This study, both structuralist and diachronic, compares two sets of fictional dialogues which mark the beginning and the end of the Enlightenment. These are the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes ...of Fontenelle (1686-7), and - far less well-known - the 'Entretiens sur les arbres, les fleurs et les fruits' of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (a segment within his Voyage à l'île de France, 1773). The debt of Bernardin's dialogues to their predecessor has been asserted in general terms, but here the relationship is examined systematically. The first part of the article offers a comparison between the two works in terms of genre, target readership, internal structure, speakers (male and female), topic and theme. The second part sets out a series of close similarities on the textual level, confirming beyond doubt the influence of Fontenelle's work on Bernardin. But the dialogues of 1773 can also be perceived as re-writing those of 1686-7. Fontenelle's Entretiens declare for a 'scientific' universe that works like a machine, and for elite sociable pleasures which are equally Modernist. Bernardin's 'Entretiens', anticipating his Études de la nature (1784), repudiate the mechanical in favour of an organic world of nature infused with spirit, foreshadowing Romanticism and also the French Revolution.
Abstract
Natasha Soobramanien’s novel Genie and Paul (2012) creatively appropriates the plot and characteristic language of Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) to give voice to the ...dispossessed and displaced of the Indian Ocean, and to denounce the socio-environmental effects of colonialism and globalization on the island of Mauritius. In the process, the novel stakes out a theoretical position for itself within contemporary debates about the roles of landscape and arboreal imagery in the elaboration of a poetics of identity and place. As Genie and Paul interrogates the roles of trees and roots both literal and figurative in relation to its characters’ individuation efforts, it offers an interesting opportunity to reconsider Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation. This reading of the novel also sheds light on the ecological ramifications of Soobramanien’s poetics of landscape, illustrating how one might effectively denounce the West’s impact on Mauritius without falling back on mythical notions of an Edenic nature.
This article aims to show how Bernardin de Saint-Pierre—whose philosophical and theological thought is generally overlooked by scholars—provides an original solution to the problem of the existence ...of evil. A comparative reading of the systematic discussion of Providence that animates The Studies of Nature, his major theoretical work, and Paul and Virginia, a true Romanesque application of the philosophical treatise, brings out a double theodicy. In fact, Saint-Pierre establishes a fruitful synergy between Rousseau’s anthropodicy, which provides a social and historical justification of evil, and Leibniz’s eschatology, aimed at its metaphysical and otherworldly justification.
Ecrivain célèbre, mais aussi successeur de Buffon à la tête du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (1792), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre a aux yeux de ses contemporains la double image d’un homme de lettres et ...d’un homme de sciences, ceci malgré l’hostilité à ses thèses des grandes institutions scientifiques et les moqueries des journaux sur son explication des marées par la fonte alternée des glaces polaires, qui est l’aspect le plus connu et le plus controversé. Quelques décennies après sa mort, ayant ...
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's first book, Voyage à l'Ile de France (1773), published anonymously and with illustrations by Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune, has often been hailed as an 'abolitionist ...manifesto', yet the author devotes only a modest portion of the text to the condition of black slaves in Mauritius, under French colonial rule. To explain the predominantly abolitionist readings of Voyage à l'Ile de France, I propose to turn to the hitherto understudied period reception of the book, in order to posit that the original illustrations and the interaction between these and the text may have played an important part in orienting the interpretation of the work. In addition to addressing a lacuna in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre criticism, the following reflections on the reception of Voyage à l'Ile de France as an imagetext may also be viewed as a case study, making a contribution to the broader area of research into modes of reception of illustrated books in the Eighteenth century.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s
Paul et Virginie
(1787) ostensibly exalts the wholesome values of a pastoral life style, that is to say, a life lived in harmony with nature, governed by virtue, and ...uncontaminated by the hierarchical divisiveness found in more materialist (European) environments. If one probes beneath the rhetorical surface, however, a vein of materialistic greed, hypocritical posturing, and class-conscious pretentiousness can be detected in the behavior and discourse of the primary protagonists. Indeed, as the novel comes to a close, the primary protagonists’ articulated attachment to rustic primitivism is revealed to be little other than a discursive pose that masks a desire for social distinctiveness, perhaps even cultural dominance. In this reading of the novel, the tragic tone of the narrative is attributed not to the heroine’s untimely death (viewed by the narrator as part of the natural order of things) but to its ultimate irrelevance. Although Virginie was briefly idolized in the immediate aftermath of her death—in a span of just twenty years, the physical trace of her existence and influence has all but disappeared; her legacy can be kept alive only in the oral discourse of an aging recluse. Although there is evidence to suggest that the “petite société” hoped to transform their sector of l’île de France into a parallel society wherein virtue and Christian subservience would serve as exemplary models for the other islanders, the community is destroyed from within by greed, self-interest and vanity, the very values the protagonists rhetorically condemned, but ultimately embraced.
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