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Conscience and Antimilitarism in Vigny's Servitude et grandeur militaires
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Alfred de Vigny's Servitude et grandeur militaires is a highly personal work, but it is related to the historical and literary conjuncture of the 1830's, which saw the French army's Napoleonic grandeur sullied in the suppression of working-class revolts. A refutation of Joseph de Maistre's concept of the soldier as an apocalyptic executioner and Lamennais's denigration of the soldier's honor, Servitude is a characteristic Vigny triptych, but only the third tale, “La Canne de jonc,” provides a morally determining lesson. Here the necessity of experience in the formation of conscience is emphasized. The hero of the tale, Captain Renaud, who throughout his career meets a series of negative and absent fathers (suggesting a metaphysical void that must be filled with human values), inadvertently kills a young Russian cadet during the campaign of France. Years later, Renaud is mortally wounded by a talionic reincarnation of the enfant russe, and expiates his crime in stoic silence. Conscience, as in Vigny's poetry, is attained in the grandeur and honor of silence and renunciation.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974
References
Note 1 in page 56 Le Journal d'un poète, in Alfred de Vigny, Œuvres complètes, ed. F. Baldensperger, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), ii, 1037. The other 2 cantos (for Vigny's imagination is characteristically triangular) are Stello and Cinq-Mars.
Note 2 in page 56 Quoted in Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (Cleveland and New York: World, 1962), p. 200.
Note 3 in page 56 See Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Pion, 1958).
Note 4 in page 56 Souvenirs et réflexions politiques d'un journaliste (Paris : Michel Lévy, 1859), pp. 148–49.
Note 5 in page 56 Lucien Leuwen, in Stendhal, Romans et nouvelles, ed. H. Martineau, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris : Gallimard, 1952), i, 1070–71. The phrase juste milieu, so derisively voiced in Lucien Leuwen (by the Henricinquistes, of course), was the political slogan of the July Monarchy, and was apparently launched by Louis-Philippe himself in an address to the town of Gaillac (Jan. 1831): “Nous cherchons à nous tenir dans le juste milieu également éloigné des excès du pouvoir populaire et des abus du pouvoir royal.” 6Servitude et grandeur militaires, ed. F. Germain (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1965). All references are to this edition.
Note 7 in page 56 “Le Roman et la prose lyrique au xixe siècle,” in Histoire des littératures, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), iii, 1023.
Note 8 in page 56 The source of this tale provides an excellent practical example of the theory of “Vérité dans l'Art,” which Vigny expounded in the preface to Cinq-Mars. See Servitude, pp. xxvii-xxviii.
Note 9 in page 56 The allusion is to Vigny's early poem “La Prison”; the link is the theme of undeserved destiny.
Note 10 in page 56 Progressively layered or tiered composition is characteristic of Vigny's art. It is not by chance that the passage most illustrative of this process should be found precisely in the last pages of Servitude; see the passage beginning “Chaque vague de la mer. . .” on p. 202. See also the history of Servitude's publication in installments and my “Notes on Vigny's Composition,” MLR, 60 (1965), 369–75.
Note 11 in page 56 Thus Germain : “Tant de certitudes convergent dans la Canne de jonc que cette nouvelle fait figure de somme. Comme la Maison du berger, en vers, nous offre un panorama du poète contemplé du seuil de la maison roulante, la Canne de jonc, en prose, nous offre le même horizon humain aperçu sous un autre angle, du haut de cet Honneur où se consomme le martyre de Renaud” (p. lvi). And James Doolittle: “the best piece of prose to come from Vigny's pen” (Alfredde Vigny, New York: Twayne, 1967, p. 119).
Note 12 in page 56 In Ch. xxxv of Paroles d'un croyant, Satan says to the tyrants : “Prenez dans chaque famille les jeunes gents les plus robustes, et donnez-leur des armes, et exercez-les à les manier, et ils combattront pour vous contre leurs pères et leurs frères; car je leur persuaderai que c'est une action glorieuse. Je leur ferai deux idoles, qui s'appelleront Honneur et Fidélité, et une loi qui s'appellera Obéissance passive. Et ils adoreront ces idoles, et ils se soumettront à cette loi aveuglément, parce que je séduirai leur esprit, et vous n'aurez plus rien à craindre” (Œuvres complètes, Paris: Pagnerre, 1844, x, 115). The importance of this passage for Servitude was first noted by Marc Citoleux, Alfred de Vigny, persistances classiques et affinités étrangères (Paris: Champion, 1924), pp. 7–10.
Note 13 in page 56 Similar confrontations between the human and the natural or the supernatural in Vigny's poetry characteristically end with combative, Pascalian affirmations of man's dignity and grandeur in his knowledge of defeat: “J'aime la majesté des souffrances humaines” (“La Maison du berger”) is the most famous instance of this mood. There is also the notion of metaphysical revolt, as instanced in the strophe du silence (“Le Mont des oliviers”), of which more later.
Note 14 in page 56 “—Cependant ce fut plutôt l'idée gigantesque de la guerre qui désormais m'apparut, que celle de l'homme qui la représentait d'une si redoutable façon, et je sentis à cette grande vue un enivrement insensé redoubler en moi pour la gloire des combats, m'étourdissant sur le maître qui les ordonnait. ..” (p. 169).
Note 15 in page 56 Here François Germain notes that “Renaud décide de se sacrifier lui-même à ses deux devoirs plutôt que de sacrifier l'un d'eux” (p. lxix).
Note 16 in page 56 Les Métamorphoses du cercle (Paris: Pion, 1961), p.235. Poulet also quotes with this passage, most appropriately, the lines beginning “Poésie, ô trésor, perle de la pensée!” (v. 134) from “La Maison du berger.” A third passage may be mentioned in this context, namely the last stanza of “Les Oracles” : “Le DIAMANT, c'est l'art des choses idéales, / Et ses rayons d'argent. …” (On the significance of the diamond for Vigny, see François Germain, L'Imagination d'Alfred de Vigny, Paris: José Corti, 1962, p. 219. See also Ch. iii of this work, “L'Univers sphérique.”) The key image linking these passages is the rayon, the beam or beacon that bears witness to the molding of conscience, whose hard brilliance survives and illumines the ages. Such passages are thus related to Vigny's concept of experience's role in the formation of wisdom.
Note 17 in page 56 These “fatherly” relationships are also discernible in “Laurette” and “La Veillée de Vincennes.” Two fathers in “La Canne de jonc” that I shall leave undiscussed are the father of the enfant russe and the Holy Father, Pius vu (the spiritual father to offset Bonaparte, the temporal father).
Note 18 in page 56 Journal, ii, 992. This sentence dates from 1833.