Literary portraits, i.e. physical and moral descriptions, of fictional characters in 18th century French novels, were shaped by three unlikely sources: Cicero’s docere, delectare, movere, Plato’s kalokagathia and Baroque appearances. 

Cicero’s dictates shaped portraits’s function, justifying their textual presence through three concerns: aestheticizing the narration, entertaining readers and instructing them in morality. Plato’s theory equated beauty to goodness and truth. Following this principle, in 18th century French novels, a beautiful character would systematically be a good person, and conversely, an ugly exterior would envelop an evil nature. However, Baroque moralists had taught a wise and valuable lesson: as Pascal showed, le coeur humain est creux et plein d’ordures, and in truth, beautiful exteriors could and did hide dark pits of cruelty and duplicity. 

How, then, was one supposed to combine these forms of knowledge, and, use them to recognize a friend from a foe? Enlightenment novelists took up this hermeneutical challenge, going beyond the Platonic, Ciceronian and Baroque approaches and thereby transforming literary portraits into pedagogical instruments and proleptic narratives devices. 

They conceived each physical description of a fictional character as a sum of cues meant to uncover the character’s true morality: in this way, 18th century writers turned literary portraits into valuable manuals to teach their readers how to read a character’s (and, by extension, a person’s) physical appearance. More importantly, whenever there was a deviation from Plato’s kalos kagathos norm, authors would timely warn their readers that a given alluring character actually concealed a base nature. 

Following my dissertation research, my paper will explore the intricacies of these legacies and show how 18th century authors such as Le Sage, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau used them to their advantage to edify and entertain readers.