The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848

By William M. Reddy

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520324497

William M. Reddy

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The Invisible Code

The Invisible Code

Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848

William M. Reddy

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1997 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reddy, William M.

The invisible code: honor and sentiment in postrevolutionary France, 1814-1848 / William M. Reddy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-20536-7 (alk. paper)

i. France—History—Revolution, 1789-1799—Influence.

2. Honor—France—History—19th century. 3. France—Social conditions—19th century. 4. Women and democracy—France— History — 19th century. I. Title.

DC252.R38 1997

944.04—deão 96-21675

Printed in the United States of America 987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ©

To Claire

Contents

Contents

Illustrations and Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

2 The Hidden Pedagogy of Honor Cicero, Racine, Sévigne

3 Sensitive Hearts Marital Honor and Women’s Identity

4 The Ladder Up Accumulating Honors in the Ministry of the Interior

5 Condottieri of the Pen The Politicali Honor of Journalists

6 Conclusion Gender and Sentiment

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and Tables

Plates

Following p. 136

The Mistress of the House. Engraving by Eugene Lamy, 1840.

The Adulterous Woman. Engraving by Hippolyte Lucas, 1840.

The Vegetable Woman. Engraving by Pauquet, 1841.

The Supernumerary. Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828.

Asking for a Raise. Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828.

Ten o’clock: Reading Newspapers, Breakfast, Trimming Quills.

Lithograph by Henry Monnier, 1828.

The Political Journalist. Engraving by Paul Gavami, 1840.

The Literary Journalist. Engraving by Eugène Lamy, 1840.

Figures

i. Number of Newspapers Worked for by Journalists. 212

Tables

i. Variation in Number of Newspapers Worked for, as Reported

in Two Sources, for Fifty-nine Journalists. 213

Preface

The great legacy of French revolutionary legislation was consolidated and transmitted to the nineteenth century between 1804 and 1810 in a number of Napoleonic compilations, including the Code cM and the Code pénal. The abolition of privilege, equality before the law, the right of due process, freedom of contract—these and other principles of 1789 were enshrined in definitive form in the codes, in terse, easy to understand French. The codes also consolidated a noteworthy decline in the status of women from a high point of the early 1790s. The authority of fathers and husbands over women and their property was rendered complete; women were firmly excluded from participation in politics; divorce was retained, but made much more difficult to obtain than under the initial divorce law of 1792. (Divorce would be eliminated entirely immediately after the Bourbon Restoration, in 1816.) Husbands were given the power of marital correction over wives and were excused even if they should slay a wife caught in the act of adultery. The Codes provided the structure of a new male public sphere of open competition, in which talent and merit were to receive their due and in which property and money would flow freely from hand to hand in response to the pressures of supply and demand, and from which the family and women would be firmly excluded.

But there was another code, an invisible one, that was also transmitted to the future by the work of the Napoleonic years, a code of honor. It was invisible, as we shall see, because observers presumed honor to be a thing of the past and easily categorized its manifestations as traces of the shameful influence of bourgeois self-interest. This code of honor had a family and marital dimension and a public or political dimension, both of which will be explored in some detail (but far from exhaustively) here. It also had a commercial dimension, of which, given the limits of this study, very litde will be said, but which certainly deserves more attention than it has received to date.

This honor code differed from its old-regime predecessor principally in its all-inclusiveness. Before the Revolution, the fastidious social distinctions of the corporate order had always provided the individual with a first bulwark for the defense of honor. Whether a baker, a window maker, or a magistrate of the prestigious Paris Parlement, every man in old-regime society, except for the very lowest reaches, possessed the honor of his estate, and transmitted that honor to his spouse and his children. A casual insult—the angry words of a customer in the bake shop, a stone flung at the procession of magistrates into the Palais de Justice—threatened status, but in a less direct way than after the Revolution. In the new laissez- faire order, any man who could afford respectable clothing and possessed the polish of literacy could contend for honor on an equal footing with the great. No honor was above challenge. Forms of politeness were democratized, as was the duel. This new code of honor, although written nowhere, was enforced by the new, more numerous, more public law courts of the postrevolutionary era in a number of ways. They interpreted the articles of the Code civil dealing with marriage as a guide for the protection of family honor. They upheld the press laws that responded to the special need of the king to protection from insult. They recognized the de facto legality of duels that were carried out in proper form. But this code of honor was also enforced in other ways, especially by men’s extremely strong emotional responses, feelings of shame that could overwhelm their better judgment and which, up until now, have seldom attracted the attention they deserve from historians. These feelings could lead men to fail to defend themselves in the (shameful) arena of the public courtroom against separation requests by their wives. These feelings could force men to importune their superiors for raises and promotions, revealing in spite of themselves a sense of desperation about their lowly fates. These feelings could lead men to hurl invective, to fabricate insults and scandalous lies in Parliament and in the press, in the hope of scarring the reputation of political enemies.

