The meanings and implications of the term philosophe changed a good deal between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the severe, disapproving, often pedantic figure of yore was supplanted by a more civil persona. No single text illustrates that transformation more clearly than “Le Philosophe,” an essay first published anonymously in the Nouvelles libertés de penser of 1743.1 Often attributed to César Chesnau Dumarsais, but widely circulated in edited form by Voltaire and others, “Le Philosophe” defined its subject as an even-tempered individual, “full of humanity . . . who knows how to divide his time between retreat and social engagement.”2 This new model of the philosophe did not go uncontested. For example, in Progrès de l’éducation (1743), René de Bonneval maintained that the sort of person popularly called a philosophe was a vain, showy character who affected singularisme in his ideas on everything—including religion, politics, and “common” sentiments.3 More notoriously, Charles Palissot de Montenoy’s satirical comedy Les Philosophes (1760) skewered Diderot, Rousseau, and Helvétius by painting them as con artists. For better or for worse, the new-style philosophe popularized during the eighteenth century was widely perceived as a very visible sort of intellectual.
The invention of this figure reflected a larger effort to balance intellectual work with engagement in public life. As J. B. Shank puts it, “The Siamese twins ‘philosophe’ and ‘public’ constitute arguably the core element of the French Enlightenment itself. The public was a necessary correlate of the philosophe persona because it served to locate him socially.”4 This often entailed grafting the figure onto more established “polite” personae like the honnête homme—as, for example, in the Encyclopédie article “Philosophe” (1765), an abridged version of the 1743 text, which stated, “Given that he loves society extremely, it is more important for him [the philosophe] than for the rest of men to use all of his mainsprings [ressorts] so as to produce nothing but the effects consistent with the idea of an honnête homme.”5 The philosophe’s temperament was clocklike in its reliability, ensuring that he could not possibly act in a manner inconsistent with reason, moral integrity, and the good of the public. As was often the case in Encyclopédie articles, “Philosophe” defined its subject by contrasting it to countermodels. The author thus opposed the philosophe to those who “are carried away by their passions, without reflecting before they act”—setting up an allusion, a few paragraphs later, to the hotheaded emotions fostered by religious fanaticism (509–10). Another countermodel was the unfeeling Stoic sage: in contrast to that figure, the philosophe“does not claim the chimerical honor of destroying the passions, because that is impossible; but he strives not to be tyrannized by them” (510). The true philosophe was, in short, both a master of self-control and a man of feeling—but only of the socially beneficial sort.
There are multiple fault lines hidden beneath the image presented in this text. Among other things, the principle of honnêteté it promoted left unresolved the tension between that principle’s central notion, perfect adherence to society’s rules and constraints, and the intellectual liberty claimed for the philosophe.6 It also elided the essential incompatibility that many authors saw between rigorous truth seeking and the frivolous, vapid aspects of the worldly society in which the philosophe was supposed to be actively engaged. Also absent in “Philosophe” are three ideological strands that did much to shape the period’s intellectual personae in other texts and contexts: the period’s growing valorization of conjugality and paternity, a movement in which the philosophe was fully implicated;7 the toiling aura that surrounded those who worked to expand knowledge; and the image of the philosophe as a person who could be moved to tears by compassion for the suffering of humanity’s downtrodden. Whereas the first of those themes was prominent in theatrical representations of the philosophe, the others factored into debates over the state of the contemporary Republic of Letters—debates in which passions, and even a few manias, were front and center.
Theater was a key medium for commenting on the philosophe as a social figure from the beginning of the eighteenth century.8 A few early plays featuring this character were written by Jesuit priests in order to be performed or seen by their pupils: for example, Le Philosophe à la mode (1720) was composed by Father Jean-Antoine du Cerceau to teach his students at the Collège de Louis Le Grand to beware of the “wickedness and corruption” of fashionable thinkers like his title character, symbolically named Narcisse.9 Most playwrights, however, aimed less to preach about the dangers of the “new” philosophe than to poke fun at the personal peculiarities of intellectuals, variously defined.
According to Ira Wade’s count, the eighteenth century produced approximately 225 plays in which a scholarly persona appeared, an estimate to which we can add greater precision thanks to the database “Calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l’ancien régime et sous la révolution,” also known as CESAR.10 Some intriguing patterns emerge when one peruses the sorts of characters who appeared before theater audiences in the guise of a philosophe or savant. First, judging from the dates on the CESAR lists, philosophes and savants were ambivalent stage personae from the very beginning of the century, their intellectual status sometimes cast into doubt through pejorative qualifiers like faux, petit, soi-disant, or ridicule. Second, male scholars or pseudo-scholars were the principal targets: although femmes savantes or femmes philosophes remained comic targets in the wake of Molière’s famous satires, their virile counterparts were more frequently lampooned on the stage. Finally, love themes predominate in most of the plays that feature a philosophe or scholarly type, suggesting that even playwrights who sought to impute charlatanism or other dark ambitions to this type found sentiment to be the easiest mechanism for tripping up their target.
From Germain-François Poullain de Saint-Foix’s Le Philosophe dupe de l’amour (1726) to Pierre-Antoine-Augustin de Piis’s Aristote amoureux, ou le philosophe bridé (1780), the philosophe was regularly played for a fool by and in love—so foolish that, in the case of Piis’s comic opera, the once haughty Aristotle ends up allowing himself to be fitted with a bridle and hooked to the front of a cart carrying the gorgeous young Indian maiden with whom he has become smitten.11 This illustrates the persistent tendency on the part of comic playwrights to associate the philosophe with romantic incompetence, a vestige of the pedant persona of centuries past. Given the degree to which some prominent intellectuals were integrated into worldly society, it may seem paradoxical that the stage persona of the philosophe retained this particular trait, but playwrights continued to exploit the entrenched idea that “philosophy,” or the love of knowledge, was inherently incompatible with carnal love as well as politesse.
