Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction ed. by Michael J. Mulryan and Denis D. Grélé (review)

This collection of five essays sheds light on a number of prison escape narratives that historians and literary scholars have never studied as a coherent group. Beyond the sheer entertainment value of the stories themselves (who would fail to be amused by Louis Dominique Cartouche's adventures or enthralled with the scandal and gossip surrounding the "Affair of the Necklace"?), there is much to learn in this volume about eighteenth-century French popular culture and the shifting perception of those who escaped from prison in the period. Each essay brings a wealth of archival information and critical perspectives to its object of study and develops the central argument laid out by the two editors in their introduction: in the eighteenth century, the prison escapee ceases to be perceived as a danger to society and as a threat to royal power. Instead, escaping from prison—and living to tell the tale—becomes an expression of courage and an act of resistance against unfair incarceration.

Prison escape narratives reflect the development of new forms of social consciousness and the coming-of-age of Enlightenment values. There is a political subtext to each escape—and it is almost always the same one. Those who escape are fighting for the ideals of freedom and happiness. They are reclaiming rights to which each individual is entitled, and their desire to reinvent themselves through their stories is more important than protecting the established social order. Narratives foreground moments when escapees elude arrest, outsmart the police, or simply humiliate the authorities through cunning and intelligence. Not only is the act of escape subversive in itself—since it goes against the all-powerful will of the monarch—but writing those stories also challenges the status quo, as does the act of reading and assigning political meaning to them. Those who escape are often described as having superhuman abilities (and confidence), as if magical powers were at play in transforming them from prisoners into free people.

Escape narratives rarely pretend to be factual, historical accounts; on the contrary, the escape is often romanticized, and the narrator does not hesitate to insist on certain details to sell more books (for instance, her supposed intimate relationship with Marie-Antoinette in the case of the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois). By becoming part of prison folklore, escapees hope to gain more social prestige, rebrand themselves as heroes and heroines, and no longer be seen as criminals who endanger social peace. As Léa Lebourg-Leportier writes in her essay, a criminal biography transforms its protagonist into "an extraordinary person who should be remembered in national history" (26). The authors of escape narratives are also great storytellers who are well aware of the tools of the trade. For Casanova or Abbé Jean-Albert d'Archambaud du Bucquoy, relying on well-honed literary devices to tell their stories means that they become characters open to interpretation and appropriation. It is not unusual for the narratives to echo the plot structure of mythological texts in order to give an epic quality to their deeds. This structure also serves a social and political purpose: inscribing one's story within an established matrix reaffirms "the ageless dichotomy between tyranny and individual liberties" (3) and its relevance in the context of eighteenth-century France.

The most famous fictional escapees of the period are without doubt the Abbé de Prévost's characters Manon Lescaut and her lover, the Chevalier Des Grieux. Their story exemplifies the tensions between traditional social structures and the desire for self-fulfilment, but, as Rori Bloom demonstrates in her essay "Du plaisir dans ma solitude: Finding Pleasure in the Prisons of Manon Lescaut," keeping the two characters in jail is also a way of controlling their sexual activity. Bloom focuses on small textual clues that have been often overlooked to provide a fascinating retelling...