Chamfort and the Revolution. A Study in Form and Ideology. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2002: Volume 11

David McCallam

ISBN 10: 0729408019 / ISBN 13: 9780729408011

Published by Voltaire Foundation - University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 2002

About this Item

Paperback 2002. Uncreased spine. Clean & tight. MARGINS HAVE SOME LINES & A LITTLE ANNOTATION. Dispatched ROYAL MAIL FIRST CLASS with TRACKING next working day or sooner securely boxed in cardboard. ref H3389.

Seller Inventory # 016480

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Chamfort and the Revolution. A Study in Form and Ideology. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2002: Volume 11
• Publisher: Voltaire Foundation - University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0729408019
• ISBN 13: 9780729408011
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort remains one of the most enigmatic ‘prompters’ of the French Revolution. This study analyses his rhetorical and political programmes in tandem to reveal how Chamfort’s discourse and politics inform and elucidate one another in both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods. It considers his key political texts – his ‘Discours à l’Académie française’, Des académies, the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française and his posthumous Maximes et pensées, caractères et anecdotes – and exposes how, in each instance, Chamfort’s conception of politics hinges on the adoption and subversion of prescribed discursive forms (reception speech, historical tableau, maxim).

In the ‘Discours’ and Des académies, Chamfort opposes the implicit discursive norm of le bon usage sanctioned by the Académie française, because it represses free expression and at the same time constitutes the Académie itself into an oppressive corporation imbued with neo-feudal values. Chamfort’s subsequent interpretations of revolutionary events in his Tableaux historiques, while making explicit this same radical libertarianism, frame some reservations about the insurgent peuple as a political force. In the end, many of the tensions troubling Chamfort’s politics are resolved by his posthumous Maximes et pensées, whose prevailing principle of honnêteté gives them a rhetorical and political independence from both the ancien régime, centred on notions of honneur, and the revolutionary Republic, founded on a principle of vertu.

Previous studies have tended either to interpret Chamfort’s works from their historical or biographical context, or – by considering exclusively the Maximes et pensées – to subordinate them to an established literary tradition. This innovative reading posits Chamfort’s texts as an exemplary meeting-place of literary practice and political praxis at the time of the Revolution, shedding new light on both the function of literary forms in Chamfort’s politics and the role of Chamfort the writer, as an ideological subject caught up in revolutionary events.

About the Author

Dr David McCallam is Reader in French Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. His main areas of research are eighteenth-century French literature (Chamfort, Laclos, Chénier, Sade); eighteenth-century travel writing (Alps, southern Italy, eastern Adriatic); and eighteenth-century environmental humanities (volcanoes, avalanches, clouds).