The Devil (original: Le Diable) was written by Étienne Léon, Baron de Lamothe-Langon. Lamothe-Langon (1786-1864) was a high-ranking government official and in 1811 was the Prefect of Toulouse. He is best-known for his historical romance The Memoirs of the Comtesse du Barry (1826) and for having written Histoire de l’Inquisition en France (1829), a forged (and extremely influential) history which falsely claimed enormous witch trials and burnings took place in southern France in the early fourteenth century.

The Devil is a post-Melmoth the Wanderer Gothic novel. Lamothe-Langon, who was a commercially successful writer, made the decision to take the figure of John Melmoth and eliminate his angst and guilt, creating instead a figure who is the distillation of evil: elegant, charming, a perfect gentleman, but corrupt and thoroughly wicked. The Chevalier Draxel is a vector of sin, who strengthens the wicked in society and weakens, demeans, and ruins good people. His evil spreads, so that he no longer has to act; his mere presence exacerbates all that is harmful, corrosive, and ruinous in people. Unfortunately, Lamothe-Langon’s talent was not the equal of his ambition or ideas, and The Devil is a high-pitched and often hysterically toned novel which was quickly forgotten.

The Devil does, though, stand as an example of the trend–to call it a craze is not to overstate matters–in French culture in the 1830s to make use of the Devil in art. This trend had begun in the 1820s but reached its peak in the 1830-1835 period, with the Devil appearing in literature (Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1831], Eugene Sue’s La Salamandre [1832], and in The Devil), in music, and in paintings. This version of the devil, though, embodied a certain type of beauty as well as elegance and charm, just as Draxel is a gentleman of manners and wit.¹ French literature had seen “Devil’s memoirs” since the early eighteenth century, beginning with l’abbé Bruslé de Montpleinchamp’s Diable bossu (1708).² But the 1820s and 1830s version of the Devil, appearing at a time when Romanticism was dominant and the spirit of protest against the throne and the haute bourgeoisie (merchants, industrialists, bankers, and financiers) was widespread, reflected a certain idea of the Devil as embodying the characteristics of the haute bourgeoisie rather than the characteristics of the folklorish or pre-Revolution Devil.

Print: Étienne Léon de Lamothe-Langon, Le Diable. Paris: Lachapelle, 1832. (There is no English-language translation of the novel).

¹ Max Milner, Le Diable dans la litterature francaise. De Cazotte a Baudelaire (Paris: Corti, 1960), 2-4.

² Flora Larsson, “Les Memoirs du Diable, ou l’apprentissage infernale,” in Ellen Constans and Jean-Claude Vareille, eds, Crime et chatiment dans le roman populaire de langue francaise du XIXe siecle (Limoges: PULIM, 1994), 193 ff.