art- saisselin- dandyism and honnêtete

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Dandyism and Honntet

Author(s): Rmy G. SaisselinSource: The French Review, Vol. 29, No. 6 (May, 1956), pp. 457-460Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/383046 .

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Dandyism and Honn^tet"by Rkmy G. Saisselin

IDEAS DIE HARD. The idea of the honn'te homme urvived muchlonger than Paul Hazard would have it. In his Crise de la conscienceeuropeennehe puts the death of honn&tetWbout 1690. In the realm of thehistory of ideas that venerable ideal may well have been theoretically deadby then, but in real life, in the salons, in courts, in the high society of theeighteenth century, the ideal nevertheless continued to live on and thehonnetehommecontinued to exist. We do not say that the idea of the honn&tehommeunderwent no transformations. But we do say that the idea of thehonn'te hommeas a model man continued to survive even in models setup in opposition to him. Thus the notion of the philosophedoes not differcompletely from that of the honn~tehomme.One has but to read the defini-tion of philosophein the Encyclopedieto be aware of it. And the idea, wesuspect, survived in an exaggerated form in the dandy.The definition of the dandy in Littr6 is brief, simple, and damning:Dandy, s.m. Hommerecherchedans sa toiletteet exaggrant es modesjusqu'auridicule. This is much too simple. Dandyism is much more than an over-scrupulous attention to dress. Dandyism is, like honn~tete,a philosophy oflife put into practice. Baudelaire saw much truer than Littr6 when he wrote:

Le dandysme est une institution vague...; tr&sancienne, puisque Cesar,Catalina, Alcibiade nous en fournissent des types 6clatants; trWs-generale,puisqueChateaubriand 'a trouv6e ans lesforets etau borddes lacs du nouveaumonde ((Euvrescompletes,ed. "Club du meilleur livre," 1955, II, p. 613).The accent on universality and the references to the well-known figuresof the ancient world are full of interest. One has but to include Alexanderthe Great, Socrates, and Cicero, plus various heroes of Plutarch and thegallery of what a Montaigne, a chevalier de M6r6, a Saint-Evremond,would have considered a sort of pantheon of gentlemen would be complete.We may surmise that to Baudelaire the dandy was an honnetehomme inthe nineteenth century. This kinship is not arbitrarily established. Weread in a Theorie de l'6lgance by Eughne Chapus: "Les gens 6lgans seretrouvent ntremille (Paris, 1844, p. 18)." Yet this could be said about the

honndtesgens too; they too could recognize each other by a je ne sais quoiwhich distinguished them from the ordinary run of men. And Balzac, in aTraite de l'li6gance, insists at length, as Baudelaire does, on the leisure457

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458 FRENCH REVIEW

required for the elegant life. Yet honngtet6was also conditional on leisure,was a function of a leisure class, and held itself to be a sufficient raisond'etre for man. Thus we find striking and noteworthy parallels betweendandyism and honnitete.Both claimed universality, both were conditionalon leisure, both were an end in themselves. The Chevalier de M6r6 heldhonngtet6 o be the "quintessence of all virtues" and Baudelaire associatedit with a cult of beauty, of the self, of aristocratic distinction:

Que ces hommes se fassent nommerrafinds, incroyables, beaux, lions oudandys, tous sont issus d'une mdmeorigine; tous participentdu memecarac-tared'opposition et de r'volte; tous sont des repr'sentantsde ce qu'il y a demeilleurdans l'orgueil humain, de ce besoin, troprare chezceux d'aujourd'huide combattre tde detruire a trivialit6(Idem. p. 611)."This quotation illustrates at once what dandyism and honn&teteave incommon and how dandyism is a form of honnetetewhich has been deformed.For, in a sense, the dandy is the honnetehomme n a paradoxical situation;he is the honnete homme in a democratic society. Thence the eccentriccharacter of the dandy: he is at odds with society. The honnete homme s,on the contrary, in perfect accord with it. Philinte is a perfect example ofit and one might say that Alceste is spiritually a dandy in a gentleman'ssociety. Alceste indeed would have been happy to be in the nineteenthcentury where it was the fashion to be angry at society; where, in otherwords, it was properto assume a pose. Alceste is a poseurin the seventeenthcentury and that is why he is ridiculous. Philinte is not ridiculous, but thenhe does not pose, he accepts society, is at peace with it. Now displacePhilinte to the nineteenth century and he becomes Alceste, not because hechanges, not because he changes character, but because society has changedabout him.The honnetehomme was theoretically universal, divorced from ties withany particular social class. But in fact he was tied to the leisure class, theland-owning nobility and the very high bourgeoisie. He was a phenomenonof the Ancien Regime. Make of him a survivor of two revolutions and hebecomes, in the 1840's, a paradoxical figure, because, unlike the commonrun of men he does not care for Guizot's enrichissez-vous.In the colorful

