French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

French classical literature inherited Greek and Latin models of writing; it also integrated Italian poetics and courtly behaviors alongside Spanish dramatic sources and Jesuit moral pyrotechnics. Part of its European success came also from its publication in the Netherlands and its editorial acts of piracy. Despite this dependence on these particular localized cultures, French classicism insistently claimed for itself the status of the universal. When the Jesuit Dominique Bouhours evaluated the moral value of different languages at the end of the seventeenth century, he claimed that the French language was actually the most natural of all, since it reflects the naturalness of thought, which always follows the same line: subject-verb-object. Clarity and sweetness of style were imagined to create an immediate connection between social exteriority and internal thoughts. The category of the self is already inscribed in the very nature of language, operating as the source of actions. Making French universal in the seventeenth century meant revealing that the French language speaks of nature itself: internal with the self, social with the commerce of signs, ontological with the connection of language and thought. Yet when the self reveals its fissures, when the doux commerce exhibits its conflicts, when the adequation of language and thought is questioned, then global classical French literature appears as a remote, strange, and auratic figure that has, nevertheless, constructed our actual world—actual in both the English sense of active and practical, and in the French sense of contemporary.

Moral doctrine had a problematic position in the seventeenth century. For the ancients, morality had constituted one of the privileged discourses for dealing with others and with the community in general: the philosophia moralis examined conduct habits, and the social character of human beings, in order to permit everyone to live well (eu zèn, in the Greek) in the city and in accord with divinity. Closely linked to theological and political power, moral doctrine designated everyone’s social role. Yet by the sixteenth century, humanists tended to separate morality from a pure Christian tradition. With the advent of Europe’s civil and religious wars, moral conscience became a source of conflicts and massacres instead of a source of peace and social harmony; thereafter, morality could no longer be sustained by coherent religious or traditional communities. Before the Renaissance, moral discourse had been, above all, a Christian discourse, but from that point on the anthropology of morals made the specific morality of the honnête homme or honnête femme the only possible ground for being a good Christian. On a more sociological level, virtue and nobility were no longer synonymous.² Models of glory and honor, as incarnated, for example, by the Chevalier de Bayard (1476–1524), were replaced by war conducts appearing less and less moral and needing to be renegotiated; we can see this at work, for instance, in Monluc’s Commentaires (1592), which recount Montluc’s service in Italy under Bayard. As Marshal of France, his Commentaries were considered a “soldier’s breviary” in the seventeenth century. The moral code is constructed in the depths of individual self-consciousness, valued in the private domain, but has no public legitimacy. This delicate status of moral discourse gives rise to a series of increasingly problematic and original publications.

In the seventeenth century, modern politics came about through the direct relationships between individuals and the state, encountering less and less mediation from social bodies or registered churches. Thus, on one hand, the individual was rich in internal consciousness but deprived of any public power, and, on the other hand, the state became sovereignly responsible for the public good, detached from any morality or religious authority. This is a time when discourses about “reason of state” began to develop, and, therefore, it is not surprising to see, in 1635, a pragmatic France fighting alongside Protestant countries against ultra-Catholic Spain. Cut off from religion or the traditions that had until then given a sense of collective pertinence, moral doctrine was folded into what began to be called, precisely in 1635 according to the Trésor de la Langue Française, a “for intérieur” (for comes from the Latin forum, by definition a public space, which is, in a paradoxical way, invested in the interiority of a subject). Such a for intérieur suggests the way in which the individual, subject to training and constraints, navigates the social space of knowledge. Until the Renaissance, society was thought to be naturally given; it was the essence of man to be sociable, and the main question was how to live well together. From the seventeenth century on, the very existence of society is no longer obvious; its necessity has to be built (hence the new theories of social contract), and the main problem is to learn how to live together at all. Seventeenth-century moral codes appear to be less about learning social roles than about providing a training in human relations, less a common practice than a contestable and variable object of knowledge.

This new knowledge was not produced only by men of learning. Moral doctrine was no longer a scholarly matter, where dogmas were expressed and prescriptions enunciated. Instead, in this new model, conduct was described and questioned. As Henri Jean Martin has shown, the rise of books of urbane moral doctrine took place at the expense of scholarly treatises in the second half of the century.³ Treatises inspired by Aristotle or Aquinas were gradually replaced by a diversity of genres: maxims, portraits, short essays, letters, and new kinds of writing reinvented outside the authority of scholars. Moral doctrine became progressively a mundane social practice. In fact, even scholars tried to adopt an urbane style of writing and developed an interest in conversations: thus, for example, Malebranche published some Conversations chrétiennes instead of a traditional treatise on Christian morality. Such texts exploit the useful ambiguity between le monde as it refers to high society (“the world” as in the phrase “man of the world”), and le monde as the world meaning the whole of society. This slippage allows a writer to suggest that his position covers all possible social positions, and that no one outside the circle has any right to claim his own existence or to voice any opposing code of conduct. In such a way does the local present itself as global.

