L'Epopée de Voltaire à Chateaubriand: poésie, histoire, et politique (review)

In L'Epopée de Voltaire à Chateaubriand: poésie, histoire et politique, Jean-Marie Roulin restores a missing chapter to French literary history. A victim of our cultural amnesia, the notion of epic that was debated in the years 1723–1815 was supplanted by the definition that arose at the turn of the nineteenth century. Roulin revives our interest in the discussion of the neglected genre, which enabled Enlightenment thinkers to elaborate a vision of history and contemporary society during France's crucial transition from Ancien Régime to modern Republic.

Roulin's book is one of those rare achievements in which cultural historians will take an interest and for which literary critics will be grateful, for it provides an invaluable inventory of little-known, forgotten, or projected works as well as an astute, theoretically informed analysis of the rhetorical stances, cultural assumptions, and political positions they represent. Roulin opens with Voltaire's unsettling declaration that France has no epic poem, along with its implicit challenge to define the genre. Going beyond the scope of Voltaire's Essai sur la poésie épique, Roulin provides an overview of French works from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century that aspired to the title of epic poetry. He then discusses the classical and European epics that Voltaire acknowledged as his rightful predecessors, foregrounding the aspects of the genre that the Enlightenment critic accepted or rejected as he established the model of the modern epic he proposed to write. It is tempting to compare the views Voltaire advanced in his essay to those of Seigneur Pococuranté, the jaded bibliophile who takes Candide on a tour of his library, critiquing the epics on his shelves.

Roulin's analysis of Voltaire's epic patrimony is followed by a lyrical excursus that expands our notion of genre and the epic beyond the criteria Voltaire established. Though Roulin rejects a trans-historical definition of genre, he emphasizes the usefulness of the concept as a frame of reference for authors and readers alike. Based on over eighty epics he identifies as belonging to the period in question, Roulin highlights the genre's primary concerns, including the search for a modern hero and the struggle between pagan and Christian marvelous that seems so counterintuitive to the age of Enlightenment. The essence of the genre is to be found, he contends, in the tensions that defined three critical debates that erupted in the course of the century.

While Roulin's analysis is structured around the debates waged by Voltaire and his contemporaries, the Encyclopedists, and the survivors of the Revolution, it ultimately reveals a major division in the eighteenth-century conception of the epic; a division that is linked to two distinct understandings of history and the nation. Voltaire broke with the seventeenth-century conviction that the epic lends itself to an allegorical reading, perpetrates a moral, and illustrates the workings of divine Providence. In its stead, he provided the model of an epic that takes the nation's recent historical past as its subject, that serves to educate an enlightened sovereign, and that envisions an idealized political future. This model subsequently lent itself to the education of the private citizen and the promulgation of civic morality in the name of social progress. The specificity of the epic from Voltaire to Chateaubriand lies not in its attitude towards the marvelous, for Chateaubriand criticized Voltaire for not recognizing Christianity's epic dimension, but rather in its relationship to history as such.

The nineteenth-century epic was forged in opposition to Voltaire's historical model. From Sulzer to the Groupe de Coppet, Roulin traces the emergence of the Romantic notion of the poet as link between the human and the divine and the nation as linked to a land and a people that arose from the eighteenth century's reflections on the relationship between nature and society. As confidence in France's future waned in the wake of the Revolution, authors increasingly sought the...