Bandits, pirates et hors-la-loi au temps des Lumières. Par Lise Andries

Abstract

This fascinating study explores the cultural phenomenon of the outlaw in the long eighteenth century in France. As the title suggests, it presents a typology of criminals as well as their privileged topographies. It constitutes an excellent overview of its subject, ranging historically from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century and taking in not only France but also eighteenth-century Britain. Issues of gender and criminality are also usefully addressed. The breadth of coverage necessarily leads to occasional repetitions and the overall structure of the study is not always clear, something made worse by the lack of a conclusion. Nonetheless, the extensive bibliography, handily divided into subsections, indicates insightful further reading both in key primary sources and the most relevant and recent critical literature on the topic. What emerges consistently is that eighteenth-century outlaws operated primarily in liminal spaces, across borders of various sorts, often in the half-light of dawn or dusk, and they came into their own in the equally liminal imaginative space between fact and fiction, where the bourgeoning press culture met the popular literary forms of the ballad, memoir, and novel. This is particularly the case in England, where a more open judicial system, court reports, greater press and publishing freedoms, and rapid urbanization gave the figure of the contemporary outlaw more realism as well as a more prevalent place in the social imaginary than was the case in France. The pirate in particular is an English outlaw archetype whose heyday was the late seventeenth century, although Lise Andries makes pertinent distinctions between the very different forms of piracy operative in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean at the time. What is true for both France and England is that the outlaw gives real and fictional voice to alternative social values, challenging those of the prevailing order, as Andries demonstrates with her interesting survey of criminal types in Robert Challe, Alain-René Lesage, Prévost, Diderot, and Sade. By the time of the Revolution, the outlaw in France had become an autonomous literary creation, only to be reinvented again in light of the more radical political and social upheavals of the 1790s. While Andries never loses sight of the nasty, brutish, short lives of eighteenth-century criminals — their violence matched, and often surpassed, by that of the state and its officials — she makes a strong case for outlaw collectives offering thrillingly attractive counter-societies for many of their contemporaries. From the real-life cours des Miracles to the fabled pirate republics, these alternative communities are more nostalgic of lost golden ages than they are revolutionary. The exception, however, was Louis Mandrin’s popular banditry against the hated tax officials of the Ferme générale. Indeed, the most intriguing, enlightening chapter in the book is devoted to outlaw economies. It argues perceptively that colonial and metropolitan smuggling was an important motor for the modernization and liberalization of the French economy, since it flooded the market with ‘de-taxed’ goods and increased their circulation substantially. This is one insight among many in this informative, wide-ranging study.