The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520324497

Citation preview

The Invisible Code

The Invisible Code Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848

William M. Reddy

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1997 by

The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reddy, William M. The invisible code : honor and sentiment in postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848 / William M. Reddy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-20536-7 (alk. paper) 1. France—History—Revolution, 1789-1799—Influence. 2. Honor—France—History—19th century. 3. France—Social conditions—19th century. 4. Women and democracy—FranceHistory—19th century. I. Tide. DC252.R38 1997 944.04—dc2o

96-21675

Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. @

To Claire

Contents

L I S T OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S A N D T A B L E S

ix

PREFACE

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XV

1 Introduction

I

2 The Hidden Pedagogy of Honor: Cicero, Racine, Sévigné

18

3 Sensitive Hearts: Marital Honor and Women's Identity

6$

4 The Ladder Up: Accumulating Honors in the Ministry of the Interior

114

5 Condottieri of the Pen: The Political Honor of Journalists

184

6 Conclusion: Gender and Sentiment

228

BIBLIOGRAPHY

239

INDEX

2J3

Illustrations and Tables

Plates Following p. 136 The Mistress of the House. Engraving by Eugène Lamy, 1840. The Adulterous Woman. Engraving by Hippolyte Lucas, 1840. The Vegetable Woman. Engraving by Pauquet, 1841. The Supernumerary. Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828. Asking for a Raise. Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828. Ten o'Clock: Reading Newspapers, Breakfast, Trimming Quills. Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828. The Political Journalist. Engraving by Paul Gavarni, 1840. The Literary Journalist. Engraving by Eugène Lamy, 1840.

Figures i. Number of Newspapers Worked for by Journalists.

212

Tables 1. Variation in Number of Newspapers Worked for, as Reported in Two Sources, for Fifty-nine Journalists.

213

Preface

The great legacy of French revolutionary legislation was consolidated and transmitted to the nineteenth century between 1804 and 1810 in a number of Napoleonic compilations, including the Code civil and the Codepénal. The abolition of privilege, equality before the law, therightof due process, freedom of contract—these and other principles of 1789 were enshrined in definitive form in the codes, in terse, easy to understand French. The codes also consolidated a noteworthy decline in the status of women from a high point of the early 1790s. The authority of fathers and husbands over women and their property was rendered complete; women were firmly excluded from participation in politics; divorce was retained, but made much more difficult to obtain than under the initial divorce law of 1792. (Divorce would be eliminated entirely immediately after the Bourbon Restoration, in 1816.) Husbands were given the power of marital correction over wives and were excused even if they should slay a wife caught in the act of adultery. The Codes provided the structure of a new male public sphere of open competition, in which talent and merit were to receive their due and in which property and money wouldflowfreelyfrom hand to hand in response to the pressures of supply and demand, and from which the family and women would befirmlyexcluded. But there was another code, an invisible one, that was also transmitted to the future by the work of the Napoleonic years, a code of honor. It was invisible, as we shall see, because observers presumed honor to be a thing of the past and easily categorized its manifestations as traces of the "shameful" influence of bourgeois self-interest. This code of honor had a family and marital dimension and a public or political dimension, xi

xii

PREFACE

both of which will be explored in some detail (but far from exhaustively) here. It also had a commercial dimension, of which, given the limits of this study, very little will be said, but which certainly deserves more attention than it has received to date. This honor code differed from its old-regime predecessor principally in its all-inclusiveness. Before the Revolution, the fastidious social distinctions of the corporate order had always provided the individual with a first bulwark for the defense of honor. Whether a baker, a window maker, or a magistrate of the prestigious Paris Parlement, every man in old-regime society, except for the very lowest reaches, possessed the honor of his estate, and transmitted that honor to his spouse and his children. A casual insult—the angry words of a customer in the bake shop, a stone flung at the procession of magistrates into the Palais de Justice—threatened status, but in a less direct way than after the Revolution. In the new laissezfaire order, any man who could afford respectable clothing and possessed the polish of literacy could contend for honor on an equal footing with the great. N o honor was above challenge. Forms of politeness were democratized, as was the duel. This new code of honor, although written nowhere, was enforced by the new, more numerous, more public law courts of the postrevolutionary era in a number of ways. They interpreted the articles of the Code civil dealing with marriage as a guide for the protection of family honor. They upheld the press laws that responded to the special need of the king to protection from insult. They recognized the de facto legality of duels that were carried out in proper form. But this code of honor was also enforced in other ways, especially by men's extremely strong emotional responses, feelings of shame that could overwhelm their better judgment and which, up until now, have seldom attracted the attention they deserve from historians. These feelings could lead men to fail to defend themselves in the (shameful) arena of the public courtroom against separation requests by their wives. These feelings could force men to importune their superiors for raises and promotions, revealing in spite of themselves a sense of desperation about their lowly fates. These feelings could lead men to hurl invective, to fabricate insults and scandalous lies in Parliament and in the press, in the hope of scarring the reputation of political enemies. All the evidence suggests that women's experience of shame was very different. Honor could often seem less important to them than emotional fulfillment; sentimental attachments were what women prized most or mourned most if they went sour. This was deemed to be a commonsense truth about women, and many women acted as if it were true for them.

PREFACE

But how did this difference come about? Without pretending to offer a complete answer, this study points toward a complementarity in the way honor and emotion, or "sentiment"—as the female realm of feeling was labeled—were conceived and experienced by early nineteenth-century French men and women. This complementarity hinged on the idea that male shame was not a feeling, at least not a part of the female lexicon of "sentiment," and that therefore men, who regulated their behavior on the basis of honor, acted more rationally than women, were free of the bewildering play of feeling, able to see and think with greater clarity and consistency. The male public sphere thus anchored its legitimacy on the false notion that, by excluding women, just as when they excluded children or the insane, men were excluding the irrational. The idea that private feeling could be contained or eliminated from public deliberation or action—in spite of its evident falseness—ran very deep, as it still does today, for that matter. The present study constitutes the beginnings of a critique of this idea; it can be read as an initial effort to follow through on the implications of a telling comment of Germaine de Staël's, quoted by Denise Riley: "By what means can a distinction be made twixt the talents and the mind? How can we set aside what we feel, when we trace what we think? how impose silence on those sentiments which live in us, without losing any of the ideas which those sentiments have inspired? What kinds of writings would result from these continual combats? Had we not better yield to all the faults which arise from the irregularities of nature?"1 I. From Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec Us institutions sociales (Paris, [1800] 1991), +15; cited by Denise Riley, "Ami That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapolis, 1988), 40; translation as cited in Riley. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French in this book are by the author.

Acknowledgments

This study has been some time in the making, and would not have been possible without the generous support of a number of institutions. A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a Fulbright fellowship from the Franco-American Commission for Educational Exchange funded the initial rounds of research on which the study was based. The American Philosophical Society and the Arts and Sciences Research Council of Duke University supported a number of those indispensable return trips to the archives and libraries of Paris to verify and expand on earlier work. The Triangle French Studies Group read and discussed early versions of two parts of the manuscript. An early version of chapter j was presented to the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France at the University of Chicago, and a paper on marital separations was presented to the Department of History at Northwestern University. "Denial and Historical Research," a paper discussing the process of doing research on this project, was generously received by participants in "Narrating Histories: A Workshop" organized by Robert Rosenstone at the California Institute of Technology. I wish to thank all those who read and commented on parts of the manuscript at these sessions, as well as numerous friends and colleagues who did so, including Alex Keyssar, Claudia Koonz, Andy Gordon, Cynthia Herrup, Kristen Neuschel, Michele Longino, Linda Orr, Alice Kaplan, William Sewell, and Sarah Maza.

XV

1 Introduction

The project that gave rise to this book was originally conceived as an ethnographic study in the classic sense, that is, a study based on the assumption that a given community or society founds its unity— such as it may be—on a shared oudook, made up of a common sense that for the most part goes unspoken and a cosmology that must be articulated in special ways on certain public occasions. Doubt has been cast in recent years on whether this assumption can serve as a valid starting point for the study of social life. Its capacity to yield useful knowledge has been questioned; its political implications have been denounced. In what way and to what extent individuals living in a given place or region "share" a common sense or a cosmology is a politically loaded question. When a self-serving politician asserts that the "American people" or "tous les françaises et les français" feel, want, or reject something, or a classic ethnographer asserts what the "Samoans" or the "Balinese" feel or believe, each brushes aside all questions of diversity, oppression, contestation, resistance, uncertainty, and change. In the last twenty years, a wide variety of feminist, Marxist, poststructuralist, and "halfie" ethnographers have called the ethnographic tradition to account for its complicity in imperialism, its dichotomizing we/they tone of voice, its romanticization of the (nonexistent) primitive.1 Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and others, meanwhile, have advanced an influential theory of "practice" aimed at rei. "Halfie" ethnographers are persons of non-Westem origin who have acquired Western university training and applied it to the study of their own societies; the term was coined by Lila Abu-Lughod in "Writing Against Culture," in Rtcapturing Anthropology: Working i

INTRODUCTION

covering the uncertainty of everyday decision making, the importance of strategy and personal style—the game element in social life—that the old notion of "culture" failed to accommodate.2 Yet, these objections are by now so well established and new approaches have been so widely applied that we are in danger of losing our ability to conceptualize the whole in any sense. Even oppression, resistance, and variation require that there be standards and official norms to impose or to flaunt; even personal strategic innovation requires that there be a few widely shared rules of the game. These must be articulated before an outsider who does not know them can begin to appreciate individual choices, conflicts, or power plays. ("Outsider" here does not necessarily mean a "Western" traveler or ruler; outsiders may come from any point on the compass.) Marshall Sahlins has proposed an attractive means of keeping a balance between structure and variation; his solution is to view cultural structures as "performative"; agents, he insists, must make decisions whether to apply them or not. When an agent chooses to apply a structural schema, she "performs" it and simultaneously puts it to the test of action; the unfolding situation can lead to alteration of the structure even as it is realized in performance.3 Thus, structure, practice, and history, in Sahlins's view, really need each other; only false dichotomies separate them. Lila Abu-Lughod has likewise called for "ethnographies of the particular"—something very close to historical narrative. Like historical narrative, these require that the principles whose contingent application in time are being described nonetheless find a limited and provisional articulation.4

in the Present, edited by Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe, 1991), 137-162; see also the other essays in this collection, as well as Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics ofEthnography (Berkeley, Calif., 1986); George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago, 1986); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); William Roseberry, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy (New Brunswick, N.J., 1989); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1989). 2. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline ofa Theory of Practice (Cambridge, England, 1977); Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley, Calif., 1979); see also Sherry B. Ortner, High Religion: A Cultural and Political History ofSherpa Buddhism (Princeton, N.J., 1989); William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1-29; see also the special issue of Annates: Economies, socUtés, civilisations entitled "Histoire et sciences sociales: Un tournant critique," 44, no. 6 (November-December 1989). 3. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985). 4. Abu-Lughod, "Writing Against Culture."

INTRODUCTION

In her own ethnographic work, in addition, Abu-Lughod has posed the question of emotion. If older notions of culture were too rigid, and agents enjoy more freedom than was once supposed, from what source do their actions spring? Emotion or feeling has emerged in Abu-Lughod's work, and in other recent ethnographies, as a site where cultural schémas and agents' particularities come together to produce desire, fear, experience, practice.5 Emotion has recendy arisen as an important issue for feminist scholars working on the history of the novel in France, as well. A number of studies have demonstrated that the sentimental novel was pioneered and sustained by women writers, whose work entailed a covert critique of the aristocratic social order.6 Feelings, these novelists maintained, were more important than wealth or honor. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz has argued, in fact, that the failure of Western social sciences (other than psychology) to deal with emotion in any systematic way is symptomatic of a parochial Western notion that feelings are not (or cannot be) public.7 Lutz's research has shown that other societies treat feeling as public and as an instrument or guide for collective decision making. (This is a finding that would have been welcomed by Germaine de Staël, who, in her bold survey of the history of literature, published in 1800, and in her sentimental novels, pleaded for the centrality of sentiment in public life.)8 The arguments of these works by anthropologists and literary critics converge to provide a useful conceptual tool for reintroducing individual experience and variation into historical ethnography. This tool is the notion of feeling, not as a private and idiosyncratic matter but as a domain that can be glimpsed through the documents and in which public schémas and values merge with a personal search for order. There is

5. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif., 1986) ; Michelle Z. Rosaldo, "The Shame of Headhunted and the Autonomy of Self," Ethos 11 (1983): 135-151; Fred R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pinlupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines (Berkeley, Calif., [1986] 1991); Rosaldo, Culture and Truth; Roy D'Andrade and Claudia Strauss, eds., Human Motives and Cultural Models (Cambridge, England, 1992) ; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, Calif., 1992). 6. Joan Dejean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York, 1991) ; Joan Hinde Stewart, Gynographs: French Novels by Women ofthe Late Eighteenth Century (Lincoln, Neb., 1993). See also Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York, 1988); Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (New York, 1985). 7. Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotion: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988), 53-80. 8. Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Paris, [1800] 1991).

4

INTRODUCTION

already an important model, highly suggestive for the historical study of emotion, in Raymond Williams's The Country and, the City, in which he develops the notion of a "structure of feeling."9 Such structures, in Williams's work, represent attempts to resolve contradictions that arise between values and practices; they point toward instabilities at once personal and political. These works suggest a method for conceptualizing cultural history that treats variation, political power, and change not as residual problems but as central to the analysis of the patterns that the documents present. Cultural historians have widely recognized the need for a new anchor of analysis, independent of old notions of culture. Lynn Hunt's turn toward psychoanalysis in her recent study of the French Revolution and Lindal Roper's dependence on psychoanalysis for the understanding of early modern witchcraft are responses to the widely perceived need to look beyond purely cultural interpretation to explain change and conflict. But these studies also demonstrate the difficulty of finding an acceptable point of departure that does not imply too much. Psychoanalysis is both insightful and unwieldy in its assumptions about the individual. Raymond Williams, along with Catherine Lutz, Lila Abu-Lughod, and other ethnographers, offers an approach to individual feeling that brings less theoretical baggage with it. The working assumption in this project, following their inspiration, has been that texts communicate feelings as well as messages. It is not necessary to inquire whether the individual has expressed her feelings accurately or sincerely. It is not necessary to have a perfecdy accurate reading of the feeling content of a text. The feelings one finds expressed in a document are, within some range of uncertainty, roughly those that the actors wished to convey, whether sincerely or insincerely. As such they have historical significance. Even if we can, in the present, only roughly guess about the feeling content, there is every reason to try to characterize it, simply because feeling is one of the most important facets of social life. By examining feeling, however tentatively, the historian frees herself of the false comfort implicit in the idea that the past is made up of precise "cultural structures" that individuals unfailingly apply. In order to study as many features as possible of such a well-documented society as early nineteenth-century France, and still finish the project within a reasonable time frame, I chose three disparate kinds of case ma9. Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1973); see also idem, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977).

INTRODUCTION

terial, different enough one from another to give an ethnographic perspective on the whole of society. I tried to keep the number of cases in each instance small enough to be workable. The three kinds of material were: (i) 131 marital separation cases from the period 1821-1847, to help get information on gender and on the marriage contract; (2) personnel files from the Ministry of the Interior—including a sample of 129 personal dossiers and a chronological series of personnel action records from the period 1814-1848—in order to provide a glimpse of salaried employment in this age of laissez-faire and freedom of contract; (3) memoirs, biographical entries, and essays concerning approximately 170 journalists active during the period 1820-1850, to gain perspective on how individuals earned a living through "the public exercise of one's reason," as Kant put it, in the new public sphere of the postrevolutionary era. I prepared reports on each kind of case material and published them separately.10 What united these three disparate realms, I believed initially, was that the persons captured by each sampling of material would have in common, for the most part, status within the "middle class" and, simultaneously, relative powerlessness, a subjection to the discipline of others through the contractual relationships that defined their social identities (remembering that marriage, like employment in government or journalism, was also a form of contract). I expected to find similar forms of discipline and resistance in these contractual relationships. As a follow-up to an earlier study that criticized social historians' use of the concept of class as too simplistic, I proposed to examine in detail the oppression, suffering, and powerlessness of key members of the "bourgeoisie," the fabled "ruling class" of the nineteenth century. What I found instead, at first to my great surprise, was an overwhelming preoccupation with honor in each of these social domains. In retrospect, I now realize that preoccupation with honor was a likely means by which disciplinary pressures would leave their trace for persons of any stratum in early nineteenth-century French society. This was especially so, however, for persons who saw themselves as "rulers," that is, as participating in the status, if not the reality, of power. Honor was all the more important for such persons precisely because it was the only share they could claim in hegemony.

10. William M. Reddy, "Marriage, Honor, and the Public Sphere in Post-Revolurionary France: Séparations it corps, 1815-1848 "Journal of Modern History 65, no. 3 (September 1993): 437-472; "Condottieri of the Pen: Journalists and the Public Sphere in Post-Revolutionary France, 1815-1850," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1546-1570; "'Mériter votre bienveillance': Les Employés du ministère de l'Intérieure en France de 1814 à 1848," Le Mouvement social, no. 170 (January-March 1995): 7-38.

6

INTRODUCTION

As I tried to piece together what this code was and how people thought about it, I was confronted with compelling evidence for the deeply gendered character of the modern public sphere. That "public" has for long meant "male" is not in itself a new contention, but it is a contention whose implications have only begun to be teased out. In particular, the relationship between gender and emotion, between the "female" and the "personal," "sentimental," or "private," is so intimate and elemental that it has shaped and continues to shape public action, although actors often have no awareness of it.

The Democratization of Honor A number of recent studies have pointed to the importance of honor in French history, and one, Robert Nye's ambitious overview of the subject, has turned up arichmine of material on practices and oudooks long neglected by social historians.11 Most of this work, though, has been carried out on specialized subjects that have not required the investigator to take a larger look at the implications of her findings. Two studies that have

il. Recent works that have a bearing on the history of honor in France are quite numerous, if one includes those that touch on it only tangentially. The following list is not complete: Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); Maurice Daumas, L'Affaire d'Esclans: Les Conflits de famille au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1988) ; Dejean, Tender Geographies; Ariette Farge, La Vie fragile: Violence, pouvoirs et solidarité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1986); Michèle Longino Farrell, Performing Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence (Hanover, N.H., 1991); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance ofthe French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres ofPrerevolutionary France (Berkeley, Calif., >993); Stewart, Gynographs; Edward Berenson, The Dial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); Rachel M. Brownstein, TVagicMuse: Rachel ofthe Comédie Française (New York, I99B) ; Jean-Claude Caron, Générations romantiques: Les Etudiants de Paris et le Quartier Latin (1814-1851) (Paris, 1991); Joëlle Guillais, La Chair de l'autre: Le Crime passionnel au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1986); Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, 1989); Anne Martin-Fugier, La Vie élégante: La Formation du Tout Paris, 181S-1S4JI (Paris, 1990); Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford, 1993); Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Ann-Louise Shapiro, "Disordered Bodies/Disorderly Acts: Medical Discourse and the Female Criminal in Nineteenth-Century Paris," Genders (March 1989): 68-86; idem, "L'amour aux assises: La Femme criminelle et le discours judiciaire à la fin du XIXe siècle," Romantisme: Revue du dix-neuvième siècle 68 (1990): 61-74; Philippe d'Iribarne, La Logique de l'honneur: Gestion des entreprises et traditions nationales (Paris, 1989); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without States: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

INTRODUCTION

7

tried for a larger view, Nye's and Edward Berenson's, have attempted to characterize "bourgeois" customs and oudooks, but without raising the question of what their findings imply for traditional notions of the "bourgeoisie" and its role in history. At the same time, none of these studies has attempted to analyze in depth an essential feature of honor, that is, the keeping up of appearances, the avoidance of shame by concealment. Although this has always been central to the meaning of the term honor in the European context, it has, over the centuries, consistently been spoken of in a partially veiled way. There are moments when one may recognize that concealment is an honorable act, and others when it is necessary to deny (even when speaking in general, without reference to specific individuals) that honor is any different from virtue (that is, from a quality that inheres in action without reference to whether it is known or hidden). The denials are necessary in general in order to protect specific instances of concealment. One could not say in the eighteenth century, for example, at least not in an official pronouncement of principle, "The Académie française is comprised of the finest and most honorable men of letters in the realm, as well as some who conceal the corrupt means they employ to win election to that body." Such a statement is itself an insult, even though the role of influence may be well known, and even though it may also be, in principle, perfecdy honorable to influence the Academic's elections—so long as one conceals one's means of doing so. Definitions of the term honor in dictionaries going back to the seventeenth century have specifically noted the word's odd duality. The current Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary's definition of honor, for example, refers to both "good name or public esteem" and "a keen sense of ethical conduct"—two very different, sometimes opposed concepts. Most imperative of all forms of concealment, in every period, has been that involving infractions of virtue by a close kin, spouse, or offspring.12 Protection of the family name by means of lying or covering up has always been considered laudable; no one has ever proposed that it is saintly to denounce one's wife for adultery or one's brother for fraud. As we shall see, it was just this disjuncture between honor's imperative of concealment and virtue's imperative of truth telling that gave birth to the plot of what has been called thefirstmodern novel,

12. See Daumas, L'Affaire d'Esclans; Reddy, "Marriage, Honor, and the Public Sphere"; a good example of the high value placed on concealment of kin's shameful actions or conditions can be found in the description of Raymond de Ramière's behavior in the opening pages of George Sand's Indiana (1832).

8

INTRODUCTION

in 1678.13 Tlie ideology of honor is therefore a strange mix of avowals and circumlocutions, blanket judgments and refusals to speak, that gives it a distinctive and peculiar flavor.14 It is worth noting that Pierre Bourdieu's original critique of ethnographic objectivism and formulation of the concept of "habitus" was carried out in analyzing field material from Kabylia, a social order dominated by honor, where a gap constantly yawned between the explicit norms individuals enunciated on request and the honor strategies they followed in specific practical contexts.15

La Princesse de Clbes,

Honor's precise relation to shame has also attracted little attention in current research on French history. Shame is normally considered to be an emotion, on a par with guilt, desire, joy, or sadness. Yet, it is also our only available opposite to honor, even though honor is never thought of as an emotion. As the opposite of honor, shame may exist when it is not felt, that is, the actions of "shameless" persons are "shameful," whereas persons who feel shame may act honorably as a result of this feeling, anticipating its pain. This odd duality of the word, which exists in most European languages, certainly in the French dyad honneur/honte, is the counterpart to the odd ambiguity of honor.16 The special ambiguity of honor is displayed in its ability to act at times almost as a synonym for virtue and at other times to represent virtue's opposite, as when it is used to refer to mere "honors," the exterior trappings of superiority. As a result of these peculiarities of vocabulary and necessary circumlocutions, the workings of honor in the French past cannot be understood on the basis of explicit statements or official pronouncements. Books on dueling, even accounts of insults or duels, do not explain all. The very words of participants that most authentically describe their experiences are inflected i j . See Dejean, Tender Geographies; see also Chapter 2 of this book. 14. These problems are well known among anthropologists w h o specialize in the honor issue. Landmark studies include Julian Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge, England, 1977), as well as works in the following collections: David D. Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, Special Publication N o . 22 of the American Anthropological Association (Washington, D . C . , 1987); J. G . Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers, eds., Honor and Grace in Anthropology (Cambridge, England, 1992). Other important works o f anthropologists dealing with honor and shame include Rosaldo, " T h e Shame o f Headhunters and the Autono m y of Self"; Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self; Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments; Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation (Berkeley, Calif., 1990). This issue is discussed further in Chapter 2 of this book. 15. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. 16. The following two passages are from P. Charron, Delasagesse, Trvis litres (Paris, [1601] 1797). In the first, the word honte is mentioned as a "passion" along with ambition; in the

INTRODUCTION by the need to avoid insult (or else to use this potent weapon in a strategically appropriate way). These intricacies have impeded research. But with the question of gender now squarely on the agenda, there is an advantage to examining honor as both a cultural and an emotional construct. Recognition that shame is a powerful feeling offers the chance to glimpse the emotional underpinnings of male rejection of female "sentiment." The question of honor was central to the thought of Montesquieu and Rousseau, yet we find that, from the generation of Tocqueville and Marx on, honor was widely deemed to have no further relevance for the understanding of modern society. N o w recent research tells us that honor remained vigorous. H o w could this be? To understand how honor could remain important even as it disappeared from view, it is necessary first to review briefly how revolutionary and Napoleonic legislators sought to found male equality by redrawing the lines between public and private.

second, honte is treated as the opposite of honneur, and ambition (a passion for honors) itself is said to have shameful results. L'on n'estime pas la grandeur, grosseur, raideur d'une riviere, de l'eaue qui luy est advenue par une subite alluvion et desbordement des prochains torrens et ruisseaux; un faict courageux ne conclud pas un homme vaillant, ny un oeuvre de justice l'homme juste: les circonstances et le vent des occasions et accidens nous emportent et nous changent; et souvent l'on est poussé à bien faire par le vice mesme. Ainsi l'homme estil très difficile à cognoistre. Ny aussi par toutes les choses externes et adjacentes au dehors; offices, dignitez, richesses, noblesse, grâce, et applaudissement des grands ou du peuple. Ny par ses desportemens faicts en public: car comme, estant en eschec, l'on se tient sur ses gardes, se retient, se contrainct; la crainte, la honte, l'ambition, et autres passions, luy font jouer ce personnage que vous voyez. Pour le bien cognoistre il le faut voir en son privé, et en son à-tous-les-jours. (6) Il ne faut point estre avide de gloire plus que l'on n'en est capable: de s'enfler et s'elever pour toute action utile et bonne, c'est monstrer le cul en haussant la teste. L'ambition a plusieurs et divers chemins, et s'exerce par divers moyens. Il y a un chemin droict et ouvert, tel qu'ont tenu Alexandre, Caesar, Themistocles, et autres. Il y en a un autre oblique et couvert, que tiennent plusieurs philosophes et professeurs de pieté, qui viennent au devant par derriere; semblables aux tireurs d'aviron, qui tirent et tendent au port, luy tournant le dos. Ils se veulent rendre glorieux de ce qu'ils mesprisent la gloire. Et certes il y a plus de gloire à fouler et refuser les grandeurs qu'à les desirer et jouyr, comme dict Platon à Diogenes; et l'ambition ne se conduict jamais mieux selon soy que par une voye esgarée et inusitée. C'est une vraye folie et vanité qu'ambition; car c'est courir et prendre la fumée au lieu de la lueur, l'ombre pour le corps, attacher le contentement de son esprit à l'opinion du vulgaire, renoncer volontairement à sa liberté pour suyvre la passion des autres, se contraindre à desplaire à soy mesme pour plaire aux regardans, faire pendre ses affections aux yeux d'autruy; n'aymer la vertu qu'autant qu'elle plaist au vulgaire; faire du bien non pour l'amour du bien, mais pour la réputation. C'est ressembler aux tonneaux qu'on perce: l'on n'en peust rien tirer qu'on ne leur donne du vent. L'ambition n'a poinct de borne; c'est un gouffre qui n'a ny fond ny rive; c'est le vuide que les philosophes n'ont encore pu trouver. (139)

IO

INTRODUCTION

The revolutionaries sought to clarify and delimit spheres and competences. They made public the holding of government office by the elimination of venality; they made public the legislative function, replacing the secret deliberations of the king's council with the open debates and voting of the National Assembly. They made public the deployment of coercion by eliminating lettres de cachets and by opening all courtrooms to public observation; they made public the deliberations of citizens by establishing freedom of speech and of the press. They made private all commercial establishments, previously subject to the public regulation of the guilds and capable of enjoying royal privileges and monopolies. They increased the strength of the barriers that protected the family from public interference by eliminating police backing for the authority of fathers and for the enforcement of religious vows and by passing divorce legislation that rendered marriage much more like a contingent contract between private individuals. In this way, the revolutionaries walled off as beyond the sphere of public action a private realm of the family and household as well as a quasiprivate realm of commercial contract and buying and selling. By doing so they made limitations on government interference—which were essential to individual liberty—coincide with just those sorts of activities an adult male head of family would have most wished to keep secret when seeking to protect his honor. The importance of honor was both reinforced and altered by the new property system. Arranged marriages remained as vital as ever to family well-being, and all the careful management of reputation and appearances entailed by marital strategy would continue to play a role into the early twentieth century. Personal honor and personal liberty became intertwined. The "private" in the sense of freedom from government interference and the "private" in the sense of family secrets, male authority, and the management of family name, were merged. The Revolution also brought a democratization of the aristocratic linkage of honor with conspicuous merit. Now, every worthy male citizen, irrespective of birth or rank, could distinguish himself by bravery in defense of fatherland or, analogously, by arduous public service. The long years of warfare, the mixing of millions of French men from all strata of society in the Grande Armée, solidified the hegemony of this democratized code—an outcome that would have chagrined the Jacobin advocates of Rousseauian "virtue." Robert Nye concludes that the imperial officer corps under Napoleon was particularly influential in bringing back the duel—aritualof honor formerly limited to aristocrats and a few wealthy

INTRODUCTION

11

bourgeois, now democratized to reflect the diverse social origins of Napoleon's officers, and evolving a code of everyday civility that was to prevail among men without distinction of social rank. Nye cites as typical of the attitude of postrevolutionary etiquette manuals the quip by Louis-Damien Emeric in a guide published in 1821: "All men should be equal before lapolitesse as they are before the law."17 Edouard Alletz agreed in 1837 that "La politesse is the simulacrum of love for one's neighbor; it is a tacit truce between men consumed by self-love, the silence of egotism, an involuntary respect for human dignity. It has been invented to re-establish in this world the appearance of equality."18 Although the revolutionaries succeeded in democratizing the honor code, nineteenth-century social observers spoke uniformly as if the old aristocratic code had been, not open to all, but set aside, abolished. As a wellspring of action, nineteenth-century thinkers asserted, honor was replaced by "interest."19 Before the Revolution, to be motivated by "interest" was to be less than honorable. Only a commoner might avow such a motive; that is precisely what distinguished commoners from those of noble status, whose wealth, education, and family traditions oriented them toward selfless dedication to king and public service. Nobles were not allowed to engage in retail or industrial occupations for this reason, just as commoners were barred from serving at the highest levels of state and military institutions. By 1820, the word interest had taken on a new connotation; it became an amoral, scientific term designating whatever it was that people strove for. Yet, it retained the sense of the pursuit of gain that it had always had. In the context of the postrevolutionary liberal order, commercial exchange had assumed a paradigmatic quality, appearing as the most essential or most natural form of human interaction. The use of the term interest in this sense had gained currency thanks to the Physiocrats and Adam Smith and its promotion was carried on in France by J.-B. Say, Adolphe Blanqui, and other economists in the early nineteenth century. Yet, even those who kept their distance from political economy nonetheless agreed that interest was the essential motive force of human action in a "bourgeois" laissez-faire social order because such an order was based on absolute prop-

17. Louis-Damien Emeric, Nouvcauguide de la politesse, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1821), 23; cited and translated in Nye, Masculinity, 129. 18. Edouard Alletz, De la democratic nouvclle: Ou des mocurs et de la puissance des classes nwyennes en France (Paris, 1837), 1:107; cited and translated in Nye, Masculinity, 129. 19. This issue will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2 of this book.

12

INTRODUCTION

erty rights and freedom of contract. This was just the kind of society that the Revolution had produced, in the general view. However, this was also just the society that was driven by concern for honor, as recent research shows—driven to such an extent that the nineteenth century must be considered the great age of dueling. This was the period when the restrictions placed on the dress and public behavior of women reached their apogee, a period whose politics consisted more than ever before or since of polemics based on insult and calumny, the period when it was first conceived that shame might be a strong enough emotion to cause temporary insanity, a period of extreme public sensitivity to slight and innuendo, the great age of political caricature (that is, of the development of a visual code of insults), an age of unequaled social disdain and misogyny posing as realism in art and literature.20 Could it be that, when honor reached its apogee of influence, it became invisible in a peculiar way and went unrecognized by all the systematic thinkers of the age, as well as most historians up until the last decade or so? Why did it become conventional to label all contention for honors and all efforts to avoid shame as actions motivated by interest in the new, broader meaning of the term? We shall look closely at how this trick was carried out in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book. Besides being spoken of in this reductionist way, honor also became the object of a certain naturalizing discourse carried out by physiologists, psychiatrists, racial theorists, and others. In this context, honor emerged as an element of nature. A timid, easily insulted man was likely to be impotent. Virile, touchy men were more intelligent, more rational. Women, incapable of being guided by fear of shame, could not be trusted to act or think rationally. Hence the necessity of keeping them out of politics. The same was true of inferior races, such as North Africans and Blacks. Jews were considered to be a people without honor. Balzac's Gobseck is emblematic of this prejudice in the early part of the century, as are Deroulede's anti-Semitic stereotypes at century's end. This way of thinking about honor was muted in the first half of the century, often implicit in offhand comments. As the works of Nye, Harris, Berenson, and others show, however, this naturalizing discourse became common, if not predominant, in the second half of the century.21 20. On the relation between misogyny and realism, see Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York, 1993). 21. See especially Nye, Masculinity; Harris, Murders and Madness; Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux; Guillais, La Chair de I'autre; Shapiro, "Disordered Bodies/Disorderly Acts."

INTRODUCTION

In the nineteenth-century view, honors were pursued either as a part of a strategy for maximizing gain or as items of preference, like consumer goods, that individuals chose for their own reasons; honor was a natural quality of the superior European male, not a social construct. In either case, honor did not have to be understood or theorized at the level of society or history. Hence honor's power and its invisibility were connected. It was a part of nature, a mundane everyday reality behind politeness and ambition; it was not a historical or a social phenomenon. It was genetic, psychological, unalterable therefore, and banal. Cultural anthropologists are familiar with characterizing the operation of principles that are all but invisible to their practitioners; and because such principles do operate, however fitfully or partially, there is still some sense to the term culture. If honor in general was too banal to be worth mentioning, individuals also avoided speaking of their own honor in many circumstances. A journalist or a politician had to appear virtuous, disinterested, altruistic, truthful; this was how he kept his honor. A merchant or businessman had to appear trustworthy, prudent, hardworking. Only when challenged in public with lying, fraud, or corruption did a manfindit necessary to speak of his honor or to speak of defending his honor. It would have been suspicious for someone to say, "I strive to appear virtuous because I am concerned with my honor." Making the point explicidy in this way was selfdefeating. It was important to one's honor to appear concerned, not so much with just honor, but with the things that bring it: generosity, selfsacrifice, courage, honesty, self-esteem. In addition, there was no longer a special kind of honor appropriate to each status in society, as there had been in the old regime, and this was one more reason why the concept did not have to come up explicitly in daily practice. This convergence of discursive styles and practical styles of treating honor rendered it difficult to theorize, even to notice, in many contexts. Acting honorably, defending one's honor, is doubdess in all circumstances a mode of behavior closely associated with what psychologists call "denial," a process of self-deception aimed at blocking painful feelings from consciousness. In the nineteenth century, this association became even closer. It was easier for a man who kept a mistress to act as if he were virtuous and had nothing to reproach himself for if he indeed convinced himself that he did no wrong, that his wife understood, forgave, accepted without pain, that his sons' and daughters' feelings were not relevant. There is plentiful evidence of this kind of denial in the records that will be discussed in this book—evidence that helped force this study in the direc-

INTRODUCTION

don of an examination of the history of honor's relation to emotion, to what was then called "sentiment." But it is not necessary to do research in the archives to find traces of honor and denial working in tandem; it is equally plain in such well-known texts of the period as Balzac's Cousine Bette and George Sand's Indiana. Here is how Sand describes the male protagonist of that novel, the young and wealthy Raymond de Ramière: "He was a principled man when he reasoned with himself; but impetuous passions often carried him beyond his moral system. Then he could no longer think, or else he avoided calling himself before the tribunal of his conscience: he committed transgressions as if unbeknownst to himself; and the man of the night before endeavored to fool the man of the morning after."22 The ability of males to suspend clear thinking about the relationships between their duties and their desires is central to the plots of this and many other nineteenthcentury novels. In practice, therefore, honor came up as an explicit topic only in the breach, or when ambiguities became painful and required resolution. Nonetheless, as we shall see, breaches of honor and ambiguities concerning the honor code were common enough to ensure that honor is explicitly discussed in the documents, at least on the level of case material. When considering practical detail and individual feelings, there are plentiful indicators of honor's form and its import.

The Continued Relevance of Honor Honor in the twentieth century has taken on yet another, even less visible configuration. When the prevailing code of honor underwent a profound transformation as a result of the First World War, the changes that followed were widely noted at the time: the disappearance of dueling, the greaterfreedomsfor women, and the looser standards of public morality of the 1920s and afterward.23 Why was the bourgeoisie compelled (or inclined?) to change its outward standards of behavior in this way? These changes have been attributed to the sufferings at the front and to the rise 22. "Cétait un homme à principes quand il raisonnait avec lui-même; mais de fougueuses passions l'entraînait souvent hors de ses systèmes. Alors il n'était plus capable de réfléchir, ou bien il évitait de se traduire au tribunal de sa conscience: il commettait des fautes comme à l'insu de lui-même, et l'homme de la veille s'efforçait de tromper celui du lendemain." George Sand, Indiana (Galimard Folio edition of 1984), 72. Throughout this novel, Raymond shows refined understanding of the prevailing code of honor. 23. Nye, Masculinity; and Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes.

INTRODUCTION

of consumerism, white collar employment, feminism, the automobile, the cinema, and radio, but they have never been incorporated into a larger history of European honor. Instead, gradually, the nineteenth century began to be seen through the same tinted lenses that nineteenth-century observers had used to look back at the old regime.24 Losing its sheen of modernity and newness, by comparison with twentieth-century horrors and wonders, the nineteenth century acquired an air of quaintness and stuffiness, of poindess strictness and rigidity. A wand was waved, and it became "la belle époque," in English, ''Victorian.'' It became safe to notice that nineteenth-century bourgeois families were rather more preoccupied with respectability than their twentieth-century counterparts. But that was in the past. The present remained apparendy free of the influence of honor, just as it had seemed throughout the postrevolutionary era. The present continued to appear (as it had appeared before) the age of interest, of calculation, competition, rationality, progress. Honor gradually became a quality denied all relevance. Freud built his theory on guilt and ignored shame.25 Early twentieth-century anthropologists discovered honor codes among the savages, and such codes became a distinguishing feature of the primitive and the Oriental, of poor Mediterranean peoples, Muslims, the Japanese.26 Its continued centrality in our own day is founded on this continued occlusion. In practice, we all know the power of shame. Feminism has been raising our awareness of it—not, however, by delivering any surprises. That rape victims feel overwhelmed by shame, that battered women refuse to pursue court cases against their husbands, or harassed employees against their bosses, out of shame, that men on the job often do not like being under the supervision of a woman, that men often find housework and child care degrading—these and many other unsurprising facts, when they become the subject of angry calls for reform by feminists, point to an underlying, half-hidden order to gender identities, a code of honor. In the United States recendy, public avowals by celebrities and others 24. Arsène Houssaye, Mademoiselle de Volières etMadamedeMontespan: Etudes historiques sur la cour de Louis XIV (Paris, i860) ; Edmond Goncourt and Jules Goncourt, La Femme au XVIIIe stick (Paris, 1887) are good nineteenth-century examples of nostalgia for the old regime. 25. On Freud's failure to deal with shame, see Robert Karen, "Shame," Atlantic Monthly 269, no. 2 (February 1992) : 40-70. 26. A well-known example is Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns ofJapanese Culture (New York, 1946); Julian Pitt-Rivers denies that honor is important to contemporary British society in his pathbreaking The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex.

i6

INTRODUCTION

of victimization through marital violence or child abuse have become common. In Europe, a similar trend has emerged.27 In France and Italy, the political scene has been swept by revelations of widespread wrongdoing in recent years, scandals that have left no segment of the political spectrum or the state untouched. In these scandals we see the old male honor code robustly at work, nowhere more so than in the suicide of former French prime minister Pierre Bérégovoy in May 1993, after he was accused of having received an interest-free loan from a businessman. A man may be impelled to commit suicide even when innocent, defenders of Bérégovoy asserted, simply because of a sense that his reputation has been irreparably damaged. The importance of appearances remains very strong. In practice, of course, few social historians have failed to recognize that self-interest is too narrow or too empty a concept to account for the full range of human behavior in any period; doubtless few would argue that honor has ever been eclipsed as a value in European history. For many historians, the contribution of this study may be more as an attempt to formalize this insight and to give it an adequate framework in ethnographic terms, in terms that avoid, as well, falsely historicizing the past as a quaint vision of alien cultural customs. If occasionally the tone of the study suggests a misplaced "Eureka!" when discovering the obvious, the reader is asked to forgive it as an effect of the effort of Entfremdung— making the obvious appear strange. Such an effort is essential whenever applying ethnographic method to a social order close to one's own.

Plan of the Study Throughout the study, because the argument concerns emotions, the handling and concealment of emotions, the precise vocabulary and style of allusion to feelings, and a code of behavior that is often not spoken of openly, I will employ quotations from original sources that are often longer than is conventionally deemed necessary in historical monographs, providing the original French in a footnote. In this way, readers will be equipped to judge for themselves whether the tone or tendency of a document is as I interpret it to be.28 Dominick LaCapra has recommended, 27. Parallel trends are obvious in, for example, recent revelations by French television anchorman Pierre Poivre d'Arvor about his family and his private life. 28. Spelling of quotations from the original French in this book follows closely the source they are taken from. Where documents from the early nineteenth century use the verb endings -oit and -oient in place of present-day -ait and -aient, this usage has been preserved. Noun ending -mens in place of present-day -ment has also been preserved. Early

INTRODUCTION

with reason, that "social history be more publicly accountable by providing the reader with a basis for critically evaluating and possibly contesting interpretations and readings."29 Because honor is a relatively new theme in the study of French history, and because nineteenth-century observers displayed a systematic inability to see honor as a social and political (rather than a merely individual or biological) issue, I will discuss in Chapter 2, on the "hidden pedagogy of honor," both the origin and character of nineteenth-century blindness to honor as a social issue and the indirect but all-pervasive manner in which the code of honor was inculcated in successive generations of French men and women. This subject was not originally envisioned as a part of the research project, and the issues raised in this chapter can only be examined in an exploratory manner. However, the general lines of my argument will be clear, and it will be easy for those familiar with French history to envision the wealth of other kinds of evidence that could be marshalled to back it up. In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, the evidence of each in turn of the three case studies that make up the project is presented. For each of these chapters, a preliminary research report has been published elsewhere; these reports contain additional material and independent arguments that have not always been included here.30 In Chapter 6, an effort is made to point out the larger implications of the study, both methodological and substantive, for French history.

nineteenth-century manuscript sources are seldom rigorous in the use of diacritic marks, and, as I am not a native speaker, my handwritten notes may not have always preserved the exact usage of the manuscript. Therefore, all citations of such sources were corrected to reflect present-day usage. The citations from the Princessc tie Cleves in Chapter 2 followed the 1950 Droz edition, which preserved the spelling of the original. 29. Dominick LaCapra, "Intellectual History and Its Ways," American Historical Review 97 (1992): 425-439, quote from p. 431. 30. For a list of these reports, see note 10.

2 The Hidden Pedagogy of Honor Cicero, Racine, Sévigné

This chapter examines background issues of great importance for interpretation of the case material presented in subsequent chapters. Child rearing, education and schooling, the literary canon, social thought, are each vast subjects; each has been extensively treated by historians and literary critics. The aim here is to offer a few glimpses of h o w the honor code was represented and enforced, as well as how it was contested, in educational institutions, in the official canon, in more popular literature, and, more generally, for young people. The examples that have been chosen are a few of those suggested by the available research on these arenas.1 Ethnographic holism suggests there is benefit in considering these matters, even if inadequately. i. On education see, for example, Jean-Claude Caron, Générations romantiques: Les étudiants de Paris et le Quartier latin (1814-1851) (Paris, 1991); Isabelle Bricard, Saintes ou pouliches: L'Education des jeunesfillesau XDCe stick (Paris, 198$); Françoise Mayeur, L'Enseignement secondaire desjeunesfillessous la Troisième République (Paris, 1977); Robert Gildea, Education in Provincial France, 1800-1914-: A Study of Three Departments (Oxford, 1983); Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling Jbr the People: Comparative Local Studies of Schooling History in France and Germany, I7so-i8so (New York, 1985); Marie-Françoise Lévy, De mires enfilles:L'Education desfranfaises, i8so-i88o (Paris, 1984) ; Marie-Madeleine Compère, ed., Du collège au lycée (ISOO-I8SO): Généalogie de l'enseignement secondairefrançais (Paris, 1985). On the French literary canon, see Martyn Lyons, Le Triomphe du livre: Une histoire sociologique de la lecture dans la France du XDCe siècle (Paris, 1987) ; Michèle Longino Farrell, Performing Motherhood: The SévignéCorrespondence (Hanover, N.H., 1991); Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins ofthe Novel in France (New York, 1991); David Denby, The Sentimental Novel and the Social Order in France, 1760-1820 (Cambridge, England, 1994). Interesting insights on the child-rearing practices of the period can be found in Pierre Citron, Dans Balzac (Paris, 1986); see also George D. Sussman, SellingMothers'Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 18

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

19

If historians have not discussed honor and shame until recently, it is in part because the importance of honor in the nineteenth century was obscured by certain prevalent ideas of the time. Thinkers as different as François-René de Chateaubriand, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx agreed that honor was a quality characteristic of the feudal and monarchical past, whereas the present era was characterized by an increasing preoccupation with self-interest. Chateaubriand made an easy, unquestioning elision of honor with Christianity, and of each of these with France's prerevolutionary monarchy, as in the following passage from the Génie du christianisme, in which Chateaubriand addresses four "marble squires, covered with armor, armed to the teeth, hands joined and on their knees at the four corners of the entablature of a tomb":2 Is that you, Bayard, who returned ransoms to virgins, so they might marry their lovers? Is that you, Beaumanoir, who drank your own blood in the batde of the Thirty? Is it some other knight who sleeps here? These squires seem to be praying with fervor, because those valiant men, ancient honor of the French name, warriors that they were, nonetheless feared God from the bottom of their hearts; and crying out Montjoie et Saint Denys, they tore France from the grasp of the English, and worked miracles of bravery for the church, their lady, and their king.3 The plots of Walter Scott's novels, by far the best-selling new fiction to appear in France in the 1820s, often turned on this very same contrast between a past social order founded on honor and an emergent, new one based on self-interest.4 In Quentin Durward, which sold over twenty thou(Urbana, 111., 1982). On French social thought of the period, see Pierre Ros anvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris, 198$); André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris, 1984); idem, Histoire du libéralisme politique: De la crise de l'absolutisme à la Constitution it 187s (Paris, 1985); François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Le Siècle de l'avénement républicain (Paris, 199}); François Furet, La Gauche et la Révolutionfranfaiseau milieu du XIXe siècle: Edgar Quinet et la question du Jacobinisme (1S6S-1S70) (Paris, 1986). 2. "écuyers de marbre, bardés de fer, armés de toutes pièces, les mains jointes, et à genoux aux quatre coins de l'entablement d'un tombeau.'' 3. "Est-ce toi, Bayard, qui rendais la rançon aux vierges, pour les marier à leurs amans? Est-ce toi, Beaumanoir, qui buvois ton sang dans le combat des Trente? Est-ce quelqu'autre chevalier qui sommeille ici? Ces écuyers semblent prier avec ferveur, car ces vaillants hommes, antique honneur du nom français, tout guerriers qu'ils étaient, n'en craignaient pas moins Dieu, du fond du coeur; et c'était en criant: Montjoie et Saint Denys, qu'ils arrachaient la France aux anglois, et faisaient des miracles de vaillance pour l'église, leur dame et leur roi." From François René de Chateaubriand, Le Génie du christianisme (Paris, [An 171S-1914

XI-1803] 1978), 936.

4. On the popularity of Walter Scott, see Armand de Pontmartin, Mes mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1885-1886), 2:2-3; Lyons, Le Triomphe du livre, 86,129-144. On Scott's social vision

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

sand copies in France between 1825 and 1830, Scott used this contrast to structure a plot set infifteenth-centuryFrance but whose events closely paralleled those of the Revolution. Louis IX was brought low, in that novel, because he depended for guidance on cringing bourgeois advisers instead of on his loyal feudal vassals and pursued interest at the expense of honor. Tocqueville, who eschewed Romantic nostalgia, nonetheless agreed with the basic thrust of such conservative views, warning that contemporary societies, driven everywhere to abolish aristocracies, exposed themselves to the danger of despotism: "For in a community in which the ties of family, of caste, of class, and craft fraternities no longer exist people are far too much disposed to think exclusively of their own interests, to become self-seekers practicing a narrow individualism and caring nothing for the publicgood" (emphasis added).5 Karl Marx was in complete agreement; he characterized bourgeois society as "unheroic" and denounced its hypocritical standards of virtue and respectability as a sham aimed at concealing the amoral pursuit of profit that was its real raison d'être.6 One could go on and on here; as noted in Chapter 1, France's leading political economist, J.-B. Say, treated honor as just another good, whose value to an individual could be given a precise monetary equivalent.7 But these characterization were seriously flawed. The French word honneur (honor) and its related words, honorer (to honor) and honorable (honorable), were widely used in the early nineteenth century. That the concept remained important will be evident from the material presented in this study, but it is easy to do a superficial independent check using the American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) data base. In 109 works published

and its relation to the Scottish Enlightenment, see Graham McMaster, Scottami Society (Cambridge, England, 1981). 5. "Les hommes n'y étant plus rattachés les uns aux autres par aucun lien de castes, de classes, de corporations, de familles, n'y sont que trop enclins ine se préoccuper que de leurs intérêts particuliers, toujours trop portés à n'envisager qu'eux-mêmes et h se retirer dans un individualisme étroit où toute vertu publique est étouffée* (emphasis added). From Alexis de Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la révolution (Paris, [I8J6] 1964), 51; translation cited here is from Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the Revolution, translated by Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1955), xiii. 6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte (New York, 1963), 16; on the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, see numerous statements in Marx's Communist Manifesto. 7. J.-B. Say, Traité d'économie politique (Paris, 1841), }6j.

