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MELANCHOLY: ENGLISH GLOOM


AND FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT
IVIC

Eric Gidal

When French writers and travelers looked across the Channel in the eighteenth century, the chief characteristic they were likely to focus on was English
libertyintellectual, economic, religious, and political.1 The empirical investigations of Locke and Newton, the expansion of English trade, the proliferation of
dissenting religious communities, and the balance of power born of the Glorious
Revolution: all testified to a spirit of liberty that encouraged the arts and sciences,
supported commercial growth, and produced a degree of civic participation unparalleled in Europe. Bat de Muralt, a Pietist from Bern, praised England for its
prosperity and freedom. England is a Country of Liberty, he asserted in his
Lettres sur les Anglois et les Franois (1725), every one lives there as he wishes
. . . it is in England that a Man is Master of his own, without the Oppressions of
the Great, or ever knowing them, if he thinks fit.2 In 1727, Csar de Saussure
wrote from London to his family, Protestants exiled in Lausanne, that the English
advances in the arts and sciences were cultivated by the liberty which the government affords, and in which Englishmen take great pride, for they value this
gift more than all the joys of life, and would sacrifice everything to retain it.3
Similarly, Abb Jean-Bernard Le Blanc wrote in his 1745 Lettres dun Franois
that what is properly stiled the People, is what most distinguishes the English
from their neighbours; the share they have in the government by their right to
choose their representatives inspires them with a certain courage, which is not to
be found in other countries in those of the same rank.4 Voltaire was thus in good
company when he repeated the common observation that the English are the
Eric Gidal is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of Poetic
Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (Bucknell University Press, 2001). He is currently studying manifestations of civic melancholy in English,
French, and American literature during the eighteenth century.
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (2003) Pp. 2345.

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only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of
Kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last establishd
that wise government, where the Prince is all powerful to do good, and at the
same time is restraind from committing evil; where the Nobles are great without
insolence, tho there are no Vassals; and where the People share in the government without confusion.5
Nevertheless, if admiring English civic culture was a commonplace of the
French Enlightenment, so too was wondering at the English penchant for melancholy. Whether attributed to their cold and foggy climate, the coal-smoke of their
cities, their excessive consumption of meat and ale, the severity of their Protestant
sects, or the systematic rigor of their empirical sciences, melancholy was viewed
as a distinguishing feature of the English nation.6 Le Blanc quipped that When I
see an Englishman laugh, I fancy I see him hunting after joy, rather than having
caught it . . . the most laughing air is instantly succeeded by the most gloomy: one
would be apt to think that their souls open with difficulty to joy, or at least that
joy is not pleased with its habitation there.7 Finding the entire nation both melancholy and passionate, Muralt was struck by the frequency of suicide among
the English, a common point of observation among his contemporaries.8 Aubry
de La Mottraye, who traveled to England three times in the early decades of the
century, noted that barely a month passes, nor even a week, that somebody does
not hang himself, or throw himself into the Thames, or cut his throat, or take a
pistol to his head.9 Both Muralt and La Mottraye repeat the story of a Frenchman who, visiting England, contracted this prevailing humor and took his life.
Saussure himself wrote that though he was initially surprised at the light-hearted way in which men of this country commit suicide, he too fell ill to the black
humor:
Little by little I lost my appetite and my sleep; I suffered from great
anxiety and uneasiness, and that without any reason. Finally I fell into
the deepest and blackest melancholy, and suffered untold misery. . .
Everything made me sad and anxious; I could no longer sleep, and my
food disgusted me. Had I been an Englishman I should certainly have
put myself out of misery.10

Even Voltaire, despite his admiration for the English, observed that philosophy,
liberty, and climate are productive of misanthropy: London has scarcely any
Tartuffes, while it abounds with Timons.11
French travelers were by turns amused and appalled by the gloomy disposition of the island nation, but they often viewed the English melancholy as
inextricable from the very civic culture they so admired. Linking the melancholic disposition of the English to the foggy climate, Le Blanc reasoned, this same
tendency to melancholy prevents their ever being content with their fate, and
equally renders them enemies to tranquility and friends to liberty.12 Formalizing
such speculations into a broader system of comparative climates and political
cultures, Montesquieu argued in LEsprit des lois (1748) that cold climate led the
English not only toward suicide, but also toward constitutional government:
In a nation so distempered by the climate as to have a disrelish of
everything, nay, even of life, it is plain that the government most

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suitable to the inhabitants is that in which they cannot lay their


uneasiness to any single persons charge, and in which being under the
direction rather of the laws than of the prince, they cannot change the
government without subverting the laws themselves.

The obstinate impatience so characteristic of the English humor thus frustrates


the establishment of tyrannical government. Slavery is ever preceded by sleep,
Montesquieu opines, but a people who find no rest in any situation, who continually explore every part, and feel nothing but pain, can hardly be lulled to sleep.13
Germaine de Stal would later bring the question to bear on literary expression
when she argued that the melancholy poetry of the North was much more suitable . . . to the spirit of a free people. In her essay of 1800, De la littrature
considre dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, Stal asks
why the English, who are contented with their government and customs,
have an imagination so much more melancholy than was that of the
French. The answer is that liberty and virtue, those two great results of
human reason, require meditation, and meditation necessarily leads to
serious pursuits.

For Stal, the gloomy imagination of the English as expressed in landscape poetry
and epistolary novels is superior to the levity of French romance and attests to the
liberty of every individual and the economic health of the nation. Happy the
country, she writes, where the writers are gloomy, the merchants satisfied, the
rich melancholy, and the masses content!14
To modern readers, this conjunction of civic harmony and melancholic
gloom may seem counterintuitive. As the disposition of the autonomous self par
excellence, melancholy would seem to belong more to the realm of the private
spirit than to the public sphere. When we think of melancholy in the eighteenth
century, we more likely picture ruined abbeys than halls of parliament, cemeteries
rather than coffeehouses, the call of nightingales rather than the pronouncements
of periodicals. Whether attributed to humoral imbalance, aesthetic sentiment, or
psychological trauma, expressions of melancholy traditionally remove the individual from the world of social commerce, privileging in its place religious or
philosophical speculation. Following Ecclesiastes, the melancholic views all human endeavor as vanity and vexation of spirit, a fallen state redeemable only
through the rejection of the worldly and the perception of the divine. Divided
from the bulk of humanity by a profound skepticism of social mores, the melancholic might find him or herself in a condition of abject despair, meditative contemplation, or heightened sensitivity, but in any case well removed from the vanitas mundi of our common life.
Still, a countertradition exists in both French and English letters that
unites the skeptical peevishness of the melancholic soul with the civic virtue of the
magnanimous hero to articulate what we may call a civic melancholy. Grounded
in classical and medieval humoral theory, yet aligned with the methods and aspirations of the Enlightenment, this tradition understands melancholy as the dark
undercurrent of political identification, removing the individual from vain aspirations and luxurious self-indulgence while simultaneously promoting civic ideals
and public engagement. As French Protestants and philosophes came to identify

