L'Utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre, 1675-1761 (review)

REVIEWS 187 Jean-Michel Racault. L'Utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre, 16751761 . Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 280. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991. xii + 830pp. ISBN 0-7294-0404-8. The scholarly volume under review belongs to the time-honoured tradition of the French "thèse d'Etat." As we are told in the foreword, the thesis was successfully defended at the Sorbonne in 1987. The reader is here confronted by one of these massive, encyclopedic studies tiiat hark back to the days of Mauzi et al. The scope is die same, as the tradition of the "thèse de doctorat d'Etat" has upheld now for the better part of the last century and a half: the theme of Utopia is treated as a topos throughout French and English letters between 1675 (the date of the English "translation"—in the eighteenthcentury understanding of the term—of Veiras's Histoire des Sévarambes, whose French original would not appear for another two years) and 1761 (the date of publication of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse with its Garens situs). The structure of this study, like that of the vast majority of such doctoral theses in France, can best be characterized as a collection of several monograph-length sections, introduced by a very short (thirty pages) introduction and framed by an equally short conclusion, followed by an especially thorough bibliography, an index of titles cited, and an index of names appearing in the text of the book. The first of the sections, entitled "Le Mode utopique," treats the relationship between the social world of quotidian reality and the fictional realization of the Utopian dream in literature. These pages are among the most perceptive of the book. Racault touches, however briefly, on the many social experiments of the era, communities of radical social transformation, long-overlooked events in the history of English radicalism such as Winstanley's mystical communism, the impact of the Quaker sect, American religious communities such as that envisaged by Ann Lee and what came to be called the Shaker phenomenon in New York State. The emphasis then moves towards the colonialization of the New World, where the Utopian ideal held sway over the imaginations of several generations of explorers, and, similarly, of those whose explorations never went beyond the covers of books. Defoe, "the Projecting Age," and the growing, almost panting, dream of a bourgeois Utopia become the target of Racault's history. This first section ends with Mandeville's FaWe of the Bees, Montesquieu's Troglodyte stories , and Robert Wallace's Various Prospects. The second monograph-length section bears the title "Le Genre utopique: essai de délimitation." In this section, Racault tries to delimit the sociology ofthe genre, and examines how the Utopian model of social perfection found its labyrinthine way into works as diverse as Garnier's Voyages imaginaires, Gulliver 's Travels, Geranio by Barnes, Gildon's Nouvelle Athènes, the Utopias of Fénelon, Morelly, the "robinsonnade" treatments of the theme, and the more traditional imaginary voyages found throughout the era. The third section deals with what Racault calls Utopia's "formes canoniques et modèles annexes." Here he detours from his appointed path to include discussions of the novel's "crisis" at the end of the seventeenth century and in the first decades of the eighteenth, the rapport between the developing novel as a genre and the "récits de voyages," the theoretical problems of where to situate Utopia, with concerted emphasis on Veiras's Histoire des Sévarambes (arguably the most original discussions in the book), and of Veiras's successors and literary heirs. In the fourth section Racault delves into the amorphous issue of human nature and the many antirational aspects of the Utopian lure, stressing Foigny's Terre australe in detail. (It may be that the discussion here is the most exhaustive commentary to date on Foigny.) To the Terre australe commentary is linked a reading of Gulliver's Travels from the same viewpoint . The fifth section ranges widely, as its title indicates: "Du roman utopique l'utopie dans le roman: 'micro-utopies' et 'petites sociétés' dans le roman des Lumières." Five basic...