Droit et littérature sous l'Ancien Régime. Le Jeu de la valeur et de la loi

Christian Biet, a prolific scholar of seventeenth-century French literature and theater who teaches at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, has taken an interest in recent years in the relationship between literature and the law in Old Regime France. In his 1994 work, Œdipe en monarchie, he used the many versions of the Œdipus myth created on the French stage from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries as a departure point for reflections on the relation of tragedy to juridical theory. Two recent workshops, in Paris and in Berkeley, have allowed Biet, his students, collaborators, and North American colleagues to examine the structural and narrative borrowings between the courtroom, the playhouse, and the printed page during the Old Regime. Another conference he co-organized in Paris in the summer of 2002 featured an international gathering of scholars who studied the interplay between courtroom trials in many times and places and their representations in print, on stage, and in film. The work under review, Droit et littérature sous l'Ancien Régime, continues Biet's investigations into these matters by turning to the novels, and especially the later stage comedies, of the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715).

The book begins with a polemic against the French academy, which Biet believes has undervalued the comparative study of literature and law when explicating seventeenth-century literary and theatrical texts. In a call to reverse Anglo-American borrowings from French post-structuralist thought, the author recommends that his university colleagues study the work of North American scholars such as Richard Weisberg, Stanley Fish, and Thomas Brook, who have provocatively analyzed the cross-fertilization of narrative techniques in the courtroom and the novel. The first half of Droit et littérature justifies this agenda by examining the changing nature of French law in the second half of the seventeenth century. The author reminds us that a grounding in legal theory and practice was more common among educated men in Old Regime France than among the populace at large today; indeed, important authors of both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as P. Corneille, Molière, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Beaumarchais had legal training, or published legal briefs that were widely circulated. Furthermore, many French men and women from the middling classes to the aristocracy were likely to be involved at some point in their lives in protracted civil lawsuits, thereby acquainting them with the culture of the bar. Biet then invokes the normative sources of authority in French politics and law before the Revolution, a triad in which he characterizes as "God, King, and Father". In Catholic France, divine right flowed from the Christian deity to the anointed King, whose task it was to represent divine justice and authority; fathers served as miniature versions of this deity within the family context. Both the social world of seventeenth-century France, and the comic and tragic universe of the French stage, were nominally structured according to these principles.

As seventeenth-century theater audiences knew, however, the divine, paternal authority of the King and the Father might be undermined in the course of political upheavals, or, more commonly, everyday events. The task of literature in this period, especially the novel and the comedy, was to stage these disruptions to the social and political order, and then resolve them through literary convention. Biet compares the literary techniques of resolution to those employed by magistrates investigating civil conflicts under the Old Regime. He claims that in civil matters (although not in criminal ones), the goal of the magistrates was to restore social order through the creation of a narrative plausible to contemporaries, rather than to establish an ultimate truth. Comedy, he argues, worked the same way: "[It] is above all the civil resolution of a civil affair, and tends to offer a way out of a crisis engendered by differences, not crimes" (115). As the century wore on, Biet notes, published legal pleadings became less technical, more literary, and more attuned to the tastes of an expanding reading audience in the capital. Readers of these texts were implicitly invited to become judges, just as audiences in the public theaters passed increasingly definitive judgements on the plays staged before them. Boundaries between legal and literary fictions blurred. In this world of legal briefs that read more and more like novels, and judicial decisions that sought to restore social order rather than discover absolute truths, Biet believes that literature and the stage became a kind of "laboratory" where alternative outcomes to social dilemmas might be imagined.