All the evidence suggests that women’s experience of shame was very different. Honor could often seem less important to them than emotional fulfillment; sentimental attachments were what women prized most or mourned most if they went sour. This was deemed to be a commonsense truth about women, and many women acted as if it were true for them.

But how did this difference come about? Without pretending to offer a complete answer, this study points toward a complementarity in the way honor and emotion, or sentiment—as the female realm of feeling was labeled—were conceived and experienced by early nineteenth-century French men and women. This complementarity hinged on the idea that male shame was not a feeling, at least not a part of the female lexicon of sentiment, and that therefore men, who regulated their behavior on the basis of honor, acted more rationally than women, were free of the bewildering play of feeling, able to see and think with greater clarity and consistency. The male public sphere thus anchored its legitimacy on the false notion that, by excluding women, just as when they excluded children or the insane, men were excluding the irrational. The idea that private feeling could be contained or eliminated from public deliberation or action—in spite of its evident falseness—ran very deep, as it still does today, for that matter. The present study constitutes the beginnings of a critique of this idea; it can be read as an initial effort to follow through on the implications of a telling comment of Germaine de Staci’s, quoted by Denise Riley: By what means can a distinction be made twixt the talents and the mind? How can we set aside what we feel, when we trace what we think? how impose silence on those sentiments which live in us, without losing any of the ideas which those sentiments have inspired? What kinds of writings would result from these continual combats? Had we not better yield to all the faults which arise from the irregularities of nature?¹ 1

1 From Germaine de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutionssociales (Paris, [1800] 1991), 415; cited by Denise Riley, Ami That Name? Feminism and the Category of Women in History (Minneapolis, 1988), 40; translation as cited in Riley. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French in this book are by the author.

Acknowledgments

This study has been some time in the making, and would not have been possible without the generous support of a number of institutions. A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a Fulbright fellowship from the Franco-American Commission for Educational Exchange funded the initial rounds of research on which the study was based. The American Philosophical Society and the Arts and Sciences Research Council of Duke University supported a number of those indispensable return trips to the archives and libraries of Paris to verify and expand on earlier work. The Triangle French Studies Group read and discussed early versions of two parts of the manuscript. An early version of chapter 5 was presented to the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France at the University of Chicago, and a paper on marital separations was presented to the Department of History at Northwestern University. Denial and Historical Research, a paper discussing the process of doing research on this project, was generously received by participants in Narrating Histories: A Workshop organized by Robert Rosenstone at the California Institute of Technology. I wish to thank all those who read and commented on parts of the manuscript at these sessions, as well as numerous friends and colleagues who did so, including Alex Keyssar, Claudia Koonz, Andy Gordon, Cynthia Herrup, Kristen Neuschel, Michele Longino, Linda Orr, Alice Kaplan, William Sewell, and Sarah Maza.

1

Introduction

The project that gave rise to this book was originally conceived as an ethnographic study in the classic sense, that is, a study based on the assumption that a given community or society founds its unity— such as it may be—on a shared outlook, made up of a common sense that for the most part goes unspoken and a cosmology that must be articulated in special ways on certain public occasions. Doubt has been cast in recent years on whether this assumption can serve as a valid starting point for the study of social life. Its capacity to yield useful knowledge has been questioned; its political implications have been denounced. In what way and to what extent individuals living in a given place or region share a common sense or a cosmology is a politically loaded question. When a self-serving politician asserts that the American people or tous les françaises et les français feel, want, or reject something, or a classic ethnographer asserts what the Samoans or the Balinese feel or believe, each brushes aside all questions of diversity, oppression, contestation, resistance, uncertainty, and change. In the last twenty years, a wide variety of feminist, Marxist, poststructuralist, and halfie ethnographers have called the ethnographic tradition to account for its complicity in imperialism, its dichotomizing we/they tone of voice, its romanticization of the (nonexistent) primitive.¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and others, meanwhile, have advanced an influential theory of practice aimed at recovering the uncertainty of everyday decision making, the importance of strategy and personal style—the game element in social life—that the old notion of culture failed to accommodate.2 3

