LAST WORDS ON THE SCAFFOLD:

"CONDEMNED" SPEECH AS ROMANTIC REVOLT

BY SARAH BERNTHAL

B.A., POMONA COLLEGE, 2005

M.A., NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, 2006

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFULLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2015

© Copyright 2015 by Sarah Bernthal

This dissertation by Sarah Bernthal is accepted in its present form by the French Studies Department as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Gretchen Schultz, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Pierre Saint-Amand, Reader

Date______Kathryn Grossman, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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VITA

Sarah Elizabeth Bernthal was born on December 24th, 1982, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

After attending Bullard High School in Fresno, California, she entered Pomona College.

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in May of 2005 with a major in French. In

September 2006, she completed a Master of Arts degree in French Literature at New

York University in Paris. Sarah enrolled as a graduate student in French Studies at Brown

University in 2008, after spending time teaching English in France and tutoring at Fresno

State University. From 2010 to 2011, she served as a lectrice at the Université Lumière

Lyon 2. Upon returning to Brown, she completed her preliminary examinations and began studying portrayals of condemnation in Romantic literature. She defended her dissertation in May of 2015. During her time at Brown, Sarah was a teaching assistant in the French Studies and Comparative Literature departments. She taught beginning and intermediate French and led discussion sections for literature classes on the themes of relationship and medicine.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank first and foremost my dissertation advisor, Gretchen Schultz, whose extremely patient and thorough readings, advice, intellectual rigor, and illuminating questions helped shape this manuscript in its entirety. My abilities as a reader and writer have been greatly strengthened thanks to her. During the course of an independent study project, Gretchen encouraged me to formulate the central ideas of my dissertation proposal. I chose to focus on the nineteenth century relatively late in my graduate career, and without Gretchen's support, this transition and the resulting research would not have been possible.

Heartfelt thanks go also to my readers. Pierre Saint-Amand has been involved in this project from its inception, as he helped guide my preliminary research on criminal language and public opinion. My manuscript owes much of its scope and depth to Pierre's guidance in approaching questions of cultural history. Pierre was always generous with his time, advice, and editing skills. I am also grateful to Kathryn Grossman for enthusiastically agreeing to be my outside reader. I believe her suggestions for transforming this manuscript into a book project will be invaluable for future revisions.

I would also like to thank Edward Ahearn for his help with my research into judicial spectacle and courtroom language. As a teaching assistant, I have had the privilege of

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learning from course chairs who have inspired me with their dedication to their students and their commitment to pedagogy: Annie Wiart, Stéphanie Ravillon, Thangam

Ravindranathan, and Arnold Weinstein. Members of various reading groups have been instrumental in giving me feedback on my dissertation chapters and conference presentations. They have also generously shared their own written work with me. I appreciate the efforts of Bryan, Josh, Sonja, Anne-Caroline, and Valentine in creating a space for peer feedback and community in writing.

Thanks go also to Justin for being a wonderful colleague, conference co-chair, and fellow editor. Brittney, Yuri, Jack, Stefanie, and Shannon: your friendship, generosity, culinary skills, humor, sense of adventure, and hospitality during my graduate school years will be fondly remembered. I am also deeply grateful to Chris, whose words of reassurance have accompanied me throughout the past three years of the writing process.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents and brother for their continued emotional support, trips to visit me throughout my travels, and constant proofreading. I am indebted to my father, Craig, for cultivating my interest in literature and the humanities, and to my brother, Luke, for the example of his work ethic and his equanimity. This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Gail, whose love and compassion have helped carry me through the challenging times of my life.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1

The Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Human Rights……………………………8

The Scaffold as Public Theater…………………………………………………..16

Romantic Speech and Hypersensitivity…………………………………………..20

Performative Speech, Violence, and Sacrifice…………………………………...24

Corpus……………………………………………………………………………32

Chapters………………………………………………………………………….35

Chapter One Doublings and Variations: Vigny's Universal Death Sentence………………………40

Cinq-Mars, Peripheral Hero………………………………...……………………43

Uprooting the Aristocracy………………………………………………………..46

Richelieu's Writing Machine…………………………………………………….48

Urbain Grandier, Romantic Legend and Condemned Judge...... 55

Jeanne's Accusations...... 61

Cinq-Mars, anti-Hero...... 68

Cinq-Mars, Romantic Hero...... 70

Poets and Posterity...... 77

Conclusion...... 79

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Chapter Two Living through Recitation, Death by Improvisation: Julien Sorel's Metamorphosis ...... 81

Condillac and Idéologie...... 86

Recitation, Repetition, and the Treachery of Language...... 90

Self-Betrayal and False Hypocrisy...... 98

The Loss and Recovery of Language...... 101

Improvisation, Living Language, and Death...... 107

Overturning the Discursive Hierarchy...... 111

Performative Monstrosity...... 113

A Respite from Irony...... 116

Conclusion...... 120

Chapter Three Criminal Memoirs and the Displacement of Speech into Writing...... 122

Part I: Rivière's memoir...... 128

Inquisitorial Narratives...... 128

Rivière as (Romantic) Reader and Writer...... 133

Marriage as Verbal Dispossession...... 148

Murder as Speaking and Writing...... 153

Traveling as Trying to Speak...... 156

Part II: Lacenaire's Memoir...... 160

The Assassin's Education...... 160

Lacenaire's Loss of Language: Reconceiving the Complainte...... 164

Murder as Metaphor...... 169

Phrenological Readings: The Murderer as Object...... 173

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The Question of Courage...... 181

Conclusion: From Object to Subject...... 184

Chapter Four The Double as Advocate: Speaking on Behalf of the Condemned in Sand's Mauprat...... 185

The Beast and the Fairy: From Animal to Human Language...... 189

Uprootings and Transplantations...... 199

Speech and Silence as Deliberate Decisions...... 204

Crime and the Involuntary Loss of Language...... 209

Bernard's Trials: Verbal Recovery by Proxy...... 215

Edmée Unveiled...... 224

Conclusion: The Moral of the Story...... 228

Chapter Five Terror, Warfare, and the Death Penalty: Imagining Alternatives in Hugo's Quatrevingt-Treize...... 230

Overlapping Histories and the Imagery of Capital Punishment...... 234

Hugo's Political and Social Spectrum...... 241

The Letter of the Law...... 246

The Letter Compromised...... 251

Fléchard's Heroic Journey...... 259

Mercy as Crime...... 266

Echoing Fléchard...... 277

Conclusion...... 281

Conclusion...... 284

Bibliography...... 290

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1: Rivière Quotations...... 132

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INTRODUCTION

Varying and contradictory accounts of the execution of Louis XVI abounded shortly after his death on January 21, 1793. In a letter to the republican newspaper Le thermomètre du jour, Charles-Henri Sanson, official executioner, recounted the king's final moments.1 According to Sanson, the former monarch was markedly concerned with whether his last words would be heard. His letter explains how the beating of drums drowned out the condemned man's voice:

Alors il s'informa sy les tembours batteroit toujour; il lui fut repondu que l'on n'en savoit rien. Et c'étoit la véritée. Il monta l'échaffaud et voulu foncer sur le devant comme voulant parler. Mais on lui représenta que la chose étoit impossible encore. Il se l'aissa alors conduire à l'endroit où on l'attachat, et où il s'est ecrié très haut: Peuple, je meurs innocent. Ensuitte, se retournant ver nous, il nous dit: Messieur, je suis innocent de tout ce dont on m'inculpe. Je souhaite que mon sang puisse cimenter le bonheur des Français. Voilà, citoyen, ses dernières et ses véritables paroles. (qtd. in Arasse 77)

Far from accepting Sanson's testimony as definitive fact, witnesses told a plethora of other stories. The scène d'échafaud or scaffold scene became a locus of invention, with no fewer than fourteen versions of the event coming to light even before the publication of Sanson's letter (Arasse 78). In La guillotine et l'imaginaire de la terreur, Daniel Arasse describes how republican and royalist opinions mobilized distinct narratives of the king's death, with the respective aims of making him into a monster or a martyr. In each of these contradictory reports, the king's last words—their presence or their absence, their nature, the reactions they engender—are of paramount importance. Another newspaper,

1 The orthographical errors in the following passage are reproduced in Arasse's transcription.

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Révolutions de Paris, implied that spectators wished to silence the king: "il voulut avancer pour parler, plusieurs voix crièrent aux exécuteurs, qui étaient au nombre de quatre, de faire leur devoir" (qtd. in Arasse 86). The drummers’ smothering of the king’s voice is thus retroactively given popular support; denying the monarch a final statement becomes an expression of the people's will.

Louis' desire to make his voice heard is further emphasized by journalist and almanac writer Rouy l'Aîné, who wrote (in Le magicien républicain) that the king resorted to physical violence, striking one of the executioners in order to free himself long enough to address the populace, "dans l'espoir sans doute que sa voix serait parvenue à les apitoyer sur son sort, et à lui faire obtenir sa grâce." But l'Aîné suggests a more insidious motive may also have been present: "il était fortement persuadé, que ses amis se trouveraient là en grand nombre pour le secourir et qu'à cet effet, ils auraient tenté de renouveler la sanglante journée du 10 août" (qtd. in Arasse 87). L'Aîné suggests that the condemned man's speech had the potential to create instantaneous disorder and civil revolt, to reinstate the monarchy. In this account, the commander Santerre "prudently" orders the drummers to muffle the king's voice, but Louis nevertheless swears that his enemies will be punished.

In his Mémoires inédits, Louis-Sébastien Mercier insists even more emphatically on the king's resistance, for in this account, the king struggles and forces the authorities to draw their weapons. In Mercier's version, the king’s verbal aggression escalates: "[il] parlait sans cesse" until the blade fell, at which moment his words dissolved into a terrible, bestial cry (qtd. in Arasse 88). As Arasse points out, in republican accounts of the king's beheading, his speech reveals his treacherous intent, but the guillotine cuts him

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short before he can captivate and seduce credulous onlookers. In royalist accounts, the king is more eloquent, declaring his innocence and forgiving his enemies: "tout se passe comme si le discours du roi, mieux, le verbe royal constituait . . . la véritable relique spirituelle du monarque" (Arasse 90).

These multiple, competing, and contradictory anecdotes all point to the stakes of speech upon the scaffold: its power to create disorder, combat authority, influence history, and sway a crowd of onlookers even as the speaker's life draws to a close. The partially ghostwritten memoirs of Henri-Clément Sanson, the last of the French "dynasty" of professional executioners (and the grandson of Louis’ executioner), recall another significant occurrence in which the condemned man's speech was troublingly difficult to control. In this case, the man who spoke was not a king, but rather twenty-year-old

Pierre-Charles-Rodolphe Foulard, a "chasseur de la garde royale" (313) who, in 1819, was condemned for murdering two women. Henri-Clément reluctantly assumed the position of official executioner, taking over his father's duties because of the latter’s declining health. During his first execution, the horrified Sanson was struck dumb. He describes himself, awakening on the fateful day, as "éperdu." Like a "cloche brisée," he is

"sans voix" (328). In contrast, the convict Foulard speaks with fevered animation, "sans trouble et sans émotion apparente" (330). The men's roles are strangely reversed when

Foulard's confessor turns his attention to the distressed executioner, trying in vain to comfort him. On the way to the scaffold, Sanson reflects: "Je fus incapable d'articuler une seule parole pour réponde à M. l'abbé Montès, bien que je comprisse le sentiment de bienveillance qui lui avait dicté ce langage." As Sanson loses the ability to speak, "une grande exultation" washes over Foulard, who begins to address the assembled crowd. In a

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move that, as we shall see, is typical of the condemned, Foulard blames his parents' negligence for his criminal behavior. While Foulard simultaneously accuses and exonerates himself, Sanson, "muet et atterré" (333), is physically incapable of uttering a syllable. This upheaval, during which the condemned man seizes control of the scaffold's

"theater," threatens to derail the execution. Perceiving the danger, Sanson's assistants guillotine Foulard without waiting for their leader's signal, "voyant bien que je serais incapable de le donner" (335). Sanson is unable to give the cue for the blade to fall: the execution constitutes a semantic failure in more ways than one.

In addition to its historical and cultural importance, the question of who has the right (and the opportunity) to speak from the scaffold became a major preoccupation of

French Romantic literature. During the Old Regime, criminals were expected to repeat certain formulae of contrition and repentance, often on their way to the scaffold, but also immediately before their deaths or during their torture. Although the content of their speech was often coerced, the condemned were allowed and even encouraged to address the crowds that assembled to witness their deaths. In Surveiller et punir, Foucault refers to this rhetorical convention as the discours d'échafaud or scaffold speech: "Au moment de l'exécution, il semble qu'on lui laissait [au condamné] en outre l'occasion de prendre la parole, non pour clamer son innocence, mais pour attester son crime et la justice de sa condamnation" (78). In Seeing Justice Done, Paul Friedland explains how public appearance and acknowledgement of wrongdoing were essential components of ritualized capital punishment that, he argues, provided communities with cathartic experiences of vicarious redemption. Condemned criminals would pronounce a speech known as the amende honorable:

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Literally the "fine of honor," the amende honorable was required of those who committed crimes that were understood to be an attack on divine, royal, or public honor, a category including such varied acts as sacrilege, sedition, and poisoning, as well as crimes of fraud such as counterfeiting. The condemned was required to walk barefoot, or "with only a shirt" . . . and was usually brought to the entryway of a prominent church or to the scene of the crime. There, the condemned would get down on his or her knees and publicly beg forgiveness. (96)

As the advent of the guillotine made executions more rapid, however, last words ceased to be an integral part of the ceremony of death. The condemned were henceforth discouraged, if not always prevented, from speaking on the scaffold, lest their words prove too inflammatory.2 Whether condemned criminals had a right or an obligation to publically proclaim their last words was called into question during the French

Revolution and the early nineteenth century. In fact, Arasse affirms that "la perfection [de la guillotine] voudrait que le dernier mot du condamné soit coupé par le couperet même"

(143). During the nineteenth century, as the condemned approached the scaffold, they were allowed to speak only to their confessors: "Sur l'échafaud, en effet, la parole, hypocrite, est prohibée. À l'exception de quelques mots de repentir adressées à voix basse

à l'aumônier et à Dieu, le silence est exigé" (Guignard 171-172). In using the word

"hypocrite," Guignard suggests that during the early nineteenth century, scaffold speech was no longer looked upon by authorities as sincere (perhaps because they could no longer effectively script it). The condemned were expected to demonstrate courage in the face of death and docile submission to legal authority, but with their movements, facial expressions, and bodily postures: not their words. Yet the very "prolifération" (often in newspapers) of “edifying” accounts explaining how the condemned should conduct themselves hints at "la rareté" of such behavior in real life (Guignard 173).

2 See Guignard, pages 171-172, for how speech upon the scaffold was discouraged during the nineteenth century.

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My dissertation examines the limits of controlling scaffold speech and how the desire for last words (their subjectivity, theatricality, and disruptive potential) was displaced into literature during the nineteenth century. Even as spectacles of death and their accompanying language became less visible,3 the importance of last words lingered in literature and the popular imagination. In the case of historic criminals who had the will and the knowledge to write, words that might, in another age, have been pronounced upon the scaffold were committed to memoirs. These memoirs as well as the Romantic fiction that helped to inspire their creators represent the speech of the condemned as transformative, both for themselves and others. Condemned heroes and antiheroes move between two extremes: on one hand we see an incapacity or hesitation to speak, a dispossession of linguistic agency, and on the other, its reappropriation, often associated with violence, death, and civil disorder. Romantic writers portray the condemned

(re)enacting miniature revolutions, criticizing political systems ranging from Cardinal

Richelieu’s bureaucracy to the last days of the Old Regime. They also criticize the

Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the revolutionary government itself.

Through the speech of their condemned characters, Romantic writers attack a wide range of governments and oppressive practices. Despite a great deal of variation in their political beliefs, the authors in my archive privilege rebellion, glorifying the struggle of the individual against the state and society. Social and political change, they suggest, starts with the individual’s willingness to sacrifice him or herself on the scaffold, an act

3 In his Essais sur l'histoire de la mort en Occident: du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Philippe Ariès describes how in medieval and early modern France, death was a very public ceremony even when it occurred naturally: "La chambre du mourant se changeait alors en lieu publique. On y entrait librement." This practice continued into the early nineteenth century, with strangers and passers-by entering into the homes of the dying: "les passants qui rencontraient dans la rue le petit cortège du prêtre portant le viatique l'accompagnaient, entraient à sa suite dans la chambre du malade" (23). Executions were attended with similar enthusiasm, although authorities began taking steps during the 1830s to discourage crowds from assembling around the scaffold.

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that becomes meaningful because it is accompanied, or at least preceded, by a verbal performance.

I investigate the verbal transformations and idiosyncrasies of the Romanic criminal, arguing that this character type came to symbolize a struggle for authentic speech, for eloquence that instigates revolt and envisions possibilities of social transformation. The Romantic period produced a number of works in which the confluence of melodramatic trial scenes, executions, and verbally fragile protagonists is particularly pronounced. By examining such works, this project seeks to reenvision the condemned as verbal agents. Loïc Guyon has claimed that Romantic "condamnés à mort" are "privés de liberté" (Les martyrs de la Veuve: romantisme et peine de mort 107): "ne pouvant être admiré pour ce qu'il a fait, le héros est, d'une certaine manière, admiré pour ce qu'on lui fait" (108) —that is, for suffering violence inflicted upon him. I would complicate this view by showing how Romantic heroes both desire and hasten death, often by pronouncing their own death sentences. Despite their critically reduced capacity for action, the characters I study instigate disorder and imagine social change.4 The condemned Romantic hero represents an ideal relationship to language, a search for speech that grants authentic access to the speaker’s thoughts and has the power to destabilize institutions and their rituals of execution. Rebellious last words twist the meaning of state violence by causing these rituals to misfire, to deliver unplanned and

4 Although it has been contended (and rightly so) that criminal discourse in the nineteenth century served to entertain the bourgeoisie, Romantics used the topos of condemned speech to question the foundations of post-revolutionary society. In Surveiller et punir, Foucault calls the poet-assassin Lacenaire, who composed his memoirs for a large and educated audience, "la figure symbolique d'un illégalisme assujetti dans la délinquance et transformé en discours—c'est-à-dire rendu deux fois inoffensif " (332). Thomas Cragin has contested this perspective, challenging "the Foucaultian assumption of the insignificance of cultural resistance," the presupposition that the policed participate in and contribute to "disciplinary technology" (15). Like Cragin, Romantics believed that resistance to punitive methods was not always contained. My project explores this possibility of resistance; whereas Cragin focuses on popular and oral culture, I focus on the condemned.

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unpredictable messages to impressionable crowds of onlookers. Condemnation pushes one to the margins of the social, to a precarious place between life and death, between community and isolation. In the eyes of the Romantics, this liminal position affords certain powers of expression.

The Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Human Rights

From its inception, French Romanticism was marked by a preoccupation with the death penalty. Loïc Guyon has convincingly argued that Romantics, many of whom began their literary careers as royalists, wrote about capital punishment as a means of confronting collective guilt stemming from the regicide of Louis XVI. Shaken by the trauma of the Terror and the bloody spectacle of public executions, writers such as Hugo,

Lamartine, Nodier, and Vigny found literary inspiration in historical and contemporary events of crime and punishment. Romantics exploited executions for their melodramatic potential, indulging in the morbid specter of the guillotine and the imagery of severed heads. And yet these sensational stories united the serious pursuits of esthetic innovation5 and political engagement, making pleas on behalf of political prisoners and eventually, as

Romanticism became increasingly liberal, the lower classes.

Romantics continued a humanitarian tradition seeking less violent punishment, which began during the Enlightenment. Long before the guillotine was invented and placed into use during the Terror, the monarchy used public executions to bolster its authority. Foucault explains in Surveiller et punir how breaking the law was seen as an

5 With Romanticism, France discovered what Peter Brooks has called "death in the first person." In French classical theater, propriety dictated that characters must die offstage. Their deaths were recounted by others. Classicists were shocked by Romantic literature that made death explicitly visible: "les œuvres de la peine de mort devinrent tout à la fois l'étendard du Romantisme et la bête noire du Classicisme" (Les martyrs de la Veuve 81).

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attack against the king’s person that necessitated vicious reprisals. During the 1760s,

Voltaire and the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria wrote treatises questioning the morality and efficacy of judicial violence. The Enlightenment saw a marked increase in concerns that condemned criminals be treated as human beings.6 In Inventing Human Rights, Lynn

Hunt argues that during the eighteenth century, wider interest in fiction and the practice of novel reading paved the way for greater empathy, the recognition that others' subjectivity, regardless of "class, sex, and national lines" (38), was similar to one's own.7

Such "positive feelings of empathy" (108) allowed spectators to more deeply identify with the pain of the broken and mutilated bodies of the tortured and executed, leading the

American physician Benjamin Rush to declare in 1787 that criminals "possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations" (qtd. in Hunt

76). Human rights, according to Hunt, are predicated on the ability to recognize convicts as fellow human beings.

Conceptualizing human rights was intimately bound to experiences of narrative, whether strictly fictional or written with juridical purpose. Eighteenth-century lawyers often penned mémoires judiciaires to relate their clients' misfortunes. These texts borrowed elements from melodramatic theater8 as well as sentimental novels. In Old

6 Derrida argues that this wasn't the case as far as Beccaria was concerned. Beccaria was in favor of replacing the death penalty with forced labor, a supposedly crueler fate that he deemed more likely to deter potential criminals. 7 Similarly, in L'homme-dieu ou le sens de la vie, Luc Ferry argues that recognition of a shared humanity is fundamental to the ethics of a secular society. Modern humanitarianism is based on a willingness to sacrifice oneself for others not because they belong to the same political or religious community, but merely because they are human. If the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l'homme was rooted in a historically specific democratic society (one had to be a citizen for these rights to apply), then the more modern ideal of "l'assistance humanitaire" is based on the conviction that "tout individu possède des droits, abstraction faite de son enracinement dans telle ou telle communauté particulière." Ferry asserts that this more modern attitude can nevertheless be traced back to the "universalist heritage" of the Déclaration (176). 8 Maza specifies: "extreme moral polarities, hyperbolic expressions and gestures, sketchy characterization, complicated plotting, and emphatic moral didacticism" (66). Many of these elements reemerge in the Romantic literature under study in the following chapters.

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Regime France, as Sarah Maza explains, "the judging of court cases was almost entirely in the hands of magistrates who operated privately, behind closed doors" (16).

Technically, mémoires judiciaires were meant to serve an advisory function, yet their mass consumption by a public eager for scandal and sensation enabled their authors to push a humanitarian agenda, rally public opinion, and urge judicial reform. To give more pathos to the stories of the accused, lawyers wrote memoirs in the first person, borrowing their clients' voices to address the public. These mémoires are proto-Romantic in their intense portrayal of individual suffering and their emphasis on melodramatic twists and turns. Voltaire used a similar strategy when writing on behalf of the family of Jean Calas, a protestant merchant who was executed in 1762 for ostensibly murdering his son. Calas insisted throughout his torture that he was innocent. Believing him to be a victim of religious intolerance, Voltaire wrote fictional letters to expose the affective repercussions of injustice, inventing a correspondence between Calas' devastated family members.

Voltaire's lettres supposées, much like the fiction mentioned by Hunt, portray the interior lives of suffering human beings in order to evoke compassion for their plight.

Romantics purposefully joined debates on judicial reform and capital punishment.

In his 1832 preface to Le dernier jour d’un condamné, Hugo portrays himself as following in the footsteps of Beccaria. Alfred de Vigny explicitly attacks philosopher and politician Joseph de Maistre,9 one of the early nineteenth century's outspoken

9 Vigny mentions Maistre explicitly in Journal d'un poète, and the narrator of Stello (1832) quotes him (anachronistically). While Vigny did not share Hugo's optimism that society could, through revolution, improve the human condition by granting basic rights and dignities, he did join Hugo in denouncing violence in its most excessive forms. Vigny's fiction and journalistic writing attack rationales behind the Reign of Terror and protest Joseph de Maistre's apology of the Inquisition. In particular, Vigny objected to the use of capital punishment as a means of purifying society and imposing abstract, systematic ideals of order through the inculcation of terror. Laura J. Poulosky interprets Vigny's writing as categorically opposing capital punishment, arguing that the descriptions of violence in Cinq-Mars speak for themselves:

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reactionaries. In Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821), Maistre condones both torture and the death penalty, describing the executioner as a cornerstone of social and political order. Whether the accused are guilty or innocent, Maistre argues, their judgment, suffering, and execution contribute to mankind's social and spiritual wellbeing. He describes the executioner as God's agent on earth, a man whose profession no one would choose to exercise were it not for divine influence: "pour qu'il [le bourreau] existe dans la famille humaine, il faut un décret particulier, un FIAT de la puissance créatrice" (4: 32).

Maistre refuses to recognize famous cases of judicial error, dismissing them as imagined or exaggerated by public opinion. He asserts, moreover, that the condemned are likely to be guilty of unknown crimes: "Il est . . . possible qu'un homme envoyé au supplice pour un crime qu'il n'a pas commis l'ait réellement mérité pour un autre crime absolument inconnu. Heureusement et malheureusement il y a plusieurs exemples de ce genre prouvé par l'aveu des coupables. . . ." Although these aveux were extracted by torture,10 such desperate confessions fed the belief that judicial errors providentially accomplished

"temporal justice" (4: 37) by punishing hidden crimes.

Whereas Maistre's Premier entretien explains the unexpected social advantages of judicial error, his treatise Sur les sacrifices (1821) illustrates the spiritual benefits of sacrificing the innocent. While Maistre deplores human sacrifice in pagan cultures and credits Christianity with putting a stop to it, he nevertheless attributes a powerful efficacy to sacrificial practice, which he equates with the death penalty. Describing Louis XVI as an "auguste martyr [qui semblait] craindre d'échapper au sacrifice" (5: 347), Maistre

"while the decapitations of [the novel's protagonists] were legally justifiable under seventeenth-century law, Vigny's abhorrence of such public murders is clear" (105). 10 Until torture was definitively abolished by the French Revolution, it could be inflicted immediately before execution for the purpose of discovering accomplices. Hunt specifies that such torture was "provisionally abolished" in 1788, thanks to Louis XVI (76).

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represents the monarch's death as similar to that of Christ and thus a source of analogous

(if lesser) redemptive benefits.

Here, Maistre seems to anticipate Réné Girard's "sacrificial crisis," which the latter describes in La violence et le sacré (1972). The sacrificial crisis is a period of turmoil that ends when escalating acts of revenge are redirected onto what Girard terms a

"surrogate victim." The death of the surrogate reestablishes consensus within the troubled community, hastening the return of peace and prosperity. Girard gives as an example

Sophocles' Oedipus tragedy (not to be confused with the myth, whose connotations,

Girard argues, are quite different): by taking responsibility for plague and civil strife and immolating himself, the unfortunate king brings an end to reciprocal accusations. Girard believes that Maistre understood the principle of sacrificial substitution while failing to comprehend that guilt and innocence have little to do with who is sacrificed for whom.

Although Maistre ignores the problem of vengeance that plays an essential role in

Girard's theory of social turmoil, he does describe sacrifice as benefiting social groups and family units that offer up victims:

Les changements les plus heureux qui s'opèrent parmi les nations sont presque toujours achetés par de sanglantes catastrophes dont l'innocence est la victime. Le sang de Lucrèce chassa les Tarquins, et celui de Virginie chassa les Dé-cemvirs. Lorsque deux partis se heurtent dans une révolution, si l'on voit tom-ber d'un côté des victimes précieuses, on peut gager que ce parti finira par l'emporter . . . les familles les plus durables sont celles qui ont perdu le plus d'individus à la guerre. (5: 348)

According to Maistre's theories, capital punishment, a special type of sacrificial violence, will always have partially positive outcomes. If the guilty suffer, then justice will be done; if the innocent are killed, their martyrdom contributes to the redemption of humanity (and, Maistre argues, the universe as a whole). Whereas Vigny criticizes these

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ideas and views them as complicit with the ideology of the Terror, he and other

Romantics nevertheless created their own sacrificial narratives, glorifying those who stoically submit to death in times of upheaval. The specter of Louis XVI haunts Romantic texts, and even though Vigny attacks Maistre as an "esprit falsificateur" and "sophiste"

(Oeuvres complètes 951), his fiction is full of willing martyrs reminiscent of Maistre's beheaded king. Yet the eagerness of Romantic heroes to be sacrificed and even to condemn themselves by no means contradicts their commitment to revolt. They participate in their own destruction in order to better deride and shame their enemies.

Romantic authors, Guyon argues, were the first in France to use fiction systematically in the quest for the abolition of the death penalty.11 As early as 1819, Jules

Lefèvre-Deumier began writing argumentative poems that fascinated the young generation of Romantic authors, including Victor Hugo, who in 1823 wrote an enthusiastic review of Lefèvre-Deumier’s “Le parricide,” a poem depicting the final moments of a heroic criminal. Hugo went on to treat similar material in his own works, including Claude Gueux (1834) and Quatrevingt-Treize (1874). The Romantics’ writing in favor of abolishing the death penalty was closely linked to contemporary controversy.

In 1830, the issue of capital punishment again entered the political scene when four former ministers of the exiled Charles X were put on trial, inspiring Lamartine to write his didactic poem “Contre la peine de mort" (1830). The July Monarchy briefly considered outlawing the death penalty so that their lives might be spared, but in the end the ministers were banished or imprisoned and no such reform was made, much to the

11 In Un poète romantique contre la peine de mort, Guyon asserts that in regards to the death penalty, "ce n'est pas en effet par hasard si l'époque de l'émergence de ce thème dans la littérature (les années 1820) correspondait également à l'essor officiel de l'école romantique. La peine de mort, en tant que topos littéraire, a offert aux écrivains romantiques un défi à relever . . ." (20).

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dismay of Lamartine, Hugo, and their fellow abolitionists. As Romantics distanced themselves from monarchism, arguments against capital punishment, such as Hugo’s in his preface to Le dernier jour d’un condamné, focused on the injustice of executing criminals from the lower classes whose wellbeing and education were neglected by those in power. While lamenting the attitudes of the Parisian populace, described as savoring executions for the free and macabre entertainment they provided, Hugo also sought to awaken the humanity of judges and magistrates.

Although Romantics described the guillotine as immoral and even barbaric, their protagonists gain the courage and capacity to speak the truth about themselves and their social experience because they are sentenced to death. In Romantic fiction, sincere speech tends to alienate the speaker from society, for others would prefer him to maintain a conventional facade: to utter platitudes and echo the dominant ideology. Condemnation, an extreme example of social isolation and exile, thus represents an ideal relationship to language. When one is closest to death, having passed beyond care for social constraints and for maintaining one’s image in public opinion, one is also closest to speaking one's mind. Although Romantics longed for the plenitude of self-expression, they recognized that such an ideal is irreconcilable with social existence and often with the possibility of staying alive. The Romantic hero’s last words, inspired by proximity to death, sometimes hasten a demise that might otherwise have been avoided. Romantic criminals precipitate their self-destruction when they choose rebellious speech over life; conversely, voiceless characters find expression only after experiencing the devastation of a death sentence. If the ability to speak and the ability to live are inversely related within the diegeses of

Romantic literature, condemnation nevertheless prompts the Romantic hero to envision

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and verbalize hypothetical societies (futures or utopias) where the death penalty does not exist, where speech and life are no longer in stark opposition to one another. Stendhal's

Julien Sorel, from his prison cell, imagines a time when "quelque législateur philosophe aura obtenu, des préjugés de ses contemporains, la suppression de la peine de mort"

(502). In Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), the condemned Gauvain imagines a peaceful republic where the values of education will replace those of warfare. The Romantic criminal is disruptive because he or she leaps ahead, inventing alternative political systems and worldviews. Although rights to speech and life are often perceived as distinct from one another, Romanticism shows the pursuit of these rights to be fundamentally interconnected, even if their practice is not always compatible.

In addition to (and alongside) their scrupulous attention to speech—its risks, its registers, how and when it becomes authentically possible—many Romantics (Hugo,

Sand, and Vigny, for instance) argue for man's fundamental right to live, as opposed to the much more limited "right not to be deprived of life without due process" (Griffin 212) that many modern thinkers still espouse. In this sense, Romantics reaffirm Beccaria's assertion that a social contract does not give men the right to execute each other. In his

1764 treatise On Crimes and Punishments, Beccaria asks:

What gives men the right to kill other men? It certainly does not follow from the right from which sovereignty and law derive. These result from the sum of the small portions of private liberty of each person given up for the common good; they represent the general will which is the aggregation of individual wills. Who has ever wanted to give the right to other men to decide to kill another? (71)

Although Romantics approach the question of the death penalty through appeals to empathy as well as logic, like Beccaria they target the absurdity of ceremonial, legal killings.

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The Scaffold as Public Theater

Romantics deplored the populace’s bloodthirsty enthusiasm for executions to better insist upon the barbarity of these spectacles, and yet the presence of the crowd at the Place de Grève and later the Barrière Saint-Jacques allowed the condemned to be perceived and to perceive themselves as martyrs. In spite of the aura of horror surrounding capital punishment in Romantic literature, its protagonists rely on the scaffold and its audience to bestow meaning on their revolt against the social order.

Executions, the object of intense criticism by the Romantics, transformed the criminal into a sacrificial victim and a paradoxical hero, prompting readers and spectators to feel horror, pity, and even admiration on his behalf. Guyon refers to this process of transformation as “sacralisation”12: "Les personnages de condamnés à mort demeurent des anti-héros jusqu’à leur confrontation avec la guillotine: à partir de ce moment précis, leur statut change radicalement . . . de l’horreur naît ainsi une forme de sublime qui, en retombant sur la personne du condamné, le fit finalement accéder au statut de héros"

(197-8).

The crowd’s ambivalence towards the condemned man (or more rarely woman)13 developed long before the French Revolution. The scaffold has a lengthy rhetorical

12 Derrida mentions the concept of sacralisation in a similar (albeit more religious) sense, recalling an image of the condemned Eugène Weidman described by Genet in his book Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs: “ce qui compte, c’est . . . la sacralisation qui s’empare immédiatement, dans son image publique, théâtrale et fascinante, de cet assassin condamné à mort” (Séminaire la peine de mort 61). 13 Although literary instances of condemned women may be rarer than those of men, there exist noteworthy examples of French women who were executed for violent crimes, loose morals, and political or religious dissent. Manon Roland and Olympe de Gouges, executed during the Terror, pronounced (probably apocryphal) last words that became legendary. Foucault describes the elaborate symbolism involved in the execution of “une servante de Cambry” accused of killing her mistress in 1772 (Surveiller 56). He also quotes the complainte of Magdeleine Albert, a female parricide executed in 1811 (Moi, Pierre Rivière 272). In his 1832 preface to Le dernier jour d’un condamné, Victor Hugo mentions the particularly cruel beheading of a woman. Nodier’s “Hélène Gillet” tells the “true” story of a woman who narrowly escapes being executed for suspected infanticide. In her book Death Comes to the Maiden, Camille Naish acknowledges, however, that in French literature, "there is no female equivalent of Julien Sorel" (2).

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history. Rules and rituals regulating what condemned criminals could say were well established in Old Regime France, although these traditions did not always contain the actions of the crowd or even the criminal. Foucault describes at length the way in which executions in pre-revolutionary France functioned as public expiatory rites, wherein condemned bodies were put on display and the guilty made to proclaim the justice of their sentences. Even the most monstrous criminals, such as Gilles de Rais, could be theoretically reintegrated into the social and religious order if they adequately

“performed” their deaths as acts of repentance. As Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini explains,

“dans le système sacrificiel christianisé, la mise à mort de l’exception, qui signe une exclusion radicale du corps social, est aussi, devant la foule rassemblée, célébration de sa réintégration symbolique comme victime expiatoire" (246). The condemned were expected to follow certain scripts contributing to the purification of the community, thereby annulling the disorder unleashed by their crimes. In his book The Spectacle of

Suffering, Pieter Spierenburg remarks that prisoners often confessed just before going to the scaffold, and that this phenomenon of "after-confession" placed a seal of authenticity on the convict's speech: "a confession uttered just before parting from this world is almost by definition the truth. By death a person can confirm a statement" (60).14 Spierenburg nevertheless makes the addendum that "the magistrates were not always successful in gaining the convict's cooperation" (61) and gives examples from the 1700s of convicts who made jokes upon the scaffold, who refused to confess or to convert to Christianity.

14 While Spierenburg's book chiefly addresses the history of Amsterdam, we know from Maistre's Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg that "after-confessions" were well known and widespread. Spierenburg's comment that "a number of the condemned . . . confessed improbable things or events long ago" suggests they were intimidated or terrified, in addition to needing "absolute certainty that their soul was saved" (60).

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By the eighteenth century, the speech made by a condemned man or woman on the scaffold was fixed by social convention and reinforced by the press and popular literature, including the anonymous feuilles volantes that circulated in the streets.15 This tradition carried over into the nineteenth century with complaintes16 that told the stories of condemned criminals in ways that were both sensational and moralizing. These complaintes were sometimes written in the first person, printed on flyers, set to popular tunes, and sung in the street by peddlers of popular literature. In contrast to Romantic literature, complaintes often delivered conservative messages—warnings and examples of repentance—while transcribing scaffold scenes for all to see and hear.

Despite its representation by the press and the limits imposed upon it by the ritual of execution itself, the speech of condemned criminals carried the potential to lash out at the social order attempting to channel and exploit it. Foucault theorized that executions in Old Regime France were well attended because crowds hoped to witness transgressive speech, to hear men with nothing to lose “maudire les juges, le pouvoir, la religion”

(Surveiller 73). Through such spectacle, the words and actions of convicts became invested with the explosive potential to instigate riots and revolt. This potential was ever- present during the French Revolution and was part of the rationale behind implementing the guillotine. The Assemblée Nationale, in crafting its legislation to ensure that one type of death was applied to all capital offenders, was concerned with the possibility of the

15 It may be that public executions were not always so carefully scripted. Spierenburg believes that "staging" may have been "less prominent in the later Middle Ages" than during the early modern period. State formation, he argues, brought a greater degree of control to ceremonies of publically administered death. 16 The complainte often formed part of a canard. The latter, which combined "headline, summary, narrative, picture, and song to interpret a single news item" (89), often embellished and (partially) fictionalized crimes and executions. The first half of the canard consisted of a more objectively written, detailed prose piece, which was then followed by the complainte. Thomas Cragin's book Murder in Parisian Streets provides a fascinating look at the history of this narrative form.

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crowd's unruly participation during executions. A surgeon consulted by this legislative body in March of 1792 made the following argument:

. . . M. le ministre de la Justice et le directeur du département de Paris . . . jugent qu'il est de nécessité instante de déterminer avec précision la manière de procéder à l'exécution de la loi, dans la crainte que si, par la défectuosité du moyen, ou faute d'expérience et par mal-adresse, le supplice devenait horrible pour le patient et pour les spectateurs, le peuple, par humanité, n'eût occasion d'être injuste et cruel envers l'exécuteur, ce qu'il est important de prévenir. (qtd. in Pichon 29-30).

The possibility that executions might set off a riot was a very real concern. In Surveiller et punir, Foucault mentions three instances in which executions led to riots in pre- revolutionary France, adding: "on trouve beaucoup d'exemples où l'agitation est provoquée directement par un verdict et une exécution" (72). In La guillotine et l’imaginaire de la terreur, Daniel Arasse describes a woman’s execution in 1806 arousing the indignation of a crowd that nearly lapidated the executioner. He also mentions the rescue of Jean Tinel, a man condemned in 1795 for taking part in a popular insurrection and subsequently "enlevé de la charrette au pied de l'échafaud, emporté et caché dans le quartier Saint-Antoine" (156).

Efforts to control behavior on and around the scaffold continued into the nineteenth century: not only during executions, but also during public exposure, a peine infamante that shamed the criminal by exhibiting him or her to public scrutiny. During this ritual, which until 1848 took place daily outside the Palais de Justice, criminals mounted a scaffold and were placed beneath a large sign displaying "leurs noms, professions, domicile, peine et cause de la condamnation" (Guignard 165). Although a repentant attitude was expected, this spectacle often went awry. Guignard gives striking examples of the "réappropriation de l'échafaud au profit du condamné" (166). François,

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accomplice to the celebrity-assassin Lacenaire, was exposed before being sent to a forced labor camp: he proclaimed he would return to Paris in three years to finish what he had started. Despite (or perhaps because of) such outbursts, endeavors to control the behavior of those sent to their deaths continued. Those who mounted the scaffold in order to die were "ligoté[s] pieds et poings, bras fortement ramenés dans le dos ce qui [leur] oblige à courber la tête. . . . L'assujettissement du corps, du même que la préparation spirituelle du condamné, vise à supprimer toute capacité à se mettre en scène . . ." (Guignard 171).

Authorities feared the condemned might indulge in disruptive performances, turning the theater of the scaffold to their own benefit. Romantic authors writing in the wake of the

French Revolution and amidst the ever-present threat of regime change were aware of the incendiary possibilities posed by scaffold speech.

Romantic Speech and Hypersensitivity

The Romantic period, as a whole, was concerned with the individual’s troubled relationship to language. Crouzet traces the Romantic fascination with verbal crisis back to Rousseau’s obsession with his conversational ineptitude: “l’union si simple d’un moi et de la parole, paraît inconcevable . . . Rousseau . . . ressent[ait] le devoir social et mondain de parler comme une insupportable tyrannie" (135). Romantic protagonists, in turn, experience a hypersensitivity to the shortcomings of their own speech. For the Romantics, language was already associated with authority as opposed to individual subjectivity, and was thus felt to be an inadequate means of communicating one’s thoughts. In Stendhal et le langage, Crouzet defines the “beyliste” as being “hors la loi,” particularly when it comes to language: "Le langage relève du pacte social, il lie mots et choses, il me lie . . .

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il humilie le moi et le trahit . . . la crise du langage vient de ce qu’il est perçu comme l’antagoniste de l’individu et le signe du pouvoir; il y a un pouvoir des mots, et il y a des mots de pouvoir" (18).

This Stendhalian anxiety, induced by a mistrust of language and the social hypocrisy it abets, permeates many Romantic texts and plays an important role in my reading of Romantic literature. In his study of Stendhal’s language, Crouzet conceptualizes revolt in linguistic terms: “si le langage est le conformisme suprême, c’est au fabulateur, au destructeur des lois de langage, que revient la palme de la révolte” (19).

In both Romantic novels and memoirs, capital crime and punishment provide an opportunity for criminals to reevaluate their capacity for expression and narrative, to break free of linguistic control imposed upon themselves or the communities they represent. Romantic anxiety concerning speech ties into nineteenth-century debates on whether language can be meaningful and accurate: whether the individual can manipulate language as he would a tool, or whether language "uses" him, operates through him.

Michel Crouzet sums up this controversy: "ou l'homme crée sa langue et peut penser sans langage; ou l'homme reçoit ses langues et ne peut penser sans langage" (121).17 The principal school of thought addressing this issue, which I discuss in my second chapter, was Idéologie.

Both Lloyd Bishop and George Ross Ridge, in their respective books on the

Romantic hero, associate this figure with rebellion, self-consciousness, and in Bishop’s case, “intense” and “explosive” individualism. I wish to show that the Romantic hero is

17 Crouzet describes this debate in terms of "réalisme" versus "nominalisme," with Louis de Bonald typifying the first school of thought and Maine de Biran the second. In regards to language, the "réalistes" or "antinominalistes" of the time believed language to be "vraie" and "juste," and human thought to be dependent upon this medium of expression (128).

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tormented by self-consciousness of a verbal nature, and how his acute awareness of language (and its inadequacies) is a catalyst for revolt. According to Bishop, the

Romantic hero’s “total sincerity” makes “others feel uneasy” (4). When the hero says too much or adopts an inappropriate or brazen tone, he threatens both polite society and social order. While scholars have studied the relationship between French Romanticism and capital punishment,18 no one, to my knowledge, has systematically explored what the speech of condemned Romantic heroes reveals about verbal anxiety, censorship, and liberation. The Romantic hero has been compared to Don Juan, Goethe’s Werther,

Milton’s Satan, Prometheus, and the Napoleonic legend; categorized as poet-prophet, dandy, rebel, and antihero. I examine the condemned criminal as yet another significant incarnation of Romantic revolt.

Loïc P. Guyon and Laura J. Poulosky have both published fairly recent studies on the portrayal of capital punishment within French Romantic literature, and their books have been instrumental in delineating a corpus and helping to assess the social and historic repercussions of writing about capital punishment. Poulosky’s book, Severed

Heads and Martyred Souls (2003), explores the impact of executions on Romantic narrative, whereas Guyon’s Les martyrs de la Veuve (2010) focuses on “les enjeux historiques, philosophiques et artistiques des rapports entre Romantisme et peine de mort” (14). Both insist on Romanticism’s political engagement, its ties to the debate on

18 Loïc P. Guyon and Laura J. Poulosky have examined a large corpus of French Romantic literature that focuses on capital punishment. According to Guyon, they are the only two scholars "ayant abordé spécifiquement les rapports du Romantisme français, en tant que mouvement littéraire, à la grande question de l'abolition de la peine de mort" (14). In her book Crimes de sang et scènes capitales, Christine Marcandier-Colard speaks more of crime and murder than of execution. In The Shadow of Death: Literature, Romanticism, and the Subject of Punishment, Mark Canuel addresses how British Romantic writers also campaigned again the death penalty.

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the abolition of the death penalty, and its emphasis on martyrdom and redemptive suffering. Their linguistic analyses, however, are mostly limited to the presence of argot in literary texts. I add to these studies by examining how the speech of condemned criminal “heroes”—both guilty and innocent, real and fictitious—undermines judicial performative utterances through its capacity to perturb ritual and to challenge social reality. I also consider the interaction between heroes who are unwilling or unable to speak for themselves and those who “double” them and speak on their behalf.

What discursive, ideological, and physical spaces does the speech of the condemned occupy that no other speech can? And how does this speech illustrate the clash between institutional and individual language, between the hero and society? I argue that the courtroom and the scaffold allow the condemned to perform revolt through language. The trajectory between places of judgement and execution is also of paramount importance: conversations taking place in prison afford the condemned opportunities for speech, as does their journey to the scaffold, often by cart or on foot. I dub such performances "condemned" speech in order to emphasize that both the speaker and the content of the speech itself are censured (and censored), pushed towards the margins of the social. I trace this speech as it unfolds within places of judgment such as trials, but also in salons and during social interactions where verbal performance is evaluated.

Moreover, I consider speeches made on metaphorical scaffolds. For example, cases of terminal illness and circumstances of extreme poverty prompt Romantic characters to speak as if they were under a death sentence.

It is thus through crime, death, and the fatal quest to (re)possess one’s language (a quest that often ends in death) that Romantic writers stress the role of speech in revolt and

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social alienation. Historians and critics continue to disagree whether violent crimes such as murder constitute a meaningful and effective method of revolt against the social injustice and the upper classes:19 looking at Romantic texts through a linguistic lens will allow me to approach this debate from a different angle by exploring the links between speech and silence, violence, crime, and historical moments of revolution.

Performative Speech, Violence, and Sacrifice

Romantic texts represent the speech of condemned criminals as perturbing the smooth functioning of judicial institutions and their rituals, and having the potential to change, if only momentarily, the criminal’s relationship to language. I focus on the performative dimension of such speech by addressing explicit speech acts (challenging, defying, ordering, daring, naming, etc.).20 I also consider speech in which these aforementioned illocutionary verbs are absent, but which nonetheless provokes or consists of action. J. L. Austin, in how How to do Things with Words, defines performatives as occurring when “saying” something “is to do it” (6). While performativity has since been elaborated in various ways by different scholars, I approach it as speech that is equivalent to action and that can be wielded not only by institutions

19 Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini and François Foucart disagree on this point in regards to Lacenaire, whereas Jean-Pierre Peter and Jeanne Favret (who coauthored an article entitled “L’animal, le fou, la mort” in Foucault’s dossier of the Rivière case) discuss Pierre Rivière’s crime in terms of misplaced revolutionary energy. Daniel Fabre, however, claims that Rivière's crime “ne change pas la face du monde et ne transfigure pas son auteur” (109). 20 According to Austin, when a hearer or reader analyzes speech, he or she may choose to focus on the performative aspects of this speech even if descriptive elements are also present: “with the performative utterance, we attend as much as possible to the illocutionary force of the utterance, and abstract from the dimension of correspondence with facts” (144-5). Bourdieu takes this assertion a step further, arguing that language is always “un instrument d’action et de pouvoir,” whether it be descriptive or issuing an order (Ce que parler veut dire 13). Austin and Searle both offer taxonomies that take these different speech acts or “illocutionary acts” into account. For example, Searle’s taxonomy, which attempts to improve upon Austin’s, includes representatives (statements in which the speaker claims to tell the truth), directives (attempts to influence the hearer to engage in some kind of action), commissives (which commit the speaker to a future course of actions), as well as other categories.

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with the purpose of controlling individual behavior but also (and more importantly) wielded by individuals as a means of countering and derailing institutional language.

Particularly important to my analysis are actions of revolt expressed through speech. I argue that declarations of revolt, if successfully performed, describe social reality, yet also transform it. Searle defines the declaration as an utterance that “brings about the correspondence between the propositional content and reality” (Taxonomy 11).

In other words, declarations become true once they have been (successfully) pronounced.

When, for instance, a nation declares war, we may consider that war has begun even if shots have yet to be fired. Such declarations profoundly alter political and social reality by directing human behavior and perception. Much like declarations of war, declarations of revolt can reshape others’ worldviews when uttered in certain contexts and with certain kinds of intent.

Institutions make declarations far more easily and frequently than do individuals –

Austin’s basic examples of pronouncing a marriage and christening a ship are telling. In

Ce que parler veut dire, Bourdieu describes institutional “rites” in terms of the performative power to name: "L’institution d’une identité, qui peut-être un titre de noblesse ou un stigmate ("tu n’es qu’un . . . "), est l’imposition d’un nom, c’est-à-dire d’une essence sociale. Instituer, assigner une essence, une compétence, c’est imposer un droit d’être qui est un devoir être (ou d’être)" (125-6). And yet there are crucial situations in which individuals encroach upon this institutional prerogative. Individuals can make

“declarations . . . concern[ing] language itself,” particularly by naming themselves and others (Searle, Taxonomy 12). Revolt takes place not only by declaring oneself to be in a state of revolution, but more subtly (and often simultaneously) when individuals usurp

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performatives that traditionally belong to institutions, by naming themselves and even by condemning themselves.

Even as institutions impose upon individuals a name and a social essence, individuals fight back against such rites by naming themselves and their aggressors in certain ways. Such speech exposes institutional weaknesses by revealing what Bourdieu calls “social magic,” i.e. nominations deployed through ritual and having the power to cement human identity and thereby direct behavior, to be an illusion that disappears once one ceases to believe in it. If stigmatizing is a kind of naming, then condemnation, in addition to its rhetorical violence, is also a performative nomination placing the condemned outside of the community, outside the law. Thus the hero of Lefèvre-

Deumier’s poem "Le parricide" addresses the crowd come to witness his death in order to explain how he has been “misnamed” in the Bourdieusian sense of the word. He claims that he is not a common criminal, but rather a warrior who had hoped to die on the field of battle: “Soldat, je ne meurs pas sur un champ de victoire” (53). The man who has been designated simply as “le parricide” renames himself a soldier. Moreover, he assures the executioner that he does not seek to save his own life, demonstrating, when he throws a dagger to the ground, that he could have committed suicide and deprived his sentence of its symbolic power. This scenario, this choice to foregoe suicide in order to die a public death, reoccurs in various permutations throughout Romantic fiction. Lefèvre-Deumier’s parricide strips institutional language of its performative powers to name and to kill, for the parricide goes so far as to orchestrate his own execution, using his voice to “excite” the horses that will draw and quarter him, rendering the executioner, instrument of the king’s vengeance, superfluous.

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Verbal revolt carried out against the judicial system has at least three major consequences in Romantic literature. It 1) shows judicial violence to have a sacrificial or scapegoating quality that competes with and often supersedes its punitive function, 2) causes the ritual of execution to fail in numerous ways, and 3) forces a reevaluation of the criminal’s relationship to language. I will examine the implications of each of these consequences in turn.

Many similarities exist between the Romantics’ portrayal of executions and René

Girard’s description of human sacrifice. Girard argues that sacrificial rituals deflect the dangerous possibility of vengeful reprisals within an insular community onto a victim or scapegoat. While Girard focuses on anthropological studies and Greek tragedy more than

European history, his model fits Romantic fiction surprisingly well. The Romantic hero, often willingly, fills the role of scapegoat. Girard’s theory sheds light on the sacrificial nature of executions, a dimension that is largely absent from Foucault’s description of the discours d’échafaud and Old Regime expiatory rites, which he interprets primarily in terms of monarchical vengeance.

Girard elegantly demonstrates that a “méconnaissance” (40) or misunderstanding is essential to the proper functioning of ritual. Communities practicing human sacrifice believe they are appeasing the gods rather than their own violent urges. Modern judicial systems, Girard theorizes, like sacrificial institutions, depend on misunderstanding the ends of violence: “A partir du moment où il est seul à régner, le système judiciaire soustrait sa fonction aux regards. De même que le sacrifice, il dissimule—même si en même temps il révèle—ce qui fait de lui la même chose que la vengeance” (40). Capital punishment, like human sacrifice, must disguise the fact that it exists, at least in part, in

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order to purge the violent urges of the community it claims to protect. Like sacrifice, it deflects vengeful impulses onto one victim who may or may not be guilty and prevents individuals from carrying out their own revenge. The Romantics were well aware that execution and sacrifice catered to similar cathartic desires and voyeuristic urges. Within

Romantic fiction, the speech of condemned criminals becomes especially dangerous when it threatens to reveal the violent desires lurking behind judicial machinery and to disrupt such machinery through its own performative force. An integral part of verbal revolt involves exposing and demystifying the hidden association between justice, vengeance, and sacrifice.

The verbal revolt of the condemned can turn the efficacy of sacrifice on its head, causing insurrectional violence to spread rather than be contained by capital punishment, as in the final chapter of Balzac’s Annette et le criminel (1824), in which the execution of a former pirate sets off a minor civil war. Executions are the outcome of speech acts declaring someone guilty. If the execution fails to happen as planned, then the smooth functioning of institutional violence is compromised. Judith Butler explains such failures in Excitable Speech: "I may well utter a speech act, indeed, one that is illocutionary, in

Austin’s sense, when I say 'I condemn you,' but if I am not in a position to have my words considered as binding, then I may well have uttered a speech act, but the act is, in

Austin’s sense, unhappy or infelicitous: you escape unscathed" (16). While the term

“unscathed” may be overly optimistic in regards to my corpus, such failures within

Romantic fiction are numerous. Sometimes, as in Charles Nodier’s "Hélène Gillet," a revolutionary outcry does in fact prevent the executioner from killing his victim.

Moreover, the unruly presence of the crowd during trials can have a similar effect.

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Sometimes the executioner himself is portrayed as less than cooperative, as in "Hélène

Gillet" and Dumas’ La reine Margot. Finally, and of utmost interest to us, the language of the criminal himself, transformed by the threat of death, is instrumental in creating this kind of disturbance, in stirring up the crowd and activating its disorderly potential.

Romantic literature repeatedly shows how the ritual of execution is undermined by the opportunities for speech that it affords its victims. More often than not, executions fail to send the expected, “appropriate” message to the public, even when they do succeed in killing. There are many ways the ritual of capital punishment can be emptied of its symbolic value: 1) by failing to establish the guilt of the accused in the eyes of the people, 2) by failing to reinforce or reestablish the authority of the king or state, 3) by failing to accomplish a ritual cleansing of the community, 4) by failing to shame the person who is condemned. The victim’s speech and behavior can interfere with all of these intended messages.

Romantic criminals, both before and after their crimes, during their trials, in prison, and at the foot of the scaffold, wander into discursive spaces outside established norms, infringing upon the unspoken rules of decorum and the tyranny of censorship.

Much like Foucault, who uses the metaphor of “savage exteriority” to evoke breaking through discursive boundaries at the risk of becoming unintelligible (L’ordre 37), Butler talks about “unspeakability,” a concept which she borrows from Lacanian psychoanalysis and transposes into politics. Butler’s terminology is useful in assessing the consequences of verbal revolt. She uses the term foreclosure (everything outside the "normativity of language" is “foreclosed”) to show how “censorship operate[s] on a level prior to speech”

(135, 137). Censorship, rather than merely attacking already existing forms of expression,

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restricts speech before the moment of its production. Yet there is always the costly possibility of wandering into the domain of the foreclosed: "if the subject speaks impossibly, speaks in ways that cannot be regarded as the speech of a subject, then that speech is discounted and the viability of the subject is called into question" (136).

Rebellious subjects thus “speak at the border of the speakable” and “take the risk of redrawing the distinction between what is and is not speakable at the risk of being cast into the unspeakable” (139). In Romantic literature, the condemned are adept at

“redrawing,” blurring, and crossing the lines between the sayable and the unsayable, i.e. what one is expected to say and what one manages to say in spite of social and political pressures. Examples of such unexpected speech include complicating the question of one’s guilt or innocence so that it no longer adheres to a binary logic, making counter- accusations, and exposing the logical flaws of legal systems: all strategies that run against the grain of the traditional discours d’échafaud and its themes of repentance, submission to religious and political authority, and concurrence with one’s sentence.

Romantics portray instances that warp established rules of discourse as moments of transcendence wherein the heroic criminal accesses a language that is truly his or her own, a language that escapes the predetermination of conventions, customs, and censorship. Such moments are necessarily brief. Later, the hero returns to the inauthentic,

“artificial” speech of social interaction and dissimulation or enters the truly

“unspeakable” domain of death. Condemnation reveals a longing for transparent, authentic speech giving the hearer direct access to the speaker’s thoughts. Last words are thus instrumental in understanding Romanticism and its quest for what Derrida, in De la grammatologie, refers to as “self-presence”: the idea that the self is a cohesive whole,

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aware of its thoughts and intentions, and able to express them through language.

Romantics place the condemned self on a trajectory during which its thoughts and feelings, through speech, become increasingly present to others, even as such speech prompts self-discovery. As we shall see, the condemned may be surprised and taken aback by their own improvisations. If these ideals of "presence" are ultimately unsustainable, the condemned move closer to them as they approach death.

Speech acts of self-condemnation prompt the reconsideration of certain aspects of performativity, including whether a speaker's intentions are clearly present in his or her mind when a speech act is being pronounced. In Austin's examples of illocutionary acts

(revisited by Derrida in Limited Inc.), performatives encompassing self-condemnation— declarations such as “It is my will to die" —are not specifically considered. Austin’s performatives exist within the context of institutional rites and enjoy institutional protection.21 If we consider the possibility that performatives made by individuals and signed, as it were, by their deaths, are in some way unique, we might challenge (or at least nuance) Derrida's doubts as to whether a) the events produced by speech acts are in fact "unique"22 events, and whether b) the speaker's intentions, and thus the proper context of a speech act, can ever be determined. Derrida questions whether speech acts are truly marked by the "présence à soi d'un contexte total, transparence des intentions, présence du vouloir-dire à l'unicité totale d'un speech act, etc." (Limited Inc 44). Derrida doesn't deny that intention is present when utterances are made, only whether such intention is "de part en part présente à elle-même et à son contenu" (46). Intentions can

21 According to Searle, Austin "sometimes talks as if all performatives (and in the general theory, all illocutionary acts) required an exta-linguistic institution . . ." (Taxonomy 12). Searle disagrees. 22 Derrida voices reservations concerning "l'événementialité d'un événement qui suppose dans son surgissement prétendument présent et singulier l'intervention d'un énoncé qui en lui-même ne peut être que de structure répétitive ou citationnelle" (Limited Inc. 45).

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never, in his opinion, be present or determined in their totality. We might consider the

Romantic representation of condemned speech as a thought experiment in which intention becomes increasingly (if not entirely) present as one moves closer to death and further away from linguistic and social norms.

Death, despite the ritual that surrounds its occurrence (and its administration), is an event whose "événementialité" is more "real" than the ceremonies Austin and Derrida describe, ceremonies in which "on ouvre des séances . . . on parie, on défie, on lance des bateaux, et on se marie même quelquefois" (Limited Inc. 45). Death cannot be reduced to social conventions and perceptions, even if it cannot be strictly separated from them either. We may never agree as to whether a bet, a bequeathal, or a marriage has properly taken place, or whether a ship has been appropriately named, but we can agree, given sufficient powers of observation, as to whether someone has died. And if declarations of self-condemnation are successful, death may lend the speaker's intentions some element of death's reality. Dying in fulfillment of a performative declaration grants the speaker some credibility, because we know that he has pulled reality into alignment with his words. This holds true even if the condemned man's behavior is theatrical and ostentatious. Romantics represent condemned speech as violating the "script" of executions, thereby perverting the "citationnalité" or "itérabilité" that characterizes

Derrida's conception of rites and ceremonies.

Corpus

Around 1793, English authors including William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt,

William Blake, Percy Shelley, Byron, and John William Polidori began examining the

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question of capital punishment in poems and treatises. Inspired by this trend, which may itself have been inspired by the Terror, French poets such as Lefèvre-Deumier, Joseph-

Honoré Valant, and eventually Lamartine began writing both narrative and didactic poems against capital punishment. Lefèvre-Deumier’s third poem on the subject, entitled

“Parisina,” is in fact a very liberal translation of a poem by Byron. Eventually, the death penalty was widely treated in novels and short stories by Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo,

Balzac, Stendhal, Charles Nodier, Eugène Sue, George Sand, and Alexandre Dumas, among others. The ideological positions of these authors varied, ranging from outright condemnation of capital punishment to implied disapproval and even, in the case of

Balzac’s Annette et le criminel, explicit approval for the punishment combined with criticism of the way in which it was carried out. During the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Jean Revel, and eventually Albert Camus explored the range of emotions provoked by capital punishment and continued to develop arguments for its abolition.

