In the ‘Concluding note’ to An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (IPML), added in January 1789 to the original 1780 text, Bentham addresses highly theoretical questions in jurisprudence: ‘What is a law? What are the different parts of a law?’ He then demonstrates that only an imperative theory of legislation can provide adequate answers and provide the means to establish a precise nomenclature of legal phenomena. These broad questions sum up the work conducted in the manuscripts Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence, which remained at that time unpublished.Footnote 1 After such abstract matter, Bentham concludes on a much lighter note:
Leaning on his elbow, in an attitude of profound and solemn meditation, ‘What a multitude of things there are’, (exclaimed the dancing-master Marcel), ‘in a minuet?’ – May we now add? – and in a law.Footnote 2
Who is Marcel? In contrast to their treatment of nearly every proper name in the volume, the very thorough editorial footnotes provided by J. H. Burns, H. L. A. Hart and F. Rosen to the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham edition of the text remain silent on Marcel's identity. In French, ‘Marcel’ can be a first name or a surname, which makes identification more complex. On what account does a dancing-master deserve a mention in a work of jurisprudence? IPML contains allusions to various amusements such as stag hunting, spinning tops and smoking, not to mention the pleasures of a brisk walk in the countryside. Dancing, however, is not mentioned before this final note.
Though his first name remains elusive, Monsieur Marcel, as he was known, was a dancing-master to the best Parisian society. His date of birth is not known and he probably died in 1757. In 1820, he was still well known enough to deserve a two-page entry in the Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne. Footnote 3 His talent as a minuet-dancer had been noticed at the royal court in 1710. By 1726 he was giving lessons to King Louis XV and composing a number of ballets for fashionable operas.Footnote 4 In the 1740s he took in private pupils, many of whom came from abroad, drawn by his international fame. He was said to recognize the nationality of his students by their posture and their gait.
Rousseau, who had attended some of his lessons, mocked him in Emile, or On Education, published in French in 1762. He contrasted the contrived moves of ballet dancing as taught by Marcel with the natural and unfettered agility he wished his pupil to acquire.
If I were a dancing master I would not perform all the monkeyshines (singeries) of Marcel, good only for that country where he engages in them. Instead of eternally busying my pupil with leaps, I would take him to the foot of a cliff. There I would show him what attitude he must take, how he must bear his body and his head, what movements he must make, in what way he must place now his foot, now his hand, so as to follow lightly the steep, rough, uneven paths and to bound from peak to peak in climbing up as well as down. I would make him the emulator of a goat rather that of a dancer at the Opera.Footnote 5
The personal attack on the late Marcel then led to a heated epistolary exchange with his nephew, also a dancing master, who sought to defend the family honour. Rousseau's reply is unlikely to have closed the matter, as he mocked one of the most famous aphorisms attributed to Marcel: ‘Que de choses dans un menuet!’ This summed up the dancing-master's self-importance and pomposity in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. Rousseau wrote:
Your M. Marcel invented nothing, except phrases that died with him, he left his art in the same state he had found it. He would have served it better by babbling less and working more and instead of admiring so many things in a minuet, he should have put them in it.Footnote 6
But Marcel also had less critical admirers. His famous phrase on the minuet was taken more seriously by Helvétius, who used it in De l'esprit, published in 1742, when Marcel was at the height of his fame. Helvétius wanted to illustrate the fact that the mind could apply itself to any object. It could be interesting and legitimate for a dancing-master to analyse the moves of a dancer, and there was as much skill in the art of the orator as in that of the dancer:
However frivolous an art may appear, yet it is susceptible of infinite combinations. When Marcel, with his hand placed on his forehead, his eyes fixed, his body without motion, and in the attitude of profound meditation, on seeing a young lady dance, cries out, What variety in a minuet! doubtless, this dancing-master then perceived in the manner of being, rising and performing the steps, elegancies invisible to common eyes, and therefore his exclamation is no farther ridiculous than in the too great importance it places on trifles. Now if the art of dancing includes so great a number of ideas and combinations, who knows, whether the art of declamation does not suppose in the actress, who excels in it, as many ideas as a politician employs in forming a system of government!Footnote 7
In the closing lines of IPML, Bentham gave his own English translation of Marcel's famous phrase: ‘What a multitude of things there are in a minuet!’ In so doing, he created a strong bond with those of his readers who would recognize the allusion. It indicated his knowledge of the works in which Marcel's words had been quoted and debated, both significant landmarks in the French-language Enlightenment.
Beyond this, it also signalled a potentially more controversial allegiance to the ideas of Helvétius. Bentham did not use the reference within a discussion of dancing or of the performing arts in general, but in the context of the science of legislation. He also borrows from Helvétius the description of Marcel's posture. Like him, he takes Marcel's statement seriously, if in a light tone: it does take a trained eye to see the complexity of a law. In so doing, he adds his own field of study, jurisprudence, to the list drawn by his master.
If his debt to the utilitarianism of Helvétius is now widely recognized,Footnote 8 the young Bentham refrained from any direct mention of his mentor in his first published works, reserving his praise for unpublished manuscripts or private correspondence. Neither the name of Helvétius nor the titles of his works appear in A Fragment on Government. In IPML, the French author is only mentioned once, in a footnote, among ‘those ingenious moralists, who, travelling out of the beaten tract of speculation, have found more or less difficulty in disentangling themselves from the shackles of ordinary language: such as [La] Rochefoucaul[d], Mandeville, and Helvétius’.Footnote 9 Like Mandeville's, Helvétius's name was still associated with scandal, thereby exciting, as Bentham points out, ‘contempt’ and ‘indignation’ for insisting on the consequences of an action rather than on the nature of its motive to pass a moral judgement.
The hidden reference to Helvétius in the final paragraph of IPML pointed to a network of quotes and allusions that integrated Bentham within the literary context of the French Enlightenment and with the more radical moral and political ideas of Helvétius.
