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  • Écrire son temps: Les Mémoires en France de 1815 à 1848
  • Francesco Manzini
Écrire son temps: Les Mémoires en France de 1815 à 1848. By Damien Zanone. Lyon, PUL, 2006. 416 pp. Pb €30.00.

Zanone's welcome study seeks to make sense of a neglected publishing phenomenon, asking how and why 444 new Mémoires, many of them running to multiple volumes, came to be produced between 1815 and 1848. Zanone chooses to limit his investigation to eleven representative texts of varying authenticity and often suspect veracity. He excludes autobiographies, and other writings inspired by Rousseau's Confessions, as well as compilations and disguised biographies: thus Stendhal's Souvenirs d'égotisme and Vie de Henry Brulard fall by the wayside, as does the bulk of the Napoleonic corpus, including Las Cases's Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Instead Zanone focuses on the Mémoires written by or on behalf of actors on the stage of contemporary history, whether prominent (Fouché, Genlis, Abrantès, Bourrienne), obscure (Fauche-Borel, Fonvielle, Campestre) or imagined (the Contemporaine, the pair de France, the femme de qualité). Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe complete Zanone's list, serving at once as the culmination of and an exception to the writing practice he identifies, not only in their form but also because these alone are still read and accorded literary status. Zanone starts by uncovering the methods and motivations of publishers (Ladvocat, [End Page 344] Mame) and the teinturiers (Villemarest, Lamothe-Langon) they employed. He goes on to set his chosen corpus against other kinds of texts published in the same period, whether autobiographical, historical or fictional. In particular, Zanone presents the Mémoires of the period as 'un genre amphibie', floating between history and fiction, Histoire and histoire, using this freedom to open up a space for the inscription not only of contemporary history but also of the (in)significant individual's place within it. The extraordinary density of political events in the period covered by these Mémoires —1770–1830 —accorded a new prestige to the eye-witness, a Zelig to be honoured as much for where as for what s/he was. Zanone demonstrates that these witnesses, or their ghosts, typically produced a codified testimony. Thus the (hi)stories of the Revolution, Directory, Consulate and Empire are, again and again, reduced to staged encounters with a handful of mythical, stereotyped figures (Marie-Antoinette, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Napoleon, Joséphine), always word-perfect in their assigned roles. Zanone therefore uncovers a great deal of continuity between apocryphal and authentic Mémoires, each conforming to the expectations of their readers. The Mémoires, however, by recording the doxa of contemporary history, also allow for its interrogation, a possibility exploited by Chateaubriand in the Mémoires d'outre-tombe and by Balzac, himself a teinturier, contributing to the apocryphal Mémoires of Bausset and Sanson. Thus Zanone, in his final chapter, makes particularly illuminating links between the ways in which the Mémoires of the period and La Comédie humaine set out to rethink 'l'histoire contemporaine'. Indeed, if there is a criticism of this excellent book, it is that such a productive line of enquiry should not have been developed further —for instance by considering the relationship between the Mémoires and Balzac's use of melodrama (as described by Christopher Prendergast) —or else extended to cover the works of Stendhal, that other voracious consumer and transmuter of Mémoires.

Francesco Manzini
King's College London
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