techniques of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1981). On individual authors see Jean Sgard, Prévost romancier (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1989);
A. and Y. Delmas, À la recherche des ‘Liaisons dangereuses’ (Paris: Mercure de France, 1964);
Laurent Versini, Laclos et la tradition: essai sur les sources et la technique des ‘Liaisons dangereuses’ (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968).
William Ray, Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social Identity in the Eighteenth-Century French and English Novel (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 9.
See, on the situation of women in the eighteenth century, Samia I. Spencer (ed.), French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984);
Jennifer Birkett, ‘“A Mere Matter of Business”: Marriage, Divorce and the French Revolution’, in Elizabeth M. Craik (ed.), Marriage and Property (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984);
Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989);
Lynn Hunt (ed.), Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). See, on women writers,
Joan Hinde Stewart, Gynographs: French Novels by Women of the Late Eighteenth Century (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).
On the French-English connection see F. C. Green, Minuet: A Critical Survey of French and English Literary Ideas in the Eighteenth Century (London: Dent, 1935);
H. W. Streeter, The Eighteenth-Century English Novel in French Translation: A Bibliographical Study (New York: Publications of the Institute of French Studies, 1936).
Béatrice Didier, Écrire la Révolution: 1789–99 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). On the ‘domestication’ of the French Revolution, see
Jack Hayward, After the French Revolution: Six Critics of Democracy and Nationalism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), which includes studies of Joseph de Maistre, Saint-Simon, Constant, Tocqueville, Proudhon and Blanqui.
See, on the press and publishing, Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (eds), Revolution in Print: The Press in France 1775–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); Lough, Writer and Public in France;
Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France (1789–99) (Durham, USA: Duke University Press, 1990).
See, on the orators, Didier, Écrire la Révolution; essays by Philippe Roger, Peter France and Eric Walter in John Renwick (ed.), Language and Rhetoric of the Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).
See Graham Rodmell, French Drama of the Revolutionary Years (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).
See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung; Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971);
Gilbert Lély, Vie du marquis de Sade (Paris: Mercure de France, rev. edn, 1989);
Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, Sade et l’écriture de l’orgie (Paris: Nathan, 1991). See also the prefatory essays by various scholars in
D.-A.-F. de Sade, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Du social au mental: une analyse ethnographique’, in Histoire de la France rurale, eds Georges Duby and Armand Wallon, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1975);
Mark Poster, The Utopian Thought of Restif de la Bretonne (New York: New York University Press, 1971);
Pierre Testud, Restif de la Bretonne et la création littéraire (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1977).
Published in Élisabeth Badinter (ed.), Condorcet, Prudhomme, Goyomar … Paroles d’hommes (1790–93) (Paris: POL éditeur, 1989), pp. 174–5. On women in the Revolution see
Paule-Marie Duhet (ed.), Cahiers de doléances des femmes et autres textes (Paris: des femmes, 1981); Les Femmes dans la Révolution française (Paris: EDHIS, 1982);
Élisabeth Badinter (ed.), A. L. Thomas, Diderot, Madame d’Épinay … Qu’est-ce qu’une femme? (Paris: POL éditeur, 1989);
Élisabeth Roudinesco, Madness and Revolution: The Lives and Legends of Théroigne de Méricourt (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989);
Olwen H. Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
See Gabriel de Broglie, Madame de Genlis (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1985).
See Simone Balayé, Madame de Staël: lumières et liberté (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1979);
Marie-Claire Vallois, Fictions féminines: Mme de Staël et les voix de la Sibylle (Saratoga, USA: ANMA Libri, 1987);
Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo (eds), Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991);
Simone Balayé, Madame de Staël — écrire, lutter, vivre (Geneva: Droz, 1994).
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© 1997 Jennifer Birkett and James Kearns
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Birkett, J., Kearns, J. (1997). Enlightenment and Revolution, 1680–1815. In: A Guide to French Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25758-4_4
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