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England as a model of liberty to counter their own experiences of religious, political, and intellectual repression following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in
1685, they elevated the traditional characterization of the English melancholy
into the mark of a free society. Joined with evolving speculations on physiology
and climate, the French view of England as that country of liberty and spleen,15
was codified and elaborated within theories of public culture and national mores.
Writers from Prvost and Voltaire to Montesquieu and Stal transformed melancholy from a sign of humoral imbalance, intellectual genius, or religious vocation
into both a symptom and cause of political freedom and national identity. In turn,
these French accounts were speedily translated and disseminated among the English themselves, providing artists, philosophers, and statesmen with a self-emulative model of an atrabilious public body.
Numerous doctrines on melancholy, from classical physiology and Aristotelian philosophy through medieval medicine, Arabian astrology, and Florentine Neoplatonism, have all sought to reconcile the varied conditions of the melancholic within broader economies of humoral, seasonal, geographical, and
cosmological order. In the intellectual tradition charted most famously by Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl in their landmark study Saturn and Melancholy, these
macrocosmic systems of balance and harmony offer redemption if not relief for
the melancholics perpetual vacillation from extreme frenzy of inspiration to extreme torpor of dejection.16 Jennifer Radden, in her fine anthology of primary
writings from Aristotle to Kristeva, has complemented this earlier study by delineating a progression from descriptive to expressive accounts of melancholy and
arguing for the emergence in the nineteenth century of a distinction between subjective temperaments and behavioral pathologies. Unlike the earlier studys emphasis on Renaissance Neoplatonism and its system of allegories, Raddens sequence of primary texts explicitly privileges Freud and the psychoanalytical
tradition. In this model, subjectivity emerges not as a microcosm of larger harmonies, but as a function of desires founded in loss and displacement.17 Still, the
French contribution to the discourse of melancholy in the eighteenth century points
less toward Freud and more toward Durkheim; less, that is, toward theories of
the subject and more toward theories of society.18 Suggesting neither cosmic unity
nor subjective isolation, a wide range of French writings both frivolous and ambitious offer a third means of understanding melancholy as a sign of cultural contingencies and national distinctions. While English physicians such as George
Cheyne, Bernard Mandeville, and Richard Blackmore viewed melancholy as the
ennui of a leisure class set apart from the mechanisms of society,19 an argument
echoed by Wolf Lepenies in his more recent sociological study,20 French writers of
the period viewed it as the foundational temperament of an active and engaged
citizenry. In their typically sanguine emphasis on behavior over confession, French
observations on the English malady offer confident accounts of a political culture
they both admired and pitied, and, in so doing, conjoin the psyche with the social
as a means of promoting intellectual freedom and civil liberties.
The union of melancholy and civic virtue in the English character recasts
in the language of temperament and sensibility the traditional stoic advocacy of
public service as a rational response to the hardships and vicissitudes of life. Indeed, the figure of the Englishman in French drama, prose fiction, and political

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theory recurrently embodies the vacillation between stoicism and sentiment that
Julie Ellison has recently observed as a central trope in Anglo-American performances of civic heroism.21 Franois-Ignace Espiard, in his admiring portrait of the
ancient Romans in LEsprit des nations (1752), contended that Melancholy . . .
is ever a Concomitant of Magnanimity,22 and throughout the eighteenth century,
as John McManners and Dorinda Outram have argued, French intellectual culture from the philosophes to the Conventionnels recalled both Socrates and Cato
as exemplars of intellectual defiance and heroic self-sacrifice, viewing their suicides as compelling acts of republican freedom and virtuous self-dignity.23 In his
Grandeur et dcadence des Romains (1734), Montesquieu claimed that Rome
owed its best emperors to the Stoic sect and, in praising heroic suicide, bemoaned that men have become less free, less courageous, less disposed to great
enterprises than they were when, by means of this power which one assumed, one
could at any moment escape from every other power.24 Such noble precedents
notwithstanding, the French understood the English melancholy more properly
as a constitutional condition rather than a philosophical position. As Montesquieu put it later in LEsprit des lois, this action [suicide] among the Romans
was the effect of education, being connected with their principles and customs;
among the English it is the consequence of a distemper, being connected with the
physical state of the machine, and independent of every other cause.25 French
accounts consistently portray the English as suffering from a splenetic temperament with as much potential for misanthropy and useless self-destruction as for
magnanimity and heroic selflessness. In this respect, they situate civic melancholy
as Anne C. Vila has positioned sensibilit in French medical and imaginative literature during the period, between enlightenment and pathology.26
As a simultaneously physical and moral condition, English melancholy
was thought both to emerge from and in turn to promote a volatile liberty, both
personal and societal. Englishmen were observed to vacillate between proud selfjustification and suicidal despair, just as their nation lurched from constitutional
freedom and civic pride to regicide and civil war. Voltaire observed, it was literally the East wind that cut off the head of Charles the First and that dethroned
James the Second,27 and French travelers throughout the century expressed consistent horror at the gloomy English history of the previous century. But they also
perceived that in its more moderate form melancholy might regulate pride as
powerfully as any Roman precedent, producing a golden mean between vanity
and dejection by which the melancholic might find relief through active participation in the affairs of state. Voltaires observations are in this respect, as in most
others, exemplary. He noted the members of the English Parliament are fond of
comparing themselves to the old Romans, but that besides the common corruption
of their politicians, the two nations were entirely different. Whereas the Romans
never knew the dreadful folly of religious Wars . . . the English have hangd one
another by law, and cut one another to pieces in pitch battles over ecclesiastical
disputes. But here follows a more essential difference between Rome and England, Voltaire continues, which gives the advantage entirely to the latter, viz.
that the civil wars of Rome ended in slavery, and those of the English in liberty.28
The opposition of the vain yet cheerful Frenchman and the proud yet
melancholic Englishman was a dominant clich of the stage on both sides of the

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Channel. Louis de Boissys comic drama Le Franais Londres (1727) offers


national characterizations of the Frenchman as amiable, lively, light-hearted,
energetic, amusing, delightful company, a fine speaker, full of pleasant banter
and the Englishman as dull-witted, pedantic, melancholy, taciturn, boring, the
curse of a party, a moralizer, a futile dreamer.29 The Marquis de Polinville, a vain
French rake convinced of the superiority of his own nation, complains that the
sad residents of London spend all of their time in coffeehouses, debating politics
and reading papers when they should be refining their social graces. His rival,
Jacques Rosbif, an English merchant, counters the false airs of the Marquis with
his own blend of somber eccentricity and plain speech. Boissy reconciles these
polarities in the Baron de Polinville, who combines the politesse of the French
with the common sense of the English and thereby wins the hand of the coveted
English maid. The English, he notes, countering his countrymans vanities, are
not brilliant, but they are profound. 30
Later British adaptations of Boissys drama from the 1750s were predictably less conciliatory. The plots of Samuel Footes two farces, The Englishman in
Paris (1753) and The Englishman Returnd from Paris (1756), and Arthur Murphys The Englishman from Paris (1756) move away from international union
toward virulent anti-Gallicism, yet maintain the oppositional clichs. The French
to be sure, are the dearest creatures in the world, remarks Murphys young Jack
Broughton, recently returned from Paris, Under an absolute Monarch, youll see
them dance, and sing, and laugh, and ogle, and dress, and display their pretty
little small talkwhile an English John Trott, with his head full of Politics, shall
knit his brow, and grumble, and plod, unhappy and discontented amidst all his
boasted Liberty and Pudding.31 The plots of Foote and Murphys plays reject
Boissys vision of international union, portraying the two nations as humorally
irreconcilable, an argument presented even more aggressively in John Browns
contemporary Jeremiad, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times
(1758). Brown argued that a Spirit of Chagrin, and splenetic Turn of Mind,
seems the original Cause of our Spirit of Liberty, just as the gay, cheerful, and
contented Turn of the French, is certainly one ruling Cause of their Slavery. The
Truth is, they are happy under it; and therefore no Desire of changing their Condition ever ariseth in their Hearts; For it is Uneasiness alone, that prompts to
change.32 Brown, Foote, and Murphy recast the classical figures of the sanguine
and the melancholic in terms of French servility and English liberty, converting
the sociability of the former into the bane of the latter.
Yet following the 1763 Treaty of Paris, these clichs served just as well as
propaganda for reconciliation. Charles Simon Favarts LAnglais Bordeaux
(1763), written expressly as a celebration of the treaty, presents Milord Brumton,
a student of Locke and Newton, expressing his disdain of French levity while
gazing upon a pendulum: Now while this ball, with its solemn balancing, makes
me count my advancing minutes toward death, the thoughtless French, hurried
on by a squall of frivolous desires, read on each sun-dial a round of pleasures;
nay, so alien are they from the proper feelings of humanity, that they dance in
church-yards; and fiddle in charnel-houses. His lover the Marquise de Floricourt admires the sincerity and nobility of the English soul, but implores him to
not be for ever on the stretch to hunt out new matter, as fuel for the devouring