Loïc Guyon links Hugo’s conceptualization of Romanticism to concern with this particular issue, citing Hugo’s review of “Le parricide,” which he published in Le réveil on February 19th, 1823. This review praises Lefèvre-Deumier while simultaneously attacking outdated, classical esthetics. The subject of capital punishment contributed to the Romantic “revolt” against classical forms and literary codes. This artistic innovation was widely perceived as creating moral upheaval. Literary conservatives such as Louis-

Simon Auger accused Romanticism of encouraging crime by making it appear triumphant and sublime, and Lacenaire’s trial was simultaneously “le procès de la littérature romantique,” which was suspected of having inspired his behavior and the

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creation of his literary persona (Demartini 223). Romantic works treating the death penalty were denounced for violating the rules of propriety, for exposing “atrocious” subjects, and for privileging a gritty, realist representation of truth at the expense of decorum. Moreover, by delving into crime and capital punishment, the Romantics explored the link between horror, beauty, and the sublime. As Loïc Guyon and Christine

Marcandier-Colard have pointed out, violent crime implies a heightened state of energy that the Romantics found attractive: “la violence suggère une intensité extrême et l’intensité extrême mène à la transcendance où, si l’on préfère, à la sublimation" (Guyon,

Les martyrs 199).

Among the many works in prose discussing capital punishment, Victor Hugo’s Le dernier jour d’un condamné leaps to mind as a milestone in the genre. The experimental form of this novella, narrated in the first person by a convict as the moment of his execution approaches, inspired some critics to interpret the work as a precursor to the nouveau roman. By taking the discours d’échafaud and drawing it out over several days,

Hugo “perversely” (Brooks 537) forces the reader to identify with the psychological state of a condemned criminal, demonstrating that a death sentence is cruel because of the state of mental torment it creates. The narrator’s hyper-awareness of language as he attempts to navigate the milieu of the prison, his existence as a bourgeois-criminal hybrid at the intersection of different discursive registers, and his mingled attraction and disgust for argot are all factors that call attention to the problematic relationship between language and the self. Perhaps because of its controversial nature, Le dernier jour d’un condamné was referenced by authors from Balzac to the mysterious ghostwriter who altered

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Lacenaire's memoir after the assasin's death. This novel certainly influenced many of the works this project addresses.

In what follows, I explore the link between capital punishment and verbal, performative revolt in prose works written, for the most part, during the late Bourbon

Restoration and the early July Monarchy. In addition to novels, I consider memoirs that borrowed from and played upon the topoi of Romantic fiction, concentrating on texts wherein self-consciousness relating to verbal expression is consistently evoked. These texts portray narrative struggles between criminals and the powers that accuse them. I aim to show how stories told by and about the accused perturb the functioning of trials and executions. Some of my chapters focus specifically on the portrayal of speech within texts that have already been shown to illustrate the thematic importance of the death penalty in Romantic fiction (Cinq-Mars, Le rouge et le noir, and Lacenaire’s memoirs); others treat works that have received less critical attention in this area, such as George

Sand’s Mauprat and Pierre Rivière’s memoir.

Chapters

My first chapter examines Alfred de Vigny's Cinq-Mars (1826), which has often been analyzed as an (inaccurate) historical Romantic novel representing a conspiracy against Richelieu and the demise of the conspirators. Less attention has been paid, however, to the linguistic elements of the plot. Vigny describes Richelieu’s regime as a machine that both generates language and seeks to control the speech and writing of others. The words of condemned characters disrupt this control, unleashing disorder that foreshadows the French Revolution. In Cinq-Mars, nearly all of the characters face some

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kind of death sentence. I read this novel as a series of variations on, or reiterations of, a very untraditional discours d'échafaud that disrupts censorship.

My second chapter focuses on Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1830). Julien

Sorel’s tortured relationship to verbal performance makes him a striking example of inauthenticity and social alienation. As Marina van Zuylen has aptly pointed out, Sorel’s obsession with sustaining “a series of powerfully choreographed selves” and the constant strain he suffers from falsely representing himself prevent him from constructing an

“‘authentic’ personal or social narrative” (77). To further his ambition, Sorel relies on his memory to recite, rather than risk verbal spontaneity and potential humiliation. No doubt

Sorel’s crime, arrest, and death sentence change his relationship to language, but in what way? While critics tend to see Sorel’s "recovery" of language as a peripheral element of limited importance to the novel's plot,23 I explore how his shift from recitation to improvisation is essential in conceptualizing his seemingly inexplicable crime. Sorel’s disastrous “improvisation” before the jurors unleashes a performative violence that can only end in his death. To historically contextualize Stendhal's anxiety about language, I consider his interest in Idéologie, a philosophical movement troubled by whether words can accurately transcribe human thought.

My third chapter discusses two memoirs with intertextual links to Romantic fiction, written respectively by Pierre François Lacenaire (1835-6) and Pierre Rivière

(1835). In very different ways, both Lacenaire and Rivière attempt, following violent crimes, to declare themselves in possession of their own language and thus of their own deaths. Lacenaire’s writing anticipates the speech he was never able to make before being

23 Crouzet, for instance, confines this information to footnotes (pages 199-200). See also Van Zuylen (page 77) and Yetiv (page 34), who emphasize Sorel’s dispossession of language as opposed to its recovery.

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guillotined; some say because of fear, others, lack of time.24 I study how his memoir exploits the image of the tormented Romantic poet who struggles to express himself. The loquacious Lacenaire describes himself, surprisingly, as “un homme qui sent tout sans pouvoir l’exprimer” (95). This self-portrait makes Lacenaire’s verbal “triumphs”—his performative suicide25 during his trial and his usurpation of the court's prerogative to condemn him—appear more surprising and significant. With his memoirs and poetry,

Lacenaire creates a discours d’échafaud over which he has complete control, rehearsing his future death through writing.

Despite his status as a supposedly uneducated peasant, Pierre Rivière’s memoir is surprisingly saturated with literary and historical allusions that resonate with Romantic esthetics.26 In his memoir, Rivière portrays himself as one suffering an emasculation that parallels his father’s incapacity to verbally match his mother. His mother, on the other hand, is depicted as mastering language and using it to brutalize men, her murder being a means of restoring language to its rightful owners. I problematize Daniel Fabre’s assertion that Rivière remains unchanged by his crime by looking at how the narrator’s relationship to speech shifts throughout the text, particularly at the moment of its closure.

My fourth chapter focuses on George Sand’s Mauprat (1837), a novel that has received little attention from critics interested in Romanticism and the death penalty,

24 Demartini discusses this controversy in her chapter “La mort du monstre”: 259-289. 25 Lacenaire explains: “je n’ai pas rougi un instant à la cour d’assises . . . parce que je me suicidais” (46), flaunting his self-accusations as verbal suicide. 26 Like the Romantics, Rivière was inspired by recent historical events of revolution, murder, and sacrifice. Besides alluding to several historic figures—Charlotte Corday, Napoleon, and Henri de La Rochejacquelein— who also inspired Romantic authors, he twice mentions Le musée des familles. This popular periodical published authors such as Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, Sue, Lamartine, Verne, and Hugo. The editions appearing during the two years preceding Rivière’s crime recount the deaths of Jane Grey and Mary Stuart (both described as martyrs) as well as judgments, a judiciary duel taking place in fifteenth- century Flanders between a murderer and his victim’s relative, and, of course, violent crime. This material would have helped Rivière to conceptualize himself as a Romantic criminal.

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perhaps because its protagonist narrowly escapes his sentence. Nevertheless, Bernard de

Mauprat is condemned, and his trial culminates in the resolution of his troubled linguistic journey. Raised by his barbaric uncles in an isolated fortress, Bernard escapes and submits to a courtly education in the hope of winning his cousin’s love, undergoing for her sake a romantic apprentissage that turns him into a social and linguistic transplant.

Although he has painstakingly learned to speak in polite society, renouncing with limited success the more natural and violent expression of his criminal family, Bernard is effectively struck dumb when his cousin is shot and nearly killed. By looking at the way the novel’s characters react to being dispossessed of language and how Bernard’s trial ambiguously restores it to them, I show how condemnation changes the stakes of relationships, revealing affective secrets even as it stokes political upheaval. I also examine how popular and feminine speech (uttered respectively by Bernard’s friend

Patience, a philosopher-peasant, and his cousin Edmée) assert themselves on behalf of the condemned during his trial. In Mauprat, the three major characters double each other by undergoing similar ordeals and speaking in each other’s places: this dynamic influences my reading of gender roles within the novel. While Keith Wren argues that George Sand uselessly prolongs Mauprat with the trial episode, I point out that judicial confrontations are instrumental in forcing resolutions to take place because they allow otherwise stifled speech to flow forth.

Quatrevingt-Treize, Victor Hugo’s final novel, is the subject of my fifth chapter.

Despite being written in 1872-3, this novel echoes the form and style of Romantic drama.

I explore how the novel's condemned characters perturb the functioning of military institutions and their “mots d’ordre.” In particular, their speech calls into question the

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justice of executing prisoners of war. As in Mauprat, popular language is instrumental in demystifying the functioning of institutions, and the pleas of characters from the lower classes stand in place of speeches that aristocrats refuse or fail to make. These characters attempt to communicate with institutions that to them appear alien and absurd, approaching military and legal language with a naiveté that reveals the logical flaws inherent in discourses of power that privilege political abstractions over common sense, popular wisdom, and human life. I show how this dynamic prepares and anticipates the novel’s final scene, which represents the spectacular failure of a military execution to uphold authority. Although Hugo died ninety-six years before the death penalty was abolished in France, he and his fellow Romantics helped to create a culture in which the eliminatination of capital puishment became conceivable. Their writings remain relevant in a world where debates on the legality and morality of the death penalty have yet to be resolved.

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CHAPTER ONE

Doublings and Variations: Vigny's Universal Death Sentence

In Alfred de Vigny's pessimistic vision of the world, all members of the human race are condemned to a lifetime of suffering in the "prison" that is human existence.27

The result of this incarceration is, of course, an unavoidable death sentence. In an 1834 entry of Le journal d'un poète, Vigny describes human existence in terms of universal condemnation:

Condamnés à la mort, condamnés à la vie, voilà deux certitudes. Condamnés à perdre ceux que nous aimons et à les voir devenir cadavres, condamnés à ignorer le passé et l'avenir de l'humanité et à y penser toujours! Mais pourquoi cette condamnation? Vous ne le saurez jamais. Les pièces du grand procès sont brûlées: inutile de les chercher. (Œuvres complètes 1003)

Vigny's narrative poems and theater, as well as his novels, give the impression that all are on trial and helpless before obscure forces of judgment. His articulate

Romantic heroine (and titular character of a play), the Maréchale d'Ancre, expresses this anguish: "On me fait un procès . . . et je ne puis jeter un seul mot dans la balance"

(Œuvres complètes 473). Capital sentences (and perpetual imprisonment) not only propel

27 Vigny believed that human beings, all condemned "prisoners," should pity each other and "[se] tendre la main mutuellement" (Oeuvres complètes 1202). This worldview ties into Vigny's criticism of the death penalty. If life is comparable to incarceration, then the execution of one inmate by another amounts to gratuitous cruelty. In Cinq-Mars, Jeanne de Belfiel, driven mad by the execution of the man she loves, decries the absurdity of one mortal pronouncing the death sentence of another: "O crime! l'horreur du ciel! . . . La chair détruire la chair! elle qui vit de sang faire couler le sang! froidement et sans colère!" (231). Apart from Jeanne's tirade, Vigny comes closest to attacking the institution of capital punishment outright when he criticizes Joseph de Maistre, a reactionary, Counter-Enlightenment political and religious thinker. For a discussion of the prison in Vigny's writing, see Catherine Savage, "'Cette Prison Nommée La Vie': Vigny's Prison Metaphor."

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and resolve Vigny's plots; they represent the human condition and lend his fiction philosophic depth. The Maréchale's unjust condemnation for witchcraft exemplifies the human plight: all human beings suffer for unknown reasons, and seldom can we put an end to our suffering by proving our innocence.

Most of Vigny's characters are burdened with a death sentence, whether they are heroes or villains, purely fictional or drawn from history. The sources of their condemnation are many: institutions (religious, political, and judicial), personal vendettas, social scorn, and the slow decay of illness all take their toll. At times, characters are reprieved only to find themselves back on the scaffold hundreds of pages later. Vigny's vision of condemnation is paradoxical, however, in that condemned characters often experience greater agency and vitality as they approach death. The scaffold accords linguistic life to the condemned, granting them the opportunity to seize control of their own words.

Among Vigny's many characters who suffer condemnation, the most heroic actively seek it out. Across Vigny's oeuvre, institutionally inflicted punishment is a consequence of revolt, but also a catalyst for further rebellion against unjust persecution and the bleak conditions of human existence. This rebellion goes hand in hand with self- destruction: as Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen points out, Vigny's oeuvre represents "une complicité plus ou moins explicite entre la victime et ses bourreaux; celle-là ne fait, en effet, qu'achever l'œuvre commencée par ceux-ci" (87). Vigny's heroes do not submit passively to punishment, but rather embrace it, the better to deride and mortify their enemies. Condemned men (and women, in the case of Jeanne de Belfiel, the Maréchale d'Ancre, or the fallen angel Éloa) epitomize rebellion and go to death (or damnation)

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defiantly. In "La Prison" (1821), the Man in the Iron Mask rages against his fate by smashing his arm against a wall and refusing to make a confession. In Stello (1832), the imprisoned poet André Chénier complains that he hasn't been included in a group of prisoners being sent to the guillotine and taunts the guards to take him as well. And in

Cinq-Mars (1826), death is the only possible means of defiance left to the hero after the collapse of his political and amorous endeavors.

In keeping with his fascination with condemned characters, Vigny envisioned

Cinq-Mars, his first and longest historical prose work, as part of a tetralogy on the decline and martyrdom of the aristocracy.28 Although the other novels in this project were abandoned, Cinq-Mars presents its own series of elite characters who travel towards death on parallel trajectories of revolt and condemnation. As Claudie Bernard remarks:

“le grand préalable dans Cinq-Mars, c’est la mort" (63). Death hangs over nearly every character, and the plot consists of a sometimes slow, sometimes accelerated movement towards final thoughts and words. In the end, the novel, which takes place between 1639 and 1642, is less about the Second Estate than the journey towards death and the language that marks it.

The novel's heroes use their last words to disrupt the censorship of Cardinal

Richelieu's authoritarian regime. In Cinq-Mars, political revolution is unsuccessful, and the condemned rebel primarily through spoken language. Vigny portrays Richelieu as a diabolical yet magnetic personality whose politics are designed to silence dissenters. If they hope to survive, renegades must adopt and repeat the cardinal's words, thereby

28 Vigny meant to write a preface entitled "Histoire de la grandeur et du martyre de la noblesse de France." His hypothetical tetralogy would have focused on aristocrats condemned and persecuted under the first Bourbons, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, and the French Revolution. See Wren, "A Suitable Case for Treatment," page 337.

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divesting themselves of agency and self-expression. Death sentences, on the other hand, briefly allow characters to repossess speech and energy. Scholars of Cinq-Mars display a particular interest in Richelieu, who, they often argue, triumphs over the hero—a reading

I wish to nuance. Cinq-Mars and the novel's other heroes demonstrate exceptionality by wagering their lives rather than surrendering their words. Condemnation allows them to occupy intermediary positions between life and death, between the social and the asocial, between sanity and madness, between history and legend. The "in-betweenness" of condemnation gives their words the power to haunt society long after they are banished, imprisoned, or killed.

This chapter explores how Vigny portrays the influence of scaffold speech or the discours d'échafaud on authority, the populace, the movement of history, and literary creation. I read Cinq-Mars as a series of variations on, or reiterations of, very untraditional scaffold speech. In Vigny's vision of history, last words cannot change the immediate course of politics. As several critics have remarked, Cinq-Mars' attempt to overthrow Cardinal Richelieu's regime is a stark failure. Yet condemnation produces meaningful revolt of a verbal nature, showing that speech may briefly elude the jurisdiction of the powerful. In learning how to die, Cinq-Mars also learns how to speak.

Cinq-Mars, Peripheral Hero

Cinq-Mars weaves two historic trials into a single narrative thread. The novel follows the courtly career, conspiracy, and execution of Henri Coiffier de Ruzé d'Effiat, marquis de Cinq-Mars, the favori, confidant, and Grand Equerry of Louis XIII. It also

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recounts the condemnation of the renegade priest Urbain Grandier, who was tried for sorcery and burned at the stake.

Grandier's death serves as a prelude to the hero's adventures. After witnessing the priest's execution, Cinq-Mars joins the king in battle and wins a place in courtly society, but with the secret ambition of deposing the monarch's prime minister, Cardinal

Richelieu. He hopes in so doing to gain ascendance over the king, advance his career, and attain a social rank that will facilitate his marriage with Marie de Gonzague, a princess to whom he is secretly engaged. Aided by Gaston d'Orléans, brother to the king, Cinq-Mars conspires with the Spanish to end Richelieu's control of the French government. Like

Grandier, Cinq-Mars makes a personal foe of the cardinal, whose henchman, Jean Martin de Laubardemont, presides over the unjust trials of both men. Laubardemont also happens to be the uncle of Grandier's principal accuser, the Ursuline abbess Jeanne de

Belfiel. Out of guilt, Jeanne condemns herself to physical mortification and starvation following the priest's execution, eventually becoming yet another victim of Richelieu.

The novel ends with the deaths of Cinq-Mars and his friend François-Auguste de Thou, who are tried for treason and beheaded in Lyon.

Whereas the broad lines of Cinq-Mars are rooted in historical fact, much of the novel, including the hero's romance with Marie de Gonzague, is highly idealized.29 Many characters are stripped of moral ambiguity. Cinq-Mars and de Thou represent heroic, aristocratic virtues, while the Cardinal's minions—Laubardemont and Père Joseph—

29 See Henri Robert's chapter on Cinq-Mars in Les grands procès de l'histoire for ways in which Vigny fictionalized historic figures. Vigny, moreover, readily admitted to altering history in his essay Réflexions sur la vérité dans l'art, in which he argues that it is necessary to "faire céder parfois la réalité des faits à l'IDEE que chacun d'eux doit représenter aux yeux de la postérité" (Œuvres complètes 20).

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incarnate absolute depravity. As we shall see, however, the character of Richelieu demonstrates greater complexity.

During the first several chapters of Cinq-Mars, the eponymous protagonist stands aloof from the major events of the plot. He is a troubled observer of happenings described as “souillures sanglantes” (51) on the reign of Louis XIII. In lieu of the protagonist, who has yet to enter the political scene, three minor characters—François de Bassompierre,

Urbain Grandier, and Jeanne de Belfiel—are at the center of the action. Each confronts

Richelieu, not through revolt and war, as the hero will later try and fail to do, but rather through words (and in Jeanne's case, a botched assassination attempt). Well before Cinq-

Mars’ trial and execution, these secondary characters evoke the plight of the individual whose language fails, stylistically and ideologically, to adhere to the exigencies of institutional rule. Before, during, and after their condemnations, their speech collides with Richelieu's bureaucratic regime, which Vigny interprets as a precursor to France's revolutionary government.

The demise of these characters leaves no doubt as to what must arise when Cinq-

Mars himself finally rebels and leads a conspiracy against the cardinal. Within the first few chapters of the novel, Bassompierre is imprisoned in the Bastille, Grandier is burned, and Jeanne is kidnapped by her uncle Laubardemont, the judge responsible for Grandier's sentence and Cinq-Mars' eventual beheading. Exiled to slavery in the Pyrenees, she dies of physical and emotional trauma. These characters' downfalls come about because

Richelieu perceives their words as menacing. Their speech threatens not only his regime, but also his attempt to control, down to the smallest details, what others say, think, and

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write. While the parallel between Grandier and Cinq-Mars is most obvious,30 the (speech) acts of all three characters mirror those of the protagonist and foreshadow his death.

Cinq-Mars will find himself in the place of Grandier, Bassompierre, and Belfiel once he surrenders to the king and has no means of aggression left save his words.

Uprooting the Aristocracy

At the end of the novel’s first chapter, François de Bassompierre becomes the first character to fall victim to his own words. His arrest demonstrates the extent of Richelieu's censorship and the impossibility of eluding, even within the "private" space of a family gathering, the minister's spies and his far-reaching control of acceptable communication by others. The incipit, a dinner scene at the chateau of the d'Effiat family, shows the hero and heroine arriving late, while Bassompierre occupies center-stage. Inspired by several glasses of wine, a “remède . . . contre la réserve" (30), he plays the role of an honest buffoon, the fool who speaks the truth. Bassompierre’s naive courage is misunderstood by his interlocutors, who feel contempt for his “galanterie surannée” (29). Despite their failure to understand the gravity of his words, Bassompierre's speech exemplifies the type of verbal revolt that reoccurs throughout the novel and characterizes its heroes.

Bassompierre praises the late Henri IV while disparaging the politics of Louis

XIII and his prime minister. Escorted to the Bastille mere hours after his indiscretions, he manages to speak at length on courtly communicative trends. The contrast between the tone of the former regime and that of the current one forms the cornerstone of his

30 As Laura J. Poulosky and Keith Wren have indicated, Grandier and Cinq-Mars both suffer from forbidden love, clash with Richelieu, are imprisoned, and are ultimately executed despite efforts to save them.

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criticism, for the new king is “froid" with an "aspect de glace," the opposite of the

“spirituel et simple” Henri IV whose manner of speaking was “vive et franche” and who encouraged spoken affection: "nous avions la liberté de lui dire que nous l'aimions" (37).

In fact, the deceased monarch's former entourage is in a state of constant miscommunication with his son's court: “nous entendons mal la langue de la cour nouvelle, et elle ne sait plus la nôtre" (30). This description of a communicative crisis between generations gives way to a more dire assessment: “Que dis-je? On n’en parle aucune [langue] dans ce triste pays, car tout le monde s’y tait devant le Cardinal . . ."

(30). The aristocrats whom Vigny believes to be the rightful masters of France are not in possession of their speech. The cardinal, who sits at the center of a vast letter writing machine, controlling domestic and foreign affairs and putting words into the mouths of others, has usurped the speech of the king and of the aristocracy—the lower classes, we subsequently learn, are less intimidated. Bassompierre's social blundering establishes the stakes of Cinq-Mars’ future conspiracy: revolt against the cardinal signifies an attempt to restore speech to its rightful owners. Although he is insulted and disrespected by the hero, who only half-heartedly attempts to rescue him, Bassompierre defines Cinq-Mars’ mission.

Outmoded in everything from style of dress to the woman he loves, Bassompierre refuses to adopt the current tone of address and stubbornly adheres to the old one, even after receiving several tacit warnings to hold his tongue. His speech targets one of

Richelieu’s spies, M. de Launay, who is present at the table and will later be responsible for his arrest. When warned, by glances from the Maréchale d’Effiat, of the danger posed by M. de Launay, Bassompierre becomes increasingly aggressive: “écrasant ce

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gentilhomme de ses regards hardis et du son de sa voix . . .[il] affecta de se tourner vers lui et de lui adresser tout son discours” (40). His diatribe moves, in this moment, from the constative to the performative: the defiance inherent in continuing to speak supersedes his argument. Regardless of content, the mere sound of his voice becomes a means of

“crushing” his opponent. Bassompierre nevertheless submits quietly to arrest out of respect for the late king, refusing Cinq-Mars' offer of rescue, a gesture the hero will emulate before his own execution.

Richelieu's Writing Machine

The rationale behind Bassompierre's arrest becomes clearer several chapters later when the novel's villain is introduced. After having witnessed another of Richelieu's

"crimes," the burning at the stake of the renegade priest Urbain Grandier, we are finally introduced to Richelieu. The appearance of the cardinal coincides with the reader's discovery that his political apparatus is designed not only to influence the various governments of Europe, but also the minute details of individual expression, both spoken and written. Keith Wren points out that in spite of himself, Vigny makes Richelieu more likeable than the cowardly, inept conspirators. If his ambition is cruel and selfish, it is at least "decisive and unambiguous in its objectives" ("A Suitable Case" 346), a claim Cinq-

Mars is far from being able to make about himself. Vigny sets out to depict Richelieu's rule as disastrous for France, yet he cannot help but admire the energy of the man.

In his perceptive article interpreting Cinq-Mars as a "post-structuralist novel,"

Patrick Craven associates Richelieu with the Derridian notion of writing, in which language blurs or obstructs meaning rather than solidifying it. Cinq-Mars, on the other

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hand, represents logocentric speech: "The conflict in Cinq-Mars is only superficially a confrontation between proponents of oligarchy (Cinq-Mars) and those of absolutism

(Richelieu), the root conflict is a struggle between two modes of communication, the dialectic between the letter and the voice" (Craven 218). Richelieu, Craven observes, is

"an indefatigable purloiner of letters, well-aware of the elusiveness of meaning as a means to power" (217). He gains control of the king and is able to execute Cinq-Mars because he masters politics through the arts of reading and writing, whereas the monarch lacks the talent and the resolve to do the same. By encrypting political documents and rewriting diplomatic reports, the cardinal controls how the king perceives or "reads" politics: "between the King (consciousness) and the nation (reality) is the impenetrable barrier of Richelieu's 'caractères'" (Craven 218), his encoded diplomatic and judicial missives. I wish to expand upon this analysis of Cinq-Mars' and Richelieu's dialectical relationship by interpreting their struggle in terms of another hostile dichotomy, one between dictation and improvisation.31

Bassompierre describes the aristocracy falling silent before Richelieu. The prime minister's dominion, however, is more insidious than the silence it provokes: his secretaries (and by extension, the French government) are not ceasing to speak so much as they are repeating, copying, and propagating the prime minister's words. In Richelieu's cabinet, "le seul bruit qui s'élevât était celui des plumes qui couraient rapidement sur le papier et une voix grêle qui dictait, en s'interrompant pour tousser" (120). This model of dictation perpetuates itself throughout the novel, with the surviving characters eventually succumbing to the prime minister's voice and repeating what he says. Richelieu dictates

31 In my second chapter, I trace a similar tension between recitation and improvisation in Le rouge et le noir. Like Sorel, Cinq-Mars begins to improvise and commit unforeseeable acts as his death approaches.

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commandments to the king's confessor, who in turn repeats them to the king, who ultimately recites them back to the cardinal without ever having understood their point of origin. Richelieu's primary role is that of ventriloquist, and his initial appearance already hints at how he will "write the script" (Wren, "A Suitable Case" 341) of Cinq-Mars' trial by forcing Gaston d'Orléans to repeat certain accusations.

A miniature scene of judgment and condemnation takes place within Richelieu's own cabinet when he realizes that a page, Olivier d'Entraigues, rather than copying his dictations, is writing a love note. Richelieu deals the young man a verbal blow: "Venez ici, monsieur Olivier." This command constitutes a nearly physical attack, "un coup de foudre pour ce pauvre enfant. . . ." Even though he denies his fault, claiming only to have written "ce que Votre Éminence me dicte" (122), Olivier is dismissed from Richelieu's service, not so much for wasting the minister's time as for having dared to go off script.

Richelieu envisions absolute power as a single dictating voice whose words are repeated ad infinitum by those who hear it.

The cardinal's censorship of the dissenting aristocracy goes hand in hand with the eradication of its caste privileges. In Richelieu's nascent absolute monarchy, only the king (or rather, the man who controls his voice) is marked by difference and allowed to choose his own words. Richelieu is the great leveler who plunges society into chaos by eliminating distinction and difference, linguistically as well as culturally, for all save the man who speaks through the monarch. In René Girard's theory of sacrificial crisis, order depends on difference: "l'ordre, la paix et la fécondité reposent sur les différences culturelles. Ce ne sont pas les différences mais leur perte qui entraîne la rivalité démente, la lutte à outrance entre les hommes d'une même famille ou d'une même société" (77).

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According to Girard, human sacrifice has been used across various cultures to put an end to such times of turmoil. Sacrifice redirects escalating violence onto what Girard terms a

"surrogate victim." The death of the surrogate reestablishes consensus within the troubled community, hastening the return of peace and prosperity.

Richelieu effaces difference by forcing those around him to copy or give voice to his words; this tactic makes possible his transformation of France. By curtailing aristocratic privilege, Richelieu seeks to make all men (in theory if not in practice) equal subjects before the king, thereby leveling the nobility's complex hierarchy. If the aristocracy is to lose its independence, one voice must drown out pluralities of tone and opinion.

In Vigny's mind as well as Girard's, this loss of differentiation is deadly. Girard admits that his theory of sacrificial crisis is counterintuitive to the modern valorization of equality, but he insists that "primitive" societies viewed the elimination of distinguishing characteristics, even in the birth of twins, as a harbinger of disaster. Vigny's class- conscious worldview aligns with this theory. As Hansen explains in her article on Vigny and sacrifice, "l'effacement des différences entraîne chez les êtres de statut 'inférieur' (à défaut de meilleur terme) le désir et la volonté d'accéder aux privilèges de leurs

'supérieurs'" (87). Richelieu's destruction of the aristocracy opens up a power vacuum and eliminates an essential buffer between the king and his people. In the novel's final chapter, throngs of unruly Parisians parade through the streets, singing: "Le printemps commence, les rois sont passés" (515). An anonymous plebeian explains to his "bande effrayante": "Le Parlement est mort . . . les seigneurs sont morts: dansons, nous sommes les maîtres; le vieux Cardinal s'en va, il n'y a plus que le Roi et nous" (516). After

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Richelieu's centralization of French power, nothing remains but a dying sovereign and a mob. A sacrificial crisis ensues and manifests itself in popular disorder foreshadowing the French Revolution. Yet Vigny's vision of such crisis is even more extreme than

Girard's, for it is doubtful whether human sacrifice, in the form of multiple executions, will ever restore order.

In addition to hijacking the king's voice and mastering the deceptive practices of reading and writing, Richelieu inflicts violence by monopolizing speech acts—threats, commands, condemnations—that have the power to kill. This power is amplified by the array of voices at the minister's disposal. Just as we saw Olivier d'Entraigues respond to

Richelieu's "deux mots" as if he had been struck by lightning, Madeleine de Brou,

Grandier's mistress, is described as having been killed by a single "word" from one of

Richelieu's minions (92). This word is the false news of Grandier's death (the priest's trial has yet to take place). Cinq-Mars also recognizes the lethal power of language, speculating that he will soon come ear to ear with "des voix qui n’auraient qu’un mot à dire pour me perdre" (114). This prediction comes true when the king's brother surrenders his voice to the cardinal. The written word also carries a deadly force: when Richelieu dictates an order summoning his own corrupt judges to their deaths, his underling writes

"aussi froidement qu'un Turc fait tomber une tête au geste de son maître" (439). As Cinq-

Mars foresees, his death is "écrite à Narbonne" (319).

The ensemble of voices and pens that surround the cardinal and respond to his will become a prosthetic extension of his speech and body that reaches into the furthest corners of Europe, allowing him to condemn dissenters, such as Grandier, without ever

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leaving his writing cabinet.32 Richelieu uses his formidable intellectual powers to operate the machinery of death from afar. His maneuvers resonate with Jacques Derrida's description of the scaffold as both an intellectual architecture33 and a concrete machine.34

The former, which Derrida terms "speculative scaffolding" (l'échafaudage spéculatif),35 refers to the type of authority that stands aloof from acts of violence while serving as their origin and rationale. Elissa Marder defines such authority as "the sovereign

'executive' agency that is empowered to prescribe the death sentence as the legal consequence of a legal process that is construed to be both rational and just" (102). In

Cinq-Mars, only by being passed along through dictation can this prescription take on deadly force. Richelieu does not write his own lethal orders: his army of secretaries conveys them to a very different kind of scaffold, the "executing scaffold" that "must appear to be purely mechanical and absolutely devoid of any human intervention in order

(paradoxically enough) to be considered just and humane" (Marder 102). The gesture of copying is the means by which violence travels from one scaffold to another, from the abstract (Richelieu's intellect) to the concrete.

During the Old Regime, however, capital punishment did not generally pretend to be humane, impersonal, or mechanical. Foucault theorizes that death sentences, often

32 In Stello, Robespierre is surrounded by secretaries who compile lists of those destined to be guillotined. Doctor Noir observes them "écrivant éternellement sans lever la tête . . . Il y avait là terriblement de listes nominales" (159). The sight of this writing makes the doctor feel as if he has seen blood. In bother cases, writing appears to be an act of violence. 33 As Elissa Marder explains, "speculative scaffolding" refers to an architectural metaphor that underlies philosophy: "as a mode of speculative thinking, philosophy is conceived of as an edifice" (102). Derrida advances the troubling hypothesis that the death penalty underlies this edifice of human thought, making philosophy, as we know it, possible. 34 The guillotine would be one example of such a machine. In Marder's words, both types of scaffolds are "nonhuman prosthetics" (95). 35 This term and the dual notion of the scaffold come from the chapter "Peines de mort" in the series of dialogues De quoi demain. Elisa Marder's article provides an elaboration of this duality in relation to questions of the human and the animal.

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accompanied by torture, constituted the king's revenge upon those who broke his laws.

Executions staged "la force physique du souverain s'abattant sur le corps de son adversaire" in an unbalanced mockery of personal combat where the executioner played the part of king's champion: "le supplice ne rétablissait pas la justice; il réactivait le pouvoir" (Foucault, Surveiller 60).36 Through the character of the cardinal, who foreshadows the French Revolution through his centralization of the French government and his curtailment of aristocratic privilege, Vigny tells the story of the advent of modern, post-monarchical "justice," a supposedly depersonalized system in which language mediates the relationship between the two "scaffolds," and the act of killing becomes further removed from those who inflict it, no longer with weapons, but with words. The cardinal is not present in Lyon when Cinq-Mars is killed, but attending another spectacle of his own making, a play, in Paris.

Richelieu signifies the arrival of a new kind of violence that claims to be detached from human passion. In such a system, a compassionate royal pardon is not to be hoped for. The cardinal's motives are carefully hidden behind institutional language; his bureaucracy masks the reasons behind the bloodshed it sanctions. The executions of

Cinq-Mars and Grandier carry out vendettas, but this vengeance is concealed by the secretaries, judges, and politicians that relay Richelieu's words and will. The minister's machinations are further obscured when these intermediaries themselves are put to death.

36 Other historians, Michel Bée and Paul Friedland, for instance, have forwarded a competing interpretation of Old Regime executions, describing them as rituals of public healing akin to Passion Plays. Lynn Hunt astutely describes how the terrorist function of executions could easily have gone hand in hand with a sacrificial component: just as the "pageantry of pain at the scaffold was designed to instill terror in observers and in this way served as a deterrence," the offender also "served as a kind of sacrificial victim whose suffering would restore wholeness to the community and order to the state" (93-94).

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Not until the prime minister appears on the scene can we understand, retrospectively, Bassompierre's arrest and Grandier's execution. Bassompierre is a metaphorical wrench in the cardinal's machine, an unintimidated voice. The larger-than- life version of the historical Urbain Grandier, whose execution again highlights Vigny's preoccupation with verbal revolt, creates an even greater perturbation within the pattern of Richelieu's carefully planned dictations.

Urbain Grandier, Romantic Legend and Condemned Judge

Before examining Vigny's retelling of Grandier's trial, I will turn my attention to the historical circumstances that inspired this episode of Cinq-Mars. In 1632, the plague, an illness incomprehensible to seventeenth-century medical doctors, struck the town of

Loudun and killed approximately 3,700 of its 14,000 inhabitants. As the last victims of the epidemic were dying, another mysterious contagion began: a series of demonic possessions spread from an Ursuline convent to the secular community. After reporting obscure visions, the afflicted nuns identified a local priest, Urbain Grandier, as their tormenter. This man had many enemies, including Richelieu. Grandier was suspected of writing satire against the cardinal and was reputed to have mistresses. Perhaps to make an example of this "fauteur de troubles" (Certeau 110) at a time when France was recovering from faction and religious warfare, Richelieu expedited Jean Martin de Laubardemont to investigate Grandier's role in the possessions. The priest was found guilty of sorcery and burned at the stake on August 18th, 1634.37

37 These historical details are taken from Certeau's La possession de Loudun and Huxley's The Devils of Loudun.

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The happenings in Loudun baffled intellectuals well into the nineteenth century.

Doctors invented numerous explanations for the nuns' behavior, including "violent disappointment," "nervous illness," "unrequited sexual desire," "melancholic monomania," "hysterical affliction," religious ecstasy, hypnotism, somnambulism, catalepsy, and hallucinations (Bowman 115-117). Mid-century religious thinkers, on the other hand, maintained that the possessions were genuine and that Laubardemont and

Richelieu had acted out of necessity.38 Romantics who saw Grandier as a martyr, lover, and freethinker admired this dissenter who refused to relinquish control of his last words despite torture and the stake.39

Grandier's contemporaries were even more bewildered by the vicar's resolve and his judges' failure to extract a confession. Such a breakdown in inquisitorial procedure was rare; the practice of torture was widely used in early modern and seventeenth-century

Europe to persecute crimes of sorcery and almost always procured confessions, multiplied accusations, and fueled the tendency of witch-hunts to expand "exponentially"

(Sidky 118). Perhaps because of his unusual stubbornness in affirming his innocence and refusing to accuse others, Grandier achieved renown, and accounts of his death began to circulate "sous le signe de l'exemplarité" (Certeau 261) in the weeks following his execution. Less than a month after Grandier's death, Ismaël Boulliau, a "jeune érudit" and future astronomer, offered this ambivalent interpretation of the vicar's "constance":

Je ne puis m'empêcher de vous parler de feu M. Urbain Grandier mort ou comme un ange, si les anges pouvaient mourir, ou comme un diable, s'ils

38 An anonymous author published in Migne's Encyclopédie catholique claimed, in 1846, that the nuns had truly been possessed. Eudes de Mirville, writing in 1854 and 1855, and Fr. Leriche, writing in 1858, also defended this point of view. For a discussion of nineteenth-century interpretations of Loudun, see “From History to Hysteria” in Frank Paul Bowman’s French Romanticism. 39 Alexandre Dumas and Hyppolite Bonnelier, in addition to Vigny, were inspired by Grandier's story, as were authors later in the century.

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étaient mortels, car si cet homme était innocent, il a bien usé de la plus grande vertu qui soit entre toutes les vertus . . . qu'il ait enduré la torture extraordinaire sans être épargné, et que telles douleurs n'aient pu tirer de lui un mot de travers . . . je l'ai vu sur le bûcher parler hardiment. . . . (Certeau 261-2, emphasis added)

The judicial records of Grandier's interrogation and torture corroborate this refusal to confess. Although the vicar asked to have his sentence mitigated, he stopped short of acknowledging his guilt, and a royal notary's account of the execution describes

Grandier's insolence when told to repeat verbal acts of contrition. The judges interpreted this tenacity as proof that the accused was being strengthened by the devil.40

Grandier's celebrity, both during his life and after his death, was linked to his verbal prowess, evident in both his eloquence as a preacher (his ability to craft language into art) and his refusal to confess to the crime of sorcery (his resistance to others' efforts to manipulate his words). Even before his harrowing execution, Grandier was a man remarkable for his powers of seduction and persuasion. As does Certeau in his more recent scholarship, Vigny concludes that Grandier’s ability to manipulate words provoked jealously and scandal, arousing the enmity of those who falsely accused him.41

In Cinq-Mars, the hero's tutor describes the potent effects of Grandier's speech:

"L’éloquence de Grandier et sa beauté angélique ont souvent exalté les femmes qui venaient de loin pour l’entendre parler; j’en ai vu s’évanouir pendant ses sermons. . . . Il est certain que, si ce n’est sa beauté, rien n’égalait la sublimité de ses discours, toujours inspirés . . ." (75-76). Like his words, Grandier's writing provoked scandal. Inspired by his love for Madeleine de Brou, the priest composed a treatise against clerical celibacy.

40 For the documents providing this information, see Certeau 252-258. 41 Certeau asserts that Grandier's quarrel with the inhabitants of Loudun had its source in the priest's manner of speaking: “Le procès contre le curé sert d’allégorie à la guerre provinciale contre le beau causeur, contre l’homme qui n’est pas de la terre et possède seulement l’art de manier les mots" (85).

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In Cinq-Mars, Vigny changes the date of Grandier's trial from 1634 to 1639 so that it coincides with his hero's journey to Perpignan. Richelieu has laid siege to the city in hopes of snatching it from Spanish rule. Intending to use the hero as a pawn in court politics, the cardinal invites Cinq-Mars to join the king in battle. The protagonist journeys south and stops in Loudun to pay a visit to his former tutor, the clergyman Quillet. As he arrives in the town, Grandier is being paraded with great ceremony into the building where his trial will be held. He refuses to compromise his friends by accepting their offers of armed rescue, a choice Cinq-Mars repeats later in the novel when he is led to the scaffold. The priest speaks, however, during his trial, his torture, and immediately before being put to death, and his words help to instigate an ahistoric riot and rescue attempt.42

Vigny's portrayal of a public, theatrical trial followed by popular revolt implies a cause and effect relationship between the discours d’échafaud and civil disorder. In Cinq-

Mars, Vigny condenses the trial and execution into one spectacular event. Even

Grandier's torture is visible to a child perched high on a wall, who narrates what he is seeing to an eager audience. In reality, the public was only present for Grandier's sentencing and execution. The historic trial lasted over a month and most of its proceedings were carried out in secret, in accordance with inquisitorial procedure. In fact, the judges convened at five o'clock in the morning inside a Carmelite convent to arrive privately at their decision. In Cinq-Mars, however, Grandier's words reach a divided and fickle populace that eventually erupts in his favor.

Throughout his ordeal, Grandier's language thwarts the elaborate rituals of public shaming that were inflicted on the condemned in Old Regime France. Stripped of his

42 Aldous Huxley writes in The Devils of Loudun that spectators protested the cruelty of Grandier's sentence by asking to have him strangled, but there is no historical evidence of a riot.

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clerical position, he stubbornly continues to pronounce the speech acts of a priest. During his trial he forgives and absolves Jeanne de Belfiel, the superior of the Ursuline convent who, in a passionate plea of her own, proclaims Grandier’s innocence and confesses to giving false witness. (In Vigny's version of the trial, Belfiel is led astray by her obsessive, jealous love for the priest.) This act of forgiveness quickly becomes an act of self- naming, a refusal by Grandier to be divested of his ecclesiastical identity. The Fourth

Lateran Council of 1215 specified that before being condemned, clerics who committed heresy had to be "first degraded from their orders" (qtd. in Friedland 45). Grandier's behavior runs against canon law. When the magistrates admonish him for pronouncing

“les paroles de l’Église,” he insists that he still represents the church (92), thereby contesting the appellation of sorcerer imposed upon him.

Unlike the historic Grandier, Vigny’s character does not desire to save himself, but rather accepts his death as a foregone conclusion. He nevertheless derails his persecutors' narrative, disrupting the spectacle of his execution. Before he is tied to the stake, Grandier goes wildly off script when told to pronounce the amende honorable, a formulaic declaration of guilt and repentance that contributed to the theatricality of executions in Old Regime France. The condemned man or women would make the amende honorable at the threshold of church doors on his or her way to the scaffold.43

With a rope tied round their neck, wearing only an undershirt and carrying a burning torch, the condemned were made into public spectacles of shame. Grandier is led in front of Loudun's church wearing “une chemise blanche qui le couvrait tout entier” with a

“torche ardente” placed in his hand. Crippled by torture, he is physically maneuvered by

43 According to Foucault, “le rite de l’exécution voulait donc que le condamné proclame lui-même sa culpabilité par l’amende honorable qu’il prononçait, par l’écriteau qu’il arborait, par les déclarations aussi qu’on le poussait sans doute à faire" (Surveiller 78).

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the priests who lead him to the stake, “soulevé ou plutôt porté par six hommes” (102), one of whom controls the hand that bears the torch. He is brought before the crowd like a puppet, having lost control of his body.

But when a Capuchin exhorts him to repent (“fais amende honorable et demande pardon à dieu de ton crime de magie" (103)), Grandier makes quite a different kind of speech. He begins by sentencing his judge, Laubardemont, to die in three years time, a prophesy that comes true before the novel’s close. This death sentence, given in exchange for Grandier's own, performs an inversion of the trial that has just taken place. Grandier usurps the function of the judge responsible for his execution. He also denies his guilt, an exceptional occurrence in the history of witchcraft proceedings. In Cinq-Mars, the vicar's words proclaiming his innocence are his last: “je n’ai jamais été magicien . . . j’ai beaucoup péché contre moi, mais jamais contre Dieu . . .” (103). Grandier's unorthodox interpretation of sin aggravates his conflict with religious authority: he comes close to expounding a protestant theology, claiming to have confessed directly to God. His protestations are cut short when another priest forcefully closes his mouth. Fearful of the crowd’s growing discontent, his enemies lead him hastily to the stake.

Although Grandier's composure and mastery of language excite the people's sympathies and make his judges uneasy, it is Cinq-Mars who unleashes a riot and belated rescue attempt. Having learned the condemned was presented with a heated iron crucifix to kiss, the hero uses it to strike one of the judges, delivering his own impromptu sentence: “scélérat, s’écrie-t-il, porte la marque de ce fer rougi” (104). His words infuriate the spectators who overpower the soldiers guarding the stake, only to discover they are too late to save the victim. Grandier’s death constitutes a dramatic example of

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how executions and the language they involve transform "inert" onlookers into a rebellious force.44 The populace, so often disparaged by the conservative Vigny, becomes momentarily heroic in its attempt to save a man from being burned alive. In Stello (1832), we find a similar passage in which a crowd tries to block a cartload of men, women, and children from reaching the guillotine. Although Vigny's spectators act and react, this spontaneous civil disobedience only goes so far, for his fictitious crowds never successfully save anyone.

Yet the effect of Grandier’s voice, what we might call his verbal “specter,” survives the flames that kill him. Haunted by hallucinations (or prophetic visions), Jeanne de Belfiel, Grandier's former accuser, claims to speak on behalf of his ghost and sets out, inspired by his words, to confront and kill the cardinal. The lingering of Grandier's voice implies that he has outperformed Richelieu's magistrates and made a lasting impression on public memory, sabotaging whatever message his execution was meant to send, rewriting his carefully scripted punishment.

Jeanne's Accusations

Despite (or perhaps because of) her hysteria, Jeanne shows herself to be a formidable and courageous speaker. Like Grandier, Bassompierre, and Cinq-Mars, she seeks to liberate herself from Richelieu’s control. Jeanne allows Laubardemont and his exorcists to direct the spectacle of her possession because she is jealous of Grandier's love for Madeleine de Brou. But when they threaten to condemn the object of her infatuation, she rebels by speaking unexpectedly at Grandier’s trial, making the amende

44 One of Grandier's advocates, who is not allowed to speak, explains: "l'inertie d'un peuple est toute- puissante, c'est là sa sagesse, c'est là sa force" (Cinq-Mars 96).

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honorable he will later refuse to pronounce. The spectators are startled when they see

“trois femmes en chemise, pieds nus, la corde au cou, un cierge à la main,” advance towards the middle of the platform where the accused is being held. Although her companions are too afraid to speak, Jeanne declares: “je demande pardon à Dieu et aux hommes du crime que j’ai commis en accusant l’innocent Urbain Grandier. Ma possession était fausse, mes paroles suggérées, le remords m’accable . . ." (88). She nearly strangles herself before being led away—evidence, perhaps, of a desire to die in

Grandier’s place. Jeanne’s plea for forgiveness suggests submission. Yet by incriminating herself, she also indicts Richelieu's magistrates, reversing the process of accusation just as Grandier overturns the privilege of judging. The torch she bears, meant to be a symbol of shame, becomes a weapon, for she brandishes it like "le glaive de l'ange" (89).

The abbess has been possessed not by demons, but by men speaking though her.

She reveals a symmetry between demonic possession and having one's speech commandeered by others, accusing the exorcist Lactance: “le démon qui m’a possédée, c’est vous" (89). While the crowd applauds the nuns, the magistrates are momentarily struck dumb (interdits) and resort to whispering among themselves, a sign that language and control of the public have passed simultaneously out of their hands.

Jeanne shows more resolution than the novel's heroine, Marie de Gonzague, who has promised to marry Cinq-Mars, but whose courage and devotion ultimately waver.

Whereas the obedient Marie becomes queen of Poland after her lover’s death, Jeanne vows to obtain Grandier’s pardon and to scatter Richelieu's ashes to the wind. The next time we see her, she is following Cinq-Mars on foot as he continues his journey towards

Perpignan. When she speaks, she seems to have gone mad, and Cinq-Mars mistakes her

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for a figment of his terrifying dreams. Despite her quest for vengeance, Jeanne’s most pressing purpose is to ask forgiveness for herself, Grandier, and Cinq-Mars, in the form of a royal pardon. But before she can find the king, she encounters Richelieu, who literally intercepts all messages intended for the monarch, including the stricken abbess herself. Jeanne cannot circumvent Richelieu in order to reach the king (as it turns out, no one can), but she momentarily fills the cardinal's mind with doubt and fear.

From the moment she puts the rope around her neck and proclaims the amende honorable, Jeanne exists as a condemned woman, neither fully dead nor fully alive. Her speech and physical appearance occupy an intermediary space between life and death: she is pale as a “fantôme" (223), "à moitié morte” (405). Wracked with fever and

“condamnée à la faim” (225), she swears to go barefoot and hungry until she assassinates

Richelieu. During her encounters with Cinq-Mars and the cardinal, Jeanne resembles at times a ghost returned from the grave, at others a terminally ill woman. She envisions death as a means of marrying her phantom lover, singing that she will in turn be judged and led to the tomb:

Le juge a parlé dans la nuit, Et dans la tombe on me conduit. Pourtant, j'étais ta fiancée! Viens . . ., la nuit est longue et glacée, Mais tu ne dormiras pas seul, Je te prêterai mon linceul. (230)

Jeanne’s impossible desires can only be expressed through the metaphor of a death sentence. Her fantasies of condemnation double those of the novel's hero. After

Grandier's execution, the protagonist dreams of marriage to Marie, but his dream turns into a nightmare of execution. He awakens to see Jeanne lingering over him, for she has caught up to him in a roadside tavern.

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When they meet, Jeanne is suffering from another possession by a masculine voice. Although she has freed herself from the exorcists, she believes Grandier is traveling with her and claims “il est dans la chambre voisine, qui dort avec moi.” Jeanne depends on her phantom lover to script her plea to the king: “je lui parlerai, comme

Grandier m’a appris à lui parler” (116). Foreseeing the hero's undoing, Jeanne hopes to obtain his pardon as well. “J'ai lu sur ton visage que tu es condamné à mort” (116),

Jeanne tells him. By naming the hero a condemned man (and reinforcing his nightmare of execution), Jeanne effectively turns him into one, just as she earlier made herself a condemned woman. Although Cinq-Mars is fascinated by the prospect of dying for

Marie, only later will he find the courage to embrace his imminent death through a declaration of his own: the condemned abbess must pronounce his sentence first.

Following Butler's Excitable Speech, one could say that Jeanne's self- condemnation has "cast" her "into the unspeakable" (139), or perhaps that she has purposefully thrown herself outside the "social domain of speakable discourse" (133).

Giving voice to the dead, her language no longer operates within a frame of reference that her interlocutors can understand. Jeanne is aware of her peculiar status and knowingly declares herself outside the realm of "normal" meaning. When she comes across a group of soldiers who harass and torment her, she explains that any communication between them and herself is impossible: "Je n'entends pas votre langue, et vous n'entendriez pas la mienne" (222). She reiterates this thought to Richelieu, whom she mistakes for a military officer: "vous ne me comprendriez pas" (224). Jeanne's speech is no longer legible to those who have no knowledge of her suffering. She has ceased to be a linguistically viable subject in Butler's sense of the term: "to become a subject means to be subjected to

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a set of implicit and explicit norms that govern the kind of speech that will be legible as the speech of a subject" (133). To Richelieu, to his soldiers, and even to Cinq-Mars, the meaning of Jeanne's speech can, at best, only be grasped or sensed on a quasi-intuitive level. Similarly, she is no longer a useful subject to the king (a political subject), having abandoned her post in a convent to challenge his judicial apparatus. With nothing to lose,

Jeanne wanders into an “unspeakable” or "foreclosed" realm of fevered, prophetic language. She incarnates the "impossible speech" that haunts society in "the ramblings of the asocial, the rantings of the 'psychotic'" (Butler 133). These ravings and their disturbing truth, although pushed away and dismissed, nevertheless shake Cinq-Mars and

Richelieu to the core.

Jeanne's abandonment of normative speech (first in her staged, demonic possession, then during Grandier's trial, and finally in the delirium she inflicts upon herself through lack of food and sleep) ultimately brings about her destruction: she is no longer an abbess, a subject of the king, or even a "living" woman. She is, however, temporarily compensated by the extraordinary powers of speech that her proximity to death affords, for she no longer knows any fear of censorship. Jeanne leaves the female hierarchy of the convent where she enjoyed a socially sanctioned form of authority and crosses into the masculine domain of war, wandering in nun's garb through a military encampment. Simultaneously, she leaves behind the rules of literal, coherent meaning.

Her words describe Grandier's burning on a poetic, symbolic register that belongs neither to history nor recent memory. Jeanne is reliving the execution at regular intervals, interpreting it in different ways: "il est venu me voir à l'heure du bûcher, vous savez bien?

. . . l'heure où il pleut, l'heure où mes mains commencent à brûler comme à présent . . . "

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(229). Besides comparing their mutual destruction to a marriage ceremony, she speaks of the execution as if it were a coronation, with Grandier singing (or rather, Jeanne singing with his "voice"):

Je vais être prince d'Enfer, Mon sceptre est un manteau de fer, Ce sapin brûlant est mon trône, Et ma robe est de soufre jaune . . . (230)

This "song" is striking for several reasons: first, it reinforces the analogy between the pairs Grandier/ Jeanne and Cinq-Mars/ Marie, since in the protagonist's dream his marriage to Marie also involves a coronation. Jeanne's lyrics reinforce this overlap between death, love, and politics. Secondly, Grandier's words, coupled with Jeanne's réplique (quoted above) describing her own judgment, play upon the form and meaning of criminal complaintes that circulated in Old Regime and nineteenth-century France.

Jeanne's lyrics and her earlier self-accusations correspond to the structure of complaintes

(a type of poetic lament) that were written and sung to familiar tunes: "Dans ces étranges poèmes, le coupable était censé prendre la parole pour rappeler son geste; il évoquait rapidement sa vie, tirait les leçons de son aventure, exprimait ses remords, appelait sur lui–même au moment de mourir l'épouvante et la pitié" (Foucault, Pierre Rivière 272).45

Richelieu experiences horror and pity as he listens to Jeanne, but his feelings are directed more at himself than her, for she has reminded him that his crimes are at the source of hers and surpass her own. Jeanne has perverted the function of the criminal complainte by redirecting a rhetorical form designed for self-accusation against the cardinal. Finally,

Jeanne's song combines words and music that contradict each other, amplifying the paradoxical combination of coherence and madness in her speech. The lyric is sung "sur

45 Foucault cites as an example the complainte of Magdeleine Albert, accused of parricide. Unlike Jeanne, the apocryphal Magdeleine reaffirms the justice of her sentence. See Moi, Pierre Rivière, 272-273.

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l'air de De Profundis" (230), one of the penitential psalms. Jeanne is still asking for forgiveness, but through a melody fitted to morbidly celebratory lyrics. This clash of symbols, words, music, references, and registers casts her into the "unspeakable" yet poetic realm of the insane.

Moreover, Jeanne's ramblings are "unspeakable" in a more explicitly political and ideological sense because she makes an argument against the death penalty that contradicts religious orthodoxy (ironically, she plans to take revenge on Richelieu by killing him). Mortal men, she argues, should not send each other into the unknown horror of death, where no one knows what may await him. Although she does not succeed in killing Richelieu or in halting his bureaucratic killing machine, she does awaken his conscience and give him an emotional shock: he is "saisi d'horreur et de pitié" (231).

Rather than attempting to argue or reason with her, he simply has her taken away: an admission, perhaps, that his words are not a match for hers.

When we see Jeanne again, more than two years later, working as a “slave” for

Richelieu’s spies on the border between France and Spain (an intermediary, extra-legal space suitable for the condemned), she is still preoccupied with obtaining pardon for herself and others: “on me fait tenir un homme pendant qu’on le tue. Oh ! que j’ai eu de sang sur les mains ! Que Dieu leur pardonne si cela se peut" (403). She also continues to prophesy condemnations, predicting her cousin’s death minutes before Richelieu’s agents murder him. But like Cassandra, her predictions cannot save her, and she dies of horror after coming once again face to face with Laubardemont, "le juge," a word she has been repeating, we are told, for years (411).

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If "survival" and "speakability" are linked, with the subject's continued existence predicated on its adherence to verbal norms, it is not surprising that Jeanne only manages to survive (and barely) for a few years after crossing the "bar" between "normal" and supposedly "illegible" speech (Butler 136). Her exile and death are the consequences of her dissolution as a subject, the price she pays for her poetic and political improvisations.

Jeanne abandons her physical place in society by leaving the convent and the town of

Loudun and sets herself symbolically apart through the declaration of self-condemnation.

Her delirium, prophetic hysteria, and near-insanity make her incomprehensible to all save the reader and those who are personally familiar with the circumstances of Grandier's death. Jeanne's speech shows where the condemned woman stands in relation to society: as an external, haunting46 presence that imposes itself even as its hearers send it into exile.

Cinq-Mars, anti-Hero

After having witnessed the reckless daring of Vigny's minor characters, we might expect the novel's protagonist to follow their example. On the contrary, many critics see

Cinq-Mars as a wholly inadequate Romantic hero, unable to live up to the role Vigny intended him to play, selfish and guilty of placing his ambition above national interests.

According to Keith Wren, “Vigny cannot find the men to fit his thesis [defending legitimism]" ("A Suitable Case" 349). In Patrick Craven’s reading of the novel, the mode of communication championed by Cinq-Mars (voice) erodes even as he attempts to overthrow Richelieu’s writing apparatus: “despite the triumphant, even hagiographic

46 Bassompierre's voice eludes the Bastille and comes back to haunt the text in the form of a letter, moments before the protagonist's death. Cinq-Mars' voice also lives on in a letter describing his death.

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depiction of Cinq-Mars’s death, Vigny unwittingly hands over the victory to Richelieu"

(221). Claudie Bernard sees in Cinq-Mars an example of linguistic defeat: "Cinq-Mars s’est chargé de rétablir la transparence de la communication; mais il se heurte à cette

'langue étrangère,' la rhétorique politicienne, au spécieux pathos amoureux, et à sa propre inaptitude locutoire, qui lui fait deux fois trahir de Thou—d’abord en lui 'taisant' la conjuration, puis en 'parlant' involontairement de sa complicité" (67).

How can we reconcile this mediocrity, both verbal and political, with the

“hagiographic” depiction of Cinq-Mars’ death? In his article “A Suitable Case for

Treatment; Ideological Confusion in Vigny’s Cinq-Mars,” Keith Wren addresses the novel’s many contradictions, including those surrounding the hero, by analyzing Vigny’s

“grudging admiration” (347) for Richelieu. Despite his cruelty and repulsive appearance,

Richelieu comes across in Cinq-Mars as a political genius and a clear, efficacious thinker. Wren argues that Vigny's portrayal of the cardinal mirrors his ambivalence towards Napoleon: "Both Napoleon's usurpation and Richelieu's centralization represented political tendencies alien to the centrifugal legitimism hereditary in the Vigny family . . . " (349). Despite his aristocratic roots, Vigny was fascinated by the Empire, succumbing to “the hypnotic effect that Napoleon exercised on so many of the

Romantics" (349). In his youth, he yearned for a military career in Napoleon's army.

I believe the reluctant admiration for Napoleon that inspired Richelieu's character also complicates the character of Cinq-Mars. Despite their enmity, Cinq-Mars and

Richelieu are two incarnations of this dangerous yet hypnotic Napoleonic energy that

Vigny associates with ambition, death, and moral ambiguity.47 Cinq-Mars is no less

47 In his article "Milton et le mot de la fin dans Cinq-Mars," Jean Gillet compares both Cinq-Mars and Richelieu to Milton's Satan, who, like the Napoleonic legend, inspired the creation of the Romantic hero.

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ambitious than the cardinal, whose influence over the king he seeks to supplant.

Richelieu, in the grips of consumption, is no less marked for death than the many characters he sends to their graves, making him yet another condemned double of the eponymous hero. Cinq-Mars and Richelieu possess an (anti)heroic energy that consumes them both. If Cinq-Mars becomes purely heroic by the end of the novel, it is because he embraces destruction and death. He suffers (or self-inflicts) a literal rather than a figurative death sentence. As his execution approaches, his relationship to speech undergoes a fundamental shift.

Cinq-Mars, Romantic Hero

Henri d'Effiat, who begins his rebellion as a calculating politician, becomes spontaneous in his language only after embracing his own demise. As a conspirator, his political speech rouses enthusiasm, but stops short of sincerity. When the protagonist delivers his first "public" discourse to a secret assembly, the narrator leads us to believe that Cinq-Mars is coming into his own voice as he assumes political leadership: "Cinq-

Mars étonna toute l'assemblée et de Thou lui-même par ce discours. Personne ne l'avait entendu jusque-là parler longtemps de suite, même dans les conversations familières."

Yet we subsequently learn that his reserve was a long-meditated pretense, an affectation designed to hide his "ambition personnelle" (379). The hero's speech and moments of silence are deliberate maneuvers, his tone of expression carefully planned. When an anonymous written threat dampens his supporters' ardor, Cinq-Mars employs a ruse to ensure their loyalty. By granting them permission to abandon his cause, he convinces

Parallels abound between Vigny's mediocre hero and the ambitious Julien Sorel, himself a fervent admirer of Napoleon.

