Abstract

The French Revolution’s severe restriction of the right of bequest reflected and consolidated a longstanding French legal skepticism about the ability of the dead to control property and, through property, the living. This article argues that this “resistance” to the power of the dead, and its legal enactment by the Revolution, had significant consequences not only for the legal but also for the literary cultures of post-Revolutionary France. The most straightforward of these was the relative absence of inheritance plots, and especially plots involving wills, in nineteenth-century French fiction, compared to their abundance in Victorian fiction. But through a reading of Honoré de Balzac’s “The Elixir of Life” and Colonel Chabert, the article suggests that this resistance was itself sometimes thematized, and allowed for a reflection on the difficult relationship of modern France to its Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary past, as well as on the all-powerful status of the law.

摘要

法国大革命对遗赠权的严格限制反映并巩固了法国长期以来对死者控制财产以及通过财产控制生者的能力的法律怀疑论。本文认为，这种对死者力量的“反抗”，以及大革命对死者力量的合法化，不仅对法国大革命后的法律文化，而且对文学文化都产生了重大影响。其中最直截了当的是，与维多利亚时代小说中的丰富相比，19 世纪法国小说中相对缺乏继承情节，尤其是涉及遗嘱的情节。但通过阅读奥诺雷·德·巴尔扎克的《长生不老药》和夏伯特上校, 文章表明，这种抵抗本身有时是主题化的，并允许反思现代法国与其革命和革命前过去的困难关系，以及法律的全能地位。