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melancholy of your mind . . . The English think; the French enjoy . . . take my
friendly advice, renounce philosophy, it is good for nothing but to give the spleen,
and rob the heart of tender sensibility. The drama culminates in their marriage
and the declaration of peace, with appropriate songs and panegyrics to universal
harmony and a reconciliation of national humors: We [the French] are too gay,
they frequently too sad;/ We run stark wild; they, melancholy mad. / Extremes of
either reason will condemn, / Nor join with us, nor vindicate with them. Favarts
translator (an English Lady now residing in Paris) resolved, she wrote in her
dedication, to give it an English dress; a free not a servile one: in order to attempt, in my country, what you have so laudably endeavoured in yours [sic], the
removal of national prejudices, which are a disgrace to humanity.33 Such sentiments were not universally embraced. While Footes dramas enjoyed a substantial
revival during the 176364 season, Favarts LAnglais Bordeaux seems never to
have been performed on the London stage.34
The melancholic yet civic-minded Englishman is no less a common figure
of the French novel, from Prvosts Cleveland to Rousseaus douard Bomston
and Stals Oswald, Lord Nelvil. But rather than presenting stock characters in
the service of farce or propaganda, these novels offer the Englishman as a focal
point for philosophical reflection and sympathetic identification, key elements of
an emergent realist aesthetic that, as Patrick Coleman has argued, negotiates between individual loss and narrative production.35 Prvost had included extensive
panegyrics on English libertysocial, political, and religiousin the fifth book
of his earlier Mmoires et aventures dun homme de qualit (173031), contrasting the frivolity, presumption and inconstancy of the French with the natural
good sense and the purest reason of the English.36 In Le Philosophe anglais, ou
histoire de Monsieur Cleveland (173239), he reflects on the consequences of
that freedom as he creates a melancholic embodiment of the countrys splenetic
history of political upheaval and reconciliation. Cleveland, the denied bastard
son of Oliver Cromwell, spends his formative years as a fugitive in a cave in
Devonshire, learning stoic philosophy from his mother and developing sentimental relations with other fugitives from Cromwells tyranny. As we follow his travels to an audience with the exiled Charles II at Bayonne, his half-brothers adventures in a Protestant utopian community in St. Helena, his attempts to found a
rationalist society among tribes of noble savages in America, his return to Restoration England where he is made a Privy Counselor, and his final retreat from
courtly intrigue following the Glorious Revolution, Cleveland figures as a distinctly political man of feeling. Clevelands history of personal tragedies and philosophical disillusionment is explicitly aligned with the fate of England during the
period of civil war and monarchical crisis, but it is his constitutional melancholy,
a kind of delirious frenzy, which is found to rage more among [his] countrymen,
the English, than the rest of the Europeans, that motivates him first toward selfdestruction and later toward religious reflection and political engagement.37 Only
after William assumes the throne and the nation is at peace may Cleveland retreat
to the blissful tranquility of his country estate.
Rousseaus Bomston, or the Englishman, as he is denominated in the
instructions for the engravings for Julie (1761), suggests a sentimental update of
this figure, a melancholic source of stoic advice to the young impetuous lovers.

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He wears an air of grandeur that comes from the soul more than from his station; the mark of courage and virtue, but a little ruggedness and harshness in the
features. A grave and stoic demeanor under which he barely hides an extreme
sensibility. Bomstons philosophy is distinctly humoral in origin, less a product
of reflection than of mood. As Saint-Preux puts it, I think he is by temperament
what he thinks he is by method, and the Stoic veneer he gives to his actions consists only in embellishing with nice reasonings the choice his heart has led him to
make.38 Though most remembered for talking Saint-Preux out of committing
suicide, resisting the despairing lovers attempt to model his impulses on the stoic
example, Bomston nonetheless exemplifies English melancholy, motivated by sensibility as much as philosophy in his rejection of false hierarchies and decorum.
Like Cleveland, Bomston stands as a figure whose personal sentiments vie with
philosophical and religious imperatives in his engagement with public affairs.
This figure finds its romantic apotheosis in Oswald, Lord Nelvil, the
doomed hero of Stals Corinne (1807). Oswald, while a Scot, plays the part of
the melancholic Englishman to perfection, mourning his lost father to the point of
self-destruction and consistently demonstrating noble and egalitarian kindred with
humanity. Corinne, the sensuous and imaginative Italian, offers Oswald a perfect
object of desire, the promise of an ideal spiritual marriage fated never to be consummated in this world. A secondary character, Count dErfeuil, provides the
recurrent commentary of the vain and frivolous, yet decidedly happier, Frenchman. Despite his love for Corinne, Oswald is fated to fulfill his national destiny
and wed Lucile, the English half-sister to Corinne, whom his father had preferred.
Back in England, a country where political institutions give men honourable
opportunities for action and public appearances, Oswald soon turns from the
visionary passion of the Italian south: The entrancing pictures, the poetic impressions, gave way in his heart to the deep feeling of liberty and morality.39
Stals personifications of an imaginative yet decadent Italian culture in contest
with a sober yet melancholy English philosophy give expression to her contention
that free countries are and ought to be serious,40 and unites the philosophical
impulses of the sentimental novel with the political engagement of the English
nation. For all three of these works, as well as many of the more minor novels
surveyed by Josephine Grieder in her study of French popular fiction during the
period, the figure of the gloomy Englishman serves both as a model of political
morality and as a focus for sentimental identification. 41
While the dramas and the novels engage primarily with questions of cultural mores and philosophical temperaments, most expositions of melancholy as
a distinctive trait of English liberty emerge from humoral and climatic theories
handed down from Hippocrates and Galen. Montesquieus elaborate explication
of climate as determinative of social mores and political institutions in LEsprit
des lois offers the most influential but by no means the only eighteenth-century
manifestation of a Hippocratic tradition that Clarence J. Glacken has traced from the
classical world through its development in the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and the Enlightenment.42 The Hippocratic essay On the Nature of Man was
first to situate melancholy as one of the four humorsthe others being blood, yellow
bile, and phlegmand to align them with the four seasons and the four ages of
man, thereby reconciling individual imbalance and cosmological harmony.43 A

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similar economy of physical dispositions informs the Hippocratic essay Airs,


Waters, Places, which assesses the effects of weather, topography, and water
drainage on the physical constitution of a countrys inhabitants and the nature of
their customs and institutions. The essay speculates on the choleric hardiness of
northern cultures and their superiority over the phlegmatic indolence of those in
the temperate zones, characterizing the Europeans as hot-headed and courageous,
self-ruled, and hence more willing to sacrifice themselves, and the peoples of Asia
as lethargic and cowardly, easily dominated in body and soul. Like the theoretical
exposition of the four humors, the Hippocratic theory of climate relies on structures of opposition, establishing a larger order, tendentious to be sure, by which
individual extremes may be understood and contained.44
In the eighteenth century, these theories provided a framework for a range
of nationalist caricatures and especially for increasingly sophisticated speculations on the English civic melancholy.45 As early as the 1690s, English writers
were defending the liberality of the English drama as a cathartic expression of
their nations politically volatile melancholy. Our country, William Temple
observed, must be confessed to be what a great foreign physician called it, the
region of spleen, which may arise a good deal from the great uncertainty and
many sudden changes of our weather in all seasons of the year. Explaining the
variety of characters to be found in the English drama, Temple reasons, this may
proceed from the native plenty of our Soil, the unequalness of our climate, as well
as the ease of our government, and the liberty of professing opinions and factions.46 In 1698, John Dennis found himself indicted for libel against the government for making similar claims in defense of the usefulness of the English drama
for counteracting that gloomy and sullen Temper, which is generally spread
through the Nation, a temper which he blamed on the reigning Distemper of
the Clime and which, he asserted, [has] so often made us dangerous to the
Government, and, by consequence, to ourselves.47 As Roy Porter argued, a distinctively Whig discourse of English physicians subsequently sought to recast the
English melancholy from an unstable condition of revolutionary madness to a
manageable condition of a free and advancing society.48 In 1733, George Cheyne
famously blamed what he dubbed The English Malady on
the moisture of our air, the variableness of our weather, (from our
situation amidst the ocean) the rankness and fertility of our soil, the
richness and heaviness of our food, the wealth and abundance of our
inhabitants (from their universal trade), the inactivity and sedentary
occupations of the better sort (among whom this evil mostly rages) and
the humour of living in great, populous and consequently unhealthy
towns.49

