Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon
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Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (January 16, 1675 – March 2, 1755), French soldier, diplomatist and writer of memoirs, was born at Versailles. The peerage granted to his father, Claude de Saint-Simon(1608-1693), previously titled the Vidame of Chartres, is the central fact in his history.
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[edit] Peerage
No one was made a peer who was not a nobleman, but men of the noblest blood might not be, and in most cases were not, peers. Derived at least traditionally and imaginatively from the douze pairs of Charlemagne, the peers were supposed to represent the chosen of the noblesse, and gradually became associated with the parliament of Paris as a quasi-legislative (or at least law-registering) and directly judicial body. The peerage was further complicated by the fact that not persons but the holders of certain fiefs were made peers. Strictly speaking, Saint-Simon was not made a peer, but his estate was raised to the rank of a duché-pairie (or a comté-pairie, as the case might be). The peers were, in a way, representative of the entire body of the Nobility, and it was Saint-Simon's lifelong ideal to convert them into a sort of great council of the nation.
The family's previous title of Vidame was a rare one; in the Middle Ages a vidame commanded the military forces of a bishop and performed other feudal duties unsuitable for a man of the Church. Over time seven of these titles, relating to some of the larger dioceses became attached to specific properties and useable as titles by the owner. An earlier Vidame of Chartres (not related) had been a famous intriguer and participant in the Wars of Religion on the Huguenot side, which still cast something of a shadow over the title in Saint-Simon's day. Rather oddly, the title was given to an elderly character in the court novel La Princesse de Clèves published in 1678, three years after Saint-Simon was born. Since he himself went by this title until he was eighteen, it must have been the subject of jokes, although he does not appear to mention them in his Memoirs.
[edit] Life
His father, a tall and taciturn man, was keen on hunting and completely unlike Saint-Simon, who was clearly extremely garrulous, was exceptionally short, and preferred to live indoors. His father had become a minor favourite of Louis XIII, who was addicted to hunting, and made him his Master of Wolfhounds before giving him his Dukedom when relatively young; he was 68 when Saint-Simon was born. Saint-Simon was high up the order of precedence among the Dukes, but much less grand than most of them in terms of ancestry and wealth.
His mother, Charlotte de l'Aubespine, belonged to a family not of the oldest nobility but one which had been distinguished in the public service at least since the time of Francis I. Her son Louis was well educated, to a great extent by herself, and he had for godfather and godmother Louis XIV and the Queen Marie Thérèse. After some tuition by the Jesuits (especially by Sanadon, the editor of Horace), he joined the mousquetaires gris in 1692. He was present at the siege of Namur, and the battle of Neerwinden. But it was at this very time that he chose to begin the crusade of his life by instigating, if not bringing, an action on the part of the peers of France against Marshal Luxembourg, his victorious general, on a point of precedence.
He fought, however, another campaign or two (not under Luxembourg), and in 1695 married Gabrielle de Durfort, daughter of marshal de Lorges, under whom he had latterly served. He seems to have regarded her with a respect and affection not very usual between husband and wife at the time; and she sometimes succeeded in modifying his aristocratic ideas. But as he did not receive the promotion he desired he flung up his commission in 1702. Thus Louis XIV took a dislike to him, and it was with difficulty that he was able to keep a footing at court. He was, however, intensely interested in all the transactions of Versailles, and by dint of a most heterogeneous collection of instruments, ranging from dukes to servants, he managed to obtain the extraordinary secret information which he has handed down.
His own part appears to have been entirely subordinate. He was appointed ambassador to Rome in 1705, but the appointment was cancelled before he started. At last he attached himself to the duke of Orléans, Louis XIV's nephew and the future Regent. Though this was hardly likely to conciliate Louis' goodwill, it gave him at least the status of belonging to a definite party and it eventually placed him in the position of tried friend to the acting Chief of State. He was able, moreover, to combine attachment to the duke of Burgundy, the Dauphin's son and next heir to the throne, with that to the duke of Orléans.
Both attachments were no doubt all the more sincere because of his undying hatred to "the bastards," that is to say, the illegitimate children of Louis XIV. It does not appear that this hatred was founded on moral reasons or on any real fear that these bastards would be intruded into the succession. The true cause of his wrath was that, by Royal fiat, they had ceremonial precedence over the peers.
The death of Louis seemed to give Saint-Simon a chance of realizing his hopes. The duke of Orléans was at once acknowledged Regent and Saint-Simon was of the council of regency. But no steps were taken to carry out his favourite vision of a France ruled by the noblility, and he had little real influence with the Regent. He was indeed gratified by the degradation of "the bastards," and in 1721 he was appointed ambassador to Spain, to arrange for the marriage (which never took place) of Louis XV and an infanta. His visit was splendid; he received the grandeeship, and, though he also caught smallpox, he was quite satisfied with the business.
