Moralistes of Modern Life: the Subjectivization of Moralist Discourse in Eighteenth-Century France

by

Órlaith Catherine Creedon

Doctor of Philosophy in French

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Nicholas Paige, Chair

This dissertation studies the breakdown of classical moralist discourse in the post-absolutist moment and traces the newly flexible forms of this self-defined "literature of social observation" over the course of the eighteenth century. Tied to the specific context of absolute monarchy, moralist literature had analyzed the world in function of analytical grids and rigid codes, and hence generated a literature of closed forms: maxims, portraits, caractères. I argue that the static completeness of moralist literature reached its limits of possibility under the Regency, when the migration from the closed system of the court to the "open" system of the city radically destabilized the finite and fixed nature of social categories and their codes - presuming this had ever been a social reality, though it had in fact been represented as such in moralist texts. Analyzing generically diverse texts which have never before been put into dialogue - Le Spectateur français (Marivaux), Le Neveu de Rameau (Diderot), and the Tableau de Paris (Mercier), I study a feature of the emergence of urban modernity that has heretofore remained overshadowed by Benjaminian studies of the nineteenth-century capital: the figure of the urban spectator. Informed by eighteenth-century aesthetics and drame theory, my dissertation argues for the figure of the urban spectator as the mediator and model of a public in the making. No longer an implied, disembodied narrator, the spectator's emergence produced not only new ways of writing, but also of knowing, what La Rochefoucauld referred to as "les choses de la vie." This dissertation focuses on narrative texts that stage the spectator in the act of beholding; that is to say, narratives in which moralist discourse is subjectivized.

This dissertation discusses danger as of one the central concepts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thought. While many classic inquiries have emphasized metaphysical themes like “evil” in Rousseau’s work, I focus on danger as it pertains to the relationship between man and the built environment, as distinct from interhuman relationships. I argue that dangerousness is most visible for Rousseau in human creative activities like architecture, urban planning, and other material makings, subjects poorly treated in Rousseauian criticism. Although some theorists of risk and danger like Georges-Yves Kerven have briefly touched on this problematic in Rousseau, literary and philosophical approaches have not, thus weakening our grasp on the totality of Rousseau’s thought. Thus, in classic readings such as Derrida’s as well as more recent studies like Rudy Le Mentheour’s Manufacture des maladies, danger is either kept on a secondary plan or has been largely limited to psycho-political approaches. Through readings of texts such as the Lettre sur le désastre de Lisbonne, the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, and the Lettre à d’Alembert, this dissertation seeks to fill a gap in the Rousseauian criticism by showing that Rousseau offers a true « riskology », one that has no counterpart either in earlier thinkers such as Hobbes or in contemporaries like Voltaire. I believe that this dissertation will render Rousseau and his thought more accessible to non-literary and non-philosophical thinkers who cannot dialogue with Rousseau within the classical critical frames.