Abstract
Henri Grégoire’s Mémoires have never been included in lists of great French autobiographies. Written around 1808, but first published some fifteen years after the author’s death in 1831, Grégoire’s text lacks the imaginative qualities of a literary classic, and it is too episodic to constitute a real source of insights into the politics of the revolutionary period.1 Scholars writing specifically on Grégoire have of course made use of his Mémoires, although they have pointed out that the work does not always represent his activities accurately;2 other revolutionary historians have generally ignored them. My purpose here is neither to try to elevate Grégoire’s recollections to a loftier literary status, nor to evaluate their factual accuracy, but to use them to elucidate some questions about the connection between the revolutionary experience and the writing of first-person narrative.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The first edition of Grégoire’s Mémoires was edited by the nineteenth-century republican Hyppolite Carnot in 1847. References in this paper are to a more recent edition: Henri Grégoire, Mémoires de Grégoire, ancien evêque de Blois, député à l’Assemblée Constituante et à la Convention Nationale, Sénateur, membre de l’Institut, suivies de la Notice historique sur Grégoire d’Hyppolyte Carnot, éd. Jean-Michel Leniaud (Paris: Editions de Santé, 1989).
See, for example, Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire, 1787–1831 (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1971), p. xiv.
Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 4.
Henri Peyre, Literature and Sincerity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 205.
James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 38.
Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. xii.
Philippe Lejeune, L’Autobiographie en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), p. 10.
Daniel Roche, “Bruch und Kontinuität im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution: Der Beitrag der Autobiographien zur Präzisierung der politischen Visionen,” in Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt, eds., Die Französische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewusstseins (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1988), p. 380.
Jacques Guilhaumou, La Langue politique et la Révolution française (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989), p. 159.
Sergio Luzzatto, II Terrore ricordato: Memoria e tradizione dell’ esperienza rivoluzionario (Genoa: Marietti, 1988), p. 8.
Necheles, Grégoire, p. 274.
On Grégoire’s role in creating the notion of a national artistic patrimony, see Anthony Vidler, “The Paradoxes of Vandalism: Henri Grégoire and the Thermidorian Discourse on Historical Monuments,” in this volume, pp. 129-156.
See, for example, the essays in Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters, eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 170.
Lynn Hunt has emphasized this characteristic of the Revolution in a key passage of her Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 27.
The fact that David’s portrayal of his gesture was not factually accurate — the monk, Dom Gerle, whom Grégoire was shown embracing, had not been present on 20 June 1789 — does not seem to have bothered him. Warren Roberts, Jacques-Louis David: Revolutionary Artist (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 52. On the reasons for David’s abandonment of the project, see ibid., p. 58.
On the different “plots” used to explain the Revolution, see Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, pp. 34-37.
On the significance of the model of the bon curé, see Timothy Tackett, Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 168-169.
This aspect of the Jansenist tradition has been brought out particularly in the work of Dale Van Kley.
Among the few hints of his interest in apocalypticism is the inclusion of the English millenarian Vaughn, author of a book entitled Of Twelve Scriptural Prophecies, in a long list of men of letters with whom he corresponded. (66-67) Maistre’s earliest meditations on the divine significance of the Revolution were written in the 1790s, but his work was not known in France at the time when Grégoire was writing his Mémoires.
Peyre, Sincerity, p. 205.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Popkin, J.D. (2000). Grégoire as Autobiographer. In: Popkin, J.D., Popkin, R.H. (eds) The Abbé Grégoire and his World. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 169. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4070-6_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4070-6_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5790-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4070-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive