Les Chouans
Encyclopedia
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
(1799–1850) and included in the Scènes de la vie militaire section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
. Set in the French region of Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
, the novel combines military history with a love story between the aristocratic Marie de Verneuil and the Chouan
Chouan
Chouan is a French surname. It was used as a nom de guerre by the Chouan brothers, most notably Jean Cottereau, better known as Jean Chouan, who led a major revolt in Bas-Maine against the French Revolution...
royalist Alphonse de Montauran. It takes place during the 1799 post-war uprising in Fougères
Fougères
Fougères is a commune and a sub-prefecture of the Ille-et-Vilaine department in Brittany, in north-western France.-Sights:Fougères' major monument is a medieval stronghold built atop a granite ledge, which was part of the ultimately unsuccessful defence system of the Duchy of Brittany against...
.
Balzac conceived the idea for the novel during a trip to Brittany arranged by a family friend in 1828. Intrigued by the people and atmosphere of the region, he began collecting notes and descriptions for later use. After publishing an Avertissement for the novel, he released three editions – each of them revised significantly. The first novel Balzac published without a pseudonym, he used many titles as he wrote and published, including Le Gars, Les Chouans ou la Bretagne il y a trente ans, and Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne en 1800.
Following closely in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott, the novel uses its truthful historical backdrop to tell a fictional story of people who sculpted the past. The novel addresses themes of passionate love, vengeful trickery, and social status. While it is disdained by critics in favor of Balzac's later work, the novel marks a turning point in his life and artistry.
Background
In the wake of the French RevolutionFrench Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, groups of royalists
Monarchism
Monarchism is the advocacy of the establishment, preservation, or restoration of a monarchy as a form of government in a nation. A monarchist is an individual who supports this form of government out of principle, independent from the person, the Monarch.In this system, the Monarch may be the...
loyal to the House of Bourbon
House of Bourbon
The House of Bourbon is a European royal house, a branch of the Capetian dynasty . Bourbon kings first ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma...
rose up against the new government. One group was the Chouans of Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
, led by Jean Chouan
Jean Chouan
Jean Chouan was the nom de guerre of the Frenchman, Jean Cottereau, who was born at Saint-Berthevin, near Laval, in the department of Mayenne on 30 October 1757 and died 18 July 1794 at Olivet, also in Mayenne...
. They allied themselves with counter-revolutionary forces in Vendée
Vendée
The Vendée is a department in the Pays-de-la-Loire region in west central France, on the Atlantic Ocean. The name Vendée is taken from the Vendée river which runs through the south-eastern part of the department.-History:...
and by 1793 the Revolt in the Vendée
Revolt in the Vendée
The War in the Vendée was a Royalist rebellion and counterrevolution in the Vendée region of France during the French Revolution. The Vendée is a coastal region, located immediately south of the Loire River in western France. The uprising was closely tied to the Chouannerie, which took place in...
had begun. The insurrection was put down by the republic, and within two years the royalist forces had been routed.
Chouannerie
The Chouannerie was a royalist uprising in twelve of the western departements of France, particularly in the provinces of Brittany and Maine, against the French Revolution, the First French Republic, and even, with its headquarters in London rather than France, for a time, under the Empire...
, even when Napoleon
Napoleon I of France
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
took power in 1799. The Bonaparte forces responded as the republic had, and the Chouans were defeated – although political divisions and resentment lingered for more than a century.
At the start of the nineteenth century, the works of Sir Walter Scott were best-sellers in France. His novels captured the ebb and flow of society, and he demonstrated the far-reaching impact of major historical changes. A slew of authors in France attempted to replicate Scott's success, but their works were isolated from one another and divorced from their surroundings.
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
was profoundly influenced by Scott (as well as Irish writer Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe...
), and decided to write novels using France's turbulent history as a literary backdrop in the same way they had used the history of Scotland and Ireland. Balzac had previously only published potboiler
Potboiler
Potboiler or pot-boiler is a term used to describe a poor quality novel, play, opera, or film, or other creative work that was created quickly to make money to pay for the creator's daily expenses . Authors who create potboiler novels or screenplays are sometimes called hack writers...
novels under a variety of pseudonyms, books designed to excite readers and sell copies. He had also engaged in a series of ill-fated speculative investments, which left him in considerable debt. Nevertheless, he believed in his skills as a writer, and awaited success around every corner.
Preparations and publications
In September 1828 Balzac visited the home of a family friend and retired general, the Baron de Pommereul, in FougèresFougères
Fougères is a commune and a sub-prefecture of the Ille-et-Vilaine department in Brittany, in north-western France.-Sights:Fougères' major monument is a medieval stronghold built atop a granite ledge, which was part of the ultimately unsuccessful defence system of the Duchy of Brittany against...
