Le roman de l’avenir, here translated as The Novel of the Future, was first published by Lecointe and Poucin in Paris 1834. Unlike the author’s first novel, Eveline (1824), it was signed, both with his name and the subheading “Membre de la Chambre des Deputés”—the French equivalent of “Member of the House of Representatives.” As his postscript explains, its publication was an attempt to claim credit for having come up with the idea of setting a novel in the future—credit that was not, in fact due to him, and to which his claim might have been deliberately disingenuous.
Although the book attracted little attention at the time and was not judged to be one of Bodin’s more important works in the various capsule biographies that appeared in 19th century reference books, it was solidly established within the canon of landmark works in the prehistory of science fiction by a glowing report in Pierre Versins’ Encyclopédie de l’utopie et de la science-fiction (1972). It subsequently became the climactic work considered in Paul Alkon’s study of The Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987), in which it is described and discussed in considerable detail, and it was also the subject of a descriptive essay by Nadia Minerva in Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson’s Dictionary of Literary Utopias (2000).
Not unnaturally, all of these articles concentrate on the work’s academic interest as a commentary on the possible viability of futuristic fiction and a hesitant example thereof. As critics of futuristic fiction, Versins and Alkon are primarily interested in the non-fictional aspects of Le roman de l’avenir, and primarily interested in its fictional content as a hesitant exemplification of the argumentative points made in its preface, whereas Minerva’s brief requires her to concentrate specifically on the book’s utopian ideals. Although Alkon is happy to damn the fictional component of Le roman de l’avenir with faint praise in describing it as an “intriguing story,” all three critics maintain a diplomatic silence as to the possibility of it being read for pleasure in modern times—a possibility somewhat undermined by the fact that it is brusquely fragmentary, introducing its characters and sketching out their initial situation and then stopping dead, in mid-scene. Despite its fragmentary nature, however, the relentlessly self-referential story told in the novel is often funny—deliberately as well as accidentally—in an oddly flirtatious fashion, and many of the ideas it deploys are still interesting, provided that the modern reader can set their particular manifestation in its biographical and historical context.
Bodin was elected as a deputé (at the second attempt) to the government that took power after the July Revolution of 1830, and most of the biographical sketches that appeared after his death concentrate on his significance as a politician and a political historian. His first love, however, had been literature, and he had already established a considerable reputation in the 1820s as a popular journalist. Le roman de l’avenir is part of a long and robust tradition of French satirical contes philosophiques that had descended from Voltaire and, more remotely, from François Rabelais—both of whom had written about deadly serious things in a flagrantly comic vein because it would not have been diplomatic, or nearly so effective, to conduct their assaults on received wisdom in earnest.
Le roman de l’avenir is, however, as much a jeu d’esprit as a conte philosophique; although Bodin admits to having written it in a hurry—in 20 days—in order to stake his claim to the invention of the putative genre to which it belongs, and obviously made it up as he went along, it also features a number of self-indulgently introspective passages in which Bodin revisits almost all of his previous preoccupations and either summarizes his conclusions in a blithe manner, or admits to his continuing confusion with ironic modesty and a certain degree of critical self-analysis. His postscript attributes his failure to get to grips with the task sooner to the deadly sin of paresse [sloth], but he was actually a busy man, and must have squeezed the book’s composition into an interval between parliamentary sessions, when he undoubtedly had other things to do as well. It is not surprising, in view of the circumstances of its composition, that the attempted novel is unashamedly rambling, calculatedly unfocused, and cheerfully sarcastic—characteristics that are doubtless not suited to everyone’s taste, but are appealing in their fashion.
