Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction ed. by Michael J. Mulryan and Denis D. Grélé (review)

This collection of five studies analyses narratives from three national contexts, with France as its principal focus. The first chapter asserts that the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey was the model for two accounts of escapes from the Bastille (those of the abbé de Bucquoy and of Jean-Henri Masers de Latude), and that of Casanova’s flight from the Piombi in Venice. It is followed by analyses of the biographies, intended for popular consumption, of the robbers Louis-Dominique Cartouche and John Sheppard in French and English respectively (Chapter 2), and of representations of the jewel thief, the comtesse de La Motte-Valois — another escapee from the Bastille — who would attempt to ingratiate herself with the Revolutionary cause from across the English Channel (Chapter 3). The last two contributions study prison as a refuge from immorality in the form of the novel (Manon Lescaut), and the theme of the escape from an ‘oppressive’ utopian society (Tyssot de Patot’s Les Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé). An Introduction explores some of the commonalities in these diverse escape narratives, such as their potential to act as a ‘threat to the status quo’ (p. xix), or their role in the creation of a mythology surrounding individual prisoners or prisons (most obviously, the Bastille). There is no denying the interest of these varied narratives, and their capacity to reflect such aspects of eighteenth-century thought as the place of the individual in society, the ‘force’ of the passions (p. xvi), or even (in the account of Massé’s Voyages) the oppressive nature of organizing time itself. Two escapees also vividly illustrate how individuals attempted to reposition themselves for their own ends during the turmoil of the Revolution. La Motte-Valois, as Claire Trévien writes, was ultimately unable to ‘rebrand herself’ through her memoirs (p. 54), whereas Latude, after the storming of the Bastille, ‘wandered around the worksite, sharing his life story with whoever would listen to him’ before finding himself ‘paraded through the streets as a revolutionary hero’ (editors’ introduction, p. xxiv). Chapter 4 strikingly illustrates another facet of thinking about space in the Ancien Régime, with the Americas, as Rori Bloom writes, becoming a vertiginous ‘world without walls’ for the two central protagonists of Manon Lescaut (p. 67). This is quite a concise volume, and its overall conclusions are based on a relatively wide geographical range, and a comparatively limited number of case studies. The editors posit a wide-ranging transformation in thinking about imprisonment according to which ‘prison becomes the main punishment’ in itself, but one might expect more sustained critical engagement with, for example, the Foucauldian model (and which might nuance the idea, put forward in the closing lines, that ‘at the dawn of the nineteenth century’, ‘royal power’ was compelled to ‘[implement] better justice for all’, p. 84). There are several instances where greater attention to copy-editing might be wished for (for example, ‘tempting the feat’, p. 8; ‘receiving his last rights’ p. 37). Nonetheless, this book offers a range of new perspectives about the strategies employed by marginalized individuals to criticize society, and, when the occasion arose, to negotiate a new place for themselves within it.