Yet, these objections are by now so well established and new approaches have been so widely applied that we are in danger of losing our ability to conceptualize the whole in any sense. Even oppression, resistance, and variation require that there be standards and official norms to impose or to flaunt; even personal strategic innovation requires that there be a few widely shared rules of the game. These must be articulated before an outsider who does not know them can begin to appreciate individual choices, conflicts, or power plays. (Outsider here does not necessarily mean a Western traveler or ruler; outsiders may come from any point on the compass.) Marshall Sahlins has proposed an attractive means of keeping a balance between structure and variation; his solution is to view cultural structures as performative; agents, he insists, must make decisions whether to apply them or not. When an agent chooses to apply a structural schema, she performs it and simultaneously puts it to the test of action; the unfolding situation can lead to alteration of the structure even as it is realized in performance.4 Thus, structure, practice, and history, in Sahlins’s view, really need each other; only false dichotomies separate them. Lila Abu-Lughod has likewise called for ethnographies of the particular—something very close to historical narrative. Like historical narrative, these require that the principles whose contingent application in time are being described nonetheless find a limited and provisional articulation.5

In her own ethnographic work, in addition, Abu-Lughod has posed the question of emotion. If older notions of culture were too rigid, and agents enjoy more freedom than was once supposed, from what source do their actions spring? Emotion or feeling has emerged in Abu-Lughod’s work, and in other recent ethnographies, as a site where cultural schemas and agents’ particularities come together to produce desire, fear, experience, practice.6 Emotion has recently arisen as an important issue for feminist scholars working on the history of the novel in France, as well. A number of studies have demonstrated that the sentimental novel was pioneered and sustained by women writers, whose work entailed a covert critique of the aristocratic social order.7 Feelings, these novelists maintained, were more important than wealth or honor. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz has argued, in fact, that the failure of Western social sciences (other than psychology) to deal with emotion in any systematic way is symptomatic of a parochial Western notion that feelings are not (or cannot be) public.8 Lutz’s research has shown that other societies treat feeling as public and as an instrument or guide for collective decision making. (This is a finding that would have been welcomed by Germaine de Staël, who, in her bold survey of the history of literature, published in 1800, and in her sentimental novels, pleaded for the centrality of sentiment in public life.)9 The arguments of these works by anthropologists and literary critics converge to provide a useful conceptual tool for reintroducing individual experience and variation into historical ethnography. This tool is the notion of feeling, not as a private and idiosyncratic matter but as a domain that can be glimpsed through the documents and in which public schemas and values merge with a personal search for order. There is already an important model, highly suggestive for the historical study of emotion, in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, in which he develops the notion of a structure of feeling.10 Such structures, in Williams’s work, represent attempts to resolve contradictions that arise between values and practices; they point toward instabilities at once personal and political.

These works suggest a method for conceptualizing cultural history that treats variation, political power, and change not as residual problems but as central to the analysis of the patterns that the documents present. Cultural historians have widely recognized the need for a new anchor of analysis, independent of old notions of culture. Lynn Hunt’s turn toward psychoanalysis in her recent study of the French Revolution and Lindal Roper’s dependence on psychoanalysis for the understanding of early modern witchcraft are responses to the widely perceived need to look beyond purely cultural interpretation to explain change and conflict. But these studies also demonstrate the difficulty of finding an acceptable point of departure that does not imply too much. Psychoanalysis is both insightful and unwieldy in its assumptions about the individual. Raymond Williams, along with Catherine Lutz, Lila Abu-Lughod, and other ethnographers, offers an approach to individual feeling that brings less theoretical baggage with it. The working assumption in this project, following their inspiration, has been that texts communicate feelings as well as messages. It is not necessary to inquire whether the individual has expressed her feelings accurately or sincerely. It is not necessary to have a perfecdy accurate reading of the feeling content of a text. The feelings one finds expressed in a document are, within some range of uncertainty, roughly those that the actors wished to convey, whether sincerely or insincerely. As such they have historical significance. Even if we can, in the present, only roughly guess about the feeling content, there is every reason to try to characterize it, simply because feeling is one of the most important facets of social life. By examining feeling, however tentatively, the historian frees herself of the false comfort implicit in the idea that the past is made up of precise cultural structures that individuals unfailingly apply.