Politeness took its place next to politics as part of the culture of social beings. This culture slowly gave rise to a new form of social distinction. Rather than the quality of faith, the authority of learning, or family prestige, it was the quality of conversation, the sophisticated pleasures of urbanity, and the elegance of manners that shaped the new forms of social status. The women of the Paris salons were at the center of this new understanding of social culture, since their obvious modesty and the necessity for them to show their control of passions exemplified the new interest in social constraints and the organization of appearances. They played an important role in the imaginary of civilization—which, of course, does not mean in the real practice of power, even if, in more modest urban circles, wives who at the beginning of the century would have followed their husbands’ guidance in moral affairs tended, by the end, to be in charge of Christian moral education in the family and have to watch over their husbands.⁴

Madeleine de Scudéry, one of the greatest writers of the classical age, was a careful surveyor of the territory of politeness, and in one of her Conversations extracted from her novels Clélie and the Grand Cyrus, she writes,

La veritable politesse est proprement sçavoir vivre, & sçavoir tousjours parler à propos . . . mais à ce que je voy, dit Clarinte en soûriant, il faut sçavoir la morale pour bien sçavoir la politesse. Je ne dis pas cela precisément, reprit Theanor, mais j’avance hardiment que la politesse rend la pratique de toutes les vertus plus agreables.⁵

[True politeness is properly knowing how to behave, and always knowing how to speak appropriately. . . . I see, Clarinte said, smiling, we must know morality in order to know politeness. This is not exactly my claim, said Theanor, but I do hold that politeness makes the practice of all the virtues more pleasant.]

In his Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702), a Jesuit essayist and critic, remarks on the similarity between savoir vivre and savoir son monde: “C’est un homme qui sait son monde, qui sait vivre [This is a man who knows the world, who knows how to behave].”⁶ Politeness is, then, the art of worldly knowledge, a social learning that makes virtues enjoyable. It is not enough to perform one’s moral duty; one must first of all take pleasure in the exercise of virtue. There is a social utility of pleasure, which will eventually permit the elaboration of what the eighteenth century will call “aesthetics.” It has sometimes been said that after the sixteenth century, a growing aestheticization of social conduct increasingly prized grace, elegance, and style as the defining elements of social behavior, as can be seen in treatises on civility: for example, Daniel Gordon claims that “Renaissance thought had conferred significance upon civil manners as well as civic virtue, and much of the French Enlightenment can be understood as a transformation of the older, mainly aesthetic concept of civilité into a morally, historically, and politically charged concept of société civile.”⁷ But, to be precise, we should reverse the formula: what will eventually be named aesthetics is, in the early modern period, shaped by the moral code of politeness.

Two elements of Madeleine de Scudéry’s case are particularly striking. First, she shows a growing appropriation of moral discourse that one can easily follow in the titles of her published works: Conversations sur divers sujets (1680), Conversations nouvelles sur divers sujets (1684), Conversations morales (1686), Nouvelles conversations de morale (1688), and finally, Entretiens de morale (1692). From the modest vagueness of the divers sujets (various topics) to the attributive adjective and especially to the noun morale, one sees the progression of Scudéry’s claims. In 1686, the Conversations morales were even published under another title given by the publisher: La morale du monde, ou conversations, which emphasizes both the claiming of moral doctrine and the manifestation of its specific territory. It is important to note that a genre of writing (conversation) typical of worldly practices was able to capture the energy of moral knowledge; moreover, it is important to note that women took charge of the domain of morality both as writer (Scudéry) and as characters (in the dialogues). These conversations are distant in tone from the authority of erudite treatises, but they nonetheless convey different points of view on moral behaviors and discussion of their respective values. Though the genre of the “conversation” obviously drew on an imagined oral standard, its passage into print did not trouble it, but rather extended the intimate relationship implied by polite conversation, seeking to draw its readers into the fold; indeed, the very term conversation designates not only a piece of discourse but also the company in which that discourse takes place. The representation of polite and moral conversation is itself an example of politeness and morality. Paradoxically, mediation produces here an effect of immediacy. That standard of immediacy was of course problematized by the contradiction observed by Peter Burke, a contradiction posed by the printing of treatises enabling readers to learn how to behave and talk politely at the same time as the valorization of natural and unaffected manners, the latter a standard trope in writings of all sorts, often evoked as a guarantee of noble birth (and therefore noble mind) against the artificiality and superficiality of the parvenu or bourgeois gentilhomme.⁸ The conversation (as well as the novel from which it comes) could, however, at least partially conceal this tension. By bringing together a range of protagonists from different backgrounds, it was able to stage a wide repertoire of behaviors, discursive styles, and expressions, affording the reader the opportunity to acquire appropriate manners and moral knowledge through vicarious experience rather than direct instruction, through immediate internalization rather than prescribed rules.

