La Morale Research Articles

First Swedish Translation from the Lunyu


 
 
 This paper describes the first known translation from the Confucian classics into Swedish, a collection of eighty quotations from the Lunyu published as an appendix to J . A . Bellman’s Wishetenes råd (1707). The work is a third-generation translation, made from the French La morale de Confucius (1688), which is itself an abridged translation of the Latin Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687). This paper selects ten of the eighty quotations for detailed analysis and commentary. The main findings are that the translation removes so much of the Chinese context and Confucian technical vocabulary that the text becomes almost indistinguishable from generic wisdom literature. Furthermore, the Swedish translator adds a layer of “Christian” vocabulary, which was not present in the Latin and French versions. However, at a time when Sweden had almost no contact with non-Christian cultures, the translation may have played a valuable role in making the Swedish public positively disposed toward Chinese culture .
 
 

La morale sensitive de Rousseau: Le livre jamais écrit. By MarcoMenin. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2019. 362 pp. €37.50 (pb). ISBN: 978‐2‐343‐18966‐6.

Journal for Eighteenth-Century StudiesEarly View Book Review La morale sensitive de Rousseau: Le livre jamais écrit. By Marco Menin. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2019. 362 pp. €37.50 (pb). ISBN: 978-2-343-18966-6. Jessica Stacey, Corresponding Author Jessica Stacey [email protected] Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany Correspondence Jessica Stacey, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Jessica Stacey, Corresponding Author Jessica Stacey [email protected] Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany Correspondence Jessica Stacey, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 01 March 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12878Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Dal cosmopolitismo radicale al cosmopolitismo radicato. Intervista a Anthony Kwame Appiah

Anthony Kwame Appiah is an internationally renowned philosopher who has worked on the philosophy of language, political and moral theory, African intellectual history and cosmopolitanism, with a particular interest in the theme of identity. He has held prominent positions and received numerous important awards; he has also dedicated himself to an intense activity of dissemination, giving countless lectures and collaborating with a number of newspapers, such as the BBC at which in 2016 he gave the Reith Lectures on the theme of identity and the New York Times Magazine where, as a columnist, he reasons about the ethical dilemmas that can arise in everyday life. In Italy he has published Cosmopolitismo. L’etica in un mondo di estranei (2007), Il codice d’onore. Come cambia la morale (2011), La menzogna dell’identità (2019). In this interview, given in July 2021, he explains his conception of cosmopolitanism, which he named “rooted or patriotic”, and from this perspective addresses the topics of migration, cosmopolitan education and practice, ‘cancel culture’ and freedom of expression.

The Paradoxes of Religion in Gabrielle Suchon

Gabrielle Suchon’s reliance on religious texts and authorities to support and legitimise the arguments she makes in her two texts Traité de la morale et de la politique (1693) and Du célibat volontaire (1700) has sometimes been perceived as running contrary to its defence of female freedom. Suchon’s use of religious texts will be examined here as a corner stone of her attack on male hegemony and crucial to her argument, which rests in large part on the distinction between divine law and social customs. The article will focus specifically on how Suchon uses the paradoxes and contradictions found in her extensive corpus of references to advance the notion that the subjugation of women is a political strategy to support male power rather than the result of a natural and divinely ordained hierarchy of genders.

Society and Sociability in Gabrielle Suchon: Towards a Politics of Friendship

This article aims to examine the treatment of friendship in Gabrielle Suchon's Traité de la morale et la politique (1693) and Du célibat volontaire (1700). In the Traité, friendship is cast in political terms and is represented as the key foundational element of a healthy society. Specifically, a feminization of friendship and a politicization of sociability and conversation allow Suchon to carve out a space for women at the centre of a society founded on egalitarian civic friendship. In Du célibat, Suchon expounds her conception of true friendship, particularly for those who choose a celibate life, and casts freedom as a key constituent element. Through her vision of friendship and conversation as hallmarks of a civil society, Suchon casts her neutralistes within a civil space, constructed and envisaged between the public and private, and so procures for voluntarily celibate women the validity of a space of classical origins.

