In his chronicle of To have to September 23, “Teaching Generation Z”, Emilie Nicolas reports a number of her experiences as a teacher and as a student. She evokes in particular her year in a baccalaureate in French literature too focused, according to her, towards hagiography. She gives two classic works as an example, Madame Bovary, by Flaubert, and Candide, by Voltaire.
It turns out that I worked a lot, in class, on the notion of classical. It is in this context that I have been putting on the program for years Candide. My reading of the work is not that of Emilie Nicolas.
She writes this: “I would have liked to be presented with the Candide by Voltaire not as the apotheosis of tolerance, but as a work which promotes respect between European gentlemen while also conveying an anti-Semitism and negrophobia which will have an important influence on the French Enlightenment. “
“Negrophobic”, Voltaire? Things are obviously a bit more complicated than that.
In the Voltairean tale, who speaks of blacks? Characters and, to a much lesser extent, the narrator. In good method, it is essential to distinguish the first from the second (and from Voltaire). This is one of the essential things that we teach in literary studies: the words of the characters and the narrator do not necessarily reflect those of the author. To ignore this is to ignore the very functioning of literature.
The word Noirs appears above all in the mouth of what Voltaire calls “the old woman”, at 11e and 12e chapter. In the story of her life, this character speaks of “civil wars of blacks against blacks, of blacks against tanned”, and she deplores this “continual carnage”. The narrator, nor, a fortiori, the author, never qualifies these words. This is a reported fictitious speech.
In the rest of her story, “the old woman” uses another term, now considered denigrating, on three occasions, the famous n-word. It is still the character who speaks, and a character who is never valued by the narrator.
At 19e chapter, this word is used by the narrator to designate a slave from Surinam. This is precisely the meaning of this word in the XVIIIe century, as attested by Dictionary of the French Academy of 1799: “This is the name that is given in general to all the black slaves employed in the work of the colonies. “
Not only does the narrator use the vocabulary of his time – which cannot be faulted two centuries later – but this whole passage is a clear denunciation of colonial violence. How is the slave described by the narrator? This poor man was “missing his left leg and his right hand.” The character of Candide is also moved by this “horrible state”. What would justify such a condition? “This is the price you eat sugar at in Europe”, answers the slave lucidly, who continues: “Dogs, monkeys and parrots are a thousand times less unhappy than us. »Physical violence arises from economic violence. We could not be clearer.
Anyone who wants to call Voltaire a “negrophobe” should demonstrate it, which Emilie Nicolas did not do.
However, is it necessary, when we teach today Candide, limit oneself strictly to a contextual reading of the tale without taking into account the contemporary connotations of its vocabulary? No. For my part, although the full reading of the 19e This chapter continues and will continue to be part of my teaching, I have decided not to read the beginning of it aloud in front of my students, because I am aware of the load that this lexicon can have. I adopt the lesson given by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor in her lecture The N-Word in the Classroom : we can study all the words of the past; no one is required to say them in front of a class.
However, we must always relate these words to the contexts in which they were said.
Response from Emilie Nicolas:
M. Melançon concludes his letter on the importance of putting the work in its context, and I am one of them. In his Treatise on metaphysics, Voltaire exclaims: “Finally, I see men who seem to me superior to these negroes, as negroes are superior to apes, and as apes are superior to oysters and other animals of this species. ” In his Essay on the Mores and Spirit of Nations, he explains the supposed physical and moral inequalities between the “races” by a theory of the multiple origins of the human species.
In Candide, Voltaire shows a certain pity for the fate of the slave. There is a difference between pity and abolitionism, and certainly between pity and belief in equality. Besides, being anti-racist in the 18th centurye century would have profoundly altered his career. A significant portion of French wealth depended on the exploitation of my ancestors in what would become Haiti. Not to be negrophobic, in its context, was in a way an attack on the homeland and its social order.
Like you, I dig into what is hidden behind the famous n word. And that’s what I find there.
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