Most of these conversations were originally part of Scudéry’s long novels, extracted from their previous contexts. This isolation made it possible to generalize about the most seemingly local of incidents and exchanges. The conversations offer not merely the display of an enjoyable salon way of life, but rather a globalizing and nonpedantic discourse about virtues and vices, proposing an “anatomy of human hearts”: they point to a way to explore the depth of the human self, once it has been experienced.

The paramount example of such a process of extraction is the form of the maxim. A maxim presents a global or general opinion in its most compact figure by imposing strict and obvious boundaries on it; it imposes a general overview precisely because of the typographical void, which encircles it with a white halo, crowning it with the glory of universality. The maxim results from a rhetorical and logical technique,⁹ first exploited in connection with the use of prudence (a discourse which permitted a connection between moral and intellectual virtues as well as between theory and practice), or even with jurisprudence and theology. For example, Saint-Cyran’s moral letters are thus maximized, that is, turned into maxims, thanks to a process of extraction explicated by the title Maximes saintes et chrestiennes tirees des Lettres de Messire Jean du Verger de Hauranne Abbé de saint Cyran:

on ne doute point que tant de personnes pieuses à qui la lecture de ces excellentes lettres a donné une si grande satisfaction, ne soient edifiées de voir icy comme le suc & l’esprit de ces discours admirables qui les ont ravis, & de trouver en ce petit livre le soulagement de leur memoire, & la nourriture de leur ame.

[It is clear that the vast number of pious people who have found satisfaction in reading these great letters, would be edified to see here something of the extract and the spirit of these amazing discourses that have delighted them; to find in this small book, a relief for their memory and a nourishment for their soul.]

By the end of the century, maxims seemed to have acquired their autonomy: they are not dependent upon a previous text that they abridge, but rather they present a kind of moral quintessence that must be thought over and developed: small is not only beautiful, but it is also meaningful. Buffon, in a retrospective remark, explains very clearly that a good writer must properly order his thoughts (a well-known topos of classical thought), but he adds something more surprising for us: that “a care in naming things in the most general terms will make one’s style nobler.”¹⁰ Far from the contemporary taste for singularity, people in the classical age enjoyed generality, which does not mean vagueness.¹¹ Ordering thoughts was imagined to be a matter of reason, while a discourse composed in general terms signaled a certain social standing.

At the end of the century, the use of maxims formed part of a general taste for cultural condensation:

Le goût de ce siecle s’est entierement declaré pour le stile sentencieux, & pour les pensées concises qui presentent beaucoup de sens en peu de paroles. C’est ce que l’on trouvera dans ce petit ouvrage, qui joint l’utile avec l’agreable, & pour en achever l’eloge, il suffit de dire que c’est un precis du nouveau Testament.¹²

[Contemporary taste entirely favors sententious style and concise thoughts, which offer plenty of meaning in a few words. It is what one will find in this small book, which puts together the useful and the agreeable, and to complete its praise, it suffices to say that it is a summary of the New Testament.]

But we must realize that this concision and condensation proffered a new way of conceiving the very form of maxims or even a new way of conceiving the maxim as a specific form. If one looks at all the books published during the seventeenth century that are entitled or subtitled “maxims,” most of them, especially in the first half, do not offer discontinuous and dense utterances. On the contrary, maxims are simply general rules of conduct appearing inside the continuity of discourses. It is only after La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions et maximes diverses that the example of separated short pieces of discourse, carefully dissociated from any apparent logical or thematic sequence and with an autonomous numbering, starts to take off.

