Steele on Mas and Kerlouégan (2020)

The Code civil, promulgated in 1804, famously provided a model of concision and clarity for Stendhal and a source of plot elements for Balzac. This collection of essays, the proceedings of a conference held in 2015 at the Université Paris-Diderot, represents a dialogue between lawyers and literary scholars illuminating the myriad points of contact between law and literature in the drafting and reception of the Code.

Articles range from the examination of the use of the Code by specific authors (Balzac, Sand, Zola) to the stylistic analysis of the Code itself, revealing how its polysemy and slippage between proscriptive and narrative modes undermine claims of transparency and enable subsequent interpretative and literary elaboration. Particularly useful are explorations of a wide variety of nineteenth-century legal and literary texts, for instance legal periodicals, as they gradually developed from daily reports of significant court cases aimed at lawyers to broad coverage of scandalous trials aimed at a popular audience, all of them illuminating points of law through arresting narratives and potentially providing source material for literary authors. Parodies of the Code (Le Code gastronomique, Le Code des boudoirs, Le Code civil, manuel complet de la politesse) use the form of the Code to present models of social advancement, ironic maxims, and descriptions of mœurs adjacent to the contemporary vogue for physiologies and thus to the new realistic novels of authors such as Balzac. Popular works explaining the Code to specific audiences sometimes use narrative exempla which, like journalism and fiction, serve to promote submission to the social forces embodied by the Code while also providing an outlet for voices of revolt.

Running through the essays in the volume is an account of the interplay between the seemingly monolithic but in fact fissured voice of the Code and narrative representations of lived experience, which reveal social realities that the apparently authoritative pronouncements of the Code cannot in fact control. This is particularly the case in the Code’s provisions concerning women, especially in issues of marital property, adultery and divorce, which are all set up to advantage men, a fact brought to light by texts at various levels. Fictional works by authors such as George Sand, but also narrative examples in popular texts explaining the Code to women such as Auguste-Charles Guichard’s Code des femmes, ou récits et entretiens sur leurs droits, privilèges, devoirs et obligations, reveal the gap between law and justice, as the Code is unmasked as a piece of social engineering intended to shore up a patriarchal system. If laws of ownership and inheritance are intended to promote social peace after the massive property transfers of the Revolution, they spectacularly fail, as fictions by Zola illustrate, producing instead jealousy, acrimony, and violence. This gap between the intentions of the Code and its actual results, between social control and social aspirations, between order and the struggle for progress (or the inevitability of decay), is nowhere more evident than in the literary fight for the re-institution of divorce and then for its liberalization, as fictional treatments of the arbitrary miseries produced by the Code eventually succeed in inspiring real-world legislative change.

The essays in the collection provide useful insights into the influence of the Code civil on literary texts in the long nineteenth century, but like many such analyses they sometimes overstate the significance of the specific importance of the Code by failing to take into account a longer legal history. One exception is an essay on the legal distinction between persons and things, inherited from Roman law, which points out that it was the 1685 Code noir, enacted by Louis XIV and still in effect in the early nineteenth century, that reduced enslaved persons to property, and not the Code civil itself, although the essay overstates its case by claiming that the two Codes govern socially distinct races, thus ignoring the legal existence of free Blacks and mixed-race people of color and their specific histories. Another partial exception is the  discussion of divorce; as several essays mention in passing, the Code’s restrictive provisions were in reaction to the liberalization of divorce during the Revolution, with further restrictions imposed in 1816 during the Restoration before the re-institution of divorce by the Third Republic in 1884. A fuller exploration of this history could have further illuminated the continuing struggle between social and political forces played out through the bodies of women. Indeed, early commentaries on the Code often de-emphasized its legal innovations by revealing its sources in law of the ancien régime, which by the late eighteenth century was itself already largely codified even in the field of customary law, a fact largely ignored here. Especially for literature written in the aftermath of Revolution, such as the novels of Balzac, looking only to the Code for the legal provisions that underly the social determinants of the characters’ lives without considering the continuities and ruptures with earlier systems of property, marriage and inheritance can obscure the real impact of social change on the characters’ aspirations, anxieties and frustrations.

The collection opens up many fruitful pathways for future research by literary scholars, both by theorizing the gaps and continuities between law and literature in the long nineteenth century and by suggesting new genres ripe for exploration. Especially useful is an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources at the end of the volume, and a long introduction which places the issues evoked by the individual essays into a broader context. The volume is highly recommended.