REINVENTION OF OBSCENITY: SEX, LIES, AND TABLOIDS IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE, THE

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Braider, Christopher

As Dejean's case histories attest, the story of obscenity is the story of much else. For a start, it forms a telltale chapter in the history of the book. The scandal surrounding L'Ecole des filles turns in large part on the machinery of supply and demand in a time of depressed economic conditions when Parisian printers and booksellers were on the lookout for new audiences to replace those enjoyed during the explosion of pamphlet literature during the political upheavals of the Frondes (1648-53). The first classic of modern erotica, L'Ecole is also the first bestseller in the genre-a status owed to its cheap and portable format as much as to its salacious content.

Another topic derives from Foucault: citing L'Usage des plaisirs (1984) and Les Anormaux (1999), DeJean relates the invention of modem obscenity to Elias's "civilizing process" construed as an effort to discipline the intimate lives of the emergent modern state's self-policing and to that extent self-subjugating citizens. In legislating the literary expression of desire, the state monitors how citizens think and feel as well as behave. The prosecution of obscenity thereby parallels the contemporary development of the techniques of confession by which ecclesiastical directors of conscience sought to shape the inner lives of the faithful by compelling (and therefore teaching) them to name sexual thoughts and actions. Further, as attested by the fate of Théophile's "sodomite sonnet," which was condemned in part for what censors took to be the homoerotic thrust of the poet's vow to confine himself to anal sex, the attack on obscenity was attended by a repressive normalization of sexual desires. Beyond emphasizing the fumbling and spotty nature of the early modern state's efforts to police the publication of so-called obscene materials, however, DeJean refreshingly stresses obscenity's emancipatory potential. The phenomenon thus contributed to the growing secularization of early modern French society precisely because, in arrogating the prosecution of speech crimes to itself, the crown asserted its authority over its subjects in direct competition with the Church. And a byproduct of the normalizing heterosexual turn announced above all in L'Ecole des filles was to democratize sex's literary manifestations by adapting its contents to majoritarian tastes.

Still, the chief outcome of the story of obscenity in Dejean's view was the creation of the institution of modern authorship. This in turn defines the special relevance of Molière's case. Thanks to the scandal L'Ecole des femmes provoked, a scandal of which the playwright was as much the instigator as the victim,

Molière seems the ultimate modern author. The transgressive plays of his greatest period forced Louis XIV and Colbert finally to make censorship ... a systematic, bureaucratic institution. And if Molière "invented" censorship, censorship can also be said to have "invented" Molière. As a result of six years of relentless confrontation with that institution, he was transformed from merely an excellent dramatist into the greatest playwright of the French tradition. (p. 85)