A good example is the best seller of the 1680s: Balthazar Gracian’s L’homme de cour, translated from Spanish and published in 1684. It has been said that the translator, Amelot de La Houssaye, classicized the baroque Spanish of the Jesuit in making it sound more rational, more elegant, more French, which is to say, more universal. Actually, even in polishing Gracian’s paradoxical witty style, La Houssaye remains fairly close to the original. The true displacement resides in remaking what in Spanish was continuous print with different paragraphs for each separate topic into something openly discontinuous, with blanks separating each subject, numbers, titles, and historical or philosophical footnotes. Amelot de La Houssaye is a typical case of the new proletariat of Letters: well-educated young men who tried to sell their knowledge as writers, rewriters, or translators. At best they gained access to the service of grandees or even the king, at worst they struggled along churning out works hastily ordered by publishers. The translation of Gracian’s Arte de prudencia (Art of Prudence) was to be Amelot’s only great success. The new title he gave it was actually to be followed by translations into other foreign languages, and even into Latin (De homine aulico, 1692), testifying to its success: ancient prudence, thus appropriated, became a courtier’s strategy.

Another Jesuit, Joseph de Courbeville, published a new translation in 1730, and in his preface emphasized his agreement with Amelot: “pour ne pas intituler cet Ouvrage: Oracle Manuel & Art de prudence. . . . Ce sont ici ses Maximes en général, ainsi que nous appellons les Réflexions de la Rochefoucault, les Pensées de Pascal, les Caracteres de la Bruyere [in not giving it its original title: Oraculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia. . . . What we find here are his maxims, just as we speak of La Rochefoucauld’s Reflections, Pascal’s Thoughts, La Bruyère’s Characters].” It was now perfectly possible to give the work a new title, which the text as it was known after Amelot de la Houssaie called for: Maximes de Balthasar Gracian.

The formal discontinuity of the layout suggests also a social discontinuity, as Amelot de La Houssaye explains in his own preface:

Son Titre exprime non seulement tout ce qu’il traite, mais encore à quel usage, & à quelles gens il est propre. Il n’est donc pas propre à tout le monde, me dirés-vous? Non certes; il ne l’est qu’au grand-monde, & aux personnes, qui savent le monde. C’est un homme-de-cour, qui n’est pas d’humeur à se familiariser avec le Vulgaire.

[Its title expresses not only everything it deals with, but also for what use and to whom it is addressed. Does it not concern everyone? You might ask. I say not; it is only proper for the members of high society, and for the persons who know the world. It describes a Court Gentleman, who does not mingle with the common.]

bien que le titre d’homme-de-cour, pris au pié de la létre, semble exclure tous ceux, qui ne le sont pas : si est-ce que pris en son vrai sens, il n’exclut que ceux, à qui le Poëte-de-Cour défend de lire ses Odes, c’est-à-dire, les Ignorans, les Mécaniques, & les Esprits malfaits. (L’homme de cour, preface)

[Although the title of Court Gentleman, literally understood, seems to exclude every person who is not one, it actually excludes only those to whom the Court-Poet forbids to read his odes: that is, the ignorant, the mechanical arts performers (those not belonging to the liberal arts), the ill-bred souls.]

Moralist maxims deal with an ambiguous figure of speech, which allowed both the social construction of a community of readers and the elaborate distinctions of a social elite. The explicit model here is the king himself, who is both universal and unique: he is the ground of everything, and yet has not any perceptible ground (as is obvious in La Houssaye’s preface):

Car s’il est si dificile de faire vôtre éloge, par parties, comment fera-t-on vôtre Histoire, où il faudra dépeindre un Prince de todas prendas, c’est-àdire, un Prince Universel; un Prince incomprehensible, & par son secret, qui est impénétrable, & par son fonds, qui est sans fond; enfin un Prince, qui, pour user encore des termes de gracian, dont je ne suis que le truchement, est un grand-tout.

[Since it is so difficult to praise you, even in parts, how is one to write your history, where one has to paint a prince de todas prendas, that is, one that cannot be grasped, due to his secrecy, which is impenetrable, and to his grounding, which is without any ground; a prince who is at last (to use again Gracian’s words, whose medium I am merely) a Great Whole.]

