The Pose of Naturalism in Zola’s Germinal

 

     Germinal remains, after over a hundred years, strong stuff.  Zola’s prose continues to deploy the luxurious richness of concrete specific detail found in Flaubert and Balzac, but here the facts alone are merciless and painful.  The excruciating miners’ lives, the consequence of an oppressive economic system, only seem the more miserably unjust when set off by a few scenes of the bourgeois comfort of their bosses.  The book seems in many ways tragic.  The workers, after suffering terrible privations and numerous casualties, gain nothing from their strike.  The unmerited suffering of the poor, rather than being (as in Christianity) redemptive, only degrades and brutalizes them further.   Yet the title is clearly hopeful with its reference to the 1789 Revolution and to germination, here referring to the coming of radical change, an implication made explicit in the final passage.

 

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages.  And very soon they would crack the earth asunder.  (trans. By L. W. Tancock)

 

Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre. 

 This incongruity between the ugliness of the miners’ degradation and the beauty of the utopian vision of a better economic order represents a more general tension informing the work as a whole.  While claiming to construct narratives out of lived experience alone, Zola consistently allowed observed facts to be overruled by his thematic enthusiasm as well as by emotion, literary convention, and allusion.   

     Zola’s Naturalism was for him a “scientific” method which he regarded as uniquely appropriate for his day.  In The Experimental Novel (1893) he explains that his approach to writing fiction is based on the rigorous research principles of Claude Bernard, the physiologist.  Quoting with approval Bernard’s characterization of the scientist as “the photographer of phenomena,” Zola notes that for the novelist no less than the biologist “his observation should be an exact representation of nature... He listens to nature and he writes under its dictation.”  Just as in the laboratory the scientist forms hypotheses first suggested and then tested by empirical facts, Zola maintains that the writer must survey the scene and formulate possible explanations for events, while remaining, like other researchers, ready to follow the data wherever they may lead.  For him this is possible because in his view human actions are the inevitable result of heredity and environment, just as evolutionary changes proceed independent of any creature’s choices and, in pre-Einsteinian physics, a mechanistic view is possible in which every event is theoretically predictable.  As Zola puts it, “There is an absolute determinism for alI human phenomena.”

     He rejects “the work of the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural,” and declares “The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is transformed by the advent of the physiological man . . .. This view of the matter is a new one; we have become experimentalists instead of philosophers.”

     Zola went to some pains in pursuit of this goal of scientific objectivity.  In researching Germinal he visited northern French mining towns at least one of which had recently been through a strike and even descended into the pits under the pretense that he was a government representative.  He had set himself the ambitious goal in his twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle of providing a comprehensive vision of Second Empire France recording not only its nature but also the process of historical change.  Such a picture could, he thought, only be generated through an accumulation of facts.

     Yet the author’s own emotions and the usages of literary convention often take precedence over the data of lived experience.  Though he conceived his project as dispassionate -- he uses the word “impersonal” and insists that “naturalism is not a personal fantasy” -- he nonetheless did not hesitate to include tendentious, melodramatic, and sensational material, elements that in fact made his work moving and popular even as it deviated from his theory. 

     Each of these thematic or affective aspects of his fiction is complicated by a certain ambivalence.  For instance, the most straightforward theme of Germinal, shaping much of the story, is certainly the denunciation of capitalism and the promise of socialism.  While this novel is one of the very best of tendentious revolutionary narratives, arousing sympathy for the exploited and anger against their callous masters, it avoids a reductive cast of heroes and villains while maintaining an unqualified support for socialism.  The miners and their families are not idealized.  All, including Étienne, the outsider, are flawed.  A few, like Jeanlin, can even kill without reason.  Some, like Catherine or old Bonnemort, are so victimized that they possess little other identity.  Many are subject to the temptations of the pleasures available to the poor, principally sex and drinking.  

     Meanwhile, the advocates of change are likewise imperfect tribunes of the people.  Étienne is capable of being seduced by his new celebrity as well as by the whims of an excited mob.  Meanwhile, Pluchart is a professional activist who seems more anxious to promote his own career in the Socialist International than to put himself on the line with the workers, and Souvarine is a Russian anarchist so seduced by violence that he holds himself aloof for much of the action and then sabotages the mine elevator, causing unnecessary workers’ deaths.  

