Regressive Fictions

The term regression I employ here primarily in its Freudian sense: a psychological retreat from adulthood, or social reality and genital sexuality, into an earlier if not primary stage of development.¹ By extension, I use it to designate the desire to recover some imagined original state of plenitude and innocence.² I shall examine in successive chapters its manifestations in three novels: the Lettres d'une Péruvienne (published in 1747, revised edition 1752) of Mme de Graffigny, Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1788). All three are among the half-dozen best-selling fictions of the later eighteenth century. I take them to be evidence of an increasing tendency towards what might be called psycho-cultural regression.³ Broader support for my reading is offered in this preliminary section, which sketches some large perspectives and then points to indices of cultural change in the mid-century from which these works emerge.

Inwardness

The 'rise of the novel' in the eighteenth century, notable in itself, is strongly characterized by the use of first-person forms. In memoirs and letter-novels alike, the new centrality of 'je' must reflect a new individualism and a new interiority in this period. We are at a further stage of what Charles Taylor calls 'the inward turn', which he traces in Western consciousness from St Augustine.⁴ In the eighteenth century (inaugurating Taylor's 'third stage') the source of self becomes Nature. Nature, we may say, is no longer to be seen as fallen, but increasingly, on the contrary, as the principle of moral good. That good is known rather less from traditional institutions — Church, monarchy, social hierarchy — or from the current ethos of sociability, and more immediately in the heart. Present society, if not society itself, is now identified as the source of corruption. Man is born innocent; and this opposition is mirrored in the discovery of the state of childhood. That state comes to offer an answer to the Enlightenment search for happiness. Its idealization is also an element in the rising cult — sentimental, moral, social and political — of the family. In all these matters we are dealing both with changes in 'real' social practices and with imaginary representations — propagandist or wishful — which may go against reality.

Individual self-awareness seems to derive less from classical antiquity than from the Judeo-Christian tradition.⁵ That tradition's first story tells of original innocence and an expulsion which is linked to knowledge and to shame. Does this imply that 'l'homme ne commence à se connaître qu'au moment où il se sent coupable'? Conscience and consciousness are allied (and 'self-consciousness' partakes of both). 'A la limite, la conscience de soi serait essentiellement et peut-être exclusivement la conscience de la faute, ou du moins la conscience du rapport à l'autorité qui me juge'.6 The evidence for this link, in the most notable literary instances, is quite striking. The founding text of inwardness, Augustine's Confessions, is centrally concerned with the sinful condition of humankind and the sinfulness of the writer. The founding text of modern autobiography, Rousseau's Confessions, is written by a man filled with the sense of his own guilt. The evidence for Rousseau's sentiment of culpability is, in good part, precisely his insistence on his own innocence. This is reflected in his affirmation of the innocence of all humankind in nature.⁷ The emergence of the idea of natural goodness, earlier in the eighteenth century, curiously coincides with the rise of first-person fiction.

The earliest first-person narrative genre is the picaresque. In its authentic Spanish form (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the picaro's account of humankind and of himself is profoundly bleak. Bleaker still, and more explicitly Christian, is Grimmelshausen's German masterpiece Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669), which nevertheless assigns innocence to its first-person narrator. The French fictional mode (Francion, Le Page disgracié) is aristocratic, disabused yet drawn to childhood, romance and fantasy. The non-fictional origins of modern autobiography include the journals of spiritual self-examination — principally Puritan in English and Pietist in German.⁸ Another source, on the French side, is aristocratic memoirs. Their authors remain more concerned with historical events than with inferiority.⁹ But they tend to self-justification, and a certain self-fascination. 'L'Histoire est là; mais aussi Narcisse historien'.¹⁰ Protestant individualism takes literary form notably around 1720 in Defoe's down-to-earth fictional autobiographies (Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana). French pseudo-memoirs reach their literary apogee in the 1730S. Though also authored mainly by the middle class (Prévost, Marivaux, Crébillon, Duelos), their protagonists are mainly aristocratic. But all these fictional memorialists are self-analytical. They exhibit both anxiety and considerable self-complaisance. To look ahead, the contradictory imperatives will appear most strikingly at the start of the most 'inward' of all writings, Rousseau's Rêveries:

Stern self-examination, anticipating judgement, mutates almost unawares into swooning self-communion.

Other kinds of inwardness may be linked to the new model of the family. The 'extended' family, characteristic of the nobility and the lower classes, is gradually displaced by the bourgeois nuclear family. Initially a Protestant phenomenon in the seventeenth century, it is slower to spread in France. The new model is closed and domestic; it becomes (like the persons inside it) more 'private'. It is strongly bonded within by immediate consanguinity, legal and moral duty, and interpersonal affection.¹² External ties are correspondingly weakened. The organic relation with lineage and household, local community, religious institution, monarchy and society is reduced. Their traditional authority declines, partly through analogous changes, but it is also transferred. The rise of the bourgeois family, like that of the individual, has been seen as a great gain in freedom. But the decline in traditional beliefs and the separation from larger structures must also bring anxiety.13 More profoundly, their authority is taken inside. Not only is the burden of regulation shifted towards the self and (its) 'nature'. Patriarchal status is partially transferred from God, King and priest to the family father. Constraints are internalized.¹⁴

Thus Freud's account of family relations can be understood not as a universal but as historically and socially contingent. The Oedipus complex in particular is a product of the new arrangements emerging in advanced societies around the eighteenth century.¹⁵ This would generate for the individual a new psychic conflict and sense of guilt.¹⁶ A more nuanced argument finds the oedipal drama to be universal, but suggests that certain kinds of social arrangement facilitate the transition to adulthood, while others make psychic development more difficult.¹⁷ In either case, the evidence is largely in stories. The first Judeo-Christian story, to which we referred before, is also about disobedience to the law of the Father. Those who break the divine interdiction earn punishment, knowledge and a painful freedom. But the Biblical Eden story is not about the family. Even the Greek family tragedies (the cycles of Thebes or the house of At reus) are dynastic and public, as well as determined by the gods.¹⁸ Stories which treat of the family unit in problematical relation to the public sphere appear in the Early Modern period.¹⁹ Those which centre on relations within the family, especially the private family, are substantially an Enlightenment invention. The most significant depict with startling clarity the oedipal drama, and the triumph of the father.

