Anonymity

In French as in other literatures, ‘anon.’ is a prolific and impressive author. The Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes occupies four large volumes of J.-M. Quérard's Les Supercheries littéraires dévoilées (2nd edn., augmented by G. Brunet and P. Jannet, 7 vols., 1889). The association of anonymity with ‘supercherie’ suggests that it is a tactic of concealment, and this is indeed often the case.

Anonymity may simply mean that the author is not identifiable. This applies in particular to older texts and those which were originally transmitted orally, from chansons de geste to popular songs. The modern notion of authorship, implying the individual creation and ownership of a body of work, only developed gradually in the Middle Ages. As late as the 17th or 18th c., as with La Princesse de Clèves, anonymous publication might reflect the fact that a work emanated from a group or salon. It might also indicate that for social reasons the author of the text (e.g. an aristocrat or a woman) did not wish to figure as a writer. Alternatively—and here we are coming nearer to the hoax—anonymity might be an attempt to suggest that a given work (e.g. the Lettres portugaises) is not an author's creation but a real-life document.

Very often, however, and particularly during the ancien régime, anonymity is the result of prudence, like the use of pseudonyms (the line between the two is unclear when the title-page reads ‘Par M. de ***’). Vast quantities of scurrilous pamphlets and libertin writings (e.g. Diderot's Bijoux indiscrets) appeared anonymously, as did some major works of the Enlightenment, from the Lettres persanes to Helvétius's De l'esprit. In these two cases, the author's identity was no secret, but Morelly's anonymous Code de la nature, for instance, was attributed to Diderot throughout the 18th c. Since the Revolution, while much journalism is still unsigned, few important literary works have been published anonymously. Mérimée's Chronique du règne de Charles IX is an exception. Perhaps because of an increased sense of literary property, the pseudonym is more normal.

[Peter France]