La Philosophic dans le boudoir: or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World

Abstract

La Philosophie dans le boudoir; or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World* R. F. Brissenden For ANYONE concerned with sentimentalism, in all the senses of that complex term, the last ten years of the eighteenth century, the decade dominated by the French Revolution, are of particular interest. To talk of one revolution is misleading: there were many revolutions.1 One of these, perhaps the most important, consisted of a conscious attempt to realize in political actuality an ideal theory of man, "[to put] into laws,” as Robespierre said, "the moral truths culled from the works of the philosophers.”2 These moral truths can, in a strictly technical sense, be described as sentimental', that is, they were grounded in the belief that man’s ability to act morally is related to the degree of psychologi­ cal and physiological sensitivity with which he can spontaneously respond to the world about him, related, to use the language of the day, to his sensibility. With this belief went the hope that if peo­ ple were allowed to exercise their sensibilities freely they would act in a "humane” way. As Henri Peyre succinctly puts it, "The eighteenth-century writers [who] prepared the way for the Revo­ lution without wishing for it . . . taught a secular code of ethics .. . [in which] they gave first importance ... to the love of human­ ity, altruism and service due society or our fellow man.”3 "Hu­ manity” functioned as a concept at once empirical and idealistic; and it is significant that it was not until the eighteenth century that the English word "humane” as distinct from "human” (an * I wish to thank the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Univer­ sity of California at Los Angeles, whose grant of a Senior Research Fellow­ ship enabled me to complete this paper. 113 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century orthographic distinction which cannot be made in French) took on exclusively the meaning it has today. According to the OED, the word, which had long existed as a variant form of "human,” only then "became restricted to a particular group of senses,” viz., those "marked by sympathy with and consideration for the needs and distresses of others; feeling or showing compassion and ten­ derness . . . ; kind, benevolent.” It was in a democratic mood of sympathy with and tenderness for the needs and distresses of others that the National Assembly, in 1790, accepted Dr. Guillotin ’s proposal that "in cases of capital punishment the privilege of execution by decapitation should no longer be confined to the nobles, and that it was desirable to render the process of execu­ tion as swift and painless as possible.”4 Three years later Robes­ pierre, invoking another moral principle, the sanctity of the general will, was to condone and direct the employment of the guillotine for the purpose of creating forcibly the conditions under which people could be genuinely free. No doubt it is true, as Les­ ter G. Crocker has observed, that "the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Terror were due to revolutionary dynamics, not to any ideas of the philosophes.''^ Nonetheless the uses to which Dr. Guillotin ’s mercifully efficient machine were put demonstrated con­ vincingly that man, in his attempt to be humane, could be only too appallingly human. I am, of course, stating the obvious. My excuse for doing so is that the irony of the situation presented itself in just such brutally obvious ways to the people at the time. One did not have to be on the scaffold oneself to appreciate the force of Madame Roland’s remark: "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” In England, in 1798, the same charge was laid at the door of Sensibil­ ity: Sweet child of sickly Fancy! — her of yore From her loved France Rousseau to exile bore . . . Taught her o’er each lone vale and Alpine steep To lisp the story of his wrongs and weep ... Mark her fair votaries, prodigal of grief, With cureless pangs, and woes that mock relief, 114 La Philosophic dans le boudoir Droop in soft sorrow o’er a faded flower; O’er a dead jack-ass pour the pearly shower; —* But hear, unmoved, of Loire’s ensanguined...