In order to study as many features as possible of such a well-documented society as early nineteenth-century France, and still finish the project within a reasonable time frame, I chose three disparate kinds of case material , different enough one from another to give an ethnographic perspective on the whole of society. I tried to keep the number of cases in each instance small enough to be workable. The three kinds of material were: (i) 131 marital separation cases from the period 1821-1847, to help get information on gender and on the marriage contract; (2) personnel files from the Ministry of the Interior—including a sample of 129 personal dossiers and a chronological series of personnel action records from the period 1814-1848—in order to provide a glimpse of salaried employment in this age of laissez-faire and freedom of contract; (3) memoirs, biographical entries, and essays concerning approximately 170 journalists active during the period 1820-1850, to gain perspective on how individuals earned a living through the public exercise of one’s reason, as Kant put it, in the new public sphere of the postrevolutionary era. I prepared reports on each kind of case material and published them separately.11 What united these three disparate realms, I believed initially, was that the persons captured by each sampling of material would have in common, for the most part, status within the middle class and, simultaneously, relative powerlessness, a subjection to the discipline of others through the contractual relationships that defined their social identities (remembering that marriage, like employment in government or journalism, was also a form of contract). I expected to find similar forms of discipline and resistance in these contractual relationships. As a follow-up to an earlier study that criticized social historians’ use of the concept of class as too simplistic, I proposed to examine in detail the oppression, suffering, and powerlessness of key members of the bourgeoisie, the fabled ruling class of the nineteenth century. What I found instead, at first to my great surprise, was an overwhelming preoccupation with honor in each of these social domains. In retrospect, I now realize that preoccupation with honor was a likely means by which disciplinary pressures would leave their trace for persons of any stratum in early nineteenth-century French society. This was especially so, however, for persons who saw themselves as rulers, that is, as participating in the status, if not the reality, of power. Honor was all the more important for such persons precisely because it was the only share they could claim in hegemony.

As I tried to piece together what this code was and how people thought about it, I was confronted with compelling evidence for the deeply gendered character of the modern public sphere. That public has for long meant male is not in itself a new contention, but it is a contention whose implications have only begun to be teased out. In particular, the relationship between gender and emotion, between the female and the personal, sentimental, or private, is so intimate and elemental that it has shaped and continues to shape public action, although actors often have no awareness of it.

The Democratization of Honor

A number of recent studies have pointed to the importance of honor in French history, and one, Robert Nye’s ambitious overview of the subject, has turned up a rich mine of material on practices and outlooks long neglected by social historians.¹² Most of this work, though, has been carried out on specialized subjects that have not required the investigator to take a larger look at the implications of her findings. Two studies that have tried for a larger view, Nye’s and Edward Berenson’s, have attempted to characterize bourgeois customs and oudooks, but without raising the question of what their findings imply for traditional notions of the bourgeoisie and its role in history. At the same time, none of these studies has attempted to analyze in depth an essential feature of honor, that is, the keeping up of appearances, the avoidance of shame by concealment. Although this has always been central to the meaning of the term honor in the European context, it has, over the centuries, consistendy been spoken of in a partially veiled way.

There are moments when one may recognize that concealment is an honorable act, and others when it is necessary to deny (even when speaking in general, without reference to specific individuals) that honor is any different from virtue (that is, from a quality that inheres in action without reference to whether it is known or hidden). The denials are necessary in general in order to protect specific instances of concealment. One could not say in the eighteenth century, for example, at least not in an official pronouncement of principle, The Académie française is comprised of the finest and most honorable men of letters in the realm, as well as some who conceal the corrupt means they employ to win election to that body. Such a statement is itself an insult, even though the role of influence may be well known, and even though it may also be, in principle, perfecdy honorable to influence the Academic’s elections—so long as one conceals one’s means of doing so. Definitions of the term honor in dictionaries going back to the seventeenth century have specifically noted the word’s odd duality. The current Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary’s definition of honor, for example, refers to both good name or public esteem and a keen sense of ethical conduct—two very different, sometimes opposed concepts. Most imperative of all forms of concealment, in every period, has been that involving infractions of virtue by a close kin, spouse, or offspring.13 Protection of the family name by means of lying or covering up has always been considered laudable; no one has ever proposed that it is saintly to denounce one’s wife for adultery or one’s brother for fraud. As we shall see, it was just this disjuncture between honor’s imperative of concealment and virtue’s imperative of truth telling that gave birth to the plot of what has been called the first modern novel, Princesse de Cièves, in 1678.14 The ideology of honor is therefore a strange mix of avowals and circumlocutions, blanket judgments and refusals to speak, that gives it a distinctive and peculiar flavor.15 It is worth noting that Pierre Bourdieu’s original critique of ethnographic objectivism and formulation of the concept of habitus was carried out in analyzing field material from Kabylia, a social order dominated by honor, where a gap constantly yawned between the explicit norms individuals enunciated on request and the honor strategies they followed in specific practical contexts.16

