Paul-Louis Courier (1772–1825)

Acknowledgements

Small parts of this monograph are derived, with modifications, from work which I have previously published. I am grateful to Peter Lang Group AG for permission to reuse material from Leonardo Sciascia’s French Authors (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), ch. 2. The material is present mainly in Chapter 2.

Some of Chapter 6 is based on articles published by the Société des amis de Paul-Louis Courier in the Cahiers Paul-Louis Courier: ‘“Ce garçon-là ira loin”. Courier et le style’, 5/2 (2016), 45–58; and ‘Courier et Napoléon Bonaparte’, 5/9 (2023), 5–14.

It is a great pleasure to thank my friend Dr Michael Haren, formerly of the Irish Manuscripts Commission and University College Dublin, for advice on the question of sovereignty; and likewise, to thank my friend and former colleague Hugh Dauncey, for support in many matters.

Preface

Paul-Louis Courier was an artillery officer, a landowner, and above all an author whose legacy includes a dialogue, over thirty pamphlets, several translations from ancient Greek, some occasional pieces and over two hundred letters. I shall consider some of his letters from Italy for their critical content, although they were not published in his lifetime. In his day, he was known mainly for political pamphlets, often designed to defend individual freedom against the authorities, and these political texts are our main concern here. According to Michel Crouzet, ‘il a agi en politique par la toute-puissance du ridicule’ (Éc, 33). Though that may overstate Courier’s practical impact, his pamphlets impressed sympathetic contemporaries such as Stendhal and Béranger, and so disturbed the authorities that he was prosecuted twice and imprisoned once. As a writer, he has been widely praised for his style. The historian Bertier de Sauvigny, for example, having associated him with ‘la masse des écrivains de second rang qui ont monnayé pour le grand public la doctrine libérale’, goes on to distinguish him as being ‘l’un des plus grands pamphlétaires de tous les temps; rarement plus de mauvaise foi et plus de bassesse de pensée ont été enveloppées d’un style plus attique, d’une ironie plus cinglante, d’une maîtrise plus grande dans le sous-entendu polisson ou calomnieux’. The great literary scholar Erich Auerbach judged his letters ‘von einer leichten und einfachen Vollkommenheit des Stils’ but he also noted that, roughly a hundred years after the author’s death, he had been ‘ziemlich vergessen’.¹ These two verdicts on Courier the writer are the more striking because Bertier and Auerbach disapproved of his outlook. In the English-speaking world, he has attracted no recent scholarly interest. In Italy, he caught the attention of one notable recent author, Leonardo Sciascia, and a selection of his letters has been translated into Italian.² Even in France, despite recent publications such as Crouzet’s edition of his pamphlets (2007), and biographies by Jean-Pierre Lautman (2001) or Alain Dejammet (2009), his work still seems neglected. Perhaps he has suffered from the lack of interest in the Bourbon Restoration as a whole. More specifically, his writing had general implications but often sprang from local controversies and, as the events have been forgotten, the point of his interventions has become obscure. His focus on particular cases also means that he expresses his ideas piecemeal, not systematically, which may be why some critics are lukewarm about his thought. Sainte-Beuve, for example, wrote that ‘il voit bien, mais par parties, il a de vives idées, mais elles ne sont ni très-variées ni très-abondantes’,³ and later scholars have not challenged this assessment. Amongst the recent studies mentioned above, Lautman’s biography often seeks to defend Courier against accusations, for example, that he was a bad soldier or a thief. This work is valuable, especially on questions of local history, but does not examine Courier’s literary qualities in detail. Dejammet’s biography is more panoramic and attempts, for example, to relate Courier’s views to contemporary political thinking. Unusually, Dejammet also pays due attention to the existence of Mme Courier. However, the work is slightly superficial and also suffers from arbitrary segmentation of Courier’s life. Crouzet’s edition offers a first serious analysis of Courier’s authorial characteristics. The Preface depicts him as a Romantic, that is, an anti-Establishment writer in literature and in politics. In examining Courier’s writing, Crouzet mentions many features of his manner, but unfortunately he treats them collectively. (He interprets this mass of features as a hostile reaction to the Establishment and its styles.) Methodologically, the defect of this analysis is that it does not relate stylistic features to particular pamphlets, and thus masks the crucial links between manner and content in individual cases. It may be added, incidentally, that Crouzet’s commendable enthusiasm sometimes leads him to write in an effusive manner which readers unfamiliar with Courier may struggle to understand.

The present study, then, explores Courier’s letters, where relevant, and his political pamphlets, with occasional references to other texts. The range of issues over which he adopted a critical stance should emerge clearly and justify application to him of the term ‘dissident’. I shall focus both on his ideas about political and social questions, and on his practice as a controversialist defending his own views. More particularly, I shall try to show that his thinking is closely connected with various practical realities, and not simply derived from the commonplaces of French liberalism, as is suggested, for example, by Bertier (above). Thus, he was concerned with French conduct of war, which he had seen as an officer; he was also interested in the treatment of the lower ranks under the Restoration. Above all, as a landowner himself, he knew and wrote about the lives of smallholders and their difficulties: for example, oppressive security legislation, possible challenges to their ownership of land, fiscal pressure, or clerical interference in their activities. As I proceed, I shall consider his qualities as a writer in particular pamphlets and attempt to show amongst other things that, as a controversialist, his expression is multifarious and cannot be reduced to one single style. I shall, however, end by reviewing two general characteristics of his writing which pertain to most of his works, his alleged simplicity and his uses of irony. For the reader’s convenience, I begin with a brief overview of Courier’s career and main ideas. The subsequent chapters examine his output: first, some letters from his time in the French army in Italy which concern the military and political situation, and then his political pamphlets in roughly chronological order.

1 G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, La Restauration (Paris: Flammarion, 1955), 345; Erich Auerbach, ‘Paul-Louis Courier’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 4 (1926), 514–47 (pp. 518–19, 515).

2 Ian R. Morrison, Leonardo Sciascia’s French Authors (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), ch. 2; Paul-Louis Courier, Lettere di un polemista, edited and translated by Antonio Motta (Palermo: Sellerio, 1997).

3 Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, 3rd edn, 15 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1858–72), vol. 6, pp. 322–3.