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

21

in the 1830s included in the data base, for example, the word honneur occurs 1,384 times. Its opposite, honte, occurs 519 times. The ongoing centrality of honneur is suggested by the fact that it occurs frequendy in landmark pieces of literature of the time: 16 times in Hugo's Hernani (where honte occurs 3 times); 28 times in George Sand's Lelia (where honte occurs 42 times); 85 times in Stendahl's Le Rouge et le noir (where honte occurs 27 times). These and other occurrences of the term can easily be classified according to two different but related senses. These two core senses had a long history and have survived to this day. In thefirstsense, an honneur was an exterior or visible mark of distinction or rank. One could have, receive, give, or do an honor. Usage in this sense ranged from the mundane, in, for example, introductions to formal letters (Monsieur, J*ai l'honneur de vous adresser ci-joint. . . ) to the very substantial honor of nomination to a post in government, university, or an officer's rank in the military. There was also Napoleon's specifically named Legion of Honor, nomination to whose ranks was a prize much coveted by careerists in many walks of life. Honors were, by this sense, plural, something one accumulated, or a grand series of gradations through which one advanced. This aspect of honor was largely a male concern; women were, however, expected to comport themselves—in terms of dress, household management, social relations, consumption, conversation—in a manner appropriate to the rank of their husband or male relations.8 The second sense of the word honneur implied a single state, rather than a multiplicity of ranks. In this sense, honor was something one preserved from taint; if one failed, one fell into an opposite state of dishonor (déshonneur) or shame (honte). It was in this sense that one "honored" (honorer) one's commitments, whether they were contractual obligations, debts, or the obligation to show courage on the field of battle or to defend one's name from insult. Perhaps the most frequent usage in this sense was the phrase "ma parole d'honneur" ("my word of honor"), a solemn promise, but often used ironically or as an expletive, as in the English phrase, "my word!" It was in this second sense, as well, that honor was a most active concern for women; their honor, in the sense of rank, was derived from their male relations, especially their husband, if married. Their task, vis-á-vis honor, was to preserve themselves and their family's name from even the suspicion of improper conduct. Both of these senses of the word honneur have to do with what is ex8. This is the issue on which the plot of Balzac's Les Employés turns; its original title was La Femme supérieure (1838).

22

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

ternal or visible or publicly knowable.9 One could have the merit to make a good prefect or a brave officer, for example, and there was a kind of honor in this; but one had to be nominated to a prefecture to have the honor of the office, and one had to be made an officer before one could display the bravery appropriate to that rank. Likewise, to be honorable in the sense of avoiding shame involved more than being moral. It was not considered immoral for an unrelated man and woman to live chastely together, for example, but it was dishonorable because, for men and women, living in the same dwelling was a conventional exterior mark of sexual relations. What people may have believed was irrelevant; the community may generally have believed the man and woman to be chaste; cohabitation would still be a taint against honor because of what it invited someone to believe. Preserving honor required a superfluity of proofs of one's intentions. Thus, the focus on externality could be positive, in the sense of aiming at ensuring accurate public reflection of internal states, attitudes, proclivities, capacities, merit—hence recognition by means of a diploma or medal or office. Or it could be negative, in the sense of avoiding the appearance of improper or immoral behavior. To be honorable in this latter sense is to know and apply the rules of propriety, in French, biense'ance. The evidence examined in this study confirms Robert Nye's argument, summarized in Chapter i, that honor was democratized in a way that created a painful dilemma for the early nineteenth-century male. The abolition of privilege and enhanced freedom of contract had the effect of stripping individual males of their former clear, public corporate identities (as master mason or secrétaire du mi). With a much wider array of career paths open, and a much wider scope for striking contractual partnerships, concern for personal reputation became an obsession, where before it had been only a constant concern. At the same time, all understood that, thanks to the Revolution, any man, by adopting the dress and manners of a minimal education, could aspire to a career of honor on an equal footing with all others.10 Even if few of these aspirations could be satisfied, there were plentiful examples known to all of men who rose from nothing to the greatest heights, like Napoleon himself, like Adolphe Thiers, Emile de Girardin, 9. On these two senses of the concept of honor, see David D. Gilmore, "Introduction: The Shame of Dishonor," in idem, ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity ofthe Mediterranean, Special Publication No. 22 of the American Anthropological Association (Washington, D.C., 1987), 2-21, esp. 5. 10. See Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modem France (Oxford, 1993), 129. We will say more of this below, in the conclusion of this chapter.

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

and Victor Hugo. 11 Thus, as ready-made gendemen's clothes became ever cheaper, it was necessary to examine each individual ever more closely to see the signs of lowly status, the poor cut of the coat around the shoulders, the umbrella, or the "légère teinte de boue" ("slight color of mud") on the boots (to use a favorite example from Balzac). Both the umbrella and the trace of mud revealed that one had no carriage and could not even afford a taxi for moving about the city.12 Scrutiny and the danger of humiliation were acutely felt. Conflicts over legitimacy were interpreted within this framework of honor under siege and carried out by means of insult and violence. And they could only have worsened male sensitivities. Paradoxically, this sense of endemic threat of dishonor was easily linked to the political economists' notion of the profit motive as prime mover of social life, so that—by a curious combination of observation and theory—the new social order based on self-interest, the laissez-faire social order, came to be seen as inherendy shameful. As legitimist publicist Alfred Nettement put it in 1836, in terms that closely echoed the views of both Chateaubriand and Marx: "In old France the accomplishment of duty was the social end, honor and religious sentiment the two social motive forces. But in today's France . . . the social end is no more than wellbeing or pleasure; and money, supreme money, is the unique and sovereign motive force" (emphasis added).13 Historians, literary critics, art historians, and other scholars of the French past had litde reason to question the predominance of self-interest in nineteenth-century bourgeois society until confronted by the problem of gender and the need, as women's history has become more complete 11. On the (in principle) opening of career paths, see Christophe Charle, Histoire sociale de la France au XDù siècle (Paris, 1991), 48; Caron, Générations romantiques, 37-52,103-106; Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation if 1S20 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 225-258. 12. On ready-made clothes, see Henriette Vanier, La Mode et ses métiers: Frivolités et luttes des classes, 1830-1870 (Paris, i960); Philippe Perrot, Les Dessus et les dessous de la bourgeoisie: Une histoire du vêtement au XEXe sück (Paris, 1981) ; Honoré de Balzac, Les Illusions perdues (1837). On the légère teinte de boue in Balzac, two examples: Gaudissartll (ca. 1844) in vol. 7 of the Pléiade edition, p. 851, a trace of mud on woman's shoe noted by commis of a shop where châles are sold; and in Père Goriot, Rastignac must polish his boots before visiting Mme de Restaud, pp. 67-68 in the Garnier-Flammarion edtion of 1966; on umbrellas, see Anne-Marie Bijaoui-Baron, "La Bureaucratie: Naissance d'un thème et d'un vocabulaire dans la littérature française," Thèse d'état, Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), 1981,531-535. 13. "Tandis que dans la France ancienne l'accomplissement du devoir était la fin sociale; l'honneur et le sentiment religieux, les deux mobiles sociaux; dans la France actuelle . . . la fin sociale n'est autre que le bien-être ou le plaisir; l'argent suprême, le mobile unique et souverain, l'argent" (emphasis added). Alfred Nettement, Les Ruines momies et intellectuelles (Paris, 1836), 15.

24

T H E H I D D E N P E D A G O G Y OF H O N O R

and more sophisticated, to reunify the field and seek a single vision of the unfolding of gender identities in history. The view that has remained a commonplace, if not an orthodoxy, from that day to this—that "bourgeois" society is based on the pursuit of profit and of self-interest—and its corollary—that such pursuit is itself shameful, or at least not an honorable or heroic pursuit—is not, in my view, so much an explanation as a symptom. In practice, few historians have subscribed to this view in an unreserved way; this is why historians are so often taken aback by the assumptions of the new economic history, which treat maximization of utility as the basis of all behavior. But a clear view of the nineteenth-century "mal du siècle" requires more; it requires that one actively eschew those confusions from which the prevailing malaise arose, so that their history and effects can be mapped out. This study can only be a first step in such an effort. If honor was invisible to the most penetrating social thinkers of the era, and if official ideology did not sanction it as an explicit value, especially after 1830, how was it embodied, learned, and passed on to new generations? Partly in the rhythms of everyday life, especially in the contexts of consumption patterns, child rearing, and sociability. Another important method, however, was the implicit value placed on notions of honor that were contained in standard texts of the curricula that every boy and girl of the elite was exposed to in school. To see how this worked, and as an introduction to the prevailing code of honor of the era—whose depiction in literary texts has not received the attention it deserves—three canonical texts have been chosen here for close consideration: Cicero's diatribe In Catilinam; Racine's tragedy, Phèdre; and the letters of Mme de Sévigné. This brief discussion will not only be very useful for interpreting research results presented in subsequent chapters, it will also suggest how examination of the question of honor allows a whole shift of the prism through which we read nineteenth-century texts.

Cicero Early nineteenth-century French schoolboys read Cicero through a special lens. A bilingual edition of selected works published in Paris in 1840 by J.-J. Dubochet seems to smell of those overheated classrooms, the dry air, the dreary concentration on word endings and syntax that were the common lot of the collège student of the day.14 Then as now, Cicero's 14. Oeuvres completes de Cicéron, avec la traduction enfianfais,publiées sous la direction de M. Nisard, 5 vols. (Paris, 1840-1841).

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

25

diatribes were among the earliest pieces of genuine Latin literature students were exposed to. Prominent among these is In Cattlinam, a denunciation in the Senate of the conspirator Catiline, who had aimed to overthrow the republic in the days before Julius Caesar's more successful attempt. "Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?" ("When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience?")—the first line of Cicero's attack on Catiline—drips with sarcasm, as the noted orator prepared to use every tool of the rhetorical art to defeat this armed conspiracy. The resonance of Cicero's predicament, and his prose, would have been felt very differently by many early nineteenth-century French schoolboys than it is by their counterparts today. By the 1830s, six major changes of regime, leading to delirious victories and crushing defeats, glorious insurrections and humiliating coups d'état, had transformed France's once stable political and social order into a shuddering carousel of contending legitimacies. It seemed impossible to speak about politics without implicidy taking sides in favor of one threatened (or defeated) form of government and pointing a finger of accusation at its attackers. To be presented with Cicero's brand of high-prestige tirade as a model for emulation in that context was to be invited to share a vision of the French present as morally and politically challenging in a similar way. Over three hundred pages of the printed catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale are required to list all its holdings of Cicero, many of them, in fact, nineteenth-century schoolbook editions, testifying to the continued centrality of this Roman author, and exemplar of oratorical style, to the curriculum of primary and secondary education from the Renaissance down through the early twentieth century.15 In 1993,1 browsed through these references, looking for likely titles to check, because I thought Cicero might be a helpful source of insight about oratory and journalistic prose of the early nineteenth century. I was not prepared, however, for the strength of the resemblance—for the uncanny feeling, on reading Cicero for the first time in a French translation, that I could have been reading an early nineteenth-century speech or newspaper article. Here are the first few lines from the translation of In CatUinam in the October 1840 bilingual edition, translated by J. L. Burnouf:

15. Lynn Hunt has discussed the importance of rhetorical education to speakers of the revolutionary decade in Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 19-51; on the importance of oratory in early nineteenth-century France, see Anne Martin-Fugier, La Vie élégante: La Formation du Tout-Paris, 1S1S-1S4S (Paris, 1990), 229-234.

26

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

Jusqu'à quand abuseras-tu de notre patience, Catilina? combien de temps encore serons-nous le jouet de ta fureur? jusqu'où s'emportera ton audace effrénée? Quoi! ni la garde qui veille la nuit sur le mont Palatin, ni les forces répandues dans toute la ville, ni la consternation du peuple, ni le concours de tous les bons citoyens, ni le lieu fortifié choisi pour cette assemblée, ni les regards indignés de tous les sénateurs,rienn'a pu t'ébranlé! Tu ne vois pas que tes projets sont découverts? que ta conjuration est ici environnée de témoins, enchaînée de toutes parts? Penses-tu qu'aucun de nous ignore ce que tu a fait la nuit dernière et celle qui l'a précédée; dans quelle maison tu t'es rendu; quels complices tu a réunis; quelles résolutions tu a pris? O temps! O moeurs! tous ces complots, le sénat les connaît, le consul les voit, et Catilina vit encore! Il vit; que dis-je? il vient au sénat; il est admis aux conseils de la république, il choisit parmi nous et marque de l'oeil ceux qu'il veut immoler. Et nous, hommes pleins de courage, nous croyons faire assez pour la patrie, si nous évitons sa fureur et ses poignards!16 (When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Do not the mighty guards placed on the Palatine Hill—do not the watches posted throughout the city—does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men—does not the precaution taken of assembling the Senate in this most defensible place—do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect upon you? Do you not feel that your plans are detected? Do you not see that your conspiracy is already arrested and rendered powerless by the knowledge which everyone here possesses of it? What is there that you did last night, what the night before—where is it that you were—who was there that you summoned to meet you—what design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that anyone of us is unacquainted? Shame on the age and on its principles! The Senate is aware of these things; the consul sees them; and yet this man lives. Lives! Ay, he comes even into the Senate. He takes a part in the public deliberations; he is watching and marking down and checking off for slaughter every individual among us. And we gallant men that we are, think that we are doing our duty to the republic if we keep out of the way of his frenzied attacks.)17 Compare this passage to commentary in the left-wing newspaper Le National on $ October 1840, the same year the above translation was published, after the Thiers government had allowed a British-led expedition to seize Beirut without raising a finger: 16. "Premier discours contre L. Catilina," in Oeuvres complètes de Cicéron, 1:556-565. 17. The English translations of passagesfromIn Catilinam used here are from Orations ofMarcus TulUus Cicero, translated by Charles Duke Yonge (New York, 1900), 5-20.

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

27

La France! elle a proclamé elle-même à la face de l'Europe que le traité du quinze juillet était un insulte pour elle; que l'exécution de ce traité par la violence était un grave atteint à tous ses intérêts; elle l'a dit, elle s'est armée, et quand on a tiré le canon, bombardé des villes, livré déjà deux combats, la France se tait: elle recule devant l'audace des alliés! elle reçoit le défi sans y répondre, elle reçoit l'outrage sans faire un mouvement! . . . Maintenant que font-ils [le gouvernement]? Les verra-t-on enfin en appeler au pays, invoquer la puissance révolutionnaire, qui seule peut nous sauver de la honte et peut-être, dans un avenir prochain, d'une troisième invasion?... L'honneur, ce trésor cher et sacré des nations qui ont le coeur haut placé, l'honneur repousse toute transaction, tout subterfuge; il a reçu trop d'affronts pour ne pas les venger. Il s'agit de savoir si nous sommes les fils de nos pères, ou si nous ne serions point déchus et dégénérés, comme on l'ose dire dans les conseils de nos ennemis. (France! She proclaimed before all Europe that the Treaty of 1$ July was an insult for her, that the application of this treaty by violence was a serious blow to all her interests; she said it, she armed herself, and when they fired cannons, bombarded cities, twice gave batde, France said nothing: she recoiled before the boldness of the allies! She received the challenge without a word, she suffered the outrage without making a move!. . . Now what does [the government] do? Do we see them at last appealing to the country, invoking its revolutionary power, which alone can save us from shame and, perhaps, in the near future, from a third invasion?... Honor, that dear, sacred treasure of nations whose hearts soar, honor rejects all compromise, all trickery; honor has been too often attacked to go without vengeance. Are we the sons of our fathers, or have we aged and degenerated, as they now dare to claim in the councils of our enemies?) At the other end of the political spectrum, the legitimist paper La Quotidienne of 5 October 1840, denounced the government in almost identical terms: M. Thiers songe à sa popularité perdue, et il voudrait la retrouver dans une habile retraite; la camarilla songe à prévenir la guerre par des intrigues dans les antichambres, et par des publications pacifiques dans la presse. Et la France! et les intérêts, la dignité, l'honneur du pays! Hélas nul ne s'en préoccupe avec cette sollicitude intelligente et jalouse que les circonstances exigeraient cependant avec tant d'empire. (M. Thiers thinks only of his lost popularity, which he hopes to regain by a clever resignation; the camarilla imagines it can prevent war by means of intrigues in the antechambers and pacificist articles in the press. And

28

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

France! and the interests, the dignity, the honor of the country! Alas, no one takes responsibility for it, not with that intelligent and jealous care that the circumstances require with such urgency.) In each of these passages we have, as in Cicero, a piling up of outrages, followed by a cry of distress, marked by exclamation points, and a concluding mournful allusion to what ought to be done. In October 1840, even middle-of-the-road papers were sounding alarms in more or less similar terms. Le Siècle denounced efforts to bring about the fall of the Thiers government, which, it believed, was now prepared to defend France's honor, efforts forwarded by des poltrons et des intrigants qui tiendraient pour peu de chose l'humiliation de la France, si à ce prix leurs rancunes et leur misérable ambition étaient satisfaites. Ce sont apparemment ces gens-là que le Journal des débats prend à tâche d'édifier dans ses imprécations contre les défenseurs de la dignité nationale. (cowards and intriguers who care not the least about the humiliation of France, if that is the price for satisfying their rancor and their miserable ambition. These are apparendy the people the Journal des débats hopes to edify with its angry words against the defenders of national dignity.) Again, conspirators with obviously reprehensible motivations threaten the worthy defenders of national honor. These newspaper invectives are pale compared to the studied, longwinded development of Cicero's ire—after all, the journalists had only a few hours to cover many pages with print every day—nonetheless they share the same structure. One denounces the activities, questions the motives, and suggests the shamefiilness of one's opponents; one wraps one's self and one's cause in the cloth of patriotism, legitimacy, honor. Cicero is vicious with Catiline, whose shame taints his city's name: En effet, Catilina, quel charme peut désormais avoir pour toi le séjour d'une ville où, à l'exception des pervers qui en ont avec toi juré la ruine, il n'est personne qui ne te craigne, personne qui ne te haïsse? Est-il un opprobre domestique dont ton front n'ait à rougir? est-il une sorte deflétrissuredont ta vie privée ne porte l'ignominieuse empreinte? quelle impureté, quel forfait, quel infamie, n'ont pas souillé tes yeux, tes mains, tous ton corps? . . . je consens volontiers qu'il reste enseveli dans un oubli profond, afin qu'on ne sache pas un jour qu'un si noir attentat soit commis dans Rome, ou qu'il y fut impuni. . . . Tu viens d'entrer dans le sénat: eh bien! dans une assemblée si nombreuse, où tu as tant d'amis et de proches, quel est celui qui a daigné te saluer?... Comment peut tu supporter tant d'humiliation?

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

29

(For what is there, O Catiline, that can now afford you any pleasure in this city? For there is no one in it, except that band of profligate conspirators of yours, who does not fear you—no one who does not hate you. What brand of domestic baseness is not stamped upon your life? What disgraceful circumstance is wanting to your infamy in your private affairs? From what licentiousness have your eyes, from what atrocity have your hands, from what iniquity has your whole body, ever abstained? . . . But I pass that over, and willingly allow it to be buried in silence, that so horrible a crime may not be seen to have existed in this city, and not to have been chastised. . . . You came a little while ago into the Senate: in so numerous an assembly, who of so many friends and connections of yours saluted you?. . . With what feelings ["of humiliation" in the French translation] do you think you ought to bear this?) Thiers was not quite so badly treated in 1840, yet his honor was certainly challenged: A la nouvelle de la signature du traité de Londres, pour couvrir la sottise et la honte de sa diplomatie, il se hâte de devancer le patriotique élan de l'opinion publique. (La Quotidienne, 10 October 1840) (At news of the signature of the Treaty of London, to cover the idiocy and shame of his diplomacy, he hastens to anticipate the patriotic surge of public opinion.) L'arrivée de M. Thiers aux affaires ne servit qu'à retarder l'explosion et à donner à nouveaux alliés le temps de compléter leurs préparatifs. Ces préparatifs sont aujourd'hui terminés, et la guerre éclate. Voilà donc les résultats de cette habileté tant vantée! voilà le fruit de ces misérables roueries au milieu desquelles on voulait enlacer l'Europe et où l'on s'est bêtement perdu soi-même. On a misérablement trahi tout le monde . . . la France enfin. (Le National, 4 October 1840) (M. Thiers' coming to office served only to delay the explosion and to give the new allies time to consider what preparations to make. Now these preparations are done, and war has come. Here is the result of that cleverness so widely touted! Here is the fruit of those miserable subterfuges with which he hoped to entangle Europe and in which he has only stupidly lost himself. He has miserably betrayed everyone . . . France herself, in the end.) Besides identifying and condemning the enemy, there must be a call to action, action modeled on historical precedents, to save one's own honor, under the circumstances, and the honor and laws of one's country. As in Cicero:

30

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

Depuis longtemps, Catilina, le consul aurait du t'envoyer à la mort, et faire tomber ta tête sous le glaive dont tu veux tous nous frapper. Le premier des Gracques essayait contre l'ordre établi des innovations dangereuses; un illustre citoyen, le grand pontife P. Scipion, qui cependant n'était pas magistrat, l'en punit par la mort. Et lorsque Catilina s'aprête à faire de l'univers un théâtre de carnage et d'incendies, les consuls ne l'en puniraient pas! (You ought, O Catiline, long ago to have been led to execution by command of the consul. That destruction which you have been long plotting against us ought to have already fallen on your own head. What? Did not that most illustrious man, Publius Scipio, the Pontifex Maximus, in his capacity of a private citizen, put to death Tiberius Gracchus, though but slighdy undermining the constitution? And shall we, who are the consuls, tolerate Catiline, openly desirous to destroy the whole world withfireand slaughter?) Or in Le National of 4 October 1840: O France, noble France! reveilles-toi; sors du sommeil léthargique où t'ont plongée l'avarice et la ruse; secoue les mauvais rêves dont elles t'ont bercée; reprends ton oeuvre, l'oeuvre de 89, de 1830, et, puisqu'on te force à tirer l'épée de Fribourg et de Marengo, ô France! tire l'épée: les temps sont arrivés. (O France, noble France! awaken; slough off your lethargic sleep, into which you were plunged by avarice and trickery; shake off the bad dreams in which they cradled you; take up your work, the work of 1789, of 1830, and, since they force you to draw the sword of Fribourg and of Marengo, O France! draw the sword: the time has come.) Or in La Quotidienne of 26 October 1840: Quand un sentiment exalté d'honneur national s'est emparé de tous les esprits, quand des passions mauvaises s'agitent au sein de la société, ce ne serait pas trop pour rendre la sécurité aux populations, d'un gouvernement qui unirait la fermeté à la prudence, l'intelligence à la force; et les partis dynastiques qui se sont saisis, pour ainsi dire, des destinées de la France, laissent le pays légal sans gouvernement! Est-ce la faute des hommes ou la faute des institutions? (When an exalted feeling of national honor takes hold of every spirit, when evil passions move in society's bosom, it would not be too much to ask for a government, to return the population to a sense of safety, that would combinefirmnessto prudence, intelligence to force. But the dynastic parties who have, in effect, seized hold of France's destiny, leave the country without a government! Is this the fault of men or of our institutions?)

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

3i

There would be much more to say in a full exploration of the impact of Latin literature and rhetorical training on public life in nineteenthcentury France. Only one connection needs emphasis here: Political courage, probity, and patriotism were linked with public speech that, like Cicero's, sought to shame and humiliate political opponents; and such speech often called implicitly for civil violence to restore legitimacy and defend civic honor. Lest there be any doubt that Cicero's combat for the republic was to be read in this way, one need only examine the introductory materials that accompanied the orations. In the edition cited from above, Nisard notes approvingly that "The Republic [of Rome], faced with these terrible dangers, had no rampart but Cicero." After Cicero's denunciation, Catiline, despite his surprise, was able to "dissimuler sa honte et sa colère" ("to hide his shame and his anger") (556—557). By this account, not only was Cicero's action courageous and efficacious, but Catiline also acted true to form, as the sinister conspirator who tried first to cover his shame with blatant hypocrisy, then took a coward's way out, even while continuing to mouth lies and threats. The impact of the Ciceronian model was reinforced by the narrowness of the curriculum and the quality of discipline that prevailed in the schools of the period. In his memoirs, the comte d'Alton-Shée complains bitterly about the education he received in the elite Collège Henri IV in the early 1820s; his studies consisted of Latin, a little Greek, and history once a week—this last subject introduced only in 1820, thanks to the efforts of enlightened, liberal-leaning ministers. Classes lasted four hours per day; study and exercise the rest of the day were supervised by "maîtres d'études," called "pions" in student jargon, whom, by and large, AltonShée detested: "Recruited among the least capable and least endowed of the social order . . . the best were poor law or medical students, who found in the college food and lodging and the means to pay their tuition and pass their examinations. If they had little time to devote to the pupils, at least they did not torment them and asked only silence of them. Most were hard asses quite grown up, rejects from every career, avenging themselves for their humiliations on the children subject to their authority; cowardly with the strong, they were cruel to the weak." 18 18. "recrutés parmi les plus incapables et les plus déshérités de l'ordre social. . . . les meilleurs étaient de pauvres étudiants en droit ou en médiane, qui trouvaient au collège la nourriture et le logement et aussi les moyens de payer leurs inscriptions et de passer leurs examens. S'ils n'avaient guère le temps de s'intéresser aux élèves, du moins ils ne les tourmentaient pas et ne réclamaient d'eux que le silence. La plupart étaient des cuistres déjà murs, rebut de toutes les carrières, se vengeant de leur humiliation sur les enfants soumis à leur

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

Upper-class students also lorded it over the new arrivals. But AltonShee refused to knuckle under: I will cite only one example. I had committed the crime of insubordination against one of the upper classmen; on his order, two of those who obeyed him seized me, made me sit on a table, held my arms in such a way that all resistance was useless. After enjoying for a few moments the terror that this preparation for execution caused in me, he repeatedly beat me across the face. In my rage, I managed to get my teeth on his hand, and I bit it with violence. That was forty years ago; in spite of this long interval, at the memory of his barbaric treatment of me, I feel not the least remorse about my vengeance. The pion decided otherwise. He expressed his horror at what he called my ferocity, and condemned me to remain, in the middle of a biting cold spell, on my knees, in the courtyard, at the door of the study hall. As for my executioner, bandaged, babied, he received all the pion's tender care.19 These sufferings, Alton-Shee concludes, "have developed from an early date the instinct of solidarity to the point that I have never witnessed, never so much as heard the tale of an injustice, without feeling the desire to get even; I also owe to them [these sufferings] that I have become, in every sense of the word, an excellent fellow."20 In this social context, contrived to heighten young men's sensitivity to humiliation and to honor hierarchies, the presentation of Cicero's diatribes as prestigious examples of political use of language sank home a distinctive lesson, that language was an arm, that verbal combat was an extension of violence, and that words' wounds, quite literally, were shame and humiliation. Nye's examination of etiquette manuals and dututelle, poltrons avec les forts, cruels envers les faibles." Edmond de Lignère, comte d'Alton-Shée, Mes mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1869), 1:17-18. 19. "Je ne citerai qu'un exemple. Je m'étais rendu coupable envers un grand d'un acte d'insubordination; sur son ordre deux de ceux qui lui obéissaient me saisirent, me firent asseoir sur la table du quartier, me tenaient les bras à manière de rendre toute résistance impossible: après avoir joui quelques instants de la frayeur que me causait l'apprêt du supplice, il me frappa au visage à plusieurs reprises. Dans ma rage, je parvins à saisir avec les dents, sa main que je mordis violemment. Il y a quarante ans de cela; malgré ce long apaisement, au souvenir de ce traitement barbare, je n'éprouve pas le moindre remords de ma vengeance. Le pion en jugea autrement; il témoigna son horreur de ce qu'il appelait ma férocité, en me condamnant à rester, par un froid rigoureux, à genoux, dans la cour, à la porte de l'étude. Quant à mon bourreau, pansé, choyé, il fut l'objet de son touchant intérêt." Ibid., 20. 20. "ont développé de bonne heure les instincts de solidarité au point que je n'ai jamais été témoin, jamais je n'ai entendu le simple récit d'une injustice, sans en ressentir le contrecoup; je leur dois encore d'avoir été, dans toute l'étendue du mot, un excellent camarade." Ibid.

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

33

eling in the first half of the nineteenth century confirms that injurious speech was seen as an extension of violence and that politeness in daily affairs was akin to respect for formalities in arranging a duel, or the feints of an expert swordsman.21 Whether one took the existing structure of authority at face value or questioned it at every turn, as Alton-Shée did, one was likely to be highly attuned to insult. Of lesser importance than Cicero in the introductory Latin curriculum of that day was Caesar's Gallic Wars.21 Although Julius Caesar was the very type of political adventurer most execrated by Cicero, students were implicitly invited to admire him with equal fervor. The simplicity of his vocabulary, the vividness and precision of his descriptions, the complete absence of sentiment in what read almost like administrative reports—on batdes, sieges, forced marches in a long, bloody, victorious campaign to pacify Rome's ancient barbarian enemies to the north—make this work a perfect text for language teaching. But it was easy to slide from appreciating the work to appreciating the efficient mind of the great general and the strict discipline and high military spirit of the Roman legionaries. Doubdess students were at no time invited, with reference to Cicero, Caesar, or any other Latin author, to reflect on the conditions of production of the text. Then as now, students of Latin were not reminded that the printing press did not exist, that "publication" meant teams of slave scribes writing out hundreds of copies to be distributed at the author's expense, or that both Cicero and Caesar were engaged, as authors, in ambitious campaigns of self-promotion. In effect, these texts were still being used approximately in the manner in which their authors had intended, to glorify their authors as exemplary members of the senatorial aristocracy before a larger literate audience. In every way, these remarkable works of literature reflect the turbulence of the last days of the republic. The strident tones, the manipulation of shame, the desperation of Cicero's rhetoric, justified as a return to the true Roman speech styles of Cato and his predecessors, were hallmarks of a public sphere that was breaking apart and plagued by uncertainty about its future.23 Who, indeed, was Cicero's audience? What power could his words alone have? Their vehemence was a measure of their impotence. It is strange to consider how such works were read in early nineteenth21. Nye,Masculinity, 131-132. 22. References to Julius Caesar's works in the printed catalog of the Bibliothèque Nationale take up over forty pages. 23. On the evolution of rhetorical styles in Rome, see Pierre Grimai, Le Stick des Scipions: Rome et l'hellénisme au temps desguerres puniques, 2nd ed. (Paris, 197s).

34

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

century France, in atimewhen a new public sphere was coming together, as turbulently as the other had fallen apart. In both cases, the vehemence of rhetoric pointed to an underlying sense of powerlessness and frustration, resulting from (or feeding?) profound disagreements about legitimacy. In both cases, men felt particularly exposed to the danger of humiliation just because the rules of honorable conduct were influx.This sense of exposure among Roman men of senatorial rank has echoed down the ages, captured in the image of Brutus plunging his knife into Caesar's breast. In their own terms, both were in theright;Caesar's trust of Brutus was based, in the legend, on his knowledge that Brutus was indeed an honorable man.24 The quite different sense of exposure among early nineteenth-century French males has been summed up best, perhaps, by Marx's unforgettable opening words of The Eighteenth Brumaire: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: thefirsttimeas tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to I8JI for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances attending the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire!"25 Marx's vision captured, as we will see in the course of this study, a gnawing sense of shame widely felt, a broad agreement that "bourgeois society" was, as Marx put it, "unheroic." However much French men tried toriseto the level of Caesars and Brutuses, it seemed, they never achieved that mutual recognition of worthiness inherent in Caesar's poignant, "You, too, Brutus, my son?" as he watched the younger man join the other assassins.26 Both these ideas—that postrevolutionary French society was "bourgeois" and that it was therefore "unheroic"—could be found repeated constantly in French newspapers and political commentary from 1830 on. Marx obviously read French newspapers with avidity and profundity. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx aimed at humiliating Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, much as Cicero aimed to reduce Catiline, or Le National in 1840 to defeat Thiers: by the power of words alone. Marx charged that Bonaparte "hides his commonplace repulsive features under the iron deathmask of Napoleon," and that he is really a representative 24. The incident is reported in Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, De Vita Ccusarum. 25. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 15. 26. Suetonius reports Caesar spoke in Greek; the appellation "my son" apparently implied only an attitude of fatherly concern.

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

35

of the lumpenproletariat, a class made up of "decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin," "ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie," and "vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème" (75). What unites this amusing and colorful list of types is that all were, by the common reckoning of the early nineteenth century, men without honor.27 This strategy of shaming, shaming that denied legitimacy, shaming as a prelude to violence or call to civil insurrection—so evident in Marx's writing on France—was, as we shall see, itself entirely French, perhaps especially French, and is a phenomenon urgendy in need of historical exploration.

Phèdre One important method of transmission of a certain common sense about honor was the literature of the French canon. N o part of this literature enjoyed greater prestige or was more widely known than the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Although these "Classical" plays fell under a shadow during the high noon of Romanticism in the early 1830s, they were revived with stunning success by the young actress Rachel after 1838, and were, in any case, never absent from the curriculum.28 Racine's Phèdre, which provided Rachel with one of her most celebrated roles (as it would later in the century for Sarah Bernhardt) offers, so to speak, an official explanation of the meaning of honor in relation to family and to gender. The character of honor emerges with clarity in the piece because honor is so perfectly opposed to romantic love. Fear of shame is offered explicidy as that regulatory feeling which should block the expression of illicit attachments. The play begins with this dilemma: Phèdre loves Hippolyte, son of her husband by an Amazon woman. Hippolyte loves Aride, daugh-

27. Both Jeffrey Mehlman and Dominick LaCapra have made insightful remarks about the tone of voice and symbolic style of the Eighteenth Brumaire, without, however, examining the issue of shame explicity; see Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley, Calif., 1977); Dominick LaCapra, "Reading Marx: The Case of the Eighteenth Brumaire," in idem, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), 268-290. 28. Rachel M. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie Française (New York, 1993).

36

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

ter of a royal family whose brothers died plotting against the reign of his father, Thésée. Each loves a representative of a rival lineage and seeks to advance that lineage at his or her own expense. Hippolyte plans to make Aricie queen of Athens, despite his own claim to the throne. Phèdre dreams of union with Hippolyte, an outcome disastrous to the prospects of her children, his half-siblings. Love is therefore damaging in the first instance to the maintenance and acquisition of honors, of specific signifiers of rank and precedence, for self or blood relatives. But the central action of the play is concerned with a more immediate problem, that of concealment and avowal. For if harboring such illicit sentiments is damaging enough, then making them known to others (even if they are not acted upon) brings immediate dishonor on oneself and one's close relations. At regular intervals in the action, characters express their longing for "an eternal silence," "profound forgetfulness," for avoidance of "ghastly light."29 Honor is preserved if secrecy is successfully maintained. At the beginning of the action, Phèdre has decided to die in order to prevent herself from revealing her feelings: "J'ai voulu en mourant prendre soin de ma gloire" (211—Act I, Scene iii) ("I hoped by death to keep my honor bright," 24).30 But in an interview with Hippolyte, arranged by her faithful servant Oenone, her love of him is so strong she reveals it, at first inadvertendy, in spite of herself, then willingly. Hippolyte pretends not to understand, offering her a way out, but she persists. Later she rebukes her servant: Je mourais ce matin digne d'être pleurée; J'ai suivi tes conseils, je meurs déshonorée. (227—Act III, Scene iii)

I might have died this morning, mourned and chaste I took your counsels, and I die disgraced. (59) Upon the unexpected return of her husband, Thésée, whom she supposed dead, Phèdre is plunged into even deeper despair, but her servant proposes that they explain her state by accusing Hippolyte of having made love to her, even of having tried to rape her. This false accusation will sal-

29. "un silence éternel" (209—Oenone, Act I, Scene iii); "un profond oubli" (223— Hippolyte, Act II, Scene iv); "d'odieuses lumières" (251—Thésée, Act V, Scene v). Cites from Phèdre in parentheses contain, first, the page number from Jean Racine, Théâtre complet de Racine, 2 vols. (Paris, 1965), followed by the act and scene numbers. 30. English verse translations used here are from the translation by Richard Wilbur, Phaedra: Tragedy in Five Acts, 1677 (San Diego, Calif., 1986), with page numbers in parentheses.

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

37

vage concealment by casting doubt upon Hippolyte's testimony to her "crime," should he reveal it. "Madame," Oenone insists, pour sauver votre honneur combattu, Il faut immoler tout, et même la vertu. (229—Act III, Scene iii)

You must give up, since honor is at stake, Everything, even virtue, for its sake. (61) Phèdre acquiesces in this plan, hoping that it will lead to Hippolyte's exile, removing him to a safe distance from her passion. Hippolyte, seemingly cool and indifferent to women, is also brought to avow his love to Aricie, inadvertently at first, then openly. Like Phèdre, he had long combatted these feelings, but to no avail, and sought to conceal them as a last resort. But his love is, as his tutor explains to him, innocent, since no prior promise or marriage bond opposes it. Once Hippolyte's father, Thésée, convinced by the lies of Oenone, unjustly banishes Hippolyte, he is free to act upon his feelings for Aricie without parental approval and offers her his hand. But Thésée, in his anger, begs Neptune to punish his son, and the prayer is answered by Hippolyte's death in combat with a monster from under the earth. Upon hearing of this, Phèdre poisons herself and, while dying, tells Thésée the truth. As the curtain falls, Thésée promises to treat Aricie as a daughter, in memory of his son's last request, and reflects on Phèdre's wrongdoings: D'une action si noire Que ne peut avec elle expirer la mémoire! (252—Act V, Scene viï)

Would that I could inter The memory of her black misdeeds with her! (105) Forgetfiilness, the best means of assuring concealment, and therefore of protecting honor, offers the only possible resolution. Joan DeJean has recently pointed out that the same years that saw the initial success of Racine's tragedies at the court of Versailles also brought new legislation intended to shore up the power of fathers over the marital choices of their children.31 In addition, an important new literature was coming out of the salons of the précieuses (learned aristocratic women

31. Dejean, Tender Geographies, 109-114; see also Alain Lottin, et al., La Désunion du couple sous l'ancien régime: L'exemple du Nord (Paris, 1975), 7-23.

38

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

of the period) in which feelings of "inclination" for persons of the opposite sex were given a strong, positive cast. This literature was denounced by well-placed male literary critics and quiedy excluded from their lists of great works. Initially, in other words, Phèdre was not an innocent rendering of attitudes shared by all but a pointed effort to discredit sentiment (which some women were beginning to defend) and to depict love as a solvent, rather than a cement, of social and familial ties. Suppression of feeling saved honor. The best and easiest course—however hard this might seem—was to give dishonorable feelings no initial outward expression. The harboring of feelings, while perhaps reprehensible, was not really within the power of actors to alter. Venus is depicted as a vengeful goddess who preys upon those who feel the ardor of love. "Forgetfulness," "eternal silence," are the safest expedients. From the moment avowals are made, the necessity to save honor may arise, even at the expense of virtue.

Sévigné This same period, the late seventeenth century, also provided elite men and women of subsequent generations at least one officially sanctioned model of appropriate female comportment every bit as powerful as those of Cicero and Caesar for men: Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696), "Mme de Sévigné," was the "author" (a status accorded her only by posterity) of an important body of correspondence, consisting mostly of letters to her daughter written between 1671 and 1696. Although her section of the Bibliothèque nationale's printed catalog is by no means as lengthy as that of Cicero, it is nonetheless lengthy enough to testify to the ongoing centrality of Sévigné in girls' curricula down to the present day.32 In a recent study, Michèle Longino Farrell has provided a compelling analysis of the wellsprings of Sévigné's urge to write that helps explain why she was one of the very few women writers to achieve canonical status in the eyes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century male critics and educators.33 From the mid-seventeenth century on, letters were designated as the one literary genre at which women excelled and at which they might be allowed to excel with perfect propriety. This genre was said to fit their orientation toward feelings, and, in this genre, their intellectual weaknesses were no handicap, since the letter was meant to be an extension of one's 32. There arc thirty-six pages of cites to works by the marquise de Sévigné in the catalog. 33. Farrell, Performing Motherhood.

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

59

presence, a piece of conversation, leaping from one subject to another according to one's fancy, avoiding thoroughgoing analysis, shifting from gossip to expressions of affection, to complaints about disease or the weather, in no particular order. Farrell cites La Bruyère's comment of 1687: "Only [women] have the ability to render an entire feeling through one word, and to express delicately a thought that is delicate; they have an inimitable mode of association, which follows naturally, and which is linked only by meaning."34 For aristocratic women, both letters and conversation fell within the sphere of the "aesthetics of negligence," a standard that set as its goal the very absence of studied reflection, artifice, or contrivance.35 It goes without saying that meeting this standard might well take a great deal of studied reflection and practice; yet it was important to avoid explicit reference to such effort, lest the effect itself be lost. Further, certain critics denied that the women who did excel at letter writing actually engaged in any effort. They gained, in other words, no merit, at least not on an equal footing with great male writers, because they were themselves unconscious of the qualities of their writing. This unconsciousness—it was claimed—was the very condition of their success at the letter genre. The consecration of the letter genre as appropriate to women came at a time when the victory of absolutism was radically changing the context of aristocratic women's lives. As their husbands were drawn into the orbit of Versailles, and their political independence was declining concomitantly, the aristocratic household had to shed its earlier role as a focus of local political and military power. The household and its women were thrust into a new private sphere; women's functions were reduced to conspicuous consumption, entertainment, budgetary management, and the informal promotion of family alliances. That women had a special vocation for sentiment was an old idea that could now gain new salience.36

34. "il n'appartient qu'à elles [les femmes] de faire lire dans un seul mot tout un sentiment, et de rendre délicatement une pensée qui est délicate; elles ont un enchaînement de discours inimitable, qui se suit naturellement, et qui n'est lié que par le sens." Quoted in Farrell, Performing Motherhood, 30; translation by Farrell. 35. Farrell, Performing Motherhood, 66; these ideas were still given authoritative approval in the early nineteenth century; see, for example, the critical notes of Suard on Mme de Sévigné in Madame de Sévigné, et al., Lettres choisies de Mme de Sévigné, de Grignan, de Simiane et de Maintenon; précédées de réflexions de M l'abbé de Vauxcelles, et accompagnées de notes historiques de M GrouveUe, 2 vols. (Paris, 1810), xxiv-xxvii. 36. Dejean, Tender Geographies; Kristen B. Neuschel, "Noble Households in the Sixteenth Century: Material Settings and Human Communities," French Historical Studies 15 (1988): 595-Ó22.

40

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

That Sévigné poured great effort into her letters, Farrell makes perfectly clear. She served a kind of apprenticeship as a correspondent of her cousin, Roger de Bussy-Rabutin. Her casual references to other celebrated letter writers and her frequent instructions to her daughter about how to write, as well as praise for her successes, show that Sévigné was anything but negligent. Further, she shared her letters with others and encouraged her daughter to show them to friends and relations; she had every reason to believe that, as the body of correspondence increased, someone might someday decide to publish it. Even though she could not with propriety openly avow a wish to be published, she left hints enough for those willing to notice. Sévigné's prose breathes with a refined, highly self-conscious casualness that is consistendy entertaining. But her letters also show, perhaps more importantly, how women might have passion without offending, without shame. Sévigné is therefore a kind of polar opposite to Phèdre. Sévigné's passion is for her daughter, for her lineage, and she is quite unrestrained, invasive, even domineering in the way she expresses it and demands reciprocity from her daughter. It is fascinating to examine the circumstances that made this passion not just permissible but laudable, archetypal, a standard with which every young girl of good breeding for over two centuries was expected to be familiar. Sévigné's husband died in a duel over a mistress in 1650, only six years after their marriage, two children having been born to the union. Sévigné did not remarry. She managed her resources carefully in order to provide her children with fortunes of sufficient size to ensure they could move up in society. As a widow she had complete control of her property and of her children's marriage partners. In 1669, she chose as husband for her daughter the comte de Grignan, who, besides possessing a tide, stood at the beginning of a successful administrative career. Sévigné retained only enough property for herself to ensure a modest maintenance. Once her children were married, as Farrell remarks, she had no further social role to fulfill, except the crucial one of remaining unmarried, to ensure that their inheritance was secure. But Sévigné vigorously filled this vacuum by nurturing an all-consuming preoccupation with her daughter's affairs. There is a good reason why her son did not become her principal correspondent, apart from the fact that he stayed nearer to her. He was, upon his marriage, the adult male carrier of the family name and no longer subject to his mother's authority. Her daughter, by contrast, was in no position to object to her mother's enthusiastic attention; after all, had not Sévigné sacrificed a great deal for her, chosen a marriage partner with great

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

41

care (and apparently with relative success), and lavished her property on her? Did not her daughter owe her, out of filial solicitude, a profound consideration and respect? Sévigné did not ask for perfect obedience. All she asked was that her incessant letters be answered, her advice weighed, her wisdom deferred to, her love admired. Despite her expressions of extreme feeling for her daughter, Sévigné was severe in her judgment of romantic love, treating it with that lightness of irony she reserved for moments when open criticism would have threatened the surface negligence (letter of 9 March 1672). She disapproved of a friend's being in love with a warm humor; but at the mention of jealousy in one of her daughter's letters, she reacted strongly: There is neither in you nor in me material for making jealousy. It is an imperfection you are not capable of, and neither I nor M. de Grignan give you any cause for it. Alas, when youfindthat your heart is preferred above all by your loved ones and nothing can compare, what is jealousy to be jealous of, itself? Say no more of that passion; I hate it. It may come from an adorable source, but its effects are too cruel, too hateful. I beg you, my dearest, not to entertain such sad imaginings of me . . . I will live to love you; I give over my life to that occupation, to all its joys and all its pains, all its amusements and all its mortal anxieties, just simply to all the feelings that this passion can give me.37 (Letter of 6 May 1671) Open in embracing all of her own (highly honorable) maternal feelings, she commands her daughter to cease mentioning or even having a reprehensible feeling. Her daughter found such commands hard to follow. Farrell carefully reviews the traces in the correspondence of the daughter's, Mme de Grignan's, sense of frustration and suffocation during periods when the two resided together. In one of her first letters to her mother, Mme de Grignan reported that her husband had noticed their difficulties; they got along better when they were apart, he said. Sévigné reacted sharply, commanding her daughter not to speak thus:

37. "Il n'y a ni en vous ni en moi de quoi la [la jalousie] pouvoir composer. C'est une imperfection dont vous n'êtes point capable, et je ne vous en donne non plus de sujet que M. de Grignan. Hélas! quand on trouve en son coeur toutes préférences et que rien n'est en comparaison, de quoi pourrait-on donner de la jalousie à la jalousie même? Ne parlons pas de cette passion; je la déteste. Quoiqu'elle vienne d'un fonds adorable, les effets en sont trop cruels et trop haïssables. "Je vous prie, ma bonne, de ne point faire des songes si tristes de m o i . . . je vivrais pour vous aimer, et j'abandonne ma vie à cette occupation, et à toute la joie et à toute la douleur, à tous les agréments et à toutes les mortelles inquiétudes, et enfin à tous les sentiments que cette passion me pourra donner."

42

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

I beg you, my dearest, never again to attribute to absence the merit of having restored good understanding between us and, on my side, belief in your tenderness for me. Even if it has contributed to the latter, for then it has established it forever, let us regret the time when I saw you every day, you who are the charm of my life and of my eyes; when I heard you, you whose spirit suits my taste more than anything that has ever pleased me. Let us not make a separation between your lovable presence and your friendship; it would be too cruel to separate those two things.38 (Letter of 6 May 1671) Sevigne's love was therefore imperious and, if it met resistance, insisted that her daughter alter her feelings to suit propriety, as Sevigne herself must have tried to do. There was no other legitimate object for Sevigne to lavish her care upon. Just as propriety allowed her no other literary genre but the letter, and just as Sevigne mastered the letter form with years of constant application, so she took up the authority of that one love she could indulge in to extremes and attempted to mold her daughter into the correspondent her letters needed and deserved. Far from seeing the sadness or the frustrations of such a predicament, early nineteenth-century editors of Sevigne lauded her love as exemplary, just as they praised her style. As with the pedagogical framing of Cicero, Sevigne was taken at face value and offered explicitly as a model. In a selection of letters aimed especially at schoolgirls, which went through six editions between 1810 and 1826, for example, a preface by L'abbe de Vauxcelles offers a hymn of praise for Sevigne's ability to love: "Nothing is more sublime than her tenderness, expressed in phrases repeated a thousand times, always interesting and fresh; it is a never-failing eloquence. . . . One sees that ingenious and active tenderness, which is real love's method, because it is stripped of all self love, and knows only the happiness of others."39

58. "Je vous prie, ma bonne, ne donnons point désormais à l'absence le mérite d'avoir remis entre nous une parfaite intelligence et, de mon côté, la persuasion de votre tendresse pour moi. Quand elle aurait part à cette dernière chose, puisqu'elle l'a établie pour jamais, regrettons un temps où je vous voyais tous les jours, vous qui êtes le charme de ma vie et de mes yeux; où je vous entendais, vous dont l'esprit touche mon goût plus que tout ce qui m'a jamais plu. N'allons point faire une séparation de votre aimable vue et de votre amitié; il y aurait trop de cruauté à séparer ces deux choses." 39. "rien n'est si sublime que sa tendresse; ce sont des expressions mille fois répétées, toujours intéressantes et toujours nouvelles; c'est une éloquence intarissable. . . . On y voit cette ingénieuse et active tendresse, qui est la vraie façon d'aimer, parce qu'elle est dépouillée de l'amour de soi-même, et qu'elle ne s'occupe que du bonheur des autres." Madame de Sévigné, et al., Lettres choisies, lxxx-lxxxi.

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

43

An 1843 edition by Firmin Didot contained a eulogy of Sévigné given before the Académie française in 1840 by Mme Amable Tastu, whose essay had won a contest held by the Académie on the question, "Why does Mme de Sévigné merit glory?"40 Tastu added a modest feminist thrust to the usual unqualified praise of Sévigné's exemplary fulfillment of motherhood's duties, arguing for the importance of female education: "One sees that this girl, so passionately loved, never got the upper hand over what reason, justice, and duty demanded of her mother; one sees how, with a vivid imagination, a light character, a joyous sense of humor, great sensitivity—that is, with everything attractive—that mother knew how to govern her person and her fortune wisely, because her brilliant talents rested upon a solid foundation, a precocious familiarity with life's ways, a real and serious education, and a piety as sincere as it was enlightened."41 Literacy and a broad education were required, Tastu implied, if women were to contain their impulsive natures and govern themselves wisely. The qualities men most wanted in a woman—entertaining humor, vivid sensitivity, combined with modest and wise self-government—were only possible through education. Sévigné's influence in the early nineteenth century reinforced a general culture of private letter writing, which reflected widespread assumptions about the proper tenor of relations within families, that will be explored more fully in Chapter 3. These relations were to be close ones, close to that extreme which allows invasive commands not only to determine the choices but even to dictate the feelings of others. Effusive expressions of affection were the norm, as were demands for reciprocity of feeling.42 As we will see in Chapter 3, evidence based on letters was discounted in more than one marital separation case that came before the courts in this period because extravagant expressions of love might represent no more than the conventions of good breeding.

40. Lettres de Mme de Sévigné, précédées de son éloge par Mme Tastu qui a obtenu le prix d'éloquence décerné par l'Académiefrançaisedans la séance du 11 juin 1840 (Paris, 1843); a second edition of this collection was issued before the end of 1843, it was reissued also in 1845, 1858, i860,1862,1866,1872,1877, and 1884. 41. "On verra que cette fille si passionnément aimée ne l'emporta jamais sur ce que la raison, la justice et le devoir exigeaient de sa mère; on verra comment, avec une mobile imagination, un caractère facile, une humeur joyeuse, une vive sensibilité, c'est-à-dire avec tout ce qui entraîne, cette mère sut gouverner sagement sa personne et sa fortune, parce que ses brillantes facultés reposaient sur une base solide, une connaissance précoce des affaires de la vie, une instruction réelle et sérieuse, et une piété aussi sincère qu'éclairée" emphasis added). Ibid., 2. 42. Denis Bertholet, Les Français par eux-mêmes, ISIS-ISSS (Paris, 1991), 20-27,58-60.