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the celebrated trio of moralists is established, as is evident in de Courbeville’s statement: they are La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and La Bruyère, whose perspectives, styles, and references are nevertheless very different from one another. The moralists fall into a category, less philosophical or theoretical than poetic in a broad sense (that is to say, invented through writing). They contribute to the glory of “the century of Louis XIV” in revealing the private interests of amour-propre under the social habits and morals of everyday life, and, at the same time, they publish globalizing and generalizing truths concerning both the infinite labyrinth of the for intérieur and the necessarily social construction of taste. The moralist rewrites both ancient and modern authors under the new sign of moralism. Montaigne, for example, appeared in a book probably written by someone named Artaud and entitled Pensées de Montagne, propres à former l’esprit et les moeurs, a title that plays both on the public value of the author’s name and on the publishing value of the pensées, as a form created to nourish a new public with a fast-food digestion of social thought; as the rewriter claims in his “Avertissement,” “outre le goût que l’on a aujourd’hui pour les pensées détachées, chaque Lecteur trouvera, sans peine de sa part, tout prêt & tout choisi ce que l’on a cru pouvoir, ou lui plaire, ou l’instruire [Given the actual taste for separated thoughts, each reader will find without effort, ready and chosen, what one has believed susceptible either to please or to instruct him].”

These publications came about because of the personal interests of printers and editors. The celebrated trio of moralists was quickly copied and imitated abroad (especially in the Netherlands), thus contributing to the classicization of seventeenth-century French literature. For example, one of the imitators (probably Pierre-Jacques Brillon) writes in his Le nouveau Théophraste ou Réflexions critiques sur les moeurs de ce siècle dans le goût des Pensées de Pascal (a symptomatic title indeed): “Autant qu’ils ont reconnu les Anciens pour leurs maîtres, autant me crois-je au dessous de ces illustres Modernes; j’avouërai même que la différence est plus grande [ Just as they have acknowledged the ancients as their masters, so I believe that I am below them; I would even say that the difference is more considerable]”; and he adds later, “La Bruyère ne se croyoit pas déshonoré qu’on l’appellât le petit Theophraste; je me rejouirois fort d’être nommé le petit La Bruyère [La Bruyère did not feel dishonored to be called the minor Theophraste; I would be very happy to be called the minor La Bruyère].” Being an author implies a double status: by appearing to be someone else, one can impose one’s own name as a “minor classic,” an “alter ego” (even if the category of the ego or the self is precisely what is at stake in moralist literature).

The importance of technologies for globalization resides in the fact that they permit “telecommunication”; that is exactly what printing did, literally crossing frontiers when books published outside France came back to “invade” the country, avoiding the royal censure. Because moralist literature resembles the classics, the discontinuity of the works marks both a continuity with antiquity and a discontinuity in relation to what was to follow on from it. The eighteenth century was to see writers struggle to reconcile their recognition of the intellectual and political peak of the classical age, with their own attempt to understand the period in which they wrote as something other than a decline.

Guez de Balzac published a book of letters in 1624 that quickly fueled a violent quarrel, continuing until 1630, about the status of eloquence.¹³ In showing that a traditionally high standard of eloquence could be combined with more familiar and pleasant discourse, he became an object of much discussion, considered a conceited buffoon by some, and a great master of style by others. At a moment of transition between the main components in the classical construction of rhetoric (with elocutio and dispositio becoming more important than inventio), Balzac exemplified the very disintegration of the value of tradition and topoi (loci communes). His friend René Descartes wrote a letter in favor of this new eloquence. He recognized that Balzac’s prose opened up the sense of an original self. For Balzac, the self became the crucible of the new social recognition of belles lettres. Not only was he mixing high eloquence, important subjects, ironic remarks, and elegant trivialities, but within the same volume he also addressed readers as diverse as cardinals, dukes, bishops, and men of letters or “gallant” friends. In 1619, as a secretary of the duc d’Épernon, he had to write political letters to the king, Louis XIII, and he did not hesitate to publish them in his book, under his name, even if, originally, they had been signed by his master. We can see here that what is at stake is both the status of the author and that of the writing self.

In the first of these letters to the king, he develops an argument trying to justify d’Epernon’s disobedience that shows an irony typical of his work:

Ces considérations donc ne m’obligent point de demeurer en ce païs, où les choses sont en si bon estat, qu’elle se peuvent quasi maintenir d’elles-mesmes . . . en tout ce qui regardera le bien de vos affaires, je m’asseure que vostre Majesté est si equitable, qu’elle aura égard à la necessité des miennes particulieres, & que me permettant de retourner en ma maison, elle me laissera joüir d’une faveur, dont on a accoustumé de punir les autres.¹⁴