El veneno del materialismo: Juan Ignacio Gorriti, crítico de D`Holbach

espanolEl objetivo de este articulo es el de contribuir a la reconstruccion del itinerario de recepcion hispanoamericana de la Ilustracion radical. En particular, de las ideas de uno de los philosophes mas denostados por la ortodoxia catolica: el baron d’Holbach, cuyos textos no solo fueron conocidos y traducidos en Espana, sino tambien en Sudamerica. En efecto, La morale universelle (1776) fue establecida como texto de estudio oficial en las escuelas de Bolivia en 1827, lo que provoco la reaccion del sacerdote argentino Juan Ignacio Gorriti. Con el fin de esclarecer este episodio, el texto se organiza en tres secciones. Primero, se presentan la figura y las principales ideas de d’Holbach; segundo, se ofrece una breve reconstruccion de la difusion de sus textos en Espana y Sudamerica; finalmente, se analizan los argumentos que Gorriti esgrimio contra el materialismo en sus Reflexiones (1836). Un libro a traves del cual intento impedir que los jovenes americanos fueran infectados por «el veneno del materialismo» EnglishThis paper aims to offer a contribution to the reconstruction of the Ibero-American reception itinerary of the Radical Enlightenment. In particular, of the ideas of one of the philosophes most reviled by Catholic orthodoxy: the Baron d’Holbach, whose texts were not only known and translated in Spain, but also in South America. Indeed, La morale universelle (1776) was established as an official study text in schools of Bolivia in 1827, provoking the reaction of the Argentine priest Juan Ignacio Gorriti. In order to clarify this episode, the text is organized into three sections. First, the figure and the main ideas of d’Holbach are presented; second, a brief reconstruction of the dissemination of his texts in Spain and South America is offered; finally, the arguments that Gorriti exposed against materialism in his Reflexiones (1836) are analysed. A book through which he tried to prevent American youth from being infected by «the poison of materialism»

Overcoming the divide between freedom and nature: Clarisse Coignet on the metaphysics of independent morality

ABSTRACT Clarisse Coignet (1823–1918) played an important role in a number of the most important intellectual movements in nineteenth-century France. She grew up around and documented the leaders of the Fourierist movement, provided the philosophical support for La Morale indépendante (an influential movement that promoted the rebuilding of French society on the basis of free morality, rather than religion), and spent twenty years defending the secularization of education and improving French primary schools. She developed her own theoretical and practical philosophy and applied it in the social world to play her part in the transformation of her country into a “free republic”. Despite all of this, her work has received very little philosophical attention. This article focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of her practical philosophy, and the importance of her engagement with the French spiritualist tradition for its development.

Émile Zola, La Confession de Claude

This volume is testimony to the scope of the Classiques Garnier ambition (see French Studies, 72 (2018), 448–49) to provide new editions of all Zola’s writing. For La Confession de Claude, his first-ever novel, remains largely unread, even by specialists. It was not a commercial success when it appeared in 1865 and it is unlikely to be a good investment, however admirable, for its modern publisher. Nicole Savy’s bibliography of critical studies devoted to it is revealingly thin. It is a text occasionally mentioned in passing, either in the context of Zola’s hesitant beginnings or in relation to its oblique autobiographical dimension. Savy rehearses the latter in her introductory essay, while insisting that this ‘n’infirme en rien le fait que c’est une œuvre littéraire, à lire en tant que telle et non comme un journal intime’ (p. 9). The challenges involved in such a revaluation have to overcome Zola’s own judgement of it, in a letter of 8 January 1866 partially cited here, that ‘il est faible en certaines parties, et il contient encore bien des enfantillages […]. Le poète reparaît, le poète qui a bu trop de lait et mangé trop de sucre. L’œuvre n’est pas virile; elle est le cri d’un enfant qui pleure et qui se révolte’ (p. 15). It did nevertheless have the intended consequence of bringing his name to wider attention, as a result of certain contemporary reviewers objecting to his ‘scandalous’ portrayal of the relationship between a grisette and her two lovers. To today’s readers, this portrayal seems pretty bland, veiled as it is by the mawkish stereotypes of la vie de bohême to which the novel is indebted. Even the report by the official censors concluded that, in spite of ‘la crudité des images et le cynisme du détail’, it should not be ‘condamné comme contraire à la morale publique’ (p. 224). Savy argues, however, that the question posed by ‘ce roman d’un premier amour irrémédiable, roman de la faiblesse humaine, est celle de la tension intolérable entre l’idéal et la chair, entre l’amour sacré et la souillure terrifiante du sexe’ (p. 15). Beneath its residue of Romantic euphemisms, she detects a more hard-edged discourse prefiguring that of his mature fiction. Zola himself allowed the work to be republished in 1880 as evidence of the distance travelled since this literary apprenticeship. Savy also makes a case for its formal qualities on the basis of its ‘plusieurs structures, assez savamment imbriquées’ (p. 21). More suggestively, given her own professional background at the Musée d’Orsay (she is the author of a number of brilliant analyses of Manet’s 1868 portrait of the writer), Savy alerts us to the ways in which Zola’s early engagement with the visual arts leaves its mark on descriptive segments of the text. It is not by chance that La Confession de Claude is publicly dedicated by Zola to Cézanne as well as to their mutual friend, Jean-Baptistin Baille. The text itself is barely 150 pages in length. This edition is filled out by several appendices, the most substantial of which is devoted to the novel’s critical reception in 1865–66, reprinting for the first time each and every reference to it in the Parisian and provincial press.

