How the Enlightenment Invented La Bohème

In his introduction to the English translation of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, marquis de Pelleport’s novel, The Bohemians, composed in the 1780s and published in 1790, Robert Darnton explains why the text “deserves to be rescued from oblivion” (x). According to Darnton, Pelleport was the first writer before the nineteenth century to “bring la Bohème to life” as a countercultural literary milieu.¹ The genealogy of nineteenth-century romantic notions of “la vie bohème” stretches back to a late Enlightenment novel by a minor noble writer in the Bastille. Pelleport’s novel illuminates a shady world of aspiring authors struggling for survival in the last decade of the Ancien Régime, and if not a masterpiece, Darnton asserts that it comes close. These are big claims about a text that garnered no attention when it was published nor much since then. Yet a text can have value even if it lacks evidence of audience appeal, especially in the context of Ancien Régime France, where a strict censorship apparatus forced many texts, authors, and readers underground if not into prison. Nonetheless, Darnton’s introduction raises the reader’s expectations and therefore leads a reviewer to ask whether the novel bears out such claims. In order to answer that question, we must begin with Darnton’s essay.

Both Robert Darnton and Vivian Folkenflik deserve gratitude for seeing this translation project through from archival research to publication. They have done a service for the profession by making this noncanonical text available to students and scholars of the eighteenth century, a considerable labor, since the text requires a guide to decode the allusions to individuals and events that have disappeared from view. Darnton and Folkenflik combined their respective areas of expertise in police archives and literature to provide a scholarly apparatus for the modern reader.

Folkenflik does a masterful job with her translation, no small feat given Pelleport’s ironic tone and unorthodox blend of high art, philosophy, social satire, and ribald humor. The text pays direct homage to Cervantes’s Don Quixote but has elements of an author like Rabelais in its meandering narrative and heterodox voices. Folkenflik succeeds in capturing the flow of the text and the evident delight that Pelleport takes in language. As Folkenflik suggests in her essay, Pelleport’s novel draws on a rich comic tradition that simultaneously celebrates the creative powers of fiction while deflating authorial aspirations. Literary scholars will find much to discuss in terms of narrative voice, the self-presentation of author, and the construction of the reader. The text offers a quixotic narrative that unfolds in episodes divided into two volumes, where characters recur but under different names. Both Folkenflik and Darnton situate the novel in the genre of “secret histories” (vies privées) that combined public and private information, history and fiction, to entertain a growing reading public in the last two decades of the Ancien Régime. These texts were fun to read, and they delivered an enlightened blend of materialist philosophy, political criticism, and sexual titillation. For twenty-first century readers to enjoy the game of Pelleport’s text, however, they will need help deciphering the otherwise opaque allusions. This edition will reward readers for their efforts.

As I mentioned earlier, Darnton’s introduction is required reading for anyone interested in Pelleport’s novel. In the first part of the essay, he reconstructs the life of Pelleport and the milieu of exiled writers in London that defined his literary aspirations. After fleshing out this social world, Darnton turns a critical eye on the novel itself and its value for a twenty-first century reader. Pelleport is an ideal topic for Darnton, who has been tracking hack writers since the start of his career and has used them to redefine the field of Enlightenment history. Moreover, Pelleport initially works with and then falls out with Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754–93), Darnton’s archetype for his argument that literary...