44

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

Sévigné's studied conversational discussions of fashion, current events, and social life also continued to find echoes in the prose of arbiters of taste such as Delphine de Girardin, just as Cicero's diatribes found their echoes in Parliament and the daily press. Here, for example, is Sévigné describing for her daughter the ceremonies at the funeral of the Chancelier Pierre Séguier, in 1672: The assembly was grand and numerous, but without confusion. I sat next to Monsieur de Tulle, Madame Colbert and the Duke of Monmouth, who is as handsome as when we saw him at the Palais Royal. (Let me tell you, in a parenthesis, that he is going to the army to join the King.) A young Father of the Oratory came to speak the funeral oration. I desired Monsieur de Tulle to bid him come down, and to mount the pulpit in his place, since nothing could sustain the beauty of the spectacle, and the excellence of the music, but the force of his eloquence.... As for the music, it was fine beyond all description. Baptiste [Lully] exerted himself to the utmost, and was assisted by all the King's musicians. There was an addition made to thatfineMiserere, and there was a Libera which filled the eyes of the whole assembly with tears. I do not think the music in heaven could exceed it. There were several prelates present. I desired Guitant to look for the good Bishop of Marseilles, but we could not see him. I whispered to him that if it had been the funeral oration of any person living, to whom he might have made his court by it, he would not have failed to have been there. This litde pleasantry made us laugh, in spite of the solemnity of the ceremony.43 (Letter of 6 May 1672) Here is Delphine de Girardin writing on the death of Charles X in her newspaper column in La Presse of 23 November 1836: The court is not in mourning, which seems rather strange to us. Legitimists will wear mourning for six months, for three reasons: some, reli43. "L'assemblée était belle et grande, mais sans confusion. Tétais auprès de Monsieur de Tulle, de Mme Colbert, de M. de Monmouth, beau comme du temps du Palais-Royal, qui, par parenthèse, s'en va à l'armée trouver le Roi. Il est venu un jeune père de l'Oratoire pour faire l'oraison funèbre. J'ai dit à Monsieur de Tulle de le faire descendre, et de monter à sa place, et querienne pouvait soutenir la beauté du spectacle et la perfection de la musique, que la force de son éloquence.. . . "Pour la musique, c'est une chose qu'on ne peut expliquer. Baptiste [Jean-Baptiste Lully] avait fait un dernier effort de toute la musique du Roi. Ce beau Miserere y était encore augmenté. Il y a eu un Libera où tous les yeux étaient pleins de larmes. Je ne crois point qu'il y ait une autre musique dans le ciel. "Il y avait beaucoup de prélats. J'ai dit à Guitaut: 'Cherchons un peu notre ami Marseille.' Nous ne l'avons point vu; je lui ai dit tout bas: 'Si c'était l'oraison funèbre de quelqu'un qui fut vivant, il n'y manquerait pas.' Cette folie a faitrireGuitaut, sans aucun respect de la pompe funèbre." English translation by Richard Aldington, Letters ofMadame de Sévigné, 2 vols. (New York, 1927), 1:110-111.

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

+5

giously, out of regard for a loss truly felt; others for political reasons and in order to be counted; still others, to save money on clothes. As for the people with independent spirits with too much good faith to be dragged along by any party, who do not go to court because deference bores them, who surround themselves with every opinion because the thought of each amuses them, without putting on mourning, they will wear black so as not to shock anyone. What difference do you see there? one may ask. The nuance is quite clear, and we can prove it. It is the difference between crêpe and satin, between a profound pain and a sweet melancholy, between a malevolent feeling and a convention observed with delicacy.44 In both passages we find an occasion for official mourning treated with a very light touch, with a focus on variation in personal reactions and appreciation of form and formalities, with a readiness to poke fun, but at the same time with a certain tone of indulgence for the foibles of human beings. Sévigné and Phèdre together suggested to young girls that women were safest if they restricted their affections to family and lineage and there poured out all their feelings and demanded the same in return. Respecting this single, great law, they could afford to treat other matters with less seriousness than men—indeed, were not capable of the seriousness of men. They could provide men with relief from cares and with entertainment by thefree-associationalbrilliance of their observations, by the grace of their manners and dress. Their inconsequential approach to public matters, their focus on persons and formalities, rather than substance, was itself a direct consequence of their exclusive loyalty to family; beyond the family circle, all was gray to them, grist for the mill of conversation to while away the domestic time. There were certainly many women who actively sought to hold themselves apart from public matters and politics in this period, women whose male relatives were on both the left and the right.45 Denis Bertholet's reading of nineteenth-century autobiographies reveals a widespread tendency to subsume the identity of the loved one 44. "La cour ne porte point le deuil, ce qui nous paraît assez étrange. Les légitimistes le porteront pendant six mois, pour trois raisons: ceux-ci par religion pour une perte réellement sentie; ceux-là par politique et pour se compter; les autres par économie. Quant aux gens d'esprit indépendants qui ont trop de bonne foi pour se faire remorquer par aucun parti, qui ne vont point à la cour parce que les révérences les ennuient, qui s'entourent de toutes les opinions parce que l'esprit de tous les amuse, sans être en deuil, ils se mettent en noir pour ne choquer personne. Quelle différence voyez-vous là dedans? dira-t-on. La nuance est très grande, nous pouvons le prouver. C'est la différence du crêpe au satin, d'une profonde douleur à une douce mélancolie, d'une affection malveillante à une convenance délicatement observée." La Prose, 23 November 1836. 45. Denis Bertholet cites the memoirs of Mlle Flore and Mlle George, among the most celebrated actresses of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, who survived by insisting that, as women, they had no opinions on political issues. He also discusses Mme Cavaignac

46

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

within one's own. "The other is not denied," Bertholet notes, "but annexed."46 Typical of what Bertholet found is the comment by a certain Brosset about his wife: "To be true to her principles, Elisa made it a law for her thenceforth to renounce forever her own being and to model herself without fail on the will of her husband."47 A Counter-Tradition: From La Princesse de Clbes to Corinne In Catilinam, Phedre, and Sevigne's letters, as well as many other officially sanctioned texts taught in the schools, inculcated a widely accepted code of honor. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that all officially sanctioned texts spoke with a single voice. At least one example of the sentimental novel, the first of its genre, La Princesse de Cleves (1678), by MarieMadeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, was widely recognized as a masterpiece from early on. No novels were taught in the schools, since they represented an inferior genre with questionable effects on mores; nonetheless, the sentimental novel was very popular, and the women authors who pioneered this subgenre had a strong critical angle on the prevailing code of honor. They celebrated emotion and questioned patriarchal authority; they established a set of conventions that seemed to challenge shame's role as regulatory feeling. This last point is worth emphasizing and examining with some care; it has not been much discussed by literary critics, yet it is crucial to the argument of this study. Evidence from marital separation cases in Chapter 3 will suggest that the conventions of the sentimental novel were well known; the evidence also suggests how men sought to incorporate the novel's challenge to honor safely into a particular structure of feeling about gender. To make this link in the argument clearly, we will examine two important examples of the sentimental novel briefly, Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, the first masterpiece of the new genre, and Germaine de Stael's Corinne, ou I'ltalie (1807), a particularly outspoken example that had two periods of remarkable popularity during the time frame covered by this study. In Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, which has been called the "first

(1780-1849), daughter, wife, and mother of staunch republican males, raised on Rousseau, who confined her life activities to home and nurturing her children. Bertholet, Les Français par eux-mêmes, 71-73,77. 46. Ibid., 27. 47. Ibid., 23.

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

47

modern novel,"48 extremes of feeling are evoked by depicting characters who endeavor to conceal their attraction to each other, out of a concern for propriety. The struggle to conceal—and thus to block plans of action suggested by their attraction—in turn generates further emotions, of fear, anxiety, shame, until the characters are brought to a pitch of intensity that leaves the reader at once chagrined and marveling. It is difficult now to appreciate how original this device was in the context of the seventeenth century. The world has since been flooded by literary and cinematic imitations of less originality and less power—since the eighteenth century, the whole industry of melodrama and soap opera has kept this device in its standard bag of tricks, apparendy with unfailing success. So it is worthwhile to return for a moment to the original, to see the shadowy outline of sentiment, beginning to emerge in opposition to honor, as a specifically women's issue, written about by women, for women. In La Princesse de Cleves, the principal character marries the prince de Cleves at her mother's urging; it is an excellent match, and the prince is "madly in love" from his first view of her. She does not understand this feeling, but she soon comes to understand it when she feels a deep attraction for another man at court, the prince de Nemours, who pays flattering attentions to her and ends by loving her as well. The princess is determined to conceal her feelings, however, convinced not only of their impropriety but of their immorality and of the imprudence of following her inclination, as so many other court women would have done. The effort to conceal her feelings is so difficult, however, that she tries to enlist her husband's support. She reveals her attraction to Nemours to him, litde realizing that the prince de Nemours is hidden nearby and hears every word. At the time, this startling avowal was regarded as the most shocking and original element of the plot. Her husband agrees to help her by permitting her to absent herself from court for an extended period, but in the end her presence becomes necessary. At a central moment in the novel, both she and the prince de Nemours are present in the chambers of Mme la Dauphine, who is always well versed on court gossip. Mme la Dauphine poses a disingenuous question to the prince, not realizing that it concerns her friend, the princesse de Cleves, as well: "I want to know whether a story I have heard is true, and whether you are the man who is in love with and is loved by a lady of the court who

48. Joan Dejean calls it "the text generally referred to as thefirstmodern novel"; see her Tender Geographies, 66.

48

THE HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR carefully conceals her passion from you and has confessed it to her husband." Madame de Clèves' agitation and embarrassment cannot be conceived, and she would have welcomed death as an escape from her sufferings; but Monsieur de Nemours was even more embarrassed, if that is possible. This statement from the lips of the dauphiness, who, he had reason to believe, did not hate him, in the presence of Madame de Clèves, whom he loved better than any woman at court, and who also loved him, so overwhelmed him that he could not control his face. The embarrassment into which his blunder had plunged Madame de Clèves, and the thought of the good reason he gave her to hate him, made it impossible for him to answer. The dauphiness, noticing his intense confusion, said to Madame de Clèves: "Look at him, look at him, and see whether this is not his own story!" Meanwhile Monsieur de Nemours, recovering from his first agitation, and recognizing the importance of escaping from this dangerous complication, suddenly recovered his presence of mind and regained his composure. "I must acknowledge, Madame," he said, "that no one could be more surprised and distressed than I am by the Vidame de Chartres' treachery in repeating the adventure of one of my friends which I told to him in confidence.49 (II, 97-98) Nemours thus manages, just barely, to throw doubt on M m e la

Dauphine's initial suspicion. The princesse de Clèves joins in by express-

49. "'Je veux sçavoir de vous si une histoire que l'on m'a contée est véritable et si vous n'estes pas celui qui estes amoureux et aimé d'une femme de la cour qui vous cache sa passion avec soin et qui l'a avouée à son mari.' "Le trouble et l'embarras de Mme de Clèves estoit au delà de tout ce que l'on peut s'imaginer, et, si la mort se fust présentée pour la tirer de cet état, elle l'auroit trouvée agréable. Mais M. de Nemours estoit encore plus embarrassé, s'il est possible. Le discours de Mme la Dauphine, dont il avoit eu lieu de croire qu'il n'estoit pas haï, en présence de Mme de Clèves, qui estoit la personne de la cour en qui elle avoit le plus de confiance, et qui en avoit aussi le plus en elle, luy donnoit une si grande confusion de pensées bizarres qu'il luy fut impossible d'estre maistre de son visage. L'embarras où il voyoit Mme de Clèves par sa faute et la pensée du juste sujet qu'il luy donnoit de le haïr, luy causa un saisissement qui ne lui permit pas de répondre. Mme la Dauphine voyant à quel poinct il estoit interdit, "'Regardez-le, regardez-le,' dit-elle à Mme de Clèves, 'et jugez si cette avanture n'est pas la sienne.' "Cependant M. de Nemours, revenant de son premier trouble, et voyant l'importance de sortir d'un pas si dangereux, se rendit maistre tout d'un coup de son esprit et de son visage. "'J'avoue, madame,' dit-il, 'que l'on ne peut estre plus surpris et plus affligé que je le suis de l'infidélité que m'a faite le Vidame de Chartres, en racontant l'avanture d'un de mes amis que je luy avois confiée'" (140-141). Cites in French for this novel are to page numbers in Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clives, with an introduction by Emile Magne (Geneva,[i678] 1950). English cites are from Madame de Lafayette, The Princess ofClèves, translated by Thomas Sergeant Perry, 2 vols. (Boston, 1891).

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

49

ing skepticism that such a story could ever be known. For if a wife ever did such an extraordinary thing, neither she nor her husband would ever speak of it to anyone else. At this, Nemours seeks to raise suspicions in the princesse about her husband, knowing all the while that it was his own imprudent boasting, which he could not resist, that lay at the root of the rumor. "Jealousy," he replied, "and the desire to find out more than he had been told, may induce a husband to commit a great many indiscretions." Madame de Clèves was at the end of her strength; and being unable to carry on the conversation further, she was about to say that she did not feel well, when, fortunately for her, the Duchess of Valentinois came in.50 (II, I O I ) The king soon follows the duchesse de Valentinois; in the movement and confusion, Nemours tries to speak to the princess, but she turns away and pretends not to hear. A moment later she trips and tears a petticoat, providing a welcome excuse to return home, where she collapses in bed. The effort of concealment in this episode brings up feelings of fear, surprise, embarrassment, shame, and consternation that previous efforts at concealment have apparently failed. It is these intense feelings generated by the effort to conceal, not love or inclination, that must now be concealed by a supreme effort, which leaves the princess utterly at the end of her strength. In subsequent days, the princess loses faith in her husband, convinced he has betrayed her secret, although it is Nemours's need to brag of his conquest that was at the source of the rumor. This trait in Nemours underscores that there is a kind of reverse honor to be gained, for both men and women, from the quality and quantity of illicit amorous conquests one is known to have made. For those who choose to engage in such pursuits, the question of appearances becomes doubly complex; they must conceal in various ways, but also discreedy, strategically, reveal their "galanteries"—a difficult term that evoked the adventurous, and honorific, side of extramarital sexual liaisons. The prince de Clèves fears, in particular, this kind of discreet talk about his wife; he denounces those who "in

50. "'La jalousie,' répondit-il, 'et la curiosité d'en sçavoir peut-estre davantage que l'on ne luy en a dit, peuvent faire faire bien des imprudences à un mary.' "Mme de Clèves estoit à la dernière épreuve de sa force et de son courage et, ne pouvant plus soutenir la conversation, elle alloit dire qu'elle se trouvoit mal, lorsque, par bonheur pour elle, la Duchesse de Valentinois entra" (142).

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

showing their love, aim only at the honor of seducing you." 51 The rumors cause him to lose faith in his wife—who but she could be the source?—just as she loses faith in him. Finally, he gives in to despair: "How could you expect me to retain my self control? Have you forgotten that I loved you madly and that I was your husband? Either case is enough to drive a man wild: what must it be when the two combine? And see what they do! I am torn by wild and uncertain feelings that I cannot control; I find myself no longer worthy of you,—you seem no more worthy of me. I adore you, and I hate you; I offend you, and I beg your pardon; I admire you, and I am ashamed of my admiration,—in a word, I have lost all my calmness, all my reason."52 (II, 136) For the prince de Clèves, his wife's courage in revealing her true feelings to him has backfired; it is as if one is invited at this moment to reflect that it was perhaps a mistake, although elsewhere in the novel the princess is repeatedly praised for her startling straightforwardness, for her sincerity.53 Yet her husband sickens and dies from his emotional suffering. Is he to be seen as the victim of his wife's avowal, or of Nemours's eavesdropping, his bad faith, and his irresistible desire to brag of his conquest? Nancy K. Miller has righdy pointed out the polemical twist in the unusual ending of La Princesse de Clèves: the princess, now a widow, continues to refuse Nemours's advances and retires to a celibate life on a country estate, where she dies relatively young.54 The radical implication is clear: There was simply no place in court society for a woman of her candor, independence, and moral rigor. Yet the statement was made in such a manner that contemporary males were able to praise the novel as a masterpiece from its first appearance and to find a place for it in the official canon—for long the sole novel penned by a woman, and one of the few sentimental novels, to be so honored. Equally important, however, is that this novel pioneered the depiction of extremes of feeling generated by 51. "en vous témoignant de l'amour, ne cherche que l'honneur de vous séduire." 52. " 'Comment pouviez-vous espérer que je conservasse de la raison? Vous aviez donc oublié que je vous aimois éperdument et que j'estois vostre mari ? L'un des deux peut porter aux extrémitez: que ne peuvent point les deux ensemble? Hé! que ne sont-ils point aussi,' continua-t-il; 'je n'ay que des sentiments violents et incertains dont je ne suis pas le maistre. Je ne me trouve plus digne de vous; vous ne me paraissez plus digne de moy. Je vous adore, je vous hays, je vous offense, je vous demande pardon; je vous admire, j'ay honte de vous admirer. Enfin il n'y a plus en moy ny de calme, ny de raison'" (162). 53. See, for example: "L'aveu que Mme de Clèves avoit fait à son mary estoit une si grande marque de sa sincérité et elle nioit si fortement de s'estre confiée à personne que M. de Clèves ne sçavoit que penser" (145). 54. Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York, 1988).

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

51

the effort to maintain appearances and to avoid shame. Of course, it is quite clear in the descriptions of various scenes, and especially in the prince de Clèves's suffering, that honor is the focus of very strong feelings itself. Still, the plot seems to suggest that women are more concerned with sentiment, men with honor (even though both have strong feelings), and that a woman determined to be straightforward about expressing her feelings is in danger of being crushed by the hypocritical male-centered mores of the aristocracy. This critical tack was destined to have a long and fruitful history. At the same time, it offered a way out; those who chose to could simply categorize the protest implicit in the novel as a typically feminine (and therefore disqualified) point of view. Four recent works help trace the development of the sentimental novel through the eighteenth century and seek to gauge its effects on social and political practice. Joan Stewart has examined women writers' ongoing fundamental contributions to the genre; Sarah Maza has analyzed a number of causes célèbres of the end of the eighteenth century in which one can see the conventions of the genre beginning to be employed by lawyers and polemicists seeking to win public approval for their clients and for their political credos. Carol Blum has noted how Rousseau drew upon the tradition to create the best-selling novel of the century,Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, which laid out a vision of virtuous sincerity and openness that was starkly contrasted with aristocratic hypocritical concerns for honor and bienséance. This vision integrated perfecdy with Rousseau's political philosophy of radical, all-male democracy. Lynn Hunt has argued that the plots of sentimental novels provided imaginative material that revolutionaries in the 1790s could rework to fashion an identity for themselves as a brotherhood of equals.55 In short, there is plentiful evidence that this genre, product in major part of women's imagination and suffering, fed into the late eighteenth-century attack on privilege, an attack that, ironically, was linked—via Rousseau—to a rejection of women's participation in public affairs of any kind. We have discussed briefly how, in the period after 1794, a new, democratized code of honor was rehabilitated among the new postrevolutionary elite of French males. After 1800, the sentimental novel, for a time at least, came back into its own as well, as a

55. Joan Hinde Stewart, Gynographs: French Novels by Women ofthe Late Eighteenth Century (Lincoln, Neb., 1993); Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language if Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); Sarah C. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).

52

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

vehicle for women's concerns, in a polemic against bienséance, honor, marriage. Within the sentimental tradition, Staël's Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807) represents a high point of political explicitness and examines all the ways that concern for appearances, in the early nineteenth century, remained a central preoccupation of women's lives. This book won immediate success; a new edition of the late 1830s made it one of the best-selling tides of that decade also, according to figures compiled by Martyn Lyons.56 Because Corinne, ou l'Italie is a novel about appearances, it offers a useful entry point for understanding both the kinds of restrictions that respect for appearances imposed on women in this period and the reactions that these restrictions prompted. It offers an especially helpful framework within which to interpret women's requests for marital separations, just because these requests always took the form, necessarily, of a breach of appearance, a public, legal pronouncement that something was wrong in the marriage. In Corinne, Staël decries the fact that a woman could not develop or display her talents without violating the appearance of modesty and chastity appropriate to ladies of rank. By inciting too warm an admiration in others, the woman of talent invites suspicion that such admiration is welcomed for ulterior motives. As Corinne laments to Lord Nelvil: "If society did not bind women with all manner of chains while men go unshackled, what would there be in my life to keep anyone from loving me?"57 (271). The key word in this phrase is society (société); not God, religion, or morality, but "society" chains women. In another context, lest there be any doubt, Corinne equates "society" explicidy with "what people will say about you" (370), "ce qu'on dit de vous" (377). Corinne is chaste, honest in expressing her affections, and exemplary in her delicate handling of Lord Nelvil's passionate advances to her; yet this model of moral rectitude is renounced by her family and rejected by others as a worthy match on the grounds of "ce qu'on dit de vous." The only difference between her and her half-sister Lucile is that the latter is prevented from developing her artistic gifts and confined in a rural home where she cannot learn to exercise taste or understand her own passions. 56. See Lyons, Le Triomphe du livre, 89. 57. "si la société n'enchaînoit pas les femmes par des liens de tout genre, dont les hommes sont dégagés, qu'y auroit-il dans ma vie qui pût empêcher de m'aimer?" (276). Page numbers in parentheses after each quotation from Corinne are from the edition published by Leavitt et Allen (New York, 1853); English translations are from Corinne, or Italy, translated by Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987).

T H E H I D D E N P E D A G O G Y OF H O N O R

53

Knowing that Corinne's talents are her only "fault," Nelvil's late father, in a confidential letter sent to Corinne's father, nonetheless expresses his grave reservations about Corinne's suitability as a bride: "Surely your daughter has received from you and found in her own heart nothing but the purest feelings and principles, but she has a need to please, to captivate, to attract attention. At present she still has more talents than vanity, but such unusual talents must necessarily arouse the desire to develop them, and I do not know what theater would be broad enough for the active mind, the impetuous imagination—for the passionate character, in short, perceptible in her every word" (329).58 Nelvil's father does not blush to condemn her, in effect, unjustly on the sole grounds that others with less knowledge of her may do so. He does not condemn her in so many words, of course; that would be an insult. He merely notes that she will not be happy living in England, a discreet way of saying that display of so much talent by a woman is considered shameful there. The dilemma posed for the woman of talent by the imperative of keeping up appearances varies, according to Staël, from one country to the next. In Italy, the reign of discretion is unmatched; appearances require the least attention here because people generally are least inclined to "talk" about others. There is a general tolerance. Corinne, whose mother was Italian, feels most comfortable here. She can display her talent—her brilliant poetry, her genius for pageantry, theater, and conversation—openly. She wins devoted admirers and friends without suffering any stigma. Still, even in Italy, there are limits. After falling in love with Nelvil, she accompanies him on a trip to Naples despite her better judgment. For this, she is reproached by a French aristocrat, an émigré (the novel is set in the 1790s), who righdy deplores the effects such a decision must have on her reputation, even in Italy. "What! You really intend to set off with Lord Nelvil even though he is not your husband, even though he has not promised to marry you! And what will become of you if he leaves you?" "What I will become in all aspects of my life should he stop loving me: the unhappiest person in the world." 58. "Sans doute votre fille n'a reçu de vous, n'a trouvé dans son coeur, que les principes et les sentiments les plus purs; mais elle a besoin de plaire, de captiver, de faire impression. Elle a plus de talents encore que d'amour-propre: mais des talents si rares doivent nécessairement exciter le désire de les développer; et je ne sais pas quel théâtre peut suffire à cette activité d'esprit, à cette impétuosité d'imagination, à ce caractère ardent enfin, qui se fait sentir dans toutes ses paroles" (335).

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

"Yes, but if you have done nothing compromising, you yourself will remain intact." "I, intact!" exclaimed Corinne, "when the deepest feeling in my life is withered! when my heart is broken!" "No one would know, and if you conceal it, your reputation would not suffer in public opinion." "And why indulge public opinion, if not to be more charming in the eyes of the one you love?"59 (187-188) Erfeuil is presented in the novel as a typical French aristocrat. In France, as the story of Nelvil's earlier sojourn there demonstrates, appearances are all important; even breaches of honor are governed by a code and must conform to appearances. Nelvil's French lover, the widowed Mme d'Arbigny, is ruled by appearances and never ceases to manipulate them, even though she places sentiment above conventional morality. She encourages arivalto Nelvil, a M. de Maltigues, because, should Nelvil leave her, she does not wish to appear an abandoned woman. She would, in that case, marry Maltigues at once: "She was happy to be loved because she was in love, but also because it is to one's credit in society [literally: because that brings honor in the world]. Alone, she was capable of worthy feelings, but they gave her no pleasure if she could not turn them to the advantage of her pride or her desires. Shaped by and for high society, she was skilled at molding reality—an art often found in countries where the desire to use one's feelings to produce an effect is sharper than the feelings themselves" (220; emphasis added).60 This portrait of French mores and French honor is complex. The appearance that d'Arbigny manipulates is not that of being chaste or modest but that of being loved. The shame she fears is being abandoned by 59. "Y pensez-vous? lui dit-il: quoi! vous mettre en route avec lord Nelvil, sans qu'il soit votre époux, sans qu'il vous ait promis de l'être. Et que deviendrez-vous, s'il vous abandonne?—Ce que je deviendrais? répondit Corinne; dans toutes les situations de la vie, s'il cessoit de m'aimer, la plus malheureuse personne du monde.—Oui, mais si vous n'avez rien fait qui vous compromette, vous resterez vous tout entière.—Moi tout entière, s'écria Corinne, quand le plus profond sentiment de ma vie serait flétri! quand mon coeur serait brisé!—Le public ne le saurait pas; et vous pourriez, en dissimulant, ne rien perdre dans l'opinion.—Et pourquoi ménager cette opinion, répondit Corinne, si ce n'est pour avoir un charme de plus aux yeux de ce qu'on aime?" (192). 60. "Elle étoit heureuse d'être aimée, parce qu'elle aimoit, mais aussi parce que celafait honneur dans le monde: elle avoit de bons sentiments quand elle étoit toute seule; mais elle n'en jouissoit pas si elle ne pouvoit les faire tourner au profit de son amour-propre ou de ses désirs. C'étoit une personne formée pour et par la bonne compagnie, et qui avoit cet air de travailler le vrai, qui se rencontre si souvent dans les pays où le désir de produire de l'effet par ses sentiments est plus vif que ces sentiments mêmes" (22$;emphasis added).

THE H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

55

the one who has received the sacrifice of her "honor" in a more strict sense (by receiving illicit privileges—whether real or only in appearance). So long as a spirited and wealthy Lord Nelvil values this sacrifice, it is no shame. Her feelings, although genuine in themselves, are used as tools to enhance her honor. Thus, we have a situation of apparent tolerance, but in which honor has attached itself to the apparent feelings one can inspire in others in the midst of "good company." This is very much the same oudook as that ascribed to the prince de Nemours in La Princesse de Clèves: amorous adventures entail their own discreet forms of honor, their own unwritten code of bienséance.61 However, even though the workings of honor in France, as depicted in Staël's novel, are the most complex and least easy to grasp, it is the problem of honor in England with which she most concerns herself. Lord Nelvil is Scottish, in fact, but for Staël both Scots and British confuse honor with morality and consider appearances to be equally as important and as intimate to the well-being of the self as right conduct. Nelvil reveals his own confusion on this score in a discussion with his erstwhile French rival Maltigues, who discovers Nelvil in tears because of his indecision as to whether to marry Mme d'Arbigny or return to Scodand as his father wishes. D o one or the other, Maltigues recommends; both are good because they will put an end to your suffering. "There are situations in life," Nelvil responds, "where even sacrifice does not seem to fulfill all one's duties. . . . " "What I want is to avoid grief for the person I love by resigning myself to unhappiness." "Believe me," said M. de Maltigues, "do not mix up feelings with the difficult work of living; they make it even more complicated. They are an illness in the soul that attacks me at times as it does everyone else, but when that happens I tell myself that it will pass, and I always keep my word to myself." "But," I replied,. . . "even if one could set feeling aside, honor and virtue would always remain, and they often oppose our desires in every domain."

61. That such a characterization of at least some French aristocratic circles is not entirely implausible is suggested by the careers of, e.g., Mme du Deffand—for a good biography, see Benedetta Craveri, Madame

du Deffand et son monde (Paris, 1987)—or Mme

Récamier—a recent biography is René de la Croix, duc de Castries, Madame Récamier ( Paris, 1982). See also Martin-Fugier, La Vie élégante, 201-214, on the relation between Guizot and the Princesse Lieven. Balzac's Madame de Beauséant, in Père Goriot, lives by this code as well.

56

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

"Honor! When you say honor, do you mean fighting when one is insulted? On that score there is no question; but in all other respects, how is it in one's interest to let oneself be fettered by a thousand useless scruples?" "One's interest!" I interrupted. "It seems to me that is the wrong word."62 (223-224) In this passage, although Staël's sympathies are all with Nelvil, it must be said that it is Maltigues who understands honor correctly; he appreciates that honor is concerned only with exteriors, with warding off shame. Nelvil embraces sentiment, honor, and virtue with equal enthusiasm and expects them to dictate a single unambiguous course of action. When they fail to do so, he sinks into painful indecision. In France, he had compromised Mme d'Arbigny, therefore honor (concern for appearances) required that he marry her; but his father commanded him to return home unmarried, and filial duty required him to obey. He fears the suffering he will cause, is already causing, others, no matter what he does. He cannot act. Nelvil differs from the norm espoused by his compatriots in putting sentiment on an equal footing with honor and virtue; hence, when he later meets Corinne, he appreciates her superior understanding of sentiment, as made manifest in her poetry, in her stunning public performances, and in their profound discussions, and he falls in love. His father is now dead, but he fears (righdy) that his father would not want him to marry Corinne. Thus, he is plunged again into the same dilemma as in France, although now more deeply because of the evident superiority (and genuine devotion) of Corinne. The removal of the father is essential to the emplotment of Nelvil's indecision; had his father been alive, it might have been conceivable to confront him with the evidence of Corinne's moral and spiritual superiority and to demand that he drop his rigid concern for appearances. Equally essential to Nelvil's indecision is Corinne's in62. "Il y a des situations dans la vie où, même en se sacrifiant, on ne sait pas encore comment remplir tous ses devoirs. . . . je voudrais au moins, je vous le répète, en me résignant à n'être pas heureux, ne pas affliger ce que j'aime.—Croyez-moi, dit M de Maltigues, ne mêlez pas à cette oeuvre difficile, qu'on appelle vivre, le sentiment qui la complique encore plus: c'est une maladie de l'âme, j'en suis atteint quelquefois tout comme un autre; mais, quand elle m'arrive, je me dis que cela passera, et je me tiens toujours parole.—Mais, lui répondis-je . . . quand on pourrait écarter le sentiment, il resterait toujours l'honneur et la vertu, qui s'opposent souvent à nos désirs en tout genre.—L'honneur, reprit M de Maltigues: entendez-vous, par l'honneur, se battre quand on est insulté? à cet égard il n'y a pas de doute; mais, sous tous les autres rapports, quel intérêt auroit-on à se laisser entraver par mille délicatesses vaines?—Quel intérêt! interrompis-je; il me semble que ce n'est pas là le mot dont il s'agit" (229).

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

57

tact virtue; despite sacrificing appearances to be with him, she does not yield to his impetuous embraces. As a result, it is left to Corinne's stepmother, Lady Edgermond, to recall to Nelvil the English conception of honor, in which appearances are elevated to moral law, and Corinne's choices must necessarily be condemned. Lady Edgermond accomplishes this task eloquently. More than Nelvil's father, or any honorable man, she can speak direcdy, harshly. For Lady Edgermond, appearances are a religion, and failure to manage them is as serious a fault as debauchery itself. She admits of no distinctions. It was from her house that Corinne had fled earlier to Italy, dropping her last name so as not to compromise the family's honor by traveling and living alone. When Lady Edgermond learns that Nelvil wishes to marry Corinne, she condemns her stepdaughter in revealing terms. Does not Corinne have some right to your affection, Nelvil asks Lady Edgermond, as your husband's daughter? "And if the daughter you have abandoned, Madam," he continues, "were the most rightfully famous woman in the world for her splendid gifts in every domain, would you still look down on her?" "There would be no difference. I set no value on gifts that distract a woman from her true duties. There are actresses, musicians, artists if you will, to entertain society, but the only suitable life for women of our station is to be devoted wives and to raise their children properly." "What! Those gifts come from the soul, and cannot exist apart from the loftiest character, the most sensitive heart, those gifts are indissociable from the most touching goodness, the most generous heart: would you condemn them because they extend thought, because they give virtue itself a vaster dominion, a broader influence?" "Virtue?" Lady Edgermond replied with a bitter smile. "I do not exactly know what you mean by the word applied in that manner. Virtue in a person who has fled the paternal house, virtue in a person who settled in Italy to lead the most independent life, accepting everybody's compliments, not to mention anything else, offering an example even more harmful to others than to herself, renouncing her rank, her family, even her father's n a m e . . . . " "Madam," Oswald interrupted, "that was a generous sacrifice made for your daughter by your wish; she was afraid to hurt you by keeping your name. . . . " "She was afraid!" cried Lady Edgermond. "Then she felt she was dishonoring it."63 (323) [Emphasis added.] 63. "Et si cette femme abandonnée par vous, madame étoit la femme du monde la plus justement célèbre par ses admirables talents en tout genre, la dédaigneriez-vous toujours?

58

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

After further argument, she concludes: "By morality I understand nothing but strict observation of established rules" (324).64 But the expression "règles établies" refers not to a set of religious or ethical standards, as is perfectly clear from the context. It refers to "proper conduct," that is, just what is dictated by a concern for appearances. Staël's Corinne is, among other things, a feminist response to Rousseau; the structure of the plot echoesJulie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse at many points. The novel aims to expose the incompleteness of Rousseau's critique of honor. In both novels, an aristocratic father's concern for family honor condemns sincere lovers to unhappiness. But in Corinne, the benighted patriarch is made to mouth Rousseau's own view of women's proper place, and the ease and naturalness with which this shift is accomplished leaves no doubt about Rousseau's error. "A man born in our fortunate country," write's Nelvil's father, "must be English first and foremost: he must fulfill his duties as a citizen since he has the good fortune to be a citizen. And in countries whose political institutions give men honorable occasions to act and to prove themselves, women should remain in the background. How could a person as distinguished as your daughter [Corinne] be satisfied with such a lot?"65 Corinne's denouement leaves no doubt as to Staël's severe disapproval of such a view. Far better Italy, where the reign of foreign dynasties frees

—Egalement, reprit lady Edgermond; je ne fais aucun cas des talents qui détournent une femme de ses véritables devoirs. Il y a des actrices, des musiciens, des artistes enfin, pour amuser le monde: mais pour des femmes de notre rang, la seule destinée convenable, c'est de se consacrer à son époux, et de bien élever ses enfants.—Quoi ! reprit lord Nelvil, ces talents qui viennent de l'âme, et ne peuvent exister sans le caractère le plus élevé, sans le coeur le plus sensible, ces talents qui sont unis à la bonté la plus touchante, au coeur le plusgénéreux, vous les blâmeriez, parce qu'ils étendent la pensée, parce qu'ils donnent à la vertu même un empire plus vaste, une influence plus générale!—Ala vertu? reprit lady Edgermond avec un sourire amer; je ne sais pas bien ce que vous entendez par ce mot ainsi appliqué. La vertu d'une personne qui s'est enfuie de la maison paternelle, la vertu d'une personne qui s'est établie en Italie, menant la vie la plus indépendante, recevant tous les hommages, pour ne rien dire de plus, donnant un exemple plus pernicieux encore pour les autres que pour ellemême, abdiquant son rang, sa famille, le propre nom de son père . . . —Madame, interrompit Oswald [Lord Nelvil], c'est un sacrifice généreux qu'elle a fait à vos désirs, à votre fille; elle a craint de vous nuire en conservant votre nom . . . —Elle l'a craint! s'écria lady Edgermond; elle sentait donc qu'elle le déshonoroit" (329; emphasis added). 64. "Je n'entends par moralité que l'exacte observation des règles établies" (330). 6$. "Un homme né dans notre heureuse patrie doit être Anglais avant tout: il faut qu'il remplisse ses devoirs de citoyen, puisqu'il a le bonheur de l'être; et dans les pays où les institutions politiques donnent aux hommes des occasions honorables d'agir et de se montrer, les femmes doivent rester dans l'ombre. Comment voulez-vous qu'une personne aussi distinguée que votre fille [Corinne] se contente d'un tel sort?" (335; emphasis added).

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

59

men of their exaggerated sense of dignity, forces them to attend to private pursuits and to discover the virtues of women of talent. Stael resists the idea that political liberty, which enables the male citizen "to act and to be seen," necessarily entails the invisibility of women. Like other early feminist theorists, she explicitly disputes male complacency about female educational disadvantage. But she goes further. Her novel implies that concern for appearances destroys the family, leaving only an empty shell, in which inexperience with expressing one's feelings transforms all into victims of hidden pain. Patriarchy, citizenship, and women's lives are debilitated by a rigid honor code. Although Stael's observations about other countries often ring true, they are also often implicit reflections on her native France.66 In fact, the whole novel may be read as a critique of the current state of French concern for appearances and a polemic in favor of fundamental reform of education and mores for women. Stael's novel has been discussed in a recent essay by Nancy K. Miller, who treats the problem of appearances as subsumed under the question of the "male gaze" and its role in the formation of feminine identity.67 Here the aim is to see how both male and female identity formation were linked through the problem of appearances, of "ce qu'on dit de vous." Shame and honor, and the obsession with appearances they generate, seem to have been a central site where the constraints of political, hereditary, and familial duties made their impact on individuals in that period, as in our own. These two novels, Cleves and Corinne, are not representative of the sentimental tradition; they are, on the contrary, outstanding examples, recognized as masterpieces in their own time, widely read and admired, especially by those concerned to reconstruct the feminist threads in this tradition. This, however, is what gives them a special usefulness in the present context: Because of their popularity and their insightfulness, they strongly suggest that concern for appearances, a code of honor, remained an ongoing preoccupation of contemporaries across the revolutionary divide. We shall find that this suggestion is amply confirmed by the case material presented here in subsequent chapters and that resistance to this code of honor was both expressed and channeled through the conven66. Davidoff and Hall report that Corinne was very popular in England among women of just the strata that received Stael's sharpest criticisms; see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Mm and Women of the English Middle Class, i7lo-iSso (Chicago, 1987), 155-162. 67. Nancy K. Miller, "Performances of the Gaze: Stael's Corinne or Italy" in idem, Subject to Change, 162-203.

6o

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

tions of the sentimental novel. This literary tradition bears comparison with the Bedouin tradition ofghinndwas analyzed by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod.68 In both cases, literary expression was a safe idiom (because carried out in private among Bedouins, because masked as "fiction" in the French context) for exploring painful contradictions whose public examination would have breached the code of appearances and brought shame on the persons involved.

Conclusion So far we have identified several facets of the models of honorable behavior that contemporaries held up for emulation. It would be worthwhile to list these and consider some of their implications before proceeding further. ( i ) Passion is allowable in some domains, notinothers. The honor code concerns the government of feelings, especially strong feelings. Passion is allowable in the public sphere, in the form of just anger in defense of the public good and a combative spirit toward one's political foes, especially those who act (in one's own opinion) in such a manner as to vitiate the rule of legitimacy, the application of the law, the good order of civil society, or private morality. Much of the fervor of Cicero's tone derives implicidy from the fact that Catiline has transgressed in all these areas. Cicero's anger is paternal, aimed at a young man whose upbringing has been deficient, who has no internalized standards of conduct. Shaming him in public is appropriate because he does not art honorably; his dishonorable behavior is part and parcel of his political errors. There is no room here for dignified, respectful disagreement. Passion is allowable in the private sphere in the form of love and devotion to family members, relations, and offspring. Such love may be domineering and invasive, both because one sacrifices so much in order to keep the family unified and afloat (there are so many passions one must refuse oneself) and because one must pressure others to make similar sacrifices, inculcating in them the fears and sense of shame that will prevent them from straying from appropriate behavior. In the expression of both kinds of passion, it is appropriate to contrive, to study, to manipulate language to ensure its full effect, even though the best result is a surface that appears uncontrived and sincere. As for passion between men and women, the explicit warnings of the 68. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

61

curriculum of the dangers of such feelings, except within the safe bounds of the marriage bond, where they were still to be kept in check, are perhaps not as revealing as the fact that there was no study of modern literature (beyond the approved classics of the seventeenth century) in convent schools or in the collèges or lycées for boys. The sentimental novel, arichtradition stretching back precisely to the time of Sévigné and Racine, which was in full flower during the Romantic era, was not only excluded from the curriculum but forbidden reading matter for schoolchildren at all times.69 Indeed, that tradition represented a kind of challenge to the official models, a counter vision in which passion was creative of good marriages (where it was not tragically crushed by social prejudice), and in which the calculus of advancement in honor not only produced personal unhappiness but even resulted, in the longer term, in damage to the family's honor. This literature, for the most part, did not go so far as to promote either marriages among persons of gready differing ranks or extramarital liaisons. There was a humorous tradition, modeled on Fielding's TomJones—which was extremely popular in France—that glorified gallant love adventures, but even here plot closure was often achieved by means of a happy and socially correct marriage. The handsome young orphan would turn out to be son of an aristocrat, a perfectly appropriate marriage partner to the woman who had stolen his heart.70 In a novel such as Lelia, George Sand's 1833 rhapsodic chronicle of painful and glorious attraction and love, one can see just how far it was necessary to go tofindjustification for extramarital sexual attachments. In Sand's burning prose, the self becomes a law unto herself, a religion. Any hint of casualness or mere affectionate attraction, even for this pioneer of female sentimental liberation, would have brought unbearable shame upon the lovers. Passion that does notfitthe model needs, literally, to build a new religious and moral framework from scratch in order to justify itself in public.71 (This is not to say that individuals were forced to the same extremes to justify their private passions, although it is certain that sometimes they felt they were.)

69. Bricard, Saintes ou pouliches, 69,168. 70. De Jean, Tender Geographies; Stewart, Gynographs; Denby, Sentimental Narrative; Lyons, Le Triomphe du livre, 110-115. 71. In this limited respect, comparison of Sand to the Saint-Simonians was not without grounds. On the Saint-Simonians, see Robert B. Carlisle, The Proffered Croton: SaintSimonianism and the Doctrine of Hope (Baltimore, 1987) ; Jacques Rancière, La Nuit des prolétaires (Paris, 1981). See also a recently published collection of personal letters, Une correspondance saint-simonienne: Angélique Arnaud et Caroline Simon (1833-1838), edited by Bernadette Louis (Paris, 1990).

62

T H E HIDDEN PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

(2) Many things are better left in obscurity. What makes the code of behavior inculcated by official models best described as an honor code is the allowance for secrecy. Management of appearances is an essential feature of definitions of honor in all periods of Western history, and early nineteenth-century France was no exception. Passions and behaviors that did not fit the code were best concealed. Should they be revealed to one or a few, or brought to fruition, limitation of the damage to honor still dictated concealment, perjury, violence, the duel. Wefindboth Cicero and Racine speaking of "un oubli profond" as the best method for dealing with desires that have been avowed or acts that have been committed in violation of the code of family honor. We find Sévigné dealing with unruly feelings expressed by her daughter by simply ordering her not to feel them. We are not capable of jealousy, she informs Mme de Grignan; do not say that we get along better when far from each other (that is, do not feel smothered in my presence). Feelings that vary from the norm are to be dealt with by means of concealment; full repression of consciousness of them is even better. In sentimental novels like La Princesse de Clèves, we find depicted a social practice that varies greatly from this ideal, in which men and women seek to reconcile public morality and private desire by means of complex intrigues and painful compromises; Lafayette's heroine, capable of exemplary honesty, is unable to find a place for herself in this order. Such implicit protest was muted by the possibility of categorizing it as merely feminine, however. (3) Honor is not an explicit theme of critical reflection. Models such as the ones examined here were disseminated through pedagogy, through introductory instruction, reinforced in many cases by parental discipline. A general familiarity with them could be taken for granted by all educated individuals, even those who, like George Sand or Alton-Shée, learned quite different lessons at home because their families were connected with the liberal tradition of the Revolution or the relaxed sexual attitudes of the old aristocracy. The manner in which they were oppressively and exclusively taught in schools gave a delicious aura of transgression to adult pastimes such as reading novels and going to masked balls at Carnival time (where the masks provided safety for family honor during a brief period of intensive flirtation and adventure). Even newspapers participated in this aura of the forbidden, for they were not appropriate teaching material.72 72. Alton-Shée reports having to smuggle the Journal des débats into his room at the school for pages at Versailles, for example. On Carnivals of the early July Monarchy, see François Gasnault, Guingcttcs et lortttes: Bals publics à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1986).

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF HONOR

63

As a result, these models operated at the level of background assumptions, habits of mind, inclinations that did not need to be mentioned or reflected upon. This may help explain why honor, as an explicit theme in social thought in the period, was almost exclusively associated with the old regime. From 1795 forward, in any case, no one questioned the periodization of key motives proposed by Chateaubriand, accepted by Marx andTocqueville: prerevolutionary honor, postrevolutionary self-interest. Insofar as honor was discussed as characteristic of commoner males after 179$, it was considered to be a natural, rather than a socially constructed, characteristic of males, according to Nye's findings. The ability to feel and to be moved by considerations of honor was a mark of superior ranking in nature. Men who did not feel the stirrings of honor and shame in their breasts were considered to be medically impaired; impotence was linked by doctors to timidity, and virility was linked with the ability to reason.73 Later in the century, such ideas would feed the growth of racial theories and anti-Semitism. Jews would be characterized as incapable of the sentiment of honor, a slur that inspired what Nye has called an "epidemic" of duels in the period 1885-1910, in which Jewish men sought to prove their honor by challenging anti-Semitic journalists and politicians.74 However, as Nye remarks, the idea that honor was a natural feature of the human male was part of the larger understanding of gender differences of that day. This was a period, as Denise Riley has shown, when the assignment of gender differences to the natural order was pushed to an unprecedented extreme.75 Doubdess this was in part a consequence of the need, following a powerful current in Enlightenment thought and revolutionary legislation, to conceive of all men as equal while simultaneously conceiving of the polity as an association of these equal independent males. In practice, such a polity could not exist without the families that produced and nurtured such males, bringing them successfully to a state of manhood appropriate to the status of citizen. However, the fundamental links established within these families, among men and women and between generations, had to be pushed out of view, rendered 73. Nye, Masculinity, 68-71; a clear example of this kind of thinking is a passage in AltonShée, Mes mémoires, 1:33, where the author asserts that a Jesuit education, so full of pious frauds, deprives a person of "cette virilité de l'esprit qui nous pousse à la découverte de la vérité" ("that virility of spirit which pushes us to discover truth"). This notion was also reflected in the passage from Le National of 5 October 1840 quoted above. 74. Nye,Aiasculinity, 205-206. 75. DeniseRiley, "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapolis, 1988).

64

T H E H I D D E N PEDAGOGY OF H O N O R

irrelevant to the "universal" principles and institutions of liberalism's political order. Otherwise one was inevitably led to reflect, as Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges had been, on the "rights of women." There was no better way to render the family and the differentiation of gender roles irrelevant to political thought and institutions than by "naturalizing" them into a convenient fixity that required no explicit discussion. At the same time, since this "naturalized" familial and gender configuration was in truth highly artificial, means had to be found to inculcate it into each generation with an aura of self-evidence and of common sense that forestalled questioning. A strong tradition of critical reflection about the prevailing code of honor had developed in the sentimental novel, but its impact was muted. As fiction, especially fiction written by women, novels such as Corinne and George Sand's Indiana were viewed by male critics and readers as mere works of art, whose message was not to be taken with the same seriousness as essays on moral or political issues written by men. On the contrary, it was only too evident that the weaker sex might express dissatisfaction with the discipline essential to the protection of a family's name. Nowhere is the efficacy of such indirect education more clear—it is worth noting, at least in passing—than in the heart-wrenching difficulties that the Saint-Simonians stumbled into unwittingly, difficulties that were both personal and ideological, when they set about trying to reform the family and relations between the sexes.76 Groping for new customs, they were forced to confront their own deeply ingrained feelings of shame and insecurity. The cold reception they received from the rest of society also revealed how deeply entrenched were the paradigms of male and female behavior we have been exploring in a preliminary way here. 76. See references in note 71.

3 Sensitive Hearts Marital Honor and Women's Identity

This chapter, which examines marital separations, reports on the first of the three parts of this investigation. It focuses on honor in the second of the two senses we have discussed, a state free of shame, preserved by avoiding the appearance of improper as well as immoral or unfaithful behavior. Chapter 4, concerning employment in the civil service, focuses on honors as acquisitions or a scale of discrete ranks. Chapter 5 reports on the final part of the investigation, which deals with journalists, who worked in a segment of the public sphere in which both senses of the term honor were constantly in play.

