Cultural History and Literary Imagination 6

The Story of an Architect King

Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737-1766

vonRenata Tyszczuk

1. Auflage

The Story of an Architect King – Tyszczuk

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Inhaltsverzeichnis: The Story of an Architect King – Tyszczuk

Introduction

Je suis aussi roi des Polaques; j’ai perdu mon royaume deux fois, mais la

Providence m’a donné un autre état, dans lequel j’ai fait plus de bien que tous

les rois des Sarmates ensemble n’en ont jamais pu faire sur les bordes de la

Vistule; je me résigne à la Providence; et je suis venu passer la carnaval à

Venise.1

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Stanislas Leszczynski (1677–

1766), the twice-exiled King of Poland and Duke of Lorraine and Bar,

had become a prominent figure of both fiction and history (fig. 1). He

was the subject of much contemporary interest and intrigue, as is

recounted in the various biographies that proliferated even during his

own lifetime.2 The dominant contemporary characterization was of

Stanislas Leszczynski as the protagonist of a picaresque adventure,

compelled to wander and to constantly re-affirm his position in each

new context presented to him. True to character, he appears in

Voltaire’s Candide (1757) as one of the ‘forsaken’ kings during the

carnival in Venice, while actually establishing himself as roi

bienfaisant doing ‘more good’ in ‘another realm’, the duchy of

Lorraine and Bar. Voltaire had already presented Stanislas as a

character to the French eighteenth century audience in his Histoire de

1 Voltaire, Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1757), in René Pomeau (ed.), V 48 (Oxford:

The Voltaire Foundation, Taylor Institute, 1980), pp. 240–241. ‘I, too, am King

of Poland. I lost my kingdom twice, but Providence gave me another realm, in

which I have done more good than all the kings of the Sarmatians were ever

able to do on the banks of the Vistula. I also submit to Providence and have

come to Venice for the carnival.’ Voltaire, Candide, trans. John Butt (London:

Penguin Books Ltd, 1947), p. 124.

2 Michael Ranft, Stanislaus I (Leipzig, 1736 and Dutch translation 1738); Jean

Guillaume de Chevrières, Histoire de Stanislas Ier roi de Pologne, grand-duc

de Lithuanie, duc de Lorraine et de Bar [...] (London 1740, 1741, and in

various translations: English 1741, Polish 1741, 1744, 1747, German 1757).

16

Charles XII (1731).3 This work described the Swedish king’s

campaign itinerary, and Voltaire acknowledged Stanislas’ role in the

preparation of the history.4

In turn, Stanislas had validated Voltaire’s

account of Poland: ‘Mr. de Voltaire has neither forgotten nor mis-

placed a single fact or circumstance; all is truth and properly ranged.

He has spoken of Poland and all the events which happened there as if

he had been an eyewitness.’5 Although Voltaire had never visited

Poland, he is given the paradigmatic status of ‘eyewitness’, témoin

oculaire. Stanislas’ comment suggests here that the writing of history

is served by the as-if, or the imaginative capacity of the author to

recount the history and make it be believed (faire croire), yet the term

‘eyewitness’ is also meant to indicate the quality of the historical

evidence presented.6 The ‘eyewitness’ guarantees that the events

occurred exactly as the historian wrote about them. Voltaire’s history

detailed the political and historical situation that eventually led to

Stanislas’ compromised kingship and the loss of his kingdom. The

irony is self-evident: Stanislas’ own status as an actual eyewitness

who had contributed to Voltaire’s ‘eyewitness’ account was as a direct

consequence of his own failure as a protagonist in history. Stanislas is

unavoidably inscribed in the narrative by Voltaire as both an

eyewitness of history and a producer of the events that the history

recounts. Stanislas is thus caught in the confusion between presenting

a fictive appropriation as the guarantee for universality and truth, and

3 Voltaire, Histoire de Charles XII (1731), ed. Ulla Kölving, V 4 (Oxford: The

Voltaire Foundation, Alden Press 1996).

