Biographie & Politique: Vie publique, vie privée, de l’Ancien Régime à la Restauration ed. by Olivier Ferret, Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre (review)

This anthology is in part the result of a colloquium organized in 2011 by the research group LIRE (Littérature, Idéologies, Représentations XVIIIe–XIXe) at the University of Lyon II (France). This is a remarkable book, carefully edited, which both illustrates new methods in the practice of literary science, and contributes significantly to the advancement of knowledge in the emerging field of biographical studies. In his introduction, Olivier Ferret engages in a debate principally with François Dosse’s theses in Le Pari biographique (2005), some of which he respectfully, but very appositely criticizes, as for instance Dosse’s classification of biography into three “ages”—“heroic,” “modal,” and “hermeneutic”—although this nevertheless goes on to preside discreetly over the whole book. This general presentation deserves particular attention, first because it demonstrates a well-read approach to biography defined as “a field of research, and perhaps even a discipline of knowledge” in its own right. Second, it is also worth reading because it vindicates that this collection of articles aims to investigate how modern biography came into existence in the history of literature towards the end of the seventeenth century—that is, at the beginning of this “long eighteenth century” that is the period of predilection of this study. Indeed, it calls implicitly for a full-length analysis of how the rise of biography coincided with the rise of the novel, “in a period when history was not yet conceived of as historical science, but was still largely part of the ‘belles-lettres’.”

Such is not the main objective of this volume, however, which undertakes to show, by carefully selected case studies, how biography as a literary genre in the larger sense participates pragmatically in the construction of political discourses. The methodology of literary research elaborated here with great efficiency, borrowing both from New Historicism and Reception theories, deserves to be praised. A brief second introduction presents, and quickly comments on, some well-chosen examples of the illustrations that often accompany the biographies under scrutiny, thus showing how biography overlaps the field of literature, as much as it distinguishes itself from historiography. This efficiently composed book falls into four parts—“Agir,” “Édifier,” “Justifier,” “Interpréter”—each introduced by Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre in such a way that the reader never loses sight of the coherence of the whole, which reads easily, with the sustained interest of distinguished erudition elegantly expressed.

The volume begins strong, with a study by Christophe Cave of Pidansat de Mairobert’s Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry and other works on the same topic, showing how they pertain to the libels and the libertine, erotic, and pornographic narratives then in fashion, as well as borrow from the pica-resque novel. This “type of political biography, half libel and half true story,” partakes in “the Voltairian method in philosophy applied . . . to politics.” Samy Ben Messaoud then studies several examples of “Private Lives,” ranging from the Vie privée de Louis XV to the Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin, the latter being then further analyzed by Olivier Ritz. It is one of the great assets of these articles that they chose to study several texts at a time, always avoiding locking themselves up in a single work, but practicing instead a lively style of comparative literary criticism. “Political biography,” writes Ben Messaoud, “emerges between light and shade, through these texts that are excessive indeed, but which translate a demand for transparency, and an aspiration to the constitution of a new Pantheon.”

One of the most interesting articles in this anthology is certainly Shojiro Kuwase’s “Reconnaître Rousseau,” where he focuses on the tension between the idealized image of Rousseau that his readers had inferred from his works of philosophy and fiction, and...