The Code of Appearances When Mme de T filed for a legal separation from her husband in 1840, her lawyer claimed she had been living in a state of de facto separation for almost twenty-five years. From very early in their marriage, husband and wife had been unable to live in peace together and had soon agreed to live apart. Yet, although the husband maintained one residence for himself and another for his wife and two daughters, he frequendy dined with them and kept in constant contact with them. Among the issues that drove them apart was M. de T 's remarkable miserliness. When he moved the family to Paris in 1836, he took an apartment for his wife and children far from the city center, where rents were low. For himself he rented a garret room in the Latin Quarter. The room was cheap and the Latin Quarter itself offered many cheap entertainments. M. de T attended lectures at the Sorbonne; on one occasion he took in the dissection of a ca6s

66

SENSITIVE HEARTS

daver at the Ecole de médicine. He visited the nearby Sainte Geneviève library. Entry was free and in winter he avoided heating and lighting costs by spending time there. Thus, many hours could be passed agreeably in this neighborhood without spending a penny. He reported in a letter to his wife that he could live comfortably in the Latin Quarter on 900 to 1,000 francs a year. And yet, his wife's lawyer claimed, he owned a fortune that provided him with 40,000 francs a year of income. Tight-fistedness also appears to have prevented M. de T from retaining a competent lawyer after his wife filed for the separation. She charged him with violent acts and insults toward her. His extreme parsimony was made worse, so said her lawyer, by his touchy character. Once he broke an egg on her head when he caught her trying to eat this luxurious food for lunch. In Paris, he came to dine with his wife and daughters every night at first, and before his departure after dinner each evening he lectured them for overspending. When Mme de T asked him for a dowry for one of the daughters, he accused her of trying to match the girl with one of her own lovers. After she initially filed for separation, he wrote to her darkly of "a desperate resolution" he might be forced to take. None of these charges were decisive by the standards of the day, and M. de T might well have resisted his wife's request successfully had he been skillfully represented. But he insisted on pleading for himself and spoke mainly of the slimness of his resources. "I am accused of owning property worth twenty thousand francs a year," he said, beginning his summation; but at this comment the audience laughed and M. de T stopped in mid-sentence. Asked how he proposed to answer the specific charges laid against him, M. de T responded that they were "ridiculous falsehoods." Nonetheless, the court granted Mme de T permission to gather depositions and documents to prove her case. The Gazette des tribunaux, a Parisian daily paper founded in 1825, specializing in coverage of courts and legal issues, published a detailed article on the case of M. and Mme de T (for so they were identified) in its issue of 24 July 1840. What most interested the paper's reporter was the bizarre character of M. de T , who, as the wife's lawyer so gracefully put it, combined in himself two types well known to "the greatest of our moralists," two types that had been "most profoundly observed, most admirably rendered, the Miser and the Misanthrope. " The Gazette's writers prowled the courts of Paris and were always on the look out, not just for cases involving issues of interest to the legal profession, but also for cases that would titillate the imagination. Novels and plays were never far from their minds, nor were they far from the minds of lawyers prepar-

SENSITIVE HEARTS

67

ing their pleadings, as the above quote suggests. M. de T was irresistible for the Gazette, a kind of Père Goriot in reverse, a man whose meanness was so extravagant that it rendered him colorful. But the account in the Gazette also makes clear another dimension of this marriage. Things had gone bad very early on, but no legal action was taken by either party for many years. Mme de T 's lawyer remarked that "as long as her own resources held out, allowing her to provide for the education of her two daughters as well as for their and her own subsistence, Mme de T preferred to keep silent, to avoid at all costs a public debate which has now become a necessity." What forced her into court was the coming of age of her daughters. With "all the advantages of a good education," they had watched "chances for a most honorable establishment pass them up one after the other" (emphasis added).1 A legal separation would give the mother control of the dowry she had brought into her marriage and enable her to do what her husband would never do, to dower her daughters appropriately. She turned to the courts only as a last resort, but her husband still denounced this act. "If she had not for the last twenty-five years made a game of failing in her simplest duties," he wrote to their daughters, duties that were "the easiest of all to fulfill toward that person who had honored her enough to take her with him to the altar," then "that hideous application [for a separation] she has had the infamy to sign would never have existed" (emphasis added).2 As the words chosen both by the wife's lawyer and by the husband reveal, this was a conflict over honor; honor required Mme de T to submit to her husband's authority, at least publicly. Because she found his miserliness and abusive behavior intolerable, she was able, privately, to keep him at a distance. However, when her daughters' "honorable establishment" came into question, public exposure of the family's troubles was, in her view, a lesser evil. The husband was so deeply shamed by this exposure that he sought to push all the blame onto her shoulders and accused her of the most shameful deeds he could conjure up. Fear of public exposure shaped the destinies of everyone in this family. The origins and consequences of the French Revolution and the role that gender played in the crisis, scholars increasingly now agree, must be

1. "les occasions des plus honorables établissements leur échapper tour à tour" (emphasis added). 2. "si depuis vingt-cinq années elle ne s'est pas fait un jeu de manquer aux devoirs les plus simples et les plus faciles à remplir envers celui qui l'avait honorée assez pour la conduire à l'autel.. . cette hideuse requête qu'elle a eu l'infamie de signer n'existerait pas."

68

SENSITIVE HEARTS

sought in the growth of that very public sphere which M. and Mme de T feared so much. Embodied in a new and powerful array of institutions—museums, theaters, libraries, aristocratic salons, publishing houses, the periodical press, cafes and restaurants, and, increasingly, the royal courts—the new public sphere of the eighteenth century made possible the formulation and expression of public opinion. A political theater was created, a necessary prerequisite for the drama of revolution.3 The public sphere, to some degree, made possible a new, free and open kind of communication. Dena Goodman remarks, "The kind of conversation fostered in the salons [of the eighteenth century] depended upon a recognized equality among the speakers which allowed for the very activity of criticism and judgment that characterized their speech."4 But this heady experience, Daniel Gordon among others believes, inspired exaggerated hopes in the minds of contemporaries frustrated by a hierarchical corporate social order under the authority of an absolute monarch. The idea of public opinion, Gordon remarks, came "to reflect a dream for a rapprochement between reason and concrete social reality."5 Practice, Joan Landes agrees, fell far short of this dream: In actuality . . . the bourgeois public sphere encouraged a rather messy interaction between the concerns of literary men, financiers, industrialists, and merchants. In that sense, the political, economic, and cultural worlds were wholly intermeshed, belying bourgeois self-definitions of a public sphere oriented around reason not power, rationality not domination, and 3. Some of the more important contributions to this developing theme in research include Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied, 1962); Reinhard Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bütgerlichen Welt (Freiburg, 1959); François Furet, Penser la Revolutionfrançaise(Paris, 1978); Keith Michael Baker, "Introduction," in idem, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation ofModem Political Culture, Vol. 1 of The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford, 1988), xi-xxiv; Mona Ozouf, "L'opinion publique," in Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 1:420-434; Jeremy D. Popkin, Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley, Calif., 1987); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); Claude Labrosse, Lire au XVIIIe siècle: La Nouvelle Héloïse et ses lecteurs (Lyon, 1985); Roger Chartier, ed., Les Usages de l'imprimé (XVe-XIXe siècle) (Paris, 1987); idem, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d'ancien régime (Paris, 1987); Claude Labrosse and Pierre Rétat, Naissance du journal révolutionnaire: 1789 (Lyon, 1989). See the beginning of Chapter 5 for further discussion of this issue. 4. Dena Goodman, "Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions," Eighteenth Century Studies 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 329-350, quote on 338. 5. Daniel Gordon, " 'Public Opinion' and the Civilizing Process in France: The Example of Morellet," Eighteenth Century Studies 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989) : 302-328, quote on 309.

SENSITIVE HEARTS

69

truth not authority. Even if there was no direct discussion of property interests, such interests became the public sphere's [citing Terry Eagleton] "very concealed problematic, the very enabling structure of its disinterested enquiry."6 Robert Darnton's accumulated researches on the republic of letters document only too clearly the gap between hope and practice.7 From this perspective the Revolution, especially in its radical phase, was a Promethean struggle to liberate the public sphere from the corrupting influence of its concealed "enabling structure" of property and commerce. Carol Blum has recently described the intimate links between, on the one hand, the cult of Rousseau—the wave of enthusiasm of the 1780s for "Jean-Jacques," the sincere and propertyless man of virtue, who was free of the entangling web of protection and privilege that prevented others from speaking what was in their hearts—and, on the other, the Terror of the Year 2, which enlisted the guillotine to root out all corruption and insincerity.8 The revolutionaries tried to make the public sphere into that free and open arena of communication it was supposed to be. In doing so, they initially allowed women greater participation than they had ever known, but soon barred them from public functions and public action, consigning them to hearth and home, making of them acolytes of the fraternal and virtuous republican males.9 The Jacobin effort failed painfully before its project of building a virtuous republic was even properly begun. Worse, the Jacobins inadvertently laid the groundwork for the Napoleonic state, which tamed or muzzled the institutions of the public sphere and destroyed those it could not tame or muzzle, while subjecting women to a legal regime that left them almost totally dependent on male relations and deprived of all public voice. The Napoleonic Code appeared to preserve at least one instrument of 6. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 43; quoting from Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From "The Spectator" to Post-Structuralism (London, 1984), 15. 7. Robert Darnton, The Business ofEnlightenment: A Publishing History ofthe Encyclopédie, 177$—1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)); idem, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.,1982); idem, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985). But see also the interesting critical remarks on Darnton's views of the literary underground in Jeremy D. Popkin, "Pamphlet Journalism at the End of the Old Regime," Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 351-367. 8. Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language ofPolitics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986). 9. Ibid., 204-215; Darlene Levy, Harriet Applewhite, and Mary Johnson, Women in Revolutionary Paris: 1789-1795 (Urbana, 111., 1979); Landes, Women and the Public Sphere; Anne Soprani, La Revolution et les femmes, 1789-1796 (Paris, 1988).

70

SENSITIVE HEARTS

female emancipation, that is, divorce by mutual consent. A law making divorce possible on these grounds had been passed in 1792, offering men and women equal access to the new, expanded public courtrooms of the reformed judiciary, where their feelings and preferences were to enjoy some legal recognition. Thousands had rushed to take advantage of this new law.10 When he tightened up divorce restrictions in 1804, however, Napoleon was only convinced to preserve divorce by mutual consent because his advisers pointed out that the procedure made it possible to divorce an adulterous wife without revealing evidence of her adultery in open court. 11 In the Napoleonic version, divorce by mutual consent was intended to be simply one more bolt on the door that locked women and family matters out of the public sphere. In 1816, the restored Bourbons closed this final loophole by abolishing divorce entirely. By 1816, even though the Restoration regime brought back a relative freedom of the press and of expression, extremely guarded and instrumental attitudes prevailed toward the public sphere among large numbers of French men and women. (See Chapter 5 for further discussion of this issue.) The apparent rarity of marital breakdown, judging from the extreme infrequency of legal separations (a rate of roughly three for every thousand marriages celebrated per year), only concealed widespread practices like those documented in the case of M. and Mme de T , difficult to measure, carried out in the name of appearances, by which a surface conformity was preserved.12 The alacrity with which the new commercial daily papers like the Gazette des tribunaux seized upon and publicized interesting cases only confirmed for many their sense that the new postrevolutionary public sphere was dangerous. Thus, France entered the calm waters of the Restoration, which from the beginning granted more freedom to the institutions of the public sphere than they had in fact enjoyed at any time since 1792, with a profound mistrust of these very institutions and their powers to produce truth or justice. Indeed, public speech concerning marriage, families, or women ap10. Dominique Dessertine, Divorcer a Lyon sous la Revolution et I'Empire (Lyon, 1981); Roderick Phillips, Family Breakdown in Late Eighteenth-Century France: Divorces in Rouen, 1792-1803 (Oxford, 1980). 11. James E Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), quotes the following views, attributed to the First Consul: "Laws are made in support of morals. It is notrightto leave a husband no option but to plead before the courts of law for divorce on account of adultery. It should be made possible for the parties to obtain a divorce by mutual consent, which although not in itself a reason for divorce is a sufficient indication that divorce is necessary" (176). 12. Wesley D. Camp, Marriage and Family in France Since the Revolution: An Essay in the History of Population (New York, 1961), 71-89.

SENSITIVE HEARTS

pears to have been deeply shaped by a competition for family honor and anxieties over family reputation that stifled free discussion. Study of the rare cases of marital separations that came before the courts in the period 1815-1848 shows that French men (and, to a lesser extent, women) desperately tried to avoid the public eye whenever possible. This sensitivity was recognized in written law. Besides cruelty and extreme violence, "injure grave"—serious public insult—was the only cause for marital separation sanctioned by the law code. Records show it was by far the most common cause for the granting of separations. The courts showed in numerous cases that they agreed with M. de T , who was in this respect no crank, that appearance in court was itself shaming. In some cases, statements by a lawyer in court, suggesting or implying that a wife's conduct may not have been perfect in every respect, could and did become grounds for separation because they were perceived, given the public character of the courtroom, as serious insult. A man could beat his wife, he could shout at her, berate her, but only out of the hearing of others. One suggestion, in public, that she was unfaithful was sufficient grounds for separation in the eyes of most courts, however.13 These cases in the aggregate reveal that the task of preserving honor by managing appearances had two dimensions, one a dimension of superfluity, the other of concealment. Preserving one's honor required one to do things that were really not necessary in themselves, purely to communicate or reassure others of one's intentions, character, ends. Many restrictions on women's movements and appearances in public took on this character of superfluity. These were the restrictions Staël denounced in Corinne. Details from separation cases graphically document the operation of these restrictions. It was improper, for example, for a woman to be seen with a man in public, especially in a theater or on the street, unless the man was known to be a friend of the family or a relation and therefore obviously acting with the permission of husband or father.14 This re13. The evidence for these assertions is detailed in William M. Reddy, "Marriage, Honor and the Public Sphere in Post-Revolutionary France Separations de corps, 1820-1848,"Journal if Modern History 65, no. 3 (September 1993) : 437-472. The evidence presented there is not all reviewed here and is taken as background for the investigation of this chapter into the relation between honor and sentiment. Cases discussed in that article, which reveal patterns mentioned here, include, from the Tribunal Civil de Versailles in the Archives de l'Ancien Département de Seine-et-Oise (hereafter ADSO), U-0252, Blanc vs. husband Delaporte, requête of 1822; ADSO U-0252 Villone vs. husband Saulse, requite of 1823, rulings of 15 July and 18 December 1823 (U-034); case of the marquis de D . . . , Gazette des tribunaux, 22 May 1847; Perrotte case (also discussed below), Gazette des tribunaux, 1,15, and 29 March 1840. 14. Examples include the Guillaume and Perrotte cases discussed below in the section entitled "Courtroom Novellas."

72

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

striction could not apply to women who worked in public, behind cafe counters, in market squares, in shops or laundries. But there are cases of women who refused to work in public for just this reason; the work itself was tainted with impropriety.15 The man who improperly accompanied a woman in public might arouse suspicions as to his character, but the woman's behavior was more severely judged. Since women were considered to be weak, indecisive, easily led, it was all the more incumbent on them to provide that overflow, that superfluity of reassurance against suspicion embodied in propriety. Both men and women were expected to conceal serious infractions of morality—this is the other dimension of preserving honor—whether the infractions were their own or committed by their spouses or close relations. Not to do so was to damage one's own honor, for honor was a collective, familial state.16 Husbands were to keep their wives' secrets all the more faithfully, according to many contemporaries, as we shall see, if there were children born to the union; for the children's honor, and their hopes for marriages and positions of honor, could be threatened by a scandal involving their parents.17 For many, concealment itself became an elaborate code of conduct that allowed them to live lives quite at variance with the dictates of public morality, and at only a very slight personal cost.18 (Although this was true of both men and women, it was much easier for men to arrange their affairs in this manner; women could not do so without the cooperation and at least tacit assent of their husbands.) For others, concealment was a painful, even a monstrous duty that occasion might impose on them and that they undertook with great reluctance. Either way, not to conceal might be construed by observers as behavior equally shameful, if not more shameful, than the infraction itself.19 We have already seen in Chapter 2 how deeply such restrictions affected the fictitious character Phèdre in Racine's play of that name, who paid 15. In one case, a woman cut her hair so that her husband could not require her to serve behind the counter of his cafe; see report on Rouquier case, in Gazette des tribunaux, 6 June 1847. 16. The comte Mortier, for example, charged his wife with failing to help him conceal her scandalous behavior; their case is reported in Gazette des tribunaux, 11 December 1847. 17. See, for example, the case of Hocquet, reported in Gazette des tribunaux, 15 March 1835. 18. See, for example, coverage of the Chateauvillars case below, in the section entitled "Private Authors." 19. The wife's lawyer in the Hocquet case (Gazette des tribunaux, 15 March 1835) made this charge against the husband, who had brought a formal complaint for adultery against his wife.

SENSITIVE HEARTS

75

the ultimate price for failing to conceal illicit feelings, as well as how deeply they shaped the personality of one seventeenth-century woman, the marquise de Sevigne, who poured all her capacity for involvement with others and all her prodigious talents as a writer into the one outlet that propriety allowed, her relation with her daughter. In La Princesse de Cleves, Lafayette depicted a courageous and virtuous woman whose rebellion against the conventions of concealment led to disaster and taught her that only withdrawal from society could bring personal peace. In Corinne, StaeFs 1807 masterpiece, the author decried the superfluity of assurances of virtue required of elite women, a superfluity so extreme it could stunt the development of talent and destroy the fulfillment of true love, bring some men and women into unhappy marriages, while leaving others to languish in unjustified abandonment.

Private Authors Stael's novel can, in fact, serve as a kind of guide to the contemporary outlook on honor in postrevolutionary France. One can find traces in social practice of all the various attitudes toward honor and toward the problem of appearances that Stael attributes to England, France, and Italy. The confusion of honor and religious virtue that Stael associates with the British Isles, for example, had been for long, and continued in the nineteenth century to be, a central principle of feminine pedagogy in France.20 Both convent schools and lay schools offered ascetic discipline, strict regimentation, and intensive religious instruction to girls from a young age, as well as lessons in how to write letters, play piano, and carry on a proper conversation. The curriculum had as its aim at once protection of the girls' honor from premature taint, preparation for unhesitating submission to parental and marital authority, and inculcation of an entertaining, innocent exterior demeanor. Manners, modesty, and moral principles were instilled as elements of a seamless whole, so that regard for appearances and regard for right behavior were learned as aspects one of the other. Wealthy women were rushed from the confines of such institutions into a round of social visits, balls, theater, and opera, where they were to display their conversational skills, their bare shoulders—which

20. See James R Farr, "The Pure and Disciplined Body: Hierarchy, Morality, and Symbolism in France During the Catholic Reformation," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21 (1991): 391-414; Isabelle Bricard, Saintes ou pouliches: L'Education desjeunesfillesau XLXe Steele (Paris, 1985).

74

SENSITIVE HEARTS

they had doubtless hardly glimpsed themselves for years at a time in school—and their carefully cultivated ignorance of the world, to potential mates and their parents. After a hasty marriage, however, women were allowed to act with somewhat more leeway, to receive male visitors, to move about town with greater freedom. 21 In some instances, they exercised the freedom to take lovers as well, with little interference from their husbands. (This was, however, a very delicate issue to negotiate, even assuming the husband was willing to turn a blind eye. Respect for appearances required complex arrangements.) In this context, honor might well associate itself with the rank and handsomeness of one's lover, as well as his apparent ardor and fidelity, just as in the case of Staël's Mme d'Arbigny, exemplar of French mores in the novel.22 At the same time, Corinne's Italian character was widely emulated in contemporary France; there was, that is, no shortage of women who wished to reject the reign of appearances in favor of open expression of their sentiment, open display of their attachments, or public performance of skills not deemed commensurate with wifely virtue. Such persons were rare, but they succeeded in marking the age with a special quality of sentimental protest, very different from, but not unrelated to, the kind of protest that kept spilling onto the streets. Corinne's disciples displayed their anguish; by the conspicuousness of their suffering they aimed to tear the veil of appearances aside, so that life and affection might find a better harmony. There were, of course, actresses, singers, and dancers who lived, as they had from the seventeenth century, completely outside the realm of appearances, openly flaunting social norms, still considered beyond the pale of respectable society. Now this traditional marginal group were seconded by the new stars of female defiance of appearances— George Sand, Flora Tristan, the actress Rachel, who single-handedly revived the classic repertoire of the Comédie française, or the women SaintSimonians, Cécile Fournel, Suzanne Volquin, and others—willing to speak openly of their amorous liaisons, their failed marriages, their violent husbands, demanding equal access to public activities, especially the ability to write and to publish.23 21. On elite women's education and introduction to society, see Marie-Françoise Lévy, De mères enfilies: L'Education desfrançaises, iSso-iSSo (Paris, 1984) ; Bricard, Saintes ou pouliches; Ann Martin-Fugier, La Vie élégante, ou la formation du Tout-Paris, 1S1S-1S4S (Paris, 1990). 22. Such liaisons are difficult to document, of course; see citations in note 61 to Chapter 2; see also Pierre Citron, Dans Balzac (Paris, 1986), for Balzac's youthful liaison with a married woman. 23. On these issues, see Joseph Barry, Infamous Woman: The Lift of George Sand (New York, 1977); Pierre Leprohon, Flora Distan (Antony, France, 1979); Jean Baelen, La vie de

SENSITIVE HEARTS

75

Less well known among the minor heroines of the heart from this dark age were women who went to court to free themselves from failed marriages. Examination of marital separation cases of the 1830s and 1840s reveals a wide variety of "sensitive hearts" who chose public exposure of their affliction in order to escape unlivable situations. This was quite a new phenomenon. In the eighteenth century, access to courts to adjudicate disputes between marriage partners had been extremely difficult; the method of choice for dealing with abusive husbands or wayward wives was the lettre de cachet, an instrument designed by the royal government for the protection of family honor, because it allowed confinement of offending family members without requiring public judicial proceedings. Quite popular, even among the lower strata of urban society, the lettre de cachet, precisely because of its secret, extrajudicial character, was denounced by the philosophies as a flagrant abuse of absolute authority.24 The Revolution revamped judicial institutions to make them more numerous and more accessible, but it also forced families to adjudicate their disputes in public. Women initiated the vast majority of marital separation cases of the early nineteenth century.25 Especially intriguing among them were a subset of women who found, as a result of their legal action, that their private writings, read out in courtrooms, were splashed across the pages of the new daily press, picked over for evidence corroborating their allegations against their spouses, read avidly and commented upon in salons and cafes across the country. Real evidence of real melodramas, little epistolary nov-

Flora Tristan: Socialisme etfeminisme au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1972); Rachel Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie Française (New York, 1995) ; Susan K. Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference (New York, 1992); Laure Adkr, A l'aube du féminisme: Les Premières Journalistes (iS}0-iSso) (Paris, 1979). 24. On lettres de cachet, see Ariette Farge and Michel Foucault, Le Désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1982). 25. Evidence presented here is based on two samples. One is from a rare cache of court records, requêtes and enquêtes for seventy separation cases of the years 1822-1827, from the Tribunal Civil de Versailles in the Archives de l'Ancien Département de Seine-et-Oise (ADSO), U-0252. (Normally, marital separation cases were not kept in separate files but filed chronologically along with all other civil cases; hence they are usually difficult to find.) Before a case could go to court, a judge reviewed the requests, interviewed the parties to see whether a reconciliation were possible, and ruled on whether the facts alleged were serious enough to warrant a divorce. Only then was a hearing scheduled. Judgments in the Seine-et-Oise cases were recorded by date of hearing in registers U-032 through U-045. A meticulous search yielded judgments in forty-three of the seventy requestsfiled,which may well represent all that ever went to court. The other sample was derived from a survey of articles on separation cases from the Gazette des tribunaux, structured according to the published volumes of the Gazette, which

76

SENSITIVE HEARTS

els that were true, these writings provided acts of self-interpretation that seemed to corroborate the speculations of Romantic novelists about the human heart and the sufferings concealed within the bourgeois home. They allow us to raise questions about the dynamic of change that drove the mores of the age forward, if slowly, toward a more open acceptance of human feeling. The cases discussed in this section were taken from the pages of the Gazette des tribunaux, a daily paper aimed at both lawyers and a larger audience of sophisticated readers. Many of the women letter writers one runs across in the pages of the Gazette des tribunaux, including some who were highly educated, came to the newspaper's attention just because concern for their own emotional fulfillment eventually overrode their desire to keep up appearances. They filed for separations in spite of the stigma that a formal legal proceeding brought to any family. Their letters were used against them by angry husbands, read out in court, printed in newspapers. One question such cases raise is whether the letter writers did not anticipate that their correspondence might be made public and embrace this outcome. The move from writer to author inadvertendy forced on them by circumstance offered the glimmer of a public identity like Corinne's, in their own right as women. 26

ran in this period from November to October. Four volumes were sampled, and all articles dealing with séparations de corps were examined from them, yielding a group of sixty-one cases, spread out as follows: Tear

Number of Cases

1829 1830 1834 1835 1839 1840 1846 1847 Total

3 13 i 20 3 II

o 10 61

These years were selected to represent both turbulent (1830,1847) and calm (183s, 1840) periods of the July Monarchy. The records show that husbands asked for separations rarely: in thirteen of sixty-two cases (21 percent) sampled from the Gazette des tribunaux and in two of seventy cases (3 percent) from the Versailles sample of court records. But even women asked for separations only very rarely, roughly three requests per thousand marriages per year. For discussion of the general evolution of marriage practices, see Anthony Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 17S0-19S0: New Ideas on the Family, Divorce, and Homosexuality (London, 1989) and Camp, Marriage and Family. 26. On the move from letter writer to author in Lettres péruviennes, see Miller, Subject to Change, 146.

SENSITIVE HEARTS

77

These and other cases taken from the Gazette des tribunaux cannot be treated as "representative"; Gazette editors chose to report on them because of their special interest, sometimes because of the social prominence of the parties, frequently because of the fame of the barristers who tried the cases. Oratorical skill, as noted in Chapter 2, was highly prized in this era and constantly emphasized in elite male education. Parliamentary addresses by well-known speakers were fashionable venues for men and women of k monde.17 In the courtroom, pleadings, reported verbatim by the Gazette, became opportunities for celebrated orators to weave compelling stories about their clients. The same conventions used by writers of fiction to make their characters more realistic were used by barristers to make their clients' cases more plausible; often one has the impression of being confronted with contending mini-novels offered to the court by each party's hired orator. In this context, actual letters in the hand of one of the parties offered—or seemed to offer—precious confirmation of interpretations put forward in court. In addition, they revealed emotions and events normally deeply concealed from public view. The veil of appearances was swept aside to reveal "real" people rather than fictions, but using conventions of fiction and expectations created by the reading of fiction. Instead of being typical in any sense, therefore, cases reported in the Gazette represent episodes that many people cooperated in selecting, recording (interpreting), and passing on, confident that they would attract widespread interest. These stories fit certain presuppositions of the age and reveal widely shared preoccupations and anxieties. Out of sixty-one cases of marital separations found in the Gazette in four sampled years between 1829 and 1847, letters figured as important evidence in fifteen cases; of these, wives wrote letters in eight cases, husbands or male admirers in four; both husbands and wives in three.28 In seven of the eleven cases involving letters written by women, the letters represent conscious displays of literary talent and thus reveal their authors 27. Martin-Fugier, La Vie ¿Uigante, 215-239. 28. The cases with letters in them were as follows (for each case, the last name or identifying initial from the Gazette is given, plus the date of thefirstarticle on the case): Women only writing letters: Chateauvillars, 26 June 1835; D , 1 March 1835; Tranchant, 27 January 1847; Pithon, 27 January 1847; L , 20 March 1840; L — , 10 May 1840; Mazens, 27 December 1839; Gamier, 3 September 1830. Men only writing letters: Leret, 20 January 1847; T — , 24 July 1840; Berthaux, 12 November 1829; Godard, n December 1829. Men and women writing letters: Guillaume, 6 July 1835; de Tiremois, 6 January 1847; F , 21 November 1839.

78

SENSITIVE HEARTS

as, so to speak, students of Corinne, women who seek closeness by skillful elaboration of verbal expression or who (by the very act of filing for a separation) break the laws of appearance in search of more genuine selfexternalization. A signal case is that of a ship captain's wife (referred to only as Mme D by the Gazette, habitually averse to being charged as thefirstto publish a family name and thus damage the family's reputation). She won her separation on appeal before the Cour de Cassation in 1835. The Cour ruled that love letters she addressed to her husband at the time he was allegedly mistreating her could not be used as evidence against the wife's claims of abuse and insult. Such letters proved nothing. The Gazette's reporter heartily agreed because of "the sweetness and accommodating habits natural to women, and . . . that urbanity of expression that results as well from a certain education and a concernforpropriety" (emphasis added).29 Letter writing was, as noted in Chapter 2, an important part of the curriculum for correcdy raised young women; in the letters of Mme de Sévigné and other seventeenth-century aristocrats that were required reading, close familial attachments were a highly valued norm. In the case of the ship captain's wife, although unfortunately we have no excerpts from the letters, it seems that expressions of love and attachment could themselves be regarded as the conventional talk of a well-bred woman. Prepared to be good wives—that is, submissive and conventionally emotional—to whomever their parents chose, young women were also prepared, inadvertendy, to figure in their own melodramas of innocence abused, crossed love, and hidden shame. Reading novels, in this context (often possible only after the marriage was celebrated, or at least only after graduation), was a liberating education of the imagination, a source of consolation in the discovery of shared fates, just as writing them, or— through a court proceeding—figuring in a real-life melodrama oneself, could create a new, freer identity outside of the marriage bond. Letters written by wives trace a dimension of personal experience that cannot be treated as simply "private" or "subjective," since, as the court recognized in the case of the ship captain's wife, this very dimension was a site where cross currents of women's educational experiences, their own hard-won sense of self-worth, and their severe legal handicaps left their marks. Nor was it only well-educated women who shared in this conventional 29. "la douceur, l'aménité de moeurs naturelles aux femmes, e t . . . l'urbanité de langage que donne aussi certaine éducation et l'esprit de convenances" (emphasis added). Case of Mme de D . . . , Gazette des tribunaux, 1 March 1835.

SENSITIVE HEARTS

79

mode of self-interpretation. Newspapers, novels, theater, and song disseminated notions about female feeling and fulfillment that were adopted among the poorest strata, as the first two cases discussed here show. ANNE-LOUISE PITHON

Novels and a letter found in Anne-Louise Pithon's bedroom by her husband were among the evidence used against her when she sued for a separation in 1846.30 Her case brings out the double-edged character of solace couched in the form of Romantic melodrama, however sophisticated. She tried to find freedom by turning her life into a novel and inadvertendy provided a warrant for her own "imprisonment" in a hopeless marriage. According to the husband's lawyer, Anne-Louise Pithon's mother married her off in 1845 to a M. Lacombe, the son of a Belleville grocer; the husband's family had slipped 15,000 francs to Anne-Louise's penniless mother to serve as her "dowry," an inducement not to be refused, even though the husband was a dwarf and blind in one eye. In her letter, Anne-Louise explained the matter: I was eighteen years old and I dreamed of a brilliant future, although not above my station in life. . . . My mother, always so good, induced me to contract a union that was to overturn forever all my happiness and all my life. My opposition was in vain, and for unfortunate considerations of interest [pour de malheureuses misons d'intérêt], my hand was promised. All that I suffered was known only to God and to myself. Still, I obeyed; but such tears, such nights without sleep. What immense despair concealed in the bottom of my heart! Not long after the ceremony, Anne-Louise shut herself up in her bedroom, refusing to help in the shop or to endure her mother-in-law's verbal abuse. She read endless novels. After a time, she and her husband agreed to part. However, when she found out such an agreement had no legal status, she got her husband to help her stage an insult that could serve as grounds for a separation. The insult took the form of a refusal, before witnesses, to allow her into the conjugal domicile. The court rejected this transparent stratagem, however. Since mutual consent was not grounds for separation in this period, her evident readiness to separate undermined her case. The family's lawyer read a letter the family had found in Anne-Louise's things, written (but not sent) to an Englishman

30. Pithon case is covered in Gazette des tribunaux, 27 January 1847.

8o

SENSITIVE HEARTS

she had read about in a newspaper, who had unexpectedly inherited a huge fortune. In the letter she talked of her solitude. Her mother had died, her father worked three hundred miles away; two of her brothers were in the army and the third in England. A few days before, her grandmother had passed away, and now no one was left to her but "a spouse who cannot give me any support, for Nature has cruelly disfigured him and has given him a character as weak as his constitution. Alone with a little child, who has riveted closed the chain that holds me here where a cruel destiny has thrown me, alone, without a friend, without advice, without hope. Oh! physical suffering is nothing, maternal privations are nothing; it's just that the soul suffers, it's that emptiness, that nothingness into which such isolation throws you."31 She feared going mad, she said. "But then, don't you find that I am mad? What can you do about my privations and my dismay? By what right do I come to you and say: 'Help me'? [By what right do I say to you] "You whom fortune has fulfilled by an enormous gift, unexpected, sanctify your new riches by a noble act?' "32 She asked him for a million francs, a pittance for him now. "Alas, I have no claim to it, you do not know me; you will probably not receive this letter which I do not know how to send to you, and which I dare not sign for fear of becoming a tale known to all, if this letter should fall into the hands of a third party capable of misusing it."33 She told him that if he decided to answer, to write M.A.H.P. [sic], poste restante, Paris. "I write to you as I would write to God. [Signed:] A." "Look at the style with which Mme Lacombe writes, wife of the little grocer from Belleville [a poor suburb to the north of Paris]," remarked the husband's lawyer after reading the letter. "I wanted to read you this 31. "un époux dans l'impossibilité d'être mon soutien, car la nature l'a disgracié cruellement, et lui a donné un caractère aussi faible que son constitution; seule avec un petit enfant qui rive le lien qui m'enchaîne là où un affreux destin m'a jetée, seule, sans un ami, sans conseil, sans espoir. Oh! les souffrances physiques ne sont rien, les privations maternelles ne sont rien, mais c'est ce que l'âme souffre, c'est ce vide, c'est ce néant dans lequel vous plonge un isolement semblable." 32. "Et mais, ne trouvez-vous pas que je le suis; que peuvent vous faire à vous mes chagrins et mes privations; de quel droitviens-je vous dire: Secourez-moi? [De quel droitviensje vous dire:] Vous que la fortune a comblé d'un don immense, inattendu, sanctifiez votre nouvelle richesse par une belle action?" 33. "Hélas, je n'ai aucun titre, vous ne me connaissez pas; vous ne recevrez peut-être pas cette lettre que je ne sais comment vous faire parvenir, et que je n'ose signer, dans la crainte d'être la fable d'un monde entier, si elle venait à tomber en des mains tierces susceptibles d'en abuser."

SENSITIVE HEARTS

81

letter because it allows one to see the interior of this household, how Mme Lacombe understood her duties." The letter shows, the lawyer went on, that she had been sacrificed to interest, that her heart was empty. Pity her poor child, "who is no more than the rivet that holds her chained to him whom people call her husband." The staged insult on which her case was based was "a comedy." The very emptiness of this marriage is what ensured that Anne-Louise Pithon could not have her separation. Had her husband been cruel to her, had he uttered before witnesses just one of the insults his mother constantly heaped upon her, there might have been a way out, for evidence shows that public insult was by far the most consistendy recognized grounds for separation in the period.34 However, as the husband's lawyer admitted, the extraordinary talent of the young grocer's wife arrests one's attention. Where, outside of exclusive convent schools, could a woman have learned to write of her spouse that "Nature has cruelly disfigured him and has given him a character as weak as his constitution"? The simile is graceful, learned, revealing. Refined discrimination allows her persuasively to identify the character of her suffering: "Oh! physical suffering is nothing, maternal privations are nothing; it's just that the soul suffers, it's that emptiness, that nothingness into which such isolation throws you." Here was one of the "coeurs sensibles" that are so constandy evoked in Staél's authorial voice, an exceptional woman, lost in the tedium of the day-to-day, who by her very poverty and by the humdrum character of her surroundings raises questions about the exclusive nature of her gifts. One must wonder whether the quality of Pithon's emotional vocabulary did not derive from the novels she reportedly read unceasingly in her room. Pithon, like Corinne, had an imaginative soul and cared less for appearances than she did for finding some oudet for her inner life beyond the limitations of a marriage without feeling. Conventional appearances did not concern her, but she shrunk from the idea of revealing the full scope of her suffering. Her husband's family did not hesitate to humiliate her in order to keep her under their power. At the same time, having her letter read in court and published in a mass circulation daily paper was perhaps the only way it could have been sent; if Anne-Louise Pithon when writing the letter had wished to figure in a real-life novel, by this reading she, quite effectively, got her wish. (Even if the novel turned out badly—but of course, we cannot tell that.) 34- For a systematic review of the evidence, see Reddy, "Marriage, Honor, and the Public Sphere."

82

SENSITIVE HEARTS

MME JULIE F

The need for caution about what one reads into these documents is underscored by the case of another woman known to us only as Mme Julie F , who was, like Anne-Louise Pi thon, without any formal education. She was the wife of an innkeeper; she had exchanged letters with a lover, which she kept hidden from her husband's view in the apartment of her maid; but the correspondence had fallen into the hands of the husband, who sued for a separation. "Une correspondance amoroso-commerciale" ("Business Love Letters"), read the front-page headline in the Gazette des tribunaux.3S They quoted the lover's letters at length: "My beautiful Julie," he wrote, once a deal is wrapped up, it is time for a man in love to come to terms with his object... . You have inspired in me a love which no one has ever made me feel. It is true, my sweet friend, that I have loved before; but the love of the senses, that brutal love, moves only the body; it is monotonous and ephemeral, and from the moment one has obtained the fruit of one's passion, the person who has been seduced becomes insupportable. But with you, mon amie, it is not that way; since you have given me a taste of happiness, I am even more in love with you.36 And in another letter: "The sacrifice which you made in delivering to me ["en me livrant"—as in "livraison à domicile," "home delivery"] all that is most dear to a woman in this world is for me an ineffaceable memory."37 Julie, trying to respond to these missives, had partially copied out a form letter from a book called The Lover's Secretary (Le Secretaire des amans). This, too, her husband seized. Here is a brief sample of its radiant inanity. "Mont bien aimé" ("My best beloved"), said Julie's handwritten copy, with plentiful spelling errors, perhaps to conceal the source, Tais jolie, tes adorable lettres on rependu dans mont coeur la joie la plus douce et la plus pure. Celui qui sait comme toi sentir et connaître lamour, lamour elevai délicat, qui est une émanation de l'âme . . . [and so on].

35. The case is covered in Gazette des tribunaux, 19 June 1839, and 21 November 1839. 36. "Ma belle Julie, les affaires terminées, il est du devoir d'un homme qui aime de s'entretenir avec son objet. . . . Tu m'a inspiré cet amour que personne ne m'avait fait ressentir. Il est vrai, ma douce amie, que j'ai aimé; mais l'amour des sens, cet amour brutal, n'agite que le corps; il est éphémère et monotone, et dès l'instant qu'on a obtenu le fruit de la passion, la personne séduite devient insupportable. Mais toi, mon ami, ce n'est pas ainsi; depuis que vous m'avez fait goûter le bonheur, je suis encore plus amoureux de toi." Gazette des tribunaux, 21 November 1839. 37. Gazette des tribunaux, 19 June 1839.

SENSITIVE HEARTS

83

(Your pretty, your adorable letters have brought the sweetest and purest joy to my heart. He who knows as you do how to feel and experience love, the delicate, elevated love that is an emanation from the s o u l . . . [and so on].) She had so many clients, the Gazette speculated, that, like a business, she had fallen back on this "curious amorous form letter" ("ce curieux circulaire amoureux"). Her husband's hotel was a favored one among commercial travelers, according to the newspaper, and there is no species of man more prone to smooth-talking seduction, more dangerous to a husband, than the commis voyageur, the traveling salesman (unless it is a second lieutenant on garrison duty). In fact, the newspaper quotes from letters of only this one correspondent. Could it be that the paper twisted the story around to fit a literary commonplace?38 It is quite possible that something important was happening between these two, that Julie had never written a love letter before, and that it was an important event for her. From the evidence, such an interpretation is just as likely as the one offered by the paper. Mme Julie F and the unnamed traveling salesman had perhaps achieved a closeness that exceeded their writing ability. She may have bought a used copy of Le Secrétaire des amans from a little bookstore on the corner, rushing to her maid's apartment (where she had met secredy with her lover before he left town) to try to answer his letters. Her literacy is marginal; she is genuinely moved by his words and does not notice the ludicrous mixture of business and personal vocabulary, of public and private, of giving and purchasing, of personal love and impersonal formality—the aspects the Gazette's reporter found to be laughable and incongruous. She adds spelling errors because her lover knows she can barely write, not realizing that the contents of the letter in all their triteness will give her away. The husband won the case, and Julie F was sentenced in absentia to six months in prison for adultery. Julie F was sufficiently schooled in the prevailing conventions of love of the time that she sought adequate formulation of her feelings in a dress of expert expression that was, so to speak, ready-to-wear, the best she could afford. (Which is not to say she did not have other, oral idioms available to her.) Better-educated women could manipulate these same conventions with greater virtuosity.39

38. Among notable literary treatments of the traveling salesman, see Honoré de Balzac's L'Illustre Gaudissart (1831), and Louis Reybaud's Le Dernier des commis voyageurs (1845). 39. For a full exploration of the conventions of letter writing in this period, see Roger Charrier, éd., La Correspondance: Les Usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1991).

84

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

MME DE CHATEAUVILLARS

In the case of Mme de ChateauviHars, given extensive coverage by the Gazette in 1835, her husband, the comte de Chateauvillars, provided his lawyer with a large packet of love letters she had addressed to him; these were introduced as evidence in a preliminary hearing to show that she still loved him and that her separation request should be rejected without a trial. The Gazette published extensive verbatim excerpts.40 The Gazette acknowledged the extraordinary public interest for a case pitting against each other "a woman adorned by all the gifts of nature and of education, graceful and witty, belonging to the richest, most brilliant class of our society,"41 on the one hand, and "a young man viewed as one of the most elegant and fashionable persons of the capital [les plus élégants fashionables de la capitale], with a good name and a large fortune, and distinguished at once by his mind, by his appearance, and by his manners." The submission of these letters to the court was part of a complex tug of war between husband and wife that is difficult to untangle. Mme de Chateauvillars's lawyer had filed a highly provocative complaint against her husband, which, according to the Gazette, charged that he 'Vas a perfect representation of the great lords of the days of Louis XV, and wished to bring us back to the customs of the Regency." This circumlocution was easily understood by all to mean that he was a libertine. He had a "little house" where he carried on a luxurious and licentious existence apart from his wife, and counted among his mistresses "women of fashion and charwomen, wifes and single girls, even certain high and powerful ladies of the faubourg St.-Germain, whose names are nesded in the request for a separation Mme de Chateauvillars has submitted." Although the Gazette did not repeat any of these names, it was quite clear that the request for a separation had spared the honor neither of the husband nor of his alleged lovers. This was a frontal attack, then, aimed at doing the worst possible damage, whatever the outcome in terms of court decision. The husband's use of his wife's letters in court, in an attempt to prove that she was reconciled to him, and that therefore the request for separation ought to be dismissed, can be read as an attempt to match the wife's attack with a similar, shaming public exposure. But the blow appears not to have worked; the court allowed Mme de Chateauvillars to proceed with her suit, and she did so.

40. The case was covered in Gazette des tribunaux, 26,27,29-30 June 1835. 41. Ibid., 26 June 1835.

SENSITIVE HEARTS

85

Her letters are remarkable. Here is the first one the Gazette excerpted: Chateau du Bréau,from my little winter bedroom You, my best loved, are my whole existence, all my hopes, all my desires are concentrated in you; and the tender assurances of affection contained in your letter havefilledmy soul with the sweetest intoxication. On my return from Paris, coming into my pretty litde room, where, thanks to your thoughtfulness, I found a good fire and everything ready for my dinner, I felt a strong need for your presence. It is a joy to owe all one's well-being to the person one loves; but the desire inevitably follows to express all one's gratitude. Seeing that pretty little bed (where there is, even so, room enough for two), those white curtains, I thought of our rustic novel and I said, as you have, "What do we need of a social set that thinks nothing of us." I love you, my Alfred, more tenderly every day. You'll write me again, won't you, to tell me the day of your return, so that I can count the hours. Adieu, my best beloved.42 In a subsequent letter, she repents of having returned to Bréau by herself; she imagines him in front of his mirror in their Paris home, preparing to go out for the evening, and she says that she cannot help wanting to be with him when he goes to madame ***'s house: Today I feel at once the sweetest pride thinking how many women will envy me the happiness of belonging to you and I am tormented by the crudest jealousy when I think of all the graces which those women possess. Not one would be able to resist you . .. [sic] but not one would love you like your poor Elizabeth. Write to me that I'm an idiot, scold me, but promise me you won't forget me. Don't, above all, miss any chance for having fun; you will tell me all about it on your return—which will be in how many days? Adieu, my best beloved.43 42. "Château du Bréau, de ma petite chambre d'hiver "Toi, mon bien aimé, voilà toute mon existence, toute mes espérances; tous mes désires sont concentrés en toi, et les tendres assurances d'affection contenues dans ta lettre ont rempli mon âme de la plus douce ivresse. A mon retour de Paris, en entrant dans ma jolie petite chambre ou, grâce à tes soins prévenans, j'ai trouvé bon feu et tout prêt pour mon dîner, j'ai senti bien vivement le besoin de ta présence; on aime à devoir tout son bien être à celui qu'on aime; mais on désire aussi lui en témoigner tout sa reconnaissance. En voyant ce joli petit lit blanc (où il y a tout de même place pour deux) cesrideauxblancs, j'ai pensé à notre roman de chaumière et alors j'ai dit comme toi: Qu'avons-nous besoin d'un monde qui ne songe guère à nous? "Je t'aime, mon Alfred, plus tendrement tous les jours; tu m'écriras encore, n'est-ce pas, pour me dire quel jour tu reviendras, afin que je puisse compter les heures. "Adieu mon bien aimé." 43. "Aujourd'hui je sens à la fois le plus doux orgueil en pensant combien de femmes vont m'envier le bonheur de t'appartenir, et je suis tourmentée par la plus cruelle jalousie

86

SENSITIVE HEARTS

Apparently the reference to jealousy angered her husband, for the next letter from her, reproduced in the Gazette, is petulant and defensive: I am the cause of your greatest chagrin, you say; I and my ideas; but my ideas are those of a woman in love. May God grant that yours are not as fatal! . . . The chill that reigns between us (which for you is only a game) fills my soul with pain. For I see no way to end it. The separation that we have been considering [i.e., not a legal separation in this instance, but a period of residence apart] would only be a palliative measure, and one that would cost me tears of blood! I have nothing to hide; no illusion comforts me as I enter the arid path before me. I do not even hide my anguish. The true dignity of a wounded heart can use only the language of truth. The cause of our discord will continue always. You speak of the duties of society; I only know the chains of love.44 Other letters read out in court expressed Mme de Chateauvillars's regret that Alfred did not accompany her to England, where a third child was born to the couple. (We are told that Mme de Chateauviliars was born in England but spent many years—and was apparendy educated—in France.) These letters continue the tone, varying from importunate to affectionate to reproachful, of the others. ("If you had wanted it one quarter as much as I," she wrote from England, "we would have had a charming trip together.") 45 Later they reunited in Paris. Back at Breau, again separated from him, she wrote, chiding him for his surprise that she had been so sweet to him in Paris:

en pensant à toutes les grâces dont ces femmes sont pourvues; pas une ne saurait te résister . . . mais pas une ne t'aimera comme ta pauvre Elisabeth. Ecris-moi que je suis une sotte, gronde-moi, mais assure-moi que tu ne m'oublies pas. Surtout ne perde aucune occasion de bien t'amuser; tu me racontera tout cela à ton retour, qui sera dans combien de jours? "Adieu, mon bien aimé." 44. "Votre plus grand chagrin, dites-vous, est en moi, en mes idées ! mes idées sont celles d'une femme aimante. Plaise à Dieu que les vôtres ne vous soient pas plus fatales! . . . Le froid qui règne entre nous (qui n'est qu'un jeu pour vous) me remplit l'âme de douleurs, car je ne vois aucun moyen d'y mettre fin; la séparation que nous méditons sera un palliatif, voilà tout! et qui me coûtera des larmes de sang! Vous le voyez, je ne vous cache rien; aucune illusion ne me soutient dans la route aride qui s'ouvre devant moi; je ne cherche même pas à dissimuler mes angoisses; la vraie dignité d'un coeur blessé ne peut se servir que du langage de la vérité. "La cause de notre désunion existera toujours. Vous parlez de devoirs de la société; je ne connais que les chaînes de l'amour." 45. "Si vous l'aviez désiré le quart autant que moi, nous eussions fait ensemble un voyage charmant."

SENSITIVE HEARTS

87

Dear friend, is there any place your presence would not inspire joy? That poor marquise de ***, how she interests me! She was sick with love for you; poor woman, she thinks she is over it; I hope so, but when love shoots its arrows by your hand, they make wounds that do not heal. I know I am a fool to tell you that; but you will leave her to her error, won't you? You are wicked to say that Mme V has two lovers; you know nothing about it, except what you hear from gossip [les on-dit], which is so false! Now you are planning to go visit the spirited comtesse d ***. In spite of all the friendly things that she has said of me, I fear that house.... Apart from that, I am happy that Paris can offer you some entertainment. . . Bréau is deserted, completely deserted!46 Alfred's lawyer, the great legitimist orator Berryer, having read the letters to the court, holding a sheaf of them up for all to see, concluded that they were from a woman who "understands love so well and marriage so poorly." What is certain is that Mme de Chateauvillars was demanding a sentimental attachment from her husband, a relationship that flowered in the intimacy of the bedroom, in the rural retreat, in the contemplation of Romantic fiction, a virtuous marital devotion such as Julie and Saint Preux might have enjoyed; whereas M. de Chateauvillars sought to pursue that kind of career of honor, associated with the name of Don Juan, that Staël's Mme d'Arbigny also pursued, in which romantic attachments were displayed in the salons of the capital and one's merit measured in the number and rank of one's lovers. By the time these letters were written, Mme de Chateauvillars's mood is despairing; her expressions of affection are reproaches. It seems probable, as well, that the request for separation represented an attempt to carry on the same struggle that is revealed in the letters. Public naming of his lovers was a sure way of depriving M. de Chateauvillars of his freedom to circulate in society. In using her love letters as a

46. "Cher ami, où ta présence n'inspirerait-elle la joie? Cette pauvre marquise de * * * , combien elle m'intéresse! Elle a été malade par amour pour toi; pauvre femme, elle se croit guérie; je l'espère; mais quand l'amour lance ses flèches par tes mains, elles font des blessures qui ne guérissent point. Je sais que je suis une imprudente de te dire cela; mais tu la laisseras dans son erreur, n'est-ce pas? "Tu est un méchant de dire que Mme V . . . a deux amans; tu n'en sais rien, tu ne peux parler que par les on-dit, ils sont si faux! "Maintenant tu t'occupe de te rendre chez la spirituelle comtesse d ***. Malgré tout ce qu'elle a bien voulu dire d'aimable pour moi, je redoute cette maison. . . . D u reste je suis contente que Paris t'offre quelque amusement. . . . Bréau est désert, si désert!"

88

SENSITIVE HEARTS

counterattack, he may have hoped to humiliate her in turn by violating her privacy. One must ask, however, whether she found a certain enjoyment in being published. Each letter is written in an exquisite style, carefully planned, drawing on a large vocabulary. She expresses her indifference "to a social set [d'un monde] that thinks nothing of us." She deplores the inaccuracy of gossip, expresses admiration for rustic novels. She speaks her feelings with voluminous ease and precision. Here, surely, was another one of those "sensitive hearts" Stael spoke of, who languished for lack of an appropriate public forum within which to be and to grow. Should the husband of such an aristocratic wife prove uninterested in her capacities for self-expression, what alternative audience did she have? Two days after the court ruled that Mme de Chateauvillars could proceed with her case, the Gazette reported that M. de Chateauvillars had abducted his wife; seizing her while she was out walking, he forced her into his carriage and was reported to have headed toward the German border. The paper's reporter expressed his astonishment at this turn of events: "A husband kidnaps his wife to put an end to separation proceedings! This is an act of gallantry, of homage, of violence—whatever you like. But it is certainly an expedient that has all the merit of originality. We hope that this couple will return more satisfied with each other and that this romanesque incident will lead to a reconciliation between them, or at least to an informal separation which is more worthy of their high social rank." 47 The Gazette saw each spouse in this episode as seeking to impose her will on the other by threatening public exposure. If madame was willing to turn to the courts, monsieur tried to go even further in the same direction, by having his lawyer read her letters to the judges and reporters. Such arms were inappropriate to persons of their status, the Gazette chided. But one can imagine the wife feeling she had no recourse; she was seeking to stop behavior that only became reprehensible when it became public. Her struggle was against the very reign of appearances that the Gazette recommended they respect, as much as against her husband.