The notion of the philosophe as out of step with love and society was not, of course, unique to the eighteenth-century French stage: one version of it dates back to the medieval fabliau Le Lai d’Aristote, which inspired both Piis’s Aristote amoureux and Saint-Foix’s Oracle (1740).12 The plot of Le Lai d’Aristote was also repeated in Jean-François Marmontel’s “Le Philosophe soi-disant” (1759), a moral tale dramatized at least nine times between 1760 and 1790.13
Many of the comedic authors who satirized intellectuals did little more than recycle the devious tutor of Le Pédant joué by Savien de Cyrano de Bergerac (1654) or one of Molière’s characters, like the hypocritical schemer Tartuffe of Le Tartuffe, ou l’imposteur (1664), the jealous Arnolphe of L’École des femmes (1662), and the pompous poet Trissotin and pretentious savante Philaminte of Les Femmes savantes (1672). Other playwrights adapted the docteur character of Italian comedy and the Foire, a figure who, ridiculous by dint of his age, his pomposity, and his suspicious nature, invariably interfered in the efforts of two young lovers to achieve happiness via amorous contentment.14 Still others used thinly veiled dramatizations of the tale of Socrates included in Marie-Catherine de Villedieu’s short-story collection, Les Amours des grands hommes (1671)—itself an adaptation of biographical details gleaned from Plutarch’s Lives—where Socrates is cast as a Stoic who falls in love with his young charge Timandra, claims to be interested only in making her a “philosophical” woman, and eventually loses her to his handsome, wily young disciple Alcibiade.
Of those various sources, Villedieu probably contributed the most to the more sympathetic view of the amorous philosophe, which came into favor among French theatergoers during the 1720s and 1730s. Villedieu’s emphasis on the romantic motivations that drove antiquity’s great philosophers was clearly tied to préciosité, a seventeenth-century cultural movement that sought to create greater respect for love and the tender feelings cultivated by women of refinement.15 It was also connected to the emerging interest in the private lives of great thinkers and statesmen of the modern age. The basic plot of Villedieu’s novella was not, in and of itself, favorable to the philosopher in love: her protagonist is an ugly fellow who preaches contempt for the passions while burning with desire for Timandre, the young beauty he has secreted away in the woods of Athens; and her Alcibiade has no more trouble in shaking Socrates’ confidence in Stoic philosophy than in sweet-talking Timandre’s gullible duenna, the “astrologess” Aglaonice, in order to gain access to Timandre’s ear and heart.16 Among the plays that appropriated elements of Villedieu’s tale of Socrates, many did little more than mock the figure of the lovestruck pedant and/or a deluded femme philosophe modeled after her Aglaonice.17 A notable exception to that rule is Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux’s Le Triomphe de l’amour (1732), which borrowed from Villedieu both in its plot line and in its nuanced view of a philosophe grappling with the eternal “surprise” of love.18
The Athenian philosopher Hermocrate of Le Triomphe de l’amour has not been seen as a legitimate philosophe by all modern-day critics: some view him as a narcissist and assume that Marivaux’s sympathies lie with Léonide, a Spartan princess who, Alcibiade-like, falls in love with Hermocrate’s handsome young charge Agis, masks her identity, and presents herself at the door to Hermocrate’s garden in the guise of Phocion, a young man ostensibly drawn there only by the much-reputed wisdom of a great intellectual.19 However, Léonide-Phocion is an ambiguous character: she fools Hermocrate and his spinster sister Léontine into believing that they, not Agis, are the objects of her ardor, and only one of her reasons is unequivocally just. That is her equitable wish to right the wrongs committed by her uncle, who had usurped the throne from Cléomène, by restoring Agis, Cléomène’s son, to power.20 Léonide’s other reason is amorous obsession: she will spare no one to win the heart of Agis, a young man who has every reason to hate her. Moreover, Hermocrate is not a sinister figure: far from being the heavy of the play, as is the case in most amorous pedant comedies of the period, he comes across as a hapless victim of a con artist. His temperament and comportment are close to those exhibited by Villedieu’s philosophers. He falls in love while at the height of his justly earned fame as a sage, and he undergoes his amorous adventure in the midst of a political situation that has life-and-death repercussions for his young charge Agis—whom Hermocrate and his sister bravely rescued as an infant, and whom they also seek to restore to the throne of Sparta.
Love does not so much reduce Hermocrate as redeem him, transforming his formerly “savage” wisdom into a more sociable virtue. Although he does not end up marrying, both he and his sister Léontine exuberantly embrace the possibility of marriage and full social engagement, as is poignantly illustrated by the comic scene between the love-besotted siblings that ends act II. Hermocrate and Léontine, both giddy at the thought of eloping with Phocion/Léonide but unaware of her real identity (or of their sibling’s plans), gallantly recognize each other’s lovable qualities and admit the shortcomings of the austere mode of life they have followed (176–77). This dual confession of discontent with a purely philosophical existence emboldens both siblings to hint that they intend to give it up in favor of marriage. However, Hermocrate ends the scene with a lucid aside in which he recognizes that he and his sister are both in a silly state, a condition he describes as the destiny of all humans (177).
Ultimately, therefore, Hermocrate the philosopher is true to his name: he is the play’s chief spokesman for Marivaux’s vision of love, life, and authentic wisdom. Wisdom, this play suggests, must be sociable, but it must also be compassionate, generous, and humble (qualities lacking in Princess Léonide).21 Although the solitary sagesse in which Hermocrate and his entourage live is, as the valet Arlequin puts it, “uncivil for love” (138), one could just as easily invert the phrase to say that love proves distinctly uncivil toward philosophy in this comedy. Le Triomphe de l’amour makes it hard to say whether the punishment meted out to Hermocrate and his sister is justifiable, not just because the two recluses are simultaneously sympathetic and laughable, but because Léonide is such a mixed character. The Parisian audiences who saw this comedy when it was performed in 1732 seem to have viewed her as a scandalous trickster—and Hermocrate as her undeserving, mistreated victim. As Antoine-Jean-Baptiste-Abraham d’Origny reported in his Annales du théâtre italien (1788), “People found it unseemly that a Princess of Sparta disguised herself to go find a young man of whom she was not certain to be loved, and abused a Philosophe through a trickery unpardonable to anyone but Scapin.”22
Five years before Le Triomphe de l’amour, another play featuring a philosophe fared much better at the box office: Philippe Néricault Destouches’s Le Philosophe marié, ou Le Mari honteux de l’être (1727), the most frequently performed and well-attended French comedy of the first half of the century.23 The subtitle expresses the comedy’s central dilemma: Ariste, a well-born, bookish fellow, has secretly married Mélite, who is beautiful and refined but has no dowry. It is not Mélite’s pennilessness that causes Ariste’s shame about being married; rather, he regards love as a weakness and married life as a threat to the freedom he savors when alone with his muses in his cabinet (he is also susceptible to the teasing of his bachelor friends and annoyed by his new sister-in-law Céliante, an indiscreet chatterbox).24 Act I begins with him surrounded by his books, pens, mathematical instruments and globe, exulting in the solitary pleasures of his study until he remembers that a very different existence awaits him in the next room:
My retreat is my Louvre, and I command here like a king.
