A Short History of French Literature

by George Saintsbury

The Influence of Journalism.

So long as the old régime lasted journalism was naturally in a condition of suppression, but from the beginning of the Revolution it assumed at once an important position in the state, and a position still more important as a nursery of rising men of letters. At the time of the outbreak only two papers of importance existed, the already mentioned Gazette de France, and the Journal de Paris, in which Garat, André Chénier, Roucher, and many other men of distinction, won their spurs. 1789, however, saw the birth of numerous sheets, some of which continued almost till our own days. The most important was the Gazette Nationale or Moniteur Universel, in which not merely Garat and La Harpe, but Ginguené, a literary critic of talent and a republican of moderate principles, together with the future historian Lacretelle, and the comic poet, fabulist, and critic Andrieux, took part. Rivarol, Champcenetz, and Pelletier conducted the Royalist Actes des Apôtres, Marat started his ultra-republican Ami du Peuple, Camille Desmoulins the Courier de Brabant, Durozoy the Gazette de Paris. Barrère and Louvet, both notorious, if not famous names, launched for the first time a paper with a title destined to fortune, Le Journal des Débats; and Camille Desmoulins changed his oddly-named journal into one named more oddly still, Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant. All these, and more, were the growth of the single year 1789. The next saw the avowedly Royalist Ami du Roi of Royou, the atrocious Père Duchêne of Hébert, the cumbrously-named Journal des Amis de la Constitution, on which Fontanes, Clermont-Tonnerre, and other future Bonapartists and Constitutionalists worked. In 1791 no paper of importance, except the short-lived Girondist Chronique du Mois, appeared. In the next year many Terrorist prints of no literary merit were started, and one, entitled Nouvelles Politiques, to which the veterans Suard and Morellet, with Guizot, a novice of the time to come, Lacretelle, Dupont de Nemours, and others, were contributors. In the later years of the revolutionary period, the only important newspaper was what was first called the Journal de l'Empire, and at the end of Napoleon's reign the Journal des Débats, on which Fiévée, Geoffroy, and many other writers of talent worked. In the early days of these various journals political interests naturally engrossed them. But the literary tastes and instincts of Parisians were too strong not to demand attention, and by degrees the critical part of the newspaper became of importance. Under the restoration this importance grew, and the result was the Conservateur Littéraire and the Globe, in the former of which Victor Hugo was introduced to the public, and in the latter Sainte-Beuve. This sudden uprise of journalism produced a remarkable change in the conditions of literary work, and offered chances to many who would previously have been dependent on individual patronage. But so far as regards literature, properly so called, all its results which were worth anything appeared subsequently in books, and there is therefore no need to refer otherwise than cursorily to the phenomenon of its development. Put very briefly, the influence of journalism on literature may be said to be this: it opens the way to those to whom it might otherwise be closed; it facilitates the destruction of erroneous principles; it assists production; and it interferes with labour and care spent over the thing produced.

Chamfort.

From the crowd of clever writers whom this outburst of journalism found ready to draw their pens in one service or the other, two names emerge as pre-eminently remarkable. Garat and Champcenetz were men of wit and ingenuity, André Chénier was a great poet, and his brother, Marie Joseph, a man of good literary taste and master of an elegant style, Lacretelle a painstaking historian, and many others worthy of note in their way. But Chamfort and Rivarol deserve a different kind of notice from this. They united in a remarkable fashion the peculiarities of the man of letters of the eighteenth century with the peculiarities of the man of letters of the nineteenth, and their individual merit was, though different and complementary, almost unique. Chamfort was born in Auvergne, in 1741. He was the natural son of a person who occupied the position of companion, and legally possessed nothing but his baptismal name of Nicholas. Like his rival, La Harpe, he obtained an exhibition at one of the Paris colleges, and distinguished himself. After leaving school he lived for a time by miscellaneous literature, and at last made his way to society and to literary success by dint of competing for and winning academic prizes. On the second occasion of his competition he defeated La Harpe. Afterwards Madame Helvétius assisted him, and at last he received from Chabanon (a third-rate man of letters, who may be most honourably mentioned here) a small annuity which made him independent. It is said that he married, and that his wife died six months afterwards. He was elected to the Academy, and patronised by all sorts of persons, from the queen downwards. But at the outbreak of the Revolution he took the popular side, though he could not continue long faithful to it. In the Terror he was menaced with arrest, tried to commit suicide, and died horribly mutilated in 1794. Chamfort's literary works are considerable in bulk, but only a few of them have merit. His tragedies are quite worthless, his comedy, La Jeune Indienne, not much better. His verse tales exceed in licentiousness his models in La Fontaine, but fall far short of them in elegance and humour. His academic essays are heavy and scarcely intelligent. But his brief witticisms and his short anecdotes and apophthegms hardly admit a rival. Chamfort was a man soured by his want of birth, health, and position, and spoilt in mental development by the necessity of hanging on to the great persons of his time. But for a kind of tragi-comic satire, a saeva indignatio, taking the form of contempt of all that is exalted and noble, he has no equal in literature except Swift.

Rivarol.