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them to reaffirm their allegiance. The aspiring politician adopts a "purely mechanical" and formulaic cliché, a rhetorical "recipe" (recette):

—Du reste, messieurs, je ne veux forcer personne à me suivre. . . . Si quelqu'un veut s'assurer une retraite, qu'il parle. . . . Nul ne voulut entendre parler de cette proposition, et le mouvement qu'elle occasionna fit renouveler les serments de haine contre le Cardinal- duc. Cinq-Mars continua pourtant à interroger quelques personnes qu'il choisissait bien. . . . (382)

Despite the "franchise intempestive" (381) that compromises his schemes, and his claim to represent France's "vieille franchise" (383), Cinq-Mars uses artifice to subjugate his collaborators. His calculations recall those of the cardinal, for whom men are "des nombres pour accomplir une pensée" (218). Only after Cinq-Mars is confident of a capital sentence can he embody the authentic speech that marks the "sacralized" victim.

In an impulsive gesture typical of the Romantic hero, Cinq-Mars sentences himself to death before his enemies are able to officially condemn him. Eager to separate the hero from his fiancée, the queen of France, Anne d'Autriche, writes a letter to Cinq-

Mars urging him to release Marie from her promise to marry him. Cinq-Mars is convinced that Marie is prepared to accept the crown of Poland. He immediately abandons his revolt and writes his own death sentence in response to this letter: "Marie de

Gonzague étant ma femme ne peut être reine de Pologne qu'après ma mort; je meurs."

This gesture of writing replaces his initial suicidal impulse, which was to turn the barrel of a pistol towards himself. As a "crayon" is taken up and the "pistolet" put down, the former instrument is shown to be an equally powerful implement of death (433). This scene constitutes a reversal of an episode that took place, many chapters earlier, in

Richelieu's cabinet. Instead of serving the cardinal's bureaucracy, performative, written

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violence has been commandeered by the renegade individual. Renouncing life and political action, Cinq-Mars chooses self-condemnation over immediate self-destruction, promising his friend de Thou "de ne point me frapper moi-même" (435). The written performative je meurs has immediate physical and material repercussions: Cinq-Mars falls to the ground in a fainting fit that resembles death, bleeding profusely from the nose and ears. When he regains consciousness, he exists on the threshold of life and death. His appearance alters to reflect his transformation, and he displays the same phantom paleness as Jeanne and Grandier before him. In the pages that follow, "il n'appartenait déjà plus à la terre" (460).

In his condemned state, the hero's words and actions become unforeseeable even to Richelieu, who has carefully planned the series of events that will seal the conspirators' fate:

—À neuf heures, nous réglerons les affaires de M. le Grand [Cinq-Mars]; à dix, je me ferai porter autour du jardin pour prendre l'air au clair de lune; en-suite je dormirai une heure ou deux; à minuit, le Roi viendra, et à quatre heures vous pourrez repasser pour prendre les divers ordres d'arrestations, condamnations ou autres que j'aurai à vous donner . . . Richelieu dit tout ceci avec le même son de voix et une prononciation uniforme . . . (437)

Richelieu's voice evokes the mechanical nature of his violence, perfectly timed and seemingly all-powerful. Nevertheless, following Cinq-Mars' suicidal declaration,

Richelieu's plans begin to unravel. The king, troubled by rumors of Urbain Grandier's unjust trial, arrives early to question the cardinal. In an aberration deemed

"extraordinaire" (444), Richelieu's timetable is set off by two hours. His prediction that the king will turn over Cinq-Mars and de Thou is rendered meaningless when they arrive in Narbonne and surrender themselves. Cinq-Mars' unexpected capitulation startles and

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intimidates the king and his minister. His brusque entry makes even Richelieu

"trembl[e]" (459).

As the protagonist enters Richelieu's headquarters, the prime minister has just stripped the king of the meager remnants of his authority. The monarch has grown weak and infirm. His voice when he arrives in Narbonne is "languissante," a sign that he will soon abdicate sovereignty and control of his speech and signature (445). Frightened by his own ignorance and indecision, panicked by his failure to understand foreign policy,

Louis XIII, in exchange for Richelieu's promise not to resign, signs three documents effectively surrendering his sovereignty. In addition to giving up his children as hostages and relinquishing control of his personal guard, he signs an arrest warrant for the conspirators, permitting Richelieu "de les prendre morts ou vifs" (459).48 After this betrayal, the king echoes the words Cinq-Mars wrote to the queen: "Laissez-moi, par pitié! Je meurs!" (459, emphasis added).

With this phrase, the two dying men simultaneously double and oppose each other. When they appear before Richelieu, Cinq-Mars and the king mirror each other not only through words, but also through their physical appearance: "Le grand écuyer était d'une pâleur égale à celle du Roi . . . " (460). Despite their shared proximity to death, the contrasting connotations of the utterance je meurs illustrate the vast difference between the two men. After writing this declaration, Cinq-Mars sets out to perish at the cardinal's hands, whereas Louis XIII is describing reality: the king is dying of illness, and

Richelieu's manipulations have hastened the monarch's deterioration. Cinq-Mars' je

48 Whereas the king hands over his signature reluctantly, Cinq-Mars insists on signing a treasonous treaty with Spain despite de Thou's protests. Cinq-Mars stubbornly uses his signature as a weapon despite his friend's better judgment; the king surrenders his despite his own.

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meurs is performative; the king's is primarily constative, although it does accomplish a petulant complaint.

Through this shared utterance, Cinq-Mars becomes an inverse image of the king, exemplifying Vigny's ideal of sovereign speech. As the monarch's voice and signature lose their authority, Cinq-Mars incarnates, in the brief hiatus between condemnation and execution, the "franche," transparent speech of Henri IV. Adopting a kinglike authority, he makes himself his own judge, guard, and executioner: "Vous devez trouver, Sire, quelque difficulté à me faire arrêter, car j'ai vingt mille hommes à moi. . . . —Je me rends parce que je veux mourir, dit-il; mais je ne suis pas vaincu." This declaration is met by the cardinal's indignant silence: "il se contraignit" (460). Richelieu senses, as he did when confronted by Jeanne de Belfiel, that he has been verbally outmatched. Cinq-Mars transforms the cardinal's written orders into speech and action: amidst the confusion and shame of his berated sovereign, he must command the guards to arrest him, just as he later encourages the executioner to strike him. Ironically, it is Louis XIII who looks at

Cinq-Mars, horrorstruck, "comme regarde un homme qui vient de recevoir sa sentence de mort" (460). The king feels the weight of his approaching death and fears accusation, for

Cinq-Mars could, if he chose, reveal his wavering sovereign's approval of his conspiracy against cardinal. Cinq-Mars, on the other hand, fears neither death nor accusation and generously refrains from revealing Louis' betrayal of his prime minister.

The hero's improvisation—his arrival at Narbonne, his kinglike speech, and audacious surrender—contrast with Richelieu's meticulous dictations and the recitations of the king and his brother. Surrender and desire for death make improvisation possible, if only for the briefest of interludes. Moreover, Cinq-Mars' condemnation allows him to

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"rewrite" his narrative, to retell his story. Until his surrender, the reasons for his behavior remain obscure to those around him. Because many of the novel's chapters consist largely of dialogue, the narrator stands aloof from the hero's interiority, leaving the task of discerning (and debating) his nature to the reader and the novel's other characters. Anne d'Autriche is his most subtle critic. In order to compromise Marie's attachment to her lover, she offers the following analysis of his behavior:

Il s'est élevé pour vous atteindre; mais l'ambition, qui vous semble ici avoir aidé l'amour, ne pourrait-elle pas s'être aidée de lui? Ce jeune homme me semble être bien profond, bien calme dans ses ruses politiques, bien indépendant dans ses vastes résolutions, dans ses monstrueuses entreprises, pour que je le croie uniquement occupé de sa tendresse. Si vous n'aviez été qu'un moyen au lieu d'un but, que diriez-vous? (424)

Marie does not deny the queen's interpretation, but rather resigns herself to its possible truth, responding "Je l'aimerais encore" (424). Until Cinq-Mars condemns himself for losing her, she has no sure means of refuting Anne's compelling, if prejudiced, "reading" of his character. In the chapter "Le secret," de Thou, horrified by his protégé's recklessness, offers madness as yet another interpretation of the hero's conduct: "vous raisonnez le désordre, vous pesez la flamme, vous calculez l'erreur" (320).

The time he spends in prison allows Cinq-Mars to create a counternarrative in which Marie serves as the unique, if misguided, motive for his treason. Only on the way to accomplishing his death wish can the protagonist convincingly distinguish himself from Richelieu, whom, like the king, he both doubles and opposes: "Contemple, contemple deux ambitions réunies, l'une égoïste et sanglante, l'autre dévouée et sans tache; la leur soufflée par la haine, la nôtre inspirée par l'amour. Regarde, Seigneur . . . juge et pardonne. Pardonne, car nous fûmes bien criminels de marcher un seul jour dans la même voie . . . " (470). The hero is speaking to God, but also to Joseph who, ready to

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betray his master, has come to tempt the protagonist with offers of escape. More importantly, this plea guides the reader's understanding of the novel.

Cinq-Mars' self-interpretation emerges during his verbal duel with Joseph.

Corrupted by his desire for a bishopric, the cardinal's underling attempts to convince the protagonist that his moral pangs and ethical declarations amount to empty verbiage. Their dispute (and the novel's message) depends upon whether abstract words can carry any meaning. In response to the hero's accusation that he is a monster, the capuchin replies:

"voilà encore des mots." Joseph also dismisses love, the cornerstone of Cinq-Mars' defense, as an empty signifier, repeating yet again "voici encore des mots" (468). By emptying words of their meanings, Joseph reduces good and evil to a materialist philosophy of force and self-interest, yet by the end of their interview, his own speech begins to disintegrate into meaningless noise. Disoriented by de Thou's tranquility on the eve of his death, he momentary forgets how to speak: "—Brou . . . brr . . . brr . . . dit-il en secouant la tête" (472).

After dismissing the capuchin's offers of escape, Cinq-Mars declares to his judges: "Ma volonté est de mourir" (474). Death, in its undeniable reality, cuts his speech short while lending it a measure of meaning; unlike insults or declarations of love, the reality of its referent cannot be easily doubted. The narrator now intercedes on the protagonist's behalf, lending credibility to the hero's self-vindications: "la présence de la mort, qui vient comme la lumière d'un astre inconnu" (469), sheds light on the hero's state of mind and on his language. In dying, Cinq-Mars proves that his declaration je meurs transcends mere words; by extension, his words of love take on greater credibility, as do his final reflections. The wager of a life, it seems, lends credit to Romantic speech.

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Poets and Posterity

In spite of having lost his life, his love, and his ambitions, Cinq-Mars may yet lay posthumous claim to verbal bravado, for poets are sympathetic receptacles of his words.

Although de Thou dismisses the opinion of posterity as yet another "vanité" (487), Vigny takes pains to assure the reader that this is not the case. The hero's story, including his last words, finds its way into the hands of Corneille and Milton, poets who represent Vigny himself, and by association, the author's transformation of history into myth and legend.

Vigny wants the man of letters to triumph over the politician. In this sense, the ending of the novel serves as wish fulfillment: "le dernier mot reste aux écrivains, ces 'génies' supérieurs au génie de Richelieu" (Bernard 61). During Cinq-Mars' moment on the scaffold in Lyon, another spectacle is taking place in Paris. Richelieu has written a mediocre tragedy, Mirame, and opens its first performance to the populace as well as the court. While the aristocracy feigns admiration, the parterre remains deathly silent. But when Corneille unobtrusively enters the theater, the commoners break into thunderous applause. Like the theatrics of the Grandier affair, Richelieu's more traditional dramaturgy is met by popular disdain.

The novel's penultimate chapter ends with Cinq-Mars throwing his hat to the ground as he approaches the scaffold. This gesture signals to his supporters that he does not wish to be rescued. Following this dramatic gesture, the thread of the narration is interrupted and the next chapter cuts to Richelieu's theatrical disappointments, creating an explicit juxtaposition of two kinds of spectacle. Although the narrator never recounts

Cinq-Mars' and de Thou's deaths directly, we hear an epistolary account of the bloody event. Montrésor, who attends the execution in hopes of rescuing the condemned men,

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writes an eyewitness account, which Corneille then reads to Milton. The poets thus effectively complete the story, with Montrésor's letter picking up more or less where the preceding chapter left off: "je vis avec douleur M. de Cinq-Mars jeter son chapeau loin de lui d'un air de dédain" (517). Montrésor transcribes Cinq-Mars' final words to de Thou, to his confessor, and to the executioner, whom the hero encourages with the question:

"Qu'attends-tu?" (518). Just as he orchestrated his arrest and condemnation, the protagonist gives the verbal signal for his beheading. When Corneille rearticulates these words in the aftermath of his victory over the cardinal, the protagonist seems to share in the poet's triumph: both have derailed Richelieu's attempts at directing public performance.

Montrésor's letter recounts how the deaths of Cinq-Mars and de Thou, instead of reaffirming Richelieu's authority, provoke indignation and disgust in a vast crowd of bystanders. Cinq-Mars' beheading is met with "un cri effroyable du peuple." The headsman, "tout troublé," fails to execute de Thou with a first and then a second blow, creating an even greater disturbance as "le peuple poussa un long gémissement et s'avança en criant contre le bourreau." In referring to the scaffold in this moment as "le théâtre" (519), Vigny insists that Richelieu has doubly failed in his function of playwright: neither one of his carefully choreographed performances has transpired as planned. The civil disorder unleashed by the executions in Lyon seems magically transposed into Paris where, at the novel's close, riotous mobs fill the streets, an ominous portent of France's political future.

Cinq-Mars and de Thou command the public's respect and admiration at the moment of their deaths, but only the poets can pass along their story as a moral lesson,

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transforming them into a paradigm of exceptionality. Corneille and Milton are charged with giving a voice (and interpretation) to history, but more importantly, as symbols of

Vigny himself, they transpose the hero's last words out of history and into the realm of literature. At the height of his political ambition, Cinq-Mars dreamed that young men like himself would sculpt France's future as if it were a work of art or architecture: "La jeunesse regarde fièrement l'avenir de son œil d'aigle, y trace un large plan, y jette une pierre fondamentale" (374). But the epigraph of the chapter containing this statement

("La lecture") already gives the lie to the hero's words: "les grands écrivains . . . disparaissent en laissant à l'avenir des ordres qu'il exécutera fidèlement" (358). Writers, not politicians, will influence what is to come. In Vigny's eyes, the condemned man's revolt cannot alter history's disastrous course, but rather precipitates it; Cinq-Mars' political failure gives momentum to Richelieu's decimation of the aristocracy. The artist, on the other hand, may yet influence posterity's understanding of history, in this case by turning the condemned man into a legend.

Conclusion

Vigny's scaffold scenes imply that public executions are staged not only to inflict punishment, instill fear, chastise the body, subdue public opinion, and elicit repentance, but also in order to force criminals to follow certain scripts, thereby demonstrating that speech can and ought to be controlled. Without the submission of the condemned man or woman, the ceremony of execution rings hollow. Vigny chose (or re-created) his heroes to be an exception to this historical rule. In Cinq-Mars, condemnation precipitates verbal confrontations. The condemned triumph because they give more articulate, more

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memorable, and more thought-provoking performances than their accusers. More often than not, their punishment, by placing them before the public, serves to amplify the disquieting effect of their speech. Far from pacifying, appeasing, or intimidating the fictitious crowds that witness them, Vigny's scenes of capital punishment elicit responses of horror, pity, indignation, riot, and rebellion.

Vigny's condemned characters speak on their own terms, and their words incarnate the unexpected, the non-formulaic, the poetic, and the performative. Instead of falling prey to dictation, they reinvent the discours d'échafaud, usurping the prerogatives of magistrates and executioners. In this way, they displace blame onto the authorities lurking behind spectacles of death. Moreover, last words prove contagious: inspired by

Grandier's example, Cinq-Mars and Jeanne go on to perform their own scaffold scenes. In the coming chapters, I explore other permutations of rebellious "condemned" speech.

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CHAPTER TWO

Living through Recitation, Death by Improvisation: Julien Sorel's Metamorphosis

Like Cinq-Mars, Le rouge et le noir (1830) follows an energetic protagonist who flounders among his contemporaries because he cherishes the ideals of a past era. Much as Henri d'Effiat longs for the golden age of the French aristocracy, Julien Sorel regrets having been born too late to join the battles of Napoleonic conquest. After struggling to advance in Restoration society by mastering feats of recitation and eventually conversation, Sorel commits a seemingly irrational crime, abandons his methods of verbal deception, and resolves to die. His self-condemnation resembles that of Cinq-Mars by making him the privileged narrator of his own story and giving him the courage to publicly overturn enemy interpretations of his behavior. Above all, death makes both heroes appear virtuous, if only in their final moments.49

Le rouge et le noir was inspired by the facts of a sensational fait divers. In 1827,

Antoine Berthet, an artisan's son, fired upon Mme Michoud, his former mistress and his former employer's wife. Stendhal expanded upon the details of this scandalous court case to create a story that explores the perils of the spoken word. Like Stendhal's other novels,

Le rouge et le noir addresses the intricacies and difficulties of communication in daily life. Whereas Vigny focuses primarily on last words, addressing speech and death through a series of discours d'échafaud, Stendhal examines spoken language in ironic

49 Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré, another nineteenth-century archetype of ambition, never makes this transformation: he commits literal instead of verbal suicide before he can be judged and as a result, never attains heroic status. Unlike Julien Sorel and Cinq-Mars, he is not "sacralized."

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detail at every opportunity, exploiting his characters' verbal insecurities and idiosyncrasies for comic as well as tragic effect. As Christopher Prendergast points out,

"how to speak to others, in the language of others, is at the heart of the Stendhalian dilemma" (128).

In Le rouge et le noir, Sorel wanders through different milieus (bourgeois, clerical, aristocratic, penal), endeavoring to manipulate a string of "sociolects."50 He tries out various verbal strategies, first in the hopes of conquering women and acquiring power and prestige,51 later so that he may die with dignity and combat the contempt of his jury, whose members come from the higher ranks of society.52 Le rouge et le noir can be read as a roman d'apprentissage about learning how to speak, a novel addressing how rhetorical skills are acquired, perfected, and employed. In this precarious education, death is the final step on a path to eloquence, self-awareness, and paradoxical fulfillment.

Stendhal shows how the stakes and possibilities of public speech are radically altered by a death sentence.

Sorel's crime, trial, and condemnation change his relationship to speech in a way that he finds liberating. While several scholars interpret the final crisis of Le rouge et le noir as replacing a rigid, hypocritical discourse with the silence of violence and death,53 I argue that sincere public speech briefly asserts itself in the face of judicial authority and read Sorel's crime in the context of his development and transformation as a speaker.

Until Sorel is put on trial, he relies on his extraordinary memory to recite blocks of text,

50 See Christopher Prendergast's The Order of Mimesis: "One way of describing Le Rouge et le Noir is as an ensemble of discourses or, in Barthes' term, 'sociolects,' each of which corresponds to a particular social group, and which together furnish the different 'scripts' with which Julien acts out his various roles . . ." (132). 51 On Julien as invader, see Martin Turnell's chapter "Le Rouge et le noir." 52 In his book Juries and the Transformation of Criminal Justice in France, James M. Donovan explains that "during much of the nineteenth century, only wealthy or well-to-do men—the notables—served on juries" (6). 53 See Crouzet 199-200, Lampedusa 556, Prendergast 128 and 137-138, Van Zuylen 77, and Yetiv 34.

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thereby eliminating the need to improvise during stressful social interactions. This strategy allows him to calculate his words in advance and better hide his true political and religious opinions, which, in Restoration society, would have placed him at a great disadvantage. Whereas Cinq-Mars portrays political censorship inflicted through violent spectacles of intimidation, Le rouge et le noir shows how censorship, internalized and practiced upon the self, threatens the speaker's autonomy and personhood. During his trial, Sorel improvises for the first and last time. After shaking off his habits of recitation, he is immediately condemned. My reading of the novel will focus on the meaning of this shift from recitation to improvisation and why it proves lethal.

Stendhal's portrayal of sincere versus inauthentic speech in Le rouge et le noir was influenced by Idéologie, a turn-of-the-century philosophical movement that both elaborated and challenged the writings of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, an anti-Cartesian

Enlightenment philosopher who believed that physical sensation was the key to knowledge. Like Condillac, the Idéologues54 investigated the relationship between sensation, thought, speech, habit, signs,55 and free will. At the core of the Idéologues' project was the question of whether language, corrupted by social convention and subject to habit, can accurately express an individual's thoughts. In particular, I believe that

54 Although Destutt de Tracy referred to himself as an "Idéologiste," he and the philosophers he influenced became known as Idéologues. As Michelle Chilcoat explains, this disparaging misnomer was invented by Napoleon. Although the Idéologues supported Napoleon's coup d'état, the emperor saw their philosophy as a threat to his power and dissolved their schools, the Écoles Centrales, in 1803. See Chilcoat, pages 4 and 13. 55 Condillac and the Idéologues Destutt de Tracy and Pierre Maine de Biran all used the word "sign" to refer to the sensorial manifestation of an idea, usually in an object, sound, or written symbol. The Idéologue's sign resembles the Saussurean signifier. Condillac divides signs into three categories: accidental (objects that have been circumstantially connected to our ideas), natural (cries of pleasure, pain, surprise, etc.), and institutional (articulated words whose meanings have been fixed by convention). In his Éléments d'Idéologie (1801), Tracy gives a useful elaboration of the word "sign": "les signes de nos idées" can be tactile, visual, auditory, or even olfactory. Alphabetic languages, he argues, are one degree removed from signs: "elles rendent visuel les signes orals, et rien de plus." On the other hand, "les écritures hiéroglyphes, symboliques, arithmétiques, algébrique," are "real" languages made up of real signs (419-420).

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Stendhal's depiction of spoken language in Le rouge et le noir was influenced by the

Idéologue Maine de Biran, who argued that habits of recitation endanger the human capacity to think freely.

Stendhal discovered Condillac during his stay at the École Centrale de Grenoble in the late 1790s. Several years later, he read the Idéologues (Destutt de Tracy and Pierre

Maine de Biran, among others) with great enthusiasm, filling his personal correspondence with their philosophy.56 While scholars have analyzed Stendhal's debt to

Idéologie, I will be the first, as far as I know, to read Sorel's transition from recitation to improvisation as a response and possible solution to the problems of communication evoked by this philosophy. In her dissertation "The Impossible Reflection" (1998),

Michelle Chilcoat provides an invaluable overview of Idéologie's contradictory views of language, but her analysis of Stendhal is confined to his earlier works. Jules Alciatore's book Stendhal et Maine de Biran (1954) explains how the latter shaped Stendhal's views of human behavior, perception and sensation, imagination, artistic reverie, and passion.

Although he mentions the importance of l'imprévu in Le rouge et le noir, Alciatore does not address this concept in relation to Sorel's courtroom improvisation.57

In his extensive study Stendhal et le langage (1981), Michel Crouzet considers

Stendhal's appreciation of Maine de Biran and their shared sensitivity to the shortcomings of language.58 He also pays close attention to Julien Sorel's patterns of speech. Yet while

56Stendhal began studying the Destutt de Tracy in 1804 and discovered Maine de Biran in 1805. Biran's treatise Influence de l'habitude sur la faculté de penser (1799) plays an important role in my analysis of recitation. 57 Alciatore describes how Sorel's unorthodox thoughts and unpredictable conversation win the admiration of Mathilde and, to a lesser extent, her father. Up to a certain point, the unforeseeable is delightfully entertaining. But Sorel's courtroom speech goes a step further, threatening his social superiors rather than amusing them. 58 Christopher Prendergast revisits the concepts of social discourse, recitation, and Maine de Biran's influence on Stendhal in The Order of Mimesis. Whereas Prendergast admits that Biran was probably the

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Crouzet does not ignore the protagonist's final words (to Mme de Rênal or to the jurors), he interprets his crime and subsequent transformation in terms of a renunciation or sacrifice of communication. Crouzet argues that Stendhal's heroes travel between two kinds of silence that respectively precede and follow the adventures of the spoken word:

"le silence ou la parole nulle de celui qui n'a pas encore accédé au langage" and the

"magnanimous" silence belonging to the man who masters language, but then renounces its use (182). According to Crouzet, Sorel's crime initiates him into this second kind of silence.59

I, on the other hand, read the novel's denouement in terms of a recovery rather than a repudiation of speech: the hero's improvisation during his trial unveils a link between social expulsion, death, and unguarded, spontaneous self-expression. Although it precipitates his death, Sorel's improvisation constitutes a striking exception to Stendhal's generally pessimistic representation of communication as cynical, manipulative, and false. In addition to looking at recitation and improvisation through the lens of Idéologie,

I use Foucault's meditations on order and discourse to analyze why impromptu speech is dangerous, both for society and for the speaker. Condemnation permits the momentary existence of improvised language, of speech that transcribes thought with accuracy and sincerity, that breaks free of social conventions and the mindless verbal habits they impose. In Le rouge et le noir, however, society perceives such speech as monstrous.

"local intellectual source of Stendhal's worry about language," he cautions that the impossibility of "private sensations" passing into "public categories of language" was characteristic of Romantic subjectivity in general (144). 59 Crouzet valorizes this lack of speech, explaining how Sorel moves from "un silence né du ressentiment, à un silence vrai qui le met non en deçà des autres, mais au-delà. De l'un à l'autre, le chemin passe par une libération de la parole" (196). I see this liberation as an essential attribute of the condemned Romantic hero.

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Condillac and Idéologie

Crouzet relates Stendhal's linguistic unease to early nineteenth-century debates on whether human beings command language or are controlled by it. Do human thought and civilization produce language or merely discover its rules? Do we create and choose our words, or does language program us to think in certain ways? On opposing sides of this debate were Pierre Maine de Biran and what Crouzet terms l'extrémisme condillacien

(Louis de Bonald's60 philosophy in particular). The latter argued that language follows a set of divinely established rules that remain true whether human beings are aware of them or not, so that "tout savoir pourrait se ramener à des opérations sur les signes." Signs would thus determine thought. Language would be an independent system capable of

"fonctionnant par lui-même pour produire la signification, sans que le moi soit autre chose qu'une annexe du langage . . . " (Crouzet 125, 129). Biran, on the other hand, argued that signs and their accompanying ideas are not God-given, self-sufficient systems, but rather depend on man's activity, on human will.61

In order to properly understand this debate, we must examine its point of origin in

Condillac's theories on the use, value, and evolution of language. Condillac believed that all knowledge, including language, stems from sensory experience. Primitive man's physical reactions to external stimuli (sensations) constituted his first "language," a language of bodily responses and cries that Condillac dubs the "langage d'action." For

Condillac, thought and language are simultaneous, inextricable, and practically equivalent responses to sensation. And yet, the more complex forms of thought required

60 Like the Idéologues, Bonald was inspired by Condillac. As a fervent Catholic and legitimist, however, his political leanings were quite different from those of the Idéologues, who helped to create France's first secular school system, the Écoles Centrales, in the hopes of freeing man from the constraints of tradition. 61 Biran mentions this disagreement in the second volume of his Journal, where he claims to be looking for a "psychological" as opposed to a "metaphysical" origin of language (191).

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for philosophy and reason depend on language to solidify their existence. In La logique

(1781), Condillac argues that the building blocks of language precede ideas, so that human thought is chained to the language that expresses it: "il fallait que les éléments d'un langage quelconque, préparés d'avance, précédassent nos idées; parce que, sans des signes de quelque espèce, il nous serait impossible d'analyser nos pensées, pour nous rendre compte de ce que nous pensons . . ." (Œuvres complètes 402). In the Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746), this idea is taken further. Condillac explains that words are to philosophy and science what numbers are to mathematics:

Mais pourquoi, ce qui est vrai en arithmétique, ne le serait-il pas dans les autres sciences? Pourrions-nous jamais réfléchir sur la métaphysique et sur la morale, si nous n’avions inventé des signes pour fixer nos idées, à mesure que nous avons formé de nouvelles collections? Les mots ne doivent-ils pas être aux idées de toutes les sciences ce que sont les chiffres aux idées de l’arithmétique? (164)

Since science and philosophy cannot exist without signs to "fix" our ideas, the progress of human civilization is linked to the evolution of language. Yet this evolution is fraught with stumbling blocks. Speech becomes muddled almost as soon as it replaces the

"langage d'action" with articulated sounds. Whereas actions communicate only immediate needs, superfluous desires (including the desire for speech itself) infiltrate spoken language and erode its meaning. Because of custom and convention, words became increasingly vague, fixed, and rooted in usage and habit as opposed to reflection.

The ideas evoked by language no longer correspond to lived experience. This deterioration of language, which occurs in tandem with greater social organization, damages man's capacity for rational, analytical thought. The Idéologues elaborated

Condillac's notion of a "fallen" language, as did Stendhal, who despised the pitfalls of

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salon conversation and admired the clarity of Napoleon's Civil Code. As we shall see, speech in Le rouge et le noir recalls Condillac's linguistic dystopia.

Condillac believed, however, that language could return to its original purity. He describes contemporary dialects as "méthodes fortes défectueuses aujourd'hui, mais qui ont été exactes et qui pourraient l'être encore" (Œuvres complètes 412), implying that man should (re)create a better language reminiscent of his pre-civilized state, a language akin to mathematics in its clarity. Destutt de Tracy, who coined the term "Idéologie" in

1796 to describe his philosophy, continued this pursuit.62 Like Condillac, Tracy saw the body and its physical sensations as the ultimate source of knowledge and wanted to strip away "the layers of custom and habit" that obscure man's original nature and degenerate his expression (Chilcoat 4). Tracy aimed to perfect communication, clarify thought, and encourage self-reflection, yet he soon became preoccupied with the "elusive" nature of his own goal (Chilcoat 49). Language is fundamentally flawed, he realized, because each speaker attaches different ideas to the same word. Moreover, these ideas change in each person's mind over time. Tracy came to wonder whether precise communication can ever take place, for this would require individuals to conceptualize words in exactly the same way. As Crouzet mentions, the nineteenth century was extraordinarily modern in its pessimism regarding language, in its confrontation of the insurmountable "dualité du langage et du sujet" (123).

The philosopher Maine de Biran took Tracy's skepticism even further. In Biran's philosophy, words are meant to be the instruments of thought; the two cannot and should not be identical. Even if speaking and thinking were to become equivalent through some

62 Like Condillac, Tracy used mathematical metaphors to talk about language, arguing that without signs, human beings can scarcely conceptualize abstract ideas. Without language to stabilize them, our perceptions would be "très-légères," always fleeting and uncertain (Tracy 421).

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extraordinary, unforeseen revolution in human knowledge, this would be undesirable.

Such a revolution would reduce the science of reasoning to a series of automatic, mathematical-like operations. In his 1799 treatise Influence de l'habitude sur la faculté de penser, Biran explains this unlikely yet troubling possibility: "Si le projet d'une langue universelle, calquée sur l'algèbre, ou d'une sorte de spécieuse générale (tel que Leibnitz et d'autres savants l'avaient conçu) pouvait jamais s'effectuer, c'est alors que les opérations du raisonnement pourraient devenir, comme celles du calcul, purement mécaniques."

This in turn would cause human intellect to atrophy; a language operating with algebraic precision would bring about "la résolution de toute espèce de problèmes, sans que nous eussions besoin d'y penser" (234). Language would direct thought, instead of the other way around. Human beings, Biran argues, must fight the temptation to operate mindlessly within language, lest their powers of reasoning and expression be reduced to that of automatons.

In Influence de l'habitude sur la faculté de penser, Biran affirms that habits are dangerous for the human mind. Biran regards with suspicion human habits of perception as well habits involving our use of language. Once we become accustomed to seeing objects in a certain order or position, he argues, we stop paying attention to them. We become less aware of our surroundings and see with our "imagination" (or memory) as opposed to our eyes. Biran advises man to combat this tendency by conscientiously

"redoing" and reconsidering everything he has ever done or thought because of habit

(168). The same principle applies to man's use of language. In order to think clearly, one must reconsider the origins and meanings of words and stop using them automatically, without reflection. Routine threatens the value of language; its capacity for meaning must

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be recovered and maintained by human will. If, unlike Tracy and Condillac, Biran rejected the possibility of a perfect language, he nevertheless desired a language free from affectation, but also free from algebraic exactitude.

Biran's warnings against falling prey to habit, I argue, helped to inspire the satirical critique of recitation found in Le rouge et le noir. Crouzet elucidates this connection: habit is at the root of "le par cœur, l'appris si abhorré du Beyliste. Le langage parle seul: le sujet n'est plus dans sa parole, et celle-ci réitère des assemblages de sons tout constitués" (130). Biran's objections to recitation, which I elaborate in what follows, go hand in hand with his desire to distinguish verbal communication from mathematics.

Like the answer to an equation, the ending of a recitation is a foregone conclusion.

Neither recitation nor algebra leaves room for creative intervention on the part of the person performing the operation. Recitation causes the speaker to be mentally absent from his own speech and, in a sense, absent from himself. How and whether one can avoid such a fate is the fundamental question of Stendhal's second novel.

Recitation, Repetition, and the Treachery of Language

In Le rouge et le noir, the repetition of certain words and phrases anchors the speaker within society. Sorel is not the only character to practice recitation as a social survival strategy. His employer, the unoriginal M. de Rênal, mayor of the fictitious town of Verrières, relies on a few "anecdotes relatives à la maison d'Orléans" (26) to entertain his small-minded constituency because he finds invention to be too great a chore. When

Sorel escapes to Paris and begins to work as secretary for the Marquis de La Mole, he

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sees that the regular attendees of this family's salon, fearful of offending their hosts, repeat the same platitudes night after night.

Unlike other characters who submit placidly to the repetition of appropriate truisms, Sorel cannot always curtail the impulse to speak his mind. He makes sudden transitions between hypocrisy and more authentic, rebellious speech. When attempting to perfect his role of aspiring theologian, for example, he resorts to wordiness, falsity, and the regurgitation of others' words. Yet his natural succinctness and originality always threaten to break through. Although he seeks to eliminate the imprévu in human interaction, resorting to recitation when the hazards of conversation prove too daunting or too dangerous, Sorel simultaneously incarnates the very unpredictability he so fears.63

Throughout the novel, the opposing practices of recitation (implying predictability and submission to social norms) and improvisation (a verbal incarnation of l'imprévu signifying revolt against these norms) compete within the hero. Although these two practices bleed into and replace each other when the reader least expects it, Sorel's courtroom speech marks a significant shift towards improvisation.

Stendhal's protagonists all experience communicative difficulties, often with their romantic partners. In Armance, Octave endeavors to tell his fiancée a terrible secret, but instead commits it to writing and takes his own life. In La chartreuse de Parme, Fabrice, a natural rhetorician, struggles to communicate from inside his prison walls with his jailor's beautiful daughter. In Lucien Leuwen, the eponymous protagonist fails to confront

63 Sorel constantly startles his interlocutors, not only with his speech, but also with his awkward manners, his unexpected appearances, and his poorly suppressed énergie. At one point, he goes so far as to threaten Mathilde with a decorative sword pulled down from the wall of her family's library. Despite his best efforts at calculated deception, his actions as well as his speech are full of the unforeseen. The word imprévu reoccurs throughout the novel to describe Sorel and his effect on others: see Le rouge et le noir, pages 226, 286, 303, 335, 432, and 475. Sorel is also described as being à l’improviste on pages 87 and 328.

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Mme de Chasteller, whom he erroneously believes has betrayed his trust by having an illegitimate child. But Sorel's crises of communication are more complex: he experiences acute anxiety when speaking to strangers and fears the unpredictability of spoken language. An aspiring seminarian, Sorel memorizes the entire New Testament to better control his speech and disguise his religious disbelief. When he betrays his pious persona by going off cue and praising his idol, Napoleon, he punishes himself by carrying his arm in a painful position for two months. We also see him burn his writing no less than three times, lest his personal thoughts be discovered. Rather than be surprised in conversation,

Sorel relies on his memory to recall entire volumes: the Bible to further his ambition and

Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse to further his attempts at seduction. With affected lightheartedness, he explains: "Mon métier . . . est de faire réciter des leçons et d'en réciter moi-même" (158). Although he attempts to further his amorous and theological goals through recitation, his efforts to smother his own words only partially conceal an intense desire to speak his mind.

Sorel longs for a language with predictable effects, for conversations calculated in advance. Saying the right words, he imagines, will secure him love and a social status commensurate with his intelligence. He dreads being caught off guard, for this might

(and does) lead to the loss of love and opportunity. Like Condillac, Julien desires a dispassionate, arithmetical solution to human linguistic interaction. Yet he wants this

"solution" to be unidirectional; he wants access to the thoughts of others while his own remain hidden. He finds this hoped-for result when his recitations inspire astonishment and applause.

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Recitation is an extreme incarnation of a problem that Stendhal's characters grapple with elsewhere in the novel, namely the tendency of words and other signs, such as physical gestures, to reproduce themselves in certain pre-patterned but meaningless ways. Language, ever regulated by social convention, is an imperfect tool for personal expression. It socializes man while putting the integrity of the self at risk. As Crouzet explains, "comme le social, [le langage] répète et se répète. Il est menacé de perdre son sens et d'éliminer le parleur parce que les mots par leur usage sont cimentés en ensembles préfabriqués, en bancs de langage qui déposés en chacun le commandent et l'orientent.

Les mots sont des dépôts sociaux" (22).

In Le rouge et le noir, the specter of these "ensembles préfabriqués" lurks even when language is being used creatively. Putting together a letter involves the rearrangement of preexisting units: words, stock phrases, quotations. Sorel forges a lettre anonyme by cutting words out of a newspaper and pasting them back together. Before interviewing the protagonist for admittance to his seminary, Pirard mysteriously moves around pieces of paper displaying chunks of writing: "il prenait l'un après l'autre une foule de petits carrés de papier qu'il rangeait sur sa table, après y avoir écrit quelques mots" (187). With these scenes, Stendhal reminds us of language's "itérabilité": words can be copied, taken out of context, moved around like pieces in a game, twisted to insinuate a false origin.

Stendhal demonstrates how not only words, but also gestures, uncoupled from their original context, quickly become absurd. Early in the novel, when a foreign king visits Verrières, an elaborate and solemn mass is celebrated in his honor. Just before the ceremony, the presiding bishop goes missing, and Sorel is dispatched to locate him. Sorel

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finds him in a remote corner of the abbey, "à donner des bénédictions exécutées lentement mais en nombre infini, sans se reposer un instant" (120). While Julien is

"tempted" to understand, at first he dares not admit that the bishop "s'exerce à donner des bénédictions" (122). He wonders whether some secret ritual is taking place, when in fact the bishop's benedictions signify nothing but his vain self-preoccupation. Even sacred words and gestures rapidly lose their meaning, their connection to a referent, when mindlessly repeated.

Like the bishop's empty and isolated gestures, words in Le rouge et le noir often mean very little. Etiquette, which restricts the speaker's choice of words almost before he begins to give voice to his thoughts, nudges him to say less instead of more. Social expectations are an ever-present reminder that certain words (and the ideas they invoke) are dangerous. Characters redirect attention to these expectations when the boundaries of propriety are threatened. In an exchange between Sorel and one of his pupils, concern with verbal decorum prevents an overflow of affect:

Au milieu du déjeuner, Stanislas-Xavier, encore pâle de sa grande maladie, demanda tout à coup à sa mère combien valaient son couvert d'argent et le gobelet dans lequel il buvait. . . . —Je veux les vendre pour en donner le prix à M. Julien, et qu'il ne soit pas dupe en restant avec nous. Julien l'embrassa, les larmes aux yeux. Sa mère pleurait tout à fait, pendant que Julien . . . lui expliquait qu'il ne fallait pas se servir de ce mot dupe, qui, employé dans ce sens, était une façon de parler de laquais. (161)

Occupied by his impromptu lesson, Julien does not weep outright as does Mme de Rênal, whose non-verbal behavior demonstrates greater sincerity.

Later, Sorel finds himself in a parallel situation vis-à-vis his own mentor, Pirard, to whom he offers his savings upon receiving news of the priest's resignation. This generosity exposes Sorel's previous lie that he possesses only "trente-cinq francs" (192)

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and creates another volatile situation. The tone of conversation returns to normal only after attention has been redirected to the proper use of language:

—J'ai été haï de mon père depuis le berceau; c'était un de mes grands malheurs; mais je ne me plaindrai plus du hasard, j'ai retrouvé un père en vous, monsieur. —C'est bon, c'est bon, dit l'abbé embarrassé . . . il ne faut jamais dire le hasard, mon enfant, dites toujours la Providence. (258)

The selection of appropriate words distracts both Sorel and Pirard during emotionally charged moments and reinforces their self-control. Preoccupation with tone, style, rank, and ideology cuts off "real" communication before it exposes too much. Similarly, recitation—the contrived use of many words as opposed to just one—hides the speaker's true thoughts and feelings, neutralizing more explosive communicative possibilities.

Despite their strategic advantages, such attempts to render speech innocuous carry risks, not least of which is the possibility, evoked by Biran, for patterns of speech to become automatic, divorced from reflection. Biran's treatise considers recitation—its tendency to replace thought with empty words and poorly understood ideology—within the broader context of language's shortcomings. Like Tracy, Biran argues that the same words, applied to similar sensations but in different contexts, cannot grasp essential nuances. The repetition inherent in language itself and particularly language describing

"ce que nous avons senti" threatens to drain "toute énergie réelle de la pensée" (Influence

188).

Habits of speaking, Biran argues, are dangerous because they influence not only how we think and behave, but also what we perceive as "real." Human beings come to conceptualize the world as a reflection of their words, when it should be the other way around: "l'individu croit bien plus à ce qu'il dit, entend et répète sans cesse, qu'à ce qu'il

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voit et palpe" (Influence 214-5). Eventually, we come to believe in what we say. The repetition of articulated sounds engenders "les habitudes les plus profondes, les plus opiniâtres" (188). Reciting blocks of text is particularly dangerous for independent thought:

En répétant plusieurs fois la même opération, le jeu de la mémoire s'affermit et s'accélère; le simple rappel des signes n'est plus un travail; ils se rapprochent, se présentent d'eux-mêmes en quelque sorte sous leurs faces homologues, leur intervalle se comble . . . bientôt ils vont se pénétrer, rentrer les uns dans les autres; ce ne sera plus une série ou un ensemble de termes distincts, mais un seul tout, une masse concrète, dont les éléments, étroitement agrégés, seront peut-être ensuite réfractaires à nos moyens d'analyse. (224)

In addition to compromising the speaker's capacity to perceive and analyze reality, recitation erodes his awareness of what he is saying

In Le rouge et le noir, the relationship between memory, recitation, and lack of critical thought surfaces repeatedly, particularly when Sorel recites from the Latin Bible.

His recitations are incomprehensible to his provincial audience, which is nevertheless impressed, perhaps because such performances demand neither analysis nor understanding. His listeners are mesmerized by his recitations and succumb wholeheartedly to the illusion that they are listening to a serious and pious young man.

And yet, it is not immediately clear whether Julien's recitations and other hypocrisies are consistent with the kind of habitude Biran warns against: do they threaten his capacity to form rational judgments? Sorel's recitations fool his audience, but do they fool him? Habits of piety, obedience, and recitation do not come naturally to Sorel. He internalizes these behaviors with great difficulty and maintains them inconsistently.

Masochistic self-conditioning reinforces them, but imperfectly, and his rebellious personality always threatens to reassert itself. Most of the time, he is aware that he is

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playing a role. Although Julien can recite all of the New Testament and Maistre's Du pape, we are told: "il . . . croyait à l'un aussi peu qu'à l'autre" (32). Sorel cultivates his memory to win respect, but also to mask his incredulity.

There are times, however, when Sorel's habits take on a life and strength of their own, exceeding his plans and careful control.64 The habit of reciting—and its written corollary, copying—diminish his awareness of what he is saying and writing, and hence his capacity to make clear communicative choices. He is penalized for quoting "profane" authors during his seminary exam and he quotes Maistre without rhyme or reason to

Pirard. In an effort to secure the affections of his fickle mistress, Mathilde de La Mole,

Sorel copies a collection of love letters and sends them to one of her acquaintances, hoping to awaken the young woman's jealousy. Sorel transcribes "ligne par ligne, sans songer au sens" (433) a collection of letters originally written in England and given to him by a worldly friend. He neither reads nor responds to the replies he receives from the gullible Mme de Fervaques. So meaningless is this epistolary exchange that the supposed object of his affections "n'était point étonnée du peu de rapport des réponses avec ses lettres" (443). Julien, bored by this clumsy seduction, forgets to change the geographic specifics of his letters, copying the words Londres and Richmond, although he is writing in Paris. Later, after Mathilde's affections and obedience have been secured, he continues to copy and mail his friend Korasoff's epistolary collection, pursuing his mechanical seduction of Mme de Fervaques even after achieving his original goal of regaining

Mathilde. His habits run away with him and arouse suspicion. Once he begins

64 To make things even more confusing, Sorel passes off sincere, improvised speech as recited text, particularly when he gets carried away and needs to retract his enthusiastic words.

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appropriating words that are not his own, it is difficult for him to stop or to make meaningful selections, and as a result his behavior becomes absurd, automatic.

While Sorel's recitations cause his judgment to lapse, they do not brainwash him to the extent that Biran would have predicted. Biran theorized that over the long run, hypocrisy would consume one's thought, energy, and will. After many performances, liars begin to believe their lies, hypocrites to put faith in their hypocrisies. If deliberately deceptive behavior tends to become unconscious and eventually sincere, Sorel's crime, which allows him to break free of recitation and go "off script," precludes this outcome.

The hero's demise is not merely Stendhal's way of forcing the novel to resolve itself,65 but rather a means of sparing his hero from surrendering to beliefs imposed by habit, from succumbing to "une espèce de foi purement verbale" (Biran 215). After all, Sorel destroys himself only once success is in his grasp, once he has compromised his initial resistance to political and religious corruption and begun to adhere to precepts he once deplored. Stendhal presents us with a protagonist who, despite his best efforts, is unable to condition himself, who remains rebellious despite a long practice of recitation. In the end, Sorel's exceptionality can only be preserved through an act of self-destruction.

Self-Betrayal and False Hypocrisy

Even before his crime, Sorel's originality surfaces—inconveniently—on many occasions. He senses from the beginning that his facade cannot last forever. “Un beau jour, je me trahirais" (159), he predicts. In addition to his conversational lapses, Sorel exposes his personal and political sentiments with his body and facial expressions,

65 See Martineau 400-406, Perruchot 807, and Rioux 129-132 on the debate surrounding the denouement and whether Sorel's crime fits into the novel's internal logic.

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shedding tears and frightening others with his violent physiognomy. In the chapters preceding his attempted murder of Mme de Rênal, the word imprévu occurs with increasing frequency to describe Julien's impression on others. His behavior, it seems, becomes more unpredictable as he approaches the moments of his crime and death.

During his trial, while facing the same provincial audience he previously awed with his recitations, Sorel makes his ultimate and strangely deliberate slip.

Although he claims his courtroom improvisation as his first, this is far from being the case. Throughout the novel, Sorel's enthusiasm, distress, and disorientation result in authentic speech that betrays his true feelings and foreshadows this moment in the courtroom. Stendhal introduces Sorel's reluctant hypocrisy with an anecdote of its first failure and the hero's attempt to correct himself: "au milieu de sa nouvelle piété . . . il fut trahi par une irruption soudaine du feu qui dévorait son âme." Having praised Napoleon

"avec fureur" (36) during a clerical dinner, he forgives himself only after carrying his arm in a painful position for two months, as if imposing an unnatural habit on his body will cause his mind to follow suit.

After punishing himself for his unintended outburst of Napoleonic enthusiasm,

Julien makes further unsuccessful attempts to condition himself. Before entering the

Rênal chateau and beginning his employment as the family's tutor, "il jugea qu'il serait utile à son hypocrisie d'aller faire une station à l'église" (35). He enters the empty church at a time when this gesture remains unobserved and unlikely to impress anyone besides himself. As Victor Brombert explains: "Only a fundamentally non-hypocritical person could thus decide, from the outside, to espouse the role of hypocrite, as though hypocrisy itself were a mask" (Fiction and the Themes of Freedom 71).

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According to this logic, the narrator's use of the word "hypocrisy" to describe

Julien's behavior is ironic: this word reveals, paradoxically, the protagonist's tendency to be honest with himself about the role he is playing. Unlike Mme de Fervaques, the heiress whom the hero courts in Paris and who prefers to forget the mercantile origin of her family's wealth, Sorel remains unconvinced by the part he is performing. Nor can he remain faithful to his role at every moment, for this would require extraordinary powers of concentration. If Mme de Fervaques, a true hypocrite, is "une prude lasse de son métier" (424), Sorel is equally exhausted by his career of hypocrisy.66

Sorel's original mistake, his praise of Napoleon during a clerical dinner, repeats itself throughout the novel, for he betrays himself to nearly every character. He describes

Napoleon to Mme de Rênal as "l'homme envoyé de Dieu pour les jeunes français" (109) and saves his reputation only by claiming these words were heard elsewhere and recited.

Mathilde soon refers to his idol as "votre empereur" (325). When he returns from a diplomatic mission to England, his benefactor demands to know why he has been telling foreign ambassadors that in France, "trois cent mille hommes de vingt-cinq ans . . . désirent passionnément la guerre" (299). He complains to his Russian friend, Korasoff, that his cross, earned for diplomatic service, "n'est pas donnée par Napoléon" (420), and by the time Julien is courting Mme de Fervaques, his reputation as a consummate

Bonapartist has already reached her ears.

Sorel's hypocrisy is a painful and unnatural burden, a charade that he can scarcely maintain. He constantly fails to mask his affective reactions (anger at perceived insults, tears for the unfortunate) despite enormous effort. His greatest success as a social

66 See Prendergast: "Julien adopts, but unlike Madame de Fervaques, never internalizes the role; Julien merely plays a part, whereas Madame de Fervaques is the part" (136).

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climber, the seduction of the proud, aristocratic Mathilde de la Mole, is not the product of hypocrisy, but of a fierce infatuation. In order to continue his reckless attempts at seduction, Sorel turns down far surer and safer opportunities, including Korasoff's offer to arrange his marriage with "une riche héritière de Moscou" (420). Only after the fact does Sorel realize that compromising Mathilde will enable him to obtain a long-desired military commission. He is too clumsy, too daring, and too sentimental to use hypocrisy to his advantage.67

Sorel's death sentence prevents him from joining the ranks of the aristocracy he both envies and despises. Like his less catastrophic blunders, his crime constitutes a rebellion against inauthentic language. He fires upon Mme de Rênal after she writes a letter dictated by her confessor, dispossessing herself of self-expression just as he has done. His crime is inspired by a betrayal not only of their love, but also of the transparency Mme de Rênal represented when they first met. Until she copies the calumnious letter, Louise de Rênal, described as full of “idées imprévues” (64), remained ingenuous: "aucune hypocrisie ne venait altérer la pureté de cette âme naïve . . ." (80). In becoming the mouthpiece of religious authority, she commits the same act of hypocrisy

Sorel has attempted to perfect. His crime lashes out at the copied, recited language that threatens to estrange him from himself.

The Loss and Recovery of Language

Mme de Rênal's copied letter, which claims that Julien seduces women in order to influence powerful households, does more than move her away from the imprévu and into

67 In response to those critics who see Sorel as a predatory hypocrite, Henri Martineau responds that he is rather "un impulsif fort intelligent qui a compris le danger de la franchise" (402) and whose ability to calculate evaporates during his crime.

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the recited. This letter offers a dark interpretation of the novel and the protagonist's behavior—one that many readers and critics have come to believe.68 The letter's analysis of Sorel's character is plausible, but ultimately flawed.69 As D. A. Miller explains, it presents the bare facts of Julien's adventures while failing to take into account his many contradictions. The letter is insidious because it contains elements of truth: "muddle is erected into system, and incidental effects treated as manifest intentions. The letter's reductiveness drains Julien's career of his own particular relationship to it, and so confers on it all the coherence that his depth of feeling had tended to disperse" (204).

In Cinq-Mars, Henri d'Effiat faced similar calumny. As we saw in Chapter One,

Anne d'Autriche tries to convince Marie de Gonzague that her fiancé's conduct is driven by ambition instead of love. In so doing, she offers a "reading" of the hero's character that can only be refuted by his death. Mme de Rênal's letter puts Julien in a similar situation; his crime proves (and allows him to discover) that passion, rather than calculation, is the principal element of his character. After learning that Mme de Rênal has denounced him,

Julien comes to his senses only after traveling from Paris to Verrières, attempting murder, being tackled by two gendarmes, and locked in a cell.70 Like Vigny's hero, who suffers a similar loss of reason upon receiving a letter, Sorel returns to his senses as a condemned man.

During his delirium, Sorel loses his ability to manipulate language, both spoken and written. On his way to Verrières, he tries to write to Mathilde, but "sa main ne

68 See Prendergast 120 for a summary of the text's reception by its contemporaries. Lampedusa argues that a misunderstanding of Stendhal's narrative techniques and the writer's gift for painting his characters' interiority caused readers to perceive Le rouge et le noir as more immoral than it actually is. 69 After recovering from her injury, Mme de Rênal will write and mail to each of the jurors an equally biased letter, this time in Julien's favor 70 Martineau describes Sorel's state of mind before the murder as one of hypnosis or somnambulism: "Depuis qu'il a résolu son acte il ne raisonne plus; il ne fait que poursuivre une image. . . . Le temps ni l'espace n'ont plus de valeur à ses yeux" (407).

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formait sur le papier que des traits illisibles." Upon his arrival, Julien seeks out a gunsmith, but has great difficulty explaining "qu'il voulait une paire de pistolets" (479).

Several critics have offered remarkable analyses of this loss of language and the incoherence of Sorel's crime, but they focus more on the failure of communication in the novel's denouement than on its ambivalent success.71 I believe that the dissolution of

Sorel's language on the way to Verrières allows it to be reinvented after the shots are fired. He finds in his self-destruction the opportunity to tell a narrative more truly his own. If he misguidedly attempts to "overwrite" a calumnious letter with his crime, his courtroom speech, predicated on the certainly that death awaits him, offers a far more convincing interpretation of his character than either Mme de Rênal's letter or his attempt to kill her.

Like many nineteenth-century trial scenes, Stendhal's sets up the tribunal as a space of feverish publicity, where a female public flocks to swoon over a story of love and violence. Some of those who eagerly listened to Sorel's recitations are present during his trial, including M. Valenod, who will read Sorel's death sentence, and whose vulgar manners symbolize Stendhal's opinion of the general provincial population. During the first part of the novel, Sorel's recitations enthralled the guests at M. Valenod's dinner party. The trial recalls this event while provoking a very different reaction from his audience and a very different kind of performance from Sorel.

71 According to Jean-Claude Rioux, the crime falls into a schema of "non-compréhension et non- communication" (134). Not only does the hero fail to express himself, he also fails to comprehend signs that his former mistress still loves him: the tear-stained letter and the careful handwriting suggesting it was dictated, among others. Rioux and D.A. Miller believe that no single, coherent meaning can be assigned to the crime, while Prendergast evokes the "unnameable" (143) quality of the hero's criminal insanity.

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In addition to his old acquaintance, Sorel’s newfound celebrity packs the courtroom with curious strangers. The presence of a large audience allows him to shatter discursive and social order in spectacular fashion, even while he adheres to themes of confession and repentance that recall the content of the amende honorable. Wishing to minimize scandal and discourage publicity, he orders his lawyer not to resort to grandiloquence. Dismayed at being "exposé en spectacle à tous [ses] ennemis" (510),

Sorel resolves to say nothing himself. Yet shortly thereafter, he suddenly and inexplicably begins to speak, surprising the reader as much as the jurors. "Enflammé par l'idée du devoir" (513), he makes a plea that is simultaneously a confession, an arraignment of the judicial system, an expression of revolt, and a performative suicide.

Certain a death sentence awaits him and ever anxious to avoid contempt in the eyes of others, he seizes control of the verdict and condemns himself. Because Sorel is absolutely

(though erroneously) certain that his death sentence is unavoidable, his speech to the jurors has more in common with the discours d'échafaud than with a plea for the defense.

Its chief theme is his impending death:

Messieurs, je n'ai point l'honneur d'appartenir à votre classe, vous voyez en moi un paysan qui s'est révolté contre la bassesse de sa fortune. Je ne vous demande aucune grâce . . . . Je ne me fais point illusion, la mort m'attend: elle sera juste. . . . Mon crime est atroce, et il fut prémédité. J'ai donc mérité la mort, messieurs les jurés. . . . Voilà mon crime, messieurs, et il sera puni avec d'autant plus de sévérité, que, dans le fait, je ne suis point jugé par mes pairs. Je ne vois point sur les bancs des jurés quelque paysan enrichi, mais uniquement des bourgeois indignés . . . (513-4)

With his defiant plaidoyer, Sorel finally says something meaningful, but in doing so he breaks society's most fundamental rules regarding speech. His "plea" violates the three boundaries that Michel Foucault enumerates as delineating the order of discourse:

“tabou de l’objet, rituel de la circonstance, droit privilégié ou exclusif du sujet qui parle”

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(L'ordre 11). Sorel breaks the taboo of content by speaking of class conflict, infringes upon the ritual of the criminal trial by refusing to defend himself or beg for mercy, and commands attention despite his marginal status. His plaidoyer is a moment of radical exception from the way Stendhal tends to represent language: as a force of authority,72 dissimulation, irony, or mockery, with even the narrator playing at insincerity. Sorel

"invents" a new way of speaking, but only because he believes he is about to die.

The trial, which allows the protagonist to reinvent his voice, also interrupts

Stendhal's typical narrative style. We are given only three paragraphs of a speech that lasts twenty minutes, yet the narrator's characteristic “etc.” is absent from this passage.

As Marie Parmentier explains, "le etc. signale au lecteur qu'il s'agit d'un discours typique, répétitif, dont la transposition dans le récit présente peu d'intérêt" (183). If Stendhal’s attitude towards Sorel were one of gentle mockery, as it often is, the "etc." would most likely be present at the end of this speech. Moreover, this passage of direct discourse briefly eliminates the narrator’s disparaging commentary,73 allowing the reader to recognize Sorel in a new way at the very moment the jurors see him unmasked.

During the courtroom speech we see far more direct discourse than Stendhal usually allows his characters. Rather than give word-for-word accounts of empty loquacity, Stendhal rapidly describes vacuous speech before moving on with his narrative.74 Meaningless words are implied in Le rouge et le noir, but only rarely are they

72 See Purdy's article "Stendhal et la force du langage: le mot comme agent de transformation" for ways in which Stendhal's characters use words as means of reification, social (dis)approbation, and self-deprecation: "ces mots réduisent et figent la personne dans un rôle social ou psychologique rigide qui lui enlève toute liberté existentielle" (129). 73 For an analysis of the narrator's persistent comments and interventions in the text, see Brombert's Fiction and the Themes of Freedom 75-76 and 79-80, Jane Rush's article "Le commentaire dans Le Rouge et le noir," and Georges Blin's section "Les intrusions d'auteur" in Stendhal et les problèmes du roman. 74 Crouzet explains: "un échantillon suffit pour chaque éloquence. . . . On ne dit pas ce qui répète ou se répète" (32).

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allowed to take up space. Earlier in the novel, rumors of Sorel's affair with Mme de Rênal began to circulate in Verrières. Hearing of his disgrace, the sub-prefect comes to him with an offer of employment. Rather than accepting or refusing, Sorel's "réponse fût parfaite . . . elle laissait tout entendre, et cependant ne disait rien nettement" (154). Both men, rather than saying anything definitive, try to outmatch each other in a lengthy but obscure verbal duel. This absurd encounter, in which "etc." appears four times, is never transcribed. Rather, the narrator informs us that the sub-prefect takes two hours to come to his point, and that Sorel uses a great many words to say very little. During Sorel's courtroom speech, on the contrary, "il dit tout ce qu'il avait sur le cœur" (514). Here,

Sorel's words are transcribed instead of merely described. His improvisation creates a stark contrast with his previous recitations and his whimsical attempts to say nothing conclusive.75

Sorel's improvisation creates another kind of rupture in the text by infringing upon a (written) declaration of silence: in a letter to Mathilde, Sorel compares himself to

Iago and vows to speak no more.76 A final vow of silence is typical of the Stendhalian protagonist: in La chartreuse de Parme, Fabrice imposes speechlessness on himself through monastic exile, and in Armance, Octave's failure to tell a secret leads him to the

75 Beyle himself was given to similar, if less dangerous, feats of verbal enthusiasm: "ses aveux sont nombreux de cette parole excessive, et indiscrète, où il a proféré des énormités, gaffé exemplairement, ou dit tout à trac ce qu'il ne fallait pas dire" (Crouzet 139). Moreover, Sorel's transformation echoes a choice Stendhal eventually made as a writer. When Stendhal began to write, he deliberated whether it was best to imitate other authors or to improvise (see Crouzet's chapter "Parole du moi, parole des autres"). He eventually chose the latter method; when writing Lamiel, he scribbled in the margins that he hated the tedious task of outlining because of “la nécessité de faire agir la mémoire” affirming that “mon talent, s’il y a talent, est celui d’improvisateur” (Neefs 129, 127). 76 Crouzet describes extreme criminality in terms of silence: "l'homme radicalement autre est une volonté muette et absolue" (199).

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definitive silence of suicide.77 Neither, however, breaks his resolution to remain silent as does Sorel, whose public condemnation inspires him to improvise on his way towards death, setting him apart from Stendhal's other protagonists. Rousseau, one of Sorel’s models, concluded that “puisque enfin mon nom doit vivre, je dois tâcher de transmettre avec lui le souvenir de l‘homme infortuné qui le porta, tel qu’il fut réellement, et non tel que d’injustes ennemis travaillent sans relâche à le peindre” (Les confessions 197). If this comparison holds true, then we cannot interpret the protagonist's final days as given over to silence. His plea is rather an attempt, much like Rousseau’s Confessions, to perpetuate a narrative beyond his death, to monopolize the story that will be told about him.