But it is only here that I exercise supreme power;
Outside of my study, I am no longer the same
In the other apartment, I am always annoyed
Here, I am a bachelor; there, I am married. (6)
Predictably, annoyance from the outside arrives early and often, in the form of the various women of the household who enter his study unexpectedly.
The most intriguing aspect of Le Philosophe marié is Ariste’s transformation: he begins by viewing the “philosophical” and married modes of life as mutually incompatible, but ends by regarding marriage as the ultimate proof of a philosophe’s character and moral fortitude. The initial attitude is made abundantly clear in act I: Ariste, alone in his study, tries to read but is repeatedly interrupted, first by his friend Damon and then by the soubrette Finette. In scene 4, Finette barges in and mutters a dismissive “always reading!” and then loudly announces that “Madame your wife” wishes to speak with him (11). When Ariste rejects this request, the exasperated Finette makes a wisecrack regarding his procreative capacity: “They say that people don’t have all gifts at the same time, / And that great minds, otherwise very estimable, / Have very little talent for producing offspring” (16). Although Ariste is piqued by this insult, he says nothing much to counter it. Instead, he simply begs Finette to keep Mélite from bothering him for an hour or two so that he can philosophize in peace.
Finette’s salty intimation that Ariste may not be able to rise to his conjugal duties, if he ever fully accepts them, would go on to provide grist for the mill of the “cerebro-genital pole” theory popularized by the nineteenth-century medical author Julien-Joseph Virey, who cited Finette’s wisecrack to support his thesis that great intellectuals were tepid lovers and poor sires because their vital fluids were channeled toward the brain.25 Although Le Philosophe marié contains no more references to Ariste’s possible physical inadequacy as a husband, Finette’s remark evokes a persistent theme in both the biographical and medical representations of superior male minds: the notion that the trade-off for their intellectual creativity was a lack of interest in or capacity for social interaction, including sex and procreation.
Destouches, however, proposed other reasons for Ariste’s ambivalence toward the state of marriage: his philosophe character values his independence, disdains women’s idle chit-chat, and sees himself as a Stoic who must keep his distance from the passions. Events conspire to cure this character of his reluctance to accept the public and private duties of a married man. First, Ariste gradually moves out of his study, the space he initially regards as a sanctum to be shared only with like-minded men such as Damon and the Marquis de Laurens. Second, his philosophical mettle is tested against characters like his uncle Géronte, a venal, ill-mannered fellow who takes a dim view of the contemplative mode of life, but who possesses the fortune on which Ariste’s future depends—and who, not knowing that his nephew is already married, wants him to marry his stepdaughter. In act IV, scene 3, to counter Géronte’s portrait of intellectuals as socially useless prattlers, Ariste praises the ideal philosophe as a man of action rather than words, a true, fair, and compassionate person whose greatness shines in adversity (91–92). Ariste’s conversion to this ideal is not complete until Géronte discovers his marriage to Mélite and threatens to break it up, putting Mélite’s honor in peril and prompting Ariste to defend her before his powerful, quarrelsome uncle (123–29). Even then, his philosophical fortitude does not suffice to bring about a happy ending. That is accomplished by the Marquis’s noble offer to marry Géronte’s stepdaughter without accepting her dowry, thereby allowing Ariste to keep his uncle’s fortune and stay married to Mélite (129–32).
Ultimately, therefore, Le Philosophe marié aims not to lampoon philosophes but to socialize them, while also drawing attention to the ways in which the so-called polite society that ridicules them has been corrupted by greed, aristocratic idleness, and anti-intellectualism. True to the tradition of the “comédie de moeurs,” it offers a corrective to philosophes who don’t live up to the name, along with edifying instructions for everyone on how to be a good spouse and citizen. Anticipating the slightly later text “Le Philosophe,” it locates virtue and wisdom not in Stoic disdain for society, but in social engagement, with all of its complexities.
When we consider that Destouches’s comedy was packing the Comédie Française at the same time that Marivaux’s was getting a tepid public response, we might conclude that Parisian theater audiences in 1732 no longer wanted to see a philosophe played for a fool on the stage. And when we note that, two years later, Barthélemy-Christophe Fagan’s comedy La Pupille won acclaim and popularity by reversing the standard “duped philosopher” plot line and depicting a lovely young heroine who pines away passionately for her forty-five-year-old tutor, we catch a glimpse at an interesting mutation in public opinion.26 Although mocking satires of the amorous pedant continued to appear in French theaters until the end of the century, they were generally produced for the Foire or Opéra Comique, whereas more serious troupes offered dramas like Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765). Sedaine’s play depicted the philosophe not as an intellectual, but as an exemplary family man devoted to protecting those around him from the often turbulent passions of the contemporary world.27
Whether one leafs through the annals of the world
or supplements uncertain chronicles with
philosophical research, one will not find that human
learning has an origin corresponding to the idea we
like to have of it. Astronomy was born from
superstition; Eloquence from ambition, hate,
flattery, and falsehood; Geometry from avarice;
Physics from vain curiosity; all, even Moral
philosophy, from human pride. Thus the Sciences
and Arts owe their birth to our vices; we would be
less doubtful of their advantages if they owed it to
our virtues.
—Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 17;
First Discourse (translation slightly modified), 12
According to Rousseau’s polemical First Discourse, conventional thinking about the arts and sciences masked an ugly basic truth: far from arising from a natural, laudable desire to expand one’s mind or improve the human condition, every existing field of knowledge owed its existence to an unsavory passion. Happiness and tranquility, he argued, were to be found solely in the state of ignorance, whereas the arts and sciences were mired in the artificial, agitating emotions that dominated life in civilized society. Making matters worse, laborers and soldiers were now outnumbered by philosophes churning out useless books. If, he declared, Socrates were to come back to life, “he would not help to enlarge that mass of books by which we are flooded from all sides.”28
Extreme as it was, Rousseau’s diatribe crystallized the era’s ambivalence about the value and morality of knowledge seeking; by applying metaphors like “debility,” “poison,” and “remedy” to the practice and institutions of learning, he popularized the pathologizing language that was already present in discussions of civilization in general.29 Disease rhetoric was particularly prominent in debates between the philosophes and their adversaries: whereas conservative journalists and critics bemoaned the corrosive effects that the “disease” of philosophie was exerting on society, pro-Enlightenment authors described those writers as poisoned by the plague of envy that was afflicting the contemporary Republic of Letters. The unhealthy pursuit of recognition as an author was also a well-established subject of satire: Alexis Piron made a splash with his 1738 comedy La Métromanie ou le Poète, where he poked fun at writers afflicted with the penchant for versifying and inflicting readings of their works on their houseguests. That play may have targeted Voltaire.30
Métromanie, a word that caught on quickly enough to be featured in a short Encyclopédie entry, was just one of the many “manias” invented to diagnose the excesses of the modern intelligentsia. As Jean-François Féraud observed in his Dictionnaire critique de la langue française (1787–88), mania meant mental derangement in a medical sense, but it also had the meaning of “passion carried to excess.” Féraud added: “For some time now, it has entered into the composition of several words: Anglomanie, bibliomanie, etc. Someone has even said Voltairomanie. . . . All of these words, and those that can be forged via imitation, belong to the joking or satirical style.” Mocking humor was, indeed, the context of many of the “manic” words that were composed to characterize activities or people associated with scholarship, like “Jordanomania,” which Frederick of Prussia coined to complain that his learned friend Charles-Etienne Jordan was neglecting Potsdam for his library, where he was “always buried under a dusty pile of books” that no one else knew or cared about.31 However, even when used in jest, mania words often reflected a more serious underlying debate.
Take, for example, the most personal term in Féraud’s dictionary entry list, “Voltairomania,” which entered the French cultural lexicon in 1738 through an exchange of venomous pamphlets between Voltaire and Desfontaines. Desfontaines targeted two specific defects when he dubbed Voltaire a maniac: first, the “insane,” hateful fury that Voltaire had unleashed on him in Le Préservatif, which Voltaire had written in reaction to the journalist’s dismissive review of his Eléments de la philosophie de Newton; and, second, his “stupid pride,” which Desfontaines held responsible for Voltaire’s sensitivity to criticism and delusional belief that he could excel not just as a poet but also as a scientist and philosopher.32 The dispute that gave rise to La Voltairomanie illustrates that the use of mania as a smear word was tied to a larger struggle between the philosophes and their adversaries for control over print culture—and, more broadly, over the power to dictate the tastes, interests, and beliefs of the reading public.33
Anti-philosophes were particularly fond of imputing manias to certain types or tendencies within the Republic of Letters. In his Essai critique sur l’état de la République des Lettres (1744), Jean-Jacques Le Franc de Pompignan, Bishop of Puy, identified “the mania for being an author” as one of the causes underlying the “decadence” of contemporary belles lettres.34 Sounding a similar theme in the Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps of 1753, Élie Fréron decried “the itch to write and the multiplicity of Books,” adding that “this mania has never been carried to the extremes of which we are the witnesses and the victims.”35 Seven years later in the Année littéraire, he coined the term Editiomanie to poke fun at a related ailment: “Edition-mania is one of the maladies afflicting our gens de lettres; they imagine that it is by the number of editions that posterity will calculate their successes, and they are only too pleased to impose them on it. But will posterity be their dupe?”36 And in Le Fanatisme des philosophes (1764), Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet declared that the philosophes were afflicted with an incurable “chattering mania” that made them obsessed with publishing their opinions, out of the “fanatical ardor” to gain renown in the eyes of the public.37
Those in the opposing camp, the philosophes, also wielded mania words to draw attention to writerly excesses that called out for a cure. Taking aim at his critics in “Les Honnêtetés littéraires” (1767), Voltaire decried the pretension to bel esprit that had spread like an epidemic disease among minor authors, “either ex-jesuits or convulsionists,” who maniacally attacked “the premier men of literature.”38 He also created a metromaniac of his own, in the form of the narrator of his anonymous poem “Le Pauvre Diable” (1758): fit for no other profession, this wretched character made a living writing for Fréron’s weekly journal until Fréron started stealing his work. The poem portrays Fréron himself as a worm born from the ass of Desfontaines.39
Of course, the most established mania connected to the world of learning was bibliomania, a condition whose history reached back to the fifteenth century. The term itself did not appear in French until the seventeenth century, when commentators like Gabriel Naudé, Jean de La Bruyère, and the physician Guy Patin remarked a tendency among those seeking high social status to collect books and assemble private libraries for ostentatious purposes.40 In the Encyclopédie, Jean le Rond d’Alembert defined bibliomania as a furor for possessing books as objects to display rather than as sources of intellectual enjoyment and edification.41 Commenting that “the love of books, when not guided by Philosophy and an enlightened mind, is one of the most ridiculous passions,” he proposed two remedies. First, one should learn to read “philosophically” in order to discern what is useful in a given book versus what is not; second, one should strive to possess books as much for others as for oneself. This utilitarian, public-spirited perspective was, of course, an ideal often evoked throughout the Encyclopédie, yet d’Alembert saw it as the exception rather than the rule in contemporary society. The mad passion for accumulating books was, he stressed, all the more ridiculous in that it rarely brought genuine pleasure, any more than the passion for accumulating paintings, curios, or houses.
Not all commentators on bibliomania considered it devoid of pleasure: some saw a kinship between the love of luxurious, rare books and the love of beautiful female bodies.42 For those authors, bibliomania had an erotic side not mentioned by d’Alembert. Louis Bollioud-Mermet, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Lyon and author of the 1761 treatise De la bibliomanie, admitted that he himself had felt the seductive pull of this “strange and libertine taste.”43 Whereas the Encyclopédie offered its readers a collective exercise in the judicious triage of useful things to know, Bollioud-Mermet drew on personal experience to urge his fellow bibliomaniacs to take a healthier approach to books: “let us use books with discretion if we want to enjoy them fruitfully. Let their use be for us not a source of vanity, but a means of instruction. . . . Armed with these precautions, anyone who loves study will find in the elite company of a few good books a noble occupation and inexpressible satisfaction.”44
Bibliomania thus belonged to a somewhat different category of passions from the ideologically driven manias that were evoked as part of the battle between philosophes and anti-philosophes. It was perceived as a genuine syndrome—perhaps a delusion, or perhaps a guilty pleasure—that affected certain individuals in a social climate in which books, but not necessarily good sense, abounded. This made bibliomania a cousin to the recklessly bad reading habits that Dr. Tissot attributed to “this love of knowledge [les sciences], which has been the reigning mania for the last century” (SGL, 185).