[These considerations then do in no way oblige me to stay in these parts, where things are in such good condition, as they may well nigh subsist of themselves . . . concerning the good of your affairs. I assure myself that your Majesty will be so impartial as to be pleased to reflect upon the necessities of my particular occasions, and that suffering me to retire my self to my own house, you will at least permit me to enjoy a favor, usually inflicted on others as a punishment.]¹⁵

Anxious to keep his adversaries apart from each other, Louis XIII ordered the duke of Epernon to stay in his government of Metz under the pretext of keeping an eye on the relations between the emperor, Ferdinand of Habsburg, a fierce Catholic, and his Bohemian subjects, who were Protestants, this conflict being of course the point of departure of the Thirty Years’ War. But the duke chose to disobey, moved to his province of Aquitaine, and helped the queen mother (who had just escaped from her son’s prison) against the king. In this passage, we can appreciate Balzac’s rhetoric, which moves from the public good to private affairs, and reverses the value of royal favor in giving to his disgrace (which usually means a painful exile from the court and a dull life on one’s own lands) the flavor of a voluntary and enjoyable retirement. Such a displacement plays also on Balzac’s own situation in 1624: no longer d’Epernon’s secretary, he did not remain at the court or in Paris, but rather on his little piece of land next to Angoulême in the southwest of France, playing his crucial role from a distance.

This ironic play came about through the rewriting of the original letter sent to the king, published in 1619 as a single letter (Lettre du Roy envoyee à Monsieur le Duc d’espernon. Ensemble la premiere & derniere response du dict sieur D’espernon au Roy), and reproduced in the periodical Mercure François so that the public could appreciate the differences. What was first written, at the end of the short passage I have just quoted, was only this:

Je m’assure que vostre Majesté est si equitable, qu’elle aura égard à la necessité des miennes particulieres, & qu’elle treuvera bon que m’en retournant en ma maison d’où je suis party il y a plus de quinze mois, j’use de la liberté qu’elle permet aux moindres de ceux qui ont l’honneur d’estre sous son obeyssance.

[I assure myself your Majesty will be so impartial as to be pleased to reflect upon the necessities of my particular occasions, and that in suffering me to retire myself to my own house, from which I have been away for more than fifteen months, I would use the liberty your Majesty allows to the lowest who have the honor to be under its obedience.]

Balzac emphasizes in his rewriting both the stylistic irony of the reversal of status, crossing the boundaries of respect due to the king, and the new relation between province and the court, public good and private affairs, and he also erases the frontiers of authorship and patronage. He is a “particular,” an individual, minding only his own leisurely business, yet nevertheless writing to the highest people in France as if he was one of their closest acquaintances. The boundaries of French literature are defined not only by the external borders dividing France, England, or Spain, but also by the frontiers that exist between Paris and the provinces, as well as in the social boundaries between people powerful in the state, or of high rank, and the secondary nobility.

In this quarrel, Balzac’s main adversary, Goulu, claims, in his Lettres de Phyllarque à Ariste, “Quel tort ne fait-il point au grand duc d’Epernon aiant par cette audace recherché de la gloire aux despens de la reputation de son maistre, qui sans doute les eust fait meilleures incomparablement, s’il eut voulu se donner la peine de les écrire [What wrong is he not doing to the great Duke of Epernon when he, with such a daring gesture, looks for glory at the expense of his master’s reputation, who would have certainly written better letters, if only he would have cared to do so].”¹⁶ He criticizes Balzac for being overly familiar with his superiors, taking over rank and names as well as copying ancient authors: social boundaries and temporal borders are both at issue in the controversy, and it is clearly Balzac’s position that seduces the reading elite. This new “writing-self” proposes subtle ways of crossing the limits between the public and the particular, between uniqueness (Balzac was called the “Unico Eloquente”) and common knowledge, between a provincial life minutely described in the smallest details and a Parisian enjoyment of singular attachments. The sense of provincial life could also be mobilized in another way: letters were sent by and to Balzac in order to show and explain what happens in the capital. The construction of French social space resembles contemporary telecommunication, and indeed the regime of postal delivery was actually organized at the beginning of the century.

