Posthumous America: Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century by Benjamin Hoffmann (review)

The fur traders, Jesuit missionaries, Acadian colonists, and military figures who feature in French colonial history are mostly a distant memory in Posthumous America. The subject of this study is not New France or its demise, but an America that resides in French consciousness around the turn of the nineteenth century. French writers’ image of America is, in short, a trace presence of an idyllic past rather than a young, bustling nation. Posthumous America examines this phenomenon by making three distinct arguments: America is construed “post-humously” in French writing as a wistful evocation of a Golden Age, as a necessary failure of utopic expectations, and as a projection of European civilization. The book’s lengthy single-author studies of John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, and François-René de Chateaubriand track these modes of posthumous construction, relating them as exemplary of France’s “retrospective idealization” of America (5). Each chapter includes biographical information, and although the historical and political contexts of the American and French Revolutions are not ignored, the stated purpose is to recuperate the literary qualities of these writers. Their literariness, according to the author, stems directly from the “psychological mechanisms” of recollection—a Proustian affair of recreating a past that is irretrievably lost and yet vividly present in the writing.

Crèvecœur famously lauds America’s potential for prosperity and community, but also highlights the constant threats to its harmony. Hoffmann’s argument is that Crèvecœur commemorates an America before the ravages of its war for independence: “[t]he American Dream is already dead in the Lettres, and Crèvecœur writes in the present the posthumous representation of a reinvented Golden Age” (41). Lezay-Marnésia, the subject of the second chapter, is virtually unknown to dix-huitièmistes, and Hoffmann has also published a helpful edition of the primary text analyzed in this chapter, Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio, in French with an English translation by Alan Singerman. He was a minor aristocrat who, after founding a society of landowners, proposed a colonial settlement in what is now Ohio. The project was conceived at the height of the French Revolution and designed as a refuge for exiles who intended to preserve France’s noble past in a new world. Although Lezay-Marnésia’s empty promises and poor calculations, not least due to other rightful claims on the lands, resulted in his personal and financial ruin, his writings insist on maintaining the dream of a perfect felicity in America—a dream that was unrealizable from the start.

The trajectory from Crèvecœur to Lezay-Marnésia reveals the intensification of a political conservativism that contrasts sharply with the views of both their fellow French citizens and Americans. Crèvecœur highlights the destruction of the American Revolution and alludes to a similarly harmful fracturing of his home-land caused by the radicalism of the French Revolution. His America, “a mirage in the past,” (65) is posed as the model for France’s future. Lezay-Marnésia, for his part, envisions a regenerated monarchism in America grounded in the values of the French nobility. Chateaubriand, whose doomed expedition in America began as a way to escape the French Revolution, is also a political reactionary: he mourns the loss of New France, not simply as territorial diminishment, but because it represents the waning of French imperial glory. If these writers’ politics seem out of touch with the reality of the early American nation, it is because each is progressively more detached than the previous one from emerging U.S. society. Of the three writers, Crèvecœur is the only one who lived in America long enough to put down roots before fleeing the American Revolution, and the only one...