Cheyne significantly joined climate with the effects of trade and urbanization, a
view complemented in the same year by John Arbuthnot. In the midst of his scientific Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies, Arbuthnot ascribed a
livelier imagination to those in warmer climates, while viewing those in colder
climates as more prone to labor and exercise, requiring a regular rule of law to
protect property and the produce of ones labor. Despotick Governments, he
wrote, tho destructive of Mankind in general, are most improper in cold Climates.50

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French writers offered complementary, yet more elaborate and reflective


accounts of the English nation, expanding the Hippocratic formulas beyond purely
materialistic explanations toward increasingly nuanced theories of civic ideology.
What began as a general discussion of the relationships between the murs and
lois of a nation evolved by mid-century into a series of complex meditations on
the interplay between physical, emotional, and moral attributes in a free society.
In his Rflexions critiques sur la posie et sur la peinture (1719), the Abb du Bos
forwarded a deterministic account of climate, arguing that the humor, and even
the spirit and inclinations of adult people, depend very much on the vicissitudes
of the air. According as this is dry or moist, according as it is hot, cold, or temperate, we are mechanically merry or sad, and pleased or vexed without any particular motive. Hence climate distinguishes the French, with their insurmountable propensity to gaiety from the suicidal English and other northern countries.
A French refugee in Holland, Du Bos observes, complains at least three times
a day, that his gaiety and vivacity of spirit has abandoned him.51 Franois-Ignace
Espiard joined these purely physiological explications with sociological considerations in his Essais sur le gnie et le caractre des nations (1743), later reworked
as LEsprit des nations (1752). Espiard significantly joined climate with laws,
institutions, customs, and manners as equally important influences on the genius
of a people in order to provide a more comprehensive theory of national characters. The picturesque gallery of nations that concludes his work unites his theories of physical and moral influences, producing a detailed visualization of national spirit. The French character is uniform and agreeable, vague in manner,
mild yet noble in coloring, the Picture full of Hurry and Noise. By contrast, the
English are characterized by free and original strokes, the Colouring interspersed with Savageness, and even the Manner a little inclineable to the gloomy:
In the Shades place melancholy Figures; deep Shades express their
Misanthropy: Liberty requires strong Lights; and Gleams, flashing
amidst the Darkness, express the English Genius breaking out in
determined Sallies . . . The Scene of the Picture, however, is august; it
exhibits the greatest Objects: The Sea, the Parliament in Front, with
Parties for and against Liberty; all which add an extreme Fury to the
Picture.

Where the French are well served by the pleasingly mild and correct style of Raphael, the Englishman is better portrayed in the style of Michelangelo, haughty and
terrible, profound and learned, but harsh and exaggerated.52 Espiards portraits
solidify in aesthetic style and political allegory the contrasts of temperaments
handed down from the Hippocratic tradition, offering a more detailed conceit of
the English civic melancholy.
It was Montesquieu, however, who drew upon this growing body of speculative literature to establish, in the third part of LEsprit des lois, a systematic
connection between the effects of climate and the general spirit, the mores, and
the manners of a nation. If it be true, Montesquieu premises, that the character of the mind and the passions of the heart are extremely different in different
climates, the laws ought to be relative both to the difference of those passions and
to the difference of those characters. Where Hippocrates based his theories of
national customs on the circulation of humors in different climates, Montesquieu

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bases his speculations on the responses of the papillae on a sheeps tongue to


variations in the temperature. From this model of empirical observation, he extrapolates a familiar sequence of characteristics for the inhabitants of colder climates: they are confident and courageous, honest in disposition and insensitive to
pleasure and pain. Residents of warmer climates, conversely, are self-deprecating,
deceitful, and prone to decadent sensuality. But while such a schema would seem
to bestow only enlightened confidence upon northern Europeans, the English stand
out in Montesquieus survey of climates as a people particularly prone to selfdestruction: In all probability it is a defect of the filtration of the nervous juice:
the machine, whose motive faculties are every moment without action, is weary
of itself; the soul feels no pain, but a certain uneasiness in existing. Such national
existentialism is even more surprising in that the English provide Montesquieu
with the model of an ideal constitution from which he derives his theory of the
separation of powers. And in the final chapter of Book 19, How the Laws contribute to form the Manners, Customs, and Character of a Nation, he elevates
the condition of England to a speculative esprit gnral of a free people: Their
laws not being made for one individual more than another, each considers himself
a monarch; and, indeed, the men of this nation are rather confederates than fellow-subjects. Their climate gives them a restless spirit and extended views,
yet most of those who have wit and ingenuity are ingenious in tormenting themselves: filled with contempt or disgust for all things, they are unhappy amidst all
the blessings that can possibly contribute to promote their felicity. Their national character is more particularly discovered in their literary performances, in
which we find the men of thought and deep meditation. Their satirical writings
are sharp and severe, while their poets have more frequently an original rudeness of invention than that particular kind of delicacy which springs from taste;
we there find something which approaches nearer to the bold strength of a Michael
Angelo than to the softer graces of a Raphael.53 Montesquieu, like his contemporary Espiard, provides us with a portrait of England as tormented but free, a
sublime alternative to the vanity and luxuriousness of the French character.54
Montesquieus formulations proved influential and provocative to writers on both sides of the Channel, from Rousseau, who, in The Social Contract
and Emile, argued for the importance of temperate climate for political and moral maturity respectively, to Hume, who sought to reassert the importance of moral and institutional forces over physical conditions as promoters of national liberty.55 Yet, it is Pierre Jean Grosley, a member of the Acadmie Royale and an
intellectual disciple of Montesquieu, who provides the most complete theorization of the English civic melancholy. Grosleys early writings promote the theory
of climate and national mores advocated by Espiard and Montesquieu. Climate,
he had written in his Mmoire for the Socit Royale de Nancy, is above all else
the key to the sanctuary of legislation, the axis on which the economic universe
turns, the universal grounds of the moral and political order, just as it is the general basis of the physical world.56 But in Londres (1770), his popular and erudite
travelogue concerning England and its inhabitants, he moves beyond the limited
characterizations of Espiard and Montesquieu to provide an extensive analysis of
melancholy as a foundational temperament of English civic culture.57 Grosley
devotes over a hundred pages of his observations to the English spleen, dividing

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his consideration of melancholy into meditations on its causes, effects, and remedies. The fog and smoke from coal fires which darken the skies combine with
excessive consumption of meats and dark ales to give rise to a chyle, whose
viscous heaviness can transmit none but bilious and melancholy juices to the brain
(L., 1:165). Add to this unfortunate combination of climate and diet the severity
of the public education system; the sobriety of the Protestant religion; the morbidity of such public diversions as executions and tragic dramas; the satirical
pungency of such writers as Steele, Addison, and Swift; the English penchant for
serious conversation; and Grosley finds ample sources for the gloomy disposition of his brethren across the Channel.
In treating melancholy as pathology, Grosleys comments on its effects
are well within the medical and literary traditions of the eighteenth century, linking the English melancholy to fanaticism, superstition, madness, lunacy, and suicide. Contemplating the beneficial effects of this humor, Grosley partakes in the
traditional association of the melancholic with the man of genius and notes the
English aptitude for abstruse science and philosophy, classical learning, and antiquarian pursuits. But at the core of his ruminations on melancholy, Grosley expands the notion of solitary erudition to encompass a public sphere of cultural
and political engagement. He links melancholy to a concern with public affairs,
noting the English favor for newspapers, revolution, and popular participation in
affairs of state:
The whole English nation adopts [that rigid philosophy] by constitution; that is, with all the ardour that melancholy inspires for those
objects upon which it happens to be concentered. This occasions the
great sale of those news-papers, which are published daily, and which
the generality of the English spend a considerable time in reading: hence
arise those revolutions, which have so often changed the government of
England . . . In the present state of that kingdom, public affairs are
become the concern of every Englishman: each citizen is a politician.
(L., 1:189)

