Clément Weiss and Camille Noûs : « The Street versus The People. Juvenile Wrath and anti popular Mobilization in Paris in Year III »
The period designated as « thermidorian » which went from the summer of 1794 till the autumn of 1795 appears, in Paris, to be a singular moment of reconfiguration in the relationship between two entities that gave birth to the revolutionary process – the people and the street – as the street became the theatre of expression and of repression privileged by groups hostile to popular movement. ‘Sans-culottes’ lost the control they exercised in the streets which were now manned by groups of young angry men bent on taking their revenge on such a mob. Between the thermidorian Convention, desirous of taking over this reaction-ary agitation so as to make it the armed branch of its antipopu-lar politics, and the young men who profited from the impunity that they had been offered, a strange game of dupes opened up which lasted until the beginnings of the ‘royalist’ insurrection of 13 vendémiaire an IV (5 October 1795).
THE PEOPLE IN ANGER 901 Martial Poirson and Camille Noûs : « The Farewell to Arms.
Disarming Women’s Bodies during the French Revolution » The French Revolution promised to go along with a vast movement of female emancipation in establishing the place of women within a public sphere from which they had long been banned. The virulence of the parliamentary controversy about arming women was the result of a strategy of reassigning gender roles and of sexual discrimination in military activity. By law, if not de facto, it brushed aside for a long time the revolutionary citizens who took part in movements of popular insurrection and also on the battle fields. And yet the figure of the female fighter became a veritable obsession in the symbolic imagina-tion, contributing to the perpetuation of a misogynous cultural unconscious. Stigmatization of the firebrand, intended to exhort the masses to cruelty, and the caricature of the virago, supposed to have appropriated the attributes of masculinity and grounded in an eroticization of a troubled gender confusion, testify to a prevailing fantasy: that of the inversion of power relations between men and women.
Véronique Laporte : « “C’était la justice du peuple”.
The Elysian Fields as Popular Tribunal
during the Longchamp Promenade (1770-1830) »
Under the Ancien Régime and well into the nineteenth century, the Longchamp promenade was an unmissable attraction for all Parisians. At this event, luxurious coaches were seen converging on the square of Place Louis XV, going through the central avenue of the Elysian Fields (Champs-Elysées), then heading towards the wood of Boulogne, where they ended up sauntering up and down the avenues which surrounded Longchamp Abbey. While the elegant ones hoped for a show, the people gathered on the Elysian Fields were keen to see through the cracks of the veneer and denounce, at times angrily, the participants’ s ludicrous or indecent behaviour. Although toler-ance towards the presence of « loud critics » evolved with the various political regimes, mud-slinging never ceased to be integral to such a social event.
Francesco Toto : « “Recouvrée à la pointe de l’épée”.
People and Revolt in Discours sur l’inégalité »
The article examines whether or not Rousseau in Discours sur l’inégalité leaves a place for popular resistance as being legit-imate and efficient when up against constituted powers. Taking on board the underlying tensions of Rousseau’s conception of the people, it first highlights the dual conception of politics which is conveyed throughout the Discours, at once calamity and salvation.
Then it turns to passages that apparently subsume rebellion under the first of these conceptions as a means to deepen corruption.
Lastly it shows how a reintegration of these passages within their context allows for a questioning of such reductive thinking. Thus, the article shows that the possibility of a legitimate and victorious revolt is problematically but intensely present in the Discours.
Spyridon Tegos and Camille Noûs : « Demo-cracy and Merito-cracy in Perspective. The Middle Classes, Manners and Political Regimes in Adam Smith, Guizot and Tocqueville »
In the wake of Scottish liberalism, exemplified by Adam Smith, French postrevolutionary liberalism took a keen interest in the middle classes. The abolition of privileges following on from the French Revolution transformed the Scottish legacy without cancelling out altogether the conundrums about meritocracy and the middle classes, alternately praised for being meritocratious and vilified for being a servile mimicry of the aristocratic court-ship. The (re)introduction of Adam Smith in France, from Sophie de Grouchy to Tocqueville, took place against a backdrop of tran-sitional shifts from aristocratic politeness towards a civility associ-ated with the middle classes on the basis of a moderate republican-ism. In a democratic regime, manners betray, at another level, the antagonisms between the middle classes and the labouring classes.