Bodin borrows the English word “hoax” to describe the work, describing a hoax as something “burlesquement sérieuse et sérieusement burlesque” [farcically serious and seriously farcical]. Although he had written a great deal of non-fiction in earnest, almost all of his literary work had been satirical, and there is some evidence that he might have been something of a practical joker too. An article by Ilana Kurshan in Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Rodopi, 2006), edited by Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne, observes that Volume XVIII of the Phrenological Journal (1845) features a report that a French parliamentary député named Félix Bodin had been treated by a mesmerist on one of his several trips to England, after falling victim to an attack of “brain fever.” Once the fever had calmed, he began to compose poetry—which, the report solemnly claims, he had never done before—not only writing the words a piece entitled “La langueur” [Languor], but improvising a tune to which they might be sung. It is possible that this anecdote had been grossly exaggerated in the decade-long interval between the occurrence and the report, but it is also conceivable that Bodin—who was, in fact, an experienced and accomplished composer of comic songs—was stringing his audience along, or at least collaborating in their misapprehension. If so, that would exhibit his keen interest in “somniloquism”—the oral testimony of hypnotically-entranced subjects—in a slightly different light than the one in which it is represented within the novel and its postscript.
Although the book has not attracted any attention as an account of the psychology of somniloquism, it is arguable that its idiosyncratic depiction of that phenomenon, and the curious kind of multiple personality with which Bodin associates it, is the aspect of the novel most likely to be of interest to modern readers—a point that I shall expand in the afterword, so as not to give too much of the story away in advance. It must also be noted however, that the book’s title is calculatedly and interestingly ambiguous; the text is also unusual and original in reflecting on the possible future development of the novel as well as the possibility of developing a genre of novels set in the future, and the inter-connectedness of the two issues. Although he is generally optimistic about the future in general and the future of the novel, Bodin does have some interesting and significant reservations about the latter—reservations that proved all too justified, and still remain pertinent today (an eventuality that would probably have saddened him as well as amusing him).
As an image of life in the second half of 20th century—the era in which its action is set—Le roman de l’avenir is understandably wide off the mark, although it scores significantly higher in its anticipations of moral progress than technological progress. Writing in 1834, Bodin is easily able to anticipate the increasing importance of steam power in shipping, railways and all kinds of manufacturing processes, but he has not the slightest inkling of the internal combustion engine or electrical technology. His anticipations of the future of aerial travel are, inevitably, solely based on his experience of balloons; he is able to imagine dirigible aerostats propelled by artificial wing-power, but the wings in question are explicitly based on those of birds. He is on safer ground in anticipating the further decline of monarchical power, a corresponding increase in democracy, the increasing importance of “associations”—including societies akin to the anti-slavery movement as well as joint-stock companies—and the eventual globalization of world politics, all of which are changes that seem to him to be highly desirable; although he was on the left wing of the parliament in which he served, it is on democracy and capitalism that his hopes of future progress are firmly pinned. His conviction that it will not be easy to put an end to war, even after the last major global-political issue has been apparently settled for good and all, also proved sadly justified, although he would surely have been horrified by the extent to which warfare remained a familiar and ever-present method of settling disputes throughout the 20th century.
Bodin was also mistaken in anticipating a large-scale reform of Islam that would re-mold it in an image closer to that of Christianity, leaving advocates of polygamy and slavery in a desperate minority, but he can hardly be accused of irrelevance in taking the potential future role of Islam in world affairs so seriously. It is however, arguable, that the most original of the remarks he makes about and within his story have to do with the role of literature—particularly, but not exclusively the hypothetical novels of the future—in both reflecting and participating in patterns of sociopolitical change. He refused to take those remarks very seriously—partly because the one within the story supplied a running joke for him to develop in continual asides observing that his readers, especially female readers, will not like it, because it is so very different from the fashionable novels of 1834—but there is enough substance in them to warrant further discussion and comment in the afterword.
Had Bodin not confessed in his preface that his novel of the future was rushed into print while woefully incomplete, it might have been possible for a modern critic to claim that its incompleteness is deliberate, intended to make a point about the necessary inconclusiveness of anticipation. Given that the whole enterprise is clearly labeled as a hoax, one might even suspect that the confession in question ought to be taken with a pinch of salt, but that would probably be taking skepticism too far. In all likelihood, he really did stop the story where he did simply because he wanted to rush the book into print, and really might have continued it in a second volume if the book had been more successful, or if he had had more time to do it. Alas, he had not; as well as being a busy man he was a man in poor health, and he published little more before dying, at the age of 41, some three years after its publication.
