The argument from authority in the dynamics of the French classic-Romantic quarrel... 41 ŚWIAT TEKSTÓW • ROCZNIK SŁUPSKI Nr 18 ss. 41–52 2020 ISSN 2083-4721 © Katedra Filologii Polskiej Akademii Pomorskiej w Słupsku Oryginalna praca badawcza Przyjęto: 14.01.2020 Zaakceptowano: 24.03.2020 Marta Sukiennicka Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań ORCID: 0000-0002-0683-0860 THE ARGUMENT FROM AUTHORITY IN THE DYNAMICS OF THE FRENCH CLASSIC-ROMANTIC QUARREL (1821–1831) ARGUMENT Z AUTORYTETU W DYNAMICE FRANCUSKIEGO SPORU KLASYKÓW Z ROMANTYKAMI (1821–1831) Słowa kluczowe: Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, La Muse française, Akademia Francuska, romantyzm jako nowoczesny klasycyzm Key words: Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, La Muse française, Académie française, Ro- manticism as classicism of modern times In the 1820s, French classicists often accused the Romantics of a lack of proper education and an irreverence towards literary authorities. They saw the Romantics as a literary sect whose members were contributing to the group’s undeserved success by promoting each other through flattery, quoting each other in epigraphs to their volumes of verse, and reviewing each other’s works favourably in La Muse française, a leading journal of early French Romanticism1. This had been unheard of in the past, when only quotations from classical writers such as Virgil or Horace were considered acceptable material for an epigraph. Nevertheless, the young Romantic writers quoted one another without proper respect towards the literary institutions, as if they had not read their classics at all. This strategy of undermining the classicist authority is clearly visible during the period when Romanticism was developing in a close relationship with classicism. In the 1830s, the argument from authority seems to have gradually lost its prominence as a Romantic poetics was evolving in new directions. 1 This accusation in not unfounded: a Romantic dissident, Henri Latouche, took up the charge and turned his back on his Romantic colleagues in a satirical tract, “De la camaderie litteraire” (1829). Cf. A. Glinoer, La Querelle de la camaraderie littéraire. Les romantiques face à leurs contemporains, Droz, Genève 2008. 42 Marta Sukiennicka The nineteenth-century French classic-Romantic quarrel2 has already been well described in extenso3, which is why in this paper I would like to focus on its rhetorical dynamics, and particularly on the accusation of the lack of classical erudition levelled against the Romantics. This line of accusation deserves attention not only because it triggered an avalanche of spiteful responses which form an important part of the clas- sic-Romantic debate, but also because it captures a specific feature of French Roman- ticism which has its source in the Romantic relation to classicism, and more generally, to the literary tradition. In essence, the strategy of the Romanticists in the early years of the quarrel can be described as an attempt to undermine the aesthetic difference between Romanticism and classicism, and to appropriate the argument from classical authority, making it a part of their line of defence. Analysis of the rhetorical dynamics of the quarrel can lead to conclusions expressed in sociological terms, as an attempt to replace the old generation with a new one in an increasingly commercialised literary field4 or in psychoanalytic terms, as a form of oedipal rivalry with the aim of taking the father’s or precursor’s place5. 2 I have chosen not to use the well established military metaphors of “war” or “battle”, as they might create a false image of two opposing camps, which would be a considerable oversimpli- fication. Instead, I employ the term “quarrel”, defined as a “socialising, creative and dynamic” form of debate which structures the literary field and plays the role of a “visibility vector” for its actors (cf. J.-P. Bertrand, D. Saint-Amand & V. Stiénon, Les querelles littéraires: esquisse méthodologique, “COnTEXTES”, 2012, no. 10, http://journals.openedition.org/contextes/5005 [10.01.2020]). In the quoted article, the quarrel, distinguished from dispute, polemics and con- troversy, is defined by its component of hostility and the fact that the “participants are not adver- saries, but rivals who have similar motives and pursue the same goal, though not necessarily in a similar way”. 3 Cf. L. Séché, Le Cénacle de La Muse française, Mercure de France, Paris 1909; J. Marsan, La Bataille romantique, Hachette, Paris 1912; R. Bray, Chronologie du romantisme 1803–1830, Boivin, Paris 1932; E. Eggli, P. Martino, Le débat romantique en France (1813–1816), Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1933. More recently, some French critics have revisited the issue, mainly in order to deconstruct the overly teleological conception of the history of early French Romanti- cism; cf. V. Laisney, L’Arsenal romantique. Le salon de Charles Nodier (1824–1834), Champi- on, Paris 2002. 