Le Discours de vérité dans les mémoires du duc de Saint-Simon (review)

Marc Hersant’s dauntingly comprehensive doctoral thesis achieves a good many things, and many good things, over its considerable length, not least the emergence of an état présent, as a result of which several fruitful areas of future enquiry are generously flagged up. But his primary purpose is to bring out the status of the Mémoires as history, rather than as autobiography, fiction, or rhetoric. For Hersant, Saint-Simon’s massive undertaking constitutes the well-nigh complete account of a closed world, either as recorded over the span of the writer’s own lifetime, or as conveyed through the secondary sources available to him. The book’s argumentational manner is often combative, and erects on occasion a dichotomous interpretation in which the dismissal of one reading is apparently required in order to promote the virtues of another. This is most persistently the case in the domain of stylistics, where a protracted assault on the analyses of Leo Spitzer does nothing to reduce the possibility that the approaches of both critics are tenable, even if a concession is glimpsed in Hersant’s more irenic summary, whereby ‘la grandeur de l’œuvre [. . .] tient à un projet de vérité, et [. . .] les miracles de l’écriture qui y abondent sont les “enfants de la vérité”’ (p. 819). But it is not clear why a linguistic approach to the undeniable impact of these ‘miracles’ is ipso facto invalidated. Once such polemical features have been accepted as inherent to his method, however, Hersant’s own positive assertions carry strong conviction. Indeed, Saint-Simon affords such overwhelming evidence of his commitment to the purposes and devices of veracity, as Hersant demonstrates across the whole spectrum of his evidence, that only a wilfully aestheticist reading can occlude it. The devout duc et pair believes in truth as a religious ideal and subscribes to it as an aristocratic value; he seeks as a writer to bequeath an accurate, ordered, and justified record to posterity, and to convey everything he can glean about the motives of his actors as faithfully as his intensely held beliefs allow; and he gives evidence both of his conviction and his vocation not only in the astonishing brilliance of the portraits (often driven by an awareness of their subjects’ aberrant relationship to what Saint-Simon sees as legitimacy) and the passionate energy of his morceaux de bravoure, but also in the tedium of the genealogies and in the undeliberate negligence of his style (this is accuracy, not anacoluthon). As a result, the frequently denigrated chronicler emerges not as an entertaining anachronism, but as a consistent and intelligent, albeit reactionary, witness of his age. The inevitable question is one of format. Is it really desirable to put the (anti)theoretical prolegomenon, the interminable exemplification (often prefaced by an apology), and the exhaustive annotation of the thesis mode between hard covers? Could not this compelling and groundbreaking research have yielded a more streamlined book? It might have made more converts to the masterpiece with which it deals if some elements of that transformation had occurred.