Text, Image, and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth-Century France

Utopia and Its Afterlives

Daniel Sipe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317045694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In the decades after the French Revolution, philosophers, artists, and social scientists set out to chart and build a way to a new world and their speculative blueprints circulated like banknotes in a parallel economy of ideas. Examining representations of ideal societies in nineteenth-century French culture, Daniel Sipe argues that the dream-image of the literary or art-historical utopia does not disappear but rather is profoundly altered by its proximity to the social utopianism of the day. Sipe focuses on this persistent afterlife in utopias ranging from François-René de Chateaubriand's Amerindian utopia in Atala (1801) to the utopian spoof of J.J. Grandville's illustrated novel Un autre monde (1844). He proposes a new reading of Etienne Cabet's seminal utopian novel, Voyage en Icarie (1840) and offers an original perspective on the gendered utopias of technological inspiration that authors such as Charles Barbara and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam penned in the second half of the century. In addition, Sipe considers utopias or important readings of the century's rampant utopianism in, among others, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Gustave Courbet. His book provides the historical context for comprehending the significance and implications of this enigmatic afterlife in nineteenth-century utopian art and literature.

Chapter 1
Utopian Displacement, Irony, and the Romantic Imagination: From Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) to Hugo’s “Fonction du poëte” (1840)

In the period following the French Revolution utopianism came to represent a general desire to renew and perfect the institutions of French polity. Likewise the utopian thinker was seen as a kind of visionary and activist who would lead society toward the reasoned flawlessness to which it had been destined by the march of progress. In spite of the obvious aesthetic implications of this mission, few literary-critical appraisals have noted the extent to which this emerging concept of the utopian is closely intertwined with that of artistic sacerdoce. Widely cultivated and mythologized in works such as Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton (1835) and Victor Hugo’s “Fonction du poëte” (1840), sacerdoce might best represent the movement toward tangible social outcomes that many contemporaries thought should be the object of the artistic imagination. As Paul Bénichou has demonstrated, these poet-prophets of the modern world thought to fulfill a quasi-religious and anticipatory social function: “Ils voyaient qu’un monde achevait de mourir, qu’un autre irrésistiblement lui succédait. Leur projet: conduire ce qui survivait du passé vers l’avenir attendu” [They saw one world drawing to a close and another irresistibly taking its place. Their project: to guide that which survived the past toward the expected future].1 For Max Milner and Claude Pichois, the artist, legitimated by “la force de la foi dans la fonction sociale du poète,” embarks upon a “mission civilisatrice” whose goal is not the contemplation of the foreign but the imminent and localized transformation of the familiar.2 It is in this shared enterprise that the relationship between artistic sacerdoce and utopian social praxis emerges. And it is here that we can hope to understand how and to what effect the cultural, geographic, and temporal otherness of the traditional utopia is repositioned in the nineteenth-century cultural field to appear, as Edward Bellamy might say, “before us… and not far away.”3

As the utopian imagination is systematized, redirected, and assigned a tangible social outcome, it is subsumed both into the emerging fields of the social sciences and into the sacerdoce in the realm of cultural production. In these increasingly imbricating concerns, socialistic systems builders such as Claude Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier found common ground with socially-oriented artists in their promotion of politically grounded forms of the utopian imagination. Yet the transition from the escapist dream-images that predominate most pre-Revolutionary literary utopias to the applied utopias of the nineteenth century is not without obstacle or complication. On the contrary, the desire to perfect post-Revolutionary France appears to be haunted by the afterlife of an outmoded utopian literary fantasy—specifically that which persists in conceiving of an ideal society existing on the edges of the known world whose very existence lies in diametric opposition to Europe and its troubled history.

Nowhere is this conflicted desire more evident than in François-René de Chateaubriand’s widely read Atala (1801). If Atala is an archetype of the nineteenth-century utopian afterlife, it is first because Chateaubriand meticulously constructs a utopia only to destroy it in a symbolic act of defiance and rejection. I believe that this gesture marks a crucial, if often overlooked, stage in the repositioning of the utopian imagination within the constructivist, dynamic, and experimental nineteenth century. Atala is an invaluable document because it frames the author’s personal experience and that of a generation whose desire for, subsequent flight towards, and, finally, disillusionment with the idea of a new utopian society marks the period following the French Revolution. In this chapter, I will trace this profound reconceptualization from the rejection of utopia’s literary-ironic forms in Atala to the concept of utopian sacerdoce that Victor Hugo sets out in his seminal “Fonction du poëte.”