Let us make a brief detour back to Tissot to consider that remark in context. Although his chief aim in De la santé des gens de lettres was to warn scholars about the effects of learning mania on their own health, he also devoted some attention to its other victims: the readers of the excessive number of books that the mania had produced. Tissot was particularly concerned about women, who had been seized with a ruinous passion for consuming novels: “So many authors give rise to a great number of readers, and continuous reading produces all the nervous disorders; perhaps of all the causes that have harmed the health of women, the main one is the infinite multiplication of novels for the past hundred years. From the earliest infancy to the most advanced old age, they read them with such eagerness that they are apprehensive of a moment’s distraction, take no exercise, and often sit up very late to satisfy this passion; by which their health is entirely destroyed” (SGL, 186). This immoderate novel reading was rendering women and girls unfit for their natural domestic functions: “A girl at ten years old who sits down to read, when she ought to be running about, will be an hysteric at twenty years and not a good nurse.” It was also creating a growing number of women authors, which Tissot considered equally worrisome. A few years later in his Traité des nerfs et de leurs maladies (1778–80), he bemoaned the fact that the “furor” for reading had trickled down to artisans’ workshops and country hamlets. Here, he cited as proof the case of a seamstress who had been found reading the Baron d’Holbach’s “tedious” book Système de la nature (1770), perhaps out of the mistaken belief that it was a book of devotion.45
Both medical and imaginative writers would continue to associate intellectual pursuit with manias and other modes of excess well into the next century. Whereas Jean Baptiste Félix Descuret included a chapter on the “mania” for study in his 1841 treatise La Médecine des passions, Gustave Flaubert embraced book-mania and identified as a male hysteric.46 Flaubert’s example illustrates that such pathologization was not necessarily negative: nervous or mental disorders were often a mark of prestige for nineteenth-century authors. In any case, the eighteenth century tended to take a less solemn view of its manias than would the Romantic period. As d’Alembert quipped while referring to the fleeting fad that had made geometers highly sought out in worldly society, “no mania lasts in our nation.”47
The Enlightenment may have taken its manias lightly, but it was earnest about the quest for intellectual glory. This was an age in which grand cerebral striving was celebrated and publicized with exuberance: famous thinkers like Newton were held up as benefactors of humanity, theater and poetry were glorified as fields of honor, and Antoine-Léonard Thomas extolled the service that intellectuals rendered to the nation in the Discours de réception he delivered at the Académie Française in 1767, on the subject of “L’homme de lettres citoyen.”48 In this era before the advent of the “hatred for great men,” the effort to stir up admiration for the great minds of the scholarly and artistic pantheon was central to the rhetoric of the Enlightenment movement.49 So, too, was the attempt to rid the Republic of Letters of what some saw as its most fearsome passions: the envy and jealousy that prompted some intellectuals to attack those who had achieved greater success.
In 1716, to commemorate his entry into the Bordeaux Académie des Sciences (founded just four years earlier), Montesquieu gave a speech in which he praised the gentlemen of the academy for ushering in a sea change in attitudes toward learning and the learned:
Yes, gentlemen, there was a time when those who were devoted to study were regarded as bizarre persons [singuliers], not made like other men. There was a time when there was ridicule and affectation associated with freeing oneself from the prejudices of the people. . . . In such a critical time for scholars, being more enlightened than others did not come with impunity. If someone undertook to venture beyond the narrow sphere that marks the boundary of human knowledge, a mass of insects would immediately rise to form a cloud to obscure his path. Even those who esteemed him in secret rebelled against him in public and could not forgive him for the affront of not resembling them.50
The Bordeaux academicians had, he proclaimed, dispelled the anti-intellectualism and the clouds of “insects” that had formerly pestered scholars; they had also helped to free the nation from the tyranny of ignorance. Now that the bad old days of ridicule and resentment were over, scholars the world over could look forward to receiving laurels from the fertile grounds of such academies, the glorious institutions that were destined to perfect all fields of knowledge.
Montesquieu’s optimism about the prospects for glory in France also found its way into Les Lettres persanes: in letter 89, his character Usbek praises the French people’s love of glory and respect for the “noble emulation” it inspired, qualities that attested to their liberty, sense of honor, and capacity for patriotic self-sacrifice.51 That confident view was not, however, shared by all of his contemporaries; in fact, the century’s failure to do justice to Montesquieu was a common theme among the encyclopedists.52 In his “Éloge de Montesquieu,” which appeared at the outset of volume 5 of the Encyclopédie (1755), d’Alembert lamented the fact that, despite the great acclaim that had greeted De l’Esprit des lois upon its publication, this masterpiece was being attacked by “the public and secret enemies of Letters and Philosophy.”53 A few years later, d’Alembert expanded his thoughts about those enemies in his unpublished “Réflexions sur l’état présent de la République des Lettres écrites en 1760, et par conséquent relatives à cette époque.”
