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2021; Columbia University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00358118-9377390

2688-5220

Elena Russo,

Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

The women we meet in this collection of essays have very different profiles and stand at different points along the line that goes from the self-acknowledged femme de lettres who publishes under her own name to the salonnière whose works appear in print only because, as the story goes, her friends had really insisted, or because she had lent the manuscript to someone who had quickly made a copy behind her back.1 Their strategies for engaging in intellectual conflict run from an explicit agonistic stance (Marie Le Jars de Gournay, Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, Marie de Beaulieu, Constance de Salm) to a carefully managed art of ambiguity (Madeleine de Souvré Marquise de Sablé, Antoinette Deshoulières), which, as Lewis Seifert writes of Sablé, “asserts both individual agency and interpersonal harmony,” without forgetting such rhetorical skills as equivocation and parody, which, as Helena Taylor astutely observes in her study of Deshoulières’s pet poems, has a paradoxical and not entirely productive effect. In fact, if on the one hand Deshoulières’s skepticism, expressed in her deft and elegant handling of burlesque themes, allows her to take a position on the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, on the other it undermines that position and makes light of the quarrel itself.The articles collected in this volume amply demonstrate the panoply of risks that early modern women took when they trespassed on the territory of controversy. The role of women in the institutions of sociability and letters was important but narrowly defined. Within society they were to be figures of mediation whose function was to facilitate the peaceful integration of participants within the group.2 In the world of letters, at a time when writing was seen as one of the many modalities of communication and exchange within the broader frame of conversation, women were expected to behave like Madame de Rambouillet, whose authority on matters of taste was made legitimate by the posture that she made no claim to authority and did not aspire to be an author. Conversely, women were unequivocally discouraged from behaving like Madame d’Auchy, who had opened an academy in her home and had published a work on theology (Dufour-Maître, “‘Les antipathes’”). In Myriam Dufour-Maître’s luminous analysis, women were credited with an unfailing, native instinct for le bon usage. They were cultural icons of taste, of bien dire and bien vivre, the living embodiments of le génie de la langue, but only as long as they did not descend into the fray and become themselves producers of culture: only as long as they did not attempt to confront male writers as equals.3 Hence the paradigmatic figure of the précieuse, intended to deter women from becoming “pretentious” female authors.4Thus both the institutions of sociability and those of letters made it illegitimate for a female author to step out of her irenic role as symbol of French taste and civilizational excellence. Strong, “quarrelsome” women of letters like Gournay and Dacier stood out for blame because they dared to appropriate the institutional practices that had been routine among the savants of the Republic of Letters since the Renaissance, in the genre of the querelle savante and in religious polemics: ad hominem attacks, line-by-line refutation, dialectical argumentation, relentless pursuit of differences big and small between their own position and that of their adversary (Taylor).5 In the following century, as Dena Goodman has argued, the constraints on the woman of letters, and/or the salonnière, became even more stringent. The salonnière came to be seen as a guarantor of order and harmony, imposing a benevolent discipline on the quarrelsome and rambunctious men of letters who came to her salon to exchange ideas, network with the elites, and develop an esprit de corps.6 But whatever influence and visibility women had gained in the world of letters came at a price. A celebrated salon hostess like Madame Geoffrin, who kept a correspondence with the king of Poland and the empress of Russia and even dared to give the latter a bit of advice on a delicate political matter (though, it must be said, Catherine swatted her down with a swift movement of her gloved hand), was adamant in her posture of intellectual modesty and would lay claim only to innate, untrained, female common sense.7But the point I want to make here is that from the mid-1750s onward, the constraints of propriety and etiquette that until then had been imposed primarily on women, came increasingly to be expected of men of letters too. Explicit, open-ended intellectual conflict started to be seen as detrimental to the advancement of knowledge and to the interests of gens de lettres. Of course, quarrels peppered with satire kept happening, but writers would fill pages of controversy with one hand, so to speak, and write strong condemnation of quarreling with the other. Of course, no one was more adept at doing both at the same time than Voltaire.8 Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier were just a few of those who deplored quarreling among gens de lettres in very strong terms. But it was d’Alembert who made the case against controversy most clearly.D’Alembert did it in a short piece written in 1760, at a time rife with attacks against the philosophes, meant to be read at the French Academy. Three years after the slanderous Cacouacs had come the scandal of Charles Palissot de Montenoy’s satirical play Les Philosophes and Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan’s scathing anti-philosophe reception speech at the academy. Moral philosophers, d’Alembert writes, have been wondering for a long time if human beings living in the state of nature would be at war with one another or not. There is only one way to find out: look at how men of letters have lived with one another for centuries.D’Alembert is not the first to describe the world of letters as a Hobbesian state of nature. Pierre Bayle had famously used a similar language, but to very different conclusions: Cette république est un état extrêmement libre. On n’y reconnaît que l’empire de la vérité et de la raison; et sous leurs auspices on fait la guerre innocemment à qui que ce soit. Les amis s’y doivent tenir en garde contre leurs amis, les pères contre leurs enfants, les beaux-pères contre leurs gendres: c’est comme au siècle de fer . . . Chacun y est tout ensemble souverain et justiciable de chacun. Les lois de la société n’ont pas fait de préjudice à l’indépendance de l’état de nature, par rapport à l’erreur et à l’ignorance: tous les particuliers ont à cet égard le droit du glaive et le peuvent exercer sans en demander la permission à ceux qui gouvernent. (Bayle, “Catius” note D)10In Bayle’s playful description, the state of nature is a primitive republic ruled by perfect reciprocity; social relations, politeness, and kinship don’t take priority over the republic’s core values. War is conducted in all fairness. Ideas are tested on the battleground, energized by combat, and the one to emerge above the fray is the best. In d’Alembert’s state of nature, on the contrary, it’s the strongest, not the cleverest, who get the prize. In the world of letters as d’Alembert sees it, the battle is driven not by the desire to seek truth and defeat ignorance and error but by the hunger for power (glory being nothing but a subset of power). Men of letters seek to get the scepter and hold onto it for as long as they can. Indeed, the “republic” is not a republic at all, but a multitude of petty kings and warlords.But the crucial difference is that Bayle construes the Republic of Letters as an autonomous, entre-nous, safe space designed by (overwhelmingly male) savants for savants, in which freedom of speech is unimpeded and conflicts follow their natural course, without risk of interference from the religious and political authorities. Whether that was truer in Bayle’s late seventeenth-century Rotterdam than in the 1760s Paris is a matter of debate (on several occasions Bayle’s writing got him in trouble with the consistory, and his ongoing quarrel with Pierre Jurieu ended up costing him his teaching job; see Bost). But Bayle’s republic is delocalized and somewhat disembodied, which is the reason why he is able to compare men of letters to gladiators locked in combat and to find pleasure in a language tinted with homosocial combativeness: “Voilà un couple de gladiateurs aux prises, qui peuvent nous fournir un long spectacle”; “On peut assûrer que c’étoient deux athletes dignes l’un de l’autre, et que jamais gladiateurs ne furent mieux appariez que ces deux-là. . . . C’étoient les deux plus savans hommes de France” (quoted in Moreau, n.p.).11 Such violence is of a purely