After his return he had little to do with public affairs. His own account of the cessation of his intimacy with Orléans and Dubois, the latter of whom had never been his friend, is, like his account of some other events of his own life, rather vague and obscure. But there can be little doubt that he was eclipsed by the favourite. He survived for more than thirty years; but little is known of his life. His wife died in 1743, his eldest son a little later; he had other family troubles, and he was loaded with debt. When he died, at Paris on the 2nd of March 1755, he had almost entirely outlived his own generation (among whom he had been one of the youngest) and the prosperity of his house, though not its notoriety. This last was in strange fashion revived by a distant relative born five years after his own death, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon – the founder of Socialism. All his possessions, including his writings, were seized by the State on his death, and a large part of his Memoirs is missing.
[edit] Fame as a writer
It will have been observed that the actual events of Saint-Simon's life, long as it was and high as was his position, are neither numerous nor noteworthy. He is, however, a rare example of a man who has acquired great literary fame entirely posthumously. He was an indefatigable writer, and he began very early to set down in black and white all the gossip he collected, all his interminable legal disputes of precedence, and a vast mass of unclassified and almost unclassifiable matter. Most of his manuscripts came into the possession of the government, and it was long before their contents were published in anything like fulness. Partly in the form of notes on Dangeau's Journal, partly in that of original and independent memoirs, partly in scattered and multifarious tracts and disquisitions, he had committed to paper an immense amount of matter. But the mere mass of these productions is their least noteworthy feature, or rather it is most remarkable as contrasting with their character and style.
Saint-Simon, though often careless and sometimes even ungrammatical, ranks among the most striking memoir-writers of France, the country richest in memoirs of any in the world. His pettiness, his absolute injustice to his private enemies and to those who espoused public parties with which he did not agree, the bitterness which allows him to give favourable portraits of hardly anyone, his omnivorous appetite for gossip, his lack of proportion and perspective, are all lost sight of in admiration of his extraordinary genius for historical narrative and character-drawing. Saint-Simon is one of the greatest figures of the Grand Siècle, the Golden Age of French prose. He has been compared to Tacitus, and for once the comparison is just. In the midst of his enormous mass of writing, phrases scarcely inferior to the Roman's occur frequently, and here and there are passages of sustained description equal, for intense concentration of light and life, to those of Livy or of any other great historian. As may be expected from the vast extent of his work, it is in the highest degree unequal. He is at the same time not a writer who can be "sampled" easily, in as much as his most characteristic passages sometimes occur in the midst of long stretches of quite uninteresting matter. His vocabulary was extreme and inventive; among other words he is supposed to provide the first use of "intellectual" as a noun.
A few critical studies of him, especially those of Sainte-Beuve, are the basis of much that has been written about him. His most famous passages, such as the account of the death of the dauphin, or of the Bed of Justice where his enemy, the duke of Maine, was degraded, do not give a fair idea of his talent. These are his gallery pieces, his great "engines," as French art slang calls them. Much more noteworthy as well as more frequent are the sudden touches which he gives. The bishops are "cuistres violets"; M. de Caumartin "porte sous son manteau toute la faculté que M. de Villeroy étale sur son baudrier"; another politician has a "mine de chat faché."{translations needed!} In short, the interest of the Memoirs is in the novel and adroit use of word and phrase.
He had a decisive influence on writers like Tolstoy, Barbey d' Aurevilly, Flaubert, Valle-Inclán, Proust, Mujica Lainez and many others.
[edit] Bibliography
Extensive publication of Saint-Simon's Memoirs did not proceed until the 1820s. The first and greatest critical edition was in the Grands écrivains de la France series. The most accessible modern edition consists of nine bible-paper volumes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
[edit] English translations of his Memoirs
- Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon Volume 1 1691-1709 Edited/Translated by Lucy Norton - 1967 London:Hamish Hamilton
- Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon Volume 2 1710-1715 Edited/Translated by Lucy Norton - 1968 London:Hamish Hamilton
- Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon Volume 3 1715-1723 Edited/Translated by Lucy Norton - 1972 London:Hamish Hamilton
- Saint-Simon at Versailles, Edited/Translated by Lucy Norton - 196? London:Hamish Hamilton
NOTE: The last book above is a shortish compilation of the most important and famous passeges from the Memoirs, which are OMITTED from the three longer volumes, which together include about 40% of the whole work. All these are still in print.
- The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon 3 volumes Edited and translated by Bayle St. John - 1888 London:George Allen & Unwin
- A further translation of a substantial portion was made by the brother of CS Lewis; now out of print.
[edit] A study of the Memoirs in English
- Saint-Simon Memorialist by Herbert De Ley - 1975 Urbana/London: University of Illinois Press
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