. He spent several weeks learning about the insurrection (which Pommereul had fought against). He pored over his host's books and interviewed the townspeople about their experiences during the time of the uprising. Pommereul owned a castle which had been the headquarters of the Comte de Puisaye, a royalist leader involved with a failed invasion of royalist exiles at Quiberon
Quiberon
Quiberon is a commune in the Morbihan department in Brittany in north-western France.It is situated on the southern part of the Quiberon peninsula, the northern part being the commune of Saint-Pierre-Quiberon...
. This incursion had been aided by the Chouans, and Balzac began collecting events and people as inspiration for his novel.
As he neared completion of his novel – originally titled Le Gars – Balzac wrote an announcement heralding its imminent publication. Under the pseudonym "Victor Morillon" and writing in the third person, he describes his intent to "place his country's history in the hands of the man in the street … to illuminate and make the ordinary mind realize the repercussions that entire populations feel of royal discord, feudal dissension and popular uprising…." In the Avertissement, he praises Scott as "a man of genius" while noting his limitations, especially when writing of romance: "on his lyre the strings are missing that can sing of love…." Balzac – or, rather, "Morillon" – also declares his intention to write a companion volume entitled Le Capitaine des Boutefeux (The Captain of the Firebrands), about war in fifteenth-century Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. This later work was never completed.
In 1834 a second edition was published under the name Les Chouans ou La Bretagne en 1799. It had been heavily revised, as per Balzac's style of constantly reworking texts, even after their release. He had been corresponding with Ewelina Hańska
Ewelina Hańska
Eveline Hańska was a Polish noblewoman best known for her marriage to French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Born at the Wierzchownia estate in Volhynia, Hańska married landowner Wacław Hański when she was a teenager...
, who wrote to him anonymously in 1832. In an attempt to please her, he changed some of the language in Les Chouans for its second edition. "If only you knew," he wrote to her, "how much there is of you in every altered phrase of Chouans!" The second edition also demonstrates the author's maturing political philosophy (softening his representation of the royalists), and the evolved female characters testify to his relationship with Hańska.
When the third edition was published in 1845, Balzac was in love with his own creation. He had written two years earlier to Hańska: "There's no doubt about it – it is a magnificent poem. I had never really read it before.… The passion is sublime, and I now understand why you have a cherished and special devotion to this book.… All in all, I am very pleased with it." In a preface to the third edition, he described his plans for a part of La Comédie Humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
called Scènes de la vie militaire (Scenes from Military Life). In addition to Les Chouans with its focus on guerrilla combat, he planned another called Les Vendéans about the earlier full-scale civil war. Although in 1844 he discussed traveling to western France to write the book, it was never written.
Plot summary
At the start of the novel, the RepublicanFrench Revolutionary Army
The French Revolutionary Army is the term used to refer to the military of France during the period between the fall of the ancien regime under Louis XVI in 1792 and the formation of the First French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804. These armies were characterised by their revolutionary...
Commander Hulot is assaulted by Chouan forces, who convert dozens of conscripts. An aristocrat, Marie de Verneuil, is sent by Joseph Fouché to subdue and capture the royalist leader, the Marquis de Montauran, also known as "Le Gars". She is aided by a detective named Corentin.
Eventually, Marie becomes smitten with her target. In defiance of Corentin and the Chouans whom she detests, she devises a plan to marry the Chouan leader. Fooled by Corentin into believing that Montauran loves her mortal enemy Madame du Gua, Marie orders Hulot to destroy the rebels. She discovers her folly too late and tries, unsuccessfully, to save her husband the day after their marriage.
Style
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo...
, whose The Last of the Mohicans
The Last of the Mohicans
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is a historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in February 1826. It is the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy and the best known...
had impressed the French author. Like the Mahican
Mahican
The Mahican are an Eastern Algonquian Native American tribe, originally settling in the Hudson River Valley . After 1680, many moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. During the early 1820s and 1830s, most of the Mahican descendants migrated westward to northeastern Wisconsin...
s of Cooper's novel, the Chouan insurgents are skilled at using their surroundings, coming out of the woods in more ways than one.
Some critics claim that Balzac surpassed Scott in some respects. In his introduction to the 1901 edition, poet and critic George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury , was an English writer, literary historian, scholar and critic.-Biography:...
writes that the character of Montauran enjoys "a freedom from the flatness which not infrequently characterizes Sir Walter's own good young men." By foregrounding the affair between Montauran and Marie, Balzac indicates passion as the central theme of history. As he writes in the 1842 foreword to La Comédie Humaine: "[L]a passion est toute l'humanité. Sans elle religion, l'histoire, le roman, l'art seraient inutiles." ("[P]assion is all of humanity. Without it religion, history, literature, and art would be useless.")
