“Truths without Proofs”: Fournel, Genlis, and the Fiction of Calumny

Abstract

recent study of vanity publishing calls “le discours de la perskcution, I’une des bases les plus constantes des textes autobiographiques.”’ Constant or not, the association of autobiography A with persecution reaches one of its high points in late eighteenthcentury France. The sheer volume of apologetic texts dating from this period, like the range of their institutional contexts, literary genres, and even physical forms, suggests a broad consensus that publishing one’s story would clear one’s character-that, as Clarissa Harlowe speculates, “there would hardly be a guilty person in the world, were each suspected or accused person ro tell his or her story, and be allowed any degree of credit.”2 The apologetic mode leaves few narrative genres untouched in a period where each story is spread over a spectrum stretching from oral conversations to letters, to manuscripts in multiple copies, to privately printed books, to published essays and novels, to massive print runs of factums (published and widely-circulated narratives arguing either party’s side of a legal case, signed by lawyers but often couched in the first-person voice of their client). Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographical project, often taken as the origin of a new kind of autobiography, can also be read as a cross-section of the varied forms and forums developed for the presentation of exculpatory evidence: oral readings in private salons and public distribution of manuscript copies (including a leaflet which Rousseau claims to have handed out on a street-corner); dialogue and narrative; lyric effusions and pseudo-forensic rebuttals of real or imaginary libels which are in turn either quoted or alluded to-all framed by the threat of their own suppression by the same enemies represented as having prompted their expression in the first place.3 All