Jay M. Smith, UNC-Chapel Hill
I confess to having been unfamiliar with the Histoire Dessinée de la France, a proposed 20-volume survey of French history from its ancient origins to the contemporary era. The latest entry in the series, devoted to the Age of the Enlightenment, makes me eager to read more. Beautifully illustrated, consistently imaginative, and historically and historiographically well-informed, this bande dessinée serves as a fine introduction to major themes in the social, cultural, and economic history of France between roughly 1720 and 1780. Presumably pitched to students at the lycée level, it would also work in university courses that are compelled to “cover” the period of the Enlightenment even as they focus on earlier or later periods. If the book were available in English, for example, it would serve as an appropriate Enlightenment overview in courses on modern France or early modern Europe.
The book is organized around a very clever conceit. Its entire story is told through the perambulations of a Swiss bookseller trekking across the country in 1778, in search of customers for new and forthcoming publications. The book-seller is none other than Jean-François Favarger, the itinerant book merchant of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN) recently featured in Robert Darnton’s A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution.[1] As Favarger passes through the pages of the book, he navigates around curious border agents, visits the owners of several provincial bookshops, has memorable conversations with both Voltaire and Rousseau, makes one disorienting trip to the future (disorienting for both Favarger and the reader), and is intermittently regaled with tales about France’s rich eighteenth-century past.
Among Favarger’s fortuitously placed informants is Robert Darnton himself, whose illustrated avatar bears a striking resemblance to the original. The renowned historian of books provides an overview of the holdings of the STN, identifies the best-selling titles in the eighteenth-century book market, and cheekily reports to Favarger that “one of my most recent books follows your peregrinations.” As he takes his leave for a long-delayed meal, Favarger wishes the hunched-over Darnton, scribbling away on a new project, a bonne continuation (18).
Darnton is not the only visitor from the future who graces the pages of Les Années Lumières. Michel Foucault drops in to discuss modes of punishment and the birth of the prison.[2] Steven Kaplan, while waiting his turn at a boulangerie, tells Favarger about his first taste of French bread, the “one that changed my life” (and seems to have approximated an acid trip—as colorfully depicted by the illustrator Spruyt). When told by the boulangère that Kaplan is “an American historian of the twenty-first century,” a bemused Favarger—replying, “another one?”—struggles to take in the coincidence. But he is then treated to a detailed history of the grain trade, its regulatory history, and the monarchy’s self-sabotage as it experimented with free trade policies and abandoned its paternal duty to maintain the bread supply (28, 30-32).[3]
Many such stories are interspersed throughout a narrative that focuses ostensibly on Favarger’s quest to publish the manuscript of Rousseau’s Confessions, the whereabouts of which remain a mystery nearly until the book’s final panel.
These sidebar discussions are always punctuated by telling details and feature wonderful illustrations. Readers learn about the French-British imperial rivalry (22-23); the flour war of 1775 (31); the emergence of the cultural phenomenon of celebrity (37); the burgeoning contraband economy and the exploits of the antihero Louis Mandrin (9-12); the debate over noblesse commerçante (59); the increasing centrality of the port city Bordeaux (86-88); the history of enslavement in Saint-Domingue (83); the role of women as writers and leaders of salons (107); the Marseille plague of 1720 (60-61); the Beaumarchais-Goezman case and the role lawyers played in turning private lives into public affairs (80); the Affaire Calas (75-76); the Gournay circle and the rise of Physiocracy (30); the Maupeou revolution (73); the emergence of the drame bourgeois and, pace Jeffrey Ravel, the site of the contested parterre as a powerful vector of public opinion (90-91). In a bande dessinée that cheerily transgresses the line between past and present, it is not surprising that Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s futuristic novel, L’An 2440, also makes an appearance. The book’s final image, inspired by Mercier, is that of a contrite Louis XIV surveying the ruins of Versailles and the passing of centuries while acknowledging that a king’s abuse of his transient powers is properly interpreted as a fatal sign of weakness (112).
This is a lot of ground to cover in 112 pages, and the narrative has an unmistakable smorgasbord quality to it. Perhaps the greatest disappointment arising from this lively and readable account of “the Enlightenment years” is that Enlightenment ideas get short shrift. The cultural and social expressions of the new forms of criticism and sociability associated with the Enlightenment—salons, the book trade, the theater, the public resonance of court cases, and so on—get a lot of attention, which is fair enough. But the influential, original, and often subversive ideas produced by the authors of the day receive scant attention. Given the attention accorded the growth of France’s colonial trade and the establishment of a plantation economy in the Caribbean, for example, it is odd to hear little of the developing critique of European imperialism and slavery in important texts by Raynal and Diderot. Helvetius’s alarming assault on religious morality in De l’Esprit (1758) goes unmentioned, as do the important contributions of Mably and baron d’Holbach to European debates about representation during and after the Seven Year’s War. Lemaigre-Gaffier and Markovits instead note repeatedly—especially through the person of their chief tour guide Darnton—that the most popular publications of prerevolutionary France were books of Psalms, scandalous chronicles, poems and novels. Voltaire made the top ten only for his irreverent poem on Joan of Arc, not for his impassioned criticisms of religious intolerance or popular credulity. The result of this thematic emphasis is a survey of the Enlightenment with the Enlightenment largely left out.