The year 1760 was, we should recall, exceptionally difficult for intellectuals affiliated with the philosophic movement. Coming right after Rousseau’s noisy defection from the movement and the revocation of the Encyclopédie’s privilège in 1759, this was the year when Palissot’s satire Les Philosophes appeared and when, on the occasion of his election to the Académie Française, the poet and devout Catholic Jean-Jacques Le Franc de Pompignan made a speech denouncing his century as “drunk with the philosophical spirit . . . the scorn of religion, and the hatred of all authority.”54 D’Alembert clearly wrote his “Réflexions” in reaction to those events, particularly the power struggle that was taking place between the pro- versus anti-philosophe factions of the Académie Française.55
The central question of “Réflexions” was why intellectuals were so often despised and denied the glory that should be “the patrimony proper to their state” (361–62). D’Alembert’s answer departed somewhat from the stance he had taken in his 1753 “Essai sur la sociétédes gens de lettres et des grands,” when he criticized the deference that gens de lettres seeking attention in worldly society had to show toward those of higher social status.56 In 1760, he placed intellectuals a notch above aristocrats because of the unique cultural power they wielded.57 That power incited jealousy and hatred on the part of the nonintellectual elite, who depended on gens de lettres to have their talents celebrated, their mediocrity covered up, and their stupidities toned down—and who resented them for it (362). In “a large kingdom where so many fools want to have an existence, and where there are far more pretensions than titles,” this created plenty of enemies for gens de lettres (363–64). Other enemies came from the ranks of those who belonged to “the lower chamber of literature” (363). Out of malice and envy, such writers unfairly branded the philosophes as a dangerous sect and trafficked shamefully in false eulogies and satires to tear apart “the best among us” (365–66). D’Alembert ended by offering some words of encouragement: “You who do honor to letters through your talents and comportment, you who represent the nation in the eyes of foreigners, you who uphold its glory during troubled times, do not let some passing storms discourage you; and refrain from lowering the nobility of the state you have embraced by engaging in flattery or satire” (365–66).The sounder judgment of Europe would, he assured them, eventually silence and shame their enemies.
D’Alembert’s text typifies the rhetoric used by the philosophes to defend themselves and respond to their opponents. They often compared the sort of glory one might achieve in the realm of intellectual and literary production with the more traditional brand that arose from military prowess.58 Their tone was simultaneously combative and suffering: illustrious gens de lettres were both courageous warriors striving for glory and victims persecuted by the lowly, jealous pauvres diables of the literary world. Generally speaking, the philosophes fretted more about envy than did their adversaries—although at least one anti-philosophe, Charles-Georges Leroy, turned the tables against the philosophes by depicting their most famous member, Voltaire, as little more than an envious hack himself.59 To fight envy, the philosophes used the same sort of pathologizing language as that which they employed to combat the “infection” and “contagion” of religious fanaticism and persecution.60
It is useful to note here that the social context within which envy and related passions were examined changed somewhat from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries: high culture’s centers of gravity shifted to include urbane salons as well as royal courts, and glory turned into a quality associated with intellectual or artistic renown. Both developments helped to remake envy into a vice associated particularly with gens de lettres.
Theories of envy followed the same conceptual trajectory as the rest of the passions, which went from being a topic of dogmatic morality to a subject of secular ethics after 1650 and then became a matter of profession-or temperament-specific ethics and medical therapy in the eighteenth century. The first shift is illustrated by René Descartes’ Traité des passions de l’âme (1649), where he emphasized envy’s social repercussions as well as its psycho-physiological effects on the envious.61 According to Descartes’ classification of the passions, envy was a species of sadness intermingled with a degree of hate, “a vice that consists in a perversity of nature,” which made certain people angry when they saw something good happen to people who they believed were unworthy of it.62 Adhering to his general principle that the passions were useful as long as they were not excessive or misdirected, he insisted that envy was not always vicious: it was justified when the possession a person envied was something that “could be converted into evil” when mishandled, like the glory of a high public office—glory being, in his estimation, the possession least communicable to a large number of people, and thus most generally envied (781–82). Yet he also warned about envy’s damaging effects: those “tainted” with this passion disrupted the felicity of others while also destroying their own health and tranquility; and the damage was readily apparent on their faces. The envious typically had a livid, pale complexion mixed with shades of yellow and black, as if their faces were bruised. This, he maintained, was the result of “bruised blood”: that is, blood tinged with yellow bile from the liver and black bile from the pancreas, a combination that cooled the venous blood and slowed its circulation (783).
A few decades later, the moralist François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, analyzed envy in his Maximes (fifth ed., 1678) by situating its function within the system of aristocratic rivalry and status seeking. He called it a chronic, shameful, secret desire to see those in favor humiliated—a “fury” distinct from jealousy because it sought not to preserve something one possessed, but to destroy what belonged to another.63 Although La Rochefoucauld decried envy, he saw it as integral to the treacherous, constantly shifting universe of the social elite. A person’s approval of those who were just making their debut in that world was, he observed, quite often based upon “a secret envy toward those already established”; moreover, the aristocratic pride that fueled envy also served frequently to moderate it.64
Envy’s eighteenth-century commentators drew liberally on the explicative models proposed by their predecessors. In his short Encyclopédie entry “Envieux,” for example, d’Alembert paraphrased La Rochefoucauld’s distinction between envy and jealousy; the anonymous medical article “Envie” approached the passion in the jointly psycho-physiological manner of Descartes.65 After characterizing envy as a malignant form of melancholic delirium, this author listed such debilitating symptoms as severe thinness; muscle atrophy; a propensity for dark, obsessive thoughts and horrible bouts of ennui; continuous agitation and insomnia; loss of appetite; and, finally, a deep languor usually accompanied by a slow fever. Some relief for this “base and vile passion” could be obtained from the therapeutic measures standardly used to treat hypochondria, like baths, mineral waters, and laitages. Those methods should, however, be combined with “the moral remedies provided by philosophy and religion, to try to cure the mind while also undertaking to change the disposition of the body.”66
Nonmedical commentators proposed various moral cures for envy. Destouches, for example, wrote a one-act play entitled L’Envieux ou la critique du Philosophe marié (1727) as a coda to his famous comedy.67 Its protagonist, Lycandre, bristles so intensely at the success of any literary rival that he goes to extreme lengths to disparage him and his work. His envy is directed at the author of Le Philosophe marié, which has just enjoyed a glorious premiere. The play’s sympathetic characters are well aware that Lycandre will do anything to make a rival miserable, so they exploit his obsessive envy in such a way that he unwittingly sacrifices his chance to marry pretty, kindhearted Angélique and ends up stuck with her shrewish sister Bélise. Lycandre’s character traits anticipate those of the anti-philosophe persona soon to be constructed by Voltaire, d’Alembert, and others: furious hostility toward a work that has both pleased and instructed its audience; despair over another writer’s fame and happiness; and indignation when someone else wins the seat in the Académie that he thinks should go to him. In this play, Destouches defuses envy’s potential dangers by making the envieux a comic dupe, a man so blinded by his ruling passion that it ruins his life. This forbearing attitude was, apparently, characteristic of an author who had many firsthand brushes with jealous sorts, at least according to the account that d’Alembert provided in his “Éloge de Destouches,” delivered at the Académie Française in 1776.68
Another approach was to promote emulation as a counterweight to envy, a strategy based on the principle of countervailing passions—one of the most significant developments in early-modern theories of human nature. As Albert O. Hirschman explains, this principle consisted in pitting one passion against another as a means of keeping in check those that were most socially harmful: “the idea of engineering social progress by cleverly setting up one passion to fight another became a fairly common intellectual pastime in the course of the eighteenth century.”69 The countervailing passion principle is evident in the Encyclopédie article “Émulation,” where Jaucourt characterized emulation as a “noble, generous passion that, out of admiration for merit, beautiful things, and the actions of another person, tries to imitate or even surpass them, striving to do so according to honorable and virtuous principles”; those qualities made emulation the exact opposite of “inordinate ambition, jealousy, and envy.”70 Whereas jealousy was a “violent,” cold, sterile passion that did nothing to improve the situation of the envious individual, emulation was voluntary, productive, and ardent. Emulation was thus capable of bringing order and progress to the scholarly and artistic realm, the sphere Jaucourt emphasized in his conclusion.