Le roman de l’avenir was not, in fact, the first novel of the future, no matters how one elects to splits hairs in the matter of definition, and Bodin was certainly not the first man to have the idea of writing one, but—as he takes great pains to point out in his postscript—his own attempt does provide sufficient proof that he did have the idea, independently of the predecessors of whom he seems to have been unaware. More importantly, his method of developing that idea was not only original, but of an originality that was to prove enduring. Indeed, the novel contains a few elements that have never been replicated, and which still offer substantial food for thought. Although it has never been reprinted in France, it is fully deserving of this belated English translation.
Félix Bodin was born in Saumur in the Loire valley on December 29, 1795. He was the son of Jean-François Bodin (1776-1829), a noted local historian who published two volumes of historical researches on Saumur and Angers. Jean-François Bodin had done military service in the Armée de l’Ouest, and had then served a term in parliament during the Restoration, as député for Maine-et-Loire, between 1820 and 1823. It might be worth observing that a Pierre-Joseph-François Bodin (1748-1809) appears on lists of members of the National Convention, the Revolutionary assembly that governed France from 1792-1795; although the circumstances of the latter’s career make it unlikely that he was closely related to the Bodins of the Loire valley, Félix Bodin must have been aware of his existence, and a mere coincidence of names might well have been enough to augment his particular fascination with the historical development of “representative assemblies.”
Bodin’s continual bouts of fever undoubtedly allowed him to become very familiar with various contemporary schools of medical treatment, and presumably provided both the scope and stimulus for him to overcome his initial skepticism in developing a particular fascination with “magnetism”: the surviving remnant of the theories and therapeutic methods initially made famous by Anton Mesmer. The principal technique still in use in the early 19th century would later be renamed “hypnotism,” but when Bodin encountered it was still generally known—misleadingly, as he was fond of pointing out—as “somnambulism.” Exactly what the disease was from which Bodin suffered is not clear, but it may have been a recurrent tuberculosis, whose effects were presumably more severe while he was in Paris or London than they were in his native province.
The article on Félix Bodin in Francois-Xavier de Feller’s Biographie Universelle (1848), on which the subsequent entry in the first edition of Larousse is obviously based, declares that he dedicated his youth to the study of literature and the fine arts, but also developed a passion for history while collaborating in his father’s historical research—Jean-François Bodin had also studied architecture, so he would have been able to make a contribution to his son’s education in that respect too. The brief (and entirely gratuitous) description given in Le roman de l’avenir of Politée’s young son, Jules, is unlikely to be a straightforward reflection of the author’s own youthful enthusiasms, but Jules’ fascination with historical theorizing and the perception of odd but aesthetically-pleasing patterns of cause-and-effect probably says something about the particular nature of Bodin’s interest in history. At any rate, Bodin’s most enduring contribution to that field was his enthusiasm for historical “résumés” (single-volume synoptic histories); the only works of his that were extensively reprinted and translated were his short histories of France and England, initially published in 1821 and 1823 as the foundation-stones of a series whose prospectus he had drawn up.
Bodin was active as a writer before his father was first elected as a député, publishing Economie et réformes dès cette annéee, ou Le cri général sur les dépenses publiques par un contribuable sans appointements [Economics and this year’s reforms, or The general outcry regarding public expenses by a taxpayer with no official position] in 1819, but it was in the early 1820s that he established his career as a journalist. He wrote for various republican newspapers, including the Constitutionnel and the Globe, and was on the editorial staff of the Mercure du XIXème siècle for some while. He published De la France et du Mouvement Européen [On France and the European Movement] in 1821 and Etudes historiques et politiques sur les assemblées représentatives [Historical and Political Studies of Representative Assemblies] in 1823, but many of his journalistic writings were considerably lighter in tone. The Biographie Universelle article states that they included several “fragments of historical novels”—presumably referring to the fragments of the “Roman novel” to which Bodin alludes in the postscript to Le roman de l’avenir—but adds the comment one such fragment describing the end of the world and one set in the year 10,000; if the latter pieces actually existed, Bodin would surely have mentioned them in his postscript, so it seems probable that they are garbled references to the article that he does reproduce there, and to Le roman de l’avenir itself.
