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James LAWRENCE

[FEMINISME] Le Panorama des boudoirs, ou l'Empire des Nairs

ChezPigoreau, Paris 1817, 9,5x16cm, 4 volumes reliés.

Le Panorama des boudoirs, ou l'Empire des Nairs
 

One of the first great but almost unknown feminist books, admired by Schiller, Goethe, Godwin, Burr and which influenced Carlisle, Percy and Mary Shelley, Suzanne Volquin and Flora Tristan.
 
First edition of an extraordinary rarity, with a new title page with the Pigoreau address and enriched with four color-enhanced frontispieces, including one folding.
 
Contemporary bindings in half blonde sheep, spines decorated with gilt finishing tools and fillets and title pieces and volume labels in red morocco, marbled paper boards. A tiny worm hole at the foot of the first volume, the joint at the top of the outer board of which is very slightly split.
 
This long novel, made up of an erotic collection, is actually one of the most important feminist texts of the early 19th century. Despite a chaotic editorial adventure heavily hampered by censorship, this work written in French by a young Englishman, claiming to be a follower of Mary Wollstonecraft, will have a considerable influence on some of the most prominent European minds, including Percy and Mary Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Aaron Burr, Thomas Carlyle and Flora Tristan.
 
Although it was published in three versions, German, French and then English, each one being a complete rewriting of the work by the polyglot author, this major and subversive work was very quickly removed from bookshop catalogs, and its author disappeared from literary history from 1840 to the end of the 1970s. “Today, after having long been known only by Shelley specialists, Lawrence begins to gain visibility within work on English radicalism. [...] He features prominently among the radical English feminists of the 1790s and [...] is considered as one of the precursors, with Shelley and Owen, to the fight against marriage and for sexual reform.” (Anne Verjus, Une société sans pères peut-elle être féministe ? L'Empire des Nairs de James H. Lawrence.)
Despite dozens of editions published in the 19th century, we have not found any copy offered on the international market.
 
Lawrence was barely 18 years old when he wrote a first essay on the 'system' of the Nairs, a matrilineal society situated on the Malabar Coast, in India, in which marriage and paternity had been abolished. Enthused by the critical success his essay encountered, in 1800 James Lawrence wrote a first novel version illustrating his thesis. On reading the manuscript, Friedrich von Schiller would have encouraged him to translate it into German. It is, therefore, in this language that, in 1801, the first version of the novel was published under the title Das Paradies der Liebe.
 
Present in France in 1803, James Lawrence became a prisoner like the majority of the English and was then held at Verdun for several years. It was under these circumstances that he started the complete rewriting of his novel directly into French. It was entitled L'Empire des Nairs, ou le Paradis de l'amour and was published in 1807 by Maradan, the publisher of Wollstonecraft and Hays.
Barely off the press, the work was seized by the police, considered “detrimental to good morals”. The copies were returned only on the condition that the entire edition was exported. The work was then distributed in Germany and in Austria where he had Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an ambassador, whom Lawrence met in 1799, when the romantic poet invited him to Weimar for the performance of Voltaire's Mahomet. In his memoirs, Frédéric Soret will report Goethe's criticism of his friend's work: “According to Goethe, this is the work of a madman with a great mind and he would pay much more attention to Lawrence's writing if his approach to gender relations had not become a sort of fixed idea.” (Soret, Conversations avec Goethe, 1932) The friendship between the two men will not be affected by this “obsession” and in an 1829 letter to Thomas Carlyle, Goethe again referred to Lawrence as a “long-time friend”. Goethe was also the sponsor of the only portrait of J. Lawrence, undertaken at the philosopher's request by Johann Joseph Schmeller.
 
The first English version, “translated, with considerable alterations, by the author” was published in London in 1811 with a much more explicit title than the French version: The Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women. An Utopian Romance, in Twelve Books. It was republished in 1824 with a new title: The Empire of the Nairs; or, the Panorama of Love, Enlivened with the Intrigues of Several Crowned Heads; And with Anecdotes of Courts, Brothels, Convents, and Seraglios; The Whole Forming a Picture of Gallantry, Seduction, Prostitution, Marriage, And Divorce in All Parts of the World.
 