Improvisation, Living Language, and Death

Inspired by Idéologie, Stendhal wrote down his thoughts as they occurred to him in his Journal intime. This diary was an experimental, written improvisation that he vowed never to revise, lest his writing lose the immediacy of thought.78 Julien unconsciously initiates a similar experiment. Perceiving himself to be excluded from society, irrevocably destined for condemnation, he suddenly stops censoring himself.

In Stendhal's linguistic universe, where even well intended and carefully planned communication tends to miss its mark, improvisation constitutes an enormous risk— hence the temptation to choose silence or hide behind recitation. For Sorel, paralyzed before his crime by the uncertainties of speech, condemnation provides a strange

77 Octave, "condemned" by his friend Dolier to reveal a shameful secret, communicates it to Armance on his deathbed, but this revelation remains hidden from the reader and confined to writing. Octave's final words are never verbalized: he dies peacefully, far from public judgment. 78 Chilcoat connects Stendhal's personal writing to his fascination with Idéologie: "Stendhal decided he would never erase what he had first written in his journal . . . because of what he might lose from the immediate expression of sensation" (136).

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opportunity. Death grants the speaker who has nothing to lose a certain immunity from discursive failure. Although Sorel's acquittal remains plausible, he refuses to believe that he has any chance of escaping with his life, believing that among the jurors "il n'en est pas un qui ne désire ma condamnation . . ." (510). Before the trial, his lawyer insinuates that Sorel could save himself by pleading guilty to a crime of passion. The defendant need only repeat public rumor and admit that "la jalousie . . . lui avait mis le pistolet à la main." But Julien refuses to repeat this "abominable mensonge" (505), indicating that his days of recitation are over. Even after multiple refusals to save himself, Julien's chances of acquittal are still significant: Mathilde has been working frantically to bribe the influential Abbot Frilair to sway the jury in her lover's favor. The day before the trial,

Frilair swears that the jury's verdict is in his hands. All of these details lead us to believe that Julien's condemnation, far from being a foregone conclusion, results directly from what he says in court. As Frilair later explains, Julien's speech informs the jurors as to "ce qu'il fallait faire dans leur intérêt politique; ces nigauds n'y songeaient pas et étaient prêts

à pleurer." Sorel's death, Frilair claims, is nothing short of "suicide" (527). The protagonist effectively cuts himself off from the social contract, exiling himself from socially accepted discursive territory.

If death's proximity cannot close the gap between language and the self, between words and thought, it does narrow this gap it considerably. During his trial, Sorel explains the complexities of his character, informing the jurors that he is not their subordinate, as he was pretending, but rather their enemy. Sorel mistakenly assumes that the jurors' conception of his life story is similar to his own, and this misunderstanding

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inspires him to communicate far too clearly for his own good. His plaidoyer renders impossible any interpretation of his motives that could inspire a verdict to acquit:

Quand je serais moins coupable, je vois des hommes qui, sans s’arrêter à ce que ma jeunesse peut mériter de pitié, voudront punir en moi et décourager à jamais cette classe de jeunes gens qui, nés dans un ordre inférieur, et en quelque sorte opprimés par la pauvreté, ont le bonheur de se procurer une bonne éducation, et l’audace de se mêler à ce que l’orgueil des gens riches appelle la société. (514)

Sorel is certainly giving the jury too much credit: in the previous 500 pages,

Valenod has given no hint of comprehending the extent of Sorel's stifled rebellion. Like the rest of Verrières, he was deceived by the protagonist's recitations. Sorel implicates his audience, against their wishes, in a sincere communicative exchange; they are forced to understand his nature, which (according to Frilair) they were more than ready to ignore.

The audience reacts violently to Sorel's speech: the women burst into tears, the assistant public prosecutor (avocat général) jumps up and down with excitement, and the jury sentences him to death. Sorel's speech provides a gloss for his actions and his character, without which he would have been misunderstood, but also spared. Sorel speaks imprudently because he believes (or desires) that a death sentence is inevitable: reckless speech causes death because the anticipation of death liberates speech.

As he addresses the jurors, Sorel verbalizes his thoughts as they occur to him. He escapes Biran's dreaded straightjacket of habit, moving from the par cœur to the sur le cœur. This movement, in keeping with the Idéologues' project, prompts him to call into question what certain words mean: he nuances definitions with his personal experience instead of taking their meanings for granted. Sorel's speech to the jury shows certain lieux communs to be less common, less self-evident than one might expect. He throws doubt on the meaning of the word "société," referring to "ce que l'orgueil des gens riches appelle la

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société." If the meaning of "society" is uncertain, then, by implication, so are the meanings of any (and all) words fixed by social convention. More explicitly, Sorel's speech provokes the reconsideration of the word "mère," used to describe his relationship with Mme de Rênal, "qui était pour [lui] comme une mère," and the word "messieurs," applied with dubious respect to the jurors. Likewise, Sorel claims to belong to a group of young men who are "en quelque sorte opprimés par la pauvreté" (514, emphasis added): not all forms of oppression are equal, nor are they readily apparent. In addition to his overt rebellion against class boundaries, Sorel illustrates that words cannot be blindly reiterated with impunity.

If improvisation involves a process of reflection (the reconsideration of one's social identity, the reevaluation of what words mean), impromptu speech is also by definition impossible to predict or to control, even for the speaker himself; once the constraints of social expectations and bienséance have been shrugged off, the inner self rushes forth, only half-aware of what is happening. Julien is surprised by his own decision to speak and can only theorize retrospectively as to why he made it and what it means. In the end, he concludes that he was moved by pride: "Ils croyaient que je demandais grâce: voilà ce qu'il ne faut pas souffrir" (518). Sorel's horror of mépris, of being held in contempt and mistaken for a coward, prompts him to set the record straight.

Like the many condemned characters in Cinq-Mars, Sorel is most alive during the days of his imprisonment and condemnation. His vitality fuels his improvisation, and vice versa. Michel Crouzet perceptively describes repeated or recited language as metaphorically "dead" or "frozen": "[les] mots gelés . . . sont des mots en eux-mêmes, constitués et conservés en dehors de leur temps et de leur émission." Such language acts

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as a parasite that lodges in the speaker's mind and replicates itself. Romanticism links this kind of language, "la parole morte" (Crouzet 21), to social obedience—and, I argue, to survival. In repressive cultures, speech threatens the speaker's social existence (and by extension, his physical wellbeing and possibly his life) when it is not parasitic, not a social mechanism, but rather unexpected, imprévu, alive and responsive to the world rather than following a script. Living language is linked (symbolically) to death, and dead language to physical survival. While many of Stendhal's characters exist somewhere in the middle of these two extremes (with the unenergetic and unimaginative clinging to the latter), Sorel moves dramatically from one extreme to the other.

Overturning the Discursive Hierarchy

In addition to reigniting a poorly suppressed class conflict, Sorel's plaidoyer threatens traditions that value a ritualized relation to language. Western thought holds the fixed text to be a sacred source of truth. In L'ordre du discours, Foucault maintains that we preserve “des ensembles ritualisés de discours qu’on récite" because we suspect them of hiding "quelque chose comme un secret ou une richesse." These texts "sont dits, restent dits, et sont encore à dire" (24). Often of a religious or legal nature, they can also be literary. Such textes premiers are primary sources in the strictest sense of the word.

Occupying the second rung of Foucault's discursive hierarchy are commentaries or secondary texts, a category which includes "l'exégèse juridique . . . [le] commentaire religieux," (26) and literary exegesis. Foucault's definition of commentary encapsulates

Sorel's speech in two ways. Firstly, commentaries, like Sorel's paradoxical plea, are improvisations in the sense that they play upon the themes of textes premiers and allow

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for the infinite production of new discourse. Secondly, Sorel's speech can be read as an interpretation of Le rouge et le noir, as a commentary on the novel of which it is a part.

Sorel's improvisation, while contained within Stendhal's text, plays upon the meaning of this text, offering a unique interpretation of the narrative.

Although Sorel's improvisation resonates with Foucault's conception of commentary, it also challenges discursive "order" as Foucault describes it. According to

Foucault, commentaries are subordinate to textes premiers, their role being to recapture and interpret these timeless "ensembles." Commentaries improvise on textes premiers much as musical improvisations produce variations on a single melody. Traditionally, commentaries are themselves another form of repetition:

[Le commentaire] doit, selon un paradoxe qu’il déplace toujours mais auquel il n’échappe jamais, dire pour la première fois ce qui cependant avait été déjà dit et répéter inlassablement ce qui pourtant n’avait jamais été dit. Le moutonnement indéfini des commentaires est travaillé de l’intérieur par le rêve d’une répétition masquée: à son horizon, il n’y a peut-être rien d’autre que ce qui était à son point de départ, la simple récitation. (27)

The order of discourse depends on a relation between recitation and the improvisations of commentary that is both hierarchical and paradoxically equivalent. On one hand, we have

“le surplomb du texte premier, sa permanence, son statut de discours toujours réactualisable” (L'ordre 27); on the other hand, commentary, relegated to a secondary role, attempts to rearticulate what these textes premiers meant to say all along.

Commentaries must say "enfin ce qui était articulé silencieusement là-bas” (27) in the text fixed by ritual, the recited text.

In shifting from recitation to improvisation, Sorel is indeed repeating something we have already heard, although he is no longer parroting the New Testament or La

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Nouvelle Héloïse. Sorel’s plea, in keeping with Foucault’s paradox, both repeats79 and reinterprets key points of the novel. Sorel provides a commentary for the preceding text, supplanting the narrator (and Mme de Rênal's letter) as mediator between the novel and the reader, forcing us as well as the jurors to adopt his interpretation of the events leading up to his arrest and execution. He explains that revolt, rather than ambition, was the driving principle behind his behavior (and the novel's meaning).

Yet Sorel’s improvisation breaks with Foucault's "order" by questioning the value of the fixed, recited text. It posits itself (improvised commentary) as truth and Sorel's previous behavior, built on recitation, as a strategy for masking this truth. Moreover,

Sorel's commentary supersedes the novel itself, or at least readings of the novel that could have been maintained up until this point. If Sorel had followed his resolution to remain silent, Le rouge et le noir would have a very different meaning, or, more likely, would not be very meaningful at all. In "rewriting" the novel from his own point of view, Sorel compromises narrative authority, much as he ambushes legal and religious authority. His condemnation makes him a privileged interpreter. By overturning previous explanations of his behavior as construed by the narrator and other characters, he forces the reader to reevaluate the novel's meaning(s).

Performative Monstrosity

Sorel's final speech also reveals his monstrous nature to the men who judge him.

His words show him to be a hybrid creature who is neither peasant nor priest, neither bourgeois nor aristocrat. Sorel is a monster who combines elements of all these social

79 For example, the expression "paysan révolté" (512) in Sorel's speech recalls Mathilde's "plébéien révolté" (470) in her letter to her father.

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fields while belonging to none, who has no place in Restoration society and must therefore be eliminated.

"Monstre" was a significant word for Stendhal as well as his protagonist. Crouzet tells us: "Brulard ne nous dit-il pas que les mots 'atroce' et 'monstre' furent ceux qui le qualifièrent d'emblée selon le jugement familial et lui donnèrent un 'être' moral et social"

(327). These words erupt at key moments in Le rouge et le noir. Chelan exclaims, after his protégé's imprisonment: "mon enfant . . . monstre! devais-je dire" (488). Mme

Derville informs him that his seduction of Mme de Rênal, her childhood friend, is

"atroce" (214). Sorel's final performative utterances during his courtroom speech cement his monstrous image, which has more to do with social alienation than immorality.

While Sorel’s improvisation demonstrates his state of un-belonging, the “duty” that drives him to speak recalls his fantasies of Napoleonic honor. Sorel has often lamented how the man of words has replaced the man of action: "à une autre époque, se disait-il, c'est par des actions parlantes, en face de l'ennemi, que j'aurais gagné mon pain"

(195). During his time as a social climber, Sorel's aversion to conversation is too strong to be successfully disguised, and he struggles against his natural tendency to speak little.

For his contemporaries, however, speech stands in the place of action. Christopher

Prendergast describes the "discourse" of the La Mole salon as "composed largely of

'phatic' utterances, and devoted to the preservation of a social order by excluding all those other utterances which might threaten its closed system of meanings" (134). The personalities who frequent this salon relegate their behavior to verbal commonplaces.

Each is summed up by his manner of speaking or writing. M. Descoulis, much like

Korasoff, has a collection of stock letters for "la brouillerie" and "les transports d'amitié"

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(276). The Baron Bâton requires "au moins quatre phrases de six lignes chacune pour être brillant" (278). These characters and several more are summed up by the style of their speech. Their (non-verbal) actions and physical appearance are of minimal importance.

The salon attendees, who give empty, scripted performances, are only capable of bravery when shielded from the unforeseen, for example during the ceremony of the duel, which follows a predetermined script. As Mathilde de La Mole explains: "Tout en est su d'avance, même ce que l'on doit dire en tombant . . . il faut un pardon généreux pour l'adversaire et un mot pour une belle souvent imaginaire, ou bien qui va au bal le jour de votre mort" (350). Mathilde's theory plays out when her fiancé, the unimaginative but noble Croisenois, dies in a duel fought to defend her reputation. Such a death is less terrifying than the prospect of saying something unexpected. Even violence and death are reduced to formulae by "la civilisation et le préfet de police [qui] ont chassé le hasard, plus d'imprévu" (350). But Julien dies by going off script, not by staying on it. His improvisation consummates his desire for the imprévu, the reason Mathilde was attracted to him in the first place. Julien's fatal performance transforms his desire for actions parlantes into paroles agissantes or speech acts. His speech becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of imminent death. Sorel's execution confirms the performative power of his self-condemnation, the extent to which he has stepped outside social and discursive boundaries and into the realm of monstrosity.

In L'ordre du discours, Foucault posits that one becomes a monster by speaking the truth while failing to exist within a “horizon” of truth that one’s contemporaries are able and willing to accept. Outside this horizon one falls not into error (it is possible to commit errors with socially accepted words and ideas) but into "la chimère, la rêverie,

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dans la pure et simple monstruosité linguistique" (35). For Foucault, the case of Gregor

Mendel exemplifies such monstrous truth. Mendel's theory of hereditary traits proved itself accurate over time, but had no place in the scientific discourse of the nineteenth century. Such traits demanded "de nouveaux instruments conceptuels." They were akin to semantic units, i.e. units of meaning, that did not fit the scientific "language" of the time:

"Mendel disait vrai mais il n'était pas 'dans le vrai' du discours biologique de son époque .

. . Mendel était un monstre vrai, ce qui faisait que la science ne pouvait pas en parler"

(L'ordre du discours 36-37). Sorel's improvisation shows him to be a discursive and a social monster, but one who ultimately speaks the truth about himself. When the jurors glimpse this truth, they seek to annul it by killing the speaker: condemnation constitutes their irreversible refusal to enter into dialogue with him. Sorel's unruly speech temporarily invades the horizon of judicial authority, but is rapidly expelled. And yet the violent rejection this speech provokes testifies to its significance.

A Respite from Irony

In additional to breaking free of recitation, social expectations, discursive boundaries, and etiquette, Sorel's final speech eschews irony, if only for a few moments

(as does the moment of his death). If Sorel's situation in the courtroom is ironic in the sense that he might have lived had he kept silent (both his ignorance and his desire for self-destruction blind him to the fact that he still has a means of escape), his frame of mind is bereft of irony in this moment. In other words, the irony of this passage is situational, not psychological, external rather than internal: irony is absent from the protagonist's words. For this reason, Sorel's courtroom speech is exceptional in yet another way. Beyle and his protagonists were fond of the ironic register. As Victor

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Brombert points out, irony allows the sensitive writer (or speaker) to protect himself from his interlocutor:

Such irony betrays the fear of irony. Stendhal explains that he was always reluctant to speak of what deeply mattered to him: "the least objection would have pierced my heart." Irony for Stendhal is related to the unsayable: the desire to write the score of his inner music ("les sons de mon âme") is exacerbated by the conviction that it remains untranscribable. (The Hidden Reader 189)80

The Beylist's irony stems from frustration with language's inadequacy; he would like to speak sincerely, yet the fear of being misunderstood or held in contempt is too great. Brombert argues that Stendhal's irony "protects and defends" (184). I would add that Sorel's strategy of recitation is similarly defensive. The ironic speaker stands aloof from what he is saying, as does the reciter. He keeps his identity apart from the literal message of his words, for he cannot be ridiculed or persecuted if he does not reveal himself. Sorel's final speech exists in perfect opposition to this kind of irony, revealing not only what is on his mind, but also what is in his heart. The threat of condemnation reconfigures the boundary between the sayable and the unsayable.

Although verbal, if not situational irony dissolves during Sorel's courtroom speech, it lurks before and after this moment. Like speech and silence, irony ebbs and flows throughout the novel's final chapters. Shortly after his improvisation, Sorel abandons his newfound sincerity. He describes his condemnation to Mathilde while playing upon her emotions “avec tout le sang-froid d’un pianiste habile . . . ” (518).

80 Victor Brombert also reflects on musical metaphors in Stendhal et la voie oblique: "L'idéologie avait beau lui apprendre [à Stendhal] à jouer sur les émotions du lecteur comme sur le clavier d'un instrument, elle ne pouvait pas lui enseigner à ne pas être la victime de son propre jeu" (61). But in addition to manipulative speech and writing, Stendhal uses musical metaphors to evoke a sincere outpouring of the speaker's feelings. Referencing his love for Mozart, Stendhal admits: "le hasard a fait que j'ai cherché à noter les sons de mon âme par des pages imprimées" (Œuvres intimes 890). If Stendhal would have liked to "play upon" his readers in the way that Julien exploits Mathilde's emotions, he eventually renounced this plan in order to write for the "happy few" who understood the "secret" or "sacred" language of the sensitive elite, moving from one extreme of the music metaphor to the other.

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Sorel's moment of authenticity rapidly gives way to a mise en scène of his own bravado.

He reproduces Mathilde's pretensions, pride, and histrionics, throwing her own rhetoric back at her: "L'avantage d'une naissance illustre me manque . . . mais la grande âme de

Mathilde a élevé son amant jusqu'à elle" (518). In a wave of eloquence bordering on the ridiculous, he compares himself to a massive and mysterious geographical formation: the

Nile's source.

Sorel's self-aggrandizement vis-à-vis Mathilde exemplifies what Victor Brombert terms "amplification," a type of irony that Beyle himself indulged in. In Vie de Henri

Brulard (1835-1836), the narrator compares his life to great works of art; Julien takes this type of exaggeration a step further. Brombert elaborates two additional kinds of irony that play a crucial role during Sorel's imprisonment and the novel's denouement, but fail to influence the hero's courtroom speech and execution: 1) understatement, which serves "to trivialize the self," and 2) the "fictional irony" that Brombert (referencing Lukács) describes as "the narrative expression of a degraded epic" that is "impelled toward a future, while attempting to retrieve a lost past" (The Hidden Reader 185-186).81 Sorel participates in a "degraded epic" through his doomed attempts to reenact Napoleonic exploits.

If "amplification" permeates Sorel's conversations and correspondence with

Mathilde, he taps into understatement when, in his cell, he enters into dialogue with himself. Reflecting upon what might have been ("colonel des hussards, si nous avions la guerre . . ."), he cuts himself off and trivializes his former ambitions: "pas précisément monsieur, guillotiné dans trois jours" (517). This is indeed an understatement, for Sorel

81 Brombert is analyzing irony in Vie de Henri Brulard (1835-1836), but his observations are relevant to the study of Stendhal's other works.

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will sign his appeal and survive well beyond three days. Nor is the phrase "guillotiné dans trois jours" capable of summing up his life or even his time in prison.

Despite the ubiquity of irony in the pages surrounding Sorel's courtroom speech and execution, these two scenes are surprisingly bereft of cynicism and ironic commentary from either Sorel or from the narrator. Sorel's speech to the jurors has little in common with the self-trivializations and self-aggrandizements that erupt in his internal monologues and in his conversations with Mathilde. Neither, for that matter, does the moment of his death. In dying without "affectation," Sorel recalls the tone of his last public speech. In both instances, his behavior is commensurate with his character. He does not try to be more or less than what he is; he abandons role-playing and returns to himself, dying "simplement, convenablement" (539).

Until its final pages, Le rouge et le noir is built upon the irony that Sorel's

Napoleonic aspirations are hopelessly incongruous with the constraints of his existence: the future of France and Sorel's personal future pale in comparison to his vision of the past. The protagonist's death dissipates this irony—the idea that the past and future are out of joint—by replacing his military nostalgia with the longing for a personal, emotional, and sensual past. Sorel reenters this past just before dying: "les plus doux moments qu'il avait trouvés jadis dans les bois de Vergy se peignaient en foule à sa pensée et avec une extrême énergie" (539). Before his crime, Sorel desired a return to the days of the Empire. But his death reveals a yearning not for Napoleon, but for Vergy, where he fell in love with Mme de Rênal. Sorel's death eliminates irony by unifying the past and present at the very moment it renders the future void. Death bridges the gap

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between past and present, but also between thought and speech, between fantasy and reality.

Conclusion

In Influence de l'habitude, Biran proposes a thought experiment, imagining an isolated individual inspired to begin a process of self-examination. By tracing his thoughts back to their origins, this individual escapes the blinding influence of habit. Yet

Biran admits the impossibility of such a scenario: man cannot be truly isolated because he is by nature a social creature.82 Crime and condemnation, however, give Stendhal the perfect framework to explore such a hypothesis. In prison, excluded from society by his crime, Julien has the luxury of time. He reflects on each of his thoughts as they appear, discovering unfamiliar facets of his character. Following this period of reflection and isolation, the protagonist's speech is realigned with the movement of his thoughts, allowing him to improvise. Condemnation resolves Idéologie's most pressing problems, but only provisionally, since in order to go on as it did before, society must kill the man who speaks in such a way. Idéologie's ideal is society's monster.

Although Le rouge et le noir was inspired by the life and death of Antoine

Berthet, the novel's plot departs in significant ways from this famous case. Sorel's crime is not explicable as a simple act of passion or revenge. Rather, his attempted murder and its consequences are deeply bound to the novel's internal logic, to what Stendhal has to say about language. Stendhal romanticizes the discursive no-man's land bordering death, showing it to be a rare locus of sincerity and self-discovery. Crime propels his protagonist outside socially accepted forms of speech and prevents him from succumbing

82 See Chilcoat, page 110, for an analysis of this passage.

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to verbal automatism. Rather than enfolding him in silence, Sorel's trial and death resonate with a brief triumph of personal expression, allowing him to overcome the divide between language and the self, between the self and others. Sorel is condemned to death because he finally speaks and is understood.

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CHAPTER THREE

Criminal Memoirs and the Displacement of Speech into Writing

In November 1835, Pierre Rivière, the son of Norman peasants, and Pierre-

François Lacenaire, a self-styled intellectual and poet, were tried for murder. The first killed his mother, brother, and sister in the hamlet of La Faucterie; the second murdered a former fellow inmate and that man's elderly mother in the city of Paris. Within months of each other, these men composed memoirs explaining their elaborately premeditated crimes.83 Whereas Lacenaire was guillotined at the Barrière Saint-Jacques on January

9th, 1836 (before he could complete his manuscript), Rivière's sentence was mitigated by

Louis-Philippe to life in prison, where he eventually committed suicide. Despite their very different backgrounds, writing styles, and levels of notoriety, these men became linked in the minds of their contemporaries, in the nineteenth-century imaginary of violent crime. The Journal de Rouen describes their deeds as evidence of widespread social disintegration: "quel est donc l'état moral de cette société qui donne naissance à des natures aussi dépravées que celles de Rivière et de Lacenaire?" (qtd. in Foucault et al.

187). This chapter examines the ways in which these murderer-authors displace the discours d'échafaud from speech into writing. Neither Rivière nor Lacenaire had the opportunity to publicly speak their last words; I believe we can read their memoirs as standing in place of this final act. Like the last words portrayed in Romantic novels, these

83 Rivière wrote between July 10th and July 21st, 1835; Lacenaire between November 15th, 1835 and January 8th, 1836.

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memoirs simultaneously confess to guilt, glorify the speaker as rebel, and criticize contemporary social trends.

If Rivière and Lacenaire fell short of delivering speeches in their final moments, their memoirs nevertheless postulate an interdependence between acts of violence, acts of revolt, and acts of communication. Foucault coined the term "meurtre-récit" (268) to imply that Riviere's crime and his memoir were consubstantial, conceived as a single project and then committed in reverse order: the memoir was originally intended to precede the murder. Like crime itself, the memoirs of Rivière and Lacenaire were meant to achieve celebrity, to grant their authors a certain immortality in public opinion. Both manuscripts convey a sense of urgency, for their authors suggest that without written clarification, their crimes and deaths would fall short of delivering intended, posthumous messages.

These texts were produced in precarious circumstances. Lacenaire wrote without knowing the date set for his execution, whether he would be able to finish his manuscript, or whether it would escape censorship and remain intact (it did not). Rivière also wrote hastily, composing his memoir, which contains a multitude of grammatical and spelling errors, in only twelve days. Still unpardoned, he wrote with his impending death sentence in mind. Rivière and Lacenaire portray bloodshed and crime as forms of communication, and execution by guillotine as the necessary conclusion to such communicative acts.

Their texts anticipate and welcome punishment. Both authors depict their imminent deaths as stimulating and lending coherence to their writing.

Without ignoring the historical and sociological context in which these memoirs were written, I read them as lying somewhere between autobiography and fiction. For my

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purposes, it matters not so much whether Rivière and Lacenaire speak the truth. I am more interested in how and why they adopt Romantic paradigms to express their relationship to the spoken word. Both authors were avid readers and drew upon literature to create their heroic criminal personas. Rivière reflects at length upon his desire for life to imitate literature and admits that such yearnings clouded his judgment. Lacenaire manipulated Romantic motifs—an isolated childhood, platonic love, contempt for Old

Regime power structures, the glorification of hypersensitivity and social revolt—to play upon his readers' emotions and earn their sympathy. Like the novels I examine, these memoirs suggest that capital crime and punishment incite the verbalization of suppressed thoughts, feelings, and anxieties. Rivière and Lacenaire describe a conquest or reappropriation of speech related to crime and condemnation. Moreover, both writers are careful to show how the act of writing itself magnifies and expands upon such a conquest.

In addition to incorporating themes of Romantic literature, these memoirs imitate (and in

Lacenaire's case, parody) another genre that reproduced scaffold speech: the popular, moralizing canard complaintes, which were printed on flyers and sung aloud in both urban and rural settings. These traditional song-narratives were meant to entertain while serving as warnings against crime and vice. Rivière and Lacenaire bend themes of the complainte to their own ends, much as we saw Jeanne de Belfiel do in Cinq-Mars.

This chapter also engages a larger, contested issue of whether revolutionary energy can be meaningfully expressed through narratives of violent crime. Unlike the

Romantic novels in my corpus, these memoirs recount (and sometimes glorify) actual acts of killing. Rivière and Lacenaire portray themselves as rebels who translate their sense of being unable to speak, their indignation that no one is listening, into very real

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brutality. They set out to attack a social order into which they fail to integrate. Their frustration begins within families and eventually targets society as a whole, which they perceive as corrupt and deaf to suffering. If these murderers miss their mark, victimizing those who are no more privileged than themselves, their violence nonetheless makes possible yet another reappraisal of the discours d'échafaud.

I begin by reading Rivière's memoir alongside the many stories that were told about him. I endeavor to navigate a middle ground between two veins of criticism, the first articulated by Foucault and his colleagues, the second by scholars (Daniel Fabre,

Philippe Lejeune) who view Foucault's valorization of Rivière with a critical eye.84 The

Foucault team, especially Jean-Pierre Peter and Jeanne Favret, see the memoir and murder as an act of class revolt. In their eyes, killing and dying allow Rivière to be heard by the authorities, to "dire le vrai" (244). Daniel Fabre, on the other hand, contends that

Rivière remains a consummate verbal failure85 and that far from being "un révolté moderne" as Foucault would have it, Rivière is rather a "héraut de la conformité" (109) who wishes to preserve the patriarchal order, the father's power of life and death over members of his family. While I agree that Rivière deals a conservative blow to his mother's rebellion against the constraints of marriage, I cannot concur with Fabre's assertion that Rivière remains unchanged by his crime. I hope to find a compromise

84 According to Lejeune, Foucault's team, in its attempt to eschew dominant ideology, holds itself to the impossible goal of refusing to interpret or analyze Rivière's memoir: "on sait bien qu'il n'y a que les autres qui interprètent... Soi-même, on va s'abstenir d'interpréter. ..." Lejeune believes this strategy is misguided: "Pour se libérer d'un discours explicatif qu'ils jugent faux, ces spécialistes de sciences humaines vont se réfugier dans un discours lyrique et subjectif assez inhabituel dans ces disciplines. Pourquoi? Parce que, bien sûr, ils ne peuvent ni ne veulent aller jusqu'au bout du renversement de pouvoir qu'ils esquissent, c'est- à-dire l'apologie du crime" (Lire Pierre Rivière 85). 85 Fabre asserts that Rivière remains incapable of speaking to other human beings: "Les seuls êtres avec qui il converse sont le diable et les fées. . . . Il n'a jamais transmuté en langage ses apprentissages naturels. . . . ce sont toujours les autres qui jouent des mots, contre son père et sa famille. Lui demeure incapable de répliquer sur le même mode . . . " (106).

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between Foucault and Fabre by reading Rivière's memoir as a struggle for speech that knows a measure of success despite the brutality and uselessness of his crime.

More recently, some scholars have read Rivière's memoir through the lens of psychiatry, attempting to explain his writing and behavior as products of autism or psychosis. In her article "A wider sense of normal?" Artemi Sakellariadis links Rivière's communicative difficulties (his tendency to respond briefly to questions, his failure to understand social cues) to autism. In Serial Killers, Francesca Biagi-Chai theorizes that

Rivière suffered from psychosis that was "triggered" by the death of his uncle. This disorder resulted in Rivière's "exteriority to himself" (164)—his tendency to see himself as another person—his failure to empathize with others, and his unhealthy identification with his father. François Marty identifies psychotic qualities in Rivière's writing: the elimination, for instance, of certain words, such as "je" and "père," and the fact that

Rivière uses collective mythology (the Bible) to systematize and justify his delusions

(Filiation, parricide, et psychose à l'adolescence 31). I do not attempt to diagnose

Rivière, partly because my knowledge of psychiatry is limited, and partly because categories such as autism and psychosis had not yet been conceptualized at the time

Rivière was writing.86 Nevertheless, I believe it worth keeping in mind that Rivière's communicative difficulties, of which he was acutely aware and of which he writes at length, may have stemmed from neurological as well as social factors. Such factors may have provoked Rivière's decision to resort to writing as opposed to speech. I am primarily concerned, however, with how Rivière portrays his own relationship to language and the connections that he makes between speech, writing, crime, and condemnation.

86 The term "psychosis" was coined in 1847, "autism" around 1912 (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). The Larousse, dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français dates "autisme" from 1927 and "psychose" from 1859.

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The second part of this chapter considers Lacenaire's memoir, paying similar attention to his narrative battles with justice, the medical profession, and journalic accounts. Nineteenth-century newspapers retold and debated different reports of

Lacenaire's execution. Some considered his behavior courageous, while others accused him of cowardice. To this day, his final moments are interpreted as either confirming or debunking the defiant content of his memoir. Historians and biographers (Anne-

Emmanuelle Demartini, François Foucart, and Philippe Lejeune) have continued to analyze (and participate in) this disagreement.87 Since I am more interested in the narratives generated by condemnation than the elusive facts of any particular nineteenth- century death, I approach this problem from the other side: instead of using Lacenaire's death to interpret his memoir, I focus on how his memoir anticipates and interprets his mortality.

Most importantly, this chapter contributes to Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini's analysis of criminal subjectivity. Demartini argues that "tandis que le criminel existe dans le discours en tant qu'objet, Lacenaire s'institue sujet du discours qui le concerne" (339). I believe the same can be said for Rivière. While reading these memoirs as endeavors on the part of their authors to transcend the status of objects, I wish to avoid the trap of the

"murderer-as-exceptional-subject discourse" (13) that Lisa Downing describes in The

Subject of Murder as characteristic of Romantic thought. This "discourse" interprets the murderer as a "superman" whose actions transcend notions of good and evil. In what

87 Whereas La Gazette des tribunaux accused the murderer of cowardice, Canler, the chef du service de Sûreté (chief of security) present at the execution, later asserted in his own memoir that the Gazette had lied. See Lejeune's article "Crime et testament: les autobiographies de criminels au XIXe siècle" and Demartini's chapter "La mort du monstre" in L'affaire Lacenaire for a summary of discordant, contemporary reactions to Lacenaire's death. This disagreement continues among current historians, with Demartini and Foucart espousing opposite views of this event.

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follows, I demonstrate how Rivière and Lacenaire express their subjectivity by recreating, formally and thematically, the discours d'échafaud, the speech of contrition traditionally made by condemned criminals before their execution.

I. RIVIÈRE'S MEMOIR

Inquisitorial Narratives

Rivière and Lacenaire wrote memoirs to compete with rival conceptions of their stories, with hostile versions of their crimes and characters. They struggled for control of their stories even as judges, doctors, scientists, friends, neighbors, witnesses, lawyers, and newspapers vied with them and with each other to produce meaningful, moralizing, and dramatic narratives of crime.88 Yet both Rivière and Lacenaire entered into exchanges, and sometimes strangely amicable ones, with the authorities they claimed to oppose.

During their incarcerations these men were in conversation with the curious and the powerful. Judicial and medical inquiries inspired the convicts to create counternarratives of their own. These narratives contest, exaggerate, and (in Rivière's case) sometimes overlap with the more normative accounts (journalistic and judicial) that treated their authors as monsters and abominations.

Foucault's presentation of the Rivière dossier introduces a kaleidoscope of stories that both contradict and supplement each other. The collection begins with the "Procès- verbal du juge de paix" (a statement given and signed by the justice of the peace) describing the discovery on June 3rd, 1835, of three corpses with their necks, heads, and faces mutilated by a billhook, an agricultural cutting tool with a curved blade. Although

88 Foucault describes the Rivière dossier as "une lutte singulière, un affrontement, un rapport de pouvoir, une bataille de discours et à travers des discours" (Moi, Pierre Rivière 12).

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eyewitnesses immediately identified Pierre Rivière as the killer, his neighbors and the judicial authorities spent the following months delving into the meaning of this triple homicide. Rivière's crime became the focus of a communal storytelling project as various theories and conjectures were put forward, rejected, and retold by witnesses.

The question of Rivière's sanity or lack thereof was a potent source of disagreement. Depositions describe the accused talking to himself, indulging in prolonged fits of inexplicable laughter, mimicking wild beasts, claiming to have spoken with the devil, fearing women, torturing animals, creating strange objects and making up names for them, threatening children, and tying his own brother to the fireplace where the child narrowly escaped being burned. Several Parisian experts specializing in forensic medicine and mental illness met to discuss the case and declared the defendant to be mentally deranged, but without having examined him directly. The prosecution, however, interpreted Rivière's past in terms of cruelty and disobedience rather than madness. The

"Acte de renvoi devant la chambre d'accusation"89 insists on this interpretation:

Rivière n'est pas un monomane religieux ainsi qu'il a d'abord essayé de le faire croire; ce n'est pas non plus un idiot, ainsi que quelques témoins ont paru le supposer; aussi la Justice ne peut voir en lui qu'un être cruel qui a suivi l'impulsion du mal, parce que, comme tous les grands criminels, il a étouffé le cri de sa conscience, et n'a pas assez combattu les penchants de sa mauvaise nature. (Foucault et al. 60)

According to the juge d'instruction or examining magistrate, Pierre, "malheureusement né avec un caractère féroce," was naturally sadistic throughout his childhood and failed to control his depraved tendencies, including his desire to "bathe" in his mother's blood

(Foucault et al. 41). The magistrate, risking contradiction, assumes that Rivière was both

89 This document was written by the procureur du roi (loosely translated as "district attorney"). Its purpose was to summarize the investigation and ask for an official accusation on the part of the chambre d'accusation, a "special panel" whose purpose was to decide whether enough evidence existed for the case to proceed (See Encyclopædia Britannica's article "Procedural Law": ).

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predisposed towards abnormal cruelty and that he was capable of exercising free will and self-control.

Rivière's troubling account of his crime emerged amidst this disagreement between the prosecution and the somewhat more sympathetic witnesses. (The doctors entered the debate only as the memoir was being written.) At first, this document appeared to cooperate with the law. It soon became a "pièce du procès," an official piece of evidence (Foucault et al. 59). The juge d'instruction or examining magistrate notes, at the end of Riviere's first interrogation: "Ici l'inculpé fait avec ordre et méthode un récit très détaillé et qui dure pendant plus de deux heures. C'est l'historique des innombrables vexations que suivant lui son père a éprouvées de la part de sa femme. Rivière promet de nous transmettre par écrit ce qu'il nous a déclaré de vive voix" (Foucault et al. 43-44).

Rivière was more than willing to facilitate his condemnation by writing, in great detail, his reasons for committing the crime, as well as how he planned and carried it out. His memoir offers ample proof of its author's guilt and testifies to his presence of mind, making possible his execution. In a sense, Rivière rendered the judicial proceedings and their narrative frenzy superfluous: although he rejects accusations of innate cruelty, insisting that tormenting animals and human beings brought him little pleasure, Rivière confesses to premeditating his crime for a period of one month. He even sentences himself to death: " . . . j'attends le sort qui m'est destiné, je connais l'article du code penal a l'egard du parricide, je l'accepte en expiation de mes faûtes" (148).90

Yet Rivière's intention to bring about his conviction and condemnation backfired.

His memoir confounded the jurors who, immediately after sentencing him to death, "se

90 Throughout this chapter, I cite Foucault's transcription of Rivière's memoir, in which most of Rivière's errors are left uncorrected.

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réunirent et formèrent une demande en commutation de peine" (Foucault et al. 178).

While the prosecution and the medical experts portrayed Rivière as either a sadist or a lunatic, the memoir describes his various transformations, showing how his personality and presence of mind fluctuated over time.91 It also founds Rivière's guilt on the culpability of others, including the magistrates who misunderstood Rivière's father when his wife took him to court. Eventually, even the ministre de la Justice wrote to the king on Rivière's behalf, adopting elements of the murderer's argument and putting the burden of blame on his unconventional mother.

If the medical doctors who testified during Rivière's trial were dismissive of the memoir, refusing to consider the peasant-murderer as "a person of discourse," i.e. someone capable of telling his own story (Tennessen 295), the same was not true for the legal authorities, who were fascinated by Rivière's powers of expression and the surprising "énergie" (Foucault et al. 63) of his autobiography. Phrases taken from his interrogations and memoir permeate the documents that officially accuse him, and the murderer's voice haunts the prosecution's legalese:

91 As Philippe Riot points out, the memoir "[a pris] au piège toute interprétation à prétention totalisante" (Foucault et al. 314), showing Rivière to be neither entirely sane nor entirely evil.

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Table 3.1: Rivière quotations

Rivière Acte de renvoi Arrêt de la Acte devant la chambre chambre d’accusation 93 d'accusation d'accusation 92 On style, reading, (Mémoire): "Tout ". . . il apprit ". . . il . . . avait and writing cette ouvrage sera seulement à lire et à seulement appris à stilé trés écrire . . . " (59). lire et à écrire" (63). grossiérement, car je ne sais que lire et écrire . . . " (73). On fame and glory (Mémoire): ". . . "Il semble n'avoir ". . . un désir de j'avais des idées de puisé dans ses s’instruire et de gloire . . ." (124). lectures que des parvenir à la gloire." exemples propres . . (63). . à s'en faire un titre de gloire . . ." (59). On his attempt to (Premier "Pierre Rivière "Il prétendit qu'il avoid interrogatoire): répondit : 'que Dieu avait reçu responsibility for "J'étais dans un lui était apparu directement de Dieu his crime champ lorsque Dieu accompagné des et à l'effet de m'apparut anges et qu'il lui justifier sa accompagné des avait ordonné de providence l'ordre anges et me donna Justifier sa de tuer sa mère . . ." l'ordre de justifier sa providence'" (59). (62). providence" (41). On his true (Premier "Rivière . . . déclara "Il ajoua qu’il avait "Ainsi il a tué sa motives interrogatoire): "J'ai qu'il avait voulu tué sa mère parce mère pour venger voulu le délivrer délivrer son père qu’elle tourmentait son père des torts d'une méchante d'une méchante continuellement son qu’elle se donnait femme qui le femme qui le père, qu’elle le depuis longtemps tracassait mettait dans un tel ruinait et le mettait à son égard; sa continuellement désespoir que au désespoir, sa sœur parce qu’elle depuis qu'elle était parfois il était tenté sœur parce qu’elle aimait sa mère et son épouse, qui le de se suicider. Il prenait le parti de sa s’était toujours ruinait, qui le mettait ajouta que s'il avait mère, son frère associée à ses dans un tel désespoir, tué sa sœur Victoire parce qu’il aimait sa torts envers son qu'il était parfois tenté c'est qu'elle prenait sœur et sa mère" père; son frère, de se suicider. J'ai tué le parti de sa mère, (63). parce qu’il aimait ma sœur Victoire et il donna comme l’un et l’autre" parce qu'elle prenait motif du meurtre de (67). le parti de ma mère. son frère, l'amour J'ai tué mon frère qu'il portait à sa parce qu'il aimait ma mère et à sa sœur" mère et ma sœur" (59). (43). On his father’s (Mémoire): ". . . il se ". . . celui-là character montra toujours doux homme doux, et pacifique et affable paisible, aimé et parmi le monde, aussi estimé de tous" (63). il était estimé de tous ceux qui le connaissaient . . . " (74).

92 This document contains the decision of the special panel mentioned above, in note 89. 93 An official arraignment written by the procureur général or public prosecutor.

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On his willingness (Deuxième "Il est, dit-il, résigné to die interrogatoire): "Je à la mort" (59). suis résigné à la mort" (57).

Likewise, Rivière's declaration "j'ai hâte de mourir" (174, 181, 190), which he pronounced during his trial, reverberated in the press and was cited in a report made by the presiding judge of the assizes, a court charged with judging the most serious crimes.

Rivière's words were echoed, we might even say recited, by the machinery of justice, instead of the other way around. Such reiterations show to what extent Rivière's story, despite its atrocity, compelled his contemporaries to view it as truth.

Rivière as (Romantic) Reader and Writer

In a tactic typical of confessing murderers, Rivière apologizes for "the formal clumsiness of his text" (Lovitt 23), insisting on the importance of content above style. He wishes to be taken seriously despite his scanty education, explaining at the outset of his project: " . . . pourvu qu'on entende ce que je veux dire, ce c'est que je demande, et j'ai toute rédigé du mieux que je puis [sic]" (73-74). Notwithstanding assertions to the contrary, 94 Rivière did receive some formal education. He mentions that his

"compagnons d'école" made fun of him. The timeline of his narrative places this verbal bullying "deux ou trois ans" after a period of piety or "grande devotion," at which time he was seven or eight years old. Thus, although a public school education was not mandatory in France until the Jules Ferry laws were passed in 1881 and 1882, Rivière did spend some time in a schoolroom. He elaborates further: "j'apprît bien à lire et faire

94 The procureur du roi or "king's prosecutor," a rough equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon "district attorney," exaggerated the defendant's lack of learning: "l'éducation ne put corriger les mauvais penchants de Rivière, car il n'en reçut aucune" (Foucault et al. 59).

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l'aritmetique, pour l'écriture je n'avancait pas tant" (124). His schooling was interrupted by the necessity of laboring his father's land; this work was not to his liking.

Rivière recalls his fascination with reading and enumerates the volumes he perused. At school, he studied "la bible de Royaumont" (124). In his cinematic adaptation of the Foucault dossier, René Allio portrays the local curate directing a school, implying that Rivière might have received his education from this cleric. During his deposition,

Jean-Louis Suriray, curate of Aunay, admired Rivière's intelligence: "Je lui ai . . . toujours reconnu de l'aptitude pour les sciences, et une mémoire prodigieuse." His testimony suggests, however, that he may have known Rivière as an acquaintance as opposed to a pupil, "ayant parlé quelquefois avec lui" (45). Rivière's enthusiasm for reading and writing made an impression on the surrounding community. In another deposition, Pierre Fortin, a carpenter, explains: "J'ai connu Rivière, alors qu'il était enfant, il montrait beaucoup de dispositions pour apprendre à lire et à écrire" (46).

Rivière recalls that as a boy he intended on studying to become a priest: "J'appris des sermons et je prechais devant plusieurs personnes. . . . C'était ce que j'avais déja lu qui m'inspirait cela" (124). Above all, Rivière was an autodidact who continually sought out new reading material. He mentions Deuteronomy and Numbers, the Gospel and the rest of the New Testament, Le catéchisme de Montpellier, and recounts: "je lisais dans les almanachs et le géografie, j'ai [lu] dans le musée des familles et un calendrier du clergé, dans quelques histoires celle de Bonaparte, l'histoire romaine, un histoire des naufrages, la morale en action, et plusieurs autres choses. . . " (125). He explains that Le bon sens du curé Meslier (a philosophical treatise that rejects religion), in addition to his readings on astronomy and geography, swayed him towards atheism. Rivière mentions the desire to

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purchase books that he could not afford, including a "cour complet d'instructions" written by Gaultier containing subjects from reading and language to music (128).

Although Rivière was ashamed of his limited learning and, by association, his social and economic status, he managed to dabble in history, literature, science, philosophy of religion, and geography. As Jill Forbes points out, Rivière's "citation of justificatory examples from erudite or semi-erudite sources is an eloquent testimony to the progress of education among the peasantry" (62). Le musée des familles, which

Rivière paraphrases in his memoir, claimed on at least two occasions that its goal was to

"rendre la littérature populaire" (I: 201, II: 409). Judging from the Rivière case, it appears to have succeeded.95 In his memoir, Rivière recalls this periodical and other texts in succinct yet precise detail demonstrating a keen awareness of early nineteenth century literary sensbilities.

The magistrates who read Rivière's memoir, although struck by his assertion that he could scarcely read and write, were also astounded by his “logique surprenante”

(Foucault et al. 63), by an intelligence that asserted itself despite his upbringing. By setting the bar low and disparaging himself, Rivière exceeded his readers' expectations.

Even more surprising than Rivière's logic is his style, which, despite his self-deprecation, is more literary than one might expect. During his second interrogation, Rivière revealed a talent for pastiche, reciting from memory a poem he composed to mourn the death of his brother's pet bird (an animal he was later accused of killing). These lines imitate the

95 In addition to more journalistic and scientific subjects (descriptions of places, animals, trades, etc.), Le musée des familles contains historical narratives and fiction. I have examined its first two volumes, which appeared between 1833 and 1835. They include semi-fictional anecdotes of historical figures, such as Joan of Arc, and tales taken from foreign literatures: Russia, Italy, and the Orient.

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genre of the lament or elegy. Here, as in his memoir, Rivière masters the literary past definite tense:

Au nombre des vivants, naguères il fut porté. Des soins d'un être humain il était tout l'objet. L'espérance disait qu'un jour de son langage, Tous les peuples ébahis viendraient lui rendre hommage . . . (56)

Coming from such a source, these lines display a startling awareness of poetic tropes and lexica. Rivière uses mock-epic or mock-heroic (héroï-comique) irony to speak of a common subject in grandiloquent terms, expressing sorrow for the loss of the bird as one would for a celebrated artist. His decision to give the pet bird an elaborate funeral extends this irony into a private theatrical performance. Likewise, the use of the word "naguères," notwithstanding its misspelling, suggests that Rivière was imitating a classical, poetic register. The poem's vocabulary sets it apart from the memoir, in which day-to-day objects of Norman farm life (often denoted in the local dialect) and dry legal terminology96 exist side by side, with a more literary style occurring only rarely. The poem, on the contrary, uses a more restrained, classical lexicon.

Rivière's elegy exploits a common poetic theme in which the figure of the bird symbolizes poetry itself. In this case, the jay is admired for his song, anthropomorphized as "langage." Lamartine's poem "Les oiseaux" (1820), in which birds represent both poetry and death, is a more sophisticated contemporary adaptation of a similar theme.

The analogy between bird and poet, however, goes back at least as far as the Renaissance.

According to Françoise Joukovsky, Du Bellay's Regrets consecrated the swan as "le symbole du poète immortalisé par la douleur" (338). One cannot help but wonder if

96 Rivière familiarized himself with the many stipulations of his parents' marriage contract, which he seems to have memorized, and he was certainly preoccupied with the law. As mentioned above, Rivière was familiar with the penal code's punishment for parricide.

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Rivière, who was known in his community for his sparse words, anti-social behavior, and failure to communicate, killed the bird, whose "langage" was supposedly admired, out of frustration. This act of violence allowed him to supplant the object of his writing and become a poet in his own right.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Rivière demonstrates knowledge of versification. The first three lines of this poem (if we ignore the misspelling of "naguère") are Alexandrines, lines of twelve syllables with a caesura occurring in the middle. The fourth line strays from this count by only one syllable. Rivière achieves this syllable count by exploiting, although somewhat awkwardly, the rules of French metrical composition: for example, final mute "e"s that would otherwise be pronounced in poetry, placed in front of a mute

"h" (as opposed to an "aspirated h") combine with the first syllable of the next word to form a single syllable. Such is the case in the phrases "être humain" and "rendre hommage."

In his memoir, Rivière draws upon literary language to communicate intense emotions. To describe the terrible moment of epiphany following his crime, he shifts into direct discourse in a passage reminiscent of hyperbolic Romantic soliloquy:

. . . ah, est-il possible, me dis-je, monstre que je suis! infortunées victimes! est-il possible que j'aye fait cela, non ce n'est qu'un rêve! ah ce n'est que trop vrai! abîmes entrouverez-vous sous mes pieds, terre engloutisez-moi. . . . Helas, me dis-je, pensai-je que je m'y trouverais un jour dans cet etat; pauvre mére, pauvre sœur . . . pauvre malheureux enfant . . . ils sont aneantis pour toujours ces malheureux! Jamais ils ne reparaîtrons! Ah ciel, pourquoi m'avez vous donné l'existence, pourquoi me la conservez-vous encore plus long-temps. (138)

Here Rivière breaks with his usual style, which focuses on technical and bare facts. This burst of literary language, including the interjection "hélas" — this staging of his own guilty suffering — suggests that, consciously or not, Rivière was following written

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models.97 Such exclamations and intense emotions recall the style of Romantic drama and melodrama, in which rebuttals played a key role. Jean Boudout describes Hugo's

Romantic drama in terms of "la prouesse verbale, l'image à profusion . . . les répliques en cliquetis de mots" (XLIII). In the above passage, Rivière replies to himself, refuting his own disbelief at having caused such a calamity. He divides himself into two personas, one incredulous, the other the bearer of tragic news. Even if Rivière never read or attended performances of Romantic drama, similar constructions certainly made their way into the popular periodicals he read; Le musée des familles was steeped in the melodramatic style of the early 1830s.98 In addition to reflecting a certain Romantic style, this passage recalls an image from Rivière's biblical readings: the episode in the book of

Numbers in which the followers of Korah are swallowed alive by the earth. This passage also resonates with the Catéchisme de Montpellier (a text mentioned by Rivière in his interrogations and memoir), which speaks of the end of the world, at which time demons will be "tous précipités & renfermés dans l'abîme des enfers" (Colbert xxi). Although

Rivière abandoned his religious vocation, religious imagery seems to have made a lasting impression on him.

This use of multiple literary registers—whether as pastiche or to communicate sincere despair—attests to Rivière's prolific reading and demonstrates that his narrative techniques and his understanding of himself were profoundly intertextual. Rivière's

97 We can compare this moment to Don Carlos' tirade of self-doubt in Hernani (1830), which is also filled with intense, staccato-like exclamations of distress, and wherein the speaker contradicts himself as though he were more than one person: "Quelque chose me dit: Tu l'auras! — Je l'aurai. — / Si je l'avais! . . . — Oh ciel! être ce qui commence!/ . . . Y monter, sachant qu’on n’est qu’un homme !/Avoir l’abîme là !" (123- 124). We can also compare Rivière's speech to the lament of the titular character of Vigny's Maréchale d'Ancre (1831): "Ah! je sens que je suis perdue: j'ai eu beau lutter, le destin a été le plus fort. Ah! je sens que je suis perdue! perdue!" (Œuvres complètes 475). 98 In an 1834 article entitled "La Salpétrière" that recounts the ravings of interned, mentally deranged women, we find similar instances of melodramatic exclamation on the part of the narrator: "Oh! c'est là l'horreur, l'horreur sans émotions, sans drame, l'horreur toute nue!" (130).

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readings formed a lens through which he conceptualized his crime and his struggle to express himself. Carl Lovitt explains how Rivière's triple murder was inspired by the written word: "aspiring to emulate textbook heroes who had sacrificed themselves for great causes, Rivière conceived saving his father from his mother as an equivalent exploit" (29).99 Rivière saw his parents' marriage as symptomatic of French decadence and corruption, of his nation's subjection to feminine wiles:

. . . ce sont les femmes qui commandent à présent, ce beau siecle qui se dit siecle de lumiére, ce nation qui semble avoir tant de gout pour la liberté et pour la gloire, obéit aux femmes, les romains étaient bien mieux civilisés, les hurons et le hottentots, les alquongins, ces peuples qu'on dit idiots, le sont même beaucoup mieux, jamais ils n'ont avili la force, ce sont toujours les plus forts de corps qui ont toujours fait la loi chez eux. (132)

According Rivière's skewed logic, saving his father from his mother is analogous to saving his nation from tyranny. Rivière hoped his mother's homicide and his subsequent martyrdom would deal a blow to female despotism.

Looking at the above passage, we can see that the intertext of Rivière's memoir goes beyond the "textbook" examples mentioned by Lovitt. In fact, this tirade against women recalls Rousseau's attack on female liberty in his Lettre à d'Alembert. According to Rousseau, woman are by nature modest, and "leur partage doit être une vie domestique et retirée" (Œuvres complètes 133). Rousseau asserts that European culture, with its

"livres de chevalerie," has distracted women from their domestic vocation: "c'est ainsi que la modestie naturelle au sexe est peu à peu disparu, et que les mœurs des vivandières se sont transmises aux femmes de qualité" (136). In a corresponding transformation, men

99 In his article "The Rhetoric of Murderers' Confessional Narratives," Carl R. Lovitt distinguishes two corresponding motives for Rivière's crime, the first having its source in personal experience, the second in literature. Each of the memoir's two sections, he argues, revolves around a different of rationalization and explanation for the crime. The first and longer section sets up the narrator's desire "to free his father from his mother's tyranny" (28) as his primary motive for murder. The second depicts desires rooted in reading. Lovitt shows how these two motives are similar in nature, if different in scope.

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become effeminate, with women reigning over them in salons: "chaque femme de Paris rassemble dans son appartement un sérail d'hommes plus femmes qu'elle . . ." (154).

Rousseau explains the social danger inherent in this situation: "Jamais peuple n'a péri par l'excès du vin, tous périssent par le désordre des femmes" (166). Gender role reversal,

Rousseau warns, will bring civilization to its knees, for no longer will men be capable of government or military prowess.

Although Rivière probably never read Rousseau, he was certainly aware of the ideological and philosophical trends of his time, as revealed by his phrase "siècle de lumière." Like Rousseau, Rivière mourns the loss of a patriarchal paradise vaguely situated in antiquity (Rousseau cites the Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians as cultivating the virtue of female submissiveness). Both fear the "natural" order of the sexes has been overturned to the detriment of mankind. If Rousseau laments that "faute de pouvoir se rendre hommes, les femmes nous rendent femmes" (153), Rivière's description of his parents' marriage takes this terror of emasculation even further, for his mother, Victoire Brion Rivière, adopted the virile attributes lacking in her spouse.

Through her speech, physical strength, and legal cunning, she played an untraditional role in her marriage while forcing her spouse to do the same. Unable to control his wife,

Rivière's father was perceived as weak, and he became the object of public mockery.

Besides constructing misogynistic theories and finding inspiration in historic events of revolution, murder, and sacrifice, Rivière drew upon popular literature to model his own behavior. Particularly significant are his two mentions of the popular periodical

Le musée des familles, which launched its publication in 1833 and eventually featured contributions from several Romantic authors. As Rivière wandered the woods of

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Normandy after fleeing the crime scene, increasingly desperate and hungry, he resolved to turn himself in, but only after concocting a plan to play the part of a lunatic, a role inspired by his readings: "Je pensai qu'il y avait des folles, et j'ai vu cela dans le musée des familles, des folles qui se disaient: l'une reine de France, l'autre reine de tous lieux, l'autre papesse et se pretendant inspirée de Dieu pour prêcher par toute la terre" (142).

Rivière is recalling an article ("La Salpétrière") published in Le musée des familles in

February 1834, about fifteen months before his crime took place. The article takes its title from the name of a Parisian psychiatric ward where sick, indigent, and insane women were interred (probably in very bad conditions, for the article reports no fewer than 900 deaths per year occurring in a population of about 5000). M. Rousseau, the article's narrator, recalls his conversations with these inmates, one of whom believed herself to be engaged to Louis XVII and who had coined the title: "princesse de Navarre, grande- duchesse d'Albi, reine de France et de la COMÈTE" (Le musée I: 134). Rousseau asserts that such delusions are common among the insane, claiming to have met "cinq qui se disaient reines de France et trois qui se prétendaient reines de tous lieux" (135). Another inmate, the papesse of whom Rivière speaks, made her way to Paris, claiming that God had appeared to her in a dream with revelations for the king. Rivière told a similar story during his first interrogation: "J'étais dans un champ lorsque Dieu m'apparut accompagné des anges et me donna l'ordre de justifier sa providence" (41).

Soon after making this statement, Rivière abandoned his plan to simulate madness and religious visions. Yet his tendency to mimic scenarios discovered through reading led him to conceptualize a more enduring role for himself: that of the Romantic criminal- hero. This role, contrary to that of madman, was never completely abandoned, for Rivière

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believed in it. I surmise that Le musée des familles helped to inspire this second role as well as the first. Editions appearing in the months before Rivière's crime told stories of condemned men and women: Jane Grey, Mary Stuart, Jeanne d'Arc, and François-Joseph

Monbailly (a victim of Old Regime judicial error).100 Rivière would have found ample inspiration in these articles to craft his fantasies of self-immolation. The Romantic ideal of stoic, articulate martyrdom is conspicuously present in the articles on Jeanne d'Arc and

Jane Grey (the latter was executed for treason against Mary Tudor, her rival for the throne of England). Le musée portrays the verbal ingenuity, frankness, and fortitude of these women baffling their enemies. In particular, Grey's words profoundly disturb the executioner responsible for her death.

Rivière's criminal aspirations were linked to the hope that his trial would afford him a similar opportunity to speak with confidence: "Je pensais que ce serait une grande gloire pour moi d'avoir des pensées opposées à tous mes juges, de disputer contre le monde entier, je me représentais Bonaparte en 1815" (132). Could Rivière have had Le musée's (female) examples of last words in the back of his mind while scripting his

Napoleonic fantasies? Rivière, it seems, identified with both male and female figures from his readings, whereas in real life, he identified primarily with his father.101 Rivière's fanciful identification with both insane and condemned women may have stemmed from his jealously of their ability to speak: an ability that, in his own family, was the prerogative of women. Rivière's memoir portrays his sister, his grandmother, and his

100 These articles and many others testify to the enormous entertainment value of judicial violence and its omnipresence in the popular imagination. The 1833 volume of Le musée des familles includes a gory account of trial by duel and a history of l'exécuteur des hautes œuvres. Crime, bagnes (forced labor or penal camps where convicted criminals served out their sentences), and torture were common topics in these early volumes. 101 Francesca Biagi-Chai explains this paternal identification in terms of psychosis: "We can suppose that he belonged to the Other, his father, that he included himself blindly in the Other and that individuation was difficult for him" (162).

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mother as verbose and energetic speakers, whereas the opposite was true of himself, his father, and his brother Prosper, who was mentally disabled. According to L.Vastel, the second doctor to examine Rivière during his imprisonment, "le frère de Rivière est presque complètement idiot" (155). Recalling his readings, Rivière identifies with women who seized the opportunity to speak. Even the indigent, deranged inmates of "La

Salpétrière" do not succumb to their fate in silence, but rather speak at length of their delusions and their desire to be free. Just as he usurped the role of "poet" by killing a bird, Rivière believed that murdering his mother would allow him to appropriate one of her greatest strengths: bold, uninhibited verbal expression. Rivière's identification with women signals a desire to supplant them, to take their place, to overcome the silence which, in his eyes, his mother imposed upon his father.

In his quest for martyrdom, Rivière pursued what Loïc Guyon terms

"sacralization"—the transformation of the condemned criminal into a hero through his encounter with an all-powerful "foe," the guillotine. Guyon touches upon the verbal component of this transformation: "la proximité du couperet auréolait souvent le condamné de la gloire du désespoir et lui offrait parfois les moyens d'une éloquence jusqu'alors étrangère à sa bouche" (Les martyrs 64). While it has been argued that

Rivière's "true insanity . . . consisted . . . in the fact that his motives did not emerge from any calculated [self]-interest" (Alliume 68), I believe a very particular type of self- interest was in fact present: Rivière wished, through condemnation, to demonstrate his verbal prowess, thereby "rewriting" his public image and reputation. In addition to sympathy for his father, rage against his mother, and desire to restructure gender relationships, his criminal project was inspired by the wish to speak and to be heard.