Redefining the Sociological Paradigm: Emile Durkheim and the Scientific Study of Morality

Whereas Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) has long been envisioned as a structuralist, quantitative, and positivist sociologist, some materials that Durkheim produced in the later stages of his career—namely, Moral Education (1961 [1902-1903]), The Evolution of Educational Thought (1977 [1904-1905]), The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915 [1912]), and Pragmatism and Sociology (1983 [1913-1914]) attest to a very different conception of sociology—one with particular relevance to the study of human knowing, acting, and interchange. Although scarcely known in the social sciences, Emile Durkheim’s (1993 [1887]) “La Science Positive de la Morale en Allemagne” [“The Scientific Study of Morality in Germany”] is an exceptionally important statement for establishing the base of much of Durkheim’s subsequent social thought and for comprehending the field of sociology more generally. This includes the structuralist-pragmatist divide and the more distinctively humanist approach to the study of community life that Durkheim most visibly develops later (1961 [1902-1903]; 1977 [1904-1905]; 1915 [1912]; 1983 [1913-1914]) in his career.

Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters

Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters

The Censorship Effect: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Formation of French Modernism by William Olmsted

Reviews 283 historiographies into a wider dialogue. It does not solely focus on historical developments , wars, and revolutions, but also takes into account the impact of environmental, geographical, and hygienic factors on the concept of ‘méditerranité’(103). For instance, chapter 4 discusses the impact of the 1960 earthquake in Agadir on urban planning, transnational diplomacy and Mediterranean politics. Ottoman-French relations are examined in chapter 1, focusing on the Ottoman Empire and its three revolutions. Transnational relations between France and North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean , in particular Mount Lebanon and Syria, the “France of the Levant” (76), are traced in chapters 2 and 3. This logically leads to an examination of migration patterns and circulation trends: discussions of French-Ottoman matrimonial alliances in eighteenth century Constantinople (ch. 5), currency reforms and forgery (ch. 6), the “French”educational trajectory of three African women (Fadhma Amrouche, Tawhida Ben Shaykh, and Dorra Bouzid, ch. 7), and that of Moroccan social scientist Moïse Nahon (ch. 10). The discussion in chapter 8 of who was considered European in Tunisia, Algerian, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, with the complex judicial and legal ramification citizenship entails, is a timely one, considering the current European migrant crisis and the thorny issue of multiple citizenships. Border-crossing also defines part 3 with a discussion of the jurisprudential impact of the Dreyfus Affair in Algeria (ch. 9). Readers expecting a broad sweep of French-Mediterranean histories will be disappointed or confused by the numerous chapters dealing with highly particular case studies that might appear somewhat obscure to a general readership. On the other hand, the study sheds light on topics that have been neglected by Anglophone historical scholarship, such as the systemic, trans-Mediterranean French military and civilian interment practices in colonial Algeria (ch. 12), or French colonial hygiene, prostitution, sex tourism, and the“medical construct of the‘syphilitic Arab’” (338) in colonial Morocco (ch. 11). This study would be of interest to historians, Mediterranean Studies scholars, and French and Francophone teachers and scholars. Utah State University Christa Jones Olmsted, William. The Censorship Effect: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Formation of French Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-19-023863-6. Pp. 226. $65. What was the culture of censorship during the nineteenth century? What social factors ruled censorship? Who was it meant to protect? How