Courtroom Novellas Although the private feelings of wives are seldom as well documented as Mme de Chateauvillars's, it was almost impossible for a woman to seek 47. Gazette des triimnaux, 29-30 June 1835.

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

89

the protection of the courts against her husband without breaking in a decisive manner with the reign of appearances. This point could be made to work against her, as occurred in another case heard in 1835, the case of Mme Guillaume, who was repeatedly chided by her husband's lawyer for having made the mistake of bringing "family squabbles" ("démêlés de famille") into a court of law.48 There was only one possible defense against such a charge. The courts were clear and consistent. As in the case of Pithon, they saw their role as protecting family honorfirstand foremost; emotional well-being or suffering had no status in law or jurisprudence, unless emotions were somehow linked to insult. Mme Guillaume's lawyer set out to make just such a link. This strategy reveals, as we shall see, that contemporaries had a highly developed awareness of the deceptive nature of appearances, and of their potential conflict with sentiment. It was Mme Guillaume's very heightened emotional sensitivity, her lawyer argued, that rendered her more susceptible to shame and therefore easier to insult. The husband of such a woman was not necessarily expected to respond in kind to her expressions of feeling but was expected by the courts, in the Guillaume case and in others, to adhere to a stricter standard of honorable behavior. Such sensitivity was, after all, the product of a highly protected and expensive education and home life, a side effect, so to speak, of the honor of her family. Hence, Mme Guillaume's lawyer avoided the danger that his client's emotional sensitivity might be viewed as incompatible with honor, even though the literary tradition—from the Princesse de Clèves, through Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse and Staël's Corinne, to George Sand's Indiana—had depicted conflict between these two standards as virtually inevitable. The Guillaume case also gave two barristers who were among the best of their day a chance to display their talents to a national audience. Hennequin, who had also been Mme Chateauvillars's lawyer, represented Mme Guillaume, plaintiff in the case; the husband was defended by OdilonBarrot. Both were members of Parliament and noted orators. Their involvement, as well as the prominence and wealth of the Guillaume couple, ensured the case was covered in depth. In its first, front-page article on the trial, the Gazette des tribunaux noted that all of the bar, the judiciary, high public office, commerce, and all the elegant women of Troyes, where the Guillaumes had their principal residence, were present in the courtroom to follow the proceedings. Both lawyers gave their audience exactly what they were hoping for, as well. Their vivid, highly divergent 48. The Guillaume case is covered in Gazette des tribunaux, issues of 6,12,13 July 1835.

90

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

interpretations of the character of the Guillaumes' marriage read like little sentimental novels, one requiring separation for its sad but necessary ending, the other offering a plot line that pointed to a happy reconciliation for the couple. These pleadings help to explain how contemporaries could, on the one hand, be perfectly aware of the wide divergences between appearances and emotional realities that commonly developed within marriages and, on the other, not necessarily see any need for fundamental reform. As in all such cases, both Hennequin and Odilon-Barrot had to deal with a common body of evidence, consisting of depositions collected by each party. For Mme Guillaume, Hennequin had to prove that one or more "serious insults" had been perpetrated by her husband; this was, short of a persistent pattern of violence or cruelty, the only cause allowed by law for a separation. It was crucial to her case that certain actions by the husband be seen in the light of an overall pattern of conflict in the relationship, so that the insulting character of these actions became clear. Odilon-Barrot, for the husband, had to downplay the importance of the actions labeled as insulting by the plaintiff and to show that the relationship was not so conflictual, only temporarily troubled. Defending a husband against a separation request by a wife was a delicate task. It was necessary to show that the wife was misguided to make such a request, yet demonstrate at the same time that the husband bore her no grudge, honored and respected her, and looked forward to reconciliation. The wife had to be shown to be suffering from a lightness, or superficiality, or impulsiveness of character—without suggesting that she had anything to be ashamed of. It was not unknown for husband's lawyers to go too far down this difficult road and to end by appearing to insult the wife in open court, thereby providing independent grounds for an immediate separation.49 Hennequin, therefore, first emphasized the seriousness of Mme Guillaume's decision to seek a separation. N o woman, he asserted, could take such a step, which made her into a sort of "widow before her time," without long reflection. A lawyer, too, accepted such a case only after careful examination of the facts. Hennequin stressed the virtue, the seriousness, the purity of his client, and insisted that, in the marriage, she "had shown herself to be, year after year, a model of conjugal tenderness, of resignation, and of patience." (This was a point which the defense could hardly 49. For detailed discussion of such cases, see Reddy, "Marriage, Honor, and the Public Sphere."

SENSITIVE HEARTS

afford to dispute, of course.) Although her mother, a sister, and a brother had died young, Clementine Gallot, the future Mme Guillaume, born in 1797 to a commercial broker, was educated at the best schools and, from an early age, according to Hennequin, developed a pattern of charitable work. Hennequin regretted that these acts of charity, which he documented, now lost "the veil of mystery that was their principal merit." He submitted letters showing that the young Mile Gallot had provided funds to support pensions and apprenticeships for impoverished girls. For years, Hennequin continued, she turned away all suitors. Neither lawyer mentions it, but in fact, by the time of her marriage in 1829, she had reached the age of thirty-three, very much beyond the point at which ill-willed observers might have begun applying the term "vieille fille" ("old maid") to her. Guillaume was only twenty. This young man was very different from his new wife, according to Hennequin. With one of those euphemisms that were the stock in trade of lawyers of the time, because they said so much without risk of insult, Hennequin remarked that Guillaume "also suffered the fatal privilege of wealth. He applied to himself that pleasant maxim that circulates in high society, 'y o u t h must take its course' [II faut que la jeunesse se passe]. M. Guillaume thus let his youth run its course, and it was a fast course with all the elegant young people and the glittering set of the boulevard de Gand." Mile Gallot's first impression was negative; but she yielded "to his polished manners, his affability and grace, such as men of the salon [les hommes de salon] know how to practice. M. Guillaume is intelligent, he always has a gallant joke [un mot galant] to say or to pass on. He knows how to take on the appearance of what is called, I think, ajjoodfellow [bon enfant] . . . (laughter)" (emphasis in original). She brought a dowry of 400,000 francs to the marriage, he an annual income of 40,000 francs mosdy from rents on real estate holdings. They were extremely rich, in other words. Within ten days of the wedding, Hennequin asserted, Mme Guillaume was confronted by groundless charges from her husband that she had not come into the marriage a virgin. No woman could be trusted, Guillaume allegedly insisted. Her heart was rent by this accusation. "She, Clémentine!" Hennequin lamented, "this young girl so pious, so good, so chaste, so pure! From that moment, poor Clémentine understood her future; she took the measure of her unhappiness; this insult of her husband's [cet outrage de son mari] was to poison her whole life." In the months and years that followed, Hennequin maintained, one degrading incident followed another, as M. Guillaume gradually revealed the true violence of his character. Of necessity, he concentrated on a few

92

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

incidents he had been able to document through eye-witness depositions, mostly from servants in the Guillaume household. Skipping over large undocumented gaps, he insisted these few events revealed a clear pattern of insulting mistreatment and demonstrated the urgency of Mme Guillaume's request to end the relationship. Shortly after their marriage, Mme Guillaume had fallen ill and her husband proposed that they make a voyage to Switzerland. "As they prepared for the trip, nothing was forgotten that might add to the show of luxury and satisfy vanity. Madam's requirements had to be satisfied, after all; and it is much easier to make a woman rich and dazzling than it is to make her happy." Soon after their arrival, "sickly and suffering," Mme Guillaume proposed they return to France. "No, madam, you wanted to see Switzerland, and you will see it!" retorted her husband. During dinner in the hotel, he upbraided her, he insulted her. On their return to Paris, M. Guillaume resumed his bachelor ways; he did not sleep in his bed more than four nights out of seven (according to one servant's testimony): "Mme Guillaume, alone, after waiting in vain for whole hours, would go finally to her room, her mind agitated, her heart oppressed by a thousand stinging thoughts of a young woman who is neglected, counting in her burning bed those hours that spoke of debauchery, those hours that seemed to cry out murder and danger. Abominable punishment! to which no husband would condemn his unhappy spouse, had he the slightest modesty or feeling in his soul."50 Worst of all was Carnival season of 1833. Several former servants testified that M. Guillaume held three masked dinner parties without the authorization or even the knowledge of his wife. "License at table was so great at one of these banquets that the salon was no longer a salon" (emphasis in original).51 On jeudi gras, a carriage full of masked persons stopped in front of the house; these masks got out and invaded the courtyard and the stairs, each using more improper language than the other. In truth, M. Guillaume ordered the gates closed and the masked per50. "Mme Guillaume, seule, et après avoir vainement attendu des heures entières, se retirait dans sa chambre, l'esprit inquiet, le coeur oppressé de mille poignantes pensées de jeune femme délaissée, comptant de sa couche brûlante les heures qui disent la débauche, ces heures qui semblent hurler le meurtre et le danger. Supplice abominable! auquel un homme ne saurait condamner sa malheureuse épouse, à moins de n'avoir plus dans l'âme ni pudeur, ni sentiment!" 51. "La licence de table fat si grande à l'un de ces banquets, que le salon n'était plus un salon."

SENSITIVE HEARTS

93

sons out. But Mme Guillaume's discontent and anguish were no less well motivated. A friend, Mme Pick, offered her refuge in her own home that day, so that she could escape the evening meal which M. Guillaume had ordered for his masked dinner party.52 The party lasted till six in the morning leavingttshameful traces of the intemperance of one of the guests" (emphasis added).53 "You cari understand, Messieurs, the state of mind of the unhappy Clémentine, and all her anguish. Debauchery was in fullflower.M. Guillaume frequently did not come home at all in the evening. He ran off to the masked balls of the Variétés theater, the most delicious thing in the world, the most admirable and progressive invention ever seen!"54 No clarification is offered of the phrases "the salon was no longer a salon"—clearly some kind of euphemism—or "shameful traces"; whether this was due to the abstemiousness of the Gazette or of the lawyers themselves is not clear. The suggestion was that things too shameful to mention occurred in the conjugal residence, and thus that the wife's honor was endangered. It is characteristic of Hennequin's line of argument that this threat to her honor is spoken of as a source of "anguish," that is, of extreme feeling. Hennequin must accomplish in the minds of his audience the smooth connection between sentiment and honor. Otherwise her sensitivity and her suffering cannot be made into grounds for separation. As if this were not enough, Hennequin continued, M. Guillaume also looked for opportunities to calumny his wife, making comments to certain friends that he doubted her virtue. Unfortunately, he ran across people who believed her to be a model of chastity and rejected his insults out of hand (and who later provided depositions on these incidents for her). Seeking to resolve their differences over the Carnival revels (and to remove her from the influence of certain persons, according to OdilonBarrot), M. Guillaume took his wife against her will to their country es52. "Une voiture pleine de masques s'arrêta à la porte de sa maison; les masques descendirent et firent invasion dans la cour et dans les escaliers, tous plus inconvenants les uns que les autres en propos. " A la vérité, M . Guillaume ordonna de fermer les portes et de faire retirer ces masques. Mais le mécontentement et le chagrin de Mme Guillaume n'en étaient pas moins bien motivés. Une amie, Mme Pick, lui offrit de se réfugier ce jour-là chez elle, pour la soustraire au repas du soir qu'avait commandé M . Guillaume pour sa partie de masques." 53. "traces honteuses de l'intempérance de l'un des convives" (emphasis added). 54. "Vous comprenez, Messieurs, la situation d'esprit de la malheureuse Clémentine, et toutes ses angoisses. La débauche marchait grand train. M. Guillaume découchait très fréquemment, il courait les bals masqués des Variétés, la chose du monde la plus délicieuse, l'invention la plus admirable, la plus progressive qui se soit jamais vue!"

94

SENSITIVE HEARTS

tate at Chappcs, later that year. There, Mme Guillaume was subjected to yet another indignity. Or, in Hennequin's words, he added "still more to all the shame which had devoured his unhappy spousefarso long"^ (emphasis added), the humiliation of subjection to a kind of governess, a domestic who was ordered to follow her everywhere and from whom she had to request money. In this phrase, Hennequin was making explicit his main argument, that Clementine's distress in her marriage consisted of "shame," and that therefore her husband's mistreatment could be construed as serious insult, a grounds for separation. Mere unhappiness, as the outcome of many other cases shows, including notably the Pithon case discussed above, never swayed judges. In November of that year, M. Guillaume struck his wife in a carriage during an argument, or at least she told the driver and a cook that he had done so. At a time unspecified by Hennequin, M. Guillaume forbade his wife to make further charitable contributions to a specific poor family. At another, he required her to water plants. "Can you imagine a worse oppression for a young woman who has brought a 400,000 franc dowry than to burden her weak hands with a heavy watering can and to force her to water her garden like a vegetable woman, under a burning sun?" With this image, Hennequin concluded his presentation of facts. "Marriage as M. Guillaume has made it is not the marriage of the West, it is the marriage which the Orient is already becoming disgusted with," he summed up. Hennequin warned the court that his opponent would speak of tender love letters penned by Mme Guillaume and of balls at which the couple danced happily together. "Messieurs, that recalls for me the words of a great moralist, who compared the official joys of the fashionable world to La Fontaine's crocodile, deep beneath clear and limpid water." He turned toward the husband and warned that he would be unable to disprove that "the ornaments and pleasures of society turned into frigid torture in your home."56 Curiously, in bringing to its most extreme the contrast between appearances and reality at this point in his pleadings, Hennequin seemed content to categorize the wife's love letters to her husband as one of those "parures et plaisirs du monde" least likely to reveal

55. "encore à tant de honte que dévore depuis long-temps sa malheureuse épouse" (emphasis added). 56. "les parures et les plaisirs du monde ne se soient changés en froides tortures chez vous."

SENSITIVE HEARTS

95

true feeling. This was convenient for his case, as was the careful effort, in his development of the narrative, to emphasize one sentiment more than any other, the feeling of shame. Only in this way could a jurisprudence firmly grounded in the defense of honor be brought around to the defense of private feelings within a marriage that was, to outward appearance, both honorable and happy. It was not in Hennequin's or his client's interest to suggest that her feelings may have been much more complex, ambivalent, and changeable, or that her principal grievance may have had nothing to do with shame as conventionally defined. It was on just this weak link in Hennequin's reasoning that the husband's lawyer, Odilon-Barrot, concentrated his fire. After five hours listening to Hennequin in the July heat of the Troyes courtroom, OdilonBarrot rose and quickly began belittling the feelings of Mme Guillaume, temporarily "led on by disloyal advice" in comparison with the honorable social functions of the institution of marriage: All that has been said, Messieurs, adds up to this: Mme Guillaume is unhappy, very unhappy; life with her husband has become intolerable for her; hurry up and separate them. But, my God! separation is necessary, simply because a wife has requested it! Because a weak woman, led on by disloyal advice, has asked the court for a separation, the judge will say "woman, go your way, your separation is granted." Ah! if marriage ever declines to such a sad condition, it will be finished, the most sacred contract of human society will be finished. I am astonished that a voice which has defended religious law before Parliament has come her before this tribunal to defend a doctrine so completely anti-religious. N o reconciliation is possible after a separation, Odilon-Barrot reminded the court; all chance for future legitimate offspring is gone. Who could call separation a sacred duty when it "takes from the husband a legitimate tie, often only to throw him into a shameful cohabitation!" (emphasis added).57 With a few words, Odilon-Barrot thus shunted the question of the wife's feelings of shame aside and focused on the issue of the family's (and thus the husband's) honor. Obviously, this had to take priority over a wife's feelings, or else "marriage will be finished." Odilon-Barrot exercised extreme care not to insult Mme Guillaume as he skillfully raised doubts about the solidity of her judgment. If her husband was "saturated" with the "pleasures of society," he was all the more ready to appreciate the peaceful home life of a good marriage, Odilon57. "enlève à l'époux un lien légitime pour le jeter le plus souvent dans un honteux concubinage!" (emphasis added).

96

SENSITIVE HEARTS

Barrot insisted. H e had proved this by resisting his wife's request for separation: " H e has proven it to you before, just in searching for wisdom, maturity, and experience in a wife; for do not fear that we are unaware of Mme Guillaume's great qualities. She is even susceptible to being carried away by her virtues [de I',exaltation de ses vertus]; but she is weak, irritable; the same principle here produces both good and evil." "Exaltation" was a word with extremely negative connotations in this period; it was the hallmark of fanaticism in an age of admirers of Voltaire. "Exaltation" was the quality that drove political extremists from freely and lawfully holding opinions to unlawful insurrection. Here Odilon-Barrot brings the word into the private sphere of M m e Guillaume's sense o f self. Her very good qualities sometimes took her to the extreme o f exaltation; she became weak, irritable, liable to make harsh judgments and to overreaction. Likewise, Odilon-Barrot suggested that the early death of Mme Guillaume's mother was partly to blame for her mistaken request for a separation. This mother, had she lived, might have taught her daughter "early on . . . at what price, and by what mutual concessions the peace and happiness of a household must be purchased." This was apparently an allusion to the possibility of mutual tolerance, of a willingness to accept and to conceal the shortcomings of one's spouse. Odilon-Barrot's portrait of his client was equally skillful. H e did not try to refute the evidence o f the depositions, only to modify the context within which it was interpreted. H e ridiculed Hennequin's version of M. Guillaume's character: You have painted him as a real domestic tyrant, a pasha, a Blue-Beard, I don't remember what all, a monster, a cold-blooded barbarian, a crocodile in limpid waters. (Prolonged laughter.) Well, in reality, M. Guillaume resembles not at all what you have said. . . . M. Guillaume is a man of surfaces [un homme tout en dehors]; his fault may be that he . . . pushes self-abandonment to its ultimate. . . . His misdeeds toward Mme Guillaume may be that he adored her like a mistress when he should have loved her as his wife. He, too, was charitable, helping his poorer relatives, as well as bailing out his father-in-law in a moment of financial difficulty. If anything, he is weak, not domineering: " M . Guillaume is the reflection o f all that is said and done around him; his life is no more than the repetition of others' lives. This is M. Guillaume. I do not think I have painted a flattering portrait of him. I know that barristers are like novelists, making their clients into heros every day. I write no novels; I write history."

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

97

Following this rhetorical shot at Hennequin's obvious narrative talents, Odilon-Barrot led off with his strongest evidence. The wife's case rested entirely on the questionable testimony of domestics who had been discharged by their master, he insisted. (An oversimplification, at best.) The husband had better evidence by far, scores of letters written in Mme Guillaume's own hand between 1829 and 1832. Representative of excerpts reprinted by the Gazette are the three following passages: From letter no. 13 (March 1830): Adieu, my love, all my life, all my self! come back and never leave me, I cannot live without you. From letter no. 20 (date notgiven): I kiss your letter, my very good man, with all the force of my soul. . . . I cry, I laugh, I don't know what I do any more. I am very happy to love a heart as tender as yours; this has brought me happiness I had not known for a very long time, and that I might well have never known. From Utter no. 32 (13 November 1830): I kissed my pretty bouquet from Chappes. (Marks of kisses at the bottom of the page.) Here is no domestic tyrant, Odilon-Barrot insists, "This is passion, exaltation, it is not even the peaceful, sweet happiness of the home." These letters are "novelistic, sometimes."58 Odilon-Barrot's strategy is clear: He is not attacking Hennequin's evidence head on; he is insisting that Mme Guillaume and her lawyer are prone to melodrama, to exaltation that resembles the feelings elicited by fiction. Whereas Odilon-Barrot's case is historical, realistic, prosaic, based on written documents and an unflattering but true portrait of the everyday fellow Mme Guillaume had married. From March 1833 on, Odilon-Barrot notes, the tone of Mme Guillaume's letters changes to cold politeness because, following the events of Carnival time that year, she had fallen under the sway of interested advice from "officious persons." As for that year's Carnival, Paris had only just emerged from a prolonged period of political instability as well as from the frightening cholera epidemic of the previous year: For all social classes Carnival that year was a rebirth of pleasure. M. Guillaume was unfortunate enough to want to be like everyone else, and to feel along with everyone else that Carnival epidemic that ran through the streets of the capital. As for myself, I find that entirely natural. I like Carnival. I miss the good old days of our forebears, days of strong and frank joy, when all ranks were mixed together, and all ambitions blended. I miss

58. "romanesque parfois."

98

SENSITIVE HEARTS

those three days of equality; three days of equality, that is not so important, is it! (Laughter.) (The humorous reference here was to the three "glorious" days of the 1830 Revolution, five years before, an event necessarily sacred to the regime it had created.) Mme Guillaume had written the invitations for the first of the three parties held in their home with her own hand. At the third, she herself ordered the charlotte russe the guests had eaten. Only the second, on mardi gras, had involved uninvited masked persons in the courtyard of the building. M. Guillaume had ordered their immediate departure. Several guests had stayed late because Mme Guillaume had hidden the keys to the armoire and to the closet where the firewood was stored. To emphasize the honorable character of the gathering, Odilon-Barrot provided a complete list of the guests, which included several members of Parliament. Mme Guillaume had herself been present during Carnival season at the masked ball held at the Cercle des étrangers, a notorious gambling den; her friends Mme and Mile Mills had proposed the outing; M. Guillaume came only reluctandy. They did not get home until 4 a.m. She also attended a charity ball at the Odéon theater, without her husband's knowledge or permission; there were witnesses, and her account books record the expenses for the dress. M. Guillaume was therefore hardly alone in his love of Carnival revelry. Continuing with this line of argument, Odilon-Barrot insisted that the assault in the carriage was a mere "comédie," witnessed by no one. As for being "sequestered" at Chappes against her will, Odilon-Barrot noted that Mme Guillaume did in fact have her own spending money while there (he cited, as evidence, her own written account book, in which she began using, again, her husband's first name while at Chappes, indicating a softening of feeling toward him) and that she received and visited all the most distinguished residents of the area—so much for "sequestration." (Law required the wife to reside with the husband; therefore, only forcible confinement to home could count as an offence.) Finally, the fact that M. Guillaume had tried to find some distraction for his wife by having her water the flowers hardly made him into a domestic tyrant, Odilon-Barrot asserted: "In sum, Odilon-Barrot remarked, M. Guillaume has certainly been in the wrong, and is there among us a husband who could boast of never having been so? (Murmurs of approval among the numerous women in attendance in the courtroom.)" But so has Mme Guillaume. Her most serious fault was to have lacked indul-

SENSITIVE HEARTS

99

gence for her husband, and to have dragged the family's problems into the glare of a public courtroom. Her only real unhappiness was not to have had a mother who could have said to her, "Forgive, forgive your husband, my daughter, for he loves you; don't make irreparable something that can still be repaired." In support of this last point, at the very end of his pleading, OdilonBarrot's argument took an unusual turn. He read two letters written to the Guillaume couple by a close friend and "mother of the heart" of Mme Guillaume's, a certain Mme Mainvielle-Fodor. In these letters we see a singular, intimate, intelligent effort to resolve the conflict between sentiment and appearances, to bring feeling back in line with family honor. But the letters suggest that even this empathetic woman could offer the Guillaumes no other solution than that championed by Mme de Sévigné, the final suppression of truth, the denial of memory, the wiping clean of offending feeling. To make this seem just, Mme Mainvielle-Fodor had to equate Mme Guillaume's feelings of anger and bitterness toward her husband with her husband's own thoughdess cruelty. The couple had turned to Mme Mainvielle-Fodor for help with their marriage in late 1833; she insisted, first, that they come to see her in Paris and respect a "complete truce" until they arrived. Benevolence and sympathy come through in the gende, joking reproaches she expressed to them in her first letter: In the meantime,finally,without going into painful details, I tell him [M. Guillaume] that I willingly accept the post of judge that he has offered me through Mainvielle; but, to be judged, it is essential that the parties not avoid the presence of the judge. Yes, my children, I want to be told about your little squabbles; I will make judgment against you both, for it is a great tort, the pain that Mainvielle's story has caused me. I will condemn you both to ask my pardon, to console me by loving each other, as you did in thefirstdays of your union.59 After having met with the couple, Mme Mainvielle-Fodor wrote to them: Today the evil is serious, but is it beyond remedy? You accuse your husband of some very hard words, I agree, even harsh treatment; I cannot recognize in that language, in those brutalities a man of good society, a 59. "Enfin, en attendant, sans entrer ici en des détails affligeans, je lui [à M. Guillaume] déclare que j'accepte volontiers l'emploi de juge qu'il m'a fait offrir par Mainvielle; mais, pour être jugées il ne faut pas que les parties évitent la présence du juge. Oui, mes enfants, je désire être informé de vos petits démêlés; je vous donnerai tort à tous les deux; car c'en est un grand que le chagrin que m'a causée le récit de Mainvielle. Je vous condamnerai tous les deux à m'en demander pardon, à m'en consoler en vous aimant, comme aux premiers jours de votre union."

ioo

SENSITIVE HEARTS

man of good breeding, and yet M . Guillaume seemed such to me during our interview. In spite of the more than cold welcome I made him, he remained true to form. He in his turn accuses you of distancing yourself from him, an obstinate desire to rally society against him and a pronounced desire to move to a judicial break. These accusations that your husband addresses against you are so much in opposition with your sweetness, your patience and the tenderness that you felt toward him, that it is impossible for me not to reject for you such mean-spirited charges. I come back then to my little lambs: you began with a misunderstanding, you became embittered, and quarreled without motive, that is without a motive serious enough to warrant such disastrous results. Let each of you think things over carefully, and retreat into yourself; do not exaggerate the wrongs of the other, close your eyes on them, for a moment, and think only of your own faults. Firmly resolve to correct them and, without any tedious discussions, without recriminations, calm will return, then peace and finally confidence and your old tenderness. But you must work conscientiously, without let up, without ulterior motive, to correct yourself, to forget, do you hear, forget, tear out this shameful page from your history.™ [Emphasis added.] "This was the language of a good mother," observed Odilon-Barrot, and concluded his pleading with the hope that the judges would respond to M m e Guillaume's suit with similar advice. It is not difficult to see why M m e Mainvielle-Fodor's letters were so 60. "Aujourd'hui le mal est grave, mais est-il donc sans remède? Vous reprochez à votre mari des propos bien durs, j'en conviens, de mauvais traitements même; je ne puis reconnaître à ce langage, à ces brutalités un homme de la bonne société, un homme bien élevé, et cependant M. Guillaume m'a semblé tel dans nos entretiens; malgré l'accueil plus que froid que je lui ai fait, il ne s'est pas démenti. "A son tour, il vous reproche un éloignement pour sa personne, une obstination à ameuter contre lui la société et un désir prononcé à en venir à une rupture judiciaire. "Ces reproches que vous adresse votre mari sont tellement en opposition avec votre douceur, votre patience et la tendresse que vous lui portiez, qu'il m'est impossible de ne pas repousser pour vous d'aussi vilaines inculpations. "Fenreviensdonc à mes moutons: l'on a commencé par mal s'entendre, l'on s'est aigri, brouillé sans motifs, c'est-à-dire sans motifs assez graves pour amener des résultats aussi funestes. "Que chacun de vous fasse de sérieuses réflexions, qu'il rentre bien avant en lui-même; qu'il ne s'exagère pas les torts de l'autre, qu'il ferme les yeux dessus, pour un moment, et ne s'occupe que des siens propres; qu'il prenne fermement la résolution de les réparer, et sans explications pénibles, sans récriminations, le calme renaîtra, puis la paix, et puis enfin la confiance et la tendresse première; mais il faut travailler consciencieusement, sans relâche, sans arrière-pensée, à se corriger, à oublier; entendez-vous, oubliez, arrachez cette vilaine page de votre histoire" (emphasis added).

SENSITIVE HEARTS

101

favorable to the husband's case that Odilon-Barrot read them both in their entirety. Hennequin's pleadings, by insisting on the severity of her feeling of shame, offered the judges a way to link Mme Guillaume's feelings with the high duty of protecting family honor. But these two letters offered an alternate route between feeling and honor: gendy, compassionately, the elder woman proposed that each spouse forget, at least temporarily, the faults of the other and work on her own faults. If each takes the firm resolve of correcting them, then gradually calm, and finally tenderness will be reborn. This advice aims at resolving the conflict on the level of feeling. When one person's anger gives rise to anger in another, an unstoppable spiral of hostility can easily get going. Concentrating temporarily on one's own behavior, by mutual agreement, is a plausible technique for bringing such an ungovernable spiral to a halt. She encourages them to see that such a spiral got going between "my little sheep" because of an original misunderstanding. At the same time Mme Mainvielle-Fodor urges them, once they have gotten the spiral of hostility under control, to work conscientiously to "forget, do you hear, forget." She goes even further, telling them to "tear out this vilairn page from your history." One of the definitions of vilaine is "infamous," that is, shameful. Her reaction to the complaints each has made about the other is simply to express disbelief: "I cannot recognize" in your husband the man who did such things, she tells Mme Guillaume, and as for his reproaches against his wife, "it is impossible for me to accept such vilaines accusations." Thus, Mme Mainvielle-Fodor slips, almost inadvertendy, from urging them to concentrate on their own faults in order to put a stop to an uncontrollable spiral of feeling to urging them to tear things out of their memory for the sake of family honor, that is, to protect the reign of appearances by means of a blockage of feeling. She motivates them by the threat of shame: no "well-bred man," no woman with Clementine's patience and tenderness, could have acted as they claim. With the help of these thoughtful letters, then, Odilon-Barrot, too, managed to make a link between sentiment and honor, one favorable to his client's cause, one which fully recognized that appearances are deceptive, but used the idea of maternal love, care, and wisdom and the emotional attachment between mother and daughter as the conduit through which family honor and the reign of appearances could be infused with good feeling. It was impossible to come out and say openly that a wide gap between appearances and reality was normal, was in fact something married couples should work at managing. It was impossible to say this because such

io2

SENSITIVE HEARTS

a statement in itself would have been a breach of appearances. Nonetheless, this was, in the end, the gist of Odilon-Barrot's argument, and the true meaning behind the euphemistic phrases about "at what price and by what mutual concessions the peace and happiness of a household must be purchased." Family honor could find a place for feeling, but only if the maintenance and care of appearances and the stria management, even suppression, of feeling such care imposed were accepted as a duty. Whether either of these impressive arguments actually swayed the court is not clear. The substitute of the procureur du roi (who always expressed an opinion for the state in such cases) argued that Mme Guillaume should be granted a separation. The panel of judges agreed, in the end; reviewing seventeen alleged incidents of serious insult in Hennequin's request, they found that six had not been proven, that eight had occurred in circumstances that mitigated their gravity, but that three not only were proven but were sufficiently grave to warrant separation. It is not apparent from the Gazette coverage which were the crucial three incidents; most probably, judging from how courts acted in other cases, they included the occasions in which M. Guillaume expressed doubts about his wife's chastity to third parties of his own social milieu. If the judges considered such comments to have been proved, they most likely found them to be the most serious offences of the husband. This sort of utterance could not be justified by any notion of family honor. If false, such an accusation was perfidious in the extreme; if true, it was something one was honor-bound to keep quiet about. Usually judges found that there was only one permissible method of responding if one felt a wife was guilty of an infidelity. One kept quiet until one had proof (or even after); with proof, one could proceed to have one's wife prosecuted for adultery and simultaneously seek a separation. Without adequate proof, any insulting suggestion about one's wife was sufficient grounds for the wife to gain a separation. The evidence on the Guillaume case is insufficient for determining much about the real motives of either party. It seems certain that both lawyers' little novellas were wide of the mark, however. By Hennequin's account, Mme Guillaume was shocked into alienated bitterness against her husband within days of the celebration of the marriage in 1829. Odilon-Barrot uses the written evidence of changes in expressions of affection for her husband to argue that she did not break with him until the incidents of Carnival time in 1833. Hennequin claims his client suffered deep shame at her husband's mistreatment of her, but this claim was a clear requirement of his legal strategy and therefore not necessarily an accurate reflection of her feelings. He treats the letters and the evidence of

SENSITIVE HEARTS

103

the active social life that the couple continued to enjoy as so much pretense, the necessary display of normality, a ruse routinely performed by all. Law and jurisprudence were so fully committed to defending the honor of families and individuals in this period that neither lawyer could afford to stray very far from a slim repertoire of story lines. But each lawyer was successful in destroying his opponent's case. Neither provided enough to allow us to see beyond a thicket of possible alternative interpretations of this unhappy relationship.

Plebeian Melodrama The Pithon case demonstrates that the conflict between honor and sentiment was not just a preoccupation of the wealthy and well-educated. At the same time, there is every reason to believe that Pithon herself was exceptional. Evidence of marital separations from a different source, however, allows one to glimpse the contours of a rather different plebeian sense of conflict between sentiment and honor, between feeling and appearances. The traces of this popular outlook do not come up directly in court because judges and lawyers knew little, and apparently cared little, about the honor of persons whose rank was below a certain threshhold. The Gazette des tribunaux rarely reported on separation cases involving artisans or shopkeepers, to say nothing of lower ranks. When they did so, evidence of elite condescension is frequent. This was already apparent in the tone of voice of the husband's lawyer in the Pithon case. In the case of Mme L , for example, filed in 1830, her husband's lawyer argued that the husband's use of a whip on her did not constitute an insult. She had insulted him and slapped his face. This behavior merited punishment. M. L was a tapistry weaver or rug weaver (tapissier), and a whipping "in that class of society is less an insult than an appropriate marital discipline."61 The court agreed and rejected her request for a separation.62 Court records of marital separations are usually quite difficult to locate; they found their way into the archives usually mixed with all other civil cases, arranged by date. At least one clerk of court (greffier) kept a separate file of marital separations, however, for about twenty years, in the 1810s and 1820s at the Tribunal Civil de Versailles. Requêtes and enquêtes (requests and depositions) for such cases can be found in separate 61. "c'est moins, dans cette classe de la société, une insulte grave qu'une correction maritale." 62. Gazette des tribunaux, 21 February 1830.

io4

SENSITIVE HEARTS

bundles in the Versailles departmental archives for the years 1822-1828; these seventy cases were given a close reading, and the registers of judgments were searched, locating the court's findings in forty-three of them.63 As a corpus they are quite different in a number of ways from the separation cases that the Gazette des tribunaux found worth reporting on, although they confirm in general the courts' preoccupation with defending family honor, at least where persons of sufficient rank were concerned.64 The Versailles archives contain many more cases involving persons of lesser rank than do the pages of the Gazette. If one calculates percentages using only the cases in which the husbands' occupations were stated, onefindsthat the very heterogeneous stratum of artisans and shopkeepers produced 44 percent of cases in the Versailles records, but only 31 percent of cases reported by the Gazette des tribunaux. Peasants and wage laborers represented 22 percent of cases in the Versailles records, but were not represented at all in the Gazette des tribunaux sample. As the case of the tapissier mentioned above suggests, the court handled these cases very difFerendy from those of higher rank. Seemingly inured to questions of honor or shame for shopkeepers, artisans, or laborers, the court saw its role as protecting wives from their husbands' violence, but only if that violence could be shown to be prolonged and severe or endangering life. Lawyers prepared their cases accordingly, making few references to issues of insult or sentiment, emphasizing only the extent of physical injuries incurred. However, when one examines the depositions taken in these cases, one finds plentiful evidence of a popular sense of honor and a popular readiness to suppress or ignore sentiment where honor seemed to require it. In the depositions, neighbors and relatives give voice to their own occasions for observing marital violence and their own feelings and reactions. Here one discovers, again, a struggle between honor and sentiment, although difFerendy configured. In the crowded urban neighborhoods and marketplaces these cases reveal to us, there was what one might call an "honor of the household" rather than family honor. At least that is how the situation appears through the lens of separation cases, and this finding is consistent with the conclusions of other recent studies of the urban setting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.65 To protect that honor, it was often necessary to 63. For details on the sources, see note 25. 6+. See Reddy, "Marriage, Honor, and the Public Sphere," for a full discussion of the differences. 65. See, for example, Ariette Farge, La Vie fragile: Violence, pouvoirs et solidarités h Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1986); David Garrioch, Neighborhood and Community in Paris,

SENSITIVE HEARTS

suppress feelings, to pretend not to see, to keep up appearances even in the face of murder. Because of the court's lack of concern for honor in these cases, successful requests for a separation often involved great brutality. Marie Anne Lapostolle's husband had routinely beat her with a stick.66 In August 1823 he delivered fifty successive blows with this stick as she lay supine in their apartment. A doctor later testified that he found her arms, thighs, and torso covered with contusions, requiring prolonged confinement to her bed for recovery. Her lawyer convincingly argued that her life would be in danger if she were to remain in the marriage. Another successful application for separation came from Victoire Anastasie Sirondy, a fishmonger, wife of Germain Rouyrre, journeyman mason. From shortly after their marriage in 1821, according to her request, he "gave himself over to drunkenness, and to severe mistreatment" of his wife. The violence of his attacks gradually worsened. In early 1823 he came upon her in the marketplace without a word of warning and began beating her with such violence that it took three people to get him off (a bystander, a commissaire de police, and a guard). In the weeks just before her application for a separation, he had attacked her two more times. Sirondy was also awarded her separation.67 In those cases which proceeded to the stage of gathering depositions, there is widespread evidence of witnesses doing their utmost not to see, not to hear, not to know. Even when bystanders intervened, it was often only to restore the appearance of normality as quickly and as smoothly as possible. Unlike the courts, then, fellow members of the plebeian community reveal they possessed a lively sense of honor and shame. Catherine Gille, for example, a washerwoman (ouvrière blanchisseuse) by trade, testified in the Lapostolle case. She and her husband lived in the same building. She said that during the day of 15 August 1823, Lapostolle's husband, Aubert, had come to her apartment and asked her where his wife was. Gille said that she did not know but that Lapostolle was probably out in the town somewhere. "Seeing that the husband was wrought up with anger, holding his stick in his hand, and preparing to beat his wife,

1740-1790 (Cambridge, England, 1986); Daniel Roche, Peuple de Paris: Essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1981). 66. ADSO U-0252, requête of 1823. Judgments of 2 December 1823 (U-035) and 31 March 1824 (U-036). 67. See the requite of 12 August 1825 in ADSO U-02J2; judgments in the case are in ADSO U-038,31 August and 16 December 1825.

io6

SENSITIVE HEARTS

[Gille] thought it best to leave the house with her daughter, so as not to be a witness to the scenes which she feared would follow."68 Emilie Maslin, age twenty-six, who had worked briefly as a domestic servant in the Aubert household, testified that she had frequently been awakened in the night by the mistreatment Aubert meted out to his wife, and that she "thought it best not to get involved in these quarrels, and resigned herself to groan in silence at such excesses."69 Anne Françoise Husson, married, fifty years old, who sold cloth in the market for a living, testified in the case of Victoire Anastasie Sirondy. She said that she had seen Sirondy's husband, Germain Rouyrre, attack her in the market with a stool and hit her repeatedly with it. When the stool fell from his grasp, she said, he continued his beating with a plank of wood. "The witness [Husson] was unable to stand the sight of such a spectacle, and re-entered her stall uttering cries of dismay."70 Louise Victoire Becquet, a fishmonger who worked in the Vieux Marché in St Germain en Laye, testified in 1823 in the case of Marie Catherine Hays, who operated a charcuterie with her husband Henri Mahot in the same market square. Becquet had been an all too frequent witness of the mistreatment of the husband towards his wife, that she [Becquet] had seen him, without respect for the public or for himself, strike Mme Mahot in his shop, even though she [Becquet] advised him to avoid such scandal. But she remembered an even more horrible scene. A few days before theirfinalseparation, he had armed himself with a cleaver, and raised his hand against his wife. And in the turmoil she felt at the sight of such a spectacle, she hardly had the strength toget away so as not to be a witness of the crime she saw coming.71 [Emphasis added.] Geneviève Durange,fifty-nineyears of age, widow of a farmer, testified that as a neighbor she had frequendy heard Louis Michel Montigny come 68. "voyant le mari dans un accès de colère, ayant un bâton à la main, et disposé à battre sa femme, elle crut devoir s'éloigner de sa maison avec safillepour n'être pas témoin des scènes qu'elle redoutait." ADSO U-0252, enquête of 5 February 1824. 69. "crut devoir s'abstenir de s'interposer dans ces querelles, et se contentait de gémir en silence sur de pareils excès." Ibid. 70. "la déposante ne pouvant soutenir la vue d'un pareil spectacle rentra dans sa boutique en jetant des cris d'effroi." ADSO U-0252, enquête of 3 November 1825. 71. "a été trop souvent témoin des mauvais traitemens du mari envers sa femme qu'elle l'a vu sans respect pour le public et pour lui-mêmefrapperla dame Mahot dans sa boutique, quoi qu'elle lui recommandât d'éviter un pareil scandale mais qu'elle se rappelle comme une scène plus horrible que peu de jours avant leur dernière séparation il s'étoit armé d'un couperet, levoit la main sur sa femme et que dans le saisissement qu'elle éprouvait à la vue d'un pareil spectacle, elle eut à peine laforcede se sauver pour n'être pas témoin du crime qu'elle redoutait" (emphasis added).

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

home drunk, start an argument with his wife, Marie-Antoinette Divary, and then beat her. She was not, however, actually present at any of these "domestic scenes, into the midst of which she did not permit herself to enter."72 Nicolas Henry Brilly, a baker, aged twenty-five, testified in the Divary case that he had brought his cart loaded with bread into the village of Garche one day (he did not remember the date). He stopped to ask Divary if she needed any bread. (She operated a small grocery shop in her home.) At that moment he heard the noise of a fight going on between husband and wife—"without knowing the subject," he cautioned. And he "decided he ought to get on his way without knowing which of the two was right or wrong." However, he added, he well knew that Montigny was a habitual drunkard.73 Those who actively intervened to stop the violence often did so only after shaking themselves free from a similar reserve. Ursule Becquet, sister of the witness in the Hays case cited above, also testified about the scene involving the cleaver. Until then, she said, she had seen Mahot beat his wife many times, but "she had resigned herself to moaning about it and to sharing in the low opinion of that man held by all the women of the market, who were revolted by his conduct."74 But on that day she saw a crowd of more than a hundred people gather in front of the Mahot shop; they were watching him systematically destroy the charcuterie's counter top and other equipment with the cleaver. There was no sign of the wife. Unlike the other spectators, "who all looked on undisturbed," she decided to go for help and walked to the police commissariat (emphasis added).75 Hie commissaire de police testified that he came to the shop, found Mahot sitting calmly in a back room, talked to him soothingly, and took him into custody, assuming that the wife had been killed. When he found out that she had survived the rampage, he let Mahot free immediately. Neighbors and passers-by, it seems, intervened only when it appeared that the woman's life was in danger, or when the sight or sound of such cruelty in public was too much for them. Like police and city officials, they rarely did more than separate the spouses and urge them to seek a reconciliation.76 Pierre Louis Martin, a thirty-eight-year-old stonecutter, 72. Divary enquête, 15 July 1822, A D S O U-0252. 73. Ibid. 74. "elle se contentait d'en gémir et d'unir son opinion sur cet homme à celle de toutes les femmes du marché que sa conduite révoltoit." Ibid. 75. "qui tous restoient paisibles spectateurs de cette scène." Ibid. 76. Another example of minimal police intervention is provided by the Demard case: A D S O U-0252, 3 August (requête) and 15 November 1822 (enquête); U-032, 21, 23 August 1822 (judgments).

io8

SENSITIVE HEARTS

was passing by when Rouyrre attacked his wife with a stool in the street. Martin was at first attracted by the noisy crowd that he saw gathering. When he heard that a husband was beating his wife with a wooden stool, he set down his tools, entered the fray, and helped to get the woman away from her husband. "It was not without difficulty,'' the deposition reads, "that he [Martin] brought [the husband] to a near-by cafe which he had apparendy just come from, because there he found several of his buddies, and [Martin] even had a glass of wine with him in order to keep him away from his wife. He took advantage of a moment when [Rouyrre] appeared calm to go back to his work." 77 Martin put all his energy into restoring normality. Rouyrre had gone too far, his wife might have died; the proper way to correct him was to smooth everything over as quickly as possible. Get him back with his drinking buddies, have a glass, doubtless accompanied by anodine, soothing male barroom conversation. Anne Françoise Delaunaye requested a separation from her husband Louis Christophe Merlière in September 1822; the couple ran a grocery shop and also a stall in the market in Versailles. Witnesses' depositions in this case tell a familiar tale of drunkenness and frequent beatings.78 Crucial to Delaunaye's case was an incident in the market when her husband tried to strangle her, causing a crowd to gather. Aimée Marie Paul, operator of a contiguous stall in the market, testified that she had often overheard arguments between Delaunaye and Merlière, but that "she did not bother herself about it so long as only words were involved."79 In fact, a commissaire de police testified that frequent violent incidents had occurred in the market stall before. On the day of the strangling attempt, however, she heard Delaunaye cry out, "He's murdering me!" and rushed to her aid. Routine violence, then, did not disturb Aimée Paul, but the thought of murder was enough to bring her to act. One rental agent who had been forced to evict Merlière and Delaunaye because of the noise his beatings and abuse caused was careful to stipulate in his deposition that, although he had also heard the noise of frequent quarrels, he had "no personal knowledge of the couple's private differences."80 This kind of ignorance

77. "Ce ne fut pas sans peine qu'il entraîna dans un cabaret voisin d'où il était sorti suivant toute apparence, puisqu'il y trouva plusieurs camarades avec lesquels il prit même un verre de vin, pour le contenir éloigné de sa femme et profita du moment où il paraissait calme pour aller continuer ses travaux." A D S O U-0252, enquête of 3 November 1825. 78. Requête of 5 September 1822, enquête of 11 January 1823, A D S O U-0252. 79. Enquête of 11 January 1823, A D S O U-0252. 80. Ibid.

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

was undoubtedly a product of effort and was not necessarily pleasant. Many "groaned" (gemir) in silence, or, like Jacques Gillet, a hat shop operator who testified in the Hays case, they might "shudder at the sounds of multiple blows" coming through a wall.81 At the same time, many of those who sought to avoid seeing or hearing were also prepared to offer generous help after the event. Catherine Gille, who did her best to avoid witnessing Lapostolle's impending beating on 15 August, nonetheless offered Lapostolle and her son refuge from her husband later that night. She guarded the door and refused Aubert entry when he came knocking; she let Lapostolle sleep in her bed through part of the next day. Perhaps Aubert had come looking for his wife there because Gille had offered his wife refuge before. Two witnesses in the Hays case, a toy store owner and a tobaconnist, testified they had frequendy offered Hays temporary asylum from her husband's attacks but refrained over a period of years from any other kind of intervention. Hays's brother said he had often taken her husband off to Paris for a night or two to calm him down and extract promises of better behavior. But no one ever offered her physical protection from his frenzies. After the last incident, Hays's brother bought the nearly bankrupt charcuterie from her husband and Mahot moved out; only then did the question of a legal separation at last arise. One witness in the Hays case acted on her feelings without reference to appearances. She rushed into the shop while the husband was smashing things with the cleaver. She was "trembling all over" as she shouted at Mahot, "Unhappy man, what have you done?" She found Hays in a corner and begged her to leave this madman who "no longer having his victim to beat,. . . split his keys with his cleaver and mutilated his pots and pans." But even she did not try to intervene actively or to organize active intervention by onlookers.82 Women as well as men shared this reticence (although women occasionally predominate among the witnesses giving depositions). The strongest witness for Delaunaye's request, it turns out, was Victoire Anastasie Sirondy, who was a neighbor and who also ran a nearby stall in the Versailles market. She was among the women who saved Delaunaye from being strangled. The example of Delaunaye's successful legal proceedings 81. "frémir des coups multiples qu'il a entendu." Hays enquête, 7 and 17 February 1823, ADSO U-0252. 82. "n'ayant plus sa victime à frapper,. . . brisa ses clefs avec son couperet, et mutila des casseroles." The witness was Françoise Pény, in Hays enquête of 7 and 17 February 1823, ADSO U-0252.

no

SENSITIVE HEARTS

may have encouraged Sirondy to file the following year. Such traces of women's solidarity do not, however, alter the prevailing picture of scrupulous disengagement. What was the rationale for this widespread reserve? Clearly people were not indifferent. On the contrary, they were filled with feelings about the violence they witnessed or tried to avoid witnessing. Such behavior quickly became a general topic of discussion in tenements and marketplaces as well. The neighborhood, the tenement, the marketplace come out repeatedly as the locations of knowledge, comment, discussion, judgment, much as Farge, Garrioch, and others have demonstrated for the eighteenth century.83 Getting involved meant at the least emotional stress, assumption of responsibility, andriskof being attacked oneself. But the general reticence cannot be explained on these grounds alone; it constituted a collective recognition of the independence of the (married) couple and of the household unit. It represented a popular conception of the proper relation between public and private that could survive the crowded conditions of the poorer urban neighborhoods. This stricdy observed independence, in turn, made guarding one's honor an important matter; no one could protect an individual from the consequences of a breach of appearances. Abusive husbands were left free to inflict their violence, even when to do so cost a considerable effort to control one's emotional reactions. As far as it goes, therefore, the evidence from the Versailles separation cases suggests an impressive continuity with the eighteenth century among the laboring poor, even if there may have been some change associated with the new ease of access to the court system. At the same time, comparison of the Versailles separation cases with the treatment (or rather the lack of treatment) of separation cases among the laboring poor in the pages of the Gazette des tribunaux shows that two of the most important new institutions of the postrevolutionary public sphere—newspapers and courts—neither understood nor sought to uphold standards of judgment that prevailed in the communities of the urban lesser shopkeepers and laborers. The stories that witnesses told do not conform closely to fictional or theatrical conventions of the time, either. However, they often take the form of "cliffhangers" in which women are literally saved at the last moment, when sympathy and horror finally overcome respect for appearances 83. Farge, La Viefragile;Garrioch, Neighborhood and Community in Paris; Roche, Peuple de Paris.

SENSITIVE HEARTS

in

in the mind of one intrepid bystander who steps in to save the day. As soon as calm is restored, the breach of decorum is covered over and "forgotten."

