18 - Law and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Summary

Though legal plots are a common feature of the nineteenth-century European novel, the massive legal changes brought about by the French Revolution made law a uniquely important theme of French fiction, and changed the way novelists made use of it. In the early part of the century, Romantic novelists’ meditations on law, such as those of Mme de Staël, reflected their eighteenth-century intellectual inheritance, in attempting to understand if and how individual happiness and social duty could be reconciled by enlightened legal reform. Yet later novelists abandoned such utopian abstractions, to see in law the very epitome of the ‘realist’ view of the world that ultimately gave them their name: law, novelists such as Honoré de Balzac suggest, is about compromise with imperfect systems, the balancing of competing interests, and the operation of power—it is, in short, political. To learn the law, as so many nineteenth-century heroes set out to do, is thus to learn ‘the way of the world’. Finally, however, nineteenth-century novelists saw in the language of the law (and especially the Civil Code of 1804) a model for, and indeed a rival to, their own task: to build worlds in words, to speak ideas into being.