French Literature: A Very Short Introduction by John D. Lyons

Author:John D. Lyons [Lyons, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Europe, France, French, General, French literature, Literary Criticism, History, European
ISBN: 9780199568727
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-05-12T18:30:00+00:00

6. Napoleon Bonaparte throwing a book of the Marquis de Sade into the fire, in a drawing attributed to P. Cousturier (1885)

The liberation from revealed religion that permitted the Revolution to found a state on human reason was taken by Sade as the opportunity for complete freedom in the service of pleasure in a world in which the strong use and destroy the weak One of the heroine's persecutors calmly explains the process by which primitive men invented a transcendent being to explain natural phenomena that frightened them. In its structure, Justine combines the loose, open-ended picaresque plot with the atmosphere of the gothic novel. Justine as heroine is a female Candide, but where Candide represents common sense at last freeing itself from a doctrine that is obviously ridiculous, in Justine, more daringly, the central tenets of religion and the traditional state are presented as absurd, while Justine tries vainly to resist on behalf of religion and virtue. In a dedicatory letter, Sade presents the triumph of vice as a literary innovation, saying that novels almost always show good rewarded and evil punished, but:

to show an unfortunate woman wandering from one calamity to another, a plaything of wickedness, target of every debauchery, exposed to the most barbarous and monstrous appetites [...] with the goal of drawing from all that one of the most sublime lessons of morality that mankind has every received - this is [... ] to reach the goal by a road little travelled until now.

Sade's atheistic libertinism was always out of step with the Revolution as a whole, with its emphasis on civic virtue and equality (both in short supply in Sade's novels) and became more so as time passed. Arrested by Napoleon under the Consulate, Sade died in the Charenton mental hospital just before the Bourbon Restoration.

From `heroes' to great men (and women)

`Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be based solely on what is useful to all' (Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et egau,x en droits. Les distinctions sociales ne peuvent etre fondees que sur l'utilite commune), proclaims the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (La Declaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen, 26 August 1789). This brief and eloquent official document, adopted by the National Constituent Assembly, demonstrates that the central issue of the struggle that lasted from 1789 until the Bourbon Restoration in 1814 was the status of each individual man (two years later Olympe de Gouges pointed out the omission of women's rights in her proposal for a Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne - her text was rejected and she died on the guillotine in 1793).

Figaro had prefigured this demand for equality, and Justine suffered as eternal victim of an aristocratic libertinism. Looking forward and backwards from these representative literary figures, we can see (with help from Beaumarchais's Moderate Letter) that all works reveal ideas, usually implicit and taken for granted, about which people are worth writing about, about whose stories are important.

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