On the French side the great forerunner is Racine, within tragedy and its royal families his genius creates a new mode — that of 'intimité'.²⁰ Racine's later plays offer a perfectly Freudian configuration. Guilty sons, and wives or daughters, are morally dominated by the father.²¹ Just one play features a complete 'nuclear' family: husband, wife and child we find in Iphigénie. Here the daughter Iphigénie dutifully accepts the law of the patriarchy (the priest Calchas, the gods) which appears to designate her as the victim. She countenances the dismissal of her mother (Clytemnestre), and she herself rejects her lover (Achille) in favour of her father (Agamemnon). It is for her father that she is willing to be sacrificed — quite literally, for this drama of the family is still a sacred drama. But Racine draws from this situation much pathos. Finally a providential intervention saves the submissive daughter and punishes her rebellious double (Eriphile). Racine's only 'drame bourgeois', as Barthes rightly calls it, will be adored in the eighteenth century.²²

One might expect families to be prominent in the new 'bourgeois' genre of the novel. Freud's 'Family Romance' has provided the basis for a notable account of the rise and development of two tendencies in fiction.²⁵ As in theatre, oedipal anxiety in French fiction seems to emerge first through the more elevated line: not the 'realist' mode but that of imagination. Celebrated by the Enlightenment above all other seventeenth-century works is Fénelon's Télémaque (1699). Set in the ancient world, this epic romance is in prose (that is, modernized). Télémaque is not only about the education of a prince; it is about a son in search of his father. Télémaque's guide and surrogate father is Mentor (actually Minerva, and thus in some sense also his surrogate mother). Télémaque dutifully gives up the girl that he loves (the dangerously seductive Eucharis), as later he quits the young woman whom he wishes to marry (the 'good sister' Antiope, devoted to her own father Idoménée). He does so at the behest of Mentor, in order to find his father (Télémaque, Books vi and χ vii).

Finally in this influential sequence we come to Prévost. For his contemporaries, Prévost's best-known novel was Cleveland (1731-39), which had the proverbial fame or notoriety of Mme de Scudéry's romances for previous generations. Cleveland itself has many characteristics of the romance — an elevated register, amorous passion and violence, exotic voyages and providential encounters. Most strongly, it has the imperative of regression.²⁶ But this is now bound to the family and especially relations with the father. By its oedipal anxiety as well as other elements — setting, mode of narration, presentation as an authentic document — Cleveland is a romance modernized.

Cleveland offers (as so often in Prévost) the pattern of a youthful innocent love and the formation of a family, sponsored or more often destroyed by a father-figure.²⁷ The title announces that Cleveland is 'fils naturel de Cromwell'. This terrible patriarch (who is himself also a regicide or 'parricide') will dominate Cleveland's youth. The opening volumes also tell the strangely parallel story of young Bridge, another bastard son of Cromwell by a different woman (the Primal Horde). Each boy and his mother live together, alone, hidden from the father (the pre-oedipal situation). Each boy indeed hides for years in an underground cavern, Cleveland with his mother whom at her death he buries there so that he can 'continuer à vivre auprès d'elle' (p. 35).28 Cleveland is succoured by a 'good father', Viscount Axminster, who takes him to his own secret cave and into his own family 'comme leur propre fils' (p. 56). Still underground, Cleveland aged sixteen falls in love with Axminster's daughter Fanny, who is in effect his sister as well as being just ten years old. After they emerge, the match will be opposed and the marriage long blighted by Cleveland's grandfather. In parallel, Bridge will be rescued by Mme Eliot who takes him to a hidden Utopian colony and into her own family. Bridge too falls in love with his surrogate parent's younger daughter. But the match is fiercely opposed by another bad father and tyrant, the Calvinist minister (Book iii). In this case the 'son' challenges the bad father. The essential point however is firstly the narrative of the search for parents and the sibling love. Secondly it is this narrative's recurrence, which suggests a primary 'compulsion to repeat'.²⁹

Many adventures later, Cleveland and his own fourteen-year-old daughter Cécile, unknown to each other, will meet and fall in love.³⁰ The tie of nature revealed, Cécile will refuse all suitors. Now playing the role of the destructive patriarch himself, Cleveland demands an explanation. Death, she tells him, will be the only 'remède' for love, which since infancy she has sought and considered 'nécessaire au bonheur'. She continues,

What she then calls 'une erreur si charmante' leaves her dissatisfied with any 'réel'. Unable it seems to separate from the father (as Cleveland and Bridge could scarcely separate from their mothers), Cécile dies.

The Histoire de M. Cleveland, the full title states, is écrite par lui-même. With Prévost we reach fiction in the first person. But fictional memoirs were already an established genre, as we saw, and since about 1690 they had often taken a pseudo-historical form. The significance of Prévost is that he shifts their emphasis — from exterior to interior. The focus in Prévost is less upon the events than upon feeling. 'La vérité qui lui tient à cœur n'est pas de [...] l'histoire, mais d'un autre ordre: celui des sentiments et des rêves.' In turn, this gives the narrative a new and subjective unity. '[C'est] la vérité affective qui fonde l'aventure.'³¹ But that affective truth extends to the events, which become Symbolic and repetitive. In Cleveland at least, the memoir regains the oneiric unity of romance.

