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23Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (2003) Pp. 2345.
IVIC MELANCHOLY: ENGLISH GLOOMAND FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT
C
Eric Gidal is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Iowa and author of PoeticExhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and
the Pleasures of the British Museum (Bucknell Univer-sity Press,
2001). He is currently studying manifestations of civic melancholy
in English,French, and American literature during the eighteenth
century.
Eric Gidal
When French writers and travelers looked across the Channel in
the eigh-teenth century, the chief characteristic they were likely
to focus on was Englishlibertyintellectual, economic, religious,
and political.1 The empirical investiga-tions of Locke and Newton,
the expansion of English trade, the proliferation ofdissenting
religious communities, and the balance of power born of the
GloriousRevolution: all testified to a spirit of liberty that
encouraged the arts and sciences,supported commercial growth, and
produced a degree of civic participation un-paralleled in Europe.
Bat de Muralt, a Pietist from Bern, praised England for
itsprosperity and freedom. England is a Country of Liberty, he
asserted in hisLettres sur les Anglois et les Franois (1725), every
one lives there as he wishes. . . it is in England that a Man is
Master of his own, without the Oppressions ofthe Great, or ever
knowing them, if he thinks fit.2 In 1727, Csar de Saussurewrote
from London to his family, Protestants exiled in Lausanne, that the
Englishadvances in the arts and sciences were cultivated by the
liberty which the gov-ernment affords, and in which Englishmen take
great pride, for they value thisgift more than all the joys of
life, and would sacrifice everything to retain it.3
Similarly, Abb Jean-Bernard Le Blanc wrote in his 1745 Lettres
dun Franoisthat what is properly stiled the People, is what most
distinguishes the Englishfrom their neighbours; the share they have
in the government by their right tochoose their representatives
inspires them with a certain courage, which is not tobe found in
other countries in those of the same rank.4 Voltaire was thus in
goodcompany when he repeated the common observation that the
English are the
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM23
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24 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 37 / 1
only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to
the power ofKings by resisting them; and who, by a series of
struggles, have at last establishdthat wise government, where the
Prince is all powerful to do good, and at thesame time is restraind
from committing evil; where the Nobles are great withoutinsolence,
tho there are no Vassals; and where the People share in the
govern-ment without confusion.5
Nevertheless, if admiring English civic culture was a
commonplace of theFrench Enlightenment, so too was wondering at the
English penchant for melan-choly. Whether attributed to their cold
and foggy climate, the coal-smoke of theircities, their excessive
consumption of meat and ale, the severity of their Protestantsects,
or the systematic rigor of their empirical sciences, melancholy was
viewedas a distinguishing feature of the English nation.6 Le Blanc
quipped that When Isee an Englishman laugh, I fancy I see him
hunting after joy, rather than havingcaught it . . . the most
laughing air is instantly succeeded by the most gloomy: onewould be
apt to think that their souls open with difficulty to joy, or at
least thatjoy is not pleased with its habitation there.7 Finding
the entire nation both mel-ancholy and passionate, Muralt was
struck by the frequency of suicide amongthe English, a common point
of observation among his contemporaries.8 Aubryde La Mottraye, who
traveled to England three times in the early decades of thecentury,
noted that barely a month passes, nor even a week, that somebody
doesnot hang himself, or throw himself into the Thames, or cut his
throat, or take apistol to his head.9 Both Muralt and La Mottraye
repeat the story of a French-man who, visiting England, contracted
this prevailing humor and took his life.Saussure himself wrote that
though he was initially surprised at the light-heart-ed way in
which men of this country commit suicide, he too fell ill to the
blackhumor:
Little by little I lost my appetite and my sleep; I suffered
from greatanxiety and uneasiness, and that without any reason.
Finally I fell intothe deepest and blackest melancholy, and
suffered untold misery. . .Everything made me sad and anxious; I
could no longer sleep, and myfood disgusted me. Had I been an
Englishman I should certainly haveput myself out of misery.10
Even Voltaire, despite his admiration for the English, observed
that philosophy,liberty, and climate are productive of misanthropy:
London has scarcely anyTartuffes, while it abounds with
Timons.11
French travelers were by turns amused and appalled by the gloomy
dis-position of the island nation, but they often viewed the
English melancholy asinextricable from the very civic culture they
so admired. Linking the melanchol-ic disposition of the English to
the foggy climate, Le Blanc reasoned, this sametendency to
melancholy prevents their ever being content with their fate,
andequally renders them enemies to tranquility and friends to
liberty.12 Formalizingsuch speculations into a broader system of
comparative climates and politicalcultures, Montesquieu argued in
LEsprit des lois (1748) that cold climate led theEnglish not only
toward suicide, but also toward constitutional government:
In a nation so distempered by the climate as to have a disrelish
ofeverything, nay, even of life, it is plain that the government
most
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM24
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25Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment
suitable to the inhabitants is that in which they cannot lay
theiruneasiness to any single persons charge, and in which being
under thedirection rather of the laws than of the prince, they
cannot change thegovernment without subverting the laws
themselves.
The obstinate impatience so characteristic of the English humor
thus frustratesthe establishment of tyrannical government. Slavery
is ever preceded by sleep,Montesquieu opines, but a people who find
no rest in any situation, who contin-ually explore every part, and
feel nothing but pain, can hardly be lulled to sleep.13
Germaine de Stal would later bring the question to bear on
literary expressionwhen she argued that the melancholy poetry of
the North was much more suit-able . . . to the spirit of a free
people. In her essay of 1800, De la littratureconsidre dans ses
rapports avec les institutions sociales, Stal asks
why the English, who are contented with their government and
customs,have an imagination so much more melancholy than was that
of theFrench. The answer is that liberty and virtue, those two
great results ofhuman reason, require meditation, and meditation
necessarily leads toserious pursuits.
For Stal, the gloomy imagination of the English as expressed in
landscape poetryand epistolary novels is superior to the levity of
French romance and attests to theliberty of every individual and
the economic health of the nation. Happy thecountry, she writes,
where the writers are gloomy, the merchants satisfied, therich
melancholy, and the masses content!14
To modern readers, this conjunction of civic harmony and
melancholicgloom may seem counterintuitive. As the disposition of
the autonomous self parexcellence, melancholy would seem to belong
more to the realm of the privatespirit than to the public sphere.
When we think of melancholy in the eighteenthcentury, we more
likely picture ruined abbeys than halls of parliament,
cemeteriesrather than coffeehouses, the call of nightingales rather
than the pronouncementsof periodicals. Whether attributed to
humoral imbalance, aesthetic sentiment, orpsychological trauma,
expressions of melancholy traditionally remove the indi-vidual from
the world of social commerce, privileging in its place religious
orphilosophical speculation. Following Ecclesiastes, the
melancholic views all hu-man endeavor as vanity and vexation of
spirit, a fallen state redeemable onlythrough the rejection of the
worldly and the perception of the divine. Dividedfrom the bulk of
humanity by a profound skepticism of social mores, the melan-cholic
might find him or herself in a condition of abject despair,
meditative con-templation, or heightened sensitivity, but in any
case well removed from the van-itas mundi of our common life.
Still, a countertradition exists in both French and English
letters thatunites the skeptical peevishness of the melancholic
soul with the civic virtue of themagnanimous hero to articulate
what we may call a civic melancholy. Groundedin classical and
medieval humoral theory, yet aligned with the methods and
aspi-rations of the Enlightenment, this tradition understands
melancholy as the darkundercurrent of political identification,
removing the individual from vain aspira-tions and luxurious
self-indulgence while simultaneously promoting civic idealsand
public engagement. As French Protestants and philosophes came to
identify
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM25
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26 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 37 / 1
England as a model of liberty to counter their own experiences
of religious, polit-ical, and intellectual repression following the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes in1685, they elevated the
traditional characterization of the English melancholyinto the mark
of a free society. Joined with evolving speculations on
physiologyand climate, the French view of England as that country
of liberty and spleen,15
was codified and elaborated within theories of public culture
and national mores.Writers from Prvost and Voltaire to Montesquieu
and Stal transformed melan-choly from a sign of humoral imbalance,
intellectual genius, or religious vocationinto both a symptom and
cause of political freedom and national identity. In turn,these
French accounts were speedily translated and disseminated among the
En-glish themselves, providing artists, philosophers, and statesmen
with a self-emu-lative model of an atrabilious public body.