language of Sartre the salaud of the seventeenth century has become abdtard,but also a passeiste.This dandy is, however, not content to be a paradoxical gentleman. Thedandy is the honn&tehomme engage. Here again a paradox, because thehonnete homme is by definition not an engag4. "Le vrai honn&te omme estcelui qui ne se pique de rien means precisely that, in this context, and thealoofness of a Fontenelle is a perfect example of this gentlemanly disdain



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DANDYISM AND HONNETETE 459for all causes and commitments. Now the dandy engages himself in a mostpeculiar manner: he will assume an air of indifferencetowards all that othermen value. Yet we know that this indifference is not sincere since it is adeclaration of war on the trivial, the vulgar, in brief on that formidableenemy, the bourgeois. The dandy thus may also be considered the honnetehommeengaged in a class struggle. His tactics are shock tactics: etonner,scandaliser,et dpater e bourgeoisare the orders of the day. And since in thisrelationship of the dandy to the bourgeois it is extremely important thatlines be drawn, that distinctions be clear, the dress becomes important.In a century which contributed the paletotand pantalonto dress, the dandyendeavors to distinguish himself from the mass of dark and grey withcolor, line, dash, and frills. Thence the kinship of the dandy with whatBalzac calls l'elegant.This insistence on clothes marks a departure from the practises ofhonnetete. The gentleman was not especially concerned with his dress solong as it was decent. The dandy's preoccupation with what might beconsidered externals, however, marks a decline in true honnetet6. But thenthis is a result of the paradoxical situation of the dandy-honnetehomme.But another result and a more important one of this paradoxical situationis the relation of the dandy to esthetics. Dandyism is also a cult of beauty.Honnetet6could be called that too, provided one insist that it was linkedto classical esthetics and also to the idea of bienseance. Honnetete thenwould be the imitation of noble lives of antiquity. Montaigne, de M6r6,Saint-Evremond, in a sense imitated Socrates, Caesar, Cicero. Thus theywere in tradition with classical esthetics, one which insisted on the imitationof models and on respect for decorum. Now the dandies, though, as wehave seen with Baudelaire, they may have claimed kinship with heroes ofantiquity, did not really imitate them. One finds rather a nostalgia for theeighteenth century among them than one for antiquity. Thus Musset forexample, himself a dandy, had a nostalgia for the late century: "Si le XIXesi&cle ui paraft trivial, c'est qu'il songe A a R6gence, au Parc-aux-Cerfs"(Pierre Moreau, leRomantisme,Paris, 1932, p. 377). One might then perhapssay that dandyism is a nostalgia for the lost paradise of the honnetehomme,that eighteenth century so artfully evoked by the Goncourt brothers (intheir book on the women of that century), or by Taine's description of thesalons of the Age of Reason. It is a literary eighteenth century, one offinesse, taste, of amour-gozt, of elegance, and of brilliant salons which isrecalled by these dandies, one in which they must have imagined them-selves as loved, as brilliant, and as subsidized.For them salons were of the past. For let us note that if the salon wasthe natural habitat of the honn&teomme t was not that of the dandy. Theclass struggle he fought required him to go out into the streets and so the



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460 FRENCH REVIEWdandy became a boulevardier, frequenterof the Jockey club, and Tortoni's.His gestures of defiance are made in public and gentlemanliness, honnatetM,survived into the dandy who, transformed by the new environment, goesgloriously down in a flourish of fancy waistcoats, walking sticks, lacqueredshoes, frilled shirts, and yellow gloves.One might thus say that honnetetewas not analyzed out of existence bythe critical reason in the late seventeenth century. Rather the course ofdecline of honn&tet's a slipping of biensdance nto bienfaisance, a rally inthe form of elegance, thence a further effort in terms of dandyism, only toend as the esthetics of gloves and waistcoats.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN


art- saisselin- dandyism and honnêtete

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