Bodin published a substantial collection of his journalistic essays, Diatribe contre l’art oratoire, suivi de Mélanges philosophique ou littéraires [Diatribe Against the Art of Oratory, followed by Philosophical and Literary Pieces] (1824), whose title-piece had attracted considerable attention, but his greatest popular success appears to have been a series of “complaintes,” three of which were separately reprinted in pamphlet form. A complainte is a popular song, usually on a pious or tragic subject; “authentic” ones were supposedly traditional, dating back centuries, but the stock had always been continually augmented, and there was a vogue in the early 19th century for fitting new words to traditional tunes, usually in a satirical fashion—these newly-fabricated complaintes became, in effect, the comic “protest songs” of their day. The three that made their way into bibliographies of Bodin’s work, even though they were either anonymous or pseudonymous, were Complainte sur la loi d’amour [Lament on the Law of Love] (1825), Complainte sur l’immortalité de M. Briffaut by “Cadet Roussel” [Lament on the Immortality of Monsieur Briffaut—who actually spelled his name Brifaut—by Roussel junior; “Roussel” was undoubtedly intended to be reminiscent of “Rousseau”] (1826) and Complainte sur la mort du haut et puissant seigneur le Droit d’aînesse, déconfit au Luxembourg, faubourg Saint-Germain, et enterré dans toute la France en l’an de grâce 1826 [Lament on the Death of the Noble and Powerful Right of Primogeniture, defeated at the Palais du Luxemburg in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and Buried in the Whole of France in the Year of Grace 1826] (1826). The last-named—also signed “Cadet Roussel”—was supplemented in its book version by notes and justificatory essays; it was reprinted several times, the edition of 1832 being further augmented by “two famous couplets.”
The subject-matter of all three of these works is extensively recapitulated in Le roman de l’avenir. I shall leave elaborate commentary on his thoughts on “the law of love” until the third part of this introduction and the afterword, but it is worth observing now that the second of the three must have been composed immediately after the elevation of Charles Brifaut (1781-1857) to the Académie Française in 1826. Brifaut was a poet, dramatist and journalist, founder of the Royalist Gazette de France who became notorious in the final years of the Restoration when he was appointed as a government censor and embarked upon a fierce ideological struggle with the rising stars of Romantic republicanism, most famously Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. Bodin, who was on the left wing of his own party, let alone the government in which that party held a majority, was inevitably moved to take issue with Brifault, even though he had his reservations about literary Romanticism. The third also celebrates a recent event, reacting to the official abandonment of the principle by which the first-born son of an aristocratic family automatically inherited the entire estate—a measure which, as Le roman de l’avenir makes clear, Bodin believed to be highly significant as a likely influence on future social and political developments.
Bodin went on to publish more work in this vein, including La bataille électorale, poème politi-comique [The Electoral Battle: A Politicomical Poem] (1828), and had obviously established a considerable reputation by that time as a lively political commentator. A current catalogue of manuscripts advertises a letter written by him on June 6, 1828, addressed to a “Mr. Moore,” which mentions that he had been invited to stay when next in London at Jeremy Bentham’s house—still a highly important center of liberal discussion, although Bentham, the founder and popularizer of “utilitarianism,” was then in his seventies. Bentham would not have seen anything incongruous in the use of satirical verse as a political instrument; it was routinely employed by both reactionaries and radicals in the English political periodicals of the era. Bodin’s regard for Bentham’s ideas is obvious in Le roman de l’avenir, where the meeting of the “Universal Congress” takes place in the republic of Benthamia, evolved from a hypothetical colony founded in Guatemala by disciples of Benthamite utilitarianism.
