Rhetoric as Sexology in the French Enlightenment College: The Maximalist Argument and Its Limits

The intellectual disagreement over the aesthetic value of antiquity that played out between classicists Anne Dacier and Antoine Houdar de la Motte constituted just one spat in a series of debates known as the “Quarrel of ancients and moderns” which wracked the world of French letters in the decades around 1700. The Quarrel’s implications were not only aesthetic, however, but also moral. Early modern rhetors had long used language as a means to probe the nature of gender and sexual difference--a kind of gender studies and sexology avant la lettre that drew especially on the humanists’s reception of Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian. But the Quarrel, and its emergent Enlightenment historicity, threw those ancient certainties about manners and morals—especially concerning masculinity and male sexuality—into doubt. This paper, bringing together methods from intellectual history as well as the history of gender and sexuality, surveys a corpus of rhetoric treatises, textbooks, and classroom records from instructors including Pierre Fromentin, Alexandre Prepetit de Grammont, Balthasar Gibert, Charles Rollin, and Jean-Baptiste Crevier; I argue that the profession viewed their discipline, which sought to inculcate "good taste," as a social and embodied intellectual field. I argue first that such regents played an important role in disseminating the results of the “Quarrel” to their students as they popularized the progress narrative of the Enlightenment, with attendant visions of moral progress and difference. However, the single-sex institutional constraints of the collège, harkening to the Roman forum, restricted the discipline’s range of vision: as only men spoke, rhetoric only provided tools for dealing with masculinity, and therefore remained incomplete. Second, as these rhetoric teachers at elite Parisian schools grappled with the implications of the "Quarrel," their colleges enforced an understanding of gender and sexual difference predicated less and less on aesthetic theory.