Utopias, as a literary genre, almost invariably take the form of fictional autobiography.33 This might be explained by their filiation with travel literature. But that link too has its implications. The idea of making a voyage, and the invention of a Utopian world, suggest something about the writer in relation to his own society. 'Au risque de simplifier, on peut admettre que l'insatisfaction face au réel et la fuite compensatoire dans l'imaginaire sont les motivations premières de l'utopiste'.³⁴ This seems to be true of the authors of French utopias in the late seventeenth century — Veiras, Foigny, Tyssot de Patot. 'Tous sont, à bien des égards, des marginaux.'³⁵ The paradigmatic work is the Histoire de Sévarambes of Denis Veiras (1677-79).³⁶ Here the confluence of self, imagination and utopia is made literal. The fictional protagonist is called 'Siden', which is an anagram of Denis. The Sevarambes are a people instituted by the sun-priest and legislator Sevaris or Sevarias. The alternative names are anagrams of Veiras/Vairasse. The author's voyage to the ideal appears to be the distinctly oedipal journey back into his own family, which reveres its patriarchal founder and lawgiver, or still more regressively into narcissist self-replication. This anticipates the pattern, more overt a century later, in the vast fictional production of Restif de la Bretonne. Nicolas-Edmé Restif fantasizes about the origins and moral meaning of his family name. He gives his protagonists versions of his own first names: Edmond, Edmé, M. Nicolas. In further self-multiplication, their women may be onomastic extensions of the same identity: Edmé and Edmée, Nicolas and Colette. Restif depicts repeatedly the rural plenitude that he has lost, idealizes the patriarchal family, alludes increasingly openly to incest, and sets out Utopian projects. His interlocking mythical worlds are the written expression of his own desire.³⁷ By now however these worlds are often local and their expression intimate. We are well into the latter part of the eighteenth century, the time of my three novels. There is much change at the mid-point of the century.

The 1750s see the emergence of new kinds of literature.38 In the later 1750s in particular there occurs a whole set of generic changes. Probably the best-known is the appearance in theatre of what we have come to call the 'drame bourgeois'. The 'drame' is theorized by Diderot in the Entretiens sur 'Le Fils naturel' (1757), and the Essai sur ta poésie dramatique accompanying Le Père de famille (1758). In prose fiction, 1758 is the date of publication in the Mercure de France of Marmontel's first 'conte moral'. Promising to make 'la vertu aimable', it will found a new subgenre.³⁹ At the same time we have a revival of poetry, with a new attention to nature.⁴⁰ The 'style troubadour' is heralded in 1756 by Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye's version of Aucassin et Nicolette. The taste for medievalism becomes more evident with the huge success in 1758 of Colardeau's French adaptation of Pope's Eloisa to Abeiard. English literary models are an element in most of these developments.⁴¹ The latter suggest the appeal of earlier times or simpler worlds.⁴² This is confirmed by the great success in France of the lyrical and moralizing works of the Swiss-German Gessner.⁴³ His treatment of a quasi-Edenic subject, La Mort d'Abel, goes through several French editions in 1760. Arcadian or pastoral innocence is celebrated in his Idylles et poèmes champêtres, translated in 1762. Significantly, these are prose poems. The abbé Trublet has already provided a key to the character of the new writing by noting that 'la Poësie est commune d'elle-même à la prose et aux vers'.⁴⁴ The formalist opposition between prose and verse, inherited from French classicism, is being replaced by a holistic view: verse may be prosaic; more importantly, prose may be poetic.

The 'drame' develops tendencies that we noted in tragedy earlier in the century: focus on the family, natural sentiment, didacticism through pathos. But it also constitutes a rejection of the ethos of tragedy. Aristocratic tragedy is to be displaced by the 'drame bourgeois'. Divine injustice is denied in favour of Providential justice. Verse is replaced by prose, and irony by peroration. Instead of purging the passions, drama now invites its audience to identification. The new mode is more 'democratic' in its affective directness, and in its aim of collective improvement.⁴⁵ The 'drame' is also to replace comedy, which in its five-act form was generally still in verse until the mid-century. Comedy distances the audience from the characters through satiric wit, and laughs at human and social (especially bourgeois) follies. The 'drame' on the contrary demands identification with persecuted innocence, and offers the moralizing condemnation of vices alongside the affirmation of bourgeois virtues. The new mode is to have dramatic and moral impact: victims and villains, coups de théâtre, secrets and revelations. It seeks a new and immediate language. The truth of feeling and the body is to be expressed verbally through the 'style entrecoupé' and the 'cri de la nature'; it is conveyed more directly through mime, and the visual force of collective tableaux.

Much of this change occurs also in painting. As the tableau enters drama, narrative becomes more of an element in painting. The aristocratic frivolity of Boucher is displaced around 1760 by the bourgeois sentimentalism of Greuze.46 In Greuze we duly encounter the family, affectivity and melodrama (titles such as 'La Mère bien-aimée' and 'La Malédiction paternelle'), expressive gesture and moral didacticism. Imaginative involvement becomes important in painting, as what has been called 'absorption'.⁴⁷ Writers on music have begun to seek a similar shift. 'Je croirais assez volontiers [...] que le chant est plus propre à exprimer les grandes passions et à les faire sentir, que la déclamation; l'harmonie par elle-même a le pouvoir de nous émouvoir, de nous séduire.'⁴⁸ This proposition shows clearly that the new imperative of identification has two elements. To the aesthetic effect in the art object — in music, painting, or literature — corresponds a cultural practice in the experiencing subject.

Literary narrative however lends itself uniquely to identification. This is in part because unlike most other art forms it is experienced — increasingly, as oral culture gives way to silent reading — individually and alone.⁴⁹ First-person narration in the novel facilitates the process further. But here too we find a significant change around the mid-century. The memoir, at its apogee from the 1720s to the 1740s, is then increasingly displaced by epistolarity. Memoir-novels recount events in the past. The fictional narrator writes from a secure present, possessing in retrospect an overview and proposing some understanding of what is told.⁵⁰ In many cases (Prévost is an exception), the acquisition of experience is also treated with a degree of irony. By its form if not also morally and emotionally, the memoir-novel distances the narrator — and thus the reader. The letter-novel however abolishes that distance. The narrator of a letter writes not only at the time of the events, but "within" them, and often in more or less spontaneous reaction to them.⁵¹ The experience becomes direct; feeling and its expression become unmediated and thus authentic. The writing subject is devoid of the 'arrière-pensée' of the memoir — Second thoughts, knowledge, maturity. He or she becomes, in this sense if not also in others, innocent.

