Writing the Aristocratic Self: Violence, Love, and Friendship in Three Seventeenth-Century Memoirs

Abstract

French aristocratic memoirs from the seventeenth century constitute one of the richest and most underused sources available to early modern historians. Most scholars have tended to mine memoirs selectively for wider insights into aristocratic culture, or to look to them as evidence for the beginnings of modern autobiography and individualism. Scholars seeking to find representations of self and self-awareness in these memoirs have traditionally looked for memoirists’ expressions of interior subjectivity. My purpose in this thesis is not so much to enter into the debate about whether seventeenth-century memoirs constitute genuine autobiography, as to examine how three seventeenth-century male aristocratic memoirists actually presented themselves on the page. In this thesis, I examine the memoirs of two professional military nobles who scholars have suggested offer especially intimate depictions of themselves, Louis de Pontis and Henri de Campion. But I argue that while interiority is one of the illuminating and fascinating marks of self-representation in these memoirs, focusing on inner reflection in isolation does not fully capture how such self-representation drew on the social and cultural context in which these authors were embedded. Juxtaposing Pontis and Campion with the memoir of a very different noble, Jean de Gourville, an ennobled commoner, allows us to see how (even in authors whom we might expect to present themselves differently based on their divergent experiences) these memoirists fashioned themselves as men around two topoi of their noble existences: violence and affection. Drawing on Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “self-fashioning”, I argue that a heightened attention to the language, rhetoric, tropes, and emotional expressions of these memoirists allows us to see how interiority was only prompted by their experiences and relations with others in the aristocratic monde. Violence and affection were two intimately linked manifestations of a seventeenth-century masculine elite culture bound by honour, deriving their meaning from the gaze of others. Campion’s, Pontis’s, and Gourville’s idiosyncratic understandings of these complex and multivalent phenomena nonetheless show fascinating commonalities of expression and concept. Although such highly mediated texts are not open windows onto the past, these memoirists’ acts of self-representation are therefore invaluable insights into attitudes and norms in that elite culture. While a study of only three memoirs has important limitations, my approach is a novel one that foregrounds a new historical direction, by suggesting that just as memoirists’ representations of interiority can be illuminated by an understanding of their noble social and cultural context, so too can that noble society and culture be illuminated through the ways that its members represented themselves.