4 Ibid. p. 466.

5 ‘Avis Important sur L’Histoire de Charles XII’, with a letter from Le Comte de

Tressan, Commercy, 11th July 1759 (Best. D8390); cf. Theodore Besterman,

Voltaire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), p. 640; (my emphasis). For the French text

see also Voltaire, Histoire de Charles XII, pp. 579–580: ‘M. de V… n’a oublié,

ni déplacé aucun fait, aucune circonstance intéressante; que tout est vrai, que

tout est en ordre dans cette histoire: qu’il a parlé sur la Pologne, et sur tous les

événements qui y sont arrives etc. comme s’il en eût été témoin oculaire.’

6 The capacity to place some past event or person vividly before the reader’s

mind was identified by Aristotle in the Rhetoric as lexis or locution (usually

translated as ‘style’ or a way of saying things to do with a particular situation),

a way of making things visible as if they were present.

17

being actually made to appear in, and validate, the very history that he

himself makes.

The gradual decline of the metaphor of the ‘eyewitness’ in the

eighteenth century marks the development of the concept of a general

history, with its authority residing in evidence accumulated by a

historian professing neutrality with respect to the history under

scrutiny.7 The change in the meaning of ‘eyewitness’ in this period

gradually implied a new way of looking at, or responding to history,

one which involved a discerning, knowing ‘spectator’: part

speculative reader, and part author or producer, of the landscape of

history. This corresponded to changes in writing, narration, and in

conceptions of the self and of time. The new styles of narration both

expressed and hastened the demise of a view of the world as an

embodiment of archetypes, and at the same time promoted a new

mode of self-understanding in disengaged reason.

History had provided exempla of life according to the topos

historia magistra vitae. The traditional interpretation of the historical

dimension of existence in Stanislas Leszsczynski’s time had put

human history in second place with respect to the eternal and

primordial truths disclosed in symbols. The requirements of the new

objectivity that arose in this period, along with a separation of myth

and history, and the loss of authority of the symbols, was

accompanied by the elevation of human history to first place in self-

understanding. In a world increasingly understood and lived as a

string of episodes every individual or ‘actor’ could make history.

Human history became a domain of change and of potentially vast

scope encompassing infinite detail. Epistemological procedures in the

eighteenth century sought to secure the ontological orientation once

7 On the changes in the understanding of history and historical time see for

example Reinhart Koselleck, Future’s Past: On the Semantics of Historical

Time (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985); Karl Löwith, Meaning

in History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Eric

Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1975); Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace

(Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1990) and The Legitimacy of the

Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge MA and London: MIT

Press, 1983).

18

granted by symbolic interpretation with respect to history. The

problem of the meaning of history had been a matter of disclosing

what tended towards permanence or at least recurrence, the Same, and

to an intensive depth of understanding.8 Instead, there now existed

the possibility of treating history as an extensive aggregation of

everywhere equal information, and therefore as an object of human

knowledge. In short, time had aquired human intention and history.

Along with the investigations of history and historical thought in this

period9 there arose the notion that history was a process with its own

universality and significance, and could therefore tell a ‘story of its

own’.10

It is not surprising that the problem of meaning in history, or

how so-called actual history should be presented or interpreted,

remains open.11

The Histoire of Stanislas Leszczynski is necessarily both story

and history.12

In the middle of the eighteenth century, styles of

interpretation and narration, myth, stories and dialogues which once

8 Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth shows that questions about the structure,

intelligibility and explanation of history in its widest sense (following

Heidegger, as the growth of the human lifeworld of meaning, that includes the

institutions, rituals, artistic practices, traditions of idea and symbol, and also

theories through which we understand ourselves), converge with questions

about the nature and significance of mythology in human history.

9 See Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1946) for an account of the different approaches to history and the rise of the

science of history.

10 See also Hannah Arendt, ‘The Concept of History’ in Between Past and Future:

Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), pp.

41–90, p. 67.

11 As Arendt writes in her comparison of history and the natural sciences: ‘In both

instances the perplexity is that the particular incident, the observable fact or

single occurrence of nature, or the reported deed and event of history, have

ceased to make sense without a universal process in which they are supposedly

embedded; yet the moment man approaches this process in order to escape the

haphazard character of the particular, in order to find meaning – order and

necessity – his effort is rebutted by the answer from all sides: Any order, any

necessity, any meaning you wish to impose will do.’ Ibid. pp. 88–89.

