Le Comte d'Antraigues: Mes Soliloques: Autobiographie rêvée (review)

Louis de Launay, comte d'Antraigues (b. Montpellier 1753, assassinated Barnes Terrace, 1812) was one of thousands of provincial, radical nobles, who thought they were the natural protectors of the people against absolute monarchical power. He wrote many political memoirs, speeches and pamphlets between 1788 and 1804, starting as a fiery rousseauist republican critic of hereditary royal power and divine right, and ending his days as a disgruntled counter-revolutionary spy exiled in London, reviled by monarchists, democrats and bonapartists alike. Alongside the published works, he left many holograph manuscripts: espionage reports and memoirs to the Allied governments, novels, and two full-length autobiographies: Mémoires sur la Turquie (covering his travels in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, 1778–79), and Mes Soliloques. Roger Barny has performed a service yet again, following his 1991 monograph, Le Comte d'Antraigues, un disciple aristocrate de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by making the text of Mes Soliloques available, as part of the ongoing process of rehabilitating this controversial figure, who for many years has been dismissed by some historians as simply a politically unstable and mendacious writer of Rousseauesque pseudo-confessions. It is d'Antraigues' very inability to separate reality from fantasy that makes him psychologically interesting (a sort of bovarysme avant la lettre), especially as he had literary as well as political aspirations. This is why Barny, in his Preface, pinpoints the ethical and political contradictions governing his complex subject, distinguishing three levels of imagination in Mes Soliloques: cultural, sexual and directly social. D'Antraigues aspired to the coveted status enjoyed by 'hommes de lettres' which was nourished by the Enlightenment, but he was prey to a conflict between two value systems: his innate 'vertu guerrière' and the bourgeois virtues extolled by contemporary writers, especially Rousseau. Barny sees this conflict of 'codes' revealing itself in d'Antraigues' account of the embarrassing episode of the Poncharamet duel, which led to a protracted campaign accusing d'Antraigues of dishonourable cowardice. Barny refers to d'Antraigues' opponent as Poucharamet (pp. 18, 160–172), but (p. 160) wrongly accuses me (or rather, 'C. Duworth'), of misreading his name as 'Poucharamet' in The D'Antraigues Phenomenon (Avero, 1986). The manuscript, and third-party holograph letters I quote, make the name unequivocally Poncharamet.

In his effusive Avant-Propos Claude Mazauric states that the holograph manuscript used by Barny was 'exhumé des réserves de la Bibliothèque de Dijon', after 220 years in oblivion. This was puzzling, as I had published in my biography, The D'Antraigues Phenomenon (to which Barny generously refers) and in articles between 1976 and 1986, many extracts from the holograph manuscript kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Nouvelles acquisitions franc¸aises, No 15467). The relationship between this manuscript and the 'Dijon manuscript' was mysterious enough, but it was compounded by Barny's omission of any information about the provenance, physical appearance or bibliographical identity of the Dijon manuscript. It seemed to me very unlikely that d'Antraigues would have taken the trouble to write out two identical versions with nothing to gain politically or financially. Furthermore, Barny's text ends in 1782, but the B.N. manuscript continues up to 1810: certainly the main body of the memoirs ends in 1782, but the first 'Suite de mes Mémoires' begins again on 9 October 1784, and the second in 1802 ('Le 25 x^bre') when the (by then) disenchanted and exiled secret agent takes up the sequel until 1810. It was (and remains) a mystery why this edition omits these thirty-six sad and bitter folio pages whilst reproducing (without comment or explanation) the portrait and caption which in fact form part of the entry for 9 April 1804. It transpires that there is no manuscript of Mes Soliloques in Dijon. When is an edition not an edition, but a transcription? When there is little or no attempt by the editor to provide information about the...