     Rasseneur, the one-time miner who operates a tavern, supports the workers, but feels rivalry with Étienne’s more radical leadership.  Maigrat, the owner of the village shop, offers credit but also sexually exploits his customers.  Even higher on the economic ladder, Zola finds mixed characters.  M. Hennebeau, manager of the mine, is so miserable in his marriage that he fancies he would rather be one of his workers.  His nephew Négrel is already affluent, and is in addition engaged to Cécile Gregoire, the owner’s daughter, yet in the end this capitalist works tirelessly to save the trapped workers and embraces Étienne as a brother.  Deneulin, owner of a smaller nearby mine, tries to act in a responsible fashion, modernizing his operation even though he thereby reduces his profits, and for his pains he is gobbled up by his richer competitor. 

     The contradiction that exists between Zola’s straightforward view of a socialist solution which one might with justice term “idealist” and his more nuanced “realistic” depiction of the actors involved is not the only compromise of the “scientific” Naturalist theory  in the novel.  Lurid, sensational stories in fiction may indeed be equaled by lived experience, but such material is often emphasized in popular works like ‘thirties pulp fiction or Tarantino’s movies from the ‘nineties.  Incidents in Germinal like the women’s bacchante-like mutilation of Maigrat after his death, Bonnemort’s sudden murder of Cécile, and the underground consummation of love between Étienne and Catharine are possible but unlikely, included in order to heighten the story’s impact and to attract readers. 

     Each of these incidents is only barely plausible.  Maigrat’s end seems to owe a good deal to Euripedes.  Bonnemort’s act expresses, as Zola tells the reader, a lifetime of suppressed resentment.  A physician might find his act improbable for a stroke victim, but it is a powerful symbol of the potential explosive energy inherent in every worker.  While it is difficult to conceive of people near death as Étienne and Catharine are when trapped underground as inclined toward or even capable of sexual activity, their love it makes a touching, even sentimental, scene with the two characters with whom  the reader has been most in sympathy, forming a kind of denouement that, amid the ruination of the end, prefigures the novel’s hopeful final words.

     Clearly only literary convenience makes Étienne the tenuous connection of the miners’ saga with the larger Rougon-Macquart cycle.  Though a few references appear relating to other novels, such as the protagonist’s hereditary vulnerability to alcohol, no knowledge of other works is necessary for the reader of Germinal.  The entire encyclopedic concept is entirely artificial in spite of the pretension to scientific objectivity.  Zola’s ambition to render his times in such precise detail that he would be a dispassionate scientific observer, exhibiting neither abstract principles nor personal traits, but simply copying with accuracy the world around him can scarcely overcome one insuperable obstacle.  Every turn of Zola’s plot is the result of his own conscious decision.  His choices are surely based on his own life experience but they  are far from inevitable; the author’s claim to objectivity is untenable.

       Zola clearly distinguished his Naturalism from Balzac’s Realism in his essay Différences entre Balzac et moi (1869), saying “My work is less social than scientific.”  (“Mon oeuvre sera moins sociale que scientifique.)  in his view Balzac’s aim was to be wholly descriptive, simply to illustrate that “there are lawyers, idlers, etc. just as there are dogs, wolves, etc.  In a word, his work seeks to be a mirror of contemporary society.”  (“Il y a des avocats, des oisifs etc. comme il y a des chiens, des loups etc. En un mot, son oeuvre veut être le miroir de la société contemporaine.”)  In contrast for him “My great project is to be purely a naturalist, a physiologist.  In place of social concepts like royalty or Catholicism he meant to substitute scientific laws such as those of heredity” (“Ma grande affaire est d'être purement naturaliste, purement physiologiste. Au lieu d'avoir des principes (la royauté, le catholicisme) j'aurais des lois (I'hérédité.”).  He here disclaims any intention of suggesting themes, whether “political, philosophical, or moral.” For him his story is “the simple relation of the facts of a family, showing the internal mechanism that makes it act.  I accept even anomalies.”  (“Un simple exposé des faits d'une famille, en montrant le mécanisme intérieur qui la fait agir. J'accepte même l'exception.”)