One theme that is extensively developed, however, concerns the dark side of the modern world’s debt to Enlightenment culture. In an entertaining but lengthy excursion (40-52) bracketed out from the rest of the story, Voltaire—reimagined as a kind of eighteenth-century Transformer—whisks away Favarger, Rousseau, and an unsuspecting female bookseller to the site of the modern-day Panthéon. (The egotist Voltaire wanted to show off for having been interred there several years before Rousseau’s own installation in that sanctuary of heroes.) The tour guide and a mustachioed male visitor, educating an awestruck child making her first visit to the monument, celebrate the intellectual heroes of the past and credit Voltaire, Rousseau and their contemporaries with forging a path that led toward secularization, the abolition of censorship, the modern conception of human rights, and the defense of…Charlie Hebdo. A young Black woman, hearing about as much as she can stand, intervenes to denounce this “misogynistic, white and Euro-centric” account and urges the young girl to “take the red pill and leave the matrix,” leaving behind the “fairy tales” that serve only to hide the dark side of the inheritance of the Enlightenment (50). Already in the eighteenth century, and in the generations since, she insists, the inventors of the concept of “civilization” had used that global filter to promote racism, colonialism, capitalism, and exploitation. To celebrate the Enlightenment was “to celebrate the destruction of the planet” (52). A chastened Voltaire and Rousseau offer brief retorts—why not counter their critic by noting the sensational success of Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes?—but the ironic lesson that the Enlightenment caused and rationalized later human suffering carries the day.
The references to the Matrix movies and to Charlie Hebdo are among the many clues to the unapologetic present-mindedness of the authors. In the exchange at the Panthéon just discussed, the skeptical bystander responds to the self-satisfied man’s laudatory account of Enlightenment achievement by firing off a dismissive “OK, boomer” (50). In Marseille, an Armenian merchant accuses Rousseau of “cultural appropriation” (57). Some of these echoes of contemporary life and discourse are indisputably hilarious. Yelp-style reviews for an inn near the French-Swiss border, for example, complain of stained bedsheets, an overhyped “French gastronomy,” and “those horrible French toilets” (18-19). Knowing winks and inside humor are of course inherent to the genre of the bande dessinée, and the pithy asides and playful sparring around the “fourth wall” that leads to the present day make this text consistently engaging and never boring.
Specialists may find, though, that some of the time dedicated to playfulness could have been better spent filling out the content of key Enlightenment texts and settling on a narrative strategy with a clearer sense of direction. Favarger and his horse, in pursuit of Rousseau’s final text, move through space with a clear enough sense of purpose. But their encounters with people and with the mineshafts of history they stumble on together often occur on random paths that might fairly be described as detours. Important developments and telling events, therefore, get left out. Despite the book’s subtitle, for example, the authors offer no account of the Estates-General or of the thorny path that would-be reformers followed to get to that momentous meeting.
These organizational choices seem to reflect, on the one hand, a desire to speak to the contemporary sensibilities of (probably mostly young) readers. They reflect, on the other hand, the authors’ deep appreciation for specific texts that are mined for the many anecdotes that form the substance of this version of the années lumières. Darnton and Kaplan are not the only recognized authorities who hail from the U.S. The contributions of Michael Kwass, Lauren Clay, Jeffrey Ravel, Paul Cheney, Raymond Birn, and Sarah Maza don’t merely appear in the bibliography; they shape the larger story from beginning to end.[4] Recent books by French historians also bulk large. The work of Arnaud Orain, Antoine Lilti, Anne Montenach, Eric Brian, Catherine Maire, and others informs the presentation in ways that ensure the book’s accuracy and distills the latest findings of some of France’s most skilled historians.[5]
The authors’ determination to sample from so many excellent works of eighteenth-century history is laudable and gives the text much of its intellectual authority. Specialists might have preferred a leaner and more focused presentation. The series of appendices that close the book, for example, offers short essays on a set of disconnected topics (116-163)—including the eighteenth century as depicted in film, the new appeal of products such as coffee and indigo, and the life stories of important people, from fashion designer Rose Bertin to secretary of state and China expert Henri-Léonard Bertin (no relation). These short essays fail to cohere as an integrated whole, creating the impression of missed opportunities.
Despite its loose organization and an occasionally obtrusive present-mindedness, the text admirably achieves its main goal: to make the history of eighteenth-century France colorful, surprising, pivotal, and fully worthy of laughter. Instructors who teach the period and can use French-language texts in the classroom will find Les Années Lumières a valuable addition to their textual repertoire.
[1] 1. Robert Darnton, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[2] Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
[3] Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Anthem Press, 1976).
[4] Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); Lauren Clay, Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and its Colonies (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Paul Cheney, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017); Raymond Birn, Forging Rousseau: Print, Commerce and Cultural Manipulation in the Late Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001); Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Some but not all of these books are available in French translation.
[5] Arnaud Orain, La Politique du Merveilleux: Une autre histoire du système de Law, 1695-1795 (Paris: Fayard, 2018); Antoine Lilti, Figures Publiques: L’invention de la célébrité, 1750-1850 (Paris: Fayard, 2015); Anne Montenach, Femmes, pouvoirs et contrebande dans les Alpes au XVIIIe siècle (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2017); Eric Brian, La Mesure de l’Etat: Administrateurs et géomètres au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994); Catherine Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la Nation: Le jansénisme au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).