Through Strangers' Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France

5. Montesquieu's "Introduction" and "R

Chapter Five Montesquieu’s “Introduction” and “Réflexions,” and the Question of the “Secret Chain” To bring this analysis of the novel to a close, I would like to consider two texts that surround the Lettres persanes: the “Introduction” (7–9), which accompanied the novel in 1721, and the well-known retrospective statement, the “Quelques Réflexions sur les Lettres persanes” (3–5) published in 1754. The importance of preliminary texts is no longer to be ignored especially after Gérard Genette’s monumental study Seuils, although Genette limits himself to a taxonomy, albeit thorough and detailed, of all the possible types of accompanying texts, titles, postfaces, notes, etc. But, as Lorraine Piroux has demonstrated in her study that goes far beyond Genette’s taxonomy, the situation of dedications is one of complex hybridity. Piroux states that the dedicatory epistles lie on several frontiers: between the main text and the reader, between the world and the book, between literature and culture: “l’étude d’une dédicace doit nécessairement passer par la singularité du texte auquel elle se rapporte et du milieu culturel qui l’a produit” (29). The preface also involves an address by the author to his or her readers, at a time when authors thought much more about who their readers were or should be: in the Old Regime, “la question de l’adresse faisait partie intégrale du projet de l’écriture [. . .]. Décider de ceux pour qui l’on écrivait consistait alors à décider de la visibilité et de la portée que l’on voulait attribuer à son écriture” (20). Despite the dedications’ apparent marginal status and conventional content, they set up a circulation of meaning and interplay that, properly interpreted , can renew the interpretation of the texts in an original way. By Montesquieu’s time, the traditional practice of an author’s dedicating a book to a powerful and distinguished protector was starting to fade, as authors acquired more 118 independence and status as writers, and depended less on patronage from aristocrats and monarchs. Indeed, in his study of French dedicatory letters, Wolfgang Leiner cites Montesquieu ’s “Introduction” to the Lettres persanes as explicitly rejecting the practice of dedication in its first paragraph, stating bluntly that a work must stand on its own merit (309). However , if dedications were passing from the scene, the practice of prefacing texts was still current, and perhaps because prefaces displaced dedications, they still carried a certain weight. While authors were no longer searching for attention from higher personages, they were still dependent on a reading public , perhaps more than in our time where large commercial entities like bookselling chains and publishing house conglomerates remove the author from his or her audience—book tours and signings in bookstores are an attempt to overcome this distance . Apart from press reviews and word of mouth, such aids to develop readership did not exist in the Old Regime, but the situation was different. As one writer describing the situation in Elizabethan England says, aside from the author the bookmaking process consisted of only three functions: “that of the capitalist who owns the manuscript and finances the enterprise, that of the craftsman who prints the book, and that of the merchant who sells it to the public” (Gebert 22). In France, the “libraire” was frequently the purchaser of the manuscript and the seller of the book as well, thus reducing even further the number of entities between the author and his public. (On the other hand, the production of “contrefaçons” unauthorized by the bookseller-publisher and the author lay beyond the author’s and the bookseller’s control in the days before copyright of intellectual property; and other factors such as growing literacy rates and lending libraries contributed to a wider readership.) Despite these factors, and despite the passing of personal patronage, prefaces and introductions could still be written and read as more personal statements from an author to his or her audience than in the following century. Therefore, it would have been logical to look at Montesquieu ’s “Introduction” before analyzing the novel itself, but I depart from that sequence because of a peculiar circumstance connected with Montesquieu’s novel, the existence of a text that Montesquieu wrote much later about the novel: his 119 Montesquieu’s “Secret Chain” 120 Chapter Five “Quelques Réflexions” which were written to defend his novel against a clergyman’s accusation of...