Grosley links the English melancholy to their burgeoning republicanism and thereby
charts a history of English politics along the trajectory of the dismantling of supreme authority. In the times of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, the case was
quite different, the royal authority then concentering the whole power, and, like
the divine agency, not discovering itself otherwise than by its effects, left the citizen no other merit but that of obedience and submission(L., 1:189). However,
the twin strains of independent thought and religious fanaticism, two expressions
of the English malady of which Newton and Cromwell are exemplary, tore apart
the authority of the monarchy and the Church. Melancholy thus stands as a mark
of a potentially destructive skepticism and religious delirium, standing in opposition to the maintenance of a regular rule of law.
Yet in contrast to such isolating forms of melancholy, Grosley perceives a
national pride that does not reject melancholy so much as it works through it,
rebuking the vanities of private luxury all the while maintaining a commitment to
civic duty. In an extensive chapter entitled National Pride, How far Melancholy
may be productive of it. Effects of this Pride, with regard to England, Grosley
offers a philosophical model of political self-identification:

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The impetuosity, and the perseverance, with which melancholy dwells


upon such objects as interest and engage it, are the principles, which
induce the English to concern themselves so much about public affairs.
Each citizen identifying himself with the government, must of necessity
extend to himself the high idea which he has of the nation: he triumphs
in its victories; he is afflicted by its calamities: he exhausts himself in
projects to promote its successes, to second its advantages, and to repair
its losses: he may be compared to the fly in the fable, which, when it
approaches the horses, Thinks to animate them by its humming, stings
one, then another, and imagines every moment that it makes the
carriage go forward; it sits upon the pole, and upon the coachmans
nose: and no sooner does it see the carriage driven on, and the people
continuing their journey, but it arrogates the glory of the whole
movement to itself. (1:1912)

Grosleys analogy suggests a dynamic relation between melancholy and pride, a


movement from determined antagonism toward collective identification. English
melancholy, in its impetuous obsessions, motivates national solidarity and engenders a pride, which, being the first foundation of public strength, and multiplying it ad infinitum, subdivides, and, in some measure, distributes itself to every
citizen(L., 1:192). Grosley quotes the sixth book of the Aeneid regarding the
Neoplatonic union of souls as a model of this patriotic identification: Totam
diffusa per artus / Mens agitat molem ac magno se corpore miscet( L., 1:192).58
In a cosmic dialectic of melancholy and pride, the nation redeems the splenetic
soul whose great actions in turn promote the national good. Grosley notes with
admiration, whatever does honour to the English nation, at the same time, throws
a luster upon each citizen( L., 1:196), and offers a litany of noble figures commemorated by public monuments in the inns, gardens, abbeys, and museums of
London, the Royal Society, Garricks Shakespeare Gallery, the Royal Exchange,
and, finally, in Westminster Abbey, the grand depository of the monuments erected
to the glory of the nation:
The abbey in which they stand is incessantly filled with crowds, who
contemplate them: the lowest sort of people shew also their attention: I
have seen herb-women holding a little book, which gives an account of
them; I have seen milk-women getting them explained, and testifying,
not a stupid admiration, but a lively and most significant surprise. I
have seen the vulgar weep at the sight of Shakespeares beautiful and
expressive statue, which recalled to their memory those scenes of that
celebrated poet, which had filled their souls with the most lively
emotions. (L., 1:205)59

As the centerpiece of his discussion of the English melancholy, Grosleys extensive


survey of memorial pride presses beyond the deterministic climatic explanations
of the Hippocratic tradition toward what must be recognized as an early theory
of civic ideology. A capacious national pride inspires dialectically the idea of the
nation and the observation and emulation of its citizens. It is founded in temperament, but given expression and modification by public institutions and the actions of private individuals of all classes and, as Grosley discusses at length, of
both men and women alike. The pride that Grosley identifies is not mere patriotic
bluster, but the positing of a totality by which the isolation and insufficiency of

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the individual might be at least partially relieved, a collective ideal that transforms personal despondency into a recognition of common interests and accomplishments.
The national pride of which Grosley speaks is distinct from vanity, and
he goes to great pains to distinguish between the two:
In the one, men appear and shew themselves such as they really are: in
the other, they exist only by illusion and deceit: at the bottom, both are
actuated by the self-same love: in great souls, this is pride; in narrow
minds, it is vanity. Pride is the source of all great achievements: vanity is
the mother of all things of a frivolous nature, as for example, of
fashions, of the etiquette of court punctilio, of ceremonial, of precedence, of honorary privileges, of pomp and parade, and all those
objects, with which little souls are so greatly captivated. (L.,1:212-13)

Citing such artists as Michelangelo, Malherbe, Corneille, Lully, and Milton alongside such eighteenth-century figures as Voltaire and Rameau, Grosley argues that
the morality of the Christian religion offers humility as a counterpoise to vanity;
but it gives none to pride, which, without debasing itself in its own eyes, can
perform all the duties enjoined by the most profound humility (L., 1:216). As
isolated men of genius, such luminaries would seem to embody the positive achievements of melancholy without the despair and self-loathing. Neither pathologically humble nor contemptuously vain, Grosleys men of genius, and the emulation
they inspire, partake of a noble pride that breaks from social custom only to
reinvigorate it. In turn, such a melancholic pride becomes the basis for important
public foundations, from Gresham College and the Garden of Apothecaries to
Guys Hospital and the British Museum. These institutions supply the place of a
variety of equipages, of lace, jewels, and all the transient brilliancy, that national
vanity elsewhere substitutes to solid and durable monuments, such as adorned
Athens and Rome, and, in the eyes of posterity, will also be the ornament of
England (L., 1:223-24).
Grosleys distinction between pride and vanity is hardly original, partaking as it does in a tradition that, like that of the melancholic genius, goes back to
Aristotle, who, in the Nicomachean Ethics, distinguishes between the megalopsychos and the mikropsychos, or men of great and small souls.60 The former knows
his true abilities and acts upon them. The latter underestimates his worth and
therefore under-utilizes his capabilities. Aristotle distinguishes both from the foolishly vain man who overestimates his own value: A man is regarded as highminded when he thinks he deserves great things and actually deserves them; one
who thinks he deserves them but does not is a fool, and no man, insofar as he is
virtuous, is either foolish or senseless.61 In this respect, and as Aristotle formulates it even more explicitly in his Magna Moralia, the megalopsychos represents
a golden mean between vanity and dejection. Such a man derives moderate pleasure from honors properly bestowed but does not, as with fame and wealth, desire them disproportionately to the actions that deserved them.62 Cicero adopted
this formulation in his advocacy of political engagement, arguing, the person
who embarks on affairs of state . . . must be sure not to succumb to thoughtless
despair through cowardice nor to become overconfident through greed.63 The
Christian era, however, promoted a very different sense of pride, equating super-

