Le Mauvais goût des autres: Le jugement littéraire dans la France du XVIIIe siècle by Jennifer Tsien (review)

This French translation of Jennifer Tsien's The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) is admirably well done and captures both her style and meaning. The new edition, moreover, converts the notes from endnotes to footnotes, making them much more accessible to the reader. Since the original English edition had translated all of the quoted materials from French into English in the body of the text and then sent the reader to the end-notes for the original French, this new format with quotations in their original French in the body of the text and footnotes on each individual page is significantly more readable. While there are a few minor changes between editions, Le Mauvais goût des autres is a faithful translation of the 2012 English edition.

The timeliness of Tsien's work (or perhaps the timely appearance of this new translation) cannot be overstated. At the heart of the book sit a number of paradoxes that are deeply relevant in our present moment: How might the assertion of universally held faculties of thought, such as taste or reason, actually be hiding the preservation of elite status? What are the politics of seeking to explore beyond one's national borders while still asserting one's own cultural primacy? How might "popular opinion" risk supplanting "studied opinion" with the rise of certain technologies, like the printing press (or in our modern day, the internet), that facilitate the dissemination of popular and sometimes inaccurate views? Throughout the book, Tsien shows the reader how the guise of mauvais goût was used to delimit frontiers between elite and non-elite, French and non-French, genius and barbarian, educated and uneducated. Since taste is such a vague and amorphous category to begin with, she argues that it works well as a catch-all for exclusion: "Même si l'écrivain sait suivres ces règles, son oeuvre peut encore échouer si son sons instinctif du gout—parfois appelé 'je ne sais quoi'—est pris en défaut" (64). The identity of those judges capable of discerning good taste from bad invariably coincided with the intellectual elites who were, intentionally or not, striving to preserve their stronghold.

Tsien's book has an ambitious scope that could have, in less capable hands, left the reader behind. In a series of wide-ranging chapters, she takes on questions of bad taste across history, geography, language, and literary genre. Throughout this impressive tour of eighteenth-century French thought, she repeatedly returns to the idea that accusations of bad taste should not be read simply as matters of individual judgment. Rather, she shows how they mask more systematic assertions of cultural superiority, intellectual exclusivity, gender bias, or the attempt to preserve elite status. Tsien favours moving swiftly between the works that she invokes (which are united largely by being the product of the eighteenth-century philosophes, including most notably a wide variety of entries from the Encyclopédie) over lingering with an extended analysis of any one work. The effect of this is to thoroughly convince the reader of the insightfulness of Tsien's argument—in the end, there can be little doubt of the truth of her fascinating observations—even though some readers might still hope for a more sustained analysis of individual works. Scholars of the eighteenth century will find this work to be a trove of insights about both well-known and obscure works; students who are newer to the period will find themselves making a list of works to read carefully in order to better understand Tsien's striking insights.

Le Mauvais goût des autres succeeds at putting several well-worn truisms about the Enlightenment into serious question. Through the lens of taste, Tsien encourages the reader to question...