The epistolary form is particularly suited to conveying the experience of subjects of extreme sensibility placed under emotional stress or in moral peril. The reader shares the effect, and undergoes the affect, which are created by the real writer. The imaginative identification of writer and reader with the fiction is exemplified in the anecdote retailed in the 'Préface-Annexe' of Diderot's La Religieuse. Discovered 'plongé dans la douleur et le visage inondé de larmes', Diderot explains 'Je me désole d'un conte que je me fais'.⁵² Contemporary with the first draft of his novel is his Eloge of the presiding genius of epistolary fiction. 'Ό Richardson! on prend, malgré qu'on en ait, un rôle dans tes ouvrages.'⁵³ Engaged with the character, 'on se met à sa place ou à ses côtés, on se passionne pour ou contre lui'. Engaged through ethical sentiment, 'on s'unit à son rôle s'il est vertueux; on s'en écarte avec indignation, s'il est injuste et vicieux'. Diderot continues: 'Mon âme était tenue dans une agitation perpétuelle. Combien j'étais bon! combien j'étais juste! que j'étais satisfait de moi!' (p. 30). Identification slides here from emotional and moral to narcissistic. The hint of exaggeration and self-irony in Diderot's formulations underlines the intensity of his imagined experience, but also perhaps invites us to be wary of it.

But imagination is also perilous. It may leave one perpetually dissatisfied. Prévost's Cécile, we may recall, thirsted in vain after what she called 'mes imaginations et [...] mes désirs'. Imagination alienates one from reality. Rousseau recognizes that 'cet amour des objets imaginaires et cette facilité de m'en occuper achevèrent de me dégoûter de tout ce qui m'entourait, et déterminèrent ce goût pour la solitude qui m'est toujours resté' (Confessions, p. 41). Withdrawal from social life itself may go with what are in more than one sense solitary pleasures, as the author of the Confessions knows very well.⁴⁶ Memory and fantasy (passive and active imagination, in the theory of the time) can be overwhelmingly erotic. 'Les idées que nous avons acquises nous suivent dans la retraite, la peuplent malgré nous d'images plus séduisantes que les objets mêmes et rendent la solitude [...] funeste à celui qui les y porte.' This warning Rousseau issues most strongly in Emile. The 'Gouverneur' must keep his adolescent pupil under constant surveillance. 'Veillez donc avec soin sur le jeune homme, [...] ne le laissez seul ni jour ni nuit [...] s'il connaît une fois ce dangereux supplément il est perdu. Dès lors il aura toujours le corps et le cœur énervés'.⁵⁷ Masturbation, the product of a corrupted social culture and an overheated individual imagination, will destroy one's physical and moral health for ever. Rousseau's anxiety, though evidently personal, is a sign of the times. The publication of Emile in 1762 is contemporary with that of L'Onanisme, by Dr Samuel Tissot (in Latin, 1758; in French, augmented, 1760). Setting out the dire effects of masturbation, this treatise was a huge and enduring best-seller.⁵⁸

It seems legitimate to perceive the rise at this time of a kind of cultural hysteria. In fact, the period almost diagnoses itself in such terms. The 1750s see the appearance of the first of a number of works on 'les vapeurs' or nervous illness. These claim to identify a new phenomenon, and they explain it as- a pathology of the body individual and social.⁵⁹ The diagnosis itself is one more symptom. One can speak of hysteria in several modern senses of the term. In the Freudian sense, this must be a sign of a neurosis, individual or collective.60 In a Lacanian or Kristevan sense, the spread in literature of fragmented and exclamatory writing (the 'style entrecoupé/ haletant'), and in theatre and painting of a fascination with the expressive body, can be seen as the pressure of repressed desire upon language. In the general sense we have the reflection of a moral panic. It can perhaps be explained as the anxiety aroused by a newly permissive and appetitive society. At its centre is the problem of the autonomous self, and the governance of overstimulation and excess, identified notably with urban sociability, the consumption of luxury goods and private reading.⁶¹

If individual imagination is fed by narrative fiction, the collective imagination can be addressed through the public stage. In the Entretiens of 1757, Diderot is already dreaming of a theatre for the nation. Drawing on ancient Greek models, he envisages first a very large performance space. The 'théâtre très étendu' would be matched by a mass audience, perhaps éven 'un peuple'. In contrast to our current drama — 'amuser [...], dans un petit endroit obscur, quelques centaines de personnes' — this new theatre would 'fixer l'attention d'une nation entière dans ses jours solennels'. Performance too would be grandiose and ritualized ('la poésie et son emphase', 'la pantomime et la déclamation'). Not only is the whole to be on a vast scale; that which is not inclusive and transparent is treated with disapproval ('un petit endroit obscur'). Diderot (or his speaker Dorval) is in fact enthused by the idea of arousing in the collectivity a single moral emotion. All will be moved by the tears of a republican patriarch:

Failure to share the collective sentiment is to be considered, indeed, as a mark of inner wickedness. 'Celui qui ne sent pas augmenter sa sensation par le grand nombre de ceux qui la partagent, a quelque vice secret; il y a dans son caractère je ne sais quoi de solitaire qui me déplaît.'⁶²

This sketch for a national theatre clearly anticipates the fêtes of the French Revolution.⁶³ Its ethos is republicanism. Its underlying imperative is the wish for a shared identity and a unanimity of feeling which signify guiltlessness.⁶⁴ Sentiment that is defective or deficient, though by definition involuntary, is blameable. The private and hidden are innately culpable. Diderot's 'vice secret' notably resembles Rousseau's 'solitude funeste' and 'dangereux supplément'.⁶⁵ The agent of culpabilization is implicitly a watching eye. Its gaze is collective ('l'attention d'une nation entière') and it never sleeps ('veillez [...] nuit et jour').⁶⁶ It is embodied in a patriarchal 'Gouverneur' or in the fatherland itself. Always present and morally judging, it evidently figures the superego.⁶⁷ It dominates the individual subject, who must identify with the ego-ideal ('un homme vénérable') and regress to innocence and primitive indifferentiation. The subject's only choice is between the collective imagination and a private imagination which may compensate for its guiltily hidden pleasures by creating a more intimate version of the same ideal community.