Honor’s precise relation to shame has also attracted little attention in current research on French history. Shame is normally considered to be an emotion, on a par with guilt, desire, joy, or sadness. Yet, it is also our only available opposite to honor, even though honor is never thought of as an emotion. As the opposite of honor, shame may exist when it is not felt, that is, the actions of shameless persons are shameful, whereas persons who feel shame may act honorably as a result of this feeling, anticipating its pain. This odd duality of the word, which exists in most European languages, certainly in the French dyad honneur/honte, is the counterpart to the odd ambiguity of honor.¹⁷ The special ambiguity of honor is displayed in its ability to act at times almost as a synonym for virtue and at other times to represent virtue’s opposite, as when it is used to refer to mere honors, the exterior trappings of superiority. As a result of these peculiarities of vocabulary and necessary circumlocutions, the workings of honor in the French past cannot be understood on the basis of explicit statements or official pronouncements. Books on dueling, even accounts of insults or duels, do not explain all. The very words of participants that most authentically describe their experiences are inflected by the need to avoid insult (or else to use this potent weapon in a strategically appropriate way). These intricacies have impeded research. But with the question of gender now squarely on the agenda, there is an advantage to examining honor as both a cultural and an emotional construct. Recognition that shame is a powerful feeling offers the chance to glimpse the emotional underpinnings of male rejection of female sentiment. The question of honor was central to the thought of Montesquieu and Rousseau, yet we find that, from the generation of Tocqueville and Marx on, honor was widely deemed to have no further relevance for the understanding of modern society. Now recent research tells us that honor remained vigorous. How could this be? To understand how honor could remain important even as it disappeared from view, it is necessary first to review briefly how revolutionary and Napoleonic legislators sought to found male equality by redrawing the lines between public and private.

The revolutionaries sought to clarify and delimit spheres and competences. They made public the holding of government office by the elimination of venality; they made public the legislative function, replacing the secret deliberations of the king’s council with the open debates and voting of the National Assembly. They made public the deployment of coercion by eliminating lettres de cachets and by opening all courtrooms to public observation; they made public the deliberations of citizens by establishing freedom of speech and of the press. They made private all commercial establishments, previously subject to the public regulation of the guilds and capable of enjoying royal privileges and monopolies. They increased the strength of the barriers that protected the family from public interference by eliminating police backing for the authority of fathers and for the enforcement of religious vows and by passing divorce legislation that rendered marriage much more like a contingent contract between private individuals.

In this way, the revolutionaries walled off as beyond the sphere of public action a private realm of the family and household as well as a quasiprivate realm of commercial contract and buying and selling. By doing so they made limitations on government interference—which were essential to individual liberty—coincide with just those sorts of activities an adult male head of family would have most wished to keep secret when seeking to protect his honor. The importance of honor was both reinforced and altered by the new property system. Arranged marriages remained as vital as ever to family well-being, and all the careful management of reputation and appearances entailed by marital strategy would continue to play a role into the early twentieth century. Personal honor and personal liberty became intertwined. The private in the sense of freedom from government interference and the private in the sense of family secrets, male authority, and the management of family name, were merged.

The Revolution also brought a democratization of the aristocratic linkage of honor with conspicuous merit. Now, every worthy male citizen, irrespective of birth or rank, could distinguish himself by bravery in defense of fatherland or, analogously, by arduous public service. The long years of warfare, the mixing of millions of French men from all strata of society in the Grande Armée, solidified the hegemony of this democratized code—an outcome that would have chagrined the Jacobin advocates of Rousseauian virtue. Robert Nye concludes that the imperial officer corps under Napoleon was particularly influential in bringing back the duel—a ritual of honor formerly limited to aristocrats and a few wealthy bourgeois, now democratized to reflect the diverse social origins of Napoleon’s officers, and evolving a code of everyday civility that was to prevail among men without distinction of social rank. Nye cites as typical of the attitude of postrevolutionary etiquette manuals the quip by Louis-Damien Emeric in a guide published in 1821: "All men should be equal before la politesse as they are before the law."18 Edouard Alletz agreed in 1837 that "LÄ politesse is the simulacrum of love for one’s neighbor; it is a tacit truce between men consumed by self-love, the silence of egotism, an involuntary respect for human dignity. It has been invented to re-establish in this world the appearance of equality."19

Although the revolutionaries succeeded in democratizing the honor code, nineteenth-century social observers spoke uniformly as if the old aristocratic code had been, not open to all, but set aside, abolished. As a wellspring of action, nineteenth-century thinkers asserted, honor was replaced by interest.20 Before the Revolution, to be motivated by interest was to be less than honorable. Only a commoner might avow such a motive; that is precisely what distinguished commoners from those of noble status, whose wealth, education, and family traditions oriented them toward selfless dedication to king and public service. Nobles were not allowed to engage in retail or industrial occupations for this reason, just as commoners were barred from serving at the highest levels of state and military institutions.

