Between celebrity and glory? Textual after-image in late eighteenth-century France

ABSTRACT

Eighteenth-century France had a particular interest in identifying and celebrating its ‘great men’, the model individuals through whom it defined its national identity. Across the century, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists were celebrated by the state, in a cult of glory that culminated in the creation of the secular temple of the Panthéon in 1791. Yet the eighteenth century is also acknowledged as the starting point of a very different sort of recognition: the widespread curiosity about a public figure’s private life that lies at the heart of modern celebrity culture. Rousseau and Voltaire incarnated these two burgeoning forms of fame. This article examines the literary discourse that surrounded their deaths in 1778 and their later inclusion in the Panthéon, analysing the use that was made of their textual remains and considering how their glorious posthumous status related to their public image in life. Using these case studies, I suggest that authors occupy a privileged place in the conversion of lifetime celebrity into enduring posthumous fame; not only – as has traditionally been argued – thanks to the durability of the text, but also because of its flexibility and a created intimacy that mimics the process by which literary celebrity is created in life.

KEYWORDS:

• literary celebrity
• Voltaire
• Rousseau
• posterity
• glory

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Antoine Lilti, Alain Viala, Ruth Scobie, Rebecca Braun and two anonymous readers for their insightful comments on drafts of this article, to other members of the ‘Authors and the World’ project for discussion and suggestions at our various meetings, and to Clare College, Cambridge and St Catherine’s College, Oxford for research funding. All translations from French are the author’s own unless otherwise noted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Indeed, Barthes himself would later write Roland Barthes par lui-même, ‘speaking about myself as though I were more or less dead’ (1977, p. 168).

2. On tenses used to talk about death in early modern France, see Kenny (2015).

3. I employ Lilti’s terms ‘curiosity’ and ‘fan’ in full awareness that they are not contemporary: I believe such anachronisms, when used in consciousness of their limits, can be useful tools in linking similar practices throughout history.

4. On the nineteenth-century cult of statuary, see Garval (2003).

5. The trajectories of contemporary female celebrities, particularly authors, provide a fascinating counterpoint to the male figures discussed, although there is no space to do this topic justice. One particularly interesting example is Olympe de Gouges: see Brown (2001) and my forthcoming edition of Gouges’s Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées (Goodman 2017).

6. William Marx (2005) sees this moment as the apogee of literary fame: figures like Voltaire retained the socio-political status of their forerunners, whilst also being admired for their literary value. The status of author was therefore at its most prestigious, prior to a gradual disintegration towards – it is implied – the sort of modern literary fame that focuses on personality.

7. Lilti (2008, 2014, pp. 153–219) and Arnold (2014) are good starting points on Rousseau, with bibliographies that point to the vast corpus regarding his posterity; for studies on Voltaire and self-fashioning, see, among others, Lilti (2014, pp. 25–37) and Cronk (2011).

8. Burke (1998, p. 39) notes that when Barthes returns to a form of authorial biography following his ‘death of the author’, it is not with grand narratives but with a series of almost personal vignettes, reducing the author from the nineteenth-century god-figure to something resembling mortality. But even in the eighteenth century, the growth of the novel and the development of autobiography (notably Rousseau’s Confessions) gave the audience’s relationship to books and their authors an increasingly personal dimension.

9. Cf. Braudy’s concept of ‘intrinsic charisma’ (1986, pp. 380–382): an ahistorical cultural authority detached from a specific political context, which can move followers to action even after the individual’s death.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica Goodman

Jessica Goodman is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in French at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, UK. She specialises in eighteenth-century literature and thought, with a particular interest in authorial self-fashioning. Her monograph, Goldoni in Paris: la Gloire et le Malentendu, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She has also published on anonymity, the digital humanities, eighteenth-century theatre history and commemoration, and her latest project focuses on authorial posterity in the 1790s.