Saint-Simon, ou, La politique des ‘Mémoires’ by Christophe Blanquie, and: Rhétorique des ‘Mémoires’ du duc de Saint-Simon by Juliette Nollez (review)

Christophe Blanquie’s tripartite study aims to place the duc de Saint-Simon in an asymmetrical trio of contemporary political contexts, and to present him as a driven and in some respects influential protagonist in his lifetime (in distinction to the well-rehearsed perception of him as no more than a marginal and embittered observer). Blanquie largely succeeds in convincing the reader of his initial assertion that we are dealing in the Mémoires with ‘un texte éminemment politique, qu’il convient de lire […] comme tel’ (p. 16), and of Saint-Simon’s achievement in describing how ‘les affaires publiques sont traitées, par qui et dans quelles conditions, pour quelles raisons et avec quels résultats’ (p. 223). The first (brief) part deals with the absentee nobleman’s epistolary government of his hereditary estates at Blaye and Senlis, as a kind of apprenticeship for his subsequent responsibilities. The more important central chapters are then devoted to his (and, equally crucially, his wife’s) rapidly evolving sequence of political roles during the turbulent series of power conflicts that marked the second decade of the eighteenth century. This is the point at which Saint-Simon above all asserts his status as a duc et pair (as he wrote, ‘ma passion la plus vive et la plus chère est celle de ma dignité et de mon rang’, quoted p. 238), despite his main source of hope for (what he was not alone in seeing as) desirable political reform being threatened by the deaths of Louis XIV’s son in 1711, and in particular of his grandson, the duc de Bourgogne, the following year. His role thereafter as a conseiller du prince is thus pragmatically transferred, following the king’s own death in 1714, to the duc d’Orléans, who was to serve as Regent until 1723; in this capacity Saint-Simon was unstintingly hostile to the claims to power made by the bastard offspring of the dead monarch, and to the growing influence of the future prime minister, the abbé (later cardinal) Dubois. His carefully calibrated participation in the Conseil de Régence set up in the aftermath of the lit de justice of 1718 thus constitutes the apogee of his influence, after which his apparently paradoxical refusal of preferment is persuasively justified by Blanquie’s evocation of ‘[un] homme des solutions progressives, [qui] préfère généralement atteindre ses objectifs par étapes’ (p. 206). The last section then deals, again more briefly, with Saint-Simon’s involvement in the complex Franco-Spanish negotiations surrounding the claims of Philip V of Spain to the French throne (alongside his not disinterested evaluation of the relative antiquity and influence of the French and Spanish aristocracies), and with the related difficulties associated with the contemporaneous presence of the exiled English court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The study, which is inevitably technical in its detail, nonetheless steers the reader persuasively through the fast-moving narrative with the help of trenchant summaries, overviews, and partial conclusions, although a detailed knowledge of the historical background (as of the arcane titles adopted by certain salient court dignitaries) is sometimes taken too much for granted.

Juliette Nollez makes a judiciously selective application of rhetorical terms in order to inform her erudite, fertile, and often innovatory survey of this most apparently intractable of records of the grand siècle and the Regency (although the century to which it belongs is of itself a matter of debate). The substantial first part is devoted to the notion of paratopie, to the framework of external circumstances, in other words, in which the whole project is conceived and crafted. The M...