Pascal’s Lettres provinciales also exemplify the new regime of the self and the constitution of a specific reading public. In his first letters, Pascal struggled to save Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) from the Sorbonne’s censure. (Arnauld was a brilliant theologian who followed the radical interpretation of Saint Augustine proposed by Jansenius and Saint-Cyran and who strongly opposed Jesuit more “humanist” conception of grace.) Pascal’s attacks turn upon the lax morality of Jesuit casuistry. When the Jesuit fathers begin to intervene publicly against Pascal’s critiques of their conception of divine grace and their casuistical practices, the latter answered them with a growing rhetorical indignatio, which culminates in the peroration of the twelfth letter:

Vous croyez avoir la force et l’impunité: mais je crois avoir la vérité et l’innocence. C’est une étrange et longue guerre, que celle où la violence essaie d’opprimer la vérité. Tous les efforts de la violence ne peuvent affaiblir la vérité, et ne servent qu’à la relever davantage. Toutes les lumières de la vérité ne peuvent rien pour arrêter la violence, et ne font que l’irriter encore plus. Quand la force combat la force, la plus puissante détruit la moindre: quand l’on oppose les discours aux discours, ceux qui sont véritables et convaincants confondent et dissipent ceux qui n’ont que la vanité et le mensonge: mais la violence et la vérité ne peuvent rien l’une sur l’autre. Qu’on ne prétende pas de là néanmoins que les choses soient égales: car il y a cette extrême différence, que la violence n’a qu’un cours borné par l’ordre de Dieu, qui en conduit les effets à la gloire de la vérité qu’elle attaque; au lieu que la vérité subsiste éternellement, et triomphe enfin de ses ennemis, parce qu’elle est éternelle et puissante comme Dieu meme.¹⁷

[You think you have might and impunity of your side, and I think I have truth and innocence on mine. ’Tis a strange and long war wherein violence endeavours to oppose Truth. All the attempts of violence cannot so much as weaken truth, nay they as much as may be strengthen her. All the lustre of truth is so far from appeasing violence, that it does but more and more exasperate it. When might is engag’d with might, the stronger power swallows up the weaker; but when discourses are oppos’d one to another, those that are true and convictive confound and defeat those who which have nothing in them but vanity and falsehood : but violence and truth can prevail nothing one upon another. Yet let it not be thence presum’d that things are equall: for there is this main difference, that violence is limited by the order of God, who disposes the effects of it to the glory of that Truth which it opposes: whereas Truth subsists eternally, and at last triumphs over her enemies, because she is eternal and powerful as God himself.]

The conflict between force and truth defines two incommensurate areas, even if the very fact that there is a war between them implies that such a conflict operates on the ground of force. Nevertheless, what is proper to physical force is that it cannot last forever; it has to diminish and perish, while truth remains simply itself, an opposition that was important to Jesuit/Jansenist debate. This is how we may understand Pascal’s claim at the beginning of this twelfth letter, an astonishing claim for someone of the ancien régime, which does not surprise our modern minds enough since we are blind to its radical originality:

j’espère en me défendant vous convaincre de plus d’impostures véritables que vous ne m’en avez imputé de fausses. En vérité, mes Pères, vous en êtes plus suspects que moi. Car il n’est pas vraisemblable qu’étant seul, comme je suis, sans force et sans aucun appui humain, contre un si grand corps, et n’étant soutenu que par la vérité et la sincérité, je me sois exposé à tout perdre, en m’exposant à être convaincu d’impostures.¹⁸

[My hope is, in vindicating myselfe, to convince you of more true impostures then you have imputed false to me. Certainly, Fathers, you are more to be suspected then I am. For ‘tis not likely that being alone, as I am, without force or any humane assistance, against so great a body, and being not back’d by any thing but truth and sincerity, I should put all at stake, by exposing myselfe to be charg’d with impostures.]

Surprising to the 17th-century reader was the assumption that the isolation of a position from certain social forces, against strong institutional groups, can be the very guarantee of its truth. No one in the hierarchical society of the ancien régime would have been allowed to speak if he did not have some kind of authorization: only those who belong to a community have the right to speak. To pretend that not belonging to any social body opens a space for the enunciation of truth is something, which, at the time, seemed absurd. No surprise then to see that it is exactly what the Jesuits ironically remarked, with their usual subtlety, in their Responses aux Lettres provinciales publiées par le Secrétaire de Port Royal contre les PP. de la Compagnie de Jesus, Sur le sujet de la Morale desdits Peres:

Vous estes seul. Je croy fermement, que vous voulez faire pitié aux gens, & pour moi j’ay de la compassion de voir trente ou quarante solitaires fort empêchez, l’un à chercher des passages, l’autre a les couper ou les allonger, l’autre à revoir vos Lettres, l’autre à corriger des épreuves, l’autre à débiter des fueilles [sic], l’autre à les lire à la ruelle des lits, & les faire valoir, pendant que vous criez en vous cachant, Je suis seul, sans force, & sans aucun appui humain, donc je ne suis pas un imposteur. Ce raisonnement est persuasif & fort puissant.¹⁹

