A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Marguerite was as conscious of her differences with Erasmus as Rabelais was conscious of his proximity. In two late works she pointedly represented Erasmian humanism in an extremely negative light. One of these is the evangelical farce Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, in which four female allegories interact symbolically. La Mondaine (Worldly) is concerned only with her body and is proud of her physical beauty. La Superstitieuse (Devout) is concerned only with her soul and is proud of her works of piety, certain that she will be saved by mortifying her own flesh. La Sage (Wise) converts and reconciles the first two by offering each a copy of the Bible, promising that if they study this book they will be reborn in humility and virtue, love of God, and love of neighbor. But the play does not end here. The three happy ladies encounter a fourth, a lovesick Bergère (Shepherdess) who seems to care nothing at all for body, soul, or mind, but sings ecstatic love songs about her absent lover. She is identified in the dramatis personae as “ravished by the love of God” (ravie de l’amour de Dieu) but, as the three other characters point out, her words contain no indication that her love is spiritual or that her lover is Christ. Are her words meant to be allegorical? We have no way of knowing. All we know is that the Bergère is beyond the reach of reason. She cannot be bothered to read the Bible, much less to study it, less still to join into communion with her sisters. The play ends as the three others leave in disgust, and the shepherdess remains alone on the stage, singing her heart out like a mad Ophelia. However we choose to interpret the play, it clearly represents the defeat of Erasmian humanism.

  A similar defeat is represented in Marguerite’s greatest work: the long allegorical poem Les prisons, which describes three successive stages in a male narrator’s life. In the second of these the narrator is seized by a love of the world and all it contains. A cheerful old man named Amateur de Science (the French equivalent of philo-sophos) providentially appears to convince him that the “world” he admires is in fact a prison; that the thirst for honor, wealth, and pleasure (the three “concupiscences” condemned in 1 John 2.15–17) are “tyrants” that bind him to a transitory world governed by fickle Fortune; and that learning holds the key to freedom, virtue, and immortality. Inspired by the old sage, the narrator devotes himself entirely to study. He labors tirelessly to master all the humanistic disciplines: philosophy, poetry, law, mathematics, medicine, history, rhetoric, and finally theology, which consists not of abstract metaphysics but of unmediated study of the text of the Bible. Here again we recognize the Erasmian ideal of learning in the service of a Christian life, and here again the Erasmian ideal is shown to fail. Once liberated by liberal studies, the narrator discovers he has once again become a prisoner, this time of the letter of all these texts, and of the capital sin of cuyder, or prideful presumption. Laboring on his own to know everything, the narrator has simply repeated the original sin against God and brought about his own fall from grace. Providential grace intervenes, unsolicited, to liberate the self-imprisoning humanist. A sudden manifestation of the Spirit leads to the conflagration of the universal library and all the books it contains. The poem ends with an apocalyptic vision and a long song of ecstasy and praise uttered by a narrator now freed from his own being, reduced to “nothing” and “ravished by Love, transported by joy.”

  The anti-Erasmianism of these works is so apparent that it is tempting to view La Sage and Amateur de Science as representations of Erasmus himself, and the love songs of the ecstatic Bergère and the mystical transports of the spiritually liberated narrator of Les prisons as Marguerite’s replies to Erasmus’s two unanswered letters. To the eloquent, learned, ennobling Latin prose of the humanist, Marguerite responds with the irrational vernacular ravings of an illuminated ignorant “nothing,” innocent of books and even of the Book, and simply “ravished by love.” From Marguerite’s point of view, Erasmian humanism consists in dead letters and sinful pride. Illumination comes directly from the Spirit, unsought, unearned, unlearned, and incomprehensible to the wise—an extreme case of the “folly of the Cross” that is foolishness to the Greeks seeking wisdom.

