Chamfort, doctor of morals : the maxim and the medical aphorism in late eighteenth-century France

The increasing prestige of medicine as a science, accompanied by the social rise of the doctor, in eighteenth-century France is well documented. What I would like to argue here, however, is that there exists a correspondence between the establishment of medicine as an independent field of study in eighteenth-century France and the increasing use and influence of an autonomous form of medical discourse, namely, the aphorism, in this period. This is not so much a question of the language used by the more renowned doctors of the day but of a form of discourse deeply imbued and associated with medical practice. (It is nonetheless true that certain famous physicians combined medical and literary roles. For instance, Theophile Bordeu intervenes significantly in Diderot's Le Reve d'Alembert, and Vicq d'Azyr, Marie-Antoinette's doctor, was elected to the Académie Française in 1788 in a sort of social consecration or medical discourse, implicitly incorporating his medical figure and figures into the socio-linguistic norms of 'le bon usage’ promoted by the Académie itself.) Yet what interests me particularly here is the insinuation of the medical aphorism itself into other fields of late eighteenth-century discourse, notably those of literature and politics, the traditional domains of the maxim

The nature of libertine promises in Laclos's Les 'Liaisons Dangereuses

This article suggests that the libertines Valmont and Merteuil privilege promises because their futural orientation implies a godlike control of people and events, and because promises offer the possibility of being broken, of further pleasure to be derived from transgression. Moreover, it demonstrates how promises constitute paradoxical markers of the interlocutor's desire, rather than the speaker's sincerity; a desire that the libertines expertly exploit, although they too can fall victim to this dynamic. The article concludes with a consideration of why promises are made to be broken in Les Liaisons dangereuses, focusing on the absence of patriarchal figures in the text

Une forme frondeuse: the Function of Discontinuity in La Rochefoucauld's Maximes

[First paragraph] In 1663 Mme de Sablé circulated privately a small number of copies of La Rochefoucauld’s Sentences et maximes de morale (as it was titled at the time); this exercise was intended to sound out opinion about the work in advance of any publication. Among the extant replies to this consultation, one in particular singles out disapprovingly the disjointed nature of the work. Describing the reading process in terms of masonry, the anonymous critic states: On y remarque de belles pierres, j’en demeure d’accord; mais on ne saurait disconvenir qu’il ne s’y trouve aussi du moellon et beaucoup de plâtras, qui sont si mal joints ensemble qu’il est impossible qu’ils puissent faire corps ni liaison, et par conséquent que l’ouvrage puisse subsister. The critic goes on to claim that the work is nothing but an anthology of ‘sentences’ and ‘pointes’ culled from more coherent works that had the distinct advantage over the Maximes of contextualizing their remarks: ‘car si l’on voyait ce qui était devant et après, assurément on en serait plus édifié et moins scandalisé

Waxing Revolutionary: Reflections on a Raid on a Waxworks at the Outbreak of the French Revolution

[First paragraph] Parisians from all walks of life were already accustomed to watching heads roll before the Revolution of 1789. This is not a reference to public executions of the time (beheadings were reserved for the nobility and were rare events) but to another cultural spectacle of late eighteenth-century Paris, one which was sufficiently well-known to become the object of a satirical print in 1787. Entitled ‘Avis au public: Têtes à changer’, the print by P. D. Viviez lampoons the unceremonious updating of fashionable or celebrated waxwork figures displayed in the popular entertainments district of the Boulevard du Temple [See Figure 1]. It shows wax heads being handed down from shelves; heads being replaced on models; one head about to be struck off with a chisel; another head lies discarded on the ground, being sniffed at by a little cat. All of this takes place in front of a crowd of curious, chatty onlookers

Chamfort, doctor of morals : the maxim and the medical aphorism in late eighteenth-century France