Numerous doctrines on melancholy, from classical physiology and
Aris-totelian philosophy through medieval medicine, Arabian
astrology, and Floren-tine Neoplatonism, have all sought to
reconcile the varied conditions of the mel-ancholic within broader
economies of humoral, seasonal, geographical, andcosmological
order. In the intellectual tradition charted most famously by
Kliban-sky, Panofsky, and Saxl in their landmark study Saturn and
Melancholy, thesemacrocosmic systems of balance and harmony offer
redemption if not relief forthe melancholics perpetual vacillation
from extreme frenzy of inspiration to ex-treme torpor of
dejection.16 Jennifer Radden, in her fine anthology of
primarywritings from Aristotle to Kristeva, has complemented this
earlier study by delin-eating a progression from descriptive to
expressive accounts of melancholy andarguing for the emergence in
the nineteenth century of a distinction between sub-jective
temperaments and behavioral pathologies. Unlike the earlier studys
em-phasis on Renaissance Neoplatonism and its system of allegories,
Raddens se-quence of primary texts explicitly privileges Freud and
the psychoanalyticaltradition. In this model, subjectivity emerges
not as a microcosm of larger harmo-nies, but as a function of
desires founded in loss and displacement.17 Still, theFrench
contribution to the discourse of melancholy in the eighteenth
century pointsless toward Freud and more toward Durkheim; less,
that is, toward theories ofthe subject and more toward theories of
society.18 Suggesting neither cosmic unitynor subjective isolation,
a wide range of French writings both frivolous and ambi-tious offer
a third means of understanding melancholy as a sign of cultural
con-tingencies and national distinctions. While English physicians
such as GeorgeCheyne, Bernard Mandeville, and Richard Blackmore
viewed melancholy as theennui of a leisure class set apart from the
mechanisms of society,19 an argumentechoed by Wolf Lepenies in his
more recent sociological study,20 French writers ofthe period
viewed it as the foundational temperament of an active and
engagedcitizenry. In their typically sanguine emphasis on behavior
over confession, Frenchobservations on the English malady offer
confident accounts of a political culturethey both admired and
pitied, and, in so doing, conjoin the psyche with the socialas a
means of promoting intellectual freedom and civil liberties.
The union of melancholy and civic virtue in the English
character recastsin the language of temperament and sensibility the
traditional stoic advocacy ofpublic service as a rational response
to the hardships and vicissitudes of life. In-deed, the figure of
the Englishman in French drama, prose fiction, and political
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27Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment
theory recurrently embodies the vacillation between stoicism and
sentiment thatJulie Ellison has recently observed as a central
trope in Anglo-American perfor-mances of civic heroism.21
Franois-Ignace Espiard, in his admiring portrait of theancient
Romans in LEsprit des nations (1752), contended that Melancholy . .
.is ever a Concomitant of Magnanimity,22 and throughout the
eighteenth century,as John McManners and Dorinda Outram have
argued, French intellectual cul-ture from the philosophes to the
Conventionnels recalled both Socrates and Catoas exemplars of
intellectual defiance and heroic self-sacrifice, viewing their
sui-cides as compelling acts of republican freedom and virtuous
self-dignity.23 In hisGrandeur et dcadence des Romains (1734),
Montesquieu claimed that Romeowed its best emperors to the Stoic
sect and, in praising heroic suicide, be-moaned that men have
become less free, less courageous, less disposed to
greatenterprises than they were when, by means of this power which
one assumed, onecould at any moment escape from every other
power.24 Such noble precedentsnotwithstanding, the French
understood the English melancholy more properlyas a constitutional
condition rather than a philosophical position. As Montes-quieu put
it later in LEsprit des lois, this action [suicide] among the
Romanswas the effect of education, being connected with their
principles and customs;among the English it is the consequence of a
distemper, being connected with thephysical state of the machine,
and independent of every other cause.25 Frenchaccounts consistently
portray the English as suffering from a splenetic tempera-ment with
as much potential for misanthropy and useless self-destruction as
formagnanimity and heroic selflessness. In this respect, they
situate civic melancholyas Anne C. Vila has positioned sensibilit
in French medical and imaginative liter-ature during the period,
between enlightenment and pathology.26
As a simultaneously physical and moral condition, English
melancholywas thought both to emerge from and in turn to promote a
volatile liberty, bothpersonal and societal. Englishmen were
observed to vacillate between proud self-justification and suicidal
despair, just as their nation lurched from constitutionalfreedom
and civic pride to regicide and civil war. Voltaire observed, it
was liter-ally the East wind that cut off the head of Charles the
First and that dethronedJames the Second,27 and French travelers
throughout the century expressed con-sistent horror at the gloomy
English history of the previous century. But they alsoperceived
that in its more moderate form melancholy might regulate pride
aspowerfully as any Roman precedent, producing a golden mean
between vanityand dejection by which the melancholic might find
relief through active participa-tion in the affairs of state.
Voltaires observations are in this respect, as in mostothers,
exemplary. He noted the members of the English Parliament are fond
ofcomparing themselves to the old Romans, but that besides the
common corruptionof their politicians, the two nations were
entirely different. Whereas the Romansnever knew the dreadful folly
of religious Wars . . . the English have hangd oneanother by law,
and cut one another to pieces in pitch battles over
ecclesiasticaldisputes. But here follows a more essential
difference between Rome and En-gland, Voltaire continues, which
gives the advantage entirely to the latter, viz.that the civil wars
of Rome ended in slavery, and those of the English in
liberty.28
The opposition of the vain yet cheerful Frenchman and the proud
yetmelancholic Englishman was a dominant clich of the stage on both
sides of the
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28 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 37 / 1
Channel. Louis de Boissys comic drama Le Franais Londres (1727)
offersnational characterizations of the Frenchman as amiable,
lively, light-hearted,energetic, amusing, delightful company, a
fine speaker, full of pleasant banterand the Englishman as
dull-witted, pedantic, melancholy, taciturn, boring, thecurse of a
party, a moralizer, a futile dreamer.29 The Marquis de Polinville,
a vainFrench rake convinced of the superiority of his own nation,
complains that thesad residents of London spend all of their time
in coffeehouses, debating politicsand reading papers when they
should be refining their social graces. His rival,Jacques Rosbif,
an English merchant, counters the false airs of the Marquis withhis
own blend of somber eccentricity and plain speech. Boissy
reconciles thesepolarities in the Baron de Polinville, who combines
the politesse of the Frenchwith the common sense of the English and
thereby wins the hand of the covetedEnglish maid. The English, he
notes, countering his countrymans vanities, arenot brilliant, but
they are profound. 30
Later British adaptations of Boissys drama from the 1750s were
predict-ably less conciliatory. The plots of Samuel Footes two
farces, The Englishman inParis (1753) and The Englishman Returnd
from Paris (1756), and Arthur Mur-phys The Englishman from Paris
(1756) move away from international uniontoward virulent
anti-Gallicism, yet maintain the oppositional clichs. The Frenchto
be sure, are the dearest creatures in the world, remarks Murphys
young JackBroughton, recently returned from Paris, Under an
absolute Monarch, youll seethem dance, and sing, and laugh, and
ogle, and dress, and display their prettylittle small talkwhile an
English John Trott, with his head full of Politics, shallknit his
brow, and grumble, and plod, unhappy and discontented amidst all
hisboasted Liberty and Pudding.31 The plots of Foote and Murphys
plays rejectBoissys vision of international union, portraying the
two nations as humorallyirreconcilable, an argument presented even
more aggressively in John Brownscontemporary Jeremiad, An Estimate
of the Manners and Principles of the Times(1758). Brown argued that
a Spirit of Chagrin, and splenetic Turn of Mind,seems the original
Cause of our Spirit of Liberty, just as the gay, cheerful,
andcontented Turn of the French, is certainly one ruling Cause of
their Slavery. TheTruth is, they are happy under it; and therefore
no Desire of changing their Con-dition ever ariseth in their
Hearts; For it is Uneasiness alone, that prompts tochange.32 Brown,
Foote, and Murphy recast the classical figures of the sanguineand
the melancholic in terms of French servility and English liberty,
convertingthe sociability of the former into the bane of the
latter.
