Chamfort and the French Revolution

Sbastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort remains one of the most enigmatic prompters of the French Revolution. This study analyses his rhetorical and political programmes in tandem to reveal how Chamforts discourse and politics inform and elucidate one another in both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods. It considers his key political texts his Discours lAcadmie franaise, Des acadmies, the Tableaux historiques de la Rvolution franaise and his posthumous Maximes et penses, caractres et anecdotes and exposes how, in each instance, Chamforts conception of politics hinges on the adoption and subversion of prescribed discursive forms (reception speech, historical tableau, maxim). In the Discours and Des acadmies, Chamfort opposes the implicit discursive norm of le bon usage sanctioned by the Acadmie franaise, because it represses free expression and at the same time constitutes the Acadmie itself into an oppressive corporation imbued with neo-feudal values. Chamforts subsequent interpretations of revolutionary events in his Tableaux historiques, while making explicit this same radical libertarianism, frame some reservations about the insurgent peuple as a political force. In the end, many of the tensions troubling Chamforts politics are resolved by his posthumous Maximes et penses, whose prevailing principle of honntet gives them a rhetorical and political independence from both the ancien rgime, centred on notions of honneur, and the revolutionary Republic, founded on a principle of vertu. Previous studies have tended either to interpret Chamforts works from their historical or biographical context, or by considering exclusively the Maximes et penses to subordinate them to an established literary tradition. This innovative reading posits Chamforts texts as an exemplary meeting-place of literary practice and political praxis at the time of the Revolution, shedding new light on both the function of literary forms in Chamforts politics and the role of Chamfort the writer, as an ideological subject caught up in revolutionary events.