A Note on Translations
Depending on the context, I have either rendered in English or, more often, kept in the original the following terms used in the French aristocratic discourse of politeness:
aisance—The rough English equivalent is “ease” or “effortlessness,” but those translations do not evoke the emphasis on performance in the French social aesthetic of play.
complaisance—Only indirectly related to what “complacency” has come to mean in the Anglophone world. The French word connotes the art of “pleasing”—of being agréable—in rituals of politeness.
délicat—Literally “delicate,” with the implication of weakness or fragility, but sometimes implying the strength of a kind of intellectual acuity.
esprit—Connotes “mind,” “spirit,” “wit,” etc., depending on its usage in the text.
honnête (honnêteté)—The best translation is probably “polite,” but the French word evokes an entire way of life in Parisian elite circles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In some contexts its older meaning of “honesty” or “integrity” continued through the early modern era.
mondain (mondanité)—Of “The World,” the elite milieu of Paris. The word suggests a secular worldliness, a certain indifference to religious strictures, but has a much wider range of meaning.
Introduction
In one of his private pensées, written sometime in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, laments that the French no longer have a taste for the works of Corneille and Racine, two of the most exalted figures in seventeenth-century neoclassicism. Works that require concentrated mental effort (esprit) have come to seem “ridiculous.” The “problem,” he continues, “is more general”:
Nothing that has a specific object is bearable anymore: men of war can no longer stand war: men of politics can no longer stand politics, and so forth. Only general objects are known, and in practice, that amounts to nothing. It is the company of women that has led us there, because it is in their character not to be attached to anything fixed. [Thus we have become like them.] There is only one sex anymore, and in our minds (par l’esprit) we are all women in spirit (esprit), and if we were to change faces one night, no one would notice that anything else had changed. Even if women were to move into all the employments that society offers, and men were deprived of all those that society can take away, neither would be disoriented.1
The entry sounds virtually all the themes pursued in this book. French high culture is in decline, and this cultural change is due to a social innovation, the modern commerce between the sexes. The change has not simply feminized society; it has resulted in a process of effeminization, the emasculation of the male mind. In the world as it should be, and as it once was, there is in fact nothing neuter about the mind’s sex or gender: there are manly minds and feminine minds, different by nature. But in the unnatural culture of polite sociability that the word “company” evokes, the manly mind has disappeared. The connection between mind and sexed body has become irrelevant. A manly mind could endure sustained concentration; female minds—and now all minds—flit about in a void of nothingness. Implicit is that the widening commercialization of print culture has combined with the commerce of the sexes to produce this situation. Since the mind is no longer required to labor, a sexual division of labor no longer has any justification. If women began practicing occupations once exclusive to men, no one would notice.
The cultural gloom Montesquieu voices here is now quite familiar to historians and literary scholars, but we are only beginning to plumb the social and cultural logic of conceiving the mind as manly; to interrogate the textual representations of the manly mind; and to understand the ways in which it was subverted or at least obliquely questioned. While this book focuses on texts written by men, it also investigates the ways in which women in their circles challenged their perceptions. The story of the discursive formation of the manly mind in the age of politeness is a crucial chapter in the history of modern gender relations and modern literature. Beneath an overarching narrative of the tenacity of assumed dichotomies between men and women, sanctioned by Nature and hence not to be questioned, we find a lexicon fraught with ambivalence, ambiguity, and argument.
Hence the questions I have posed. How did educated and cultivated men in early modern France and Britain perceive and value their own and women’s cognitive capacities, and how did women in their circles challenge those perceptions, if only by revaluing the kinds of intelligence attributed to them? What was thought to distinguish the manly mind from the feminine mind? What dangers to its manliness did it face? How did awareness of these questions, often tinged with ambivalence and anxiety, inform various kinds of published and unpublished texts, including the philosophical treatise, the dialogue, the polite essay, and the essay in literary criticism?
Our story takes a circular path; we begin with seventeenth-century France, when the Enlightenment is emergent, move on to England and Scotland, and return to France in the High Enlightenment of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Perhaps the best way to provide an initial map of the terrain is to introduce the cast of characters. Guez de Balzac (1597–1654) was a savant and man of letters who tried to inform the marquise de Rambouillet’s famous Blue Room in Paris, the prototype of the old-regime salon, with what he called the urbanité of the ancient Roman patriciate. Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), one of the progenitors of the modern novel, was the central figure in the Parisian circle of society women who were celebrated and ridiculed as the précieuses. In 1673 Poullain de la Barre (1647–1724), a theology student at the Sorbonne who had been captivated by Descartes’s new paradigm of the human body, published On the Equality of the Two Sexes, which arguably made him the first modern feminist. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), author of the much-loved Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, was an eminent natural philosopher, a master of the “modern taste” in literature, and the unrivaled polite gentleman (honnête homme) of his generation. Through his long years of exile in London Charles de Saint-Évremond (1613–1703) remained the epitome of the French epicurean gallant and casual polite essayist. In this group of seventeenth-century French authors Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), Oratorian priest, natural philosopher, and moralist, was the odd-one-out, and that is what makes him so relevant; from his clerical residence in Paris he found in the mixed-gender worldliness and polite taste of his contemporaries confirmation of his Augustinian conviction that man was innately sinful. In the next generation Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733), a worldly but rigorously moral woman, brought together a wide range of scholars and men of letters in her salon and dared become a thoughtful critic in public of the denigration of women’s intelligence.
Across the Channel we focus on the English grandee and essayist Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), and David Hume (1711–1776), whose call for a “science of man” in 1740 did so much to shape the Scottish Enlightenment. We return, via Hume’s initially exhilarating but in the end crestfallen visit to Paris in the early 1760s, to le monde and the men and women of the French High Enlightenment who had at least one foot in it: Antoine-Léonard Thomas (1732–1785), a French Academician and master of the patriotic eulogy (a very popular genre in his day); Suzanne Curchod Necker (1737–1794), an intimate friend of Thomas, and the presiding figure in the last great salon of old regime France; and the radical philosophe Denis Diderot (1713–1784). We end with Louise d’Épinay (1726–1783), who achieved precarious acceptance in