Yet following the 1763 Treaty of Paris, these clichs served just
as well aspropaganda for reconciliation. Charles Simon Favarts
LAnglais Bordeaux(1763), written expressly as a celebration of the
treaty, presents Milord Brumton,a student of Locke and Newton,
expressing his disdain of French levity whilegazing upon a
pendulum: Now while this ball, with its solemn balancing, makesme
count my advancing minutes toward death, the thoughtless French,
hurriedon by a squall of frivolous desires, read on each sun-dial a
round of pleasures;nay, so alien are they from the proper feelings
of humanity, that they dance inchurch-yards; and fiddle in
charnel-houses. His lover the Marquise de Flori-court admires the
sincerity and nobility of the English soul, but implores him tonot
be for ever on the stretch to hunt out new matter, as fuel for the
devouring
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29Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment
melancholy of your mind . . . The English think; the French
enjoy . . . take myfriendly advice, renounce philosophy, it is good
for nothing but to give the spleen,and rob the heart of tender
sensibility. The drama culminates in their marriageand the
declaration of peace, with appropriate songs and panegyrics to
universalharmony and a reconciliation of national humors: We [the
French] are too gay,they frequently too sad;/ We run stark wild;
they, melancholy mad. / Extremes ofeither reason will condemn, /
Nor join with us, nor vindicate with them. Favartstranslator (an
English Lady now residing in Paris) resolved, she wrote in
herdedication, to give it an English dress; a free not a servile
one: in order to at-tempt, in my country, what you have so laudably
endeavoured in yours [sic], theremoval of national prejudices,
which are a disgrace to humanity.33 Such senti-ments were not
universally embraced. While Footes dramas enjoyed a
substantialrevival during the 176364 season, Favarts LAnglais
Bordeaux seems never tohave been performed on the London
stage.34
The melancholic yet civic-minded Englishman is no less a common
figureof the French novel, from Prvosts Cleveland to Rousseaus
douard Bomstonand Stals Oswald, Lord Nelvil. But rather than
presenting stock characters inthe service of farce or propaganda,
these novels offer the Englishman as a focalpoint for philosophical
reflection and sympathetic identification, key elements ofan
emergent realist aesthetic that, as Patrick Coleman has argued,
negotiates be-tween individual loss and narrative production.35
Prvost had included extensivepanegyrics on English libertysocial,
political, and religiousin the fifth bookof his earlier Mmoires et
aventures dun homme de qualit (173031), contrast-ing the frivolity,
presumption and inconstancy of the French with the naturalgood
sense and the purest reason of the English.36 In Le Philosophe
anglais, ouhistoire de Monsieur Cleveland (173239), he reflects on
the consequences ofthat freedom as he creates a melancholic
embodiment of the countrys splenetichistory of political upheaval
and reconciliation. Cleveland, the denied bastardson of Oliver
Cromwell, spends his formative years as a fugitive in a cave
inDevonshire, learning stoic philosophy from his mother and
developing sentimen-tal relations with other fugitives from
Cromwells tyranny. As we follow his trav-els to an audience with
the exiled Charles II at Bayonne, his half-brothers adven-tures in
a Protestant utopian community in St. Helena, his attempts to found
arationalist society among tribes of noble savages in America, his
return to Resto-ration England where he is made a Privy Counselor,
and his final retreat fromcourtly intrigue following the Glorious
Revolution, Cleveland figures as a dis-tinctly political man of
feeling. Clevelands history of personal tragedies and
philo-sophical disillusionment is explicitly aligned with the fate
of England during theperiod of civil war and monarchical crisis,
but it is his constitutional melancholy,a kind of delirious frenzy,
which is found to rage more among [his] countrymen,the English,
than the rest of the Europeans, that motivates him first toward
self-destruction and later toward religious reflection and
political engagement.37 Onlyafter William assumes the throne and
the nation is at peace may Cleveland retreatto the blissful
tranquility of his country estate.
Rousseaus Bomston, or the Englishman, as he is denominated in
theinstructions for the engravings for Julie (1761), suggests a
sentimental update ofthis figure, a melancholic source of stoic
advice to the young impetuous lovers.
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30 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 37 / 1
He wears an air of grandeur that comes from the soul more than
from his sta-tion; the mark of courage and virtue, but a little
ruggedness and harshness in thefeatures. A grave and stoic demeanor
under which he barely hides an extremesensibility. Bomstons
philosophy is distinctly humoral in origin, less a productof
reflection than of mood. As Saint-Preux puts it, I think he is by
temperamentwhat he thinks he is by method, and the Stoic veneer he
gives to his actions con-sists only in embellishing with nice
reasonings the choice his heart has led him tomake.38 Though most
remembered for talking Saint-Preux out of committingsuicide,
resisting the despairing lovers attempt to model his impulses on
the stoicexample, Bomston nonetheless exemplifies English
melancholy, motivated by sen-sibility as much as philosophy in his
rejection of false hierarchies and decorum.Like Cleveland, Bomston
stands as a figure whose personal sentiments vie withphilosophical
and religious imperatives in his engagement with public
affairs.
This figure finds its romantic apotheosis in Oswald, Lord
Nelvil, thedoomed hero of Stals Corinne (1807). Oswald, while a
Scot, plays the part ofthe melancholic Englishman to perfection,
mourning his lost father to the point ofself-destruction and
consistently demonstrating noble and egalitarian kindred
withhumanity. Corinne, the sensuous and imaginative Italian, offers
Oswald a perfectobject of desire, the promise of an ideal spiritual
marriage fated never to be con-summated in this world. A secondary
character, Count dErfeuil, provides therecurrent commentary of the
vain and frivolous, yet decidedly happier, French-man. Despite his
love for Corinne, Oswald is fated to fulfill his national
destinyand wed Lucile, the English half-sister to Corinne, whom his
father had preferred.Back in England, a country where political
institutions give men honourableopportunities for action and public
appearances, Oswald soon turns from thevisionary passion of the
Italian south: The entrancing pictures, the poetic im-pressions,
gave way in his heart to the deep feeling of liberty and
morality.39
Stals personifications of an imaginative yet decadent Italian
culture in contestwith a sober yet melancholy English philosophy
give expression to her contentionthat free countries are and ought
to be serious,40 and unites the philosophicalimpulses of the
sentimental novel with the political engagement of the
Englishnation. For all three of these works, as well as many of the
more minor novelssurveyed by Josephine Grieder in her study of
French popular fiction during theperiod, the figure of the gloomy
Englishman serves both as a model of politicalmorality and as a
focus for sentimental identification. 41
While the dramas and the novels engage primarily with questions
of cul-tural mores and philosophical temperaments, most expositions
of melancholy asa distinctive trait of English liberty emerge from
humoral and climatic theorieshanded down from Hippocrates and
Galen. Montesquieus elaborate explicationof climate as
determinative of social mores and political institutions in
LEspritdes lois offers the most influential but by no means the
only eighteenth-centurymanifestation of a Hippocratic tradition
that Clarence J. Glacken has traced from theclassical world through
its development in the Middle Ages, the early modern peri-od, and
the Enlightenment.42 The Hippocratic essay On the Nature of Man
wasfirst to situate melancholy as one of the four humorsthe others
being blood, yellowbile, and phlegmand to align them with the four
seasons and the four ages ofman, thereby reconciling individual
imbalance and cosmological harmony.43 A
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31Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment
similar economy of physical dispositions informs the Hippocratic
essay Airs,Waters, Places, which assesses the effects of weather,
topography, and waterdrainage on the physical constitution of a
countrys inhabitants and the nature oftheir customs and
institutions. The essay speculates on the choleric hardiness
ofnorthern cultures and their superiority over the phlegmatic
indolence of those inthe temperate zones, characterizing the
Europeans as hot-headed and courageous,self-ruled, and hence more
willing to sacrifice themselves, and the peoples of Asiaas
lethargic and cowardly, easily dominated in body and soul. Like the
theoreticalexposition of the four humors, the Hippocratic theory of
climate relies on struc-tures of opposition, establishing a larger
order, tendentious to be sure, by whichindividual extremes may be
understood and contained.44
In the eighteenth century, these theories provided a framework
for a rangeof nationalist caricatures and especially for
increasingly sophisticated specula-tions on the English civic
melancholy.45 As early as the 1690s, English writerswere defending
the liberality of the English drama as a cathartic expression
oftheir nations politically volatile melancholy. Our country,
William Templeobserved, must be confessed to be what a great
foreign physician called it, theregion of spleen, which may arise a
good deal from the great uncertainty andmany sudden changes of our
weather in all seasons of the year. Explaining thevariety of
characters to be found in the English drama, Temple reasons, this
mayproceed from the native plenty of our Soil, the unequalness of
our climate, as wellas the ease of our government, and the liberty
of professing opinions and fac-tions.46 In 1698, John Dennis found
himself indicted for libel against the govern-ment for making
similar claims in defense of the usefulness of the English dramafor
counteracting that gloomy and sullen Temper, which is generally
spreadthrough the Nation, a temper which he blamed on the reigning
Distemper ofthe Clime and which, he asserted, [has] so often made
us dangerous to theGovernment, and, by consequence, to ourselves.47
As Roy Porter argued, a dis-tinctively Whig discourse of English
physicians subsequently sought to recast theEnglish melancholy from
an unstable condition of revolutionary madness to amanageable
condition of a free and advancing society.48 In 1733, George
Cheynefamously blamed what he dubbed The English Malady on
the moisture of our air, the variableness of our weather, (from
oursituation amidst the ocean) the rankness and fertility of our
soil, therichness and heaviness of our food, the wealth and
abundance of ourinhabitants (from their universal trade), the
inactivity and sedentaryoccupations of the better sort (among whom
this evil mostly rages) andthe humour of living in great, populous
and consequently unhealthytowns.49
Cheyne significantly joined climate with the effects of trade
and urbanization, aview complemented in the same year by John
Arbuthnot. In the midst of his scien-tific Essay Concerning the
Effects of Air on Human Bodies, Arbuthnot ascribed alivelier
imagination to those in warmer climates, while viewing those in
colderclimates as more prone to labor and exercise, requiring a
regular rule of law toprotect property and the produce of ones
labor. Despotick Governments, hewrote, tho destructive of Mankind
in general, are most improper in cold Cli-mates.50
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French writers offered complementary, yet more elaborate and
reflectiveaccounts of the English nation, expanding the Hippocratic
formulas beyond purelymaterialistic explanations toward
increasingly nuanced theories of civic ideology.What began as a
general discussion of the relationships between the murs andlois of
a nation evolved by mid-century into a series of complex
meditations onthe interplay between physical, emotional, and moral
attributes in a free society.In his Rflexions critiques sur la
posie et sur la peinture (1719), the Abb du Bosforwarded a
deterministic account of climate, arguing that the humor, and
eventhe spirit and inclinations of adult people, depend very much
on the vicissitudesof the air. According as this is dry or moist,
according as it is hot, cold, or temper-ate, we are mechanically
merry or sad, and pleased or vexed without any partic-ular motive.