Conclusion This evidence does not yield a neat picture. We have uncovered some elements of a male-centered code of honor—specifically those concerned with honor as a state free of shame—and we have examined a large array of reactions to it. The small number of cases we have examined in depth all reveal women preferring sentiment, in one way or another, preferring what we might call, for lack of a better term, emotional fulfillment, at the expense of appearances, at the expense of family honor. Their affinities, their attachments and aversions, their bitterness, resentment, or desire, their private feelings of shame, brought them into opposition with appearances, in a manner not unlike the opposition that Corinne expressed, in her desire to make herself and her talents known to an admiring public. Like Corinne, sometimes by their own choice, these women found themselves subject to public scrutiny, their letters published in newspapers, their personal qualities dissected by nationally famous lawyers, winning admiration or blame depending on the observer's inclination. Not just Stael, but they, their lawyers, their husbands' lawyers, the courts, and—judging from the extensive coverage of these cases provided by the Gazette and other papers—many members of the public were all concerned with the problem of reconciling honor and sentiment. This task seemed to present puzzles of daunting moral and emotional complexity. How should private feelings of shame or rejection or loneliness be reconciled with the protection of family honor? When could one overrule the other? When did a grievance pass from "family squabble" to legally acceptable cause of action? How much should be forgiven, forgotten, suppressed from memory, in order to maintain the calm outward display of affection, or at least civility, in the marriage? The publicity certain cases received, and the sophistication of lawyers' pleadings, suggest men and women were quite familiar with, and deeply concerned about, these issues, conceiving of them within an idiom that the sentimental novel had both drawn on and contributed to. At a lower rank of society, below an ill-defined barrier beyond which elite males no longer considered persons to be honorable (about this elusive barrier, more will be said in Chapter 4), evidence shows a different but equally vigorous sense of household honor which, like its elite coun-

ii2

S E N S I T I V E HEARTS

terpart, was maintained at the expense of frequent and difficult suppression of feeling. The evidence does not allow us to see what kinds of sentiment were expressed in the "ideal" plebeian marital relationship, although the kinds of violence reported seem to speak of a special closeness gone awry and bitterly regretted. It does allow us to glimpse how much effort plebeian urban neighborhoods were prepared to expend in order to maintain a smooth exterior of normal household independence and commercial and friendly interaction. In this respect, despite elite disdain, they seem hardly different from their betters. Both elite and plebeian men seemed prone to use alcohol as a prop to denial. Blockage of feeling, motivated by shame, often more robust in men than in women, rendered daily life flat, prosaic, and lonely. The drug temporarily lifted inhibitions but at the same time opened the way to potentially shameful acts, even as it fortified denial by clouding thought and derailing introspection. There is nothing peculiar to the age or to France in any of this, however. Still, the recent democratization of honor and the impact of wartime experiences may well have heightened male susceptibilities to this fearful spiral. The conflict between sentiment and honor is such a common theme of the period that one is tempted to ask whether the two are related on a deeper level. This is not to say that feelings cannot exist without an honor code. But it may be that in France, as notions of the self evolved from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, honor and sentiment were defined, developed, and experienced in tandem. What assured men that, unlike women, they were not subject to the sway of feeling was the notion that shame felt by men was something outside the realm of "sentiment," of feeling. Shame operated as a regulatory emotion, as it did among the Bedouin studied by Abu-Lughod, or, in a different way, the Ilongot studied by Michelle Rosaldo, and the Pintupi studied by Fred Myers.84 Hence, women's feelings—Anne Louise Pithon's loneliness, Mme Chateauvillars's sense of abandonment, Clementine Guillaume's fear at Carnival time in 1833—were not in themselves cause for dissolving a marriage. An action or situation warranted legal dissolution of a marriage only if it was, in the court's eyes—that is, the eyes of male magistrates and heads of families—a positive cause of insult or humiliation. The shame

84. Michelle Z. Rosaldo, "The Shame of Headhunters and the Autonomy of Self," Ethos 11 (1983): 135—151; Fred R Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines (Berkeley, Calif., [1986] 1991); Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).

SENSITIVE HEARTS

113

of males (that is, the honor of families) was a serious matter; the loneliness of females ("sentiment") was of no consequence. This structure of feeling—although the possible range of reactions to it was quite large— was sufficient clear and prevalent that its themes became the foundation of melodrama and popular fiction, that is, of commodities that needed to frame exciting and compelling personal conflict for eager consumers. We can also sense that the growth of the public sphere and the hope of appealing to the female consumer helped give voice to oppositional impulses. Public exposure was inimical to the reign of appearances; at the same time, as members of the public, people were avid to know about others' secrets. As victims, women were often more willing to bring the public gaze to bear as a form of punishment, vengeance, or protection.

4 The Ladder Up Accumulating Honors in the Ministry of the Interior

Examination of cases of marital separations has revealed the passion with which married couples struggled over the intricate, and inequitable, rules of the game of appearances, essential to maintaining honor in the sense of a state free of shame. This chapter attempts to understand how males sought to accumulate honors, in the sense of exterior markings of merit or worth. The focus will be on personnel files from the Ministry of the Interior, part of the new vast government bureaucracy created by the Revolution, an institution based on salaried employment, in which individual merit was supposed to be rewarded with promotions and raises. Before beginning this analysis, however, it is essential to consider two preliminary issues. First, honor as a state free of shame and honors as acquisitions were linked by an inner logic, an underlying notion of independence, with male and female variants.1 Independence was, by long tradition, considered essential to decision making that was free of the taint of self-interest. Self-interest was a less than honorable motive for engaging in public functions. Second, even though self-interest continued to i. For a particularly insightful discussion of the relation between independence and honor in one context, see Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif., 1986); for further discussion of the concept of independence in the Western context, see William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modem Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge, England, 1987), 72-81; also C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975)114

THE LADDER UP

be regarded as less than honorable, it was difficult in practice to distinguish honor from self-interest when assessing actors' motives. A discussion of literary depictions of the new bureaucracy will illustrate this latter issue, showing how satirists could easily portray bureaucrats' behaviors as based on self-interest. After consideration of these two preliminary issues, it will be possible to turn to the case material derived from the Ministry of the Interior archives. Here we shall discover dossiers of individuals who seem tofitthe stereotypes of the satirical literature with uncanny exactness. Further exploration will show, however, that only the operation of a robust code of honor among ministry employees can explain these extreme cases and make sense of both the rhetoric in the personnel documents and the career patterns of individual employees.

Honor and Self-Interest The conditions of male competition in the early nineteenth century conflicted with an underlying valuation of independence in two ways. First, the democratization of the honor code, as we have noted, allowed a much wider circle of males to compete on an equal footing than ever before, at least in principle. Yet, many of these males suffered from educational deficits or from a lack of means that threatened their ability to operate as independent competitors. They did not dispose of that minimum of wealth and style necessary to a state free of shame. Second in the new wide open arena of competition, the scramble for honors easily turned due deference to superiors into abject flattery, obsequiousness—and what the French called importunité, base and tiresome begging. Such slavishness was the antithesis of independence, and its practitioners were the object of universal scorn; yet avoiding this pitfall often required a special presence of mind that was more readily available to those who enjoyed other advantages: education, family, influence. Further, who was to say with authority where to draw the line between appropriate submission and shameful, self-interested groveling? In the bureaucracy itself, there was a third source of conflict. Merit was supposed to rule in hiring, promotion, and distribution of raises. Merit was understood to be the result of individual talent and hard work; it could also be acquired by ancienneté, long years of faithful service. In practice, however, jobs, promotions, and raises often went to those who enjoyed influence or protection of various kinds. These factors, as we shall see, encouraged strong feelings of desperation, self-denigration, and shame in many males (and not just less-

n6

T H E L A D D E R UP

advantaged ones). Of course, such feelings are common in every era; whether these were stronger or weaker than in other periods would be difficult to say. It is certain, however, that they had a salience in the documents characteristic of this era of laissez-faire competition and contributed to its unique structure of feeling. This can be seen, for example, in the social commentary inspired by new open, competitive professions such as the civil service and the daily press, which displayed a tendency to "blame the victim," to shame individuals for the difficulties they encountered living up to a code of honor ill adapted to their circumstances. An obvious instance is the spate of satirical social portraits well known to literary historians calledphysiologies that were popular around 1840. Personnelfilesexamined here also reveal, from time to time, intense personal anguish about status and advancement. This examination of the bureaucracy will therefore begin with a brief discussion of the problems posed by living on the lower limits of independence, and the difficulty of distinguishing these lower reaches from dishonorable dependency. We have already seen that the courts made a sharp distinction in judging requests for marital separation between women who were deemed honorable and those who were not. The former needed protection from insult, the latter only from violence or cruelty. A marital separation case of 1830 involving a civil servant provides evidence of a man who crossed the subde boundary between less than honorable and honorable, showing that the domain of honor began not at the boundary between "bourgeois" and "working class" but somewhere within the ranks of what we would now call "white collar" employees. Independence was the crucial variable. This case involved a man named Eudier who rose from the rank of expéditionnaire (copyist) to that of chef de bureau (bureau chief) in the Ministry of Finance between 1815 and 1830.2 While still a copyist making 1,200 francs a year, he had married a seamstress who lived down the street from him. At some point thereafter, Eudier became convinced that his wife was not faithful to him (the exact details behind this discovery were a subject of dispute between the parties), and he made informal arrangements to separate from her, providing her a small allowance. After Eudier was promoted to bureau chief in the cabinet of the minister, however, his wife—according to the husband's complaint—informed him she wanted an increase in her pension or else she would insist on a 2. Gazette des tribunaux, 8 May 1830.

THE LADDER UP

réintégration into her husband's household, which was her legal right as his wife. He refused both proposals. When she threatened to write direcdy to the minister about his unjust treatment of her, Eudier finally took the step of seeking a legal separation. To prove his wife's repeated infidelity to the marriage, Eudier submitted letters from her, dating from some time back, in which she confessed to her wrongdoings and begged his forgiveness. These letters were sufficient to justify the husband's request for separation, Eudier's lawyer argued; to make a formal inquiry into the wife's adulteries would be "useless and dangerous"—useless because we already know all we need to know, dangerous "because the woman Eudier's accomplices are now honorably established, and it would bring disorder into their families. It might even happen that, as a result of the fear of disturbing happy marriages, one would not obtain from witnesses called to testify depositions in conformity with the truth" (emphasis added).3 Here the lawyer was appealing explicitly to the court's concern to protect family honor by helping to preserve appearances, a very different task from that of enforcing a moral code. He invited the court to recognize as well that perjury in the service of appearances is both predictable and laudable. The wife made a counterclaim, asking the court to force her husband to take her back. In support of her claim, her lawyer disputed certain facts in the complaint. Eudier had been no more than an assistant in a pharmacy when the twofirstmet, so that there was "absolutely no mismatching of social rank."4 After going to work at the ministry, however, "He became a somebody and soon his pride made him blush at his marriage to a seamstress. If he saw his wife on the street he did not speak to her, did not even acknowledge her, and pretended he was a bachelor [at work]" (emphasis added).5 The phrase italicized here obviously meant that Eudier was ashamed of his marriage because his honor had increased with his new job in a government ministry, however modest his pay may have been at first. Eudier's own morals left much to be desired, according to the wife's

3. "parce que les complices de la dame Eudier sont maintenant honorablement établis, et que ce serait porter le désordre dans leurs familles. Il pourrait arriver d'ailleurs que, par suite de cette crainte de troubler par des révélations des mariages unis, on n'obtint pas des témoins appelés des dépositions conformes à la vérité" (emphasis added). 4. "assurément aucune disproportion dans leur rang." 5. "il y devint personnage, et bientôt sa vanité le fit rougir d'être allié à une couturière. Rencontrait-il sa femme dans la rue, il ne lui parlait pas, ne la saluait pas même, et [au bureau] se fait passer comme garçon" (emphasis added).

II8

T H E L A D D E R UP

lawyer, who insisted that the incriminating letters had been extracted by force; the husband had threatened to cut off her pension unless she moved to the country. Not wanting to "lose her daughter," she resisted. So the husband agreed to continue her pension if she would write letters confessing to wrongdoing. At this point, the wife's lawyer articulated an important principle with far-reaching implications for the honor code: "Someone who is dying of hunger cannot afford to calculate the effects of the conditions imposed on him for survival; doubdess the novelistic coloration which our adversary has noted in the letters is explained by the fact that they were contrived." 6 What's more, he remarked, there is no explicit admission of "a complete lapse of duty" in the letters, only, at best, of "a few slips."7 Once he had the letters in hand, the wife's lawyer alleged, Eudier felt he could safely cut off her pension unconditionally. It was not surprising she decided to write to the minister. Throughout the documents and the lawyers' pleadings, neither Eudier nor his wife are referred to as monsieur or madame. As a sure mark of their generally inferior social status, both lawyers refer to them as "sieur Eudier" and "la dame Eudier." By the early nineteenth century, such terms were purely technical, socially neutral appellations, the sort of term found in notaries' documents and police officials' reports. The contrast to the respectful titles (of monsieur and madame) used consistently throughout the Chateauvillars and Guillaume cases discussed in Chapter 3 is striking. Eudier's salary at the beginning of the marriage, 1,200 francs a year, was less than many skilled artisans made; lower administrative employees frequently depended on wives' work to make ends meet. These wives engaged in all sorts of occupations; many of these occupations, such as dame Eudier's work as seamstress, were not compatible with their husbands' social aspirations.8 By 1830, as bureau chief, Eudier's income must have risen to at least 3,600 francs and may have been as high as 4,500 francs per year—a comfortable, if modest, "bourgeois" income. Yet, all references to him in court marked his lowly origins. Both the procureur du roi and the court in this case decided in favor of the wife, rejecting the husband's request for a separation and granting the wife the opportunity to make a case for her reintegration into his

6. "Celui qui meurt de faim ne peut pas calculer les conséquences des conditions qu'on lui impose pour le faire vivre; et c'est sans doute au peu de naturel que devaient avoir ces lettres, qu'il faut attribuer cette teinte romanesque que l'adversaire y a trouvée." 7. Not "un oubli total de ses devoirs," only "quelque légèreté." 8. See, for example, Honoré de Balzac, Les Employés (1837-1843).

T H E LADDER UP

119

household. In the meantime, he was to pay her an annual pension of 1,600 francs in quarterly installments. This case underscores that honorable independence required freedom from subsistence needs. "Someone who is dying of hunger cannot afford to calculate the effects of the conditions imposed on him for survival," claimed the wife's lawyer in the Eudier case. At first glance a self-evident proposition, this statement passes silently over many instances in which honor dictated precisely that it is essential to calculate the effects of conditions of survival. A captured soldier, for example, even if dying of hunger, was expected to keep vital secrets from the enemy to the last. An honorable woman could yield her virtue to no man without disgrace, no matter what the penalty. But the lawyer's observation could be taken as commonsensical because it had a long history behind it, in discussions of the conditions and comportment of the poor.9 Because the poor were liable to be compelled by hunger or other need to do things that were less than honorable, that were dishonest, or disgusting—involving filth, fraud, or fawning—they were considered, globally, to be without honor. A woman driven by starvation into prostitution lost her honor in spite of the mitigating circumstances. An unemployed worker who accepted a job in the sewers was personally tainted by his lowly profession even if fear of starvation had moved him as well.10 The logic had the same structure as that which applied to commercial trades. He who persistently and exclusively sought monetary gain in his dealings with others was deemed liable to allow this ulterior motive to distort his ability to speak truly and undermine his ability to perceive and to seek the larger good of the community.11 Even worse, those who had to hire themselves out and were unable, on the basis of their own property or skills, to maintain their independence from others were liable to fall into a state of dependence on their master or employer. This kind of reasoning, within the republican tradition, had shored up resistance to universal suffrage for 9. See Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 17SO-17S9 (Oxford, 1974), 219-351; William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750-1900 (Cambridge, England, 1984), chapter 5, "Visions of Subsistence." 10. See Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et prostitution aux 19e et 20e siècles (Paris, 1978). 11. This perception blocked businessman Louis Véron's aspirations for political position in 1839-1840; as a successful entrepreneur, especially as director of the Opéra, he was regarded as ineligible by the Thiers faction for political appointment; see his memoirs, Louis Véron,Mémoires d'un bourgeois de Paris, 5 vols. (Paris, 1856-1857), 3:285-286; see also Anne Martin-Fugier, La Vie élégante: La Formation du Tout Paris, iSis-1848 (Paris, 1990), 344-350.

T H E LADDER UP

centuries.12 Honor, independence of means, and independence of mind went together. To say, as her lawyer did, that Eudier's wife was compelled by hunger to dishonor herself with lies about her wifely comportment was compatible with calling her "la dame Eudier" rather than "Mme Eudier." It was to admit that she was of an inferior social station, one of whom honorable behavior was not expected, or at least for whom that expectation was relaxed. Eudier had crossed the boundary into independence and honorability, not merely by achieving higher income, but by joining the ranks of those within the bureaucracy who exercised decisionmaking authority. As bureau chief, with high job security, executive competence over a specific area, and a listing in the Almanack royal, Eudier was a personage. However, the court would not allow him to bury the past. Impoverished copyists and seamstresses were compelled by circumstance to act out of self-interest, according to prevailing prejudice. The Eudiers' social identity could not help but bear the mark of this lowly beginning. This was a social order that, in principle, worked on self-interest, as noted in Chapter 2. Freedom of contract and absolute right of property created an arena of competition in which decisions were, perforce, made on the basis of profit maximization. Those who failed to conform to competitive practices, whatever their social rank, were liable to find their interests damaged, their fortune shrinking or ruined. Yet, as the Eudier case underscores, self-interest was still widely viewed as incompatible, in many of its implications, with honor. "La dame Eudier's" alleged motives are one instance among many one could cite; another was the desire of a lowly copyist to move up.13 Thus, as we shall see, the very social order itself was often regarded as essentially shameful, since it was designed to give free reign to a shameful or suspect motive. This view, shared by socialists such as Marx and Louis Blanc, as well as monarchists such as Chateaubriand and Alfred Nettement, was easier to sustain because of the possibility of seeing all behavior as self-interested behavior. There were, and are, two difficulties involved in distinguishing honorable from self-interested motivation. The first is one of definition. If self-interest is defined as the pursuit of gain, then only behavior explicidy and narrowly aimed at earning money is motivated by self-interest. 12. See the works listed in note i. 13. For an extended discussion of Balzac's Pht Goriot as offering numerous examples of interest's conflict with honor, see William M. Reddy, "Need and Honor in Balzac's Pire Goriotin The Culture of the Market, edited by Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III (Cambridge, England, 1993), 325-354-

THE LADDER UP

If self-interest is defined more loosely, as pursuit of whatever one values highly for oneself, then it becomes applicable to almost all behaviors and is next to meaningless. If honor is defined as the possession of explicit exterior markers of rank, such as a spotless reputation or a high office in government, then only behavior aimed at respecting propriety or winning recognition or promotion is motivated by honor. If honor is defined more loosely, as pursuit of whatever others value, then it becomes indistinguishable from both altruism and self-interest and, equally, loses its meaning. The aim here will be to avoid loose definitions of these difficult terms and to look to the evidence of language in the documents as the only possible arbiter of what might have been moving early nineteenthcentury French men and women. The second difficulty in distinguishing honor and self-interest is one of evidence. Pursuit of honor and pursuit of self-interest are sometimes impossible to distinguish in practice, even when these terms are narrowly defined. Since independence of means is honorable, more independence of means can appear more honorable. They are indistinguishable when, for example, honor is pursued through the acquisition of properties or the procurement of income—because property and income can bring some honor and can be used, once they are acquired, to acquire honor. They are likewise indistinguishable when the possession of honor is used to acquire properties or income, since the latter may be a means to further honor. When a noble father marries a son to a rich commoner's daughter, the former pursues wealth in the short term by condescending to the alliance; the latter pursues honor in the short term by offering a large dowry. Yet, these immediate, short-term motives, implicit in the action, say nothing about whether, in the long run, either actor considers honor as the end, money as the means, or vice versa. Sometimes general patterns can be discerned with relative security. Before the Revolution, French merchant families generally acquired wealth in order to gain entry into the nobility and, in the meantime, imitated noble fashions and values as much as possible; they sought honor by means of gain, the only way available to commoners. They did not, like Weber's ideal-typical capitalist, acquire money for its own sake. Two generations of social historical research established this with reasonable conclusiveness. I am trying to pursue a similar line of reasoning about nineteenthcentury evidence here. Postrevolutionary bureaucrats sought honor (not more income) by means of promotions and raises. The evidence for this does not come from what they did with money, once they had it, however. It comes from the means they were compelled to use to win ad-

122

T H E LADDER UP

vancement. These were similar to the classic sorts of means employed under the old regime by aristocrats to enhance their own honor: protections, family alliances, loyal service (to a protector, not to the government), mutual promises, exchanges of favor. The bureaucracy operated by means of the old aristocratic honor game, democratized; it was not a new sort of meritocracy. In Chapter 5 we will see that the same could be said of the world of journalism. In both instances, public perception of these new callings became skewed by the tendency to view all their behaviors as shamefully self-interested, as not endowed with that minimum independence of spirit essential to honor. Thus, the ongoing importance of the honor code, evident in the details of practice, remained invisible at the level of social thought and social perception.

Marette's Household, Monnier's Scorn The democratization of the honor code created impossible dilemmas. The difficulties that lower-level civil servants faced, in particular, in evolving an idiom of honor appropriate to their ambiguous status were enormous and contributed to an acute sense of uncertainty that plagued all those who lived near the lower frontier of honor in the new social order, making them an easy target for satirists. Such targeting of ambiguous professions was, in turn, an important aspect of the depiction of the social order as moved by self-interest and therefore (implicidy) shameful. These difficulties and the way they were used by satirists can be illustrated by a comparison of one inventaire après décès, an inventory of household property occasioned by a death in 1832, with a humorous skit published in 1830 by well-known caricaturist and vaudeville playwright and performer Henry Monnier.14 This inventory, prepared on the death of the wife of Louis François Marette, an employee of the Ministry of the Interior, shows how extreme might be the penury of a household that, nonetheless, ought to have ranked well within the circle of honor.15

14. The inventaire came to light in a small sample of notarial documents from the 1830s. It is in AN, Minutier Central, XXIX, 98+ (June 1832), Tourin, 16 June 1832, inventaire of Mme Louise Françoise Marette, née Mouton. Some 250 notarial acts were sampled from eight different études of the 1830s and 1840s; for further information on the use of such sources, see especially Adeline Daumard, La Bourgeoisieparisienne de iSis à 1S4S (Paris, 1963). The skit is "Le Diner bourgeois,"firstpublished in Henry Monnier, Scènes populaires (Paris, 1830). 15. Marette's personnel file is in AN F l b I 2731. He was a commis d'ordre at that time, by no means the bottom of the ladder.

T H E LADDER UP

123

Marette's household could have been used as the set for the skit by Monnier, "Le Diner bourgeois," and his wardrobe could have provided the costumes. Marette, a low-level civil servant, lived in a four-room, third-floor apartment at 69 rue du Bac, just a few hundred meters from the ministry where he worked. The death of his wife in 1832, at age forty-seven, had necessitated the inventaire because the couple was childless and the wife's siblings had inheritance rights to protect. The inventaire revealed precious litde property to dispute, however. The total value of the contents of the apartment was estimated at 1,060 francs. In addition, Marette had 280 francs in cash. He owed 1,075 francs on two notes held by a M. Millard and a M. Beauval, payable over the next nine months; he also owed small amounts to a number of local shopkeepers, including 175 francs to his tailor, 92 to the pharmacist, as well as 82 francs for third-quarter rent on the apartment. His Ministry of the Interior salary was at that time 1,800 francs a year.16 These figures speak for themselves; Marette's resources were meager in the extreme. A journeyman mason of the time could expect to earn 4-5 francs a day, thus 1,500 francs in a good year. Male factory workers in the northern textile centers might clear 600 francs a year; if several family members worked, as was the rule, a mill operative's household might get by "comfortably" (in a one-room or two-room tenement dwelling) on 1,200 francs.17 Any master artisan with a modestly prosperous trade—a bootmaker, a bookbinder, a butcher—would have been better off than the Marette household. Six francs a day, Marette's approximate earnings, did not go far. Dinner in the cheapest Latin Quarter student restaurant ran about 1.50 francs, a ride in afiacre (taxi) across town could cost 2 francs. But M. Marette, as an employee of the government, was expected to fulfill a certain social role, and a closer look at the contents of his home suggests how important, and how challenging, that expectation might have been for him. In his wardrobe, for example, the commissaire priseur found fourteen 16. The salary and his employer are named in the inventaire; in addition, Ministry of the Interior archives show that Marette was hired as commis d'ordre-expeditionnaire in the bureau of the book trade in 1827, and was promoted to commis d'ordre in 1831. His annual salary had increased to 2,100 by 1838; he was made rldacteur at 3,000 francs a year in 1848, and sous-chef in I8JI. By 1853, when he was transferred along with his bureau to the new ministry of general police, his salary had risen to 4,000 francs. AN F l b I 2731; see also AN F lb I io4 through F l b I io8. 17. On these figures, see Reddy, The Rise ofMarket Culture, 138-184.

124

THE LADDER UP

worn (mauvaises) cotton shirts;fifteenpairs of cotton socks; six wool undergarments; two cotton undergarments; six old woolen vests; ten vests of different colors and fabrics, of which one appeared to be silk; four wool pants (two black, two blue); one black habit (a formal black coat with tails); two blue redingotes (less formal coats with tails); one complete uniform of a chasseur of the National Guard; one felt hat; two pairs of boots. Total value: 120 francs. This was truly the bare minimum for making a presentable appearance at the office. Given the low value estimated for them, these garments must have been of very common quality or else quite well worn. Marette's office mates must have tired of seeing the same two or three coats week in, week out; but they, of course, were likely to have been little better fitted out than he. Marette's National Guard uniform may have been paid for by a special supplement that the ministry made available to purchase uniforms for employees who joined the Guard. The windows of the apartment were all covered with calico drapes. (Here, as in their wardrobes, the Marettes took maximum advantage of the new cheapness of calico prints, one of the earliest mechanically produced consumer goods.) Its walls were decorated with lithographs (lithography was also a new, cheap technology of reproduction); the lithographs in the bedroom did not have frames, those in the salon were in frames with glass covers. They were generic pieces, it seems; the commissaire priseur mentions the tides of some: "The Prayer," "Study," "The Reconciliation," "The Mustache," "The Bohemian." The bedroom had a good feather bed, one table with a mirror, and a dresser with a marble top. The dining room table was a folding model with an extension leaf and six matching chairs upholstered with black horsehair cloth. An armoire contained tablecloths, glasses, a soup serving bowl, six teacups and saucers, a platter, and a set of terra cotta dishes that served eight. All this dinnerware, along with some other pieces, was valued by the commissaire priseur at the lowly sum of 10 francs. The salon had a mirror with a gilded wooden frame, a folding card table covered with green felt, a secretary, a footstool; but no chairs are mentioned. There were more dishes stored in the salon, including silverware for four place settings valued at 190 francs, constituting the Marette's single most valuable item of household furnishings apartfromtheir bed. On the mantel in the salon was a clock with gold-plated brass ornaments valued at 60 francs. The clock on the mantel was a kind of badge of honorable status in many households. Finally, the Marettes' kitchen was fitted out with a sufficiency of inexpensive cooking gear. Thus, the household was equipped much as Marette's wardrobe, with a bare minimum of honorable accoutrements. They could have had a

T H E L A D D E R UP

125

small dinner party—but where would the guests have sat before going to table? Perhaps the chairs were shifted from salon to dining room as need required. Henry Monnier, in a mordant vaudeville sketch entided "Le Diner bourgeois"—an early contribution to the growing genre of theater, fiction, and caricature that satirized France's new governing bureaucracy— brings to life for us the severe obstacles faced by couples such as the Marettes in living up to the expectations imposed on them by their place in society. Like most observers of the period, Monnier was merciless in his derision of persons like Marette, whose low educational attainments and laughably inadequate standard of living made them into living travesties of what they should have been: efficient public servants imbued with a sense of duty. Monnier knew of these difficulties from personal experience, having worked in a ministry as a clerk himself. 18 From the very beginning of the sketch, Monnier shows his characters struggling without much success against feelings of shame, plunged into a daily commerce of recrimination and complaint, as they try to live up to expectations that outstrip their means. Here is scene one: Bedroom ofMadame Joly, transformed into a salon ... M. and Mme Joly, Victorine at her piano Joly, in shirtsleeves: It's funny how big our bedroom looks without the bed in it; it makes a pretty salon. Madame Joly, dressed, with an apron, sleeves rolled up to her elbows: Who asked you? You've been sitting there, monsieur Joly, since this morning like a statue. You do nothing, and the company will be here any minute. Joly: Ah, sure, that's it, that's a good one, like a statue! Madame Joly: Just so. Joly: What do you mean? I've been up since five. . . . I went to buy the pain de sucre on rue de la Verrerie. . . . I was at the butchers. . . . I took down both b e d s . . . . I moved the dresser and the secretary.. . . Or did that all get done by itself?... And I'm sitting there like a statue! Madame Joly: And me, I suppose I have had nothing to do? It's such fun, when you don't have a maid, to do all the cooking for the whole party! Joly: Well, you have to do something to be sociable. . . . What the devil. . . . You have Madame Payen to help you. Madame Joly: Oh, yes, she's a big help.. . . Come on, get your coat on, and a tie, don't sit there like that, unclothed in front of your daughter. . . . They'll be here any minute, I tell y o u . . . . Hey, Victorine, you're just staring out into the street, you won't know your lesson this evening. 18. On Monnier, see J. J. F. Champfleury, Henry Monnier, sa vie, son oeuvrc (Paris, 1879). Note that all ellipses in the passages from this play quoted here are in the original text.

126

T H E L A D D E R UP

Victorine: Darn, this is boring. Madame Joly: That's it, you'll be too shy again, you'll just provide more grist for Madame Locard's mill, when she says there aren't any good housewives except those who have worked at repairing lace. Joly: Yes, that's right, Madame Locard; talking like that she may find a good husband for her Olympe! Madame Joly: Still, I hope she doesn't bring her along to dinner tonight. . . . She is not a proper acquaintance for Victorine. . . . Get going, monsieur Joly, in the name of all the saints! . . . Go get your coat on. (Joly exits.) The first guests to arrive, M. and Mme Duret, are similarly situated in life. M. Duret works at the same office; they live in the same neighborhood. Mme Duret begins the conversation by complimenting the Jolys on their apartment. Madame Duret: I just love your apartment. . . . Don't you, monsieur Duret? What a difference from our own! Madame Joly: Yours is also quite comfortable . . . but here, you see, one thing is quite inconvenient: we have only a little booth of a kitchen; you need a candle in there at noontime; it's so small you can't turn around in it. . . . (She takes her hand.) How hot I am. . . . I was suffocating in there. I'm swimming in perspiration. Madame Duret: Every apartment has its bad points. . . . We like ours because M. Duret is right in the vicinity of his office. Duret: Just around the corner. Madame Duret: We wouldn't put up with it otherwise. First of all, we have such impolite doormen! With those people you must always have money in your hands. And even then . . . Madame Joly: It's the same here, no more, no less. . . . They put on a hat, and the next thing you know, it's the world turned upside down. The humor in this passage for an early nineteenth-century audience arose from two circumstances. First of all, Madame Joly's admission to dinner guests that she herself was doing all the cooking in the kitchen and "swimming" in sweat would have been considered grotesquely inappropriate for salon conversation—just the kind of faux pas to be expected from someone who could not afford a cook, in fact. (One finds the inability to pay for a maid referred to in some memoirs as one of the most galling badges of shameful poverty.19) 19. See, for example, Jacques Landrin,/«/«Janin, amteur et romander (Paris, 1978), 26.

THE LADDER UP

127

Second, the idea that porters were "disagreeable" for expecting tips was silly; respect from persons in lowly service positions was, as everyone knew, carefully tuned to the flow of tips into their pockets. Such lowly persons, everyone knew, were moved only by self-interest and had no regard for one's true worth or rank. That Mme Joly should consider this a sign of "the world turned upside down" showed that she was the social anomaly. How could they pretend to give a "diner bourgeois" when they lacked all but the most ridiculous hints of what "bourgeois"—in this context, "honorable"—demeanor and habits looked like? At the same time, Monnier was playing on the very ambiguity of the term bourgeois, which had always stood for an intermediate status and might as easily connote disdain as respect, depending on context. Insofar as the Joly household pretended to more honor than it deserved, Monnier invites the ironic reflection that it was eminendy "bourgeois." Monnier's sketch continues its merciless exploration of his characters' pitiful social pretensions. The remaining guests arrive, including the character Monnier's portrayals made famous—M. Prudhomme, with his wife. Monnier's M. Prudhomme is, in this skit as always, pomposity personified. Nothing, however trivial, fails to elicit a long-winded speech. Joly politely kisses Mme Prudhomme on the cheek in greeting, as he has all the other women guests. But Prudhomme takes the opportunity to launch an announcement on the subject. Prudhomme, in a loud and sonorous voice: Monsieur Joly, you did not ask me permission. Ladies, I have the honor of expressing to you my best wishes.. . . Sirs, at your service... . Where is madame Joly, so I can give you, monsieur Joly, the change for your coin? Madame Joly: Excuse me, ladies. Prudhomme, advancing: I come to claim from you, madame, an engagement contracted with M. Joly. . . . If you will permit. . . . (He kisses her.) He kissed madame Prudhomme. Madame Joly, in afriendlytone: Quite appropriate. (Approaching her husband.) And your no-good pastry cook? The humor in Prudhomme's profession of writing expert requires some explanation. Before the invention of the typewriter later in the century, bureau employees were exclusively male, and final copies of correspondence and reports were prepared by copyists, expéditionnaires, they were called in France, because they prepared the final copy that would be expédié, or sent. A good, clear hand was valued in an expéditionnaire, and

128

T H E LADDER UP

there were recognized teachers of handwriting, "professeurs d'écriture," who could help young men get entry-level office posts. Ironically, as Monnier himself found out while working at the Ministry of War, a good hand might become an impediment to advancement.20 Just because superiors valued the prestige of elegant-looking documents, they often hesitated to promote a good copyist to a post with more responsibility. Poor or rushed handwriting, young men were advised in all seriousness, gave superiors an incentive to promote one into the ranks of the rédacteurs (writers) who composed letters and whose work was an apprenticeship for higher things. Handwriting expertise was therefore a highly ambiguous skill that could hold one down, just as good typing skills have been viewed in our century as a disadvantage for an ambitious woman. Handwriting experts were also, from time to time, called on by the courts to verify signatures, just as they are today; hence, Prudhomme's self-important claim to be "distandy affiliated with the judiciary." Monnier thus peopled this sketch with ambiguous characters whose status on the margins of the circle of honor made them easy targets for ridicule. Their pretensions were inherent in their social position, and yet they were also necessarily exaggerated because they lacked both the means and the education necessary to play a larger role. Middle-class by any number of criteria, persons of Marette's status lacked the minimum of independence necessary to enter fully into the circle of honor. Independence was an important criterion that cut across lines of class as they are usually defined by historians. Handwriting experts, as we shall see below, and just as Monnier's skits implied, did have great difficulty winning respect and advancement. There were many other "middle-class" professions that suffered from disqualifications. Actors and actresses, in lending their voice and their emotions to playwright and theater director for pay, and in displaying the charms of their person openly before the public, also lacked the independence necessary to honor.21 The ridicule that the Gazette des tribunaux heaped on Julie F , wife of an 20. Champfleury, Henry Monnier, p. 8. 21. Actors and actresses had won civil equality in 1789. (In the old regime, they had suffered under a number of legal disqualifications.) However, the social prejudice against them remained lively, as recent studies have shown. See Rachel Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie Française (New York, 1993); Martin-Fugier, La Vie ¿¡¿¿ante, 309-323. See also the following typical examples of disdainful attitudes toward women of the theater: Nestor Roqueplan, Les Coulisses de l'Opéra (Paris, 1855); Véron, Mémoires d'un bourgeois de Paris, 3:96-263; Théophile Gautier, "Le Rat," in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie morale du XIXe siècle, 9 vols. (Paris, 1841-1842), 3:249-256. Several marital separation cases involving actresses and opera singers that came up in the course of research for this study showed that, lacking honor, it was impossible for women of the stage to win a

T H E LADDER UP

innkeeper, discussed in Chapter 3, was characteristic of attitudes toward any woman, however famous or well off, who had to serve in public, whether in a cafe, a butcher's shop, or an elegant hotel. Shopkeepers were frequent objects of literary scorn, for their lack of education, their stinginess, their self-importance. Anyone involved in commerce mightfindhimself branded an épicier (grocer), a literary type treated as epitomizing pretentiousness and meanness of spirit.22

The New Commonplaces of Bureaucratic Satire In the case of the bureaucracy, honor's role in individual motivation was obscured by a whole new genre of satirical literature, including mock treatises, novels, plays, and vaudeville pieces. (We shall see in Chapter 5 that literary reflection played a similar role in oversimplifying the public image of journalism, as well.) From the very beginning of the Restoration, widespread interest in the new administrative bureaucracy found expression in theater, in novels, and in a humorous "paraliterature" of mock treatises and guides.23 These examinations were part of a larger current of reflection on the problematic status of those who stood on the margins of the circle of honor. Characteristic of all this literature was the refusal to take the question seriously. It was not a high, not an honorable subject matter. However profound some of the work was—Monnier, among others, certainly deployed a touch of genius in his caricatures—seriousness was forbidden. Laughter played a healing, as well as a consciousness-raising, role; but comedy, as a low genre appropriate to a low subject, implicidy accepted the postrevolutionary rearrangement of the system of honor, ambiguous as it may have been. In the end, mockery of the incongruities that resulted, as in "Le Diner bourgeois," helped only to maintain a strong devotion to the honor code that would haunt French males throughout the nineteenth century.24 In line with the conventions of parody and satire that were available, case for separation on the grounds of insult. Their lawyers did not even try to argue insult and confined themselves to cruelty claims. The following cases involved women of the stage: Godard, Gazette des tribunaux, 11 December 1829; Ponchard, Gazette des tribunaux, 19 May 1830; Lebrun, Gazette des tribunaux, 23 July 1830. 22. For lore on épiciers, a good point of departure is Honoré de Balzac, "L'épicier," in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, 1:1. 23. The term paralittérature is from the definitive guide to this subject, Anne-Marie Bijaoui-Baron, "La Bureaucratie: Naissance d'un thème et d'un vocabulaire dans la littérature française," Thèse d'état, Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), 1981. 24. See Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes ofHonor in Modem France (Oxford, 1993)-

130

T H E LADDER UP

therefore, treatment of the new bureaucracy exaggerated and simplified, painting blacks over grays, labeling practices as shameful that were often no more than efforts to preserve the operation of the honor system in a new institutional context, and treating motivation as a matter for laughter, if not harsh condemnation. Showing the path toward this kind of simplification was JacquesGilbert Ymbert's two-volume 1825 mock-treatise, Les Moeurs administratives.25 As Bijaoui-Baron has remarked, this important work was both widely read and mined by subsequent writers, providing a vocabulary of metaphors and a new set of commonplaces for ironic commentary on the bureaucratic life that was passed on in works by Monnier, Balzac, Reybaud, Flaubert, and others.26 Ymbert was well positioned to make insightful observations; havingrisento bureau chief in the Ministry of War under Napoleon, he had fallen victim to one of the waves of dismissals that followed the hundred days in 1815, then was taken back in 1818, only to be discharged again following the assassination of the duc de Berry in 1820. He published the work anonymously, along with a number of other pieces of social satire, including vaudeville plays produced in collaboration with Eugène Scribe and others. He returned as division chief at the Ministry of the Interior charged with rebuilding the National Guard after the July Revolution. According to Ymbert, under Napoleon, the bureaucracy had worked well. In the days when the colossal empire absorbed all energy, talent had made a difference. Napoleon himself had a knack for calling division chiefs into the Tuilleries Palace, interrogating them, and rewarding genuine talent with a Legion of Honor medal or a spot on the Conseil d'etat (1:76-84). Napoleon always understood what was said to him and evaluated it with acute intelligence (1:164). In the bureaux, everyone worked in constant haste, often not getting home at night under the press of some urgent monumental task (1:145-148). But now (in 1825), under the restored Bourbons, all had changed. Now, "it is by constancy, style [la tenue], discretion, by diplomacy or by ruse that one keeps a post or gets ahead. . . . A trifle will bring you favor, but a bagatelle is also sufficient to plunge you into disgrace" (1:98-99). "The salaried agent," Ymbert remarked, has the "vice" of "importance" [l'importance] (1:172). This vice, or "illusion," of his own importance helps compensate for the strict regulations the bureaucrat must obey (1:180). 25. 2 vols. (Paris, 1825). 26. Bijaoui-Baron, "La Bureaucratic," 315-335.

T H E L A D D E R UP

131

In other words, by contrast to the venal officers of the old regime and their personal clerks—who were always open to influence and routinely received payments directly from the subject—the new salaried civil servant "has lost in means of pleasing and persuading all that he has gained in authority" (1:173). In one bureau: The bureau chief studied violin, and, taking advantage of the distant and insulated position of his office, frequendy practiced the art of Baillot [violin] during office hours; the sous-chef took English lessons; the two rédacteurs —one sketched caricatures, the other wrote vaudeville skits for private occasions; the commis d'ordre [clerk who controlled theflowof work] worked with cardboard; the expéditionnaire made embroidery designs; and the garçon de bureau [office boy] sewed vests and breeches. If a visitor came to the door, he was welcomed by a vigorous "I don't have the time!" which was repeated by all ranks like a military command. There is in this bureau, when pronouncing such words, an admirable order and a unison: as a result it is known as one of the busiest bureaux of the ministry. This passage gives a taste of the broad humor that Ymbert brought to the subject, but raises the question, How great was the exaggeration here, and just what kind of supervision of work existed in the bureaux? As for getting hired, Ymbert warns his reader that nothing is more poindess than writing letters or making visits to apply for a post. People do not realize that "m every salon the budget for next year's hiring is always drawn up in advance; that credits are drawn against jobs for one, two, or three terms in the future, just as they are against bank accounts or commercial correspondents, and they do not know either that ministers supported by factions are obliged if they come to power to accept their supporters' job requests as if they were a kind of letter of exchange" (emphasis added).27 The implication of the term salon here is that these decisions are made by the minister (or other highly placed individuals) in their homes, among their close associates, and in a space open to the influence of women (which influence, Ymbert complains, has returned in full force with the Restoration, in contrast to the manly days of the Empire). When a job opens, the bureau chief makes a reasoned recommendation, but the min-

27. "'dans chaque salon, le budget des places des années suivantes est toujours dressé à l'avance; que l'on tire sur les emplois à une, deux ou trois usances, comme sur les banques et les places de commerce, et elles ne savent pas non plus que les ministres portés par la coterie sont forcé s'ils arrivent au pouvoir d'accepter ces lettres de change de nouvelle espèce" (emphasis added; 1:224-226).

i}2

THE LADDER UP

istcr and secretary general are inundated with six hundred letters from dukes, countesses, peers, bishops, deputies, generals, academicians, all pumping for a nephew or a cousin. Lackeys and chambermaids join in. A batde follows in which talent and seniority have no role to play. "There an actress carries off a victory over a general," elsewhere it is a dance instructor whose candidate wins out over a peer's (1:265-268). Nepotism is rampant; twelve or so families fight an ongoing war for places; their names constantly pop up in the Chamber of Deputies or the Conseil d'etat. These relatives have "mutual insurance policies" indicating what kinds of eulogies they will make for each other when needed. In the faubourg Saint-Germain, you can learn exacdy what a son-in-law, a nephew, an uncle, or a grandfather is worth. Ministers with foresight place their relatives in other ministries, so they retain their posts even if the minister himself falls (2:84-94). Salaries are set in the same capricious way as jobs are handed out. Favoritism, circumstance, and protection, "compliancy, flattery, little services," win out over work and intelligence, resulting in "the most shocking senselessness and barbarities" (1:105).28 Those less well paid keep one old habit in a wardrobe in the office, which is ceremoniously donned at the beginning of the day; the garçon de bureau is kept busy repairing every tear or spot (1:186-187). Since Napoleon's fall, Ymbert notes, protocol has resumed the luxuriant complexity which it had under the old regime. Under the Revolution it was "of a monstrous vulgarity, everyone used only the familiar tu and tot." Under the Empire, "protocol became civil again," but without the "infinity of superlatives poured forth out of servility and feudal subjection" that has since returned to the bureaux.29 The salutation of a minister's letter always takes the same form, with variations according to the rank of the addressee: I have the honor of being

your very humble and obedient servant.

The following formulas are then inserted in the blank tofitthe circumstance: with consideration with a perfect consideration with a high consideration

(sub-prefect) (prefect) (lieutenant general, deputy)

28. "les contre-sens et les barbarismes les plus épouvantables." 29. "le protocole redevint civil" but without the "infinité de superlatifs prodigués par le vassalage et la servilité."

T H E LADDER UP

with very high consideration with the highest consideration

133

(peer) (ambassador)

Ymbert tells the story of a prefect who received a letter from the minister with an improper salutation, "with consideration" instead of "with a perfect consideration." He responded by addressing the minister as "Monsieur" rather than "Monseigneur" in subsequent correspondence. The minister, in turn, wrote back as follows: Monsieur le préfet, Personally I do not attach much importance to titles and distinctions; but I cannot impose the same indifference upon successors, for whom I must preserve intact the privileges of authority and even those of self-interest [amour propre]. Your letters have deprived them of an appellation consecrated by long use. I would certainly not have mentioned this omission, if it had only been noticed by myself. I have the honor to be, with a perfect consideration, your very humble and obedient servant. (2:34-35) The prefect returned forthwith the first letter from the minister, in which his own amour propre had been slighted. The expéditionnaire who had made this error was then given a severe reprimand. Ymbert also vented his impatience with thefloodof circular letters that went out in their thousands from every ministry into the provinces to plague prefects, subprefects, and mayors. Their style was guarded, abstract, heavily dependent on the subjunctive. They always ended on a hortatory note: "I do not doubt, Monsieur, that you will do all that is in your power to assure, insofar as it falls within your competence, the execution of the dispositions of this letter and that you will find in it an opportunity to give new proofs of your zeal and of your devotion."30 This ending was invariant and consecrated by custom. "If I had the honor to be a deputy," Ymbert quipped, "I would demand its suppression, as an important efficiency measure." When the printer's horses return from delivering a new circular at the ministry, he observed, they "lift their heads and start trotting. One guesses that they have executed the circular insofar as itfalls within their competence" (emphasis in original; 2:50-53). When a new minister is installed, there is an obligatory reception of all the directors (directeurs), division chiefs (chefs de division), bureau chiefs 30. "Je ne doute pas, Monsieur, que vous ne fassiez tout ce qui dépendra de vous pour assurer, en ce qui vous concerne, l'exécution des dispositions de cette lettre et que vous n'y trouviez l'occasion de donner de nouvelles preuves de votre zèle et de votre dévouement."

134

THE LADDER UP

(chefs de bureau), and bureau sub-chiefs (sous-cbefs), who are ushered into his office in little groups for introductions. It is an impressive sight, two hundred habits noirs in a parade crossing the courtyard, milling about in hall and antechamber. The minister never remembers any of these introductions. What protocol could not obscure for the discerning eye was that the bureaux did little work. Many ministries tried to track the arrival time of employees with what were called feuilks de presence, sign-in sheets circulated between nine and eleven in the morning. But this device could not ensure that anyone worked, or even that people stayed at their desks or in the office (1:182-183). Newspaper reading was a consuming passion; unable to afford their own subscriptions, employees often clubbed together and shared a copy. The accounting department preferred the Moniteur (the most boring and staid of the big dailies). Employees with less job security preferred "the fanatical newspapers" in order to display "fanatical devotion": "A director would not dare lay off an employee who subscribes to such and such a gazette, which counts among the ministries as many partisans as there are clerks who fear for their jobs. They say, trembling, that its literary articles are excellent, shaking, that its political doctrines are very sound; and the gazette sees its subscriptions of fear and its renewals of terror grow and grow" (1:191). Employees fill their time with arranging and rearranging their workspace and sharpening their quills. They block the drafts with stacks of paper, shade their writing areas with last year's almanac, divide their six square meters with a screen into "an antechamber, a reception room, and an office." 31 They use old reports and circulars to make platforms for their tobacco pouches and handkerchiefs. With "the instinct of a beaver" they carve a piece of firewood to make a coat rack (1:101-103). In the meantime, it was quite common for a ministry to take two months to answer a letter. Ymbert was happy to explain why. The average ministry received about a thousand pieces of mail per day. Each had to be given its registration number and sorted according to the bureau competent to handle it (two to three days). Each director or division chief received a separate packet of mail every morning for each bureau under his authority. The director, between yawns, over the next forty-eight hours, went through the stack looking for letters from people he knew personally. On these, he noted, "Check with me." Still none had actually been

31. "une antichambre, un salon de réception, et un cabinet de travail."

T H E L A D D E R UP

read. Those from individual citizens were most often simply filed unread; citizens were supposed to communicate with subprefects. Functionaries out in the provinces known for writing too much and too often (for being, that is, "écrivassiers"), were warmly hated in the ministries. As were those "innovators" (a slur) who were always proposing new ways of doing things, new projects or plans.32 Finally, the letters got to the appropriate bureau chief, who read them, noted the tenor of a response in the margin, and passed each to a rédacteur to compose a full draft response. This draft might be reviewed by the sous-chef, who disagreed; or the bureau chief might change his mind, and the affair would languish. With luck, the draft would be approved and sent to an expéditionnaire for afinalcopy ready for the minister's signature. This copy would be reviewed by the division chief and, if acceptable, taken along to the division chief's weekly meeting with the minister, where it might be discussed before signature, or a further revision proposed. As like as not, the minister would sign it unread, along with the four hundred other pieces the division chief usually had in his weekly portfolio. Forty days after the initial letter arrived, a response might find its way into the mail. When Ymbert makes general remarks about the situation, they often turn on the contrast between the Empire and the Restoration. Napoleon had made things run; abuse, corruption, and inefficiency came back with the Bourbons. At the same time, often as not, Ymbert uses financial or commercial metaphors to explain bureaucrats' ulterior motives. We have seen some of these above, when he speaks of favoritism in hiring as parceled out according to a "budget," and promises of jobs as letters of credit; or when he calls relatives' willingness to help each other get jobs and promotions "mutual insurance policies," and speaks of a son-in-law, a nephew, an uncle, or a grandfather as having a specific monetary value. Bureaucratic ambitions are equated to the profit motive. Ymbert also sees the salaried employee's sense of self-importance and indifference to work as motivated by self-interest. Since his earnings are not linked to his output, he has no incentive to work efficiently. In a telling general comment that comes toward the end of the first volume, Ymbert deplores the reduction of all factors to their financial dimension; it is a shameful feature of the present era: "In this shameless century, everything that pays or that ought to pay—jobs, contracts, supply accounts—is accorded through

32. Balzac borrowed this theme for his character Rabourdin in Les Employis.

136

T H E L A D D E R UP

long-term planning to oneself and one's heirs, whether direct or collateral" (emphasis added; v.227).33 As in so many other respects, here too, Ymbert showed the way for those observers of bureaucracy who followed. The inadequate operation of the bureaucracy, itself a product of the Revolution just as the rest of the social order now in place, was a consequence of the shameful free play that modern institutions gave to self-interest. Henry Monnier seconded Ymbert's view in a satire of the early 1830s, "Scènes de la vie bureaucratique" (Scenes of Bureaucratic Life).34 Monnier pours scorn upon the majority of sycophantic incompetents in the bureaux, who owe their positions to political influence and family ties. He is indulgent toward the individuals who do most of the work, but they are divided between the intelligent, self-respecting few, who have little chance of advancement, and the submissive ones, who accept any humiliation in the hope of advancement. When Eugène, the unpaid intern (surnuméraire) who is trying to win a permanent post, is asked as a personal favor to go to the bureau chief's home to write out two hundred birth announcements, he is delighted to have been noticed and to have offered a service. His mother is full of hope at the news. But Desroches, an underpaid expéditionnaire who, significandy, was wounded fighting in the cause of liberty in July 1830, deplores Eugène's groveling attitude: "If I was your age, I would not spend my time hunkered down as I do in the bureaux; besides I am too frank to make my way, and I have the misfortune not to adore injustices; I, for one, am not a mere servant."35 But in Monnier's view, it is certainly the "mere servants" (plat valets) who carry the day, even if his own plot has a happy ending, with Desroches narrowly saved from dismissal by a stroke of luck. Craven selfinterest is demeaning and shameful, yet dominates almost unchallenged. Balzac, who closely studied both Ymbert and Monnier, echoed this judgment in his novel on the bureaucracy, Les Employés (1837-1844).36 He 33. "Dans ce siècle éhonté, tout ce qui rapport ou doit rapporter, places, marchés, fournitures, est adjugé, par une longue prévision, à soi-même et à ses héritiers en ligne directe ou collatérale" (emphasis added). 34. This piece, Henry Monnier, "Scènes de la vie bureaucratique," is most readily available in a compilation of 1835, Scènes populaires dessinées à la plume, 2 vols. (Paris, 1835-1837), 2:219-359. 35. "Si j'avais votre âge je ne serais pas à croupir comme je le fais dans des bureaux; d'ailleurs je suis trop franc pour faire mon chemin et j'ai le malheur de ne pas adorer les injustices; je ne suis pas un plat valet, moi." Monnier, "Scènes de la vie bureaucratique," 266. 36. See the preface by Anne-Marie Meininger, to the Gallimard Folio edition of Les Employés (Paris, 1985), 26-27.

