Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance

While Montesquieu was praising indifference to financial gain, Louis XV regularly presided over dizzying gambling games at Versailles. While Descartes was advancing a strategy for escaping from chance by appealing to the protocols of certainty, clandestine gambling operations in Paris numbered in the hundreds. Despite efforts by the major figures of the French Enlightenment to suppress the period's fascination with chance, high-stakes gambling was an integral part of the social rituals of the most influential groups withing the "ancien regime". This book explores this paradox in order to shed light on the genesis, development and function of the 18th-century French novel. First considering the roles of chance and gambling in the epistemological, social and economic histories of the period, Kavanagh shows that doctrines of chance played a denied yet operative role in important aspects of what the French Enlightenment proclaimed itself to be.
The author then looks at representations of chance in the novels of Prechac, Prevost, Voltaire, Denon, Crebillon and Diderot, and shows how they tell two stories: that of a deterministic and ordered universe, and that of a world of fortuitous events determined only by chance. It was the tension and interplay between these two poles, Kavanagh argues, that contributed in an important way to the development of the Enlightenment's ideal of the rational man.