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  • Les Journaux de Marivaux et le monde des ‘spectateurs’
  • D. J. Culpin
Les Journaux de Marivaux et le monde des ‘spectateurs’. By Alexis Levrier. Préface de Françoise Gevrey. (Lettres Françaises). Paris, Presses de l’Universitéde Paris-Sorbonne, 2007. 521 pp. Pb €38.00.

Surprisingly, as Lévrier points out, there has been no systematic study of the links between Marivaux’s journals and other French-language ‘spectators’. The author sets out to make good this deficit, limiting himself to the period 1711–1734, from the publication of Addison’s Spectator to Marivaux’s Cabinet du philosophe. In Part 1, he identifies a corpus of eight works, in addition to Marivaux’s three journals: Van Effen, Le Misanthrope (1711), [Rousset de Missy], Le Censeur (1714), Van Effen, La Bagatelle (1714), Granet, Le Spectateur inconnu (1724), Desfourneaux, Le Spectateur suisse (1723), Van Effen, Le Nouveau Spectateur (1723–5), Mangenot, Le Spectateur littéraire (1728) and the anonymous La Spectatrice (1728–9). In Part 2, the author seeks the links which unite these spectatorial publications with other manifestations of the journal which, as a literary form, was so popular in the first half of the eighteenth century. The shared features that he identifies include the foregrounding of the author; the distant, sometimes misanthropic vision of the fictional journalist; the preoccupation with moral reflection; the similarities with the short literary forms employed by French moralists; the inclusion of fictional letters as a means of giving the reader a voice; and a preoccupation with aesthetic considerations related to literature, theatre, opera and taste. Part 3 concentrates on the three French-language ‘spectators’ that appeared in Holland during the decade between the appearance of Addison’s publication and Le Spectateur français, while Part 4 is concerned with Marivaux’s journals and the reasons that led him to imitate his English predecessor. Lévrier contends that the birth of Marivaux’s first journal was an act of conscious choice by an author already in command of his literary resources. He insists on Marivaux’s originality with regard to the English Spectator, citing as proof the [End Page 210] irregular publication schedule of the Spectateur français, which destabilizes the expectation of the reader; the more harshly pessimistic tone of the Indigent Philosophe; and the unexpected interweaving in the Cabinet du philosophe of ‘deux unités structurantes, le fragment et la feuille volante’ (p. 315). Part 5 shows that Marivaux’s Spectateur français was considered a model to be imitated by the majority of French-language spectators appearing during the 1720s, but Lévrier contends that the authors of these publications did not comprehend the extent of Marivaux’s originality: they demonstrate univocity, rather than the proliferation of voices which marks the Spec-tateur français; they adopt ‘la posture confortable du prédicateur’ (p. 393) which Marivaux eschewed; and, by the regularity of their publication, they show that, ‘derrière la tentation de la continuitéperceptible dans la plupart des «spectateurs», se cache peut-être une peur de la feuille volante, forme subversive dans sa volatilité même’ (p. 422). The author’s conclusions are modest, namely that it is difficult to state categorically that a ‘genre spectatorial’ emerged during these years, and that Marivaux was probably more quoted that imitated by his successors. Nevertheless, this book will be a useful source of reference for those seeking to understand the context and originality of Marivaux’s journals.

D. J. Culpin
University of St Andrews
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