1st Edition
Reimagining Society in 18th Century French Literature Happiness and Human Rights
The French revolutionary shift from monarchical to popular sovereignty came clothed in a new political language, a significant part of which was a strange coupling of happiness and rights. In Old Regime ideology, Frenchmen were considered subjects who had no need of understanding why what was prescribed to them would be in the interest of their happiness. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen equipped the French with a list of inalienable rights and if society would respect those rights, the happiness of all would materialize.
This volume explores the authors of fictional literature who contributed alongside pamphleteers, politicians, and philosophers to the establishment of this new political arena, filled with sometimes vague, yet insisting notions of happiness and rights. The shift from monarchical to popular sovereignty and the corollary transition from subjects to citizens culminated in the summer of 1789 but it was preceded by an immense piece of imaginative work.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
Happiness and the Politics of Words
The Political Anthropology of Happiness and Rights
Literature
Chapter I: The Unfinished Declaration
Debating the Declaration
Nature and Society
Rights and Duties
Enmity and Passive Citizenship
Literature
Chapter II: What Was Literature?
The Author-Politician and the Code of History
Louis-Sébastien Mercier and the Re-Awakening of Patriotic Virtue
Choderlos de Laclos’ Reinterpretation of Dulce et Utile
Marie-Joseph Chénier and the Author-Legislator
Literature
Chapter III: Louis-Sébastien Mercier and the Dream of a Happy Future
Temporality in Mercier’s Utopian Thought
The Form of Government in L’an 2440
Taxation and the Duty of Patriotism
Literature
Chapter IV: The Search for Order in Choderlos de Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses
Laclos and the Politics of Social Forms
The Rhythm of Social Forms
The Hierarchies of Social Forms
Literature
Chapter V: The Regeneration of the State in Marie-Joseph Chénier’s Fénelon ou les religieuses de Cambrai
Convent Life and Paternal Inflexibility
The Problem of Humanness
Political Agency : From Unhappiness to Happiness
The Tableau Vivant: The Politics of the Happy Ending
Literature
Conclusion
Literature
Index
Biography
Jonas Ross Kjærgård, PhD, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University and recipient of the EliteResearch travel grant. He acquired his PhD degree at Aarhus University, Denmark, with a dissertation on French Revolutionary rights and literature. He has published articles and book chapters on literature and the French revolution and edited the volume Discursive Framings of Human Rights: Negotiating Agency and Victimhood (with Karen-Margrethe Simonsen), published by Birkbeck Law Press. He has begun a new research project on the literary history of the Haitian revolution.