did it influence writers,and who were the decision makers in censorship cases? In 1857, Flaubert and Baudelaire were both prosecuted for “outrage à la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes mœurs,” for their respective works, Madame Bovary and Les fleurs du mal. While Flaubert was acquitted of the charges, Baudelaire was condemned, resulting in the excising of six poems from his volume. Olmsted studies how Flaubert and Baudelaire responded to the censors’ accusations, and especially how they adapted their writing in order to avoid censorship. Olmsted’s aim is to prove that the modernist techniques that Flaubert and Baudelaire invented, and for which they are celebrated today, were foils they created to thwart state authorities. Relying on such documents as Flaubert’s sketches and scenarios for his novel, and Baudelaire’s revisions and various paratextual materials, Olmsted describes the“censorship effect”on their works, and on the development of their respective techniques of free indirect discourse, dramatic monologue, and multiple poetic personae. Olmsted’s book is distinct from earlier criticism of these writers’works; until now, no scholarship has shown the extent of the censorship effect on the formation of the writings themselves. Flaubert’s use of free, indirect discourse allowed him to paint ambiguous scenes and implied events, thus avoiding realistic representations that would have been considered scandalous. Olmsted compares Flaubert’s sketches and scenarios to the published novel, pointing out the graphic outlines of his intended meaning, drastically mitigated in his final text. Olmsted’s indepth study of the famous scene in which the heroine Emma joins Leon in a (implied) scandalous carriage ride,reveals the stylistic choices Flaubert made,creating ambiguous insinuations, thus evading censorship, although not controversy. Olmsted conducts a more detailed analysis of Baudelaire’s strategies. Acutely aware of Flaubert’s trial and the ongoing disputes related to it, Baudelaire first defended his work by...

The Provisional Moral Code (la morale provisoire) or the Permanent Ethical Stopgap? Inspiration from Descartes and Montaigne

The purpose of this article is to distinguish three essential ways of understanding “provisional ethics” derived from the Cartesian provisional moral code ( la morale provisoire ). The first meaning is connected with providing an answer to the need for the “provision” of a moral code to someone who is not yet ready to formulate a final ethical model established in the system. The other meaning emphasises the temporariness of the set of these rules whereas the third one brings out the imperfection reflected by the Polish word prowizorka (stopgap). These considerations lead to a question whether provisional ethics is indeed merely a vestibule of a mature and complete system. Or, to the contrary, the difficulty or inability to build such a system requires such an ethical stopgap to become a permanent state. In the second depiction, partly inspired by Michel de Montaigne’s thought, the use of provisional ethics would come closer to the category of a specifically understood tinkering.

Loving More, Being Less: Reflections on Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Le paradoxe de la morale

In Le paradoxe de la morale, Vladimir Jankélévitch proposes that the moral life is a matter of balancing the demands of love, which call us to give without limit, and our natural, egoistical attachment to self, which he terms 'being'. This balancing act is ultimately paradoxical since love must both depend on and overcome being. The vision of moral life as a paradoxical balancing act of love and being, however, is implicitly challenged by another, "supernatural" vision of ethics that Jankélévitch proposes near the end of the text. In these passages, the egoism of being that marks human nature is not merely balanced but genuinely transformed by the passionate care for an other. In this paper, these two visions of the ethical life offered by Jankélévitch's text are discussed in turn, and a way to read them as complementary rather than contradictory is proposed.

Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary Europe. By Mark Curran. Royal Historical Society Studies in History. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2012. viii + 222 pp. $90.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary Europe . By Mark Curran . Royal Historical Society Studies in History. Rochester, N.Y. : Boydell , 2012. viii + 222 pp. $90.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis is an excellent study of the literary career of Paul-Henri Thiry the Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), the atheistic philosophe of German background, and an important landmark in contemporary Enlightenment research. It is also an event in research into the changes in religious apologetics in the late eighteenth century. This study's importance derives both from its intrinsic value but also from the unaccountable fact that d'Holbach, its main focus, has been neglected by Enlightenment scholars at all stages despite the historical impact of his publications. This neglect was due in part, Curran explains, to the lack of sources of biographical information about d'Holbach's life and activities. But it is equally due to the pervasive, strange, and unjust myth that grew up in the nineteenth century and prevailed through the twentieth that d'Holbach is a dull and uninteresting author, a judgment that appears exceedingly odd to anyone familiar with his extremely subversive religious, philosophical, social, and political views. In any case, his Systeme de la nature (1770), in particular, administered a tremendous shock within the world of late Enlightenment European intellectual culture and provoked a powerful and lasting reaction from both Catholic and Protestant theologians and moderate enlighteners which forms a significant chapter in church history.Curran begins by following Jeremy Popkin, Daniel Gordon, Elisabeth Eisenstein, David Bell, and Jonathan Israel in pointing out, quite correctly, that while Robert Darnton's historical researches revealed d'Holbach to have been the hand behind eight of the ten most popular pre-Revolutionary clandestine anti-religious treatise that appeared in France (5), and that he was one of the most widely read Enlightenment authors, neither Darnton nor anyone else has thus far seen fit to write about d'Holbach as the pre-eminent figure that he undoubtedly was. Curran advances considerably beyond the point reached by the older scholarship devoted to d'Holbach, in particular the works of W. H.Wckwar and Pierre Naville, by drawing on the substantial material and fresh information from the numerous books, brochures, and articles, the 128 recorded publications, published in the 1770s and 1780s, responding to the challenge offered by d'Holbach's major works. Churchmen and moderate enlighteners eager to defend religion regarded his books as especially dangerous. They did so less for his detailed partially scientific exposition of materialist doctrines as such, a dimension of d'Holbach's original work largely confined to the Systeme de la nature , than to his readiness to deduce moral, social, and political conclusions from his atheism and materialism, something he does, both in that work and still more in La Politique naturelle (1773) the Systeme social (1773) and La Morale universelle (1776). D'Holbach emerged as a social critic in a notably more systematic and challenging manner than either La Mettrie or Diderot.As Curran notes d'Holbach remained high-profile, especially in Catholic and Protestant apologetic literature, through the 1770s and 1780s down to 1789 and not the least valuable feature of this slim volume are two appendices, one extremely useful eighteen-page list of the books published partly or wholly responding to d'Holbach (appendix 2), and another ten-page list of the articles responding to the challenge that appeared in the periodical press (appendix 3). …

Legitimating Other People's Scriptures: Pasquier Quesnel'sNouveau TestamentAcross Post-Reformation Europe

This study traces the evolution of one version of the New Testament across two early modern kingdoms and three confessional communities. The Oratorian priest Pasquier Quesnel salvaged the text of theNouveau Testament“de Mons,” which was condemned in 1667 for infidelity to the Vulgate, by attaching “Christian thoughts” to each verse and framing the new product as a moral commentary. The French Jesuit Michel Le Tellier revived the charges against the “Mons” scriptures, but he could not prevent their redistribution in Quesnel'sL'Abrégé de la morale de l'Evangile(1672) andNouveau Testament(1692) for more than three decades until he shifted his attack away from the translation toward the legitimating paratexts. Long before then, Le Tellier plunged the French Jesuits into the competition for marketing vernacular scripture-books. Though they first proposed an alternative model of scripture-reading, they increasingly borrowed from Quesnel's model as they had more success proscribing his book. Meanwhile in England, both Catholics and Protestants attempted to fit Quesnel's scripture-books to the standards of their geo-confessional communities, conforming enough to make transgression possible. The Catholic physician Richard Short represented Quesnel's book as the “Jesuit” Rheims version while the Anglican divine Richard Russel re-packaged it as a deluxe King James Bible. The struggles of all these competitors illuminate the informal processes of authorization that enabled scripture-books to shadow the Authorized Versions and to expand the space for publisher adaptation and reader appropriation between them. By analyzing the permutations ofbooks, scholars might enrich their understanding of confessional differences, often limited to comparisons oftextualaccess, and more precisely discern the varieties of historical relationships that particular Christian communities sought with their sacred scriptures.

