Revolutionary Love in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century France (review)

In this wide-ranging survey of largely forgotten works of French literature, Allan Pasco is concerned to identify a 'new amorous mentalité' (p. 1) consisting of a shift towards a belief in the right to experience love as passion, although, as Pasco shows, this inevitably led to disappointment and became a factor in attitudes towards divorce. (The coda to his story relates a concomitant rise in venereal infections, as reflected in several late eighteenth-century works of fiction.) Pasco's discussion is informed by a conviction that literary texts, if used with circumspection, can provide evidence that aids in the reconstruction of the historical picture, thereby making good any deficiencies in the archives. In keeping with his emphasis on interdisciplinary complementariness, he provides enlightening syntheses of the findings of a number of historians. (Shown to be of particular interest in this regard is the work that has been done on marriage and remarriage by émigrés or their spouses during the Revolution and its aftermath.) Historians may consider that Pasco's use of fictional scenarios falls short of historical 'proof, although other readers may agree with him that the weight of literary evidence is incontrovertible and parallels that found in other kinds of document. As for the literary texts themselves, they are primarily exploited for their outline plots, although there are extended considerations of Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville and Mme de Staël's Delphine. Pasco is candid about what he terms the lack of 'lasting literary value' (p. 2) of many of the works he adduces, while the proliferation of references to unfamiliar authors and characters is leavened by the modest, good-natured, and tolerant stance he adopts throughout his agreeably written study. Specialists in those of his chosen authors to whom scholarly attention has been devoted may be disappointed by the absence of original or detailed readings, but the very fact of drawing attention to the potential interest of such authors as Pigault-Lebrun outside the stereotypes that have been repeated from one literary manual to the next is reason for gratitude. Pasco's bibliography will also be a precious resource for future researchers. Although his methodology is applied with a broad brush, and there are occasions when his objections to certain critics and cultural historians fail to acknowledge the originality of their arguments, his study possesses immense worth as a result of his toil in libraries across the world. One may surmise that 'Dame Censure' is the only reader other than Pasco himself to have read all the works analysed. The footnotes are a mine of information, though they could have been shortened by the avoidance of repetition in full of the lengthy titles and details of publication. The reference to Phèdre's passion for her 'son-in-law' is simply a lesson in American usage, but the mention of the 'abbé Prévost's pathetic Présidente de Tourvel' (p. 68) is less satisfactorily explained. It is a pity, too, that, in an otherwise elegantly produced volume, a number of French words have been systematically anglicized by an automatic spell check.