From Romantic Teleology to Decadent Animal Activism:

Human-Animal Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel

By

Christopher Robison

B.A., University of Rochester, 2009

M.A., Brown University, 2015

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of French Studies at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

February 2020 © Copyright 2020 by Christopher Robison

This dissertation by Christopher Robison is accepted in its present form

by the Department of French Studies as satisfying

the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Gretchen Schultz, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Thangam Ravindranathan, Reader

Date______Kari Weil, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

iii Curriculum vitae

Christopher Thomas Robison received a B.A. with dual majors in French and Comparative Literature from the University of Rochester in 2009. He received his M.A. in French Studies in 2015 from Brown University, where he would go on to successfully defend his doctoral dissertation in December 2019. During his time at Brown, he taught beginning through advanced-level French courses, served as Teaching Assistant in the Brown English Department, and taught in the English Department at Université Lumière Lyon 2 as a part of Brown French Studies’ exchange program. He was awarded the Simmons-Ahearn Prize for Excellence (departmental award) in 2018 in recognition of his teaching and research.

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to begin by thanking Gretchen Schultz for being an absolutely extraordinary advisor. In all my years of being a student, from l’école maternelle in

Rennes to the final days of dissertation-editing in Providence, I have no fonder academic memory than our bi-weekly meetings for my independent study on nineteenth-century animality. That project gradually morphed into the present dissertation, and at all of its stages, Gretchen’s close readings, insightful feedback, generosity, and vast knowledge of all things nineteenth-century France were deeply inspiring.

I cannot imagine a better Dissertation Committee for this project than the one of her, Thangam Ravindranathan, and Kari Weil. I thank all of them wholeheartedly for their work in bringing this dissertation to its present state, and for encouraging me to push my ideas as far as they could go. It has been a genuine pleasure to work with them.

Throughout my time at Brown, I have had the privilege of being surrounded by brilliant, inspiring, and giving professors. For everything they have done both in and outside the classroom, I thank Svetlana Evdokimova, Justin Izzo, Virginia Krause,

Ourida Mostefai, Pierre Saint-Amand, Lewis Seifert, and David Wills.

Annie Wiart and Stéphanie Ravillon have done so much over the years to help me and all of the other grad students in French Studies become the best teachers we can be.

For both their pedagogical rigor and their steadfast commitment to their TAs, I thank them immensely.

Rochambeau House is an almost unreasonably beautiful space in which to study literature. I would like to thank here Kathy Wiggins and José Mendoza for flooding its

v halls with their positive energy, and for everything they do to make this special place operate the way it does.

I have been able to share many beautiful, important moments with the grad students who have passed through French Studies during my time here, and I would like to thank all of them for being the incredible people that they are. My cohort (Justin

Gibson, Becca Krasner, Anne-Gabrielle Roussel, and Jack Sieber) was the best team with which to endure the sometimes trying first years of grad school. All of the grad students I am seeing off now have made Brown an absolutely delightful place, and I would like to thank them all here: Elise Bouley, Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza, Mary Claire Chao, Kate

Clark, Abigail Culpepper, Hayley Jayson, Marie Larose, Mark Leuning, Kaitlyn

Quaranta, and Brigitte Stepanov. I would like to thank in particular Atticus Doherty, Ben

Fancy, and Laurin Williams for having been maximally wonderful people as I pushed through my last stretch as a grad student.

My friends Julie Bridgeman, Meriel Cordier, Sean Elligers, Molly O’Rourke-

Friel, Mike Pontacoloni, Justin Verrier, and Chris Zizzamia have all done so much to see me through this chapter of my life, and I thank all of them profusely for their love and their inspiring commitment to making beautiful things.

My family has likewise been immensely supportive during this whole experience.

For all they have done to turn me into a person, and for all they have done to help that person get to the other side of a dissertation, I thank Cynthia Thomas, Lois Thomas,

Roscoe Robison, Nina Robison, Curt Robison, Delphine Robison, Peter Robison,

Nolwenn Robison, and Kaelig Robison.

vi In particular, I would like to thank my twin brother, John Robison, who has been there for me since the womb. Neither this dissertation nor anything else of consequence in my life would exist without him, and I cannot thank him enough.

To conclude, I would like to thank Edie, Andy, Lu, and Honeycloud, the nonhuman animals who looked over my shoulder during this whole dissertation process to make sure I wasn’t writing nonsense about them.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter One — Anthropocentric Vegetarianism and the Natural Gift of Pork: Animal Ethics in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre………………...... ……...16

I. Tracing Saint-Pierre’s Vegetarian Legacy…………………………..………...19

II. Saint-Pierre the Scientist Takes his Lunch Break……...……………………..29

III. You Can Have Your (Crab) Cake and Eat it Too……………..……………..45

Chapter Two — Zolian Zoology: ‘L’amour des bêtes’ and (Human-) Animal (-Machine) Ethics………………………………………………….……………57

I. Balzac, Darwin, Bernard: Tracing the Origins of the Human-Animal-Machine Trichotomy…………………………..…………………………………………...60

II. Fanfan, or The Humanity in Mechanical Animal Suffering……………...…..77

Chapter Three — Rachilde’s Decadent Animal Activism: Le Loup-garou Bites Back from the Table..…………………………………………………………………92

I. Le Loup-garou vs. the Scientist: Animal Ethics in the Autobiographical Rachilde……………………………..…………………………………………...96

II. La Marquise de Sade: Animal Allies in the War against L’homme……...….109

III. L’animale: The Space Above and Beyond L’Échelle des Êtres………..…..118

Conclusion — Nineteenth-Century Animals in Twenty-First-Century Ecosystems…………………………………………………………………...... 128

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...137

viii INTRODUCTION

Depuis deux cents ans les êtres qu’on séparait au dix-septième siècle se sont rejoints, et les choses ont repris leur parenté naturelle. […] Nos théories ne nous empêchent plus de nous intéresser aux bêtes […] on est tenté de les observer. Car ce n’est pas assez pour nous de connaître l’homme ; il n’est qu’une portion du monde, et notre esprit est fait pour reproduire les sentiments de tous les êtres ; il est incomplet, s’il n’est pas universel.

—Hippolyte Taine1

The nineteenth century witnessed a series of dramatic paradigm shifts in the evaluation of nonhuman animals across a variety of disciplines. Written in the very middle of the century, Hippolyte Taine’s positivist critical reading of La Fontaine et ses fables (1853) succinctly speaks to a constellation of biocentric ideas at the intersection of literary and scientific thought of the period. In the above passage, Taine goes so far as to frame an earnest interest in the study of animal life as a modern, specifically nineteenth- century phenomenon, one that fully disassociates his own epoch from seventeenth- century Cartesianism and its deep sense of human exceptionalism. “Nos théories ne nous empêchent plus de nous intéresser aux bêtes”: to write in the nineteenth century, suggests

Taine, entails a negotiation of rapidly shifting biological and aesthetic paradigms that privilege nonhuman animals in new ways.

1 Taine, La Fontaine et ses fables (1853), 167-168.

1 At all stages of the nineteenth century, several of the novelists most directly responsible for shaping the contours of their respective literary movements turned explicitly towards the developing field of biology as a guiding force in their literary enterprise. In step with Taine’s assertion that “Nos théories ne nous empêchent plus de nous intéresser aux bêtes,” novelists turned their attention to the study of nonhuman animals not only as a means of better understanding what it is to be human, but also more broadly what it is to be animal, what it is to be part of the phenomenon of life. Tracking the nineteenth-century French novel’s manifold engagement with contemporaneous life sciences, the following pages explore how changing paradigms of how human beings relate to the rest of the animal kingdom shaped the ways in which novelists could identify with nonhuman animals, giving rise in turn to novel (in all senses of the word) ways of framing the question of animal ethics.

* * *

The seventeenth-century episteme against which Taine juxtaposes the work of his contemporaries sets in place a wide ontological gulf between human beings and nonhuman animals. In his Discours de la méthode (1637), René Descartes proposes his famous categorical divide between the rational, soul-endowed human and the purely corporeal, mechanical animal, arguing that the lack of a discernible linguistic capacity in nonhuman animals (even among creatures like parrots who are physically capable of producing word-sounds) “ne témoigne pas seulement que les bêtes ont moins de raison que les hommes, mais qu’elles n’en ont point du tout” (165). If human language serves as an indicator of a rational, immaterial soul, its apparent absence in other animals leads

Descartes to conceptualize all nonhuman creatures in purely mechanical terms: “c’est la

2 nature qui agit en eux selon la disposition de leurs organes […] ainsi qu’on voit qu’une horloge, qui n’est composée que de roues et de ressorts, peut compter les heures et mesurer le temps” (166).

The finer details of Descartes’ animal-machine theory make salient the connection between the question of animal ethics and the history of the life sciences, a connection that directs several of the primary concerns of the present dissertation. In his “Lettre à M.

Morus” (February 5, 1649), Descartes defends his vision of animal physiology as mechanistic, arguing that his ideas do not take anything away from nonhuman animals since the concept of mechanicity is able to do justice to a rich range of complex operations. In a paradoxical line of argumentation, Descartes then denies the accusation of animal cruelty while simultaneously justifying any form of conduct toward nonhuman animals: “mon opinion est moins cruelle envers les bêtes qu’elle n’est pieuse envers les hommes […] qui sont délivrés du soupçon de crime toutes les fois qu’ils mangent ou tuent les animaux” (Descartes, “Lettre à M. Morus” 1320). Cartesian physiology thus explicitly excludes nonhuman animals from the realm of moral considerability on the grounds of their supposed mechanicity, insisting that even the most egregious acts of violence become ethically permissible towards these unthinking animal machines.

Much of Enlightenment-era natural history is written at least partially in response to Descartes’ vision of animality, with much of it taking on, explicitly or implicitly, the ethical underpinnings of Cartesian physiology. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

(1707-1788), eighteenth-century France’s most influential natural historian, presents a particularly compelling case insomuch as he simultaneously carries Descartes’ animal- machine theory deep into the Enlightenment, while also studying animal behavior with a

3 remarkable precision that often appears to take seriously animal cognition. In Le silence des bêtes : La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité (1998), Elisabeth de Fontenay points to this seemingly paradoxical nature of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749-1789), noting that “sa doctrine se trouve sans cesse construite contre et menacée par ces vivants autres que l’homme auxquels le naturaliste a voué sa vie” (408).

In his chapter “De la nature de l’homme” (1749), Buffon takes up the Cartesian animal-machine theory with a strikingly similar line of argumentation: he attributes the capacity for thought exclusively to human beings by virtue of a linguistic ability; he refuses to grant any form of thought “même au plus petit degré” to other animals since

“on ne les a jamais vus s’entretenir ou discourir ensemble”; and, returning to Descartes’ thoughts on parrots, he rejects the idea that the inability for other animals to speak comes from a “faute d’organes” since several species can learn how to “prononcer des mots,

[…] mais jamais on n’est parvenu à leur faire naître l’idée que ces mots expriment ; ils semblent ne les répéter que comme un écho ou une machine artificielle les répéterait ou les articulerait” (187-188, emphasis mine).

Buffon’s meticulous adherence to the steps of Descartes’ theory underlines the veritable assimilation of the animal-machine within his natural history. As does

Descartes, Buffon uses the concept of animal mechanicity as a way of justifying any form of conduct toward nonhuman animals, insisting that “L’empire de l’homme sur les animaux est un empire légitime qu’aucune révolution ne peut détruire, c’est l’empire de l’esprit sur la matière, c’est non seulement un droit de Nature, un pouvoir fondé sur des lois inaltérables, mais c’est encore un don de Dieu” (499). Buffon pushes Descartes’

4 ontological, ethical hierarchy still further by accentuating this religious dimension in his human/animal dichotomy.

And yet, despite this deeply anthropocentric human/animal ontological hierarchy,

Buffon’s detailed studies of the animal kingdom did much to foster an intellectual curiosity around nonhuman animals in modern France, one that, as I argue throughout this dissertation, eventually fostered a new sense of human-animal sympathy in nineteenth-century French letters. During the latter half of the Enlightenment, natural history texts like Buffon’s Histoire naturelle and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Études de la nature (1784) began to rival even the most popular novels in terms of commercial success and cultural impact. Both of these works were republished numerous times throughout the nineteenth century,2 and both were valued not only for their scientific merits, but also their aesthetic ones, with novelists applying the lessons learned from these zoological texts to their craft. In Génie du Christianisme (1802), for instance,

François-René de Chateaubriand turns to Saint-Pierre’s “talent pour peindre la nature”

(302) in the Études’ explorations of diverse animal habitats as an inspiration for the treatment of novelistic setting. In the “Avant-Propos” to La comédie humaine, meanwhile, Balzac sees in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle a template for his own literary project, drawing influence from the descriptive, observational methods of Buffon’s taxonomy for La comédie humaine’s character studies: “Si Buffon a fait un magnifique ouvrage en essayant de représenter dans un livre l’ensemble de la zoologie, n’y avait-il pas une œuvre de ce genre à faire pour la Société ?” (8). This encounter between the natural sciences and the novel had a profound effect on the aesthetic practices of the

2 See Duflo 30 for more on the publishing history of Saint-Pierre’s work, and Pierre 81 for that of Buffon’s.

5 period. Allen Thiher, in his study of the role of the sciences in literary Realism, argues that the modern novel was indeed born of “literature’s desire to rival science in the nineteenth century” (7), that is, its desire to absorb and respond to the claims of science in a literary fashion.

In the new biological frameworks available to nineteenth-century novelists as theories of transformism and evolution begin to gain currency throughout the century, the line of demarcation between the human and the nonhuman became progressively blurred, allowing for new ways of empathizing and sympathizing with nonhuman animals. The field of biology and the abstract, unifying concept of “la vie” underlying it emerged at the outset of the nineteenth century in early evolutionary works like Jean-Baptiste de

Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique (1809), marking, as Michel Foucault famously forwards in Les mots et les choses (1966), a radical epistemic rupture from classical, eighteenth-century conceptions of natural history in which all species constitute a collection of disparate “êtres vivants” (Foucault 139). While there is a rigid divide between human beings and nonhuman animals in Buffon, Lamarckian transformism introduced a radical interspecies fluidity in its suggestion that all animals are variations of living matter shaped by the influence of diverse environmental factors. In Principes de philosophie zoologique (1830), Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire expanded upon Lamarck’s ideas by introducing the theory of “l’unité de composition organique” (Saint-Hilaire 48), which suggests that all animals share a single anatomical design that transforms into increasingly complex variations of species as the organs of individual organisms undergo diverse “modifications comme formes et comme fonctions dans l’influence des milieux, où ces mêmes parties sont appelées à se développer” (Saint-Hilaire 118). These early

6 evolutionary models eventually give way, of course, to Charles Darwin’s natural selection-based evolutionary theory proposed in The Origin of Species (1859), which continues to be the working model of species transformation in present-day biology.

In all of these nineteenth-century biological paradigms, the boundaries between species (whether human or nonhuman) are compromised in a way that was not fully possible in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century frameworks. To repeat Taine, “Depuis deux cents ans les êtres qu’on séparait au dix-septième siècle se sont rejoints, et les choses ont repris leur parenté naturelle.” Significantly, Taine’s call to march in step with the sciences of one’s time by including nonhuman animals in the scope of one’s concerns immediately transitions to the question of empathy: in the extract from La Fontaine et ses fables serving as the epigraph to this introduction, “observer” gives way to “reproduire les sentiments de tous les êtres,” the idea of empathizing with and doing justice to the unique experiences of other animals. An analogous gesture is reflected in Pierre-Jules

Hetzel’s preface to Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (1840-1842), a popular collection of animal-based short stories abounding in references to the natural history of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, with collaborations by Balzac, Charles Nodier,

George Sand and Jules Janin, among others.3 When comparing the nature of his collaborative project to classical fables (La Fontaine’s and otherwise), Hetzel emphasizes the importance of perspective and, as far as possible, of inhabiting the mentality of the nonhuman:

Jusqu’à présent, en effet, dans la fable, dans l’apologue, dans la comédie, l’Homme avait été toujours l’historien et le raconteur. Il s’était toujours

3 Recent scholarship, it should be noted, suggests that Sand’s contribution may very well have been written by Balzac but attributed to Sand in an effort to attach a larger number of high-profile names to the project (Farrant 21).

7 chargé de se faire à lui-même la leçon, et ne s’était point effacé complètement sous l’Animal dont il empruntait le personnage. Il était toujours le principal, et la Bête l’accessoire et comme la doublure ; c’était l’Homme enfin qui s’occupait de l’Animal ; ici c’est l’Animal qui s’inquiète de l’Homme, qui le juge en se jugeant lui-même. Le point de vue, comme on voit, est changé. (Hetzel iii)

The fabular medium can of course do only so much in terms of realistically respecting the radical alterity of nonhuman species. Likewise, Taine’s above-cited assertion that “notre esprit est fait pour reproduire les sentiments de tous les êtres” hints at a slightly cavalier optimism regarding the knowability of nonhuman alterity, a blindspot that becomes one of the more nuanced focal points in contemporary, postmodernist animal studies.4 If, in practice, the desire to be “effacé complètement sous l’Animal” is prone to occasionally facile anthropomorphic renderings of animals in

Hetzel’s collection, it is significant that both Taine and Hetzel nevertheless accentuate their intention of more authentically engaging with nonhuman animal interiority when juxtaposing their work to La Fontaine’s.

From this literary interest in sincerely empathizing with animal life gradually emerges a more pronounced effort to sympathize with nonhuman animals, that is, to take pity upon and consider the ethical desert of creatures with whom one can identify in some significant way. As Pierre Serna points out, the very end of the eighteenth century set the stage for a profound reconsideration of the ethical status of nonhuman animals as a renewed focus on ideas of citizenship and rights began to trickle down to nonhuman

4 See Kari Weil’s discussion of animal ethics and the idea of alterity in Thinking Animals: “the ethical turn that has followed in the wake of deconstruction is an attempt to recognize and extend care to others while acknowledging that we may not know what the best form of care is for an other whom we cannot presume to know. It is a concern with and for alterity, especially insofar as alterity brings us to the limits of our own self- certainty and certainty about the world” (17).

8 creatures in post-Revolutionary discourse, as evidenced, for instance, by the numerous biocentric dissertations written for the newly established Institut de France during the

First Republic (Serna 304). It is not until the mid-nineteenth century, however, (precisely

1850, in fact) that the first form of legal protection for nonhuman animals comes into effect in France with la loi Grammont, a law that prohibited public displays of cruelty against domestic animals.5 This law was largely pushed forward by thinkers and activists associated with the Société Protectrice des Animaux, which had just come into existence

(with a few fits and starts) in 1845. For writers who had grown up in a literary culture steeped in natural history, the SPA’s overarching project of animal welfare was an attractive one: its official members included august figures such as Jules Michelet

(Crossley 124), while authors such as Guy de Maupassant lent explicit public support for the organization by advocating for their efforts to establish the first animal refuges in

Paris.6 Émile Zola and Rachilde, meanwhile, two of the primary novelists considered in the backhalf of the present dissertation, were both awarded medals by the SPA for their animal welfare advocacy (and direct activism, in the case of Rachilde).7

The very fact that many of the French literati of the nineteenth century were so vocally attached to the question of animal welfare is a point that merits closer inspection in the critical literature (although, as we will see in the coming chapters, individual perspectives on what animal welfare ought to resemble varied dramatically). Scholarship

5 See Crossley 35 and Pierre 85 for more on the background of la loi Grammont (as well as some of its classist limitations).

6 See Maupassant’s “Histoire d’un chien” (1881).

7 See: Zola, “Enfin Couronné” 319; Organographes du cymbalum pataphysicum, n. 19- 20, special edition on Rachilde 77.

9 at the intersection of Animal Studies and nineteenth-century French culture such as Ceri

Crossley’s Consumable Metaphors: Attitudes towards Animals and Vegetarianism in

Nineteenth-Century France (2005) and Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir:

Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (1994) have done much to emphasize the proliferation of new ethical questions that arose in broader cultural discourses as animals became increasingly visible in human society throughout the century. Éric Baratay’s

Bêtes de somme : des animaux aux service des hommes (2011) points to truly astounding statistics regarding the quantities of livestock and domesticated animals in France from the Revolution to 1914, noting figures that had “doublé, voire triplé, tandis que la population n’augmentait que de 45%.” The number of sheep alone in France grew to previously unthinkable numbers with the advances in industrialized agriculture, reaching

“33 millions en 1852 pour 35 millions de Français” (Baratay 11). The sheer volume of domesticated animals in the nineteenth century made it virtually impossible to avoid thinking about their utilization in some way or another in a broad range of discourses, including those agricultural, scientific, and literary.

While the sociohistorical scholarship on animal ethics in the nineteenth century often makes nods to the literary thought of the period, there is still much work to be done from a specifically literary angle. Following the lead of projects like Laurence A.

Gregorio’s Maupassant’s Fiction and the Darwinian View of Life (2005) and Allen

Thiher’s Fiction Rivals Science: The French Novel from Balzac to Proust (2001), this dissertation will explore the rich cross pollinations of the scientific and literary discourses of the century, but with an expressly ethical emphasis focusing on the diverse ways of conceptualizing the relationship between human and nonhuman life.

10 * * *

The present project is structured around three primary novelists: Bernardin de

Saint-Pierre (1737-1814), Émile Zola (1840-1902), and Rachilde (1860-1953). Despite belonging to three drastically different literary movements spanning the century—they are indeed foundational, emblematic representatives of, respectively: literary

Romanticism, Naturalism, and Decadence—these writers sit alongside one another in this project by virtue of their shared investment in questions of natural science and the treatment (ethical and aesthetic) of nonhuman animals. As we shall see, while each of these authors makes direct statements regarding an ethical concern for nonhuman animals

(much of which has been underrepresented in the scholarship), the shape and parameters of their animal sympathy vary significantly with regard to our precise moral obligations toward other animals, the manner and extent to which human beings relate to nonhuman animals and vice versa, and the amount of textual space granted to nonhuman animals in each author’s essayistic and novelistic work.

By tracing the three respective scientific frameworks these novelists explicitly and consistently espoused throughout their work, this project will analyze how shifting conceptions of an interspecies ontological hierarchy informed the ways in which each of them identified and sympathized with the diverse range of creatures roaming their texts.

While the present project does not purport to make conclusive statements on the question of animal sympathy across different literary movements—any such claims would necessarily be facile and over-generalized—the corpus of worthy literary chefs de file I consider will permit a balanced reflection on the manner in which an identification with nonhuman animals both shapes and is shaped by prototypically Romantic, Naturalist, and

11 Decadent sensibilities; to that end, where appropriate, contextualizing nods to other contemporaneous novelists will be made throughout my analysis.

The overarching structure directing this project follows a significant shift in the concept of species hierarchy throughout the course of the nineteenth century. While it would be remiss of me to impose too tidy an arc upon the history of the life sciences— and, indeed, closer investigation of these different frameworks will demonstrate that each one’s conceptual unity can readily fluctuate—there is nevertheless a traceable trajectory in which the hierarchical divide between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom becomes progressively destabilized over the century.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the only author in this study whose credentials could be genuinely qualified as both literary and scientific, draws from the anthropocentric teleology of his own Études de la nature as a guiding force in his novelistic work. In

Saint-Pierre’s natural history, humans and nonhuman animals are fundamentally, qualitatively different entities as all of nature (nonhuman animal life included) is expressly designed by God to serve humankind. Zola, before asserting the Darwinian framework he would espouse in his own novelistic enterprise, first entertains the 1830s transformism of Saint-Hilaire, whose theory of l’unité de composition organique figures prominently in the “Avant-Propos” to Balzac’s La Comédie humaine; in the Saint-

Hilairian biological model, the differences between humans and nonhuman animals become merely quantitative as human beings are simply some of the most structurally complex forms of living matter within a unified developmental history of ever-increasing biological complexity. In Zola’s Darwinian landscape, by contrast, the concept of an interspecies hierarchy no longer exists as humans and nonhuman animals are simply

12 variations of living matter naturally selected to survive in specific environmental milieus.

Rachilde, finally, perverts classical interspecies hierarchies, deliberately and subversively pitting women/nonhuman animals as a unified category in opposition to l’homme (in all its human/male ambiguity) and the male-dominated milieu of fin-de-siècle life sciences, whose invasive experimentation on both nonhuman animals and women Rachilde despises.

What is remarkable, then, is that while these aesthetic/biological landscapes all present vastly different models of how humans relate to nonhuman animals, each one of them is nevertheless genuinely invested in the aesthetic and ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. My dissertation argues that a closer look at the specific dynamics of animal sympathy manifested in each system will provide us with a critically undervalued vantage point from which to consider the ideological shifts separating the nineteenth century’s diverse literary movements.

* * *

Moving chronologically, each of the following chapters thus explores: the engagement of the novelist at hand with a specific scientific paradigm; the foundations and dynamics of the ensuing sense of identification with nonhuman animals as detailed in the novelist’s essayistic, journalistic, and/or autobiographical writings; the nature of the ethical commitment to nonhuman animals that emerges from these texts (with an eye towards specific moral issues like vegetarianism, vivisection, and various acts of animal cruelty); and the ways in which this animal sympathy manifests itself in the writer’s novels through the treatment of nonhuman animals, the corresponding treatment of

13 human characters, and the diverse range of devices—particular to each author—directly traceable to a greater or lesser degree of human to nonhuman animal identification.

My project’s emphasis is thus three-fold: 1) it focuses on scientific-historical analysis through engagement with primary sources of nineteenth-century life sciences, as well as critical histories of science by Toby A. Appel, Linda L. Clark, Colas Duflo,

Michel Foucault, and Richard H. Grove, among others; 2) it engages in close readings of the novelistic output of the proposed corpus, treating works both canonical, like Zola’s

La bête humaine (1890), as well as works like Rachilde’s L’animale (1893), to which considerably less scholarly attention has been attached; and 3) it enters into dialogue with the complex question of animal ethics as it manifests itself in contemporary Animal

Studies, drawing from scholars broadly associated with rights-based animal ethics (e.g.

Martha Nussbaum, Tom Regan, and Peter Singer, who argue that nonhuman animals, like human beings, should be protected by a basic right to life), postmodernist animal ethics

(e.g. Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Donna Haraway, who are less concerned with practicable ethical measures, and more with the deconstruction of abstract, ontological boundaries across different life forms), and ecofeminist animal ethics (e.g. Marti Kheel,

Josephine Donovan, and Carol J. Adams, who aim to dismantle both the patriarchal binary between rationality and emotion in animal ethics, as well as the interrelated binaries of man/animal, man/woman).

In putting these nineteenth-century texts in contact with the divergent branches of present-day Animal Studies, I aim at all stages to do justice to the specificity of each novelist’s vision of what it means to sympathize with nonhuman animals, that is, of what an ethical concern for nonhuman life entails within these divergent paradigms of how

14 human beings relate to the rest of the animal kingdom. In both nineteenth-century and twenty-first century contexts, the question of animal ethics is a multifaceted one, one in which no single ethical system adequately addresses the myriad nuances involved in caring for creatures who can be at once remarkably similar and dissimilar to human beings. One of the goals of this dissertation, then, is to illuminate as much as possible the merits and pitfalls of these unique ethical systems in the hope of obtaining a polyphonic moral clarity regarding what it has meant, what it currently means, and what it could mean to care for animal others.

The three novelists forming the primary corpus of this dissertation have thus far been either profoundly underrepresented in the ever-evolving field of Animal Studies, or, as we shall see in the first chapter in a case like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s, profoundly misrepresented. All of them, as I will argue throughout the dissertation, fluidly blur their aesthetic concerns with their ethical ones, such that their interest in and sympathy for nonhuman animality manifests itself in a variety of significant ways in their literary practices. As such, the hope is that this dissertation will be of interest not only to those studying the literary history of animal ethics, but more broadly to those interested in the complex evolution of the nineteenth-century novel.

15 CHAPTER ONE

Anthropocentric Vegetarianism and the Natural Gift of Pork: Animal Ethics in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Études de la nature (first ed.: 1784) are undoubtedly best remembered today for having been lampooned by Gustave Flaubert, who included a paraphrased passage from the work in Bouvard et Pécuchet’s “Sottisier” (1881): “Le melon a été divisé en tranches par la nature, afin d’être mangé en famille ; la citrouille,

étant plus grosse, peut être mangée avec les voisins” (Flaubert 474). The anthropocentric finalism underlying this passage (that is, the view that all of nature is a divine gift expressly designed for human beings) is indeed the major throughline of Saint-Pierre’s natural history. The manifestations of this teleological framework in his oeuvre are both numerous and often just as remarkable as Flaubert’s favorite passage on melons.8

The present study takes as its starting point a passage in which Saint-Pierre turns his attention away from the number of slices in a melon and towards the number of teats on the udders of various mammals in order to draw similarly anthropocentric conclusions, this time with significant consequences for nonhuman animal life:

8 Flaubert’s oft-cited paraphrase hardly does justice to the actual line from the Études, which additionally considers how perfectly fruits like cherries and plums “sont taillés pour la bouche de l’homme,” as well as how pears and apples are specifically fitted “pour sa main” (Études 417).

16 [La vache] a quatre mamelles, quoiqu’elle ne porte qu’un veau et bien rarement deux, parce que ces deux mamelles superflues étaient destinées à être les nourrices du genre humain. La truie, à la vérité, n’en a que douze et elle nourrit jusqu’à quinze petits. Ici la proportion paraît défectueuse. Mais si la première a plus de mamelles qu’il n’en faut à sa famille, et si la seconde n’en a pas assez pour la sienne, c’est que l’une devait donner à l’homme la surabondance de son lait, et l’autre celle de ses petits. Par tout pays, le porc est la viande du pauvre, à moins que la religion, comme en Turquie, ou la politique, comme dans les îles de la mer du sud, ne le prive de ce bienfait de la nature. Nous observerons, avec Pline, que de toutes les chairs c’est la plus savoureuse. (Études 175)

This passage on the natural gift of surplus piglet meat might not be any more remarkable than the melons passage were it not for the fact that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is routinely championed in both nineteenth-century sources and present-day scholarship as a key figure in the propagation of vegetarian ideology in modern France. From early scholarly histories of vegetarianism like Howard Williams’ The Ethics of Diet (1883), to

Animal Studies criticism of the past decade by Ceri Crossley, Rod Preece, Pierre Serna, and Tristram Stuart,9 Saint-Pierre is framed as a pioneering vegetarian advocate and animal ethicist, with absolutely no reference being made to his unabashedly carnivorous teleological theories. And yet, the above passage is not simply some anomalous moment in Saint-Pierre’s work, nor is it just an early-career mode of thought that is subsequently replaced by his vegetarian advocacy. Later in this chapter, I will point to conceptually identical passages from his Études, L’Arcadie (1781), La Chaumière indienne (1791), and the posthumous Harmonies de la nature (1815), all of which defy the going conception of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre by explicitly presenting flesh food as a “présent de la nature” (L’Arcadie 20).