virtual nature and should not cause any real injury. More important, when those gladiators lock heads with each other, they do so before an audience of their peers, who are familiar with their methods and know how to evaluate the fight and what benefit they may draw from it.D’Alembert’s world of letters, on the other hand, is not an autonomous, cosmopolitan space, but one embedded in the social and political world—a world that is unequivocally Parisian, full of sound and fury. When conflict bursts out, it does not emerge from within, but it is malware implanted by malicious external agents who enjoy the support of a cabal of powerful enablers.D’Alembert’s anatomy of a typical quarrel fits the Palissot affair to a tee. The preface to Les Philosophes portrays the Encyclopedists as a seditious sect bent on destroying all forms of political and religious authority. Far from engaging with their ideas, Palissot persistently misrepresents them by stitching together truncated, misappropriated, and misattributed citations taken out of context. And by attempting to extract Voltaire from the company of the other Encyclopedists, by singling him out for superlative praise, Palissot hopes to sow division among the philosophes (Palissot). Quarrels, d’Alembert says, are a perfect trap for the gens de lettres: Rien n’est plus facile [que] d’armer les gens de lettres les uns contre les autres, de les détruire par leurs propres mains, d’animer ceux qui ne savent faire que des satires (et qui est-ce qui n’en fait pas quand il le veut?) contre ceux qui ne veulent faire que de bons ouvrages, de faire harceler les troupes réglées par des pandoures, d’exciter, en un mot, si nous pouvons parler ainsi, la Chambre basse de la littérature contre la Chambre haute; cette tentative ne peut manquer de produire un très bon effet, car ou la Chambre haute entrera en lice, et elle s’avilira, ou elle se laissera traiter avec insulte et paroîtra se soumettre à cette avanie; quel triomphe, dans les deux cas, pour la médiocrité puissante et jalouse! (D’Alembert, L’État présent 72)The stakes are not primarily of an intellectual nature; they are strategic and institutional (if we consider the community of philosophes an institution, or a “societé,” as d’Alembert would have it [D’Alembert, Essai sur la société 394]). When d’Alembert sparred with Rousseau regarding the alleged Socinianism of Geneva’s pastors and the merits and demerits of theater, he did so with the greatest precautions.12 Maintaining the exchange within the bounds of politeness and propriety was, he believed, the means to retain control of the debate and prevent it from spilling outside the community of philosophes and into the hands of the public at large (Ribard). With the Palissot affair it’s just the opposite.The hostilities kicked off with a maximum of publicity (Les Philosophes was performed at the Comédie Française), to force the community of philosophes to respond and thus to lend legitimacy to the attacker. It was a war being conducted by pandoures, d’Alembert writes. Pandoures were the “irregular” troops of peasants and thugs who fought alongside the Hungarian army in the War of Austrian Succession and made up in brutality and doggedness what they lacked in discipline and organization. Pandoures would be easily defeated if confronted on the battlefield by a battalion of well-organized professional soldiers (troupes réglées), but they were successful in guerrilla wars of attrition (skirmishes, theft of supplies, surprise attacks), which created a sense of insecurity and demoralized and depleted the ranks of a regular army.13 What the pandoures of literature wanted was less winning the war than making their adversaries look bad, demoralizing them, and depleting their ranks. The Chambre basse of literature (they are none other than the representatives of the lowlife of literature cherished by Robert Darnton), who had nothing to lose, would emerge on top, regardless of whether the Chambre haute would enter the fray or not. If it did, if it accepted the challenge of such an unworthy adversary, the Chambre haute would lower itself to its level. If it stayed put, it would signal that it was willing to swallow an insult and that it deserved getting it. S’avilir or se laisser traiter avec insulte: in this battle of symbols, the language is that of honor and dueling.As gens de lettres acquired visibility and even celebrity, their quarrels inevitably spilled out into the public space, on the theatre, in