L'Épopée de Voltaire à Chateaubriand: poésie, histoire et politique (review)

With epic poetry firmly established as the pinnacle of literary genres, successive generations of early modern poets jostled for the eminent position of becoming France's Homer or Virgil. Jean-Marie Roulin's study traces the inexorable trajectory of the French epic through its metamorphosis from the early modern period to the post-revolutionary moment that is poised on the threshold of modernity. His study is remarkably ambitious in its sheer range and breadth: it sweeps from Voltaire's La Henriade, Marmontel and Sulzer, through Vixouze and revolutionary epic, to Mme de Staël, Chateaubriand and beyond (in other words, from 1723 to 1815); and it traces the transition from the traditional historical or biblical heroic epic to the modern political 'engaged' epic. Roulin argues that La Henriade first marks a watershed: divine intervention is banished and the epic text permits a mortal king to take charge of his country's destiny through the measured promotion of religious tolerance in a context of civil war. Thus epic mutates into an overtly political and prophetic textual space, exploited in like vein by Louis Racine (Jansenist epic) and Batteux (visionary epic), whom Roulin reads as precursors of the Romantics. While both Voltaire and Chateaubriand tread in the footsteps of the Aeneid, the two key cornerstones of epic — heroism and fantasy — are shown to be constantly challenged by them. By mid century, anthropological concerns such as happiness and nature already rival historicity for primacy in the epic. The second development occurs in the 1750s, where Marmontel, focusing on epic as the poetic celebration of national origins, promotes tolerance between cultures and civilizations within the colonial context. In parallel, Sulzer underscores the revalorisation of national identity at a moment when Macpherson's Ossianic poems — the literary equivalent of a 'promising ruin' — are being diffused across Europe. These nationalistic epic discourses are ajudged to be precursors of the revolutionary, republican ideal embodied by Vixouze (or Pagès de Vixouze) in his rebellious civic epic La France Républicaine; ou, le Miroir de la Révolution française. Here, as with Bitaubé, the epic hero is ousted and symbolically replaced by a people or a nation. The final metamorphosis is post-revolutionary and involves grappling with the problematic issue of depicting the epic origins of Liberty. Where Napoleon himself embodies dream, fiction and epic combined, the Groupe de Coppet attempt to redefine the epic with the focus on medieval chivalric traditions: Chateaubriand chooses Roman Catholicism as his primary source of modern Liberty, and both Staël and Chateaubriand juggle with the problematics of epic symbolism for France as post-revolutionary nation.

Imbued with acute historical awareness, Roulin's rich work constitutes a remarkable and complex ensemble that traces the evolution of the epic genre through a period of high political volatility, demonstrating that politics and epic poetry are largely symbiotic. His bibliography of epics is a marvel in itself and could profitably inspire future study on this fascinating metamorphic phenomenon. Ultimately, he identifies the epic poem as a literary space whose imaginary element proffers a sense of rooted stability and reassuring coherence beyond the chaos of human existence.