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Strategies for achieving this goal were an essential part of his plan. At first he imagined

"qu'aprés le meurtre je viendrais a Vire, que je me ferais prendre par le procureur du roi ou par le commissaire de police; ensuite que je ferais mes declarations que je mourrais pour mon pére, qu'on avait beau soutenir les femmes, que cella ne triompherait pas . . ."

(132). Rivière planned to expound his theory (cited above) that France was degrading itself under the influence of women. His crime was thus conceived in tandem with the design of proclaiming a political theory. And the audience he wished to address grew larger and more important as his fantasies progressed, until he imagined that he would

"venir devant les juges soutenir [ses] opinions" (133).102

Long before the murders and his subsequent wanderings, Rivière amused himself with private role-playing, mimicking personalities that were not his own. Living as a character in imaginary scenarios was a favorite pastime: "Mais j'etais toujours occupé de mon excelence, et en allant seul je faisais des histoires ou je me supposai jouant un rôle, je me mettais toujours en tête des personnages que j'imaginais" (126). In Foucault's dossier, Philippe Riot notices that after describing a more or less normal childhood,

102 Although he never had the courage to go to the legal authorities after committing his crime, the idea of speaking before them became an obsession for Rivière. Peter and Favret theorize that Rivière's desire to be heard in court constitutes part of a larger trend among the nineteenth-century peasantry. Horrific crimes (infanticide, cannibalism) were not rare occurrences in the nineteenth-century countryside. According to Peter and Favret, these crimes were the means by which the peasant or "indigène" made himself or herself heard in the official records of society: "C'est ici que quelques délégués des campagnes vont intervenir et garantir par le poids de leur vie . . . le droit qu'ils se donnent de prendre la parole. A vrai dire, cette parole était si négligeable qu'on avait pris l'habitude de ne l'enregistrer jamais . . ." (254). This theory may be farfetched when it comes to criminals who never wrote about themselves, who never recorded their thoughts and feelings. It fits, however, with what Rivière had to say about himself. Pierre's fantasies of speaking in court suggest that he conceived his crime in order to create a social impact, to facilitate the oppression of women on a broader scale. The opportunity to appear before magistrates was as important to Rivière as the crime itself. But when his day in court came, his verbal difficulties continued. His memoir, I believe, was meant to stand in place of this speech that he failed to make, and it did indeed enter into the judicial record.

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Rivière recounts the onset of behavior that his neighbors and family found disquieting.103

In his deposition, Pierre Fortin, the local carpenter, traces a similar deterioration, claiming that Rivière was an intelligent child. Fortin implies that the murderer's abnormalities arose later on: "Dès l'âge de dix ou douze ans, il ne parut plus le même"

(46). In addition to Riot, other scholars have noted this moment of disadvantageous transformation. In Serial Killers, Biagi-Chai theorizes that the upheaval occasioned by the death of Rivière's uncle, which happened around the same time, "triggered" (162) his psychosis. I would like to point out that Rivière's own description of his transformation from promising child into disturbed young man coincides with his first mention of acting out his fantasies, of private role-playing. Rivière recollects it thus:

Plus tard mes idées se changérent je pensais que je serais comme les autres hommes. Cependant je montrais des singularités. Mes compagnons d'ecole s'en apercevaient ils se moquaient de moi, j'atribuais leur mepris a quelques actes de bétise que je pensais avoir fait des les commencemens, et qui suivant moi m'avaient decredité pour toujours. Je m'amusais seul j'allais dans notre jardin, et comme j'avais lu quelques choses sur les armées je supposais nos choux verds rangés en bataille, je nommais des chefs, et puis je cassais une partie des choux pour dire qu'ils etaient tués ou blessés . . . " (124, emphasis added).

From childhood, Rivière was susceptible to the printed word: his devotional readings inspired a clerical vocation that was quickly abandoned. But in the above passage, it seems that his original relationship to reading had changed. His religious activities (study, fasting) gave way to mimesis (staging and role-playing, hence "battling" the cabbages).

This transition was marked by a new self-awareness: Rivière became conscious of his

103 Riot explains: "une coupure très nette y est marqué [dans le mémoire] qui divise sa vie en deux périodes. . . . La première période commence à la naissance de Rivière. . . . Il semble indéniable que Rivière ait accompli une bonne scolarité. . . . Apparemment Rivière entretient des rapports normaux avec son entourage. . . . Alors que Rivière a renoncé à être prêtre (donc à dix ou onze ans) se produit la coupure" (298).

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unpopularity, of the fact that others were mocking him. As I demonstrate in what follows, this unpopularity had its source in verbal awkwardness and anxiety.

In his mock battle with the cabbages, Rivière projected violence, which he conceived and desired through reading, onto real, if symbolic, objects. The consequences of such behavior were drastically altered during his crime, when long-imagined violence became all too real. Yet important parallels exist between the two episodes, both of which displace epic, heroic narratives onto mundane family and village life. In the passages of his memoir that justify his plan to murder, Rivière compares himself to famous sacrificial figures encountered in his readings, taken from antiquity (Eléazar des Maccabées), the crusades (Châtillon), the War in the Vendée (Henri de la Rochejaquelein), and the New

Testament (Christ). Rivière fused his identity to the historical legends he most admired, embellishing them through private role-playing.

In his book Pourquoi la fiction, Jean-Marie Schaeffer describes the mimetic games of children as one of the most basic forms of "fiction" that all cultures share. Such games, like Rivière's cabbage war, displace physical gestures from their original context,

"découpl[ant] certaines activités motrices de leurs fonctions premières" (15). According to Schaeffer, the uniquely human experience of consuming (and reenacting) fiction depends on the mind's ability to distinguish between the fictive and the real. Fiction necessitates a "partial immersion" in illusion, sustained by certain "mécanismes de blocage" (59) that prevent us from being fully carried away by the fictive experience. The reader must walk a delicate line between suspension of disbelief and awareness of the boundaries between illusion and reality. Western culture, however, has regarded role- playing with particular suspicion lest it take on a dangerously "real" quality. This mistrust

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of fiction, which dates back to Plato, is based on the fear that stories may prove

"contagious" by tempting readers (or theater-goers) to imitate the actions they depict.104

According to Schaeffer, fiction entails a double risk: 1) the risk of immersion within fiction's illusion, i.e. the possibility of confusing the fictitious with the real, à la Don

Quixote and 2) the risk of entraînement, i.e. the tendency to take fiction as a model for one's behavior even though one is fully aware of its imaginary quality. Whereas immersion entails insanity, entraînement implies a more natural, and practically unavoidable, form of mimesis.

In his memoir, Rivière describes how he succumbed to both immersion and entraînement. He immersed himself in heroic roles of his own creation until he came to believe that he was, indeed, a hero who had the right to use violence. In this respect, he was like an actor whose role took over his life and blinded him to reality. By attempting to model his family's "politics" on examples from his readings, he also fell prey to the practice of entraînement. Through his (imaginary) heroism, he hoped to bring reality into alignment with what he had read.105 Rivière, who surrendered wholeheartedly to

Schaeffer's effet d'entraînement, provokes the question of whether such attempts to align the real with literature constitute insanity when undertaken with great tenacity.106 Rivière was more susceptible to the lure of literature than the average reader and more eager to impose scenarios taken from fiction, journalism, and historic legend on daily life, yet he

104 Schaeffer gives the example of Marcel Aymé's parodic fairytale about a tame wolf who becomes vicious while playing the childish game Loup y es tu ? 105 Schaffer describes this type of occurrence, a feedback loop between the processes of immersion and entraînement: "Prenons le cas de la fiction littéraire . . . elle met à notre disposition des schémas de situations, des scénarios d'actions, des constellations émotives et éthiques, etc., qui sont susceptibles d'être intériorisés par immersion et (éventuellement) réactivés de manière associative" (47). 106 François Marty, for example, takes this practice as evidence of Rivière's psychosis: "il vit dans un monde imaginaire, un monde où le jeu et la réalité sont confondus, un monde où l'imaginaire envahit la pensée. . . . un monde qui peu à peu renfermait son espace dans les frontières de la psychose" (31).

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was not entirely unaware of the difference between fantasy and reality. Just as he was neither entirely sane nor entirely mad, the "blocages . . . qui sont censés empêcher l'immersion" (Schaeffer 59) functioned only partially for him. His perceptions of himself and his enemies were deeply influenced by fiction, while in other ways, his grip on reality remained intact. Although he was seduced by the heroic role he envisioned himself playing, Rivière's illusions were shattered by his crime. In the following section,

I explore how his retreat into literature, role-play, and eventually autobiography (which, I believe, always involves a somewhat fictional construal of the self) were motivated by dissatisfaction with his own powers of speech and his rage against those who skillfully used words as weapons.

Marriage as Verbal Dispossession

The first section of Rivière's memoir describes his father's metaphorical castration at the hands of his wife. Throughout their antagonistic marriage, Victoire Brion, a virtuoso when it came to mockery, had the final say in disputes, often controlling rumors to her advantage because her speech was the loudest, the shrewdest, and the most persistent. In comparison, Rivière's father, Pierre-Margrin, was hopelessly hampered in his speech. While following Jill Forbes' analysis of gender role reversal and emasculation in the Rivière dossier, I examine these questions from a uniquely verbal angle. As we shall see, Pierre-Margrin's incapacities mirrored Rivière's own.

Rivière describes his parents' disastrous marriage as a series of economic exchanges in which his mother maintained the upper hand, often because her words were a powerful force of persuasion and intimidation. Victoire Brion Rivière fought to

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maintain her independence from her husband, with whom she rarely lived, by using houses, land, animals, furniture, children, and sex as means of exchange and bargaining chips.107 In defiance of the Civil Code and her marriage contract, which, according to

Riviere, stipulated that the goods of the wife's dowry be "regis et administrés par le mari conformément à la loi titre du regime dotal" (75), Victoire Brion managed her own property and kept it separate from her husband's, forcing him to do business with her as an equal: "il lui achetait des vaches . . . et ils se rendaient compte liad pour liad, ma mére avait dans son jardin une chouppée d'osier, elle en vendait si mon pére en avait besoin de quelques bottes, il les payait sur les prix qu'elle lui démandait . . ." (86). In the early years of their marriage, sex was given in exchange for day labor on the Brion family land, for Rivière's mother continued living with her parents, and Rivière's father "allait y faire le labourage qu'il y avait à faire" (76). Rivière adds: "il n'a couché avec ma mére que lorsques qu'il allait faire ce labour ou quelque autre ouvrages comme d'apprêter du grain, couper du bois, planter des arbres, faire du cidre, etc." (78). Victoire Brion, portrayed as subverting contracts, including her marriage contract and agreements to rent property, later disrupted this exchange by making sure her husband would be uncomfortable in her bed: "Il coucha avec elle plusieurs nuits et puis voyant qu'elle ne laissait pas de couéte de son côté ni de plume dans l'oreillier, et qu'elle faisait tout pour faire mal, il prefera coucher dans l'autre lit . . . " (110). Victoire Brion incurred debts and failed to give her husband his "due," both sexually and economically. Through daily disruptive actions, she fought to keep control of both her body and her property.

107 As Peter and Favret point out, Rivière chose as victims "deux autres rebelles, engagées dans le même et confus combat de l'émancipation, femmes acharnées à miner d'un côté (le leur) un ordre injuste que Pierre visait de l'autre" (257). Rivière's animalization and demonization of his mother cannot hide the fact that she was, somewhat like himself, an intelligent dissenter.

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In a telling passage, Pierre-Margrin attempts to rape his wife, resorting to physical domination, the only kind of which he is capable. He is interrupted and scolded by his eldest daughter, her mother's verbal protégée. In Rivière's eyes, these two women formed an alliance to torment his father. In addition to claiming bodily independence, they demanded their own house, thwarting article 214 of the 1804 Civil Code, which specified that wives must cohabitate with their husbands. This untraditional arrangement was largely maintained by the mother's verbal manipulation, examples of which permeate the memoir. Pierre portrays his mother insulting and criticizing those around her: "malgré tous les soins que mon pére et ma grand-mére prenaient d'elle, elle l'est accablait d'injure et de paroles mortifiantes . . . " (78). Pierre's mother had no compunctions telling everyone in the surrounding community that she had left her husband because he was mistreating her: "elle debita dans Courvaudon qu'elle n'etait revenue que parce qu'on la faisait périr qu'elle manquait de tout . . ." (79). Later, she accused her husband of mistreating their children: "ma mere a debité plusieurs fois que mon pére était un mangeards et qu'ils faisait perir ses enfans." Rivière describes her as a continual source of

"paroles mortifiantes" (81) attacking not only her husband, but also her mother, with whom "elle disputait . . . elle ne lui disait pas une parole que cela ne fut pour la mortifier .

. ." (82). Pierre depicts her as a source of defamation and calumny, delivering insults and mockery with so much force that she foams at the mouth ("avait la bros à la bouche") like a rabid animal (87).

But Victoire Brion's mastery of language went beyond family quarrels and insults: she argued convincingly before magistrates to further her independence, initiating legal actions against her husband to obtain custody of their children, repossess property, and

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request a legal separation. Pierre's mother went to local authorities to gain the upper hand in marital disputes. The latter were at times impressed, at times intimidated by her speech: Rivière describes the justice of the peace taking her side in order to avoid appearing "hebété" (114) in her presence. He also explains that his mother obtained custody of him at an early age by crying in the streets "je reveux mon enfant" and then going to the justice of the peace " . . . pour lui demander si mon pére avait le droit de lui retenir son enfant" (81). At one point, she convinced Villers' justice of the peace that her husband was forcing her to live in poverty. On these grounds, she obtained an

"ordonnance de monsieu le président" (88) for a legal separation. Rivière claims this was a deceitful maneuver on her part, driven by avarice as opposed to genuine need. The authorities also took her side when she complained of being forcefully removed from her house, which her husband had agreed to rent under the assumption that she would henceforth live with him.

Pierre-Margrin, on the contrary, failed to sway local magistrates, even though the

Civil Code was technically on his side. Rivière makes it clear that in disputes over property, his mother "s'expliquait bien" whereas his father "n'avait pu . . . expliquer son

état" (97). On one occasion, his father refused to acknowledge hints from the justice of the peace that his wife was committing adultery. Through a verbal blunder, he unwittingly cast himself in the role of unfaithful husband. Rivière describes his father's farcical ineptitude: "Ce juge s'entretenant un jour avec mon pére lui demanda si sa femme n'était point d'une mauvaise vie. Si elle n'aimait point d'autres hommes que lui. Mon père dit: non. Je ne la soupçonne pas de cela. Cela m'etonne, dit le juge. . . . mon pére dit: je ne le pense pas, elle ne dit pourtant pas la même chose de moi; ah, c'est cela, dit le juge, elle

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est jalouse" (100). When they appear before the justice of the peace, Pierre's mother is described as "fort," his father as "malheureux." The justice, however, champions the cause of the "stronger" party because he perceives her as the weaker, declaring: "votre femme est faible il faut la menager." Rivière implies that Victoire Brion's pretense of victimization was her greatest strength, giving her the "force de rire de mon pére et de soutenir ses raisons" (114).

To counter his wife's attempt to separate, Pierre-Margrin relied on written character recommendations, but failed to say anything meaningful on his own behalf:

Pendant la semaine mon pére obtint des certificats, un du maire d'Aunay dans lequel il etait fait mention de sa conduite et de l'estime dont il jouissait; un de celui de Courvaudon qui contenait la même chose et en outre quelques choses sur la conduite de ma mére et un autre écrit par Mr le curé et signé de plusieurs habitans de la commune qui exposaient qu'elle conduite mon pére avait tenue avec ma mére, plusieurs des sacrifices qu'il avait faits pour vivre en paix avec elle. Mon pére prît aussi son contrat de mariage . . . le bail qu'il avait cassé, la lettre des dettes qu'on lui avait envoyé . . . (119-120).

Everyone, it seems, was willing to stand up for the wronged husband, save himself. Yet this arsenal of documents could not prevail against his wife's machinations: "ses certificats ne furent regardés qu'avec indiférence" (120). Victoire Brion's speech is more powerful than the written word, than legal or clerical documentation. Rivière portrays his father as a well-intentioned, wronged, gentle, inarticulate being. Driven to despair by his wife, he gives a wordless cry of lament: "oh, oh, oh, oh" (113). Rivière is moved to give his father a voice, to intuit what the man might say if only he could speak coherently: "il semblait vouloir dire: je renonce a tout j'abandonne tout ce que j'ai" (112). By using his parents' relationship to justify his crime, Rivière implies that only murder will restore language (and thereby power) to its rightful owners: men.

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Murder as Speaking and Writing

In his memoir's second section, Rivière focuses on his own inability to verbally outmatch women. He recalls his solitude growing up and explains how it came about because of his failure to find the right words: "Je voyais pourtant bien comme le monde me regardait, la plupart se moquaient de moi. Je m'apliquai un voir la maniére de m'y prendre pour faire cesser cela et vivre en société, mais je n'en avais pas le tac, je ne pouvez trouver les paroles qu'il fallait dire. . . . " This anxiety, he explains, was exceptionally acute "lorsqu'il se rencontrait des filles dans la compagnie" (126).108 His inability to speak to women, however, was symptomatic of a more general problem, for he explains that he could neither communicate sociably with other young people, nor with his cousins, nor with his father's friends. Like his father, he attempted to counteract his awkwardness with writing. But instead of relying on others' pens, Rivière sharpened his own. Furious when a girl kissed him, he composed a satirical song attacking her honor and hoped, through such compositions, to take revenge on all who outsmarted him,

"en faisant des chansons sur tous eux" (126).

Rivière's verbal paralysis came into play when he interacted with female members of his family, in whose presence he either listened helplessly or responded, reluctantly, to their barrage of questions. He and his father hid beneath the floor of his mother's house as

108 In his article "La Folie de Pierre Rivière," Daniel Fabre relates the murderer's obsession with animals, and particularly birds, to his failure to communicate with women. Birds are messengers of erotic intent: "Aussi la Normandie est-elle également bruissante de rossignols à la fontaine et de coucous dénonciateurs qui déclinent toutes les situations de l'amour." Pierre's relationship to these animals, asserts Fabre, remained childish. He was a "oiseleur" who had not "parcouru les étapes jusqu'à la conversation galante" (106). In his memoir, Rivière explains that he was bothered by desire and at the same time repulsed by the thought of succumbing to it. He associated his sexual feelings with incest (with female members of his family): "Dans ce temps la passion charnelle me genait. Je pensai qu'il etait indigne de moi de jamais penser à m'y livrer. J'avais surtout un horreur de l'inceste cela faisait que je ne voulais pas approcher des femmes de ma famille . . ." (125). This perhaps explains why Rivière had difficulty speaking to his grandmother and sisters, as well as to his mother.

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she and Victoire hatched articulate plots, but their spying did them little good, for they were no more than furtive receptacles of information. As he secretly planned to murder his mother and sister, Rivière was frustrated by the questions of other women. His grandmother and his younger sister, Aimée, sensed that something was amiss and attempted to get to the bottom of his strange behavior. In a tirade that takes up nearly a page, his grandmother admonishes him, accusing him of plotting to leave his father to find more profitable work elsewhere. Rivière gives a meager response, protesting "que cela n'était rien, que lon faisait des grands etalages pour trés peu de choses" (136), before fleeing to avoid further conversation. The juxtaposition of these two speeches—one developed and self-assertive, the other shameful, elusive, and abortive—shows male speech within the Rivière household to be dwarfed by its feminine counterpart.

Moreover, Aimée's persistent questions forced Rivière to abandon his first attempt at writing a memoir. Pierre originally planned to put down "toute la vie de mon pére et de ma mére a peu près telle quelle est ecrite ici de mettre au commencement un annonce du fait, et à la fin mes raisons de le commettre, et les niarges que j'avais intention de faire à la justice, que je la bravais, que je m'immortalisais, et tout cela . . ." He intended to mail this document before committing his crime. Rivière wrote at night, supposing the rest of his family to be asleep. But his sister Aimée saw what he was doing and asked to see the writing. The next day, she came to Rivière accompanied by her father and one of their neighbors, asking "il est donc impossible que l'on voie cela?" (131). Troubled by his sister's inquiries, Rivière burned what he had written.109 He was thus reduced to silence,

109 After destroying his original memoir, Pierre then conceived his plan of speaking before the judges. This speech, which was meant to replace his original writing, was in turn replaced by the memoir he wrote in prison. Pierre affirms that had the original memoir been written according to plan, he would have

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both verbal and written, by all of his female relations, even those who took his father's side against his mother.

Rivière imagined murder as a way out of this intolerable muteness. Killing the maternal despot was meant to ensure his future renown and give him the chance to speak publicly: "je pensai de l'occasion était venue de m'elever, que mon nom allait faire du bruit dans le monde, que par ma mort je me couvrirais de gloire, et que dans les temps à venir, mes idées seraient adoptées et qu'on ferait l'apologie de moi" (132). Even as he longed for posthumous approbation, Rivière was wary of his contemporaries' disapproval. His crime, it seems, was designed to produce a (secondary) literature of apologetics, as if it were a precocious work of literature that only future generations would be able to understand.

Murder is the means by which Rivière sought to overcome his glossophobia, to publicly assume a verbal adroitness of his own. Brought before the magistrates, he would have no choice but to speak. But as he envisioned this scene of judgment, Rivière became increasingly and obsessively anxious about the respectability of his physical appearance:

"Je pensai aussi que comme je devais venir devant les juges soutenir mes opinions, qu'il fallait que je fît cette action avec mes habits du dimanche pour partir pour Vire aussitôt qu'elle serait consommée" (133). Rivière wanted to murder his family dressed in his

Sunday best; this detail, he believed, would allow him to orate with confidence.

This plan became a fixation. On two occasions, Rivière changed into formal clothing only to reassume his ordinary attire each time he balked at committing the murders. Like a nervous speaker stammering before a crowd, his murderous project

committed suicide immediately following his crime, for no further explanation of the act would have been necessary.

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underwent fits and starts. Having aroused the suspicions of his grandmother and sister,

Rivière renounced yet another component of his plan: "je me pensai: qu'importe que je sois habillé bien ou mal, je m'expliquerai tout aussi bien sans avoir des beaux habits . . . "

(135-136). The difficulty, however, with which this plan was abandoned (and only after two failed attempts) testifies to Rivière's concern that rhetoric alone would not suffice.

His fear of failing to speak convincingly and à propos was displaced onto a detail that appeared, at first, to be under his control. Like his father, Pierre dreaded appearing in court with words as his only weapons.

Traveling as Trying to Speak

Rivière's verbal anxiety also manifested itself in the pattern of his wanderings around Normandy. After committing his crime, he repeatedly contemplated and then shied away from making himself known. For nearly a month, Rivière roamed the woods between Caen, Bayeux, and Vire, living off of wild plants and bread begged or purchased with the small amount of money he carried with him. After suffering a sudden onset of remorse, he forswore his resolution to defy the judges, explaining that only the process of walking could "dissipate" (138) his regrets. In the wake of his crime, Rivière's thought process, his wavering resolution to turn himself in, became intertwined with his physical displacements: "Dans le mois qui s'est ecoulé depuis ce crime jusqu'a mon arestation mes idées ont changés plus d'une fois, je les raporterai avec les endroits ou j'ai passé" (138).

Although he was eager for his wanderings to end, Rivière feared speaking to the authorities as much as he feared death and damnation. As we shall see, these fears were

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overcome almost simultaneously, implying once again that acceptance of death liberates speech.

Around the ninth day of his wanderings, Rivière took refuge in a ditch near

Cremelle and reconciled himself to getting caught: "je ne me souciais plus beaucoup que l'on m'arrêtât ou pas" (140). Although he intended to denounce himself, he lost his courage several times, just as he had previously turned back from writing his memoir, committing his crime, and appearing in court. Like his earlier irresolutions, Rivière's difficulty turning himself in was symptomatic of his struggle to speak: "je n'avais pas la force de me denoncer, j'aurais préféré qu'on m'eut demandé mes papiers" (141). Rivière longed for someone else to initiate the conversation ending in his arrest.110 As his situation became increasingly desperate, he resolved to “me déclarer a un gendarme"

(142), but abruptly changed his mind and wandered back to the woods. Hoping that non- verbal eccentricities might attract suspicion, he developed other strategies to precipitate his arrest, resolving to "faire des gestes sur les routes" (143) and to excite "l'attention publique" (144) by digging for roots by the side of the road. In Vassi, he ate publicly at a tavern, but to no avail. Pierre was not only mute as far as society was concerned; he was also invisible.

On June 24th, 1835, the Mayor of Aunay wrote a letter explaining how Rivière’s flagrant appearance had gone unnoticed by the police: "Si la gendarmerie de Flers eût été assez instruite sur cet événement, il y a tout lieu de croire qu'il aurait été arrêté puisqu'il a

été exposé devant la porte d'un cabaretier dans l'approche du bourg de Flers au moins trois ou quatre heures tenant un livre à sa main où il lisait" (30). Like the police, the men

110 Rivière fears having to "prendre la parole," as Foucault would say (L'ordre du discours 7). He would rather insinuate himself into the discourse of the very authorities he had previously hoped to contest.

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and women Rivière crossed on the road either failed to recognize him or, in the case his family's former servant Marianne Beauvais and his acquaintance Laurent Grellay, were unable or unwilling to bring about his capture. Grellay went so far as to warn Rivière that the police were waiting for him near Flers. Refusing to respond, the fugitive silently acquiesced: “c’est ce que je demande” (143).

Rivière was finally apprehended in the village of Langannerie when the strange contraption (“albalêtre”) that he was carrying attracted attention. Riviere, who was fond of neologisms, constructed this instrument, probably a type of bow, for the purpose of killing birds. He transcribes the conversation that fulfilled his desire to be questioned: "—

Avez vous des papiers—Non—Qu’allez-vous faire par là—C’est Dieu qui me conduit, et je l’adore—Tenez je crois que je affaire à vous, d’ou etes vous—J’ai parti d’Aunay—

Comment vous appelez vous—Riviére” (147). Rivière’s speech remains hesitant and indecisive; pretending to experience religious visions, he has yet to take responsibility for his actions.

Following his arrest, those who came in contact with Rivière were struck by his manner of speaking, which, like the rest of his behavior, was neither entirely normal nor consistently mad. Bouchard, the first doctor to examine the accused in prison, noted:

"Rivière parle peu. Si on lui adresse une question, il y répond clairement, mais en peu de mots. . . ." (Foucault et al. 151). L. Vastel, a mental illness expert, was also troubled by

Rivière's speech: "Sa parole a quelque chose d'enfantin et de peu viril . . ." (154).

Rivière's verbal behavior continued to attract attention during his trial. The Pilote du

Calvados maintained: "Il répond avec peine d'une voix faible et par monosyllabes" (174).

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The report made by the presiding judge of the assizes was more flattering: "Ses réponses ont toujours été claires et précises" (181).

On trial and under medical examination, Rivière's speech was remarkable for its sparseness. Preoccupied by writing, he spoke reluctantly to the doctors, yet clearly and precisely in the courtroom. When Bouchard examined him, Riviere's communicative efforts were focused on his memoir, for he would "reprend aussitôt la plume" (Foucault et al. 151) as soon as he was given a moment's peace. But if we look closely at Rivière's interrogations, we see that an important spoken disclosure had taken place before

Bouchard's arrival. On July 9th, one week after his arrest, Rivière spoke at length for

"plus de deux heures" (Foucault et al. 43). In the final lines of his memoir, Rivière explains how this long-anticipated moment of speech (before a magistrate) became possible:

Lorsques qu'on m'eut laissé seul, je me resolut de nouveau a dire la vérité, et je m'avouait à Mr le geolier qui était venu me parler, et je lui dit que j'avais intention de tout declarer devant mes juges; mais lorsques que j'allai prêter mon premier interrogatoire devant Mr le juge d'instruction, je ne put encore m'y decider et je soutint le sistême dont j'ai parlé jusqu'à que Mr le geolier parlât de ce que je lui avais dit. Je fus trés satisfait de sa declaration, il me dechargea d'un grand poids qui m'accablait. Alors sans rien déguiser, je declarai tout ce qui m'avait porté à ce crime. (147-148)

Rivière begins his confession with a declaration by proxy. Instead of speaking directly to the examining magistrate, he uses his jailor as an intermediary, a porte-parole. This man, quite possibly a member of Rivière's own socio-economic echelon,111 proved to be a more accessible confidant that the judges themselves. Yet the jailor's second-hand

111 In Les martyrs de la Veuve, Loïc Guyon describes how nineteenth-century literature represents jailors as vulgar beings belonging to the lower classes, whereas it portrays (corrupt) judges and prosecutors reflecting a "raffinement bourgeois" (168). Rivière's jailor is never mentioned in the transcriptions of his interrogations, which depict the examining magistrate badgering the truth out of Rivière. Perhaps, much like peasants themselves, jailors were overlooked in the official record.

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declaration clears the air for Rivière to make a declaration of his own. In turn, Rivière's statement of his motives enables him to transition into writing, to "transmettre par écrit ce qu'il . . . a déclaré de vive voix" (Foucault et al. 43). While the moment of (self)- revelation described above facilitates Rivière's transition from the spoken to the written, the memoir itself is structured around an opposite movement. Only after twelve days of writing about verbal impotence—his own and his father's—was Rivière able to conclude his manuscript by explaining his decision to speak.

Rivière's confession, which enabled the memoir to be written in the first place, forms its conclusion, so that Rivière's "declaration" of "tout ce qui m'avait porté à ce crime" both initiates the telling of his story and delineates its closure. This declaration terminates his struggle with society and allows him to embrace death, "la peine que je merite, et le jour qui doit mettre fin a tous mes ressentimens" (148). After writing these words, Rivière had little to say, except to declare, once more, his desire for death: "J'ai hâte de mourir." His intention, thwarted by Louis-Philippe, came to pass five years later.

Only by killing himself could he pull the world into alignment with his words.

II. LACENAIRE'S MEMOIR

The Assassin's Education

Only two days after Rivière was tried on November 12th, 1835, Lacenaire was condemned by the Parisian cour d'assises (loosely translated as "circuit court").112 Unlike

Rivière, however, Lacenaire became something of a celebrity in the Parisian press. From

November 15th until the eve of his execution, which took place on January 9th, 1836, he

112 The term "circuit court" applies to the U.S. legal system, but this word, and the British term "crown court," exist as common translations. In France, the cour d'assises operates on a departmental level and is responsible for judging the most serious crimes.

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wrote with great concentration, composing, in addition to his memoir, over half of his 28 poems. Lacenaire's memoir describes his childhood and adolescence in great detail, focusing on his intellectual development and his lack of adequate professional opportunities. At the age of eight, he claims, he responded to his parents' coldness by conducting his own "éducation morale," discovering, with no assistance, the ideas of

Enlightenment philosophy. Lacenaire believed himself in possession of innate intellectual greatness. He speaks of his "haute capacité" (39) and credits himself with precocious powers of observation that granted him insight into human nature. At the outset of his memoir, Lacenaire asserts his superiority vis-à-vis uneducated assassins, as well as those who wrote mediocre poetry.

Lacenaire's learning was made possible in part by his father's determination to leave the peasantry. This man acquired a basic education from the local curate and set himself up as a Lyonnais merchant, making his fortune in the iron trade, only to lose it several decades later through speculation. After spending Lacenaire's childhood in the countryside, his family returned to Lyon to place him and his elder brother in school. The following years of formal education saw a series of geographic displacements, upheavals, and rebellious acts that continued throughout Lacenaire's adolescence and into his adulthood. According to the wishes of his brother, whom Lacenaire describes as a spoiled child, both siblings soon left their first school. Lacenaire's parents, who preferred their firstborn, sent the narrator away to boarding school. The assassin paints his parents' neglect as the source of his eventual moral decay. At first, Lacenaire was sent only as far as the Croix-Rousse, on the outskirts of Lyon. This was too short a distance to suit his family, which then consigned him to the collège of Saint-Chamond. Here he tasted his

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first scholarly success, but was eventually expelled for admiring certain Protestant doctrines. In hopes that a religious education would bring his son into line, Lacenaire's father enrolled him in the "petit séminaire d'Alix" (52), but the pupil was appalled by the school's somber, pious, and moralizing atmosphere. Lacenaire stayed at Alix for one year, succumbing to depression. He recovered from his despondency and took up poetry, but was soon dismissed for his lack of religious sentiment. Having returned to Lyon, he was placed as a pensioner in another collège. This time, he was sent home for possession of a pornographic book, a situation that gave him ample opportunity to "[faire] l'école buissonnière" (58). Lacenaire again took charge of his own education, indulging in solitary, nocturnal reading.

Lacenaire's professional training followed the same haphazard pattern. When his father joined the silk trade, he was made apprentice to a silk worker. A series of brief employments followed with an attorney, a notary, and a bank. Suspected of stealing money from the latter, Lacenaire tried his hand at writing articles and vaudeville plays.

Finally, he joined the army under a false name, only to desert. Never was he able to exercise a single profession or stay in one place for very long. When his father lost his fortune, Lacenaire was left without monetary assistance, and having failed to make his living as a man of letters, a combination of laziness and desperation prompted him to take up crime.

Much like Rivière, Lacenaire links his precocious intellectual development to verbal ineptitude. During his unhappy childhood, reading served as a substitute for human interaction. In his family, he was forced to keep to himself, "de me replier en moi- même . . . " (37). He maintains that his affectionate nature gave way to silence and

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solitude because of his parents' indifference. Unable to speak to his estranged but beloved mother, he longed for her to intuit his thoughts, to "lire dans [son] âme" (38). But communication between them remained impossible until it was too late. At the time of their reconciliation, he was "déjà proscrit par la société" (36). A stranger within his family, the young Lacenaire was incommunicative with other children: "Ne voyant alors personne de mon âge avec qui je puisse sympathiser, et forcé de me concentrer en moi- même et d'y chercher mes jouissances, je m'en créai une dans l'observation de tout ce qui m'entourait" (40). His compulsion to observe went hand in hand with his literary interests. Justifying his love for Molière, Lacenaire explains: "c'est avec lui que j'aimais à observer les hommes" (58). Throughout his memoir, he expounds upon his love of literature. As a child, fiction amplified his sentimental qualities: "la fable des deux

Pigeons" (36), he claims, moved him to tears. He secretly borrowed material from the local cabinets de lecture where he encountered Molière, various novelists,113 and the forbidden philosophes. So great a role did reading play in his education that when he decided to become a professional thief, he instructed himself by studying the memoirs of

Vidocq, a former criminal turned chief of police.

Lacenaire suggests that his early literary isolation stunted his social skills. His manners, until the age of fourteen, were "raides et maussades" (62). He casts himself as a consistently misunderstood and persecuted poète maudit, "un homme qui sent tout sans pouvoir l'exprimer" (95). Although he became increasingly adept at speaking as he grew

113 In his article "Lacenaire, héros stendhalien," René Bourgeois explores the reciprocal intertextuality between these two authors and points out possible allusions to Le rouge et le noir in Lacenaire's memoir: “s’il nous est impossible de tracer un parallèle rigoureux entre Lacenaire et le héros du Rouge, nous soulignerons cependant dans leur destin un certain nombre de similitudes, qui pourraient illustrer un cas assez curieux de rencontre entre la création littéraire et la réalité. . . . Lacenaire . . . semble s’être souvenu de maint détail du roman de Stendhal . . .” (221). Likewise, Stendhal based his character Valbayre, who appears in Lamiel (his last, unfinished novel, written between 1839 and 1842), on the poet-assassin.

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older and spent time away from his family, Lacenaire maintains that his metamorphosis from awkward child into brazen criminal was not absolute until the ordeals of his arrest, trial, and condemnation. Reflecting on the rejection of his appeal, he concludes: "j'avais besoin de cette position pour me mettre à nu" (93). Only after being definitively condemned could Lacenaire give voice to his private thoughts, to his ostensible intellectual and affective superiority.

Lacenaire's Loss of Language: Reconceiving the Complainte

Like Rivière, Lacenaire used writing to more closely control and more greatly exploit his last communicative opportunities. Not only did writing allow him to displace, lengthen, and elaborate upon the discours d'échafaud, it also gave him a chance at fame during a time when executions and their accompanying linguistic conventions were becoming less and less public. In 1832, the guillotine was moved from the Hôtel de Ville to the Barrière Saint-Jacques in order to shorten the spectacle of the condemned man's journey from the prison to the scaffold. Executions were carried out at dawn to discourage disorderly mobs from assembling.

In addition to being less visible at the time of their deaths, Lacenaire and his accomplice, Avril, were deprived of the opportunity to make a final, public speech.

Versions of their last moments insisted, in various ways, on Lacenaire's silence. La gazette des tribunaux describes the murderer's fear cutting him short: "Lacenaire descend brusquement de la voiture . . . il balbutie et semble chercher des paroles que sa langue se refuse à articuler. . . . Il avait annoncé qu'il parlerait au peuple; mais il n'en a plus la force

. . . " (qtd. in Demartini, L'affaire Lacenaire 262-263). In Le constitutionnel's version,

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however, Lacenaire is calm and stoic, unable to speak because of the rapidity of the ceremony: "il promène pendant quelques secondes des yeux assurés sur la foule, et paraît un instant se recueillir comme pour la haranguer . . ." (2). In this second version,

Lacenaire is seized by the executioner's assistants before he can begin to speak.

Demartini compares these passages, interrogating in passing their verbal elements:

"Renonce-t-il à une harangue faute de force ou faute de temps?" (264). But the newspapers, whether they portrayed Lacenaire as cowardly or courageous, agreed to his being bereft of a final speech.

Lacenaire's predicament was typical of nineteenth-century executions. Laurence

Guignard's explanation of this trend bears repetition: "Sur l'échafaud, en effet, la parole, hypocrite, est prohibée. À l'exception de quelques mots de repentir adressées à voix basse

à l'aumônier et à Dieu, le silence est exigé" (171-172). Guignard mentions the example of one Asselineau, executed in 1827, who, despite the "ferveur de son repentir," was dissuaded from delivering a speech that he had prepared and memorized. Guignard adds:

"La rapidité même du supplice empêche aussi la prise de parole" (172). The invention of the guillotine had changed the ceremony of death some time before Lacenaire mounted the scaffold, and we can assume the assassin knew that making a speech would be difficult, if not impossible.114 I believe Lacenaire's memoir was designed to make up for his lack of opportunity to make a public and coherent discours d'échafaud. During the

Old Regime, the condemned were expected to use this speech to stage their remorse and warn onlookers to shun their fate. Unlike those who pronounced the traditional discours

114 While the advent of the guillotine made final speeches rare, it could not eliminate them altogether. As we saw in my introduction, Louis XVI and Pierre-Charles-Rodolphe Foulard insisted, with varying degrees of success, on speaking from the scaffold despite efforts to keep them silent. Also, nineteenth-century complaintes continued to portray scaffold speech, marketing this trope to an eager audience.

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d'échafaud, however, Lacenaire uses his own guilt to accuse others of still greater culpability. He indicts both his family and those who refused to provide him with meaningful employment. In his memoir, Lacenaire ceaselessly asserts that a corrupt, hypocritical, elitist society is responsible for his conduct.

Lacenaire's written revolt was impeded, however, by the censors and the scruples of his publishers. On the day following the convict's death, Ollivier, a publishing and bookselling company, announced the upcoming debut of Lacenaire's memoir, but this advertisement was quickly followed by rumors of the text's confiscation by the police.

The memoir was finally printed in May of 1836 by Les Marchands de nouveautés, a publishing house that was probably more willing than Ollivier to alter the manuscript.

Demartini explains how the latter "a dû céder sa place aux Marchands de nouveautés, un confrère peut-être plus docile" (323). The authorities' alarm and the violence done to

Lacenaire's writing attest to its inflammatory nature. In addition to presenting an atheistic, materialist worldview, the memoir criticizes political and religious institutions, lampoons the bourgeoisie, and justifies violence and self-interest. But perhaps equally troubling was Lacenaire's manipulation of the complainte, both in his memoir and his poetry. Unlike the criminal figures of conventional complaintes, whose stories of depravity and greed present clear notions of good and evil, Lacenaire set out to muddy the waters, to sap the strength of social mores.

We have already seen how Rivière's memoir serves a similar function, displacing his guilt onto his mother and everyone who took her side. Foucault theorized that Rivière was fully aware of complaintes and eager to emulate their message of (self)-abjection.115

115 Foucault argues: "il est venu loger son geste et sa parole en un lieu bien déterminé dans un certain type de discours et sur un certain champ de savoir." In this "well-determined" discursive niche of self-

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But while his memoir reproduces essential elements of the complainte ("le sujet parlant porte visiblement son meurtre, s'isole en lui, appelle la loi, invoque à la fois la mémoire et l'exécration"), it also embodies everything that, according to Foucault, the complainte is not supposed to be: "aveu (au sens juridique) . . . justification . . . réconciliation" (273).

Rivière's recognition of his guilt goes hand in hand with his self-justification, and while he calls himself a monster, he also goes to great pains to humanize himself. He complicates the Manichean quality of canard-complaintes, their folkloric portrayal of absolute good and evil.116 Most importantly, Rivière does something most subjects of complaintes never did: he uses the first person on his own behalf. His most innovative and (perhaps his only) revolutionary action was to be one of the first condemned criminals of the peasant class to write extensively about himself.117

Similarly, Lacenaire manipulates the complainte to throw blame on members of his family. In both his memoir and his poetry, he adopts, often ironically, a theme common to complaintes and popular legends: a warning to parents, lest their children develop criminal tendencies. In Surveiller et punir, Foucault cites the apocryphal speech humiliation, the criminal articulates the horror he inspires in others and himself, proclaiming his "monstrosity" for all to hear (Moi, Pierre Rivière 273). According to Foucault, one of the "traits remarquables" of complaintes was their use of the first person (272). The majority of nineteenth-century criminal complaintes, however (including one about Rivière included in Foucault's dossier), were written in the third person. But there were exceptions to this rule, and complaintes sometimes included last words in the form of direct discourse. The 1829 "Grande complainte tirée des journaux et des audiences de la cour d'assises de la Meuse . . ." contains a significant segment written in the first person. In this case, the condemned man accuses himself in accordance with convention. In the "Complainte sur Fieschi le régicide," however, the criminal's words are anything but repentant, for he makes vulgar jokes and pronounces "gros mots" on the scaffold. 116 See Thomas Cragin's Murder in Parisian Streets for a discussion of the folkloric roots of this popular genre. 117 In Philippe Lejeune's "Crime et testament: les autobiographies de criminels au XIXe siècle," we find only two other condemned authors who originated from the lower classes and wrote about their crimes during the first half of the nineteenth-century. The first is Pierre Lemaire de Clermont, executed in 1825. "Fils de paysans pauvres et vertueux," he committed several murders (87). The second is none other than Pierre-Victor Avril, Lacenaire's accomplice. When Les Marchands de nouveautés published Lacenaire's memoir in 1836, they included a fragment of Avril's memoir at the end of the volume. In a move resembling Foucault's handling of the Rivière dossier over a century later, this publishing house chose to leave Avril's idiosyncratic spelling unaltered.

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of Marion le Goff, "chef de bande célèbre en Bretagne au milieu du XVIIIe siècle," who supposedly cried from the scaffold: "Père et mère qui m'entendez, gardez et enseignez bien vos enfants; j'ai été dans mon enfance menteuse et fainéante . . . " (79). The use of public executions to instruct parents and their children continued into the nineteenth century. In the "Grande Complainte tirée des journaux et des audiences de la Cour d'assises de la Meuse . . . ," a condemned man warns his children not to follow in his footsteps, instructing them to curse his memory. While imprisoned in the Conciergerie,

Lacenaire wrote a complainte that begins along similar lines, but with great sarcasm:

Voilà, voilà la complainte de Lacenaire. Accourez tous, chrétiens et bonnes dames, Venez aussi, méchants petits moutards! Oui, venez tous, pour le bien de vos âmes, De notre sang repaître vos regards! Que notre supplice, Vous convertisse, Petits enfants qui volez du nanan! (171)

Lacenaire parodies the typical opening of the complainte, which calls attention to the speaker. (The colporteurs who sang such verses in Parisian streets or rural villages also began with calls to public attention.) But Lacenaire undermines the genre's moral purpose by suggesting that his listeners are not in search of edification so much as carnage.

Like Marion le Goff, Lacenaire evokes his childhood vices: "Tout maume encor, et malgré porte close, / Je dérobais biscuit et massepain" (171). Lacenaire's recollections are pointedly sardonic, for his early criminal efforts were fairly sophisticated. Rather than stealing pastries, Lacenaire and his brother stole money from their mother, deceiving her with their own private code, "des mots d'argot" (64). Lacenaire's false repentance contributes to his satire: "Mon cœur s'afflige,/ Mon sang se fige" (172); we know from his memoir that he was without remorse.

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Whereas Lacenaire's complainte is a tongue-in-cheek rendition of one of the most widely consumed forms of nineteenth-century popular literature, his memoir presents a more subtle reworking of the discours d'échafaud. In his prose, Lacenaire describes his early years with pathos and self-pity. He paints himself as a hypersensitive child, the product of an unhappy marriage between a dominant, overbearing father and a submissive, neglectful mother. Lacenaire blames his family for his subsequent transgressions. If, in his memoir, he warns children "ne volez jamais vos parents" (64), his story is primarily a warning to parents who, like his own, neglect their children:

"puisse cette leçon ne pas être perdue pour bien des parents" (37). Lacenaire's guilt, the cause of his misfortunes, is redirected at others. He blames his brother for instigating his early thefts and his father for his ignominious death. After one of Lacenaire's adolescent transgressions, his father pointed out the guillotine and destined his son for the deadly machine: "'Tiens, me dit-il, regarde, c'est ainsi que tu finiras si tu ne changes pas.'" From this moment, Lacenaire felt the presence of "un lien invisible entre moi et l'affreuse machine" (66). This passage illustrates how supposed methods of deterrence backfire, how the logic of the complainte fails; instead of instilling fear and respect for the law, public executions engender a morbid fascination. Upon seeing the guillotine, Lacenaire feels uncanny desire.

Murder as Metaphor

On December 14th, 1834, Lacenaire committed a double homicide with the aid of

Pierre-Victor Avril, whom he met and recruited in prison. The object of the crime was robbery and personal revenge; its victims were Chardon, another former inmate, and his

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elderly mother, with whom he lived. After striking the former with an awl, Lacenaire then attacked the widow Chardon, who was ill and confined to her bed. The two assailants stole 500 francs, some silverware, and a few clothes.118 This crime was followed, about two weeks later, by the attempted murder of a garçon de recette or bank courier. Lacenaire, after fabricating a false debt and assuming the identity of a fictive defaulter, set a trap for the courier, intending to murder him and steal the money he would be carrying when he came to collect the debt. This plan failed several times, but came closest to succeeding on January 31st, when Louis Genevey, a courier for the offices of MM. Mallet, escaped after struggling with Lacenaire and his accomplice

François. Although Lacenaire was guilty of other crimes, including a murder in

Switzerland and the attempted murder of one Javotte, a seller of stolen goods, his judges and the press concerned themselves primarily with his crimes against the Chardon family and Louis Genevey.

Like Rivière, Lacenaire avoids writing at length about the details of his crimes, focusing rather on the events leading up to and following his double homicide. Both memoirs present murder as their raison d'être, yet fail to describe it. Instead of relating the deaths of Chardon and his mother, Lacenaire explains that he went to their home, concluding: "on sait le reste" (123). In regards to the attempted murder of Genevey, he says much the same thing: "On connaît aussi les détails de cette tentative dont je ne parlerai pas ici" (124). Rivière follows a similar narrative strategy, although his brevity incorporates a few more details: "Profitant de cette occasion je saisit la serpe, j'entrai dans la maison de ma mére et je commis ce crime affreux, en commencant par ma mére,

118 These details can be found in the endnotes of Albin Michel's edition of Lacenaire's memoir (pages 332- 333), as well as in the first volume of Fouquier's Causes célèbres de tous les peuples.

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ensuite ma sœur et mon petit frére, après cela je redoublai mes coups . . ." (137). Rivière, who recounts at length the events leading up to and following the murders, describes the act itself in less than one sentence. Because of the press, contemporary readers were all too aware of the gory details, making lengthy retellings of these crimes unnecessary. But aside from expediency, the elision of the killings diffuses violence throughout these texts, making murder appear ethereal, abstract, and metaphoric, part of a philosophical or political discourse as opposed to an act inflicted on real people. Ever present in the reader's mind, violence is both everywhere and nowhere. This narrative strategy makes it easier to endow murder with symbolic qualities. Like Rivière, Lacenaire depicts his criminal activity as surpassing ordinary homicide, as transcending self-interest, even though his murders involved theft and were clearly motivated by desire for material gain.

Lacenaire's memoir consistently overdetermines murder and (retroactively) associates it with revolt, contagion, suicide, and communication. Although he cites economic injustice as his primary motive, he did not attack the wealthy classes he so often criticized. Instead, he killed a former inmate and an old woman, lashing out within his own criminal milieu because of an old grudge: "J'avais connu Chardon à Poissy en

1829; nous étions ennemis; des discussions d'intérêt avaient fait naître cette haine" (122).

Yet the memoir describes murder as a means of attacking the social edifice on which the privileged depend: "Croyez-vous que c'était l'appât de l'or que je devais trouver chez

Chardon qui m'avait poussé? Oh non! C'était une sanglante justification de ma vie, une sanglante protestation contre cette société qui m'avait repoussé; voilà quel était mon but, mon espoir" (123). Lacenaire uses the murder of another marginalized individual to sound the trumpet of revolt. He hopes to spark a criminal epidemic, predicting that others

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will imitate him, much as he read and imitated Vidocq: " . . . l'assassinat n'est jamais plus fréquent que lorsqu'on vient de condamner un homme pour assassinat. . . . En sortant de la cour d'assises, on est toujours plus disposé à commettre un crime qu'en y entrant" (94-

95). Lacenaire's crime, having failed to attack the powerful and privileged, is useless in itself as an act of class revolt. Its revolutionary potential is reduced to its perlocutionary effect, to its impact on others. Lacenaire (anachronistically) "inverts" Austin's theory of performativity: instead of interpreting speech as a form of action, he recasts criminal activity as a kind of speech, as a declaration of rebellion inviting others to follow suit.

In another move displacing his guilt onto others, Lacenaire compares violence to the most basic of communicative acts, a seal or signature. Accusing the rich, he contrasts his metaphorical signature with theirs:

. . . chaque jour vous foulez aux pieds, vous broyez sous vos dents, sans remords, le cadavre de vos victimes; chaque jour vous marchez sur des douleurs saignantes, sans daigner vous retourner. . . . je viens protester contre l'ordre atroce que vous avez établi pour vous dans la nature, parce que je savais que je devais la signer et la sceller avec le mien. . . . (98, emphasis added)

If the privileged class has trampled "nature"119 with (legal) violence, Lacenaire seeks to superimpose his own bloody signature on theirs, thereby compensating for his silent childhood and his social impotence.

Murder becomes a kind of writing (quite literary a carving into and onto bodies) meant to signal the quintessence of the killer's identity. Like Rivière, the "auteur"

(Foucault et al. 73) of his matricide, Lacenaire equates murder with the written signifier.

119 Lacenaire argues that the only "natural" justification for violence is self-preservation: "hors ce cas, le meurtre ne peut se justifier" (97). Society has already perverted this "order." But Lacenaire's acts of violence are more of a counter-perversion than a return to nature, for he violates his own principal: "ce n'est plus pour ma vie que je combats, c'est pour la vengeance" (94). His murders are outside the natural order (as he defines it).

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And his double oeuvre, his meurtre-récit, is designed, like Rivière's, to elicit a secondary literature. Whereas Rivière envisaged posthumous praise, Lacenaire hopes for a wave of copycat killings. Yet he also seeks to have his trial "rewritten" by posthumous readers:

"retaillez vos plumes maintenant, moralistes, observateurs, qui avez voulu me juger sans me connaître" (98). By writing his memoir, he seeks to instigate an alternative judicial procedure, to displace his trial into the reader/ author relationship: "Ce ne sera pas de ma faute si je ne vous mets pas à même de bien me juger" (86).

Like murder, the act of writing signifies many things. Lacenaire's memoir stands in place of his trial and, as we shall see, his corpse. But to reconstitute his murders, his trial, and his body through writing, Lacenaire needed his memoir to remain intact, a circumstance over which he had little control.

Phrenological Readings: The Murderer as Object

Eager to receive a fair hearing from his readers and, more insidiously, induce them into criminal mimesis, Lacenaire was apprehensive lest hostile parties sabotage his message.120 His fears came to pass, for multiple passages of his memoir were censored after his death, and apocryphal passages added. This fear permeates his text, in which the condemned body becomes a metaphor for the author's vulnerability to censorship and ghostwriting. Lacenaire interweaves the fate of his body with the fate of his manuscript, claiming he fears not decapitation, but rather post-mortem examination, mutilation, and defamation, the latter on the part of phrenologists. He derides phrenology, a "science" invented by Franz Joseph Gall in 1796 that could supposedly ascertain a person's

120 Demartini has attempted to distinguish between the authentic portions of Lacenaire's text and those that were added after his death by examining two manuscript fragments from the Fonds Lacordaire of the Bibliothèque de Saulchoir. See her bibliography in L'affaire Lacenaire, page 409.

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character by examining the shape of his or her skull. Phrenologists believed they could infer personality by inspecting and comparing the protrusions of different parts of the cranium. On the first page of his memoir, Lacenaire speaks of phrenological methods with irony and sarcasm: "la phrénologie n'en est déjà plus aux conjectures, elle s'appuie sur des données certaines; elle est enfin aussi avancée dans sa marche que la pathologie du choléra" (25). Two years earlier, in 1832, Paris had been struck by a catastrophic cholera epidemic. Infectious diseases were still poorly understood, and the epidemic gave rise to conspiracy theories. In Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses, Louis

Chevalier recounts how some of the poorest Parisians believed the epidemic was orchestrated by the bourgeoisie and the government in order to thin the populace.

Passers-by suspected of poisoning food and water supplies were "massacred" (XXI).

Thus when Lacenaire compares phrenology to the "pathology" of cholera, he creates an analogy between two vague, paranoid, pseudo-scientific practices.

The phrenological studies performed on Lacenaire were conducted in order to explain his propensity for violence. In this sense, phrenologists set out to reinforce an already know fact: Lacenaire was a killer. In contrast, the doctors who examined Rivière debated whether the peasant was sane or mad, responsible or unaccountable for his crime.

Phrenology was not a factor in diagnosing Rivière.121 Regarding Lacenaire, there was never any doubt that he was fully responsible for his actions, and medical opinion played no part in determining his guilt or innocence. Phrenologists examined Lancenaire out of

121 Instead, medical doctors based their differing opinions on a variety of practices and theories, ranging from physical examination to consideration of Rivière's medical history. Medical experts also made conjectures based on heredity, on the murderer's behavior, and the strange rationale behind his crime. Among the doctors who wrote medical reports for the Rivière case, only Bouchard mentions phrenology, explaining: "Je n'ai pas fait de recherches phrénologiques, car si cette science est encore très peu avancée, je dois convenir aussi que, sur ce point, mes connaissances sont trop imparfaites pour que je voulusse en faire l'application dans une circonstance aussi grave" (Foucault et al. 152).

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curiosity and, according to the assassin, a desire to show off their sophistry. For this reason, medical study of Lacenaire's body continued after his death, although it began while he was still alive. The phrenologists Alexandre Dumoutier and Hyppolite

Bonnelier, for instance, visited the convict in prison, where they took a plaster mold of his skull.

Even before this event, Lacenaire was certain that phrenologists would misinterpret his personality upon examining the shape of his severed head. He associates this potential medical misinterpretation with literary misinterpretation: Lacenaire feared readers would misunderstand him should ghostwriters tamper with his memoir. He wrote two prefaces to his manuscript that (respectively) condemn phrenology and apocryphal writing. In his first preface, Lacenaire predicts: "Je vois d'ici une nuée de phrénologues, de cranologues, physiologistes, anatomistes, que sais-je? tous oiseaux de proie vivant de cadavres, se ruer sur le mien sans lui laisser le temps de se refroidir" (25).122 Lacenaire's body was indeed appropriated by science and shown to the curious: in addition to molds of his head, a mummified hand was put on display. Laurence Senelick mentions that "its red fell, long nails and yellowed skin were viewed by Théophile Gautier . . ." (292), who wrote a poem minutely describing the severed hand. In this poem, "Lacenaire becomes reducible—literally—to the hand that did the killing," to a "fetishistic" body part

(Downing 47-48).

The French Revolution's many changes to the nation's legal code included the stipulation that families of condemned criminals could henceforward reclaim and bury their kinsmen's bodies. Napoleon incorporated this reform into his own laws. Article 14

122 Le journal de Rouen later used a similar image to describe this event, which occurred according to Lacenaire's prediction: "A peine Lacenaire et Avril avaient-ils expiré . . . qu'une nuée d'hommes de l'art s'est abattue sur les pavillons de l'école [de médecine]" (qtd. in Demartini, L'affaire Lacenaire 291).

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of the 1810 Penal Code specifies: "Les corps des suppliciés seront délivrés à leurs familles, si elles les réclament, à la charge par elles de les faire inhumer sans aucun appareil'" (Chauveau and Hélie 133).123 Nevertheless, the bodies of the condemned were often given over to medical research when families failed to claim them. Laurence

Guignard explains: "Les familles usent très rarement de ce droit soit par désintérêt soit parce que, les autorités ne précisant pas la date de l'exécution, elles n'en ont pas le temps." The bodies of the condemned were usually buried in a section of the cemetery nicknamed "le champ aux navets" (175), which was otherwise reserved for those who died destitute in hospitals. Doctors would then come to the cemetery to retrieve the body, sometimes going so far as to bid on it. Lacenaire was buried for only a few hours in the

Montparnasse cemetery before his body was exhumed for scientific study.124 After a mold was taken of his head, the skull was opened up and the brain examined by

Dumoutier.

Six days later, a report of this autopsy was read aloud before a curious audience in the Musée phrénologique, a museum that Dumoutier had opened in his Parisian home.

No less than seven to eight hundred visitors attended this event, which included an opportunity to view two models of the murderer's head, taken respectively before and after his decapitation. The author and reader of this report was Dumoutier's collaborator, the amateur phrenologist and Romantic writer Hippolyte Bonnelier, who describes the murderer's skull as the most authentic evidence of his character and personal history. In his report, Bonnelier implies that phrenology can supplement and perhaps even replace

123 See also the first chapter of the Code des délits et des peines, entitled "Des peines en matière criminelle." 124 Demartini explains: "Pour Lacenaire, abandonné par les siens, ainsi que pour Avril, l'inhumation n'a donc duré que quelques heures" (L'affaire Lacenaire 291).

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autobiography. Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini elucidates this competition between literature and science in her extremely thorough account of the Lacenaire case:

. . . la méthode phrénologique aboutit à une complète réduction de Lacenaire et à sa pleine ouverture au langage de la rationalité: le crâne est un livre ouvert. "La tête de Lacenaire dit sa vie: elle est l'avant-propos de ses Mémoires," écrit le fervent adepte de la phrénologie qu'est Bonnelier, révélant ce faisant la vraie ambition de la lecture phrénologique: se substituer à la lecture autobiographique. Et si le crâne de Lacenaire dispense de ses Mémoires, c'est bien parce que le cadavre a mué le monstre de sujet en objet. (L'affaire Lacenaire 294)

Lacenaire's first preface anticipates this "lecture phrénologique" and sets out, preemptively, to overturn it. By illustrating the complexity of his character, Lacenaire pits autobiography against science, postulating that the former can better account for human nature and its aberrations.

But in his second preface, he presents a parallel and complementary reason for taking up his pen. "Sur le point de poser la plume pour [se] livrer tout à fait au dolce farniente" (28), Lacenaire is alarmed to hear that a newspaper is about to publish, without his permission, an excerpt of his half-written manuscript. He thumbs through his pages to see if any are missing. After verifying that his manuscript is still intact, he suspects that a facsimile has been created by another writer. Finally, he discovers that an article he previously wrote is being passed off as this excerpt. Lacenaire fears, almost simultaneously, theft, apocryphal writing, and the misrepresentation of his own words.

He claims that he would have abandoned his project were it not for the threat of a false memoir.

Lacenaire's two prefaces present two sides of a single apprehension: having one's body mutilated and misread is analogous to having one's writing hijacked, deformed, and given to credulous readers. This dual trepidation pervades the memoir. Later in the text,

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as he reflects on his misfortunes, Lacenaire tells the story of M..., who stole and published one of the assassin's satirical political songs after making some modifications.

Having one's writing sabotaged, Lacenaire argues, is akin to having one's body maimed.

He compares M's betrayal to being flayed alive: "J'ai raison de dire que vous avez estropié la chanson, monsieur? . . . Passe pour me voler, mais m'écorcher tout vif!" (113).

Lacenaire creates an analogy between text and corpse, between plagiarism and bodily torture.

This same analogy is further developed by whatever ghostwriter altered

Lacenaire's text without his permission. The memoir predicts: "[la société] voudra châtier mes pages après avoir mutilé mon corps" (109). Demartini believes that this line, absent from the convict's manuscript but included in the first published version of his memoir, was not written by Lacenaire himself: "Curieusement, le passage intègre un avertissement au lecteur sur la manipulation du texte qu'il lit . . . " (L'affaire Lacenaire 320). Moreover, historians, literary critics, and editors generally agree that the last 26 pages of the

"original" edition, published in 1836 by Les Marchands de nouveautés, are apocryphal.

These pages express uncertainty, fear, and repentance. Laurence Senelick affirms they were added by "a hack ghost-writer filling out the posthumous narrative" (284).