9 See: Williams 173-176; Crossley 38; Preece 224; Serna 91; Stuart 194-214.

17 The scholarship on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre as anthropocentric finalist and the scholarship on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre as vegetarian animal ethicist largely speak past one another. The central aim of this chapter is to put the two in direct dialogue and to reveal how these seemingly contradictory components of his thought ultimately cohere within the logic of his overall body of work insofar as they both serve to set human beings apart as qualitatively superior to the rest of the animal kingdom.

In section one, I will begin by exploring in detail the foundations underlying

Saint-Pierre’s reputation as an influential vegetarian thinker. In addition to revisiting his most famous pro-vegetarian passages from both his novelistic work (e.g. Paul et Virginie

[1788]) and his political essays (e.g. Vœux d’un solitaire [1789]), I will situate Saint-

Pierre within an intellectual lineage that tracks his absorption of Rousseauistic natural and ethical principles, and his subsequent legacy among the Romantics as an archetypal ami de la nature. In section two, I will then complicate this vision of Saint-Pierre by investigating not only the numerous instances in which he endorses carnivorism as a part of his teleological worldview, but also the diverse range of antagonistic positions towards nonhuman animals more broadly underwriting his oeuvre. This section will pay particularly close attention to the nature of Saint-Pierre’s (often ignored) dual literary- scientific career, and the manner in which his natural history feeds his more widely read novelistic output. In section three, I will then demonstrate how the more comprehensive evaluation of Saint-Pierre’s oeuvre afforded by the first two sections of this chapter ought to inform how we conceptualize his animal ethics.

Indeed, a closer look at Saint-Pierre’s ostensible displays of animal sympathy

(whether taking the shape of pro-vegetarian arguments or otherwise) will reveal that these

18 moments actually operate in tandem with his carnivorist teleology insomuch as both work above all to set human beings apart as morally and ontologically superior to the rest of the natural world. Nonhuman animals in Saint-Pierre, like the rest of nature, are never interesting in and of themselves, but rather exclusively in regards to how they service human beings; as Saint-Pierre writes, “tout ce qui est possible n’existe pas. Il n’y a d’existant que ce qui est utile relativement à l’homme” (Études 82). Saint-Pierre’s stance on vegetarianism readily fluctuates depending on what position will most productively service his overarching theory of human distinctiveness in a given situation: in certain cases, human beings are ennobled by an Edenic, return-to-nature spirituality and transcendent sympathy for putatively lesser animal beings; in other cases (often voiced mere chapters apart from his passages advocating vegetarianism), human beings are ennobled through their unchecked dominion over their divine animal food gifts. In both cases, animals are simply things with no significant ethical status, and animal sympathy a purely rhetorical platform upon which to showcase human virtue. Ironically, Saint-

Pierre’s compassion towards animals in certain passages consistently works in other passages to grant human beings a moral authority to rule over the animal kingdom as would-be benevolent despots—in Saint-Pierre’s pre-Romantic landscape, human beings are essentially rewarded for zoophilic sentiments with the right to subjugate and consume animals.

I. Tracing Saint-Pierre’s Vegetarian Legacy

The scholarship on Saint-Pierre’s animal ethics invariably frames his work as a conceptual extension of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s return-to-nature ideology: roughly,

19 what is natural is good, and the diet that is most natural for human beings is a vegetarian one. The reasons to align Saint-Pierre’s thought with Rousseau’s are clear. Rousseau was both a friend and mentor to Saint-Pierre, and Saint-Pierre’s entire oeuvre abounds with references not only to Rousseau’s texts, but also to private conversations between the two. 10 In his “Essai sur J.-J. Rousseau” (1818), Saint-Pierre even boasts that Rousseau once asked him to write a final, additional section of Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762), with Rousseau supposedly declaiming: “Je mourrais content […] si je laissais cet ouvrage entre vos mains” (276). Regardless of the veracity of the story, the very fact that Saint-

Pierre would advertise such a request speaks to the extent to which he wished to promote the idea that he was a legitimate heir to Rousseau.

Fittingly, as far as the question of animal ethics is concerned, the going conception of Saint-Pierre is that he does indeed pick up where Rousseau left off in works like Émile, amplifying and building upon that text’s interest in vegetarianism in order to propose a more rigorous, practically-minded version of Rousseau’s ideas.

Scholars consistently emphasize a vision of Saint-Pierre as a writer who put into practice the ideas Rousseau advocated on an abstract level with regard to vegetarianism. In Sins of the Flesh: A History of Ethical Vegetarian Thought, Rod Preece writes, “Not only was

Saint-Pierre himself a vegetarian advocate and apostle of rustic simplicity, but, so far as we can tell, unlike the master [Rousseau], he also practised what he preached” (224).

Likewise, Tristram Stuart suggests in The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of

Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern times that “[the] legacy of Rousseauist vegetarianism—which went beyond what Rousseau himself espoused—was very largely

10 For more on the nature of Saint-Pierre and Rousseau’s close (but occasionally tumultuous) relationship, see: Cook 49-52.

20 thanks to Rousseau’s young friend Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814) who developed his own nature philosophy […] with an explicit endorsement of vegetarianism” (208), emphasizing in unison with Preece that “Saint-Pierre was not just a theorist: he practiced what he preached” (212).

Since Saint-Pierre’s animal ethics is so often conceptualized as a more exacting offshoot of Rousseauism, it will be useful to briefly consider Rousseau’s writings on the question of vegetarianism before jumping into Saint-Pierre’s work. For the time being, I will focus exclusively on the passages that have earned the two authors their shared reputation as animal ethics luminaries; later in the chapter, however, I will return to

Rousseau in order to demonstrate how some of the paradoxes in Saint-Pierre’s animal ethics are likewise conceptually linked to his mentor.

* * *

Throughout his body of work, Rousseau frames vegetarianism as the diet to which human beings are most naturally suited, and, as such, the diet most in line with a virtuous life lived in harmony with nature. In Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), Rousseau examines the human digestive system in order to determine what a pre-societal human diet must have been. Noting that our dental structure is significantly flatter than that of natural carnivores, and that our developed colon is much more in keeping with that of natural herbivores, he writes: “Il semble […] que l’homme, ayant les dents et les intestins comme les ont les animaux frugivores, devrait naturellement être rangé dans cette classe” (173). Rousseau returns to this idea a few pages later in order to point out that the number of human offspring in a given litter corresponds much more closely to the smaller litters of herbivorous animals like cows,

21 sheep, and goats rather than those of carnivores like dogs, cats, and tigers, thereby providing “une nouvelle raison de tirer l’homme de la classe des animaux carnassiers et de le ranger parmi les espèces frugivores” (179).

Rousseau’s insistence that human beings are naturally herbivorous had more at stake than the purely taxonomical concern of how to classify human beings. Indeed,

Rousseau’s Discours suggests that the fact that we are herbivores by nature implies that we ought to continue to be so, and, further, that an herbivorous diet is most conducive to a peaceable, virtuous life:

On peut voir par là que je néglige bien des avantages que je pourrais faire valoir. Car la proie étant presque l’unique sujet de combat entre les animaux carnassiers, et les frugivores vivant entre eux dans une paix continuelle, si l’espèce humaine était de ce dernier genre, il est clair qu’elle aurait eu beaucoup plus de facilité à subsister dans l’état de nature, beaucoup moins de besoin et d’occasions d’en sortir. (173)

This tie between vegetarianism and a peaceable, untarnished state of nature is developed in much of Rousseau’s work, and is the dimension of his vegetarian thought that Saint-

Pierre most readily emphasizes in his own writings. In his educational treatise Émile,

Rousseau aims to raise his eponymous fictional student by using nature as a pedagogical guide, laying out the following recurring maxim: “Observez la nature, et suivez la route qu’elle vous trace” (19). Given that vegetarianism was deemed the most natural form of diet for human beings in the Discours sur l’inégalité, it necessarily becomes the best option for Émile’s physical and moral development. Accordingly, not only does

Rousseau work to prove that “le goût de la viande n’est pas naturel à l’homme” (ibid.

168), but he also suggests that the consumption of meat is directly linked to one’s moral character:

22 Il importe surtout de ne pas dénaturer ce goût primitif, et de ne point rendre les enfants carnassiers ; si ce n’est pour leur santé, c’est pour leur caractère ; car, de quelque manière qu’on explique l’expérience, il est certain que les grands mangeurs de viande sont en général cruels et féroces plus que les autres hommes ; cette observation est de tous les lieux et de tous les temps. (168)

In short, Rousseau’s suggestion is that, as a vegetarian diet is the one best suited to us by nature, it is the one that we must espouse for both our physical and moral wellbeing— conversely, to consume meat is to cultivate a cruel and ferocious temperament unnatural to human beings.

* * *

Like Rousseau, Saint-Pierre promotes vegetarianism by suggesting that what is natural is good and, just as Rousseau does above, Saint-Pierre expressly points to vegetarianism as a type of natural antidote to the risk of human cruelty. However, while

Rousseau had only touched upon these ideas, Saint-Pierre makes vegetarianism a pressing matter of Revolutionary reform in his political essay Vœux d’un solitaire.

Saint-Pierre’s Vœux were first published on their own in 1789, and subsequently included by Saint-Pierre in the 1792 edition of the Études de la nature as a conceptual extension of that project. Written in September of 1789 during the thick of Revolutionary activity, the Vœux essentially function as a series of political and educational proposals aimed at helping France navigate its way out of its violent present into a prosperous, stable future.

In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Bastille and the first wave of

Place de Grève beheadings, Saint-Pierre describes a Paris “livré à l’anarchie” and transformed into “un théâtre de carnage et d’horreur” (Vœux v). While friends of his had reached out to offer him ways of escaping from the dangers of the city, Saint-Pierre

23 boasts, “J’ai préféré de rester dans ce grand vaisseau de la capitale […] dans l’espérance de contribuer à sa tranquillité. J’ai donc tâché de calmer des esprits exaltés, […] et surtout de mettre en ordre ces Vœux pour la félicité publique” (v-vi). As a part of his efforts to curb this Parisian bloodlust, then, Saint-Pierre explicitly calls for the national adoption of vegetarianism, writing: “On accoutumera les enfants au régime végétal, comme le plus naturel à l'homme” (211), echoing Rousseau’s idea that because the diet is the one most natural for human beings, it is also the one that we ought to adopt.

Saint-Pierre details a series of arguments that point to vegetarianism as a useful tool for calming the rising violent impulses of his compatriots, suggesting that “Les peuples qui vivent de végétaux sont, de tous les hommes, les plus beaux, les plus robustes, les moins exposés aux maladies et aux passions, et ceux dont la vie dure plus longtemps.” He subsequently emphasizes a plant-based diet’s powerful effect “sur la tranquillité de l’âme” and its ability to bring out the “caractère le plus doux” in its practitioners (211-212). Accordingly, part of Saint-Pierre’s apparent motivation for vegetarianism (continuous with Rousseau’s outlook) is that a vegetarian diet contributes to a more natural, healthier, and—most importantly—more peaceful state of human existence. Saint-Pierre returns to this idea throughout his oeuvre, most notably in his

Harmonies de la nature, in which he writes that “le régime végétal […] fait fleurir la santé, la beauté, la vie, et, en calmant les passions, étend la sagacité de l’intelligence”

(vol. XI, 292).

This way of motivating a vegetarian diet similarly appears in Saint-Pierre’s much more famous novelistic output. In his sentimental bestseller Paul et Virginie, Saint-Pierre spends several pages describing the titular characters’ upbringing in the tropical climate

24 of Île de France (present-day Mauritius). In particular, Saint-Pierre refers to their “repas champêtres qui n’avaient coûté la vie à aucun animal,” describing in detail their vegetarian fare of “des calebasses pleines de lait, des oeufs frais, des gâteaux de riz sur des feuilles de bananier, des corbeilles chargées de patates, de mangues, d’oranges, de grenades, de bananes, de dattes, d’ananas” (105). As in Émile, vegetarianism is presented as an integral part of the characters’ idyllic, putatively natural education, playing a vital role in Paul and Virginie’s physical and moral development. In describing their vegetarian diet and book-free, close-to-nature education, Saint-Pierre thus writes:

Une nourriture saine et abondante développait rapidement les corps de ces deux jeunes gens, et une éducation douce peignait dans leur physionomie la pureté et le contentement de leur âme. Virginie n’avait que douze ans ; déjà sa taille était plus qu’à demi formée […] Pour Paul, on voyait déjà se développer en lui le caractère d’un homme au milieu des grâces de l’adolescence. (90)

Saint-Pierre here expounds upon Émile’s link between vegetarianism and a healthy, naturally developed sense of virtue, and the copious pages in Paul et Virginie highlighting the protagonists’ remarkable physical and spiritual beauty are all rooted in their natural, vegetarian upbringing. In his later novels, Saint-Pierre continues to include intimate vegetarian repasts as an important signifier of his vision of a virtuous domestic life, detailing in La Chaumière indienne, for instance, the meal of “des mangues, des pommes de crème, des ignames, des patates cuites sous la cendre, des bananes grillées, et un pot de riz accommodé au sucre et au lait de coco” (Saint-Pierre, Chaumière, 346) shared between the novel’s protagonist (a nameless, sage pariah) and his family.

* * *

25 Given the enormous popularity of novels like Paul et Virginie throughout the nineteenth century,11 Saint-Pierre’s vegetarian advocacy was guaranteed an immense cultural visibility. And indeed, Saint-Pierre and his mentor Rousseau exerted a considerable influence on the discussion of animal ethics from the Revolution through the mid-nineteenth century. As scholars like Éric Baratay, Pierre Serna, and Tristram Stuart have demonstrated, the image of Rousseau and Saint-Pierre as noble allies to animals looms large in the mythos of the French Revolution, and both figures did much to inspire writers and activists of the period to assimilate nonhuman animals into a broader “idée de communauté des opprimées” (Baratay, “La promotion de l’animal sensible” 151). Stuart points to revolutionists like Robert Pigott (1736-1794), John Oswald (1760-1793), and the Marquis de Valady (1766-1793), all of whom integrate, with explicit nods to

Rousseau and Saint-Pierre, the questions of vegetarianism and animal welfare into their vision of the new republic (320). Serna likewise points to the numerous dissertations written in defense of animals for the Institut de France during the First Republic, projects that consistently cite Rousseau and Saint-Pierre as key references (304).

The Romantics carried the legacy of Rousseau and Saint-Pierre as pioneering animal ethicists well into the nineteenth century. In his Portraits littéraires (1844),

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve offers a picture of Saint-Pierre that is entirely representative of the period, one that succinctly intertwines Saint-Pierre’s vegetarianism, his friendship with Rousseau, and a tear-filled sentimentality characteristic of Saint-

Pierre’s aesthetic:

11 See Cook 105 for more on Paul et Virginie’s historically unprecedented commercial success.

26 [Saint-Pierre] marquait une sympathie presque fraternelle aux divers animaux ; il y a l’histoire d’un chat, laquelle plus tard, racontée à Jean- Jacques, faisait fondre en larmes celui qui, d’après Pythagore, s’indignait que l’homme en fût venu à manger la chair des bêtes.12 […] Ces instincts sont bien de l’ami de la nature qui réalisera parmi nous quelque image d’un sage Indien, de l’écrivain sensible qui […] dans Paul et Virginie, les louera avec complaisance de leurs repas d’œufs et de laitage, ne coûtant la vie à aucun animal. (105)

Alphonse de Lamartine discusses his own childhood vegetarianism in his autobiographical Confidences (1849) (“Je ne vécus donc, jusqu’à douze ans, que de pain, de laitage, de légumes et de fruits” [Lamartine 81]), attributing his lifelong compassion for animals to the teachings of his mother, who “avait puisé ses idées sur l’éducation d’abord dans son âme, et puis dans Jean-Jacques Rousseau et dans Bernardin de Saint-

Pierre, ces deux philosophes des femmes, parce qu’ils sont les philosophes du sentiment”

(78).13 George Sand’s oeuvre, meanwhile, boasts characters like Mauprat’s (1837)

Patience, the hermit-philosopher who feels an intellectual kinship with Rousseau and

Saint-Pierre (Sand 66, 203), and who delights in practicing his (predominately) vegetarian, ascetic lifestyle in the wilderness: “sans se faire une loi d’observer le régime végétal, il éprouvait involontairement une secrète joie de pouvoir s’y adonner, et de n’avoir plus occasion de voir donner la mort tous les jours à des animaux innocents” (65).

Saint-Pierre’s image as a devoted animal ethicist was then cemented by his inclusion in Howard Williams’ The Ethics of Diet (1883), one of the first scholarly

12 The “histoire d’un chat” is an allusion to a conversation between Saint-Pierre and Rousseau in which the former recounts how he once nursed a sickly stray cat back to health over several weeks. The story is told in “Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre” (1818) by Louis-Aimé Martin (1782-1842), Saint-Pierre’s friend and the editor of his posthumous complete works.

13 See Crossley 99-120 for an in-depth study of Lamartine’s vegetarianism in his autobiographical and fictional works, most notably his novel in verse La chute d’un ange (1838).

27 histories of vegetarianism and a work so influential that its 1892 Russian translation contains a preface by Leo Tolstoy. Williams’ text, which primarily relates some of the key passages from Paul et Virginie and Voeux d’un solitaire referenced above, continues to be cited by animal ethics scholars (Stuart 574) and Saint-Pierre specialists (Thibault,

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre 238) alike in discussions of Saint-Pierre’s vegetarianism.

This historical perception of Saint-Pierre is further substantiated by passages throughout his oeuvre in which he exhibits a genuine interest in animality and animal welfare. In the Études, he calls into question mammalian vivisection (“J’observerai ici que les expériences cruelles que l’on fait chaque jour sur les bêtes, pour découvrir ces correspondances secrètes de la nature, ne font qu’y jeter de plus grands voiles” [286]). La

Chaumière indienne, L’Arcadie, and Paul et Virginie all showcase deeply sentimental relationships between humans and dogs, who are explicitly integrated into Saint-Pierre’s vision of domestic happiness (the protagonist of La Chaumière indienne, for instance, insists that “jusqu’au chien prenait part au bonheur commun” [347]). Saint-Pierre also argues passionately in favor of animal intelligence, criticizing the Cartesian theory of the unthinking animal-machine as a product of philosophers who are “infidèles au témoignage de leur raison et de leur conscience” (Études 60). Given the wealth of supporting evidence, it is perhaps unsurprising that Saint-Pierre’s animal sympathy and vegetarian thought have essentially been taken for granted, and have received virtually no critical reevaluation.

Having traced the foundations of Saint-Pierre’s vegetarian legacy from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day, I will now demonstrate how his animal ethics are much more ambivalent than the critical literature would suggest. Importantly, this

28 ambivalence is not just a fleeting moral inconsistency that can be facilely brushed aside; rather, Saint-Pierre’s natural history writings meticulously construct a system that is pointedly hostile towards nonhuman animal life and expressly opposed to vegetarianism for reasons ethical, metaphysical, and even simply anatomical. As we have seen, Saint-

Pierre’s brand of animal ethics carried significant influence in the Romantic era, such that a more comprehensive understanding of his vision of human-animal relations can provide a hitherto underappreciated keystone to the nature of animal ethics discourse in early nineteenth-century France.

II. Saint-Pierre the Scientist Takes his Lunch Break

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s extensive work in natural history has been widely overshadowed in the critical literature by his (comparatively small) novelistic output. His most famous novel, Paul et Virginie, was in fact originally published in the third edition of his Études de la nature as an extension of this vast environmental treatise. As Saint-

Pierre writes in the 1804 “Préambule” to Paul et Virginie: “Il n’est au fond qu’un délassement de mes Études de la Nature, et l’application que j’ai faite de ses lois au bonheur de deux familles malheureuses” (27). The “lois” governing the Études de la nature—which ultimately inform his entire literary enterprise—are much less sympathetic towards nonhuman animals than are the passages we have explored thus far, and they are often vehemently opposed to the vegetarianism for which Saint-Pierre is famous. To begin this section, I will first contextualize Saint-Pierre’s background in the natural sciences in order to then explore the consequences of his theories on animal life.

29 Trained as an engineer-geographer at the École des ponts et chaussées, Saint-

Pierre spent the years between 1760 and 1771 on a series of expeditions that would take him as far north as Arctic Finland and as far south as Île de France.14 The copious geological, botanical, and zoological observations recorded over the course of his travels would go on to form the substance of his numerous writings on natural history, from

Voyage à l’Île de France (1773) to the posthumous Harmonies de la nature.

While his novels are often read independently from his scientific writings today,

Saint-Pierre consistently worked to unify both dimensions of his work during his lifetime.

Not only did he publish all of his novels within the various editions of his Études de la nature as a means of affirming their conceptual unity, but his public persona thoroughly blended his identities as a scientist and writer. As such, Saint-Pierre’s résumé boasts prestigious positions that emphasize both facets of his career: from 1792 to 1793, he worked as intendant of the Jardin du roi, a highly sought-after position previously held by the French Enlightenment’s most celebrated natural scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc,

Comte de Buffon; from 1794 to 1795, he was subsequently employed as Professor of

Morals at the newly established École normale supérieure. Throughout his career, Saint-

Pierre’s scientific and literary pursuits were inextricably linked.

Saint-Pierre’s rather substantial scientific credentials notwithstanding, both his

Études de la nature and, more broadly, his image as natural historian fell largely out of critical favor over the course of the twentieth century. Recent scholarship, however, has found compelling ways of rehabilitating his contributions within the history of the life

14 See Thibault for a comprehensive biographical study of Saint-Pierre’s engineering years.

30 sciences. Most significantly, environmental historians like Richard H. Grove, as well as literary critics like Giulia Pacini, Roselyne Rey, and Colas Duflo have highlighted the

“perspectives écologistes avant la lettre”15 underlying Saint-Pierre’s appreciation of the interdependence between animals, plants, and minerals within what we would now call an ecosystem.

Indeed, Saint-Pierre’s natural history repeatedly insists that “Pour étudier la nature avec intelligence, il en faut lier toutes les parties ensemble” (Études 259), calling into question modern science’s rigidly taxonomical (and often rigidly taxidermic16) impulse to study organisms in isolation. Thus does Saint-Pierre criticize ornithologists, for instance, for failing to study bird species in relation to the other entities within their particular habitats: “ceux qui ont écrit l’histoire des oiseaux, les ont classés par les pieds, les becs et les narines. Quelquefois ils parlent des saisons où ils paraissent, mais presque jamais des arbres où ils vivent” (ibid., 398). Saint-Pierre’s natural history thus treats all of nature as a perfect equilibrium of interdependent entities that would fall apart if any single item were changed. Saint-Pierre’s sense of environmental harmony and his repeated insistence that “Tout est lié dans la nature” (ibid., 323) do indeed occasionally lead him towards provocative reflections on ecological stability in his work. Grove, for example, justifiably frames Saint-Pierre’s writings on the wide-ranging, interspecies consequences of French deforestation in Mauritius as “among the earliest fully

15 Duflo 8. Also see: Pacini 93; Grove 248, Rey 329.

16 “Quel spectacle nous présentent nos collections d’animaux, dans nos cabinets ? En vain l’art des Daubentons leur rend une apparence de vie […] Pour bien juger du spectacle magnifique de la nature, il faut en laisser chaque objet à sa place” (Études 64-65).

31 developed, fully argued and fully evidenced critiques of the European impact on tropic nature” (248).

This focus on the complex interrelatedness of diverse life forms was precisely the aspect of Saint-Pierre’s thought that was most valued by his scientific contemporaries. In a letter to the German chemist Christoph Heinrich Pfaff (1773-1852), the famous zoologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) detailed his intentions of writing a book on natural history that would closely examine “les rapports de tous les

êtres existants avec le reste de la nature, et montrer surtout leur part dans l’économie de ce grand Tout” (Cuvier, Lettres 71). After explaining how several of the most hallowed names in the history of the life sciences (from Aristotle through Linnaeus and Buffon) had fallen short of his vision, Cuvier brings up Saint-Pierre’s name as someone in step with his intended project. As Jean-Marc Drouin points out, however, Cuvier’s endorsement is also decidedly ambivalent, and ultimately representative of “l’attitude à la fois nuancée et critique” (79) of many of Saint-Pierre’s scientific contemporaries in regards to his work. Cuvier’s letter to Pfaff thus reads: “Les Études de la nature de

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, que je te conseille d’acheter […] répondent jusqu’à un certain point à mes idées ; mais l’auteur avait trop peu de connaissances, ce qui le fait tomber dans une foule de théories absurdes” (Cuvier, Lettres 73).

Gabriel-Robert Thibault reminds us that the geographer Alexander von Humboldt

(1769-1859) was another illustrious contemporary who appreciated various aspects of the

Études de la nature, seeing therein the conceptual groundwork of fields like

32 geobiology.17 Like Cuvier, however, Humboldt’s reaction to Saint-Pierre is decidedly mixed, with Humboldt’s Cosmos (1845-1862) admiring the Études’ nuanced landscape descriptions while lamenting the fact that they are “unfortunately disfigured by wild theories and erroneous physical opinions” (76-77).18

* * *

As sophisticated as Saint-Pierre’s proto-ecological insights may sometimes be, one of the main reasons we continually run into phrases like “théories absurdes” or

“erroneous physical opinions” is Saint-Pierre’s often heavy-handed insistence on proving that all of these intricate environmental harmonies are designed to be at the service of human beings: as he unambiguously and unabashedly declares in the Études, “Toutes ces harmonies sont faites pour l’homme” (299). Building upon a tradition of anthropocentric finalism found among Catholic theologians like François Fénelon (1651-1715) and the abbé Pluche (1688-1761),19 Saint-Pierre’s scientific work is everywhere infused with a religious conception of nature as a benevolent, harmonious force specifically designed for human beings to flourish.

17 Thibault, “Science de l’ingénieur et théologie naturelle dans l’œuvre de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre” 156. Thibault goes on to remark (a bit overzealously) that “il est également possible d’y lire [l’intuition] de l’écologie, de la géographie du paysage, du concept de biosphère” (ibid.).

18 See Masseau 73-4 for more on Saint-Pierre’s reputation as a scientist among his contemporaries.

19 See Baratay’s L’Église et l’animal for a discussion of “un finalisme extrême” (102) in eighteenth-century French Catholic thought.

33 Saint-Pierre never fully committed to any specific denomination of Christianity,20 but he is very explicit about the Christian underpinnings of his work, and he does not hesitate to reference Christian dogma in order to anchor his points. When conceptualizing the relationship between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom, Saint-Pierre turns directly to the Book of Genesis in order to affirm humanity’s dominion over all other animals:

L’auteur de la nature a réuni dans l’homme tous les genres de beautés, il en a formé un assemblage si merveilleux, que les animaux, dans leur état naturel, sont frappés à sa vue d’amour ou de crainte […]. Ainsi s’accomplit encore cette parole qui lui donna l’empire dès les premiers jours du monde: “Que tous les animaux de la terre et tous les oiseaux du ciel soient frappés de terreur, et tremblent devant vous avec tout ce qui meut sur la terre. J’ai mis entre vos mains tous les poissons de la mer.” 21

Indeed, the Christian foundation of Saint-Pierre’s work is particularly salient in his vision of human-animal relations. Saint-Pierre specifically admires Christianity for being the only religion to suitably place all animal life at humanity’s feet. While other religions like “Le paganisme, le judaïsme, le mahométisme, ont tous défendu l’usage de quelque espèce d’animal, en sorte que si une de ces religions était universelle, elle entraînerait, ou sa destruction totale, ou sa multiplication à l’infini,” Saint-Pierre declares that “La religion chrétienne permet seule l’usage nécessaire de tous les animaux” (ibid.,

201). This last passage concisely encapsulates the often-laborious hybrid of religious and ecological thought directing Saint-Pierre’s work. Under the banner of a concern for environmental stability (i.e. the concern that the world would become overrun with pigs or cows if all human beings adopted some non-Christian, religious abstention from

20 See Wiedemeier 185-194 for Saint-Pierre’s strained relationship to the clergy.

21 Études 74. Saint-Pierre’s text cites Genesis 10.2.

34 meat…), Saint-Pierre invokes a religious imperative for human beings to take advantage of the generous bounty of animal life on offer in nature. With this anthropocentric foundation in place, much of the work of Saint-Pierre’s environmental studies then becomes a matter of describing the specifics of how the natural world, including animal life, serves human beings.

* * *

In the introduction to this chapter, we considered the example of the sow that gives birth to more piglets than its udder can naturally feed at a time, a phenomenon that suggests to Saint-Pierre that these piglets are designed to be consumed by human beings.

In the first place, this example is noteworthy for just how brazenly it defies the narrative of Saint-Pierre as a stalwart vegetarian advocate. In the second place, this example is illuminating insomuch as the pig was already at the center of a debate concerning the idea of finalism in natural history during Saint-Pierre’s lifetime.

In his article on “Le cochon, le cochon de Siam, et le sanglier” (1755), Buffon had already detected some apparent irregularities in the pig’s anatomical makeup, including

Saint-Pierre’s observation that sows routinely produce litters that exceed the number of teats on their udders. For Buffon, this was an obvious sign that the doctrine of finalism was fundamentally flawed, for why else would nature produce these superfluous piglets?

As Buffon writes:

Pourquoi dans la truie, qui souvent produit dix-huit, et même vingt petits, n’y a-t-il que douze mamelles, souvent moins, et jamais plus ? ceci ne prouve-t-il pas que ce n’est point par des causes finales que nous pouvons juger des ouvrages de la Nature, que nous ne devons pas lui prêter d’aussi petites vues, la faire agir par des convenances morales […] ? (L’histoire naturelle 624-625)

35 Buffon thus categorically rejects the notion of final causes based on the pig’s seemingly imperfect piglet-to-teat ratio.22 Saint-Pierre, however, appears to take Buffon’s article as an intellectual challenge. Nature is not imperfect for this apparent abnormality, argues Saint-Pierre; rather, nature’s perfection is evidenced precisely by this peculiar feature of pigs, which is actually not abnormal at all insomuch as it follows nature’s first law of serving human beings (in this case with fresh pork). Indeed, Saint-Pierre repeatedly affirms that nature can often seem to defy its own laws in order to provide for human beings. When examining the irregular growing pattern of the double-flowered rose, for instance, which certain botanists “ont osé qualifier de monstre, quoiqu’elle soit la plus belle des fleurs,” Saint-Pierre scoffs: “Des naturalistes ont cru qu’elle sortait des lois de la nature, parce qu’elle s’écartait de leurs systèmes ; comme si la première des lois qui gouvernent le monde, n’avait pas pour objet le bonheur de l’homme !” (Études 174).