newsletters, in conversational circles. They became objects of gossip; they were focal points, catalysts for social cooptation, as their dissensions were embraced by this or that coterie or interest group (Lilti). Like d’Alembert, Louis-Sébastien Mercier argued that quarreling made gens de lettres look bad to le public. But Mercier’s recommendation is paradoxical. Gens de lettres, he writes, ought to present a unified front: instead of turning their weapons against each other, they ought to turn them against their enemies. “Quand on veut rabaisser les gens de lettres, on parle de leurs querelles vives et quelquefois scandaleuses. Il est vrai que, dans leurs débats, ils semblent peu éclairés sur leurs véritables intérêts, et qu’ils aiguisent l’un contre l’autre des armes redoutables qu’ils devroient détourner contre leurs ennemis” (277).Let us pause on this sentence for a moment, for it tells us something important: the Baylean Republic of Letters is no more.What makes me say that? The fact that the logic of confrontation that drove the search for truth in the Republic of Letters (at least in Bayle’s eyes) no longer exists, or is considered detrimental to the flourishing of ideas.14 To Bayle, the vigorous confrontation of ideas (including the right of refutation, critical examination of sources, etc.) was an essential part of the common project of criticism that underlay the dynamism and resilience of the republic’s pursuit of knowledge. Who would gens de lettres quarrel with if not with each other?But Mercier doesn’t think there can be such a thing as a dispute worth having: invariably, disputes are the result of misguided passions and irrelevant quibbling.Disputes are passionate affairs driven by a need for power. Their principal characteristic is publicity. Prodded by social pressure and malicious interference, despite their better judgment, gens de lettres make a spectacle of themselves, and sooner than they know it they have lost control of the narrative. Literary quarrels are like the canevas of the commedia dell’arte: a collection of tipi fissi, stock characters (Pantaloon, the Doctor) and predetermined situations (rivalry, jealousy, ridiculous quid pro quo) ready to be filled by this or that star actor.Mercier is very persuasive in analyzing the insidious power dynamic that underlies the relationship between gens de lettres and le public. On the one hand, the public expects suprahuman standards of moderation and politeness from gens de lettres when they are being attacked: “on exigera une modération extrême; on voudra le spectacle d’un combat froid, poli, réservé, tandis que nous sommes attaqués dans la partie la plus sensible de nous-mêmes.” But on the other, the public that blames authors for their impolite behavior does so only out of hypocrisy, “pour se donner un ton de dignité et de décence.” The truth is that the public loves the horse race, the combat of gladiators, the blood and gore. Readers will rush “dans l’antichambre,” driven by their “malignité insatiable,” to grab the latest “feuille satirique.” If they don’t find what they were looking for—biting satire and delicious humiliation—they’ll throw away the paper and swear they’ll quit subscribing to it.15And if the latest “feuille satirique” doesn’t have enough to satiate the public’s hunger for combat, it can always turn to the delightful and titillating volumes published by a few of those Pandoures, those members of the Chambre basse, those desperados of literature, such as Jean Zorobabel Aublet de Maubuy, whom the police files describe as “an unemployed attorney’s clerk who would lend his poison pen to whatever cause would pay him” (Bell 114). Aublet de Maubuy was “embastillé” in 1752, when he was a student of theology.16 The police files paint the picture of a down-and-out, talented young author with a sharp pen and in search of a good gig. “C’est un jeune homme qui a perdu ses père et mère et qui a d’abord été abbé, ensuite clerc de procureur et enfin sans état. Il était en pension en attendant un emploi, paraissant en avoir un grand besoin. Il a de l’esprit, fait des vers et beaucoup de satires tant contre le clergé que contre le Parlement, qu’il faisait imprimer par Beauvais, où il allait souvent manger” (quoted in Darnton 262).Aublet was a prolific compilateur-polygraphe and the author of several works of historical divulgation. His five-volume collection Les Vies des femmes illustres et célèbres de la France (published in 1762–66 with a royal privilege) took