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bia with vana gloria and marking it as the chief cardinal sin, if not the root of
them all. As Gregory the Great formulated it most influentially, pride separates
the individual from the bulk of humanity so that he walks with himself along the
broad spaces of his thought and silently utters his own praises.64 But, in the early
modern era, the Aristotelian distinction re-emerged in many of the key works of
political and ethical philosophy and pride became viewed as a necessary passion
for unifying and promoting a societys achievements. In his chapter of Leviathan
(1651) on the passions, Hobbes distinguishes a laudable form of what he calls
Glorying from Vaine-Glory on the one hand and Dejection on the other.
Either extreme may lead to madness, whether choleric rage or melancholic gloom,
but proper Glorying arising from imagination of a mans own power and ability leads toward a properly social confidence and political ambition.65 In the
eighteenth century, Adam Smith, taking his cue explicitly from Aristotle, introduces in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) a distinction between pride and
vanity based upon the sincerity of self-estimation.66 Promoting a self-command
and noble pride to steer between the alternate passions of fearful anger and selfish
pleasure, Smith contends, vanity is almost always a sprightly and a gay, and very
often a good-natured passion. Pride is always a grave, a sullen, and a severe one.67
Smiths formulation underlines the affinities between political temperament and
individual passions that were already evident in Aristotles original conception of
magnanimous virtue.
It is but a short step from such ethical distinctions to the nationalist caricatures we have been observing. Grosley cites Montesquieus own observation
from his discussion of English melancholy that Free nations are haughty; others
may more properly be called vain,68 a point touched upon by Le Blanc when he
observed that a Frenchman seems to esteem his nation only with respect to himself: an Englishman appears not to set any value on himself, but with respect to
his nation: which gives an air of vanity to the one, and to the other an air of
greatness.69 Rousseau had likewise contended in Emile (1762) that the Englishman has the prejudices of pride, and the Frenchman has those of vanity, and
noble pride is at the core of Rousseaus psychological and historical narratives.
First introduced in a lengthy note to his Discours sur lorigine et les fondemens de
lingalit parmi les hommes (1755) as a counterpoint to the misery of modern
society, what Rousseau distinguishes as lamour de soi stands apart as a natural
self-esteem that bears little relation to amour propre, a vain love of self that evidences the corrupting influence of social divisions. For Rousseau, society and
despair are inextricable. I ask if anyone, he writes, has ever heard it said that
a Savage in freedom even dreamed of complaining about life and killing himself.
Let it then be judged with less pride on which side genuine misery lies.70
Clearly, national pride comes at quite a price. Grosley commends the
English for their civic institutions, their concern with public affairs, and even the
military valor that their contempt for life engenders. Nevertheless, like many
Frenchmen before him, he is aghast at the frequency of suicide among the English, the fanaticism of their political and religious rebellions, the superstition of
their national tales, and the insanity and lunacy on constant display at Bedlam.
Such are the advantages and disadvantages, the good and the evil, which result
from the English character in its present state, he concludes, and in this state, I

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doubt very much, whether the French, who affect a strong passion for every thing
English, would consent to change condition and manners with that people.71 His
remedy for such morbidity of soul is taken from the book of Proverbs: Give
wine to those that be of heavy hearts, let them drink:
We see in France itself the power, that a more or less extensive use of
wine has upon a nation. Our ancestors regulated the affairs of state over
a bottle; but, at the same time, regulated themselves so ill, that all their
projects vanished with the bottle, from whence they took their rise. All
that remained, after their consultations, was a few songs, which little
alarmed the government: the French were neither devoted to politics,
nor a prey to vapours. (L., 1:247)

Grosley recalls that the English themselves were once more partial to the juice of
the grape, and fears that exorbitant duties on wine have caused even the French
to change their national manners so that insipid raillery, pitiful conundrums,
dull metaphysics, and plaintive elegies, have supplied the place of light conversation, amiable simplicity, sprightly wit, Bacchanalian songs, and joyous parodies:
in fine, funeral urns, coffins, and melancholy cypress-boughs, are become fashionable even in buildings of the most elegant taste (L., 1:248). He thus urges the
lowering of duties in order to better compete with the wines from the American
colonies and to bring about an equilibrium in the temperament on both sides of
the Channel:
The use of wine being restored in England, whether by France or
America; the English [will grow] more tractable and less speculative,
more gay, and less addicted to dispute and wrangling, more friends to
society, and less saturnine, more submissive, and less occupied with
state affairs, less profound in their speculations, and more religious. (L.,
1:249)72

Commerce in wine may achieve what the marriages staged by Boissy and Favart
had proposed: a mutually beneficial tempering of national spirits, providing a
sanguine amendment to Englands melancholy constitution.
Grosleys elaborate fusion of medical diagnosis and sociopolitical analysis exemplifies the periods discourse of national temperaments, a discourse that
reconciles rather than opposes personal melancholy and civic culture in the English character. This reconciliation assumes many formstravelogue, theatrical
farce, sentimental novel, aesthetic defense, physiological treatise, cultural critique
works that offer us less a consistent theoretical model and more a recurrent topic
for reflections on national mores and cultural institutions. Though the medical
and institutional paradigms upon which they draw may seem outdated, their simultaneous emphases on physical and social contingencies connect melancholy
with histories and theories of ideology and the political subject. By grounding
political culture in the idiosyncrasies of the body and the weather, these eighteenth-century reflections complicate any purely discursive model of public society. Conversely, by fusing physiology with political philosophy, they advance models
of subjectivity beyond the reductions of Hippocratic materialism while suggesting a provocative counterpoint to a purely psychoanalytical model. Above all,
they offer an emphatic promotion of public life as an amelioration to melancholy,

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an alternative to pensive isolation, which, in its rejection of social engagement,


can be as narcissistic as the vanities it seeks to escape. Grounded in a fusion of
humoral and stoic philosophy, this insight may be re-emerging in our own postFreudian moment.
Melancholia is not French . . . The rigor of Protestantism, or the matriarchal weight of Christian orthodoxy admits more readily to a complicity with
the grieving person . . . while . . . the Gallic, renascent, enlightened tone [tends]
toward levity, eroticism, and rhetoric rather than nihilism. So writes Julia Kristeva
in Soleil noir (1989), her influential study of depression and melancholia in literature and psychoanalysis. Her redeployment of these nationalist clichs is all the
more intriguing given the enormous power she ascribes to melancholy as a foundational moment for the entrance into language and society. Without a bent for
melancholia, she writes, there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.
Indeed, there is meaning only in despairthere is no imagination that is not,
overtly or secretly, melancholy. 73 In this context, the French predilection for
cheerfulness and style would seem to condemn them not only to political enslavement but also to psychic atrophy. But, following Freud, Kristeva counters such
degenerate frivolity with a pathological melancholy that marks a failure of selfintegration, an incapacity to move from a necessary prelinguistic experience of
object loss toward a primary identification with a communal schema, be it language, family, or law. Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, she writes,
noting the despair attendant upon the melancholics inward gaze. Absent a compensatory signifier of identification, the melancholic withdraws from all social
intercourse toward inaction or self-destruction. Analysis therefore may offer a
lucid counterdepressent, not so much negating or neutralizing depression as
enabling the transference into language that is melancholys ultimate triumph and
the foundation of civil society.74
In her more overtly political writings, Kristeva has offered the nation as a
particularly compelling compensatory sign, forwarding an ideal of cosmopolitan
nationalism adopted directly from Montesquieu. In her Lettre ouverte Harlem
Dsir (1990), Kristeva recalls Montesquieus advocacy of a national identity based
in heterogeneous and dynamic confederacy as a means of redeeming nationalism
from its nineteenth- and twentieth-century corruptions. Seeking to avoid both the
alienation of a purely individualistic society and the violent authoritarianism of
racist philosophies of the Volkgeist, Kristeva advocates a nation without nationalism, an historical and thereby contingent esprit gnral encompassing a multiplicity of identities and a range of causalities, from climate and diet to laws, customs, and manner. Seeing in Montesquieus formulation a means of avoiding both
abstract idealism and ethnic determinism, Kristeva celebrates a vision whereby
the different levels of social reality are reintegrated into the esprit gnral without being absorbed; and this is accomplished, quite obviously, under the influence
of the English model, but also, in very original fashion, through the synthesizing
power of the French philosophers thought.75 Kristeva demonstrates the possibility of wedding Montesquieu with Freud and conceives of national pride as
comparable . . . to the good narcissistic image that the child gets from its mother
and proceeds, through the intersecting play of identification demands emanating
form both parents, to elaborate into an ego ideal (N., 52). Failing to achieve this