Hence climate distinguishes the French, with their insurmount-able
propensity to gaiety from the suicidal English and other northern
countries.A French refugee in Holland, Du Bos observes, complains
at least three timesa day, that his gaiety and vivacity of spirit
has abandoned him.51 Franois-IgnaceEspiard joined these purely
physiological explications with sociological consider-ations in his
Essais sur le gnie et le caractre des nations (1743), later
reworkedas LEsprit des nations (1752). Espiard significantly joined
climate with laws,institutions, customs, and manners as equally
important influences on the geniusof a people in order to provide a
more comprehensive theory of national charac-ters. The picturesque
gallery of nations that concludes his work unites his the-ories of
physical and moral influences, producing a detailed visualization
of na-tional spirit. The French character is uniform and agreeable,
vague in manner,mild yet noble in coloring, the Picture full of
Hurry and Noise. By contrast, theEnglish are characterized by free
and original strokes, the Colouring inter-spersed with Savageness,
and even the Manner a little inclineable to the gloomy:
In the Shades place melancholy Figures; deep Shades express
theirMisanthropy: Liberty requires strong Lights; and Gleams,
flashingamidst the Darkness, express the English Genius breaking
out indetermined Sallies . . . The Scene of the Picture, however,
is august; itexhibits the greatest Objects: The Sea, the Parliament
in Front, withParties for and against Liberty; all which add an
extreme Fury to thePicture.
Where the French are well served by the pleasingly mild and
correct style of Rapha-el, the Englishman is better portrayed in
the style of Michelangelo, haughty andterrible, profound and
learned, but harsh and exaggerated.52 Espiards portraitssolidify in
aesthetic style and political allegory the contrasts of
temperamentshanded down from the Hippocratic tradition, offering a
more detailed conceit ofthe English civic melancholy.
It was Montesquieu, however, who drew upon this growing body of
spec-ulative literature to establish, in the third part of LEsprit
des lois, a systematicconnection between the effects of climate and
the general spirit, the mores, andthe manners of a nation. If it be
true, Montesquieu premises, that the char-acter of the mind and the
passions of the heart are extremely different in differentclimates,
the laws ought to be relative both to the difference of those
passions andto the difference of those characters. Where
Hippocrates based his theories ofnational customs on the
circulation of humors in different climates, Montesquieu
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bases his speculations on the responses of the papillae on a
sheeps tongue tovariations in the temperature. From this model of
empirical observation, he ex-trapolates a familiar sequence of
characteristics for the inhabitants of colder cli-mates: they are
confident and courageous, honest in disposition and insensitive
topleasure and pain. Residents of warmer climates, conversely, are
self-deprecating,deceitful, and prone to decadent sensuality. But
while such a schema would seemto bestow only enlightened confidence
upon northern Europeans, the English standout in Montesquieus
survey of climates as a people particularly prone to
self-destruction: In all probability it is a defect of the
filtration of the nervous juice:the machine, whose motive faculties
are every moment without action, is wearyof itself; the soul feels
no pain, but a certain uneasiness in existing. Such
nationalexistentialism is even more surprising in that the English
provide Montesquieuwith the model of an ideal constitution from
which he derives his theory of theseparation of powers. And in the
final chapter of Book 19, How the Laws con-tribute to form the
Manners, Customs, and Character of a Nation, he elevatesthe
condition of England to a speculative esprit gnral of a free
people: Theirlaws not being made for one individual more than
another, each considers himselfa monarch; and, indeed, the men of
this nation are rather confederates than fel-low-subjects. Their
climate gives them a restless spirit and extended views,yet most of
those who have wit and ingenuity are ingenious in tormenting
them-selves: filled with contempt or disgust for all things, they
are unhappy amidst allthe blessings that can possibly contribute to
promote their felicity. Their nation-al character is more
particularly discovered in their literary performances, inwhich we
find the men of thought and deep meditation. Their satirical
writingsare sharp and severe, while their poets have more
frequently an original rude-ness of invention than that particular
kind of delicacy which springs from taste;we there find something
which approaches nearer to the bold strength of a MichaelAngelo
than to the softer graces of a Raphael.53 Montesquieu, like his
contem-porary Espiard, provides us with a portrait of England as
tormented but free, asublime alternative to the vanity and
luxuriousness of the French character.54
Montesquieus formulations proved influential and provocative to
writ-ers on both sides of the Channel, from Rousseau, who, in The
Social Contractand Emile, argued for the importance of temperate
climate for political and mor-al maturity respectively, to Hume,
who sought to reassert the importance of mor-al and institutional
forces over physical conditions as promoters of national
liber-ty.55 Yet, it is Pierre Jean Grosley, a member of the Acadmie
Royale and anintellectual disciple of Montesquieu, who provides the
most complete theoriza-tion of the English civic melancholy.
Grosleys early writings promote the theoryof climate and national
mores advocated by Espiard and Montesquieu. Climate,he had written
in his Mmoire for the Socit Royale de Nancy, is above all elsethe
key to the sanctuary of legislation, the axis on which the economic
universeturns, the universal grounds of the moral and political
order, just as it is the gen-eral basis of the physical world.56
But in Londres (1770), his popular and eruditetravelogue concerning
England and its inhabitants, he moves beyond the
limitedcharacterizations of Espiard and Montesquieu to provide an
extensive analysis ofmelancholy as a foundational temperament of
English civic culture.57 Grosleydevotes over a hundred pages of his
observations to the English spleen, dividing
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his consideration of melancholy into meditations on its causes,
effects, and reme-dies. The fog and smoke from coal fires which
darken the skies combine withexcessive consumption of meats and
dark ales to give rise to a chyle, whoseviscous heaviness can
transmit none but bilious and melancholy juices to the brain(L.,
1:165). Add to this unfortunate combination of climate and diet the
severityof the public education system; the sobriety of the
Protestant religion; the mor-bidity of such public diversions as
executions and tragic dramas; the satiricalpungency of such writers
as Steele, Addison, and Swift; the English penchant forserious
conversation; and Grosley finds ample sources for the gloomy
disposi-tion of his brethren across the Channel.
In treating melancholy as pathology, Grosleys comments on its
effectsare well within the medical and literary traditions of the
eighteenth century, link-ing the English melancholy to fanaticism,
superstition, madness, lunacy, and sui-cide. Contemplating the
beneficial effects of this humor, Grosley partakes in
thetraditional association of the melancholic with the man of
genius and notes theEnglish aptitude for abstruse science and
philosophy, classical learning, and anti-quarian pursuits. But at
the core of his ruminations on melancholy, Grosley ex-pands the
notion of solitary erudition to encompass a public sphere of
culturaland political engagement. He links melancholy to a concern
with public affairs,noting the English favor for newspapers,
revolution, and popular participation inaffairs of state:
The whole English nation adopts [that rigid philosophy] by
constitu-tion; that is, with all the ardour that melancholy
inspires for thoseobjects upon which it happens to be concentered.
