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Recent archival research has focussed on the material conditions of
marriage in eighteenth-century France, providing new insight into
the social and judicial contexts of marital violence. Mary Trouille
builds on these findings to write the first book on spousal abuse
during this period. Through close examination of a wide range of
texts, Trouille shows how lawyers and novelists adopted each
other's rhetorical strategies to present competing versions of the
truth. Male voices - those of husbands, lawyers, editors, and
moralists - are analysed in accounts of separation cases presented
in Des Essarts's influential Causes celebres, in moral and legal
treatises, and in legal briefs by well-known lawyers of the period.
Female voices, both real and imagined, are explored through court
testimony and novels based on actual events by Sade, Genlis, and
Retif de la Bretonne. By bringing the traditionally private matter
of spousal abuse into the public arena, these texts had a
significant impact on public opinion and served as an impetus for
legal reform in the early years of the French Revolution.
Trouille's interdisciplinary study makes a significant contribution
to our understanding of attitudes towards women in
eighteenth-century society, and provides a historical context for
debates about domestic violence that are very much alive today.
"Les Lieux de memoire" is perhaps one of the most profound
historical documents on the history and culture of the French
nation. Assembled by Pierre Nora during the Mitterand years, this
multivolume series has been hailed as "a magnificent achievement"
("The New Republic") and "the grandest, most ambitious effort to
dissect, interpret and celebrate the French fascination with their
own past" ("The Los Angeles Times"). Written during a time when
French national identity was undergoing a pivotal change and the
nation was struggling to define itself, this unprecedented series
consists of essays by prominent historians and cultural
commentators which take, as their points of departure, a "lieu de
memoire": a site of memory used to order, concentrate, and secure
notions of France's past.
The first volume in the Chicago translation, "Rethinking France, "
brings together works addressing the omnipresent role of the state
in French life. As in the other volumes, the "lieux de memoire"
serve as entries into the French past, whether they are actual
sites, political traditions, rituals, or even national pastimes and
textbooks. "Volume I: The State" offers a sophisticated and
engaging view of the French and their past through widely diverse
essays on, for example, the chateau of Versailles and the French
history of absolutism; the "Code civil" and its ordering of French
life; memoirs written by French statesmen; and Charlemagne and his
place in French history. Nora's authors constitute a who's who of
French academia, yet they wear their erudition lightly. Taken as a
whole, this extraordinary series documents how the French have come
to see themselves and why.
Contributors:
Alain Guery
Maurice Agulhon
Bernard Guenee
Daniel Nordman
Robert Morrissey
Alain Boureau
Anne-Marie Lecoq
Helene Himelfarb
Jean Carbonnier
Herve Le Bras
Pierre Nora
Set in Paris in the 1780s, Retif de la Bretonne's Ingenue Saxancour
is a thinly veiled account of his daughter's disastrous marriage to
an abusive husband. From the time of her marriage in January, 1780,
until she left her husband in July, 1785, Agnes Retif suffered
continually from severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.
Published in 1789, Retif's novel scandalized the public with its
graphic descriptions of his son-in-law's sexual perversity and
brutal violence. Retif's novel remains shocking more than two
centuries later and continues to raise disturbing questions about
power relations within abusive relationships. Perhaps most
disturbing of all are the accusations leveled against Retif himself
concerning his motives for writing and publishing this account: Was
he, as some charged, a shameless exhibitionist willing to reveal
his family's darkest secrets merely to attract attention and
broaden his readership? Was he an unscrupulous opportunist willing
to capitalize on his daughter's misfortunes and risk her reputation
simply to pay his debts? Or was he, as he himself claimed, trying
to warn young women about the dangers of marrying men of dubious
backgrounds against their parents' wishes? Retif was all this and
more: a reform-minded pioneer far in advance of his time with his
graphic portrayal of spousal abuse, his call for greater public
awareness of this perennial problem, and his crusade for liberal
divorce laws that would allow women to escape from abusive
relationships and to remarry. This, in fact, is what Agnes Retif
was able to do after passage of the divorce law passed by France's
revolutionary government in 1792. Mary S. Trouille is Professor of
French at Illinois State University.
Trouille (French, Illinois State U.) offers a feminist study of
Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by seven
contemporary women writers, exploring their paradoxical attraction
to ideas considered reactionary, paternalistic, and even blatantly
misogynist by today's standards. She cites the written responses
and their reactions
Ross Chambers, an eminent critic of French literature, proposes an
original theory of the development of French modernism. His bold
rereading of mid-nineteenth-century texts, from Madame Bovary to
Les Fleurs du mal, leads to a reconception of the workings of
narrative - in themselves and in relation to history. Chambers
makes a distinction between a text's formal mode of address
(narrative function) and the reflexive devices by which it invites
interpretation (textual function). The works he considers reveal a
discontinuity or disjunction between these two functions and as a
result seem uncentered, their manner of conveying meaning oddly
blurred. In this they recall the general malaise that swept through
French society in the wake of the failed revolution of 1848.
Chambers shows how the internal opposition of narrative and textual
function, often read as a willful resistance to this historical
ennui, is actually its symptom. Pursuing this argument through
works by Flaubert, Nerval, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Hugo, Chambers
uses theoretical insights to illuminate textual details, which in
turn clarify and advance his theory. The process yields a subtle
and compelling meditation on the powers of writing and reading,
which contributes significantly to the debate about the historical
status of literary texts. At the heart of the book is the concept
of oppositionality; in this respect The Writing of Melancholy is
both a necessary complement to Chambers's previous work in Room for
Maneuver and a discreet homage by a member of the post-1968
generation to those who were thirty-something in 1848. Originally
published in French, the book has been revised and expanded to
include an entirely newchapter on Gerard de Nerval's "Sylvie".
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