12 Histoire in French means both ‘story’ and ‘history’. The German language

distinguishes the terms by using for history geschichte and for story historie.

Both meanings are intended here.

19

served in the disclosure of truth were nevertheless preserved in the

midst of the developing awareness of how historical existence must be

rendered according to the new epistemological criteria. The result,

however, was not only a blurring of these styles of narration – where,

for example, phenomena were subjected to a trial which would

separate res factae from res fictae, fact from fiction.13

More

profoundly, this led to a deep ambivalence in self-understanding.14

Stanislas Leszczynski embodies the ambivalence in self-under-

standing of this period to a particularly rich degree. He was deeply

affected by the new claims of history, or historical knowledge, of the

Enlightenment. Accordingly he produced a body of writing which

traversed utopian fable, political tract, and instruction on agricultural

economy, published towards the end of his life in 1763 as the Oeuvres

du Philosophe Bienfaisant. At the same time, as king, even in exile, he

held a position in a field of meanings central to traditional (Baroque)

culture.

Stanislas’ status as a king in exile compelled him to seek

legitimacy outside the exercise of real power. This quest was carried

out in a domain which ranged between a political experiment and a

drama on the European stage in which Stanislas was the legendary

protagonist. Stanislas seems to have taken his ambiguous status as a

positive virtue, and as a form of alienation, which nevertheless

granted a deeper truth. He is an important vehicle for understanding

the problem of continuity as a matter of self-understanding. His quest

for a new legitimacy is a quest for identity, for situatedness with

respect to an evolving cultural context which presented quite

contradictory modes of participation in meaning. At the same time, his

authorship or self-witnessing is tied to his identity as a dispossessed

13 See Koselleck, Future’s Past, for a discussion on the exchange between res

fictae/res factae, p. 30 and p. 213.

14 On the changes in self-understanding in this period and how they were

inseparable from a changed world-understanding see Charles Taylor, Sources of

the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1992).

20

king or, as he expressed it in La Voix Libre15

– his political treatise on

the government of Poland, ‘a voice crying out in the wilderness’ (vox

clamantis in deserto).

In Future’s Past, Reinhart Koselleck speaks of the historian’s

‘compulsion to use fictional narrative to render available a reality

whose actuality has vanished.’16

As part of his study Koselleck

developed the notion of the acceleration or manipulation of time

through fiction. The as-if proper to fiction is presented as symp-

tomatic of the changes of modern culture in the portrayal of history

and as a kind of narrative urge. The modern discovery of a specific

historical time resulted also in an understanding of reality as

contingent, compelling the historian to make a fiction of the factual.

The as-if, moreover, is understood as a significant turn in the

structuring of the world that occurs in the eighteenth century, as is

evident in the creation of settings and representations that intensify

this appropriated time.

The ambivalence of the new understanding of this appropriated

time, whereby on the one hand there was an awareness of rational

intent to deconstruct accidental history and on the other hand an

allegiance to the story was maintained, can be called a fictional

contingency. The fictive appropriation of the spatial and the temporal

reveals the essential pairing of a fictional contingency with the

contemporary notion of a contingent reality. Moreover, the new self-

understanding of history as man-made process was uncomfortable

with its own notion of contingency. This self-conscious contingency

demanded ever more novel manipulation with the res fictae

continually deployed by the demands of consistency of the res factae.

Stanislas Leszczynski’s ambiguous status, in fiction and in history,

lends itself to a characterization of him in this study as an as-if king. It

is however, the exploration of his representational oeuvre, his writings

and his architecture, that more profoundly reveals the contemporary

fictional contingency.

15 La Voix Libre Du Citoyen, ou Observations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne

(1749). I have used mostly the Paris 1753 edition of this work for citations in

this book.