a decidedly “philogynist” approach (Pellegrin). But that didn’t prevent him from coming down heavily on Madame Dacier in his two-volume work Histoire des troubles et des démêlés littéraires, depuis leur origine, jusqu’à nos jours inclusivement (1779). There is nothing out of the ordinary in this consecrated cliché of the fanatical female author: “L’on peut dire que dans cette occasion elle vomit contre le détracteur du Poëte Grec un torrent d’injures et qu’elle employa pour le combattre le ton acre et pédant” (1: 13). The paradigmatic story of the confrontation between the aggressively “pedantic” Dacier and the polite (if sadly misguided) Antoine Houdar de La Motte, one of the major episodes of the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, was retold, borrowed and plagiarized, passed from one abbé to the next, immortalized in countless periodicals—the various bibliothèques françaises, histoires littéraires—and in the multivolume collections by Aublet de Maubuy and the Abbé Augustin Simon Irailh. And let’s not forget the exquisite Abbé François Cartaud de La Vilate, who regretted that Dacier, for all her love for Homer, had not followed the example of Andromaque: “Cette belle princesse aimait son cher Hector et lui brodait des robes. Il sied aussi mal à une femme de s’hérisser d’une certaine érudition que de porter des moustaches” (157). Nor should we overlook the sympathique Abbé Antoine Gachet d’Artigny, author of a “Chronique scandaleuse des savants,” who took pleasure imagining the well-deserved, pointed barbs Mme Dacier would have thrown at Cartaud had she been alive to read his words (2: 261). Indeed, the Dacier—la Motte story was so popular that the Abbé Irailh’s version was featured as an exercise in a French grammar book for English-speaking students, published in 1768. With the space for verbs left blank (Perrin 175–78).But even though a misogynistic bias singles out “angry” women of letters for special blame, we should remember that eighteenth-century historians of quarrels were not impartial observers and that they didn’t just write for the sake of transmitting knowledge. Invective and indignation were exactly the point in books that thrived on conflict, and did so in the very language of conflict that they purported to denounce. The preface to volume 1 gives a sample of Aublet’s tone throughout: On verra les génies les plus propres à s’élever au plus haut degré de gloire, dégrader les talens, les Lettres, en y répandant l’opprobre & l’ignominie. . . . De là ce déluge d’invectives, d’injures, d’imputations, qui en nous apprenant leurs démêlés, ont consigné & consignent leur honte à la postérité. De là cet esprit d’indépendance, cette tyrannie, qui règnent dans la Littérature; ce despotisme qu’on s’efforce d’y établir, qui suffoque ou corrompt les germes du talent, qui en bannit l’émulation & décourage le mérite. (1: vii)We can’t help but suspect that this is more than a simple denunciation: it’s an advertisement.Although the trope of the harangère is misogynistic in its origin, its usage was not reserved exclusively for women. Often the harangère has a male companion, who also hails from les halles: the crocheteur or the porte-faix. Thus Aublet declares: “[La littérature peut-elle mieux acquitter sa dette envers “notre bienfaisant Monarque”] qu’en proscrivant tous ces écrits qui ne semblent être que des compilations d’injures, des disputes d’harangeres et de porte-faix? . . . Qu’on critique tant qu’on voudra un Ouvrage; mais qu’on n’introduise pas sur le Parnasse le langage des halles.” (2: 264). The Abbé Irailh quotes Paul Thomas de Girac calling his quarreling partner Pierre Costar a harangère: “On verra que jamais harangère ni crocheteur n’a vomi tant d’injures et tant d’impuretés . . . quel avantage dois-je donc attendre de combattre un homme si foible, de tenir tête à une harangère?” (1: 214–14).Aublet is unsparing with Voltaire: “Après des traits aussi satyriques et des comparaisons aussi infâmes, comment M. de Voltaire persuadera-t-il que la passion n’entre pour rien dans ses dêmêlés littéraires? Quelque raison qu’ait un homme attaqué, l’indécence révolte toujours les âmes honnêtes. Un héros doit se mettre au-dessus de la jalousie et de la malignité. Malheureusement, dans la République Littéraire, on connoît la théorie mais on méprise trop la pratique” (1: 223).The power game dissected by Mercier—the public’s fascination for the drama and conflict generated by the makers of culture (be they