L’Œuvre romanesque de François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil. Par Łukasz Szkopiński

Abstract

This is the first monograph devoted to Ducray-Duminil, one of the most popular novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His literary career spanned decades, from his first novel in 1787 to a volume of fairy tales in 1819, and he demonstrated considerable political flexibility, moving from writing republican short fiction during the Terror to praising the Restoration in 1815. The volume begins with a biographical sketch to give the reader a sense of the range of Ducray-Duminil’s activities — for in addition to being a novelist, he was also a journalist, playwright, musician, songwriter, and poet. Łukasz Szkopiński then takes a structural approach to the novels in order to move away from the prevailing view of nineteenth-century critics that Ducray-Duminil’s work was homogenous, although he nevertheless admits that there is a ‘caractère réitératif’ (p. 58) to Ducray-Duminil’s plot construction: many of his protagonists are young people faced with family secrets, persecution, and increasingly dramatic obstacles to being reunited with loved ones, but they are always rewarded in the end when good triumphs and vice is punished. The analysis considers the various narrative strategies that the author uses to involve readers, an important element of the novels, and explores characterization, with a particular focus on Roger (from Victor, ou, L’enfant de la forêt) and Jules (from Jules, ou, Le toit paternel) as some of his more complex or unusual characters. Questions of morality and didacticism in the novels are considered, alongside the theme of education. Szkopiński rightly highlights the fact that, despite the didactic content and the young age of many of the protagonists, these novels were not written as littérature de jeunesse but were intended for all readers. There is also a detailed exploration of the use of the merveilleux. For the main part, Ducray-Duminil follows the French tradition of explained supernatural, despite his inclusion of dreams of a prophetic nature that fall outside of this. The mutual affinities between Ducray-Duminil and Ann Radcliffe are highlighted, although Daniel Hall’s work on French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005) is surprisingly absent from the bibliography. In many ways the novels of Ducray-Duminil are ‘l’expression de son temps’ (p. 275). His recurring themes of social identity, bigamy, secret marriages, and disguised identities are to be found in numerous other novels of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era, even if no other writer had quite the success that Ducray-Duminil had. Victor, ou, L’enfant de la forêt, to give but one example, went through thirty-seven editions in the course of the nineteenth century (the last in 1893). The study concludes by sketching out Ducray-Duminil’s literary legacy, most visible on the stage with Pixerécourt’s adaptations, but Szkopiński also explores writers such as Balzac, Sue, and Hugo, for whom Ducray-Duminil was an influence. Overall this is a useful volume for those interested in fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: it puts Ducray-Duminil in a broad context and helps us to understand better how he marked a whole generation of readers.