1st Edition

Reimagining Society in 18th Century French Literature Happiness and Human Rights

By Jonas Ross Kjærgård Copyright 2018
    238 Pages
    by Routledge

    238 Pages
    by Routledge

    The French revolutionary shift from monarchical to popular sovereignty came clothed in a new political language, a significant part of which was a strange coupling of happiness and rights. In Old Regime ideology, Frenchmen were considered subjects who had no need of understanding why what was prescribed to them would be in the interest of their happiness. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen equipped the French with a list of inalienable rights and if society would respect those rights, the happiness of all would materialize.



    This volume explores the authors of fictional literature who contributed alongside pamphleteers, politicians, and philosophers to the establishment of this new political arena, filled with sometimes vague, yet insisting notions of happiness and rights. The shift from monarchical to popular sovereignty and the corollary transition from subjects to citizens culminated in the summer of 1789 but it was preceded by an immense piece of imaginative work.

    Table of Contents





    List of Figures





    Preface





    Introduction



    Happiness and the Politics of Words



    The Political Anthropology of Happiness and Rights



    Literature





    Chapter I: The Unfinished Declaration



    Debating the Declaration



    Nature and Society



    Rights and Duties



    Enmity and Passive Citizenship



    Literature





    Chapter II: What Was Literature?



    The Author-Politician and the Code of History



    Louis-Sébastien Mercier and the Re-Awakening of Patriotic Virtue



    Choderlos de Laclos’ Reinterpretation of Dulce et Utile



    Marie-Joseph Chénier and the Author-Legislator



    Literature





    Chapter III: Louis-Sébastien Mercier and the Dream of a Happy Future



    Temporality in Mercier’s Utopian Thought



    The Form of Government in L’an 2440



    Taxation and the Duty of Patriotism



    Literature





    Chapter IV: The Search for Order in Choderlos de Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses



    Laclos and the Politics of Social Forms



    The Rhythm of Social Forms



    The Hierarchies of Social Forms



    Literature





    Chapter V: The Regeneration of the State in Marie-Joseph Chénier’s Fénelon ou les religieuses de Cambrai



    Convent Life and Paternal Inflexibility



    The Problem of Humanness



    Political Agency : From Unhappiness to Happiness



    The Tableau Vivant: The Politics of the Happy Ending



    Literature





    Conclusion



    Literature





    Index

    Biography

    Jonas Ross Kjærgård, PhD, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University and recipient of the EliteResearch travel grant. He acquired his PhD degree at Aarhus University, Denmark, with a dissertation on French Revolutionary rights and literature. He has published articles and book chapters on literature and the French revolution and edited the volume Discursive Framings of Human Rights: Negotiating Agency and Victimhood (with Karen-Margrethe Simonsen), published by Birkbeck Law Press. He has begun a new research project on the literary history of the Haitian revolution.