16 Koselleck, Future’s Past, p. 217.

21

In terms of the self-understandings that are constitutive of the

modern period, Koselleck’s schema proposes an approach to history

as a dialectic of the ‘space of experiences’, and the ‘horizon of

expectation’, which relates narrated events to anticipations and

projects.17

The space of experiences is the residual home of memory,

while the horizon of expectations is linked to hope and a world of

possibilities. This study is concerned with the tension between the

modalities of hope and memory in Stanislas Leszczynski’s works. His

works appear both to recognize and to respond to this tension and

transpire, in their different manifestations, as his hope for a better age.

The study therefore acknowledges the split character of history while

bearing in mind Ricoeur’s observation that ‘we may ask ourselves if

the tension between expectancy and experience was not already

beginning to be threatened the very day it was acknowledged.’18

In Stanislas’ period, history itself was considered as the defining

feature of the identity of a culture as much as of the identity of an

individual. As a transitional figure in an as-if domain, Stanislas is

therefore caught between being an exemplary individual and

furnishing the ‘beautiful pages of history’:

Un prince qui recommencerait à vivre après avoir veçu, pourrait fournir de

belles pages à l’histoire.19

As Stanislas Leszczynski’s own aphorism suggests, he seems to

have been aware of the singular eventfulness of his life. The prince’s

survival is conflated with an opportunity presented to him that is

understood in terms of a contribution to historical narrative. This also

17 Ibid. pp. 273–275.

18 Paul Ricoeur; cf. Richard Kearney, ‘Between Tradition and Utopia: The

hermeneutical problem of myth’ in David Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur:

Narrative and Interpretation (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.

55–73, p. 56.

19 ‘A prince who would start to live again after having lived already, would be

able to furnish history with beautiful pages.’ Stanislas Leszczynski, ‘Penseés

Diverses’ in Mme de St Ouën (ed.), Oeuvres Choisies De Stanislas, Roi de

Pologne, Duc de Lorraine, de Bar, etc. (Paris, 1825), p. 364; (my translation).

This collection of Stanislas Leszczynski’s writings will hereafter be referred to

as Choisies.

22

serves to indicate the importance of the culture of the book in this

period. The emphasis is on survival; the prince’s return evades closure

of the narrative. Instead the ‘beautiful pages’ are presented as an

adequate if immanent eschatological proposal where individual life is

meaningful when equated with the course of history. This aphorism

shows Stanislas Leszczynski to be profoundly if problematically

situated within the new understanding and writing of history as

observation and composition. History is ultimately regarded as

devised and carried out by an individual, and is no longer implicated

in the re-enactive structure of Christian eschatological expectation.

This new understanding of history eventually resulted in the concept

of progress, which combined experiences and expectations ‘constantly

subject to being overlaid with utopian conceptions’20

but directed to

actual transformation of this world. The question of an all-embracing or complete meaning for history could no longer be answered by eschatology, and in a sense the idea of progress had been drafted in to fulfill its function of expectation. At the same

time the uncertain contact with the contingent world of experiences

was resolved through an immersion in the fictional and in narratives

of self-understanding. For Stanislas Leszczynski, the question of how

he should start to live again, in Lorraine, after a time of war and

wandering, served as a new narrative beginning. It also serves as the

point of departure for this study.

On ne peut être meilleur roy et meilleur homme.21

The renown of Stanislas Leszczynski as philosopher king, writer and

architect is associated with his sojourn in Lorraine, the realm in which

the Polish king had been able to do ‘more good’ than in Poland,

between 1737 and 1766. The activities of the roi bienfaisant22

were

20 Koselleck, Future’s Past, p. 279.

21 ‘One cannot be a better king and a better man.’ D3616 Voltaire to comte

d’Argental, writing about Stanislas, Lunéville, février 14 1748 in Corres-

pondence X, V 94 (Geneva, 1970), p. 203; (my translation).

22 This title was proclaimed by Thibault in his opening speech at the academy in

Nancy founded by Stanislas Leszczynski, the Societé Royale des Sciences et

Belles Lettres. See Choisies, p. 98.