In France, it was not until 1814, after the fall of Napoléon, that Maradan was authorized to sell his copies repatriated from abroad, of which he replaced the title page, nonetheless specifying the date of the completed printing 1807 at the foot (erroneously printed “1087”). Even after the lifting of the censorship, distribution was so modest that today there are no copies with the 1807 date, and only a few rare 1814 copies in the major European and American institutions.
 
Indeed, in 1817, Pigoreau, Maradan's heir, still held enough copies to consider a new sale. (Quérard announced 1816, but this was clearly an error) He decided to use a ruse. Taking the original 1807 copies, he again changed the title page and replaced it this time with a very suggestive title: Le Panorama des boudoirs which it illustrates in frontispieces of four erotic engravings superbly enhanced in color, thus insinuating a completely different literature.
The first French edition published, therefore, under three separate title pages in 1807, 1814 and 1817. After a ban, an expatriation, a first resale, it is only at the price of this last subterfuge that the final copies of this too progressive work were sold. This idea will be weakened in several ways since in 1831 the Baron d'Hénin publishes a 16-page rewriting of the text with religious emphasis: Les Enfants de Dieu ou la Religion de Jésus réconciliée avec la philosophie (incidentally, he announces in the preface that the copies of the first edition are still available). Then, in 1837, the novel is modified again by the author and this time appears with a vaudeville title: Plus de maris ! plus de pères ! ou le Paradis des enfants de Dieu.
 
In fifty years, this multifaceted work has known at least seven publications in French – and a dozen in all three languages. However, we have been able to reference only two copies that have been put up for sale of the French edition (one from 1814 and one 1817), presented as erotic works following the faulty notice of Gay-Lemonnyer's Bibliographie des ouvrages relatifs à l'amour.
These editorial shifts as well as the almost total disappearance of the copies and the erasure of this author of literary history, testify to the obstacles raised in the face of the emergence of a consciousness which would become the challenge of centuries to come: the necessary and still unfinished struggle for equality and rights for women.
 
If France chooses to simply ban the work by invoking its immorality and the danger it represents for French readers, England, already grappling with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, authorises the publication of this new red-hot book, but unleashes criticism. In 1811, The Critical Review devotes several scathing pages, expecting that its readers, and especially its female readers, reject with “degust and indignation” a text so “absurd, improbable, indecent, immoral and only good for the fire”.
 
Thus, thanks to these manoeuvres the work will pass almost unnoticed by the general public, despite international distribution. The circulation of Lawrence's novel will, therefore, be restricted, but its influence will be major in progressive intellectual circles.
 
The first convert was no doubt the son-in-law of Mary Wollstonecraft, the poet Percy Shelley. Part of his work, in particular Queen Mab (1813), Laon and Cythna (1817) and Rosalind and Helen (1819), would be inspired by this praise of free love and even more specifically some of the novel's scenes. Perhaps he recommends reading it to his new conquest and future wife, the very young Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft who cites the work in her diary of 27 September 1814 and in her reading list in 1814, that is to say, just after her meeting with Percy Shelley.
 
Far from sharing the enthusiasm of her young companion, the young 17-year-old girl is very critical of James Lawrence's work. The future Mary Shelley is no less deeply moved by this novel which will be of major significance in the writing of her masterpiece, Frankenstein. In his study, The Paradise of the Mothersons: “Frankenstein” and “The Empire of the Nairs”, published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, (1996), D. S. Neff analyses James Lawrence's influence over Mary Shelley and shows “that a close reading of both novels reveals that even though Mary appears to have borrowed some key plot and thematic elements from Nairs, she nevertheless felt compelled to write an “anti-Nairs”, a monstrous parody of Lawrence's romance, whereas Percy Shelley used Nairs as a source of inspiration for his poems written during the writing of Frankenstein.”
 
