Paroles pamphlétaires dans le premier xixe siècle (1814–1848). Par Laetitia Saintes

Abstract

Not many people, even among specialists in French literature, will have heard of Paul-Louis Courier. In the nineteenth century, however, he was almost as famous as Diderot and Chateaubriand still are, mainly because in 1824 he published a pamphlet entitled Le Pamphlet des pamphlets that, in inadvertent homage to its title by posterity, became something like a model of what a pamphlet should be. For many years during the nineteenth century, Courier was associated as strongly with the pamphlet as Lafontaine with the fable or La Rochefoucauld with the maxim. He is, as a result, one of the major figures in Laetitia Saintes’s large and very well documented study of French pamphlet literature in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Courier had a readership and a presence comparable to those now enjoyed by Chateaubriand, Germaine de Staël, or Benjamin Constant. Unlike them, however, Courier adopted a persona, in this case that of a plain-spoken peasant from the Touraine, to comment on topical subjects, current events, and public figures. Here too the persona in question became something like a model of what a persona should be. In this respect, Courier was soon matched or followed by the chansonnier Pierre-Jean de Béranger and by the many assorted publications of Louis de Courmenin and Claude Tillier, and their work in turn provides the basis of much of the historical and analytical content of the whole monograph. Despite its size, both the historical and analytical sides of this otherwise fine study are somewhat limited. Pamphlet literature did not begin in France between 1814 and 1848; even in nineteenth-century France, it had its earlier counterparts in the publications of the period of the French Wars of Religion or the mazarinades of the time of the Fronde. The reason for making the point is not to indicate a straightforward historical omission but to suggest, instead, that overlooking this temporal dimension makes it more difficult to recognize the several different levels of historicity built into the combination of a pamphlet and a persona, irrespective of whether its target is situated in France in the nineteenth century or, as in the persona of John Bull and the pamphlets of William ­Cobbett, somewhere entirely different. Something, in short, about the genre itself has gone missing. ­Pamphlets clearly belong to the world of print, but their content could belong to the worlds of Roman satire, the Greek Cynics, or even the Parisian sans-culottes. The multiple connotations of the satire, diatribe, or polemic often involved in pamphlet literature are not particularly visible in this study, and neither is discussion of the procedures and evaluations followed in other well-known studies of pamphlet literature by, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin or Robert Darnton. On its own terms, however, this remains an impressively thorough examination of French pamphlet literature between 1814 and 1848.