REVIEW: Gossanna cave siege tragic tale of betrayal

Review of: Rebellion [l’Ordre at la morale], directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. Nord-Ouest Films, 2012 [English version]. 136min. www. lordreetlamorale-lefilm.comWhen the headlines hit France in April 1988 about the critical turning point in ‘les évènements’ down under in New Caledonia, maverick filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz was just 18. He remembers the gritty images of the Gossanna cave siege on television. Indigenous Kanaks were reported to have massacred a quartet of gendarmes with machetes and shotguns and taken 27 others hostage (three others were captured later). There were also false reports of alleged decapitations and rape on Ouvéa in the remote Loyalty Islands.

The “Fooliton”: A French Media Invention

The “Fooliton”: A French Media Invention Marie-Ève Thérenty (bio) Among periodicals of the Victorian era, the French daily newspaper was distinguished by a unique feature: the feuilleton section, found at the foot of the page, and described in French journalism as en rez de chaussée, or “at ground-floor level,” where it was denoted by a dark horizontal line that separated it from the rest of the page. The feuilleton was generally held in contempt by the British; Lord Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail, deliberately called it the fooliton. It does, however, accurately define a specific quality of French literary journalism and the French social imaginary.1 As an illustration of this phenomenon, I have chosen the 4 December 1842 issue of the Journal des débats. On that day, the reader could find above the feuilleton, the “premier-Paris,” an editorial column addressing the question of the Orient, as well as a collection of news stories about French foreign policies, readers’ letters, news copied from foreign sources, a series of local crime reports, miscellaneous news items, a mix of advertisements for shows and bookstores, a list of those appointed to public office, a summary of the stock market activity, a list of entertainments, and a series of other advertisements—all spread over four pages. Separated from the rest by a solid [End Page 35] line, in the feuilleton running across the bottom of the pages, is a particularly sentimental serial part from Eugène Sue’s novel Les Mystères de Paris. Morel, a poor diamond cutter whose granddaughter has just died of cold and hunger in his garret, escapes being taken to prison for his debts. He is saved by the intervention of Prince Rodolphe, the novel’s hero, who gives him the 2,500 francs needed to pay off his debts. The episode ends in a comic sequence in which the caretaker, Mme. Pipelet,2 to chase off the bailiffs, hurls a pot of stew from the top of the stairs—no doubt Sue’s way of easing the tension after several dramatic instalments. Consisting of a very long dialogue, the feuilleton creates an airy typographical space, which sharply distinguishes it from the dense columns on the rest of the page. Curiously, this episode is followed (still in the feuilleton)3—by a very long note signed by the author, consisting of a series of remarks about imprisonment for debt, as well as, notably, excerpts of various stories from Pauvre Jacques, a newspaper published by the Société de la morale chrétienne. In Les Mystères de Paris, Sue ultimately and overtly calls for the reform of legislation that oppressed the poor. From its initial serial publication in the feuilleton on 19 June 1842, Les Mystères de Paris was an unprecedented success, noteworthy for reaching out to readers from almost all social classes.4 Those who could not afford a subscription to the Journal des débats would gather in reading rooms where they could borrow the latest instalment for a half hour a day. The creation of the feuilleton was, in fact, the fruit of a fiscal subterfuge. Before becoming a genre, the feuilleton was merely a space to be filled, appearing for the first time in the Journal des débats on 28 January 1800. The proprietors of the Journal des débats, having closely examined the law, discovered that they could increase the size of a newspaper page without incurring an increase in taxes. Its original role as a supplement rendered the feuilleton a distinct space, one in which the era’s journalistic writing conventions did not apply. It was a place of resistance, of connivance with readers, of generic innovation—all qualities found in the feuilleton of 4 December 1842. In daring to defend the underclass, Eugène Sue opposed the ideology of the Journal des débats, a conservative organ secretly supported by the government, whose mission was to promote the interests of the industrial haute bourgeoisie. Moreover, Eugène Sue cultivated a certain complicity with the popular class, which for some weeks had sent him a flood of letters encouraging him to continue his work...