The precedent set by his father obviously influenced Félix Bodin’s decision to stand for parliament after the July Revolution of 1830, which resulted in the overthrow of Charles X, the last representative of Bourbon dynasty—a dynasty that remained symbolic of absolute monarchy despite the relative curtailment of its power after its post-Imperial Restoration—in favor of the strictly constitutional monarchy of the Orléanist King Louis-Philippe. He was, however, also heavily influenced by one of the most important friendships he had formed, with Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877). Thiers had arrived in Paris in 1821 and had asked for Bodin’s help in achieving publication for his ten-volume Histoire de la révolution française [History of the French Revolution] (1823-27)—a slightly risky enterprise under the Restoration. Bodin had persuaded his own publisher to take it on, and added his own name to the by-line of the first two volumes in order to reduce the risk of its commercial failure. Thiers went on to enjoy a much longer and more successful political career than Bodin; he not only became an important statesman in Louis-Philippe’s government, but remained a député after the Revolution of 1848, kept his place after Napoleon III’s coup d’état, and survived the Second Empire to become the first president of the Third Republic after putting down the Paris Commune in 1871.
Bodin’s political career was not conspicuously successful even before it was cut short, mainly because he was regarded as a radical even by other Republicans, by virtue of his opposition to the prevailing governmental philosophy of juste-milieu, which sought to strike a balance between Royalism and Republicanism by negotiating a balanced compromise on every practical question. The capsule biographies do, however, give him credit for contributions to the establishment of several useful social institutions, most importantly caisses d’épargnes and salles d’asile, both of which are mentioned en passant in Le roman de l’avenir as small but significant elements of future civilization. A caisse d’épargne is a saving bank, akin to the modern building society; salle d’asile is normally translated in contemporary documents as “maternal school”—a usage I have conserved—but it was actually a new kind of foundling home, in which effective quasi-maternal care was provided for the children unlucky enough to end up there. Previously, foundling homes had been virtual death-traps; Bodin was undoubtedly aware that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of whose philosophy he disapproved—all the more so because there was still a strong Rousseauesque Romantic streak in republican politics—had taken all his children to the local foundling home in order to be able to work in peace, and that all of them had perished there.
It is unsurprising that the flow of Bodin’s literary work petered out after 1830; indeed, the surprising thing is that he found time to write Le roman de l’avenir—an achievement made all the more surprising by his admitted tendency to “go to sleep on” his ideas, failing to complete all but one of the novels he had previously thought about writing, including those on which he had managed to make a start. The one exception is, however, particularly interesting, if not because of its intrinsic merits then because of the light it casts on his attitude to the contemporary novel, and his anticipation of its likely future development.
Contemporary readers of Le roman de l’avenir might be surprised by Bodin’s less-than-enthusiastic attitude to the novel, especially to the contribution of Romanticism, given that we now look back upon the great French Romantic novels of the 19th century as peaks of literary achievement, at least some of which were steeped in Republican fervor. When Bodin wrote Le roman de l’avenir, however, the second wave of French Romanticism, to which Victor Hugo served as a key father-figure, had only just begun. Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1830) and Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) had recently appeared, but Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue had only just launched their careers, while Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset were still effectively unknown. Honoré de Balzac had published Les Chouans in 1828, but was still most celebrated for the allegorical Faustian fantasy La peau de chagrin (1830); the quintessentially Balzacian Le père Goriot (1834) did not appear until Le roman de l’avenir was complete.
In Bodin’s mind, therefore, the presiding genius of French Romanticism was still Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by virtue of the cult of sensibilité that Rousseau had launched, and its principle contemporary apostle was Charles Nodier—who, despite the careful praise that Bodin heaps upon him in his postscript, was ideologically antipathetic to Bodin by virtue of his political conservatism and frank disbelief in the idea of progress. He might well have continued to disapprove of the subsequent development of Romanticism even if he had witnessed the movement’s swing to the left, but it would certainly have encouraged his willingness to make excuses for it, and it would have eroded his conviction that the movement was too deeply rooted in its “Gothic” affiliations to make the kind of contribution to reformist zeal that Hugo eventually made, while in exile from the Second Empire, with Les misérables (1862).
