Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer by Patrick Coleman (review)

Reviewed by: Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer by Patrick Coleman Caroline Jacot Grapa (bio) Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer by Patrick Coleman Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xii+250pp. £55. ISBN 978-0-19-958934-0. Patrick Coleman delivers an interesting study in personal and social emotions as thematized in French Enlightenment literature. He analyzes anger and gratitude as reactions felt, their legitimacy as expected or banned emotions in eighteenth-century society. He offers a study in mœurs that encompasses the self and its relation to the other, and specifically the writer and his reader. Considered together, they prove a rewarding frame of inquiry into the French Enlightenment ideal of sociability. Coleman refers to the anthropology of the gift, but restricts his subject to the ways in which emotions are expressed and negotiated by the writer through his work and his characters, giving a peculiar insight into society at large. The project focuses on Robert Chasles (or Challe), Marivaux, Rousseau, and Diderot, and their experiencing and questioning of anger and gratitude in their life and work. Anger and gratitude are not seen as passions in the classical psycho-physiological sense, as in Descartes’s Traité des passions. Instead, they are considered as emotions and as social transactions that shape the construction of the self through interaction with others. Coleman draws on an expansive cultural perspective to account for the Enlightenment writer’s attitude towards anger and gratitude. On the one hand, classical philosophical notions about the control of personal emotions involving the social status of the person were still prevalent in descriptions of mentalities. His opening chapter works through sources from Homer and the Bible to Seneca and Juvenal (from whose most angry satire Rousseau excerpts his motto vitam impedere vero). Anger was considered a destructive passion, confined in the literary forms of satire or sermon, and gratitude or friendship was seen as a binding obligation that structured an aristocratic society. Coleman captures how in modern times the culture of politesse and the theory of honnêteté went along with the prohibiting of self-justice, of duels in particular, and a recess in taking offence. It created a background for a discourse on a conflict-free sociability, and a society governed by the law, where personal slight would either be avoided or regulated on an impersonal level. On the other hand, a new sensibility that values the expression of emotions penetrates the public opinion at this time. Anger that would have been seen as an outright comic or satirical situation coming from a commoner or a woman with no social standing is then given a singular relevance and is newly cultivated as a sign of human dignity. The writer is at the epicentre of the tension between the necessity of self-control, his critical, philosophical position, [End Page 622] and a social status that frustrates a desire of Diogene’s parrhesia, which would be to speak truth freely. The relationship to the other generates modes of dependence and obligation that create resentment from which one has to free oneself, and this is achieved through writing. Coleman’s book has a wide modern and contemporary resonance. It shows how intellectual prose and fiction contribute to shape a political recognition and negotiation of anger or indignation that will have a dramatic outcome in the time of the Revolution. The old regime society had seen the rise of new conceptions of human associations, based on natural rights and social contract, calling for the involvement of all men in the legitimization and critique of political association. Furthermore, anger and gratitude shaped rhetorical stances and literary choices, as Coleman’s analysis of Rousseau’s work and Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew demonstrates in a particularly rewarding way. Coleman’s work is focused on the writers who are gaining a prominent role as intellectuals and public figures. He argues that beyond their personal psychology or biography, the way they reflect upon anger and gratitude and thematize these emotions in their fictional work provides historical insights about the evolution of attitudes, the ethics of society, and the writer’s status. On a historical and methodological level, Rousseau is considered as a “paradigm case” central...

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