Demartini presents the intriguing theory that this ghostwriter was none other than

Bonnelier. Citing a passage towards the end of the memoir in which Dumoutier takes a plaster mold of the (still living) convict's head, she argues that "ayant assisté au moulage de Dumoutier, [Bonnelier] était bien placé pour en raconter l'épisode . . ." (L'affaire

Lacenaire 323).

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These final 26 pages cause the text's coherence to dissolve from within.

Lacenaire's final days are fictionalized in a way that erodes both his voice and his sense of self. Within these apocryphal pages, the assassin's assessment of his worth and identity becomes increasingly unstable as the date of his death approaches: "Depuis quelques jours je reconnais une grande différence, en moi, devant les visiteurs qui m'épient, me traduisent à leur façon, c'est-à-dire de cent mille façons . . . et moi, devant moi-même, je tranche tantôt du bon garçon, tantôt du scélérat . . ." (136). Lacenaire's plethora of visitors and their competing interpretations undermine the condemned man's self-appointment as privileged narrator. Their diverging perspectives spread like a contagion through his mind, which can no longer cling to a single story.125

Not surprisingly, the ghostwriter also overturns Lacenaire's protestations against phrenology. On the eve of his execution, the fictive Lacenaire examines the results of

Dumoutier's mold and reflects: "Si leur science phrénologique ne ment pas . . . voilà un plâtre qui va contredire beaucoup de mes paroles, qui va ruiner mon système, qui va dénoncer mes sensations secrètes et m'accuser de mensonge" (138). This sentence contradicts the entire purpose of the memoir. Until now, Lacenaire has mocked phrenology as primitive and reductionist, but here he worries it contains truths that could unmask him. Moreover, he begins to doubt not only the sincerity of his memoir, but also his desire to write it: ". . . le but que j'attendais de l'idée d'écrire ces Mémoires, je le sens moins: ce plaisir de m'expliquer à loisir, avec détail, s'affaiblit; il est temps que cela finisse: j'ai beau m'irriter contre la société, m'exhorter à lutter . . . la voix secrète . . . me simplifie mes propres impressions . . . ; et simplifié, je me trouve peu de chose . . ." (135-

125 As Demartini explains, "la voix de la conscience grandit en Lacenaire, au gré de nuits désormais agitées qui ébranlent les convictions diurnes, disqualifient l'écriture poétique et autobiographique, creusant le fossé entre l'être et le paraître, dissolvant le moi" (L'affaire Lacenaire 321).

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136). Lacenaire is almost penitent, close to recognizing his own abjection, as would a typical protagonist of the complainte.

But the real Lacenaire, ever cognizant of his text's vulnerability, was careful to deliver his own avertissement to those who would alter it: "Calomniez, calomniez, il en reste toujours quelque chose, il en restera toujours quelque chose de moi" (95). Writing is

Lacenaire's way of having something left over after his death that is still his. He desires a

"reste" or remains that is whole, a self-portrait that will survive the partition and scrutiny of his body. Evoking swarms of vulture-like anatomists, Lacenaire asks: "je ne m'appartiens plus en ce moment; que sera-ce après ma mort?" (25). At stake, then, in the creation of his manuscript, is the question of whether a person's story (and in a sense, his body) can belong to him after death, and a shameful death at that. Through his memoir,

Lacenaire strives to maintain a metaphorical "body" that is integral, intact.

If the convict's final wishes for his body and his manuscript were not respected, fragments of both did survive. Even the phrenologists were influenced by the self-image

Lacenaire created for himself. Bonnelier's report contains eerie similarities to Lacenaire's memoir (both are rife with contradictions). In his transcription of Dumoutier's autopsy,

Bonnelier enumerates several traits that Lacenaire himself elaborates at length in his memoir:

. . . [il] faisait peu de cas de la vie. — Bien que sensuel, il pouvait supporter la frugalité. — Très affectueux, il aurait aimé ses enfants, sa famille. —L'idée de la destruction lui paraissait simple, elle lui était familière. . . . —Il était avide d'acquérir plutôt pour satisfaire à ses besoins accidentels que pour conserver. . . . le peu de développement dans l'activité des organes des sentimens religieux et de la croyance en une autre vie explique son scepticisme. . . . — Homme à projets. . . . — Il était éminemment artistique. . . . Il était gai, plaisant; inventait un rationalisme pour motiver son irréligiosité. —Observateur . . . (Bonnelier 13-14).

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During their visits with the incarcerated criminal, Bonnelier and Dumoutier were charmed by his conversation. Bonnelier remembers calling on the convict, who, with

"bonne grâce" (8), permitted his guest to feel his head. Even Dumoutier fell under the spell of Lacenaire's legend, recognizing in him certain characteristics "qui sont nécessaires pour être grand, même dans le crime" (qtd. in Demartini, L'affaire Lacenaire

293). Try as he might to "unmask" the convict, Dumoutier succumbed to the myth of the criminal as an exceptional human being who, under different circumstances, might have proven himself a great man.

The Question of Courage

Despite his reluctant admiration of Lacenaire's persona, Dumoutier concluded that the object of his study was "peu courageux" (Bonnelier 13). Much as Lacenaire foresaw his post-mortem dissection, he also saw this observation coming: ". . . j'ai appris qu'un de ces savants professeurs, qui ne procèdent en observations et en morale que par bosse et protubérances, avait dit de moi: Le défaut de courage l'a porté à se contenter de diriger le meurtre et à le faire exécuter par un complice. On se rappelle cette phrase souvent répétée: Lacenaire était la tête, Avril était le bras" (91). Lacenaire disputes his lack of courage at length, citing murders committed or attempted without the help of an accomplice. More importantly, he insists that he planned his death by guillotine as a form of self-destruction, that condemnation was part of his oeuvre.

Despite his bravado, Lacenaire balked at the prospect of arrest and traveled arduously to avoid it. The details of his flight and arrest are not so different from

Rivière's story. Lacenaire's final crime was a string of frauds. To better exploit the French

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banking system, he journeyed back and fourth between the Franche-Comté and Paris, passing through Dijon, Beaune, Geneva, and Lyon, "en répandant des faux tout le long de ma route" (127). He knew the authorities were in pursuit: "toute la police était à ma recherche, et, grâce à Avril, François, Germain et Bâton, elle commençait à avoir d'assez bonnes indications" (126). Although he tried to stay one step ahead of the police, they eventually cornered him in Beaune, where "un dernier instinct de conservation" (127) prompted him to lie about his identity. Only after his arrest did Lacenaire resign himself to death, to what he conceptualizes, in his text, as a suicide, an act of self-destruction.

Of course it is impossible to know with certainty if Lacenaire's desire for death was genuine. Accounts of his final moments were prolific, ranging from descriptions of extreme cowardice to respectable resignation. La gazette des tribunaux portrays

Lacenaire nearly fainting as he mounted the scaffold, half-carried by the executioner's assistants, whereas Le constitutionnel describes an unfazed Lacenaire "faisant un effort désespéré" (2) in order to swivel his head and gaze upward at the falling blade.

(According to Le constitutionnel, the execution had been momentarily impeded by a mechanical problem.) Various other newspapers took sides. Lacenaire's executioner, the last of the Sanson "dynasty," corroborates in his memoir Le constitutionnel's version, claiming that "le journal judiciaire le plus accrédité," no doubt La gazette, had succumbed to a "mensonge officiel" (505) propagated by the authorities. But Sanson's testimony did not put an end to the controversy: the legal historian François Foucart insists in his book Lacenaire, l'assassin démystifié (1995) that the story of a harrowing mechanical error was a lie and that Lacenaire's death was in no way exceptional.

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My purpose, however, is not to determine whether the assassin's beheading was in keeping with his ostentatious behavior, but rather to consider what stories of condemnation have to say about speech, language, and communication. Like Rivière's memoir, which concludes by recounting the moment of confession that led to its composition, Lacenaire's tells how his evolving relationship to speech culminated in autobiographical writing. Both criminals represent autobiography as the final stage in a long journey towards appropriation of the spoken word, an accomplishment that goes hand in hand with a dubiously desired condemnation. In Rivière's memoir, the murderer's reluctant confession puts an end to his fears and leads to the declaration that he is eager to die. Lacenaire depicts a similar transformation. During his trial, he explains, he was unexpectedly transfigured:

Étrange contradiction de l'esprit humain, direz-vous; vous vous piquez de fierté, vous dites que les humiliations vous pèsent, et vous avez affronté les regards du public qui se sont portés sur vous comme sur un épouvantable scélérat! Deux fois j'ai comparu sur les bancs de la police correctionnelle couvert du rouge de la honte, et je n'ai pas rougi un instant à la cour d'assises. . . . horreur, haine, mépris, n'étaient rien pour moi; c'est parce que je me suicidais. (46)

Lacenaire describes his trial as a suicide in which his speech assumes a persuasive and performative power: ". . . on se souvient qu'une personne a dit à l'audience qu'elle croyait

à ma parole d'honneur . . ." (115). The memoir both depicts and continues to participate in this transformation, which depends on the recognition of Lacenaire's "word of honor," on the condemned man's status as a speaking subject whose words carry a social weight.

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Conclusion: From Object to Subject

The prominence of last words in history and literature implies that "dying well" involves producing thoughtful speech in excruciating circumstances. Wishing to destroy

Lacenaire's reputation of daring, La gazette des tribunaux portrayed him as incapable of bodily control or verbal innovation. Whereas it depicts the repentant Avril facing death with a measure of courage, Lacenaire is deprived of bravery, lest his defiance take on an aura of virtue. In La gazette's article, he can neither speak nor move. His memoir, on the other hand, describes how death inspires speech and writing, the control of one's body and words.

It has been argued that Lacenaire desired himself and his oeuvre to be

"appreciated or subject to disapproval only as beautiful objects, according to purely aesthetic criteria" (Downing 50). I believe, however, that Lacenaire wished, through writing, to evade the status of object (scientific, esthetic, or otherwise), to show himself capable of speech, of movement, of change, and thereby escape the fixed and fatalistic deductions of phrenology. This science claimed it could unmask Lacenaire and force him to "speak" posthumously, to reveal the secrets of his true nature. But he and Rivière sought a different kind of posthumous voice, distinct from scientific, medical, and juridical analysis. Endeavoring to create self-images and narratives that would stand alone, they sought the status of primary sources speaking on their own behalf.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Double as Advocate: Speaking on Behalf of the Condemned in Sand's Mauprat

Mauprat (1837), one of George Sand's earlier novels, tells the story of a condemned Romantic hero who survives his death sentence. Unlike the Romantic figures studied in my first three chapters, Bernard de Mauprat stands innocent of his alleged crime and is eventually acquitted. Although he is spared execution and denied last words, his death sentence has important communicative repercussions. Bernard's trial brings about a long-delayed declaration of love. Edmée de Mauprat, the protagonist's distant cousin, purported victim, and the object of his obsessive pursuit, puts her affective cards on the table in court. After seven years of equivocation, she confesses that she loves her cousin. In a bold move, she insinuates her willingness to take his place upon scaffold, declaring: "A l'échafaud! toi! . . . on m'y mènera plutôt moi-même" (412). Edmée heroically prevents her lover's death by assuming the role of sacrificial victim. Her testimony, which anticipates a (hypothetical) scaffold speech, demonstrates the performative force of the female voice.

In this chapter, I aim to rethink critical readings of gender relationships, class, and politics in Mauprat.126 Rather than privileging male or female speech, I believe that Sand portrays men and women as interdependent doubles whose powers of expression grow

126 Bozon-Scalzitti mentions the pervasive linguistic dimension in Mauprat: "En fait, tous les personnages de Mauprat se définissent par leur relation tourmentée avec le langage . . . " (14). Over time, I argue, this relationship becomes less tormented, tying into the novel's optimistic message about the enlightening effects of education.

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stronger and weaker in tandem. The novel culminates in two spectacular trial scenes that,

I argue, stage a recovery of speech shared by three characters: Bernard, Edmée, and

Bernard's unofficial advocate, the wandering peasant Patience. During his imprisonment and his first trial, Bernard succumbs to despair. He believes that Edmée, shot twice in the chest by an unknown assailant (who turns out to be Bernard’s uncle), is about to perish.

Hampered in his powers of expression by his unwillingness to live, Bernard is nearly sacrificed for the many crimes of his family. With the injured Edmée unable to speak coherently, it is up to Patience, an amateur philosopher, to argue before the court on behalf of the accused. The peasant delivers a rebellious plea that exposes the corruption of Old Regime judicial procedure.

Whether or not male voices dominate Mauprat is a subject of critical disagreement. The fate of Edmée, which ties into the novel's troubling and enigmatic gender dynamic, is at the center of this controversy. The heroine has been read as a heroic figure, as a woman bent on controlling both herself and others, and as a brutalized victim.

It is open to debate whether she holds sway over her male entourage or whether she submits to patriarchal tyranny. Elena Patrick, for instance, reads Mauprat as a story about silencing the female voice, interpreting the heroine's marriage as a diminishment and metaphorical death.127 Such an interpretation implies that Sand's notice, which conceptualizes marriage in terms of "la beauté morale de son principe" (33), is ironic or misleading. On the other hand, Elena Anastasaki (among others) argues that Bernard is tamed and subjugated by Edmée: after a series of role reversals and inversions in which

127 In her article "George Sand's Mauprat, a Gendered Way from Aristocracy to Bourgeoisie," Patrick argues that masculine interests commandeer the heroine's speech and will, coercing her into exonerating her abusive cousin. Patrick claims that Mauprat reflects the bourgeois transformation of France that confined women to the domestic sphere. Caught up in this historical process, Sand's heroine suffers a forced erasure of "voice and desire" (75).

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the traits of "fort" and "faible" are interchanged between them (59), Bernard effectively surrenders.128 For Anastasaki, Mauprat stages the triumph of the female voice, which inspires and directs Bernard’s narration. As he reminisces about his past, Bernard sees himself through the eyes of the woman who transformed him: his former self is now

"devenu autre" (63). In this sense, Edmée is the true narrator of the story. Her ghost is speaking through Bernard, whose identity has become fused with the memory of his wife.129 Keith Wren politicizes this argument, claiming that in Mauprat, matrimony serves as a metaphor for the social contract. According to this logic, Sand's novel proposes an ideal model of marriage that foreshadows, from its diegesis set in the 1770s, revolutionary ideals of universal equality.130

I aim to shed light on this discussion by studying how Sand portrays the interplay of different kinds of speech—personal and judicial, frank and refined, masculine and feminine, aristocratic and popular—in court and in scenes of unofficial judgment. In reading Mauprat as a story of verbal apprentissage and the recovery, via condemnation, of spoken language, I argue that when it comes to speech, Sand portrays men and women as interdependent, if not strictly equal. The protagonist is saved by popular and women's

128 Yvette Bozon-Scalzitti also reads Mauprat in terms of a gender role reversal, in which "c'est l'homme qui occupe la place connotée féminine de la nature, de l'instinct, de l'impulsivité, et la femme le lieu dit viril de la raison et la maîtrise" (2). Bernard is metaphorically raped, experiencing "un viol de tout son être" (9) through his cousin's attempt to civilize him. Bozon-Scalzitti argues that although Edmée educates Bernard to take on the role of her "master," the heroine herself is the very incarnation of "maîtrise" and is thus turning Bernard into her counterpart: ". . . son égal, son alter ego, autrement dit un maître" (5). 129 Similarly, Lisa Blair, using Joseph Campbell's theories of mythology, argues that Edmée, far from being reduced to a victim, is the true hero of Mauprat. Edmée descends into a metaphorical hell, Roche-Mauprat, where she meets Bernard, her "unsuspected self, her opposite. . . . her unconscious" (129). After a series of trials, comparable to the defeat of mythical monsters (demons, beasts, and dragons), she reincorporates this otherness as part of herself. Martine Reid agrees that the story of Mauprat belongs more to Edmée than to Bernard: "la gratification est évidente qui consiste à célébrer les innombrables qualités de l'héroïne . . . " (49). 130 The French Revolution failed, however, to put such ideals into effect, particularly when it came to women. The year 1793 saw an "anti-feminist backlash" (Counter 5) against rights for women gained during the revolution's initial stages, including the right of daughters to inherit property in equal shares alongside their brothers. Unlike Wren, Patrick argues that women are more oppressed in bourgeois states than aristocratic ones.

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speech, both of which espouse the revolutionary principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.131

Only after his trial does Bernard truly master the art of the spoken word: Mauprat's incipit depicts an elderly Bernard recounting his life story to a pair of curious visitors, indicating that his narrative powers have increased considerably. This transformation becomes possible because those less socially powerful than he help him to survive and become civilized.

Although Bernard's judgment, condemnation, and trials have been read as superfluous episodes that overextend the novel's plot,132 I contend that these scenes are key to understanding Sand's vision of reciprocity between the sexes. In Mauprat as in the other novels considered in this dissertation, the trial is an essential literary device that puts all of the characters in the same place at the same time, revealing (to an unprecedented extent) who they really are, what they think, and what they feel: the most important revelation being not Bernard’s innocence or his uncle's guilt, but rather

Edmée’s love. My reading of Mauprat explains how the courtroom, rather than stifling or hijacking the female voice, creates a utopian vision in which men and women, aristocrats and plebeians, achieve the capacity to speak as a collective endeavor. In fact, the aristocratic protagonist depends on his female and popular counterparts, on his two

"doubles," Patience and Edmée, being able to speak as well.133 The trial catalyzes a

131 Sand was a lifelong enthusiast of Rousseau and made references to the philosopher throughout her personal letters and fiction. Christine Planté explains (in "George Sand, fils de Jean-Jacques") the omnipresence of Rousseau in Sand's works and the latter's attachment "aux valeurs que Rousseau incarne" (23): Rousseau's love of nature and solitary reverie as well as his political and social theory. 132 Wren, for instance, argues that George Sand is "overplaying her hand" when she delays Edmée's consent to marry Bernard beyond his return from America (363). 133 In his study The Literature of the Second Self, Carl Francis Keppler pinpoints the Romantic movement as "particularly rich in the production of Doubles" (x). This is especially true for Mauprat, in which the protagonist-narrator doubles two other major characters. Keppler defines the double as a "second self" or "physical extension of the self into an independent being that still retains its participation in the self it shares with its counterpart" (15). This definition fits well with my own reading.

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recovery of speech by Edmée and Patience on behalf of Bernard, who is too weak, discouraged, and inarticulate to save himself. Sand's scenes of crime and courtroom drama demonstrate how men and women experience in parallel the loss and recovery of language, for not until Edmée speaks is Bernard truly able to recover and posses his own voice.

The Beast and the Fairy: From Animal to Human Language

Like other Romantic heroes, Bernard occupies a liminal position and suffers a striking loss of language: raised in the wilderness amongst the uncivilized, he struggles to enter society. Imbued with a feudal ethos, he gradually adopts the principles of enlightenment philosophy. But his lust, stubbornness, and shame impede his powers of expression. Unlike Sorel and Cinq-Mars, Bernard does not indulge in hypocrisy or charades, and his loss of speech has little to do with political expediency or ambition.

Rather than speaking false, Bernard is often struck dumb. Following his childhood and adolescence in a violent, isolated community of men, he cannot find the words to communicate with women or address his more civilized relations. Throughout the novel, he struggles to proffer appropriate responses. When he stands accused, his verbal incapacity is amplified. Edmée, who civilizes her wayward cousin, is described in retrospect by her grieving husband as "la fée qui m'a transformé" (39). Indeed, her unexpected appearance on the witness stand brings him back to the world of the living and the social through an act of verbal "magic."

Bernard's condemnation precipitates the final stroke in his long and painful metamorphosis. Throughout the novel, Edmée effectuates Bernard's linguistic, social, and

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moral transformation. His transfiguration, however, remains incomplete, and the story opens on a note of linguistic dissonance: the elderly Bernard, who takes over the role of narrator after a brief prologue, is torn between two registers, two manners of speaking.

Alternating between exquisite politeness and harsh vulgarity, the old recluse shocks his guests. Within the course of a shared meal, he frightens his servants with his loud voice and "paroles d'impatience" before soothing them, mere moments later, with his "douce et quasi paternelle" manner. He uses "les termes les plus choisis" to address his visitors before letting out "un jurement . . . terrible" (38). Bernard's speech alerts his audience— both his dinner companions and the reader—to his hybrid nature, for the protagonist remains suspended between the human and the bestial.134 The story he subsequently tells explains the uneasy coexistence of two voices within one man.

When Bernard takes over the role of narrator, he explains to his visitors that he belongs to a waning aristocratic family. His youth forms the subject of his framed narrative. Within this story, two branches of his family oppose each other: one is led by

M. Hubert de Mauprat, a chevalier of the order of Malte, and the other by Bernard's grandfather, the crafty and treacherous Tristan. On one hand, Hubert and his daughter

Edmée inhabit the Sainte-Sévère chateau, a haven of luxury and familial affection.

Sheltered and doted upon, Edmée cultivates Enlightenment ideas through extensive reading and contact with the natural world. Tristan and his seven sons, on the other hand, represent the superstitions and abuses of the past: fancying themselves warlords, they pillage the countryside, committing rape and torture. This clan of men occupies the

134 For an analysis of Bernard's animal-like tendencies and their symbolic significance, see Yvette Bozon- Scalzitti's article "Mauprat ou la belle et la bête."

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Roche-Mauprat fortress, a den of criminal activity and feudal cruelty. Bernard, orphaned at an early age, is raised by his barbaric uncles.

Edmée and Bernard meet for the first time when both are seventeen years old.

Having wandered astray during a hunt, Edmée happens upon Roche-Mauprat without realizing where she is. Bernard, who intends to rape his cousin, is coaxed by the eloquent

Edmée into abetting her escape. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the two protagonists immediately double each other,135 with the novel's title hinting at their shared identity.

This doubling is key to the novel's resolution: in what follows, I argue that Bernard and

Edmée experience parallel verbal "deaths" and "resurrections," losing and then regaining the ability to speak. These two characters, who are verbally interconnected, resemble each other in many ways. Notwithstanding her refined upbringing, Edmée, like her cousin, is proud and ferocious. In addition to sharing certain hereditary characteristics— violent temperaments, feudal notions of honor, and self-destructive urges—they also experience a series of similar losses and misadventures, wanderings and psychosomatic illnesses. Both lose their mothers at a young age and grow up surrounded by male companions. As he comes to better understand their parallel natures, Bernard refers to

Edmée as a "jeune homme de mon âge" (197). The overly sensitive narrator, who sheds tears in abundance, is ostensibly more feminine than his female counterpart, whose writing demonstrates a "précision virile du style" (250).

In her article "A Heroic Voyage," Lisa Blair suggests that Mauprat is patterned upon the mythology and folklore of heroic quests, and indeed, both protagonists undergo and survive similar trials and calamities. Edmée's first ordeal—getting lost during a storm

135 As Bozon-Scalzitti points out: "Dans Mauprat même, le sort d'Edmée est solidaire de celui de Bernard. . . . il est très certainement son double. Ils portent le même nom, ils sont du même sang, ils ont le même âge, la même fortune . . ." (8).

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and wandering into her cousins' clutches—echoes one of Bernard's early misadventures.

As a thirteen-year-old boy, the protagonist was roaming the woods at nightfall with a few companions. The group happened upon the tour Gazeau,136 a ruined donjon occupied by

Patience, a mysterious hermit and reputed sorcerer rumored to enjoy the company of wolves. Having learned from his companion that Patience "n'aime pas les monsieu [sic]"

(69),137 Bernard, in a show of bravado, kills the hermit's pet owl. A preliminary scene of judgment and punishment turns the social tables when Bernard is tied up and whipped by his social inferior. After promising vengeance, the frightened young man gets lost in the woods, wandering alone for most of the night before finding his way home. In the distance, he hears the howling of wolves. A few pages (but several years) later, Edmée arrives at Roche-Mauprat under similar conditions, straying through the forest by night after losing her way during a wolf hunt. The figure of the lone wolf connects these three characters, leading them to each other.

Bernard and Edmée's first meeting begins with a violent verbal misunderstanding that precipitates the former's transformation and prefigures his painful adaptation to respectable pre-revolutionary society. Ignorant of Edmée's name and identity, but overwhelmed by her beauty, he addresses the young woman as if she were a prostitute.

Her response, "changez de langage et sachez à qui vous parlez" (93), sets the tone of their relationship. In order to enter society and compete for his cousin's hand, Bernard must communicate on her terms. Surprisingly, he almost obeys Edmée's first injunction, a testimony to the performative force of his cousin's orders. A sudden surge of empathy for her distress signals his future transformation: "Par une involontaire sympathie, je frémis

136 For an analysis of the "sociopoétique" and "psychopoétique" connotations of this location in Sand's novel, see Céline Bricault's article "La Tour Gazeau dans Mauprat de George Sand." 137 Sand's text places words of local dialect in italics.

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moi-même, et je faillis changer tout à coup de manières et de langage" (94). Bernard's body mirrors his cousin's fright as he shivers in sympathy with her own trembling. There follows a verbal duel in which the heroine convinces Bernard that they must flee the fortress. Only by deploying all of her skills—by insulting, reprimanding, pleading, pitying, reasoning with, and awakening in him ideas of love—is Edmée able to ward off sexual aggression. Bernard prolongs their negotiations, demanding that she promise to become his mistress: "jurez que vous serez à moi d'abord, et après vous serez libre."

Edmée subtly reformulates this vow, outsmarting him by swearing only "de n'être à personne avant d'être à vous" (108) in a verbal maneuver that makes possible her indefinite independence from men and marriage.

This scene sets up Bernard both as Edmée's verbal inferior and her double. In many ways, Edmée is Bernard's "second self," a creature who is both his copy and his opposite. Carl Francis Keppler describes the second self as an "intruder from the background of shadows" whose origins are unknown, often supernatural, and sometimes sinister. This apparition destabilizes the security and worldview of his or her double.

Bernard, as narrator, occupies the role of "first self . . . who tends to be at the foreground of the reader's attention" (3), whose thoughts are more accessible, and who is acted upon by the double. Edmée intrudes upon Bernard's masculine universe, where the laws of force determine human interaction. Often described as a divine or supernatural creature, she reconfigures his intellect, manners, and emotions, his way of making sense of the world. Even as a prisoner, she controls the unfolding of events. In keeping with Keppler's model, Edmée's intrusion into Bernard's life seems to be "at [her] initiative and under

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[her] control" (27), at least from the protagonist's perspective, who finds himself in love and at her mercy.

This is only the case, however, because Bernard is narrating the story. Were

Mauprat recounted from the heroine's perspective, Bernard could easily be read as

Edmée's second self, a sinister being from a criminal underworld who unites in his person both the natural and the bestial. Keppler explains that the "uncanny Twin [or double] often retains certain animal characteristics . . . " (29). After emerging from Roche-

Mauprat, Bernard shocks the civilized world with his animal-like appearance, and

Edmée's lady-in-waiting describes him as a beast or monster: "Il a l'air d'un ours, d'un blaireau, d'un loup, d'un milan, tout plutôt que d'un homme!" He resembles "un ogre,"

"un loir" (138-139). Moreover, Bernard, like many malevolent doubles, falls into the role of pursuer,138 literally chasing Edmée around Roche-Mauprat's great hall just as he later chases her through the forest before she is shot. As Edmée's pursuer, Bernard nearly drives her to death and destruction. For seven years he ceaselessly attempts to become her lover or her husband, even from his exile in America, where he hopes to win her approval.

Bernard represents the darkest part of Edmée's nature, for both are heirs to a long, bloody history of aristocratic oppression and both share a hereditary ferocity.

Reciprocally, Edmée evokes the potential good in Bernard and awakens his better half; from the beginning, she affirms that he is not naturally vicious. To the protagonist, however, she first appears as a tormenter who leads him through a series of ordeals and refuses, for seven years, to satisfy his lust. A metaphorical fée, she also represents the unknown and supernatural. As Keppler points out, when the second self becomes good,

138 Keppler argues that the pursuer is the most frequently occurring incarnation of the double in literature.

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the first self takes on the characteristics of the evil self, although "we feel him to be less absolutely vicious than benighted, someone like ourselves who has been corrupted. . . ."

In such a case, "the Power of Good appears as the uncanny and suspect counterpart, the alien intruder from the shadows" (101). Bernard experiences Edmée's influence as an assault that weakens and tears him apart. In addition to giving Bernard a social conscience, Edmée acts as the beloved who, as the hero's missing half, exerts a powerful attraction.139 This irrational pull is magnified by their shared bloodline, their familial bond. Edmée refers to herself as Bernard's "parente" his "sœur" (101) and calls him "mon enfant" (96).

But in order to be his protector and eventually his wife, Edmée must first conquer her pursuer. She wins her original contest with Bernard in more ways than one. Not only does she trick him into accepting a reworded promise, but she also tempts him to enter her social universe and sets his transformation in motion, for he recognizes that, by declaring his love, he has spoken for the first time in his life with "l'accent de la voix humaine" (105). Bernard's metamorphosis from beast into man is conspicuously verbal.

Only by learning to speak with civility, Sand implies, can the hero learn ethical behavior.

Thus begins a long period of communicative crisis between Bernard and the rest of the world that both culminates in, and is resolved by, his criminal trial. After meeting Edmée,

Bernard enters society as a verbally dispossessed individual who is mystified by basic precepts of civil communication. Instead of speaking, he weeps and howls like a beast. Ill at ease and lonely in his new surroundings, he explains: "j'avais envie de rugir comme un

139 Keppler sites Plato's myth of the Androgyne as one of the original stories of the double as "beloved." In this scenario, two lovers "attract each other . . . because they are each other" (132). Although he does not mention Mauprat, Keppler does discuss at length the protagonists of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, which, according to Patricia Thomson, was greatly influenced by Sand's novel.

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lion mis en cage" (131-132). Driven to despair, his animal nature reasserts itself: "j'aurais voulu rugir, et je mordais mon mouchoir pour ne pas céder à cette tentation" (164).

Bernard stifles his inhuman cries as he learns to control his words. In these initial days and weeks, he is doubly mute.

Upon entering Sainte-Sévère, Bernard is confounded by the unfamiliar habitus, by the refined tastes and manners that surround him. Edmée's father and her fiancé (the well-mannered but insipid M. de La Marche), treat this prodigal relation with extreme courtesy. Both are tricked by the young woman into believing that Bernard rescued her

(whereas Sand insinuates it was the other way around). Bernard struggles to comprehend their kind decorum: "je me tenais immobile et muet devant les protestations et les caresses dont j'étais l'objet" (123). Following his entry into society, Bernard is often the objet not only of praise and thanks, but also of suspicion, fear, and criticism. Only gradually does he become a speaking subject.140 When Hubert de Mauprat visits his great-nephew's bedside, the narrator explains: "J'essayai d'être poli et reconnaissant; mais les expressions dont je me servais ressemblaient si peu aux siennes que je me troublai et souffris de ma grossièreté sans pouvoir m'en rendre compte" (126-127). Bernard alternates between awkwardness and silence. He finds it "impossible de répondre un mot"

(127) when he encounters unexpected sympathy, and Edmée forbids him to speak of his love or of the oath he extorted from her. His cousin's behavior intimidates him into silence, at least most of the time: "Mes réponses ne pouvaient compromettre personne; c'étaient toujours quatre ou cinq paroles incohérentes, estropiées par la honte" (139).

140 Bozon-Scalzitti explains that Mauprat's "force" stems from "la mise en scène . . . de la naissance du sujet," a transformation that is never completely finished and that she compares to a "sacrifice sanglant" (1).

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After Edmée asserts that she will never "belong" to Bernard "si vous ne changez pas de langage, de manières, et de sentiments" (163), Bernard objects that speech is not equivalent to virtue, that elegant language does not equal love: "vous savez bien que je suis honnête . . . mais je vous déplais parce que je n'ai pas d'esprit, et vous aimez M. de

La Marche parce qu'il sait dire des niaiseries dont je rougirais" (167). Bernard nevertheless submits to receiving an education that will make him into his cousin's verbal peer, but only after overhearing a conversation between Edmée and her confidant, the abbé Aubert, in which the latter explains that even were Bernard to show his cousin affection and respect, his speech would still make him an unacceptable spouse: "songez- vous à l'impossibilité de vous entendre, à la grossièreté de ses idées, à la bassesse de son langage? . . . et dans quelle langue lui parleriez-vous, grand Dieu?" (192). In Sand's fictional universe, which borders on the marvelous, language is the obstacle that defines

Bernard's romantic quest, the chasm he must cross before he can reach emotional, sexual, and social fulfillment. Bernard must learn to speak with his cousin: such is the purpose of his entire apprentissage, and only by communicating with his female double can he understand himself. Edmée becomes his teacher, but she cannot confide in him, lest revelations of her love allow him to gain the upper hand. If Bernard's speech is crippled,

Edmée's must remain incomplete and self-censored until her cousin becomes her equal.

The admonished Bernard applies himself to receiving an "apprentissage humiliant" (202) that begins with grammar lessons. He makes rapid progress and undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis: "au bout d'un mois je m'exprimais avec facilité et j'écrivais purement" (203). The result of this progress, however, is a violent illness.

Entering society comes at a high physical price. Bernard is confined to his bed, suffering

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from psychological upheaval rather than any concrete malady: ". . . l'effroyable révolution que mon être était forcé d'opérer sur lui-même pour passer de l'état d'homme des bois à celui d'homme intelligent, me causa une maladie de nerfs qui me rendit presque fou pendant quelques semaines . . . me laissant tout rompu, tout anéanti à l'égard de mon existence passée, mais pétri pour mon existence futur" (204). Speech is bound to questions of life and death in more ways than one: not only condemnation, but also health and illness, stem from one's tumultuous relationship to spoken language. Bernard's illness, much like his earlier nocturnal wanderings, mirrors an ordeal suffered by Edmée.

Following the shock and exhaustion of her brief captivity, she also becomes bedridden for several days.

Even as he learns socially acceptable behavior and begins to understand the ways of courtship, Bernard continues to make blunders. Like Sorel, he is both acutely aware of his mistakes and unable to prevent them. His newly edified self falls into numerous pitfalls, the worst being the desire to show off his freshly acquired philosophy (Edmée has taken care to familiarize her suitor with her favorite authors: Condillac, Fénelon,

Rousseau, Montaigne, and Montesquieu). Moreover, the ostensibly reformed Bernard retains his characteristic bluntness and is periodically carried away by emotional outbursts. In order to better discipline himself, Bernard fights in the American

Revolutionary War for six years, but when he returns, traces of brutality and madness still appear in his letters to Edmée. The final stages of Bernard's sentimental education are interrupted (or perhaps precipitated) when a mysterious assassin shoots his cousin, and

Bernard is condemned in place of the actual assailant. The protagonist's situation—his character, his language, and his relationship to Edmée—can only be made clear to

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himself and others in the wake of a condemnation that makes way for riskier communication.

Uprootings and Transplantations

If Edmée doubles Bernard with her heroic and masculine attributes, Patience represents a parallel case of hybridity and social uprooting that manifests itself through speech. Like Bernard, Patience is displaced from his rustic environment into the society of Sainte-Sévère. Proud, stubborn, and irascible, he resembles the two protagonists. The word "patience," which he mutters to himself, is not a self-description, but rather a reminder or mantra, for as his friend Marcasse admonishes: "A votre âge . . . pas patient du tout! Tout le tort, oui, tort, vous!" (114).

Just as Bernard flounders while moving between sociolinguistic registers,

Patience, trapped between his rural background and his yearnings for knowledge, struggles to speak comprehensibly to others. Both men have received a scanty education, can barely read or write, and have the habit of making offensive outbursts. After a brief sojourn at a Carmelite school during his youth, Patience was expelled for his "franc- parler" (60), a quality that plagues Bernard again and again. The protagonist, as narrator, takes on the role of translating Patience's idiosyncratic speech, for he is powerless to reproduce it fully: ". . . en traduisant sa parole dans notre langue méthodique je lui ôte toute sa grâce, toute sa verve et toute son énergie" (159). Patience invents a dialect that exists between the poetic and the rational. His "langage rustique, animé d'une poésie barbare" (61), combines images and abstract ideas, the logical and the oneiric. Incapable of recitation, having "nullement la mémoire des mots," he expresses his thoughts "dans

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des improvisations où son génie triomphait de la barbarie de son langage" (156). A scanty memory, Sand implies, enhances powers of improvisation. Like Stendhal, Sand portrays memory and improvisation existing in an inverse relation to one another.

From his fist appearance in the novel, Patience is said to be in possession of

"magical" words. Like Edmée's speech upon the witness stand, Patience's intrusion into

Bernard's trial will later have the nearly magical effect of saving the protagonist's life.

The superstitious provincial population mistakes Patience for a sorcerer, and one of

Bernard's young companions warns him: "je viens de voir le sorcier qui dit des paroles sur sa porte, et je n'ai pas envie d'avoir la fièvre toute l'année [sic]" (69). Patience's magical powers, however, are of a different kind: he is at once a rhetorician whose torrent of "éloquence sauvage" and "enthousiasme irréfrénable" confounds religious orthodoxy

(67), a prophet who foresees the turbulence of the French Revolution, a "vieux oracle qui résout toutes choses sans en savoir aucune" (196), and the "fou du château" (175) who has the right to say whatever he pleases without incurring retribution. He is also, at regular intervals, both advocate and judge, not only in respect to Bernard, but also the rest of his countrymen. Nicknamed "grand juge" (397), he is later installed as district judge during the French Revolution.

Although during the days of the Old Regime, Patience exists outside social institutions (and often society itself), he influences social reality by shaping the behaviors and channeling the perceptions of those around him. In my introduction, I mention how institutions use performative language to assign identities to individuals. Through rites and rituals, through the establishment of names and titles, institutions guide human behavior by controlling how individuals perceive themselves and others. Bourdieu's

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explanation of this process, which he terms "social magic," bears repeating: "L'institution est un acte de magie sociale. . . . L'institution d'une identité, qui peut être un titre ou un stigmate ("tu n'es qu'un . . ."), est l'imposition d'un nom, c'est-à-dire d'une essence sociale" (Ce que parler veut dire 125-126). Naming and describing are powerful speech acts that influence human thought and action.

Sand implies that Patience's verbal powers are rooted in the natural as opposed to the social, having developed in response to his intense relationship with pastoral beauty.

Yet he exists as a (paradoxical) one-man institution, delivering advice, conducting interventions, pronouncing decrees, and ultimately telling people who they are and who they might become. In keeping with Bourdieu's idea of "social magic," Patience molds

Bernard's identity, transforming the way the protagonist sees himself, "la représentation que la personne investie se fait d'elle-même" (Ce que parler veut dire 124). Patience recognizes that he and Bernard are similar and predicts that the hero will become "un digne et honnête homme," just as Edmée is "une digne et honnête fille" (Sand 173).

Through this appellation of "honnête" and its connotations of honor, good faith, and law- abiding behavior, Patience coaxes the young man to conform to socially acceptable codes of conduct, to make himself agreeable to others. Patience also places Bernard in a position of (potential) symmetry to Edmée. As Bourdieu points out, assignations such as

"honnête homme" mean a great deal, since one who is named or titled "se sent sommé d'être conforme à sa définition" (Ce que parler veut dire 127).

Patience's prediction comes true, for Bernard begins to transform according to his wishes. Like the couple Bernard/Edmée, Bernard and Patience confront similar challenges and undergo parallel transfigurations. Bozon-Scalzitti describes how the two

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become more civilized in tandem: Bernard's "promotion au rang de propriétaire virtuel" via his appropriation of the abandoned Roche-Mauprat estate precedes "le premier compromis de Patience avec la civilisation." The latter abandons the tour Gazeau for a cottage neighboring Sainte-Sévère in order to conduct charitable work on behalf of

Edmée and her father. When Bernard comes back from America, the penultimate step in his courtly education, he discovers "la socialisation accrue de Patience" (6). These parallel trajectories imply that Patience, if only in a symbolic, vicarious sense, will also share in Bernard's condemnation. (I later argue that the same is true for Edmée.)

In Sand's play Mauprat (1854), which condenses the major arcs of the novel,

Patience conveys with precision the idea that he and Bernard are undergoing parallel transformations: "je suis comme vous, je suis têtu! nous nous ressemblons par plus d’un côté, allez ! nous sommes des gens de campagne tous deux, des hommes de la nature. . . .

On nous a transplantés et nous avons grand’peine à nous enraciner; mais nous nous y ferons avec le temps, parce que tous deux nous aimons Edmée" (Théâtre complet de

George Sand 63-64).141 In this passage, Patience uses the agricultural image of a plant being uprooted and planted in new soil to explain the tortuous process of socialization.

Although he originally lived in the wilderness, renouncing all but his most basic needs in exchange for greater freedom, Patience eventually becomes a cultivator, transplanting a variety of crops into his own garden. Such behavior marks the man's increasingly civilized behavior. He nevertheless remains, like Bernard, a character who exists at the margin of two worlds, a position that recalls the precarious (and prophetic) place of the condemned. This liminality has the paradoxical effect of granting him "magical" verbal powers even as he struggles to communicate with others. When he barges into Bernard's

141 This is the only citation I have taken from Sand's play as opposed to her novel.

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trial, Patience's speech both shocks the court and begins to reshape the machinery of justice.

Despite his transplantation into (the borders of) the social, Patience continues to feel more comfortable using a language full of natural imagery.142 Through the metaphor of painfully uprooting and re-integrating oneself into an alien soil, Patience gives an example of docile obedience to female authority: without the ascendance of Edmée, such a metamorphosis would not be possible. Patience has surrendered to the quasi- supernatural influence of the heroine whom Bernard describes as a fairy, an apparition from another world. As a successful transplant, Patience illustrates Bernard's potential. In

Sand's novel, the elderly Bernard doubles Patience's language, adopting this same image of an uprooted plant, suggesting he has, in a sense, become much like his former mentor:

"je suis un vieux rameau heureusement détaché d'un méchant tronc et transplanté dans la bonne terre, mais toujours noueux et rude, comme le houx sauvage de sa souche" (38). If

Bernard has been successfully transplanted, he is still living, somewhat arduously, between two worlds. From this utterance, we can see that in addition to adopting

Patience's philosophy, Bernard has learned to imitate the peasant's manner of speaking: his use of images, his agricultural metaphors. Like his former enemy, and despite their shared transplantation, Bernard remains a liminal figure, both socially and linguistically, teetering on the threshold between the civilized and the natural, between logic and metaphor. Bernard's eventual condemnation serves both to emphasize and exacerbate his precariously placed identity.

142 Popular language, Bourdieu explains, is often rooted in metaphor: "le langage populaire dispose de ses ressources propres qui ne sont pas celles de l’analyse mais qui en trouvent parfois l’équivalent dont une parabole ou une image . . ." (La distinction 537).

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Patience's character corresponds to Bernard's in another important respect: like the highly emotional, hypersensitive, uncivilized, and "natural" hero, Patience combines traits traditionally separated into categories of masculine and feminine. Although he is

"toujours fort gauche et timide avec les femmes" (60), there is no indication that he holds their gender in contempt. In fact, he acts as a substitute maternal parent to Edmée.

Although he describes himself as "une sorte de père nourricier" (398), Patience has not replaced Edmée's father, who is still alive, but rather her deceased mother. The word nourricier evokes the feminine nourricière: a foster mother, nursemaid, or wet nurse.

Although it has been suggested that Patience is part of a misogynistic band of men who break the heroine's will and force her into marriage,143 he and Bernard serve to praise and even worship the feminine. Edmée is described hyperbolically by the men who surround her as sainte, belle, fée, and fille de Dieu. Is she the object of exploitation, adoration, or of both? The attack upon her life only serves to complicate this question.

Speech and Silence as Deliberate Decisions

Apart from the trial scene, Mauprat takes place, for the most part, in the wilderness. The American désert that Bernard traverses during the Revolutionary War resonates with his native landscape, the desolate, forested Berry. On the other side of the socio-geographical spectrum is Paris, where Bernard spends a year between his escape from Roche-Mauprat and his departure for the New World. The protagonist's uneasiness within Parisian salon culture foreshadows his trial, the novel's only other public spectacle. In the salons, as in court, men are judged by their appearance and rhetoric, and

143 Patrick argues that "negative attitudes towards women are prevalent in Bernard's uncles, in Patience, and in the abbé Aubert, all of whom, as the novel explicitly states, despise women and remain unmarried" (80-81).

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Bernard, who has difficulty saying the right thing at the right time, is found lacking. Like the drawing rooms of Paris, the tribunal is a theatrical space to which would-be actors and spectators throng. In both spaces, Bernard perceives these onlookers as invaders who threaten the privacy of his family life and destabilize his precarious inner world.

In Paris, once word of Edmée's beauty spreads, her salon "devint trop étroit pour les beaux esprits de qualité et de profession et les grandes dames à idées philosophiques"

(221). Needless to say, Bernard resents this competition for his cousin's attention. Later, when he is put on trial, crowds again intrude upon his physical space and his fragile state of mind, for the protagonist's case quickly becomes a cause célèbre, with curious bystanders pressing at the doors and besieging the nearby Hôtel de Ville to catch a glimpse of him. Bernard's show trial recalls that of Sorel. In both cases, the proud protagonist resents being publicly exposed before his enemies. Moreover, these novels present trials not only as spectacles, but also scenes of sexual excitement for a female audience. In Le rouge et le noir as in Mauprat, the courtroom is "remplie de femmes"

(Stendhal 511). Both protagonists enthrall female onlookers with their young and handsome appearance. In Mauprat, "des jeunes filles du peuple se récrièrent tout haut" at the aspect of Bernard (371), while in Le rouge et le noir, Julien is met with "un murmure d'étonnement et de tendre intérêt" (511). Yet unlike Sorel, who is distracted by the beauty of these thrill-seekers, Bernard is deeply saddened by the aspect of the crowd, wherein he sees "aucun appui" (371). Sorel feels liberated by his imprisonment and trial and continues to take an interest in the world; the depressed Bernard feels little desire to speak or interact with others until Edmée unexpectedly appears.

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In Paris, Bernard derides the salon attendees in much the same way as he later ridicules the gawking courtroom audience. Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of

Edmée's favorite thinkers, he targets women who converse with greater facility than himself: "leur grande habitude du monde me faisait l'effet d'une insupportable effronterie" (221-222). Bernard's hostility towards socially adept women stems from his own sense of inferiority: "ma grande colère contre ces femmes venait de ce qu'elles ne faisaient aucune attention aux gens qui se croyaient du mérite et qui n'avaient pas de célébrité; et ces gens-là, c'était moi" (224). These women sway public opinion by approving or rejecting others' words; they have the power to censor or propagate ideas.

Bernard persuades Edmée of their inferiority by drawing upon Rousseau's notions of ideal womanhood: "[Edmée] aimait à reconnaître avec [Rousseau] que le plus grand charme d'une femme est dans l'attention intelligente et modeste qu'elle donne aux discours graves" (223).144

Bernard's critique of Paris, coupled with his assertion that "une femme vraiment supérieure . . . sait se taire" (223), certainly renders his worldview shocking from any modern, feminist perspective. Is Sand, as Patrick suggests, painting Bernard as a consummate misogynist in order to sabotage his narrative authority? Or is Bernard

Sand's mouthpiece (here as he is elsewhere), and therefore evidence of the author's own hesitation to champion women as speaking subjects? Without discounting the problems posed by this passage for feminist readings, I would argue that Bernard's tirade ties into broader themes of speech and silence that implicate men as well as women. While the

144 Christine Planté touches upon Sand's lack of objection to Rousseau's vision of women: "peu de réserves en revanche sont exprimées là où nous les attendrions surtout aujourd'hui, face à la position que Rousseau réserve aux femmes dans la famille et dans la société" (26). Planté mentions, however, one notable exception to this silence: Sand's 1845 novel Isidora, wherein a female character asserts that Rousseau has never understood women's intellectual and spiritual capacities.

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protagonist certainly echoes Rousseau's admiration for normative femininity, he is also defending his own reserve, the fondness for introversion that he and Edmée share. In

Paris, the loudest and most verbose have the final word, but Sand paints succinctness as more valuable than eloquence. Marcasse, who accompanies Bernard to America and discovers the hiding place of Edmée's assassin, speaks remarkably little and always in fragments. Although he is a commoner, his nickname hidalgo (a title given to Spanish noblemen) hints at his aristocratic nature. Silence and reserve carry connotations of nobility. On the other side of the verbal spectrum exist the clergy and the unintelligent aristocracy, as well as Parisian women. Bernard is repulsed by "le prieur des carmes, ce virtuose du discours mystifiant" (Bozon-Scalzitti 7), not only because this man is abetting and aiding his uncles, but also because of the monk's excessively civilized manners.

Characters who speak with ease, particularly M. de La Marche, Edmée's would-be husband, and the conniving clergy who attack the protagonist in court, are portrayed as untrustworthy. Bernard's aversion to speech is a hallmark of the Romantic hero, shared even by the long-winded Julien Sorel, whose "désir secret qu'on ne lui adressât pas la parole" (216) becomes all too obvious to his ennemies. The elderly Bernard reflects that he has been absent from Paris for more than thirty years, and he interrupts his story when he becomes "fatigué d'avoir tant parlé" (215). In Mauprat's economy of language, less is usually more, with Patience being the conspicuous exception to this rule.

Bernard and Edmée speak rarely, except to close friends and family members.

The heroine paradoxically dominates salon culture through her reserve (which connotes mystery, discipline, and eccentricity), her beauty, and her wealth, as opposed to spoken language. Bernard spends six years in the American wilderness speaking mostly to his

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naturalist friend Arthur and the concise Marcasse. When they appear in court, both

Bernard and Edmée are ashamed of the public attention they receive; both feel themselves superior to judicial theatrics and have no desire to verbalize their private, emotional lives. In court, their preference for silence contrasts with the "éloquence mystique" (309) of the theological forces arrayed against them and led by Jean de

Mauprat, who becomes a Trappist monk in order to better manipulate his nephew into handing over his fortune. Throughout the novel, Bernard maintains his contempt for those with polished language. This disdain extends to the guests who visit and record his story, part of the younger "génération efféminée" (Sand 39) that, unlike the hardy narrator, indulges in the stimulant of coffee. Civilization, Sand implies, brings as many losses as gains. "Civilized" speech unleashes treachery, deception, and affectation, and drains the speaker's energy. If it is painful to be torn between two natures, between two manners of speaking, this very hybridity (shared by Edmée and Patience), this suspension between the savage and the civilized, gives Bernard and his doubles something worth saying.

The idea that reserve is a privileged, higher state of awareness is very different from the dispossession of language that both Bernard and Edmée suffer following the attack on the heroine's life. Before they appear in court, Edmée and Bernard are recalcitrant public speakers, and neither enjoys the attention of strangers. Both are discreet by choice, but their voicelessness takes on a more pronounced and more sinister quality after Edmée's injury. If Lacenaire and Rivière depict crime as a means of recovering their voices and commandeering public attention, Mauprat focuses on how violence stuns its victims into silence. Only after much suspense will judicial injustice prod Bernard from his mute resignation and Edmée from her reserve. Bernard's trial

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disrupts the protagonists' predilection for withdrawing from the public eye. In court, the stakes of not speaking are simply too high, and both succumb to the necessity of addressing a large audience.

Crime and the Involuntary Loss of Language

The crime brings Sand's cast of characters—first Edmée and Bernard, then

Patience and the abbé Aubert—back to the tour Gazeau, where they were formerly

(re)united after Bernard and Edmée's flight from Roche-Mauprat seven years earlier.

From the novel's early chapters, this dilapidated structure symbolizes judicial abuse, for a local legend of injustice makes it famous. The tower was the scene of "la mort tragique d'un prisonnier que le bourreau, étant en tournée, trouva bon de pendre, il y a une centaine d'années, sans autre forme de procès, pour complaire à un ancien Mauprat, son seigneur" (59). This original judicial sin, perpetrated by Bernard's ancestor, returns to haunt the protagonist. Like the anonymous pendu, Bernard will not receive due process.

Fate, perhaps, is calling him to answer for his family's bloody history: none of his uncles stood trial after the fall of Roche-Mauprat, for they were either dead or had managed to escape, and most of their henchmen avoided punishment: "Deux ou trois périrent; d'autres prirent la fuite; un seul fut mis en prison. On instruisit son procès, et il paya pour tous"

(141). This human sacrifice, in which one man's death pays for the crimes of many, is not enough to satisfy the people of Berry. Bernard is a second scapegoat, standing in place of the dead and missing.

Bernard's return from America precipitates his uncle's crime. Having overheard the protagonist complaining of his unrequited love, of his "chagrins . . . espérances et . . .

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inquiétudes" (296), Jean de Mauprat communicates this information to his brother,

Antoine, the only other surviving Mauprat of the criminal branch. Antoine frames his nephew for Edmée's murder, creating a fictive crime of passion that Bernard's upbringing, behavior, and epistolary writing make plausible. Antoine hopes to be rid of both cousins in one blow, leaving himself and his brother to inherit the family fortune.

Though technically innocent of attempted murder, Bernard is far from blameless in the events leading up to Antoine's assault, and his partial culpability makes him an ideal target. Before the hunt begins, he takes up an old vice, swallowing "plusieurs tasses de café mêlé de rhum" (338). As he gallops, inebriated, through the woods beside Edmée, his civilized self is subsumed and replaced by the sexual predator still lurking inside him.

Telling parallels exist between this scene and the protagonists' first encounter, in which

Edmée appeared to Bernard like a fairy from the "légendes de chevalerie" he read as a child.145 As he pursues her through the woods, Bernard unearths this medieval trope146 to explain his irrational behavior, describing his cousin as "une fée apparaissant . . . pour troubler la raison des hommes." Just as he chased her around Roche-Mauprat's great hall with the intention of raping her, Bernard, in this instant, imagines "n'avoir pas d'autre but que de poursuivre Edmée" (338). He forces her to dismount and lifts her off the ground, but is put to shame by her reprimands. After a "minute d'angoisse" (344) during which desire overwhelms his reason and his senses, Bernard gets the better of himself and

145Although he could barely read and write, Bernard was raised on certain literary fragments, in particular "quelques ballades de chevalerie" (184) that reaffirmed his uncles' feudal mentality. As his education progresses, he continues to interpret his life through this medieval narrative lens, believing himself to be "un noble preux, condamné par [sa] dame à de rudes épreuves pour avoir manqué aux lois de la galanterie" (249). Even as the courtly love tradition supplants his more brutal instincts, his moral and esthetic sentiments remain rooted in the Middle Ages. For an analysis of how Sand reworks the themes and images of medieval literature, see Chantal A. Maréchal's "Mauprat de George Sand: présence du Moyen Age." 146When he first sees Edmée, Bernard compares her to Morgane and Urgande, two fairies from medieval lore. The first appears in the King Arthur Legends; the second is defined in J. Collin de Plancy's 1863 Dictionnaire infernal as a "bonne fée des temps chevaleresques" (674).

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staggers off into the forest, convinced that he is too dangerous to remain by Edmée's side.

After putting a short distance between himself and his near-victim, he hears the sound of a gunshot.

From this moment until Bernard's second trial, both protagonists lose the ability to speak coherently. The wounded Edmée's words are "rares" (350) and raise suspicion that

Bernard is her assailant (which, in a sense, he is). After the crime and before her appearance in court, she is described as either speaking through delirium or falling silent.

Patience later testifies: "Au bout de trois jours elle a cessé de dire des paroles intelligibles, et au bout de huit jours sa maladie a tourné à un silence complet" (399).

When Arthur visits her some time after the assault, he reports: "Elle ne parlait pas et ne paraissait pas souffrir, tant qu'on se bornait à lui éviter toute espèce d'excitation nerveuse; mais, au premier mot qui pouvait réveiller la mémoire de ses douleurs, elle tombait en convulsion" (389, emphasis added). Not only is the heroine dispossessed of language: its mere presence causes her great pain. Subjected to an onslaught of interrogations (by doctors and her maid, Mlle Leblanc), she neither complains nor expresses any sign of emotion, barely communicating through nonverbal "signes nonchalants." She neither hears nor understands what is going on around her. Her will is absorbed, stifled by

"muette douleur" (390). Once she can be questioned without having seizures, the doctors predict she will produce only nonsense.

Throughout her illness, Edmée's few words are several degrees removed from both the protagonist and the reader's knowledge. Immediately after her assault, Edmée's speech is heard by Patience, who repeats it to Aubert. Marcasse, who is subsequently informed of her words, refuses to divulge their content to Bernard, who thereby deduces

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that they are "accablantes" (351) for his case. Edmée's speech becomes more vague, distant, and distorted with each successive rumor of its content. Both Bernard and his judges try in vain to discover her words, for Patience goes missing, and Aubert refuses to participate in hearsay. Only the heroine's long-delayed appearance on the witness stand

(supposedly) unravels the mystery of what she has been trying to say. Critical readings of

Edmée's silence tend to connect it to her tumultuous relationship with Bernard. Patrick sees Edmée's incapacity to speak as evidence of masculine abuse. Bozon-Scalzitti offers an opposite theory: it is Edmée's domination of Bernard that causes her voice and will to wither. By taming her other, unconscious self, Edmée metaphorically suppresses her own natural instincts. Her desire to maîtriser her cousin and the beast within herself, to control the ferocity they share, leads her to suffer a "névrose qui va croissant avec les années, la dénégation de l'Autre se traduisant chez elle par un mutisme et une mélancolie" (9).147

But Bernard, in addition to Edmée, finds himself struggling to speak through delirium, a fact that is key to my reading of the novel. The cousins suffer equally dire predicaments of non-communication at the same moment in time. This suggests that rather than dominating or surrendering to each other, they are moving along parallel trajectories.

When Antoine fires upon Edmée, Bernard does not see the crime occur. Yet he is equally and instantaneously struck by an invisible, psychological, and metaphysical blow.

Upon hearing gunshots and a "gémissement," he throws himself towards the noise, only to fall to his knees, inexplicably "foudroyé" (345). Like Edmée during her subsequent illness, he can no longer distinguish reality from illusion. When he encounters the

147 Perhaps muteness, for Sand, is not so much a sign of defeat as of hidden verbal potential, the possibility of saying the right thing at the right moment. Edmée's muteness, as we shall see, is only temporary. Marcasse, who often appears in the company of Patience, says very little, but his words cut straight to the point, and he is also the first to understand that Jean de Mauprat is not truly dead.

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suspicious Aubert, he speaks only nonsense, stammering "des paroles sans suite," returning to the pre-verbal state of a terrified child. Before his reformation and education, mindless repetition was a telltale sign of the protagonist’s remorse. Speaking to Edmée after a spell of bad behavior, "[il] ne [put] articuler que le mot demain à plusieurs reprises" (199). Following the crime, repetition becomes a symptom of his distress and helplessness. He echoes the words of his accusers, repeating after Aubert: "C'est horrible!" The narrator explains: "j'entendais le son de cette dernière syllabe, et je souriais d'un air égaré en la répétant comme un écho." Alongside the unconscious Edmée, who is comatose and bleeding on the ground, Bernard enters a kind of verbal and intellectual paralysis, "un état de stupidité absolue" (346) in which he understands nothing. He misses his first opportunity to defend himself and will miss many more.

Just as Bernard's loss of speech (his verbal "death") mirrors that of Edmée, so does his loss of consciousness. Like Sorel and Cinq-Mars, Bernard is condemned after losing awareness of his surroundings. Although he does not yet know it, he stands guilty in the eyes his acquaintance: Patience, Aubert, and Mlle Leblanc suspect he is the culprit even before the authorities arrive to arrest him. In the hours following the crime, Bernard suffers delirium and a series of fainting fits, i.e. metaphorical deaths. In this intermediary space between life and death, between lucidity and sleep, communication remains out of reach. The matrix of language has been undone and will not be woven back together until

Patience comes to the prodigal’s rescue. In the meantime, conversation between the novel’s characters breaks down. Marcasse's reassurances seem "des mots dépourvus de sens qu'on entend dans les rêves.” Bernard, believing himself mad, remains silent,

"craignant de laisser échapper une parole qui pût faire constater la perte de mes facultés"

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(349). Madness settles on Edmée as well, and she mistakes her elderly father for a ghost.

After recovering some of his strength, Bernard rides to Sainte-Sévère to see if his cousin is still alive. Ghoulishly pale yet beautiful, Edmée reminds him of a marble sculpture, a piece of ice or alabaster. Her illness displaces (and thereby renders visible) Bernard’s encroaching condemnation. She also hangs between life and death, a silent phantom.148

The protagonist's verbal difficulties continue as he confronts Edmée's friends and protectors, who accuse him of murder. He senses that a few words could quickly exonerate him, yet these syllables remain out of reach: "Je ne pouvais croire qu'une telle accusation tînt un seul instant contre l'accent de la vérité. Je m'imaginais qu'il suffirait d'un regard et d'un mot de moi pour la faire tomber; mais je me sentais si consterné, si profondément blessé, que ce moyen de défense m'était refusé. . . . Je restais accablé sans pouvoir proférer une parole" (354-355, emphasis added). Bernard, unlike Patience, cannot find the magic words that transform reality by altering human perception. When

Patience questions him, Bernard ends this preliminary interrogatoire by bursting into tears, a signal of verbal helplessness. Finally, "sans dire un seul mot aux autres personnes" (361, emphasis added), he surrenders to the authorities in hopes that a trial will clear his name and restore his family's honor. He has, however, no desire to survive and plans on committing suicide as soon as Edmée is dead. He remains passive during the criminal investigation, falling into a stupor and taking few measures to ensure his defense. Like Sorel, Bernard is imprisoned in a high tower with a magnificent view, but in contrast to Stendhal's hero, this situation affords him little comfort. Rather, his captivity plunges him into a universe of somber signs and hostile voices. He hears "des

148 Aubert describes Edmée and her father, who falls ill from shock, to "deux fantômes chez qui la vie morale est éteinte et que la vie physique va bientôt abandonner" (353). Bernard observes that he is condemned alongside his relations, that three coffins must leave the estate of Sainte-Sévère together.