DIX-HUITIÈME SIÈCLE, no 53 (2021)
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Eleonora Alfano : « Neither God nor Master. Communist Readings in Italy of Dom Deschamps’s Metaphysics
This article attempts to shed light on the pivot of Dom Deschamps’s system of nature, that is the correlation between its materialist metaphysics and his Communist morals. To do this, Italian readings of his metaphysics will be examined because one finds there the same tendency to deduce Communist principles from the état de mœurs, as is outlined in Dom Deschamps’s philos-ophy – that is the antinomical duality between the be-all and end-all, Le Tout (the being of the universe) and Tout (infinity).
While aligned with the principles of the True System (Vrai système), such a historiographical trend did not, however, produce the same results. Indeed the analysis of the first readings by F.
d’Amato, C. Vasoli and F. Venturi reveal that such a deduction can have different possible consequences.
Jérôme Aymard : « Praying as Free Men : the Debate on the Introduction of the French Language
in Catholic Liturgy during the French Revolution »
At the time of the French revolution, the primacy of Latin in the Catholic cult was questioned as much in ecclesiastical as in lay spheres. The issue of the use of French in the liturgy arose in the name of the regeneration of religion and in order to align the cult with the advent of the sovereignty of the people. From 1789 until the Concordat, the debates were about praying with the priest and no longer just through him, addressing God via one’s reason as much as via one’s heart and affirming the identity of a French Roman Catholic church. Of these initiatives, the polemic around the prayer book brought out the weaknesses of the constitutional Church.
Maëlle Bernard : « From Legal Innocence to Judicial Suspicion. Sexual Consent of girls in Eighteenth-Century trials for Rape at the Châtelet »
In the eighteenth century, legal theory and judiciary reality were pitted against each other when it came to juvenile sexual consent. Considered in legal dictionaries as perfect victim (because innocent by nature) the girl whose family came to lodge a complaint had to prove her innocence to the tribunal when facing judges and doctors who questioned the absence of her consent as well as accusers who pleaded feminine responsibility. With the analysis of twenty or so trial procedures for rape taken from the Châtelet archives in Paris (1750-1785), mistrust is noted on the part of Parisian justice when acknowledging an absence of juvenile consent: the discourse that prevails in the sentencing is that of the accuser, not that of the accused.
Antoine Chatelain : « The Representation of The Young Drawing Master. A Leitmotif in Enlightenment France »
Popularized by the painters Jean Siméon Chardin, Nicolas-Ber-nard Lépicié and François-Hubert, the representation of the young drawing master developed particularly during the second half of the eighteenth Century. This article will account for the excep-tional favouring of this motif, from its origins to its appropria-tion by an élite of men of letters, alert to the ideas of Rousseau and to the new taste for artistic practice. It is important to situate such iconography within the challenges posed by the century of Enlightenment whilst also trying to pin down the genre within a hierarchy that tended to die out. This motif went side by side with other representations of childhood and contemporary youth but it differs by the attention given to drawing and in this it reinforces its French specificity.
Tom Fischer : « Étienne Libois Libois’s Encyclopédie des dieux et des héros (1773) : Enlightenment Mythography and Alchemy »
Étienne Libois (1694-1776) was the author of the vast Encyclo-pédie des dieux et des héros sortis des qualités des quatre élémens et de leur quintessence, suivant la science hermétique, published in 1773
VARIA 905 and reedited in 1776. This work, although little known, deserves, however, a closer look as it is stands at a highly original crossroads between mythographic scholarship and alchemical exegesis. In the wake of literary practice dating back to the fourteenth century, the Encyclopédie remains, to our eyes, an outstanding example of the swansong of alchemical interpretation in Graeco-Roman mytho-logy. This article unveils the content and reception of the work itself, and gives shape to its author, a forgotten alchemist.