This occasions thegreat sale of those news-papers, which are
published daily, and whichthe generality of the English spend a
considerable time in reading: hencearise those revolutions, which
have so often changed the government ofEngland . . . In the present
state of that kingdom, public affairs arebecome the concern of
every Englishman: each citizen is a politician.(L., 1:189)
Grosley links the English melancholy to their burgeoning
republicanism and therebycharts a history of English politics along
the trajectory of the dismantling of su-preme authority. In the
times of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, the case wasquite
different, the royal authority then concentering the whole power,
and, likethe divine agency, not discovering itself otherwise than
by its effects, left the citi-zen no other merit but that of
obedience and submission(L., 1:189). However,the twin strains of
independent thought and religious fanaticism, two expressionsof the
English malady of which Newton and Cromwell are exemplary, tore
apartthe authority of the monarchy and the Church. Melancholy thus
stands as a markof a potentially destructive skepticism and
religious delirium, standing in opposi-tion to the maintenance of a
regular rule of law.
Yet in contrast to such isolating forms of melancholy, Grosley
perceives anational pride that does not reject melancholy so much
as it works through it,rebuking the vanities of private luxury all
the while maintaining a commitment tocivic duty. In an extensive
chapter entitled National Pride, How far Melancholymay be
productive of it. Effects of this Pride, with regard to England,
Grosleyoffers a philosophical model of political
self-identification:
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The impetuosity, and the perseverance, with which melancholy
dwellsupon such objects as interest and engage it, are the
principles, whichinduce the English to concern themselves so much
about public affairs.Each citizen identifying himself with the
government, must of necessityextend to himself the high idea which
he has of the nation: he triumphsin its victories; he is afflicted
by its calamities: he exhausts himself inprojects to promote its
successes, to second its advantages, and to repairits losses: he
may be compared to the fly in the fable, which, when itapproaches
the horses, Thinks to animate them by its humming, stingsone, then
another, and imagines every moment that it makes thecarriage go
forward; it sits upon the pole, and upon the coachmansnose: and no
sooner does it see the carriage driven on, and the peoplecontinuing
their journey, but it arrogates the glory of the wholemovement to
itself. (1:1912)
Grosleys analogy suggests a dynamic relation between melancholy
and pride, amovement from determined antagonism toward collective
identification. Englishmelancholy, in its impetuous obsessions,
motivates national solidarity and engen-ders a pride, which, being
the first foundation of public strength, and multiply-ing it ad
infinitum, subdivides, and, in some measure, distributes itself to
everycitizen(L., 1:192). Grosley quotes the sixth book of the
Aeneid regarding theNeoplatonic union of souls as a model of this
patriotic identification: Totamdiffusa per artus / Mens agitat
molem ac magno se corpore miscet( L., 1:192).58
In a cosmic dialectic of melancholy and pride, the nation
redeems the spleneticsoul whose great actions in turn promote the
national good. Grosley notes withadmiration, whatever does honour
to the English nation, at the same time, throwsa luster upon each
citizen( L., 1:196), and offers a litany of noble figures
com-memorated by public monuments in the inns, gardens, abbeys, and
museums ofLondon, the Royal Society, Garricks Shakespeare Gallery,
the Royal Exchange,and, finally, in Westminster Abbey, the grand
depository of the monuments erectedto the glory of the nation:
The abbey in which they stand is incessantly filled with crowds,
whocontemplate them: the lowest sort of people shew also their
attention: Ihave seen herb-women holding a little book, which gives
an account ofthem; I have seen milk-women getting them explained,
and testifying,not a stupid admiration, but a lively and most
significant surprise. Ihave seen the vulgar weep at the sight of
Shakespeares beautiful andexpressive statue, which recalled to
their memory those scenes of thatcelebrated poet, which had filled
their souls with the most livelyemotions. (L., 1:205)59
As the centerpiece of his discussion of the English melancholy,
Grosleys extensivesurvey of memorial pride presses beyond the
deterministic climatic explanationsof the Hippocratic tradition
toward what must be recognized as an early theoryof civic ideology.
A capacious national pride inspires dialectically the idea of
thenation and the observation and emulation of its citizens. It is
founded in temper-ament, but given expression and modification by
public institutions and the ac-tions of private individuals of all
classes and, as Grosley discusses at length, ofboth men and women
alike. The pride that Grosley identifies is not mere
patrioticbluster, but the positing of a totality by which the
isolation and insufficiency of
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the individual might be at least partially relieved, a
collective ideal that trans-forms personal despondency into a
recognition of common interests and accom-plishments.
The national pride of which Grosley speaks is distinct from
vanity, andhe goes to great pains to distinguish between the
two:
In the one, men appear and shew themselves such as they really
are: inthe other, they exist only by illusion and deceit: at the
bottom, both areactuated by the self-same love: in great souls,
this is pride; in narrowminds, it is vanity. Pride is the source of
all great achievements: vanity isthe mother of all things of a
frivolous nature, as for example, offashions, of the etiquette of
court punctilio, of ceremonial, of prece-dence, of honorary
privileges, of pomp and parade, and all thoseobjects, with which
little souls are so greatly captivated. (L.,1:212-13)
Citing such artists as Michelangelo, Malherbe, Corneille, Lully,
and Milton along-side such eighteenth-century figures as Voltaire
and Rameau, Grosley argues thatthe morality of the Christian
religion offers humility as a counterpoise to vanity;but it gives
none to pride, which, without debasing itself in its own eyes,
canperform all the duties enjoined by the most profound humility
(L., 1:216). Asisolated men of genius, such luminaries would seem
to embody the positive achieve-ments of melancholy without the
despair and self-loathing. Neither pathological-ly humble nor
contemptuously vain, Grosleys men of genius, and the emulationthey
inspire, partake of a noble pride that breaks from social custom
only toreinvigorate it. In turn, such a melancholic pride becomes
the basis for importantpublic foundations, from Gresham College and
the Garden of Apothecaries toGuys Hospital and the British Museum.
These institutions supply the place of avariety of equipages, of
lace, jewels, and all the transient brilliancy, that nationalvanity
elsewhere substitutes to solid and durable monuments, such as
adornedAthens and Rome, and, in the eyes of posterity, will also be
the ornament ofEngland (L., 1:223-24).
Grosleys distinction between pride and vanity is hardly
original, partak-ing as it does in a tradition that, like that of
the melancholic genius, goes back toAristotle, who, in the
Nicomachean Ethics, distinguishes between the megalopsy-chos and
the mikropsychos, or men of great and small souls.60 The former
knowshis true abilities and acts upon them. The latter
underestimates his worth andtherefore under-utilizes his
capabilities. Aristotle distinguishes both from the fool-ishly vain
man who overestimates his own value: A man is regarded as
high-minded when he thinks he deserves great things and actually
deserves them; onewho thinks he deserves them but does not is a
fool, and no man, insofar as he isvirtuous, is either foolish or
senseless.61 In this respect, and as Aristotle formu-lates it even
more explicitly in his Magna Moralia, the megalopsychos representsa
golden mean between vanity and dejection. Such a man derives
moderate plea-sure from honors properly bestowed but does not, as
with fame and wealth, de-sire them disproportionately to the
actions that deserved them.62 Cicero adoptedthis formulation in his
advocacy of political engagement, arguing, the personwho embarks on
affairs of state . . . must be sure not to succumb to
thoughtlessdespair through cowardice nor to become overconfident
through greed.63 TheChristian era, however, promoted a very
different sense of pride, equating super-
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bia with vana gloria and marking it as the chief cardinal sin,
if not the root ofthem all. As Gregory the Great formulated it most
influentially, pride separatesthe individual from the bulk of
humanity so that he walks with himself along thebroad spaces of his
thought and silently utters his own praises.64 But, in the
earlymodern era, the Aristotelian distinction re-emerged in many of
the key works ofpolitical and ethical philosophy and pride became
viewed as a necessary passionfor unifying and promoting a societys
achievements. In his chapter of Leviathan(1651) on the passions,
Hobbes distinguishes a laudable form of what he callsGlorying from
Vaine-Glory on the one hand and Dejection on the other.Either
extreme may lead to madness, whether choleric rage or melancholic
gloom,but proper Glorying arising from imagination of a mans own
power and abili-ty leads toward a properly social confidence and
political ambition.65 In theeighteenth century, Adam Smith, taking
his cue explicitly from Aristotle, intro-duces in his Theory of
Moral Sentiments (1759) a distinction between pride andvanity based
upon the sincerity of self-estimation.66 Promoting a
self-commandand noble pride to steer between the alternate passions
of fearful anger and selfishpleasure, Smith contends, vanity is
almost always a sprightly and a gay, and veryoften a good-natured
passion. Pride is always a grave, a sullen, and a severe one.67
Smiths formulation underlines the affinities between political
temperament andindividual passions that were already evident in
Aristotles original conception ofmagnanimous virtue.