23

initiated within the historical/fictional time that spanned Voltaire’s

above-cited works, Histoire de Charles XII and Candide. The writings

of Stanislas Leszczynski reflect his transitional status with respect to

the Enlightenment enterprise. At the same time the architecture

constructed under his supervision anticipates many architectural and

garden motifs central to the representational concerns of European

Enlightenment culture. The architecture, like the narrative, serves as a

realm of exploration for Stanislas within the new historical time and in

the context of his tenuous kingship.

A study of Stanislas presents the opportunity to contribute to the

understanding of a group of phenomena, usually considered to mark

the beginning of the dispersal of the European tradition. This book

seeks to demonstrate that the architecture is not an illustration of a

programme that is most tangible in the writing. Nor is the architecture

simply the laconic background to events narrated or played out in

history. The architecture plays its own roles within Stanislas’ larger

representational enterprise, where governing, writing, inventing and

play-acting, are all part of the context of, and for, the architecture.

With the exception of biographies of Stanislas, scholarship has tended

to be divided into either studies of the architecture or studies of the

writings. The main argument given for this separation is that Stanislas

did not write about architecture. This book has not seen this as an

obstacle for inquiry however, but as an opportunity to explore this

particular eighteenth-century ‘social imaginary’.23

It aims to show that

a contextual analysis is the most relevant and appropriate treatment of

Stanislas’ oeuvre.

There is always a difficulty when talking about both an

individual and history at a general level. Conventional historiography

has organised the relation of unique events in line with the deeds of

individuals who have been given distinguishable epithets such as the

great, the bold or the good. As Norbert Elias has said: ‘The observing

23 ‘This approach is not the same as one that might focus on the “ideas” as against

the “institutions” of modernity. The social imaginary is not a set of ideas;

rather, it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of society.’

Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC and London: Duke

University Press, 2004), p. 2.

24

lens is applied primarily to changes that take place through individual

people, or are believed to be attributable to individual people as their

causes.’24

This customary focus on individuals in history and the

importance of their actions has obvious connections with social

position and the distribution of power. With the foregrounding of

Stanislas as le roi bienfaisant there is therefore a double difficulty.

First, there is the need to contend with the authority of the tradition

that granted him the title in the first place, and, second, there goes

with this the awareness that his social position as king had much to do

with the possibilities of representation which have provided ground

for this study.25

Stanislas’ precarious royal position demanded a

particular strategy that focused on identity and individualization. This

leads to the second problem: that of the underlying and powerful sense

of ourselves as individuals – as primary human agents of modernity,

and consequently, where the world is seen as constituted by

individuals and individual actions – that is still taken for granted

today.26

In short, to speak of Stanislas Leszczynski as a transitional

figure demands recognition that to understand history at all as

transition became possible only within the new world-understandings

that came to the fore in the eighteenth century. This new historical

self-understanding first made it possible for modernity to call itself

such and to conceive of itself in time, and it can be seen as a

precondition of modernity.27

This book explores the oeuvre of

24 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1983), p. 14.

25 On the paradigms of power and the arts of representation as a vehicle of social

control see Louis Marin, Portrait of a King, trans. Martha M. Houle (London

and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1988).

26 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 61. Taylor argues that ‘The mistake of

moderns is to take this understanding of the individual so much for granted that

it is taken to be our first-off self-understanding “naturally.” Just as, in modern

epistemological thinking, a neutral description of things is thought to impinge

first on us, and then values are added, so here we seize ourselves first as

individuals, then become aware of others and of forms of sociality.’ p. 64.

27 Or as Zygmunt Bauman has stated: ‘Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything

else, perhaps more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time

when time has a history.’ Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p.

110.

