In Praise of Modest Men: self-display and self-effacement in nineteenth-century France

Nineteenth-century France underwent a process of individuation, or self-affirmation, that was at once political (elections), socio-economic (market forces and social promotion), and cultural (autobiographical writings). While some contemporaries embraced this evolution and others rejected it, numerous individuals sought to enjoy its benefits while shielding French society from the threat of ambition and dissolution. Many male elites, this article argues, did so through a prescriptive and self-referential language of modesty. Indebted to ancient Christian and secular vocabularies, modesty acquired a new resonance as compensation for aspirations and lifestyles that could prove both seductive and distressing. This article focuses on provincial learned societies, speeches given at school awards ceremonies, and the career of celebrated doctor Jean-Louis Alibert. At every juncture, it finds individuals who employed an idiom of modesty when speaking of themselves, fellow elites, or workers and peasants. Vis-à-vis themselves, they sought less to erase individuation than to make it socially innocuous and conceptually pleasing. Their twin aspirations to self-affirmation and self-effacement capture a broader effort to resolve contradictions between, on the one hand, individual merit, initiative and opportunity and, on the other, equality, duty and community.