     That last phrase provides the author a useful wild card.   In fact Germinal and Zola’s other novels are shaped by literary convention, as well as by ideology, taste, and a host of elements.  Zola outlines not a new, more scientific form of literature but rather a new posture meant to enhance the reader’s impression of  verisimilitude.  The Naturalist method, rather than delivering art over to science, constructs a new novelistic artifice.  By the profession of objectivity Zola advances his own thematic interest in asserting that the actions of individuals are the foreseeable result of their heredity and environment.  The claim that he is merely transcribing data from life is a rhetorical device to convince the reader that the novelist has been faithful to lived reality.  It is the nineteenth century version of the eighteenth-century writers who presented works of fiction as authentic letters or otherwise reflecting real events. 

     One’s critical estimation of Zola is in no way diminished by the idea that his Naturalism is a calculated effect rather than some new sort of objectivity.  Writing, after all, can be nothing but marks on a page which makes at best a highly selective and refracted use of the sense data of experience.  The literary devices used by writers can only be judged by  their effectiveness in context, and Zola in Germinal has told a dramatic, significant, and well-crafted story.  While the claim of Naturalism is a pose, it is neither more nor less “false” than the pretensions of some writers to relate the doings of divinities.  Everything in art is symbolic.  Whereas Bernard in studying the liver quite properly sought results “objective” enough to be replicated by other researchers, Zola’s view of the miners arose from his passion and the narrative in which it is contained owes more to literary tradition and to the author’s own imagination than to transparent, quasi-scientific reportage.  

Two Poems by Mellin de Saint Gelais

The French texts are appended.

 

     While great work may occur at any stage of literary history, often the first practitioners of a form possess a fresh richness and ingenuity that soon vanishes.  I find this “early morning” quality in William IX among Troubadours, for instance, and in the greatness of the first generation of Mississippi Delta blues.  A similar glow is perceptible in the poetry of Thomas Wyatt who imported Continental verse forms to English poetry, most significantly the sonnet, a generation or two after their introduction in France.    

    Mellin de Saint-Gelais (c. 1491-1558) played a significant role in the process of adapting Italian models into French poetry.  He is said to have mocked Ronsard and was in turn attacked by du Bellay, but these quarrels have little relevance to the pleasure of a modern reader coming across the wit and ingenuity that first brought the author into favor with Francis I whom he served as court poet,  chaplain, and librarian. 

     I use the text from the 1873 edition Oeuvres complètes de Melin de Sainct-Gelays edited by Prosper Blanchemain which prints as a note another version with many variations, the most significant of which are the substitution of English trickery and Lombard usurers for African monsters and “opinions en une republique” in the penultimate triplet.  This poem was set to music by André Jolivet using the title “Sonnet à une lunaticque” (1951).

 

There aren’t in Venice near as many boats,

Or Bourgian oysters,  or Champagne’s fine hares,

Fewer Breton calves, Savoyard bears

Or white swans up and down the Thames afloat,

 

Or liaisons that were begun at mass,

Or fighting among petty German states,

Or Spanish grandees thinking they are great,

Or courtly lies told by the highest class,

 

Or  prodigies in Africa’s hot clime,

Opinions in a democratic time,

Or Papal pardons on each feast day signed,

 

Not so much greed among men of affairs

Or academic quarrels splitting hairs,

As my beloved’s notions in  her mind.

 

      I like the unpredictable catalogue, reminiscent of Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book,  of “things of which there are many,” which holds the reader in  suspense until the punch line, an affectionate (if patronizing and misogynistic) remark.  The author begins with the reputations of various regions that would be immediately recognizable to readers, but, in the second stanza, moves to scattershot social satire: the supposedly pious are really cruising for lovers in church, the Germans are a somewhat absurd collection of petty principalities, the Spanish lords are egotistical, and everyone lies in court.  The third stanza mixes these two elements with every characteristic having a satirical edge.  The last tercet moves to matters of the mind, first the rapacious avarice of economic life, then the fierce rivalries in the Sorbonne (mentioned by name in the original), to subtly prepare the way for the vagaries of thought of the lover.  Surely here the lover has proven his imagination as whimsical and wandering as that of his beloved.

