Un siècle de deux cents ans? Les XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles: continuités et discontinuités (review)

In the prevailing representation, the relationship of the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is inscribed in a teleological historical narrative. Beginning perhaps with Voltaire's appropriation and domestication of classical culture in the Siècle de Louis XIV, aesthetic, literary, scientific and philosophical developments of the seventeenth century are elaborated in their capacity to lead to fruition in the Enlightenment. One of the merits of this new study is that it offers, in a series of essays, which examine a broad range of cultural phenomena, a productive alternative to that teleology. Instead, we may begin to view the two centuries as a productive totality that reveals marked (non-teleological) continuity and displacements in politics, religion and culture. This important collection of essays offers a series of entryways into that complex but important debate. In the prefatory essay, Jean Dagen draws three principal lines of inquiry that would link the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Noting the continuity of culture, of the absolutist state, of the post-Tridentine church and religious life, and of language, he asserts that both centuries focus on the reference to classical culture and the model of antiquity, the Church of the Counter-Reformation and the rise of rationalism. The essays of this volume are divided into sections devoted to philosophy, poetics, genres and periodization. Most of the contributions examine the relations of the two centuries in terms of continuity and displacement. On the former count, Jean Charles Darmon traces the survival of Epicurean currents of political and aesthetic reflection into the eighteenth century. Thomas Pavel sees the same for the subjectifying rhetoric that links the novel of the two centuries, and the same continuity is observed in the canon presented by anthologies in those periods (Sylvain Menant), the theme of delirium in theatre (Patrick Dandrey), the 'morale' of fiction (Marc Escola) and the aesthetics of opera (Sylvie Mamy). Assaying a more complex form of continuity, Shelly Charles argues cogently for the hybridization of the eighteenth-century novel, which is caught between the classical tradition and the English model. The case for difference and displacement is not as numerically strong, but there are a few surprises. Béatrice Guion, for example, argues against accepted tradition and makes a compelling case for the important differences that separate amour-propre éclairé of the seventeenth century and what self-interest and self-love will become in the eighteenth century. The contributions that address the question of periodization are especially pertinent. Peter France suggests that the century breaks are artificial because they have been situated in the wrong place: there is more continuity and unity in thought and aesthetic conventions when the lines of division occur at mid century, creating periods of 1550-1650, 1650-1750 and 1750-1850. Michel Delon resumes the argument of Paul Valéry in asserting the relativity of a term such as 'classical', which functions only when held against a period of innovation. Charles Porset sees gradual transformation with some continuity in passing from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, a scheme that stands against the pattern of irruptive changes recorded by Paul Hazard. These, of course, are just a few examples drawn from this important volume that will help to open important lines of interrogation in scholarship on the relations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.