Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Dream of the Feeling Citizen: Law and Emotion in Corneille and Montesquieu

2006; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sub.2006.0021

1527-2095

Susan Maslan,

Historical and Literary Analyses

The Dream of the Feeling Citizen:Law and Emotion in Corneille and Montesquieu Susan Maslan (bio) In these pages I want to sketch out the pre-history of the "homme-citoyen" enshrined in the French constitution and in world history with the promulgation of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (1789), the first formal declaration of human rights. This essay seeks to trace a part of the story of man and citizen before their yoking together in and as the modern subject of rights. The invention of the man-citizen might well be the most significant legacy of the French Revolution, but the political success of this figure and its centrality in modern democratic republicanism have obscured the tensions—historical and actual—within and between the two terms. This essay is then an attempt at a genealogy not only of the terms, but also of the ambivalences of modern citizenship. Corneille's Horace When, in Pierre Corneille's play Horace, Sabine sees her husband, the eponymous hero, wet with the blood of her three brothers—killed in a fight not to save life or limb, not to preserve freedom or territory or goods, but to decide the question of which city, Rome or Alba, would assume symbolic mastery over the other—and wet too with the blood of her sister-in-law Camille (Horace's own sister), she begs him to kill her: "Joins Sabine à Camille, et ta femme à ta soeur; / Nos crimes sont pareils, ainsi que nos misères; / Je soupire comme elle, et déplore mes frères."1 Horace refrains from killing his wife, because despite Sabine's claims, her crime is not identical to Camille's. Camille insists on two points that her brother Horace and her father ("Old Horace") both find criminal. First she condemns Rome's violence (embodied in her brother) rather than simply lamenting her loss, and she holds Rome responsible for the death of her lover Curiace (Sabine's brother). Corneille had already prepared us to sympathize with Camille's denunciation of Rome's violent politics: he shows that the blood-letting was unnecessary, since an agreement between the rulers of the two cities had been signed previous [End Page 69] to the contest between the Horatii and the Curatii; he also stages the horror that this quasi-civil war inspired in the masses of Alban and Roman soldiers who, when reminded of the bonds of kinship and affection that bind them (bonds like those between the Horatii and the Curatii) are stupefied, and lower their arms. In other words, Horace and Curiace are structural synchdoches for the Roman and Alban armies, but they do not act as synechdoches. Second, Camille swears that her rage, tears, and accusations will be incessant, total, and public. When her brother Horace insists that she honor the triumph he has won for Rome through his killing of her lover, Camille not only vows instead to honor the dead Curiace, but declares it her sole duty to perpetually accuse her brother and the Rome in whose name he fought: "Ne cherche plus ta soeur ou tu l'avais laissée; / Tu ne revois en moi qu'une amante offensée, / Qui comme une furie attachée à tes pas, Te veut incessament reprocher son trépas" (4.6). The traditional role of the fury—the position Camille claims for herself—is to pursue justice when a functioning legal institution is either absent or incapable of proper action. Camille, in other words, refuses to contain her mourning within the domain of private grief. Her indictment is as much political and juridical as it is familial. Her accusation is against a Roman politico-juridical structure that operates on the principle of the use-value of human beings and on their radical substitutability. The play stages the absolute incommensurability between Camille's supreme valuation of the human being "as such," and her father's (Old Horace's) Roman instrumentalization of humanity. Thus, on the one hand, Curiace is for Camille "mon amant, mon plus unique bien" (1.2) simply because she loves him, in and for himself. On the other hand, Old Horace tries to persuade...