Secondly there is what one might call the paradox of patriarchy. Some cultural historians have argued that, from the mid-century, the decline in the authority of the monarch (and of the Church) is mirrored by that of the father within the family.⁷⁶ In the public sphere there was unquestionably some loss of status for the Crown after the 1750s (though the disasters of the Seven Years' War also prompt the new patriotism). In representations of the family — in literature and painting — the father has also been declared by some scholars to be 'falling'.⁷⁷ Yet the evidence in this period seems to be rather the contrary.⁷⁸ prom Rousseau to Restif, or Greuze to David, the dominant presence in a group is likely to be a father, or his surrogate (the 'vieillard vénérable', the priest or educator). It is true that in fiction fathers are now usually presented less as fearsome or dignified (like, respectively, Cromwell or Axminster in Cleveland) and more as good and tender; but this reflects the greater sentimental intimacy of the bourgeois Sphere. It is true that now they frequently suffer. The cause of their suffering is usually their children (Diderot's eponymous Père de famille, Voltaire's Freind in the Histoire de Jenni, the later family pictures by Greuze, and so on). They may suffer instead for their civic virtue (Belloy's mayor in his theatrical triumph Le Siège de Calais, Marmontel's blinded patriot in his very successful Bélisaire); or for both (Greuze's Septime Sévère, David's Brutus). But this is the source of their power. The 'père malheureux' rules by shame. 'Pity, fear and guilt, alone 01* in combination, are the feelings these old men are most likely to inspire.'79 If the father is absent (or the nation's 'father' is killed by his 'family'), through his law he becomes more powerful. 'The psychic task Freud called the Oedipus complex became a significant and universal experience only at this historical moment. The Oedipus complex becomes socially necessary to the reproduction of the bourgeois world precisely because it is the process whereby the old man's authority — and hence the state — is internalized.'⁸⁰

The elements of my 'psycho-cultural' argument, outlined earlier, may help to explain the pattern of changes in cultural expression at the mid-century. In prose fiction — our concern from now on — I noted a shift from memoir-novels to the greater interiority of the epistolary. But there is also a kind of reversal. The memoir-novels of Marivaux, Crébillon, Duelos and others (less so Prévost), in the 1730S and 1740S, deal with entry into the world. What has been called 'the novel of worldliness' offers a model of progressive experience, both sexual and social. Its characteristic mode is a mature irony (which embraces its own conventions). Novels in the latter half of the century however are more likely to depict a flight from the world. Their characteristic mode is the pathos of innocence. These fictions depict and invite retreat — or return — to a protected space, among a group offering intimate communion. The group becomes increasingly familial. The desired domain becomes increasingly separate and self-complete, a world conjured by writing, yet also more integrated into a natural order. I shall treat my three novels separately and chronologically. My regressive reading in each case offers a broadly narrative account, attending closely to the fiction's opening sections, before looking more systematically at particular motifs.

Notes to the Introduction

1. Freud's Introductory Lectures treat in ch. 21 'The Development of the Libido', and in ch. 22 'Development and Regression'. Regression may occur where the libido's direct 'aim of satisfaction' is blocked. 'There are regressions of two sorts: a return to the objects first cathected [chosen/invested] by the libido, which, as we know, are of an incestuous nature, and a return of the sexual organization as a whole to earlier stages.' Penguin Freud Library, trans, by James Strachey, ed. by Angela Richards, 15 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990—93), 1: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 385. All references to works by Freud will be to this edition, indicated by PFL.

2. My choice of this term, embracing technical and broad senses, is to some extent pragmatic: it seems to fit the evidence that I shall present. The concept of regression is not greatly amplified in Freud; nor has it been much used as a paradigm in cultural or literary studies. It is however one element in Freudian approaches, which have been very productive in relation to eighteenth-century culture, for reasons which I shall suggest are themselves partially historical.

3. Freud recognizes broadly 'the analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development', so that 'it can be asserted that the community, too, evolves a superego'. He adds, 'may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization [...] have become "neurotic"?' (Civilization and its Discontents (PFL x 11), pp. 335, 338.)

4. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

5. Robert Ellrodt, 'De Platon à Saint Augustin', in Genèse de la conscience moderne, ed. by Robert Ellrodt (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), pp. 40—48 (p. 45).

6. Yvan Brès, 'Ambiguïtés de la conscience de soi', in Ellrodt, ed., Genèse, pp. 13—22 (p. 15). Compare Freud: 'The sense of guilt [is] the most important problem in the development of civilization' (Civilization and its Discontents, p. 327).

7. The idea of man's natural goodness is first enunciated by Rousseau not as a theory but as a feeling which he is happy to have. 'Quoique l'homme soit naturellement bon, comme je le crois, et comme j'ai le bonheur de le sentir, [...]': 'Dernière réponse' (1752), Œuvres complètes, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1959—95), 111, 80. All quotations from works by Rousseau will use this edition; but I have modernized the spelling for consistency with other period works cited from modernized editions.

8. Georges Gusdorf, 'De l'autobiographie initiatique à l'autobiographie genre littéraire', Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 75 (1975), 957—94 (p. 985).

9. The changing sense of the term 'mémoire(s)' illustrates very well the gradual emergence of interiority. From signifying 'a simple record of events witnessed by the scriptor', it comes to mean 'a record of the scriptor's role in events', then 'the life of the scriptor'. See René Démoris, Le Roman à la première personne: Du Classicisme aux Lumières (Paris: Armand Colin, 1975), especially p. 59; Faith E. Beasley, Revising Memory: Women's Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (New Brunswick/London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), especially p. 37. The term 'autobiography' is not coined until the end of the eighteenth century (earlier in English than in French).