theologians, scientists, or littérateurs) and the concurrent need to chastise them for their lack of self-restraint, propriety, and moral decency—is at the heart of the successful history of quarrels. It’s a morality play, a Punch and Judy spectacle in which everybody takes turns getting whacked on the head. Hard-hitters like Voltaire get their comeuppance at the hands of the historian (the infallible judge of so much foolishness), and the reader, eyebrows raised, enjoys watching people of reputation and prestige tear each other apart.The historian of quarrels claims to be an impartial referee, one more intent on policing manners than on siding with one or the other party: “Je ne prétends pas toucher au fond de la dispute mais seulement à la manière dont elle fut traitée,” declares Aublet (1: 13). That gives him the flexibility to treat any subject without getting mired in things uncomfortable. And yet, we may ask, why are there so many Christian apologists among the people whose reputation Aublet (a former theology student) tries to extract from Voltaire’s claws? MM. [le pasteur Jacob] Vernet , Guyon [de Maleville], l’Abbé François,17 [le révérend père jésuite Jean] Crasset, [Abbé Nicolas-Charles-Joseph] Trublet , [Jean-Baptiste-Louis] Gresset, Titon du Tillet, [Antoine] Guénée, Macarti [?], [Jean-Baptiste Louis] Crevier, Vauvenargues , & plusieurs autres, se font trouvés en but aux traits envenimés de M. de Voltaire; il les lance avec tant d’adresse qu’on a dit que son génie ne reprenoit des forces que quand il est [sic] inspiré par la haine. Quiconque a été son ennemi en a été impitoyablement déchiré; lorsqu’il n’a pu avilir leur mérite Littéraire, on l’a vu s’appliquer à rendre leur personne odieuse & méprisable; de là ce déluge d’écrits polémiques, de libelles pour éterniser le ressentiment des Combattants & les consigner à la postérité, à la honte des Lettres & de leurs Auteurs; car dans toute espèce de combats il y a un droit des gens qu’on doit respecter. (2: 195)Here is not the place to discuss the historians’ attitude toward the actors in the quarrels. To a great extent, these historians are predictably middlebrow, “moderate” observers of the Enlightenment. Unlike Aublet, the Abbé Irailh is an admirer of Voltaire, but he is much less sympathetic toward the Encyclopédistes, who, he says, have brought their troubles on themselves by spawning someone like Claude-Adrien Helvétius; and then he goes on to quote several pages of Joseph-Omer Joly de Fleury’s requisitory against De l’Esprit—of course, what else can one expect from a work published in Paris with royal privilege (Irailh 4: 147–50)? But their insistent emphasis on the medium rather than on the message, on the pragmatics of speech—the prise de parole—rather than on the content, is a sign of something worth paying attention to.What are the rules of engagement in a literary quarrel? Who has a right to speak, and when, and what forms of speech are acceptable? Historians of quarrels often present a reductive view of the motives that drive gens de lettres to engage in debates. They muddy the distinction between critique and satire. From Bayle to Voltaire, everybody stuck to the line that critique was licit and satire was illicit, but the distinction was largely in the eyes of the beholder. When it came to specific cases, everybody was convinced that satire was always, exclusively, what others did to them. Like Mercier, writers and historians attributed quarreling to the many deviances of that good old urmotiv amour-propre: envy, a desire for power, blind self-regard. Deep down, they claimed, the issues were never about principle: they were always about personal hostility. For a variety of reasons (perhaps because the stakes had become so high, because the battle around the Encyclopédie had been so incendiary) it had become almost impossible to claim a legitimate ground of engagement, one that could make a quarrel seem acceptable to most people. Was there anything that could authorize a writer to publicly stake a position against another writer? That the answer to this question was no has been shown by Kate Tunstall in her revealing reading of Diderot’s Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron et sur les mœurs et les écrits de Sénèque pour servir à l’introduction de la lecture de ce philosophe (1782). Analyzing Diderot’s many transgressive gestures in this unwieldy, hulking, impassioned “quarrel-text,” Tunstall argues that Diderot paid a price for daring to expose publicly