The Mistress of the House. Engraving by Eugène Lamy, 1840. A young woman, elegantly dressed, is prepared to receive company. In the accompanying text, an old aristocrat complains that women no longer know how to receive guests; his young interlocutor counters that it is because they are too busy receiving flirtations. Source: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris, 1840-1841), j: opposite 145. The text, of the same title, is by Albert de Circourt, in ibid., 3:145-152. Photo courtesy of Perkins Library Special Collections, Duke University.

The Adulterous Woman. Engraving by Hippolyte Lucas, 1840. The artist has chosen to depict the adulteress in the street, alone, entering a building, with a cab in the background, while trying to reduce the chances she will be recognized; this was suspect behavior in itself, in which no respectable woman would engage. Source: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris, 1840-1841), 3: opposite 265. Photo courtesy of Perkins Library Special Collections, Duke University.

The Vegetable Woman. Engraving by Pauquet, 1841. This sympathetic rendering shows a woman similar in occupation to many of those who sought separations in the Tribunal civil de Versailles. Source: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris: 1840-1841), 5: opposite 321. Photo courtesy of Perkins Library Special Collections, Duke University.

The Supernumerary. Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828. In the government bureaucracy, the unpaid surnuméraire was given from one to four years to prove his worth; during this apprenticeship, he was, by legend, and often in fact, made to carry a heavy burden of the most menial work: copying. Source: Henry Monnier, Les Moeurs administratives (Paris, 1828); a collection of lithographs, this copy was hand painted. Photo by the author, by arrangement with the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.

Asking for a Raise. Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828. Obsequiousness was, in Monnier's view, one of the many vices that plagued the administration. Source: Henry Monnier, Les Moeurs administratives (Paris, 1828); a collection of lithographs, this copy was hand painted. Photo by the author, by arrangement with the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.

Ten o'Cbck: Reading Newspapers, Breakfast, Trimming Quills. Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828. Even an hour after work was supposed to have begun, most were still engaged in drawn-out preliminaries. Source: Henry Monnier, Les Moeurs administratives (Paris, 1828); a collection of lithographs, this copy was hand painted. Photo by the author, by arrangement with the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.

The Political Journalist. Engraving by Paul Gavarni, 1840. This engraving accompanied the essay by Jules Janin, "Le Journaliste"; this is the same essay that appeared separately as a pamphlet and is discussed in Chapter 5. Gavarni's figure admirably captures both the aggressiveness of journalists in this era and the nagging self-doubts that plagued them. Source: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris: 1840-1841), 3: opposite xxxiii. Photo courtesy of Perkins Library Special Collections, Duke University.

The Literary Journalist. Engraving by Eugène Lamy, 1840. This caricature also accompanied the Janin essay. The sharp judgmental cast of the face contrasts with the relaxation of the pose and luxury of the surroundings, suggesting success has come to this critic as reward for a certain arbitrary harshness. Source: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris: 1840-1841), 3: opposite 26J. Photo courtesy of Perkins Library Special Collections, Duke University.

THE LADDER UP

137

depicts bureau chief Rabourdin's wife as reviewing the "expenses" she has made to get her husband promoted and deciding that, in view of his likely new salary level, the deal had been a good one: At last, thanks to her boldness, Madame Ra bourdin heard the hour strike when she was to have twenty thousand francs a year instead of eight thousand. "And I shall have managed well," she said to herself. "I have had to make a small outlay; but these are not times when one goes looking for hidden talents; rather, by putting oneself in the limelight, being seen in society, cultivating relationships and building new ones—that is how one succeeds. After all, ministers and their friends interest themselves only in the people they see, and Rabourdin knows nothing of society! If I had not cajoled those three deputies, they might have wanted La Billardière's place: whereas, now received by me, shame strikes them and they will become our supporters instead ofrivals.I have rather played the coquette but am glad that thefirstbits of nonsense with which one fools a man sufficed."37 [Emphasis added.] In this passage one sees interest and honor intricately interwoven; shame (la vergogne) has been purchased by a small ouday (un peu de dépense), which includes not just the "cost" of entertaining and dressing well, but also that of the "first bits of nonsense" (les premieres niaiseries) for fooling a man, that is, a bit of coquetry too inconsequential to count as infidelity. These costs bring ample return, a salary increase, which means increased honor. Needless to say, Mme Rabourdin's calculations would turn out to be overly optimistic. In another passage, Balzac makes division chief des Lupaulx's election to the Chamber of Deputies—final step in his studied campaign of selfadvancement—depend on the assistance of Jewish usurers, who provide

37. "Enfin, grâce à sa hardiesse, Mme Rabourdin entendait tinter l'heure où elle allait avoir vingt mille francs par an au lieu de huit mille. —Et je me serai bien conduite, se disait-elle. J'ai fait un peu de dépense; mais nous ne sommes pas dans une époque où l'on va chercher les mérites qui se cachent tandis qu'en se mettant en vue, en restant dans le monde, en cultivant ses relations, en s'en faisant de nouvelles, un homme arrive. Après tout, les ministres et leurs amis ne s'intéressent qu'aux gens qu'ils voient, et Rabourdin ne se doute pas du monde! Si je n'avais pas entortillé ces trois députés, ils auraient peut-être voulu la place de La Billardière; tandis que reçus chez moi, la vergogne les prend, ils deviennent nos appuis au lieu d'être nosrivaux.J'ai fait un peu la coquette, mais je suis heureuse que ¡espremières niaiseries avec lesquelles on amuse les hommes aient suffifsic]" (emphasis added). Balzac, Les Employés (Paris, [1837-1843] 1985), 70. The English translation is by Charles Foulkes, in The Bureaucrats (Evanston, 111., 1993), 40.

138

THE LADDER UP

him with the money necessary to purchase land qualifying him for office. His meeting with them is secret, because dishonorable. His only possible means of repaying them will be somehow to make his office itself a springboard to other lucrative deals. These twists in the plot graphically argue: Everything has a price—and this fact is shameful. We shall see, in Chapter 5, how common was the very same judgment when it came time for observers to explain what was wrong with the newspaper trade. These observers were aware, partially, that self-interest in the strict sense of pursuit of monetary gain was not the sole driving force behind the new social order. But they contrived to find the motive of self-interest at work everywhere because this was a convenient way of shaming the new postrevolutionary order. This was an easy trick (or mistake), as we have noted. It was not self-interest that bogged down the bureaucracy but a system of male family honor that was only distantly linked to individual "talent" or "merit" or seniority. This system survived and flourished, albeit in a new configuration, not because of social changes wrought by the Revolution but because pre- and postrevolutionary society remained founded on property. Changes in property and contract law brought changes in the system of honor, to be sure; however, as we have seen in the context of postrevolutionary marriage, they hardly put an end to the reign of honor. And just as honor differs from morality in depending on appearances, so honor differs from interest in defying a rational calculus of prices. A system of honor involves both the management of reputation and, as Mme Rabourdin understood, the exchange of favors or gifts, practices involving high uncertainty both in terms of knowing what effects they have and of knowing what might come of those effects. It is this uncertainty that Ymbert alludes to when he speaks of "mutual insurance policies"—the financial metaphor is revealing but points also to the limits of the notion of interest for explaining this kind of system.

Living Caricatures The voluminous personnel archives of the French administration do provide plentiful evidence to back up Ymbert's criticisms and the satires of his imitators. Historical research on the governing bureaucracy, insofar as it has been written (it is a relatively neglected field), has often, in fact, recycled the imagesfirstelaborated by the generation of Monnier and Ymbert because the records offer plenty that is curious and amusing.38 The 38. See the excellent introduction by Guy Thuillier, La Vie quotidienne dans les ministères au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1976).

THE LADDER UP operation of the bureaux, as revealed in these files, seems peculiar in the extreme, and the temptation is great to deploy colorful anecdote, portraiture, even caricature to evoke this topsy-turvy world. H o w it came into being and maintained itself is more difficult to determine. Why, in particular, had the great reforms of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras created an institutional structure that itself almost at once was seen as in desperate need of further reform? (This is a point on which, seemingly, all observers agree.) To explore this issue, we begin with some cases taken from an examination of personnel files from the central bureaux of the Ministry of the Interior for the years 1814-1848. 3 9 This ministry was chosen for research because of its centrality to the successful governance of the country and its reputation as the most "corrupt" segment of the administrative apparatus. These initial cases give a sense of the puzzling range of attitudes and performance levels to be found in the administrative bureaux. In 1841, the Ministry of the Interior hired as surnuméraire a certain Labrosse, w h o had worked previously for over twenty years as a bureau chief in the prefecture of the Allier Department in Moulins. 40 "Unhappy 39. Personnelfilesfromthe central bureaux preserve the arrêtés (decisions) signed by the minister that were required for every change in an employee's status, no matter how minor. These records may be found in AN F l b I 10 2 through F l b 1 1 0 Thesefileswere subjected to a close reading for the whole period under investigation and to a statistical review for the years 1829 to 1848 inclusive, recording rank and type of action for 2,342 personnel actions. For a small minority of these actions, this series also preserves letters, reports, and notes scribbled in waiting rooms that reveal significant facts about the circumstances surrounding the action. Another useful series of dossiers was begun in 1807, to provide evidence of the length of service of each employee. In practice, these dossiers were used to store the correspondence written by and to employees about their employment. The final sample for this study included 128 dossiers of persons who worked at some time during the period under study (1814-1848), roughly 9 peitent of the total. The dossiers are contained in AN F l b I 2601 through F l b I 286. This alphabetical series continues unbroken down to 1890, covering all persons who retired before that date. There are 56 boxes in the series; sampling suggests an average of between 50 and 60 dossiers per box; therefore, between 2,800 and 3,300 persons worked in the Ministry of the Interior's central bureaux sometime after 1806, and quit or retired before 1891. Four of these boxes were sampled in their entirety, and three others partially. In the four boxes sampled in their entirety, dossiers of 109 persons were found who had worked sometime between 1814 and 1848, inclusive. Extrapolating from thisfiguresuggests that the 56 boxes contain a total of about 1,500 who worked in this period. Two other boxes were sampled in part. Other evidence bearing on personnel matters and work includes lists (états) of the ministry's bureaux, with names of employees, ranks, and salary levels, and dossiers on procedures, work discipline, hours, equipment purchases, and the like. The états can be found in AN F l b 19 2 through F l b I io 12 ; regulations and procedural rules are collected in F la 1 through F la 5. For further discussion of this part of the project, see William M. Reddy, '"Mériter votre bienveillance': Les Employés du Ministère de l'intérieur en France de 1814 à 1848," Le Mouvement social, no. 170 (January-March 1995): 7-37. 40. Labrosse dossier, AN F l b 1279 2 .

i4o

THE LADDER UP

turns of fortune," he said, had forced him to move to Paris, and he had marshaled his protection network to try to get taken on by the ministry once he was there. The "turns o f fortune," it later turned out, involved the anger o f some local investors in Moulins w h o had placed money with him and lost everything. His protectors included two deputies from the Allier, a former prefect whom he had worked for, and a peer—all of whom either wrote or visited the ministry personally to seek a job for him. From his first letter requesting a position, it is apparent that Labrosse was a handwriting expert, and he was placed in the Bureau des Archives. Throughout his career at the ministry, which lasted till his retirement in I8$2, he seems to have striven to live up to the image made famous by Monnier o f the pompous M . Prudhomme. Bombast, hypocrisy, selfimportance, and shameless self-promotion drip from his pen onto every page of his personal correspondence with superiors, all written in a graceful, ornate hand. Here, for example, is the letter he wrote to the ministry's personnel director, the sous-secrétaire d'état (undersecretary of state), thanking him for the unpaid intern post: Monsieur le Sous-Secrétaire d'Etat, I wish to accomplish that most holy of duties, the expression of gratitude. I take, therefore, the liberty to beg you to approve the expression of my most profound sentiments of thankfulness. You know my position and my rights to the just benevolence of the higher Administration. For this reason, I dare to hope, Monsieur le SousSecrétaire d'Etat, that, as a result of that solicitude whose effects I have just experienced, you will not leave me for long in the state I find myself in. I place myself, in this regard, under your paternal protection. Permit me to attach here a number of recommendations that I had not thought to place before your eyes previously. With the greatest desire to renew, in person, my expression of gratitude to you, I beg you to have the goodness to grant me an interview. I am, with profound respect, Monsieur le Sous-Secrétaire d'Etat, Your very humble, very obedient and very grateful servant, Labrosse41

41. Monsieur le Sous-Secrétaire d'Etat, Je viens accomplir le plus saint des devoirs, celui de la reconnaissance. Je prends donc la liberté de vous prier d'agréer l'expression de mes sentiments de la plus profonde gratitude. Vous connaissez ma position et mes droits à la juste bienveillance de l'Administration supérieure. À ce titre, j'ose espérer, Monsieur le Sous-Secrétaire d'Etat, que, par

T H E LADDER UP

141

In August of 1841, four months after being taken on, Labrosse was granted a salary of 1,000 francs a year. But this was still not enough to live on, and, after repeated interventions from his protectors and protestations from himself (especially about the cost of putting a son through the collège at Moulins), his salary inched up to 2,600 by 18+8. He was not, however, promoted beyond rédacteur, in part doubdess because at the higher rank of sous-chef he could not have been expected to prepare documents in his lovely hand anymore. That his hand was valued is evident from an absurdly detailed statistical table that Labrosse prepared to indicated the amount of work he had done in his first nine months at the ministry. His tasks were divided as follows: 1. Agendas (feuilks de travail) for the Royal Council 2. Visas for maps and other indexes 3- Analyses of ordonnances (royal ordinances) to publish in the Bulletin ties bis 4- Circulars registered 5- Filing of ordonnances of 1840 and 1841 in chronological order 6. Number of pages copied 7- Hours collating 8. Filing of 720 maps of which 610 concern the city of Paris and are already noted in a general register set up for them 9- Transcription of laws onto parchment

104 651 883 85 ",573 2,134 51 720 —

Filing and copying—especially high-prestige documents such as the agendas for the meetings of the royal council or parchment copies of all laws passed by Parliament—occupied most of Labrosse's time throughout his years at the ministry. He was thus condemned to low rank and low salary, no matter how much work he managed to pour out. Yet, he tried unceasingly to establish his credentials as something more than a copyist. He noted repeatedly that, among his accomplishments, suite de cette sollicitude dont je viens de ressentir les effets, vous ne me laisserez pas longtemps dans l'état où je suis. Je me mets, à cet égard, sous votre protection paternelle. Permettez que je joigne ici plusieurs attestations que je n'avais point songé à mettre sous vous yeux. Ayant le plus grand désir de vous renouveler de vive voix toute ma reconnaissance, je vous supplie d'avoir la bonté de m'accorder une audience. Je suis avec profond respect, Monsieur le Sous-Secrétaire d'Etat, Votre très humble, très obéissant et très reconnaissant serviteur, Labrosse"

142

THE LADDER UP

he had co-authored a manual for local mayors called La Mairie pratique. In about 1843, he began work on a statistical survey of charitable giving in France. For this latter project, he requested official sanction from the minister and indemnities for the extra work. Once he had received an indemnity, he subsequendy referred to the project as one "commissioned by" the minister. Labrosse's hypocrisy comes out most clearly in a pair of letters, one written in October 1847, just before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, one written two days after its outbreak, on 25 February 1848. In the first, he solicits the further protection of Mme Duchâtel, wife of the minister: "Deign, Mme la comtesse, deign to continue toward me your benevolent support, and you will have made yet one more happy man." In the margin, he mentions his eagerness to continue giving handwriting lessons to her little children: "I am anxious to see my little pupils again. I hope I find them in very good health and ready to work. I offer them my sincere expressions of friendship." Two days after the outbreak of revolution in February 1848, before all the toys of his little pupils could have been removed from the ministry, Labrosse wrote to an unnamed new official of the ministry, begging to be taken on as night guard for the ministry, as member of the National Guard, assuring that he was "a person he can rely on, entirely devoted." Labrosse's loyalties shifted without skipping a beat and, even under a republic, he could not resist doubling the length of the standard closing by adding the "homage" of his "gratitude." Labrosse's unlimited taste for bombast was nowhere more apparent than in his descriptions of his statistical project, which, unfortunately, was notfinisheduntil spring 1848. As a result, its nature and merits had to be explained to a minister of the new regime, still in the hope of winning a promotion. In a letter of 12 May 1848, to the minister and to the sous-secrétaire d'état (as if they would have had nothing else to worry about amid the turmoil and threatened uprisings of those days!), Labrosse describes the statistical work as follows: Among public services, institutions of charity occupy, without contradiction, one of the highest ranks and can, on that score, claim at all times the highest solicitude of a Government. Penetrated by this thought, I conceived in 1841 a project to establish a General Statistics of Gifts Made to Establishments of Charity going back to the beginning of this century, and endeavoring to give to this document that character of permanent utility not often found among works of this nature. . . .

T H E LADDER UP

In effect, a rapid overview of the summary results that it offers gives occasion to a remark interesting and consoling at the same time; it is that, in our century and our society, the trend of legal charity follows the ascending progress imprinted on all social phenomena (population, public wealth, industry, instruction, etc.) under the auspices of liberal institutions.42 In other correspondence, he referred to his statistical work as a "veritable administrative monument" (emphasis in original), "it's gigantic," "my four enormous Statistical Atlases." There is no trace that his superiors took the slightest notice of this work. Like Monnier's Prudhomme (or Flaubert's Homais, the self-important pharmacist from Madame Bovary), Labrosse was really at sea in the world he pretended (a bit desperately) to comprehend. His handwriting expertise may have been a sign, as it was with Prudhomme, that he had not received the higher degrees, baccalauréat or licence. In this case, we might infer that his deficit of educational attainment left him ill at ease with all but the lowest level of office employees and that he tried to make up for this ill ease by somewhat mechanical expedients. He knew how to make a page look good, but not how to make his superiors see him as "one of us." He imagined that he had only to go them one better at their own game. If they were very polite and deferential, he would be extremely polite and deferential; if they used a standard set of formulas and protocols, he would double their length and frequency in his prose. Labrosse would not "think" something when he could be "pénétré de cette pensée" ("penetrated by this thought"). If offering thanks was good, then requesting approval for offering the homage of thanks was better. The ulterior motives of a Labrosse were transparent, hence the attraction of such persons for satirists; here, self-interest seemed obviously to masquerade behind the conventions of honor because the latter were so badly mishandled. 42. "Au nombre des services publics, les établissements de bienfaisance occupent, sans contredit, un des premiers rangs et peuvent à ce titre, réclamer en tout temps la haute sollicitude d'un Gouvernement. "Pénétré de cette pensée, je conçus en 1841 le projet d'établir une Statistiquegénérait des Libéralités faites aux Etablissements de Bienfaisance en remontant au commencement de ce siècle, et en cherchant à donner à ce document ce caractère d'utilité permanente que ne comporte pas en général les travaux de cette nature. . . . "En effet, un coup d'oeil rapide jeté sur les résultats sommaires qu'elle présente donne lieu à une remarque intéressante et consolante toute à la fois; c'est que, dans notre siècle et notre société le mouvement de la charité légale suit la progression ascendante imprimée à tout les phénomènes sociaux (population,richessepublique, industrie, instruction, etc.) sous les auspices d'institutions libérales."

T H E LADDER UP

A living caricature of himself, Labrosse was also apparently a tireless workhorse and appreciated as such. But other employees of similar rank and higher pay could be found alongside of Labrosse who apparendy did almost nothing. Two years after Labrosse came to the ministry, a shortlived effort to evaluate employee output was made, the only such effort of which there remains any trace in the records. Monthly reports from a bureau chief named Cabanne in the Section des Prisons for the period from August 1843 through February 1844, apparendy misfiled, were preserved in the archives.43 The section chief, Ardit, annotated Cabanne's remarks where he felt they were misleading or inaccurate. Two young expéditionnaires, Desmolins and Lam arque, were evaluated as follows: July 1843 Desmolins: The nature of the work he is given is not difficult and even less varied. He is prompt and of good will. [Added by Ardit: ] By "prompt" one must understand that M. Desmolins keeps up to date the small amount of work assigned to him. But he always comes in late. Lamarque: He continues to fail to respect the office's hours, nonetheless, he was able to complete the copying work for the affairs assigned to him. He can do more and better. One could put him in a better bureau and demand more of him while paying him more. [Added by Ardit:] I don't think Lamarque wants to stay in the ministry. He is involved in work for newspapers, where he hopes to make a more lucrative career for himself. Perhaps he is right. Always late. November 1843 Desmolins: He is assigned the job of copying out letters that grant permission to stay in departmental prisons, to convicts with more than one year to serve. He did 47 this month, which has kept him up to date. I would like to assign some other litde detail to him, for he does not lack good will. December 1S43 Lamarque: M. Ardit offered this young man a chance to try rédaction [composing correspondence]. The lack of interest he showed for this favor tends to prove that M. Lamarque has given in to discouragement and to the apathy that follows from it. He seems now to recover a bit of zeal, and composes letters with intelligence; one can therefore hope still to make a useful employee of him, if he realized that the administration is not indifferent

43. These documents were apparently prepared in response to a circular letter of the sous secrétaire d'état of 7 April 1843. But only one section's responses were found. They are now in A N F l b I 91.

T H E LADDER UP

145

to the destiny of those who work well for it. M. de Lamarque is far from lacking in talent. These two, Desmolins and Lamarque, were at the bottom of the totem pole, making small salaries (1,200 francs); it appears that Cabanne did not really expect them to work. In the whole month of November, Desmolins "wrote" ("copied" would be more accurate) forty-seven form letters—a rate of about two letters a day. This is all he was expected to do; he seldom came in before noon. Yet, in his first report, Cabanne used the word exactitude— meaning never absent or late—to describe his work. Later, he admitted Desmolins's habitual tardiness, but suggested more pay and more work might encourage more application on his part. Lamarque did even less work; his section chief, knowing he was writing for newspapers on the side, offered him more prestigious redaction work; still he was indifferent, late. There were some workhorses in the bureau who kept it going: the souschef Brunet (recently promoted from rédacteur), who handled between 80 and 160 affairs per month, the surnuméraire Beyerlé, who copied over 500 pages a month (still only about 20 a day, less than 3 pages an hour). They, too, were recommended for encouragement in the form of raises or promotions. There is no evidence of disciplinary action taken against any of these workers.44 If Labrosse recalls Monnier's handwriting expert M. Prudhomme, Desmolins and Lamarque remind one of Ymbert's bureau, where everyone knew how to say emphatically, "I don't have the time!" while pursuing their favorite hobbies. But how were they able to carry it off? Was the bureau of prisons, like Ymbert's fictitious bureau, located at the end of an out-of-the-way hall?

The Rhetoric and Practice of Honor Although the pictures conveyed by these cases seem both extreme and humorous, they do not add up to a coherent picture on their own. Neither hard work nor immoderate groveling helped Labrosse get ahead. But neither idleness nor indifference to one's superiors seemed to have any ill effects on the careers of Lamarque and Desmolins. To understand what, after all, did make a difference in the bureaux, it is necessary to increase our stock of examples while pursuing an analysis of the patterns we have already unearthed and the charges of satirists like Ymbert.

44. In a report of 27 December 1845, Ardit referred to Lamarque as an "excellent employé" (AN F lb 110 8 ).

146

T H E LADDER UP

DISMISSALS

The records suggest it was extremely difficult, in fart, to get dismissed from a job at the ministry. Review of the rare cases that provide a clear rationale for firings shows that employees were discharged when their conduct endangered the honor of the ministry. Poor performance counted for little unless the employee enjoyed no protections. Here, for example, is the explanation Division Chief Fauchat provided for demanding the dismissal of a young man named Delisle in 1821: "Sometimes held in Ste. Pélagie prison for debt, sometimes preoccupied with his health, which had been affected by his bad conduct, he has allowed the burden to fall on his comrades. When he feels well and is not in prison, a lugubrious passion rules him, and he is hardly any more helpful in the bureau. This passion, which is not his only one from what I hear, is gambling. All present and future resources are sacrificed to it." His wife's family has been of some help, Fauchat continues, but can do no more. "Compromised in the esteem of respectable people, compromising the honor of the bureaux of the ministry, this employee can no longer be included in a class of men who must have public opinion on their side, in the interest of the administration itself" (emphasis added).45 Fauchat assured his superior that he had given Delisle every opportunity to reform himself. Twenty times he had summoned Delisle to his office to discuss his behavior; Delisle had not been at work on any of the twenty occasions.46 One could say that the standard of performance applied by Fauchat in his case was extremely lax. But "laxity" misses the point; performance was not really the issue for Fauchat in the Delisle case. It was the dishonorable character of Delisle's behavior—both of his passions and of their consequences for wife and colleagues—that made it necessary to dismiss him. Other cases of dismissals confirm this pattern. Fauchat was perfecdy explicit about this; not poor performance, but "compromising the honor of the bureaux" was the grounds for his dismissal. In two instances, high officials, trying to free up funds for hiring, produced very frank evaluations of subordinates they wished to fire. In the second of these, a detailed report prepared in 1837, Edmond Blanc, soussecrétaire d'état, identified twenty individuals who were in his view the

45. "Compromis dans l'estime des honnêtes gens et compromettant l'honneur des bureaux du Ministère, cet employé ne peut plus faire partie d'une classe d'hommes qui doit avoir pour elle l'opinion publique dans l'intérêt même de l'administration'' (emphasis added). 46. Report of 11 January 1821, A N F l b I io4.

T H E LADDER UP

147

best candidates for dismissals.47 He divided them into three categories: (1) those who could be fired forthwith "without any inconvenience resulting for the administration"; (2) those with thirty years' service who might be induced to retire early; (3) those whom there were good reasons to fire, but whose dismissal might create "quite serious difficulties." Of the five listed who could be fired immediately, none were charged with poor performance. The list contains two persons sullied by possible connection to a notorious criminal, a political appointee who was planning to leave for another post, a man of advanced age, and a young man known to be dissolute. The seven persons in the second category, eligible for retirement (although not yet eligible for the maximum benefit), would all require some persuasion, according to Blanc. In some instances, this might entail enhancements of pensions, in others poor health or enfeeblement could be cited as justifying the minister's desire to part with them (in which case, they benefited from slightly more favorable pension arrangements). But the third category is, in some ways, the most interesting. Five of the nine persons whose dismissals would present difficulties were evaluated as simply not being necessary but as enjoying, unfortunately, strong protection. De la Madeleine, rédacteur-expéditionnaire in the Bureau des Beaux Arts, "has not made himself very useful," but "I am assured he has protectors in high places."48 In some instances the protector was named: Silvestre had taught handwriting to Louis Philippe's children before becoming commis d'ordre in the Bureau du Personnel, where "he is of no use." Spicrenaël had been brought in by minister Gasparin, but "his colleagues have not found that he is necessary." A sixth, Miot fils (son of a long-time ministry bureau chief), had fallen into debt and was suspected of having had ties to the notorious criminal, Vidocq. In the Bureau des Théâtres, Genetet's sight "is almost gone"; but his division chief insisted he be granted a small pension from the belles lettres budget before being discharged. Of nine employees whom it would be difficult to fire, six were judged poor performers; difficulty arose for five of them from the protections they enjoyed. Again, performance had little relevance. Most of those who were charged with poor performance were individuals relatively new to the ministry who had gotten their positions thanks to outside protectors and who

47. Undated report of 1837 in A N F l b 1 1 0 6. See also an earlier report recommending multiple firings, by Franchet Desperez, 12 April 1822, in A N F l b I io 4 . 48. "on assure qu'il a de hautes protections."

148

T H E LADDER UP

had not (or not yet)foundprotection inside the ministry.49 Those who could most easily be discharged were not poor performers at all but had dishonored themselves in some way, by criminal involvements, indebtedness, or dissolute habits. The minister could, of course, fire anyone he wished at any time, but the Blanc report reads as if the employees were following careers of honor, in which by avoiding shame and seeking out powerful protectors they sought to advance their standing and that of their families.50 This may in turn help to explain the Cabanne evaluations. If Lamarque and Desmolins held their jobs because of the influence of protectors, and could not befiredbecause of certain "inconveniences" that would result, then Cabanne's avuncular, even resigned tone of voice, as if he and section chief Ardit were trying to lead troublesome schoolboys aright, would make perfect sense. NEPOTISM, OFFICES, RAISES AND PROMOTIONS

Other elements of Ymbert's satirical critique can easily be documented. Nepotism was openly practiced, and employees cooperated willingly in finding places for their colleagues' sons, nephews, and in-laws. Two examples will suffice to convey the atmosphere. High food prices in Paris in 1817 induced the ministry to distribute emergency bonuses to some of its less well paid staff members. The secretaire general (secretary general, to whom routine personnel management was delegated at that time) proposed to the minister that 7,200 francs of available funds be distributed as supplements to the neediest employees, whose low salaries put them at risk of real hardship. Among those he mentioned as worthy of consideration was M. de l'Etangji& (M. dc l'Etang, son). "The second son of M. de l'Etang works next to his father [in the Bureau of General Administration]," remarked the secretaire's report. "M. Maitre [the bureau chief] requests a bonus for him; it is due him undoubtedly, for all work merits recompense; but I must reproach M. l'Etang, his father, for having paid no attention to the decision of Your Excellency of 27 January. . . . This is not thefirsttime that M. l'Etang has kept his son in the bureau in spite of an order given not to admit him anymore."51 49. An example of an employee who came in with outside protections but gradually developed internal ones is Rome, AN F lb 1278 s . 50. The notion of a career of honor is, of course, an old one; for its relevance to an earlier period of French history, see Kristen B. Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989). 51. "M. Maitre [le chef de bureau] demande pour lui une gratification; elle lui est due sans doute, puisque tout travail mérite recompense; mais je doit faire a M. l'Etang pere Ie

T H E LADDER UP

1+9

In the end, de l'Etang fils got not only his supplementary pay but also a permanent post. He enjoyed a long, if not distinguished, career in the ministry.52 This was one of sixteen cases found in the personnel files of a son coming to work in the same bureau as his father, with the willing cooperation, or at least, as in this case, the grudging acquiescence of peers and superiors. As this case suggests, this kind of unauthorized hiring went undocumented, and it is therefore difficult to evaluate its true frequency, although probably it affected no more than 10 percent of hires. A second example shows the workings of nepotism at a higher level. In August 1840, Mme Roulhac du Maupas wrote to the minister of the interior demanding a job for her eldest son.53 In support of her demand, she noted that his late father was a long-time employee of the ministry, as director of the asylum at Charenton, and that she was herself a niece of Royer-Collard, a député and former secretary general of the ministry. Roulhac, age twenty, wrote himself, as well, mentioning these family entidements with bald self-assurance. Young Roulhac's uncle, Genty de Bury, member of the Conseil d'état and bureau chief in the Ministry of War, left several notes for various officials of the Ministry of the Interior in late 1840 after unsuccessful attempts to visit them. These all found their way eventually into Roulhac's personnel file (he was hired in the end). From Octobers, 1840: I have the honor of [extending?] all my [illegible] to M. de Malleville. I came by ten times at least without being lucky enough to catch him. Would he do me the kindness of telling me what time I might be sure not to disturb him? I remind him that the minister did me the kindness to formally promise the admission as intern of the great nephew of Royer-Collard . . . son of a former high official of the Ministry of the Interior.54

reproche de n'avoir tenu aucun compte de l'arrêté de Votre Excellence du 27 janvier. . . . Ce n'est pas la première fois que M. l'Etang père maintient son fils dans le bureau malgré l'ordre donné de ne plus l'admettre." Report of Lescarène to the minister, 25 June 1817, AN F l b Iio 3 . 52. Among frequent mentions of him, see arrêtés of 10 October 1840 (AN F l b I io7); 22 December 1845 (AN F"> I io8). 53. The Roulhac file is in AN F l b 1278 s . 54. T a i l'honneur de [illegible] tous mes [illegible] à M. de Malleville. Je suis venu dix fois au moins sans être assez heureux pour le rencontrer. Voudrait-il bien avoir la bonté de me dire à quelle heure je serais sur de ne pas le déranger? "Je lui rappelle que le ministre a eu la bonté de me promettre formellement l'admission comme surnuméraire du petit neveu de M. Royer-Collard . . . le fils d'un ancien fonctionnaire supérieur du ministère de l'intérieur."

ISO

THE LADDER UP Another note to Malleville followed on 20 October; on 9 December,

a note to the minister reminded him of a second promise he had made "at the home of the minister for foreign affairs." There was also a note of 15 November with no addressee listed; the salutation, "mon cher collègue" ("my dear colleague") indicates that it was addressed to someone of equal rank. This note concludes: "You would be doing good for all our family under the circumstances [if you got my nephew the post], and I who have appointed myself spokesman, would feel infinite gratitude." Obviously, Genty de Bury's reference to "all our family" and to "infinite gratitude" were nearly explicit promises to make equal return at a later date. Roulhac received his nomination in January 1841, after five months of persistent effort by his relatives. H e received a salary by 1843 (a relatively brief interval for those years) and enjoyed a slow but steady rise to bureau chief by 1874, a post that he still held at the time of his death in 1884The ministries were, as Ymbert implied, frequendy ill housed in old aristocratic hotels of the faubourg Saint-Germain, with lower employees crammed four or five to a room in outer offices, with bureaux scattered illogically along hallways and landings, and poorly marked, so that supervision was impossible and visitors often lost their way. 55 Although seldom spoken of explicidy, the meaning of this palpable link to the oldregime high aristocracy, represented by the use of their expropriated palaces—however ill adapted they were to their new uses—was made all the more clear by the fact that certain employees of the ministry, the 55. In 1822, for example, Lacvivier made the following vivid complaint: "Trois de nos bureaux, avec leurs accessoires et dépendances, sont entamés actuellement dans une pièce triangulaire qui sert d'antichambre à M. de Lavédrine. Un garçon de bureau y passe et y repasse continuellement, aurisque,non seulement de nous déranger de nos travaux, mais, ce qui seroit plus tragique, de nous casser la tête avec une des bûches dont il va alimenter le feu de la pièce voisine. Je ne parle pas des solliciteurs, dont les visites intéressées doivent être tout aussifréquentesqu'ailleurs et, par conséquent, tout aussi importunes. Depuis vingtquatre heures je n'en ai encore compté que trois, mais, pour bien calculer l'étendue de la servitude, il faut attendre le premier jour de l'audience. Ajoutez, et ce n'est point un léger inconvénient, que, dans ce malheureux bureau, il fume horriblement, en dépit du Vagistar qui orne la croisée, et que cette fumée qui, partout ailleurs, n'incommoderoit que la vue, devient ici très malfaisante, en se mêlant aux émanations de trois corps resserrés dans un si petit espace. D'un autre coté, le bureau, placé sous les combles, est beaucoup trop éloigné du cabinet de M. le chef Allant, qui se trouve au rez-de-chaussée d'un corps de logis séparé. M. Allent, qui est l'humanité même, aura-t-il le courage de nous appeler auprès de lui, cinq à six fois dans une matinée, par un temps de glace, de pluie ou de neige, de nous faire descendre d'un troisième étage, traverser une grande cour? Et, s'il ne le fait pas, ces ménagemens ne nuiront-ils pas à l'expédition des affaires?" From Lacvivier dossier in F lb 1272 1 . See also Thuillier, La VU quotidienne dans les ministères, 15-20.

T H E LADDER UP

highest-ranking and the lowest, actually lived on the premises. The core of the old palace, its grand halls and reception rooms along with a private apartment, were reserved for the minister himself. Numerous garçons de bureau, porters, official messengers (huissiers), and janitors (ordonnances) were able to find rooms or small apartments in the garrets. Occasionally, a division chief or department chief might also be granted an apartment.56 Thus, each ministry doubled as an aristocratic household, replete with lackeys and resident protégés, presided over by a head of household whose personal powers over his people were every bit as extensive as a prince de Condé of prerevolutionary days.57 Bureau staff cooperated in maximizing the importance of their work and minimizing its burden on themselves. They grew to expect that salary funds freed up by a death or retirement in their own bureau would be redistributed to them exclusively, a practice that contributed further, along with nepotism and protection, to salary inequities constituting, in Ymbert's words, "the most shocking senselessness and barbarities."58 An example of the complex, proprietary calculations that went into decisions about raises and promotions is provided by the series of changes that followed the death on 27 May 1842, of Ducoroy, sous-chef of the Bureau des Opérations Centrales (Central Operations Bureau). Ducoroy had reviewed all outgoing ordonnances (payment authorizations), an important responsibility. Arranging for a replacement gave rise to delicate negotiations between Rosman, chief of the Division de la Comptabilité Générale (General Accounting Division) and Passy, sous-secrétaire d'état (charged with personnel management at this time). Following their meeting, Rosman wrote to Passy on 1 June 1842, to confirm in writing what they had agreed to verbally; dry, even boring atfirstglance, this note probably echoes very closely the tense, terse reasoning of face-to-face negotiations over the ministry's most precious resource, salary funds. "In the conference which I had this morning with you, " Rosman wrote: "I explained the conditions that do not permit me this time to find in the division of accounting, by promotion, the means of replacing M. Ducoroy. I accepted with enthusiasm the sous-chef that can be ceded to me . . . but I had to insist on the necessity of increasing the salaries of the current em56. Sec Fauchat dossier for an example, AN F l b I 2661. 57. In fact, as Maza's book has shown, aristocratic households had refigured service within them as salaried employment prior to the Revolution; see Sarah C. Maza, Servants and Musters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, N.J., 1983). 58. For a full discussion of all the factors enumerated here, see Reddy, "Mériter la bienveillance."

152

THE LADDER UP

ployees of the Bureau where the vacancy has occurred, and I attempted also to make known the entitlements of two other persons to whom I consider myself personally engaged" (emphasis added).59 As the emphasized words suggest, superiors felt their own reputations on the line when they sought to satisfy their subordinates' pent-up desires for recognition and advancement. Rosman proposed a raise of 200 francs for the sous-chef who was to transfer in; 400 francs for the bureau chief who would be his new boss; 200 francs for each of two expéditionnaires in the bureau, and 600 francs to provide a salary for the bureau's surnuméraire. In addition, he wanted a small raise for one of his other bureau chiefs. Rosman noted that this would leave 1,600 francs of Ducoroy's salary, a sum that would fall back into the minister's control (but that would not compensate for the whole salary of the sous-chef transferring in). The sous-chef transferring into Rosman's division, Etévenot, had been working under Paillet in the Bureau des Réfugiés (Bureau of Refugees), part of the Direction de la Police Générale du Royaume (Direction of General Police of the Realm). Paillet acceded to the idea of Etévenot's departure, assuring the sous secrétaire d'état that present personnel could fill the gap. But Paillet had reasons of his own for agreeing to the deal: You have appreciated, Monsieur le Sous-Secrétaire d'Etat, and I do not doubt that Monsieur le Ministre will deign also to appreciate the excess work and surveillance that results for me from the loss of an intelligent collaborator and from the care I must take in training another employee in a very special set of skills. In these circumstances you have been so good, Monsieur le SousSecrétaire d'Etat, as to promise me that you would bring my salary from 5,joo to 6,000 francs. My record of service, which goes back twenty-eight years, permits me to hope that Monsieur le Ministre will consent to this raise, which has been promised me fòr a long time.60 [Emphasis added.]

59. "Dans la conférence que j'ai eue ce matin à ce sujet avec vous, j'ai exposé les motifs qui ne me permettent pas cettefins,de trouver dans la division de comptabilité, par de l'avancement, des moyens de remplacer M. Ducoroy. J'ai accepté avec empressement le sous chef qui peut m'être cédé. . . mais j'ai du insister sur la nécessité d'améliorer les traitements des employés actuels du Bureau qui éprouve la vacance, et j'ai cherché aussi à faire valoir les titres de deux autres sujets avec lesquels je me considérais comme personnellement engagé" (emphasis added). A N F l b 110 *. 60. "Vous avez apprécié, Monsieur le sous secrétaire d'état, et je ne doute pas que Monsieur le Ministre ne daigne également apprécier le surcroît de travail et de surveillance qui résultera pour moi de la perte d'un collaborateur intelligent et du soin que je devrait prendre de former un autre employé à une nature toute spéciale d'attributions.

T H E LADDER UP

Paillct went on to mention two other employees of his bureau, a rédacteur and an expéditionnaire, for 200 and 400 franc raises, respectively. This would amount to 1,100 francs out of Ducoroy's salary. "I am reassured about the outcome of the above proposals," Paillet concludes, "because you have already bun sogood as to agree to them" (emphasis added) ].61 The wording here emphasizes previous commitments, but in that knowledgeable way of the experienced bureaucrat who recognizes that promises mean nothing until the minister's signature is affixed to a document. Close comparison of Paillet's and Rosman's notes reveals the full character of the arrangement. Ducoroy's salary had been 3,400. Etévenot, transferred in to replace him, was not himself being replaced in the Bureau of Refugees. Therefore, the entirety of Ducoroy's salary was available for redistribution. Etévenot was to receive a raise of 200; a further 1,100 was to go to Paillet and his employees; 1,600 was to go to former colleagues of Ducoroy, partially to placate them for receiving no promotions. (Amyot, Ducoroy's bureau chief, had remarked to Rosman: "In any case, if this unhappy event is not an occasion for advancement for them, which I would have very much wished as their colleague, I would recommend them to the special benevolence of M. Rosman for a good raise.")62 The whole operation was a zero-sum game from the minister's point of view. Employees, in a manner of speaking, "inherited" raises and promotions from departed colleagues. This was one of the "abuses" that minister Duchâtel attempted to eliminate by a series of personnel policy reforms of November 1839. But it persisted nonetheless. Five of the best-documented cases of such local redistributions of salary funds, involving a total of 36 raises or promotions, date from the period after November 1839, because such redistributions now had to be justified by written requests. Review of well-documented personnel actions revealed 15 cases involving 45 persons in which at least half of the funds freed by a

"En cette occurrence vous avez bien voulu, Monsieur le sous secrétaire d'état, me promettre de faire porter mon traitement de 5,500 à 6,000 francs. Mes services, qui datent de 28 années, me permettent d'espérer que Monsieur le Ministre consentira cette augmentation qui, depuis longtemps m'est promise." Ibid. 61. "Je suis rassuré sur le sort des propositions qui précèdent, puisque, déjà vous avez bien voulu les accorder. " Ibid. 62. "Dans tous les cas, si ce malheureux événement n'était pas pour eux une occasion d'avancement, ce que j'aurais vivement souhaité comme leur camarade, je les recommanderais à la bienveillance particulière de Monsieur Rosman pour une bonne augmentation." Ibid.

154

T H E LADDER UP

departure were redistributed within the same bureau.63 In seven of these cases, and in an additional ten cases, raises and promotions resulting from a departure or death were kept within the same unit (section, division, or department), affecting a further 81 persons. In all, it was possible to document 133 raises or promotions that were linked to funds freed up by a departure in the same bureau or same unit. (Of these, 97 occurred between 1829 and 1848, or 7.4 percent of a total of 1,308 raises and promotions tallied for these years.) In a much larger set of cases, there can be little doubt, the necessary documentation for tracing such patterns was not generated. There is indirect evidence that these patterns of redistribution were so well accepted that they did not require specific notice or justification. Anticipating such complex redistributive deals, bureau chiefs and even division chiefs had every reason to emphasize the indispensability of every employee, no matter how idle he might be in practice. Here is yet another reason why Desmolins and Lamarque were treated with such indulgence by their superiors. To insist on their superfluousness was to invite a budget cut when one of them left. T H E R H E T O R I C OF

HONOR

It is striking that the records contain no trace of efforts to conceal or deny any of the conditions just enumerated, the idleness, the nepotism, the lack of supervision, the proprietary calculus used to redistribute salary funds; quite the opposite, it would seem that Ymbert and other observers decried as corruption and inefficiency practices that were embraced as proper and exemplary by the employees themselves, at every level of the hierarchy. One or two voices were raised against them, it is true; but these were the exceptions that proved the rule. What Ymbert, and the whole literature of bureaucratic satire, fail to offer us is any idea of the principles of legitimacy that informed and justified these practices. Close examination reveals the clear operation of a more or less coherent system 63. Here is a list of cases: From A N F l b I io 4 arrêtés of the following dates: 15 March 1819, 24 May 1820,15 February 1821, 8 March 1821; from A N F l b I io 5 an arrêté of the following date: 12 November 1836; from A N F l b I io 6 an arrêté of the following date: 17 April 1839. Cases involving such written justifications dated after 8 November 1839: From A N F l b I io 7 arrêtés of the following dates: 6 October 1840, 24 April 1841; from A N F l b I io 8 arrêtés of the following dates: 1 July 1842, 31 December 1842,19 August 1845, 30 September 1845; from A N F l b I io 9 arrêtés of the following dates: 2 November 1846, 6 June 1846, 13,17 March 1848. The requirements for redistributing salaries were specified in article 14 of the arrêté of 8 November 1839, an arrêté that set out a whole new salary and promotion regime for the ministry; see A N F l b I io 6 .

T H E LADDER UP

155

of honor. Misconstrued by critics of the administration as a corrupt, ulterior motive of "self-interest," the search for honor was carried out by well-understood rules, and its relation to the principle of "merit," although often cloudy, nonetheless did not pose insuperable difficulties. Honor had a rhetoric as well as a set of practices, and it was not the bombast of Labrosse or the empty multiplication of formulas of protocol denounced by Ymbert. This rhetoric involved a careful balancing of a vocabulary of merit and a vocabulary of deference and gift giving. The two are often closely sandwiched together in the stock phrases of bureaucratic prose, but they contained an underlying tension. Whether or not they actually worked hard, ministry employees were quick to defend their mérites and their titres (entitlements) to raises and promotions. They and their protectors cited the services of their relatives as readily as their own; they cited their ancienneté (seniority), ztle (zeal), assiduité (application), capacité (talent), exactitude (promptness). They cited their family situations (bankrupt brothers, invalid mothers-in-law, young children), if these seemed to merit intérêt (interest). (It was always useful to mention one was the father of a family.) They spoke frequently of justice, and of promises. But however definite the merit, the entidement, or the promises, however deserving the family needs, one never made demands of the minister. A minister's promises, likewise, created no rights in themselves. Promising to do something later was a fundamental tool for dealing with unwanted visitors. Protectors reported these promises (perhaps slighdy exaggerated), and their protégés remembered them; but everyone knew that promises did not have to be kept. There was always a rhetorical buffer zone between entitlements and ministerial decisions; by definition, the minister could do no wrong; nothing could be required of him. The minister was addressed as "Votre Excellence." His Excellency never dispensed rewards that had been earned; he proffered favors, he extended benevolence, he conferred kindnesses. The rhetoric of merit was paralleled by a rhetoric of gift giving. The two were often tighdy interwoven. A typical example is the following, from a letter of a certain Roussel to the minister in 1828: "The movements that are occurring in various branches of the ministry may render Your Excellency capable of distributing a few favors; so I dare beg You to take into account the entitlements which I believe I have to Tour benevolence" (emphasis added).64 Roussel felt entided, not direcdy to a raise, but to that 64. "Les mouvemens qui ont lieu dans les diverses branches du Ministère pouvant mettre Votre Excellence à même de répandre quelques faveurs, j'ose la prier de se faire rendre

ij6

THE LADDER UP

benevolence which prompted the minister to distribute favors. Said a prefect of the Moselle Department in 1838, on behalf of a cousin who was employed in the ministry's central bureaux: "I would be profoundly grateful for whatever Your Excellency might think You ought to do for M. Sers, who would know how to prove by his devotion how much he merits your kindnesses" (emphasis added).65 This language seems on the face of it contradictory. Rights and entitlements are the opposite of gifts and kindnesses. The former require recognition; the latter are arbitrary and free. Although these phrases flowed easily from the pens of ministry employees, there is an unmistakable tension between a vocabulary of meritocracy and a vocabulary of protection and favor, of personal exchange between, not fellow citizens, but a lofty patron and his humble servants. Mastery of the subdeties of this rhetoric was an advantage, a form of "merit" far more appreciated than a mere fine hand or sweated hours of extra copying, as is suggested by the successful career of one employee, whose dossier contains a number of excellent examples of properly deferential bureaucratic prose. Hired as a surnuméraire at age sixteen in 1812 (having quit school for reasons not given, perhaps financial), made expéditionnaire two years later, Hyppolite Frédéric Jacot-Presset had achieved the rank of sous-chef by 1829, and was by 1847 a full bureau chief. Jacot-Presset was one of the relative few who sailed with ease over the hurdle that blocked the advancement of many others, Labrosse included, beyond the rank of expéditionnaire or at most rédacteur: an incomplete education. The earliest piece of correspondence in Jacot-Presset's file, a request for promotion dated 1817, shows he was already, as a twenty-yearold expéditionnaire, master of the necessary rhetorical forms. "Monseigneur," he begins, "Permit me to beg from the goodness of Your Excellency a favor to which I attach a great price. For over a year I have been charged with the work of commis d'ordre in the Bureau of Subsistence, without having that title."66 Jacot-Presset explained that he hadfirstsub-

compte des titres que je crois avoir à sa bienveillance" (emphasis added). From Roussel file in AN F l b 1278 s . 65. "Je serais profondément reconnaissant de ce que Votre Excellence croirait devoirfaire pour M. Sers qui saura prouver par son dévouement combien il mérite vos bontés" (emphasis added). Letter of Sers, préfet de la Moselle, 12 October 1838, in Sers dossier, AN F lb 1279*. 66. "Permettez moi de solliciter de la bonté de Votre Excellence une faveur à laquelle j'attache un grand prix. "Depuis un an je suis chargé au Bureau des subsistances des fonctions de commis d'ordre, sans en avoir le titre." From Jacot-Presset's file, in AN F l b 1270.

