Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France by Roger Pearson (review)

"Hugo was a man of many words, of many, many words": this is Pearson, accounting for why his erudite ramble among French ideas about the role of the poet weighs in at 624 pages, 2 lbs. 9 oz., and £85. The fruit of lifelong engagement with Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Alfred de Vigny and their moral-cum-literary mentors François René de Chateaubriand and Germaine de Staël, Unacknowledged Legislators exhibits the oratorical orotundity of lectures I recall from my Oxonian youth. It covers the same fertile ground as Paul Bénichou's Le Sacre de l'écrivain (1973) and its sequels, namely the monumental self-construction of the great poets of nineteenth-century France. What does it add to Bénichou's four great volumes or to the substantial body of scholarship that has engaged with them over the last half-century? Pearson believes that there is less of a split in the "idea of the poet" between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century than Bénichou or his heirs and critics (José-Luis Diaz, Claude Abastado, Jacques Rancière) have argued to be the case and that the key linking term is not secular priesthood but lawgiver. This is not a very strong claim, in my view, and it does not offer a radically new reading of texts that Pearson clearly loves, and loves to quote. On the other hand, despite the wordiness of what presumably began as magisterial lectures for new readers of these canonical treasures, Unacknowledged Legislators is a reliable, learned, and detailed exposition of a historical and cultural phenomenon of great importance. Not a pocketbook and not a book for every pocket, Pearson's magnum opus is more to be dipped into for careful readings and expositions of key moments in the long history of the rise and eventual fall of the myth of poetry as the source of spiritual and social truths.