Si l’histoire m’était contée . . . Le roman historique de Vigny à Rosny aîné

It seems appropriate that the nineteenth-century historical novel should be attracting renewed scholarly interest in an age when history and culture seem to have found each other again within the academy, whether that is in the historical turn of much literary criticism or in the rise of cultural history. That mutual gaze can nevertheless be myopic. Cultural historians may turn to literary fiction under the aegis of their own linguistic and deconstructive turns, but as a literary critic (or, dare I say, literary historian), as I turn to the literary interpretations of such cultural historians, I invariably experience the kind of gnawing pain one might otherwise associate with a toothache. It is therefore restorative to find such richly textured literary analysis in Claudie Bernard’s book, which pins each of ten chapters to the close reading of a particular novel (or, in two instances, novels) in a chronological structure from the Restoration to the Third Republic. As a bookending “épiloque contemporain,” Bernard evokes Jean d’Ormesson’s 1990 novel Histoire du Juif errant.In addition to the narratological and rhetorical sophistication of the analyses, each chapter benefits from an unusually broad knowledge of the literary field in which each close reading sits. Bernard is also supremely well situated to navigate between French and Anglophone criticism, having maintained close contact with academic life in France during her years at NYU and continued to publish primarily in French and in France. There are two main strands to her voluminous critical output. First, a pair of books on the family in nineteenth-century fiction: Le Jeu des familles dans le roman français du dix-neuvième siècle (2013) and Penser la famille au dix-neuvième siècle (2007; revised version as an e-book in 2019). And second, this investment in the historical novel: from Le Chouan romanesque: Balzac, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Hugo (1989) via Le Passé recomposé: Le roman historique français du XIXe siècle (2021; revised and expanded edition of the Hachette first edition of 1996) to the current volume. It is worth noting in this regard one of her two coedited volumes of the following year, L’Histoire feuilletée: Dispositifs intertextuels dans la fiction historique du XIXe siècle (2022), in collaboration with Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin.Indeed, the brief introduction of Si l’histoire m’était contée . . . echoes the terms of reference of the coedited volume in its evocation of “la mise en évidence, au sein du roman historique, d’un feuilletage palimpsestique: du démarquage d’un vaste intertexte historiographique, s’ajoutant à l’intertexte littéraire” (12). These studies are presented in its opening chapter as “une illustration et une mise à l’épreuve” of the arguments presented in Le Passé recomposé, from which Bernard borrows a series of dichotomies: between “Histoire factuelle, à majuscule” and “histoire fictionnelle”; then between “Histoire-événements accomplis (res gestae)” and “Histoire-discours sur ces événements (historia rerum gestarum)”; and finally, between diegesis and narration, all of which fashions her definition of the historical novel as “une histoire fictionnelle qui traite d’Histoire factuelle, ou plus précisément d’Histoire passée, par la médiation de l’Histoire-discours ou historiographie, dans le contexte de son Histoire contemporaine” (9–10). In this generically precise definition, the italics are indeed important. A tripartite definition of the adjective historique then follows: “passé; public, notoire; et avéré,” which mutates in the course of the century under François Hartog’s notion of the “régime moderne d’historicité” (10), born of the original revolution, a forward-looking sense of the past, captured, as so often in the book, in Bernard’s etymologically deft sense of connotation, as the novel “transforme l’ad-venu en aventure (ad-ventura, ce qui est à venir)” (11).One of the advantages of organizing chapters in terms of a focus on a particular novel is pedagogical, in that it would be very easy to prescribe one of these texts and guide the work of students by directing them toward the relevant chapter (not merely because of Bernard’s historical and critical insight but also, quite simply, because she writes in such beautiful French). Her first two cases emanate from the Restoration: Vigny’s Cinq-Mars (1826) and Mérimée’s Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1829). The July Monarchy is represented in three chapters: one on Balzac’s Sur Catherine de Médicis (1836–41), another on Dumas’s Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge (1845–46), with the intervening chapter, “L’Histoire sur le billot,” unusually conjoining three texts, namely, Nodier’s Histoire d’Hélène Gillet (1832) and Stendhal’s Les Cenci (1837), to a much later text, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Une page d’histoire (1887). The antimonious political chemistry of the century’s halfway turn is represented from the particular perspective of Gobineau’s L’Abbaye de Typhaines (1849).The Second Empire is embalmed in Gautier’s Le Roman de la momie (1857). The only decades of publication between the 1820s and the 1880s not to be represented in the book are the 1860s and 1870s, either side of that key historical moment, the Franco-German War (as scholars are increasingly happier to call it these days), after which restored monarchy and Napoleonic Empire will, to the present day, never return. The next three chapters highlight early Third Republic material, in particular from the 1880s. Between chapters on Bourges’s Sous la hache (1885) and then on Rosny aîné’s Les Xipéhuz (1887) and La Guerre de feu (1909), Bernard addresses 1870–71 directly via Jules Vallès’s Communard novel, L’Insurgé (1886).As she realizes, this briefest of time spans in her corpus between historical experience and fictional publication (a mere fifteen years) raises the question of when the past represented in fiction becomes historical. In this, she returns to that introductory definition of the adjective historique in terms of “trois sèmes: ceux de passé, de public et d’avéré” (266). As such, she concludes: “Quand on a affaire à une période récente, il n’y aura roman historique que dans la mesure où cette période se trouve distanciée, reléguée dans un statut d’ancien régime” (266). She asserts that this is the case for two fictions about 1870–71, Zola’s La Débâcle (1892) and the Margueritte brothers’ tetralogy Une époque (1898–1904). She does not however choose these texts for scrutiny, perhaps because of the formal as well as political radicalism of Vallès’s quasi-autobiographical account: “Le roman historique est un genre à degré d’historicité variable: j’appréhenderai L’Insurgé comme un cas limite, éclairant justement en ce qu’il s’insurge contre les catégories usuelles, afin de mieux baliser d’autres insurrections: contre l’Histoire déjà faite, contre l’Histoire en train de se faire, et finalement contre les Lettres” (269).One way for future scholars to nuance this model of historical time would be to set it within the quotidian (or weekly, or biweekly) context of newspaper serialization. From this perspective, one could reframe Bernard’s question by exploring the precise points of divergence between the roman historique and that newly coined notion of the roman contemporain that comes to characterize the accelerating rhythms of a self-consciously modern culture of actualité.But there are, necessarily, some paths that any book does not follow, even one as well-researched and wide-ranging as this. Necessarily, and understandably, although some pistes à ne pas suivre are to be lamented more than others, not least the decision not to engage with chapter 4, “Scott Comes to France,” of Maurice Samuels’s The Spectacular Past. There Samuels opened up the relationship between the historical novel and other forms of popular visual culture in a way that has altered our understanding of such fiction: “Through the introduction of a new technique of historical ekphrasis, a mode of literary description that encourages readers to form mental images of people, places, and things from the past, structured according to the logic of painting, Scott’s novels simulated the process of looking at visual representations; contemporary critics described how Scott’s novels made them feel as if they were seeing a painting, a wax display, or a panorama of the past” (152). Samuels’s interpretation manages to hold this fiction within the broader field of postrevolutionary French culture, rather than allowing such novels to float untethered within the autonomy of precise close readings. Nor does Bernard pursue Samuels in his major focus on gender, not least on the pre-Scottian historical novel as a women-authored form and subsequently on female readers as well as authors. Indeed, none of the thirteen authors who appear on her contents page are female. Nonetheless, Si l’histoire m’était contée . . . enjoys another kind of richness and depth, from which I have learned so much, and by which its many other readers will not be disappointed.