10. Yves Coirault, 'Autobiographie et mémoires (xvii^e-xviii^e siècles), ou existence et naissance de l'autobiographie', Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 75 (1975), 937^_53 (p. 950).

11. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, i; OC 1, 999.

12. See the two classic works in this domain: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500—1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977), especially Pt iv; and Jean-Louis Flandrin, Familles: Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l'ancienne société (Paris: Hachette, 1976).

13. 'Tout se passe comme si la famille moderne se substituait à la défaillance des anciennes relations sociales, pour permettre à l'homme d'échapper à une insoutenable solitude morale': Philippe Ariès, L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime (Paris: Plon, 1960), p. 461.

14. 'The conjugal family [...] served especially the task of that difficult mediation through which, in spite of the illusion of freedom, strict conformity with societally necessary requirements was brought about. Freud discovered the mechanism of the internalization of paternal authority. His disciples have related it, in terms of social psychology, to the patriarchally structured conjugal family type.'Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans, by Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 47.

15. See notably Paul Pelckmans, Le Sacre du père: Fictions des Lumières et historicité d'Œdipe (1699—1775) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983). 'D'une certaine manière, le père est une invention des Lumières', is the polemical conclusion of Jean-Claude Bonnet, who valuably historicizes the theory too, observing that 'Freud [...] a défini le complexe d'Œdipe dans une culture et une société issues du 18^e siècle': Bonnet, 'La Malédiction paternelle', Dix-huitième siècle, 12 (1980), 195—208 (p. 208). More carefully, Mary Jacobus notes 'the possibility that the psychic formations and subjectivity associated with Freudian psychoanalysis are themselves the products of changes in [...] attitudes to the family — or rather, as some critics and theorists of the family would claim, the product of the specific form of the modern family known as "bourgeois" ': Jacobus, 'Incorruptible Milk; Breast-Feeding and the French Revolution', in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. by Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 54—75 (p. 56). For a recent review of the debate among cultural historians, see Charlotte Daniels, Subverting the Family Romance: Women Writers, Kinship Structures, and the Early French Novel (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000).

16. According to Freud's developmental model, it is 'only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a superego [...] that we should speak [not only of anxiety, prompted by external sanctions, but] of conscience or a sense of guilt': Civilization and its Discontents, p. 317.

17. See the survey and persuasive documentation in Allen W.Johnson and Douglas Price-Williams, Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family Complex in World Folk Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 'The Family Complex' (like 'the Family Romance' in some usages) is a convenient shorthand term embracing Freud's notions of the Primal Horde (see Totem and Taboo, IV.5: PFL XIII), the Oedipus Complex (PFL 1, ch. 21) and the Family Romance (PFL VII, pp. 219—25).

18. Arguing that tragedy shapes Freud's theories, Suzanne Gearhart observes nevertheless that 'the unconscious itself, or at any rate an unconscious, is in some irreducible sense modern': The Interrupted Dialectic: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and their Tragic Other (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 102.

19. This theme is remarkably traced through several cultures (English, Spanish, Dutch and French) by Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000).

20. Racine's famous comment in defence of Britannicus, 'Il ne s'agit point dans ma tragédie des affaires du dehors: Néron est ici dans son particulier et dans sa famille' ('Première Préface'), might be applied to most of his tragedies. The depiction of relations within the imperial or royal family — here Néron and Agrippine — is hardly less ferocious in other plays; the collocation itself— 'the royal family' — becomes cruelly ironic.

21. On this configuration, see Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1979), pp. 14—15.

22. Daniel R. Dupêcher, 'Racine à la Comédie Française, 1680—1774', Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 78 (1978), 190—201, shows that only Phèdre was performed more often than Iphigénie in this period, and on average audiences were larger for Iphigénie.

23. La Motte 's Inès, like Voltaire's Œdipe (and Zaïre), are included in the Pléiade Théâtre du xviii^e siècle, ed. by Jacques Truchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 1.

24. For an overview, see Marie Wellington, The Art of Voltaire's Theater: An Exploration of Possibility (Bern: Peter Lang, 1987), ch. 2 ('Situations') and ch. 4 ('Theme').

25. Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris: Grasset, 1972) identifies two fictional paradigms: that of the 'enfant trouvé', inhabiting principally a world of pleasurable fantasy (the line of Don Quixote); and that of the 'bâtard' who is more engaged with social reality (the line of Defoe). Both derive from the narcissist self-fabulation of the child, and offer 'un expédient à quoi recourt l'imagination pour résoudre [...] le "complexe d'Œdipe"' (p. 43).

26. 'The romance is the nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream. [...] The perennially childlike quality of romance is marked by its extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, its search for some kind of imaginative golden age.' (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 186.)

27. See Jean Sgard, Prévost romancier (Paris: José Corti, 1968), especially ch. 5, 'Le Récit de destinée', and pp. 136—46, 233—41. References are to Œuvres, 11: Le Philosophe anglais, ou Histoire de M. Cleveland, ed. by Philip Stewart (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977).

28. He then describes himself as 'un véritable enfant de la terre' (p. 37), which would imply a regression that is literally chthonic. On this 'refuge maternel' see Christophe Martin, Espaces du féminin dans le roman français du dix-huitième siècle, SVEC 2004.01 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004), p. 153, n. 259.

29. See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (PFL XI), chs 2—5.

30. This love brings out the implications of the earlier pattern: 'Repliés dans l'intimité du cercle familial, les amants y régressent vers l'état d'enfance, et la tendresse qui les unit est aussi celle d'un frère et d'une sœur; d'où le caractère virtuellement incestueux de cet amour, que met en évidence le destin de Cleveland et de Cécile': Jean-Michel Racault, L'Utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre, 1675—1761, SVEC 280 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), p. 605.