Saint-Pierre’s natural history is thus largely a series of elaborate mental gymnastics meant to show how any natural phenomenon, no matter how peculiar, has as its end goal human interest.

As animal flesh appears in nature, then, it must be made to follow la première des lois de la nature by directly benefitting human beings. Contrary to the predominant

22 For those interested in agricultural science: the figures that both Buffon and Saint- Pierre give are slightly inexact. Though a rare occurrence, pigs can have as many as eighteen teats (Bullard et al., 403), and the excessively large litters Buffon and Saint- Pierre mention are more the exception than they are the norm (ibid., 412). Nevertheless, contemporary research does confirm both writers’ findings that sows are rarely able to support all of their offspring, but the phenomenon appears to be linked more to “siblicidal aggression” than it is a deficient piglet-to-teat ratio: “There is a strong neonatal competition for teats even when the number of functional teats equals the number of offspring […] During this competition, some piglets will […] give up fighting after several unsuccessful attempts, and within 2 or 3 days, they will starve to death” (Andersen et al., 1160).

36 narrative regarding his career, Saint-Pierre’s oeuvre is thus filled with passages of ardent meat apologism. Saint-Pierre undertakes this task with not only a palpable enthusiasm (in his discussion of pig meat, he asserts that one can distinguish in pork “jusqu’à cinquante goûts différents” [ibid., 175]), but also a no-stone-left-unturned comprehensiveness, scouring the animal kingdom for example after example to prove his point that nature is entirely designed for human beings. We will consider here a few such examples in order to demonstrate just how pervasive this finalist carnivorism is at all stages of Saint-

Pierre’s career.

As early as his first novel, L’Arcadie (1781), which was written concurrently with his preparations for the Études, Saint-Pierre begins integrating his developing natural history theories into his novelistic work. While tracing the protagonist Amasis’ journey from Egypt to Gaul, Saint-Pierre tracks the migrational patterns of various animal species in order to highlight “une merveille de la providence des Dieux, qui dans les lieux les plus stériles, sait nourrir les hommes de mille manières différentes” (19-20). A recurring point in the novel is that nature cares for human beings in even the harshest of climates by graciously providing edible animals to compensate for any lack of vegetation. When

Amasis passes through the rocky, barren Mediterranean islands of Mélite and Enosis,

Saint-Pierre describes desolate landscapes that offer “presque rien pour la subsistance des hommes et des animaux” (19). Nature holds fast to its first law of providing for human beings, however, delivering “une quantité prodigieuse de cailles” (ibid.) to Mélite every autumnal equinox, thanks to the quails’ annual migration from Africa to Europe. Saint-

Pierre specifically refers to these birds as a “présent de la nature” (20), and the gift is a particularly easy one for its human recipients to enjoy: “Quand elles arrivent dans l’île,

37 elles sont si fatiguées, qu’on les prend à la main. Un homme en peut ramasser dans un jour, plus qu’il n’en peut manger dans une année” (19). In L’Arcadie alone, Saint-Pierre points to two other similar examples highlighting the salvational dimension of animal food for human beings: on the uncultivable Enosis islands, he describes the vast quantity of tuna that swim conveniently close to the shore while migrating from the Atlantic to the

Mediterranean, passing by “en si grande quantité […] que leurs habitants sont occupés nuit et jour à les pêcher” (20). When Amasis finally reaches Gaul, meanwhile, Saint-

Pierre describes the herds of woodland creatures that willingly approach the Gaulish settlements during the harsh winter months in order to offer their bodies as food and clothing: “L’hiver est pour ces peuples septentrionaux le temps des festins et de l’abondance. Les oiseaux de rivière, les élans, les taureaux sauvages, les lièvres, les cerfs, les sangliers abondent alors dans leurs forêts, et s’approchent de leurs cabanes. On en tue des quantités prodigieuses” (46-47). In Saint-Pierre’s universe, nonhuman animals readily sacrifice themselves in order to serve human beings.

Saint-Pierre is particularly invested in detailing the ways that animals come to humanity’s aid in these sorts of barren climates as the inhospitality of these milieus would otherwise present a challenge to his vision of a natural world that is fundamentally benevolent to human beings. Later in the Études, Saint-Pierre implores the French to send out fishing expeditions to the frigid North Sea, where “la Providence donne à l’Europe, d’une main si libérale, les poissons peut-être les plus friands de la mer” (166). Tracking this time the migrational patterns of herring, whose route along the Scandinavian coastline mimics the tuna migrations he had observed in L’Arcadie, Saint-Pierre notes that herring are both easy to catch and easy to conserve because of their cold climate and

38 their ability to retain much of their flavor with salt, declaring: “Il semble que la nature ait voulu faire participer, par ce moyen, tous les peuples de la terre à l’abondance des pêches qui sortent des zones glaciales” (167). As this abundant supply of herring is also closely accompanied by delicious natural predators like sea lions, whose flesh is “aussi belle et aussi blanche que celle d’agneau, et très bonne à manger fraiche” (ibid.), Saint-Pierre winds up presenting the North Sea as some sort of divine refrigerator that the French ought to take advantage of. In his “Mémoire sur la nécessité de joindre une ménagerie au

Jardin des plantes de Paris” (1792), Saint-Pierre goes so far as to justify the very study of zoology by invoking the importance of these herring, presenting the fish not as living creatures, but rather as a valuable “élément” in nature that merits closer inspection: “le hareng […] fait la richesse de plusieurs nations. L’histoire naturelle doit donc s’occuper des productions d’un élément qui procure tant d’avantages aux hommes” (“Ménagerie”

336).

Saint-Pierre pushes this brand of anthropocentric finalism to its apogee in his posthumous Harmonies de la nature when describing the harsh Lapland winters he experienced firsthand during his travels through Finland. While he points to all sorts of mammals, fish, and birds who swoop in to offer their flesh and fur, he draws particular attention to the whale, whose blubber, bones, organs, and oil are perfectly designed to take care of all basic human needs for food, shelter, and clothing (vol. XI, 169). For

Saint-Pierre, the whale presents a harmonious counterpart to the unforgiving northern climate, transforming what could have been a bleak picture into yet another example of nature’s benevolence towards human beings: “C’est elle [la nature] qui a fait vivre le plus grand des animaux aux lieux où expire la puissance végétale, et qui a renfermé sous le

39 cuir de la baleine tout ce qui était nécessaire aux besoins de l’homme, afin qu’il n’y eût pas sur le globe un point où un être intelligent et sensible ne pût jouir de ses harmonies”

(170).

One does not have to find oneself in such extreme climes in order to take advantage of such animal gifts, however. Despite the fact that Saint-Pierre describes vegetarianism as the diet that is most natural to human beings in Paul et Virginie and

Vœux d’un solitaire, his natural history texts insist, on the contrary, that human anatomy is specifically organized for an omnivorous diet. Contra his mentor Rousseau’s thoughts on the human digestive system, Saint-Pierre notes “L’homme a, à lui seul, des lèvres, une langue, des sucs gastriques, des dents incisives, canines et molaires, un œsophage, un estomac, des intestins ; et, par ces divers moyens réunis, il s’approprie et digère tous les aliments” (Harmonies, vol. XI, 288). As always with Saint-Pierre, this anatomical observation is an extension of his anthropocentric finalism—if human beings can digest every type of food, it is because every type of food is meant to feed human beings.

Omnivorousness is indeed the only viable option for human beings to retain their privileged position at the center of the natural world, a point that Saint-Pierre is very clear about in Harmonies:

L’homme réunit en lui tous [les goûts] des animaux. Il s’approprie leurs aliments, et il les combine de toutes les manières pour en tirer des jouissances. Nous l’avons déjà dit, et nous ne saurions trop le répéter, les divers genres d’animaux n’ont que des rayons des divers genres de sensations ; l’homme en a la sphère entière : c’est cette universalité qui le distingue d’eux, même physiquement, en l’harmoniant seul avec toute la nature. (287-288)

Omnivorousness thus becomes an essential component of Saint-Pierre’s idea that all of nature is designed for human beings, for otherwise, what purpose could all of that

40 edible animal flesh in the world serve? Despite his arguments in favor of vegetarianism elsewhere, the spiritual superiority of human beings central to Saint-Pierre’s entire system is then at least partially dependent upon the consumption of meat.

The rest of Saint-Pierre’s work oscillates between his carnivorist, anthropocentric finalism and his vegetarian advocacy in a seemingly indiscriminate manner. If, as we saw in section one, vegetarianism is key to the portrayal of an idyllic domestic life in La

Chaumière indienne, the novel simultaneously derides Brahmans for “s’abstenir d’une multitude de jouissances innocentes” in abstaining from animal products (380, emphasis mine); ironically, as we saw above, these sorts of remarks did not prevent Sainte-Beuve from describing Saint-Pierre as “quelque image d’un sage Indien” (105). Even Paul et

Virginie’s famous “repas champêtres qui n’avaient coûté la vie à aucun animal,” the segment in Saint-Pierre’s œuvre most frequently cited by contemporaries and present-day scholars in discussions of his animal ethics, is followed a mere handful of pages later by a family meal in which all of the characters go fishing for “des cabots, des polypes, des rougets, des langoustes, des chevrettes, des crabes, des oursins, des huîtres, et des coquillages de toute espèce” (108). Certain critics have offered precarious explanations for Paul and Virginie’s sudden shift in diet. Stuart points to other passages in Saint-

Pierre’s work in which shellfish are described as an “ecologically efficient resource, which may explain why they were the only animals Saint-Pierre allowed Paul and

Virginie to eat” (212); Preece qualifies his discussion of Saint-Pierre’s vegetarianism by simply stating: “a skeptic might consider it probable that he was no more than a pesco- vegetarian who dined on shell fish” (224). Both of these explanations, however, completely ignore the teleological foundations of Saint-Pierre’s natural history texts

41 written before, concurrently with, and after Paul et Virginie: the eating of shellfish is not some exceptional moment in Saint-Pierre’s oeuvre, but rather entirely in keeping with his treatment of pigs, deer, elk, whales, tuna, quail, and a wide range of other animals, all of which Saint-Pierre carefully studies in order to prove how they are designed to be eaten by humans.

* * *

In a stunning moment of self-contradiction in his Études, Saint-Pierre insists that human beings are naturally omnivorous creatures, vehemently rejecting all the health benefits that elsewhere he attributes to a vegetarian diet. In the following passage, Saint-

Pierre explicitly denounces le régime végétal while suggesting that human beings, as inherently spiritual creatures, are so qualitatively distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom that their wellbeing depends not on material things like food, but rather exclusively spiritual, moral factors:

Je rejette absolument les raisonnements qui attachent à l’usage du régime végétal la durée de la vie humaine. La vie de l’homme est le résultat de toutes les convenances morales, et tient plus à la sobriété, à la tempérance et aux autres vertus, qu’à la nature des aliments. […] La vie a un terme fixé pour chaque genre d’animal, et un régime qui lui est propre ; celle de l’homme seul s’étend à tout. Le Tartare vit de chair crue de cheval, le Hollandais de poissons, un autre peuple de racines, un autre de laitage, et par tout pays on trouve des vieillards. (Études, 251-252)

The Christian undertones of this passage are clear. While Saint-Pierre does not directly cite scripture as he does elsewhere, his argument is conceptually in keeping with passages from the Gospel of Matthew (“Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man” [KJV, Matthew

15:11]), or the Book of Acts, in which God grants Saint Peter the right to eat various animals that were originally considered unclean in the Old Testament (“Rise, Peter; kill,

42 and eat […] What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common” [KJV, Acts 10:15]).

Saint-Pierre is particularly in accord with this last passage from the Book of Acts as he is all too eager to distance his brand of Christianity from the Old Testament’s stance on pork: “il y a dans l’Ancien Testament quantité de conseils qui ne sont pas pour nous. […]

Par exemple, dans le Lévitique, il est défendu de manger de la chair de porc” (Études

219). Within the logic of his Christian framework, material food (animal-based or otherwise) ought not have any significant impact on the predominately spiritual creatures that Saint-Pierre takes humans to be—thus does he go on to declare even more adamantly in the Études: “je suis persuadé que les affections morales s’étendent si loin pour les hommes, que je ne crois pas qu’il y ait une seule maladie qui ne leur doive son origine”

(252).

What is particularly remarkable about Saint-Pierre’s argument is not just the extent to which it conflicts with passages like the ones we considered earlier from Vœux d’un solitaire in which he praises the life-extending, spiritual benefits of a vegetarian diet, but also the extent to which he seems to be oblivious to these moments of self- contradiction. While Saint-Pierre did make slight revisions to the Études de la nature across the numerous editions of the text (mostly in the form of new proofs for his infamous and hotly contested theory on tidal movement),23 he never altered any of his

23 Saint-Pierre’s theory on tidal movement, which argues that the tides are a result of the alternating melting of the poles, was by far the aspect of his thought that encountered the most backlash from his contemporaries in the scientific community—see Cook 95-97 for more on Saint-Pierre’s lifelong defense of the theory in letters and the revised editions of the Études.

43 carnivorist or anti-vegetarian arguments.24 In the post-1792 editions of the Études de la nature, which incorporate the Vœux as a supplementary extension of the larger work, the

Études’ indignation towards vegetarianism is made to sit right alongside the Vœux’s vegetarian advocacy. Saint-Pierre even suggests that the conceptual unity of the Études and the Vœux is so strong that he is mostly worried about repeating himself too much across the two, ultimately suggesting that these repetitions are justified given the importance of his message: “Dans mes Etudes de la Nature, imprimées pour la première fois en décembre 1784, j’ai formé la plupart des vœux que je publie aujourd’hui, en septembre 1789. J’y serai tombé sans doute dans quelques redites : mais les objets de ces vœux […] sont si importants, qu’on ne saurait trop les répéter” (Vœux, i).

Honoring Saint-Pierre’s claims to theoretical consistency and uniformity across his body of work, the following section will attempt to offer a reconciliation of his constantly shifting, seemingly incompatible stances on human diet. Saint-Pierre’s intellectual commitments to carnivorism and vegetarianism, as I will demonstrate, are less disparate than they might initially appear, as they ultimately constitute two sides of the same anthropocentric coin: the two forms of diet offer a pairing of contradictory means working in tandem towards essentially the same end, that of maintaining an interspecies hierarchy in which human beings are both ontologically and morally superior to the rest of the animal kingdom.

24 For more information regarding the Études’ publishing history, see the “Éditions consultées” section of Colas Duflo’s 2007 critical edition of Études de la nature (29-30).

44 III. You Can Have Your (Crab) Cake and Eat it Too

As we have seen in the first two sections of this chapter, if Rousseau’s Edenic conception of vegetarianism is attractive to Saint-Pierre for its numerous physical and moral health benefits and its imagery of a naturally virtuous humanity, he is nevertheless cautious with the idea because of two interrelated questions: 1) Can vegetarianism really be the healthiest and most natural human diet if there are all sorts of animal food sources that would be entirely superfluous (and thus imperfect) if they were not able to benefit human beings?; and 2) Can the type of food human beings consume even have any significant bearing on our physical or moral health if we are primarily spiritual creatures whose constitutions should be affected primarily by immaterial, spiritual factors?

Saint-Pierre may approach the question of vegetarianism from a myriad of contradictory angles, but for all his wrestling with the issue, it is important to note that in all cases the moral considerability of nonhuman animals is nowhere to be found. Even in the most unequivocal moments of his vegetarian advocacy, Saint-Pierre sidesteps the ethical question of how we ought to treat nonhuman animals, focusing instead on the physical and spiritual health benefits that human beings stand to gain through vegetarianism. While he can detail at length the positive effects of vegetarianism “sur la beauté du corps & sur la tranquillité de l'âme” (Vœux 212)—although even this point, as we have seen, is one that he vacillates on—the nonhuman animals to be consumed or spared are given no ethical status. Nonhuman animals necessarily come second to la première des lois de la nature, and thus become literally disposable in Saint-Pierre’s work: the choice between vegetarianism and carnivorism is to be made entirely based on

45 which diet will better serve human beings, regardless of the consequences for other animals.

This purely anthropocentric focus is detectable in all other dimensions of Saint-

Pierre’s animal ethics. If he is indeed critical of vivisectionist experimentation, he is primarily opposed to the practice not for the actual harm being done to animals, but rather because vivisection risks inspiring future acts of human cruelty (“Ces moyens barbares de notre physique moderne ont une influence encore plus funeste sur le moral de ceux qui les emploient ; car ils leur inspirent, avec de fausses lumières, le plus atroce des vices, qui est la cruauté” [Études 287]). Likewise, while Saint-Pierre makes compelling and generous arguments in favor of animal intelligence, animal ingenuity exists only to serve human beings, as is the case with Paul et Virginie’s aptly named dog Fidèle, who boasts a preternatural ability to assess its masters’ needs (P et V 97).

On its face, of course, the motivating factors of Saint-Pierre’s vegetarianism might not seem inherently consequential. After all, if his work does genuinely espouse vegetarianism in key passages (albeit inconsistently), and if he did indeed inspire future generations of French thinkers to take up vegetarianism in the name of animal ethics, is the anthropocentric bent of his own views all that important?

Among contemporary animal rights ethicists like Tom Regan and Martha

Nussbaum, this anthropocentric approach to animal welfare is known as an “indirect duty” view (Regan 183; Nussbaum 300), a type of view most famously espoused by

Saint-Pierre’s contemporary, Immanuel Kant. In his Lectures on Ethics (1784-1785),

Kant argues that “Our duties toward animals are merely indirect duties toward humanity,” suggesting that cruelty toward animals cannot be an ethical failure in one’s

46 duty to them, but rather an ethical failure toward oneself and human society because anyone who inflicts such violence “damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men” (Kant 212). While their respective philosophical systems share little else, Kant is in step with Saint-Pierre in declaring that animals “are there merely as means to an end. That end is man” (ibid.). The only difference between the two in this regard is that Kant makes his case based on the belief that “Animals are not self- conscious” (ibid.), and are thus incapable of rationally participating in a moral economy, whereas Saint-Pierre does so as part of his overarching teleological natural history.

In theory, an indirect duty view does not have to be antagonistic toward animals; on the contrary, despite denying animals any moral considerability of their own, Kant nevertheless sets up a moral imperative to treat them with compassion—again, in the interest of human societal wellbeing, “one must practice kindness toward animals” (ibid., emphasis mine). Upon closer inspection, however, these sorts of indirect duty views leave open the possibility of egregious violence not only toward animals, but also toward all types of human “moral patients,” that is, human beings whose cognitive faculties are sufficiently narrow so as to exclude them from the realm of “moral agents” capable of consciously engaging in a social contract (Regan 183). In perhaps the most straightforward critique of a Kantian indirect duty view, Robert Nozick points out a wide range of scenarios in which it is by no means a forgone conclusion that cruelty toward animals would necessarily cultivate a sense of cruelty toward humans. As there is such a hard and fast distinction between rational human beings and irrational nonhuman animals

47 within Kant’s ontological hierarchy, Nozick astutely points out that it ought to be fairly easy to keep this difference in mind when performing acts of animal cruelty: “If it is, in itself, perfectly all right to do anything at all to animals for any reason whatsoever, then provided a person realizes the clear line between animals and persons and keeps it in mind as he acts, why should killing animals brutalize him and make him more likely to harm or kill persons?” (Nozick 36). As Regan emphasizes when juxtaposing his own rights-based animal ethics to Kant’s indirect duty view of animal welfare, in order for it to be the case that cruelty toward animals would necessarily lead to cruelty against humans, the similarities between human and nonhuman animal suffering would have to be so marked (i.e. the manifestations of suffering would have to elicit a similar sensation in the inflictor of violence), that to deny animals moral considerability would become arbitrary and unconscionable: “Otherwise we flaunt the requirement of formal justice: we allow dissimilar treatment of relevantly similar cases” (Regan 183). The all too easy justifications of wanton cruelty toward nonhuman animals within an indirect duty view have made it so that many of the more serious attempts at constructing a rights-based animal ethics in contemporary analytic philosophy have begun by contrasting the rigor of animal rights to Kant’s seemingly innocuous, but ultimately grossly insufficient, model of animal welfare.25

In Saint-Pierre, who asserts that “la férocité à l’égard des hommes commence souvent son apprentissage par celle qu’il voit exercer sur les animaux” (“Ménagerie”

347), we essentially get to see an indirect duty view unravel in real time. Vegetarianism is all well and good when its putatively pacifying effects can save Parisian society by

25 See: Nussbaum 300; Regan 183.

48 reducing the violent impulses in the bloodthirsty Revolutionaries of Vœux d’un solitaire; however, when this same vegetarianism interferes with humanity’s ability to assert its spiritual dominion over the natural world in Études de la nature or Harmonies de la nature (i.e. when a position of animal welfare no longer offers any indirect benefits for human beings, but rather deprives humanity of the very proof that all of nature is a divine gift for human beings), Saint-Pierre enthusiastically encourages the consumption of animals. Saint-Pierre’s oeuvre actualizes the hypothetical shortcomings of a Kantian indirect duty view that the above animal rights scholars have acknowledged since the late-twentieth century: the indirect duty to animals disintegrates when there is no indirect benefit for humans.

Given how readily Saint-Pierre’s indirect duty view of animal ethics thus allows for (and even, in certain situations, encourages) violence against animals, his arguments for vegetarianism often amount to nothing more than a grandstanding gesture meant to underscore humanity’s spiritual superiority over other animals. Throughout the labyrinthine paradoxes of Saint-Pierre’s oeuvre, there is a muffled anxiety that human beings could risk descending into animality. In one particularly revealing passage in the

Études, Saint-Pierre vocalizes this very fear before rapidly precisifying that, even when human beings act in a supposedly animalistic manner, their divine nature continues to shine through by virtue of an elevated set of spiritual concerns: “si l’homme descend souvent par ses passions au niveau des bêtes, ses inquiétudes, ses lumières et ses affections sublimes démontrent assez qu’il est lui-même une consonance de la divinité”

(80). It is not difficult to make the leap that in Vœux d’un solitaire, the text in which

Saint-Pierre presents the most pessimistic vision of an animalistic, violent humanity

49 descended into “un théâtre de carnage et d’horreur” and the very text in which vegetarianism receives the most sustained reflection, a concern for animals is ushered in precisely as a means of highlighting these sorts of inquiétudes, lumières, and affections sublimes that supposedly distinguish human beings from other animals. In other words, when Saint-Pierre fears that humans risk becoming like animals, he ends up showing compassion toward animals precisely in order to keep humans above animals. In this regard, Saint-Pierre’s vegetarianism actually mirrors his carnivorism in its efforts to retain the spiritual distinctiveness of human beings.

* * *

The commitment to vegetarianism is thus less important than is the commitment to keeping human beings above the rest of the animal kingdom. Significantly, this dynamic is already detectable in Saint-Pierre’s mentor Rousseau; however, while Saint-

Pierre turns to vegetarianism when he is worried that Parisian Revolutionaries are becoming too animalistic, Rousseau abandons Émile’s vegetarian diet when he is concerned that his star pupil is at risk of descending into animality.

In the second half of Émile, Rousseau spots a troubling dilemma when confronted with the prospect of his student’s entrance into puberty. Unsure of how to talk to teenage

Émile about his burgeoning sexual desires, Rousseau worries on the one hand that too candid and supportive a conversation could send Émile down a path of debauchery and lasciviousness; on the other hand, an attempt to stifle Émile’s natural desires would risk throwing Émile off his course of a natural, healthy education. “Mais quel parti prendre ?,” asks Rousseau in a puritanical panic, “On ne s’attend ici qu’à l’alternative de favoriser des penchants ou de les combattre, d’être son tyran ou son complaisant ; et tous

50 deux ont de si dangereuses conséquences, qu’il n’y a que trop à balancer sur le choix”

(392-393). After some deliberation, Rousseau finally decides that Émile needs a new, all- consuming, mentally and physically draining hobby to channel his sexual energy, such that the topic of sex can be approached with a cool head. Ultimately, Rousseau decides that the only hobby that meets all of his criteria is “la chasse” (397). As he explains: “Si la chasse est jamais un plaisir innocent, si jamais elle est convenable à l’homme, c’est à présent qu’il y faut avoir recours. […] il y perdra, du moins pour un temps, les dangereux penchants qui naissent de la mollesse” (ibid.). What is most compelling here is the extent to which, in an educational treatise that goes to great lengths to explain and justify its pedagogical choices, Rousseau makes virtually no effort to do so in this instance: “Je ne veux pas que toute la jeunesse d’Émile se passe à tuer des bêtes, et je ne prétends pas même justifier en tout cette féroce passion ; il me suffit qu’elle serve assez à suspendre une passion plus dangereuse pour me faire écouter de sang-froid parlant d’elle, et me donner le temps de la peindre sans l’exciter” (398).

Rousseau is hardly concerned with resolving this contradiction between Émile the vegetarian and Émile the hunter: when Rousseau’s virtuous, puritanical conception of humanity is at risk of becoming bestial—which is to say, of descending to the level of animality through a heightened sensuality—he deems it permissible to sacrifice animal life, just as Saint-Pierre (reversing the order) turns to vegetarianism as a sort of last-ditch effort to make sure that human beings remain the perfect, entirely spiritual beings at the center of the universe he imagines them to be, and not the pack of ferocious Parisian

Revolutionaries he describes outside his window. As is Rousseau, Saint-Pierre is less concerned with the paradoxes of his writings on vegetarianism, and more concerned with

51 maintaining the moral, ontological superiority of human beings in the finalist system he defends.26 Both authors can (and do) go either way on vegetarianism; it is their anthropocentric interspecies hierarchy that is consistent.

* * *

While the scholarship on Saint-Pierre’s animal ethics has tended to smooth over his inconsistencies, scholars who have approached his work from the angle of postcolonial studies have long detected similar paradoxes within his work on human rights. Scholars like Pratima Prasad, Christopher Miller, Chris Bongie, and M.J. Muratore have explored the glaring cases of “doublespeak” (Prasad 38) in his discourse on slavery, his manner of ostensibly arguing in favor of emancipation while vigorously maintaining systems of thought that uphold and rationalize the very institution.27 Prasad has characterized Saint-Pierre’s contradictory writings on slavery accordingly:

Bernardin himself is a writer of inextricable contradictions. He is a fervent abolitionist, and yet he naturalizes the master-slave relationship in his fiction. His Voyage à l’Île de France denounces, by depicting in gruesome detail, the corporeal sufferings of slaves and the fragmentation of their families. Yet his utopian novel [Paul et Virginie] does not attempt to imagine the opposite, that is, an authentic emotional, corporeal, or familial life for its black characters. They function primarily as adjuncts without an autonomous existence, living off the ups and downs experienced by the white family they serve. […] In the end, Paul et Virginie is caught up in the web of its own impossible paradoxes. (44)

I would add to this evaluation of Saint-Pierre’s human rights discourse that his arguments in favor of abolition are marred by the same type of indirect duty views that we encountered in his writings on animal ethics. Just as Saint-Pierre (inconsistently)

26 For further explorations of the paradoxes in Rousseau’s writings on vegetarianism, see: Oliver; Wolloch.

27 See: Bongie 96; Miller 106; Muratore 264.

52 condemns vivisection and carnivorism as phenomena that can risk fostering cruel impulses toward human beings, he also argues for the abolition of slavery not in recognition of a human right to freedom, but rather in order to prevent the possibility of future white enslavement: “il est de toute nécessité que l’esclavage du peuple noir soit aboli dans nos colonies, de peur qu’un jour il ne s’étende, par l’influence de l’opinion de quelques particuliers riches, jusque sur le peuple blanc et pauvre de la métropole” (Vœux

153-154).

While the stakes are of course dramatically different, the dynamic that postcolonial scholars have pointed to in Saint-Pierre’s paternalistic writings on slavery has much to tell us about how he frames the question of animal ethics, an area of his oeuvre that is still far too commonly read (as were his abolitionist arguments up through much of the twentieth century) essentially at face value. In both cases, Saint-Pierre’s declared sympathy for those that fall outside a very narrow window of identity (white and human) is often but a self-serving gesture that belies an indifference toward (and even a desire to maintain the subjugation of) these same would-be objects of sympathy.28

* * *

While Saint-Pierre’s legacy as a vegetarian ami de la nature is an enduring one in the scholarship, it is important to note that it was by no means his only legacy among the

Romantics; indeed, his natural history also had a significant influence on early-

28 In a particularly troubling moment of grandstanding in the Études, Saint-Pierre attempts to show a sense of sympathetic solidarity toward slaves, only to off-handedly justify the entire enterprise of slavery: “À qui devons-nous l’usage du sucre, du chocolat, de tant de subsistances agréables et de tant de remèdes salutaires ? À des indiens tout nus, à de pauvres paysans, à de misérables nègres. La bêche des esclaves a fait plus de bien que l’épée des conquérants n’a fait de mal. Cependant, dans quelles places publiques sont les statues de nos obscurs bienfaiteurs ?” (95, emphasis mine).

53 nineteenth-century French thought. François-René de Chateaubriand in particular, whom scholars like Gabriel-Robert Thibault and Christina Romano have rightly described as

“L’un des premiers grands héritiers de Bernardin” (Thibault, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

398), pushed Saint-Pierre’s philosophy of nature to even more extreme displays of anthropocentrism. In Génie du Christianisme (1802), Chateaubriand dedicates multiple pages to Études de la nature and Paul et Virginie, praising them for their strong Christian virtues and their vivid descriptions of nature (299-302). Romano offers a considerable list of features in Chateaubriand’s work traceable to Saint-Pierre: on a macro level,

Chateaubriand’s insertion of Atala (1801) and René (1802) within his Génie du

Christianisme as novelistic extensions of the larger work’s Christian theories is analogous to the relationship between Paul et Virginie and Études de la nature (Romano

207); on a more micro level, Romano demonstrates how several of the most recognizable symbolic devices in Chateaubriand’s Romanticism (in particular, his fascination with ruins as a symbol of nature’s grandeur) are already visible in Études de la nature (ibid.,

209).