Contes immoraux du xviii e siècle (review)

Reviewed by: Contes immoraux du xviiie siècle James Fowler (bio) Nicolas Veysman, ed. Contes immoraux du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2009. 1312pp. 31€. ISBN 978-2-221-11057-7. In his concise and useful preface, Michel Delon argues that the contes immoraux of the Enlightenment era deserve to be better known and appreciated (8–27). The collection will surely help to achieve this increased recognition. Nicolas Veysman groups his selection of contes under the headings: “Licences poétiques” (that is, contes immoraux in verse form), “Le Boudoir des fees” (fairy-tale variants of the genre), and “La Culbute immorale” (late-century contes immoraux). In the general introduction, Veysman compares and contrasts the conte immoral that stretches back to La Fontaine with the “conte moral inventé en 1755 par Marmontel et continué après 1765 par ses nombreux épigones” (48). He then suggests that as the conte immoral assumed a succession of forms, its relationship to traditional morality changed. The conte en vers, with its subversive “immoralité oppositionnelle,” comes first; its peculiar immorality is founded on “un choix délibéré de l’immoraliste pour le vice et le plaisir lubrique.” The conte [immoral] en vers is succeeded in the course of the first half of the eighteenth century by the fairy-tale version, which promotes an “immoralité substitutive,” an alternative (im)morality tending towards social harmony. Finally, in contes written after the middle of the century, but especially around the tournant of the eighteenth and nineteenth, we discover an “immoralité problématique,” which “[rend] impossible tout partage entre le bien et le mal, impraticable toute censure, invalide tout jugement et impossible toute repression” (49–50). Adopting a more formalist perspective, Veysman then asserts that the conte immoral is intrinsically better suited than the novel to show “les mutations de la philosophie morale.” He claims that it shares this characteristic with the conte moral; for these shorter forms more readily (or necessarily?) present characters as vehicles of ideas rather than as complex or developing individuals (52). Correlatively, he argues that any key character in a conte immoral/ moral is “doté de qualités hyperboliques. Non pas seulement moral ou immoral mais prodige de moralité ou d’immoralité” (52). The placing of the “prodige” at the centre of the phenomenon is an excellent insight that reinforces the editor’s historically informed and nuanced overview of the conte immoral. Veysman distinguishes between “prodiges événementiels,” that is, extraordinary occurrences that may defy the normal course of nature or simply lack a known cause, and “prodiges identitaires.” The latter term refers to extraordinary characters, but usually in a sense opposed to traditional morality (as in “un prodige de cruauté”). Veysman forcefully argues that “chaque conte immoral élabore un prodige spécifique” (55). The verse variety contains only the “prodige événementiel”; this generally involves [End Page 741] “un stratagème mis en place par le protagoniste immoral, destiné à confondre la crédulité d’un mari ou à séduire un jeune tendron” (55). The conte féerique contains the “prodige événementiel” as well as the “prodige identitaire,” since in that genre supernatural beings disrupt the laws of nature in order to serve extremes of human passion. Finally, the late-century conte [immoral] vraisemblable contains the “prodige identitaire” alone; it depicts characters who are “prodigies” only in the sense that they display extraordinary characteristics. It mirrors the conte moral in this respect, for “le prodige immoral est un être d’exception qui fait l’expérience des limites de la nature humaine; non plus exploration des limites de la bonté humaine, comme chez Marmontel, mais exploration de celles de la jouissance et de la cruauté, comme chez Sade” (55). The editor also brings out the fact that, however comical and subversive most contes immoraux might have been, they were part of a highly serious Enlightenment trend. For as the Grand Siècle recedes, “moralistes et immoralistes sont amenés à repenser la morale, à la considérer, non plus [...] comme un rapport naturel et réflexif de soi à soi, mais désormais comme le résultat culturel d’un rapport social de soi avec les autres” (51). Having framed the problem in...

