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  • Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France
  • Jessica Goodman
Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France. By Elena Russo. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 2007. xi + 346 pp. Hb £36.50.

In the past decade, scholars have increasingly called into question the existence of a coherent Enlightenment project. Elena Russo's latest monograph tackles this issue from an aesthetic perspective, identifying two major aesthetic trends in eighteenth-century France, and arguing that their contrasting theories conceal very similar artistic practice. Drawing on fiction, essays, theatre and eulogies, Russo outlines a confrontation between the philosophes and the beaux esprits over the definition of good and bad taste. Russo characterises the goût moderne of 1700–1750 as feminine, critical and ironic: an eclectic combination of genres that eschewed mimeticism in favour of self-reflexivity, and rationality in favour of sudden flashes of understanding. Marivaux and Montesquieu are invoked as the standard-bearers of this aesthetic, dismissed by its detractors as mere petit goût: dazzling with wit rather than providing real enlightenment, and more concerned with the social advancement of its creators than the moral improvement of the nation. One such detractor was Voltaire, whom Russo describes in contrast as promoting a return to a sublime, ancient grand goût. Fénelon and (to an extent) Diderot are placed alongside Voltaire in the camp of the philosophes, presented as the advocates of an almost classical theory of art rooted in perfect illusion, striving for a directness of emotional recognition that was troubled even by the artificiality of verbal communication. However, Russo argues that despite its emphasis on intellectual labour and reasoned understanding, this return to the grand goût adopted many of the features of the goût moderne it claimed to despise. She highlights irony and self-reflexivity among the techniques that Voltaire and Diderot appropriated, attracted despite themselves to a subversive questioning of aesthetic system and authority that had parallels with their political beliefs. For Russo, theatre is an apposite representation of the century's evolving aesthetic values. Spectators were ejected from the stage of the Comédie-Française in 1759, creating a separate stage-space of illusion, yet the public appetite for parody and topical adaptation never died, and the outside world continued to intrude into art's privileged realm. The most ambiguous figure in Russo's account is Diderot. Voltaire is clearly Russo's representative of the grand goût, and his borrowings from the goût moderne are only touched on in the closing pages. Diderot, however, whilst broadly grouped with Voltaire, is evoked from the start as an example of both grand and petit goût, and by identifying self-reflexivity and eclecticism as typical of the latter, Russo underlines Diderot's link with the modern camp. This complex figure seems to embody Russo's thesis of an ancient–modern hybrid, and it is therefore curious that whilst Montesquieu and Marivaux are accorded their own [End Page 471] chapters, it is only in the conclusion that Diderot is accorded any sustained individual attention. Russo's focus on taste as a crucial element of the philosophes' Enlightenment is not new, but her emphasis on the often dismissed petit goût provides a new perspective on the aesthetic tensions underpinning later eighteenth-century writing, and contributes to the broader debate over the unity of the Enlightenment, revealing how even the philosophes' grand goût contained traces of the earlier trends it claimed to combat.

Jessica Goodman
Worcester College, Oxford
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