Missing in the scholarship on the connections between the two authors is

Chateaubriand’s equally anthropocentric finalism. Chateaubriand uses examples from across the animal kingdom, presenting cases entirely in line with Saint-Pierre’s natural history. In the fifth section of his Génie du Christianisme, “Existence de Dieu prouvée par les merveilles de la nature,” Chateaubriand insists for instance that nature strategically sends in ducks to migrate to France to serve as food “quand la terre est dépouillée,” while prettier species of birds fly in during “la saison des fruits” in order to delight the French with their colors and songs (165); later on, Chateaubriand considers

54 the migrational patterns of the North American buffalo, claiming that “Quand le temps de changer de climat est venu, pour aller porter l’abondance à des peuples sauvages, quelque buffle, conducteur des troupeaux du désert, appelle autour de lui ses fils et ses filles”

(174). The following passage is more violent than anything to be found in Saint-Pierre, and this violence is expressly called upon to defend a Saint-Pierresque interspecies hierarchy:

Ceux qui cherchent à déshériter l'homme, à lui arracher l'empire de la nature, voudraient bien prouver que rien n'est fait pour nous. Or, le chant des oiseaux, par exemple, est tellement commandé pour notre oreille, qu'on a beau persécuter les hôtes des bois, ravir leurs nids, les poursuivre, les blesser avec des armes ou dans des pièges, on peut les remplir de douleur, mais on ne peut les forcer au silence. En dépit de nous, il faut qu'ils nous charment, il faut qu'ils accomplissent l'ordre de la Providence. (154-155)

If Lamartine’s vegetarianism has readily discernible roots in Saint-Pierre, so too does Chateaubriand’s assertion that animals have no choice but to sacrifice themselves for human beings. The complicated paradoxes of Saint-Pierre’s writings on human- animal relations (both his vegetarian advocacy and his teleological carnivorism) are echoed among some of the most influential writers of the Romantic period, and it behooves the scholarship on Saint-Pierre to keep in mind this ambivalent dimension of his legacy.

While there are certainly multiple passages in which Saint-Pierre advances positions that are progressive for the time in their compassion for animals, this compassion, as we have seen, ultimately refuses animals any kind of meaningful, sustainable ethical status. Saint-Pierre’s oeuvre thus reveals the real limitations of an animal ethics in which human and nonhuman animals are conceived as two radically distinct entities. In the chapters that follow, we will consider how new ways of perceiving

55 the ontological divide (or lack thereof) between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom in the shifting scientific paradigms of the nineteenth century gave rise to new ethical possibilities for nonhuman animals. Saint-Pierre, while having indisputably galvanized certain French animal ethicists of the early nineteenth century into action, presented in his own writing a set of problematic contradictions that ultimately prove to be remarkably hostile towards nonhuman animals.

56 CHAPTER TWO

Zolian Zoology: ‘L’amour des bêtes’ and (Human-) Animal (-Machine) Ethics

Enfin le matérialiste convaincu, quoi que murmure sa propre vanité, qu’il n’est qu’une machine ou qu’un animal, ne maltraitera point ses semblables, trop instruit sur la nature de ces actions…

—Julien Offray de La Mettrie29

A genuine investment in animal ethics marks Émile Zola’s literary output at all stages of his career, occupying a central yet often overlooked space in his moral and aesthetic thought. While scholarship has often hovered on the periphery of Zola’s animal ethics, privileging instead the related issue of his Darwinian, animalized conceptualization of human character,30 critics have rarely approached his writings with a direct focus on the ethical status of actual nonhuman animals.

The general neglect of Zola’s animal sympathy, it should be noted, was something with which he was very familiar in his own lifetime: upon publishing his most comprehensive statement on the matter in the form of an article entitled “L’amour des bêtes” (Le Figaro, 24 Mar. 1896), Zola bordered upon incredulity and indignation at the influx of letters he subsequently received from Figaro readers who were pleasantly (but decidedly) surprised by his declared love of animals. When later reflecting upon the

29 La Mettrie 214.

30 See: Baguley; Bernardini; Clark; Lyle; Thiher.

57 unanticipated public response to “L’amour des bêtes” in his follow-up article “Enfin couronné” (Le Figaro, 30 May 1896), Zola let out the following shocked outburst:

“Quelle leçon de modestie, lorsqu'un beau matin, après avoir dans plus de vingt volumes parlé des bêtes avec une tendresse fraternelle, mis des bêtes en scène ainsi que des sœurs préférées, donné à la bête la place la plus large à côté de l'homme, on voit les gens s'étonner et se récrier, parce qu'ils apprennent tout d'un coup que vous les aimez !”

(“Enfin” 233).

Zola’s irritated disbelief here echoes a similar moment from his public speech “À la Séance annuelle de la Société Protectrice des Animaux” (25 May 1896) in which, mildly vexed at having been invited to speak before the SPA only after the success of this most recent article, he declares: “Ma seule surprise est de me trouver parmi vous si tard, à cinquante-six ans, lorsque, depuis trente années, je n’ai pas écrit une œuvre, sans y mettre une bête aimée, sans y parler de mes chères bêtes, dans toute l’effusion de mon cœur”

(“SPA” 18). The persistence with which he vents this frustration in public and in the press speaks to the veritable centrality he attributes to animals in his work, and, indeed, a look at his corpus reveals that Zola was not entirely unjustified in feeling slighted by his readers. From as early as 1865, Zola begins tackling the question of animal ethics in works like his fantastical “[Le vieux cheval]” (originally published as an untitled

“Chronique” in Le Petit Journal, 26 Jan. 1865), a dreamlike story in which Zola stumbles upon a talking horse who begs the young writer to come to the defense of abused workhorses:

Le travail enrichit les hommes, le travail conduit les chevaux à l’abattoir. Il y a là une injustice criante […] Nous sommes vos frères, frères simples d’esprit, et vous aurez à rendre compte un jour de l’emploi que vous aurez

58 fait de nous […] Si tu as le cœur tendre, toi qui passes dans ce chemin, répète à tes frères ce que je viens de te dire. (240)

Zola takes his talking horse’s words very seriously, proceeding in the short term to push for a more equitable “maison de retraite” (ibid.) for workhorses at the end of

“[Le vieux cheval],” and in the longer term, to reiterate throughout his body of work the

“vérité philosophique” (ibid) his horse gives him at the outset of his literary career: animals are “frères” who merit some form of ethical consideration.

Situating Zola’s interest in animality alongside his engagement with both the

Saint-Hilairian zoological influences of Honoré de Balzac’s Realism, as well as the monistic life sciences of the latter half of the nineteenth century (e.g. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, but also—prima facie paradoxically—the mechanistic physiology of the unabashed vivisectionist Claude Bernard), the present chapter will examine the foundations and parameters of Zola’s animal ethics as manifested in “L’amour des bêtes,” with an eye towards their elaboration in selections from his broader oeuvre. At the core of Zola’s animal ethics, I argue, lies an anti-hierarchical, multi-directional Human-

Animal-Machine trichotomy in which his human characters are consistently animalized and mechanized, his animal characters humanized and mechanized, and his mechanical characters (la Lison, the train from La bête humaine [1890], for instance) animalized and humanized. The three-part interchangeability of this materialist, quintessentially

Naturalist approach to character type calls into question human exceptionalism on levels both ontological and ethical, with Zola ultimately treating nonhuman animals and machines as altogether relatable objects of human sympathy.

As I will demonstrate by placing Zola’s “L’amour des bêtes” in dialogue with

René Descartes’ infamous theory of the animal-machine from the Discours de la méthode

59 (1637) in section two of this chapter, Zola’s sense of biological-mechanical continuism has the particular upshot of subverting an entire legacy of post-Cartesian thought that would deny nonhuman animals moral considerability on the grounds of their putative mechanicity; in uniting human and nonhuman creatures by way of their shared mechanical qualities, Zola’s work situates all organic life on fundamentally level footing, re-evaluating in the process the moral status of machines more broadly construed, whether steel or flesh. Ultimately blurring all forms of ontological boundary into the single, totalizing unit of “la vie universelle” (“Enfin” 236), Zola’s framework reconfigures the question of animal ethics by asking not who deserves ethical consideration (his quasi-panpsychic materialism effectively universalizes moral considerability), but how we can maximally avoid suffering of any form (irrespective of categorical distinctions like human, animal, or even mechanical) within the unified supraorganism of “la vie universelle.” As Zola solemnly declares in “Enfin Couronné”:

“Notre sort commun devant la douleur ne saurait être séparé, c'est la vie universelle qu'il s'agit de sauver du plus de souffrance possible” (236).

I. Balzac, Darwin Bernard: Tracing the Origins of the Human-Animal-Machine Trichotomy

When working to establish Les Rougon-Macquart’s conceptual unity during the series’ early planning stages, Zola drafted the illuminating (if bluntly titled) manuscript

“Différences entre Balzac et moi” (1869). Significantly, Zola’s efforts to distinguish his own project from its most conspicuous literary antecedent focus almost entirely on the question of how one ought to conceptualize the relationship between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. In the 1842 “Avant-Propos” to La Comédie humaine,

60 Balzac famously asserts that his understanding of character type “vint d’une comparaison entre l’Humanité et l’Animalité” (18), drawing from contemporaneous zoology as a means of understanding species/character formation. While Zola admires and draws influence from Balzac’s turn to the life sciences, he spends the bulk of “Différences entre

Balzac et moi” chastising Balzac precisely for not doing enough to bring out the biological, animal nature of La Comédie humaine’s characters, emphasizing how his own

Naturalist project will push things much further. Balzac’s “Avant-Propos” and Zola’s criticisms thereof merit attention here as they demonstrate not only the extent to which

Zola’s Naturalism takes seriously the idea of a human-animal continuism, but also the manner in which this sense of continuism ultimately extends beyond animal life so as to further encompass material things.

* * *

Taken in the narrowest sense, Balzac’s writings might not have the same explicitly scientific aspirations as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s, which we considered in the preceding chapter of this dissertation. Even in its most dubious moments, Études de la nature presents itself as a text meant to contribute directly to a body of scientific knowledge through its methodological, botanical, and proto-ecological insight; Balzac’s corpus, conversely, is at least prima facie entirely literary in scope. With that said, whereas Saint-Pierre’s novels serve straightforwardly as applications and demonstrations of his scientific theories, Balzac’s literary enterprise is itself a partially scientific one, one that attempts to observe and explain the sociobiological diversity of his French compatriots through novelistic analysis. In other words, Saint-Pierre’s science exists outside of and prior to Paul et Virginie: the content of his theories is proposed in Études

61 de la nature, and his novels simply provide fictional examples to accompany the real-life ones he had already detailed in his essayistic work. Balzac’s science, conversely, lies precisely in the formal component of his literary Realism’s descriptive and taxonomical analysis, his attention to the environmental factors shaping his fictional subjects. This quasi-scientific dimension of his work has become a commonly referenced subject of analysis in Balzacian studies: Allen Thiher has eloquently and convincingly described

Balzac’s literary alternative of scientific inquiry as “both a response to, and an attempt to rival, the claims to knowledge advanced by increasingly triumphant science” (6).

In his “Avant-Propos,” Balzac suggests that the conceptual tools used by zoologists to explain animal behavior ought to be just as applicable to the novelistic study of human beings. While several of the most august names in the history of science line the pages of the “Avant-Propos,” the text’s most salient theoretical anchor is the transformist unité de composition organique of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-

1844). Saint-Hilaire, whose first official position as a “sous-garde et sous-démonstrateur” in the Cabinet d’histoire naturelle was granted to him by none other than Bernardin de

Saint-Pierre in 1793,31 is most famous for his intellectual battle with Georges Cuvier

(1769-1832) in the monumental 1830 Parisian anatomical debates before the Académie des sciences. Primarily at stake within this series of public debates, followed closely by

Balzac, were questions of anatomical structure and the division of branches of animal life, with the idea of the transmutability of species gradually shifting into the debate as the discussions went on. We will consider here the basic parameters of the zoological debate as they relate to Balzac’s oeuvre and, by extension, Zola’s.

31 Saint-Hilaire, I.G. 21-22.

62 On the one hand, Cuvier maintained that all animal life could be divided among the four radically distinct embranchements of 1) animaux vertébrés, 2) animaux mollusques, 3) animaux articulés, and 4) animaux rayonnés (Cuvier, Le règne animal 57-

60). Saint-Hilaire, on the other hand, made a case for a structural analogousness between mollusks and vertebrates,32 an observation that subsequently compelled him to propose his more extreme “unité de composition organique” (Saint-Hilaire 48), a transformist theory in which all species share a single anatomical design that transforms into increasingly complex variations of species as the organs of individual organisms undergo diverse “modifications comme formes et comme fonctions dans l’influence des milieux, où ces mêmes parties sont appelées à se développer” (Saint-Hilaire 118). Saint-Hilaire thus builds upon Jean-Baptise Lamarck’s (1744-1829) theory of an environment-based transformism proposed a few years earlier in Philosophie Zoologique (1809), nuancing and explaining Lamarck’s theory by adding this idea of a universally shared, basic anatomical structure across all animal life. As Saint-Hilaire emphasizes, this framework makes it so that the distinctions across animal species become much more fluid: “Pour cet ordre de considérations, il n’est plus d’animaux divers. Un seul fait les domine, c’est comme un seul être qui apparaît. Il est, il réside dans l’Animalité ; être abstrait, qui est tangible par nos sens sous des figures diverses (22).

The debate’s subsequent lines of argument revolved around the two scientists’

32 Drawing from a now lost article by Laurencet and Meyranx, Saint-Hilaire suggests that the anatomical organization of cephalopods, decidedly members of the mollusks embranchement, is structurally analogous to that of vertebrates if one imagines both a certain vertebral “plicature” and a reconceptualization of a “lame musculaire étendue, […] laquelle occupe la région centrale des viscères” as the structural equivalent of a vertebrate diaphragm (Saint-Hilaire 44-46).

63 respective visions of anatomy. In Cuvier’s fixist, functional approach, each species has a specific, unique anatomical structure predetermined for specific functions: “ces fonctions, ces différences, s’expliquent très bien, parce qu’ils constituent l'animal ce qu'il est, parce qu’ils s’appellent ou s’excluent les uns les autres” (Cuvier, quoted in Saint-Hilaire 159).

In Saint-Hilaire’s transformist, morphological approach, meanwhile, species are the products of a single anatomical structure interacting with specific environmental influences “suffisantes pour en altérer les formes [des organes], pour en faire varier les fonctions” (Saint-Hilaire 185). The public and professional reception of the debate has been discussed at length in scholarly histories of science: as Toby A. Appel notes, while

Cuvier was more or less unofficially deemed the victor due to his professional stature, eloquent presentational demeanor, and his virtuoso handling of counterexamples, he quickly became seen in certain literary circles as a leader of a “retrograde movement of science” (199), while writers like Balzac (as well as George Sand) were “drawn toward

Geoffroy’s philosophy by its romantic, pantheistic, and unified vision of the world”

(190).

The debate’s subsequent lines of argument revolved around Cuvier’s functional approach to anatomy—i.e. the fixist idea that each species has a specific, unique anatomical structure predetermined for specific functions: “ces fonctions, ces différences, s’expliquent très bien, parce qu’ils constituent l'animal ce qu'il est, parce qu’ils s’appellent ou s’excluent les uns les autres” (Cuvier, quoted in Saint-Hilaire 159)—and

Saint-Hilaire’s morphological approach, i.e. the transformist idea that species are the products of a single anatomical structure interacting with specific environmental influences “suffisantes pour en altérer les formes [des organes], pour en faire varier les

64 fonctions” (Saint-Hilaire 185). The public and professional reception of the debate has been discussed at length in scholarly histories of science: as Toby A. Appel notes, while

Cuvier was more or less unofficially deemed the victor due to his professional stature, eloquent presentational demeanor, and his virtuoso handling of counterexamples, he quickly became seen in certain literary circles as a leader of a “retrograde movement of science” (199), while writers like Balzac (as well as George Sand) were “drawn toward

Geoffroy’s philosophy by its romantic, pantheistic, and unified vision of the world”

(190).

Indeed, in his “Avant-Propos” to La Comédie humaine, Balzac expressly celebrates Saint-Hilaire as “le vainqueur de Cuvier” (18), concentrating in turn on Saint-

Hilaire’s “unité de composition organique” as a means of understanding human character in his literary universe:

Il n’y a qu’un animal. Le créateur ne s’est servi que d’un seul et même patron pour tous les êtres organisés. L’animal est un principe qui prend sa forme extérieure, ou, pour parler plus exactement, les différences de sa forme, dans les milieux où il est appelé à se développer. Les Espèces Zoologiques résultent de ces différences […] La Société ne fait-elle pas de l’homme, suivant les milieux où son action se déploie, autant d’hommes différents qu’il y a de variétés en zoologie ? (18-19)

Drawn to the explicative importance attributed to milieu in Saint-Hilaire’s transformist theory of species formation, Balzac proposes to study the interdependence of environment and human character type in his novelistic work, thereby concretizing the

Realist precedent of describing the physical world surrounding human beings with an aesthetically revolutionary attention to detail. As Thiher emphasizes, Balzac’s treatment of his characters’ living spaces thus grants these environments the same sort of impact on human identity as more seemingly natural milieux would have on species formation in

65 Saint-Hilaire’s biological system: within Le Père Goriot (1835), for instance, “the character of the landlady explains the boarding house, and the boarding house implies the existence of the landlady” (72).

Balzac’s adherence to an unité de composition that extends all the way to human beings, his suggestion that the study of nonhuman animal life is thus largely analogous to the study of human life, entails an implicit degree of identification with nonhuman animals that does much to compromise the sort of sharp ontological divide between the human and nonhuman characteristic of Saint-Pierre’s early Romantic, anthropocentric finalism. While the dominant critical interpretations of Balzac’s zoological interests have taken seriously on some level the animalization of the human subject underlying his emphasis on milieu—Louise Lyle and Allen Thiher, for instance, see in Balzac “a discourse in which human beings are squarely recognized as part of the animal kingdom

[and in which] there is no ontological break between the natural realm and the social realm”33—Zola is manifestly skeptical about the genuine animality of Balzac’s characters.

* * *

Indeed, in “Différences entre Balzac et moi,” Zola argues that Balzac, for all his scientificity, never truly assimilates human beings to the animal kingdom, but that he instead merely maintains humans and animals as two distinct categories capable of being productively compared. While Balzac is happy to make “une comparaison entre l’Humanité et l’Animalité” (emphasis mine), he does so with an Humanité and Animalité whose majuscule “H” and “A” stay firmly intact, retaining a solid distinction between the

33 Thiher 69. See also Lyle 307.

66 two. The comparison, according to Zola, never becomes more than a purely metaphorical gesture; as such, remarks Zola dismissively, “Toute sa science consiste à dire qu’il y a des avocats, des oisifs, etc., comme il y a des chiens, des loups, etc.” (“Différences” 25).

Zola’s criticisms are manifold; some of them are fairer than others, but all of them have much to tell us about Zola’s own conception of animality and, more specifically, human animality. In the first place, Zola argues that the social, moralistic undertones of

Balzac’s dedication to “Le Catholicisme et la Royauté” (Balzac 24) interfere with La

Comédie humaine’s ability to observe human beings with a rigorous, scientific objectivity, boasting that Les Rougon-Macquart, by contrast, “sera moins sociale que scientifique” (“Différences” 26). In the second place, Zola’s misgivings appear to be largely grounded in the paradigm shift between Balzac’s Saint-Hilairian influences, and the Darwinian framework in which Zola claims to operate. While Zola does not mention

Charles Darwin by name in “Différences entre Balzac et moi,” his proposed framework certainly signals the post-Darwinian landscape in which he works. By the time he writes his own aesthetic-scientific treatise “Le roman expérimental” (1880) about a decade after

“Différences,” Zola does indeed insist (as Balzac had done with Saint-Hilaire) that novelists looking to accurately capture human character ought “aborder les théories de

Darwin” (18).

On the most basic level, Darwinian evolution differs from Saint-Hilairian transformism by shifting away from the idea of direct environmental influence on anatomical structure, and towards the natural selection of competitively favorable traits over time. Zola is quick to emphasize that Les Rougon-Macquart studies not an entire society within a largely static time period as does Balzac’s project, but rather a single

67 family over several generations, and thus the relative success of familial, genetic traits over time within a dynamic milieu:

En un mot, son œuvre veut être le miroir de la société contemporaine. Mon œuvre, à moi, sera tout autre chose. Le cadre en sera plus restreint. Je ne veux pas peindre la société contemporaine, mais une seule famille, en montrant le jeu de la “race modifiée” par les milieux. Si j'accepte un cadre historique, c'est uniquement pour avoir un milieu qui réagisse […] Ma grande affaire est d'être purement naturaliste, purement physiologiste. Au lieu d’avoir des principes (la royauté, le catholicisme) j’aurai des lois (l’hérédité, l’énéité [sic]). (26)

With this framework established, Zola ultimately seems to suggest that he is more sincerely treating his human characters as animal subjects (more “purement naturaliste”) in large part because his multigenerational study can better track the evolutionary, physiological change of its human organisms than can Balzac’s snapshot environmental observations: Zola proposes a spatiotemporal study where Balzac offers an essentially spatial one. Richard Somerset has detected as much, contrasting the “atemporal taxonomic space occupied by the denizens of La Comédie humaine, and the genealogical space in which the individuals and families of Zola’s post-Darwinian cycle of ‘scientific’ novels are defined,” emphasizing that “The characters of the Rougon- Macquart cycle do not merely exist in time; they are formed by time” (101). In his efforts to connote human animality as convincingly possible, Zola turns to Darwin as the most cutting-edge zoological reference available, dismissing Balzac’s 1830s scientific influences as outdated.

* * *

The Darwinian influence in Zola’s oeuvre manifests itself in several ways beyond the overarching hereditary angle of his Naturalist project. Scholars like Jean-Marc

Bernardini, Linda L. Clark, and Louise Lyle have all eloquently traced the Darwinian

68 themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence within the socioeconomic conflicts guiding novels like Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) and Germinal (1885), demonstrating the extent to which the human dramas of Les Rougon-Macquart are often animalistic in nature.34

Zola’s self-professed Darwinism is most significant for the present chapter insomuch as it is accompanied by a firmly anti-hierarchical, non-anthropocentric understanding of species. The Saint-Hilairian idea of a single anatomical structure that becomes increasingly complex over time relies upon a hierarchical chain of being in which all animal life can be evaluated along a single spectrum of complexity—towards the head of which one finds human beings—an anthropocentric notion that is incongruous with Darwinian evolutionary models in which all existent species have undergone a process of natural selection in order to thrive in specific environments.35 The

34 See, in particular: Bernardini 217; Clark 115; Lyle 309. It should be noted, however, that despite Zola’s cavalier boasts that his project will be more “purement naturaliste” than Balzac’s, and despite his evident familiarity with the major ideas of Darwin, the details surrounding his actual readership of Darwin are surprisingly hazy. David Baguley’s scrupulous research on Zola’s personal library and manuscripts even suggests (contrary to the widely held assumption in Zolian scholarship) that we have good reason to believe that Zola may have never actually read Darwin himself, but that he instead mobilizes a superficial, vulgarized conception of Darwinism that was floating about in the mid-nineteenth-century Parisian ether (Baguley 204), partially shaped by Clémence Royer’s polemical preface to her original French translation of The Origin of Species (see Joy Dorothy Harvey’s Almost a Man of Genius: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-Century Science [1997]). That Zola knowingly and deliberately writes in the shadow of Darwin is indisputable—Baguley himself points out that “A brief survey of some of the most significant examples from the Rougon-Macquart series clearly shows the nature and extent of the novelist’s Social Darwinism” (208)—but Zola’s implicit and explicit nods to Darwinism are likely less grounded in a steadfast devotion to Darwin’s written word than they are in an effort to grant a layer of authenticity to his animalized vision of humanity by way of reference to broad Darwinian concepts.

35 While less immediately concerned with the anthropocentric consequences of an échelle des êtres, Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (1966) nuances the simplistic

69 concept of an interspecies hierarchy becomes altogether incomprehensible in a Darwinian framework because mere existence (which is to say, survival) becomes the only criterion by which one can evaluate a being: in other words, human beings do as good a job of surviving in their milieu as, say, intestinal worms do in theirs. As Darwin explains in The

Origin of Species when juxtaposing his own evolutionary model to older transformist theories based on ever-increasing anatomical complexity:

Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, does not necessarily include progressive development—it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life. And it may be asked what advantage, as far as we can see, would it be to an infusorian animalcule—to an intestinal worm—or even to an earthworm, to be highly organized. (120)

It is with this firmly anti-hierarchical vision of life that Zola most closely works within the spirit of Darwin throughout Les Rougon-Macquart. In L’Œuvre (1886), Zola advances his resistance to an interspecies ontological hierarchy as a fundamental pillar of his literary Naturalism. Pierre Sandoz, the young Naturalist author who is the most emphatically autobiographical character Zola ever produced, thus declares:

Ah ! Que ce serait beau, si l’on donnait son existence entière à une œuvre, où l’on tâcherait de mettre les choses, les bêtes, les hommes, l’arche immense ! Et pas dans l’ordre des manuels de philosophie, selon la hiérarchie imbécile dont notre orgueil se berce ; mais en pleine coulée de la vie universelle, un monde où nous ne serions qu’un accident, où le chien qui passe, et jusqu’à la pierre des chemins, nous compléteraient ; enfin, le grand tout, sans haut ni bas, ni sale ni propre, tel qu’il fonctionne. (104)

dichotomy of the progressive Saint-Hilaire and the retrograde, fixist Cuvier by addressing the shortcomings of Saint-Hilaire’s strongly hierarchical framework. Foucault’s landmark text creatively rehabilitates Cuvier’s role in the history of evolution by pointing to the fact that the perennially caricatured naturalist “a introduit dans l’échelle classique des êtres une discontinuité radicale,” and thus a more explicit emphasis on anatomical difference that made “possible quelque chose comme la pensée de l’évolution” in the Darwinian sense (288).

70

Sandoz’s rapturous, pantheistic outcry embraces “le grand tout” without any sense of ontological hierarchy, such that the three categories of “les choses, les bêtes, les hommes” become interchangeably important parts within a unified “vie universelle” (an image to which we will return when discussing “L’amour des bêtes” and “Enfin courroné” in the second section of this chapter).

This de-hierarchized vision of life—in which any individual sliver of “la vie universelle” becomes as deserving of novelistic attention as any other sliver—stands in stark contrast to the vision that Balzac ultimately advances in his Saint-Hilaire-inspired

“Avant-Propos.” While Balzac begins his text with a vocal interest in animality, he drastically tempers his enthusiasm as the “Avant-Propos” progresses. Seemingly justifying the exclusively human emphasis of La Comédie humaine’s title, Balzac first notes that even “Buffon a trouvé la vie excessivement simple chez les animaux,” before going on to argue that human beings are infinitely more interesting to study than are other animals because “les habitudes de chaque animal sont, à nos yeux du moins, constamment semblables en tout temps” (9). Balzac’s ultimate declared object of study in the “Avant-Propos” then holds fast to a strong sense of human exceptionalism insomuch as it categorically juxtaposes “l’homme” to everything else in the universe: “Ainsi l’œuvre à faire devait avoir une triple forme : les hommes, les femmes et les choses, c’est-à-dire les personnes et la représentation matérielle qu’ils donnent de leur pensée ; enfin l’homme et la vie” (20, emphasis mine). This relegation of all nonhuman existence to the single category of “la vie” facilely contrasts all the complex diversity of the universe to “l’homme,” and is precisely the sort of gesture that inspires Jacques Derrida’s term “animot” (Derrida 65) in L’animal que donc je suis (2006), a concept meant to

71 illuminate the violent and fictitious conceptual unity of the idea of “l’Animal” in the singular.

In “Différences entre Balzac et moi,” Zola pounces on Balzac’s sense of categorization, emphasizing his own intention to fully envelop humanity not only within the category of animality, but also within the far broader category of material things, breaking down in the process all distinctions between organic and inorganic: “Balzac dit qu'il veut peindre les hommes, les femmes et les choses. Moi, des hommes et des femmes, je ne fais qu'un, en admettant cependant les différences de nature, et je soumets les hommes et les femmes aux choses” (26, emphasis mine). From his initial effort to do justice to the animality of his human characters, then, Zola fully repurposes Balzac’s terms so as to push for a still more radical reconfiguration of ontological boundaries that would blur, in step with Sandoz’s vision in L’Œuvre, “les choses, les bêtes, les hommes.”

* * *

This emphasis on the simultaneous animality and thingness of humanity is a direct outgrowth of Zola’s materialist, mechanistic conceptualization of physiology. In “Notes générales sur la marche de l’œuvre” (1868), a preparatory manuscript from the same period as “Différences entre Balzac et moi,” Zola discusses the idea of unifying his oeuvre by means of an underlying materialist worldview, advising himself: “Prendre avant tout une tendance philosophique […] pour donner une unité à mes livres. La meilleure serait peut-être le matérialisme” (17). Echoing the Enlightenment-era materialism of Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751), author of L’homme-machine

(1748), Zola’s materialism treats the animal body (human or nonhuman) as a material thing by framing it as an intricate piece of machinery to be disassembled and studied; as

72 such, the animalization of his human characters necessarily implies a simultaneous mechanization thereof. Zola expressly links his mechanical and biological imagery together in his “Notes générales sur la marche de l’œuvre,” giving Les Rougon-Macquart the following mission statement: “dire la vérité humaine, démonter notre machine, en montrer les secrets ressorts par l’hérédité” (18).

While this type of bio-mechanistic imagery is certainly hinted at in Darwin,36 it is much more pronounced in Zola’s most prominent scientific influence, Claude Bernard, whose Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865) serves as the blueprint for Zola’s “Le roman expérimental.”37 Ironically, despite being the nineteenth century’s most famous practitioner and proponent of mammalian vivisection, Bernard provides

Zola with a conceptual framework whose underlying principles transform into arguments for animal sympathy in Zola’s hands. Bernard’s materialist, experimental physiology systematically dismantles any sort of categorical distinction between humans and other animals by uniting both under the category of “machine vivante” (Bernard 175). In order to confidently declare that “tout ce que l’on obtient chez les animaux peut parfaitement

être concluant pour l’homme quand on sait bien expérimenter” (ibid., 188), Bernard must reject not only the idea of a hierarchy that would treat human beings as qualitatively distinct organisms from other animals, but also the idea of species distinction tout court,

36 “When we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical invention is the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting—I speak from experience—does the study of natural history become!” (Darwin 504).

37 “Je n’aurai à faire ici qu’un travail d’adaptation, car la méthode expérimentale a été établie avec une force et une clareté merveilleuse par Claude Bernard, dans son Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale” (“Le Roman Expérimental” 1).