25

Stanislas Leszczynski in its context, and in so doing it inevitably

confronts some of the contemporary issues around modernity and the

self-understandings that have been constitutive of it. The concept of

modernity itself, or Neuzeit, that arose in the eighteenth century is

distinguished by criteria, as described by Koselleck, that have

continued to characterize the world of today, where, for example,

socio-political forces are deemed subject to contingency, pluralistic

diversity, simultaneity, transition, and acceleration.28

This book will not attempt to take issue with generally held

formulations that describe the eighteenth century, since this study

does not attempt to square its findings with wider histories of the

subject nor with wider cultural, social or political descriptions of the

period. Nor does it sit comfortably within the discipline of archi-

tectural history. Nor is it a biography. The store of knowledge on

Stanislas is impressive and extensive. This book is interested instead

in the connections across cultural experience that the case of Stanislas

Leszczynski offers, where history and fiction are intertwined. What is

explored in this book is the transformation of experience into sense

and back again, which includes the writing of history, stories, and the

architecture. It is therefore an investigation into the reciprocity

between thought and architecture, through recourse to the continuity

28 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History,

Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 168: ‘To summarize the concept of

modernity (Neuzeit) can be characterized by the fact that it is not only intended

to be a formal concept following on earlier periodizing determinations. It

contains criteria that are hypothetically also applicable to the earlier histories of

previous ages. Conceptualized in the eighteenth century, they have, however,

given rise to all those questions for which it is first a task of Neuzeit to provide

answers: the dynamization and temporalization of the experiential world; the

task of trying to plan for the open future without being able to foresee the paths

of history; the simultaneity of the simultaneous, which pluralistically dif-

ferentiates events in our world; arising out of it, the perspectival diversity

within which historical knowledge must be gained and evaluated; furthermore,

the knowledge that one is living in a period of transition in which it becomes

harder and harder to reconcile established traditions with necessary innovations;

and finally, the feeling of acceleration by which processes of economic or

political change appear to be taking place.’

26

of the imaginative trope, or narrative structure present in Stanislas’

own works. The contribution of this book is therefore not to the

discipline of history per se, nor to the writing of history as a genre but

to the investigation of the cultural treatment of historical experience.

In this it has been informed by the hermeneutic approach to history of

Gadamer and Ricoeur which has challenged the conventional

opposition of fictional and factual discourse.29

The book is however essentially historical in its aims and

procedures, taking as its starting point Gadamer’s principle of

‘effective history’.30

This suggests that history not be taken as an

object, but instead requires an awareness from both the author and the

reader of being already implicated in history and affected by history.

In short ‘effective history’ is the very condition of the possibility of

understanding, thus providing us with the intelligible horizon within

which we, as thinking beings, ‘live, move and have our being’.31

The

investigation will not be exhaustive but attempts to bring together a

number of instances from fiction, history, architecture and writings,

which have often been perceived in isolation, and give them a starting

point for meaning. The attempted synthesis seen in Stanislas’ efforts

to construct a representational kingdom is taken as the basis on which

the synthesis of this interpretation of his oeuvre can proceed. The

experience of culture is always more important than the objects

themselves. For Ricoeur, hermeneutic interpretation as poetics is

‘directed neither toward scientific verification nor ordinary com-

29 On the different definitions of hermeneutics and hermeneutical schools see also

Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,

1969).

30 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1988), pp.

267 ff. The German term for ‘effective history’ is Wirkungsgeschichtlichkeit or

wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein. See also G.B. Madison, Chapter 9

‘Hermeneutics, Gadamer and Ricoeur’ in Richard Kearney (ed.), Routledge

History of Philosophy Volume VIII: Twentieth Century Philosophy (London and

New York: Routledge, 1994) pp. 290–349. Madison writes: ‘Like so many

German terms, this one defies easy translation. The “hermeneutical

consciousness” it designates is “the consciousness of effective history” or,

alternatively “the consciousness in which history is effectively at work.”’ p.

305.

31 Gadamer, op. cit. pp. 267–8.

27

munication but towards the disclosure of possible worlds.’32

The

writing of this book seeks to acknowledge the worlds of the many

texts and authors, as involved or intersecting in the worlds of the

many readers, in what Gadamer has called a ‘fusion of horizons.’33

The different horizons of understanding include the text of this book,

the world that the reader encounters through its pages, the world in

which the interpreters live, and also that of Stanislas, as both author

and reader. A fusion of horizons is essential to the understanding of a

text and is akin to the process of understanding in a conversation.34

The parallels that can be drawn between a hermeneutics of texts and

a hermeneutics of history, where both contain the potential for a

confrontation of the horizons of expectation and experience as a

condition of ‘mediation in the world’, is also a concern of this study.35

An exposure to the effectiveness of history is complemented by an

interpretative response to the histories, texts and materials that

communicate the past. The writing of this book is thus oriented to the

figure of Stanislas as an as-if king, as both peculiarly modern and less

historical than one might initially think.