     He may have written the first French sonnets, but the form was at the time fluid.  Here is a poem with  thirteen lines

 

Thirteener

 

In sea’s wide waters, far from any port,

lascivious sirens swim about and sport,

and there they comb their long and golden hair.

Their voices of serene and pleasant sort

can grab the mast and seize the hull’s support,

and then make mighty waves halt in the air.

So stormy tempests sink ships they have snared.

No different is the case with life so dear.

A fickle mermaid may make disappear

quite all our joy, the sweetness of life’s stream.

When death brings shipwreck and a watery bier,

we’re nothing but a rumor one might hear, 

less than a wind or shadow, smoke, or dream

 

      The poem begins with what might seem a romantic literary reference to mermaids, but this is a magician’s move to distract the reader.  The initial references reproduce the sirens’ allure by mentioning their “lasciviousness” and the beauty of their hair and voices, but, in a volta with a vengeance, their charms are revealed as treacherous and deadly.  The conclusion, with its wistful list of insubstantial things, recalls the dramatic conclusion of the Diamond Sutra.

 

Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;

Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.

                                                                           (tr. Alex Johnson)

 

 

  

Il n'est point tant de barques à Venize,

D'huystres à Bourg, de festuz en Champagne,

De differentz aux peuples d'Allemagne,

De cygnes blancz au long de la Tamise;

 

Ne tant d'amours se traictent en l'eglise,

Ne tant de veaux se treuvent en Bretagne,

Ne tant de gloire en un signor d'Espagne,

Ny en la Court tant y a de faintise;

 

N'en ces Anglois a tant de cornardise,

Ne de pardons à Rome un jour de feste,

Ny d'usuriers en toute Lombardie;

 

Ny de travaulx à vaincre femme honneste,

Ne dans Auvergne animaulx d'Arcadie,

Que vous avez de lunes en la teste.

 

 

 

Treizain

 

Par l'ample mer, loin des ports et arènes

S'en vont nageant les lascives sirènes

En déployant leurs chevelures blondes,

Et de leurs voix plaisantes et sereines,

Les plus hauts mâts et plus basses carènes

Font arrêter aux plus mobiles ondes,

Et souvent perdre en tempêtes profondes;

Ainsi la vie, à nous si délectable,

Comme sirène affectée et muable,

En ses douceurs nous enveloppe et plonge,

Tant que la Mort rompe aviron et câble,

Et puis de nous ne reste qu'une fable,

Un moins que vent, ombre, fumée et songe.

What Use is a Princess? [Madame de La Fayette]

 

My account of the controversy in France draws on an article by Andrew Gallix, “Why a 17th-century novel is a hot political issue in France,” The Guardian, Tuesday, March 31, 2009 which notes “France may no longer be the centre of world culture, but culture remains at the centre of what it means to be French,” and a retrospective review of the issue a few years later by Elisabeth Zerofsky, “Of Presidents and Princesses,” The New Yorker, November 8, 2012.

The unpretentious translations are my own.  The original French texts of quoted passages longer than a phrase are provided as end-notes.

 

 

     Though one hardly expects venal politicians, especially reactionaries, to have any taste, Nicholas Sarkozy seemed to have  entertained a particular animus against Madame de La Fayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678).  Always a mediocre student, Mr. Sarkozy must have felt confounded by his literature assignments to such an extent that his distress was still evident when, decades after his schooldays, he complained of the poor princess “I’ve suffered greatly by her.”  To him it could only have been “either a sadist or an idiot” that included the novel in civil service examinations.  Sarkozy asked a sympathetic audience in mockery whether “it happens to you often that you ask a counter clerk what she thought of The Princess of Clèves.”

     The fact that aspiring postal workers in  the United States need not show any familiarity with Moby Dick or the poems of Emily Dickinson does indeed indicate a cultural difference.  The reaction of the French to the denigration of what is generally considered a cultural treasure is likewise difficult to imagine occurring in this country.  In reaction to Sarkozy’s remarks, university students staged readings of the novel, publishers issued three new editions, and booklovers sent copies of Mme. de La Fayette’s book to the president in protest.  (Lovers of literature may be reassured to recall that Mr. Sarkozy was later twice convicted of peculation.)

