La France galante: essai historique sur une catégorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu'à la Révolution (review)

Alain Viala's book, the fruit of many years of apparently happy work, wears its learning lightly. More than once the author tells us that he aims for what the galants knew as 'le style moyen', and his gracious, smiling, and unpedantic book is designed to appeal to the cultivated general reader, presumed averse to specialist quarrels and jargon. The thesis is that between 1650 and 1750 the dominant French literary-cultural current was not 'classicism' but la galanterie. Although the word's origins lie in the Middle Ages, the use of galant explodes in the years around La Fronde; to the recipe for courtly success known as honnêteté, galenterie added a more properly urbane practice of the art of love and the love of art. The best early example is the work of Madeleine de Scudéry, as Delphine Denis has shown; but in Viala's narrative Scudéry's circle is just the beginning of a florescence that includes Racine, Molière, the fêtes of Versailles, the nouvelle, early periodicals, opera, fairy tales, Watteau, Marivaux, as well as a more earthy underside — the licentious Bussy-Rabutin, the parodies of le théâtre de la Foire, and finally eighteenth-century libertinage, the degenerate offspring of a kind of wit and enjouement that could no longer compete with the Rousseauian 'modèle du sensible' (p. 471). Viala thus cuts a wide and deep swathe stretching well beyond the Modern camp — and well beyond aesthetics proper, in that he continually stresses the practical uses of a literature that aimed to 'former les moeurs' (p. 160) and to 'jouer [un] rôle de ciment social' (p. 184). Literature regulates the behaviour of the collectivity: especially in the context of writers such as Scudéry, Méré, and Bouhours, the idea is hardly new. Nonetheless, Viala expands the material, making it fresh and accessible; he offers convincing sociological explanations for the mode's invention by a group of parvenu monarchical loyalists; and he prospects well into the eighteenth century, when galanterie held its influence even as its success undermined its constitutive elitism. Drawbacks? Methodologically, the preference for the endogenous term galant over the post hoc fabrication classique makes undeniable sense. But do all the works discussed really belong to the selfsame 'cultural category' just because the word figures in or around them? The author's (gallant) distaste for scholarly debates keeps him from pinning down what he adds to studies crystallized around other key words — ancient/modern, conversation, civility, sociability, mondanité. Indeed, he pays relatively little attention to the abundant work on such subjects, favouring a limited number of scholars institutionally close to him, while others (say, Marc Fumaroli in France, Benedetta Craveri in Italy, Joan DeJean in the US) receive nary a nod. Likewise, Viala's underlying contention that galanterie's basis in respect and reciprocity makes it a forerunner of (democratic?) modern manners might benefit from more intellectual triangulation (Tzvetan Todorov's La Vie commune comes to mind). Still, La France galante, engaging throughout, makes a very strong case for seeing galanterie as the defining characteristic of French cultural production before the reign of sensibilité.