La conquête de l’intime: public et privé dans la correspondance de Madame de Sévigné by Nathalie Freidel (review)

FREIDEL, NATHALIE. La conquête de l’intime: public et privé dans la correspondance de Madame de Sévigné. Paris: Champion, 2009. ISBN 978-7453-2005-6. Pp. 732. 100 a. Freidel approaches Sévigné’s correspondence from a socio-literary perspective : rather than privileging the private side of letter writing (Roger Duchêne’s notion of the “épistolier” who writes for a private correspondent) or its public side (Bernard Bray’s notion of the “auteur épistolaire” who writes for a public), Freidel focuses on their generic intermingling (25). Her starting observation is that Sévigné wrote in a period of transformation of the public/private dynamic which is mirrored in the letters’ contradictions and constant alternation between public events and intimate tales on family, friends, and self. Likewise, Sévigné’s expression alternates between a deference for and skepticism toward public authorities, conformity to the status quo, and independence of mind. Sévigné’s attraction to the worldly public sphere (“la sphère mondaine”), however, gives way progressively over a half a century to a preference for smaller circles of friends and family and for the arcane regions of the self. Without seeking to innovate , “Sévigné invented a new prototype of the familiar letter” (16) by transforming the humanist and mondain letter into a genre capable of expressing the self. This study is divided into four parts. Part one examines the transformation of concepts of the public and the private over the course of the seventeenth century ; part two, the topography of public and private spaces in Sévigné’s letters; part three, Sévigné’s connections to the worldly sphere, friendship networks, family, and her growing consciousness of self which she fashions through the writing process; and part four, Sévigné’s writing of the intimate, which is based not on anachronistic self-revelation but a mélange of dissimulation, allusions, and prudent avowals. A short review cannot do justice to a study as rich as this one. This reader was struck especially by the breadth and subtlety of the analysis in part one on the public and the private. Basing herself on the work of Jürgen Habermas, Alain Vialat, Marc Fumaroli, and Hélène Merlin, among others, Freidel examines the progressive demarcation of the public and the private in the politics, religion, and epistolary literature of the period. The political sphere saw a depersonalization of power relations and the end of “favorites” as illustrated in the Fouquet affair. Sévigné, however, was slow to understand the new emerging political order and, only later, when confronted with the economic troubles of the Grignan clan into which her daughter had married, became critical of political power relations, finding a refuge in what Montaigne called an “arrière-boutique.” Likewise, Sévigné forged a personalized religion centered on the individual and diverging from the official expression of religious sentiment in salons and theological debates . In the literary domain, Freidel examines the key distinction between the writer whose public usefulness was founded on praise of state and king, the amateur whose writings—often in manuscript form—served a salon constituency, and the independently-minded writer who, though professionally connected to public power, frequented the salons. Salons gave rise to a new reading public consisting of these independently-minded writers, court nobles, and the bourgeois elite. This enlarged public valorized conversation and literary genres associated with sociability, chief among them the letter. After a thorough analysis of the three main epistolary genres—the humanist, worldly, and love letter—Freidel concludes that Sévigné “invented a form [the “lettre intime”] and gave it simultaneously its consummate expression” (179). Paradoxically, concludes Freidel, Sévigné’s letters, directed to particular readers, direct themselves as well to all the readers (“parti1170 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 culiers”) of the new modern reading public (190). This highly accessible study has an extensive bibliography and several indices. Sévigné scholars, early modern French social and literary historians, and students of the epistolary genre will find it illuminating. Hope College (MI) Anne R. Larsen KING, ADELE. Albert Camus. London: Haus, 2010. ISBN 978-1-906598-40-2. Pp. 165.£7.99. The publication of Albert Camus coincides...