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ego ideal, one risks either a fall into an individualized or communal depression
characterized by idleness, withdrawal from communication, and any participation in collective projects and representations, or, alternatively, a perverse development of a negative narcissism of superegotic, hyperbolic ideals of which the
aggressive, paranoid excesses are well known (N., 52). Kristeva reproduces Grosleys theory of the nation as an intermediary between dejection and vanity in her
advocacy of a national pride positioned between suicide and barbarity (N.,
52), between the failure of identification and its excess. It is here that she turns to
Montesquieus dictum that men, in such a nation, would be confederates rather
than citizens (N., 57). Contending that the heterogenous, dynamic, and confederate formulation of the esprit gnral is one of the most prestigious creations of French political thought, Kristeva argues that it suggests the integration, without a leveling process, of the different layers of social reality into the
political and/or national unity (N., 57).76
Here, then, is the powerful and recurrent theme voiced in French accounts of the English nation. Inheriting the stoic commitment to public life in an
imperfect world, yet grounding such commitment in the passions of the independent soul, the French tradition from Montesquieu to Kristeva recasts the despondency of the individual into both a symptom and an amelioration for a world
bereft of final truths. As both Grosley and Kristeva contend, in their different yet
complementary accounts, absent the assurances of absolutism, monarchical or
theological, the subject is at risk of a profound loss of meaning and a retreat to
either the isolation of despair or the enslavement of collective arrogance. We avoid
such narcissistic self-cancellations by means of an endlessly repeating movement
from semiotic incoherence to ethical union. As Kristeva puts it in Soleil noir, what
makes . . . a triumph over sadness possible is the ability of . . . the dead language
of the potentially depressive person [to] arrive at a live meaning in the bond with
others.77 French accounts of the English malady suggest that this manifestly interior struggle may find solace, all the more powerful for its insufficiency, in the
vanities and vexations of public life.
NOTES
1. Ira O. Wade provides an excellent survey of the English influence on French thought during
the period in The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1977), 1:12071. A more archaic yet still valuable study of the influence may be found in Joseph
Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitanisme littraire; tude sur les relations
littraires de la France et de lAngleterre au XVIIIe sicle (Paris: Hachette, 1895), translated by J.W.
Matthews as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (London: Duckworth,
1899). See also F.C. Green, Eighteenth-Century France: Six Essays (London: Dent, 1929), 2969;
Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant lopinion franaise au XVIIe sicle (Paris: Gamber, 1930);
Gabriel Bonno La Culture et la civilisation britanniques devant lopinion franaise de la Paix dUtrecht
aux Lettres Philosophiques (17131734) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1948); Frances
Acomb, Anglophobia in France, 17631789 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1950); Gerald B. Maher,
LAnglomanie en France au XVIIIe sicle, La Revue de LUniversit Laval 10 (1955): 12542; and
Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 17401789: Fact, Fiction, and Political Discourse (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1985).
2. Bat de Muralt, Letters Describing the Character and Customs of the English and French
Nations (London: Tho. Edlin, 1726), 24. The majority of French works studied in this essay were
translated into English soon after their French publication and I have used those editions whenever

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possible. All other translations are either from modern scholarly editions or my own, as noted, with
the original provided in the notes.
3. Csar de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I & George II. The
Letters of Monsieur Csar de Saussure to his Family, trans. and ed. Madame van Muyden (London:
John Murray, 1902), 179.
4. Abb Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations (London: J. Brindley, 1747), 4.
5. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1999), 34. For the frequent occurrence of this formulation, both before and after Voltaire, see
Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson (Paris: Cornly, 1930), 1:9495 n. 9.
6. For the prevalence of this view, see Cecil A. Moore, Backgrounds of English Literature 1700
1760 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1953), 179235. See also Oswald Doughty, The
English Malady of the Eighteenth Century, Review of English Studies 2 (1926): 25769; and Paul
Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 16501850 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2000), 5064.
7. Le Blanc, Letters, 135.
8. Muralt, Letters, 34. On the English reputation for suicide, see S.E. Sprott, The English Debate on Suicide from Donne to Hume (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1961); John McManners, Death
and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 42837; Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); and Georges Minois, History of
Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1999), 179209.
9. The Voyages and Travels of Aubry de La Mottraye (London, 1732), 213.
10. Saussure, A Foreign View, 197.
11. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 2:104. La Philosophie, la libert, & le climat conduisent
la Misantropie. Londres, qui na point de Tartuffes, est plein de Timons.
12. Le Blanc, Letters, 56.
13. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (London: J. Nourse and P. Vaillant, 1758), 1:3312.
14. Germaine de Stal, Madame de Stal on Politics, Literature and National Character, trans.
and ed. Morroe Berger (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1964), 1012.
15. The phrase is taken from the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, Letters of the Marchioness of Pompadour from MDCCLIII to MDCCLXII (London: W. Owen and T. Cadell, 1771), 94, a fictionalized account of courtly intrigue during the Seven Years War.
16. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the
History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1979).
17. Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2000). Other recent studies in the cultural history of melancholy by Juliana Schiesari,
Lynn Enterline, and Guinn Batten have likewise privileged Freudian models of subjectivity even as
they have critically analyzed historical divisions of gender and modern systems of commodification.
Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of
Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992); Lynn Enterline, The Tears of
Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1995); Guinn Batten, The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culutre in English
Romanticism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998). Stanley W. Jackson offers a clinical history of
melancholy as a medical and psychological condition in Melancholia and Depression, From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale, 1986).
18. Although Durkheim explicitly rejected the climatic and physiological explanations of suicide
promoted by Montesquieu, his own landmark study of suicide of 1897 helped to establish modern
sociological method by which ostensibly personal and affective phenomena are understood in rela-

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tion to structures of social organization. In this respect, and as Durkheim himself explicitly argued in
1893, he stands as Montesquieus intellectual descendant. See Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in
Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1951) and Emile
Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology, trans. Ralph Manheim (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960).
19. Roy Porter offered a synopsis of the medical associations between melancholy or hypochondria and the refined nervous systems of the civilized classes, a view most famously propagated by
George Cheyne in The English Malady (1733). Porter, Civilization and Disease: Medical Ideology
in the Enlightenment, in Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 16601800, ed. Jeremy Black and
Jeremy Gregory (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1991), 15483. See also John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988),
20140.
20. Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1992). Lepenies focuses upon the seventeenth-century French aristocracy and
eighteenth-century German bourgeoisie, but French accounts of the English call to mind more the
utopian strains that Lepenies finds in writings on melancholy from Robert Burton to Edward Bellamy. Melancholy, in such formulations, offers a sign of disorder that must be subordinated by the
state, or society, which functions as an intermediate domain, which is neither as universal as the
cosmology of antiquity or the Middle Ages nor as micrological as the medicine of antiquity or of the
Arabic and medieval worlds (19).
21. Julie Ellison, Catos Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1999). In readings of English and American drama and poetry of the long eighteenth
century, Ellison demonstrates a foundational link between assertions of heroism and presentations of
bereavement in the language of republican sensibility.
22. Franois-Ignace Espiard, The Spirit of Nations (London: Lockyer Davis, 1753), 402.
23. McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 40937; and Dorinda Outram, The Body and the
French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 90105.
24. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (New York: Free Press, 1965), 145, 118.
25. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:249.
26. Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of
Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998). Vila provides a learned
study of how French physiologists and men of letters placed the sensible body at the center of discussions of organic dynamics, socio-political classifications, and cosmological harmonies, thereby creating a tension between rational virtue and physical excess.
27. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 2:263. Ctait la lettre par un vent dEst quon coupa la
tte Charles Ier, & quon dtrna Jacques II.
28. Voltaire, Letters, 3334.
29. Louis de Boissy, Le Franais Londres (Utrecht: Etienne Naulme, 1767), 30. Cest lui qui
fait un homme aimable, vif, lger, enjou, amusant, les dlices des socits, un beau parleur, un
railleur agrable, et, pour tout dire, un Franais. Le bon sens, au contraire, sappesantit sur les matires, en croyant les approfondir; il traite tout mthodiquement, ennuyeusement. Cest lui qui fait un
homme lourd, pdant, mlancolique, taciturne, ennuyeux; le flau des compagnies, un moraliseur,
un rve creux; en un motUn Anglais, nest-ce pas?
30. Boissy, Le Franais Londres, 4. Les Anglais ne sont pas brillans, mais ils sont profonds.
31. Arthur Murphy, The Englishman from Paris, ed. Simon Trefman (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969), 24.
32. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London: L. Davis and
C. Reymers, 1758), 2:3132.
33. Charles Simon Favart, The Englishman in Bourdeaux (London: G. Kearsley, 1764), 22, 33,
61, iii.