By 1820, the word interest had taken on a new connotation; it became an amoral, scientific term designating whatever it was that people strove for. Yet, it retained the sense of the pursuit of gain that it had always had. In the context of the postrevolutionary liberal order, commercial exchange had assumed a paradigmatic quality, appearing as the most essential or most natural form of human interaction. The use of the term interest in this sense had gained currency thanks to the Physiocrats and Adam Smith and its promotion was carried on in France by J.-B. Say, Adolphe Blan- qui, and other economists in the early nineteenth century. Yet, even those who kept their distance from political economy nonetheless agreed that interest was the essential motive force of human action in a bourgeois laissez-faire social order because such an order was based on absolute prop erty rights and freedom of contract. This was just the kind of society that the Revolution had produced, in the general view.

However, this was also just the society that was driven by concern for honor, as recent research shows—driven to such an extent that the nineteenth century must be considered the great age of dueling. This was the period when the restrictions placed on the dress and public behavior of women reached their apogee, a period whose politics consisted more than ever before or since of polemics based on insult and calumny, the period when it was first conceived that shame might be a strong enough emotion to cause temporary insanity, a period of extreme public sensitivity to slight and innuendo, the great age of political caricature (that is, of the development of a visual code of insults), an age of unequaled social disdain and misogyny posing as realism in art and literature.21 Could it be that, when honor reached its apogee of influence, it became invisible in a peculiar way and went unrecognized by all the systematic thinkers of the age, as well as most historians up until the last decade or so? Why did it become conventional to label all contention for honors and all efforts to avoid shame as actions motivated by interest in the new, broader meaning of the term? We shall look closely at how this trick was carried out in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book.

Besides being spoken of in this reductionist way, honor also became the object of a certain naturalizing discourse carried out by physiologists, psychiatrists, racial theorists, and others. In this context, honor emerged as an element of nature. A timid, easily insulted man was likely to be impotent. Virile, touchy men were more intelligent, more rational. Women, incapable of being guided by fear of shame, could not be trusted to act or think rationally. Hence the necessity of keeping them out of politics. The same was true of inferior races, such as North Africans and Blacks. Jews were considered to be a people without honor. Balzac’s Gobseck is emblematic of this prejudice in the early part of the century, as are Déroulède’s anti-Semitic stereotypes at century’s end. This way of thinking about honor was muted in the first half of the century, often implicit in offhand comments. As the works of Nye, Harris, Berenson, and others show, however, this naturalizing discourse became common, if not predominant, in the second half of the century.22

In the nineteenth-century view, honors were pursued either as a part of a strategy for maximizing gain or as items of preference, like consumer goods, that individuals chose for their own reasons; honor was a natural quality of the superior European male, not a social construct. In either case, honor did not have to be understood or theorized at the level of society or history. Hence honor’s power and its invisibility were connected. It was a part of nature, a mundane everyday reality behind politeness and ambition; it was not a historical or a social phenomenon. It was genetic, psychological, unalterable therefore, and banal. Cultural anthropologists are familiar with characterizing the operation of principles that are all but invisible to their practitioners; and because such principles do operate, however fitfully or partially, there is still some sense to the term culture.

If honor in general was too banal to be worth mentioning, individuals also avoided speaking of their own honor in many circumstances. A journalist or a politician had to appear virtuous, disinterested, altruistic, truthful; this was how he kept his honor. A merchant or businessman had to appear trustworthy, prudent, hardworking. Only when challenged in public with lying, fraud, or corruption did a man find it necessary to speak of his honor or to speak of defending his honor. It would have been suspicious for someone to say, I strive to appear virtuous because I am concerned with my honor. Making the point explicidy in this way was selfdefeating. It was important to one’s honor to appear concerned, not so much with just honor, but with the things that bring it: generosity, selfsacrifice, courage, honesty, self-esteem. In addition, there was no longer a special kind of honor appropriate to each status in society, as there had been in the old regime, and this was one more reason why the concept did not have to come up explicitly in daily practice.