73 which is exactly what he does by way of his mechanistic imagery in passages like the following: “Le physiologiste […] ne s’occupe que d’une seule chose, des propriétés de la matière vivante et du mécanisme de la vie, sous quelque forme qu’elle se manifeste. Pour lui, il n’y a plus ni genre ni espèce ni classe, il n’y a que des êtres vivants” (202, emphasis mine). While Bernard uses this materialist physiological unity between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom as the theoretical backbone to his violently invasive animal experiments, Zola uses this same idea as an anchor for his own animal sympathy—thus do we find Zola joyously declaiming in his speech to the Société

Protectrice des Animaux, for instance: “aimons [les bêtes], au nom de la fraternité et de la justice, pour honorer en elles la création, pour respecter l’œuvre de vie et faire triompher notre sang, le sang rouge qui est le même dans leurs veines et dans les nôtres” (319, emphasis mine). From this shared foundation of a monistic biological continuism emerge two entirely different ethical uses in Zola and Bernard.

Bernard’s anti-vitalist blurring of the binaries of organic/inorganic and human/nonhuman is thus grounded in the binding element of his often-repeated imagery of the “machine vivante,” “mécanisme de la vie,” (Bernard 202) and other similarly mechanistic physiological expressions. This hard materialism is one of the components of

Bernard’s thought that Zola most noticeably amplifies throughout his body of work, such that in “Le roman expérimental,” he insists that human beings are not simply animals, but more specifically that “l’homme [n’est] plus pour nous qu’une machine animale” (27, emphasis mine). In order to hypostatize this imagery in his novelistic universe, Zola thus mobilizes the Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy proposed above, offering an

74 ontological vision in which each of the trichotomy’s individual components freely morphs into the other two, with no sense of ontological hierarchization.

* * *

A look at La Bête humaine most efficiently illuminates the multidirectional fluidity of this Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy, as well as some of its ethical upshots. The novel’s title alone concisely announces its animalized human imagery, and its human characters are indeed transformed into a vast menagerie of animals, ranging from the titular “bête humaine” (155) Jacques Lantier, to Roubaud the “loup” (30) who paces about in a jealous fury in the opening scene, to Cabuche the “chien fidèle” (266) who clings to Séverine towards the end of the novel.38 Alongside this animalized human nature lies a perpetually mechanized one, with the novel’s characters going about their work and personal lives along the Paris-Le Havre railway with a deterministic regularity that finds them rigorously attached to the adjectives “mécanique” and “machinal” (31, 57,

65, 168, etc.).

As for the mechanical proper, the train la Lison is both animalized and anthropomorphized throughout the text, with Zola often blurring the line between these two analogies by using them in rapid-fire succession, occasionally switching from one to the other in the span of one sentence: “[La Lison] se releva d’ailleurs, la machine ronflait, crachait, comme une bête qu’on surmène, avec des sursauts, des coups de reins, où l’on

38 La Bête humaine follows in this sense a trend in Zola’s novels, which boast increasingly vast quantities of human-animal metaphors as Zola’s style matures; Phillipe Bonnefis, who has painstakingly enumerated all the instances of animal metaphors applied to human beings in several of Zola’s works, highlights some staggering statistics: “Les débuts sont modestes : 40 images dans Thérèse Raquin, 49 dans Madeleine Féral. Puis, sauf rares exceptions, le nombre en augmente, progressivement ou par à-coups : 83 dans la Fortune des Rougon, 86 dans la Curée, 102 dans le Ventre de Paris, 122 dans Son Excellence Eugene Rougon pour atteindre enfin la cote 340 avec l’Assommoir” (98).

75 aurait cru entendre craquer ses membres. Et [Jacques] la rudoyait, en femme vieillie et moins forte, n’ayant plus pour elle la même tendresse qu’autrefois” (163).

While the novel contains fewer animals than do some of Zola’s other works like

La Joie de vivre (1884) or La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret (1875), the animals that do appear are explicitly likened to both the human and mechanical. The novel’s most prominent animals are the horses tragically caught in the train accident in the tenth chapter. Within this climactic scene, Zola deftly accentuates his mechanical-biological unity, placing the human (Jacques Lantier), the nonhuman animal (the train wreck’s lone surviving horse), and the mechanical (la Lison) in the same catastrophic situation to which they all respond identically, with all three lying on their backs in a parallel agony—along parallel train tracks—in the collision’s aftermath. Zola first describes his horse and train in nearly indistinguishable terms, describing two suffering creatures whose innards are left exposed after the accident:

La Lison, renversée sur les reins, le ventre ouvert, perdait sa vapeur, par les robinets arrachés, les tuyaux crevés, en des souffles qui grondaient, pareils à des râles furieux de géante […] Justement, près d’elle, le cheval qui n’était pas mort, gisait lui aussi, les deux pieds de devants emportés, perdant également ses entrailles par une déchirure de son ventre. (252)

Just a few pages later, Zola likens this same horse to the human, depicting an animal state so humanlike in its suffering that the categories of human and animal are completely obliterated, making way for an image of pure suffering in which humanity and animality are freely passed back and forth: “[le cheval] avait un hennissement continu, un cri presque humain, si retentissant et d’une si effroyable douleur que deux des blessés, gagnés par la contagion, s’étaient mis à hurler eux aussi, ainsi que des bêtes”

(258, emphasis mine). Scholars like Jean-Louis Cabanès have turned to this train wreck

76 scene when considering more broadly the humanized depictions of horses in Zola’s work, with Cabanès detecting therein “une fraternité des hommes et des animaux, une proximité

éthique, voire ontologique” (42). In order to truly do justice to Zola’s vision, however, one must consider how the mechanical train is equally integrated into this fraternité, and how the ethical, ontological proximity between the human and animal is made possible largely through the pair’s shared common ground with the mechanical.

Within this scene in which human, animal, and mechanical suffering are all granted the same amount of gravitas and textual space, the three components of Zola’s

Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy thus totally dissolve into one another, revealing a fluidity of identity that takes seriously suffering in any form imaginable, whether human, animal, or even mechanical—ontological boundaries of any sort become totally irrelevant in the assessment of moral considerability. The significance behind this radically materialist, monistic conceptualization of suffering becomes clear when we approach the brand of animal ethics laid out in “L’amour des bêtes,” whose call for animal welfare is accompanied by the story of the death of Zola’s beloved (and vigorously humanized and mechanized) dog Fanfan.

II. Fanfan, or The Humanity in Mechanical Animal Suffering

From the very beginning of “L’amour des bêtes,” Zola methodically works to blur all hierarchical, ontological boundaries that could have an impact on the question of moral considerability. Philippe Hamon, in analyzing the human-animal metaphors developed throughout Zola’s corpus, points to a recurrent strategy in which the act of

“montrer l’humanité des bêtes revient bien, par effet repoussoir, à mettre en relief la

77 bestialité de l’humain” (99). “L’amour des bêtes” strategically capitalizes upon this notion, opening with a humanizing portrayal of a lost dog that subsequently transitions into a clinical, psychophysiological examination of human beings as corporeal, decidedly animal entities.

The article opens with a series of eight pathos-laden rhetorical questions, all variations on why animal suffering so poignantly affects Zola and why he feels so strong a connection to animals. As the questions progress, Zola’s rhetoric gradually pushes him from simple sympathy toward a complete identification with animals. The first line of the text thus focuses exclusively on how powerfully animal suffering can affect him, making no explicit effort yet to blur the human-animal line: “Pourquoi la rencontre d’un chien perdu, dans une de nos rues tumultueuses, me donne-t-elle une secousse au cœur ?” (85).

By the middle of the section, however, Zola hints increasingly at a human-animal continuism, with his third question asking why he feels “un élancement de fraternelle compassion, dans le souci de savoir ce qu’il fait, où il est, si on l’a recueilli, s’il mange, s’il n’est pas à grelotter au coin de quelque borne ?” (ibid., emphasis mine). If this

“fraternelle compassion” begins to point towards a humanization of the animal, suggesting a compassion in which we could love an animal as we love a brother, it nevertheless remains within a purely metaphorical context, a problem that Zola is quick to remedy in the section’s eighth and final question: “Pourquoi les bêtes sont-elles toutes de ma famille, comme les hommes, autant que les hommes ?” (86, emphasis mine).

Instantly correcting himself, replacing the comparative “comme” with the firmly equalizing “autant,” Zola thus finalizes the gradual operation he had been developing

78 since the beginning of the article, finishing this first section with a radical equalization of human and nonhuman animal.

Right after this culminating moment, however, Zola swaps out this grandiose, affective palette for an almost cartoonishly Naturalist one in order to discuss human beings, presenting a marked shift in tone that animalizes the human after having humanized animals. Musing on the question of what makes certain people feel particularly attached to animals, Zola declares: “Souvent je me suis posé la question, et je crois bien que ni la physiologie, ni la psychologie n’y ont encore répondu d’une façon satisfaisante” (86). Subsequently offering his own loose research as a springboard for future psychophysiological experiments, Zola insists: “D’abord il faudrait classifier,” ultimately making his way to “trois classes : les amis des bêtes, les ennemis, les indifférents” (ibid.) (Zola, of course, falls in the first category). From here, Zola makes the case for rigorously applying the experimental method to this data set, writing “Une enquête serait nécessaire pour établir la proportion […] Peut-être arriverait-on à trouver quelque loi générale” (87) on the biological explanations for sympathy towards animals.

Zola even suggests that he has begun this process himself as, in order to prove that the love of animals is a unique form of love and not some sort of displaced parental love felt by childless parents (…!), he has undertaken some statistical analysis of his human- animal test subject: “Vingt fois, j'ai vérifié le cas, des mères passionnées pour leurs enfants, et qui gardaient aux bêtes l'affection de leur jeunesse, aussi vive, aussi active”

(87).

The first two sections of “L’amour des bêtes” thus present a striking stylistic contrast in the treatment of their respective subjects: while the first section humanizes

79 nonhuman animals with its lofty rhetoric of universal compassion, the second essentially turns human beings into laboratory animals to be studied and classified in a series of cold, psychophysiological examinations. Zola’s nuanced shift in tone meticulously pushes the reader towards a state of empathetic identification with animals, who are no longer so far removed from the human. Later on, in describing his mourning period for Fanfan, his dog whose death constitutes the centerpiece of “L’amour des bêtes,” Zola directly touches upon the question of rhetorical style in regards to the description of animals, underlining a dramatic stylistic divergence from his standard writings on aesthetics. Zola very clearly states in “Le Roman expérimental” that the scientific duty of the Naturalist author is to be cool-headed, objective, and analytical in approach, which necessitates an aesthetics of restraint and transparency: “Ce qu'il faut bien préciser surtout, c'est le caractère impersonnel de la méthode […] le grand style est fait de logique et de clareté” (41, 47, emphasis mine). In “L’Amour des bêtes,” by contrast, Zola fears that his story of

Fanfan’s death suffers from a lack of subjective passion, and he regrets the story’s potential coldness stemming from his calm, objective distance from the events he failed to record immediately after their happening: “Aujourd'hui, tout cela est loin, d'autres douleurs sont venues, je sens que les choses que j'en dis sont glacées. Mais, alors, il me semblait que j'avais tant à dire, que j'aurais dit des choses vraies, profondes, définitives, sur cet amour des bêtes, si obscur et si puissant” (95). In other words, in order to get to

“des choses vraies” about animals, Zola suggests that he must adopt a decidedly anti-

Naturalist approach that would forsake his characteristic, calmly analytical lens: in order for the human and animal to truly be placed on the same footing, Zola must

80 overcompensate on both ends, naturalizing the traditionally romanticized human, and romanticizing the traditionally naturalized animal.

Zola’s style thus demonstrates a remarkable pliability in tone sensitive to the component of the Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy he wishes to describe. Indeed,

J.H. Matthews detects a related pattern underlying Zola’s frequent anthropomorphization of machines and inanimate objects (e.g. the train La Lison; the eponymous department store in Au bonheur des dames; the mineshaft Le Voreux in Germinal), seeing in this ostensibly anti-Realist, fantastical gesture “a necessary evil, a calculated risk, for a writer intent on conveying his deep conviction of the importance reserved for things in human affairs” (219). In order to underscore the monistic, materialist unity of his vision, then,

Zola must frame the animal/mechanical in romanticized, even fantastical ways, a balancing act in which he grants them a literary treatment he has stripped from his de- romanticized, Naturalist human being.39

* * *

While we have thus far considered exclusively the human and animal in regards to “L’amour des bêtes,” the third component of the proposed Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy plays a critical role in Zola’s discussion of animal ethics. Kelly Benoudis

Basilio rightly points out that Zola’s overarching sense of physiology draws from a certain Cartesianism in its mechanization of the animal body (Basilio 32)—her work

39 Thus can we also account for the otherwise surprising number of fabular stories with talking animals from an author who claims to strive for scientific integrity. See, in addition to “[Le vieux cheval]”: “Une cage de bêtes féroces” (1883); “Le paradis des chats”(1874).

81 completely ignores, however, the highly contrasting ethical explorations of the mechanical animal theory in the writings of Descartes and Zola.

Early in “L’amour des bêtes,” Zola enters into an implicit intertextual dialogue with Descartes through a reflection on the nature of language. When taking pity on the

“souffrance […] du pauvre être qui ne peut parler” (86), Zola destabilizes the very foundation of Descartes’ hierarchical division between the soul-endowed human and the mechanical animal, a distinction Descartes bases on the linguistic capacity of the former as compared to its apparent absence in the latter. In the fifth section of his Discours de la méthode (1637), Descartes likens nonhuman animals to “machines” (164) through the following line of argumentation: while even deaf-mute humans are capable of linguistic communication through the adoption of alternative physical sign systems that enable “un discours par lequel ils fassent entendre leurs pensées,” not even the nonhuman animals who are physically capable of uttering word-sounds ever seem to employ such symbols purposefully. As Descartes writes, “on voit que les pies et les perroquets peuvent proférer des paroles ainsi que nous, et toutefois ne peuvent parler ainsi que nous, c’est-à-dire en témoignant qu’ils pensent ce qu’ils disent […] Ceci ne témoigne pas seulement que les bêtes ont moins de raison que les hommes, mais qu’elles n’en ont point du tout” (165).

While Descartes then extrapolates that animals must be mechanical beings devoid of any ethical status, such that human beings “sont délivrés du soupçon de crime toutes les fois qu’ils mangent ou tuent les animaux” (Descartes, “Lettre à M. Morus” 1320), Zola appropriates this same lack of animal language as the very cornerstone of his own animal ethics: “Je crois bien que ma charité pour les bêtes est faite […] de ce qu'elles ne peuvent parler, expliquer leurs besoins, indiquer leurs maux. Une créature qui souffre et qui n'a

82 aucun moyen de nous faire entendre comment et pourquoi elle souffre, n'est-ce pas affreux, n'est-ce pas angoissant ?” (“Bêtes” 88). For Zola, then, the idea of animals becoming lesser beings due to their lack of a linguistic capacity becomes totally preposterous—it is precisely because animals lack language that we ought to consider them more sympathetically.

With that said, Zola’s materialist Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy obviously does not shy away from the attribution of mechanicity to organic matter, and the condemnation to the status of mechanical animal loses much of its bite within a system that so readily intertwines the categories of human, animal, and mechanical. Zola can thus approach Descartes head-on, fully appropriating the mechanical animal theory in the centerpiece to “L’amour des bêtes” with the description of his dog Fanfan. Having already implicitly rejected the Cartesian argument that the lack of animal language leads to an ethically insignificant state of animal mechanicity, Zola then turns Descartes’ argument on its head, presenting the image of an unabashedly mechanized animal described in the most sympathetic tones, an animal machine whose sympathetic nature even stems from its very mechanization.

Zola perpetually refers to his dog in mechanistic, object-like terms, introducing the animal by describing how charmed he was by Fanfan’s manner of walking about

“comme un petit chien à roulettes” (93), an evidently infectious quality of the dog that

Zola repeats when referring to “son allure de petit chien à roulettes qui faisait rire les passants” (94) during his routine promenades. The Cartesian mechanical animal immediately becomes not only approachable under Zola’s pen, but a genuinely endearing creature with whom the reader is invited to sympathize.

83 In the first section of “L’amour des bêtes,” the animal’s progressive identification with the human unsurprisingly corresponded with an increase in the text’s expressed sympathy for animals; much more unexpectedly, however, the reader’s level of sympathy for Fanfan also directly corresponds to the level of metaphorical mechanization Zola grants him. The playful “chien à roulettes” imagery rapidly gives way to a more somber look at the animal machine as we soon discover that Fanfan—in a twist of fate only too fitting for Émile Zola’s dog—suffers from a debilitating cerebral disorder that is decidedly mechanical in nature. Fanfan’s condition plays out like some sort of terrible wind-up machine stuck in an infinite, unthinking loop. As Zola describes it:

C’était un petit chien fou. Un matin, je l’avais depuis huit jours à peine, lorsqu’il se mit à tourner sur lui-même, en rond, sans fin […]. Quand, saisi de pitié, je le prenais dans mes bras, ses pattes gardaient le piétinement de sa continuelle ronde ; et, si je le posais par terre, il recommençait, tournait encore, tournait toujours. (93)

Zola presents a strikingly mechanical portrayal of an animal in this passage, an animal whose repetitive, unthinking locomotion in “cette ronde involontaire” (94) grotesquely epitomizes the Cartesian animal machine. Far from invoking a state of ethical indifference as this creature would in Descartes, however, the Fanfan narrative reduces

Zola to tears (97), and is expressly presented in order to stir up the reader’s sympathy before the question of animal welfare.

Zola thus uses Fanfan’s pathological condition above all to signal the real injustice of equating the suffering dog to a purely mechanical being, or more precisely, a being any more purely mechanical than any other creature (human or otherwise) in his materialist system. Accordingly, all the while that Zola goes about describing Fanfan’s movement in mechanistic terms, both playfully through the “chien à roulettes” image and

84 more bleakly through “sa folie circulante” (94), he simultaneously points to Fanfan’s eyes as evidence of the animal’s human-like emotional complexity. Zola consistently uses Fanfan’s eyes as an indicator of the animal’s mental state; in the story’s more lighthearted beginning, Fanfan looks at his future owner “avec des yeux si pleins de tendresse” (92) right before Zola purchases him; later on, when Fanfan becomes the only being allowed to remain in Zola’s study while the author works, he writes that Fanfan

“était devenu ainsi de toutes mes angoisses et de toutes mes joies de producteur, levant son petit nez aux minutes de repos, me regardant de ses petits yeux clairs” (93).

The real importance behind Zola’s emphasis on Fanfan’s eyes, however, comes out in the bleaker moments of the text when Zola continues to see the will of his animal trapped behind the mechanical behavior. Zola writes of Fanfan: “On riait de moi, on me disait que j'étais fou moi-même de garder ce petit chien fou dans ma chambre. Je ne pouvais faire autrement, mon cœur se fendait à l'idée que je ne serais plus là pour le prendre, pour le calmer, et qu'il ne me regarderait plus de ses petits yeux clairs, ses yeux

éperdus de douleur, qui me remerciaient” (94-95, emphasis mine). Zola insists here that even within this outwardly mechanical animal, he continues to see a conscious, sentient being whose eyes communicate (non-linguistically) both suffering and gratitude.

Significantly, Fanfan’s eyes, rather than the mechanical disorder, become the final image of the dog: “Ce fut ainsi, dans mes bras, qu’un matin Fanfan mourut, en me regardant”

(95). In true Zolian form, the combination of Fanfan’s emotive eyes and mechanical paws recalls animal, human, and machine all at once, ultimately presenting an ontologically ambiguous creature whose suffering calls for sympathy independently of any considerations of category. The Fanfan narrative thus nuances the Cartesian binary of the

85 human vs. the mechanical-animal by pushing Descartes’ animal machine to its extreme while still managing to present a being with which a human reader can relate “comme on fraternise avec un être humain” (95, emphasis mine), and which one can mourn “comme on pleure une créature chère” (96).

* * *

I must here argue against a certain strand of present-day criticism that points to a supposed “angoisse de l’indifférenciation” (Hamon 121) in Zola’s writings on human animality. Philippe Bonnefis, for example, bases his “Le bestiaire d’Émile Zola” on a theory that Zola’s human-animal metaphors progressively move from a smattering of animal comparisons in the earlier stages of Zola’s career towards a more systematic metaphorical application of animals in which “au bestiaire proprement dit se substitue une simple table d’équivalences logiques” (106). For Bonnefis, this shift in tendency works to liberate humanity from its animalistic origins, as Zola supposedly fights to differentiate the human from the animal kingdom via a gradual taming of the animal metaphor into a rational metaphorical system—“Le bestiaire reste longtemps le théâtre d’une lutte de Zola avec lui-même et dont la délivrance de l’homme est l’enjeu” (ibid.).

Bonnefis thus suggests that Zola’s metaphorical usage of animals speaks to a “peur profonde du nivellement qui est propre à Zola” (102), a declaration that I argue runs patently counter to all the available evidence in Zola’s late-career thought on animal ethics.

Far from fearing this fluidity between the human and nonhuman, Zola fully embraces a sense of indifferentiation as a fundamental component of his ethical concern for animals. In his follow-up to “L’amour des bêtes,” “Enfin couronné,” Zola pushes his

86 ontological blurring to its apogee by fusing all matter into the single, pantheistic40 image of “la vie universelle,” elaborating in the process a unified, interdependent ethics in which all forms of suffering become inextricably linked:

La cause des bêtes pour moi est […] intimement liée à la cause des hommes, à ce point que toute amélioration dans nos rapports avec l'animalité doit marquer à coup sûr un progrès dans le bonheur humain […] Notre sort commun devant la douleur ne saurait être séparé, c'est la vie universelle qu'il s'agit de sauver du plus de souffrance possible. (235- 236)

Just as La Bête humaine’s train wreck merges its distinct victims into a single portrait of suffering such that its human, equine, and even locomotive casualties cannot be considered in isolation, this all-encompassing image of “la vie universelle” renders any and all forms of suffering completely indissociable from one another. Zola sidesteps the question of who or what deserves to be included within the realm of human ethical consideration by blurring boundaries so thoroughly that no individual constituent of “la vie universelle” maintains a categorically distinct ontological or ethical status. Zola’s ethical question then becomes that of how to minimize the total amount of suffering

(whether human or nonhuman) in this unified “vie universelle.”

* * *

Unsurprisingly, there are some important ethical ambiguities that arise within this highflying, pseudo-pantheistic utilitarianism. In the first place, the precise measures to take in order to reduce this universal suffering are somewhat hazy in Zola’s work.

Literary contemporaries like Élisée Reclus or Rachilde (whom we will consider in the

40 While the label of pantheism may seem like a loaded one for the decidedly positivist Zola, his image of la vie universelle is undeniably in keeping with Enlightenment-era deistic conceptions of nature as a unified entity. Zola’s daughter Denise Le Blond-Zola points to a “souffle panthéiste” (307) in her study of Zola’s animal sympathy, as does Philip Walker in his study of the religious tendencies in Germinal (39).

87 subsequent chapter) took much clearer stances in favor of precise issues of animal welfare such as vegetarianism or antivivisectionism.41 While Zola’s ardent admiration of

Bernard can certainly be read as an implicit endorsement of vivisection, he is in reality conspicuously evasive on the ethics of the issue. “L’amour des bêtes” rapidly fluctuates between cavalierly mocking “de vieilles dames qui guettaient les savants vivisecteurs, et qui tombaient sur eux à coups d’ombrelles,” and extending to these same activists a sympathetic olive branch: “Mais s’imagine-t-on la révolte qui devait soulever ces pauvres

âmes, à la pensée qu’on prenait des chiens vivants, pour les découper en petits morceaux ? Songez donc qu’elles les aiment, ces misérables chiens, et que c’est un peu comme si l’on coupait dans leur propre chair.”42 Despite his brief show of solidarity for anti-vivisectionist movements, Zola never clearly tips his hand either way: it is never clear if he considers the findings of vivisectionist experimentation capable of eventually decreasing the total amount of suffering of “la vie universelle,” or if the humanitarianism of antivivisectionism should be considered the type of amelioration in human-animal relations that ought to constitute progress for all parties (i.e. the above-cited declaration that “toute amélioration dans nos rapports avec l'animalité doit marquer à coup sûr un progrès dans le bonheur humain”).43 Zola’s tight-lipped ambivalence here is not atypical

41 See: Crossley 212; 272.

42 91-2. See Kete 16 for more on women animal activists like Marie Huot, who famously attacked vivisectionist Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard with her umbrella while he was operating at the Collège de France.

43 Guy de Maupassant, by contrast, can simultaneously rail against the physical abuse of workhorses while unequivocally justifying vivisectionist research on the grounds of “les immenses résultats obtenus déjà au bénéfice de l’humanité” (“La Pitié,” Le Gaulois, 22 Dec. 1881).

88 of the period, however: as Ceri Crossley points out, vivisection was a highly divisive issue even among the members of the SPA, such that an interest in animal ethics by no means necessarily implied antivivisectionism (Crossley 201).44

The most concrete measure proposed in “L’amour des bêtes” is an extraordinarily ambitious international regulation against animal cruelty. Here again, it is not entirely clear what would constitute animal cruelty under Zola’s proposed regulation. As he focuses largely on “des coups de canne” (96) against dogs, one assumes he is envisioning an international application of something like the Grammont Law introduced in France in

1850, a law targeting public displays of animal cruelty while still permitting violence against animals in laboratories, slaughterhouses, and various private institutions.45 If the precise ethical measures are once again ambiguous, the profound interconnectedness between questions of animal and human ethics is abundantly emphasized, with Zola ultimately hoping that “de cet amour universel des bêtes, par-dessus les frontières, peut-

être en arriverait-on à l’universel amour des hommes” (96).

If evaluated on the basis of its practicable activism, Zola’s animal ethics are thus undoubtedly cloudy. Zola’s work is not that of an animal activist, however, and by considering his work under a slightly different light, one can appreciate the innovation of his writing on animal sympathy. Indeed, despite the decidedly fin-de-siècle timbre of its materialist, pantheistic flourishes, Zola’s framework anticipates several of the key components of turn-of-the-millenium, postmodernist approaches to Animal Studies, whose ethical work similarly prioritizes ontological de-hierarchization over the

44 See also Pierre 89.

45 For more on the Grammont Law, see Baratay, Bêtes de somme 6.

89 elaboration of precise moral imperatives.46

Donna Haraway’s work, for instance, bears intriguing conceptual overlap with

Zola’s: while the feminist dimension of her intersectional animal ethics is of course widely foreign to Zola, her “Cyborg Manifesto” (1980) is altogether Zolian in its turn to the mechanical. Presenting an “argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and

[…] responsibility in their construction” (“Cyborg” 150), Haraway experiments with the mechanical/organic hybrid figure of the cyborg as a means of exploring and problematizing the ontological divide between human and nonhuman animals (among other binaries) in a manner that readily recalls the Zolian Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy examined above. Likewise, in When Species Meet (2007), Haraway’s reassessment of biological boundaries is accompanied by ethical measures that are similar to Zola’s in their deliberate haziness. Like Zola, Haraway is less concerned with detailing specific stances to take in the interest of animal activism, and more with rejecting the categorical condemnation of certain beings to a wholly other ethical status.

Thus does she call into question the command “Thou shalt not kill”:

The problem is not figuring out to whom such a command applies so that “other” killing can go on as usual and reach unprecedented historical proportions. The problem is to learn to live responsibly within the

46 While the divide between analytic and continental philosophical traditions is sometimes facilely exaggerated, the rupture between the two is nowhere more visible than in the realm of animal ethics, in which the analytic tradition tends to prioritize practicable ethical measures, while the continental tradition typically favors more abstract, ontological de-hierarchization. The two camps (broadly conceived) can be found routinely disparaging one another for this difference in approach: from the analytic tradition, Paul Waldau criticizes Jacques Derrida’s L’animal que donc je suis for containing “little power” (Waldau 183) because of its lack of moral clarity; on the other end, Élisabeth de Fontenay criticizes the utilitarian bioethics of Peter Singer for what she deems an oversimplified moral absolutism, judging his work “pas le fait de philosophes, du moins au sens continental du terme” (Fontenay 24).

90 multiplicitous necessity and labor of killing, so as to be in the open, in quest of the capacity to respond in relentless historical, nonteleological, multispecies contingency. Perhaps the commandment should read, “Thou shalt not make killable.” (80)

The impulse behind Haraway’s modified commandment is at the very heart of

Zola’s animal ethics; indeed, Zola’s version of “Thou shalt not make killable” is so far- reaching that it even seems to extend to mechanical objects like trains in La bête humaine. Despite the strong panpsychic undertones in Zola (whose eponymous protagonist in Le Docteur Pascal [1893] can take pity on the “sanglot immense des êtres et des choses” [185, emphasis mine]), the importance is obviously not on whether la

Lison (a fictional train, after all) can genuinely feel pain;47 rather, what is important is that Zola experiments with the idea of mechanical (animal) suffering with la Lison or

Fanfan in a manner that complicates and rejects traditional, post-Cartesian categorical distinctions as a means of deciding who or what deserves sympathy and ethical consideration. By making the idea of mechanical suffering as palpable as possible, and by intensifying the mechanicity of both human and nonhuman animals, Zola denies any individual component of his unified Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy a categorically distinct ethical status. Zola’s stances on precise issues may be vague in spots, then, but few novelists of the nineteenth century could claim to have developed an overarching aesthetic/ontological framework that so radically questions the ethical disparity between human and nonhuman animals.

47 With that said, Zola’s admiration for Denis Diderot, whom he at one point declares “le véritable aïeul des naturalistes” (Zola, “Le naturalisme” 101), does leave open (if largely speculatively) the possibility of a veritable receptiveness to the idea of sentience as a fundamental component of all matter. For an exposition of the panpsychic materialism in Diderot’s Le rêve de D’Alembert (1769), see Wolfe 38-65.

91 CHAPTER THREE

Rachilde’s Decadent Animal Activism: Le Loup-garou Bites Back from the Table

While Rachilde (née Marguerite Eymery, 1860-1953) is most widely read today for her provocative, fin-de-siècle Decadent novels like Monsieur Vénus (1884), she was also a prolific, experimental autobiographer at all stages of her seven-decade career. In her numerous romans à clef like La Marquise de Sade (1887) and Les Rageac (1921), as well as her more explicitly autobiographical texts like Dans le puits (1918) and Face à la peur (1942), one of the details of Rachilde’s life that she most consistently emphasizes is her stalwart commitment to the question of animal ethics. These autobiographical texts tell and retell a constellation of sensational anecdotes that underscore her intense affinity with animals. She was an unwavering vegetarian whose animal liberation résumé, virtually peerless among nineteenth-century French novelists, includes the vandalizing of laboratory vivisection equipment, the freeing of trapped wolves and lab mice, an arrest for obstructing a bullfight, the establishment of a makeshift animal sanctuary in her country home during the two world wars, and a medal from La Société Protectrice des

Animaux.