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paroles de mort et d'outrage dans toutes les brises qui passaient dans les violiers de la muraille crevassée. Chaque son rustique, chaque refrain de cornemuse qui montait vers moi, semblaient renfermer une insulte ou signaler un profond mépris pour ma douleur"

(366). The mute protagonist is a passive receptacle of ominous sounds, which he interprets as signals that the natural world, in addition to his friends and family, has risen up against him. This array of accusing voices highlights the loss of his own.

Bernard's Trials: Verbal Recovery by Proxy

During his first trial, Bernard'a verbal impotence continues. He refuses to speak of his childhood, his upbringing, or his love, disappointing crowds of spectators by uttering only "réponses monosyllabiques" (372). He hides the truth of why he left Edmée alone in the woods, telling the lie that he fell from his horse. His story is incoherent, contradictory, and badly delivered, but it does fulfill his goal of frustrating "la curiosité publique" (372) and keeping his trial as short as possible. Like Sorel, Bernard refuses to save himself via escape or verbal maneuvers, and his time in court resembles a prolonged suicide. He is rescued by his two doubles who act as porte-paroles, providing a series of pleas on his behalf. Because they share part of his nature, in saving Bernard they also save themselves.

In order to understand the role that Edmée and Patience play in Bernard's two trials, it is essential to consider the episodes that both parallel and anticipate their moment in court. Just as the protagonists double each other, the novel is structured around a series of parallel passages. The protagonist's official trials are far from being his first, for

Mauprat contains several miniature scenes of judgment leading up to its final

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catastrophe. In this sense, Bernard's trials are diffused throughout the novel: they are multiple, reoccurring. If Bernard's advocates must win the favor of public opinion in order to save his life, he must first win the support of these very advocates. From

Mauprat’s first chapters, Edmée and Patience act as arbiters of justice. Although they eventually serve as witnesses, they are also judges, and this latter role is fundamental to their characters. Before they can advocate on his behalf, both Edmée and Patience must pardon the wayward protagonist, and Bernard appears before them as the accused on several occasions. During their first meeting, Patience sentences the young man to a beating for senselessly killing an animal. Later, he is the first to accuse Bernard of

Edmée's murder. After a great deal of indecision and deliberation, Patience revokes his accusation and issues a new, written verdict, sending the following missive to the imprisoned protagonist: "Vous n'êtes pas coupable, espérez donc" (392). Like Patience,

Edmée is a natural magistrate, endowed with discernment and authority. When she first appears before the startled Bernard, he mistakes her for a supernatural being sent to adjudicate human affairs: "Je crus presque que Morgane ou Urgande venait chez moi pour faire justice." Although burdened by culpability, he believes that his guilt is circumstantial rather than innate. Nurture is the problem, he implores, not nature: "j'eus envie un instant de me jeter à genoux et de protester contre l'arrêt qui m'eût confondu avec mes oncles" (90). Throughout the novel, the guilty Bernard evokes the mitigating circumstances of childhood mistreatment, creating a contrast between himself and his guiltier relations.

Bernard's initial encounters with Edmée and Patience hint at his subsequent predicament, at his role of perpetual defendant. After Edmée and Patience are introduced

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as judges, they take on the role of advocates in an early scene that prefigures the novel's final calamity. During Edmée's captivity in Roche-Mauprat, the fortress comes under attack by the maréchaussée (a cavalry charged with keeping the peace in Old Regime

France). Taking advantage of this distraction, the cousins, after a series of negotiations and Edmée's reformulated vow, flee to the tour Gazeau. Two of Bernard's uncles, hotly pursued by the authorities, catch up to them, but these men perish before they can be captured. One commits suicide, shooting himself in the head and creating a "spectacle affreux" (119). At the sight of his death, the cousins are struck dumb by shock. This scene foreshadows Bernard's condemnation and Edmée's coma. During these two disasters that occur seven years apart, the cousins' muteness signals their distress and their shared identity. Bernard, disoriented and "pétrifié" (119), fails to realize that he is about to be arrested. Edmée's reaction to the suicide prefigures her nearly mortal injury, for she is "pâle comme la mort" and unable to utter a word: "elle fit d'abord des efforts inouïs pour parler, sans pouvoir s'exprimer autrement que par signes." After sustaining gunshot wounds seven years later, Edmée will again be reduced to the gesture. Given the protagonists' deplorable state, the only person able to speak on Bernard's behalf is

Patience. In spite of the enmity between them, the peasant leaps to his defense, falsely identifying Bernard as Hubert de Mauprat's gamekeeper. Bernard is saved, as he will later be, by Patience's speech and Edmée's desperate efforts to communicate despite her terror.

The heroine struggles through non-verbal signals and back into the realm of speech:

"Enfin, elle obtint qu'on ne me traitât pas en prisonnier" (119). In this scene, which replicates Bernard's trial in miniature, his two former judges and adversaries ensure his survival and freedom.

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This passage suggests that the respective roles of defendant and advocate are fundamental to Bernard and Edmée's relationship. Shortly afterwards, when he is taken under her father's protection, Edmée defends Bernard's barbaric manners and unseemly physical appearance to Mlle Leblanc. These precedents suggest that Edmée's defense of

Bernard during his criminal trial does not signal a waning vitality or submission to patriarchal power. Rather, the two have simply come full circle, back to the hours of their first meeting. Seven years later, Edmée is still playing advocate (and judge) to her defendant.

The condemned figures studied in my earlier chapters wait until they are on the brink of death—already self-condemned—before delivering clear-cut narratives to exonerate their motives, if not their conduct. Neither Cinq-Mars, nor Sorel, nor Rivière, nor Lacenaire plead innocent, but rather offer certain keys to (or excuses for) their behavior: love, poverty, political ideology, etc. These figures, both historic and fictional, defend their characters rather than their actions. In doing so, they claim to shed light on the mysteries surrounding their respective stories. Mauprat, however, pushes such suspense even further, for condemnation is not enough to resolve the mystery of whether

Bernard is a hero or a villain. Bernard's first trial pits contesting versions of the novel's meaning against each other, but brings little resolution to this narrative confusion. Sand's work is unique among the novels of my corpus because its protagonist does little to clarify his criminal responsibility: his doubles must do this for him. In the meantime, different accounts of his life and crime are elaborated on the witness stand, which becomes a locus of competing narratives. Mademoiselle Leblanc accuses Bernard of raping and attempting to murder her mistress; Marcasse, who discovers that a monk with

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Mauprat-like physiognomy was wandering near the scene of the assault, presents his testimony only to have it treated as a "roman" (368),149 although in the end, this man turns out to be Antoine de Mauprat, the culprit. Adding to the confusion, Bernard invents his own fiction to cover up his violent behavior and quarrel with his cousin, claiming they were separated when he fell from his horse.

In addition to Marcasse's improbable assertions and Bernard's falsehoods, the trial provides a framework for Mlle Leblanc's "reading" of the novel's events, in which Edmée is brutalized by Bernard throughout the seven years of their courtship. Mauprat's courtroom scenes, far from highlighting only the condemned man's story, give rise to a polyphony. This confusion shows how difficult it is to interpret a series of events, i.e. the novel itself. Although the narrator sets up Leblanc as a malevolent character, her words contain some truth and several credible accusations.150 Leblanc affirms that Edmée loved her former fiancé, M. de la Marche, "à la passion" and that she detests the man who forcefully supplanted him. Although we know that Bernard, contrary to Leblanc's insinuations, is innocent of attempted murder (and rape), the duenna's interpretation of

Edmée's emotional life is plausible. Until the heroine's appearance in court, her thoughts remain mysterious to both reader and narrator. Before his condemnation, Bernard is unsure of his cousin's feelings. If certain elements of Leblanc's story are blatantly false

(Edmée, for instance, was not raped at Roche-Mauprat, even if appearances are stacked

149 Leblanc refers to Marcasse's testimony as a version (379). 150 Patrick's article is fascinating in its rehabilitation of a character who is disparaged, or, in Patrick's words, "slandered," by the narrator. Patrick makes astute points as to why Leblanc's viewpoint is credible. Her name connotes a certain innocence and purity. Unlike Bernard's other accusers, she is never punished, but is rather left free to continue "her independent life in another part of France" (84).

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against her reputation), her construal of the heroine's thoughts and feelings cannot be refuted with any degree of certainty.151

Even the protagonist becomes confused by the jumble of facts and theories pertaining to his case. When his own writing, in the form of a half-destroyed letter, is brought as evidence against him, he admits that he no longer distinguishes "la limite entre la réalité et la perfidie" (380). Such disorientation suggests that he half-believes his accuser's story. Several chapters earlier, after a "nuit d'angoisse," Bernard wrote Edmée a violent declaration of love. His letter evokes the verbally impotent brigand still roaring

("il rugit") like a lion beneath Bernard's civilized exterior. The surviving fragments of this missive are found on Edmée's person after her assault. They recall Bernard's nightmares and fantasies of murdering his cousin. The letter's imagery evokes forced sexual possession, a rape that might somehow supplement the writer's verbal impotence, his incapacity to court his cousin with appropriate words: "dans le délire de mes songes, il semble que je vous plonge un poignard dans le cœur, et que, par une lugubre magie, je vous force ainsi à m'aimer comme je vous aime" (333). This piece of evidence hastens

Bernard's condemnation, for no one can deny the damning nature of the protagonist's self-portrait. Much like the letter written in Le rouge et le noir by Mme de Rênal's confessor, Bernard's words lend themselves to a skewed but tenable interpretation of the protagonist's behavior, symbolizing how Bernard's story, and the bulk of the novel itself, is being "misread" during his trial. The letter testifies to the difficulty of interpretation, the elusiveness of meaning, for even its writer is unsure where the truth lies when

151 Leblanc's story, certainly damning for Bernard, nevertheless contains certain pieces of information that cannot be true unless Bernard has fabricated his entire narrative, specifically the affirmation that Edmée has already been raped. Leblanc's testimony also seems to hit a snag when she represents Edmée "souriant" (379) after receiving Bernard's passionate letters.

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confronted with these epistolary fragments and their place in Leblanc's construal of his character. As in Cinq-Mars and Le rouge et le noir, a (mis)interpretation of the written word precipitates the protagonist's undoing. But in this case, it is not a hostile female character who writes the hero's condemnation. Bernard, who sentences, however obscurely and subconsciously, his female double to death, writes his own death sentence in the same stroke: his desire to kill Edmée amounts to redirected self-destruction. As counterparts, the two will either be destroyed or saved together.

Condemned by his own hand, Bernard cannot exonerate himself. In an inversion of the typical fairytale, Edmée, the comatose heroine, rouses herself and brings her condemned lover back to the world of the living. But her long-delayed testimony is only made possible by Patience's efforts to obtain a retrial. Together, Bernard's two doubles take up the task of revealing where the truth of their collective story lies. Following

Bernard's hasty condemnation, Patience conveniently appears just as the judges have delivered his death sentence. For weeks, the peasant has been "insaisissable" (370), wandering the woods in search of evidence. He appears in the form of "une figure en toute semblable à celle qu'on prête au paysan du Danube, trapue, en haillons, pieds nus, à la barge longue" (385). Patience's savage, uncivilized appearance emphasizes his role of outsider and the collision between two worlds that takes place when he enters the courtroom. Unconcerned that he is out of place, he demands a retrial and the opportunity to present a crucial deposition of mysterious import.

The peasant's intrusion destabilizes the logic and order of the court; his words

(their formal qualities as well as their meaning) offend the ordered, insulated world of the magistracy. The presiding judge accuses this newcomer of "âcreté et . . . insolence" and

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threatens to send him to prison if he does not change his "ton" (386). Ironically, Patience, who has infringed upon etiquette, addresses a parallel complaint to the judge, claiming that the trial's verdict is "inique quant au fond et illégal quant à la forme" (385). Meaning and form, in this clash of registers and worldviews, are equally potent sources of hostility and conflict. As a member of the lower classes, Patience's language is automatically devalued: the authorities are dubious that he has "des motifs à faire valoir " (385). Before

Patience can alter legal reality (Bernard's death sentence), he must first gain the privilege of testifying. The question of who should be allowed to speak and how is of paramount importance in the courtroom: "Songez où vous êtes, témoin, et rappelez-vous à qui vous parlez" (386), orders the judge, echoing Edmée's first words to Bernard. The peasant's response amounts to a speech act declaring, tautologically, that he can and should be allowed to speak: "Je le sais trop, et je ne dirai rien de trop. Je déclare ici que j'ai des choses importantes à dire, et que je les aurais dites à temps si vous n'aviez pas violenté

[sic] le temps. Je veux les dire, et je les dirai; et croyez-moi, il vaut mieux que je les dise

. . ." (386, emphasis added). His right to speak, Patience implies, is as much at stake as

Bernard's life.152

In order to have Bernard's sentence suspended, Patience calls upon the spectators to intervene, creating an impromptu trial of public opinion: "Mais vous qui m’entendez, hommes du peuple . . . joignez-vous à moi. . . . c’est vous qu’on insulte et qu’on menace quand on viole les lois" (387). Patience is able (where Sorel, for instance, was not) to stoke rebellion within a tribunal whose purpose is to maintain the old order of "le clergé

152 The vow Patience makes during Bernard's second trial is remarkably similar to this passage in its overdetermination of what it means to speak, in its performance of speech as an act that stands apart from its content: "'Je dirai la vérité, toute la vérité. Je lève la main une seconde fois, car j'ai à dire des choses qui se contredisent. . . . Je jure devant Dieu et devant les hommes que je dirai ce que je sais. . . . Vous voyez tous que je jure, et vous savez que l'on peut croire en moi'" (396).

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et la robe" (369). He succeeds by appealing to both aristocrats and commoners; as a communicative endeavor, his speech exists between the popular and the philosophical and draws upon fashionable Enlightenment ideas: "La philosophie était alors trop à la mode chez les jeunes gens de qualité pour que ceux-ci ne répondissent pas des premiers à un appel qui ne leur était pourtant pas adressé" (387). Through Patience's speech, Sand reminds her readers that the people are a force to be reckoned with, that the French

Revolution is coming. This speech is nevertheless intellectually appealing to the elite.

Sand takes pains to explain that eighteenth-century aristocrats were fascinated by the political theory that would come to threaten their existence. Because he occupies the precarious, intermediary space of educated poverty, of eloquent illiteracy, Patience sways public opinion in Bernard's favor. He unites the "masses égarées" (387) behind his frankness even as he enthralls the aristocracy, who see him as a caricature of popular virtue, a "Figaro" (397). In order to counteract "le langage dénaturé de la loi," he produces "un langage 'composé,' à la fois populaire et cultivé" (Bozon-Scalzitti 15).

In the absence of a physical scaffold, Sand's courtroom scene is crucial to illustrating the disruptive and transformative potential of condemned speech. Patience, who resembles Bernard in many ways, is metaphorically condemned in the person of his protégé. Moreover, he has violated the legal code by refusing to show up for his interrogation and then appearing in court unexpectedly. While Bernard remains silent,

Patience makes the kind of speech that one would expect of the condemned Romantic hero. As the protagonist is led from the courtroom, his sentence suspended, the crowd that he previously perceived as hostile breaks into applause. Through the in-betweenness

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of his speech, the peasant-philosopher has saved his hybrid double, the gentleman- brigand.

Edmée Unveiled

In the process of absolving Bernard and clarifying who he is, his advocates also unmask themselves and their enemies. This "unmasking" happens on both a literal and a figurative level, through namings, unveilings, and other revelations. The speech act of naming occurs several times in court following the pronunciation of Bernard's death sentence. This naming the narrator a dead man is countered by a multiplicity of other designations. The trial becomes a space that clarifies identity, cementing the shared traits of Bernard, Patience, and Edmée as they (re)identity themselves and others. Patience announces for the first time in court his legal name, Jean le Houx: a name which links him more explicitly to Bernard, who in the novel's early pages compares himself to "le houx sauvage de sa souche" (38). Although the names of Bernard's enemies remain unchanged, we learn the true identity of the mysterious wandering monk, who is none other than Jean's brother, Antoine de Mauprat, presumed deceased. Jean's true character also comes to light when the supposedly pious Trappist convert is shown, thanks to

Patience's spying, to be cognizant of his brother's crime.

Following Patience, Edmée pronounces in court her full name, Solange-Edmonde de Mauprat.153 But, to the alarm of Bernard's lawyer, who fears for the sanity of this key witness, she also gives herself another, more fanciful name: Edmea sylvestris, a North

American flower Bernard named after her during his travels. What does it mean that she

153 Mauprat was originally conceived to be a short story about a young woman named Solange. This was also the name of Sand's daughter.

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now names herself in this way? Patrick takes this utterance as proof of her domesticity:

"Thus, the young woman, once strong and free, now identifies herself with a dried flower entombed in a locket" (84). In her correspondence with her daughter, however, Sand uses this botanical appellation to refer to the latter's tempestuous nature, writing in her correspondence: "Jusqu'ici tu n'es encore que l'Edmunda sylvestris, c'est-à-dire une fleur sauvage, une plante épineuse de la forêt" (qtd. in Rocheblave 76). Moreover, Edmée's self-identification with a wild plant implicates her in the metaphor of transplantation that characterizes Patience and Bernard, both of whom dub themselves "houx" or holly. The identities of these three characters have never been more closely intertwined than they are in the courtroom, through these various botanical metaphors.

In addition to these revelations and re-appellations, Bernard and Edmée are unshrouded, released from the veil of death. Edmée's presence allows communication,

"living" language, to flow forth once again. Until this moment, Bernard has been mired in repetition, having made little communicative progress since the moment the shots were fired: "Je retrouvai ma présence d'esprit pour répondre dans les mêmes termes que la première fois à mon nouvel interrogatoire" (394). Edmée's appearance, like that of

Patience, is an improvisation, a profoundly surprising and unforeseen event that enables the creation of new meaning.

On the witness stand during his retrial, Bernard feels himself engulfed by an invisible pall that envelops and overwhelms his senses: "Puis un crêpe funèbre sembla s'étendre sur ma tête; un anneau de fer me serrait le front . . . je ne voyais plus que moi- même, et je n'entendais que des bruits vagues et incompréhensibles" (394). Immediately thereafter, Edmée enters the tribunal, herself enveloped in a literal veil that creates

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another conspicuous parallel between the two protanonists. As she prepares to speak, the veil is lifted, symbolizing resurrection and the reappropriation of one's voice. On the witness stand, the heroine's physical weakness and pallor contrast with her energy and willfulness, which suggest that she is not being manipulated: "elle montra cependant une grande force et une grande présence d'esprit" (408). The questioning that follows pushes the reluctant Edmée towards more and more significant revelations. Her initial strategy is similar to Bernard's: she attempts to say as little as possible while maintaining the defendant's innocence. Following in the footsteps of her cousin's testimony, she covers up his violent behavior in the woods, claiming that she fell from her horse, just as Bernard claimed that he fell from his. Although their stories are contradictory, they remain synchronized, with each narrative positing a similar accident. Edmée trivializes her justifiable anger as "une petite colère de femme assez niaise" (409) and declares Bernard incapable of murder. After having understood the overwhelming evidence compiled against her cousin, she declares that if her own life were at stake, she would refuse to say another word. She then proceeds to explain the entire mystery of her behavior with "un seul mot: Je l'aime!" (411).

Is Edmée merely a "puppet" during this pivotal scene (Patrick 84), with men controlling her words as well as her gestures? Even Bernard is unsure whether she speaks the truth, reasoning that since she minimized his faults and made him seem a better man than he is, she might also exaggerate her affection. The focus of the trial has shifted from the judicial to the sentimental: "Est-il aimé, ou n'est-il pas aimé?" (415), is the question to be resolved. The conundrum of Bernard's guilt or innocence, perpetually murky even in his own eyes, is rendered superfluous. Edmée's confessions are reassuring because she

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fills in the missing pieces of the narrative, straightening out the jumble of contradictory stories. She recites Bernard's letter from memory, making it appear innocuous in its integrity. She also explains her conversations and behavior in the weeks and months following their first meeting, excusing her coldness as a means of civilizing Bernard, of recreating and molding him into "le premier des hommes par la sagesse et l'intelligence, comme tu en es le premier par le cœur" (412). At first glance, Edmée's improvisation on the witness stand welds the narrative into a cohesive and satisfying whole, a story of love and marriage.

But there is at least one question, one troubling void in the narrative, that even

Edmée cannot fill, for she admits to having been uncertain, before the discovery of

Antoine's culpability, as to whether or not Bernard attacked her. Edmée diminishes the worth of her own testimony, admitting she may have loved Bernard enough to absolve and defend him "au prix d'un mensonge" (425), implying that when she was brought into court, she doubted her future husband's innocence. It is this troubling possibility that makes Patrick's reading of Mauprat particularly compelling. Nevertheless, it must also be noted that Edmée's testimony follows that of Patience: if she has any inkling of what has been said in the courtroom before she bears witness (a detail that is never fully explained), she is not technically lying, for proof of Bernard's innocence has already been delivered. It is also worth noting that during her marriage to Bernard, Edmée maintains her verbal ascendancy. Just as during their courtship she vanquished him with "un mot et

[un] regard" (416), he continues to live under her orders, campaigning in and then retiring from the French Revolutionary Wars according to her wishes. A similar order enjoins him to live on after his wife's death.

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Conclusion: The Moral of the Story

Whereas Cinq-Mars and Julien Sorel solidify the meanings of their stories by dying, Bernard de Mauprat has no last words. Perhaps for this reason, his story and his marriage remain open to wide and problematic interpretation: a living hero is more ambiguous than a dead one. I would argue that the key to understanding Bernard's tempestuous relationship with Edmée lies in their parallel natures and experiences. Both lose hope while suffering simultaneous lethargies and metaphorical deaths. When

Patience, as deus ex machina, reenters the story in order to resolve its unanswered questions, all three characters gain the right and the capacity to be heard: while constituting a microcosm of the pre-revolutionary social universe (young and old, male and female, aristocrat and peasant, feudal and enlightened), they operate as if they were three aspects of a single being. Sand thus presents us with a paradox: Bernard, who appears to (the arguably rational) Mlle Leblanc as a consummate villain, takes his place in Mauprat's Manichean universe on the side of good.

This (re)alignment of Bernard's character carries an optimistic message, rooted in

Enlightenment philosophy, of redemption through education. Of this message, Bernard is the evidence and the porte-parole, for as narrator, he explains the meaning of the story he has told: a meaning that mitigates his violent behavior, making it more palatable to the reader. Sand's legitimizes Bernard's point of view by having him deliver the moral of her story. The protagonist admits that men are partially free beings, dragged along by their instincts, yet he exhorts his audience: "Ne croyez pas à la fatalité" (432). At the novel's close, Bernard iterates Sand's argument against the death penalty, which is founded on a belief in free will: "la loi du talion, la peine de mort . . . n'est autre chose que la

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consécration du principe de la fatalité, puisqu'elle suppose le coupable incorrigible et le ciel implacable" (434). These words are backed up by actions: Bernard and Edmée leave the countryside after the former's exoneration in a refusal to witness Antoine's execution, a silent protest against the gruesome torture of the wheel. Bernard's trial, moreover, is compared to that of Jean Calas (a Protestant merchant and victim of religious prejudice) who unjustly suffered such a fate.154 As others spoke on his behalf, Bernard ends by speaking on behalf of the condemned, including the man who nearly brought about his own execution.

154 Voltaire championed the cause of the Calas family after Jean Calas' execution in 1762. Calas was accused of murdering his son, now believed to have committed suicide. Voltaire's writings on the subject denounce judicial error as well as the intolerance of Toulouse's Catholic population. The philosopher blames a mob mentality for fanning the flames religious prejudice. Voltaire wrote letters appealing to enlightened opinion in which he demanded that judicial proceedings become more transparent in order to prevent such abuses of power. In the words of Sarah Maza, “Voltaire’s entire argument is structured around an explicit opposition between popular prejudice and enlightened reason, a rallying of the forces of the educated public against the ignorant populace” (33). In Mauprat, Patience makes a similar appeal to a courtroom audience that exists as a microcosm of the pre-revolutionary public.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Terror, Warfare, and the Death Penalty: Imagining Alternatives in Hugo's

Quatrevingt-Treize

Although Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), Victor Hugo's final novel, was written during the middle of the naturalist movement, the author's characteristic Romantic style is very much present in his ultimate work, which is composed of melodrama, pathos, surprises, and plot twists. This prose piece depends upon "coups de surprise dès longtemps préparés, suspensions calculées du récit aux moments pathétiques" (Boudout

XLII). In keeping with Hugo's lifelong preoccupation with capital punishment, these surprises frequently involve unexpected and shocking speeches made by condemned characters. In addition to its eminently melodramatic form,155 the novel's diegesis incorporates settings that highlight the spectacular nature of both politics and capital punishment. Hugo paints a picture of revolutionary Paris in which the old theater of the

Tuileries, the "king's theater," has been torn down to make room for the National

Convention.156 This public spectacle, where "la rue entrait dans l'assemblée" (200), foreshadows the novel's final scene: in a more sinister performance, a French military commander is executed for treason in Brittany before his assembled troops. Through

155 As Jean Boudout explains, "les épisodes s'annoncent, s'enchaînent, se dénouent selon la technique du roman ou du drame des années 1830, sinon du mélodrame" (XLII). See Boudout, page XLIII, for how the dialogue of Quatrevingt-Treize resembles that of Hugo's earlier theatrical works. 156 In her article "Exorbitant Geometry," Suzanne Guerlac notes: "all Paris, theater of the Revolution, has itself become theater. The set of the classical stage and monarchy is struck. A carnavalesque intermixture of genres ensues" (859).

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these two theaters, Parisian and provincial, Hugo demonstrates how the rationale behind capital punishment is fundamentally irrational.

Hugo's digression on Parisian politics notwithstanding, the novel's primary focus is the Vendean revolt, a conservative, counter-revolutionary, provincial rebellion. Paris and the Breton wilderness constitute the novel's two geographic poles, with the threat of an English invasion by way of Brittany ever present. The year 1793, which pits France against Europe and Paris against the provinces, is described as a "tempest"157 in which individual lives count for little, in which human beings are swept away by the currents of history and sacrificed to the ideal of progress. In the novel's second of three sections, "À

Paris," the narrator suggests that free will has little or nothing to do with history's great events: "Le rédacteur énorme et sinistre de ces grandes pages a un nom, Dieu, et un masque, Destin. . . . Blâmer ou louer les hommes à cause du résultat, c'est presque comme si on louait ou blâmait les chiffres à cause du total" (208). History, the narrator asserts, cannot be imputed to man, but rather to a greater force, "l'Inconnue" (207).158 The throngs of political actors and spectators in the capital city create a manmade storm that is unpredictable, beyond any human control, including their own. However in the

Vendée, the locus of the novel's third section, human subjectivity and responsibility are thrust to the forefront of the plot, and the inhuman forces of fate recede into the

157 In his prison, on the eve of his execution, Hugo's protagonist, Gauvain, absolves the present moment, the Terror, which he describes as "une tempête" (478), a "great wind" delivering civilization from the "plague" of old abuses. 158 Taking up where the narrator left off, Gauvain later espouses this point of view: "Selon moi, le vrai point de vue de la révolution, c'est l'irresponsabilité. Personne n'est innocent, personne n'est coupable" (288). In his article "Civil War, Revolution, and Justice in Victor Hugo's Quatrevingt-Treize," David Denby explains this perspective: "The Revolution is a supernatural force which cannot be questioned, and to ask moral questions of it makes no sense" (13). I argue, nevertheless, that certain characters do ask these questions. In particular, Michelle Fléchard, a Vendean peasant, demands that men and God account for the violence she suffers during France's civil conflict.

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background.159 The novel's key moments and the voices of its condemned popular characters challenge the narrator's impersonal political philosophy, creating a polyphony that demonstrates Hugo's complex, multi-faceted, and contradictory views of history and ethics.

Quatrevingt-Treize shows the violence of civil warfare to be all too personal, even when it pretends to be objective and procedural. The republican and royalist militaries are equally entrenched in a merciless logic forbidding empathy and compassion. Both espouse the fanatical certainty that "the ends justify the means, however brutal"

(Grossman 231). Such ideology, I argue, is overturned in Quatrevingt-Treize by the practice of "condemned" speech, which interrupts warfare and renders its logic impotent.

I suggest that Hugo, often interpreted as a pro-revolutionary writer,160 is even more profoundly anti-war in his depiction of the Vendean revolt.

The novel's plot presents us with two figures of inflexible authority, one on either side of the conflict. Fighting for the royalists is the Marquis de Lantenac, a Breton aristocrat and military general dispatched from England to organize the rebellion. His revolutionary counterpart is Cimourdain, a former priest. These two men are old acquaintances whose past lives were once intertwined. Many years earlier, Cimourdain educated and cared for Lantenac's great-nephew, the handsome and heroic Gauvain. So influenced was Gauvain by his childhood tutor that he elected to fight on the side of the

159 Guy Rosa's individualist reading of the novel perhaps comes closest to my own: "La fiction atteste que chacun reste responsable de ses actes et qu'ils sont passibles d'un jugement moral auquel la nécessité historique n'apportera aucune circonstance atténuante" (341-342). Rosa, however, concentrates on the figures of Gauvain, Lantenac, and Cimourdain, as opposed to the novel's popular characters who, I argue, play a significant role in proclaiming individual moral responsibility, thereby precipitating the actions of the novel's major characters. 160 Jean Boudout explains: "Le livre n'a pu être écrit que par un admirateur de la Révolution. . . . Non seulement les commentaires, mais la peinture même des personnages laissent par mille détails échapper la préférence" (XXVI). Alternately, Kathryn Grossman reads Quatrevingt-Treize as subverting its own "superficial dualism" in order to place humanity over politics (228).

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revolution. Unlike his mentor, this young man, now a commander, champions the virtue of clemency. When Lantenac is eventually captured, Gauvain chooses to liberate him.

Hugo's protagonist does not commit treason for the sake of family loyalty. Rather, overcome by his uncle's decision to free his own prisoners after rescuing them from death, Gauvain resolves to imitate the general's generous action.

The novel's two merciless figures, who implement their respective military protocols with pitiless exactitude, eventually come to understand that military law fails to encompass the human condition or humane behavior. Lantenac saves his own hostages from a fire he designed to kill them, and Cimourdain commits suicide after sentencing

Gauvain, his protégé, to death. After listening to the condemned, these fervent ideologues find the practice of vengeance and retaliation incompatible with their own continued existence.

In The Later Novels of Victor Hugo, Kathryn Grossman explains how the notion of utopia becomes possible through what Fredric Jameson calls "the imagination of otherness and radical difference." This "utopian imagination" allows one to conceptualize alternatives to present-day reality (qtd. 232). Condemnation, I argue, pushes one outside the social, into a place where such "otherness" becomes more readily accessible. In this sense, the articulation of Hugo's utopist vision—his hope for a republic transcending terror—is made possible through the speech of condemned men and women. The condemned characters in Quatrevingt-Treize awaken such imagination, what Grossman refers to as dreaming "another mode of being" (232). If Gauvain achieves this dream in part by forgiving Cimourdain, the novel's condemned characters hailing from the working classes are more adamant still in censoring acts of violence vindicated by

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military and partisan thinking. In Quantrevingt-Treize, commoners who are sentenced (or who sentence themselves) to death do their utmost to impede the unforgiving progression of war, demonstrating, somewhat paradoxically, the fault lines in Hugo's own pro- revolutionary political theory. If Gauvain and Lantenac realize that "the welfare of individuals supersedes the will to establish a specific form of government" (Grossman

225), this epiphany is sparked by the words of condemned popular characters. Whereas

Gauvain's climactic execution is generally read as the novel's key moment and Gauvain as the novel's protagonist, I wish to emphasize the verbal agency of Michelle Fléchard, an illiterate Breton peasant who represents a female response to wartime violence. Fléchard survives an execution by firing squad and then searches for her children, whom Lantenac has taken captive. She and the popular characters with whom she comes into contact prompt the novel's powerful men to reevaluate their actions.161

Overlapping Histories and the Imagery of Capital Punishment

In Quatrevingt-Treize, Hugo superimposes the recent events of 1870 and 1871 onto the more distant past of 1793. His ugly portrayal of civil warfare in the Vendée brings to mind the repression of the Paris Commune, the French killing the French.

Several critics read Quatrevingt-Treize as a recapitulation of, or reflection upon, the

Third Republic's problematic beginnings. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson sums up these parallels: "[1793], too, was a Terrible Year. Then, too, foreign armies threatened the

161 In his article "Terrorizing the 'Feminine' in Hugo, Dickens, and France," James F. Hamilton discusses revolutionary violence: "the feminine side of life is repressed, rejected, or killed by a cold, mechanical reasoning. Terrorists of the right and of the left give exclusive preference to abstractions over personal relationships and exhibit a scorn of feeling" (204). Fléchard represents a resurgence of the feminine despite the attempts of a male-dominated military to control and kill her. Inseparable from this resurgence, I argue, is her increasingly assertive speech.

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integrity of the country, civil war tore France apart, and a new republic exterminated its enemies in the name of justice" ("Quatrevingt-Treize" 67). Guy Rosa explains that far from merely chronicling the year 1793, Hugo's novel stages the stakes of any civil war:

"Des personnages semblables pourraient se trouver, une action analogue se dérouler dans n'importe quelle guerre civile" (338). Kathryn Grossman interprets Hugo's insistent use of the word "commune" as a blatant allusion to "the leftist Paris Commune and its struggle with the more politically moderate provisional government in Versailles" (243). Although between 1789 and 1795, the French revolutionary government did indeed style itself the

"Paris Commune," readers of the year 1874 no doubt recalled to mind the more recent political experiment.

Aside from invoking the name of the Commune itself, Quatrevingt-Treize makes subtle allusions to both its aftermath and the siege of Paris by the Prussians that lasted from September 1870 until January 1871. Hugo's vast sketch of revolutionary Paris resonates with the more recent experience of the besieged capital: "Les femmes dans cette misère étaient vaillantes et douces. Elles passaient les nuits à attendre leur tour d'entrer chez le boulanger" (Quatrevingt-Treize 128). Jean Boudout points out that

Hugo's collection of poems, L'année terrible, describes the patient suffering of women waiting in line to receive sustenance for their families. Moreover, just as the Paris of

1871 found itself besieged by Prussians (Hugo experienced the resulting famine first hand), revolutionary France found itself encircled by foreign enemies: "Les Allemands

étaient aux portes; le bruit courait que le roi de Prusse avait fait retenir des loges à l'Opéra" (Quatrevingt-Treize 124). Quatrevingt-Treize also incorporates Hugo's own lived experience: the problem of offering asylum is one of the novel's major themes.

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Although he was critical of both the Communards and the national government, Hugo offered to shelter fugitives in his Belgian home, a gesture that resulted in his expulsion from Belgium. In Quatrevingt-Treize, civilians are threatened with death should they offer aid to enemy soldiers. Cimourdain sends a public crier across the countryside to warn those who would harbor his Vendean enemies: "Quiconque leur donnera asile ou aidera à leur évasion sera traduit en cour martiale, et mis à mort" (356). Most importantly, the years 1793 and 1871 both witnessed staggering numbers of executions.

Ferguson estimates that seventeen thousand Communards were put to death in Paris between May 22 and June 23. Memories of 1871 reverberate throughout Quatrevingt-

Treize in assessments of the revolution's mass executions as well as its politics: "À

Machecoul, ils mirent les républicains en coupe réglée, à trente par jour; cela dura cinq semaines. . . . les fusillés tombaient dans la fosse parfois vivants; on les enterrait tout de même. Nous avons revu ces mœurs" (233).

The imagery of capital punishment (by firing squad and guillotine) is omnipresent in Quatrevingt-Treize, extending far beyond the numerous, literal executions that occur throughout the novel. The death penalty structures the plot, pervades the novel's imagery and, on a symbolic level, impacts objects as well as people. In the novel's first section,

"En Mer," the ship Claymore is dispatched to conduct Lantenac across the English

Channel and place him in charge of the disorganized Vendean revolt so that he may clear the way for a British invasion. The Claymore's captain intends to arrive with stealth off the Breton coast, but instead the ship is "executed" slowly, methodically, by a loose carronade: a heavy, wheeled type of maritime canon that breaks free and rolls about the swaying ship, inflicting enough damage to nearly capsize the vessel. Hugo compares this

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rebellious piece of equipment to an enraged animal, an escaped slave, a monster. The machine assumes a sinister intelligence, as if it were intentionally inflicting harm: "il [le canon] continuait l'exécution du navire" (42). In endowing the canon with anthropomorphic qualities, Hugo implies that "execution" is a deliberate and drawn out process, one that combines human malevolence and mechanical precision. In the extended metaphor that is the ship's execution, capital punishment has no fixed starting or stopping point. The process, we might say the machinery of death, runs on, only to replace one victim (the ship) with another when the sailor who failed to properly anchor the canon is shot for negligence.

These two executions, one literal, the other figurative, alert the reader to the importance of capital punishment in Quatrevingt-Treize and its troublingly serial, sequential, and unfinished nature: its tendency to escalate. The loose carronade that

"executes" the ship results in a literal death sentence by firing squad. The series of executions that sets the novel's plot in motion, far from ending with the Claymore's defeat at the hands of the French fleet, continues when Lantenac escapes the shipwreck and begins to shoot prisoners of war almost as soon as he arrives on shore. One of his first victims is the Breton peasant Michelle Fléchard. Much as the half-executed Claymore continues to gasp on for some time as an enemy squadron finishes it off, the unfortunate

Fléchard, after surviving her execution by firing squad, rises and wanders through the wilderness, searching for her children, in the half-dead state of the condemned. Like

Fléchard’s execution, the destruction of the ship is clumsy and cruel, and the Claymore sinks amid “saccades d’agonie” (69).

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In this scene of maritime disaster, imagery of the guillotine is present alongside the firing squad, although the deadly machine has yet to make a concrete appearance in the text. The bodies of men who have been "trampled" by the carronade are dismembered, and particular attention is drawn to their heads: "les têtes mortes semblaient crier; des ruisseaux de sang se tordaient" (42). Hugo later echoes this bloody imagery while describing the National Convention: on the president's desk, "des têtes coupées, portées au bout d'une pique, se sont égouttées" (185). Parisian violence and naval warfare become mirror images of each other. When Cimourdain orders that a guillotine be brought to the Vendée in the final section, "En Vendée," the symbolism of dismembered heads extends into Brittany as well. While the guillotine, far from remaining stationary upon Parisian scaffolds, seems to turn up everywhere, the same is true for the firing squad, which makes its first appearance to dispatch the negligent sailor.

Almost immediately thereafter another firing squad, in the form of an enemy squadron carrying 360 cannons (against the damaged vessel's nine), appears on the horizon. The royalist captain compares this mismatched combat to a fusillade, the very method used to execute the Communards: “j’aime mieux être mitraillé que noyé” (63). Apart from these terse words, maritime violence is accompanied by little speech. In contrast to the verbosity of Hugo's National Convention162 and the intense debate during the military trial that concludes the novel, death at sea is shrouded in silence. "Un morne silence" (51) marks the sailor's execution by his former comrades. As the ship goes down, preparations for its last stand are carried out "sans dire une parole et comme dans la chambre d'un

162 In his paper "Sentiment et violence chez Victor Hugo," Victor Brombert highlights the verbal, performative violence of the National Convention: "Or justement, Hugo relève la nocivité particulière de la parole. Ce sont les mots qui tuent. . . . C'est le langage lui-même qui devient puissance et destruction. . . . Car l'idéologie s'exprime par la formule, par le slogan" (255). As we shall see, Lantenac's words wield a similar performative force.

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mourant" (61). Only later, after the naval battle, when the chaos of war begins to impact civilians, will rebellious language perturb death's smooth and solemn progress.

In addition to its weighty presence, both literal and symbolic, during the sinking of the British vessel, capital punishment reemerges constantly in the novel's many historical digressions. Before the Claymore sinks, Hugo transcribes the conversation between the captain and the first mate of the doomed vessel. During their brief appearance, these characters describe royalist military philosophy and tactics of intimidation, criticizing acts of clemency on the part of "les chefs [qui] font les magnanimes." They insist that "ceci est la guerre sans miséricorde" (37), that war must be won by brutality: "massacrer beaucoup, faire des exemples, n'avoir ni sommeil ni pitié"

(31). Mass executions are in style: the pair admires a certain Gaston "[qui] a gentiment arquebusé trois cents bleus après leur avoir fait creuser leur fosse par eux-mêmes."

Military executions play a role in the dismemberment of families already divided by political loyalties163: one Vendean leader "a un fils, qui est républicain, et, pendant que le père sert dans les blancs, le fils sert dans les bleus. Rencontre. Bataille. Le père fait prisonnier son fils, et lui brûle la cervelle" (32). Hugo’s historical landscape is peopled by ruthless personalities: the appropriately named Mousqueton, “qui ne fait miséricorde à personne” (78), and Bénédicité, “[qui] dit son Benedicite pendant qu’il fait arquebuser les gens” (81). These anecdotes reveal an essential wartime truth: violence is more memorable, more striking, and more intimidating when it is not carried out on the battlefield, but rather when the powerful execute unarmed prisoners. Through this

163 On destruction of the family, civil war, fratricide, and "disjunction" in Quatrevingt-Treize, see Grossman, pages 179-196.

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strategy of terror, both sides hope to win the war. Lantenac escapes the sinking Claymore and lands in the Vendée with the object of intensifying this terrorist tactic.

Despite his revolutionary sympathies, Hugo insists on the parallel viciousness of the opposing camps, making it clear that the revolutionary “bleus" are equally responsible for persecuting civilians. In the rebellious Brittany, mass executions appear to be as common as battles. Lantenac, newly arrived on shore, hears gunfire nearby and wonders:

“Était-ce un combat? N’était-ce pas plutôt une exécution militaire? Les bleus, et cela leur

était ordonné par un décret révolutionnaire, punissaient très souvent, en y mettant le feu, les fermes et les villages réfractaires. . . . On avait notamment exécuté ainsi tout récemment la paroisse de Bourgon” (106). Lantenac chooses a parallel course of action, destroying the hamlet of Herbe-en-Pail after its inhabitants shelter a republican battalion.

Besides intimidating the masses, executions are a weapon deployed by powerful men against each other. Robespierre expedites Cimourdain to intercept and guillotine

Lantenac as opposed to simply defeating him on the field of battle; an execution, in this case, is essential for the triumph of revolutionary doctrine. The logic of execution goes further, however, than the desire to make examples. More than a means of terror, capital punishment takes the place of the supposedly honorable, aristocratic ritual of dueling.

The guillotine and the firing squad have replaced the Old Regime's ceremony of virile personal combat. When Gauvain and Lantenac are fighting in the Vendée, their meetings in battle are brief and from afar (Lantenac fires upon Gauvain under cover of nightfall, but misses). These two "ci-devant," i.e. former aristocrats, paper the countryside with threats to execute each other, until one tavern owner points out "les politesses qu'ils se jettent à la tête" (246). The two announce reciprocal threats for each other's benefit: "Le

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marquis de Lantenac a l'honneur d'informer son petit-neveu, monsieur le vicomte

Gauvain, que, si monsieur le marquis a la bonne fortune de se saisir de sa personne, il fera bellement arquebuser monsieur le vicomte." And the terse, republican reply:

"Gauvain prévient Lantenac que s'il le prend il le fera fusiller" (247). Announcing the death sentence of one's foe is a potent form of verbal combat that takes the place of physical fighting. In Quatrevingt-Treize, capital punishment is the quintessential form of civil warfare. In older times, the Gauvain family would have dueled to settle differences

(among aristocrats); during revolutionary times, its members execute prisoners of war.

Capital punishment also becomes, somewhat ironically, a cornerstone of diplomacy and negotiation. The novel's final battle takes place at the Tourgue fortress (a diminutive of "Tour Gauvain"), the ancestral home of Lantenac and his nephew. The republican forces have laid siege to the royalists, whom they drastically outnumber.

Before attacking, Cimourdain speaks to his adversaries of capital punishment and sacrifice. In order to prevent a slaughter, he is willing to hand himself over to the enemy for execution, provided Lantenac does the same. Cimourdain explains: "Deux hommes sont de trop. . . . Lantenac sera guillotiné, et vous ferez de moi ce que vous voudrez."

This mutual sacrifice is necessary to save the host of nineteen "condamnés" (378) who are besieged within the tower, yet Lantenac refuses. In the end, neither of the two, but rather Gauvain, will be sacrificed for showing mercy to the enemy.

Hugo's Political and Social Spectrum

In his insightful introduction to Quatrevingt-Treize, Jean Boudout traces how

Hugo's political sentiments changed during his lifetime. As a young man, the budding

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Romantic writer was a royalist who admired the Chouan rebels, the men who fought against the capital during the French Revolution. As his sympathies shifted towards the left, he continued to denounce the Terror. By the 1850s, however, dismayed by the

Second French Empire, Hugo began to write, in his Châtiments (1853), of the Terror as a grim necessity. He anthropomorphizes the year 1793 as a "moissonneur" or reaper dispatched to destroy Old Regime atrocities. While this vision of the revolution is certainly integral to Quatrevingt-Treize, it is not, I believe, the novel's only vision, for

Hugo's final novel cannot be read as an unequivocal apology of the French Revolution.

The various political opinions to which Hugo adhered at different points throughout his life all emerge in his final novel, inspiring the narrator to express sympathy and disgust for both sides.164 The novel's characters argue passionately for a range of political (and apolitical) opinions. If, in the 1850s, Hugo believed that "pour le poète qui voit de haut les choses, 93 fut non seulement grand, mais nécessaire" (Boudout X), then the author of

Quatrevingt-Treize, without precisely contradicting his younger self, questions the legitimacy of Terror through the voices of his condemned characters.

Two characters in particular, Michelle Fléchard and the former viscount Gauvain, of opposite genders and social positions, sap the logic of the military execution. Although they never meet, they exist as parallel figures: Fléchard perturbs the warlike ethos of

Lantenac and moves him to release her children, while Gauvain's self-sacrifice paves the way for the passionate suicide of an otherwise passionless man. Scholars often interpret

Gauvain as the moral voice of the novel, as Hugo's representative within the narrative

164 Mary O'Neil touches upon Hugo's ambivalent sympathy for the Vendean rebels: "For all of his condemnation of the insurrectionists' fanaticism and backwardness, Hugo does recognize the Vendean rebellion as a truly popular movement. He admires, moreover, this people's profoundly spiritual nature" (266).

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(Denby 13; Grossman 246). Fléchard, on the contrary, is most often read as symbolic of the unenlightened. I, however, wish to argue that of the two, Michelle Fléchard presents the greater challenge to wartime ideology. A Vendean peasant caught between two armies, she enters the novel as a literally speechless fugitive hiding in the wilderness. Her powers of expression nonetheless evolve, and she eventually convinces the fanatical

Marquis de Lantenac to save her children, whom he had intended to burn in reprisal for an enemy attack.

From the novel's incipit, Fléchard's speech poses an immediate risk to her life, for she has no political or national loyalties and is unable to formulate her identity in a way that either side of the armed conflict can accept. Her husband was shot, she and her children forced to flee as their village burned. Understanding nothing of the politics behind this disaster, she cannot communicate effectively with those who are invested in the civil conflict, demonstrating "complete impermeability to the narratives by which the war is driven" (Denby 12). The "bataillon du Bonnet-Rouge" (Quatrevingt-Treize 10), a contingent of Parisians, finds her cowering in the wilderness where she had taken shelter inside a hollow tree. Interrogated by their leader, Sergeant Radoub, she is too terrified to respond without explanation to the simplest of questions. Later, after surviving a summary execution, she takes control of her speech as she wanders the countryside in search of her missing children. When she finds them trapped inside a burning building, she delivers a long, agonizing plea for help. Her words capsize the war's dichotomy, convincing both sides to come to her aid. Fléchard's entreaty—brutal, instinctive, apolitical, and extremely lucid—diverts the energy of war into a different channel. Her

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speech causes Lantenac and then Gauvain to look beyond partisan interests, to place individual lives above what they previously perceived to be the greater good.165

Scholars tend to read Michelle Fléchard as an ignorant victim incapable of coherent speech, associating her with the non-verbal, the mute, the non-linguistic, and the gestural,166 or reading her as a figure suffering from "crushing oppression" who

"mindless[ly]" recites the honorary title of seigneur (Petrey 63). Sandy Petrey argues that

Fléchard "uses [language] to state its own inadequacy, then abandons it definitively," that she illustrates "speech's impotence" and "regresses to the instinctual level of subsemiotic behavior" (97-98).167 Boudout sees her as part of "l'humble humanité . . . qui n'est là que pour assister au drame, pour en souffrir ou pour en panser les plaies" (XXVIII). Charles

Nunley describes her as an "inarticulate mother" who has been moved "to the sidelines of political life" (35, 36).168 In what follows, I endeavor to restore some verbal agency to the analysis of Fléchard's character, showing how her speech undermines military force and the binary logic of war; how instead of merely being rescued by others, she makes a concerted effort to save both herself and her children.

In addition to challenging Lantenac's cherished political beliefs, Fléchard complicates those of the narrator, who sets up an opposition between Parisian and

165 If, as Mary Anne O'Neil points out, "the characters Hugo specifically patterns after real historical types act in ways that strike the reader as historically uncharacteristic," this is largely because Fléchard convinces Lantenac to abandon the royalist cause for a humanist one. Lantenac's self-sacrifice sets off chain reaction. Thereafter Gauvain frees his great-uncle, "perpetuating the political conflict" he has sworn to resolve, and Cimourdain, a rabid ideologue, demonstrates the absurdity of the revolutionary law he upholds by committing suicide (260). 166 See Denby's article. 167 We also find this idea in Brombert's communication: "son angoisse . . . à l'extrême, ne sait plus s'exprimer que par un hurlement" (255). 168 According to Nunley, Fléchard is "unable to participate in the revolutionary process that Hugo's historical novel portrays, trapped as it were for safe keeping within the author's gendered view of language, deprived of the instruments that might allow her to play a more reasoning role in Hugo's épopée of social change" (36-37). She exists in contrast to her homonym Louise Michel, a heroine of the Commune praised by Hugo in his poem "tellingly entitles 'Stronger than a Man'" (35).

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provincial identity that denigrates the latter: "Pays, Patrie, ces deux mots résument toute la guerre de Vendée; querelle de l'idée locale contre l'idée universelle; paysans contre patriotes" (240). Interrogated by Radoub, who suspects her of being a royalist spy,

Fléchard valorizes the idea of "pays" while showing "patrie" to be an abstraction invented in a distant capital.169 By failing or refusing to understand the significance of "patrie" and thereby confounding her interrogator, the peasant conceptualizes "pays" in terms of a quotidian reality that has nothing to do with the nationalist construct of a fatherland:

"C'est la métairie de Siscoignard, dans la paroisse d'Azé" (12). "Pays" signifies the smallholding, a modest source of livelihood, as well as the surrounding religious community, the parish. As the novel progresses, Fléchard's ignorance of politics constantly refocuses the reader's attention on personal suffering and the absurdity of warfare. She ends by questioning the notion that national progress trumps respect for human life, that the welfare of France supersedes that of the family. Although she joins the Revolutionary Army as a canteen keeper, bringing water to the wounded during battle, Fléchard insists upon her local identity, on the immediate and concrete reality of her "pays."

Throughout the novel, Fléchard destabilizes and transforms masculine points of view. Just as she undermines the omnipotent perspective of the narrator, she disorients the male characters with whom she comes into contact: Radoub, who rescues her from the Breton wilderness, and Tellmarch, who shelters her after she is shot by Lantenac's

169 According to Brombert, "the lexical gap that separates her inherited notion of pays from the new political notion of patrie symbolizes her unawareness of political issues" (Victory Hugo and the Visionary Novel 211).

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firing squad.170 Fléchard's femininity blends into the men who see and hear her. After rescuing her from among the dead, the beggar Tellmarch contemplates her distress at losing her children and imagines what it would be like to be a nursing mother. Likewise, after the Fléchard children are delivered from La Tourgue, Radoub, who previously described himself as their adoptive father, takes on the "maternal" qualities of the mother herself (Grossman 199). Fléchard catalyzes a deeper understanding of motherhood on the part of men. But this transfer of her emotions and concerns into others goes further, taking on a linguistic dimension. Shortly after the novel's climactic battle, Radoub attempts to defend Gauvain from charges of treason. In what follows, I show that in so doing, he echoes the words Fléchard spoke while pleading for her children's lives.

Radoub follows the peasant's stubborn refusal to acquiesce to others' deaths.171 Fléchard is thus implicitly present (although physically absent) during Gauvain's trial, present in her speech if not her body. While Gauvain willingly dies so that France may have a better future, sacrificing himself to set the example of a merciful republic, the novel's more rebellious common characters insist upon the unequivocal folly of the death penalty.

The Letter of the Law

In painting the clash between royalists and revolutionaries, Hugo often sets them up as mirror images of each other. Members of each side exhibit courage, bravado, intelligence, energy, irony, and ruthlessness. Both armies have been given "mots d'ordre"

170 Like Fléchard, the Tellmarch has been described as "sauvage." His ignorance, his political "indifférence" (Gohin 161), leads him to rescue Lantenac, who survives to unleash the forces of war against women and children. Yet Tellmarch's naivety and apolitical behavior make him a lucid observer of the revolution, able to weigh the misconduct of both sides. 171 Gauvain's condemnation is both a cause and an effect of popular speech. Much like Mauprat's Bernard, he exists to give voice to the characters that surround him.

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that target a rural civilian population, including peasants trapped in the middle of a combat beyond their comprehension. At the novel's outset, a battalion of "bleus" wanders through the forest of Brittany, under orders from the Paris Commune to show no mercy:

"Point de grâce, point de quartier" (6). When he arrives on shore, Lantenac gives a corresponding order: "Insurgez-vous. Pas de quartier" (78). Cimourdain brings to

Brittany "la menaçante consigne de la commune . . . Pas de grâce, pas de quartier"

(282). These words resound throughout the novel like a refrain (83, 84, 119), although

Hugo's condemned characters will challenge them.

The chapters that chronicle the Claymore's destruction show how military executions depend upon performative language. Lantenac puts his merciless policy into effect before his escape from the sinking Claymore, when he orders the execution of the man who failed to properly tie down the carronade. The general pronounces a double sentence: the man is shot, but not before being awarded the croix de Saint-Louis for his bravery: at the risk of being overrun and sliced to pieces, he managed to halt the machine and stave off his comrades' deaths. Lantenac—calm, collected, brave, and cruel—shares something of the carronade's mechanical nature, for when he pronounces the sailor's death sentence, “ces paroles tombaient l’une après l’autre, lentement, gravement, avec une sorte de mesure inexorable, comme des coups de cognée sur un chêne” (51).

Lantenac’s voice sounds as if it were assembling a scaffold, hammering together pieces of wood.172 His declaration exposes the death penalty's absurdity by honoring a man who, because of him, has only moments to live. In both lauding and punishing the sailor,

Lantenac blindly follows military procedure, making no attempt to navigate a middle

172 Hugo speaks of such a sound in Le dernier jour d'un condamné: "on entend dans la place de Grève clouer une charpente" (288). The scaffold is built on execution day.

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ground. Such a sentence insists that negligence is irredeemable, that heroic actions are powerless to counterbalance a man's crime. With the Claymore on the brink of destruction at the hands of the French fleet, this double ceremony is strikingly pointless since the sailor, who might have helped defend his ship, dies mere hours before the rest of the crew. Adding to this absurdity is the fact that during the skirmish with the canon,

Lantenac saved the life of the very man he later orders to be shot.

When the Claymore comes under attack and Lantenac makes his escape by lifeboat to the shores of Brittany, his only guide is the sailor Halmalo. In a twist of fate, this man turns out to be the brother of the condemned. In order to stave off Halmalo’s vengeance and his own summary execution, Lantenac attempts to justify his merciless conduct, delivering an impromptu apology of the death penalty. The man who gives the order to fire, he reasons, is an "instrument de Dieu" (73) and bears no personal responsibility for the condemned man’s death. Inflicting capital punishment is a passionless “devoir” (71). The guilty party is not killed by his fellow men, but rather by

“sa faute” (69). The firing squad is cleared of all responsibility, as is the man who gives the order to fire: violence is cold, disinterested, and impersonal, much like Lantenac, who sees himself as a political and military figure rather than a human being. The marquis declares, and we can only believe him: “de même que j’ai fait fusiller ton frère, je ferais fusiller mon fils” (72). (Although the general himself will not have to make due on this promise, Cimourdain will later guillotine Gauvain, whom he loves like a son.) Lantenac wins Halmalo's enthusiastic loyalty through his rhetorical prowess and powers of intimidation. The sailor, who hails from Brittany, carries out the general's bidding with a double sentence hanging over his own heard. Threatened with eternal damnation for his

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short-lived rebellion, he expects to be shot, as was his brother, should he fail to rally the countryside.

The marquis defends the death penalty to Halmalo in a chapter whose title, “La parole, c’est le verbe," illustrates the deadly power of the spoken word. In a religious sense, “le verbe” (used in nineteenth-century French translations of the Gospel of John) is a force of life and breath that emanates from the divine: “au commencement étoit le

Verbe, et le Verbe étoit en Dieu, et le Verbe étoit Dieu" (John 1:1). But Lantenac’s words breathe death into his surroundings. The performative “qu’on fusille cet homme” (50), first heard aboard the Claymore, is later put into practice on a much larger scale. Several chapters later, when the royalist orders a mass shooting of peasants and soldiers, he leaves the scene of the execution before it takes place. The few surviving witnesses nevertheless pronounce him fully responsible: “Il était parti. Mais c’est égal, tout s’est fait par son commandement” (119). Like Vigny’s Richelieu, who is conspicuously absent from the executions he orchestrates, Lantenac's voice both inflicts and stands aloof from violence.

Whereas Lantenac eventually shows mercy, his enemy and double, Cimourdain, is not so easily swayed. Logical and "inexorable" (134), a learned man who knows little of life, he fails to see nuances and cannot bring himself to pardon. Like Lantenac, he has made himself into a figurehead, but instead of standing for the Second Estate, he stands for the people. He has little humanity about him. The narrator asks: "Un tel homme était- il un homme?" (141). Moreover, before learning that his mission is to oversee Gauvain

(he has been told only that he is to supervise a former aristocrat), Cimourdin blindly and prematurely extends his doctrine of inflexibility to this young man. He renounces any

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desire to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, to improvise, when he declares: "Quand c'est un prêtre qui est chargé de surveiller un noble, la responsabilité est double, et il faut que le prêtre soit inflexible" (173). Notwithstanding his oath, Gauvain remains Cimourdain's weak point, his Achilles heel, "le fils, non de sa chair, mais de son esprit," in whom he has cultivated his revolutionary fervor. Cimourdain's intellectual relationship with his pupil is described with biological metaphors: he has inoculated Gauvain with "le virus redoutable de sa vertu," nourished him with his thought like "la nourrice qui donne son lait" (142). Cimourdain takes his place alongside Fléchard as one of the novel's maternal figures. When the young Gauvain falls ill, Cimourdain nurses him back to health. He saves Gauvain a second time when they meet in battle, throwing himself between his former pupil and a well-aimed pistol shot, much as Lantenac saves the life Halmalo's brother before ordering his death. Like Lantenac, Cimourdain saves only to kill later, but instead of saving out of duty, he does so out of love, and kills against his personal desires.

Both advocates of legal and military order, Lantenac and Cimourdain are close to the written word, embracing its fixed, irrevocable nature. Charles Nunley reflects that in

Quatrevingt-Treize, "writing as a silent and silencing agent of Terror unfolds in a strictly masculine space" (41), a fact that places Michelle Fléchard, an illiterate woman, in a position antithetical to Terror's means of propagating itself. Nunley points out that

Cimourdain writes messages of death: first to the Committee of Public Safety to announce Lantenac's upcoming execution, later through the medium of the court registrar when he tallies votes in favor of Gauvain's death. As mentioned above, Gauvain and

Lantenac paper the countryside with missives placing each other outside their respective laws. The novel's popular characters, however, have neither the means nor the knowledge

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to resort to such strategies. Nor is writing the prerogative of the condemned, who, in

Quatrevingt-Treize, are given neither the time nor the materials to write. Condemned and popular language overlap in the sense that both are necessarily verbal. In what follows, I discuss how the condemned mobilize irony, storytelling, picturesque language, and raw emotion to challenge the violence of capital punishment.

The Letter Compromised

When Lantenac arrives in Brittany, the tables are turned, for he finds himself a condemned man, an invader whom, by order of Gauvain, is to be “immédiatement passé par les armes" (105). His dire situation inspires Tellmarch, a local beggar, to come to his aid, but this act of charity turns sinister when the general regains power and takes revenge upon the Fléchards. After rallying the Vendean rebels, Lantenac finds this family amidst a battalion of revolutionary soldiers, executes the mother, and takes the children hostage.

Tellmarch later shelters Michelle Fléchard in atonement for having abetted her would-be killer. Much like his second guest, Tellmarch perturbs the machinery of capital punishment through his words as well as his deeds. Saving Lantenac from certain execution gives the beggar the opportunity to deliver his own interpretation of revolutionary events.

When Lantenac and Tellmarch meet, we see that condemnation is a great leveler.

Lord and beggar both exist at the margins of the law and of the social, for Tellmarch demands: "Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi?" (98). Although not literally sentenced to death, he has endured a lifetime of hunger, not knowing in the morning if he would glean enough sustenance to survive until nightfall. He claims that he has never been

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young and, day-to-day, he glimpses the threshold of death. We might say he is under a provisionary death sentence that he keeps at bay by begging. The two men hide together, taking shelter under the roots of a tree. Lantenac enjoys Tellmarch’s hospitality in this wilderness, sharing both his dwelling and his meal. The strange equivalence between lord and beggar is rendered visible by the fact that Lantenac is disguised in rags. When the aged, disheveled Tellmarch appears, he is “presque son pareil” in age and appearance

(95). The beggar believes that by hiding and sheltering the general, he is protecting his equal, his double, another vulnerable old man who is more to be pitied than himself: “J’ai le droit de respirer, lui ne l’a pas” (98).