Other writers despaired of finding a remedy for envy. Voltaire, for example, described it in his Discours sur l’homme (1738) as both the soul and the hangman of high culture in contemporary France—a dangerous, cowardly vice that menaced the reception of new plays, guided the satirist’s poison pen, inspired the desecration of paintings, and slithered, like a venomous snake, at the feet of all the great creative geniuses.71 Germaine de Staël made envy a central theme of her youthful tribute to the work and character of Rousseau, where she called on the great men of the present day to rise up in defense of this misunderstood genius and form a “league” against envy.72 Her tone was distinctly melancholic.
Envy seemed to preoccupy Diderot throughout his career. In De L’interprétation de la nature (1754), he called envy and superstition the major obstacles facing those who resolved to take up the philosophical study of nature.73 In the Éloge de Richardson (1762), he exclaimed: “What a passion envy is! It is the most cruel of the Furies: it follows the man of merit right up to his tomb, and there, it disappears, and the justice of the centuries settles down in its place”; and in l’Essai sur la vie de Sénèque (1778), he defiantly declared that “there are men whose hatred is a source of glory; the torment of envy is always a form of praise.”74 The last remark sums up one of the central themes of Diderot’s late masterpiece Le Neveu de Rameau, where he forced the philosophe persona to confront the jungle of hateful, envious sorts lurking in contemporary Paris.
The title character of Le Neveu de Rameau, LUI, belongs to a particular species: the ankle-biting denigrators of the philosophes, a category also represented by Palissot, Fréron, and other critics named at various points in this dialogue. Yet LUI is more complex and multifaceted than his fellows: he is an extraordinary actor who can mimic everything from a fawning minister, to a girl being seduced, to an entire orchestra; he is a musician endowed with a fine ear and a Stentorian voice; he is a hedonist for whom the appetite reigns supreme; and he is a clown—or, more specifically, the former clown of the financier Bertin and Mlle Hus, a position he enjoyed until he was chased from their household for being just a bit too impertinent. What his interlocutor, the philosophe character MOI, finds useful about conversing with LUI is his unsettling bluntness: “he stirs things up, shakes them about, provokes approval or blame; he makes the truth come out; he reveals who’s genuinely good, he unmasks villains; and that’s when a man of good sense pricks up his ears and sees the world for what it is.”75 All of that combines to make him the perfect guide for MOI through the unsavory world of fashionable French society, where reputations are made and unmade around elegant dinner tables.
Envy and calumny drive the entertainment that LUI and his fellow lowlifes provide to dissipated Parisians like the Bertin-Hus, and the menagerie they form is particularly ferocious in denigrating the prominent intellectuals of the day: “You’ve never seen so many miserable, embittered, spiteful and ferocious beasts all in one place. You hear nothing but the names Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, along with God knows what epithets. None shall have wit unless he be as foolish as thee and me” (Neveu, 134; Nephew, 49). It was at such a gathering, LUI explains, that the plan for writing Les Philosophes was conceived; during a typical meal, after “the great beasts” are sacrificed, the troupe moves on to slaughtering other people.
However, envy also drives LUI more personally. This comes up early in the text, when LUI and MOI debate the pros and cons of genius (a quality whose “fiber” LUI lacks, along with the fiber responsible for moral sensitivity and empathy). LUI’s opening attack targets his renowned uncle, the composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. Embittered by his uncle’s indifference toward him, the nephew derides him as a “philosopher of a certain species” and complains that his uncle is so fixated on the quest to perfect his theory of the fundamental bass that he is oblivious to the existence of his family (Neveu, 76; Nephew, 11). LUI then generalizes the accusation, applying it to all geniuses: “They are only good for one thing. Apart from that, nothing at all. They don’t have the least idea what it is to be a citizen, father, mother, brother, relation, friend. . . . We need men, but as for men of genius, no thanks.” MOI has no good counterargument: he sticks to a “high culture” defense, arguing that some geniuses may well be nasty (like Racine, “not supposed to have been a particularly nice man” [Neveu, 80; Nephew, 13]), but that the temporary effects of their meanness are a small price to pay for the lasting benefits that their works give to humanity. The debate is left unresolved, leaving us hanging between the moral shortcomings of some recognized geniuses and the aesthetic posterity of great art.
Despite his critique, LUI regrets not being born a genius himself, and his envy makes him enraged when geniuses are praised, while he delights when they are degraded. LUI also yearns for the privileges that come with being a “great man”: a nice house, fine wine, and beautiful women to sleep with. Imagining himself as his famous uncle, recognized as the author of the Indes galantes, Profondes abîmes du Ténaire, and Nuit, éternelle Nuit, he acts out these various pleasures, punctuating his words with evocatively pantomimed gestures (Neveu, 85). When he returns to the fantasy of himself as a wealthy man later in the dialogue, LUI introduces a cast of insipid adulators, all taken from the ranks of the critics who had tormented Diderot in print. Here, LUI envisions himself as rich enough to command a troupe of cads to entertain him by belittling the great, upstanding minds of the day: “It’ll be fabulous. We’ll prove that Voltaire has no genius; that Buffon is nothing more than a sermonizing old windbag; that Montesquieu is merely a wit; we’ll send d’Alembert back to his sums; we’ll give all you little Catos a good thrashing for looking down on us when really all you are is envious, your modesty merely a mask for pride, and your sobriety simply the dictate of necessity” (Neveu, 113; Nephew, 35; my emphasis).