It is but a short step from such ethical distinctions to the
nationalist car-icatures we have been observing. Grosley cites
Montesquieus own observationfrom his discussion of English
melancholy that Free nations are haughty; othersmay more properly
be called vain,68 a point touched upon by Le Blanc when heobserved
that a Frenchman seems to esteem his nation only with respect to
him-self: an Englishman appears not to set any value on himself,
but with respect tohis nation: which gives an air of vanity to the
one, and to the other an air ofgreatness.69 Rousseau had likewise
contended in Emile (1762) that the English-man has the prejudices
of pride, and the Frenchman has those of vanity, andnoble pride is
at the core of Rousseaus psychological and historical
narratives.First introduced in a lengthy note to his Discours sur
lorigine et les fondemens delingalit parmi les hommes (1755) as a
counterpoint to the misery of modernsociety, what Rousseau
distinguishes as lamour de soi stands apart as a naturalself-esteem
that bears little relation to amour propre, a vain love of self
that evi-dences the corrupting influence of social divisions. For
Rousseau, society anddespair are inextricable. I ask if anyone, he
writes, has ever heard it said thata Savage in freedom even dreamed
of complaining about life and killing himself.Let it then be judged
with less pride on which side genuine misery lies.70
Clearly, national pride comes at quite a price. Grosley commends
theEnglish for their civic institutions, their concern with public
affairs, and even themilitary valor that their contempt for life
engenders. Nevertheless, like manyFrenchmen before him, he is
aghast at the frequency of suicide among the En-glish, the
fanaticism of their political and religious rebellions, the
superstition oftheir national tales, and the insanity and lunacy on
constant display at Bedlam.Such are the advantages and
disadvantages, the good and the evil, which resultfrom the English
character in its present state, he concludes, and in this state,
I
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doubt very much, whether the French, who affect a strong passion
for every thingEnglish, would consent to change condition and
manners with that people.71 Hisremedy for such morbidity of soul is
taken from the book of Proverbs: Givewine to those that be of heavy
hearts, let them drink:
We see in France itself the power, that a more or less extensive
use ofwine has upon a nation. Our ancestors regulated the affairs
of state overa bottle; but, at the same time, regulated themselves
so ill, that all theirprojects vanished with the bottle, from
whence they took their rise. Allthat remained, after their
consultations, was a few songs, which littlealarmed the government:
the French were neither devoted to politics,nor a prey to vapours.
(L., 1:247)
Grosley recalls that the English themselves were once more
partial to the juice ofthe grape, and fears that exorbitant duties
on wine have caused even the Frenchto change their national manners
so that insipid raillery, pitiful conundrums,dull metaphysics, and
plaintive elegies, have supplied the place of light conversa-tion,
amiable simplicity, sprightly wit, Bacchanalian songs, and joyous
parodies:in fine, funeral urns, coffins, and melancholy
cypress-boughs, are become fash-ionable even in buildings of the
most elegant taste (L., 1:248). He thus urges thelowering of duties
in order to better compete with the wines from the Americancolonies
and to bring about an equilibrium in the temperament on both sides
ofthe Channel:
The use of wine being restored in England, whether by France
orAmerica; the English [will grow] more tractable and less
speculative,more gay, and less addicted to dispute and wrangling,
more friends tosociety, and less saturnine, more submissive, and
less occupied withstate affairs, less profound in their
speculations, and more religious. (L.,1:249)72
Commerce in wine may achieve what the marriages staged by Boissy
and Favarthad proposed: a mutually beneficial tempering of national
spirits, providing asanguine amendment to Englands melancholy
constitution.
Grosleys elaborate fusion of medical diagnosis and
sociopolitical analy-sis exemplifies the periods discourse of
national temperaments, a discourse thatreconciles rather than
opposes personal melancholy and civic culture in the En-glish
character. This reconciliation assumes many formstravelogue,
theatricalfarce, sentimental novel, aesthetic defense,
physiological treatise, cultural critiqueworks that offer us less a
consistent theoretical model and more a recurrent topicfor
reflections on national mores and cultural institutions. Though the
medicaland institutional paradigms upon which they draw may seem
outdated, their si-multaneous emphases on physical and social
contingencies connect melancholywith histories and theories of
ideology and the political subject. By groundingpolitical culture
in the idiosyncrasies of the body and the weather, these
eigh-teenth-century reflections complicate any purely discursive
model of public soci-ety. Conversely, by fusing physiology with
political philosophy, they advance modelsof subjectivity beyond the
reductions of Hippocratic materialism while suggest-ing a
provocative counterpoint to a purely psychoanalytical model. Above
all,they offer an emphatic promotion of public life as an
amelioration to melancholy,
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an alternative to pensive isolation, which, in its rejection of
social engagement,can be as narcissistic as the vanities it seeks
to escape. Grounded in a fusion ofhumoral and stoic philosophy,
this insight may be re-emerging in our own post-Freudian
moment.
Melancholia is not French . . . The rigor of Protestantism, or
the matri-archal weight of Christian orthodoxy admits more readily
to a complicity withthe grieving person . . . while . . . the
Gallic, renascent, enlightened tone [tends]toward levity,
eroticism, and rhetoric rather than nihilism. So writes Julia
Kristevain Soleil noir (1989), her influential study of depression
and melancholia in liter-ature and psychoanalysis. Her redeployment
of these nationalist clichs is all themore intriguing given the
enormous power she ascribes to melancholy as a foun-dational moment
for the entrance into language and society. Without a bent
formelancholia, she writes, there is no psyche, only a transition
to action or play.Indeed, there is meaning only in despairthere is
no imagination that is not,overtly or secretly, melancholy. 73 In
this context, the French predilection forcheerfulness and style
would seem to condemn them not only to political enslave-ment but
also to psychic atrophy. But, following Freud, Kristeva counters
suchdegenerate frivolity with a pathological melancholy that marks
a failure of self-integration, an incapacity to move from a
necessary prelinguistic experience ofobject loss toward a primary
identification with a communal schema, be it lan-guage, family, or
law. Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, she writes,noting
the despair attendant upon the melancholics inward gaze. Absent a
com-pensatory signifier of identification, the melancholic
withdraws from all socialintercourse toward inaction or
self-destruction. Analysis therefore may offer alucid
counterdepressent, not so much negating or neutralizing depression
asenabling the transference into language that is melancholys
ultimate triumph andthe foundation of civil society.74
In her more overtly political writings, Kristeva has offered the
nation as aparticularly compelling compensatory sign, forwarding an
ideal of cosmopolitannationalism adopted directly from Montesquieu.
In her Lettre ouverte HarlemDsir (1990), Kristeva recalls
Montesquieus advocacy of a national identity basedin heterogeneous
and dynamic confederacy as a means of redeeming nationalismfrom its
nineteenth- and twentieth-century corruptions. Seeking to avoid
both thealienation of a purely individualistic society and the
violent authoritarianism ofracist philosophies of the Volkgeist,
Kristeva advocates a nation without nation-alism, an historical and
thereby contingent esprit gnral encompassing a multi-plicity of
identities and a range of causalities, from climate and diet to
laws, cus-toms, and manner. Seeing in Montesquieus formulation a
means of avoiding bothabstract idealism and ethnic determinism,
Kristeva celebrates a vision wherebythe different levels of social
reality are reintegrated into the esprit gnral with-out being
absorbed; and this is accomplished, quite obviously, under the
influenceof the English model, but also, in very original fashion,
through the synthesizingpower of the French philosophers thought.75
Kristeva demonstrates the possi-bility of wedding Montesquieu with
Freud and conceives of national pride ascomparable . . . to the
good narcissistic image that the child gets from its motherand
proceeds, through the intersecting play of identification demands
emanatingform both parents, to elaborate into an ego ideal (N.,
52). Failing to achieve this
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ego ideal, one risks either a fall into an individualized or
communal depressioncharacterized by idleness, withdrawal from
communication, and any participa-tion in collective projects and
representations, or, alternatively, a perverse devel-opment of a
negative narcissism of superegotic, hyperbolic ideals of which
theaggressive, paranoid excesses are well known (N., 52). Kristeva
reproduces Gros-leys theory of the nation as an intermediary
between dejection and vanity in heradvocacy of a national pride
positioned between suicide and barbarity (N.,52), between the
failure of identification and its excess. It is here that she turns
toMontesquieus dictum that men, in such a nation, would be
confederates ratherthan citizens (N., 57). Contending that the
heterogenous, dynamic, and con-federate formulation of the esprit
gnral is one of the most prestigious cre-ations of French political
thought, Kristeva argues that it suggests the integra-tion, without
a leveling process, of the different layers of social reality into
thepolitical and/or national unity (N., 57).76
Here, then, is the powerful and recurrent theme voiced in French
ac-counts of the English nation. Inheriting the stoic commitment to
public life in animperfect world, yet grounding such commitment in
the passions of the indepen-dent soul, the French tradition from
Montesquieu to Kristeva recasts the despon-dency of the individual
into both a symptom and an amelioration for a worldbereft of final
truths. As both Grosley and Kristeva contend, in their different
yetcomplementary accounts, absent the assurances of absolutism,
monarchical ortheological, the subject is at risk of a profound
loss of meaning and a retreat toeither the isolation of despair or
the enslavement of collective arrogance. We avoidsuch narcissistic
self-cancellations by means of an endlessly repeating movementfrom
semiotic incoherence to ethical union. As Kristeva puts it in
Soleil noir, whatmakes . . . a triumph over sadness possible is the
ability of . . . the dead languageof the potentially depressive
person [to] arrive at a live meaning in the bond withothers.77
French accounts of the English malady suggest that this manifestly
inte-rior struggle may find solace, all the more powerful for its
insufficiency, in thevanities and vexations of public life.