32 Ricoeur, from an interview with Richard Kearney, ‘The Symbol as Bearer of

Possible Worlds’ in Kearney (ed.), Dialogues with Contemporary Continental

Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 45.

33 Gadamer, op. cit. p. 273, p. 337 and p. 358.

34 The situation of people understanding each other in conversation has, according

to Gadamer, its hermeneutical application in understanding the world of texts.

Ibid. p. 347.

35 As Ricoeur explains in terms of literrary narrative, ‘From a hermeneutical point

of view, that is to say from the point of view of the interpretation of literary

experience, a text has an entirely different meaning than the one recognized by

structural analysis in its borrowings from linguistics. It is a mediation between

man and the world, between man and man, between man and himself; the

mediation between man and the world is what we call referentiality; the

mediation between men, communicability; the mediation between man and

himself, self-understanding. A literary work contains these three dimensions:

referentiality, communicability and self-understanding.’ ‘Life in Quest of

Narrative’ in David Wood (ed.), op. cit. pp. 20–33, p. 27.

28

Each of the following chapters connects Stanislas to a particular

understanding of culture and its representation. The first establishes

Stanislas’ multifaceted character and his portrayal and incidence in

history. It discusses the scope and breadth of his oeuvre and explores

the as-if or fictional contingency of the eighteenth century as a way of

understanding both Stanislas’ history and his representational enter-

prise that structures and intensifies his place in history. The figure of

the story-teller is suggested as a way of exploring Stanislas’ role in his

own enterprise.

The second chapter looks at his work on the res publica of

Poland, La Voix Libre, within the cultural and political climate of the

eighteenth century. It draws attention to the conflict between the

competing demands of political theory and practice. Stanislas’

ambiguous position as both author and subject of history and politics

is compounded in his writings on ideal government. The development

of an appropriate role for himself in Lorraine, as a king without a

kingdom, eventually results in his designation as roi bienfaisant, a

construct burdened by the ideological, moral and epistemological

functions it was made to bear. Stanislas’ ethical orientation is

characterized by a teleology of bonheur: the impulse to devise and

construct a representational kingdom in terms of ‘doing good’ and

finding good fortune in the new culture. This is the basis of his as-if

kingdom.

The third chapter looks at Stanislas’ proposition of symbolic

government and moral order in relation to his utopian narrative. The

theme of the voyage and curiosity is bound up with Enlightenment

attitudes to history and to the self. It introduces the idea of the

imagination curieuse as a key way of understanding the increasingly

distant view of an eighteenth century bound for betterment, the good

life and utopia. The chapter discusses the significance of utopian

thought for both cultural and political debate and its transformation in

the eighteenth century.

Chapter Four takes as its theme the imaginative variations of

Stanislas’ oeuvre. It discusses the modes of representation in the

eighteenth century that were capable of reconciling utopian thought

with its possible manifestations in the culture. Hence the chapter aims

to contribute to an understanding of the different situations embodied

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in Stanislas’ as-if architecture. It concentrates on the territories of

theatre and game playing, establishing the importance of these in

relation to Stanislas’ outlook.

Chapter Five focuses on the architecture of Stanislas’ châteaux in

Lorraine. It examines the series of projects and encounters with

gardens and landscapes in the ducal châteaux against a background of

salon and court culture. Significantly it is Stanislas’ ambiguous

position as both story-teller and scene-maker, which nevertheless

allows him to forge connections between his writings, representations

and architecture. The various garden interventions or as-if architecture

promote a play of correspondences and paradoxes.

Chapter Six explores Stanislas’ transformation of the city of

Nancy. It explores the connections with his work in the châteaux and

also with his writings. It examines the twofold remaking of Nancy: in

traditional terms as a renovatio urbis, and also in its contemporary

relation to utopia and prognosis as a construction of history. Stanislas’

awareness of both everyday experience and history as made altered

the implications of the projects for Nancy and brought about a play of

analogies that were difficult to delimit in an as-if city.