his personal feelings against Rousseau: “Que [deux philosophes] pratiquent la querelle, dont l’horizon n’est pas la vérité mais l’intérêt personnel, et le ton celui de la passion plutôt que celui de la raison, c’est aller à l’encontre de l’ethos philosophique. . . . Il est donc aisé de comprendre pourquoi ce texte a pu être exclu du canon littéraire et même marginalisé dans le corpus diderotien” (Tunstall 356–57).This brings me to the one truly successful case among those featured in this volume: the one woman who was able to claim a victory before public opinion and to present her oppositional gesture as legitimate in the longue durée. I am talking of Constance Pipelet, also known as Constance de Salm. In “A Woman’s Words—From Le Brun-Pindare to Citoyenne Pipelet and Constance, Princesse de Salm,” Catriona Seth discusses the circumstances of the publication, in 1797, of Pipelet’s poem “Épître aux femmes.” The “Épître” was a response to the claims made by Ponce-Denis Écouchard Le Brun, known as “Pindare,” a writer of witty, satirical epigrams lampooning his contemporaries, in particular women of literary ambitions. In 1796 Le Brun published a thirty-two-octosyllable poem in the periodical La Décade philosophique titled “Aux belles qui veulent devenir poètes,” which claimed women were made for love, not for the struggles of authorship.In the next few months, a back-and-forth between Le Brun and four other poets who opposed his stance ensued in the pages of La Décade. In 1797 Constance Pipelet published her “Épître aux femmes.” The poem was given several public readings, was republished in periodicals and collections, and had two separate editions, but its success was modest. Meanwhile other women writers had produced poems that responded to Le Brun; among them were Madame de Beaufort and Adélaïde Dufrénoy. In 1811, the “Épître” was reprinted in the collection Poésies de Mme la Comtesse de Salm. Then, when in 1842 Salm published her collected works, she presented the “Épître” as the centerpiece of a full-blown querelle des femmes poètes, in which Salm had played a prominent, if not a heroic, role, in being the only woman who had engaged with Le Brun and had brought the argument in favor of women poets to a triumphant close. That despite the fact that in 1797 things had not gone exactly as she was saying: other women, and some men, had participated, and their works had garnered more attention than Pipelet’s. Seth shows that in 1842 Pipelet operates retrospectively a successful takeover, spinning the quarrel to give herself a central role—indeed, the only role. Seth sees this is a striking example of the fact that querelles “can take on multiple forms,” that they are “to a certain extent, posterior literary constructions, by external critics but also sometimes, as here, by participants with vested interests” (519).18To me the takeaway is that Pipelet succeeds, both in her poem and in her subsequent publicity spin, to find a language that lends legitimacy to her gesture and justifies her taking an adversarial stance that goes “beyond traditional gendered behavioral expectations”: She in fact borrows something of the warrior rhetoric characteristic of many revolutionary songs: “Les temps sont arrivés, la raison vous appelle: / Femmes, réveillez-vous, et soyez dignes d’elle” is not so different to the opening lines of La Marseillaise (1792): “Allons enfants de la patrie, / Le jour de gloire est arrivé” which then leads on to the celebrated refrain “Aux armes citoyens, / Formez des bataillons . . . ” or to the ambiance of Le Chant du départ (1794), another revolutionary “hymn” taught to schoolchildren from generation to generation: La République nous appelleSachons vaincre ou sachons périrUn Français doit vivre pour ellePour elle un Français doit mourir. (514)In borrowing from the language of patriotic activism and the rhetoric of revolutionary songs, Constance Pipelet/de Salm found a winning strategy for making female activism acceptable. Latching the cause of women onto the idea of Patrie was a strategy that worked well for Salm in 1797 and worked even better in 1842—perhaps because that language had become part of the French identity. From that standpoint, it would have been difficult to isolate Salm, to portray her as a woman deluded, or exalted, or led astray by hate, or motivated by authorial vanity. The fact that Salm was herself a bit of a self-promoter (and who isn’t, among the authorial tribe?) is only a minor irony in this story.