Because of its extended conversations, intricate descriptions and lengthy asides, the book is considered "heavy" by some critics. In later editions its chapter breaks were removed (though some versions now restore them), and the work is in three sections – the final of which comprises nearly half the novel. The novel's feel is compounded by the lack of clarity on some points; some characters' motives are unclear even at the end, and the chaotic sequence of events is difficult to track.
Passionate history
Although he venerated Scott's writing skill and use of history as backdrop, Balzac worked to more accurately depict the turbulence of the human heart – and its effect on history. He considered Scott's view of women unrefined, and believed this led to a stale representation of human behavior as a result. In Les Chouans, Balzac places the romance of Montauran and Marie de Verneuil at the center of the narrative, around which all other elements revolve.For this reason (and owing to the florid descriptions of romantic elements), the novel has been compared to William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's play Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers.Romeo and Juliet belongs to a...
. Both stories explore love among feuding parties; both involve vengeful, scheming individuals; and both end in tragedy for the newly-wed couple. As the translator Marion Ayton Crawford puts it: "Hero and heroine are star-crossed lovers, whose fate is brought about by forces of the times acting on their own internal weaknesses…."
Although Balzac himself did not marry until 1850, he was fascinated by the subject. Soon after Les Chouans was published in 1829, he released a treatise about the institution called Physiologie du Mariage. His attention to the details of relationships – failed and successful – are woven into Les Chouans, and Marie herself is based on a woman with whom he had had an affair.
Devious ferocity
Corentin and Madame du Gua, foilFoil (literature)
In fiction, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character in order to highlight particular qualities of another character....
s to the happy couple, plot and scheme endlessly to bring about the misery and downfall of those who will not love them. Du Gua is at first a sympathetic character, but by the end of the novel she is presented as sharing a face with a spirit from hell. She represents revenge and hatred chiseled from romantic injury, and has been noted as a rough sketch of the title character in Balzac's La Cousine Bette
La Cousine Bette
La Cousine Bette |Bette]]) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and...
. Corentin, meanwhile, stands in contrast to Montauran's romantic nature as much as to Hulot's military prowess. Rebuffed by Marie and unable to wield the might of the commandant, Corentin relies on trickery and deception to achieve his ruthless ends.
Marie herself begins the operation on a quest to seduce and betray her target. Her reversal (followed by two subsequent changes of heart, back to the original mission and then in opposition to it) counterbalance the wickedness of Madame du Gua and Corentin. Her ultimate fidelity to the object of her desire demonstrates the possibility of sincere passion, even as the other pair speak to the venom of the slighted heart.
Social hierarchy
The allure of class respectability is another constant in Les Chouans, as it is for Balzac's entire oeuvre. Marie's birth as an illegitimate child contributes to her position at the start of the novel. The ups and downs of her young adult life land her in Corentin's hands, yearning for the 300,000-franc reward promised to her on the capture of Montauran. Marie's focus changes from money to marriage, a sign of hope amid the tragedy of circumstances. When she first considers Montauran, she recognizes that a return of the king would bring privileges; still, her oscillating actions follow the path of her passions, not rational self-interest.
Reception and impact
Les Chouans is considered Balzac's first real success as a writer – a milestone for which he was prepared, evidenced by his willingness to sign his own name. Saintsbury proclaims that publishing Les Chouans was how he "first emerged from the purgatory of anonymous hack-writing." Still, revenues from the book were not sufficient to cover Balzac's modest living expenses.Although he never finished the other works intended to comprise Scenes from a Military Life, Balzac returned to the people and politics of Les Chouans in later works. Corentin reappears in his 1841 novel Une Ténébreuse Affaire (A Murky Business), and Hulot is featured in 1843's La Muse du département (The Provincial Muse). Later novels mention additional royalist uprisings, connecting them thematically to Les Chouans.
As a literary work, the novel is not singled out by critics from the rest of La Comédie Humaine. Balzac's emerging style (some time before he refined his renowned realist
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
idiom) and unsteady pacing are representative of his early career. Still, critics hail it as a turning point and it has even been called "a strong favorite" among readers. In 1947 it was adapted into an eponymous feature film, directed by Henri Calef.
Footnotes
The plot summary of this article comes from the equivalent French-language wikipedia article (retrieved 16 August 2007).External links
- The Chouans at Project GutenbergProject GutenbergProject Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...