The final chapter explores the relationship between Stanislas’

imaginative play and political prophecy. It proposes a way of

understanding Stanislas’ contact with the modalities of hope and

memory and thus the allusive strategies of his representational as-if

kingdom. The convergence of ethics and poetics in his works suggests

both the free play of fiction and the recognition of a responsibility to

others. This is ultimately the function of the story in shaping reality.36

The writing of this book has followed the story of Stanislas. It

has included meanders, diversions, dead ends, gaps and confused

passages. The itinerary of his story finds parallels in the itinerary of

the writing, and his critical self-imagining in history may be compared

with the model of interpretation that has been followed in the book.

The particular story of Stanislas and his hope for a better age

exemplifies the general historical transition in a number of ways. He

36 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’ in Mario J. Valdés

(ed.), A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (New York and London:

Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 117–136.

30

was the author, reader, actor and spectator in his own history. In his

customary ambivalence, in his relation to the contemporary confusion

between reality and fiction and in his incarnation as history itself, he

appears as peculiarly, prophetically modern, whatever that might

mean. The reflexive turn is as evident in his story as it is in the

tendency to identify modernity as a particular historical condition and

distinguish ourselves as ‘modern’. This occurs in spite of the lack of

confidence and the self-contradictions that the term ‘modern’ carries

with it.37

According to Latour, ‘no one has ever been modern.’38

The goal of the interpretative understanding in this book has not

been ‘to try to recapture’ Stanislas’ ‘attitude of mind’ but instead to

gauge something of the cultural perspective within which Stanislas

‘formed his views’.39

However, the story of Stanislas’ hope for a

better age is not confined to a specific period in history. Inevitably,

‘story’ carries with it connotations of a version of events, of

something told, of something interpreted. But by using the term

‘story’ what is intended is an emphasis on the retelling and rereading

that reveals the process of imaginative change and exchange; it is not

37 I am thinking here of Bruno Latour’s We have never been Modern, trans.

Catherine Porter (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993); see pp.

10–12 for his discussion of ‘What Does it Mean to be a Modern’. He writes:

‘Modern is thus doubly assymetrical: it designates a break in the regular

passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and

vanquished. If so many of our contemporaries are reluctant to use this adjective

today, if we qualify it with prepositions, it is because we feel less confident in

our ability to maintain that double asymmetry: we can no longer point to time’s

irreversible arrow, nor can we award a prize to the winners. In the countless

quarrels between Ancients and Moderns, the former come out as winners as

often as the latter now, and nothing allows us to say whether revolutions finish

off the old regimes or bring them to fruition. Hence the skepticism that is oddly

called ‘post’ modern even though it does not know whether or not it is capable

of taking over from the Moderns.’ p. 10. As soon as one tries to counter this

‘assymetry’ and reestablish a common understanding, according to Latour one

inevitably ‘ceases to be modern’. p. 13.

38 Ibid. p. 47.

39 Gadamer, op. cit. pp. 259–260. ‘When we try to understand a text, we do not try

to recapture the author’s attitude of mind but, if this is the terminology we are

to use, we try to recapture the perspective within which he has formed his

views.’

31

an attempt to tie up all the loose ends in a particular history. More-

over, any story reaches beyond what is intended in the writing. The

traversing of many temporalities is evident in a story’s ability to

anticipate the past and remember the future. It is therefore important

to start with a part of the story. Following Gadamer, the ambition of

this book is to let the story of Stanislas, vox clamantis, ‘speak again’.40

40 ‘The best definition for hermeneutics’, Gadamer writes, ‘is: to let what is

alienated by the character of the written word or by the character of being

distantiated by cultural or historical distances speak again. This is

hermeneutics: to let what seems to be far and alienated to speak again.’

‘Practical Philosophy as a Model of the Human Sciences’, Research in

Phenomenology 9 (1980): 83; cf. G.B. Madison in Kearney (ed.), op. cit. p.

315.