Autobiography and Memoirs

The word autobiographie was imported from Britain to France in the early 19th c. to designate a type of writing felt to be different from the traditional mémoires. The distinction between the two is not a hard-and-fast one; it has in fact been the object of some controversy in France since Philippe Lejeune proposed a precise and perhaps too exclusive definition of his subject in L'Autobiographie en France (1971). According to this, the writer of memoirs, usually a high-ranking or famous person, offers posterity a chronicle of his or her actions and an eyewitness account of contemporary people and events. Autobiography, on the other hand, implies the retrospective attempt to make sense of an inner destiny, the formation of a personality—and therefore almost always includes the story of the author's childhood (récit d'enfance).

Most narratives of the self written in France before about 1750 fall into the former category, although such memoir-writers as Madame de Staal and the duc de Saint-Simon give a strong impression of their own personalities while recounting their memories, differing in this from the self-effacing medieval memorialists. Montaigne is an exceptional case, but his prolonged introspection is not given narrative shape. Most memoirs, particularly those by men, are concerned with political or military life, but they may also depict high society and literary and artistic circles. These texts have been much used by historians: the 19th c. saw the massive publication of such generally unpublished memoirs in the Collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France of Petitot and Monmerqué (1819-29) and the Nouvelle collection des mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de France of Michaud and Poujolat (1836-8).

Among the most interesting of the innumerable memoirs of the ancien régime one may cite those of d'Argenson, Bassompierre, Bernis, Brantôme, Commynes, Hénault, La Fare, La Rochefoucauld, Monluc, Montpensier, Motteville, Nemours, Retz, Saint-Simon, Staal, Sully. The memoir tradition has continued in the 19th and 20th c. with the writings of such different figures as Raymond Aron, Beauvoir, Berlioz, Dumas père, Genlis, Guizot, Herriot, André and Clara Malraux, Napoleon, Madame de Rémusat, Toqueville, and Louise Weiss (Mémoires d'une européenne, 1968-76). The most remarkable modern memorialist is Charles de Gaulle, whose skilfully crafted account of his destiny remains an essential (if suspect) source for historians.

A particular type of memoir, which may come closer to autobiography by its concentration on the inner life, is the account of a spiritual itinerary. The great models here are St Augustine and St Teresa of Avila. In French one can cite certain writers connected with Port-Royal, such as Jean Hamon (Relation de certaines circonstances de la vie de M. Hamon faite par lui-même, 1702), the Vie of Antoinette Bourignon (1683), and in particular the autobiography of Madame Guyon.

In 18th-c. France, one of the dominant forms of fiction was the memoir-novel, in which a hero or heroine, sometimes of humble birth, describes his or her path through the difficulties of life. It seems likely that the popularity of this genre contributed to the development of modern autobiography. The founding text, Rousseau's Confessions, although its title proclaims a filiation with St Augustine, is in fact more similar to the narrations of Lesage, Marivaux, Duclos, and Prévost. What distinguishes Rousseau, apart from the quality of his writing, is his insistence on the inner life (intus et in cute is his epigraph), his willingness to reveal intimate secrets, and his stress on childhood. Something similar is found in the autobiographical texts of his younger contemporary Restif de la Bretonne [see Monsieur Nicolas] and his disciple Madame Roland.

The Confessions tell the life of a commoner, albeit one who rose in the world through writing (Jamerey-Duval and Marmontel are comparable cases). From the late 18th c. there is a growing number of narratives of the lives of ordinary people who were not at all professional writers, from the glazier Ménétra to Agricol Perdiguier (Mémoires d'un compagnon, 1853) to Émile Guillaumin, Fadhma Amrouche, or J.-B. Dumay (Mémoires d'un militant ouvrier du Creusot, 1841-1905, 1976). In a similar vein, the Breton writer Hélias uses his memoirs to record the half-vanished rural culture of his native country. Recent historians have placed great value on the reports of such witnesses, often recorded orally. On the other hand, the literary genre of autobiography is dominated by the lives of writers. Important 19th-c. examples include Quinet, Sand, and Renan; these are overshadowed by the Vie de Henry Brulard of Stendhal and the Mémoires d'outretomb1e of Chateaubriand. Both of these follow Rousseau's example in mingling the present and the past, thus blurring the distinction between autobiography and the journal intime which came to prominence at the same time [see Diaries]. Chateaubriand's great work is at once memoirs and autobiography; it also contains a strong element of travel writing, which in the Romantic period began to take on an increasingly autobiographical character.

La Vie de Henry Brulard, as well as showing the way for much modern autobiography in its constant questioning of memory and self-knowledge, also anticipates later developments in presenting itself formally as a novel. In the 20th c. in particular, along with the growing favour for novels (often written in the first person) with a strong autobiographical element (Proust, Céline, Sartre, Duras, etc.), there has been a tendency to give the label roman to works which are really autobiographies (e.g. Ernaux's La Place or Camara Laye's L'Enfant noir). Doubrovsky proposed the term ‘autofiction’ for his ‘roman’ Fils (1977), and the same term might be applied to his striking Le Livre brisé. The line between the two genres has become increasingly hard to draw.

Nevertheless, many writers of the 20th c. have written interesting texts which are indisputably autobiographies, among them Adamov, Althusser, Beauvoir (the first volume of her trilogy), Cavanna, Emmanuel, Gary, Gide, Green, Leclerc, Leduc, Pagnol, Sartre, Schlumberger, Simenon . Queneau characteristically broke the mould in writing a verse autobiography, Chêne et chien (1937), though he too calls it a ‘roman’, and his example was followed by Georges Perros (Une vie ordinaire). The most remarkable autobiographical work of the century is, however, that of Leiris, whose four-volume La Règle du jeu revolutionizes the whole concept of the genre, throwing overboard the normal chronological approach, scrutinizing particular events repeatedly and in great detail and remaining constantly suspicious of his own motives and methods. This is at the opposite pole from the apparently unproblematic reminiscences of Pagnol or the polished self-presentation in Sartre's Les Mots.

Leiris's awareness of the pitfalls of the genre is echoed in the innovative autobiographies produced by writers associated with the Nouveau Roman: Sarraute (Enfance), Robbe-Grillet (Le Miroir qui revient; Angélique; Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe), and Simon (L'Acacia). Particularly striking examples of new directions in autobiographical writing are Claude Mauriac's Le Temps immobile, Laporte's ‘biographies’, several texts by Perec, including W, ou le Souvenir d'enfance, and the inimitable, halfparodic Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, which carries as a kind of epigraph the words which best characterize a certain type of modern autobiography: ‘Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman.’

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• P. Lejeune, L'Autobiographie en France (1971); Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, special number on autobiography and memoirs (1975, no. 6)
• P. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (1975)
• M. Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (1993)