Anne Verjus, for her part, recounts the many other effects of this publication: “The American Aaron Burr, a hero of the War of Independence, a competitor to Jefferson in the 1800 presidential election, and also an admirer of Wollstonecraft's educational principles, recounts in his travel journal that, during his stay in London, he had the book loaned to him by his friend [the philosopher William] Godwin, [father of Mary Shelley and friend to Lawrence since 1796]. After having spent two nights reading it, he went to Lawrence's home to discuss it, concluding that they will certainly see each other again. Lawrence, flattered by such a visit, recounts that the American invited him to return with him to the United States to establish a Naira republic. On the other hand, Burr having recommended it to his friend Mrs Thorpe, was told that, although she admired the liberality of his ideas on the education of women, it was an “abominable” system and that no one would certainly want such rights for women. Several years later, at the very end of 1828, The Lion by Richard Carlile published large extracts of the introduction to L'Empire des Nairs. According to specialists on Carlile, he would have read L'Empire des Nairs well before publishing these extracts. Many details suggest that he was inspired by Lawrence in writing his book Every Woman's book in 1826.”
 
Finally, it is undoubtedly on the Saint-Simon feminists that James Lawrence will exert the greatest influence, leaving many marks in their writing, as noted by Anne Verjus. Thus in 1832, Suzanne Volquin described L'Empire des Nairs at length in L'Apostolat des femmes; in 1833, Claire Demar quotes the novel four times in Ma loi d'avenir. Similarly, in 1834, Mrs E.A. Casaubon in Le Nouveau Contrat social, ou Place à la femme, reproduced a large extract of the 1831 version of Les Enfants de Dieu, while Flora Tristan (the famous feminist, socialist and Gauguin's grand-mother), invoked Lawrence in a petition in 1838 (petition against the death penalty, To the members of the Chamber of Deputies).
 
Despite the lineage of his thoughts on the first feminists and, generally, on the most prominent representatives of the progressive European intelligentsia in the early 19th century, almost nothing is known of this early defender of girls' right to education and the recognition of gender equality.
The unusual editorial history of this work, from its primary prohibition to its multiple distortions and its slow but inexorable disappearance from memory, is no doubt as instructive as the ideas defended by its author on the phallocrat power at work in society.
And it would be wrong to believe that 200 years after its publication, James Lawrence's text, advocating the desecration of marriage, filiation and romantic relations, has lost its subversive power: “Well! Let this word 'father' be removed from our institutions, and be marked with a sign of reform, as well as those of husband and spouse, let them be only preserved in our dictionaries to explain the usages and remind us of the simplicity of past centuries. Let every child be left in the care of its mother, and let him have no other heritage than that which she will pass on to him. May every women be freed without restriction from the domination of men, and be able to exercise all the rights that they exclusively have enjoyed until now. May she be able to change lovers at will, and take them indiscriminately from all classes of society.”
 
His 71-page long preliminary speech proves to be a real essay setting out his project of an egalitarian society and denouncing a system in which, despite perfect intellectual parity, women are raised more than educated in order to keep them in an artificial inferiority: “The many needleworks [...] will never allow her ideas to flourish. She sees no other men than her masters. [...] The moment finally comes when she enters the world; but freedom, so dear to all hearts, flees before her like a shadow: it exists even less for her than for a 10-year-old boy. [...] Man has decided, as absolute master, that ignorance would consolidate his authority [...] Now, if she is born with as much mind as he, why should woman obey man, rather than man obey woman? It is true that, according to Moses, during the first centuries she was regarded only as the servant of her proud partner: but if instead of having been written by a man, the bible had been written by a woman, we could have had a very different narrative.”
 
Exceptional and extremely rare first edition of one of the first great feminist works of the 19th century, which, despite its considerable influence, was perfectly erased from literary and intellectual history. The few copies remaining in major institutions are mostly classified in the department of erotic books!  

D. S. Neff (University of Alabama) : The

Anne Verjus : A non-patriarchal society: James Henry Lawrence (1773-1840) and The Empire of the Nairs
[Vidéo] Anne Verjus : « James Henry Lawrence (1773-1840), ou quand la pensée aristocratique sert la cause des femmes »
Anne Verjus (CNRS, Triangle, Ens de Lyon) : Une société sans pères peut-elle être féministe? L'empire des Nairs de James H. Lawrence Anne Verjus

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