     In this country, where respect for the nation’s cultural patrimony is far feebler, we might well envy the vigorous defense the French mounted in behalf of their Princesse.  Yet it remains a useful exercise to ignore the immediate reaction of considering anyone who would object to the study of the novel a know-nothing philistine and consider more seriously Sarkozy’s attitude.  What, in fact, is the value to the average citizen of studying such old literature?  And why should such knowledge be encouraged by the state?

     The most fundamental reason that the novel was required reading is the simple fact that from the very outset European education has been founded on textual study.  From the ancient Greeks through the medievals education began with the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all concerned with the effective use of language.  The demands on the student increase when the texts that are studied use archaic or obsolete language and concepts.  Europe went so far as to rely heavily on the challenges of Greek and Latin to provide a sufficient mental workout to train young people.  Oxford today has a flourishing program in English literature, but the subject was never taught there until 1894 and it was ten years more before the first chair of the subject was established.  Until that time, it was thought that the best training, no matter what career the student meant to pursue, was the study of dead languages.  Now, over a hundred years later in America, even the ideal of a liberal education using only English has been largely discarded in favor of vocational training.

     The idea that people are best educated by reading the classics is not peculiar to Europe.  Traditional Chinese and Indian scholars had to know historical philology to read documents already ancient.  In China examinations centered on the Confucian classics determined government appointments from the Sui Dynasty until the twentieth century.  Westerners who have experienced Ph. D. comprehensives and dissertation defenses will identify with the anxiety of the Chinese candidates.  Similarly, traditional schools in India such as the great university at Nalanda maintained vast libraries.  The focus of study was the Sanskrit Vedas, including reading and memorization, with attention to philosophy, textual criticism, prosody, and logic.  The only non-literary topics were astronomy and medicine.  .  

     Of course, those who succeeded in their studies eventually had to acquire new and more obviously practical skills once they began their careers as administrators, bankers, or generals, but (with the exceptions of medicine, law, and theology) this training was on the job.  The location of literary studies at the center of education, once almost universal, has become marginal at best, with English 101, a freshman essay-writing class, a sorry lingering vestige of millennia of practice.

     Whether or not one accepts the reading of literature as the best basis for education, poetry clearly is an essential tool for the species since it is found in every human society.  Perhaps the most undeniable function is entertainment.  Whatever else people are doing as they sit around a fire hearing Anansi stories or at home reading a bestseller or recline in a lounge chair in one chamber of a mall’s multiplex theater, they are amusing themselves.  As soon as it was published La Princesse de Clèves was immensely popular.  Demand outstripped supply and a reader in the provinces had a difficult time obtaining a copy. 

     The book’s appeal may have in part derived from its unprecedented realism, as the author, a comtesse, knew well the court of her own day, but her picture is hardly contained by rules of verisimilitude.  With its center in the glittering court of Henri II graced by the Pléiade poets and written during the even more spectacular reign of Louis XIV when Versailles was built, the narrative doubtless excited reader’s interest just as stories of celebrities, largely unreal, do yet today. 

     An idealized glaze covers in particular the novel’s opening.

       

Grandeur and sophistication have never appeared in France with as much radiance as in the latter years of the reign of Henri II.

Never had there been a court with so many beautiful women and such admirably well-made men.  [1]

 

 

     Even in the context of this magnificent court, the novel’s leading characters stand out.  The Duc de Nemours is “a masterpiece of nature” 9“un chef-d'œuvre de la nature”) and the Princesse herself is a similar marvel.

 

There then appeared at court a beauty, which attracted the eyes of all the world, and one must believe that she was a perfect beauty, to be so greatly admired  in a setting where people were so accustomed to see beautiful people. [2]

 

     This excess of refinement savors of the précieuse sensibility practiced in the salon of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, and familiar from Molière's satire Les Précieuses ridicules.  The hyper-aesthetic values of the court recall those of Heian Japan.  Readers who did not dwell in such lofty circles were nonetheless dazzled by the glory of their betters represented on the page, as indeed many readers are yet today.. 