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34. George Winchester Stone, Jr., ed., The London Stage, vol. 4 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
Univ. Press, 1962). An English owner of a French copy of the play wrote in his copy that he kept it
not for any merit in the work, but as a mark of the joy which the French received at the Peace . . .
I think [the author] says somewhere Deux nations faites pour sentre estimer [two nations made for
each others esteem]which is vainly begging a foolish question, for the English despise and imitate
the French and the French esteem without imitating the English, under which a later French owner
commented on the all too common English presumptuousness (loutrecuidance anglaise qui nest
que trop commune). Charles Simon Favart, LAnglais Bordeaux (Paris, 1763), British Library
copy 11737 cc.17(1), quoted in Derek Jarrett, The Begetters of Revolution: Englands Involvement
with France, 17591789 (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 40.
35. Patrick Coleman, Reparative Realism: Mourning and Modernity in the French Novel, 1730
1830 (Geneva: Droz, 1998). Coleman studies Prvosts Manon Lescaut alongside Rousseaus Julie,
Constants Adolphe, Stals Corinne and Balzacs La Peau de chagrin. His emphasis is not the English
malady, but rather a recurrent tension between sentimental affection and spiritual retreat that redeems itself in public engagement as both a thematic and aesthetic quality of the French novel during
this period.
36. Abb Prvost, Adventures of a Man of Quality, trans. Mysie E.I. Robertson (London: George
Routledge and Sons, 1930), 8687.
37. Abb Prvost, The Life and Entertaining Adventures of Mr. Cleveland, Natural Son of Oliver
Cromwell, Written by Himself (London: T. Astley, 173435), 4:4748.
38. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings, vol. 6, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher
Kelly, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vach (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1997), 621, 103.
39. Madame de Stal, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998),
318, 304.
40. Stal, Politics, Literature, and National Character, 120.
41. Grieder provides an extensive bibliography of Novels and Stories from, by, and about the
English, 17401789,as well as a chapter-length survey of their basic thematic elements. See Anglomania, 65116, 15162.
42. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought
from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967).
See also Robert Shackleton, The Evolution of Montesquieus Theory of Climate, Revue internationale de philosophie 9 (1955): 31729, and Montesquieu. A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1961), 30219.
43. See Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 89.
44. Hippocratic Writings, ed. G.E.R. Lloyd (London: Penguin, 1978), 14869, 26071.
45. For the revival of these theories in the debate between Murs and Lois as constitutive of
national character, see Wade, French Enlightenment, 1:435515 and Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 551622. For their importance in eighteenth-century British formulations of race, see
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British
Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
46. Sir William Temple, Five Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Ann Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan Press, 1963), 199200. The foreign physician does not seem to have been identified.
47. The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1939) 1:151. Hooker provides an account of this indictment and the relevant manuscript accounts in
his note to this passage (1:47172).
48. Roy Porter, The Rage of Party: A Glorious Revolution in English Psychiatry? Medical History 27 (1983): 3550.
49. George Cheyne, The English Malady (London: S. Powley, 1733), i.
50. John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London: J. Tonson, 1733), 153.

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51. Abb du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (London: John Nourse, 1748), 2.180,
184, 194.
52. Espiard, The Spirit of Nations, 4056.
53. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:316, 331, 44951.
54. C.P. Courtney offers a basic survey of Montesquieus view of English political culture in English Liberty, Montesquieus Science of Politics: Essays on The Spirit of the Laws, ed. David W.
Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A Rahe (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 27390.
More extensive treatments may be found in Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition politique
anglaise en France; les sources anglaises de lEsprit des lois (Paris: Lecoffre, 1909); and Gabriel
Bonno, La Constitution britannique devant lopinion franaise de Montesquieu Bonaparte (Paris:
Champion, 1931). Chloe Chard offers a provocative comparison of Montesquieus climatic distinctions between the south and the north and Edmund Burkes aesthetic distinctions between the beautiful and sublime in Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 16001830 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), 11925.
55. For more extensive discussions of Montesquieus immediate influence, see Glacken, Traces on
the Rhodian Shore, 592622; and F.T.H. Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics (17501800)
(London: Edward Arnold, 1939), 93103.
56. Pierre Jean Grosley, De lInfluence des Loix sur les Murs, quoted in Wade, French Enlightenment, 44344.
57. Pierre Jean Grosley, A Tour to London; or, New Observations on England and its Inhabitants
(London: Lockyer Davis, 1772). Hereafter L.. Grieder notes that Londres was second in popularity
only to Le Blancs Lettres, going through three editions in the 1770s in addition to its English
translation. She views it as ushering in a period of more profound interest in English society and cites
the Vie de M. Grosley, crite en partie par lui-mme; continue et publie par M. labb Maydieu
(Londres et Paris, 1787), which claims, All the truly learned and all sensible readers will always
view London as one of the most instructive, most interesting, and most enjoyable writings that we
have about England and its inhabitants. (25859; Grieder, Anglomania, 37 n. 11).
58. and a Mind / Infused through all the members of the world / Makes one great living body of
the mass(6:97577). Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), 185.
59. Prvost had offered a comparable account of the sweet and delightful melancholy (douce
& ravissante mlancolie) to be found in Westminster Abbey and the noble emulation inspired by its
monuments in Le Pour et contre, ed. Steve Larkin, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
309 (1993), no. 56, 6048.
60. Key discussions of the structure and history of the idea of the megalopsychos may be found in
Maurice B. McNamee, Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimity
in Philosophy and Epic Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960); Robert Payne, Hubris: A Study of Pride (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960); Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeare
and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960); Margaret Greaves,
The Blazon of Honor. A study in Renaissance magnanimity (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964);
and Stanford M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil (New York: St. Martins Press,
1978). None of these studies note its affiliation with melancholy.
61. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962),
93.
62. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935),
5235.
63. Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 26.
64. Gregory the Great, Moralia, XXIV: 48; quoted in Robert Payne, Hubris, 73.
65. Hobbes discusses this distinction in chapters 6, 8, and 11 of the Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 3746, 5059, 6975.

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66. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 23764.
67. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 257. Smith associates vanity with the French, and pride with the
Spanish, a nation whose reputation embodies, in his view, Aristotelian magnanimity.
68. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1:450. Grosley and Montesquieu had earlier corresponded on just this passage and an earlier chapter of Book 19, in which Montesquieu reflects at
length on the vanity (la vanit) and the arrogance (lorgueil) of nations. See Montesquieu, uvres
Compltes, ed. Andr Masson (Paris: Les ditions Nagel, 1955), 3:129397.
69. Le Blanc, Letters, 1011.
70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings, 3:34.
71. Grosley, A Tour to London, 1:246.
72. Espiard had suggested an analogously beneficial relation between French levity and English
gloom, noting, the Wines and Brandies of France impart to [the] melancholic Spirits [of the English]
such enlivening Sensations as they would otherwise be Strangers to. The Use of these Liquors is
become necessary to, and proves the chief Delight of the North (The Spirit of Nations, 18).
73. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), 6, 4, 6.
74. Kristeva, Black Sun, 5, 25.
75. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1993), 55. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as N.
76. For a more extensive discussion of Kristevas theories in relationship to political identification, see Nolle McAfee, Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000).
77. Kristeva, Black Sun, 2324.

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