T H E LADDER UP

157

stituted for a sick commis d'ordre. But that man had died, and now his bureau chief wished to give the post to him, "Giving meflatteringsigns of his approval for the manner in which I have accomplished my work so far. Encouraged by his praise," he continues, "which Iflattermyself I have earned, I have done all I could to respond to the confidence he has been so good as to honor me with; and, hoping I have succeeded, I turn now to beg Your Excellency to be so good as to grant me the tide of commis d'ordre, daring toflattermyself that You might indeed recognize I have somerightto it."67 To conclude the letter, he "dared" to mention another entidement: the misfortune of his parents, who depended entirely on him for their survival. "It would be sweet for me," he says, "to be able to contribute more substantially" to their support. He promises the minister continued zeal, "no matter what decision Your Excellency wishes to take in my case."68 He hopes "to be worthy at all times to merit Your benevolence, whose happy effect I beg that You will let me feel on this occasion."69 Jacot-Presset did not receive his promotion immediately. The letter augured well for his future, however, because in it he was able to achieve the proper balance between claims and entidements, on the one hand (his own performance on the job, his superior's approval, his family's need), and deference and submission (the "flattering" character of his superior's approbation; his use of supplier (beg) instead of demander (request or demand); his assurance that his zeal will be in no way affected by the minister's decision, whatever it may be). Above all, in the phrase, "osant me flatter qu'elle voudra bien me reconnaître quelques droits à l'obtenir" ("daring toflattermyself that You might indeed recognize I have some right to it"), Jacot-Presset gets the priorities right. The claim to merit is itself qualified by a request for recognition, and this recognition remains entirely within the personal discretion of the minister. Even the bureau chief's approval of the promotion does not, in Jacot-Presset's words, in any way prejudice or pressure the minister, because it is itself flattering, that is, perhaps exaggerated. The import of these complicated formulas

67. "en me donnant des témoignages flatteurs d'approbation pour la manière dont je m'en était acquitté jusqu'alors. Encouragé par ses éloges, que je me félicite de mériter, j'ai fait tous mes efforts pour répondre à la confiance dont il a bien voulu m'honorer; et je viens, dans l'espoir d'y avoir réussie, supplier Votre Excellence de vouloir bien m'accorder le titre de commis d'ordre, osant me flatter qu'elle voudra bien me reconnaître quelques droits à l'obtenir." 68. "quelle que soit la décision que Votre Excellence voudra bien prendre à mon égard." 69. He hopes "d'être digne en tout temps de mériter votre bienveillance dont je vous supplie de me faire sentir cette fois l'heureux effet."

I58

THE LADDER UP

is that the minister retains complete freedom of action, and his action will therefore be received as a gift, even if that action involves recognition of evident merit. The minister bestows a faveur (favor) out of bonté (goodness, kindness), in recognizing merit; such a favor is an honor. In referring to his family's state of need as well, Jacot-Presset's touch is light. Rather than emphasize the pain that his obligations impose on him, he notes how doux (sweet) it would be to help them in their need. Jacot-Presset received the requested promotion within nine months. His next effort at receiving a promotion succeeded as well. This was a crucial step in his career; still young, without the usual educational qualifications, he wanted to cross the line to become a rédacteur. A long letter of 1822 to the minister exhibits again his unique talent for touting his merits while granting complete liberty of action—and all credit for the action—to the minister.70 In an unusual letter in support of the promotion, Jacot-Presset's division chief, Fauchat, comments on the frequent inconveniences of such promotions, in that they lead employees to refuse to do work they did before, because it is now beneath their rank: But M. Jacot is one of those docile and zealous employees to whom it is unnecessary to give orders. He does everything that his superiors request and does it with enthusiasm. . . . I felt it was my duty to tell you of the satisfaction that I have in the work of M. Jacot, and to assure you that no employee would be more worthy of a favor nor would justify more fully the benevolence which you might direct his way.71 Even for Fauchat, who sought toflatterand to praise whenever he could, this evaluation is unusual. He says that Jacot-Presset is cooperative and does whatever is asked of him. This goes far beyond the usual drone of "zèle, capacité, exactitude." The evaluation matches the exaggerated deference of Jacot-Presset's writing style. One of Jacot-Presset's principle merits is, in effect, his self-effacing compliancy, his gratitude, his expert deference. And Fauchat habitually uses the same phrasing that depicts all acts

70. Letter of 4 January 1822, in Jacot-Presset's fife, A N F l b I 270. 71. "Mais M. Jacot est un de ces employes dociles et zélés pour desquels une mesure imperative est superflue. Il fait tout ce que lui demandent ses chefs et le fait avec empressement.. . . "J'ai cru qu'il étoit de mon devoir de vous informer de la satisfaction que j'éprouve du travail de M. Jacot [Presset], et de vous assurer qu'aucun employé ne serait plus digne d'une faveur et ne justifierait davantage la bienveillance dont vous useriez à son égard." Fauchat letter of 26 June 1822, in A N F l b I 270.

T H E LADDER UP

159

of the minister, however obligatory they may be, as acts of generosity; no employee "would justify more fully the benevolence which you might direct his way." D A N G E R S OF T H E V O C A B U L A R Y OF M E R I T

As we have noted, this language seems on the face of it contradictory. Rights and entidements are the opposite of gifts and kindnesses. The former require response; the latter are arbitrary and free. Historically, entidement was close to the idea of free contract and equality of citizens before the law, whereas the notion of munificence or gift giving depicted the minister as going beyond strict contractual justice, indeed treating with his employees as personal supplicants and recipients of personalized favors, harking back to the arbitrary power of the aristocratic patron or absolute monarch. The implication of this rhetoric, in which gift and munificence prevailed over rights and entidements, matched the proprietary oudook of the bureaucracy toward jobs, evident in nepotism, protection, and the reluctance to discharge for poor performance. Just as performance was secondary to protection, so was merit secondary to favor. Employees reaped a certain advantage from this idea, after all: One holds a gift one has received like a property; only honor prompts one to make equivalent return. The refusal of a few employees to use the accepted idiom, however, is the best indicator of the underlying tensions in this complex rhetoric that would begin to find their way into public discussion by the 1840s, and begin to effect employee policy much later, in the twentieth century.72 The vocabulary of merit held exclusive sway in the prose of Louis Fayet, for example. Hired as an expéditionnaire in the Bureau de la Librairie in 1813 at age twenty-two, he was commis d'ordre by 1819, but then his career stalled. After eleven years of repeated efforts, he was promoted to rédacteur in 1830. His further efforts to become a sous-chef were stymied, and he was forcibly retired in 1834. Louis Fayet not only had a lively sense of his own merits but was also not shy about stating his case direcdy to the minister and baldly telling the minister what he ought to do, as in a report Fayet submitted about

72. For examples of employees of the ministries who dared to speak out during the reform discussions of the 1840s, see Jules Delbousquet, De l'organisation des administrations centrales des divers ministères; des droits et des devoirs des employés (Paris, 1843); see also Guy Thuillier, Bureaucratie et bureaucrates en France au XIXe siècle (Geneva, 1980), 177-192.

i6o

THE LADDER UP

himself in 1834, when he was requesting promotion to sous-chef; it is written as a third-person narrative (as was the style of that day for curricula vitae). It begins as follows: The position of sub-chief in the Bureau of the Book Trade having become vacant, all recognized with a single voice the right which M. Fayet had to obtain that position, as much by his aptitude as by seniority. He was effectively presented by the chief of that bureau with that confidence which does not even foresee any objections. Welcomed by the Division Chief, recommended to M. le Sous-Secrétaire d'Etat by M. le vicomte Siméon, former Director of the Book Trade, M. Fayet trusted in the benevolence of his superiors and in the justice of the minister. Just last Monday, he heard of a candidacy proposed in secret and supported by recommendations from outside the hierarchy of the ministry, which threatened not only to steal from M. Fayet the promotion he sought but also to do him the even greater wrong of casting doubt upon his capacity and challenging his seniority.73 Fayet proceeded to explain that he had more seniority than the "secret" candidate Dutertre (by three years), as well as more "literary skills." In this report, Fayet, consciously or not, is trying to put the minister in a corner where he will have no choice. Fayet's rights are recognized by the unanimous voice of his superiors; his rival's pretentions are unmasked and his rival's protectors condemned as alien to the ministry. The only quality of the minister that is invoked is his "justice." Implicitly, the minister's role is reduced to ratifying the legitimacy of a promotion that is justified by objective criteria of merit and seniority and approved by a kind of democratic consensus of bureau officials. Fayet solicited letters of recommendation from a vicomte, a member of the Cour des Pairs, and a député, all full of warm, if bland, praise. This was very much business as

73. "La place de sous chef au bureau de la librairie étant devenue vacante, il ne s'éleva qu'une voix pour reconnaître à M. Fayet le droit d'obtenir cette place, autant pour l'aptitude que pour l'ancienneté. Il fut effectivement présenté par le chef de ce bureau avec cette confiance qui ne prévoit même pas d'objections. "Accueilli par M. le Chef de Division, recommandé à M. le Secrétaire Général par M. le vicomte Siméon, ancien Directeur de la Librairie, M. Fayet se reposait sur la bienveillance de ses chefs et sur la justice du ministre. "Lundi dernier seulement, il a eu connaissance d'une candidature qui s'est élevée en secret, et qui s'étant fait appuyer de recommandations étrangère à la hiérarchie du ministère, vient menacer non seulement d'enlever à M. Fayet l'avancement qu'il sollicite mais encore de lui faire le plus grand tort, en jetant des doutes sur sa capacité, et en combattant son droit d'ancienneté." Letter and report of 16 August 1834, Fayet dossier, AN F lb 1266 1 .

T H E LADDER UP

161

usual for an effort to win promotion. However, closer inspection shows that Fayet chose as protectors only persons who had served as his superiors in the ministry at one time or another, and who were therefore legitimately in a position to speak of his qualifications. This was extremely unusual and underscores Fayet's devotion to merit as a standard of judgment, flying in the face of contemporary practice. Fayet was denied the promotion, which went, indeed, after a delay, to Dutertre; Fayet's forced retirement was arranged within eleven months. Fayet's strategy, an attempt to oblige the minister to act by proving his merit, was not accidental. It conformed to Fayet's view of the minister's proper role, as expressed in a remarkable secret letter that he had written to the minister earlier, in August 1830, only weeks after the July Revolution had brought in a new government.74 "Monsieur le ministre," he wrote—not "Monseigneur" (my lord), and the usual formula of "Votre Excellence" was also missing from the letter: I am only a simple employee, but I address this letter to you to ensure that the truth gets through to you, insofar as the position of employees in general and the position of the Bureau of the Book Trade in particular are concerned. If I am the only one of my rank who dares to raise his voice, that will prove to you, Monsieur le Ministre, that I have more confidence than others in your equity and in your desire to do good. Since the Restoration, Monsieur le Ministre, hard-working employees have been sacrificed to do-nothing protégés who have been brought in, during the constant changes in minister, gradually occupying all the best places. Under the reign of justice and of truth, we will not be shut up by the warning that we should be only too happy not to be laid off; after all, a government that needs civil servants cannot afford to fire irreproachable men for the sole reason that they demand a respectable living.75 74. Letter of 30 August 1830, in ibid. A number of other employees also wrote secret letters to the minister in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1830. In a sample of about 9 percent of dossiers, besides Fayet's, three other such letters were found (suggesting the minister may have received as many as forty) : by Edmond Jean Henry Rousseau, commis d'ordre, September 1830 (dossier in AN F l b 1278 s ) ; by Jean Gabriel Rouvier, commis d'ordre, May 1831 (dossier in AN F l b 1278 s ); by Jean-Baptiste Balthazard Sauvan, souschef, 20 November 1830 (dossier in AN F l b I 2791). All these employees had experienced long periods of stagnation without raises or promotions. 75. "Je ne suis qu'un simple employé, mais je vous adresse cette lettre pour être sur que la vérité parviendra jusqu'à vous, en ce qui touche la position des employés en général et celle du bureau de la librairie en particulier. "Si je suis le seul de ma classe qui ose élevé la voix, cela vous prouvera, M. le ministre,

162

T H E LADDER UP

Thirty years ago, he continues, Louis Bonaparte thought that 3,000 francs was a good minimum salary, but now there were employees earning 1,200, 1,000, even 900. "There are no more rules of advancement, no more seniority rights. Employees almost never manage, whatever their capacity, to rise to the level of sub-chief or bureau chief. . . . From this situation, necessarily, the employees acquire a distaste, an apathy, which can only be prejudicial to public well-being."76 The reign of truth and justice, he says, will not close our mouths and make us say how happy we are to keep our jobs, or punish us just because we demand a respectable living. (Here, there is no room for disagreement.) Fayet asks nothing for himself, only that the minister establish "an orderly organization with fixed rules of advancement founded upon seniority and talent, such that the occupation of civil servant becomes an honorable, and honored career" (emphasis added).77 Fayet invokes his trust, not in the minister's benevolence, but in his sense of "equity" and his "desire to do what is good." By 1834, the political climate had changed significandy, yet Fayet was still using the language of justice andrights,as if the reform he demanded had gone through. The profile that emerges of Fayet from these documents is that of a quixotic employee who for some reason insists on acting as if the reign of merit were already securely in place.

Anguish in the Bureaux Some employees of the ministry worked very hard; many did not. Yet, there does not seem to have been any direct correlation between the que j'ai encore plus que les autres confiance dans votre équité et dans votre désir de faire le bien. "Depuis le Restauration, M. le ministre, les employés laborieux ont été sacrifiés aux sinécuristes que les changemens multipliés de ministres ont amenés successivement dans les meilleures places. "Ce n'est pas sous un règne de justice et de vérité qu'on nous fermera encore la bouche en disant que nous sommes trop heureux d'être conservés: car enfin le gouvernement qui a besoin des commis ne peut pas renvoyer des hommes irréprochable pour le seul motif qu'ils réclament une existence honnête." 76. "Il n'y a plus de règles d'avancement, plus de droits d'ancienneté. Les employés ne parviennent presque jamais quelle que soit leur capacité aux places de sous chefs et de chefs. . . . "D'un tel état de choses il résulte forcément pour les employés un dégoût, une apathie, qui ne peuvent que préjudicier à la chose publique." 77. "une organisation régulière qui fixe des règles d'avancement fondées sur l'ancienneté et la capacité, en telle sorte que l'état d'employé devienne une carrière honorable et honorée" (emphasis added).

T H E L A D D E R UP

163

amount of work produced and the incidence of stress. Much the more common source of suffering, insofar as the documents allow the historian to glimpse it, was one's perception of the relative honorability of one's achieved status, and a recognition of the arbitrariness and unpredictability of personnel management based on personal protections and influences. However unusual Fayet may have been in his claim to a right to promotion, his thirst for advancement seems to have been widely shared. Both Labrosse and Fayet became fixated on the problem of getting to just the next higher rank. Evidence suggests they were not alone and that many who enjoyed more successful careers suffered as much or more than they did. Elizabeth Pierre Clermont Sers, for example, entered the ministry at the age of thirty in 1827, with a law degree and several years' experience with the Gazette des tribunaux behind him; beginning at the rank of rédacteur, he rose to sous-chef in ten short years and to bureau chief by 1839.78 In the same twelve years his salary moved up from 1,500 francs a year to 3,500; by the late 1850s he was earning 8,000. By any standards, and certainly in comparison to Labrosse or Fayet, this was a rapid rise, and the file shows that Sers successfully called upon the influence of relatives to advance his case. But thefilealso shows that he was gripped with impatience and beset by the feeling that his career was stagnating and his prospects dim. As a result, he tired out his superiors and himself with requests for promotions and raises. Here is a list of intercessions by protectors for Sers that left written traces in his personnel dossier: (1) 1831: four pieces, three from Falguerolles, member of the Chamber of Deputies, one from the due de Decazes, asking for a raise; (2) 18 June 1833: Falguerolles, note stemming from a visit to the minister, requesting promotion; (3) 4 March 1835: chief of his division remarks that "plusieurs deputes" ("several deputies") have talked to minister about his promotion to sous-chef; (4) 4 March 1835: Sers says minister promised in February to Falguerolles that he would receive promotion to sous-chef and that his two cousins, both prefects, have received similar promises (he was not made sous-chef until 1837); (5) 3 January 1838: Macarel, conseilkr d'etat (councillor of state), letter to Edmond Blanc, head of Secretariat General, supporting promotion to bureau chief; (6) 12 October 1838: Sers's cousin, prefect of the Moselle Department, writes supporting promotion to bureau chief; (7) 13 October 1838: Baudez, conseiller d'état, député, from the Loire Department, also 78. Sers's dossier may be found in AN F l b 127s»2.

i64

THE LADDER UP

writes to support promotion; (8) n November 1838: Sers's other cousin, prefect of the Bas Rhin Department, writes supporting promotion; (9) 3 January 1839: Sers's first cousin, now prefect of the Gironde Department, refers to the minister's verbal promise at time of last visit to Paris (made bureau chief, 1839); (10) 19 July 18+4: Marty, député of the Garonne Department, writes letter for Sers to carry with him to see the minister, to ensure a "bon acceuil" ("warm welcome") for his request for a raise; (11) 25 March 18+8: Picard-Duval intercedes with note to "my dear Elias" urging him to discount rumors questioning Sers's political trustworthiness. Even by the standards of the time, this was an impressive marshaling of intercessions, and the steady train of raises and promotions Sers received suggests the effort paid off. At least one of his protectors, however, Macarel, writing to Edmond Blanc in 1838 on Sers's behalf, expressed some sense of exasperation with his protégé. Macarel had written a letter very much of the usual sort. Speaking of Sers's eleven years of capable, zealous service, Macarel conveyed Sers's vivid sense of disappointment ("vive peine") that a certain M. Brousse had been brought in as bureau chief recendy in Sers's own bureau, where he was working as sous-chef (and therefore was the logical internal candidate for the post). Macarel recalled that he had already spoken to His Excellency (the minister) of Sers's "sufferings [doléances] and claims" and had received both from the minister and Edmond Blanc "words of benevolence and hope." Pinned to this letter in due form, however, was an additional note in Macarel's own hand to Blanc, apologizing for having sent the letter at all: I am horribly irritated [horriblement fatigue—perhaps "horribly tired"], my good friend, to have written you this letter, but I thought I ought to do it. I cannot tell you how much I am suffering; nonetheless I hope I am near the end of this illness. In warmest friendship . . . M The circumstance that Macarel was ill at the time allows several possible interpretations of the letter. He may have been literally "horribly tired" by the effort of writing the letter. He may have been unable to visit, and turned to the letter as a less effectual method of informing Blanc of Sers's situation and desires. Or he may have been bothered by Sers's persistence. Throughout the mid-i830s, until he achieved the respectable rank of bureau chief, Sers appears to have been in considerable anguish about his

T H E LADDER UP

165

future. In 1835, asking to be made sous-chef, Sers noted the personal requests, and promises received, by his immediate superiors, his two cousins, both prefects, and the deputy Falguerolles. He notes his significant responsibilities and large workload, and continues by saying, "I come before you and beg you to realize your promise." In 1837, still asking for the same promotion to be granted, but by a new minister, he says his letter is "my last prayer." Ask M. Herman, he urges the minister, about the difficult, numerous, important matters that constantly come before him. "I always keep up, and, indeed, up to the present, I have managed to overcome the discouragement that obsesses me."79 This is unusually strong language. But Sers was evidendy both highly competent (working, as a lawyer, on matters involvingrights-of-wayfor local roads) and well connected. Ignoring his desperation, the ministry, in its usual plodding fashion, got around to rewarding him with the status he craved. Having been made bureau chief at last, Sers relaxed; his file contains few traces of interventions by protectors after 1839. Sers's sensitivity to status issues is underscored by the circumstance of his departure from the ministry in 1858. A new feuille de présence (sign-in sheet) had been instituted that May, and it was found that Sers was habitually absent at the time of its circulation around 11 a.m. Sers wrote to the minister requesting an exception for himself. He had chronic sinus congestion, which required several hours of treatment each morning (a doctor's certificate was attached). If his long service was not enough to win him this exception, he begged for permission to take a three-month leave in order to pursue a cure for the condition. When both requests were denied, Sers prompdy put in for retirement and ended his career at age sixty-one, with thirty-one years' service. Equally eloquent of the kind of suffering that many endured in the bureaux of the Ministry of the Interior is the dossier of Emile Fayet, son of the Fayet discussed above.80 Emile Fayet's folder direedy follows that of his father's in the ministry's personnel archives. It shows that Emile entered the ministry as expéditionnaire in his father's old bureau on 11 November 1835, three months and eleven days after his father's retirement. This was less than a month after Emile's twelfth birthday, making him the youngest employee of the ministry to appear in the sample of personnel files. Most young employees were required to serve a two79- "[Je suis] toujours au courant, et enfin... jusqu'à présent je suis parvenu à vaincre le découragement qui m'obsède." 80. Emile Fayet's dossier lies adjacent to his father's, in AN F l b 1266 1 .

166

THE LADDER UP

to-four-year unpaid apprenticeship (as "surnuméraire") before being granted a salary. Emile received 600 francs a year at once. The Fayet family must have suffered following Louis's sudden retirement at age fortythree. His salary had been low; his home address indicated modest lodgings in the northern suburb of Belleville. Louis's former colleagues conspired to find Emile a place, however small, in order to bring urgently needed aid to the family budget. Further education for Emile was now also ruled out. Having gotten in early, Emile was to wait for a very long time before winning any significant advancement. His first raise did not come until 1839, when his salary jumped to 900 francs. He was still receiving 900 francs in March 1841, when his father died; his mother received a widow's pension of 333 francs, so that the family income dropped a total of 600 that year. In August he was granted a raise to 1,000 francs; in October he celebrated his eighteenth birthday. In frequent letters of the 1840s, Emile asked for raises or bonuses. He argued, rightly, that his salary and rank were below those of most people with equal seniority. But most people had not started work at age twelve. In 1844, a general reform of salary levels in the ministry resulted in his being brought up to a new minimum for his rank, 1,500 francs. In 1845 he received a transfer, without raise or promotion, to the Division de Comptabilité Générale. As it happened, there was no better place within the ministry for winning advancement through long service than accounting. Its employees were not as well integrated into the usual network of protections and influences that pervaded other divisions. They were regarded as technicians; ministers paid more attention to the opinions of the Accounting Division chief than they did to other division chiefs in making personnel decisions. Bungling in this department could have dire consequences. Emile Fayet stayed in the Accounting Division from 1845 until his retirement in 1877, receiving steady, if infrequent, advancements. He achieved the rank of sous-chef, which his father had so fervendy coveted, in 1854, with nineteen years of service, at the young age of thirty-one. He became a bureau chief in 1865, with the ample salary of 6,000 francs, well over twice the income his father had enjoyed at retirement. In 1867, he was nominated for decoration as chevalier of the Legion of Honor. By 1874 he was earning 9,000 francs; thus, on his retirement in 1877, at age fifty-four, with forty-two years' service, he received a pension of 6,000. Everything the father had dreamed of came in time to the son. But did he ever escape the feelings of shame and insignificance that so clearly had plagued his father? A curious report on Emile written by the secrétaire

T H E LADDER UP

167

général at the time of his retirement suggests otherwise. It appears Emile retired to protest against precisely the same kind of disciplinary measure that had brought Sers to retire years before. The secrétaire wrote anxiously to the minister to justify his own role in the veteran bureau chief's decision to retire, arguing that Emile Fayet had put him in an impossible position: When I moved the Secretariat Division to the Left Bank, I was forced to look into the habitual tardiness that I suspected was prevalent in the Accounting Division, but which was in fact even more deeply rooted than I could have believed. My warnings had no effect, and the bureau chiefs were not supporting my efforts, so, with the minister's consent, I set up afeuille de présence that would circulate on random days, several times a week. After a few rough moments, things improved to a more normal state. M. Fayet, however, did not feel obliged to sign the feuille de presence, even though it did not come through his office before 10:45 a.m. He arrived even later than this. To overcome this insubordination, which was the worst sort of example, thefeuille de présence was discontinued in all the other bureaux, but retained in M. Fayet's alone, who, before this exceptional measure aimed at him, had only two alternatives, either to conform like the other employees to office hours, or to retire, as he had indicated some time before he wished to do.81 The secrétaire général was all the more anxious that the minister accept Emile's retirement request at once because he viewed Emile's work as highly inadequate recently and noted criticism of certain accounts that had arisen before a parliamentary commission. Emile's letter requesting retirement is dry but revealing:

81. "Lorsque j'ai installe la Division du Secrétariat sur la rive gauche j'ai du me préoccuper des habitudes d'inexactitude que je soupçonnais bien dans la Division de Comptabilité, mais que je ne pouvais croire aussi invétérées qu'elles l'étaient. Mes avertissements restant sans effet, et MM. les chefs de bureau ne secondant pas mes efforts, j'ai, avec l'assentiment du ministre, établi pendant un an une feuille de présence passant à des jours indéterminés plusieurs fois par semaine. Après quelques difficultés les choses sont rentrées dans un état à peu près normal. M. Fayet, toutefois, n'a pas cru devoir signer la feuille de présence, bien qu'elle ne passat dans son bureau qu'à onze heures moins le quart; il n'arrive que plus tard à son poste. "Pour essayer de vaincre cette résistance, qui était du plus mauvais exemple, les feuilles de présence ont été supprimées dans tous les autres bureaux et maintenues seulement dans celui de M. Fayet, qui, devant cette mesure prise exceptionnellement contre lui, n'avait plus que cette alternative, ou de se conformer comme les employés aux heures de présence, ou de se retirer, comme il announçait depuis quelque temps en avoir l'intention."

168

T H E LADDER UP

Monsieur le ministre, After many years of resignation, I feel I am no longer capable today to continue my work as bureaux chief in Accounting, under M. Normand. In consequence, I have the honor of begging you to allow me to claim my right to a retirement pension, in accord with article 5 of the law of 9 June 1853, section 5. I only ask for justice, I believe, M. le ministre, in insisting that your decision be taken on my request. Should M. Normand oppose this request, I would expect from you sufficient impartiality to put off a decision until you have heard my side. Please approve . . . [etc.]82 There is no other trace in the file of the personal animosity, or possible opposition, of M. Normand. Yet, it is clear Fayet felt he was withdrawing because of specific ill feelings or personality conflicts with his superior. This can be interpreted in the light of the following biographical sketch of Fayet provided in the secrétaire général's letter to the minister: M. Fayet is the son of a former employee of the Ministry of the Interior and was admitted to work in the bureaux, as a gesture of favor, before he had reached the age of twelve [actually he had just turned twelve], with an expéditionnaire's salary of 600 francs.. . . He is married, without children; and has a comfortable living. His difficult personality makes him hard to get along with. He has always been at odds with his colleagues in the Accounting Division. Still, he is intelligent and his honor is above question. On the other had, the habit attributed to him of sending secret letters about his division to the minister casts something of a shadow on the esteem he ought to enjoy.83 82. Monsieur le ministre, Après plusieurs années de résignation, je me sens aujourd'hui hors d'état de continuer mes fonctions de chef de bureau à la comptabilité sous la direction de M. Normand. J'ai l'honneur de vous prier de vouloir bien m'admettre à ce titre à faire valoir mes droits à la retraite en vertu de l'article 5 de la loi du 9 juin 1853, section 5. Je ne crois réclamer que justice en insistant auprès de vous, M. le ministre, pour que votre décision vise ma demande; dans le cas ou M. Normand s'y opposerait, j'attendrais de votre impartialité de ne pas prononcer sans m'avoir entendu. Veuillez agréer, [etc.] 8j. "M. Fayet est le fils d'un ancien employé du Ministère de l'Intérieure et il a été admis par faveur dans les bureux quand il n'avait pas encore 12 ans révolus, avec un traitement d'expéditionnaire de 600 francs. . . . Il est marié, sans enfant, et il jouit d'une certaine aisance. Son caractère difficile le rend peu sociable; ainsi a-t-il toujours été en hostilité avec ses collègues de la Division de Comptabilité. Il est intelligent du reste et son honorabilité n'est pas contestable. Toutefois, l'habitude qu'on suppose à M. Fayet d'envoyer aux ministres des lettres secrètes sur son service jette une certaine ombre sur la considération dont il devrait jouir."

T H E L A D D E R UP

169

Here, in a few strokes, the secrétaire général renders a portrait of a man who had never reconciled himself to the fate his father's poverty had forced on him, who had perhaps never felt comfortable with his colleagues, who had never felt interested in taking on the responsibilities of fatherhood, despite enjoying a comfortable income since the age of thirty-one. At age fifty-four he had been unable to stomach being made a target of a petty disciplinary action, which was out of line with his own thin-skinned sense of dignity, and his superiors accepted his retirement with relief. Somehow he had been followed by a reputation of writing secret letters to the minister about his service. There is no trace of such letters in his dossier. This proves nothing. Yet, one must ask, might he not have inherited unjustly from his father a reputation that his father had certainly earned? Could his colleagues' discomfort with him stem back, not to anything he had done, but to his father's self-righteous calls for reform in the secret letter to minister Guizot in August 1830? Fayet senior had engaged, behind his colleagues' backs, in the greatest possible act of bureaucratic hubris: demanding a general reform of the system. The thickest, most revealing files in the personnel archives of the Ministry of the Interior are usually those of persons who got stuck, like Labrosse and Fayet, or who made a long, slow rise that required repeated efforts of self-promotion, like Sers, Jacot-Presset, and Fayet fils. Less revealing, of course, are those of persons who stayed only a short while, or who languished in silence in the lower ranks. It is surprising, however, that the least revealing files of all are those of persons who rose from among the ranks to an exalted position within the ministry's hierarchy, not just to bureau chief but to section chief, division chief, or higher. These are files one would expect to be the most revealing of all about the ministry's system of advancement and the intricacies of favor and influence. Of eight persons who rose to the rank of division chief in the sample, and who served in that rank at some point between 1815 and 1847, seven files are either completely blank or yield only paltry information.84 The explanation, according to Guy Thuillier, is simple.85 At the rank of division chief or above, one wielded sufficient influence to have access to one's own file, so that, in the comfort of one's office, one could purge it of any pieces of correspondence that reflected poorly on oneself. But why bother? one might ask. These files seldom, if ever, contained evaluations 84. Purgedfiles:Rosman, AN F , b 278s; Fauchat, F l b 266 1 ; Labiche, F l b 72 1 ; Rosan, F l b 278 ; Ardit, F l b 2611. Not purged: LafFon de La Dcbat, F l b 2721. 85. Personal communication. s

I70

THE LADDER UP

or criticisms, as we have seen. They consisted of nothing more than the letters and notes written by the employee or his protectors, and the responses made by the minister or his personnel manager. No one ever wrote negative evaluations of a job or promotion candidate. The minister's notes, whether happy or disappointing, were always tersely polite. The impulse, almost uniformly felt, to purge one'sfile,therefore, must have represented a desire to eliminate all trace of one's rise, especially, it would seem from what remains, those letters of deferential request and pleading and the condescending remarks of recommenders. There were two reasons for this. Thefirstgoes back to what Maurice Daumas has argued about the system of honor in the eighteenth century, that changes of rank were themselves tainted by uncertainty. They seemed either to reveal that one had heretofore been shamefully held in a rank below one's worth, or else that one hadrisenfurther than one deserved.86 The second was that all acts of what was called "importunité"—that is, a tone of voice that was too strident or insistent—were considered shameful. Labrosse seems to have been oblivious to this point. Sers seems to have felt the threatened humiliation of constandy asking for advancement but kept up anyway. He was not alone. François Hippolyte Rome, for example, had worked for three years as bookkeeper for a daily paper that received secret government subventions (through the Ministry of the Interior's special funds), called La Charte de 1830,87 But in the summer of 1838 the paper was closed, and Rome was promised a post with equivalent salary in the ministry itself. He had waited for ten weeks and had been to see M. Lanoë, chief of the Bureau of Personnel Affairs, at least twice when, on 16 October 1838, he left a note for Lanoë after waiting fruidessly to see him for several hours. The note begins as follows: Monsieur, A few persons who have been so good as to take an interest in me advise me to come see you and to remind you of me. Despite the wisdom of their advice, I fear that I become importunate, especially after you have shown me such benevolence.88 [Emphasis added.] 86. Maurice Daumas, L'Affaire d'Esclan: Les Conflits defamille au XVUIe siècle (Paris, 1988). 87. Rome's dossier is in AN F lb 1278 s . 88. Monsieur, Quelques personnes qui veulent bien s'intéresser à moi me conseillent de vous voir afin de me rappeler à votre souvenir./; crains malgré la sagesse de leurs conseils de devenir importun, surtout après la bienveillance que vous avez bien voulu me témoigner" (emphasis added).

T H E LADDER UP

171

Rome proceeds to remind Lanoë that he had promised Rome he might know something about a job for him by the end of the week. Obviously, Rome was on tenterhooks. He did not want to annoy Lanoë; he put the responsibility for his visit on certain unnamed protectors—at once excusing his visit and implicitly threatening Lanoë with intervention from above if he did nothing.89 Four days later, Rome was named rédacteurexpéditionnaire at 1,800 francs a year—half his former salary. He took the job, with obvious disappointment, and also with the hope that he could receive rapid advancement. It is difficult to tell exactly what his protectors promised him, but clearly he had a sense of being owed something. His fear of seeming importunate was therefore not unrealistic. His frequent letters in subsequent years depart from the bureaucratic norm with their constant name dropping of protectors and their insistent mentioning of rumors Rome has picked up in the halls about salary funds to be distributed. In the following letter of 6 January 1842, he reveals to the sous secrétaire d'état that he knows both how much is to be given out in raises and how much his own section chief has recommended for him: Monsieur, Not having been included in the distribution of raises that was recently carried out, I take the liberty again, in the absence of M. le lieutenant général de St. Michel, my protector, to recall my case to your benevolence, on the occasion of the distribution which is about to be made of a fairly large sum (12,000 francs, it is said). M. Hoguer, my section chief, has only asked for 200 francs for me in the note which he sent you. . . . 90 But, Rome continues, he is in an exceptional situation, as he said last time they spoke, and therefore hopes for a raise of 600 francs. This was a very poor strategy for winning advancement; indeed, Rome did not re-

89. Another example of an apology for importunity is Lacvivier's letter of 15 January 1822, to an unnamed "M. le baron," in which he remarks, "Permettez-moi, Monsieur le Baron, de revenir à la charge et de vous importuner, pour la seconde fois, d'une réclamation qui vous paraîtra fondée, si vous pesez, dans votre sagesse, les considérations qui me déterminent à vous l'adresser" (emphasis added). A N F I b 1272 1 . 90. Monsieur, N'ayant pas été compris dans la répartition de fonds qui a été faite ces jours derniers, je prends de nouveau la liberté, en l'absence de M. le lieutenant général de St. Michel, mon protecteur, de me rappeler à votre bienveillance, à l'occasion de la distribution qui va être faite incessamment d'une somme assez majeure (12,000 francs, dit-on). M. Hoguer, mon chef de section, ne demande pour moi, dans la note qu'il vous a remise, que 200 francs."

172

T H E LADDER UP

ceive his first raise until 1845, when he was lifted up to a new minimum decreed for his rank. His salary did not reach the level he had enjoyed with the newspaper until 1853, fifteen years after coming to the ministry. It is difficult to say whether his superiors regarded Rome as importunate; it is certain that his letters, with their brusque, overconfident tone, poorly mask a feeling of shame. In a whining missive of January 1847, still earning only 2,000 francs a year, he complains to the sous-secrétaire d'état that he has no protectors left to recommend him, only his work and his zeal. This stratagem met with the same failure as had all his earlier ones. No wonder high-level officials purged their files. What could be more shameful than a record of years of pleading and wheedling, even if it met with success? The code of honor that prevailed within the ministry was therefore a very special sort of hybrid, combining some elements of a meritocracy with more dominant elements of a system of gift exchanges and personal and familial loyalties. That it was a hybrid is not surprising; no such institution could possibly embody a "pure" realization of careers open to talent or any other principle of evaluation. It is important to appreciate the precise degree of mixture, however. In this case, one recognizes that the personal easily prevailed over the impersonal, that merit itself was as often as not measured in terms of the smoothness with which one could manage personal relationships in this complex institutional context.

Contemporary Diagnoses Beginning in the mid-i830s, the ills of the administration began to attract the attention, not just of vaudeville playwrights and satirists, but of serious essayists and politicians. Important reforms were instituted in 1839 and 1844, in an attempt to correct the perceived ills. As the July Monarchy aged, its methods of rule were increasingly associated with the shortcomings of administrative procedure, and both were englobed in the notion that a certain form of "corruption" was isolating and paralyzing the government. Subsequently, historians have remarked that these charges appear overstated, that Louis Philippe's ministers were not as thorough in their handing out of favors or as effective in their "corrupt" marshaling of parliamentary support as their enemies believed.91 But both of these 91. Patrick L.-R. Higonnet and Trevor B. Higonnet, "Class, Corruption, and Politics in the French Chamber of Deputies, 1846-1848," French Historical Studies 5 (1967): 204-224; Robert Koepke, "Charles Tanneguy Duchátel and the Revolution of 1848," French Historical

T H E L A D D E R UP

views appear too simple. The government's "corrupt" influence peddling was, in effect, not very different from practices that had long prevailed throughout the administration. We have seen that nepotism and protection were routinely and openly practiced at every level of the Ministry of the Interior's bureaucracy. We have seen that some were aware that these practices were incommensurate with a strict application of the principle of careers open to talent. Others simply understood "talent" in a more supple way, as when Fauchat praised Jacot-Presset's expertly deferential attitude toward his superiors, or denounced Delisle's absences from the bureaux, but only because they resulted from imprisonment for debt. For the members of the government to use similar strategies of nepotism and protection to shore up their own power was only natural; every government had done it. We have just seen the illustrative case of Rome, who won his protectors' favor by means of political service rather than family alliance or regional affiliations. One can easily see how political, familial, and merit considerations were viewed as all of a piece in, for example, a letter of 20 June 1836, in which a young graduate of the law faculty, Pierre Lagrion, requests a job. He notes with pride that his brother died fighting in the July Revolution; a marginal note from a pair de France confirms that "this young man is son of an elector of the old grand colleges [a man rich enough to enjoy the right to vote under the Restoration] who was always faithful to the national cause [voted with the Liberals]; his brother died fighting for that cause during the July Days [Revolution of 1830]; by these entitlements, M. Lagrion merits the benevolence of the government [à ces titres M. Lagrion mérite la bienveillance du gouvernement]."92 Implicit here was that all professional and political action had a personal and familial dimension. The contradiction between this assumption and the notion of merit as strictly personal achievement, or the notion of public action as the exercise of reason for the public good, remained unexplored until it came up in the form of a scandalized discourse on "corruption." The Soult-Guizot ministry of 1840-1848 attracted especially sharp charges of corruption only because it was in power for an unusually long time and was able to build up its network of gift exchanges. This is clear

Studies 8 (1973): 236-254; François Julien-Laferière, Les Députésfonctionnairessous la Monarchie deJuillet (Paris, 1970); André Jean Tudesq, "Parlement et administration sous la Monarchie de Juillet," in Michel Bruguière et al., Administration et parlement depuis ISIS (Geneva, 1982), 13-37. 92. Lagrion dossier, in AN F l b 1272 1 .

174

T H E LADDER UP

when this ministry is compared to the confusion and instability of the early governments of the July Monarchy. Charges that the governments of the 1820s and 1830s engaged in blatant favoritism in administrative appointments and promotions were frequently raised and similar in nature to those lodged against Guizot from the early 1840s on.93 The real nature of the problem lay in the analysis of motives and the difficulty of discriminating between motives that were appropriate to employees of the administration and those that were "corrupt." We have seen that Ymbert employed, and helped to disseminate, a common strategy for analysis of bureaucrats' motives: he charged them with blind self-interest. They were concerned solely with financial gain, and they measured the value of nominations and promotions in monetary terms. But a number of the more serious observers of the administration, from the 1830s on, recognized that this analysis was inadequate. These observers tried to put into words perceptions that satirists only expressed implicitly, perceptions that pointed toward the underlying honor code. They wrestled with the problem, coming up with insightful, yet often contradictory explanations of bureaucratic mores. Boucher de Perthe's Petit¿jtossaire, traduction de quelques motsfinanciers, Esquisses de moeurs administratives (Little Glossary, Translations of Certain Financial Words, Sketches of Administrative Mores) of 1835 was a work conceived in the genre of social satire but which in practice went further, offering serious critiques and specific proposals for reform that recall Louis Fayet's secret letter of 1830. Boucher proposed that the bureaucrat was motivated, without even realizing it himself, by honor. This was a remarkable and rare perception. But Boucher qualified his claim carefully. This search for honor was, he believed, an oddity, a throwback; in an age of equality and freedom, it existed only within and for the administrative corps; and it marked the bureaucrat as isolated from the century. Like the "Jewish people," he said, they followed their own occult rules. The bureaucrat's search for honor was lamentable, Boucher insisted, and litde recognized:

93. See, for example, the secret letters mentioned in the Fayet dossier and other dossiers in note 74; see also Balzac, Les Employés; the Maleville Commission report of 1838 in France, Archives parlementaires de 1787 à i860: Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambresfrançaises,Series 2, vol. 119 (Paris, 1909), 568-577; Charles Pouthas, "La Réorganisation du ministère de l'intérieur et la reconstitution de l'administration préfectorale par Guizot en 1830," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 9 (1962): 241-263; Paul Gerbod, et al., Les Epurations administratives: XDCe etXXe siècles (Geneva, 1977).

THE LADDER UP

17?

Ah, if his pleasure was to do us good! But does this unhappy man know what he is doing? Does he even know what he wants? Does he wish to do us ill? Ah! He does not even think of preserving himself from it! He does not work for himself or against us, he does not act out of a spirit of egoism nor of malevolence, no, the bureaucrat is by nature, individually, goodness, conscientiousness, probity itself. But what does he aim at? What is his purpose? What does he ask? Whom does he work for? I will tell you. He worksfor honor, not his own, but that of his trade, of his robes, of his corps; in brief, out of devotion to the stupid cult which he has dedicated himself to, routine, goddess to whom, like a new priest of Cybelle, he and his fellows have sacrificed their virility and dedicated their existence. It is to this mad virgin, preserved pure and immaculate amidst political storms, that they immolate the nation, and do it with a good faith, a conviction, a religiosity worthy of a higher cause. In short, they are pontiffs of the letter, devotees of the tariff, levites of the budget which they serve for its glory, its eclat, its immensity, and who, without other hope of profit beyond the smell of incense that surrounds them, without being able on their own to gain access to the joys of the bank or the beatitude of [government bonds at] three percent, grant themselves candles, memorials, incense, and myrrh. [Emphasis added.] (74-7J)* 4 Boucher sees the concern for honor, then, as a prerevolutionary ethos, like that of the corps o f the old regime, such as the magistracy ("la robe"), but also as something alien, pagan, faindy emasculating. The administrative corps is unaffected by political storms, devoted to the glory o f routine, o f the letter and of the budget, in part because it is made up o f persons without independent means, w h o seek compensatory self-esteem in the petty details o f their functions. Other critics o f the bureaucracy, in contrast to Boucher, argued that

94. "Ah si son bon plaisir était de nous faire du bien! mais le malheureux sait-il ce qu'il fait? Sait-il même ce qu'il veut? Est-ce du mal qu'il prétend nous causer? Ah! il ne songe pas même à s'en préserver lui-même! Ce n'est ni pour lui ni contre nous qu'il agit, ce n'est dans un esprit ni d'égoïsme ni de malveillance, non, le bureaucrate est par nature et par individu la bonté, la consience, la probité même. Mais que prétend-il donc? Quel est son but? Que demande-t-il? Pour qui travaille-t-il? Vous aller le savoir: il travaille pour l'honneur, non le sien mais celui de son métier, de sa robe, de son corps; bref, par dévotion au culte stupide auquel il s'est voué, la routine, déesse à laquelle, nouveau corybante, lui et les siens ont sacrifié leur qualité virile et consacré leur existence. Cest à cette vierge folle, conservée pure et immaculée au milieu des orages politiques, qu'ils immolent la nation, et cela avec une bonne foi, une conviction, une religion dignes d'une meilleure cause. Bref, ce sont les pontifes de la lettre, les dévots du tarif, les lévites du budget qu'ils servent pour sa gloire, son éclat, son immensité, et qui, sans autre espoir de profit que la fumée qui s'en échappe, sans pouvoir eux-même arriver aux joies de la banque ou à la béatitude du trois pour cent, leur décernent des cierges, des ex-voto, de l'encens et de la myrrhe" (emphasis added; 74-75).

I76

THE LADDER UP

its problems lay precisely in its openness to outside influences, its lack of internal procedures, rules, methods of evaluation. Léon de Maleville, speaking for a parliamentary commission charged with reviewing the Ministry of the Interior's annual budget in 1838, deplored the disorders that had been introduced into the ministry's internal organization since the July Revolution by constant changes aimed at pleasing powerful personalities in successive governments: If we compare the diverse phases [of rapid reorganizations] that we have just enumerated with the changes in ministries which were the occasions for [these reorganizations], it is easy to see that propriety [les convenances] and even individual pretensions were more often the motives for these successive modifications than concern for the public interest and general utility. It is very important therefore to protect the organization of all the services and the regular functioning of the Administration from the caprice and the irresolution of individual wills.95 These disorders in overall organization had brought more generalized anomalies in their train, salary inequities and budgetary confusion.96 Jules Delbousquet, a bureau chief in the Ministry of War, in a bold 1843 essay, offered a diagnosis similar to Maleville's.97 The central bureaux of the ministries were all without rules of recruitment or advancement; as a result, hiring and advancement were open to all sorts of obscure influences, including political ones. The outcome was widespread incompetence, a fault that was generally recognized and frequently denounced. In effect, when there are no conditions of admission, when there are no rules of advancement, when there is no intelligent classification of job types, when, after internships that are often very long a young man who does not have powerful protectors cannot hope to live honorably for a long timefromthe fruits of his labor, when one wins neither consideration nor just independence; when, in the words of the honorable M. Leyraud, it is impossible to demand application and promptness, then, finally, it is impossible to expect to find a personnel who unites the desired conditions for providing good service. . . . three quarters of the appointments result generally from obscure influences within the interior of bureaux, influences the more dangerous because they are difficult to perceive.98 [Emphasis added.] 95. France, Archives parlementaires de 17S7 à i860, series 2, vol. 119, pp. 568-577, quote from p.570. 96. Ibid., 572. 97. Jules Delbousquet, De l'organisation des administrations centrales des divers ministères; des droits et des devoirs des employés (Paris, 1843). 98. "En effet, là, où il n'y a pas conditions d'admission, là, où il n'y a pas de règles d'avancement, là, où il n'y a pas un classement intelligent, en raison de la nature du travail, là,

T H E LADDER UP

177

Within each ministry, according to Delbousquet, there was an inner core of high officials, a veritable "état major" (general staff ) capable of protecting its own as well as of conciliating the needs of successive ministers put in charge over them. "We can consider the central administrations as constituting a veritable monopoly that profits the clientele of this general staff in each ministry, a clientele that extends down to the lowest levels" (31). Like Boucher de la Perthe, Delbousquet compared the resulting situation to the old regime: "But when the aristocracy of birth was overthrown, the one which, still, had for its motto: Noblesse oblige, can we consent to see taking its place with its clientele an aristocracy based on a sterile and rapacious mediocrity?" (31). Like Maleville, Delbousquet recognized that the Ministry of the Interior was the worst of the lot because its structure was arbitrary and unclear, often redundant, just as its functions were central to governance; therefore it was open to blatant, politically motivated manipulation and had become the laughingstock of the other ministries. So many protégés turned to the Ministry of the Interior for aid that it was always short of positions: As a result, if many receive, only a little is given to each, and to make up for this insufficiency, [the Ministry of the Interior] becomes supple, malleable; it lends itself to all sorts of combinations. Do we need a new bureau? Others might hold back; but for [Interior] setting up a bureau is a trifle. You provide one or two rooms, put in a table, an armchair, a few other chairs; you send a fewfilesin; you requisition an office boy, get two or three attachés [interns] in, there's your bureau. You give it some name or other, you install the chief. (43-44) Perhaps the ministry could only spare 2,400 francs a year for the new bureau chief; this is not a problem, Delbousquet notes. In explaining why, he came very close to identifying the element of honor that drove the system and made him (and others) think of the old regime when examining the administration, without being able to say exacdy why: "That's not so brilliant for a bureau chief, no doubt [2,400 francs a year] ; but the

où, après un surnumérariat souvent fort long un jeune homme qui tu serait pas puissamment protégé ne peut espérer de longtemps vivre honorablement du fruit de son travail, là, où on ne trouve ni une juste indépendance ni considération; là, suivant les paroles de l'honorable M. Leyraud, il est impossible d'exiger assiduité et capacité; là, enfin, il n'est pas possible de s'attendre à trouver un personnel qui réunisse toutes les conditions voulues pour faire un bon service" (24). "Les trois quarts des nominations y sont dues généralement à des influences obscures de l'intérieur des bureaux, influences d'autant plus dangereuses qu'elles sont plus difficiles à saisir" (29).

178

T H E LADDER UP

work is not crushing either, besides it is delightful to put on one's card "bureau chief," and to have one's letters rushed across Paris by a courier on horseback. That's stature; that gives you a rank in the world, one has a title and credit, almost."99 Here Delbousquet said almost everything but "honor": "un rang" ("a rank"), "un titre" ("a title"), "presque du crédit" ("credit, almost"). He recognized explicitly that the pleasures of being a bureau chief could not be summed up in a monetary figure and could be very attractive despite a lowly income. However, he immediately qualifies these remarks; they make him uneasy, they are too much like caricature: "Perhaps this is to talk with a bit too much lightness on such a grave, such a serious question! But is there a single ministry where one speaks of the organization of the Ministry of the Interior without laughing, which, with its army of directors, section chiefs, bureau chiefs for bureaux with only one or two employees, reminds us of those Spanish armies whose general staff and officers outnumber the soldiers?"(44). By invoking the Spanish army, with its superfluity of officers, Delbousquet safely locates the ministry's problem outside of present-day France, just as Boucher de Perthe did by comparing the administration to the old regime, or the "Jewish people," insisting it was not of our century. Like Maleville, however, Delbousquet locates the source of trouble in the administration's ill-defined boundaries, its lack of clear policies and procedural protections, its openness to political and other kinds of influence. So we are left with a question. Is the administration in general, and the Ministry of the Interior in particular,—with its mania for protocol, its domination by protection and favoritism, its relish for the paraphernalia of status and rank—odd? Is it out of place, in postrevolutionary France, where laissez-faire and individual merit supposedly rule? Or do these qualities arise from the administration's peculiar, intimate openness to the influences, desires, and aims of civil society?

Conclusion There are several strong reasons for opting for the latter of these two views. In the first place, it is a misconception we sometimes still share with the nineteenth century that freedom of contract is incompatible with hierar-

99. "Ce n'est pas brillant sans doute pour un chef de bureau [2400 francs par an] ; mais le travail, non plus, n'est pas écrasant, et puis c'est si agréable de mettre sur ses cartes, chef