NOTES
1. Ira O. Wade provides an excellent survey of the English
influence on French thought duringthe period in The Structure and
Form of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press,1977), 1:12071. A more archaic yet still valuable study of
the influence may be found in JosephTexte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et
les origines du cosmopolitanisme littraire; tude sur les
relationslittraires de la France et de lAngleterre au XVIIIe sicle
(Paris: Hachette, 1895), translated by J.W.Matthews as Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (London:
Duckworth,1899). See also F.C. Green, Eighteenth-Century France:
Six Essays (London: Dent, 1929), 2969;Georges Ascoli, La
Grande-Bretagne devant lopinion franaise au XVIIe sicle (Paris:
Gamber, 1930);Gabriel Bonno La Culture et la civilisation
britanniques devant lopinion franaise de la Paix dUtrechtaux
Lettres Philosophiques (17131734) (Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 1948); FrancesAcomb, Anglophobia in France,
17631789 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1950); Gerald B.
Maher,LAnglomanie en France au XVIIIe sicle, La Revue de LUniversit
Laval 10 (1955): 12542; andJosephine Grieder, Anglomania in France,
17401789: Fact, Fiction, and Political Discourse (Gene-va:
Librairie Droz, 1985).
2. Bat de Muralt, Letters Describing the Character and Customs
of the English and FrenchNations (London: Tho. Edlin, 1726), 24.
The majority of French works studied in this essay weretranslated
into English soon after their French publication and I have used
those editions whenever
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM40
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41Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment
possible. All other translations are either from modern
scholarly editions or my own, as noted, withthe original provided
in the notes.
3. Csar de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of
George I & George II. TheLetters of Monsieur Csar de Saussure
to his Family, trans. and ed. Madame van Muyden (London:John
Murray, 1902), 179.
4. Abb Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations
(London: J. Brindley, 1747), 4.
5. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, ed. Nicholas
Cronk (Oxford: Oxford Univ.Press, 1999), 34. For the frequent
occurrence of this formulation, both before and after Voltaire,
seeVoltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson (Paris:
Cornly, 1930), 1:9495 n. 9.
6. For the prevalence of this view, see Cecil A. Moore,
Backgrounds of English Literature 17001760 (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1953), 179235. See also Oswald Doughty, TheEnglish
Malady of the Eighteenth Century, Review of English Studies 2
(1926): 25769; and PaulLangford, Englishness Identified: Manners
and Character 16501850 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,2000), 5064.
7. Le Blanc, Letters, 135.
8. Muralt, Letters, 34. On the English reputation for suicide,
see S.E. Sprott, The English De-bate on Suicide from Donne to Hume
(La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1961); John McManners, Deathand the
Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death in Eighteenth-Century
France (Oxford: Ox-ford Univ. Press, 1981), 42837; Michael
MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Sui-cide in Early
Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); and Georges
Minois, History ofSuicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture,
trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniv. Press, 1999),
179209.
9. The Voyages and Travels of Aubry de La Mottraye (London,
1732), 213.
10. Saussure, A Foreign View, 197.
11. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 2:104. La Philosophie, la
libert, & le climat conduisent la Misantropie. Londres, qui na
point de Tartuffes, est plein de Timons.
12. Le Blanc, Letters, 56.
13. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (London: J. Nourse and
P. Vaillant, 1758), 1:3312.
14. Germaine de Stal, Madame de Stal on Politics, Literature and
National Character, trans.and ed. Morroe Berger (London: Sidgwick
and Jackson, 1964), 1012.
15. The phrase is taken from the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois,
Letters of the Marchioness of Pom-padour from MDCCLIII to MDCCLXII
(London: W. Owen and T. Cadell, 1771), 94, a fictional-ized account
of courtly intrigue during the Seven Years War.
16. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn
and Melancholy. Studies in theHistory of Natural Philosophy,
Religion, and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964; Nen-deln:
Kraus Reprint, 1979).
17. Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy from
Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press, 2000). Other
recent studies in the cultural history of melancholy by Juliana
Schiesari,Lynn Enterline, and Guinn Batten have likewise privileged
Freudian models of subjectivity even asthey have critically
analyzed historical divisions of gender and modern systems of
commodification.Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia:
Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics ofLoss in Renaissance
Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992); Lynn Enterline, The
Tears ofNarcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern
Writing (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,1995); Guinn Batten, The
Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culutre in
EnglishRomanticism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998). Stanley W.
Jackson offers a clinical history ofmelancholy as a medical and
psychological condition in Melancholia and Depression, From
Hippo-cratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale, 1986).
18. Although Durkheim explicitly rejected the climatic and
physiological explanations of suicidepromoted by Montesquieu, his
own landmark study of suicide of 1897 helped to establish
modernsociological method by which ostensibly personal and
affective phenomena are understood in rela-
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM41
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42 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 37 / 1
tion to structures of social organization. In this respect, and
as Durkheim himself explicitly argued in1893, he stands as
Montesquieus intellectual descendant. See Emile Durkheim, Suicide:
A Study inSociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson
(New York: Free Press, 1951) and EmileDurkheim, Montesquieu and
Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology, trans. Ralph Manheim (Ann
Ar-bor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960).
19. Roy Porter offered a synopsis of the medical associations
between melancholy or hypochon-dria and the refined nervous systems
of the civilized classes, a view most famously propagated byGeorge
Cheyne in The English Malady (1733). Porter, Civilization and
Disease: Medical Ideologyin the Enlightenment, in Culture, Politics
and Society in Britain, 16601800, ed. Jeremy Black andJeremy
Gregory (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1991), 15483. See also
John Mullan, Senti-ment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in
the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988),20140.
20. Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines
and Doris Jones (Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1992). Lepenies
focuses upon the seventeenth-century French aristocracy
andeighteenth-century German bourgeoisie, but French accounts of
the English call to mind more theutopian strains that Lepenies
finds in writings on melancholy from Robert Burton to Edward
Bel-lamy. Melancholy, in such formulations, offers a sign of
disorder that must be subordinated by thestate, or society, which
functions as an intermediate domain, which is neither as universal
as thecosmology of antiquity or the Middle Ages nor as micrological
as the medicine of antiquity or of theArabic and medieval worlds
(19).
21. Julie Ellison, Catos Tears and the Making of Anglo-American
Emotion (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1999). In readings of
English and American drama and poetry of the long
eighteenthcentury, Ellison demonstrates a foundational link between
assertions of heroism and presentations ofbereavement in the
language of republican sensibility.
22. Franois-Ignace Espiard, The Spirit of Nations (London:
Lockyer Davis, 1753), 402.
23. McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 40937; and Dorinda
Outram, The Body and theFrench Revolution: Sex, Class and Political
Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 90105.
24. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness
of the Romans and their De-cline, trans. David Lowenthal (New York:
Free Press, 1965), 145, 118.
25. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:249.
26. Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in
the Literature and Medicine ofEighteenth-Century France (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998). Vila provides a learnedstudy of
how French physiologists and men of letters placed the sensible
body at the center of discus-sions of organic dynamics,
socio-political classifications, and cosmological harmonies,
thereby cre-ating a tension between rational virtue and physical
excess.
27. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 2:263. Ctait la lettre par
un vent dEst quon coupa latte Charles Ier, & quon dtrna Jacques
II.
28. Voltaire, Letters, 3334.
29. Louis de Boissy, Le Franais Londres (Utrecht: Etienne
Naulme, 1767), 30. Cest lui quifait un homme aimable, vif, lger,
enjou, amusant, les dlices des socits, un beau parleur, unrailleur
agrable, et, pour tout dire, un Franais. Le bon sens, au contraire,
sappesantit sur les mat-ires, en croyant les approfondir; il traite
tout mthodiquement, ennuyeusement. Cest lui qui fait unhomme lourd,
pdant, mlancolique, taciturne, ennuyeux; le flau des compagnies, un
moraliseur,un rve creux; en un motUn Anglais, nest-ce pas?