4 Cf. “The ageing of authors, works or schools is something quite different from a mechanical sliding into the past. It is engendered in the fight between those who have already left their mark and are trying to endure, and those who cannot make their own marks in their turn without consigning to the past those who have an interest in stopping time, in eternalizing the present state; between the dominants whose strategy is tied to continuity, identity and reproduction, and the dominated, the new entrants, whose interest is in discontinuity, rupture, difference and revolution”, P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by S. Emanuel, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1995, p. 157. 5 A process described by Bloom as a clearing of imaginative space by a misreading of great pre- decessors and then appropriating them. In Bloom’s terms, it can be said that the dynamics of the French Romantic debate, within the chronological scope of this paper, stops at the second of Bloom’s revisionary ratios, tessera, which is described as follows: “A poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough”, H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, p. 14. The argument from authority in the dynamics of the French classic-Romantic quarrel... 43 Frivolous quarrel In April 1824, Louis-Simon Auger, secretary of the Académie française, delivered a memorable speech on the occasion of King Louis the XVIII’s return after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Auger’s speech was directed at the Romantic schism, which was, as he put it, a danger to the unity of the literary world. The politi- cal overtones in his speech are conspicuous: Romanticism is not only a manifestation of political liberalism6 but it is also anti-national in character. In contrast to Polish Romanticism, which was closely connected with the question of preserving national identity7, in France, at that stage in the Romantic debate, it was classicism that played the role of the defender of the national tradition. According to Auger, the anti-national character of Romanticism did not merely stem from the fact that it was a movement of foreign origin, but precisely from the fact that it was of German provenance. In Auger’s words, the main representatives of the German “sect”8 in France, such as Madame de Staël or Benjamin Constant, were enchanted by a nation who had neither its own language nor literature, and who deemed it possible to build true art merely by staging folk tales. As he put it, Germany was a country: where literature is as decentralised as political power, where guardians of good taste do not exist, where the minds, disposed to meditation by their isolation, to independence by their dispersion, and to error by their very sin- cerity, have often carried profundity to abstruseness, sentiment to mysticism, and enthusiasm to exaltation. That country had remained for a long time for- eign to the refinement and elegance of modern civilisation. Endowed with an energetic but rough tongue; abundant, but not conducive to accuracy and clar- ity; of a language which, even today, has not yet been codified, [that country] could have no literature proper when other nations of Europe could already pride themselves on their own9. In this diatribe against German literature Auger stresses its lack of taste and prin- ciples, as well as its primitivism and other-wordliness, none of which he recognises as 6 Six years before Victor Hugo (“Préface” of Hernani, 1830), Auger defines Romanticism as a form of liberalism, although his attack is mainly addressed to the strictly monarchist writers from La Muse française. 7 On the subject of this complex question, see T. Jędrzejewski, Literatura w warszawskiej prasie kulturalnej pogranicza oświecenia i romantyzmu, Kraków 2016, pp. 12–15, 21–26. 8 L.-S. Auger, Recueil des discours prononcés dans la séance publique annuelle de l’Institut royal de France le samedi 24 avril 1824, Firmin Didot, Paris 1824, p. 3. 9 «[En Allemagne] la littérature n’a pas pas plus de centre d’unité que le pouvoir, où la police du ridicule n’existe pas, où les esprits, disposés à la méditation par leur isolement, à l’indépendance par leur dispersion, et à l’erreur par leur sincérité même, ont souvent porté la profondeur jusqu’à l’abstrusion, le sentiment jusqu’au mysticisme, et l’enthousiasme jusqu’à l’exaltation. Cette contrée demeura longtemps étrangère au raffinement et à l’élégance de la civilisation moderne. Douée d’une langue énergique, mais rude ; abondante, mais peu favorable à la précision et à la clarté ; d’une langue qui, aujourd’hui même, n’est pas encore fixée, elle n’avait pas de littéra- ture propre quand chacune des autres nations de l’Europe pouvait s’enorgueillir de la sienne»; ibidem, p.