31. Sgard, p. 106.

32. Close accounts of these three episodes are offered by Racault, L'Utopie, Pt V.A, 'Les Parcours utopiques de Cleveland'.

33. 'Il s'agit, on l'a dit, d'un récit, presque toujours à la première personne, jusqu'à la fin du dix-huitième siècle au moins: d'où une narration rétrospective de type autobiographique': Racault, L'Utopie, p. 22. From the other side, Démoris in Le Roman à la première personne includes in each section a chapter on utopias.

34. Racault, L'Utopie, p. 21.

35. Ibid, p. 353. Evidently this does not apply to the earlier and 'establishment' figures of More (Utopia, 1516) or Bacon (New Atlantis, 1627). But the diachronic difference itself makes the point.

36. See Racault, L'Utopie, III. 10, 'Le Texte paradigme'; for a broader account, David Faussett, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great South Land (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), ch. 8.

37· See Peter Wagstaff, Memory and Desire: Rétif de la Bretonne, Autobiography and Utopia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996).

38. For a broader account of change at this time, taking in the arts, culture and 'l'imagination scientifique', see Michel Baridon, 'Les Deux Grands Tournants du siècle des Lumières', Dix-huitième siècle, 31 (1999), 15—31 (pp. 25—28).

39. See Katherine Astbury, The Moral Tale in France and Germany 1750—1789, SVEC 2002.07 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002).

40. 'C'est de 1755 environ que l'on peut dater le commencement d'innovation [...]': Edouard Guitton, Jacques Delille (1738—1813) et le poème de la nature en France de 1750 à 1820 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), 1.4, 'La Mue de la poésie française' (p. 105).

41. See Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France 1740—1789 (Geneva: Droz, 1985).

42. The first examples of nature poetry cited by Guitton are two works by Mme Du Boccage entitled respectively Le Paradis terrestre (a mini-adaptation of Milton's Paradise Lost) and La Colombiade, ou La Foi portée au Nouveau Monde — published in 1748 and 1756: Guitton, i, 4.

43. The fullest account remains Fernand Baldensperger, 'Gessner en France', Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 10 (1903), 437—56.

44. N.-C.-J. Trublet, 'Réflexions sur la prose et les vers', in the Mercure, 1760, quoted by Christian Leroy, La Poésie en prose française du xvii siècle à nos jours (Paris: Champion, 2001), p. 53. For a more historical perspective, see Aux origines du poème en prose français (1750—1850), ed. by Nathalie Vincent-Munnia et al. (Paris: Champion, 2003).

45. A valuable account of the shift from the tragic to the pathetic is offered in Anne Coudreuse, Le Goût des larmes au xviii^e siècle (Paris: PUF, 1999), 1.3.

46. See Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

47. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), who finds that 'the early and mid-1750s are a watershed in the evolution of French painting' (p. 55).

48. D'Argens, Lettres chinoises (1739—40), quoted by Jonathan Mallinson in his edition of Graffigny, Lettres d'une Péruvienne (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), p. 235.

49. '[La lecture silencieuse est] l'une des pratiques constitutives de l'intimité individuelle, renvoyant le lecteur à lui-même, à ses pensées ou à ses émotions, dans la solitude et le secret': Roger Chartier, 'Les Pratiques de l'écrit', in Histoire de la vie privée, III: De la Renaissance aux Lumières, ed. by Roger Chartier (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 113—61 (p. 151).

50. The distance is most evident at the start in the frame narrative (typically, 'Now retired in the countryside, I look back ...'). But it must also be manifested in the main narrative not only as retrospection but in the particular forms of prolepsis, commentary, irony, general reflections, and so on. See William F. Edmiston, Hindsight and Insight: Focalization in Four Eighteenth-Century French Novels (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).

51. This is, in a famous phrase, 'the nature of familiar letters, written, as it were, to the moment, while the heart is agitated by hopes and fears on events undecided': Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, (1753—54), 'Preface'.

52. Diderot, Œuvres romanesques, ed. by Henri Bénac (Paris: Gamier, 1962), p. 850. Not only is the 'tale' of La Religieuse actually in the first person; we know that its creation began, in 1760, with the composition of fictional letters (see the 'Pré face-Annexe'). The main text is a memoir but in the form of a letter which interpellates its addressee, and it ends as fragments of a journal written mainly 'to the moment'. The notorious inability of Diderot's narrator Suzanne to anticipate or understand much of her own past experience also contributes to the effect of absorption.

53. Samuel Richardson's 'ouvrages' are three letter-novels: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa (1747—48) and Grandison. Diderot calls them 'trois grands drames', and 'trois poèmes': Eloge de Richardson, in Œuvres esthétiques, ed. by Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier/Bordas, 1988), pp. 29—30.

54. Confesssions (OC 1), p. 9.

55. Dialogues (OC 1), pp. 821, 814.

56. 'J'appris ce dangereux supplément qui trompe la nature [...]. Ce vice que la honte et la timidité trouvent si commode, a de plus un grand attrait pour les imaginations vives': Confessions, p. 109.

57. Emile, ou de l'éducation (OC iv), p. 663.

58. The first work ever to be published on this subject, the anonymous Onania, appeared in England around 1712. But 'Tissot's L'Onanisme succeeded on an altogether different scale; it was an instant literary sensation throughout Europe', and by 1800 there were 'at least 35 editions in French'. Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), pp. 38-39.

59. 'When Enlightenment physicians spoke of the vapors, they referred to a disease also called hypochondria, hysteria, uterine furors and nymphomania [...]; all these conditions were commonly placed under the umbrella of "nervous affections".' 'We can situate the debate on vapors in eighteenth-century French medical discourse fairly precisely: it was conducted in about a dozen treatises devoted in part or in whole to the subject, beginning in 1756 [...]. All the vapor theorists were convinced that there was something decidedly new and alarming about the nervous disorders that were apparently rampant in certain French cities [...]. [Identifying] what was widely seen as a serious crisis in social health, [these treatises propose] both a panoply of often hair-raising curative therapies and a scathing critique of certain pathogenic aspects of contemporary French society.' Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 231—32.