Throughout her autobiographical work, Rachilde accompanies these animal activist exploits with an elaborate personal mythology in which she presents herself as a

92 fantastical human-animal hybrid fighting for animal liberation. Rachilde’s self- mythologization draws from both the folklore of her native Périgord (according to which she is a werewolf descended from a cursed family line, an origin story we will explore below) and her Parisian celebrity among the literati of the Mercure de France salon

(according to which she is, as her friend and early biographer Ernest Gaubert tells us, “la reine des décadents” [Gaubert 12]). Rachilde’s oeuvre fuses these two seemingly disparate facets of her identity into a cohesive textual alter ego: the writerly loup-garou, whose zealous animal activism is guided by both her lupine kinship and her Decadent aesthetic value system, which sees in animal life a radical individualism and a feral beauty that is at odds with the ugly, vivisecting brutality lurking beneath positivist, bourgeois ideals.

Rachilde’s interest in animal ethics is thus not simply a remarkable aside in her work, but rather a fundamental component of her specific brand of literary Decadence and its subversive, countercultural sense of purpose. Indeed, I argue that the full unity of

Rachilde’s aesthetic vision is rendered intelligible only once we register the content and basis of her animal ethics. In order to do so, the present chapter will begin by exploring some of the more extraordinary episodes of animal activism in Rachilde’s autobiographies, paying close attention to the ways in which she centers her ethical concern for animals within her literary persona. The latter half of this chapter will then focus on the human-animal relationships depicted in her novelistic work (focusing in particular on La Marquise de Sade and L’animale [1893]) in order to highlight the quintessentially Decadent topoi that are tied up with her identification with animals, namely: a profound distrust of the scientific institutions of her day (in direct opposition to

93 the positivist scientism of Émile Zola’s Naturalist project); an individualist prioritization of animal, sensorial experientiality over human, societal collectivism; and a reimagining and challenging of the nature/artifice divide that grants nonhuman animals a heightened capacity for beauty while mocking the unaesthetic blandness of nineteenth-century positivism and bourgeois modernism.

Throughout her body of work, Rachilde subverts classical, anthropocentric conceptions of l’échelle des êtres by positing an alternative version of an interspecies hierarchy that values beauty over reason and the capacity for scientific progress. In her

Decadent, aesthete biosphere, the rationalist homme (whose human/man ambiguity

Rachilde fully exploits) loses its privileged position on l’échelle des êtres to her loup- garou alter ego, a creature who fuses l’homme’s animal/woman others into a hybrid organism that rebels against the patriarchal, positivist social order upholding l’homme’s supremacy. As I will demonstrate, Rachilde’s animal ethics destabilize the human/animal, man/woman binaries underwriting the very concept of the polysemous homme, anticipating in this regard several of the key components of contemporary ecofeminist thought.48

* * *

The scholars who have touched upon Rachilde’s animal ethics have primarily done so in a tangential manner. In François Ouellet’s “Le motif du loup chez Rachilde: la

48 Although the English word Man is wrapped up in the very same human/man polysemy, I will use the French homme throughout this chapter as a means of signaling the fact that I am employing the term, as Rachilde does throughout her oeuvre, in acknowledgment of this polysemous function. Likewise, I will predominately use the French échelle des êtres (a term rooted in the Latin scala naturae), over the English equivalent of the Great Chain of Being as the hierarchical verticality of the ladder imagery will be pertinent at various moments in my analysis, particularly in my reading of L’animale.

94 règle de l’interdit,” for instance, Rachilde’s empathetic identification with wolves is quickly made to serve as a platform upon which to discuss the theme of incest in her body of work. Others like Michael R. Finn, Diana Holmes, and Melanie Hawthorne have approached Rachilde’s animal ethics more head-on in compelling ways—and my work will draw from all three of theirs at various points—but they have done so relatively briefly in the service of larger projects whose primary focal points are external to

Rachilde’s animal concerns. While I am particularly indebted to Hawthorne and Holmes for a number of the zoophile texts their research brought to my attention (as well as for the rich scope of their critical biographies more broadly), a more sustained study specifically dedicated to the workings of Rachilde’s animal ethics remains to be done.

This gap in Rachildean studies is understandable given that the above-mentioned scholars do indeed approach Rachilde with concerns wholly other than those of Animal

Studies (and Rachilde is indeed a multi-faceted author whose work lends itself to a wide range of critical possibilities). More glaring, however, is the absolute silence on Rachilde in benchmark projects on the literary/philosophical history of human-animal sympathy like Élisabeth de Fontenay’s Le silence des bêtes : La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité (1998) and Rod Preece’s Sins of the Flesh: A history of Ethical Vegetarian

Thought (2008). She is, moreover, notably absent in projects more narrowly focused on the question of human-animal relations in 19th-century France, like Kathleen Kete’s The

Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in 19th-century Paris (1994). Ceri Crossley’s

Consumable Metaphors: Attitudes towards Animals and Vegetarianism in Nineteenth-

Century France (2005), meanwhile, dedicates but two cursory sentences to Rachilde’s vegetarianism (212), largely ignoring one of the fin de siècle’s most influential and

95 conspicuously vegetarian writers. As the fields of both animal studies and Rachildean studies continue to gather steam in contemporary scholarship, then, a more thorough analysis of the two fields’ intersection is more than ready to be made.

I. Le Loup-garou vs. the Scientist: Animal Ethics in the Autobiographical Rachilde

While the other primary novelists in this dissertation expressly turned to the life sciences in order to discuss the relationship between human beings and other animals,

Rachilde’s Decadent sensibility is pointedly opposed to the positivistic scientism of an

Émile Zola, such that her dealings with animals are inevitably shaped not by a turn towards, but rather a deliberate turn against the sciences. While literary Decadence is notorious for eluding any sort of clear-cut, unanimously agreed upon definition among nineteenth-century scholars,49 the movement’s critique of a rationalist, positivistic worldview is one of its most uncontroversial and generally accepted tenets (Weir 1-21). It is precisely this point that Holmes emphasizes when discussing Rachilde’s early readings of Zola, suggesting that Rachilde’s gradual construction of a Decadent sensibility was

“wholly unconvinced of the positive march of progress” and “in total aesthetic and ideological disagreement with Zola and naturalism” (92).

This distinction between Rachilde’s Decadence and Zola’s Naturalism becomes particularly salient in the domain of animal ethics. As discussed in the previous chapter,

Zola can be unforthcoming on the moral permissibility of specific issues like vivisection, remarkably so given the fact that he is so vocal about his simultaneous interests in Claude

49 As David Weir succinctly points out in his survey of Decadent scholarship: “Practically everyone who writes about decadence begins with the disclaimer that the word itself is annoyingly resistant to definition” (1).

96 Bernard and animal ethics. Zola never commits to being for or against the practice, but rather draws from Bernard’s experimental methodology for reasons both aesthetic (i.e. authors should approach even the most terrible subjects with the poise of an experimenter and consider narrative settings as zones of experimentation in which to see how diverse temperaments react) and surprisingly ethical (i.e. our anatomical similarity to other animals evidenced by the work of nineteenth-century physiologists should compel us to respect “la vie universelle” in all of its diverse manifestations). Rachilde, by contrast, is vehemently, unequivocally opposed to vivisection for reasons methodological, ethical, and even aesthetic, and her deep skepticism of the pursuit of scientific progress grants vivisection no possible redeeming qualities. A look at an episode from the autobiographical Face à la peur, in which Rachilde directly confronts a vivisectionist, efficiently illuminates the stakes and parameters of her animal ethics, as well as the manner in which her ethical thought works in tandem with her wider Decadent project.

* * *

To begin, a quick word on the nature of this late-career autobiographical piece.

Written and published near the beginning of World War II, Face à la peur (1940) primarily relates Rachilde’s personal struggles as an eighty-year-old recluse living alone in her country home on the outskirts of Paris during the war. While her neighbors and family members undertake a mass exodus in order to escape the approaching Nazi forces,

Rachilde resolves to stay put, declaring flatly to those imploring her to flee: “Non… il y a ici des animaux à nourrir” (163). Indeed, Rachilde’s highly unconventional World War II memoir chronicles her day-to-day, isolated existence as she rations her dwindling food supplies among the mice, cats, dogs, goats, and other farm animals she shares her home

97 with. As she is a strict vegetarian, she specifies that she abstains from any flesh food that she comes across in her daily foraging, giving it instead to the kitten pensionnaires living in her attic: “Comme j’ai une égale horreur de la viande et du vin, on aura là dedans une bonne pâtée pour deux jours, si mes pensionnaires ne sont pas trop gourmands” (121). As

Alain Montandon emphasizes, Rachilde’s text ignores any details of the war not immediately related to her personal survival and that of her animal companions, such that

“Aucune consideration générale, historique sur l’actualité […] n’est faite” (Montandon

17). Seemingly as a means of explaining this extreme, wartime dedication to the animals in her life, Rachilde intersperses her text with anecdotes that explore the emotional proximity she has developed over time to nonhuman creatures. In the following scene,

Rachilde provides the backstory for her beloved pet mice, the descendants of lab animals that she freed some sixty years before the war.

Towards the middle of Face à la peur, Rachilde describes a formative experience from her youth in which she worked to supplement her then-meager literary earnings with a job as a (reluctant) lab assistant in a facility that practiced mammalian vivisection.

The story is replete with not only standard ethical criticisms of vivisection, but with firmly aesthetic and methodological ones as well, with Rachilde incisively questioning the laboratory’s use of mice, “les plus petits des animaux, les plus jolis, les plus délicats, les moins désignés pour s’apparenter à la race humaine” (Face 58, emphasis mine).

When the young Rachilde makes a stand by stating that she will not tolerate “qu’on l’instruisît au sujet de la circulation du sang en ouvrant le corps innocent et charmant d’une bestiole aussi menue, aussi peu en rapport avec les vieux singes ressemblant à ce professeur” (ibid.), her supervisor demands that she meet with him early the next day so

98 that he can train her to overcome what he believes to be an unreasonable queasiness before animal blood. Volunteering to show up before their meeting, ostensibly to tidy up the lab, Rachilde borrows the lab key from her supervisor in order to then liberate the captive mice and to destroy “quelques milliers de francs d’instruments de torture” (61).

Hawthorne has pointed to the recurrent trope of the “evil man of science” (190) in

Rachilde’s oeuvre, and the life sciences are indeed depicted in this scene as a malevolent institution preying upon both nonhuman animals and women as test subjects for the amusement and curiosity of men. Throughout her tenure in the laboratory, Rachilde was sexually harassed by her supervisor. Significantly, vivisection and sexual predation blend into one cohesive, aggressively masculine force in Rachilde’s text, such that her animal ethics merge with a wider critique of a patriarchal ideology. From the beginning of the story, Rachilde insists that her supervisor’s sexual harassment is inextricably linked to his desire to dissect and vivisect. At the precise moment when she brings up her supervisor’s predatory behavior towards her, then, Rachilde not only ushers in the idea of dissection, but she also refers to herself in the third person as her half-animal alter ego le loup-garou, assuming an identity in which both the nonhuman animal and women victims of the lab are united in a single animal-woman hybrid: “Ce savant, ignorant absolument les loups-garous du Périgord noir, faisait la cour à cet animal (dans l’espérance de le disséquer un jour ?) parce que l’homme n’est jamais à l’abri des envoûtements mystérieux qui surgissent entre deux cornues et deux causeries plus ou moins scientifiques” (59, emphasis mine). Rachilde thus explicitly frames the violence done to nonhuman animals and women in the laboratory as products of the very same power dynamic.

99 Rachilde’s metamorphic identification with nonhuman animals as fellow targets of a masculine scientific institution manifests itself throughout her body of work.50 While the title of feminist can be applied only cautiously to the resolutely anti-collectivist

Rachilde, the author of Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe (1928) after all,51 this intersection of feminist and animal welfare concerns is a prevalent one within fin-de- siècle French activism. Kathleen Kete makes nods to nineteenth-century authors like

Maria Deraismes, Cleyre Yvelin, and Jules Bois, among others, all of whom published both feminist and antivivisectionist essays. As Kete notes: “In France as in Britain, the antivivisection movement seems to have been fueled by women’s keen identification with helpless animals who lived at the mercy of controlling scientists. […] In feminist discourse in general, ‘la science masculine’ came to be posed against ‘les malheureuses femmes’” (18). From Jean-Martin Charcot’s invasive hypnosis experiments on the women of La Salpêtrière, to the rapacious over-prescription of “toutes les drogues qu’on répand par la réclame sur la naïveté des malheureuses qui s’empoisonnent pour le plus grand profit des pharmaciens” (Face 65-66), Rachilde frames the sciences as a predatory force that targets women when it is not busy targeting nonhuman animals. 52 As Finn puts

50 We will return to this notion in particular when considering Rachilde’s depictions of scientists in La Marquise de Sade.

51 Rachel Mesch, in her survey of the different scholarly negotiations of Rachilde’s ambivalence toward feminism, notes that Rachilde’s own misgivings about a political association with turn-of-the-century feminism, her “resistance to the feminist label should not prevent us from recognizing the ways in which Rachilde’s writing may have interrogated relationships among sexuality, language, and power that much later feminist theorists would explore explicitly” (Mesch 124). See also: Lukacher 150.

52 As Mesch points out when exploring Rachilde’s writings on hysteria in Monsieur Vénus, while Charcot himself argued that hysteria was a condition to be found in men just as much as in women, the popular conception of his work and the sensationalism of his

100 it, “it was the female, as Rachilde rightly foresaw, next in line after dogs and other animals, who would be the choice subject for mental dissection” (198). This connection between the exploitation of women and animals continues to be one of the guiding notions of contemporary ecofeminism as spearheaded by scholars like Marti Kheel and

Josephine Donovan, whose intersectional feminism conceptualizes violence towards women and nonhuman animals as necessary outcomes of the same network of othering dualisms (“culture/nature, male/female, good/evil, domestic/wild, conscious/unconscious, subject/object, human/animal” [Kheel 3]) inherent to patriarchal modes of thought.

What is remarkable in Rachilde, then, is the manner in which she dramatizes and subverts this shared sense of victimhood by fusing nonhuman animal and female identities into her hybrid creature of le loup-garou that turns on, and triumphs over, its human/male experimenter/persecutor. In Les Rageac, Face à la peur, and Dans le puits, among other works, Rachilde traces her loup-garou identity back to a story about her great-grandfather, an honorary canon in the Catholic Church who sacrilegiously abandoned his station during the French Revolution by marrying Rachilde’s great- grandmother in an effort to save her from the guillotine. According to local legend, explains Rachilde, her great-grandfather’s abandonment of the church cast a curse on the next five generations of the family line, transforming them into a family of werewolves:

“Jusqu’à la cinquième génération, il est admis que les enfants d’un prêtre se changent en loup, les nuits de la Chandeleur, et vont courir les bois, cherchant à mordre” (Face 54-

public hypnosis experiments on women made it so that popular and medical definitions of hysteria were easily blurred to favor the misogynist characterization: “In part as a result of the extensive discussion of the disease, medical definitions of hysteria were remarkably elastic, making it easy to diagnose any erratic female behavior as hysterical” (Mesch 128).

101 55). Rather than feel shame for her family’s bestial reputation among the Périgourdin townsfolk, however, Rachilde rapturously exclaims: “Quand j’appris cela, je fus remplie d’une joie folle ; j’appartiens enfin à la race animale !” (55). A heightened sense of animality is by no means a degrading state for Rachilde, but rather one that humans should aspire to, one that a young Rachilde delights in discovering. She welcomes her lupine ancestry, and it is precisely as this wolf-woman hybrid that she attacks the laboratory considered to be an affront to both constituents of her identity.

Not only does Rachilde destroy the lab, but she also simultaneously tears apart the anthropocentric interspecies hierarchy grounding its vivisectionist practices, proposing in its stead an alternative, quintessentially Decadent interspecies hierarchy based on a refined aestheticism. Accordingly, after destroying the laboratory and freeing the captive mice, Rachilde describes a note she leaves her supervisor that essentially reads as a spectacular Decadent super-heroine calling card:

Je n’ai d’autre vocation dans la vie que le culte de la beauté sous toutes ses formes. Je préfère les animaux aux hommes parce qu’ils sont plus sains et plus propres. J’aime les souris parce qu’elles sont charmantes et sans défense contre votre laideur de tortionnaire. Si vous n’êtes pas content, voici mon adresse et je suis prête à répondre de la casse ! (60-61)

Rachilde’s letter illuminates the extent to which her sympathy towards nonhuman animals is fully intertwined with her aesthete, Decadent value system. In reading her declaration that her life is dedicated to beauty in all of its forms, one cannot help but think of the dedication to her most famous Decadent novel, Monsieur Vénus: “Nous dédions ce livre à la beauté physique” (3). The experimenter’s vivisectionism is framed not just as a moral transgression against animal life, then, but also as an oppressively unaesthetic blow to “le culte de la beauté” delivered by the lumbering hand of his

102 “laideur de tortionnaire.” Her concern for animal liberation thus intricately synchronizes with her concern for aesthetic liberation, both of which are seen as threatened by the laboratory’s suffocating positivist values.

The manner in which Rachilde contrasts the scientist to the nonhuman animals in the laboratory is telling of the priorities of her Decadent aesthetic: while the scientist is riddled with “toutes les laideurs morales ou physiques se pouvant concevoir” (59), the lab mice are enveloped in poetic, extravagant descriptions emphasizing their beauty. The mice are not simply attached to laboratory equipment, they are “crucifiés,” their fur is “si douce, d’un blanc de lait,” and their eyes—in an emphatically Decadent description blending violent imagery with luxurious metaphor—are filled with “des larmes rouges coulant de leurs yeux de rubis” (60). What begins as an anti-vivisectionist stance thus gives way to a greater clash between positivism and Decadent aestheticism, between the rationalist homme and its constitutive others of women and animals. The triumphant liberation of the lab mice and the female loup-garou (both on the side of “le culte de la beauté”) is a blow to an anthropocentric, misogynist system anchored in l’homme’s violent march towards scientific progress; in Rachilde’s new value system, l’homme is ranked decidedly lower than nonhuman animals, and animal beauty takes priority over human positivist ideals.

* * *

As Rachilde emphasizes in the introduction to Le théâtre des bêtes (1926), a collection of autobiographical, animal-centric short stories, she more readily assumes the animal half of her loup-garou identity than she does the human half: “Je fais très peu partie de l’espèce humaine et je suis beaucoup plus proche de l’espèce animale” (2). This

103 self-distancing from l’espèce humaine points to the two-part function of the werewolf alter ego in Rachilde’s oeuvre: in the first place, it serves as a pretext for her empathetic identification with animals; in the second place, it provides her with a vantage point from which to criticize the human society that she feels herself to be outside of (whether as a woman or as a subversive Decadent novelist). 53 Since, as we saw in the laboratory scene above, one of her biggest grievances against humanity is its self-assured violence toward nonhuman animals, these two functions often fully complement each other.

In the following passage from Dans le puits (1918), a World War I memoir that sets up many of the themes she develops more fully in Face à la peur, Rachilde explores this two-part function of her werewolf alter ego, framing the assumption of her animal half as both a direct response to animal cruelty and an abandonment of the bourgeois values that, “en temps normal” (i.e. when not directly confronted with animal cruelty), she might appear to follow:

Dès que la souffrance d’un animal, injustement martyrisé, me touche, ma seconde nature est abolie. Tout ce qui peut représenter mon humanité est brusquement remplacé par une sorte de férocité instinctive […] On m’a volé mon petit et j’arrive, les yeux en feu, pour le redemander à l’homme, l’ennemi à jamais exécrable et exécré. En temps normal, je suis, j’ai l’air d’une femme du meilleur monde, d’une bonne bourgeoise très intéressée par l’ordre à mettre dans son intérieur ; en temps anormal, je ne connais plus rien de mondain ou de bourgeois, il n’y a plus ni lois ni coutumes, encore moins de sentiments, de respect humain, de tenue. (115-116)

At every juncture in which Rachilde discusses a specific issue of animal ethics, the lupine half of her loup-garou identity invariably takes over. After appearing during

53 Diana Holmes has noted a similar dual purpose to the werewolf alter ego, writing that Rachilde’s “Self-characterization as ‘the werewolf’ […] signifies at once Rachilde’s proud assumption of abnormality, of one who is feared and ostracized by the majority, and her claim to a part-human, part-animal identity” (179).

104 the anti-vivisectionist attack on the laboratory, the loup-garou once again rears its head when she discusses her vegetarianism, with Rachilde insisting in the third person that the creature lives its life “ne mangeant jamais de viande et ne faisant jamais tuer un animal, poule ou lapin, pour son usage particulier” (Face 102). While she abstains from eating meat, Rachilde nevertheless emphasizes that she gets to put her werewolf canine teeth to good use as an ideological weapon against meat-eaters: “Je mords en plein orgueil ceux qui mordent en pleine chair. Je ne sais pas si j’ai raison devant Dieu ou les hommes, car je ne crois ni en Dieu, ni en la loi des hommes s’arrogeant la suprématie de leur race sur les autres races” (61-62).

The indifference of her “Je ne sais pas si j’ai raison devant Dieu ou les hommes” speaks to Rachilde’s refusal to systematize her animal ethics into a methodical, rationalist framework. Indeed, returning to her anti-vivisectionism, Rachilde defiantly asserts that she is uninterested in proving that vivisection is wrong; instead, she aims to honor her passionate, emotional response to the practice: “La passion ne peut jamais rien prouver, mais elle peut mettre un frein aux autres passions. Si tu détruis pour défendre des idées, moi je détruis pour défendre le plus faible contre le plus fort et cela me suffit amplement pour me justifier à mes propres yeux” (61). This privileging of her emotional response to vivisection is precisely the sort of gesture that contemporary ecofeminism has striven to validate in the discourse surrounding animal ethics. Mainstream rights-based scholars like Peter Singer or Tom Regan, against whom ecofeminists like Donovan and Kheel have juxtaposed their own work, have been very clear about the fact that they wish to completely dissociate their writings from the realm of affect in order to give it a certain legitimacy:

105 Since all who work on behalf of the interests of animals are more than a little familiar with the tired charges of being ‘irrational,’ ‘sentimental,’ ‘emotional’ or worse, we can give the lie to these accusations only by making a concerted effort not to indulge our emotions or parade our sentiments. And that requires making a sustained commitment to rational inquiry. (Regan lii)

One of the central aims of ecofeminism has been to dismantle this dualism between rationality and emotion in animal ethics, a dualism grounded in a Cartesian objectivism that has of course been historically hostile toward nonhuman animals

(Donovan 351). As Lori Gruen and Kari Weil point out when discussing the impetus for an ecofeminist, ethics-of-care approach to animal welfare:

Feminists have long challenged these patriarchal dualisms and took this rejection of emotion to task, arguing that the distinction between reason and emotion was itself suspect, as the two are mutually informing [Gruen 1991]. They have urged the development of a praxis built on compassion, care, and empathy, one that includes cognition and affect in ways that cannot be disentangled, and that will lead to richer, more motivating approaches to understanding and improving our relationships with others. (Gruen and Weil 479)

Swinging the pendulum to the other extreme, Rachilde dismisses the need for a moral system to explain and justify her animal sympathy, unapologetically asserting that her compassion for animals is grounded in a visceral, emotional response to their suffering rather than in an abstract set of ethical values. Accordingly, she does not attempt to rationalize the loup-garou’s violent outbursts in defense of animals, choosing instead to simply honor and act upon her sensation of moral outrage: “Je ne cherche pas à légitimer mes violences par un droit moral. Je ne reconnais, en cessant de me connaître, que les liens mystérieux me rattachant, corps et cerveau, à l’animalité.” (Dans le puits

118, original emphasis). These “liens mystérieux” to nonhuman animal life are, at their core, a poeticized affirmation of the importance of affect and empathy in our dealings

106 with animals, a proto-ecofeminist recognition of “the role of emotion in both establishing the moral claims animals make on us and in motivating us to act on those claims” (Gruen and Weil 479). Rachilde’s prioritization of her own emotional interiority over the development of a more systematized ethics is also, of course, a characteristically

Decadent maneuver, one that neatly accords with Koenraad Swart’s classic reading of literary Decadence as an intensified echoing of Romanticism’s investment in the individual and the “irrationalisitic” as a response to Enlightenment-era values (Swart

251).

Rachilde’s animal ethics thus align not only with the overarching anti-positivist, anti-rationalist pitch of her Decadent worldview, but also with a broader range of social critiques associated with the literary movement. In the above passage concerning her vegetarianism (“Je mords en plein orgueil ceux qui mordent en pleine chair. Je ne sais pas si j’ai raison devant Dieu ou les hommes, car je ne crois ni en Dieu, ni en la loi des hommes s’arrogeant la suprématie de leur race sur les autres races”), the loup-garou’s vegetarian diet quickly moves beyond an ethical stance in favor of animals to a wider attack on anthropocentric, religious conservatism and the ontological hierarchies it enables. Earlier in the text, Rachilde delights in remembering how, when she briefly lived in a convent as a teenager, she would be ineffectually punished for her habitual misbehavior by being locked away in a cell where she was deprived of the meat-based meals served to the rest of the convent: “on me servait des bouillies de maïs des plus appétissantes, me privant des viandes que je n’aimais pas et m’abreuvant d’eau fraîche dont je me saoulais volontiers” (Face 51). Her vegetarianism, as with much of her animal ethics, takes on a surprisingly political function here, marking a form of liberation from

107 the church’s ability to control her. In this regard, her choice in diet recalls Carol J.

Adams’ ecofeminist view on vegetarianism as an affirmation of female autonomy in the face of larger patriarchal power structures: “An integral part of autonomous female identity may be vegetarianism; it is a rebellion against dominant culture whether or not it is stated to be a rebellion against male structures” (155).

This same blend of animal ethics and social critique is visible in the werewolf’s aversion to la foule, which is considered an ugly, mundane unit (as is the case in other prototypically Decadent novels like Joris-Karl Huysmans’ misanthropic À rebours

[1884]), that enables blind violence against vulnerable individuals both human and nonhuman. Nuancing the Deleuzian vision of animality in which “tout animal est d’abord une bande, une meute” and in which “Nous ne devenons pas animal sans une fascination pour la meute, pour la multiplicité” (Deleuze and Guattari 293), Rachilde conceptualizes her animal identity as a resolutely anti-collectivist, individualist phenomenon, writing later in Face à la peur: “L’unique chose dont le loup-garou a vraiment l’horreur, c’est de la foule, la foule imbécile qui piétine le faible, tue celui qui n’a pas su se garer d’elle, qui est toujours l’ennemie parce qu’elle est le nombre contre l’unique, la société, la fâcheuse société contre l’individu” (100). 54

54 Despite this divergence in thought, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of devenir-animal developed in Mille plateaux (1980) does offer several attractive qualities as a conceptual tool with which to approach Rachilde’s oeuvre, namely in its deconstruction of “la loi d’arborescence” (i.e. of hierarchical verticality) implicit in identity binaries like “mâle-(femelle) ; adulte-(enfant) ; blanc-(noir, jaune ou rouge) ; raisonnable-(animal)” (Deleuze and Guattari 358), and its endorsement of a rhizomatic (i.e. anti-hierarchical, non-linear, horizontal) understanding of identity as dependent on relations across ever-shifting, mutually constitutive entities, animal or otherwise (360). As Gruen and Weil point out, ecofeminist projects by Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, and Lynda Birke have all drawn influence from aspects of Deleuzian thought (Gruen and Weil 481). Conversely, scholars like Donna Haraway, whose work blends questions of

108 The Rachildean loup-garou thus makes her loyalties clear: she stands on the side of intense individualism, of “le culte de la beauté,” of animal sympathy, all in opposition to l’homme and “la fâcheuse société.” Her identification with nonhuman animals both shapes and is shaped by the larger enterprise of her literary Decadence. In the following sections, we will consider the ways in which she organically integrates her conception of animal ethics into her novelistic universe. In both La Marquise de Sade and L’animale,

Rachilde explores the intense affinity between and gradual fusion of her female protagonists and their cats: swapping out her image of the werewolf for the werecat,

Rachilde uses this new woman/animal hybrid as a creature through which she can claw at the systems of thought underwriting the human/masculine homme’s oppressive hegemony while simultaneously forwarding a deep sense of care for nonhuman animals.

II. La Marquise de Sade: Animal Allies in the War against L’homme

La Marquise de Sade is essentially a Decadent Bildungsroman that follows its female protagonist Mary Barbe from childhood (a childhood that draws heavily from

Rachilde’s own experiences as the daughter of a military man in the years preceding the

feminism and animal studies without adhering to an ecofeminist angle, have criticized Deleuze and Guattari’s work for being marred by certain anthropocentric and misogynist blind spots (see Haraway 27-32), ones that cover many of the defining characteristics of late-career, autobiographical Rachilde: “The old, female, small, dog- and cat-loving: these are who and what must be vomited out by those who will become-animal. Despite the keen competition, I am not sure I can find in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and horror at the ordinariness of flesh, here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist project” (Haraway 30). I will return to Deleuze and Guattari below when discussing Rachilde’s L’animale.

109 Franco-Prussian war),55 to her adulthood in fin-de-siècle Paris. As the novel progresses,

Mary takes on both an increasingly feline character and an increasingly violent femme fatale role, relying on both parts of her identity in order to subjugate a cast of male suitors that would seek to control her. Throughout the text, Mary aligns herself with animals in deliberate defiance of a prevailing social order that is antagonistic toward both women and animals.