     Apart from internal monologues as the duc and the princesse cope with their attraction to each other, much of the plot concerns plausible complications such as the stolen portrait or the note the vidame asks Nemours to claim was sent to him.  Several events, however, resemble the unlikely coincidences prominent in earlier romances.  The scene of Nemours eavesdropping on Monsieur and Madame de Clèves in the garden and the king’s fateful insistence on making a final run in the tournament, thus fulfilling a prophecy, would seem contrived in a narration that truly aims at realism.  La Princesse de Clèves thus offers a plot with a theme of love, founded in realism, but heightened by hyperbole and turns of plot too good to be true. 

     Traditionally, though, apologists for poetry have most often maintained that literature is essentially justified not as entertainment but as instruction, revealing “truths” about experience.  Very likely Madame de La Fayette agreed with Pierre Daniel Huet who introduced her novel Zayde (1670) with an essay “Sur l’origine des romans” that noted “Love must be the principal subject of novels” (“L’amour doit être principal subjet des romans”) and specified the goal of fiction writers as “the instruction of the reader” (“l’instruction des lecteurs”) toward the end of “the correction of morals” (“la correction des moeurs”).  For this reason, he specifies that “virtue must always be crowned and vice chastised” (“il faut toujours faire la vertu couronne & la vice châtié”), a requirement that prefigures  the old Motion Picture Code.

     The Princesse is taught the most conservative moral behavior by her mother.

 

She frequently described love to her daughter, showing her what was pleasant about it in order that she might more easily understand what was dangerous: she told her of men’s deceit, their trickery and infidelity, the domestic unhappiness caused by liaisons.  And she explained to her also, on the other hand, what peace accompanies the life of an honest woman, and how much virtue adds to the brilliance and stature of a person who possesses beauty and high birth.  But she showed her as well how difficult it is to maintain such virtue by an extreme self-control and by taking extreme care to retain always that which alone can bring a woman happiness which is to love her spouse and to be loved by him.  [3]

 

     Yet the Princess is such a paragon that she surpasses any ordinary faithful wife.  Though she lacks love for her husband and feels a passionate attraction to the Duke, her behavior remains impeccable. She is so exceedingly punctilious that even after M. de Clèves’ decease, she insists on remaining loyal to his memory.  The novel is less a love story than a tale of a quasi-saint.  The heroine’s scrupulous morality is no less a marvel than her beauty and charm, leading her to a heroic act of self-denial.  She herself says, “I know that there is nothing more difficult than what I mean to do.” (“Je sais bien qu'il n'y a rien de plus difficile que ce que j'entreprends.”)  An Olympic athlete of virtue, she elevates honor, what she calls “duty” (devoir) over love, leaving her beautiful Duke de Nemours a courtly lover whose affair is, like the “distant love” of Jaufre Rudel, the more perfect for being unconsummated.  Her “austere virtue” (“austère vertu”) finds a physical alliance with him impossible, while his devotion, equally “austere” under the circumstances, is likewise exemplary.

     In the last paragraphs M. de Nemours’s emotional energy slowly fades.  “In the end, after years had gone by, and absence had lessened his suffering and  extinguished his passion.” [4]   This leaves the Princess shining alone in the sky, her life blossoming, like the lives of the canonized saints of the church, with many “examples of matchless virtue” (“exemples de vertu inimitables”). 

     Though the book may exalt self-control as a theme, all art aims at beauty, and Mme. de La Fayette’s prose style has, since the publication of La Princesse, been considered an outstanding example of anti-Baroque neo-Classicism.  Her sentences are clear and concise, lacking the elaboration and obscurity associated with trends like English Euphuism, Spanish Gongorism, or Italian Marinism.  Her words are largely abstract with none of the accumulation of concrete specifics with which Flaubert and Balzac build effects.  Her point of view is less like a camera, recording a series of events more or less objectively, than it is a stream of consciousness in the minds of her characters, an exchange of subjectivities in which her readers may imaginatively share. 

     The limpid clarity of her phrasing supports the idealized aspects of the court and enacts the refined sensibilities of the duc and the princesse.  Due to the prestige accorded ancient writers, a sort of Classical simplicity, combining restraint and elegance, was considered the pinnacle of beauty.  By praising Mme. de La Fayette’s book, critics might pay homage to France as the home of a true revival of art, the center of culture in Europe.  This nationalistic concern with purity of language had had earlier been the motive for the foundation of L'Académie française, which continues to this day its attempts to safeguard the French language from ordinary linguistic evolution.