Aurélia Gaillard : « The “Borrowed Life” of Statues: Sculpture and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century »
From the premise of an eighteenth-century double reassess-ment of spectators’ emotions and of sculpture, there follows the question of what their interconnection is. What do emotions do to sculpture and what does sculpture do for the emotions? Sculp-ture, better than painting and poetry or in competition with them, became in eighteenth- century art discourse the one art that made it possible to achieve the desired empathy between spectator and objet d’art. The demonstration uses the privileged example of the Laocoon (from Van Opstal’s lecture at the Academy in 1667 to Lévesque’s article in 1792) but also the example of Pygmalion and it explores the shifts that take place between conceptions of sculpture as an expression of passions, sensitive impression, compassion, empathy or even in being a simulacrum of the living body. Thus, sculpture and emotions tend to merge in the eigh-teenth-century aesthetic experience: the statue is in turn, and sometimes even simultaneously, an emotional body and a body that arouses emotion.
Sylvia Giocanti and Camille Noûs : « Derision of Philosophy and Philosophy of Derision in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts »
How can one make sense of the bitter sweet derision under-lying Nouveaux dialogues des morts ? Should it be understood simply as a game consisting in mocking philosophers and scholars who take themselves too seriously, or as a recognition of the rele-vance of a philosophical scepticism which dares make use of the ethical resources of derision ? I show that Fontenelle’s text is better
understood in the light of the ideas of Montaigne, Pascal, La Mothe Le Vayer and Nietzche, than that of modern science inher-ited from Descartes, and that it provides an unexpected answer to this question, at least for readers familiar with Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes.
Tomohiro Kaibara : « “Tout Paris pleure en sot”.
Theatrical emotions, tears and spectators in the battle over Inès de Castro »
Antoine Houdar de La Motte’s Inès de Castro is a tragedy that plays an important part today in the history of theatre as a precursor of tearful drama but little is known of the actual battle occasioned by the success of the play, the climax of which drew abundant tears from the public and triggered an intense debate.
The study of the polemical texts published between August 1723 and March 1724 show that the battle over Inès de Castro repre-sented a crucial moment not only in the history of theatre but also in that of emotions: the emergence of a new behavioural norm favourable to tearful effusion coincided with the controversy over the changes of what is understood as an « audience », thus fore-shadowing the emergence of an impressionable public space.
Laure-Hélène Kerrio : « Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables in Mural Decorations of the Eighteenth Century : the Case Study of Hôtel Dangé »
In 1750, fermier général François-Balthazar Dangé acquired a Parisian residence and two years later the boudoir was deco-rated with twelve scenes taken from Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, painted on wood panelling and inserted into a symmetrically framed rococo surrounding. For Mme Dangé’s personal use, the boudoir space formed a reception hall that allowed select visitors to be received in a pleasant, fashionable but not too bold setting.
The theme of the fables charmed eyes with its mix of landscapes and animal scenes, while it ravished minds with the entertainment it generated, the iconographic route it provided, the thoughts to which it gave birth and the discourse it carried. The scenes are unlikely to be by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, but they were certainly
VARIA 907 painted by someone who took on the iconographical heritage of the fables in order to produce original creations.
Hervé Martin : « The Desire for Disobedience : Temptation and Sedition in Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux »
Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux, which borrows from the codes of sentimental banter and diabolical temptation, is as much a light and fantastic comedy as a disturbing moral drama. It is a drama where the passion of Belzebuth serves only to reflect Alvare’s sole desire to be obeyed in all matters and so as to be better able to disobey the very desire of his mother, the respectable Dona Mencia. But if infernal desire is at first opposed here to the hell of duty, it is only for them both to be reunited in the end – devilry obliges – into one slavish passion where the devil never appears more fearsome than when it is the zealous supporter of love and its rules.
Isabelle Masse : « Swiss Pastels and Crayons :
the Material Tools of an Eighteenth-Century Artistic Vogue » In the second half of the eighteenth century, the pastels manufactured in Lausanne established the town’s reputation well beyond the frontiers of Europe. Master craftsman Bernard-Augus-tin Stoupan (1701-1775)’s produced coloured collections desBernard-Augus-tined mainly for export and of an excellence much vaunted in artistic literature as in travel guides. This article shows how Swiss pastels, which were the most sought after, copied and faked in Europe, set international standards. The pastels created norms of confection, even of commercialization, for other manufacturers of colour and, in favouring the development of manufactured products, they actively contributed to the fashion for the art of the pastel.
