La Vengeance dans la litterature d'Ancien Regime (review)

Méchoulan, Eric, ed. La Vengeance dans la littérature d'Ancien Régime. Montréal: Département d'Etudes françaises (Paragraphes), 2000. Pp. 191.

From the time of Medea, vengeance has always been the stuff of stories, and especially of tragedies. The effectiveness of this theme for storytelling is one of the continuous threads tying together the diverse group of essays that make up this fine book. As is often the case with compendia of this type, the quality of the chapters is somewhat uneven. Nevertheless, the volume as a whole is a highly valuable contribution to scholarship on early-modern French literature and culture. The question of the specifically literary functions of vengeance is one of the most fruitful topics taken up by the authors, who examine textual representations of crime and revenge from historical, theological, rhetorical, psychological, medical, economic, and sociological, as well as literary-critical perspectives. The common point of departure for these studies is the question of how vengeance is narrated or, as in the case of classical theater, performed.

In the first chapter, Christian Biet analyzes the ways in which vengeance—more specifically, what he calls "le couple offense/vengeance" (14)—serves to drive narrative in works of theater. For Biet, the significance of literature and tragedy in particular lies in the fact that literary representation explores areas of ambiguity and complexity that the law cannot even begin to approach:

[L]es théologiens, les moralistes, et aussi les auteurs de récits tragiques et les dramaturges sont alors là pour exercer leur art et s'intéresser à ce que ne peut pas voir, ou ne veut pas examiner le droit: les passions dans lesquelles s'enracinent le crime, et ici, la résultante de ces passions, la vengeance. (24-25)

As Biet points out a number of times, the task of exacting revenge is ostensibly reserved for God. Within the terrestrial order of things, it is the king who assumes responsibility for punishing crimes against his subjects. The violent, passionate nature of vengeance poses a severe threat of social disorder, and thus state control is imposed, especially in contradistinction, by means of edicts against duels, to practices of the nobility, whose desire to settle their own scores constitutes a direct affront to the crown. This is why Corneille's Horace must be reintegrated into the social order by King Tullus, who like Louis XIV, stands as a symbol of all that is calm, rational, and immune to uncontrollable human passions. But through a skeptical approach to the French seventeenth century, Biet poses the question of whether Louis XIV was really above the human tendency to settle personal vendettas. Along with the ambiguity of the sovereign's role, Biet focuses on ways in which literature motivates a questioning of the ethical status of vengeance: "[L]a littérature affirme que le crime est discutable" (25).

Anne Defrance, who examines the fundamentally subjective nature of the perception and understanding of vengeance, reminds us that every affront is only a perceived offense and thus that retribution is always in some sense imaginary, constructed by subjects situating themselves in relation to others. Through a series of readings of Mme de Villedieu's stories, Defrance reveals how, once victimized by an attack or insult, the individual subject undergoes a kind of interior disintegration and seeks vengeance as a way of reconstituting the self that has been destabilized by the prior affront. Both the idea and the act of revenge thus have their sources in the inner regions of individual experience.

Defrance's main point is that vengeance is contingent, not only on acts of perception and conceptual construction, but also on factors external to the domain of private life, on gender and social class. Defrance touches on this book's central literary theme and finds sources of human creativity in the troubling behaviors of vengefulness:

Si la vengeance est un thème aussi productif, c'est...