Like Jane Austen, Félix Bodin favored polite common sense over Rousseauesque sensibility, and like Jane Austen, he thought that the flood of Gothic novels (romans noir in French) that had been the most conspicuous literary phenomenon of the last decade of the 18th century and the fist decade of the 19th had been a flagrant absurdity, potentially injurious to young and impressionable minds. For Bodin, “Romantic” still implied “Gothic,” and hence “absurdly over-melodramatic”—that is the reason his brief dismissal in his preface of the Romantic genre as one whose ideological anchorage was in the Middle Ages—so the whole Romantic philosophy thus seemed to him to be averse to and opposed to the further progress of democracy and capitalism, and hence to the summary concept and value that he held higher than any other: civilization.
Readers of this translation will need to bear in mind that the French word civilization implies rather more than its English equivalent; it was routinely used to refer to the process of educating children as well as the business of living in cities, and literature had long been regarded as a potentially useful instrument of civilization. Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, published at the end of the 17th century and extremely popular in the 18th, had been equipped with formal morals specifically to enable them to play a useful role in the civilization of children. It is hardly surprising, given this emphatic double meaning, that French ethnographers inspired by the great exploratory voyages of the 18th century were in the forefront of a theoretical tendency to draw analogies between “the savage mind”—i.e., the thought-processes of preliterate tribesmen—and the unformed minds of children. Nor is it surprising that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the champion of “noble savagery,” should recommend in his treatise on education, Emile (1762), that children should not be given books to read at all—with the single exception of Robinson Crusoe—lest they be corrupted by civilization. Félix Bodin, on the other hand, was a great believer in civilization in both senses of the word; its progress was, in his view, the true goal of politics and literature alike—and he seems to have believed that, while politics often sustained or thrown up manifest obstacles to that progress, literature was, in the main, currently helping to undermine it.
Romantic literature, in Bodin’s eyes, was a threat to civilization in two principal ways: firstly because of its nostalgic regard for the past, which embraced a fascination with Medieval codes of behavior and Medieval superstition; and secondly because of its glorification of sensibilité: the spontaneity of emotion conceived as an instinctive source of virtue. These two elements were not unconnected; Bodin knew that the Romantic mythology of love was a bastardized descendant of the myth of courtly love developed by the troubadours of old, providers of the raw material of the French Medieval “romance” whose name had been reclaimed by the contemporary literary movement.
By the time Bodin learned to read, the Gothic novel was already in decline, heading for temporary oblivion, but it left a marked legacy behind, especially in the form of sentimental melodramas. While his literary career was attaining its first flush of success, Claire Lechat de Kersaint, Duchesse de Duras, obtained a striking commercial and critical success with her first novel Ourika (1824). The book is only remembered today because it is claimed as the first novel to feature a black heroine, but that seemed incidental at the time. Ourika’s color is only significant in the novel because it raises a barrier to conventional marriage for the heroine, who has been adopted and raised by French aristocrats; the point of the story is to demonstrate the tragic nature of the antipathy the convention has to the spontaneous and irresistible force of love. The Duchesse de Duras repeated the formula, less successfully, the following year in Edouard, in which the black heroine is replaced by a similarly-adopted working-class hero, whose problems are further compounded by the fact that the girl with whom he falls madly in love is his adoptive sister. In the meantime, though, dozens of other novels appeared bearing their heroines’ first names as their titles. One of them was the anonymous Eveline (1824), which was Félix Bodin’s first (and only completed) novel. It carries a preface explicitly linking it to Ourika, but claiming—unsurprisingly, given the predilection Bodin that reveals in the postscript to Le roman de l’avenir—that he had written Eveline before Ourika had been published.
The heroine of Eveline is the daughter of an Irish aristocratic family, whose parents intend her to marry within her own class, but who falls hopelessly in love with an impoverished painter. Like Ourika, who eventually dies in a convent, and many similar heroines, Eveline eventually finds it impossible to defy convention by any other means than death; she perishes in her lover’s arms. The story is not advertised as a hoax, and does not seem to be a parody, but Bodin probably did not take it seriously. Although it is impossible to guess how the plot of Le roman de l’avenir would ultimately have worked out, the representations of romantic love contained within it seem too thoroughly jaundiced to be heading for any kind of ringing climactic endorsement.
