Pour une histoire de l'intime et de ses variations (review)

We have reached a historical moment when a wealthy young Amer ican can declare that privacy is no longer a "social norm." In an interview with TechCrunch, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, declared provocatively: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people" (cited in Huffington Post, 18 March 2010). And thus, in December 2009, Zuckerberg and his programming posse did away with the privacy settings of some 350 million Facebook users! This wunderkind of technological exhibitionism recalls, however unintentionally, the very debates that gave shape to our modern period. That is, the invention of the modern self as a being with an intimate and private subjectivity that somehow requires expression. The collection Pour une histoire de l'intime, edited by Anne Coudreuse and Françoise Simonet-Tenant, charts the historical contours of this evolution in France from the eighteenth century to the present.

The editors begin by recognizing that their project reposes on the shoulders of scholars from the 1970s and 1980s such as Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Michel de Certeau, and Philippe Lejeune, who inaugurated and gave legitimacy to studies about the non-events of everyday living among mostly ordinary people, including girls. They likewise acknowledge the group of French historians such as Philippe Ariès, Georges Duby, and Arlette Farge who undertook the vast project of writing a history of private life from the Greeks to modern times. With these impressive predecessors in mind, Coudreuse and Simonet-Tenant nonetheless stake out new ground by attempting a diachronic synthesis of the malleable and slippery concept of the "intimate." Here is how they put it: "En quoi l'histoire des formulations de l'intime s'écritelle dans un itinéraire qui nous conduirait de la conquête du droit à l'intime jusqu'à son exhibition en passant par son appropriation progressive et accidentée?" (10). The ten essays in the book also explore how and why the eighteenth century can be said to have invented the intimate; why the nineteenth century made it a central preoccupation; how diaries and personal journals construct a sense of intimacy; and, finally, whether the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century diktat to express publicly one's most intimate self caused some to lose their souls.

The collection begins with two solidly researched articles by Véronique Montémont and Simonet-Tenant that trace the evolution of the term "intimate" from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Based on statistical analysis, dictionaries, and the BnF catalogue of titles, the two essays offer quantitative evidence that the term does indeed develop through time. Montémont describes how the notion of the intimate evolves from a relationship of affection with another person in the seventeenth century to the idea of a self with interiority before the Revolution, and, finally by the end of the nineteenth century, the term comes to signify depth and profundity in four separate spheres: physical, moral, relational, and ethical. In Simonet-Tenant's article, we witness a parallel development with the secularization of the confession and its displacement from the confessional to letters and personal journals during the eighteenth century. One would be remiss, however, to assume that confidences and secrets were always shared in letters and diaries. To the contrary, Simonet-Tenant offers persuasive proof of a slow evolution in letter and journal writing towards an emotive self with secrets to tell that becomes a hallmark of nineteenth-century Romanticism but is hardly present earlier.

Jean Goldzinck's article on Voltaire provides, fittingly enough, a witty refutation of this fashionable trendiness by the master himself. Goldzinck's Voltaire has nothing to confess: "Indifférence à soi en tant que sujet individualisé, indifférence à toute instance de culpabilisation morale ou religieuse (qu'ai-je fait de ma vie?), indifférence aux tabous (l'homosexualité, l'argent)" (71). Philippe Lejeune's...