In the company of Lantenac, Tellmarch begins to reflect upon and analyze the cataclysmic events of '93.173 A self-appointed judge of contemporary events, the beggar maintains a strict neutrality: "Je ne suis ni pour le créancier, ni pour le débiteur" (101). At this moment in time, the people are (somewhat ironically) in the position of creditor, for the aristocracy owes them reparations for centuries of abuse. Yet simply collecting on this debt by inflicting bloodshed in the reverse direction is no permanent solution, for vengeance risks creating an endless cycle of debt and retaliation. In the eyes of

Tellmarch, a marginalized and liminal figure, both sides have crimes to account for. The beggar weighs the wrongs on either side of the balance in terms of capital punishment.

On one hand there is the king’s death, which he finds regrettable, although he cannot explain why; on the other, a history of feudal oppression: “pour un méchant coup de fusil tiré à un chevreuil du roi, j’ai vu pendre un homme qui avait une femme et sept enfants.”

The horrors of the Old Regime, it seems, outweigh those of the new, yet Tellmarch is the

173 This uneducated man (unrealistically) speaks for Hugo, pronouncing sublime thoughts and "[des] mot[s] d’auteur” (Boudout 99, footnote).

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first to admit that "il y a à dire des deux côtés" (102). His reflections raise the troubling question of the relationship between Old Regime and revolutionary methods of terror. In the novel’s final pages, this relationship is anthropomorphized when a guillotine, transported to the medieval Tourgue fortress, seems to address the tower, saying: “Je suis ta fille” (485). The guillotine connects feudal despotism to Terror through this metaphor of uncanny family, of ominous generation.

Through Tellmarch's words, Hugo asks if the guillotine is a justifiable means of eradicating the old law. If the deadly machine is truly the daughter of the feudal fortress, of antiquated horrors, then it cannot be a way out of Old Regime practice, but rather a continuation. Born in reaction to oppression, the Terror is of the same monstrous nature as the order it seeks to supplant. There is no point, as Tellmarch implies, in trying to balance this scale, since both sides are using similar methods. Here, Quatrevingt-Treize articulates a serious challenge to revolutionary violence. By emphasizing the plight of those who are caught in the middle of a struggle having little or nothing to do with their immediate interests, Hugo cannot help but undermine, or at the very least complicate, his own pro-revolutionary perspective.

Because of Tellmarch's pity, Lantenac is able to seize control of the uprising and places his theory of capital punishment (expounded on the lifeboat) into deadly practice.

The Vendean rebels, he finds, have bested a Parisian battalion and captured eighty prisoners. The general sends the captives, Fléchard included, before the firing squad. This is not the first time Fléchard is nearly executed. Before her botched execution by the royalists, she narrowly escapes being shot by the French Revolutionary Army, which mistakes her for an enemy soldier and then for a spy. The novel's opening scene

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demonstrates the dangerous quality of this woman's speech, i.e. its potential to bring about her death, as well as its power to muddy the waters of revolutionary ideology.

Quatrevingt-Treize opens in May of 1793 with a Parisian battalion making its way through forested Brittany. The nervous soldiers, having sustained severe casualties and lost most of their number, fear an ambush. Instead of finding enemy combatants, they happen upon Fléchard and her three children who are starving and terrified, hiding in the brush. The narrator remarks, with irony: “C’était là l’embuscade” (9). The vivandière, a woman traveling with the army, is more perceptive than her comrades and gives the order not to fire. Despite this intervention on the part of a citoyenne who exemplifies "la bravoure féminine" (8), Fléchard is still suspected of being a spy, and the battalion's sergeant, Radoub, threatens to shoot her should her story prove suspicious. Although

Fléchard's naiveté eventually dissuades him from this course of action, she is only given a brief reprieve, her sentence soon to be carried out by the opposing side.

Michelle Fléchard turns out, in fact, to be a one-woman ambush, albeit not in a strictly military sense. She and her children act as impediments to the war machine, ambushing not the bodies, but rather the intentions of the men they come across. After disorienting the republican troops, Fléchard goes on to sabotage Lantenac's plans. In his study History in the Text, Sandy Petrey observes that Quatrevingt-Treize is structured around a "progressive" understanding of the "purely human Fléchards" by the novel's other characters: the realization, by both sides, that the members of this family (and in a larger sense, women and children) are not their enemies (51). I wish to add to this analysis by showing that, if Fléchard begins as an object of interpretation, she ends by

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interpreting revolutionary events, by making the decree that "ce qui se passe dans ce temps-ci est abominable" (417).

Although the narrator describes her as a female animal or "femelle" (11, 280), indifferent to her own partial nudity and guided by instinct, Fléchard undergoes a verbal apprentissage born of necessity and her precarious position between two armies, two firing squads. From a silent woman, she becomes a speaking subject able to evaluate what is taking place around her. Her verbal evolution begins when the Revolutionary

Army finds her. Although she is at first "muette d'effroi" (10), her complete silence gives way to halting speech when she utters her name in a "bégaiement presque indistinct" (11).

Fléchard's verbal difficulties contrast with the verbosity of her interrogator, for the

Parisian Radoub is "un peu beau parleur" (13). Yet even in these early stages of her political education, her speech confounds the sergeant's attempt to fathom her opinions.

She fails to comprehend political terms such as "parti," "patrie," "bleu," and "blanc," while unwittingly illustrating the absurdly abstract quality of these concepts. These vocables have no meaning except for those privy to Parisian politics. Communication between the two deteriorates when Radoub asks her "Quelles sont tes opinions politiques?" and she responds with what appears to be a non sequitur: "J'ai été mise au couvent toute jeune, mais je me suis mariée, je ne suis pas religieuse. Les sœurs m'ont appris à parler français. On a mis le feu au village. Nous nous sommes sauvés si vite que je n'ai pas eu le temps de mettre des souliers" (11). Fléchard's story sums up her personal history to the best of her knowledge, bringing her interlocutor up to date with her current situation, which finds her hiding barefoot in the woods. She does not perceive her plight

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in terms of a broader political scenario, but rather as the consequence of a series of unexpected and inexplicable events.

In the pages that follow, Fléchard insists on bringing the political, the figurative, and the abstract back to the literal. When Radoub asks her "De quel parti es-tu? . . . Es-tu des blancs? Es-tu des bleus? Avec qui es-tu?" she responds: "Je suis avec mes enfants"

(14). Such ignorance lends her interrogator and his political jargon an air of the ridiculous. Petrey interprets this communicative crisis as a collision between "historical" and "pastoral" modes of discourse. Radoub's words, he explains, "have a temporally specific sense" (53). Fléchard's speech, on the contrary, is rooted in the "transhistorical signification of pastoral words," particularly words denoting family relationships: "When

Michelle Fléchard, who is with her children, refuses to respond to the demand for a

Blue/White choice, her implicit denunciation of historical meaninglessness also affirms kinship terms as radiantly meaningful" (54).

I would add that Fléchard illustrates to what extent political and historical constructs remain divorced from the real, from the concrete experiences of daily life.

Fléchard's responses show that certain ideas and ideologies emanating from Paris do not easily take root in "foreign" Brittany. Even questions regarding her family history become unintelligible to her when they asked in the context of attempting to gauge her political loyalties. Radoub's speech is reduced to empty noise when he prompts the peasant to speak about her relations: "—On a des parents, que diable! ou on en a eu. Qui es-tu? Parle. La femme écouta, ahurie, cet—ou on en a eu—qui ressemblait plus à un cri de bête qu'à une parole humaine" (13). Fléchard's relatives are dead or missing: her father was given one hundred blows for poaching a rabbit, her Huguenot grandfather sent to the

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galleys, her father-in-law hung for being a faux-saulnier (illegally fabricating and selling salt during the Old Regime). Language breaks down when speaking of the absent, of the

"parents" who are meant to reveal one's political identity. Fléchard can only gape in response to the sergeant's demand that she sum up her family history. Because she understands the world in terms of the local and the individual, as opposed to the historical or the political, she and Radoub are each in turn "stupéfait" (12) by the questions and answers they exchange. The vivandière acts as interpreter between these two worlds

(masculine and feminine, Parisian and provincial) by asking Fléchard questions that she can understand. The vivandière makes communication between the two possible by referring to what is present as opposed to what is absent, inquiring about the child the mother is holding: "Quel âge a ce môme?" (11). Verbal exchange must start with the simple and the concrete before it can take in the past.

The fact that Fléchard is able to characterize her children before explaining the

"état" (14) and origins of her family suggests that children are more present, more "real" to this woman than her banished and mutilated forebears. In focusing her attention exclusively on those who are still alive, on the next generation, Fléchard is perhaps the most forward-thinking character in the novel.174 Coaxed by the vivandière, she gives the name of her nursing daughter, Georgette, and of her two sons. This speech act of naming children becomes essential later in the novel when Fléchard is forced to plead for their lives: when the Tourgue is burning with her children inside and she calls out their names, attention to immediate reality once again supplants politics. The speech act of naming exists in contrast to other patterns of speech found in the novel, particularly the tendency

174 Grossman interprets the children as "represent[ing] the nation's future—that is, the stakes for which both sides are at war" (223).

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to refer to human beings using the gender-neutral demonstrative pronoun "ça." This pronoun emerges, often ironically, in the speech patterns of the novel's characters when they seek to turn human beings into abstractions. In the mouth of Radoub, it forms an indirect threat: "ça se fusille, les espionnes" (12). Later, in Paris, we witness Marat refer to Gauvain in a similar fashion: "ça pardonne, ça fait grâce, ça protège les religieuses et les nonnes, ça sauve les femmes et les filles des aristocrates, ça relâche les prisonniers, ça met en liberté les prêtres" (174). In this instance, "ça" emphasizes the fact that Gauvain is, in Marat's eyes, a military problem and a political threat. Finally, when he is imprisoned in the Tourgue, Lantenac gives a similar (albeit laudatory) tirade concerning the aristocracy and the example of the "gentilhomme": "C'est curieux; ça croit en Dieu, ça croit à la tradition, ça croit à la famille, ça croit à ses aïeux, ça croit à l'exemple de son père . . . et ça vous ferait fusiller avec plaisir" (449). Here, as is often the case, Lantenac's humanity is subsumed by his allegiance to his class. On the contrary, by simply naming her children, Michelle Fléchard emphasizes their humanity, encouraging others to perceive them as individuals.

If Fléchard's patterns of speech are problematic, her situation within history is even more troubling from a Parisian perspective: her family, she explains, has long been persecuted by feudal lords, by the clergy, and yet her husband fought on the side the king.

Fléchard can no more self-identify as French than can the fanciful savages, "[l]es iroquois de la Chine" (17), to which a grenadier compares her. This phrase suggests that to the

Parisians, Fléchard is a kind of hybrid barbarian who fits into no clear category. In baptizing this woman "citoyenne" (21) and adopting her children into the battalion's care, the sergeant certainly breaks his orders to show no pity. Fléchard thus infringes upon the

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injunction "Point de grâce, point de quartier" (6) almost as soon as she enters the novel.

After pacifying the republican soldiers, she becomes one of them, a citizen, but only superficially and momentarily. Soon she will be wandering the wilderness, once again unaffiliated with either side.

Fléchard's Heroic Journey

Fléchard's execution by firing squad is foreshadowed and recollected, but never described. As readers, we are privy to Lantenac's orders, "Fusillez tout," but the scene of the execution itself is absent from the text (113). Arriving in the hamlet of Herbe-en-Pail in the wake of the event, Tellmarch examines the rows of bodies for survivors and finds only one. Just as he previously saved the fugitive marquis, Tellmarch also saves his victim. Fléchard becomes the beggar’s guest, the recipient of his care and hospitality.

During her convalescence, she suffers a "quasi-agonie" and is unable to speak, a detail that serves to emphasize the recovery of speech that follows: "les plaies de la poitrine exigent le silence . . . elle avait à peine dit quelques paroles" (275). In addition to falling silent, the cadaverous Fléchard, nearly comatose, has yet to rejoin the living. After mentioning her missing children and receiving no answer from her caregiver as to their whereabouts, she retreats into voluntary silence: "A partir de ce jour, elle ne parla plus."

Yet so powerful is her despair that Tellmarch, watching her, begins to experience her agony vicariously. "Des pensées de femme" (279) invade his mind. As he dwells upon what it means to nurse and then lose a child, he momentarily transcends the boundaries of his gender.

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Fléchard, I believe, becomes the novel's unlikely Romantic hero (in contrast to its more obvious hero, the handsome and virtuous Gauvain). Although at times reduced to an animal-like figure, described simultaneously as "sublime" and "une espèce de bête"

(280), she sets out on a quest that changes the course of the war. Fléchard's search thwarts the expectations of both Tellmarch and the narrator. In a moment of indirect discourse, the reflections of these two male voices overlap, predicting that Fléchard will go insane: "Une idée fixe aboutit à la folie ou à l'héroïsme. Mais de quel héroïsme peut

être capable une pauvre paysanne? d'aucun. Elle peut être mère, et voilà tout" (280). The events that follow prove this conjecture false. Fléchard's maternity prompts her to choose a heroic role for herself, and she plainly states in the pages that follow: "Je ne suis pas une folle, je suis une mère" (361). Given the choice between insanity and maternal heroism, there is little doubt that Fléchard chooses the latter.175 During her journey, she demonstrates persistence, self-sacrifice, and a calculated determination to find her way through unknown territory.

Upon undertaking her quest, Fléchard becomes more than a "femelle" or a

"sauvage" (353), a beast of burden, an example of Breton ignorance. She becomes a kind of wandering knight, taking over the chivalric mission that the Gauvain family, despite its

Arthurian designation,176 has forsaken: the faithful pursuit of what has been lost. She also becomes a kind of female Christ, following the "Voie Douloureuse," reaching

"l'accablement de la dernière station" (365), going onward with barely any food or sleep.

Day and night she travels on foot, begging, sleeping on the ground, dressed only in rags,

175 Although she makes a contrary exclamation, "je suis folle" (415), when her children are about to perish, this insanity is temporary, brought on by unbearable grief. 176 According to Arthurian legend, Gawain (the English modification of "Gauvain") was one of the knights of the Round Table who participated in quests to find the Holy Grail. Gauvain "bears the name of the purest of medieval knights" (Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 222).

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trading sex for shelter and information: heroic and abject, animalistic and divine. She finds herself, although relatively close to home, in foreign territory: "elle allait à travers la guerre, à travers les coups de fusil" (290). Asking if anyone has seen her children, she meets with silence and incomprehension.

During her arduous journey, speaking poses a drastic and immediate threat to

Fléchard's survival. Once again, chapter titles emphasize the performative dimension of speech and the danger of the spoken word. In "La mort parle," Fléchard arrives in a village where a crowd has gathered around a public crier. As the villagers listen, nineteen royalists attempting to hold the Tourgue fortress are declared "hors la loi" (354) and condemned to death by order of Cimourdain. In the following chapter, Fléchard takes over the crier's role at the center of public attention. Speaking to the assembled populace, she demands to know the location of the aforementioned Tourgue. Death, formerly an abstraction, takes on human shape in the form of Fléchard ("la morte") herself, who explains to the peasants: "On devrait m'aider à retrouver mes enfants. Je ne suis pas du pays. J'ai été fusillée, mais je ne sais pas où." This last sentence recalls Danton's famous

"j'ai été guillotiné," a statement impossible for a living person to truthfully pronounce.

Fléchard is met with horrified incomprehension and told to keep silent: "Dans des temps de révolution, il ne faut pas dire des choses qu’on ne comprend pas" (361).

Fléchard's suspension between life and death is evoked repeatedly throughout the second part of the novel. She explains to curious onlookers that Lantenac does indeed shoot women: "Puisqu'on m'a fusillée." This remark is "singulier; il fit l'effet d'une vivante qui se dit morte" (359). Later, when she reaches the Tourgue, Radoub, who has joined his small battalion to Gauvain's army, mistakes her for a "ressuscitée," a

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"revenant[e]" (423). Fléchard occupies the intermediary, liminal space of condemnation.

A metaphorical phantom, her summary execution has placed her among the undead.

Although the peasant survives, her death sentence has not been lifted, and she must wander the earth like a ghost until she finds her children. The villagers whom she comes across during her travels fail, as did Radoub, to grasp who she is, speculating that she is an "espionne" or an "innocente," an idiot (359). She responds by telling them what she is not: "Je ne me repose pas. . . . Je ne suis pas une folle. . . . Je ne suis pas une voleuse. . . .

Je ne suis pas du pays." (360-361). This spectral language only makes her situation worse; the villagers refuse to show her the way to the Tourgue, and she is forced to find it on her own.

As Fléchard arrives, the battle between Lantenac and Gauvain is long underway, and the besieged tower is about to be taken. In a melodramatic coup de théâtre, Lantenac discovers a secret, subterranean passageway and flees. He has arranged for the building's library to be set aflame as soon as his forces no longer control the stronghold. The three children have been locked inside, along with their cradles and a last meal of soup. This act of violence, although not strictly speaking an execution (for the children stand accused of no crime), resembles in many ways the ritualized capital punishment of Old

Regime and nineteenth-century France. The fire is designed to be an intimidating spectacle, its victims in good health and conscious when their lives end. The moment of their deaths has been timed with precision;177 a fuse has been set up that will take

177 Likewise, the attack on the Tourgue is portrayed as the execution of a death sentence as opposed to a purely military maneuver. The men inside have been publicly outlawed by Cimourdain. They are given a reprieve of 24 hours, and when the attack starts, they know "on n'avait plus qu'une demi-heure devant soi." The time of their deaths has been set and they feel the minutes tick away. Like the children, they are given the chance to partake in a last meal: "Au fond de la salle basse, sur un long tréteau, il y avait à manger, comme dans une caverne homérique" (370).

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approximately fifteen minutes to reach the library. Moreover, the intent to kill has been announced in advance in order to deter Gauvain's attack. Should deterrence fail, the children will become a medium of reprisal; their deaths are calculated to coincide with the royalist defeat. In keeping with the novel's lengthy series of executions, that of the children is both an act of vengeance and an example.

Despite Lantenac's warning, the revolutionary forces attack, prioritizing victory over the hostages' lives. A ladder, sent for in hopes of rescuing the children after battle starts, is intercepted and destroyed en route. Fléchard approaches the Tourgue as it goes up in flames, recognizing her children through the window. As she realizes they are trapped inside the second story, she compares her own execution to that of her offspring:

"on m'a fusillée, eux on les brûle" (416). Her passionate plea for their lives counters the injunction "pas de grâce, pas de quartier" that has guided military behavior since the beginning of the novel. In this moment, emotion defeats reason as Fléchard's sentiment infects the besieging army as well as their enemy.

In an incredible coincidence, Lantenac exits the Tourgue in time to hear a "cri de l'inexprimable angoisse. . . . . on ne sait quoi d'inarticulé et de déchirant, plutôt des sanglots que des paroles" (413, 415). Before her cry turns into words, Hugo describes

Fléchard through a series of dichotomies: she is both "femme" and "louve," "misérable" and "formidable," incarnating "l'humanité" and the "surhumain." "Bête" and "déesse," she is also "paysanne" and "euménide" (one of the three furies, Greek deities of vengeance).

Fléchard awakens the opposing yet corresponding sentiments of terror and pity in those who hear her. Hugo compares her to both Hecuba and the Gorgon, and she paralyzes

Lantenac as if she were Medusa: after seeing this "figure hagarde et lamentable," the

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general freezes in midflight and turns back to the catastrophe he set in motion. Most importantly, Fléchard is a verbal contradiction: "Cette villageoise quelconque, vulgaire, ignorante, inconsciente, venait de prendre brusquement les proportions épiques du désespoir" (414). Fléchard moves from the vulgar to the epic register in a verbal shift typical of the condemned, bridging the gaps between the mythological and the historical, the divine, the human, and the bestial, just as she momentarily closes the chasm between

Lantenac and the Revolutionary Army who, in response to her plea, unite in a single rescue effort.

Despite beginning as a non-verbal cry, Fléchard's language is performative and has an immediate, violent, perlocutionary effect on Lantenac, who feels it "tomb[er] sur sa tête" as might the guillotine (415). Her disjointed speech causes a "grand movement" as 4,000 revolutionary soldiers rush towards the fire. Fléchard's words exploit the range of the performative. She gives commands, repeating "au secours! au feu!:" she asks for pity and delivers insults ("Mais vous êtes donc des bandits. . . . monstres. . . . les brigands!"): and she names her children (415-417). As Grossman points out, this act of naming stirs Lantenac's conscience because it "render[s] concrete what until then had been, for the noble, an abstract crime. . . . she humanizes the little hostages, thereby evacuating their symbolic value for Lantenac" (222). Fléchard emphasizes the cruel absurdity of warfare: "Mais qu'est-ce que cela veut dire . . . c'est une chose impossible!"

(415). Most importantly, she passes judgment on '93 itself, declaring that "ce qui se passe dans ce temps-ci est abominable" (417).178 In the end, Fléchard's language elaborates a

178 Fléchard's sweeping indictment of contemporary events suggests that she does not completely succumb to a "disorientation paradigm" in which she is "unable to interpret the events surrounding her" (Denby 11); rather, she has understood enough of what is going on to condemn the big picture, to criticize the "time" as well as the immediate catastrophe that afflicts her family.

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theodicy: a meditation on a world corrupted by evil where the innocent suffer, in which

God himself is the great executioner. In fact, both Fléchard and Radoub swear to take vengeance against the almighty. The execution of the children by fire takes on extra- human dimensions, with the mother demanding "Grâce!" of the inflamed structure itself, as if men were no longer responsible for (or capable of responding to) this "impossible" tragedy. The universe, however, is deaf to her plea: "de sourds craquements se mêlaient aux pétillements du brasier" (423).

Fléchard's speech, I believe, reveals the fault lines in Hugo's own political philosophy as he exposed it two decades earlier in Les châtiments: the belief that momentary violence is acceptable, that sacrifice of human life allows for progress. As

Kathryn Grossman points out, Quatrevingt-Treize makes multiple references to family members who are willing to kill each other in order to advance partisan causes. But

Fléchard imposes a limit on the practice of destroying and dismembering families, on sacrificing children for long-term gains. Children cannot be sacrificed to the future, Hugo implies, because they are the only future.179 Despite the narrator's arguments for the historical necessity of the revolution, Fléchard's predicament illustrates the ugliness of achieving political ends with civilian casualties.

The peasant's speech instantly transforms the reality of war. Since the fire is a manmade evil, neither natural nor divine, Lantenac, the man who designed it, must undo its potential for harm. The sole possessor of the library's key, he returns to save the children, ceasing to be a force of death and taking on the providential role of a deity.

When he reappears with the children, Radoub acknowledges: "tu es le bon Dieu" (424).

Fléchard's speech has introduced into the middle of the war, via its profound effect on

179 See Victor Brombert's Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel, page 208.

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Lantenac, a great improvisation, a series of unforeseen events. In returning to the

Tourgue, Lantenac effectively hands himself over to the Revolutionary Army. Shortly thereafter, following the general's arrest and imprisonment, "l'imprévu, cet on ne sait quoi de hautain qui joue avec l'homme," seizes hold of Gauvain. Reflecting on the day's unexpected happenings, he interprets180 Lantenac's return as "l'impossible devenu réel"

(430). Gauvain realizes that his uncle's heroism has made a dent in the cyclical vengeance of '93: what a pity, after such an action, for the Revolutionary Army to remain mired

"dans la guerre civile, dans la routine du sang, dans le fratricide" (436). The revolution, he believes, must show more generosity, more honor, than the aristocracy. Just as

Cimourdain "inoculated" Gauvain with revolutionary virtue, Lantenac infects him with the desire for self-sacrifice, for self-destruction. Only by dying can Gauvain exit his internal confusion, his indecision as to whether Lantenac's salvation or the safety of

France should take priority. After a lengthy private deliberation, he sets Lantenac free and takes his great-uncle's place inside the Tourgue's dungeon.

Mercy as Crime

Michelle Fléchard and her recovered children are absent from the novel's final pages. Following the children's rescue, Fléchard's story seems to come to an end. Yet before her disappearance, her words set in motion a series of melodramatic surprises, twists, and turns. Even in her absence, her speech continues to affect the triumvirate of

180 In Quatrevingt-Treize, condemnation is linked (as it is in Le rouge et le noir) to the possibility of interpreting the novel. As Suzanne Guerlac points out: "The [internal] conflict [following Lantenac's self- sacrifice] which literally divides Gauvain into two voices is not one of conscience but of interpretation. What the text reveals through Gauvain's 'débat pathétique' with himself is not the character's inner world but his efforts to interpret the external one, which is also the world of the novel" (864). Gauvain's increasing proximity to death, as he comes closer and closer to taking Lantenac's place on the guillotine, turns him into another privileged, narrating voice. As a condemned man, he takes on prophetic qualities, speaking of a utopian future.

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major characters, initiating a wave of sacrificial substitutions: Lantenac for her children,

Gauvain for Lantenac, and finally Cimourdain alongside (if not strictly in place) of

Gauvain. Fléchard's plea gives impetus to a kind of domino effect that takes down the novel's three most powerful men, as Gauvain seconds Lantenac's act of self-sacrifice and inspires Cimourdain's suicide. Whereas Fléchard interrupts the novel's lengthy series of reprisals (the continual execution of hostages by both sides) with the force of her words,

Gauvain undermines military order with his death. As he marches to the scaffold, the assembled troops, disgruntled and dismayed, cry out "Grâce!" (490). In light of their commander’s impending death, their string of victories loses its meaning, and "toute cette gloire leur tournait en honte" (488). Like Fléchard's language, Gauvain's death shows the purported logic of violence, the calculation of reprisals, to be deeply irrational.

The ending of Quatrevingt-Treize incorporates a rebuttal to philosophies and legal theories that justify capital punishment in terms of retaliation. In The Metaphysics of

Morals (1797), for instance, Kant defines the death penalty as a categorical imperative, i.e. an absolute, universal moral law that applies to all human beings in all situations.

This principle is based upon the ancient notion of the law of talion: "Accordingly, whatever undeserved evil you inflict upon another within the people, that you inflict upon yourself. . . . only the law of retribution (ius talionis) . . . can specify definitely the quality and the quantity of punishment. . . . If [a man] has committed murder he must die"

(105-106). Hugo, although quite possibily ignorant of the specifics of Kant's philosophy, invokes and then rejects a similar principle when he describes civil war in terms of "le talion, l'affreuse logique des représailles" (433). In the narrative world of Quatrevingt-

Treize, the theory of "an eye for an eye" fuels both civil warfare and capital punishment.

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Gauvain's death, however, undercuts the theory that punishment can truly reproduce an original harm and thus inflict upon the perpetrator his own crime. In what follows, I explore the different ways in which the protagonist's execution fails to uphold the law of talion. To summarize: 1) Gauvain is punished not for taking life, but rather for preserving it, so his punishment does not fit the crime; 2) Gauvain is a replacement for Lantenac, and therefore his execution makes sense only insofar as human beings are considered interchangeable; 3) instead of killing one man, Gauvain's execution involves two deaths, demonstrating that capital punishment fails to precisely target its victims. Whereas Kant envisioned executions and crime in a relation of symmetry (the same violence that a man inflicts is in turn inflicted upon this same man), Gauvain's execution is strikingly asymmetrical.

Unlike Lantenac, Gauvain does not execute prisoners, and throughout his campaign he refuses to target women, children, or the elderly. The young commander theorizes what Fléchard expresses in a more subjective fashion, namely that violence can never be justified against the unarmed, including former combatants: "Il ne faut pas faire le mal pour faire le bien. . . . Amnistie est pour moi le plus beau mot de la langue humaine. Je ne veux verser de sang qu'en risquant le mien" (289). In Gauvain's eyes, it is only acceptable to inflict violence if in so doing, one wagers one's own life. The scaffold is an illegitimate form of violence because he who kills risks nothing in return.

Gauvain takes Lantenac's place within a penal system that kills not for taking life so much as for preserving it. At the time of his execution, the National Convention is acutely concerned with the release of enemy prisoners and aims to punish with increased severity those who show mercy to the royalists. The National Convention has outlawed

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the release of prisoners, and yet those who dare give asylum remain effectively unpunished. In the novel's second section, Marat demands "un décret qui punisse de mort tout chef militaire qui fait évader un rebelle prisonnier." As it turns out, such a decree has already been passed, but the military is ignoring it: "c'est à qui fera évader les prisonniers, et l'asile est impuni" (214). In order to strike fear into those who would come to the aid of the enemy, the National Convention desires "deux ou trois bons exemples" that will make scapegoats out of important and powerful men. Examples must be made of "les grandes têtes. . . . les généraux" (215). Already, in the pages on Paris, Gauvain is set up to be a scapegoat, an example. The young commander has too much energy and shows too much clemency. His superiors cannot decide whether to shoot or promote him. In the end,

Gauvain knowingly allows himself to become a sacrificial spectacle because he believes it will do some good to war-torn France.

By saving the life of a man who has recently saved three other lives, Gauvain repays Lantenac in kind for his good deed (although he, in turn, will not be repaid). In rescuing his own hostages, Lantenac allows himself to be captured and sentenced to death; Gauvain's generosity has the same consequence. Although Cimourdain could pardon Gauvain or simply vote for his acquittal, he refuses to do so. The guillotine has been brought to Brittany, and the Committee of Public Safety does not wish it to stand idle. Revolutionary law demands an execution. The insistence that someone pay for the royalist rebellion resonates with René Girard's theory of sacrificial crisis, in which personal guilt has little or nothing to do with who is sacrificed for whom. Rather, scapegoats are killed in times of civil turmoil to restore order and harmony to a fractured community.

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Hugo's sweeping portrayal of revolutionary Paris is surprisingly similar to René

Girard's description of social strife during times of sacrificial crisis, in moments of calamity and "vengeance interminable" that end in human sacrifice. Girard theorizes that such periods are precipitated by the elimination of social difference and class distinction, by the decomposition of the old order, "l'ordre culturel lui-même" (Girard 77). Sacrificial crises arise when violence within a community gains nearly unstoppable momentum: "la violence ne cesse de se propager et de s'exaspérer." Only through human sacrifice, according to Girard's model, can "la chaîne des représailles" find a stopping point (101).

Hugo describes a similar situation. The central section of Quatrevingt-Treize, "À Paris," does little to advance the novel's plot, but rather contemplates the stakes of the French

Revolution and its relationship to trends of social crisis. Picking up on the same concepts and consequences upon which Girard would later elaborate, Hugo theorizes that "dans les crises finales des sociétés vieillies, exécution signale extermination" (197). The Terror,

Hugo implies, has taken on a life of its own. Each rising party is exterminated in turn along with its leader: "ils livraient Louis XVI à Vergniaud, Vergniaud à Danton, Danton

à Robespierre, Robespierre à Tallien" (195). The death of Louis XVI, which was meant to inaugurate a new era by killing the "monstrous"181 sovereign, leads only to a series of other killings, other reprisals and regime changes. Instigating another's death is a sure sign that one's own days are numbered: "Au moment où ils condamnèrent à mort Louis

XVI, Robespierre avait encore dix-huit mois à vivre, Danton quinze mois, Vergniaud neuf mois, Marat cinq mois et trois semaines, Lepelletier-Saint-Fargeau un jour" (200). In

181 Daniel Arasse explains that revolutionary ideology inverted "l'exception que constitue le corps royal," the notion of the king as sacred body. The sovereign was re-conceptualized as a monstrosity, with the Montagnards arguing that "les rois sont dans l'ordre moral ce que les monstres sont dans l'ordre physique" (67).

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fact, Hugo describes the vote for the monarch's death as part of an "éternelle répercussion qui emplit toute l'histoire, et qui, depuis que la justice humaine existe, a toujours mis l'écho du sépulcre sur le mur du tribunal" (198): it signals not a definitive end to an era, but rather another link in the vast history of human violence. The Paris episode imbeds the struggle between Cimourdain and Lantenac within a larger structure of escalating bloodshed.

On the eve of his pupil's death, Cimourdain visits the condemned man inside the

Tourgue's dungeon, listening as Gauvain imagines a future republic based on education and equality between men and women. Through this principle, the ghostly, condemned,

"undead" Fléchard continues to haunt the text despite her eclipse from the novel's final pages. Gauvain's last words to Cimourdain, with whom he shares a final meal, constitute a genesis-like act of creation and world building, the verbalization of a universe where human beings exist in harmony with each other and with nature. In Gauvain's utopian vision, cyclical bloodshed is ended once and for all. In addition to creating a hypothetical future, a democratic utopia, Gauvain's condemnation puts an end to the reprisals carried out by and between Lantenac and Cimourdain, ending a conflict that represents the turmoil of '93 and, by extension of what Hugo calls the "éternelle répercussion" (198), human history itself. In putting an end to the struggle between these two ideologues,

Gauvain's death closes Hugo's narrative world, allowing the hero to exit history and enter death (a literal utopia, a "non-place"). Cimourdain's suicide extends this process of closure: by executing himself, he eliminates any need for reprisal. No one will be able to avenge Gauvain, as the man responsible for his death is already dead.

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Despite its utopian connotations, Gauvain's death is subject to a more sinister economic interpretation: the substitution of the innocent for the guilty is predicated upon the belief that one life can stand in place of another, that human lives are of the same currency and are therefore interchangeable. Conceptualizing the death penalty as part of an "economy" of life goes back at least as far as Rousseau, who in the Social Contract explains that acquiescing to the practice of capital punishment constitutes a wager that ensures social order: "c'est pour n'être pas la victime d'un assassin qu'on consente à mourir si on le devient" (qtd. in La peine de mort 40). Derrida describes this as an

"échange rationnel et contractuel, contrat social et économie circulaire" (40). In the terrorist economy of Quatrevingt-Treize, however, one consents to die not only for taking life, but also for showing mercy to the enemy. Gauvain is not a murderer, but according to military logic, he has endangered the lives of others by sparing the enemy general, who may live to fight again, to attack France, to facilitate an English invasion. Lantenac and

Gauvain both reverse Rousseau's wager, risking death by preserving life. Thus Gauvain's beheading makes amends for a life spared; his life is given in payment for Lantenac's continued existence and liberty. Nevertheless, there is a kind of mathematical, Kantian equivalence to this arrangement, as one life is demanded in payment for another. In the scale of revolutionary justice, Lantenac is minus one. Gauvain is required to fill this void with his own life so that in the final calculation, nothing will be owed.

In response to Kant, Nietzsche questioned "d'où vient cette idée bizarre . . . antique, archaïque, cette idée si profondément enracinée, peut-être indestructible, d'une

équivalence possible entre le dommage et la douleur? D'où vient cette étrange hypothèse ou présomption d'une équivalence entre deux choses si incommensurables?" (Derrida, La

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peine de mort 217). Quatrevingt-Treize ends by posing a similar question. Where is the equivalence between Gauvain's crime and his punishment or, for that matter, between negligence and death by firing squad, between Fléchard's problematic "allegiance" to the

Revolutionary Army and her own summary execution? Even Lantenac, in the end, is unsuited for (we might say incommensurate with) the guillotine. Revolutionary law, like military law, is bereft of responses to human complexity.

Before he releases Lantenac and takes his place, Gauvain elaborates a more generous theory in which the value of human life cannot be so strictly calculated. As he deliberates whether or not such treason is ethical, the commander uncovers certain cracks in the logic of the death penalty and the righteousness of war. To start with, he glimpses a moral code, "l'absolu humain" (431), that outweighs the interests of the revolution, in comparison to which the war is a "conflit des valeurs inférieurs" (442). At this point, the novel espouses a viewpoint that has nothing to do with revolutionary progress or the teleological movement of history, but rather with values that transcend any kind of politics, any kind of time or place, an ethics that could be considered ahistoric or utopist.

Lantenac transcends history by renouncing "une monarchie de quinze siècles" (443) in order to save three lives, and Gauvain ignores historical cause and effect in the same way when he releases Lantenac, thereby jeopardizing the revolution and French independence from foreign powers. Both the Old Regime's view of history as something to be preserved, and the revolutionary idea of history as a movement towards the betterment of humanity, are set aside to make way for the immediate demands of human life.

Besides assigning life an incalculable value, Gauvain points out another problem with the hypothetical equivalence between crime and punishment. Lantenac is about to

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pay for his generous action with his head. By asking the question "Mais était-ce bien la même tête?" Gauvain stumbles upon a thought that threatens the coherence of the death penalty. The royalist, it seems, is no longer the same man whom Gauvain was hunting. A substitution has already taken place. The original Lantenac, the man of violence, has escaped and left behind a fundamentally different creature. By taking Lantenac's place,

Gauvain, in a sense, copies the general's transformation: this substitution is secondary to the substitution of one Lantenac for another.

Apart from targeting the wrong man, Gauvain's sentence turns back upon the person who pronounces it, for after condemning his protégé, Cimourdain also becomes subject to death. He shoots himself through the heart as the guillotine's blade falls, a wordless testimony to his agony at sentencing his spiritual son to death. Although in life,

Cimourdain clings to the model of the talion, his suicide calls it into question. When

Gauvain's execution takes more lives than one, violence defies the logic of legal boundaries, of economic exchange. The attempt to compensate for Lantenac's survival with Gauvain's death makes little economic sense when Cimourdain shoots himself out of sorrow and guilt, not after his protégé is killed, but at the same instant, as if the guillotine were striking him as well. Rather than trading one life for another or repaying one death for another, capital punishment creates a domino effect leading to the self-condemnation of the law's own representative. Two lives are lost instead of one; the payment catastrophically exceeds the debt, creating tragedy as opposed to equivalence.

The idea that one cannot inflict violence without suffering violence is prevalent in

Romantic literature. In Cinq-Mars, the king assumes the aspect of a corpse when he hands his former friend over to Richelieu. Likewise, Cimourdain is infected by the death

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sentence he delivers. Those who condemn, Hugo implies, are struck by the very sentence they pronounce. Presiding over the military tribunal, Cimourdain is "pâle comme une tête coupée" (461), and as Gauvain walks to the scaffold, it seems as though Cimourdain has already stopped breathing. Whereas Gauvain appears to be full of life, his mentor’s body is already corrupted by death’s decay. The fate of the condemned man is thus displaced into Cimourdain's physicality: "Ceux qui étaient près de lui n'entendaient pas son souffle" (489). Through Cimourdain’s demise, Hugo raises another important question: if judges, and by extension executioners, are tainted by guilt and therefore subject to self-condemnation and death, who deserves the punishment of putting a death sentence into practice? In medieval and early modern Europe, before the institution of the paid hangman was firmly established, condemned criminals might be spared should they agree to execute their accomplices.182 Once the bourreau became a fixture of public life, he was seen as a cursed man, unfit for the company of others, whose very touch brought shame. European culture condemned the executioner to a lifetime of marginality and social scorn.

Cimourdain, although technically a judge, resembles the traditional bourreau in that he lingers on the borders of the social and the human. His last words, "Force à la loi," silence the grumbling army and give the executioner the courage to carry out his duty despite the soldiers' pleas for "Grâce!" (490). In this way, Cimourdain sentences Gauvain to death a second time before taking his own life. We, as readers, are left to interpret the

182 In The Spectacle of Suffering, Pieter Spierenburg explains that "the first hangman appeared in the thirteenth century. But the office was only fully developed and institutionalized in the first half of the sixteenth" (25). During this transitional period, criminals and the condemned were sometimes used as executioners: "It often happened that when a court, having no executioner at its disposal, sentenced a party of thieves to death, one of them was selected to hang his former colleagues. In return he was granted his life. Of course he would continue in the fateful job" (21).

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meaning of his suicide. Hugo's choice not to give Cimourdain final words to speak was a deliberate one, for a sort of verbal suicide note does appear in one of the novel's unused fragments. Boudout explains:

Le Reliquat de Quatrevingt-Treize nous fournit sur ce point un précieux document: deux fragment manuscrits que Hugo n'a pas reproduits dans le texte. Dans le premier de ces fragments, Cimourdain parle: Montrant la guillotine: —J'ai satisfait à la loi. —Saisissant un pistolet: —Maintenant je satisfais à la justice. —Et il se brûle la cervelle. (XXXIII-XXXIV)

A second fragment contains a written suicide note: "Il y a deux choses, la loi et la justice.

Toutes deux doivent être obéies. La mort de Gauvain satisfait à la loi; la mienne satisfait

à la justice" (XXXIV). Hugo's choice to remove these reflections from the final version of the novel perhaps implies that they are more powerful left unsaid.

It has been argued that "as Quatrevingt-Treize draws to a close, all traces of feminine involvement are effaced" (Nunley 41). Fléchard disappears and Gauvain is executed before a vast audience of men. But the peasant's distress and pain are ever- present in the novel's close, for "just as Michelle Fléchard recovers her offspring,

Cimourdain loses his" (Grossman 200). Whereas Fléchard and Radoub threaten to kill themselves should the former's children (who are also the latter's adoptive children) die,

Cimourdain makes good on their threats when he kills himself for condemning his own son, "le fils, non de sa chair, mais de son esprit" (142).

Although France would not begin to carry out executions at daybreak until 1832,

Gauvain is guillotined at dawn.183 The timing of his death resonates with Hugo's contemporary reality, as opposed to the very public executions of the French Revolution that took place later in the day. Despite the anachronism of its timing, this death is meant to be an intimidating performance, a display of force. The Revolutionary Army has been

183 This change in policy was implemented to discourage publicity and disorder around the scaffold.

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assembled to watch: "Ce spectacle avait des spectateurs. Les quatre mille hommes de la petite armée expéditionnaire étaient rangés en ordre de combat sur le plateau" (487). The spectacular nature not only of Gauvain's death, but also of Cimourdain's suicide, hammers home the failed message of the execution: the fault of the law takes precedence over that of the condemned man.

Echoing Fléchard

On the eve of his beheading, Gauvain engages in "condemned" speech and its prophetic qualities. His words, however, are calm: he does not attack warfare and the death penalty outright, as do the novel's peasant/common characters. Similar to other

Romantic heroes studied in previous chapters, Gauvain sentences himself to death, first by taking Lantenac's place inside the Tourgue's dungeon and then by requesting the death penalty when he is brought before Cimourdain's military tribunal. Unlike Fléchard,

Gauvain does not utter a passionate plea, but his condemnation does have important ramifications for the speech of others. Firstly, by pushing Lantenac forcefully from the

Tourgue's dungeon, Gauvain renders the marquis "stupéfait" (456), cutting off a flow of verbiage that represents the past, a long tirade in which his great-uncle justifies the aristocracy. Believing that Gauvain has come to gloat, the general offers him an arrogant lecture, but his soliloquy is cut short by the young man's self-condemnation. Thereafter, the substitution of one criminal for another is seamless, as Gauvain enters the improvised courtroom that was put in place for his relative. Although he assumes the responsibility of defending himself, Gauvain refuses to do so in effect, asking for "ma mort" (463).

Kathryn Grossman reads as ironic the commander's confession that in releasing Lantenac,

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he was blinded by the old man's heroics into ignoring the greater good: rather, she argues,

Lantenac enables both himself and Gauvain to transcend the partisan politics of war.

I wish to point out that popular characters both precipitate and elucidate Gauvain's choice to free his sinister relation. If Cimourdain and Gauvain have no protest to make against their respective, self-inflicted deaths, the same cannot be said for the verbose

Radoub, who speaks on Gauvain's behalf much as, in Mauprat, Patience speaks for the aristocratic Bernard. Radoub responds to his commander's trial with an impassioned objection to the way in which capital punishment tramples individual, affective needs.

Moreover, the sergeant, one of three appointed judges, disrupts the order of the military tribunal by refusing to follow its procedure for reaching a verdict. He resists instructions to cast a vote in the affirmative or the negative, evidently finding the choice between

"oui" and "non" insufficient. Hence his tirade, his refusal to abide by binary logic, his verbal fantasy: "Je vote, dit Radoub, pour qu'on le fasse général. . . . Je vote pour qu'on le fasse le premier de la république. . . . Je vote pour qu'on me coupe la tête à sa place"

(466). Although Cimourdain insists upon transcribing these utterances into the official court record as a vote for acquittal, it is obvious that military procedure can neither accurately reproduce nor control the sergeant's language.

Striking is the fact that Radoub begins his plea with yet another self-inflicted death sentence: "Si c'est ça, alors, guillotinez-moi" (464). Fléchard voiced a similar request in response to the sight of her children surrounded by flames: "qu'on les en ôte, ou qu'on m'y jette" (418). The desire for death is a response to the "impossible" (415) injustice of men and the universe, the incomprehensible nature of suffering. Like Gauvain and Fléchard before him, Radoub expresses a desire for sacrificial substitution even as he

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points out its absurdity, the fact that victims of capital punishment (or human sacrifice) are chosen contingently, arbitrarily. If his commander is guillotined for Lantenac, then

Radoub can just as easily be guillotined for Gauvain. If one man can take another's place on the scaffold, then the potential for substitution is endless. Radoub's plaidoyer, like

Fléchard's, becomes a demand for self-destruction, the attempt to wager one life for another. Radoub imagines different forms of suicide: "c'est à se jeter la tête la première par-dessus le parapet du Pont-Neuf. . . . Je vote pour qu'on me coupe la tête à sa place"

(465, 466). Just as Fléchard declared "il me faut mes enfants" (417), Radoub declares "il me faut mon chef" (466).

Through this type of verbal echo, Gauvain's trial transcends his own, individual condemnation, encompassing the tragedy of '93 and recalling the novel's other scenes of capital punishment. Radoub's words also recall the execution of the anonymous sailor.

Whereas Lantenac granted this man the croix de Saint-Louis before ordering his death,

Radoub claims that Gauvain should be awarded this honor instead of being executed: "je vous donnerais la croix de Saint-Louis, s'il y avait encore des croix, s'il y avait encore des saints, et s'il y avait encore des louis!" (464-465). Radoub's humorous exclamation reminds us that revolution has dismantled the old order of religion and currency, but it also testifies to a newfound desire to take words (and actions), if somewhat jokingly, at face value. In this moment, Radoub parodies the way Fléchard spoke during her interrogation. Just as he considers each word in the phrase croix de Saint-Louis as an independent signifier, breaking this abstract symbol of military honor into the more concrete signifying units of the cross, the saint, and the louis (a type of coin that was replaced by the French franc during the revolution), he considers and approves the

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actions of Lantenac and Gauvain as mere acts in and of themselves, apart from the legal code, apart from the war, apart from their larger historical significance: "je voudrais avoir fait, d'abord ce qu'a fait le vieux, et ensuite ce qu'a fait mon commandant" (464). Actions, like words, suddenly have intrinsic meaning. Just as Fléchard declared she was neither

"avec" the bleus or the blancs, but rather "with" her children, Radoub's exclamation regarding the croix de Saint-Louis breaks a political concept down into a series of more easily decipherable signifiers, thereby changing the meaning of the original idea and bringing language back to quotidian reality. In this sense, Radoub adopts, if only for a moment, a Fléchardian worldview. While it has been argued that Radoub's relationship to

Fléchard is one of patriarchal domination,184 the fact that he eventually comes to understand and even put into practice her way of speaking suggests that she has given him a certain education.

Radoub's association—his shared identity—with the condemned becomes apparent during Gauvain's trial in the sergeant's body as well as his language, when "un filet de sang qui sortait du bandeau coulait le long de son cou" (466). Radoub's metaphorical condemnation, his desire to be condemned in place of Gauvain, is marked by his blood as well as his speech: his wound reopens in the wake of his emotional distress. Like Fléchard, he becomes cadaverous. The red line across his neck suggests that sympathy for Gauvain is causing him to experience a guillotining by proxy, as does the fact that he falls to the ground "sans connaissance" (467) after the commander's sentence is pronounced. Following in the footsteps of Cinq-Mars, Sorel, and Bernard,

184 Nunley suggests that "having replaced Flechard's father and dead husband, sergeant Radoub's paternal control guarantees that the mother remain subordinate. . . . effectively silencing her in his very respect for her maternal function" (38).

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Radoub loses consciousness, indicating that like the condemned, he occupies a precarious place between life and death.

The fact that Radoub wants to replace Gauvain (and that his body begins to act in accordance with this desire) demonstrates yet again that the condemnation of one man entails more than one death. Radoub is not the only character who volunteers to take

Gauvain's place. As the young man is being tied up, a grenadier asks: "Reçoit-on des remplaçants pour ça? Me voici" (490), echoing the sacrificial urges of the novel's other characters. Capital punishment fails to stop at substitution and runs into the domain of contagion, implicating all who witness its practice.

Conclusion

Gauvain, in his role of condemned "prophète" (478), speaks on behalf of women and the lower classes. Equally important, I believe, is that fact that the speech of women and popular characters influences this elite hero, that others' words both precipitate and justify his supposed crime. Gauvain's death is hastened, albeit indirectly, by a woman's speech, and the enlisted Radoub does his utmost to defend his commander. These characters touch, sway, and double each other through their shared condemnation: their willingness to die and the resulting liminality that allows them to challenge military order. This kind of mutual verbal influence and doubling between the popular and the privileged represents the reciprocity of Hugo's ideal republic.

Gauvain takes part in a revolution (of forgiveness, mercy, and non-violence) distinct from that which is taking place in Paris.185 From his prison, on the eve of his

185 Derrida elucidates the contradiction of Hugo's revolt against the revolution itself: "Hugo est à la fois Révolutionnaire et quelqu'un qui, tout en accomplissant un vœu de la Révolution française, contredit

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execution, he imagines a different world. His proximity to death enables him to envision a possible future that remains beyond the grasp of the living: a peaceful, utopian society in which "songe" and "réalité" are aligned (475), in which education takes precedence over military service, where the human race lives in harmony with nature. Gauvain explicitly links these visions to his impending death, explaining that he must move quickly towards the future, because he is speaking under a deadline: "je suis peut-être un peu pressé." Yet he "absolves" the present moment, believing the Terror is for the greater good: "c'est une tempête. Une tempête sait toujours ce qu'elle fait. . . . La civilisation avait une peste, ce grand vent l'en délivre" (478). In his eyes, '93 is justifiable: "Sous un

échafaudage de barbarie se construit un temple de civilisation" (472). But in the midst of his "prophetic utterance," Gauvain lapses into silence. Breaking "off in midsentence," he becomes "entranced and speechless." On the night before his death, far from becoming a verbal virtuoso, the hero encounters the "unspeakable" (Brombert, Victor Hugo and the

Visionary Novel 224).

Gauvain's optimistic interpretation of '93 (as well as his eventual silence, his revery) clashes with the rants and ravings of the novel's popular characters, who give the novel a polyphonic quality. Whereas Gauvain represents Hugo's political idealism, crying only "Vive la République!" (491) before he is guillotined, I suggest that popular characters condemn all warfare targeting civilians and categorically reject capital punishment, offering a more troubling interpretation of the revolution and the Terror. The popular characters of Quatrevingt-Treize are not willing to pay the price the revolution

pourtant une pratique de ladite Révolution, rompt avec elle, avec le principe de Terreur. Hugo propose en somme une Révolution dans la Révolution" (152). I would argue that in Quatrevingt-Treize, Hugo's desire to adhere to the revolution, to support the Parisian war against the Vendée, hits some major stumbling blocks despite the narrator's rhetoric in favor of this campaign.

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demands. They refuse to sacrifice people for precepts. In this sense, what begins as a pro- revolutionary novel becomes fundamentally anti-war. In Quatrevingt-Treize, the narrator tries (and ultimately fails) to justify Parisian Terror as a historical necessity. In the scene of the Tourgue fire, sacrifice in the name of future good becomes unacceptably ugly when the lives of children are in the balance. The Revolutionary Army chooses to attack the Tourgue knowing that the hostages are likely to be burned as a consequence of their military triumph. But Fléchard brings home the horror of trading lives for principles.

Hugo's attempt to find "une légitimité de la violence dans l'Histoire" (Gleizes 36)186 breaks down, almost against the design of the narrative. While men may further the future by condemning themselves, the use of terrorist tactics against children is clearly a sign of a barbaric past.

Hugo, a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, conceptualizes '93 in terms of civil warfare and reprisals, positing executions as a fundamental military strategy. In

Quatrevingt-Treize, the rejection of capital punishment is incompatible with the continued practice of warfare. Gauvain, who refuses to execute his prisoners, is guillotined: revolutionary law allows powerful men to live only if they agree to promulgate the death penalty. By showing warfare and executions to be interdependent,

Hugo implies that the eradication of one practice is impossible without that of the other.

Justifying war makes it too easy to justify the death penalty: hence, perhaps, the novel's fascinating contradictions.

186 Denby affirms a similar idea: "for [Hugo], history, blind though it is, brings progress" (16).

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CONCLUSION

The right to life was not included in the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (1789); only “la sûreté” is mentioned in this revolutionary code of human rights. The

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, however, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, lists the "right to life" in Article 3. Yet the meaning of a "right to life" or "to live" remains hotly contested in national and international debates. Should there exist an unequivocal right to life, or merely a right not to be put to death without due process? Even in France, where the death penalty was abolished in 1981, this question has been revived. In January 2015,

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right political party, the Front National, announced that were she to be elected president, she would open a referendum to reinstate the death penalty. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization based in Washington D.C., forty-two percent of the French people supported the death penalty as recently as 2006.187

Prominent French intellectuals have considered the death penalty to be mankind's most pressing ethical and philosophical problem. For Hugo, the abolition of capital punishment was a lifelong moral imperative. In his writings, the human and the humane triumph when men refuse to counterbalance crime with extreme punishments such as death or forced labor. For Hugo, all other ethical concerns—poverty, forgiveness, reciprocity—

187 The organization's website states: "On September 16th, 2006 TNS Sofres released a poll regarding the death penalty in France. Twenty-five years ago France abolished the death penalty, even though 62% of the French people supported capital punishment at that time. Currently, only 42% favor reinstating the death penalty, 52% are against reinstatement, and 6% have no opinion."

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revolve around this single issue. If one could take the death penalty out of the equation, he implies, society might achieve a more peaceful balance. Much later, Albert Camus reiterated this sentiment in his essay "Réflexions sur la guillotine" (1957). In this text, Camus declares:

“Sans la guillotine . . . le sang algérien pèserait moins sur nos consciences" (175). In the wake of his self-imposed silence on the Franco-Algerian conflict, Camus turned his attention to the issue of capital punishment, perhaps as a means of pacifying (or displacing) his own bad conscience.188 Abolishing the death penalty, he implies, might prevent the worst atrocities of colonial warfare. Without capital punishment, colonial endeavors would certainly be deprived of a potent weapon.189

In De quoi demain (2001), Derrida goes so far as to say that "la peine de mort serait une clé de voûte" (240) without which the edifice of philosophy (and sovereignty) as we know it would crumble. In the words of Elissa Marder, Derrida proposes that "the death penalty is inextricable from the philosophical articulation of that which is proper to man"

(96). Given the gradual abolition of the death penalty in a majority of nations, perhaps this

"articulation" is changing. Imagining a world without the death penalty involves a radical reconfiguration of human thought and behavior. Other forms of violence have certainly wreaked more loss of life. Yet the thinkers of import to my project suggest that the death penalty represents a structural problem, something fundamentally rotten in the polis.

188 In 1956, a year and a half into the undeclared Franco-Algerian war, Albert Camus undertook a voyage to Algiers hoping to negotiate a “civilian truce.” He sought to recast the conflict in human terms, calling for an end to torture and terrorism, an effort later judged to be a “humiliating failure” (Schalk 339). Thoroughly discouraged, he refused to speak publicly on Algeria after 1958. On Camus’s ethical thought during the final years of his life, see Mark Orme's article “Retour aux sources: crisis and reappraisal in Albert Camus’s final pronouncements on justice." 189 In a posthumously published fragment of his Choses Vues (dated 1842), Victor Hugo describes the arrival of the guillotine in Algeria. Over a century later, during the 1950s, the guillotine was used prolifically against members of the FLN. This instrument of death could be said to bracket the French occupation of Algeria.

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Contemporary scholarship and opinion struggle to explain the continued existence of capital punishment in the United States. David Garland addresses this issue in his book

Peculiar Institution: "peculiar" in the sense that capital punishment “operates in America and nowhere else in the Western world” (8). With the exception of the United States,

"retentionist countries," i.e. countries that retain the death penalty for "ordinary crimes," are located predominantly in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.190 U.S. retention of the death penalty remains incomprehensible to human rights organizations and much of Europe. A

2001 New York Times article cites French objections to American capital punishment: "Felix

Rohatyn, ambassador to France during the Clinton administration, says that every time he gave a speech, French audiences asked him to defend America's use of the death penalty -- and it was usually the first question asked" ("Europe's View of the Death Penalty"). More recently, in February of 2014, The Atlantic reported that "an EU export ban on lethal-injection drugs" was complicating practices of capital punishment in the United States. This article, written by Matt Ford, adds that "EU diplomats and leaders frequently petition U.S. governors and state parole boards to halt forthcoming executions."

David Garland suggests that in order to comprehend (yet not excuse or forgive)

America's continued use of the death penalty, we must “try to understand its moral power, its emotional appeal, and its claim to be doing justice” (9). In his book When the State No

Longer Kills (2007), Sangman Bae enumerates commonly voiced theories that attempt to explain this peculiar type of “American exceptionalism.” These theories include high crime rates, a national history of vigilante justice, and deep-seated racial prejudice. Yet these elements are also present in many societies that no longer make use of capital punishment.

190 I found this information on the website of the Death Penalty Information Center. It is worth noting that many "third world" or "developing" countries have made recent progress in abolishing the death penalty for all crimes: Rwanda in 2007, Uzbekistan in 2008, and Burundi and Togo in 2009, to name only a few.

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Another theory evokes the reluctance of US politicians to go against the wishes of their electorate (whereas their French counterparts outlawed capital punishment despite its popularity among their constituents). Bae believes strong political leadership against the death penalty remains unlikely “in a society so sensitive to public opinion” (107).

Garland posits that, as it exists today in its “late-modern mode,” American capital punishment has little to do with either “maintaining rule” or “governing crime.” Rather, it serves the interests of “local politics . . . professional rivalry and ambition” (311). Our own system of capital punishment, he argues, is represented as primarily discursive by the media:

Even the killing of the condemned is transformed into words, since the general public sees and hears nothing of the event, except in the form of pictureless published reports. Today’s system . . . is primarily about enactment and evocation, rather than execution. It revolves around the utterance of words, not the breaking of bones or the spilling of blood. In the morality play that is staged today, the body in pain recedes from view, while the promise, the power, and the pleasure of death are put center stage. . . . (312)

Romantic authors were acutely aware of the discursive elements required to maintain and justify the death penalty: if anything, my research shows that such elements were always of the utmost importance, even when they existed alongside spectacular, public violence.

Yet spectacle still plays an essential role in state violence, just as the recent occurrence of “botched executions” (at least three since April 2014, according to the

Washington Post) demonstrate that bodily suffering is still a very real consequence of the death penalty. In “From America’s Busiest Death Chamber, a Catalog of Last Rants, Pleas and Apologies” (a 2013 New York Times piece), Manny Fernandez writes that even today, the last words of the condemned are “not uttered in a vacuum — they are heard by lawyers, reporters and prison officials, as well as the inmates’ families and victims’ relatives.”

Condemned men and women are put to death before multiple audiences that are partitioned

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into discreet spaces, with the family of the condemned watching from one room, the victim's family from another. Were officials and families forbidden to watch, I believe that capital punishment as we know it would no longer exist. Without witnesses, executions convey no satisfying message, and there is no possible voyeuristic pleasure to be had. Support for the legality of capital punishment might soon erode along with the last vestiges of its ritualized staging.

Aside from the many political and social factors that set the United States apart from the rest of the Western world, the role of literature merits some consideration. There is no

American equivalent of Hugo or Camus, no American novelist who, to my knowledge, has attacked capital punishment with such consistent and energetic focus. Yet there are glimmers of such social criticism within American culture. In Light in August (1932), a novel about the

American South that ends with the brutal lynching of the novel's multiracial protagonist,

William Faulkner advances the thought-provoking claim that state-sanctioned violence encourages private vengeance and mob killings:

No man is, can be, justified in taking human life; least of all, a warranted officer, a sworn servant of his fellowman. When it is sanctioned publicly in the person of an elected officer who knows that he has not himself suffered at the hands of his victim, call that victim by what name you will, how can we expect an individual to refrain when he believes that he has suffered at the hands of his victim? (376-377)

In producing fundamental social change, the role of fiction is not to be negated. In my introduction, I mentioned Lynn Hunt’s analysis of novel reading during the eighteenth century and how this practice broadened experiences of empathy. Other scholarship on communicating pain resonates with her research. Elaine Scarry suggests that translating pain into speech is a daunting task, since language tends to fall apart in the face of physical affliction, creating a communicative chasm between sufferers and the rest of society. Scarry

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states that "for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that 'having pain' may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to 'have certainty,' while for the other person it is so elusive that 'hearing about pain' may exist as the primary model of what it is 'to have doubt'" (4).191

Art, suggests Scarry, is one of the few effective methods of communicating pain, of crossings the chasm between belief and doubt; another is advocacy (exemplified by Amnesty

International's reports on torture). During the Enlightenment, writers began to combine art and advocacy, practicing "engaged" writing. Romanticism took up this practice against the institution of capital punishment. Literature, as Scarry points out, is even more adept at communicating psychological (as opposed to physical) pain. When writing about the guillotine, a supposedly "anesthetized"192 version of execution, the Romantics sought to relate not so much the pain of death itself, but rather the psychological torture of a death sentence, the knowledge that death would occur at a predetermined moment in time. They conveyed this torment with extraordinary effect in novels that do not allow the death penalty to appear humane.

191 Many thanks to Professor Arnold Weinstein for bringing this quote to my attention during one of his lectures on "Literature and Medicine." 192 Derrida discusses "anesthetized" capital punishment in his seminar.

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