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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

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