Marivaux and Beaumarchais
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote more than
30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part bearing on the psychology of
love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a refined young lady who finds herself, to her
bewilderment or even despair, falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of
judgment and action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727), becomes
a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and delicate changes of attitude
and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’
exchanges are couched.
His sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn pride, central to
their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts. Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is
endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and
Chance), the plot of which is based on disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts,
Silvia experiences profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a
valet. When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a determination to
force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her a servant. Many plays deal
explicitly with social barriers created by rank or money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723;
Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of
Marivaux’s perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he has
come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and Molière) of the
French theatre.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic masterpieces,
Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The
Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and
generosity. Some commentators during the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in
The Marriage of Figaro, but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the
author’s part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure wins
admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of Figaro, with its 92
scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical play) and profusion of theatrical
“business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of the final act.
Bourgeois drama
Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or “middle-
class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767; “Essay on the Genre of
Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in
L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable (1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”).
The growing importance of sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as
to Classical tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as Le
Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the comédies
larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée, which enjoyed great
popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757;
“Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”) gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The
author called for middle-class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire
strong emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre, reacting
against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on pantomime and tableaux or
inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live
up to his theories, the emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically
effective in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was short-lived,
perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both realistic and didactic.
Poetry
The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of great
poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief claim to renown during
most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic, philosophical poems, or witty society
pieces he was preeminent, but to the modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate
genius is missing.
The novel
Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel developed
apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert Challes, whose Illustres
françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a collection of seven tales intertwined,
commands attention for its serious realism and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the
bourgeoisie acquired a more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the
textures of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important, most
notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon Two
Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35; The History and
Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit picaresque novel, recounts its
hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral education, set against a comprehensive picture of
the surrounding world. Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility
receive greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of multivolume
romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731;
“Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this
ambivalent mixture of idealistic passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace
but also, Prévost urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to
his fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale, love
conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and swoonings abound, as
do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of traditional romance and sordid realism.
By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological analysis
and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de Marianne (1731–41; The
Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up from the Country), follow one single
character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut, her or his past experience. But it is the comic note
that prevails as Marianne and Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct
becomes more important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The result provides a rich
density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both
protagonists are morally equivocal, born survivors with an eye for the main chance,
representative of a social class making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also
attractive, both to their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.
Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in society,
salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une
Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de
Charrière use the popular epistolary form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain
and distress of a situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The educationalist Madame de
Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide
readership for her treatises, plays, and, especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur
l’éducation (1782; Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened
and advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes, based on the
recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties, responsibilities, and work in the public
sphere needed well-educated and skilled wives at home to manage their households and estates.
The subordination of women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would later write in exile,
during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to become an ardent spokesperson for
all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored court.
Rousseau
The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and gardens, in contrast to
what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called for a new way of life attentive above
all to the innate sense of pity and benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon
what he saw as the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling that all men
share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed to practice it in his
confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern autobiography. With these radical
new claims for a different mode of feeling, one that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he
stands as one of the greatest thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to,
Voltaire. He established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his Julie;
ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an impossible, doomed
love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed a classic work of educational theory
with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away
from corrupting society, in keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer
feeling and spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential element of
his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and Diderot, not to mention the
materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La
Mettrie, for whom the progress of the Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age
from superstition, fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.
The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les
sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition,
specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable
distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality
is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary
implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract),
with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and
its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to
Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by
any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each
individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has
sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But
such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the
higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious
circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his
authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must
posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their
readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw
himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values
authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued
in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-
knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the
importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams,
desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen
as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection
of the next century.
Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and
dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which
the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos
de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account
of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival,
Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates
Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency,
cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a
dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and
directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as
well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788;
Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often
seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist
ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed
chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had
gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and
short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women,
in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street.
Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89;
Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political
dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-
François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the
connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures,
gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not
procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must
replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The
language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his
antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les
malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for
fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the
Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85,
published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the
Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative
forms of the modern unconscious.
