Jacques’ response is to assert the contrary, to claim equality and demand to be treated with appropriate respect. The context may seem trivial but the issue is not, and the figure of the servant asserts (as does Beaumarchais’ Figaro) a rejection of any social order which defines an individual’s worth by his social position.

This quarrel between Jacques and his master constitutes a high point in the novel, where the fundamental rejection of the ancien régime is most apparent. The subsequent patching up of the quarrel (which as the Narrator points out has occurred a hundred times before) is just as significant. The intervention of the innkeeper’s wife restores the equality between Jacques and his master which constitutes the de facto reality of their day-to-day existence. Indeed equality is perhaps too mild a term since, as Jacques points out, he exercises effective control in the relationship, while his master has a merely titular authority. This pragmatic solution (by no means the only one of its kind in Diderot’s works) leaves certain fundamental contradictions unresolved, but it does have the virtue of effectiveness; it works. It also underlines the fact that while the master/servant relationship is, in some respects, a conflictual one, it is also a profoundly symbiotic one. Much has been made by some critics of the ineptness and stupidity of Jacques’ master, who appears to them the embodiment of an effete and parasitic aristocracy, while Jacques is the symbol of the valorous Third Estate. This is an exaggeration and a simplification: Jacques’ master, for all his limitations, is presented as an amiable and good-natured man, genuinely fond of his servant, and capable, for most of the time, of recognizing Jacques’ peculiar gifts and accepting his natural superiority. Indeed, as their relationship of story-teller and listener illustrates, each man needs the other. What characterizes Diderot’s treatment of the master/servant theme is the subtlety with which he brings out both the inevitably exploitative side of the relationship and its profoundly symbiotic nature.

Jacques is the hero of the novel not simply by virtue of his dominant position in his relationship with his master, but also by the fact that it is his past, the story of his loves, that provide the principal element of continuity in the work. This means that a considerable part of the novel focuses on a social setting that was comparatively rare in the French novel of the eighteenth century, the village and the countryside. Diderot had read extensively the work of English novelists of the century and had been struck by the relative broadness of scope the English novel allowed. Defoe, Fielding and Richardson could paint on a wider canvas and represent a greater variety of manners, customs and classes than could their French counterparts, who were bound, Diderot felt, by the rather restricted range of their public’s taste. In this respect Jacques is one of the most adventurous French novels of the century in its insistent reference to what might be termed scenes of everyday life in the village and the countryside, the traditional domain of the peasant, a social setting found only rarely in the French novel of this time. Often the episodes recounted come from an old stock of popular images and references – the farcical scene with the little village priest, the bawdy episodes of sexual initiation and the career of Brother Jean – which cannot be said to be of Diderot’s invention. They belong to a popular tradition of tales, fables and jokes which after a considerable period of absence come back into the mainstream of prose fiction through Jacques. Indeed, it is arguable that Jacques is truly Rabelaisian not in its rather clumsy attempts at a literal reworking of Rabelais (as in the reference to the sacred gourd) but in a much more fundamental sense. With Jacques, Diderot reintroduces popular elements into the serious novel with an effect that is as liberating as it was in Rabelais’ time. The egalitarian message of Jacques lies as much in its re-introduction of popular forms into the novel as in its celebration of the clever servant.

JACQUES THE FATALIST

The title tells us that Jacques is a fatalist, but what does this mean? Many critics have assumed that Jacques is about fatalism, that it is an exploration in fictional terms of philosophical issues raised by Diderot’s materialist view of the world – a view which requires the universe to be explained exclusively in terms of matter, its properties and activity. Diderot was led from this position to a commitment to determinism which propounded that if the universe is explicable exclusively in terms of the organization and activity of matter, then there is no room for any ‘play’ in the system. Nothing is chance: all is determined.

At the same time, Diderot was intensely preoccupied by ethical problems and concerns. Resolutely hostile to what he saw as the unnatural and stultifying effects of Christian ethical teaching, he remained equally resolute in seeking some alternative foundation to ethics. But this was where Diderot’s problems began, because the philosophical position he held seemed to deny any possibility of establishing a secure basis for ethics except as a form of utilitarian social engineering: if everything is determined, the argument will run, free will is a nonsense and, if this is the case, although we may attempt by means of an appropriate system of incentives and deterrents to make man what is socially desirable, we cannot make him a moral being.

Freedom or determinism? This becomes the starting-point for a philosophical reading of Jacques. The fatalistic Jacques is committed to a form of determinism, believing that all is foreordained, ‘written up above’, in his own words, yet he constantly contradicts his own viewpoint by actions and feelings which are the behaviour of a moral being. The novel can then be read as an elaboration in fictional form of the philosophical dilemma in which Diderot found himself, committed to a philosophical doctrine which denied his need for a universe in which moral choice was meaningful.

An interpretation of Jacques along these lines is plausible, and finds justification both in the text and in Diderot’s practice as a writer (Jacques is not the only one of Diderot’s works to explore dilemmas and unresolved tensions of his thought and personality). However, there are dangers in this line of interpretation.

First, it would be wrong to explain this strange and complicated novel simply in terms of its exposition of some philosophical doctrine. Jacques’ fatalism is not really philosophical determinism but is more closely related to certain popular ideas and expressions (the idea of every bullet having its address on it, for instance, and the notion of everything being ‘written up above’) than to any philosophical doctrine. In so far as it relates to any philosophical doctrine the link is a tenuous one whose fallibility is underlined. Jacques’ ‘philosophical’ ideas are derived from his Captain, who in turn derives them from Spinoza.