The increasing prestige of medicine as a science, accompanied by the social rise of the doctor, in eighteenth-century France is well documented. What I would like to argue here, however, is that there exists a correspondence between the establishment of medicine as an independent field of study in eighteenth-century France and the increasing use and influence of an autonomous form of medical discourse, namely, the aphorism, in this period. This is not so much a question of the language used by the more renowned doctors of the day but of a form of discourse deeply imbued and associated with medical practice. (It is nonetheless true that certain famous physicians combined medical and literary roles. For instance, Theophile Bordeu intervenes significantly in Diderot's Le Reve d'Alembert, and Vicq d'Azyr, Marie-Antoinette's doctor, was elected to the Académie Française in 1788 in a sort of social consecration or medical discourse, implicitly incorporating his medical figure and figures into the socio-linguistic norms of 'le bon usage’ promoted by the Académie itself.) Yet what interests me particularly here is the insinuation of the medical aphorism itself into other fields of late eighteenth-century discourse, notably those of literature and politics, the traditional domains of the maxim

Movement and Montage in André Chénier's "Ode à Versailles" (1793)

In 1793, poet and journalist André Chénier fled Paris for Versailles for fear of being persecuted for his public criticisms of the Jacobins. There, at the start of the revolutionary Terror, he composed his “Ode à Versailles.” This article analyses the poem’s form while noting the effects of historical and philosophical contexts on the movement of the verse. The representation of time is explored in the form of a montage, as the term is defined by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. What results is a work of poetry that tells of the revolutionary upheavals in France in its very movement away from them. Caught between political and poetic states, Chénier’s “Ode à Versailles” stands as the insistent expression of an affective and poetic resistance to Jacobin Revolution

André Chénier's ‘Dernières poésies’: Animism and the Terror

Starting from the premise that André Chénier's poetry is fundamentally pantheist in nature, this article identifies animism as one of its most important modes of expression. The pantheist belief structures and animist dynamic also inform his final poems, written during the Terror (1793–94). Yet in this psychologically constraining and physically violent world, they produce a deeply ‘uncanny’, often bestial, vision of the Revolution and its actors. What is more exceptional is that this animism also inspires the figure of the Jacobins' unwavering enemy, a figure at once of Aristotelian magnanimity and implacable animosity towards the revolutionary regime. Chénier's last poems thus institute a corrective ‘justice’ to the perceived abuses meted out by the Jacobins' executive and judicial systems. They do so, moreover, by appropriating the revolutionaries' own performative and nominative speech acts, making Chénier a poet-legislator paradoxically close in character to Rousseau's mythic law-giver in Du contrat social

Metrology: The Body as Measure in Les Liaisons dangereuses

This cultural-historical reading of Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) situates it in the context of the 1780s engagement with weights and measures reform in France. The protagonists of the novel resort to a language of weights and measures in order to appraise their world which is fraught with material, sexual and ideological signification. Contemporary discussions of weights and measures often incriminated the seigneurial regime as principal abuser of the system, invoking in the process philosophical connotations of “the just measure” or socially responsible moderation and equity. As well, the human body remained at this time the principal benchmark for constituting the systems of measurement with which the French of the 1780s gauged and appraised their physical and imaginative environments. Hence, Choderlos de Laclos’s famous letter-novel of 1782 provides a telling case study allowing us to determine how far the uniquely resonant universe of contemporary fiction reflects and inflects the metrological concerns of its society as well as potentially suggesting ways in which people still measure and weigh the world atavistically, according to pre-metric and pre-decimal, corporeal means

The obverse view: Another look at Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Le 7 décembre 1815, neuf heures du matin [The execution of Marshal Ney] (1868)

In the light of recent re-evaluations of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s practice and significance as a history painter, this article focuses on one of his more controversial and innovative artworks, Le 7 décembre 1815, neuf heures du matin. This painting depicts the immediate aftermath of maréchal Michel Ney’s execution by the Restoration regime in 1815. The article reassesses in particular the scandalised reception of the painting in the Paris Salon of 1868 and proposes alternative readings of the artwork’s subversive qualities, both for its Second Empire public and for its twentieth-first-century viewers