Stendhal et l’Amérique: l’Amérique et la modernité by Michel Crouzet

Abstract

CROUZET, MICHEL. Stendhal et l’Amérique: l’Amérique et la modernité. Paris: Fallois, 2008. ISBN 978-2-87706-642-6. Pp. 282. 25 a. Michel Crouzet’s encyclopedic knowledge of Stendhal’s works has been put to good use in assembling and analyzing the author’s widely scattered thoughts on America. Since Stendhal never went to the States, his information came from writings and opinions of others. Therefore, much of this study reviews in detail the origin and context of Stendhal’s concept of America in the books that he read and the reportage of family and acquaintances with first-hand knowledge. Thus in addition to Stendhal’s views on America, this book gives us a context of French opinion that helped to shape those views. The book proceeds more or less chronologically; the first half reviews Stendhal’s positive attitudes (although, as Crouzet emphasizes, Stendhal’s opinions are often complex or contradictory). We learn that Stendhal had a desire to see America, imagined emigrating, kept himself informed about developments there, and kept in touch with American cousins and acquaintances. America represented at first the ideal political system for Stendhal: freedom, and a natural and simple state. He gleaned some of his ideas on primitives and pioneers from Volney and Malthus; and Crouzet in several chapters analyzes Stendhal’s thoughts about Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson. We also learn of Stendhal’s admiration for a British emigrant to America, Birkbeck, and of the rather positive, short dialogue, attached to one of Stendhal’s letters, between an invented American and a Stendhalian “Moi.” So much for the positive; the negative is epitomized in that familiar line in Le Rouge et le noir that belittles both America and France: “La tyrannie de l’opinion, et quelle opinion! est aussi bête dans les petites villes de France, qu’aux Etats-Unis d’Amérique.” This opinion is representative of much of Stendhal’s later thought: he fears that the worst of democracy and of the modern that he sees in America is infiltrating France. Stendhal erects an opposition between the reality of this modern democracy and the ideal of the “Romantic” republic, an ideal linked to the nostalgia for disappearing aristocratic taste and culture, in which pleasure, laughter, Eros, and sentiment reign, an ideal centered in Stendhal’s Italianism. Opposed to this ideal is modern democracy, where, as in the above quotation, the vulgar, violent mob rules tyrannically (ironically in a free country); where money and the material well being of the individual have become the new moral code and have destroyed the concept of community, where progress and the monotony of work prevail, where the private (the rule of the individual) has become the public. Crouzet goes through a general chronology of this change from positive opinion to negative, which coincides more or less with a similar shift of opinion in France around 1830. The second American that Stendhal invents in Promenades dans Rome, M. Clinker, exemplifies this new Stendhalian ugly American, gleaned in part from the writings of Victor Jacquemont, Basil Hall, and Frances Trollope. Ample footnotes attest to the high academic quality of the book, yet it is written in an essay style, which feels pleasantly informal. Stendhal sometimes gets lost in this large context, however, and I wished for more of an emphasis on Stendhal’s words and texts. The essay style also permits Crouzet to voice on occasion certain of his own interpretations à la Stendhal, sometimes comparisons between current day America and Stendhal’s views, which, for this reader at least, feel out of place and editorial, such as: “Jadis on supprimait l’existence de la femme, de nos jours l’Amérique en fait l’équivalent de l’homme et la virilise, autre suppression” (201). Nevertheless, this book enlightens us not only about Reviews 163 Stendhal’s America, but also about the context of French opinion generated as a response to the new American democracy, a context that extends beyond Stendhal alone. Boston University (MA) Dorothy Kelly HAMM, JEAN-JACQUES. Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal. Paris: Champion, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7453-1807-7. Pp. 280. 55 a. In Armance, ou la liberté de...