"La Maladie anglaise" in French Eighteenth-Century Writing: From Stereotype to Individuation

Abstract

Throughout eighteenth century, in letters, newspapers, medical treatises, travel narratives, literary criticism, and popular and high-brow literature of all sorts, Englishman is a recurrent stereotype in French writing, an emblematic figure of English national character and indeed of nation itself. Inspiring a mixture of sympathy, perplexity, admiration, pity, and horror, singularity of his condition is seen as a pathological disorder, one which mirrors other forms of English deviance. So pervasive is this stereotype that it comes to be adopted by British writers themselves. When George Cheyne published his treatise devoted to nervous diseases of all kinds in 1733, he consciously integrated view from France, promoting above scurvy and venereal diseases as condition now designated by words of his title, The English Malady. Back in 1698, Henri Misson de Valbourg had identified four very Dangerous Distempers in England that are much less known in other Countries; Scurvy, Consumption, Rickets, and Hypochondriac Melancholy (Misson 68), (1) but by mid-century, physical disorders had become secondary national characteristics. The English malady, seen from France, was situated above all in mind and soul. The ingredients of this stereotype are complex and wide-ranging. Their starting points are perceived differences between French and English. In 1770 an anonymous author summed up what she or he saw as stereotypical images of English and French: It has been decreed for all time that Englishman will be philosophical, serious and taciturn, and that he will kill himself in cold blood out of pure boredom; and that Frenchman will be thoughtless, playful, scatterbrained, high spirited almost to extravagance, passionate to point of madness, but without ever being in love; and that he will only risk his life for his king or for futile principle of a so-called point of honour. (qtd. in D'Orville 6) (2) The term most frequently employed in French to describe Englishman's condition is melancolie. Other terms were sometimes used either as synonyms (la tristesse) or as concomitant adjectives that engender (serieux, pensif). This vocabulary is applied not to individuals so much as to social groups, and sometimes to entire nation. According to Pierre-Jean Grosley, prevails in London in every family, in circles, in assemblies, in public and private entertainments (1: 183). (3) His three-volume book on London was published in Switzerland in 1770 and is based on time he spent in English capital in 1765. Like many French books on England, it was soon translated into English, in this case by Thomas Nugent, translator of Montesquieu, as A Tour to London: or, new observations on England and its Inhabitants, which appeared in 1772. Grosley's use of word tristesse (translated by Nugent as melancholy') needs to be considered in light of his comments on Latin origin of word, tristitia, which, according to him, contained a harsher meaning of spite. Tristesse evolved into a more ephemeral emotion that had nothing to do with the excesses into which men are hurried by yielding to impressions of melancholy (1: 231). (4) When Grosley uses tristesse, he is reinvesting it with its original, darker significance. (5) It is interesting to compare Grosley's terminology with that of an earlier observer of English manners, Jean-Bernard Le Blanc, whose Lettres d'un Francois, also in three volumes, were published in La Haye in 1745. Le Blanc claims to have written them during his time in England between 1737 and 1744. Their English translation, Letters on English and French Nations, dates from 1747. Le Blanc wonders why English have no word for that quintessentially French expression, l'ennui, one that we now tend to associate with nineteenth-century poets such as Baudelaire or de Vigny: How comes it to pass that English, who have borrowed so many words from our language without necessity, have not received this, which so well expresses a thing they feel every moment, and which has not less influence on their temperament than on their character? …