In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • L'enclos des Lumières: essai sur la culture littéraire en Suisse romande au XVIIIe siècle by François Rosset
  • James P. Gilroy
Rosset, François. L'enclos des Lumières: essai sur la culture littéraire en Suisse romande au XVIIIe siècle. Georg, 2017. ISBN 978-2-8257-1053-1. Pp. 271.

Rosset explores the writings of French-speaking authors in western Switzerland, mostly from the Vaud area and its capital Lausanne, in the eighteenth century. Although he includes them briefly in his study, Rosset has chosen not to devote great attention to the more famous writers, like Rousseau, Isabelle de Charrière, and Germaine de Staël. Instead he focuses on lesser-known authors, many of whom were admittedly second-rate but whose works are revelatory of the mindset and ethos of Suisse romande artists and intellectuals. These authors expressed an ambiguous stance toward their bigger and more illustrious neighbor France. There was a certain inferiority complex vis-à-vis Paris, but they often made a proud affirmation of their distinctness. Philippe-Sirice Brudel, for example, advocated a distinctly Swiss poetry, inspired by sublime Nature and the heroic past of its citizens. Swiss writers also voiced opposition to cultural and moral trends radiating from the French capital. They gloried instead in the qualities that they felt make Switzerland unique and even superior. They created collectively a myth of Switzerland which they celebrated in their works. They depicted a people that is industrious, free, tolerant, peace-loving, and sincerely virtuous. The Swiss are imbued with religious faith and a love of nature as revealing God's presence. Although they welcomed the Enlightenment values of rationalism and human rights, they did so in a conservative manner. They respected authority and aspired to be law-abiding citizens. The rights of the individual must be harmonized with the need to promote an integral social community. There is a sense of beneficent barriers and limits in the Swiss world view, be they social, political, or geographical. The most enthusiastic glorification of the utopian land surrounding Lac Léman was François Vernes's bucolic prose epic La Franciade (1789). He describes this area as the cradle of civilization, the locus of the Golden Age, and the model for the future of human society. In a later work, inspired by Sterne, Le voyageur sentimental en France sous Robespierre (1799), he decries the horrors of the Revolution and depicts violent and conflict-ridden France as a contrasting mirror image of her peaceful and harmonious neighbor. Madame de Charrière took a more critical approach in her novels. She showed that human relations, especially for women, are as difficult and complex in Switzerland as anywhere else. An interesting chapter is devoted to personal memoirs that were never published and are being discovered in archives and libraries. Although there is an increasing sensitivity to human emotion in these texts as the century progresses, these reminiscences usually express a sense of the individual as a member of a community. Their authors also display a growing consciousness of themselves as artists creating an aesthetic object distinct from themselves. As Rosset indicates, his study is an excellent demonstration of what Madame de Staël says in De la littérature (1800) about the determining influence of a nation's political and religious institutions on its culture and literature. [End Page 218]

James P. Gilroy
University of Denver (CO)
...

pdf

Share