From the very beginning of the novel, Mary commiserates with nonhuman animals as fellow targets of a masculine violence, with the opening scene announcing this association in a particularly visceral manner. As a young girl, Mary is unwittingly taken to a slaughterhouse where she is traumatized by the sight of a bull slaughtered by two male butchers. As with many of Rachilde’s dealings with animals, the scene is described in a style that combines a graphic attention to detail (emphasizing, for instance, the bull’s eyes that “sortirent de leurs orbites” from the blunt force of a mallet [29]) with a fantastical, larger-than-life, poetic tenor. Indeed, told from Mary’s perspective, the slaughterhouse scene becomes awesomely terrifying:

Il sembla à la petite fille que cette scène prenait des proportions phénoménales; elle s’imagina que tout le bâtiment de l’abattoir était une seule tête cornue, fracassée, grinçant des dents et lui lançant des fusées de sang sur sa robe blanche ; elle se crut emportée par un torrent dans lequel se débattait avec elle une arche de Noé complète, les moutons, les veaux, les porcs, les vaches, et les garçons bouchers couraient après elle pour lui passer leur couteau sur la nuque. (30)

Mary’s traumatizing, hallucinatory vision points to several of the ideas that will guide the rest of the novel’s action. In the first place, the violence done to a single bull quickly comes to represent a broader, categorical violence done to all nonhuman animal

55 See Hawthorne 228 for the autobiographical components of the novel.

110 species, with Noah’s entire ark being swept up in the scene—the little girl internalizes the lesson that the bull’s fate is not an isolated event, but is rather indicative of a larger power structure that seeks to legitimize human violence against any and all nonhuman animals

(and the bull death is indeed but the first of many violent animal deaths to come in the novel). In the second place, Mary immediately feels herself to be the target of this same violence, such that she is not only swept up right along with all the other animals, but she also imagines the “garçons bouchers” (whose masculinity is pointedly emphasized) chasing after her with their knives. Mary’s empathetic identification with nonhuman animals plays out so intensely that she actually confuses her own body with that of the bull: as soon as the animal is struck, she brings her hands “à sa nuque par un mouvement instinctif. Elle venait de ressentir là, juste au nœud de tous ses nerfs, le coup formidable qui assommait le colosse” (30). This confusion of bodies communicates the notion that, within the patriarchal microcosm of the male-run slaughterhouse, her female human body reads interchangeably with the bull’s insomuch as both fall on the othered side of the man/woman, human/animal binaries upholding the very idea of l’homme. Rachilde concretizes this power dynamic by making it so that Mary and the bull essentially share a central nervous system, a singular body that is targeted by and responds identically to the same human, masculine violence. A few pages later, Mary does indeed become the target of this same violence when she is unable to calm her nerves upon returning from the slaughterhouse: her father, “jugeant qu’une correction amènerait la détente nécessaire à ce système nerveux trop excitable, […] lui administra le fouet de bon cœur” (45).

As in the laboratory scene in Face à la peur, Rachilde pushes this visceral sense of empathy still further by then fusing the animal and woman together into a hybrid entity

111 that seeks its revenge on l’homme. In the final moments of Mary’s hallucinations brought on by the impact of the slaughterhouse scene, she addresses a feverish rant to her cat

Minoute in which she emphasizes their shared victimhood and her desire to exact revenge on l’homme alongside her cat as a cat:

L’homme!... j’ai peur de l’homme, […] tu vois, Minoute, que nous sommes de pauvres chats, toutes les deux!... Notre maman va mourir, notre papa nous fouettera, et le gros bœuf est bien malheureux! […] Minoute, nous irons sur la grande montagne, […] tu auras un bonnet de dentelles et moi j’aurai ta queue de soie jaune!... De là-haut nous verrons passer le régiment […]. Oh ! si l’homme revient, nous le tuerons… parce qu’il a tué le bœuf… le bœuf du petit Jésus… tu le grifferas… nous le grifferons!... l’homme!... l’homme!... (43-44)

All throughout this outcry, Mary blurs the boundaries between herself and her cat, taking on Minoute’s tail and claws, while the cat takes on the little girl’s lace bonnet. The two fluidly absorb each other’s identities, uniting in their ontological opposition to l’homme. In Mary’s hallucinatory haze, Minoute then responds by offering her an animal apprenticeship in order to help her overthrow the anthropocentric, patriarchal hierarchy underlying the sovereignty of l’homme (whose human/male polysemy is critical here):

“Si tu voulais… je t’apprendrais à griffer l’homme, l’homme qui tue les bœufs… l’homme, le roi du monde” (46).

The rest of the novel then tracks Mary’s gradual felinization as she seeks vengeance against l’homme. The very next time she witnesses animal cruelty, Mary is able to put her developing claws to use. Melanie Hawthorne has analyzed the numerous passages of horrendous violence against animals that appear in Rachilde’s oeuvre, interpreting them as a type of exposure therapy to help her cope with the daily sight of animal cruelty that she could not always control despite her best efforts as an animal activist: “In her need to master the pain caused by cruelty to animals, Rachilde repeats

112 such scenes obsessively in a Freudian game of fort/da, insistently rehearsing an episode of loss in order to deaden the pain, learning to not mind” (231). Such scenes may indeed have served as a psychological coping mechanism for their author; within the context of the novel, however, the sight of animal cruelty is a consistently galvanizing phenomenon that fuels Mary’s need for vengeance while further strengthening her identification with animals.

Shortly after Minoute’s call-to-arms against l’homme, Rachilde describes a fight between Mary and the little boy next door, Paul Marescut, over Mary’s pet lamb. When

Paul asks to borrow the lamb, Mary has “la vague souvenance des brebis de l’abattoir” and flatly refuses, shouting accusingly: “Tu veux le tuer !” (56). The two children then begin to fight over the lamb until Paul breaks one of the animal’s hind legs, forcing the animal to be put down. It is here that Mary’s feline metamorphosis truly begins, with

Mary letting out “un cri de chatte en colère” before falling on Paul, “le [criblant] d’égratignures” (57). The narrator elevates this childhood squabble to immense proportions, such that the scene becomes a vehement protest against animal cruelty, an affirmation of Mary’s identification with nonhuman animals, and the declaration of “sa première guerre au mâle” (ibid.).

Mary’s next significant battle with l’homme comes after the death of her mother, who dies while giving birth to a boy. Mary looks upon her baby brother with fear and hostility, seeing in him yet another example of l’homme as an entity that preys upon women and animals. When she learns of her mother’s death in childbirth, Mary immediately thinks back to the opening scene of the novel: “Morte! Maman!... cria la petite fille qui eut la vision sanglante du bœuf qu’elle avait vu tuer un jour, au fond d’une

113 espèce de cave, d’un coup, pour en tirer quelques gouttes de sang. […] on avait tué sa mère comme cela, du même coup, pour avoir ce petit morceau de chair…” (100). In keeping with her attack of Paul Marescut for having come between her and her lamb,

Mary retaliates against her younger brother, “ce petit morceau de chair,” whom she blames for killing her mother and whose very existence conjures (fairly or not) visions of meat, animal cruelty, and the subjugation of women. Dramatically escalating her war against l’homme, she secretly watches her baby brother suffocate to death under the weight of the Barbe family’s sleeping housekeeper, with the narrator coldly explaining:

“Pourquoi aurait-elle sauvé la vie de son frère ? […] Avait-elle souhaité sa naissance, sa naissance, c’est-à-dire la mort de sa mère ?” (145).

* * *

After losing her father to the Franco-Prussian war, the parentless Mary finds herself forced to move in with her uncle Célestin Barbe, a nationally famous doctor whose primary distinguishing characteristic is that he “n’aimait guère les femmes” (191).

As always, Rachilde presents the life sciences as a nexus of violent anthropocentrism and misogyny. Toward the middle of the novel, Rachilde describes a gathering of scientists that takes place at Célestin’s house, focusing in particular on a vivisectionist named

Victorien Duchesne, whose faux humanitarianism Rachilde mocks by discussing his lab dogs “qu’il empêchait de mordre, mais pas de crier à cause de l’humanité” (216), and a neurologist named Marscot (as Finn points out, a clear nod to Charcot [198]) who ushers around a nameless woman whom he hypnotizes with the beat of a drum. As she did during her own brief tenure in a vivisectionist laboratory, Rachilde calls into question both the methodology and the motives of the experimenters’ work. In describing

114 Marscot’s test subjects, Rachilde writes of “des tas de filles nerveuses [qu’il] ne se chargerait jamais de guérir, se contentant des manifestations curieuses de la catalepsie, sans songer à autre chose; filles et chiens étaient là pour servir de vulgaires mannequins à souffrance” (216). As she does on so many other occasions, Rachilde establishes a sense of solidarity between women and nonhuman animals in a gesture that overtly undercuts the integrity and sincerity of positivist values.

Mary’s final battle in her war against l’homme thus consists in the infiltration (and subsequent subversion) of this scientific milieu in which women and animals are meant to be nothing more than “de vulgaires mannequins à souffrance.” The narrator is explicit about the fact that Mary is initially barred access to her uncle’s laboratory, a space in which the only role available to women and animals is that of exploited test subject

(although even this role, remarks the narrator in a sequence of free indirect discourse on behalf of Célestin, is one for which she is deemed a suboptimal specimen as she is a

“morceau vivant, ni bon à disséquer, ni propre à se conserver en un bocal d’alcool !”

[191]). The only way for Mary to gain access into this milieu, then, is to become an object of scientific inquiry, which, echoing Rachilde’s own experiences of sexual harassment from her laboratory supervisor, is here synonymous with becoming an object of a predatory masculine desire.

If Célestin Barbe is at first entirely indifferent toward Mary on account of her gender, he begins to develop a sexual interest in her once he sees in her a potential test subject. Drawing from the anthropological criminology made famous by Cesare

Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1876), Célestin begins to pay closer attention to Mary when he notices that she has an abnormally long thumb, a physical feature he had previously

115 observed on the cadaver of an assassin: “Elle lui semblait une autre créature depuis la découverte de son pouce, il lui venait le désir de l’étudier de plus près” (200). This desire to examine her body as a Lombrosian case study quickly morphs into a much more lecherous examination; upon further anatomical analysis, remarks the narrator, “A part son pouce […], il la trouvait d’une superbe structure” (205). Célestin is particularly attracted to her for “ses hanches […] élégantes et félines” (ibid.), establishing once again the constellation of scientific experimentation, sexual objectification, and animal exploitation found throughout Rachilde’s oeuvre.

Shortly after becoming an object of scientific inquiry, Mary is sexually abused by her uncle (214). Faced with this horrifically hostile scientific milieu, Mary leverages her uncle’s scientific/sexual interest in her, using her proximity to him in order to absorb his scientific knowledge and weaponize it against him. Having gained access to her uncle’s laboratory, Mary gradually acquires a wealth of anatomical and chemical knowledge that she mobilizes in her ongoing war against l’homme, confronting Célestin with the resounding battle cry: “les sciences que vous m’avez si libéralement données tourneront contre vous, le savant !” (214).

In Célestin’s treatise on anatomy and sexuality, l’Amour physique, Mary reads up on a slew of alleged health risks tied to female sexual obsession, learning of “les libertines [qui] erraient de passions en passions, dévorées de désirs, souvent d’ulcères

épouvantables” (207). Shortly afterwards, she experiments with applying these same hygienic principles to her male sexual abuser, wielding Célestin’s desire against him by blackmailing him for his financial resources (“Estimez-vous heureux que je n’aille pas crier vos hontes devant tout ceux qui vous croient respectables” [214]) while gleefully

116 watching his health wither away as he develops a series of “mouvements nerveux,” “des palpitations étouffantes,” and “La décrépitude sénile, […], le foudroyant au milieu de ses désirs irréalisables” (211). When Célestin reluctantly marries her off to le Baron Louis de

Caumont, an acquaintance within the scientific community, Mary uses her familiarity with her uncle’s poisons cabinet (“Ce sont mes poupées, ces jolis poisons-là” [232]) to slowly, undetectably poison her new husband over six months with “de la cantharide”

(299). Meanwhile, Mary takes up an affair with Célestin’s lab assistant Paul Richard, who has a nervous condition that leads to regular nosebleeds. After studying him, she gradually learns how to provoke the condition, taking pleasure in seeing her lover weaken from bleeding out: “Oui, j’ai un bonheur à le voir couler, je t’assure. Peut-être que je t’aime à cause de cela !” (250).

Mary thus turns the tables, such that it is no longer women and animals that are

“de vulgaires mannequins à souffrance,” but rather l’homme. All the while that she goes about reversing this power dynamic, Mary becomes increasingly felinized, thereby accentuating the allied woman/animal nature of this rebellion against l’homme. The narrator points to “ses yeux rapprochés comme ceux des félins” (181), “ses bras nerveux, félinement tordus” (244), “ses jolies mains félines” (299), all the way until the final scene of the novel in which “moitié la petite fille qui veut du fruit défendu, moitié la lionne qui cède à l’instinct” (312), Mary finds herself in a débit de sang plotting how to murder her next victim. All of La Marquise de Sade’s action is set in motion by Mary’s deeply empathetic response to the slaughtering of a bull, culminating in this werecat metamorphosis and her violent dismantling of the stronghold of misogyny and anthropocentrism that is fin-de-siècle science. Rachilde’s vengeance narrative thus

117 constitutes an intensified, hyper-violent dramatization of the proto-ecofeminist underpinnings of her own real-life, animal activist exploits—at its core, the novel is an exposition and development of the same power dynamics (and power reversals) of the vivisectionist laboratory episode from her youth.

III. L’animale: The Space Above and Beyond L’Échelle des Êtres

In L’animale (1893), published six years after La Marquise de Sade, Rachilde elevates the figure of the werecat to new heights, exploring the interspecies relationship between the novel’s protagonist Laure Lordès and her beloved cat Lion as the two gradually absorb elements of each other’s identities. As in La Marquise de Sade, this deep sense of identification between a nonhuman animal and a woman is tied to a shared ontological opposition to l’homme. While the former novel targeted primarily the scientific institutions whose theoretical foundations rationalize and uphold the oppression of those woman/animal identities exterior to the rationalist construction of l’homme,

L’animale targets the realm of bourgeois domesticity. Throughout the text, Rachilde juxtaposes the intense, quasi-romantic relationship between the protagonist and Lion to the bleak, calculated, and ultimately violent relationships on offer to Laure from the modern Parisian homme, the uninspired and uninspiring product of “l’irréprochable fabrique bourgeoise moderne” (170). Rachilde turns to nonhuman animality in general, and to the individual cat Lion in particular, as a liberating, life-affirming contrast to bourgeois norms. As Kete points out, the emphasis of a hyper-sexualized feline nature elaborated in nineteenth-century zoological studies by naturalists such as Alphonse

Toussenel and J. Bourrel gradually gave rise to the notion of “The cat as icon of a

118 sexuality pushed to the margins of bourgeois life” (122), an image that Rachilde experiments with throughout her novel. L’animale paints one of Rachilde’s most vivid pictures of a Decadent animality, elaborating the countercultural values that she projects onto nonhuman animals in a gesture that informs her affective, ethical investment in them.

* * *

In the beginning of L’animal que donc je suis, Jacques Derrida famously describes a moment of epistemological crisis that occurs when he notices his cat looking at him naked, causing him to feel shame, and then shame for his shame before this cat that is itself naked but visibly unperturbed (Derrida 18). The interspecies interaction marks the beginning of a long reflection on otherness, on the possibility of a radically other, feline perspective on him: “Il a son point de vue sur moi. Le point de vue de l’autre absolu, et rien ne m’aura jamais tant donné à penser cette altérité absolue du voisin ou du prochain que dans les moments où je me vois vu nu sous le regard d’un chat” (28). From this encounter with otherness, Derrida confronts the idea of thinking difference (which culminates in his idea of l’animot considered in the previous chapter), but also of thinking tout court: “L’animal nous regarde, et nous sommes nus devant lui. Et penser commence peut-être là” (50).

In the beginning of L’animale, Laure Lordès experiences an epistemological crisis of her own when she feels herself being observed by a pack of feral cats, whose radical alterity opens up the possibility of modes of being completely other to her tame, domestic life with her fiancé Henri Alban. During one particularly restless spring night, Laure gets out of bed in order to get some fresh air, climbing a ladder that allows her to stick her

119 head outside of her bedroom skylight. She comes face-to-face here with a group of cats roaming along the roof, one of which looks her directly in the eyes, “se demandant si par ces trous on n’apercevrait pas les mystères humains” (22). This encounter with a wondering feline gaze becomes a turning point for her, causing her to dramatically rethink the past year that she had lived happily and unquestioningly with her fiancé:

“Laure […] se crut heureuse toute une année, jusqu’à cette nuit de détraquement nerveux durant laquelle, sur un toit de cristal, elle vit danser des chats au clair de lune” (141).

Laure subsequently takes one of these cats inside as a pet she names Lion. From this moment forward, Laure identifies increasingly with her feline companion while becoming increasingly estranged from her human one. As with Mary Barbe and Minoute, there is a real ontological fluidity that develops between Laure and Lion through their emotional proximity, with the two weaving in and out of the confines of their respective species: “Le petit chat, toujours se frottant contre son humanité complaisante, prenait des allures d’enfant, devenait humain, tandis que la jeune fille, plus bestiale à se frotter contre cette fourrure de bête, devenait féline, éprouvait des besoins de griffer, de hurler ses peines dans un miaulement de passion et d’angoisse” (175). This interspecies exchange gradually leads to a state in which the two share virtually all of the same emotions: “Ces deux simples créatures, si naturellement compliquées, s’entendaient à merveille, et ressentaient les mêmes ennuis, les mêmes impatiences, les mêmes joies” (234-235).

Lion’s highly developed emotional capacities are contrasted throughout the text to those of Henri, a caricature of bourgeois modernism. The narrator describes Laure’s fiancé as a devotee of the most mundane, soul-crushing rationalism: “Il était fier du Paris de M. Carnot, fier de la France, que la raison et un bel équilibre social momifient

120 honnêtement” (170). Just as La Marquise de Sade exposed the violent underside of nineteenth-century science, swapping the image of a noble, positivist pursuit of progress with a focus on the women and animal victims sacrificed within this pursuit, Henri’s aloof but seemingly innocuous bourgeois character is quickly shown to mask a vicious patriarchal cruelty. Upon learning that his fiancée had been sexually active in her youth,

Henri becomes overwhelmed and frightened by Laure’s sensual energy, which clashes with the “petit intérieur gentil qu’il rêvait” (107). Henri desperately searches for an excuse to abandon her in a “chute propre, une rupture convenable qui ne ferait pas d’esclandre en dehors du notariat,” and his horrifying solution is to pay an acquaintance

(who, like Henri, is said to belong to the class of “des honnêtes gens”) to rape her such that he can leave her for being unfaithful (190). Throughout L’animale, as Diana Holmes points out, “Rachilde satirizes her society’s complacent belief in male authority, and its fear of female sexuality” (136)—this bourgeois concern for patriarchal order is ultimately revealed to be an extremely violent force.

The turn to the nonhuman animal is thus an escape from and rejection of this bleak, bourgeois landscape. Henry’s plan ultimately fails after Laure fights off her assailant. In immediate contrast to this dark scene, Rachilde presents one of the more heartfelt moments in her body of work. As Laure lies awake crying that night, Lion comes to comfort her, offering her a sense of compassion that is an enormous departure from the violence to which she has just been subjected—“L’animal se dressa, posa ses deux pattes sur ses épaules, très délicatement lui lécha les joues, buvant ses larmes.

Comme une mère peut être heureuse de voir s’épanouir l’intelligence de son enfant, elle fut ravie, se sentit privilégiée parmi les femmes, […] et remercia ce chat de lui avoir

121 parlé” (192-193). Transcending interspecies boundaries, Lion proves to be capable of an affective depth that is unthinkable in “ces personnages bien corrects, bien à moitié sages qu’on appelait les hommes rangés” (190).

In opposing Lion to the bourgeois homme, Rachilde turns nonhuman animals into an idealized vessel for Decadent values. Laure describes her cat as “un petit cœur sans corps, qui vagabondait autour de moi” (256): rather than having nonhuman animality connote (as is more customary in nineteenth-century letters) a heightened sense of corporeality, Laure frames Lion as pure, unbridled, bodyless emotionality. This description of Lion is in line with one of the most recurrent Decadent topoi in Rachilde’s work, what Hawthorne has tracked in À mort (1886) as the “typically decadent theme [of] emphasizing the cerebral and ideal over the physical and real” (Hawthorne 130). In the face of bourgeois rationalism, nonhuman animals offer in the Rachildean imaginary an admirable, dream-state existence liberated from societal convention, a type of existence that Laure aspires to:

Henri, je m’imagine que cette existence des songes est comme la vie des animaux. On ne pense plus, et des choses vous arrivent tout naturellement, sans qu’elles vous causent la moindre stupeur. Les bêtes sont toujours au milieu de la nuit, et se heurtent contre des objets qu’elles ne discernent pas. Mais aussi, quelle tranquillité pour elles qui n’ont ni besoin de pleurer leur mère, ni besoin de pleurer leur faute, et qui ne s’occupent pas de l’heure de la pendule ou des opinions des gens ! (161)

* * *

Appropriating the conceptual tools of the modern positivism she abhors, Rachilde returns to the idea of l’échelle des êtres throughout L’animale, reconfiguring its parameters such that the modern, Parisian homme is demoted for his lack of affective vitality. In stark contrast to the bouncing heart that is Lion, “l’homme juste milieu” is a

122 creature “Muni d’un compteur spécial calculant les pulsations de l’amour” (169); on

Rachilde’s hierarchical scale, “ces hommes-là n’ont pas le don d’aimer même comme les bêtes ; ils sont, dans l’échelle des êtres, au-dessous des animaux, entre le minéral diamant et le minéral coquille d’huître !” (170). Rachilde emphasizes this point throughout the text, consistently referring to human beings as the “êtres inférieurs de l’espèce humaine”

(214).

Significantly, most of the central plot points within L’animale occur on the rooftop of Laure’s apartment building, a space she enters by climbing a literal “échelle”

(19)—the rooftop is a milieu that is both physically above an échelle, and figuratively above and beyond the anthropocentric échelle des êtres as conceived by the positivist homme. The rooftop sits squarely above the bourgeois vision of domesticity, hovering over Laure and Henri’s bedroom, and offering a space in which interspecies boundaries break down to allow for radical modes of relationship unencumbered by patriarchal, hierarchical dualisms. During Laure’s first encounter with the rooftop cats, she simultaneously feels a new sense of liberty, a vague acknowledgment of being encumbered by the échelle, and a fascination with the creatures inhabiting this space:

“elle les conviait à jouer avec cette grosse boule soyeuse qu’elle leur représentait, ne s’apercevant même pas que ses pieds s’engourdissaient et que le barreau de l’échelle lui meurtrissait les plantes. Au vent de liberté qui secouait ses cheveux, la femme s’enthousiasmait pour le bizarre peuple des toitures” (22).

The rooftop becomes an almost mythical space for Laure in which she is able to fully inhabit her werecat identity. Climbing “comme une véritable chatte l’échelle qui conduisait sur le toit” (175), she begins to take part in nightly excursions along the

123 Parisian skyline, “isolée du reste de la terre, à cent lieues du monde civilisé, oubliant les lois et les mœurs pour ne se rappeler qu’elle était aussi libre que le vent qui dénouait ses cheveux” (197). Among “le bizarre peuple des toitures,” Laure eventually finds a human lover named Auguste, who spots her through the window of his attic apartment. As soon as Auguste joins her on the rooftop, his humanity similarly breaks down into the interspecies fluidity that governs the milieu, such that the narrator describes him as

“Moitié jeune renard, moitié jeune singe” (197), with “dents de jeunes loups” (201) and the comportment of “un bon chien sur la piste” (209).

The rooftop space grants Rachilde a fascinating vantage point from which to consider the question of the échelle des êtres: if the space is decidedly above Parisian bourgeois society, thus constituting a rung that is unambiguously higher than l’homme along a hierarchical échelle, le bizarre peuple des toitures is itself made up of an anti- hierarchical, interspecies fluidity in which different creatures shape one another. The physical spaces of the novel thus intricately reflect the contrasting notions of arborescent and rhizomatic models in a Deleuzian sense: the apartment building is the arborescent, vertical, hierarchical model in which the bourgeois homme is situated on the top floor, contrasted to his animal and woman others; the rooftop is the rhizomatic, horizontal, anti- hierarchical skyline in which multispecies interdependence reigns. Stable species boundaries are lost along the rooftop as all of its inhabitants blur into the ever-shifting, multispecies peuple des toitures, which, as an entire unit, is placed above the bourgeois homme.

The rooftop is also the setting for the final scene of the novel. When Laure is finally abandoned by her fiancé (who feels justified in leaving her once he catches her in

124 her brief affair with Auguste), she takes to prostituting herself in order to survive. In so doing, she stumbles upon an unnamed man who finally sees eye-to-eye with her, falling in love with her precisely for her animalistic nature, seeing in her a “petite tigresse […] sans les préjugés, sans les détours de nos sociétés modernes” (261). The two end up sleeping together in Laure’s apartment, and the man briefly steps out the following morning to gather up his belongings so they can run away together. As soon as he leaves, however, Lion returns to the apartment after an extended absence. In a rapid-fire, brutal ending that has long puzzled critics, we discover that Lion has become rabid, and he immediately falls upon Laure, infecting her with the virus, and mauling her until the two plummet off the roof together in a single, bloody, entangled mess (269). Diana Holmes argues that this ending leaves unresolved many of the novel’s important questions, particularly those regarding Laure’s quest for a female sexual liberation:

Is she punished for her transgressive assertion of female desire? […] Or should the ending be read as Rachilde’s assertion that her society could not accommodate a freely desiring woman? In that case, the use of the jealous cat as the agent of destruction is problematic. Rachilde seems to have opted for an ending that intensifies the novel’s shock value, and its mood of relentless, violent passion, at the expense of diegetic coherence.56

The novel is certainly not lacking in shock value, and Holmes’ points are well taken, but it is important to note that we are not dealing with a simply jealous cat, but rather a rabid one. If the scene is indeed surprisingly abrupt within the context of the plot, it nevertheless pushes the anti-hierarchical, interspecies fluidity that Rachilde has been developing all along to its most radical extreme: the two creatures are finally completely bound together through their shared susceptibility to the rabies virus. There is no

56 Holmes 137. This perspective is echoed, with minor variations, in: Laporte 114; Porzak 96.

125 boundary between them: they are simply “deux bêtes enragées” (269), two organisms equally vulnerable to viral infection. In no other scene in the novel does Rachilde more forcefully reject, in step with Donna Haraway, “the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” (Haraway 11).

* * *

One of the most dominant conceptions of literary Decadence is that its adherents strongly prioritize the realms of art and artifice over the natural world (Weir 21). And yet, this conception of Decadence sits poorly not only with Rachilde’s career-long ethical and aesthetic interest in animals, but also with the indisputable evidence that several of the most canonical Decadent authors were very vocal about their love of animals. The most famous animal in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ body of work is undoubtedly Des Esseintes’ bejeweled turtle, who tragicomically dies under the weight of her luxurious adornments in À rebours (Huysmans 139), but the novelist showed greater sympathy toward animals elsewhere in his oeuvre. In an interview in Georges Docquois’ Bêtes et gens de lettres

(1895), Huysmans earnestly declares: “c’est à la lettre — je ne saurais vivre sans un chat”

(166), going on to discuss his numerous, heartfelt tributes to his real-life cats, whose likenesses appear in the fictional ones of En ménage (1881), En rade (1887), and Là-bas

(1891) (Docquois 166-169). Octave Mirbeau’s autobiographical novel Dingo (1913), about the life and death of his beloved dog, gives voice to a series of animal ethics concerns: “À vivre avec les animaux, à les observer journellement, à noter leur volonté, l’individualisme de leurs calculs, de leurs passions et de leurs fantaisies, comment ne sommes-nous pas épouvantés de notre cruauté envers eux ?” (658). All three of these authors paint animals in altogether sympathetic colors in their novelistic works, forcing

126 us to challenge and reconfigure the pervasive conception of Decadence as a certain aversion to the natural world. Or, perhaps even more radically, these works force us to challenge and reconfigure this art/nature divide; in Rachilde’s oeuvre, we have seen that nonhuman animals are deemed to have a much higher capacity for beauty than the positivist, bourgeois homme—nonhuman animals are decidedly on the side of Decadent artistry.

The most enduring image of literary Decadence has long been Huysmans’ aesthete Des Esseintes living an isolated existence in his remote, countryside home so as to completely dedicate himself to beauty and the senses. We ought to add to this image, I suggest, that of Rachilde living an isolated existence in her remote, countryside home so as to completely dedicate herself to beauty and animal welfare.

127 CONCLUSION

Nineteenth-Century Animals in Twenty-First-Century Ecosystems

In grappling with the various evolutionary frameworks that emerged throughout the nineteenth century (be they Lamarckian, Saint-Hilairian, Darwinian, or—as was common in both layman and scientific circles of the time—some vague conflation of the three57), writers from a wide range of literary traditions began to form conjectures on what evolutionary changes might await both human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom in the nearby future.

Several of these conjectures blurred the line between scientific and mystical thought. In Séraphîta (1834), one of the more fantastical novels among La comédie humaine’s Études philosophiques, Balzac makes one of his many allusions to Saint-

Hilaire’s transformist “unité de composition” (127), this time anachronistically fusing it with the spiritualist metaphysics of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1722) in order to argue that human beings, under the right environmental and intellectual conditions on earth, can undergo a full species transformation to become angelic: “Swedenborg appelle Esprits

Angéliques les êtres qui, dans ce monde, sont préparés pour le ciel, où ils deviennent

Anges. Selon lui, Dieu n’a pas créé d’Anges spécialement, il n’en existe point qui n’ait

été homme sur la terre” (67). As with all other creatures, in other words, angels are not a

57 See Bernardini 92 for more on the contemporaneous confusions surrounding the differences between Darwinian evolution and earlier transformist models.

128 fixed, radically distinct species, but rather yet another variation of a single anatomical design that has responded over time to particular environmental factors. As Saint-

Hilaire’s transformism operates linearly along a single spectrum of anatomical complexity, angelhood is just as open to all other animals as it is to humans, such that the angel is “une figure aux pieds de laquelle rampent les Formes et les Espèces de l’Animalité pour reconnaître leur chemin” [155]). It is with this shared potential future in mind that the novel’s eponymous angel figure Séraphîta advocates a radical love of all organic life: “mêle toujours l’idée du Tout-Puissant aux affection d’ici-bas, tu aimeras alors toutes les créatures, et ton cœur ira bien haut !” (24).