30. Boissy, Le Franais Londres, 4. Les Anglais ne sont pas
brillans, mais ils sont profonds.
31. Arthur Murphy, The Englishman from Paris, ed. Simon Trefman
(Los Angeles: William An-drews Clark Memorial Library, 1969),
24.
32. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the
Times (London: L. Davis andC. Reymers, 1758), 2:3132.
33. Charles Simon Favart, The Englishman in Bourdeaux (London:
G. Kearsley, 1764), 22, 33,61, iii.
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM42
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43Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment
34. George Winchester Stone, Jr., ed., The London Stage, vol. 4
(Carbondale, IL: Southern IllinoisUniv. Press, 1962). An English
owner of a French copy of the play wrote in his copy that he kept
itnot for any merit in the work, but as a mark of the joy which the
French received at the Peace . . .I think [the author] says
somewhere Deux nations faites pour sentre estimer [two nations made
foreach others esteem]which is vainly begging a foolish question,
for the English despise and imitatethe French and the French esteem
without imitating the English, under which a later French
ownercommented on the all too common English presumptuousness
(loutrecuidance anglaise qui nestque trop commune). Charles Simon
Favart, LAnglais Bordeaux (Paris, 1763), British Librarycopy 11737
cc.17(1), quoted in Derek Jarrett, The Begetters of Revolution:
Englands Involvementwith France, 17591789 (Totowa, New Jersey:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 40.
35. Patrick Coleman, Reparative Realism: Mourning and Modernity
in the French Novel, 17301830 (Geneva: Droz, 1998). Coleman studies
Prvosts Manon Lescaut alongside Rousseaus Julie,Constants Adolphe,
Stals Corinne and Balzacs La Peau de chagrin. His emphasis is not
the Englishmalady, but rather a recurrent tension between
sentimental affection and spiritual retreat that re-deems itself in
public engagement as both a thematic and aesthetic quality of the
French novel duringthis period.
36. Abb Prvost, Adventures of a Man of Quality, trans. Mysie
E.I. Robertson (London: GeorgeRoutledge and Sons, 1930), 8687.
37. Abb Prvost, The Life and Entertaining Adventures of Mr.
Cleveland, Natural Son of OliverCromwell, Written by Himself
(London: T. Astley, 173435), 4:4748.
38. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. 6, ed. Roger
D. Masters and ChristopherKelly, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean
Vach (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1997), 621, 103.
39. Madame de Stal, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998),318, 304.
40. Stal, Politics, Literature, and National Character, 120.
41. Grieder provides an extensive bibliography of Novels and
Stories from, by, and about theEnglish, 17401789,as well as a
chapter-length survey of their basic thematic elements. See
Anglo-mania, 65116, 15162.
42. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and
Culture in Western Thoughtfrom Ancient Times to the End of the
Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967).See
also Robert Shackleton, The Evolution of Montesquieus Theory of
Climate, Revue internatio-nale de philosophie 9 (1955): 31729, and
Montesquieu. A Critical Biography (Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press,
1961), 30219.
43. See Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy,
89.
44. Hippocratic Writings, ed. G.E.R. Lloyd (London: Penguin,
1978), 14869, 26071.
45. For the revival of these theories in the debate between Murs
and Lois as constitutive ofnational character, see Wade, French
Enlightenment, 1:435515 and Glacken, Traces on the Rhodi-an Shore,
551622. For their importance in eighteenth-century British
formulations of race, seeRoxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race:
Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century BritishCulture
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
46. Sir William Temple, Five Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Samuel
Holt Monk (Ann Arbor: Univ. ofMichigan Press, 1963), 199200. The
foreign physician does not seem to have been identified.
47. The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,1939) 1:151. Hooker provides an account
of this indictment and the relevant manuscript accounts inhis note
to this passage (1:47172).
48. Roy Porter, The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in
English Psychiatry? Medical His-tory 27 (1983): 3550.
49. George Cheyne, The English Malady (London: S. Powley, 1733),
i.
50. John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on
Human Bodies (London: J. Ton-son, 1733), 153.
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM43
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44 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 37 / 1
51. Abb du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting
(London: John Nourse, 1748), 2.180,184, 194.
52. Espiard, The Spirit of Nations, 4056.
53. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:316, 331, 44951.
54. C.P. Courtney offers a basic survey of Montesquieus view of
English political culture in En-glish Liberty, Montesquieus Science
of Politics: Essays on The Spirit of the Laws, ed. David
W.Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A Rahe (London: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2001), 27390.More extensive treatments may be
found in Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition
politiqueanglaise en France; les sources anglaises de lEsprit des
lois (Paris: Lecoffre, 1909); and GabrielBonno, La Constitution
britannique devant lopinion franaise de Montesquieu Bonaparte
(Paris:Champion, 1931). Chloe Chard offers a provocative comparison
of Montesquieus climatic distinc-tions between the south and the
north and Edmund Burkes aesthetic distinctions between the
beauti-ful and sublime in Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour:
Travel Writing and Imaginative Geogra-phy 16001830 (Manchester:
Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), 11925.
55. For more extensive discussions of Montesquieus immediate
influence, see Glacken, Traces onthe Rhodian Shore, 592622; and
F.T.H. Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics
(17501800)(London: Edward Arnold, 1939), 93103.
56. Pierre Jean Grosley, De lInfluence des Loix sur les Murs,
quoted in Wade, French En-lightenment, 44344.
57. Pierre Jean Grosley, A Tour to London; or, New Observations
on England and its Inhabitants(London: Lockyer Davis, 1772).
Hereafter L.. Grieder notes that Londres was second in
popularityonly to Le Blancs Lettres, going through three editions
in the 1770s in addition to its Englishtranslation. She views it as
ushering in a period of more profound interest in English society
and citesthe Vie de M. Grosley, crite en partie par lui-mme;
continue et publie par M. labb Maydieu(Londres et Paris, 1787),
which claims, All the truly learned and all sensible readers will
alwaysview London as one of the most instructive, most interesting,
and most enjoyable writings that wehave about England and its
inhabitants. (25859; Grieder, Anglomania, 37 n. 11).
58. and a Mind / Infused through all the members of the world /
Makes one great living body ofthe mass(6:97577). Virgil, Aeneid,
trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 185.
59. Prvost had offered a comparable account of the sweet and
delightful melancholy (douce& ravissante mlancolie) to be found
in Westminster Abbey and the noble emulation inspired by
itsmonuments in Le Pour et contre, ed. Steve Larkin, Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century309 (1993), no. 56, 6048.
60. Key discussions of the structure and history of the idea of
the megalopsychos may be found inMaurice B. McNamee, Honor and the
Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimityin
Philosophy and Epic Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1960); Robert Payne, Hu-bris: A Study of Pride (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1960); Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeareand the
Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1960); Margaret Greaves,The Blazon of Honor. A study in Renaissance
magnanimity (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964);and Stanford M.
Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil (New York: St.
Martins Press,1978). None of these studies note its affiliation
with melancholy.
61. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962),93.
62. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1935),5235.
63. Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2000), 26.
64. Gregory the Great, Moralia, XXIV: 48; quoted in Robert
Payne, Hubris, 73.
65. Hobbes discusses this distinction in chapters 6, 8, and 11
of the Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1996), 3746, 5059, 6975.
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM44
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45Gidal / English Gloom and French Enlightenment
66. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D.
Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianap-olis: Liberty Fund, 1984),
23764.
67. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 257. Smith associates vanity with
the French, and pride with theSpanish, a nation whose reputation
embodies, in his view, Aristotelian magnanimity.
68. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:450. Grosley and
Montesquieu had earlier corre-sponded on just this passage and an
earlier chapter of Book 19, in which Montesquieu reflects atlength
on the vanity (la vanit) and the arrogance (lorgueil) of nations.
See Montesquieu, uvresCompltes, ed. Andr Masson (Paris: Les ditions
Nagel, 1955), 3:129397.
69. Le Blanc, Letters, 1011.
70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings, 3:34.
71. Grosley, A Tour to London, 1:246.
72. Espiard had suggested an analogously beneficial relation
between French levity and Englishgloom, noting, the Wines and
Brandies of France impart to [the] melancholic Spirits [of the
English]such enlivening Sensations as they would otherwise be
Strangers to. The Use of these Liquors isbecome necessary to, and
proves the chief Delight of the North (The Spirit of Nations,
18).
73. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia,
trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), 6, 4,
6.
74. Kristeva, Black Sun, 5, 25.
75. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press, 1993), 55. Hereafter cited
parenthetically in the text as N.
76. For a more extensive discussion of Kristevas theories in
relationship to political identifica-tion, see Nolle McAfee,
Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
2000).
77. Kristeva, Black Sun, 2324.
37.1gidal 9/3/03, 11:03 AM45