Usages des vies: le biographique hier et aujourd’hui (XVIIe – XXIe siècle) ed. by Sarah Mombert and Michèle Rosellini (review)

It is a curious fact that collective studies of biography far outnumber single-author monographs, a phenomenon confirmed not only by the appearance of this latest volume but also by its own bibliography, which, though not exhaustive, lists almost three times as many collective titles as single-author ones. The reason for this fragmentation of approach may well be that, as Michèle Rosellini’s intelligent Introduction suggests, biography is an unusually plastic genre, ‘ouvert à l’hybridation, disponible à toutes les altérations et les métamorphoses que le récit de vie a assumé [sic]’ (p. 28). Being ‘fortement ancrée dans l’histoire’ (p. 12), biography calls for a pragmatic rather than a theoretical approach. It makes very good sense, then, to do as Rosellini proposes, and avoid seeking to establish a ‘poetics’ of biography or to treat it as a single and self-identical object, by paying attention instead to its various ‘uses’ as they emerge from the seventeenth century onwards. The thirteen essays illustrate the multiple ways in which biographical writing has been used across four centuries, from Mme Périer’s Vie de Pascal, the biographical portraits of Théophile de Viau and Mme de Villedieu, via Perrault’s Hommes illustres, Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, Voltaire’s biographies of Charles XII and Molière, La Harpe’s Cours de littérature, nineteenth-century scientism, Stendhal’s Vie de Napoléon, Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé, Lamartine’s Biographies de gare, the representation of Montesquieu in twentieth-century manuals of literature, to Kundera and contemporary fiction. Much of the material is relatively unfamiliar and for the most part the authors are experts in their subject area rather than in biography as such, which means that authorial expertise occasionally outstrips relevance to the volume’s overall rationale. There are, however, some productive extrapolations to be made. The social and political uses of biography emerge with commendable interestingness and clarity in the essay on Perrault’s Hommes illustres by Francine Wild, who shows how exemplarity shifted from the individual to the collective as Perrault implicitly sought to establish the myth of the ‘grand siècle’ through his portraits of men whose individual greatness is less than that of the century as a whole. Sarah Mombert’s account of Lamartine’s biographies of great men (and a few women), published in Hachette’s ‘Bibliothèque des chemins de fer’, demonstrates how this unlikely enterprise was used for pedagogical purposes to propound the values of a civilization that defended freedom and progress. The last group of essays deal primarily with biographies of individual writers, all of whom are powerfully constructed by their biographical authors to fit their own agendas: Mme Périer, who was reluctant to publish the ‘life’ of her brother, intended it not as an introduction to a then non-existent work but as an illustration of his saintliness; and the various biographies of Théophile de Viau and Mme de Villedieu, which portray them as immoral and libertine subjects, are used either to mask or to hint at the potentially subversive character of their writings. The collective merit of the volume is to set its own agenda for future studies of biography by exemplifying the benefits of attending to such uses of biographical practice over and above any formal specificity it might have.