The life of Rivarol was also an adventurous one, but much less sombre. He was born about 1750, of a family which seems to have had noble connections, but which, in his branch of it, had descended to innkeeping. Indeed it is said that Riverot, and not Rivarol, was the name which his father actually bore. He himself, however, first assumed the title of Chevalier de Parcieux, and then that of Comte de Rivarol. The way to literary distinction in those days was either the theatre or criticism, and Rivarol, with the acuteness which characterised him, knowing that he had no talent for the former, chose the latter. His translation (with essay and notes) of Dante is an extraordinarily clever book, and his discourse on the universality of the French tongue, which followed, deserves the same description. It was not, however, in mere criticism that Rivarol's forte lay, though he long afterwards continued to exhibit his acuteness in it by utterances of various kinds. In 1788 (the year before the Revolution) he excited the laughter of all Paris, and the intense hatred of the hack-writers of his time, by publishing, in conjunction with Champcenetz, an Almanach de nos Grands Hommes, in which, by a mixture of fiction and fact, he caricatures his smaller contemporaries in the most pitiless manner. When the Revolution broke out Rivarol took the Royalist side, and contributed freely to its journals. He soon found it necessary to leave the country, and lived for ten years in Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin, publishing occasionally pamphlets and miscellaneous works. He died at the Prussian capital in 1801. Not only has Rivarol a considerable claim as a critic, and a very high position as a political pamphleteer, but he is as much the master of the prose epigram as Chamfort is of the short anecdote. Following the example of his predecessors, he put many of his best things in a treatise, De l'Homme Intellectuel et Moral, which, as a whole, is very dull and unsatisfactory, though it is lighted up by occasional flashes of the most brilliant wit. His detached sayings, which are not so much Pensées or maxims as conversational good things, are among the most sparkling in literature, and, with Chamfort's, occupy a position which they keep almost entirely to themselves. It has been said of him and of Chamfort (who, being of similar talents and on opposite sides, were naturally bitter foes) that they 'knew men, but only from the outside, and from certain limited superficial and accidental points of view. They knew books, too, but their knowledge was circumscribed by the fashions of a time which was not favourable to impartial literary appreciation. Hence their anecdotes are personal rather than general, rather amusing than instructive, rather showing the acuteness and ingenuity of the authors than able to throw light on the subjects dealt with. But as mere tale-tellers and sayers of sharp things they have few rivals.' It may be added that they complete and sum up the merits and defects of the French society of the eighteenth century, and that, in so far as literature can do this, the small extent of their selected works furnishes a complete comment on that society.

Joubert.

Contemporary with these two writers, though, from the posthumous publication of his works years after the end of his long life, he seems in a manner a contemporary of our own, was Joseph Joubert, the last great Pensée-writer of France and of Europe. Joubert's birthplace was Montignac, in Perigord, and the date of his birth 1754, three years after that of Rivarol, and about twelve after that of Chamfort. He was educated at Toulouse, where, without taking regular orders, he joined the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, a teaching community, and studied and taught till he was twenty-two years old. Then his health being, as it was all through his life, weak, he returned home, and succeeding before long to a small but sufficient fortune, he went to Paris. Here he became intimate with the second philosophe generation (La Harpe, Marmontel, etc.), and is said to have for a time been an enthusiastic hearer of Diderot, the most splendid talker of that or any age. But Joubert's ideals and method of thought were radically different from those of the Philosophes, and he soon found more congenial literary companions, of whom the chief were Fontanes and Chênedollé, while he found his natural home in the salon of two ladies of rank and cultivation, Madame de Beaumont and Madame de Vintimille. Before long he married and established himself in Paris with a choice library, into which, it is said, no eighteenth-century writer was admitted. His health became worse and worse, yet he lived to the age of seventy, dying in 1824. Fourteen years afterwards Chateaubriand, at the request of his widow, edited a selection of his remains, and four years later still his nephew, M. de Raynal, produced a fuller edition.

Joubert's works consist (with the exception of a few letters) exclusively of Pensées and maxims, which rank in point of depth and of exquisite literary expression with those of La Rochefoucauld, and in point of range above them. They are even wider in this respect than those of Vauvenargues, which they also much resemble. Ethics, politics, theology, literature, all occupy Joubert. In politics he is, as may be perhaps expected from his time and circumstances, decidedly anti-revolutionary. In theology, without being exactly orthodox according to any published scheme of orthodoxy, Joubert is definitely Christian. In ethics he holds a middle place between the unsparing hardness of the self-interest school and the somewhat gushing manner of the sentimentalists. But his literary thoughts are perhaps the most noteworthy, not merely from our present point of view. All alike have the characteristic of intense compression (he described his literary aim in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition of putting a book in a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word'), while all have the same lucidity and freedom from enigma. All are alike polished in form and style according to the best models of the seventeenth century; but whereas study and reflection might have been sufficient to give Joubert the material of his other thoughts, the wide difference between his literary judgments and those of his time is less easily explicable. No finer criticism on style and on poetry in the abstract exists than his, and yet his reading of poetry cannot have been very extensive. He is even just to the writers of the eighteenth century, whose manner he disliked, and whose society he had abjured. He seems, indeed, to have had almost a perfect faculty of literary appreciation, and wherever his sayings startle the reader it will generally be found that there is a sufficient explanation beneath. There is probably no writer in any language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal variety of subjects in an equally small space, and with an equally high and unbroken excellence of style and expression. This is the intrinsic worth of Joubert. In literary history he has yet another interest, that of showing in the person of a man living out of the literary world, and far removed from the operation of cliques, the process which was inevitably bringing about the great revolution of 1830.

Courier.