Le Moi, L'Histoire, 1789-1848 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le Moi, L'Histoire, 1789-1848 W. Jay Reedy Zanone, Damien, ed. Le Moi, L’Histoire, 1789-1848. Grenoble: Ellug, Université Stendhal, 2005. Pp. 193. ISBN 2-84310-063-1 The emergence and diffusion of individualism in modern times has had its share of students in the humanities and social sciences. Much of this attention (a good example would be Steven Lukes' Individualism [1973]) focuses on the social dimensions and political institutions of this phenomenon. But the topic also has been approached from the side of literary and cultural studies. In this perspective it is the "construction" of individuality and subjectivity (i.e., the existential facets of the self-concept and self-consciousness of the individual) that claims primary interest. A number of studies by Jean Starobinski and pages from the pen of Michel Foucault dwell in this camp. But fewer scholars have tried to bridge the divide between the institutional and the existential. One exponent that comes to mind, however, is Charles Taylor, whose Sources of the Self (1989) quickly became the locus classicus of this interdisciplinary genre, at least in the Anglophone academy. The essays in the volume under review may be said to follow this more eclectic model, but they do add their own ingredient to the mix. As the title indicates, Zanone's collection is dedicated to exploring the complex web of connections and disjunctions between the actual and perceived historical developments of the tumultuous half century following the fall of the Bastille and what Gerard Rannone's initial essay calls the veritable "explosion" of French Romantic texts dedicated to probing or displaying the self. The relationship between the accelerated, destabilizing social change of those decades and the ambiguous ego explicitly or implicitly apparent in the writings of such engaged intellectuals as Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, George Sand, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gérard de Nerval, Tocqueville and Michelet is the thread that ties these contributions together. All the contributors support their interpretations with "close readings" of selected passages from the narratives, memoirs or poems of the aforementioned writers and thinkers. What emerges from these ten brief studies is that those intellectuals wrestled with the dual dilemma of understanding both the macrocosm of a revolutionized social order and the microcosm of an alienated or uncommitted self. Time and again, this volume shows that this very different group of artists and cultural observers found [End Page 402] themselves disoriented by the context of the new world they experienced. This disorientation led, paradoxically enough, in two opposed directions – sometimes toward the riches of introspection yet just as frequently toward an amorphous subjectivity that made a malaise of inwardness. Rarely was the latter disposition relished as unalloyed emancipation from past customs and constraints. The psychological burdens of individuality often compounded the sociopolitical uncertainties of individualism, just as reactionaries such as Maistre and Bonald – the ideological foes of most of those studied by Zanone's colleagues – had warned. Bonald's works contained an unexpected anticipation of Emile Durkheim's formulation of "anomie." However, even the Doctrinnaires of the Restoration and Orleanist years, though committed liberals (e.g., Royer-Collard), wrestled with this same conundrum. Germaine de Staël and Alexis de Tocqueville, as others have pointed out, were deeply affected by the loss of an aristocracy-dominated society which they roundly criticized but whose republican successor they worried over as much as welcomed. A transience of beliefs and feelings accompanied the transience of things and norms as democracy's multiple forms and consequences became manifest. On the other hand, when the ephemeral nature of human affairs and of the Old Regime's supposedly eternal institutions were revealed by history's flux poets no less than utopians gained an unprecedented appreciation of the imagination-driven plasticity of reality. The lived ambiguities that attended newly-triumphant modernity are everywhere in evidence in these reactions to early-l9th century civilization. Nowhere is this Janus-faced comprehension of accelerated history more evident than among those whose literary projects brought them closest to the role of the historian, in particular, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Tocqueville. But even Stendhal – a novelist who often drew direct inspiration from the intersection between history and his own...