La Conquête du for privé: Récit de soi et prison heureuse au siècle des Lumières by Luba Markovskaia

Reviewed by: La Conquête du for privé: Récit de soi et prison heureuse au siècle des Lumières by Luba Markovskaia Michael J. Mulryan Luba Markovskaia, La Conquête du for privé: Récit de soi et prison heureuse au siècle des Lumières ( Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019). Pp. 229. $37.25 paper. Based on a dissertation defended at McGill University in 2016, this monograph is an in-depth exploration of eighteenth-century prison literature as a source of the evolution of the for privé (essentially, the conception of self) in eighteenth-century French literature. Its specific emphasis is on the historical transition between mémoires and autobiography, and memorialists' paradoxical transformation of carceral space into a source of freedom and protection from the outside world. Although the author includes a survey of a wide array of writings from the period, most of the book focuses on Marguerite-Jeanne de Staal-Delaunay, Jean-François Marmontel, l'abbé André Morellet, and Mme Roland. Some recent scholarship has done justice to eighteenth-century prison writings but much work remains to be done. This study is a contribution to this area of inquiry. The first chapter ("Le Récit de soi en mutation") features an analysis of primary sources that represent the gradual transition from mémoires to autobiography, showing that Rousseau's Confessions was not simply an abrupt break from the past. Markovskaia argues that mémoires became increasingly autobiographical and secular in nature throughout the eighteenth-century, culminating in Rousseau's work. She uses Marc Fumaroli's term "Mémoires mondains" to place "pre-autobiographic" and secular memoirs as an essential step on the path to modern autobiography. She asserts that prison literature can be interpreted as a "mise-en-abyme" of mémoires as a genre and their development, citing the authors listed above as the most important writers of mémoires mondains to enable this transition. These four memorialists were not members of the nobility, as the [End Page 747] author notes, and one of the ways that their writings reflect the transformation of the genre lies in their desire to influence public opinion by telling their life stories. This motivation is a departure from the writing of memoirs by members of the nobility in order to regain entrance to courtly life. The second chapter ("L'Imaginaire carcéral des Lumières") contextualizes the four memorialists' writings through a historical survey of the eighteenth-century "carceral imagination." Here there is a rightful acknowledgement that these writers, in particular, do not accurately represent what everyday life was like for typical prisoners, since they were from privileged, though not aristocratic, backgrounds. The author also explains the literary origins of the black legend surrounding the Bastille, which directly contradicts the golden one featured in Markovskaia's corpus. The chapter includes a useful overview of the ways that some famous prisoners, such as Constantin de Renneville, who was imprisoned in the Bastille for espionage at the end of Louis XIV's reign, both communicated with other prisoners and managed to create writing tools. The author's purpose here is to link the evolution of "le récit de soi" with carceral space in prison memoirs, with some references to the association of the concept of the "prison heureuse" with various prisoners' recourse to the imagination and to writing in order to escape ennui and endure their physical confinement. Sometimes it is a bit difficult to follow the author's train of thought here, but the chapter is useful in the information it provides on the physical reality of prisoners' experiences, as represented in their writing. In the following chapter ("Retraites carcérales"), Markovskaia examines the representation of carceral space as a form of spiritual retreat and sanctuary that is self-imposed, rather than enforced by the social order. The enclosed retreat serves as a springboard for literary representation of the For privé. It can, moreover, serve either as an isolating space ("isolement solitaire"), as is the case with Mme Roland, or a worldly retreat ("retraite mondaine"), as is the case with Marmontel; these opposed representations of the For privé use carceral space to achieve distance from society or...

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