Politis and the Limits of Legal Form

Prolific as a scholar, active in the League of Nations, and agent for Greece before the Permanent Court, Nicolas Politis is remembered today as a key figure both in the development of international legal doctrine and in the organization of international political relations. This short article examines three of Politis� texts � the first an early foray into scholarship dealing with issues arising from the 1897 Greek�Turkish War, the second a set of mid-career lectures at the Hague Academy of International Law, and the third the posthumously published La morale internationale, a work of considerable ambition that never quite managed to find its audience. The article�s chief aim is to demonstrate that Politis� trajectory was marked by recurring appeals to extra-legal ideas and arguments � a broadly anti-formalistic tendency which made its influence felt with increasing visibility over time, but which was present even in his earliest and most conventional work.

Emma versus the Proprieties: Censorship, Self-Censorship, and Revision in Madame Bovary

In a letter written just before the last installment of Madame Bovary in the Revue de Paris, Flaubert remarked that [...] la morale de l'Art consiste dans sa beaute meme, et j'estime par-dessus tout d'abord le style, et ensuite le Vrai. Je crois avoir mis dans la peinture des moeurs bourgeoises et dans l'exposition d'un caractere de femme naturellement corrompu, autant de litterature et de convenances [Flaubert's emphasis] que possible [...] (1) In defense of his novel, Flaubert marshals some familiar terms of midnineteenth-century discourse on literature: beauty establishes the morality of art, style even more important than truth. (2) Surprisingly, he types Emma Bovary as inherently immoral and, despite his detestation of things bourgeois, insists that her portrayal combines the maximum of literature with that quintessential middle-class virtue, respect for the convenances. (3) Why does Flaubert, having just identified the morality of art with its beauty, insist on the proprieties with regard to the exposition of Emma's character? His emphasis on the word smacks of irony, and Yvan Leclerc led to claire that the letter's use of the term convenances not cognate with related uses by Flaubert: Ce qui convient selon les necessites esthetiques n'est pas le convenable de la morale sociale. (4) Yet the proprieties Flaubert has in mind, however ironic the reference, are not merely literary; indeed, the entire phrase--autant de litterature et de convenances que possible--firmly links art and propriety, no matter how little faith Flaubert has in the latter. Under a regime of state censorship, furthermore, the opposition between moral and aesthetic propriety can't easily be maintained. Self-censorship, censorship evasion, and Flaubert's pursuit of style combine in complex ways to define the convenances--at once social and literary--of Madame Bovary. Flaubert binds the moral and the aesthetic in ways that have important consequences for his depiction of Emma. In particular, the recourse to euphemism in characterizing her sexuality observes the proprieties but distances Emma from the reader, objectifying her while framing her passion in terms of strong moral judgments. Some of Flaubert's concern for the proprieties came from fear of the censors. As Rosemary Lloyd points out in reply to Tony Tanner's complaint about the novel's nondescription of the adulterous act itself, the absence of such description is far less likely to be a textual than a pragmatic strategy. (5) The timing of the letter and its declamatory style suggest an uncomfortable situation with regard to the censoring of Madame Bovary. The letter falls between the largest of the cuts demanded by the editors of the Revue de Paris (19 November 1856) and the novel's criminal indictment (24 December 1856) for outrage a la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes moeurs. Hemmed in by his editorial censors and the state censors they worried about, Flaubert had good reason to reassure friends and supporters of the purity of his intentions. Yet, while Lloyd undoubtedly correct in reproving Tanner for a lack of historical perspective, an emphasis on the practical reason for Flaubert's reticence implies a fairly sharp distinction between the stylistic and the pragmatic. I argue here that Flaubert's understanding of the proprieties with regard to the representation of Emma's sexuality was guided by stylistic and pragmatic motives that cannot be disentangled. On the basis of the changes Flaubert made at the level of plan, scenario, manuscript, and published texts, we can achieve a reasonably precise mapping of his interrogation of the proprieties and a clearer understanding of how this testing of the convenances shaped the characterization of Emma as une femme naturellement corrompu. First, we need to clarify the situation of Flaubert regarding contemporary practices of censorship. Since Madame Bovary ultimately escaped legal condemnation, unlike Les Fleurs du mal, a note of triumph tends to sound in accounts of the victory over the state censors. …