Why “sentimentalism” requires a grain of salt: Hints from early works by Robespierre and Marat

The conference on “Terrorism, Martyrdom, and Religion” held at Notre Dame’s London Centre on 7-9 April 2011 was a splendid event, especially for the panel composed of David Andress (Univ. of Portsmouth), Dominic Janes (Birbeck College, London), Greg Kucich (Notre Dame), Ron Schechter (William and Mary) and myself, where literary, political, and historical forays into the Reign of Terror were framed by methodologies ranging from queer theory to the “new positivism.” One issue was raised and remains unresolved, however, regarding our understanding of “sentimentalism,” that is, the gushing, emotional style which dominated in the 1790s and notably in revolutionary polemics.

Most critics take sentimentalism seriously; indeed a cottage industry in scholarship has developed around the concept. But what if we were to think about the continuity between what writers imagined themselves to be before the Revolution and how that self-fashioning changed during the upheaval? In most works on the Revolution, 1789 is the point at which things began. But people did not experience life like that. How can we reconstruct the revolutionary mentality so that it embraces earlier modes of thinking from the hierarchical, Bourbon court to the egalitarian Republic which was adopted with such fanfare in 1792? A look at the deputies’ writings pre-1789 may wield some answers.

In Maximilien Robespierre’s Eloge de Gresset (1785), he defends the author (a minor poet of the rococo style) against those cynics who did not believe his repentance. Gresset’s notoriety derived from two highly publicized scandals: 1) his saucy comments on the Jesuits and their subsequent expulsion of him from the order, and 2) his withdrawal from le monde. Voltaire flippantly made light of his disgrace with the comment: “Gresset se trompe, il n’est pas si coupable” (Gresset is wrong; he is not that guilty). Robespierre’s Eloge cuts both ways: he claims to admire the poet’s verve while implicitly denouncing his immorality, as if to rebut Voltaire and say: “Gresset is right; he really was that guilty.” It seems to me that this persona–of the defender who feels the shame of the victim and yet punishes him for it–may help us understand the incongruous Virtue of Jacobinism. But more interesting is Robespierre’s praise of badinage. Did he really like the amorous battle of wits? Or was his praise of badinage motivated by other forces, such as a desire to advance his own standing among the aristocratic arbiters of taste?

Jean-Paul Marat’s profile in his Eloge de Montesquieu (1785) implies a similar defense of dissimulation. He expounds at length on Montesquieu’s irony in De l’esprit des lois and shows how a literal reading of Montesquieu’s works misses the point. Montesquieu was not only a serious magistrate, he was also an adroit stylist, Marat claims, and he wielded the “bitter laughter” of irony with aplomb. Montesquieu’s treatise was no simple diatribe against prejudice, but rather a subtle dig at the unenlightened and their pig-headed ways of thinking.

A few years later, these men forcefully disassociated themselves from the clever badinage of the Bourbon court. They pretended to be taken seriously as republicans, when just a few years earlier they endorsed a highly exclusionary mode of witty banter and ironic ridicule. Surely some witnesses would have remembered their earlier persona, and been taken aback by the new rhetoric of sincerity that Robespierre and Marat affected so publicly in the 1790s.

Perhaps we need to interpret the theatrical earnestness of “sentimentalism” with a grain of salt… and remember the supreme values of wit, banter, and clever argumentation that dominated upper-class French society during the 1780s. As Montesquieu noted some-50 years earlier, equality is a much-beloved virtue, but it is scarcely realized here in society: “Les hommes naissent bien dans l’égalité, mais ils n’y sauraient demeurer.” Could Robespierre and Marat really have believed what they wrote? Should we?

Lucien Bonaparte’s La Tribu indienne: A protomarxist allegory?

Lucien Bonaparte is best known as Napoleon’s brother and a one-time statesman under the Consulate but, as this re-edition of La Tribu indienne (1799) reminds us, French politicos have long dabbled in literature. Georges Pompidou published an Anthologie de la poésie française (1961); Valérie Giscard d’Estaing has published two novels—Le Passage (1994) and La Princesse et le président (2009). The unhappy fact remains, however, that neither Giscard’s nor Lucien Bonaparte’s literary works have done much for their political reputations. The value, such as it is, lies elsewhere.

To our mind, the most interesting aspect of the romantic tragedy behind La Tribu indienne is its allegory of economic determinism. As Karl Marx wrote in 1859, “The mode of production in material life determines the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Bonaparte’s hero Edouard is primarily a trader avid for gain, so his actions—even the ultimate abandonment of pregnant Stellina—must be read in light of economic rationale. While the primitive Indian girl is tortured by useless remorse and nostalgia, the British merchant keeps his eyes firmly on the future. Would any modern investment banker have acted otherwise?

Cecilia Feilla’s introduction outlines a number of other interpretations for La Tribu indienne and places the novel in a rich literary tradition of sentimental exoticism. See our book review, forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Lucien Bonaparte, La Tribu indienne, ou, Edouard et Stellina, ed. Cecilia A. Feilla. London : Modern Humanities Research Assoc., 2006.

Pity and its adversaries

Villette, “Something to Reflect Upon for the Crowned Jugglers,” 1793.

Is emotion political?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined pity as a profoundly human emotion.

Why did revolutionary thought associate pity with weakness, manipulation, and deceit?

I am currently preparing a lecture,  « La Pitié et ses adversaires :  La politique de l’émotion dans les écrits révolutionnaires» to be presented at « Emotions et puissance de la littérature » conference at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, Paris, June 12, 2009.

The lecture builds upon my research on the pamphlets, fictions, and correspondence on the King’s demise following his ill-fated attempt to flee the country in 1791, and considers these materials in the light of the history of “emotives” outlined in William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge UP, 2001) and “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (June 1977).

The fall of Louis XVI is an excellent case to test Reddy’s claims that 1) sincerity is culturally managed; and that 2) “emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power” (NF, 111; “AC,” 335).  My study explores how authors described and criticized who could be a rightful recipient of pity at three key moments in the political history of the French Revolution:  1791, 1800-01, and 1803.  Not only was the king’s  sincerity and legitimacy radically challenged after he was arrested in June 1791 at Varennes, he also lost the right to people’s pity.  Most intriguing from a literary perpective is the contrast  between Regnault-Warin’s novel, Le Cimetière de la Madeleine, and the king’s correspondence (1803, ed. Helen-Maria Williams).  Whereas the former presents an explicitly sympathetic reaction to the king’s fate, mirroring through a number of mise en abyme techniques the desired reader’s response, the latter repeatedly challenges the king’s claims of sincerity and efforts to elicit pity with an ironic series of editorial ”commentaries.” 

Death of Louis XVI, King of France

In updating this message tonight, after posting the ”Weird Liaisons” article earlier today, I was struck by my own insensitivity to the man known as Louis XVI.  Surely the decapitated head above is just as offensive as the Dolce & Gabbana imagery of bloody victims?   How quick we are to dismiss a person–because of his or her status, creed, or color–as unfitting of basic human pity and kindness.  I have thus posted this sympathetic English icon of Louis’s execution to render homage to another facet of his memory.  Tyrant or timid, dull or deliberate, Louis XVI was no monster, and his memory deserves a more dignified tribute than Villette’s grotesquerie.