The second half of the book considers specific legal contexts, and literary texts that invoked them, in an effort to better understand the symbiotic relations between legal and literary fictions. He turns first to Madame de Lafayette's novel, La Princesse de Clèves (1678), which highlights the issue of passionless marriages that threaten to lead to adulterous affairs. Most marriages at all levels of society required approval by figures of authority within the family; such decisions were made with an eye to family finances and social standing, rather than the happiness of the couple. La Princesse de Clèves, and another tale from the Illustres françaises, present the agony of these marital mismatches; the authors intended, according to Biet, to imagine an alternative to the authority of God/King/Father. The following chapter, to my mind one of the most innovative in the book, examines the plight of figures marginal to family lines of inheritance in law and in fiction. Due to French rules structuring inheritance, both younger sons and bastards were left to the whims of their older brothers upon the death of the patriarch; as Biet shows, it was a social scenario ripe with potential in a literary moment where authors and their audiences relished situations that placed traditional authority in question. Unmarried women over the age of twenty-five and widows also posed problems for French laws governing a family's control of its wealth, because French law granted women in these two situations unrestricted possession of resources inherited from dead fathers and spouses. Biet is particularly smitten with the figure of the widow in late seventeenth-century literature, as extensive analyses of comedies by Pierre Corneille, Molière, and Donneau de Visé suggest.

Finally, the author turns to the period of French theatrical history known as the fin-de-règne, or the period between the death of Molière in 1673 and the appearance of Marivaux in the late 1710s. The theater of this generation, often contemptuously dismissed as "cynical" and "inferior" to that which preceeded and followed it, deserves a closer look, as Biet and others have begun to argue recently. The comedies in particular, which often feature characters striving to improve their social standing against difficult odds, or valets and maidservants trying to dupe their "betters" and the system as a whole, offer fertile territory for Biet's explorations. He focuses on Regnard's Légataire universel (1708), a five-act comedy whose plot hinges on an elderly uncle, his nephew and the nephew's servant, and the fortune the latter two hope will be bequeathed to them. The uncle's unexpected return to health on his deathbed threatens to expose the false testament which transfers the uncle's wealth exclusively to the nephew, but a final plot twist assures that the unscrupulous nephew will obtain the inheritance anyway. The old man is alive at the end of the play, but his authority, and control over his fortune, has been diminished. "It is in the interest of the greatest number," Biet writes, "that [the uncle] dies, so the playwright kills him, even though he comes back to life" (325). In other words, the playwright is willing to alter ultimate truth in favor of social expediency, just as Biet argues the courts do in civil cases.

An interesting result of these detailed studies of literary widows, bastards, and scheming inheritors in the second part of the book is a shift in the author's emphasis from the complex relations of law and literature to issues of identity in the age of the Sun King and his courtiers at Versailles. The alleged subjectivity of the law, and the experimentation with standard comic narratives, characters, and social situations in the novel and the comedy, become a means for Biet to invoke a perceived destabilization of the self circa 1700. He effectively suggests that the absolute system of moral and social values that had structured social relations prior to Louis XIV was replaced by exchange values dictated in the marketplace of social prestige; the stage and the page, from Molière onwards, gained particular interest for French men and women seeking to understand the fluctuating rules of social calibration. In this sense, his argument resembles that put forth by Jean-Christophe Agnew for the contemporary English-language stage. This shifting set of values, what Biet calls the period's jeu de la valeur, was tailor-made for exploration within the walls of its playhouses: "The lesson of the comedies is therefore not that of absolute skepticism, but that of hesitation and fascinated evaluation of the dangers of skepticism with regard to social conduct" (362-3).

In a "postface", Biet argues that the fin-de-règne, a chaotic moment when seemingly everyone in real life careened after material profit and relied on the stage to ease their consciences, bears striking similarities to the present age. Our own untempered pursuit of profit, and our insistence on material wealth as a marker of social status, Biet wishes to argue, makes us the heirs of the fin-de-règne; Turcaret could have become the Enron corporate mascot. The author does not offer a way out of the dilemma (perhaps a new Age of Enlightenment lies just around the corner?), but he does provide a set of theoretical and methodological tools for revivifying a period of French cultural history that too often gets ignored in the rush from the seventeenth-century halls of Versailles to the post-1750 Parisian gatherings of philosophes and salonnières.