Eighteenth-Century Fiction

In this extraordinary, ambitious book, Alain Viala traces the history— though that word suggests something rather more conventional than what he offers—of the slippery concept that is la galanterie, from the end of the Ancien Régime to (more or less) the present day. Whether conceived as a literary or artistic mode, a set of specific social practices, or a vaguer sensibility, galanterie is, as Viala’s subtitle indicates, distinctively French. At least, the French have for centuries been so persuaded that it is distinctively French that one has to take their word for it: certainly, no culture has been more insistent that it has a unique way of “doing” heterosexuality than that of France. Clearly, a good deal of the impetus behind Viala’s decision to treat the topic up to the contemporary moment (following on from the early-modern focus of La France galante, 2008) comes from the observable way the “mythology” of la galanterie has shaped the French reaction to certain key positions of Anglo-American feminism (and, more recently, the great reckoning of #MeToo), a collision of worldviews that Viala analyses with style and insight in the final chapters. At stake in the early twenty-first-century promotion of galanterie as (in Mona Ozouf’s phrase) “une particularité française” is, Viala suggests, a sort of cultural protectionism or exception culturelle that says much about French anxieties in the face of American cultural dominance. If the French resistance to “Americanization” in general has typically taken the form of denunciations of “liberalism” and the all-conquering law of the market, a specific and important strand of post-1990 French cultural production has specifically lamented, as Victoria Best and Martin Crowley observed more than a decade ago (in The New Pornographies, 2007), the extension of those “liberal” principles to the domain of sexual intimacy. For better or for worse, la galanterie has tended to offer itself, like the original exception culturelle, as the most viable model of resisting that perceived liberal encroachment in the sexual-cultural field. Yet among [End Page 486] the more problematic effects of galanterie’s hegemony in this respect are its idealization of the existing relationship between the sexes and thus pre-empting of any serious renegotiation of that relationship; and its tendency not simply to close the mainstream French mind to sexual-ethical thinking from the US, but to collapse even the most obviously countercultural and anticapitalistic strands of (say) queer or trans theory into just so many avatars of the same old American liberal capitalist individualist hostile cultural takeover bid. In a very real sense, then, and despite Viala’s humble acknowledgement, by way of captatio, that his is a “petit sujet” (9), galanterie matters. Viala’s book, which eschews an indulgent as assiduously as a judgemental attitude to its subject, offers instead a vital, sense-making, archaeological account of this powerful mythologie française.

Viala’s deft approach to this archaeology proceeds by close, evocative readings of specific works and objects whose sympathetic resonances reveal them to be exemplary of any number of contexts, traditions and genres—which is to say that Viala pulls off the feat of telling a broad, longue durée story, and telling it plausibly, through a sort of pointillist method. Some of the “dots” he joins up might be named Watteau, Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Alain-Fournier, Aragon, Sollers, Kristeva; the combined image is more than all of these. Beneath each reading, and woven into the book’s synthetic narrative, one senses a truly vast erudition and an extensive primary corpus comprising more than a thousand sources. (To appreciate just how extensive, however, and a fortiori to follow up any of Viala’s richly promising leads, one must consult the substantial part of the scholarly apparatus that is presented in the form of online-only dossiers, a cost-cutting wheeze that one hopes will not catch on any more than it already has.) In an illuminating discussion of his principles of selection and interpretative methodology, Viala...