Tropes of literary war : Personalities

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Personalities are public defamations in which a person or a proper name is referred to directly. The term appears as early as theEncyclopédie - in articles that make its field of application visible: Voltaire's "Gazette" article, Marmontel's "Comédie" article - but it's in the period we're looking at that its use really takes off. The use of personalities was particularly widespread around the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, at times when the battle for literary glory was fierce - "Do you want success? Citez des noms propres", as Rivarol put it - and where political uncertainty encouraged verbal violence.

The trial of Paul-Louis Courier (1772-1825) for contempt of public morality is an example of the judicial use of the term; the author was only too happy to take advantage of the publication of the minutes to reiterate, this time without censorship, his attacks on an aristocracy brought about by female intrigue and "prostitution". His lawyer defended him by turning the accusation of personalities against the public prosecutor's instruction: that's where the iniquitous attack comes in.

But it is above all in the theater that the category is operative: controlling the banning of celebrities from the stage is a major issue in^19th-centurycensorship. It's commonplace to trace personalities back to Aristophanes, the author of direct attacks on the stage, while advocates of ad rem attacks tend to look to Molière. Janin, in his Histoire de la littérature dramatique (1853-1858), mentions the case ofUne révolution d'autrefois, a play by Pyat and Burette, censored at the very first performance because of a rather innocuous "Il est gros, gras et bête" ("He's fat, fat and stupid"), but which appeared to refer to the July Revolution.

An 1828 pamphlet by Le Poitevin, director of Le Corsaire-Satan and founder of the first Figaro, intervened in the debate on press control, blaming Restoration laws for the proliferation of personalities. The lack of freedom for the press, and the severe economic constraints weighing down on it, encouraged recourse to scandal and satire, and it was these that needed to be corrected.

In Illusions perdues, Balzac frequently associates personality with jokes. It's a word from military vocabulary that has passed into the lexicon of journalism: the joke - in reference to the soldiers' tobacco joke - is idle chatter, emphatic discourse without truth. In Monographie de la presse parisienne, the joker, who mocks for the sake of mocking, is contrasted with the bravo, who mocks in order to kill.

Étienne de Jouy, in a preface to his Hermite de la Chaussée-d'Antin, denies making personalities, and tries to draw a line between criticism of ideas and satire, ad rem criticism and ad personam attack. In reality, it's a fine line: in a context of exacerbatedagôn, any reservation can pass for a personality. Fortunatus's Rivarol, a dictionary of celebrities, or Banville's Odes funambulesques, or even Hugo's Châtiments, can pass for personalities. The Goncourts, particularly in Charles Demailly (whose original title was La Guerre littéraire), were severe about journalists' conversion to slander, which kept open the wounds of the age; they lamented the absence of a firm critique of ideas, dissociating them from their author.

The term was used again during the Third Republic, by Édouard Drumont for example. The contributor to the Catholic newspaper Le Monde was forced to resign because of the many duels he engaged in following the publication of his book, La France juive (Jewish France) - including a very famous duel with Arthur Meyer, editor of Le Gaulois - which the Church condemned. He responds by topically associating the duel with personalities, making the former the natural, almost organic consequence of the latter: "behind these personalities, the world, as it is made, seeks a signature, and behind this signature, a breast." Charles Péguy was one of the last to use the term, in the title of one of his Cahiers de la Quinzaine. To those who criticize him for making personalities rather than indulging in the exercise of universal thought, he replies, "One must make the personalities one must make."