I will argue that the lingering presence of the utopian in the literary production of the Romantic period finds its first significant manifestation in Chateaubriand’s influential American tales. In previous utopian fictions, representations of radical alterity were employed to postulate new social possibilities or to criticize existing ones. In other words, they functioned ironically and were rarely seen as blueprints for real social transformation. Whereas the contented inhabitant of the exotic societies of utopia’s past had been conceived as a useful means of thinking social change, this ironic double appears to have become an impediment to the renovation of nineteenth-century France and needed, it seems, to be symbolically purged from the collective imagination. Chateaubriand’s Atala is a key document in the literary record precisely because it presents in striking clarity the terms of this sweeping reconfiguration. The story suggests a number of hermeneutic possibilities concerning the image of the contented but ultimately doomed inhabitants of the far-off utopian society, whose very existence appears antithetical to the new “utopian man” that Hugo and others begin to champion.

In Hugo’s “Fonction du poëte” utopian alterity is synonymous with an image de soi, albeit a radically transformed self. The poem is a prime example of the manner in which utopia comes to be understood as a kind of incubator for imminent social change:

Ève contient la race humaine,

Un œuf l’aiglon, un gland le chêne!

Une utopie est un berceau!

De ce berceau, quand viendra l’heure,

Vous verrez sortir, éblouis,

Une société meilleure

Pour des cœurs mieux épanouis,4

[Eve carries the human race, / An egg, the eagle, an acorn, the oak / A utopia is a cradle! From this cradle, when the hour is ripe / Dazzled, you will see emerge / A better society / For more enlightened hearts]

Hugo’s “better society” emerges whole from the “cradle” of the poet’s imagination, which transforms a newly enlightened public. In line with the sacerdotal mission of concrete social action, the poem points to the ways that literary utopianism was developing a response to the challenge of perfectibility that the inheritors of Enlightenment philosophy were seeking to put into practice. As such, “Fonction” follows in the wake of conceptions like the one put forth by Nicolas de Condorcet in 1795: “Il faudroit y montrer par quels degrés ce qui nous paroîtroit aujourd’hui un espoir chimérique doit successivement devenir possible et même facile” [It is necessary to show to what extent that which seems like pure fancy to us today must become successively possible and even easy].5 Insomuch as it is understood to be an emerging reality and not an untenable dream-image, Hugo’s ideal society might then be considered a resolutely post-literary-utopian figure, conceived for a century wary in equal parts of ideology and impracticality, where revolutions in politics, art, and industry had given rise to unbounded hope and, when unrealized, would lead to unfathomable deception.

To determine where this rapidly evolving form of literary practice fits into the vast field of cultural production is to fill an important lacuna in the scholarly record, for little work has been done to distinguish between the nineteenth century’s multiple utopianisms. If Hugo’s poem imparts a vital piece of information, it is that utopia remains a viable category of literary expression in spite of the transformation it undergoes as it aligns itself with more credentialed social-scientific treatises that were aimed at the renovation of contemporary society. Not only does utopia persist as a literary form, but also the century’s most prolific and influential author sees the utopian project as the essential calling of the poet. What complicates our understanding of Hugo’s utopia, however, is that his concept bears little resemblance to its literary predecessors. How it comes to pass that the artist’s sacerdotal mission to think the future and to make it happen might represent a utopia is a call to reexamine both the utopian’s self-concept and the genre’s ongoing function and meaning. As Hugo makes clear, he imagines something decidedly different than a political or social parody, understands his utopia to be much more than an elaborate social fantasy. It is with these elements in mind that I would like to pursue a line of questioning that asks about the forms taken by the literary utopia at the very moment when it comes to represent an emerging reality and not a mere dream-image. Does the artist’s newly-defined utopian function confirm Percy Shelley’s contemporaneous assertion that poets are the world’s unacknowledged “legislators or prophets”?6 And if so, does this political engagement detract from the oppositional and ironic function that Bronislaw Baczko claims is the very basis of utopia’s “synthetic and disruptive representation of social otherness”?7

