Jessica Goodman

Between celebrity and glory? Textual after-image in late eighteenth-century France

ABSTRACT Eighteenth-century France had a particular interest in identifying and celebrating its ‘great men’, the model individuals through whom it defined its national identity. Across the century, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists were celebrated by the state, in a cult of glory that culminated in the creation of the secular temple of the Panthéon in 1791. Yet the eighteenth century is also acknowledged as the starting point of a very different sort of recognition: the widespread curiosity about a public figure’s private life that lies at the heart of modern celebrity culture. Rousseau and Voltaire incarnated these two burgeoning forms of fame. This article examines the literary discourse that surrounded their deaths in 1778 and their later inclusion in the Panthéon, analysing the use that was made of their textual remains and considering how their glorious posthumous status related to their public image in life. Using these case studies, I suggest that authors occupy a privileged place in the conversion of lifetime celebrity into enduring posthumous fame; not only – as has traditionally been argued – thanks to the durability of the text, but also because of its flexibility and a created intimacy that mimics the process by which literary celebrity is created in life.

'Le Néant de ce qu'on appelle gloire': Post-Revolutionary Cultural Memory and the Dialogue des Morts

As France struggled to find ways to shape its national history and cultural heritage following the Revolution, an unknown author in a minor genre was reflecting on what the recent social and political upheaval meant for the celebrated protagonists of France’s past and present. François de Pagès, in his 1800 collection of dialogues des morts, brings together the illustrious dead to comment on the world they have left behind, and on their own lives and legacies. A particular concern, articulated by Mirabeau, Marat, Voltaire, Rousseau, and others, is what it takes to be remembered and, conversely, to be forgotten. This article explores this issue first as it appeared in the reality of 1790s France — from the ‘impossible’ Panthéon, to the reimagining of pre-revolutionary cultural icons — then as it is set out in Pagès’s text, which brings together pre- and post-revolutionary greats, and examines their relative ‘gloire’. I underline the contentious nature of the ‘grand homme’ in the revolutionary decade, and suggest that the capacity of literary creation to provide a durable but flexible form of cultural memory is one of the reasons for the renewed popularity of the dialogue des morts in this period.

The Mask of Collectivity: Compositional Practices at the Comédie-Italienne

In order to understand the phenomenon of anonymity, we must consider the concept with respect to which it is traditionally defined: that of authorship, the named relationship between individuals and texts. In using the word “author,” we tend to imply both the technical, practical sense of one who writes or creates a text, and the more symbolic sense of an individual who takes creative responsibility for a work.1 When we use the shorthand formula “anonymous text,” we are usually referring to the unknown identity of the text’s originator: unknown whether through a lack of information, or through a deliberate choice made in order to avoid censorship, to create a buzz of curiosity, or out of convention.2 This article approaches anonymity from a different angle. The case it presents does not fit easily into any of these categories: it concerns an object that is not purely textual; an object that has several “authors,” or perhaps none at all; an object

Introduction: What, Where, Who is Posterity?

This introduction sets out the key questions to be explored in the volume, examining contemporaneous definitions and uses of ‘postérité’, and the complex temporal games that both anticipating and describing posterity entail. It considers the precariousness of relying on an unknown future public, how gaps and flexibility might enhance the likely survival of a text or its author, and how the idea of posterity (in its various configurations) acts as a motivating force, conditioning how an individual acts even as ‘real’ posterity continually recedes into the distance before them.

Personne to Personnage: Names, Fame, and Identity Games in Eighteenth- Century Theatre

Abstract Names are intrinsic to personal identity: they demarcate individuality and signal links to a historical or familial collectivity. But what happens when a name becomes public property, no longer signifying a private person, but rather a celebrated figure with a public function? And what if this public personality or personnage is an actor, representing other persons through the personnages whose names and costumes he or she adopts? On the eighteenth-century stage, these concepts were in a state of flux. As perfect stage illusion became more desirable, the material presence of the actor dissolved, privileging the reality of the personnage. Yet simultaneously a new generation of star actors managed their name and image to create offstage personnages, more famous than their onstage counterparts. At the Parisian Comédie-Italienne, actors followed commedia dell’arte convention, playing one ‘type’ for life. Some actors were known by their type names, some adopted stage names, and some gave their names to roles written for them. This article explores such slippage in the naming of actors. It uses the context of the Comédie-Italienne to analyse the interaction between new theories of acting and an increasing desire by actors to ‘make a name’ for themselves, and postulates these notions as the roots of much wider modern concepts of actorship.