Blanca Maria Missé and Camille Noûs : « Rameau’s Laziness at Work : A Marxist Analysis »
Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau features a philosophical character, Rameau, who represents materialist philosophy. Rameau develops a critique of work alongside an emancipatory art of laziness. He is characterized more as a lazy common man than as an idle aristocrat and what he refuses to do is to invest in any productive activity. To resist imposed labour he sets forth an art of laziness at work, that is to say reducing the task in hand to its simple contours, to its
outward appearance. Laziness at work is for Rameau a strategy for survival to resist alienation; but it is also a social and political praxis which aims at a creating a formal or aesthetic type of dissonance, that would open the door to political dissonance and rebellion.
Fabrice Moulin and Camille Noûs : « “Showing off deep down in one’s Home” : Isolation and Representation in Sade’s Novels »
This article examines the radicality of Sade’s project, conduct-ing a study of the spaces through which the novels proceed or dream, and more particularly an analysis of the frontier between intimacy and representation, the niche and the theatre, which was inherited from the tradition of the worldly-wise libertine novel, pushed to its extreme by Sade. Light will be shed on a paradox which is present throughout Sade’s work between the dream of self- entombment and the frenzy for a self-exposure, the desire for a limitless retreat and that for infinite expansion. Such a paradox touches the very heart of Sade’s fantasies, the workings of which are revealed through its architectures (the matrix castle of Silling), discourses (the dreams of the great libertines) as well as poetics of the novel (the structure of Philosophie dans le boudoir).
Marie-Hélène Quéval and Camille Noûs : « Étienne Fay (1768-1845). A Musician in the Revolutionary Turmoil »
How much did the Revolution change musical traditions ? In the context of dechristianization, the closure of chapter houses and choir schools which were the only places to provide poor children with some quality musical training, constrained many church musicians to switch to secular stages (such as opera, comic-opera) as did Étienne Fay (1768-1845), a singer-cum-composer born in Tours, who after a respectable career at the Louvois, Favart and Feydeau theatres, ended up coaching his own company with his wife and children in order to put on productions in France, Belgium and Germany. Despite having collaborated with commit-ted writers such as the radical Jacobin Dubuisson, Fay stayed clear of the conflict, remaining loyal to the reforms of Napoleon. His career path and his work, in Gluck’s footsteps, deserve to be lifted from out of the shadows.
VARIA 909 Feifei Shen and Camille Noûs : Eighteenth-Century Bilingual Dictionaries French/Latin and Chinese
The spread of Christian faith in China generated interest in learning Chinese languages among Jesuits. Bilingual dictionaries French/Latin were born in response to the needs of missionar-ies who started to romanize Chinese characters into Latin letters with the lexicographical production of French/Chinese prevailing over Latin/Chinese during the eighteenth century. And features of European lexicography were borrowed: the single volume in large format was given multilingual treatment. Bilingual dictionaries are both the results of linguistic studies and of diplomatic relations between France and China, notably at the level of their ideology, technique and disposition.
Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau and Camille Noûs :
« Language(s) and Identity at the Time
of the Enlightenment. The Case of Netherlandish Patrician Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp (1762-1834) »
In the multilingual context of the United provinces French progressively became the second language of the Dutch élites.
During the eighteenth century, the critique of French cultural values went hand in hand with rising interest in German, English and the reevaluation of Dutch. This paper studies the influence of multilinguism on Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp (1762-1834) whose social and cultural identity were fashioned by his mother Carolina van Haren, and then by a mentor who consolidated his knowledge of classical languages and initiated him into German and English. Just when the idea was spreading that a nation is a community linked to one language, Van Hogendorp’s awareness of his national identity is shown to be bound up with an increa-singly refined mastery of Dutch.
Laurence Vanoflen and Camille Noûs : « Towards a Greater Equality : Isabelle de Charrière and Fiction (1740-1805) »
The novelist Isabelle de Charrière displayed clear-sightedness towards social norms and what sociologists designate as gender construction. Her disillusioned commentary on the indignation caused by Godwin’s Caleb Williams in 1798 testifies to this. In