“Le Chien et la Fleur sacrée,” a short story from George Sand’s Contes d’une grand’mère (1876), similarly blurs the line between Saint-Hilairian transformism and metempsychosis. Like Balzac, Sand maintained a correspondence with Saint-Hilaire and was fascinated by what his ideas meant for the future of all animal species, human or otherwise.58 Instead of a species transformation into a traditionally angelic state, however, Sand imagines an evolution to angelhood as a new bionic stage to come in the twentieth century, counting on various technological advances to alter the human species:

“La personnalité humaine n'est pas le dernier mot de la création sur notre planète. […] les ailes, nous saurons les trouver : la science nous les donnera pour traverser les airs, comme elle nous a donné les nageoires pour traverser les mers” (226-227). Nonhuman animals are entirely wrapped up in this bionic development, with Sand ultimately painting a picture in which other species progress alongside humans in both a physical and moral evolution to form a new, harmonious and vegetarian interspecies republic:

58 See: Sand to Geoffroy, 30 April 1837, Correspondance, 3: 831-835.

129 l'animalité […] progressera en même temps que nous. Qui vous dit qu'une race d'aigles aussi puissants que les ballons et aussi dociles que les chevaux ne surgira pas pour s'associer aux voyages aériens de l'homme futur ? […] l'homme doit dès ce monde devenir ange, si par ange vous entendez le type d'intelligence et de grandeur morale supérieur au nôtre. Il ne faut pas un miracle païen, il ne faut qu'un miracle naturel, comme ceux qui se sont déjà tant de fois accomplis sur la terre, pour que l'homme voie changer ses besoins et ses organes en vue d'un milieu nouveau. J'ai vu des races entières s'abstenir de manger la chair des animaux, un grand progrès de la race entière sera de devenir frugivore, et les carnassiers disparaîtront. Alors fleurira la grande association universelle, l'enfant jouera avec le tigre comme le jeune Bacchus, l'éléphant sera l'ami de l'homme, les oiseaux de haut vol conduiront dans les airs nos chars ovoïdes, la baleine transportera nos messages. (227)

Sand’s twentieth-century, technological, interspecies utopia points to a theme that became increasingly prevalent at the fin de siècle as authors began to think more seriously about what human/animal relations might resemble amid all the radical changes anticipated for the jump into the twentieth century. The science fiction writer J.-H. Rosny l’aîné (1856-1940) offered visions of the future that appear at once wholly of their time in their over-the-top, fin-de-siècle fever pitch, while simultaneously feeling eerily prescient.

In his interview for George Docquois’ Bêtes et gens de lettres (1895), Rosny proposes a transformist vision in which the world will eventually be taken over by some newly evolved amphibious creature whose ability to adapt to a wide range of habitats will allow it to outlive human beings in the bleak environmental landscape he predicts for the future:

Partisan déterminé du transformisme, M. Rosny professe volontiers que l’homme — cet animal dit supérieur — doit être remplacé, tôt ou tard, par un animal inférieur, lequel ne sera ni un chat ni un chien, mais pourra être un quelconque amphibie. Cet amphibie aura un petit organe d’adaptation propre aux conditions de la vie à venir. Comme le dipneuste, qui, présentant tous les caractères de l’animalité la plus inférieure, n’en portait pas moins en lui les germes de la supériorité, puisqu’il avait à la fois des branchies pour respirer dans l’eau et des poumons pour respirer dans l’air, la bête, innommable encore, qui se dresse, pour nous succéder, au seuil obscur des futuritions, s’offre, à notre hypothèse, nantie d’un organisme approprié à la raréfaction de l’air — probable dans ces temps… (273-274)

130

What is particularly remarkable about this interview is the fact that, while it is loaded with surreal images of amphibian takeovers, and while—as we will see momentarily—it vocalizes very specifically fin-de-siècle concerns around a Decadent obsession with human artifice, it nevertheless lucidly anticipates some of the most pressing, present-day questions tied to the Anthropocene and the intricate web of species adaptations wrapped up in human-induced climate change: “l’homme ne saurait plus durer longtemps encore : cet animal, qui, par sa préoccupation excessive de soi-même, s’artificialise chaque jour davantage, tend à devenir de plus en plus incapable de vivre dans un milieu naturel. Les manifestations ahurissantes de son industrie sont comme le sceau certain de sa proche destruction” (274, emphasis mine).

* * *

While the nineteenth-century literary visions of human/animal relations we have considered throughout this dissertation might occasionally strike the contemporary reader as fanciful products of their very particular sociohistorical settings, a case like Rosny’s demonstrates how even some of the strangest of these texts contain insights that are surprisingly forward-thinking and relevant to contemporary discussions of interspecies encounters. As we saw in chapter one of this dissertation, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s theories are often so undeniably peculiar by contemporary standards that even dedicated specialists like Colas Duflos feel compelled to qualify their work by noting, “un aspect des Études qu’on aurait tort de ne pas mentionner dans les bonnes raisons de lire ce texte aujourd’hui : pour le lecteur contemporain, Saint-Pierre est souvent d’une involontaire drôlerie que Flaubert avait bien perçue” (28). And yet, as with Rosny’s fears of an

131 amphibious coup d’état, even some of the most seemingly unusual aspects of Saint-

Pierre’s oeuvre contain elements that resonate in the present.

As remote as Saint-Pierre’s overarching anthropocentric finalism might seem from any rigorous, present-day scientific discourse, some of the foundational elements of his theoretical framework do indeed find modernized counterparts within the work surrounding contemporary conservationist efforts. Saint-Pierre’s refrain that all of nature’s harmonies are specifically designed for human beings extends into the realm of aesthetics in his Études de la nature: certain animals are beautiful to us because nature has specifically designed them with our sense of sight in mind; the distribution of colors in any given landscape, argues Saint-Pierre, is most beautiful when observed from the approximate height of human beings, such that “On doit entrevoir par là que le point de vue de ce magnifique tableau a été pris des yeux de l'homme” (Études 389).

While there is of course no serious effort to defend this sort of stance on a theoretical level in contemporary science, conservationist organizations nevertheless have to rely on conceptually similar ideas to gather the necessary financial support in order to protect endangered species and at-risk habitats. In conservationist parlance, a flagship species is one that has “particular ecological, aesthetic, or visceral appeal” to a wide public, is thus “attractive and memorable,” and is “chosen for their charisma, to increase public awareness of conservation issues and rally support for the protection of that species’ habitat. Protection of other species is [then] accomplished through the umbrella effect of the flagship species” (Caro 245). In other words, just as in Saint-Pierre’s oeuvre, pragmatic conservationist thought today lies squarely at the intersection of animal welfare, ecological harmony (that is, through the range of interdependent species

132 protected under the umbrella effect by living within the flagship species’ habitat), and an anthropocentrically-minded disposition toward nonhuman animals as creatures (be they tigers, rhinoceroses, pandas, or other examples of widely appealing “charismatic megafauna” [Caro 247]) whose primary utility is to bring human beings aesthetic, intellectual pleasure. In a certain sense, Saint-Pierre’s anthropocentric vision of natural harmonies shifts here from eccentric artifact of early nineteenth-century religious/scientific thought into a viable model of how to realistically care for endangered species in the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, the Zolian human-animal-machine trichotomy considered in chapter two bears many of the markings of a mid-nineteenth-century, positivist, materialist framework conceptually bound to the specific sociohistorical milieu of the industrial revolution; however, the ethical questions tied up in Zola’s fascination with animals and machines are equally salient in the turn-of-the-millennium discourse on robotics, artificial intelligence, and animal studies. To say nothing of the notion of robotic personhood as explored in the popular media of the past few decades from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

(1982) to Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), we can point to the increasing presence of the mechanical in the philosophical writing on animal ethics and personhood. In this regard, landmark texts like Daniel Dennett’s Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and

Psychology (1981), and more recent work by environmentally-focused philosophers like

Catherine Larrère, whose latest output extends beyond animals to encompass machines, come to mind. Readily recalling the ontological fluidity of Zola’s ethical thought, Larrère eschews questions of moral considerability based on ontological distinctions, looking instead at the types of relationships possible across categories biological and mechanical:

133 “Il faut donc renoncer à poser la question en termes d’identité, ou d’essence […] Il faut accepter de poser la question en termes de rapports […] L’identité que nous prêtons aux animaux ou aux machines n’est pas antérieure aux rapports que nous avons avec eux, c’est dans ces rapports qu’elle se constitue” (108). As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated and necessary to daily human life, as human entanglement with other animal species becomes increasingly impossible to ignore—as, for instance, in the case of the looming agricultural catastrophes linked to the “Colony Collapse Disorder” currently affecting the honeybee population and its ability to contribute to our high- pollination-dependent food supply59—our rapports with both machines and animals will continue to change drastically, opening up a series of urgent ethical questions that blur the lines between the human, mechanical, and animal.

Rachilde, whose animal ethics we considered in chapter three, is the only one of the three primary novelists in this dissertation who could genuinely be considered an animal activist in the contemporary sense. Her liberation of laboratory animals, her forceful obstruction of a bullfight, her persistent published output discussing her vegetarianism—all remarkable for a writer of her stature in her era—would now sit naturally within the daily agendas of animal ethics organizations both mainstream, like

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and more overtly radical (and morally questionable60), like Direct Action Everywhere. As we have seen, the intersectional

59 See Laurent Cilia’s “The Plight of the Honeybee: A Socioecological Analysis of large- scale Beekeeping in the United States.”

60 See Adams, Carol J., “Why I Am Boycotting Events if DxE Is Also An Invited Speaker,” caroljadams.com, April 21, 2018, https://caroljadams.com/carol-adams- blog/why-i-am-boycotting-events-if-dxe-is-also-an-invited-speaker.

134 nature of Rachilde’s thought, which blends questions of species-based and gender-based injustices, continues to be one of the guiding concepts behind contemporary ecofeminist conceptualizations of animal ethics. If Rachilde’s discussions of animal beauty and aesthetics are so uniquely tied to her Decadent worldview that it is difficult to find a parallel in contemporary animal ethics, the flipside of that Decadent coin is her criticism of a bourgeois, positivistic faith in science and technology that continues to be a significant throughline in present-day criticisms of the environmental catastrophe that is factory farming.61 In her own day, when large-scale animal slaughter had not yet reached the astronomical heights possible today with the advances in agricultural technologies,

Rachilde’s friend and fellow Decadent author Léon Bloy (1846-1917) could mock

American bourgeois values (in a nationalistic gesture not uncommon for the period) by explicitly juxtaposing a Parisian concern for aesthetics to a Chicagoan one for factory farming statistics: “À Paris vous avez la Vénus de Milo, mais à Chicago nous tuons cent mille cochons par jour !” (Le Pèlerin de l’Absolu 185). Rachilde’s siding with nonhuman animals (whether for reasons aesthetic or ethical) in the face of an ugly bourgeois positivism is at least conceptually adjacent to contemporary animal ethics battles against the capitalist megalith of factory farming.

* * *

In comparing the different ethical, aesthetic, and biological frameworks at play in

Saint-Pierre’s anthropocentric teleology, Zola’s materialist human-animal-machine trichotomy, and Rachilde’s Decadent animal activism, it is impossible to ignore the sheer diversity of conceivable responses to the question of what it means to care for animal

61 See Pluhar, Evelyn B., “Meat and Morality: Alternatives to Factory Farming.”

135 others. The nineteenth-century literary imaginary offered several different conceptualizations of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom, and the ethical implications underwriting each of these different visions varied dramatically, shedding much light along the way on some of the critical ideological differences across the century’s diverse literary movements. A look at the differences across the rights-based, postmodernist, and ecofeminist approaches to animal ethics found in the present-day scholarship lining this dissertation similarly highlights the extent to which contemporary solutions to the animal question continue to be far from monolithic in nature. It is in bringing this plurality of voices into dialogue with each other, then, that we become best equipped to make the most responsible decisions on behalf of nonhuman animals who are themselves voiceless in these ethical debates.

136 BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Primary Sources

Balzac, Honoré de. “Avant-Propos.” 1842. Œuvres complètes de H. de Balzac. Paris: A.

Houssiaux, 1855, 17-32.

⎯⎯⎯. Le Père Goriot. 1835. Paris: Gallimard. 1991.

⎯⎯⎯. Séraphîta. 1834. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1973.

Bernard, Claude. Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale. 1865. Paris:

Edition Flammarion, 2008.

Bloy, Léon. Le Pèlerin de l’Absolu. Paris: Mercure de France. 1914.

Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de. L’Histoire naturelle. 1749-1789. Œuvres.

Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2007.

Chateaubriand, François-René de. Génie du Christianisme. 1802. Vol I. Paris: Garnier-

Flammarion, 1966.

Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. Traité des animaux. 1755. Œuvres complètes de

Condillac. Tome III. Paris: Ch. Houel, 1798.

Cuvier, Georges. Le règne animal distribué d’après son organisation, pour servir de base

à l'histoire naturelle des animaux et d'introduction à l'anatomie comparée. Paris:

Deterville, 1817.

⎯⎯⎯. Lettres de Georges Cuvier à C.M. Pfaff sur l’histoire naturelle, la politique et la

littérature (1788-1792). Ed. Louis Marchant. Paris: Librairie Victor Masson,

1858.

137 Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection of the

Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 1859. New York, NY:

New American Library, 2003.

Descartes, René. Discours de la méthode. 1637. Œuvres et Lettres. Paris: Gallimard,

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1953, 123-179.

⎯⎯⎯. “Lettre à M. Morus.” (February 5, 1649). Œuvres et Lettres. Paris: Gallimard,

Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1953, 1312-1320.

Diderot, Denis. Le rêve de d’Alembert. 1769. Paris: Flammarion, 2002.

Docquois, Georges. Bêtes et gens de lettres. Paris: Flammarion.1895.

Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard et Pécuchet. 1881. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1979.

Hetzel, Pierre-Jules, Honoré de Balzac, et al. Scènes de la vie privée et publique des

animaux. Paris : J. Hetzel, 1842.

Hugo, Victor. La Légende des siècles. 1855. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. 2000.

Humboldt, Alexander von. Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe.

Vol II. 1847. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868.

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. À rebours. 1884. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1977.

Kant, Immanuel. Lectures on Ethics. 1784-5. Trans. P. Heath; ed. P. Heath and J.B.

Schneewind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste. Philosophie Zoologique. 1809. Paris: Flammarion, 1994.

Lamartine, Alphonse de. La chute d’un ange. 1838. Œuvres poétiques complètes. Paris :

Editions Gallimard, 1963.

⎯⎯⎯. Les Confidences. 1849. Œuvres complètes. Tome vingt-neuvième. Paris :

Lamartine, 1863.

138 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. L'homme-machine. 1748. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.

Leroy, Charles Georges. Lettres philosophiques sur l'intelligence et la perfectibilité des

animaux, avec quelques lettres sur l'homme. 1768. Paris: Bossange, Masson et

Besson, 1802.

Lombroso, Cesare. Criminal Man. 1876. Durham: Duke University Press. 2006.

Maupassant, Guy de. “La Pitié.” Le Gaulois, December 22, 1881.

⎯⎯⎯. “Histoire d’un chien.” Le Gaulois, June 2, 1881.

Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de. Lettres. 1752. Œuvres de Mr. de Maupertuis. Tome

II. Lyon : Jean-Marie Bruyset. 1756, 187-340.

Michelet, Jules. La Bible de l’humanité. 1864. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1899.

Mirbeau, Octave. Dingo. 1913. Œuvre romanesque (Vol. 3). Paris: Meta Éditions, 2001.

Rachilde. L’animale. 1893. Paris: Mercure de France, 1993.

⎯⎯⎯. Dans le puits, ou la vie inférieure. Paris: Mercure de France, 1918.

⎯⎯⎯. Face à la peur. Paris: Mercure de France, 1939.

⎯⎯⎯. La Marquise de Sade. 1887. Paris: Mercure de France, 1981.

⎯⎯⎯. Monsieur Vénus. 1884. New York: The Modern Language Association of

America, 2004.

⎯⎯⎯. Les Rageac. Paris: Mercure de France, 1921.

⎯⎯⎯. Le Théâtre des bêtes. Paris: Les Arts et le Livre, 1926.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les

hommes. 1755. Paris: Flammarion, 1992.

⎯⎯⎯. Emile, ou de l’éducation. 1762. Paris: Editions Garniers frères, 1957.

139 Royer, Clémence. “Préface”. De l’origine des espèces. Charles Darwin. Paris: Victor

Masson et Fils, 1866, xv-lix.

Saint-Hilaire, Etienne Geoffroy. Principes de Philosophie zoologique, discutés en mars

1830, au sein de l’Académie royale des sciences. Paris: éd. Pichon et Didier,

1830.

Saint-Hilaire, Isidore Geoffroy. Vie, travaux et doctrine scientifique d’Étienne Geoffroy

Saint-Hilaire. Paris: P. Bertrand, 1847.

Saint-Pierre, Henri Bernardin de. L’Arcadie. 1781. Œuvres complètes de Jacques-Henri-

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Vol IX. Paris: Aimé André, 1823.

⎯⎯⎯. La Chaumière indienne. 1790. Œuvres complètes de Jacques-Henri-Bernardin

de Saint-Pierre, Vol VIII. Paris: Aimé André, 1823.

⎯⎯⎯. “Essai sur J.-J. Rousseau.” 1818. Œuvres complètes de Jacques-Henri-

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Vol X. Paris: Aimé André, 1823.

⎯⎯⎯. Études de la nature. 1784. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l'Université de Saint-

Etienne, 2007.

⎯⎯⎯. Harmonies de la nature. 1815. Œuvres complètes de Jacques-Henri-Bernardin

de Saint-Pierre, Vols XI-XV. Paris: Aimé André, 1823.

⎯⎯⎯. “Mémoire sur la nécessité de joindre une ménagerie au Jardin des plantes de

Paris.” 1792. Œuvres complètes de Jacques-Henri-Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Vol

XVIII. Paris: Aimé André, 1823.

⎯⎯⎯. Paul et Virginie. 1788. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966.

⎯⎯⎯. Vœux d’un solitaire. Paris: Didot, 1789.

140 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin. Portraits littéraires. 1844. Œuvres, Vol. II. Paris:

Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1949.

Sand, George. Contes d’une grand’mère. 1876. Paris: De Borée, 2009.

Taine, Hippolyte. La Fontaine et ses fables. 1853. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1905.

Zola, Émile. “L’amour des bêtes.” Nouvelle Campagne. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier,

1897, 85-97.

⎯⎯⎯. La Bête humaine. 1890. Paris: Classiques Universels, 2000.

⎯⎯⎯. “Une Cage de bêtes féroces.” Dans Paris. 1865. Œuvres complètes d’Emile

Zola, Tome neuvième. Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1968, 303-307.

⎯⎯⎯. “Différences entre Balzac et moi.” 1869. Comment Emile Zola composait ses

romans : d’après ses Notes personnelles et inédites. Ed. Henri Massé. Paris:

Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1906, 24-26.

⎯⎯⎯. Le Docteur Pascal. 1893. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1993.

⎯⎯⎯. “Enfin couronné.” Nouvelle Campagne. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1897,

231-242.

⎯⎯⎯. La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret. 1875. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1991.

⎯⎯⎯. Germinal. 1885. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1978.

⎯⎯⎯. La Joie de vivre. 1884. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1985.

⎯⎯⎯. “Le naturalisme.” Une campagne. 1881. Œuvres complètes d’Emile Zola, Tome

quatorzième. Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1968, 507-511.

⎯⎯⎯. “Notes générales sur la nature de l’œuvre.” 1868, Ecrits sur le roman.

Anthologie établie, présentée et annotée par Henri Mitterand. Paris : Librairie

Générale Française. 2004, 108-110.

141 ⎯⎯⎯. L’œuvre. 1886. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1996.

⎯⎯⎯. “Le Roman expérimental.” Le Roman expérimental. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880,

1-53.

⎯⎯⎯. “A la Séance annuelle de la Société Protectrice des Animaux.” 1896. Œuvres

complètes d’Emile Zola : Mélanges, préfaces et discours. Paris: François

Bernouard, 1929, 318-320.

⎯⎯⎯. “[Le vieux cheval].” Dans Paris. 1865. Œuvres complètes d’Emile Zola, Tome

neuvième. Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1968, 239-240.

II. Secondary Sources

Adams, Carol J. The sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. New

York: Continuum, 1990.

⎯⎯⎯. “Why I Am Boycotting Events if DxE Is Also An Invited Speaker,”

caroljadams.com, April 21, 2018, https://caroljadams.com/carol-adams-blog/why-

i-am-boycotting-events-if-dxe-is-also-an-invited-speaker.

Andersen, I.L., Nævdal, E., & Bøe, K.E. “Maternal investment, sibling competition, and

offspring survival with increasing litter size and parity in pigs (Sus scrofa).”

Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 65 (6), June 2011, 1159-1167.

Appel, Toby A. The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before

Darwin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Baguley, David. “Zola and Darwin: A Reassessment”. Evolution of Literature: Legacies

of Darwin in European Cultures. Saul, Nicholas, and James, Simon J., eds. New

York, NY, USA: Editions Rodopi, 2011, 201-212.

142 Basilio, Kelly Benoudis. Le mécanique et le vivant : la métonymie chez Zola. Geneva:

Librairie Droz S.A., 1993.

Baratay, Éric. Bêtes de somme : des animaux au service des hommes. Paris: Points, 2011.

⎯⎯⎯. L’Église et l’animal (France XVIIe-XXIe siècle). Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf,

2015.

⎯⎯⎯. “La promotion de l'animal sensible. Une révolution dans la Révolution.” Revue

historique, 2012/1 n° 661, 131-153.

Bernardini, Jean-Marc. Le Darwinisme social en France (1859-1918). Fascination et

rejet d’une idéologie. Paris: CNRS, 1997.

Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/colonial Literature.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Bonnefis, Philippe. “Le bestiaire d’Emile Zola.” Europe, no. spécial “Zola,” avril-mai

1968, 97-109.

Bullard, C. and G.H. Parker. “On the Size of Litters and the Number of Nipples in

Swine.” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 49, No.

7 (September 1913), 399-426.

Cabanès, Jean-Louis. “Zola : Des chevaux et des hommes.” Romanesques. Animaux

d’écritures : le lien et l’abîme, Hors-série 2014, 27-43.

Caro, Tim. Conservation by Proxy: Indicator, Umbrella, Keystone, Flagship, and Other

Surrogate Species. Washington: Island Press, 2010.

Cilia, Laurent. “The Plight of the Honeybee: A Socioecological Analysis of large-scale

Beekeeping in the United States.” Sociologia Ruralis, Volume 59, Issue 4,

October 2019, 831-849.

143 Clark, Linda L. Social Darwinism in France. Alabama: University of Alabama Press,

1984.

Cook, Malcolm. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 1737-1814: A Life of Culture. London:

Routledge, 2006.

Couleau, Christèle. “Les animaux sont-ils des personnages comme les autres ?”. La

Comédie animale : le bestiaire balzacien. Sous la direction d’Aude Déruelle.

Actes de la journée d’études organisées en juin 2009. Ed. Aude Déruelle.

http://balzac.cerilac.univ-paris-diderot.fr/bestiaire.html, 2009.

Crossley, Ceri. Consumable Metaphors: Attitudes towards Animals and Vegetarianism in

Nineteenth-century France. Oxford: P. Lang, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

Dennett, Daniel. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.

Derrida, Jacques. L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006.

Donovan, Josephine. “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory.” Signs, Vol. 15, No. 2

(Winter, 1990), 350-375.

Drouin, Jean-Marc. “Science, politique et histoire naturelle chez Bernardin de Saint-

Pierre.” Bernardin de Saint-Pierre : idées, réseaux, réception. Ed. Anton, Sonia,

Laurence Macé, and Gabriel-Robert Thibault. Mont-Saint-Aignan: Presses

universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2016, 77-85.

Duflo, Colas. “Le hussard et l’inscription.” Études de la nature. By Bernardin de Saint-

Pierre. 1784. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l'Université de Saint-Etienne, 2007.

144 Farrant, T.J., “Balzac, Satire, and Subversion: The Private Life of the Avant-propos to La

Comédie humaine,” Confrontations: Politics and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-century

France, Ed. Kathryn M. Grossman et al., Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

Finn, Michael R. “Dogs and females: Vivisection, feminists and the novelist Rachilde.”

French Cultural Studies, 23 (3), 2012, 190-201.

Fontenay, Elisabeth de. Le silence des bêtes. La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité.

Paris: Fayard, 1998.

Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses, Paris : Gallimard, 1966.

Gaubert, Ernest. Rachilde. Paris: E. Sansot & Cie, 1907.

Gregorio, Laurence A. Maupassant's Fiction and the Darwinian View of Life. New York:

P. Lang, 2005.

Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and

the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP,

1995.

Gruen, Lori and Kari Weil. “Animal Others—Editors’ Introduction.” Hypatia, vol. 27,

no. 3 (Summer 2012), 477-487.

Hamon, Philippe. Philippe Hamon présente La Bête humaine d'Emile Zola. Paris:

Gallimard, 1994.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in

the Late Twentieth Century”. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of

Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181.

⎯⎯⎯. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

145 Harvey, Joy Dorothy. Almost a Man of Genius: Clémence Royer, Feminism, and

Nineteenth-Century Science. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Hawthorne, Melanie. Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship: From Decadence to

Modernism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 2001.

Holmes, Diana. Rachilde: Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer. New York: Berg,

2001.

Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Kheel, Marti. Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective. Lanham: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2008.

Laporte, Dominique. “Une Négociation stratégique du discours littéraire et du discours

social: Le Dévoilement des dessous (in) humains dans l’œuvre romanesque de

Rachilde.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 37, Number 1 & 2, Fall-

Winter 2008, 108-122.

Larrère, Catherine. “Des animaux-machines aux machines animales.” Qui sont les

animaux ? Ed. Jean Birnbaum. Paris: Gallimard. 2010, 88-109.

Le Blond-Zola, Denise, “Emile Zola et l’amour des bêtes”. Les Cahiers naturalistes, no.

6, 1956, 284-308.

Lukacher, Maryline. Maternal Fictions: Stendhal, Sand, Rachilde and Bataille. Durham

and London: Duke Univ. Press, 1994.

Lyle, Louise. “Le Struggleforlife: Contesting Balzac through Darwin in Zola, Bourget,

and Barrès.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3 & 4, Spring-

Summer 2008, 305-319.

146 Massau, Didier. “Bernardin de Saint-Pierre sous la Révolution : discours politique et

représentation de l'écrivain.” Bernardin de Saint-Pierre : idées, réseaux,

réception. Ed. Anton, Sonia, Laurence Macé, and Gabriel-Robert Thibault. Mont-

Saint-Aignan: Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2016, 68-76.

Matthews, J.H. “Things in the Naturalist Novel.” French Studies, 14 (July 1960), 212-

213.

Mesch, Rachel. The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle.

Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.

Miller, Christopher L. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave

Trade. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.

Montandon, Alain. “La vieille femme et la guerre: Rachilde face au désordre.” L’Esprit

Créateur. Volume 40, Number 2, Summer 2000, 15-24.

Muratore, M.J. “Difference De-frocked: The Triumph of Tradition in Bernardin de Saint-

Pierre’s Paul et Virginie.” Neohelicon 40, 2013, 261-274.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.

Nussbaum, Martha. “Beyond ‘Compassion and Humanity’: Justice for Nonhuman

Animals.” Animal rights: current debates and new directions. Ed. Nussbaum,

Martha and Cass R. Sunstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Oliver, Kelly. “Animal Pedagogy: The Origin of ‘Man’ in Rousseau and Herder.”

Culture, Theory & Critique 47.2 (2006): 107-31.

Organographes du cymbalum pataphysicum, n. 19-20, 1983.

Ouellet, François. “Le motif du loup chez Rachilde : la règle de l’interdit.” University of

Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 2, Spring 2012, 208-218.

147 Pacini, Giulia. “Environmental Concerns in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie.”

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18:1 (Winter 2011), 87-

103.

Pierre, Eric. “La souffrance des animaux dans les discours des protecteurs français au

XIXe siècle.” Études rurales, No. 147/148, “Mort et mise à mort des animaux”

(Jan. - Dec., 1998), 81-97.

Pluhar, Evelyn B., “Meat and Morality: Alternatives to Factory Farming.” Journal of

Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Volume 23, Issue 5, October 2010, 455-

468.

Porzak, Simon. “Perverting Degeneration: Bestiality, Atavism, and Rachilde’s

L’Animale.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 46, Numbers 1 & 2,

Fall-Winter 2017-2018, 93-113.

Prasad, Pratima. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination. New York:

Routledge, 2009.

Preece, Rod. Sins of the Flesh: A History of Vegetarian Thought. Vancouver: UBC Press,

2008.

Racault, Jean-Michel. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre : pour une biographie intellectuelle.

Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015.

Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Rey, Roselyne. “L’animalité dans l’œuvre de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre : Convenance,

consonance, et contraste.” Revue de synthèse, 113 (1992), 311-331.

Romano, Christina. “L’influence de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre dans les premières œuvres

de Chateaubriand.” Autour de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre : les écrits et les hommes

148 des Lumières à l'Empire. Ed. Seth, Catriona and Éric Wauters. Mont-Saint-

Aignan: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2010, 199-213.

Serna, Pierre. Comme des Bêtes : Histoire politique de l’animal en Révolution (1750-

1840). Paris: Fayard, 2017.

Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: Random House, 1975.

⎯⎯⎯. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. New York: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux, 1981.

Somerset, Richard. “The Naturalist in Balzac: The Relative Influence of Cuvier and

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.” French Forum 27:1 (Winter 2002), 81-111.

Stuart, Tristram. The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from

1600 to Modern times. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.

Swart, Koenraad. The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France. The Hague:

Nijhoff, 1964.

Thibault, Gabriel-Robert. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre : genèse et philosophie de l’œuvre.

Paris: Hermann, 2016.

⎯⎯⎯. “Science de l’ingénieur et théologie naturelle dans l’œuvre de Bernardin de

Saint-Pierre.” Autour de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre : les écrits et les hommes des

Lumières à l'Empire. Ed. Seth, Catriona and Éric Wauters. Mont-Saint-Aignan:

Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2010, 141-156.

Thiher, Allen. Fiction Rivals Science: The French Novel from Balzac to Proust.

Columbia: University of Missouri, 2001.

Waldau, Paul. Animal Studies: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press,

2013.

149 Walker, Philip. “Germinal” and Zola's Philosophical and Religious Thought. Purdue

University Monographs in Romance Languages 14. Philadelphia: Benjamins,

1984.

Weil, Kari. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia

University Press, 2012.

Weir, David. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts, 1995.

Wiedemeier, Kurt. La religion de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Fribourg: Éditions

Universitaires, 1986.

Williams, Howard. The Ethics of Diet. A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the

Practice of Flesh-Eating. London: F. Pitman, 1883.

Wolfe, Charles T. “Endowed Molecules and Emergent Organization: The Maupertuis-

Diderot Debate.” Transitions and Borders between Animals, Humans and

Machines 1600-1800. Ed. Tobias Cheung. Leiden, NLD: BRILL, 2010, 38-65.

Wolloch, Nathaniel. “Rousseau and the Love of Animals.” Philosophy and Literature

32.2 (2008), 293-302.

150