Saint-Simon, un historien dans les marges

Constructing a fresh, coherent, and cogent approach to a work so massive as Saint-Simon's Mémoires, one situated problematically at the "crossroads of prose genres" of the time (Fumaroli), is no simple task. Already in his introduction to the 1856 edition of the Mémoires, Sainte-Beuve claimed: "il semble qu'on ait tout dit, et bien dit." In the event, Malina Stefanovska's welcome new study seeks to elucidate the ancien régime's "imaginaire nobiliaire" by reconciling the work of historians and literary critics in an anthropologically-inspired perspective. To this end, she situates the Mémoires historically at the ending of an ideal "cosmology" at odds with both official historiography and lived history, and - as writing - under the sign of the Derridean "supplément." Exiled from his time, she observes, Saint-Simon makes a "pacte mémorialiste" with a future readership in which the secrecy of the work's writing will guarantee its veracity - its authority. But the very excess of Saint-Simon's writing, she argues, provides grounds for reading the work in terms of a modernity deeply antithetical to the memorialist's personal desires.

Beginning with an introduction which is a model of lucidity, the author lays out a plan of five chapters centering on Saint-Simon's project of "reconfiguring history"; the scandal of politics viewed against an implicit monastic ideal of purity and devotion; the passage of Louis XIV from the great promise of the youthful Roi soleil to the twilit decline of a "Roi solipse"; the memorialist's own complex literary and historical stance of quasi-moralist or "voyeux" recording the curiosities of life at court; and finally, a consideration of "les racines de l'écriture" which drew such prodigious nourishment from re-imagining the court. Professor Stefanovska points out Saint-Simon's ambiguous situation very close to the center of absolutist power, but at the margins of court life. His writing constitutes a full engagement with this situation in which the "margin" (understood politically, socially, and textually) will not only serve as background, but will eventually also move to center of his immense work.

Living at the historical watershed labelled by Hazard as the "crisis of European consciousness," and faced with the impossibility of overt resistance, Saint-Simon's choice of writing secret memoirs, a traditional way for nobles to settle scores with the crown, was nearly overdetermined. The immensity of his effort was not, however, and here Professor Stefanovska's invocation of the "supplément" demonstrates its interest. She argues that Saint-Simon's immense body of memoirs can be seen as a gargantuan extension of his own father's scribbling "L'auteur en a menti" in the margins of every available copy of La Rochefoucauld's own Mémoires, which claimed that the elder Saint-Simon had failed to keep a promise (11-15). Analyzing with flair various literary, historical, and personal dimensions of the Mémoires, the present study's author reads them as at once a cry for truthfulness against the official lies of the dynastic historical writings; a deeply reactionary denunciation of an historical, cosmological/religious, and national order's perversion and decline; a self-justification; and, as writing, through the "envahissement par la marge [in several senses] cette prolifération infinie du texte qui 'réforme' la réalité plutôt qu'il ne la narre," an establishment of "une modernité littéraire . . . que Saint-Simon méprise et annonce". The author finds surprising adumbrations of Rousseau, even Mallarmé and Proust in this "premier écrivain français moderne" (66-7, 118, 180).

Founding the Mémoires, in Professor Stefanovska's view, is the tension between an ideal and its corruption. The ideal is the ancien régime's divinely ordered "holistic cosmology", which dictates a rank for the ducs and pairs de France - Saint-Simon's group - just below that of the royal family (20-1, 70). The corruption of this ideal order in Saint-Simon's time elicits his attempt to rewrite and thus "reform" history, even take it over in a "prise de pouvoir de l'historien" in order to exact a durable, decisive revenge (16-7). The study traces how Saint-Simon's Louis XIV is measured against an idealized Louis XIII (who, the author argues, underlies the entire text of the Mémoires as its implicit "théorie" or "impensé"; 105) and also an idealized filial figure, the duc de Bourgogne (whom Saint-Simon had aspired to tutor himself, 118). The Roi soleil is depicted as not just a failure, but in practice the very opposite of what an absolutist monarch should be. Ruled by his thirst for gloire, the king, "faible, égoïste, et aveuglé" allows his own ministers to manipulate him (37, 110-14); ruled by his own carnal appetites and amour-propre, the King not only elevates his own natural offspring above the hereditary nobility, but also lowers himself literally and symbolically for Mme de Maintenon before an entire assemblage of European dignitaries at Compiègne, thus shaming the whole nation in the eyes of the world (92-3). Behind the magnificent façade of Louis le grand sits a "fort petit roi" (117).

If the increasingly isolated and despotic king lives out an unenviable life, Saint-Simon's nobility suffers far more, being bled dry not just of their fortunes but of their very being, their familial past and place in society, and thus reduced to a state of permanent triviality: "le solide, l'essentiel, le grand avait changé de place avec la bagatelle, le futile, la commodité momentanée" (66). The etiolation of the nobility's historical place and function yields a near-desperate "quête de l'être" in the face of pervasive ennui and nostalgia (147, 177). This quest, however, most often results in a flight into "chimères," especially fantasies of an imaginary past (144, 167-70, 182-3). The passages evoking this development constitute some of the study's finest pages.

Saint-Simon himself, finally, lives out the tensions of this historical situation in particularly acute personal form, which Professor Stefanovska analyzes with precision and delicacy. Knowingly incurring the king's displeasure by resigning from the army, he lives a "masked" life at Versailles (18) - a life which amounts to lifelong espionage in the service of writing. The pleasure of "masked" observation, in the author's view, founds a veritable "poétique du voyeux" (138). "Larvatus redeo" might well be his motto as he retreats from his marginal but indispensable haunting of the byways of the castle to the specially-constructed hidden writing-closet in which he produces the enormous volume of the Mémoires. Like his "cabinet secret", Saint-Simon's lifework is secret, but not private: hidden from the king's spies, but not from his closest friends. Professor Stefanovska tellingly evokes Saint-Simon's pride in engineering the Lit de Justice of 1718, and thus the historical "réexistence" of the ducs et pairs (195), recalling them from the purgatory of "notre néant et nos ténèbres" (144). His search for an "ordre perdu" pays off in its being "retrouvé," even if only for a few years (66).

Professor Stefanovska's arguments, although not devoid of occasional repetition (and slightly marred by some typographical errors), are most often clear and persuasive. Her use of several theoretical angles allows fine-grained and often illuminating readings of familiar passages and historical phenomena. Despite an argument with much theoretical input, however, at certain points one could wish for more extended discussion of the various theoretical sources on which she draws, especially the anthropologists Louis Dumont, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas. These scholars' wide-ranging viewpoints and contexts deserve more detailed adaptation to analysis of the rarefied, tightly constricted court society under consideration in the Mémoires. The lack of an index might also serve to restrict the study's usefulness for non-specialists. Despite a few such cavils, however, this study is highly recommended for its deeply thoughtful and original treatment of major aspects of Saint-Simon's work.