La Révolution dans les moeurs
One of only 2 réimposé copies, on vellum.
The regular edition is in duodecimo, with no deluxe-paper issue.
Mounted at front: an autograph letter signed by Edmond de Goncourt (dated April 79), in which he mentions the public sale of a certain “J.J.,” to which he will take care not to go, adding that if his correspondent were to see any hidden meaning in this, it would be a wasted effort: “Cher chercheur des petites bêtes, il n'y en a pas là où vous voulez en trouver…”.
From an early stage, the Goncourt brothers made the eighteenth century their intellectual territory. Before their series of Portraits intimes du XVIIIe siècle, they had already published several essays expressing this fascination, among them, as early as 1854, this Révolution dans les mœurs. In it they contrast an idealized eighteenth century with a nineteenth century they saw as undermined by the weakening of former family and moral discipline.
The pages devoted to the family, to paternal authority and to the education of young women reveal the Goncourts as moralists, mounting an indictment of egalitarian illusions and modern social ambitions. There is thus no modernity of ideas here, but rather a modernity of method: their real originality lies in the attention they pay to manners, types and the details of everyday life — a method that would soon feed into the naturalism of which Émile Zola became the architect.
Clouzot, p. 135; Carteret, I, p. 350; Vicaire, III, 1028.