Caroline Warman

Tolerance : The Beacon of the Enlightenment

This anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. First published by the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values, Tolerance has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.

From Lamarck to Aberration: Nature, Hierarchies, and Gender

Ni n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y f r e n c h c u l t u r e and, arguably most intensely, the fin de siecle seem to have turned a particularly anxious gaze on the question of aberration (physiological, psychological, moral, and other), aberration being seen in human terms and as a human problem. Scholarship in the wake of Foucault has interrogated discourses of the body intensively, and the present issue maintains that focus, making manifest why it is such an important approach and how rich a seam it is. Here, however, I would like to resituate the specifically human within a biological, natural, and material spectrum and see whether, having done that, we can begin to understand why aberration was such a fraught domain and why the human came to be so tensely associated with questions of gender and sexuality. My first point will be that the eighteenth-century materialist idea of the human as matter or molecules organized in a particular way had, surprisingly, become widely accepted. We are all probably familiar with nineteenth-century conceptions of nature as a series of forms that are modifications of one another from evolution theory, whether in Lamarck’s pessimistic version, whereby we move ever farther from the source of heat and creation, or in Darwin’s more upbeat model of perfectibility, as evinced in the term evolution itself. both streams placed humanity at the top of this hierarchy of creation, but the twin terms evolution and degeneration tell us how what was human was perceived as relating to the rest: turning these terms into questions, we see that they asked implicitly what humans would evolve into next or, more negatively, how they might degenerate and return to earlier forms. Scholars of the nineteenth century know how benedict Auguste Morel answered this question in his 1857 Traite des degenerescences (Treatise of

Caught Between Neologism and the Unmentionable: The Politics of Naming and Non-naming in 1790s France

Abstract This essay tests the assumption that Diderot was unmentionable during the 1790s because of his association with atheist materialism, and explores how philosophes close to him protected themselves and their work. It focuses predominantly on the Idéologues, Cabanis, and Destutt de Tracy, and also on the physician Bichat and the philosopher-zoologist Lamarck. It identifies certain textual strategies commonly deployed by these writers, including firstly, the curious practice of naming certain officially acceptable luminaries and using them to cover obscure references to other unnamed ‘génies’, secondly, the creation of neologisms for their work (‘biologie’, ‘idéologie’), and thirdly, exaggerated claims of originality. It suggests that the break generally perceived by modern scholarship between the eighteenth-century experimental texts exploring consciousness and matter, particularly those of Diderot, and the post-revolutionary thinkers has been overstated, perhaps because of the very success of the trace-covering strategies examined here.

Made from the Stuff of Saints: Chateaubriand's Rene and Custine's Search for a Homosexual Identity

Reviewing Anka Muhlstein’s Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine, Robert Darnton, the eminent American historian of the French Revolution, has recently commented that the existence in Paris in the 1830s of “a homosexual ménage established at the pinnacle of high society was an extraordinary phenomenon.”1 Given its contexts and development, it was indeed. Darnton’s estimate of the marquis’s achievement exudes wonderment at every turn: for not only was Custine’s salon a milestone in the history of homosexuality, but it was also “an extraordinary phenomenon” in view of Parisian high society in the early nineteenth century. That two men living domestically as if married—Custine and his lover, the Englishman Edward Saint-Barbe (or Edouard de Sainte-Barbe, as he became known)—should have filled their hotel de ville with the illuminati of the day was genuinely remarkable. As Darnton notes, “They gave dinner parties, concerts, poetry readings, and receptions, where aristocrats rubbed shoulders with the most famous figures of the Romantic era: Chopin, Berlioz, Balzac, Musset, Lamartine, Hugo, Stendhal, Heine, Sand, Gautier” (16). Darnton remains amazed at the achievement, enacted long before Oscar Wilde convened his secret nocturnal

L’affaire de Justine et l’échec de la clandestinité

Abstract This article reviews the documents in the campaign to destroy the anonymity around Justine by repeatedly denouncing Sade as its author. The campaign lasted from 1798 to 1801 and involved increasingly violent denunciations on both sides, appearing in at least three newspapers and also surfacing in a now little-known verse satire by Joseph Despaze. Sade’s ripostes were printed in newspapers, in his essay, Idée sur les romans, and also in a pamphlet of exemplary ferocity. We analyse the multiple exchanges between Sade and his opponents, and relate them to the theme of denunciation in the French Revolution more widely.

From pre-normal to abnormal: the emergence of a concept in late eighteenth-century France

This article explores the concept of ‘normal’ in the late-eighteenth century. It focuses on how these pre-normal meanings illuminate contemporaneous depictions of the role and importance of sexuality. The current sense of the term ‘normal’ enters the dictionaries relatively late in the period, having been a synonymous but less common alternative for ‘perpendicular’ in geometry. Indeed, ‘normal’ is so unfamiliar a word that the important late-nineteenth-century dictionary/encyclopaedia, the Grand Larousse du dix-neuvième siècle (1866–1877), draws attention to its novelty, explaining that it is initially hard to understand. So this article partly aims to deepen our understanding of the emergence of the term, and thus to fill in the context of Canguilhems seminal work on The normal and the pathological (1989). It investigates the proliferation of terms that indicate a deviation from the norm, many of which (such as ‘enormous’)predate the idea of the ‘normal’ by many centuries. French and English sources such as Johnson, Comte and Fourier are drawn on to chart the progress and associations of the terms and in particular to investigate the proliferation of meanings immediately before its emergence in the ‘pre-normal’ materialist thinkers Diderot and Lamarck.

Cultures of Melancholia in Late Capitalism—A Reflection Response to Discussion by Jeanne Wolff Bernstein

Our reply to Jeanne Wolff Bernstein claims that she is an ideal reader for the type of analysis we offered: because she is familiar with the European literary tradition, because she so obviously harbors a sense of the interface of literature and psychoanalysis, and—not least—because she herself has so meticulously studied the nuanced details of our diagnosis. We concur, furthermore, with the melancholia diagnosis she attributes to us and understand why our analysis led her—almost by association—to remember the models of earlier theorists of melancholy and depression. However, we caution that these three are merely a few among many models and that they should not, in any case, be considered definitive (as if models could ever be ultimate arbiters in an enterprise such as the posthumous analysis of a historical figure). Finally, in our reply we petition for a more historical approach than the one found in Bernsteins response or in the writings of the three thinkers whose approach has influenced her thinking.