I shall comment further on Le roman de l’avenir’s idiosyncratic representations of erotic attraction in the afterword, but there are a couple of minor observations that might better be made in advance of the main text. One is that none of the capsule biographies of Bodin make any reference to a marriage. This does not necessarily mean that he never married—none of the capsule biographies of his father make any reference to a wife, although he must have had one—but it seems likely that he did not, and if certain remarks made by Philirène in the novel can be construed as expressions of the author’s own attitudes and feelings, he may well have been disappointed in love. (The Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue does list a book published by a Madame Emmeline Bodin in 1833, but that author is more likely to have been his mother than his wife, if she was related to him at all.)
The other point is a curious one, which might be completely irrelevant. A review of Eveline appeared, alongside reviews of two other French novels heavily influenced by Ourika, in the English New Monthly Magazine, where the novel was misattributed to the Duchesse de Broglie. The misattribution might conceivably have arisen simply because Eveline was forwarded to the magazine in the same parcel as the non-fictional treatise bracketed with it in the review column, Invitation à des personnes pieuses pour former des sociétés bibliques de femmes [Invitation to Pious Women to form Female Biblical Societies], which presumably was by the Duchesse; the reviewer might simply have jumped mistakenly to the conclusion that both works were by the same hand. On the other hand, it is not impossible that the confusion arise by virtue of a practical joke, and that Bodin had deliberately encouraged the misattribution.
Whether Bodin knew the Duchesse de Broglie in 1824 is unclear, although he certainly made the acquaintance of the Duc de Broglie at a later date, because the Duc served as a Minister in the parliament to which he was elected as a député. He must, however, have been familiar with the work and reputation of the Duchesse de Broglie’s famous mother, the brilliant and ever-controversial Madame de Staël (1766-1817), a fierce defender of Rousseau and outspoken critic of Napoleon, who had established key exemplars for the fashion of writing novels titled for their heroines in Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807). Among Madame de Staël’s most significant contributions to scholarship was De la literature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800), which examined the relationships between the ideologies of literatures and the society that produces them: an examination with which Bodin was certainly familiar, and might well have had an important bearing on his notion of what the literature of the future might look like—and on the corollary judgment that the present-day audience would not like it.
Eveline proved not to be a crowd-pleaser, even with the assistance of a sly hint that it came from a more prestigious source than it did, but Bodin certainly knew when he wrote it that it was the kind of book that was likely to please the modern audience. When he makes sarcastic remarks about his female readers in the course of Le roman de l’avenir, the sin that he is attributing to them is that of liking books like Eveline, and of perpetuating the cult of sensibilité in an era when it should, in his opinion, have been laid to rest. It is highly significant that when Bodin itemizes the membership of the Poetic Association, which embraces all the internal enemies of European progress, democracy, capitalism and civilization, the list includes not merely the remnants of hereditary aristocracy, supposedly-redundant military men and conservative churchmen, but also literary men and artists whose stubborn commitment to obsolete values seems to have remained unreasonably tenacious.
When Philirène, who often seems to be serving as the author’s mouthpiece, is actually called upon to pass retrospective judgment on Romanticism, he treats it gently, making an apology for it, but his apology is tempered by the fact that he regards it as something dead and buried, which has largely given way to a much calmer kind of literature—whose readers would, we must presume, have regarded Eveline as a thoroughly silly book. It is clear, however, that Philirène’s own idea of love is neither generalized in his era, nor personally satisfactory, nor even coherent—which it is why it is one of the more interesting features of the story.
This translation is taken from a pdf file downloaded from gallica.fr, the Bibliothèque Nationale’s internet archive. The cover of the book photocopied to produce that version is dated 1835, but there is no other indication that it might be a second edition; it is probably a late binding of the first edition. As is usual with humorous texts, some of the wordplay did not translate very well, although I have done my best to duplicate the tone of the original. I have provided extensive footnotes to explain references that are nowadays arcane, and to provide a little more contextual background for the text; following Bodin’s invariable practice, I apologize to the reader for any annoyance this might cause.
Brian Stableford