ICFFS-Cultural Memory Program

An 1896 caricature from Le Charivari displaces, at the expense of four famous Romantic writers, the ambivalent relationship between private lives and public stature and of published correspondences to commemorative gestures. In “Act One” of “La Comédie de la Gloire,” Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Alfred de Musset, whose personal letters were receiving great attention in the press, appear as icons, statues on pedestals to which the public, on its knees, bows in respect. “Act Two,” on the other hand, represents their literal fall from grace under the weight of bags of “correspondence,” and “private papers” that the crowd, now standing, hurls at them in disgust. According to this interpretation of public reaction to Hugo’s Correspondence and Sand’s Lettres à Alfred de Musset, these publications fulfilled the dysphoric potential of all epistles. As either apotheosizing or iconoclastic agents, letters lend themselves particularly well to a problematic conflation with physiological and monumental bodies, all the more since their material existence and verbal content concretizes the double etymology of “relic,” – precious remains” and “confession” --, as Terdiman reminds us, while repeatedly satisfying the postrevolutionary valorization of the proper name, its emblematic signature and authorship.

A closer examination of the discourse surrounding the publication of letters at the end of the nineteenth-century suggests that if the dynamic relationship between France’s new “memory-documents” and the figurative monumentality of literary celebrities could be violent and overwhelming, the phenomenon was more complex than the simple fictionalization of real life that Alain Pagès deries and the cover-up, in Daniel Modelénat’s words, for “the ideological anemia of human relations in a consumer society.” Intense debates occurred, sometimes in courtrooms, more frequently in literary reviews, manuals and the daily press concerning the transformation of epistolary artifacts into literary monuments. Public scrutiny engaged correspondences in the evolution of journalism, to which the texts owed their mass dissemination, the National Library, whose space they were increasingly occupying, and literary history, whose traditions they were supposed to defend and illustrate. I will argue that while serving as a powerful canonizing and de-canonizing instrument, published letters constitute a privileged indicator of the tensions underlying the creation a canon whose purpose was to vouchsafe the originality and reproducibility of a recognizable national identity.




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