In Baczko’s analysis of eighteenth-century intellectual history, utopia is an “idea-image of an alternative society, opposed to the existing social reality and its institutions, rites, dominate symbols, systems of values, norms of interdictions, hierarchies, relationships of dominance and property.”8 Baczko’s characterization raises several questions concerning the utopias that appear in the period following the French Revolution. How do these new utopias compare with the ironic utopias that precede them? Does the persistent use of the term utopian across the nineteenth century as a neologistic synonym for the activist sacerdoce paradoxically signal the end of literary utopia as we know it? In other words, is it really necessary to imagine a “synthetic and disruptive” social model when the arrival of ostensibly rational systems for the perfection of humanity seems to hold the promise of tangible social transformation?

As a close reading of the period will reveal, the utopian dream-image, when it lingers on, often does so in the shadow of the outcome-oriented sacerdoce, which negates it. I will argue here that we can trace the emergence of this shadowy but unmistakable existence—this utopian afterlife—from its archetype in Chateaubriand’s travel narrative to Hugo’s poem and its celebration of the poet’s social-utopian function. Today a vast chasm seems to separate these notions. Indeed, Hugo’s activist utopianism rejects the kind of traditional utopian fantasy that we recognize in the rationally organized Indian village of Chateaubriand’s Atala. Yet in revisiting this idealized society, something important appears: utopian escapism may be already rejected in Chateaubriand. For as much as the author desires to imagine a perfect social order rising from the forests of the New World, for as tempted as he is to efface the trauma of European history and replace it with the fantasy of an untainted society on the American frontier, this fantasy is rigorously undermined by a more pressing desire to do away with the utopian dream-image.

In turn, the troubled nature of Chateaubriand’s fantasy points to the ways that his utopianism is intertwined with the emerging concept of French Romanticism. While the protagonists of his American tales constitute some of the archetypical heroes of French Romantic fiction, it is easy to forget that Chateaubriand’s rejection of their solipsistic lyricism foretells of the arrival of socially minded heroes of the variety promoted by Hugo. Only in the wake of Chateaubriand’s failed American utopia might there emerge a kind of Continental utopianism inhabited by the sacerdotal hero. In this sense, Chateaubriand’s American tales can be read as a crucial point of origin, a headwaters where Romanticism’s aestheticist and social tributaries take shape, where the century’s poetic and applied utopias part ways. It is this crucial movement that anticipates Hugo’s new utopianism and its alignment with the social-scientific projects that dominated the times. This is the revelation that comes from reading these texts as an expression of the public discourse on social change that dominated French society in the decades following the Revolution.

Atala in the Ruins of Utopia

As I have suggested, the archetype of the transitional moment between the exotic, dream-image model of the first manner utopia and what I have called the proximate, applied utopias of the nineteenth century can be found in Chateaubriand’s narrative of the American frontier, Atala. The author’s René can also be mentioned here, for like Atala it too posits and then consciously rejects models of utopian escapism and ironic displacement. In René, the narrative culminates when its young protagonist is called to rejoin society and thus to abandon his solitary quest for “le bonheur de la vie sauvage.”9 Here the essence of his character’s nascent mal du siècle— which includes the tendency towards escapism and solipsistic reflection—also defines the undesirable boundaries of the utopian imagination that took root in France around the turn of the nineteenth century. The problem, however, is that the antidote to this wayward imagination (which is social integration and sublimation in an ameliorated society) was viewed with suspicion and trepidation in the wake of revolutionary turmoil. Utopian literature of the Romantic period is deeply marked by these contradictory desires.

In Atala, Chateaubriand painstakingly cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Utopian Displacement, Irony, and the Romantic Imagination: From Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) to Hugo’s “Fonction du poëte” (1840)
• 2 Testing the Limits of Utopian Narrative in Etienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840)
• 3 Suspending the Referent, Upending the World in J.J. Grandville’s Un autre monde (1844)
• 4 The Aesthetics of Work and Madness in Courbet and Baudelaire
• 5 Gendered Utopias and Female Automata
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index