     Here, of course, is the source of the demanding curriculum of the lycées générals.  To know a book like La Princesse de Clèves conveys specifics of history which contribute to a sense of nationhood, but it also cultivates a particular accompanying sensibility, in the French case privileging abstraction and formal beauty.  A reader who has assimilated the style as well as the content of such canonical works might be considered authentically French, though his skin be Senegalese.  Texts like Madame de La Fayette’s novel unite the community of French-speakers in the same way that learning the lore of a tribe does for oral peoples.  And, like any young person being initiated in the myths of a tribe, the French student hoping only for a high mark comes not only to know the group’s history and values, but to consider them exceptional and superior.   

     Defenders of the French literary canon might then argue first of all, that, judging by historical practice, the study of the classics has been found the best training for general intellectual acuity.  Further, reading “great books” also has been considered a significant way to inculcate desirable social and ethical behavior.  The concept of a shared national heritage encourages social cohesion, pride, and even nationalism.  Such non-aesthetic ends have quite naturally played a role in the policies of government-run schools, libraries, and civil service systems, but surely the primary reason for reading Madame de La Fayette (or Racine or Apollinaire), the paramount motive in fact for consumption of all art, is the pleasure found in beauty.  In La Princesse de Clèves one may experience the delights of narrative turns and participate through imagination in the characters’ profound emotional experiences.  The reader will become ever more sensitive to the appreciation of the beauty of the author’s prose.  Such rewards make other considerations trivial.  Politicians, especially the poor students among them and those insensitive to beauty who think only of economic value may question whether people in general should know literature.  Yet a land of post office workers and motor vehicle clerks who are at least capable of reading the classics must surely be a more livable and more humane place than the current United States in which even otherwise well-educated people consume little art not viewable on their streaming services. 

     Most Frenchmen, politicians and citizens, have long been proud of the prestige enjoyed by their language and culture.  In this country we have seen the doublespeak of demagogues who call what is in the common interest elitist while promoting the interests of the one percent.  The right-wing Sarkozy’s opposition to La Princesse de Clèves ignores the rewards acquaintance with her might offer to readers: not only the mental calisthenics considered through history to be the most beneficial, but also the same shared culture that unites tribal societies, resulting in a benign sort of nationalism and encouraging every sort of excellence.  The formulation of a national curriculum based on the classics means that these rewards are available, not only to those who attend exclusive private schools, but to every citizen equally.  Those willing to read with an open mind will develop a capacity for the appreciation of beauty, an appetite easy and inexpensive to satisfy, allowing all citizens to spend time with the finest productions of human ingenuity and in that way to construct bonds with fellow citizens through their shared experience.  Making such texts the basis of education brings multiple benefits, not the least of which is making available to everyone the pleasures of aesthetic and intellectual life.  

 

1.  La magnificence et la galanterie n'ont jamais paru en France avec tant d'éclat que dans les dernières années du règne de Henri second. . . .Jamais cour n'a eu tant de belles personnes et d'hommes admirablement bien faits.

2.  Il parut alors une beauté à la cour, qui attira les yeux de tout le monde, et l'on doit croire que c'était une beauté parfaite, puisqu'elle donna de l'admiration dans un lieu où l'on était si accoutumé à voir de belles personnes.

3.  Elle faisait souvent à sa fille des peintures de l'amour ; elle lui montrait ce qu'il a d'agréable pour la persuader plus aisément sur ce qu'elle lui en apprenait de dangereux ; elle lui contait le peu de sincérité des hommes, leurs tromperies et leur infidélité, les malheurs domestiques où plongent les engagements; et elle lui faisait voir, d'un autre côté, quelle tranquillité suivait la vie d'une honnête femme, et combien la vertu donnait d'éclat et d'élévation à une personne qui avait de la beauté et de la naissance. Mais elle lui faisait voir aussi combien il était difficile de conserver cette vertu, que par une extrême défiance de soi-même, et par un grand soin de s'attacher à ce qui seul peut faire le bonheur d'une femme, qui est d'aimer son mari et d'en être aimée.

4.  Enfin, des années entières s'étant passées, le temps et l'absence ralentirent sa douleur et éteignirent sa passion.