Illustrating one of the dialogue’s many lexical mutations, envy migrates in this passage from one interlocutor to the other: LUI insinuates that MOI and his fellow philosophes are the true envieux, jealous of the power their critics possess to influence public opinion. He goes on to warn “Mister Philosopher” that “at this moment I represent the majority in town and at court.” He then dismisses as futile all of the virtues promoted by the philosophes—devotion to country and friends, the duties of one’s social position, the education of one’s children—and derides the “wise and philosophical universe” they dream of creating as “miserable as hell” (Neveu, 114–15; Nephew, 35–36).
MOI does his best to defend his position: he insists that he, too, enjoys sensory pleasures (good food, fine wine, a pretty woman) but finds it infinitely more delightful “to come to the aid of someone in need, to bring a fraught situation to an end, to give a piece of advice, to read something pleasant, go for a walk with a man or woman dear to my heart, spend a couple of instructive hours with my children, write a good page, fulfil the duties of my position, say some tender loving words to the one I love” (Neveu, 116–17; Nephew, 37–38). Growing more and more impassioned, he mentions the inspiring example of Voltaire clearing the name of the persecuted Calas family. He then tells the story of the friend of his who had fled to Carthagena after being harshly treated by his parents, but who, upon hearing that they are languishing in poverty, returns to France to restore them to their home: “as I tell you this story, I can feel my heart fill with joy, and it gives me such pleasure I can hardly speak” (Neveu, 117; Nephew, 38). LUI simply takes this as one more proof that, far from setting the tone of public opinion, MOI and his fellow philosophes are a strange lot (“des êtres bien singuliers”; Neveu, 118). What the public wants, he insists, is not to admire acts of virtue, but to laugh at the foolishness of others.
As MOI’s defense of virtue’s pleasures makes clear, emulation is not entirely absent from Le Neveu de Rameau. However, its power to countervail the nasty passions that dominate contemporary society is sabotaged—not just by LUI’s consistently sarcastic reactions to MOI’s earnestness, but also by the topsy-turvy ethical system LUI espouses. A perverse kind of emulation underpins that system: LUI strives to be perceived as belonging in a “long line of glorious good-for-nothings,” the rare elite formed by the completely unscrupulous, cleverly malicious people of the world (Neveu, 156; Nephew, 63).76 Two characters occupy the top spots in this hierarchy: the farmer-general Bouret, who devised a brilliant scheme for social advancement that involved using a disguise to trick his faithful little dog into attaching itself to a powerful official who’d taken a liking to the animal (Neveu, 127); and the Renegade of Avignon, who won the confidence of a wealthy Jew only to persuade him that they were both about to be handed over to the Holy Inquisition, and who then denounced his gullible friend and made off with his fortune. These are the characters whom LUI considers worthy models for those who aspire to perfection in the craft of flawlessly executed duplicity.
The darkest of these examples is the tale of the hideous crime committed by the Renegade, which LUI presents like “a connoisseur of painting or poetry would examine the beauties of a work of art” (Neveu, 156; Nephew, 63). As an expert in the art of duping people, he considers the Renegade’s atrocious action to be sublime in both design and execution. Yet admiration is not the only reason that LUI tells this story: he seeks above all to reduce MOI to speechlessness. After listening to this story, which ends with the Jew being burned in “a nice big bonfire,” MOI’s mind is so filled with horror (especially when LUI starts singing a triumphal march) that he feels physically ill and can think of nothing but to change the subject to music (Neveu, 157).
However painful, this episode reveals some essential truths. It proves that some refined sensibilities can admire the “art” of a brigand and remain unmoved by human suffering. It also shows the evil face that genius can take. As LUI puts it, “If there is one genre it’s worth being sublime in, it’s evil. We’ll spit in the face of a petty thief, but can’t help admiring a great criminal” (Neveu, 151; Nephew, 60).77 This remark sums up one of the most complex questions raised by the dialogue: namely, the presence of great criminals next to great creative minds in the class of “sublime” beings. Sublime scoundrels, as MOI is forced to admit, belong to a distinct class—an idea that bears an eerie resemblance to the reflection Diderot made about great artists in the Salon de 1767 when he observed that there may be “a morality unique to artists, or to art, which may well run counter to ordinary morality.”78
In their anthropological dimensions, these realizations anticipate what happens between MOI and LUI at the end of Le Neveu de Rameau, which occurs on the safer terrain of the comically satirical. Here, as MOI evokes the various sorts of flatterers, courtiers, valets, and beggars who tirelessly dance the “vile mime” that drives social life, the nephew brilliantly mimes “the positions of the people as I mentioned them” (Neveu, 191; Nephew, 85). Working in tandem, LUI and MOI effectively distribute these people into the various “species” or laughable social types they represent. In the end, MOI is able to smile alongside his perturbing interlocutor and see him as a source of inspiration for a new way of perceiving the various figures that dominate public life: “The follies of this man, the stories of the Abbé Galiani, and the wild imaginings of Rabelais have at times sent me into deep reverie. These three storehouses supply me with ridiculous masks to put on the faces of the most serious of personages; and so I see a prelate as Pantalon, a high court judge as a satyr, a cenobite as a piglet, a minister as an ostrich, his private secretary as a goose” (Neveu, 190; Nephew, 84–85).
Placing distorting or exaggerating masks on the faces of the “most serious of personages” allows MOI to see them for what they really are, by discerning the animal instinct that drives their behavior.79 What he embraces by the end of this encounter is a theatrical, caricatural perspective on the world. Ultimately, therefore, LUI is much more than just an envieux who rubs shoulders with the philosophes’ worst critics: he is a source of inspiration for the grotesque—an artistic mode that turns out to be an excellent means of carrying out the philosophical function of uncovering the true face of both the genuinely good and the villains. In his way, LUI is as much of a philosophe as MOI, although he would never lay claim to the name.