Dead Hands, or, How the French Stopped the Dead Seizing the Living

Abstract

The French Revolution’s severe restriction of the right of bequest reflected and consolidated a longstanding French legal skepticism about the ability of the dead to control property and, through property, the living. This article argues that this “resistance” to the power of the dead, and its legal enactment by the Revolution, had significant consequences not only for the legal but also for the literary cultures of post-Revolutionary France. The most straightforward of these was the relative absence of inheritance plots, and especially plots involving wills, in nineteenth-century French fiction, compared to their abundance in Victorian fiction. But through a reading of Honoré de Balzac’s “The Elixir of Life” and Colonel Chabert, the article suggests that this resistance was itself sometimes thematized, and allowed for a reflection on the difficult relationship of modern France to its Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary past, as well as on the all-powerful status of the law.