60. Freud also links hysteria to the Oedipus complex, in the Outline of Psychoanalysis (PFL xv).

61. My argument is that of Thomas Laqueur, who nicely summarizes the source of anxiety as 'the vice of individuation for a world in which the old ramparts against desire had crumbled' (op. cit., p. 210, and see especially pp. 248—49, 276—77). It is significant that urbanity, luxury and the private reading of fiction were all associated — particularly on the French side — with the upper classes and with women. The word 'civilization' itself first appears (in Mirabeau's L'Ami des hommes) in 1757.

62. Entretiens sur 'Le Fils naturel', ii, in Diderot, Œuvres esthétiques, pp. 114—22.

63. The classic study is Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire, 1789—1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

64. In more elegant terms, 'une communion dont la règle [...] résulterait de l'universelle spontanéité des consciences': Jean Starobinski, 1789: Les Emblèmes de la raison (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), P· 75·

65. Diderot's negative designation of the closed space of existing theatre as 'un petit endroit obscur' will be echoed by Rousseau ('un antre obscur'), at the start of his famous celebration of the 'transparent' republican festivals of Geneva: Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles (OC v), p. 114. See too Jean Rousset's editorial commentary on Rousseau's Lettre, p. 114, notes 5 and 6.

66. A gigantic eye is part of the Revolution's symbolic imagery, most strikingly in designs by the architect Ledoux. His colleagues recommend the amphitheatre as a space in which 'le sentiment de chacun devient celui de tous' (Poyet), and 'nul ne pourrait échapper aux regards de la multitude' (Boullée): quoted by Richard A. Etlin, 'L'Architecture et la Fête de la Fédération, Paris, 1790', in Les Fêtes de la Révolution, ed. by Jean Ehrard and Paul Villaneix (Paris: Société des Etudes Robespierristes, 1977), pp. 131—54 (p. 136). Surveillance is the new instrument for control in institutions, as most notoriously in Bentham's late-eighteenth-century design for a prison whose many inmates are overseen from one central viewing-point — the Panopticon. See notably Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); for England, John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).

67. 'The super-ego is an agency [... whose] function consists in keeping a watch over the actions and intentions of the ego and judging them, in exercising a censorship. The sense of guilt [...] is the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this way'. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (PFL xn), p. 329.

68. See Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1986). My argument, if not also hers, can perhaps be summed up in the following formulation of the appeal of the writings of the Citizen. 'Rousseau's descriptions of the ideal political state [...] brought to the very margins of consciousness infantile longings for immediacy, fusion, and communion repudiated by the prevailing culture of the Enlightenment, and wrapped them in the flag of moral superiority. He lent legitimacy to the inchoate yearnings of civilized man for a return to the undifferentiated self-absorption of early childhood, and did so in a voice of awesome moral authority' (p. 108).

69. His first political work, the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, was published at the start of 1751; Du contrat social appeared in 1762.

70. David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism 1680—1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 20. See particularly ch. 2, 'The Politics of Patriotism', which argues that the new movement is actively espoused by the Crown.

71. The idea of great men is 'un élément désormais essentiel de l'imaginaire national': Jean-Claude Bonnet, 'Le Culte de grands hommes en France au xviii^e siècle, ou la défaite de la monarchie', in Le Culte des grands hommes, ed. by Jacques Neefs (MLN, 116.4 (2001)), pp. 689—704 (p. 689).

72. Again we have the suggestion of regression. 'The cult's republicanism [...] implicitly criticised the concept of "civilisation" itself, holding up instead the classical concept of the patria [...]. To the extent that it reshaped France's national memory, therefore, it replaced the classic Enlightenment story of a nation struggling to rise out of barbarism towards civilisation by the story of a nation struggling to restore itself to a pristine condition of republican health, from which it had fallen into dangerous degeneration.' David A. Bell, 'Canon Wars in Eighteenth-Century France: The Monarchy, the Revolution and the "Grands hommes de la patrie"', in Le Culte des grands hommes (see Bonnet, above), pp. 705—38 (p. 730).

73. 'The Revolution was the drastic moral regeneration in real life represented in art by the neoclassical movement': Michael Levey, Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 166.

74. For the proponents of the new mode, 'rococo will be feminine and the neo-classic masculine': Rémy Saisselin, quoted in Christophe Martin, Espaces du féminin, p. 60, n. 151. Analogously, Beauty is declared feminine and inferior to the new masculine Sublime, in Burke's influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, first published in 1757.

75. Republican male heroism in the paintings of David is contrasted with the bucolic fantasies of Winckelmann, but also with David's own eroticized treatment of the nude warrior, in Alan Potts, 'Beautiful Bodies and Dying Heroes', History Workshop, 30 (1990), 1—21. The republican mother in representations of the nation has been judged variously by contemporary scholars to be 'sexless', 'masculine' and 'alluring': see Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 2001). As Landes observes, the name 'la patrie' is itself at once feminine and masculine.

76. The best-known presentation of this case is probably that of Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) — using Freud's narrative of the killing of the primal father to characterize successive manifestations of a French 'collective unconscious' from 1750 to 1800. For some objections in relation to the imagery of the Revolution, see Landes, pp. 22, 139, 159, 165.

77. Titles announce 'The Rise and Fall of the Good Father' (Hunt, ch. 2); or 'Fallen Fathers' (Carol Duncan, 'Fallen Fathers: Images of Authority in Pre-Revolutionary French art', Art History, 4 (1981),186—202); or 'Doddering Paternities' (Allan H. Pasco, Sick Heroes: French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age 1750—1820 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), ch. 3).

78. We can also note once more what comes after our period: the nineteenth century will be the great age of bourgeois patriarchy.

79. Duncan, p. 187.

80. Ibid., p. 200; author's emphasis.

Introduction and Argument

Inwardness

Cultural Change at the Mid-Century

Notes to the Introduction