[You are alone. I firmly believe that you want people to take pity on you, and from my side I feel compassion to see thirty or forty Solitaires [lay people who had decided to retire from the world and stay in Port-Royal] very busy, one to look for quotations, the other to cut them or to make them longer, the other to revise your letters, the other to correct proofs, the other to distribute the printed texts, the other to read them in the ruelles next to the beds, to make them known, while you shout, concealed, I am alone, without any force, and any human support, hence I am not an impostor. Such reasoning is persuasive and truly powerful.]

Not only does Jacques Nouet (1605–80), one of the main Jesuit polemists, show that far from being alone, the “Secrétaire de Port-Royal” (as he calls him) is successful only because of the help of the larger Jansenist community, but he also disentangles the illusory logic which makes solitude into the grounds for truth. Rousseau will later crystallize the legitimacy of such a position, and the poètes maudits or the avant-garde will validate their position (or opposition) thanks to this new evidence. But in the second half of the seventeenth century, we are still far from that.

If Pascal is able to make such a claim about truth, it is because he contends that his lonely efforts against a strong social body (the domain of the Jesuits) is sustained by tradition and the Church, in whose name he aims to speak, claiming to be closer to the Church Fathers, especially saint Augustine, than are the Jesuits. Therefore, we must not take Pascal’s claim literally; it is not yet the modern revendication of autonomy. But even if it is a way to make the past present and to speak in the name of the tradition, the logic implied by Pascal’s struggle was to open a new conception of public speech and legitimate individual selves. Saturated by a global tradition of Christian temporality, the self is considered to be full of eternal truth. Even if Pascal and his companions try to resist Church authorities, the censure and condemnation they endured only sharpened their sense of themselves as martyrs testifying to the real truth, finding only in the interiority of their “selves” a legitimation sealed by their faith and convictions. We should not then imagine that globalization is a process concerning only large elements like world economy or colonial empire; at the beginning of the modern period, it is precisely because global forms of self and speech became an important issue that the process of globalization found its momentum.

It is not by chance, therefore, that global capitalism plays on conceptions of economic and social forces based upon self interest, be it the interests of a nation, as is obvious in Henri de Rohan’s De l’intérêt des princes et des États de la chrétienté, or of persons: “il y a toujours quelque intérêt à se faire aimer des hommes.”²⁰ The commerce of goods and the commerce of signs between individuals developed together. This is why Jacques Esprit (1611–78), in correspondence with whom La Rochefoucauld elaborated his maxims, can claim, in his treatise on La fausseté des vertus humaines, that “tous les hommes sont des marchands . . . ils exposent tous quelque chose en vente [All men are merchants . . . they all display something for sale].” Among human beings, commerce is generalized: we are not sociable because we naturally like our fellow creatures; rather, it is because we want to be liked that we make ourselves sociable. Society is the artificial composition of individual interests, and so, moral literature, in the French classical age, managed to globalize and generalize the interior self.²¹

We tend to think about globalization in relation to changing economies and technologies. The standard narrative of globalization (see, for instance, Historical Foundations of Globalization or Handbook on the Globalization of the World Economy), suggests that it all began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: it was steam power, railways, and the telegraph that led inexorably to the Industrial Revolution and everything that followed it. Today we worry that economic and technological systems bring about a homogenization of cultures and self-identities; the increasing complexity of the globalization process tends, or so it is claimed, to erode differences between cultures and to efface the coherent distinctiveness of national identities. Such an accusation leaves out three important elements. First, the early modern construction of “the self” was accompanied by a growing process of social complexification that engendered a necessary homogenization of social behaviors as calculable elements. Second, in this period culture became a new way to create a common imaginary for people who were less and less united by collective memories and traditions. And third, the construction of self-identities is a constant process, stemming from multiple and incoherent encounters.

11. In the nineteenth century, vagueness and generality are linked, describing not a noble style but rather the new style of administration: “son vocabulaire est heureusement restreint et, pourtant, la compréhension que le vulgaire en a est inversement proportionnelle à la récurrence et la banalité des termes [its vocabulary is limited but, nevertheless, the understanding of the commoner is inversely proportional to the recurrence and the triviality of its terminology].” Georges Calmès, Du style administratif, discours prononcé à l’Académie d’Angers à la séance du 1er juillet 1886.