  In their differences Rabelais and Marguerite define two poles of a continuum along which most of their contemporaries can be situated. The best-known and most interesting of these is Clément Marot, the court poet famously dismissed by Boileau in the next century as a facile versifier. As Marguerite’s court poet and secretary, and later as court poet and secretary of the king himself, Marot indeed wrote circumstantial verse that is deft, witty, and charming. But he also wrote works that are very close in spirit to Marguerite’s. An obvious example is his relatively late project of translating the biblical psalms into the French vernacular—publishing thirty of them in 1541, another twenty in 1543. These are in fact paraphrases more than translations, similar to Marguerite’s Chansons spirituelles in that Marot composed them in lyric stanzas designed to be sung as four-part “chansons parisiennes,” then very much in vogue. Marot acknowledged this aspect of his translations in the dedicatory poem of the 1543 edition, addressed to the “Ladies of France,” where he clearly enunciates the principle of the Chansons spirituelles: when the ladies sing these “love songs” with new words written by God himself (the God who is love), the Holy Spirit will inhabit and transform their hearts by grace. Marot also contributed directly to some of Marguerite’s own works. His very first psalm translation (psalm 6) first appeared in a 1533 edition of Marguerite’s Miroir de l’âme pécheresse. The joyful, transformative song sung by the blessed children at the very center of Marguerite’s farce L’inquisiteur is none other than Marot’s translation of psalm 3.

  At other moments Marot appears closer to Rabelais—by no means as learned but similarly concerned with a more social, human form of evangelism. His most accomplished works are satirical and polemical poems that attack the same carnal, formalistic constitutiones humanae that Rabelais satirizes so effectively. Many of these poems are autobiographical: epistolary accounts of the two occasions on which Marot was imprisoned for “eating fat during Lent” and of his flight into exile at a time when Noël Béda’s influence was unchallenged and all “Lutherans” were being rounded up and executed. One such work is a mordant allegorical poem titled L’enfer, modeled on book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. Another is a verse epistle written in exile in which “la belle Christine,” an allegory for the paleo-Christian church, is contrasted with the whore of Babylon, an allegory for the Roman Catholic Church. All of these are brilliant portrayals of the abuses of Church and Parliament and justifications of the poet’s own actions on religious and biblical grounds. This vein of satire is unmistakably Rabelaisian, and Erasmian.

  Other poems by Marot fall somewhere between these two poles. An early work titled Le temple de Cupido (1514), for example, relates an allegorical quest for “Ferme Amour” (constant love), clearly identified as Christ’s love for humanity and agape among Christians, which the narrator eventually finds simultaneously in his own heart and in the love between François, future king of France, and his new bride Claude de Bretagne. When writing in this “middle ground,” Marot is often recognizably Erasmian. Verse translations of two and possibly three of Erasmus’s own Colloquia on the theme of women and marriage corroborate this orientation. Marot’s psalm translations also owe something to Erasmus’s idea that all Christians should have direct access to scripture in their own language. The poem in which Marot dedicates these translations to the ladies of France in fact echoes a famous passage of Erasmus’s Paraclesis, a preface to his edition and Latin translation of the Greek New Testament, which looks forward to a day when not only women, but plowers, artisans, and tradesmen will sing psalms as they toil in their fields and shops and on the road. The juxtaposition of this echo with allusions to Marguerite’s idea of conversion through song makes this wonderful little poem an emblematic fusion of the Erasmian and anti-Erasmian strains of sixteenth-century evangelism.

  Despite their many differences Rabelais, Marguerite, and Marot were attacked by the same enemies, who were also Eras
mus’s enemies, and like Erasmus they eventually found themselves caught in the cross fire between increasingly antagonistic factions—an entrenched Catholic orthodoxy on one side and emerging Protestant orthodoxies on the other. All three were victims of Erasmus’s nemesis, the hyperorthodox Noël Béda. At the same time, Jean Calvin denounced Rabelais as an “atheist” and Marguerite, more obliquely, as a “spiritual libertine.” Marot fared somewhat better with this faction at first, finding refuge from Catholic persecution in Calvin’s Geneva in 1542, where he contributed his psalm translations to the new Geneva Bible, but Marot’s urbane wit eventually proved too worldly for the dour Calvin, and he died in double exile from Catholic France and Protestant Geneva, in Turin, in 1544.

  Rabelais’s last book, the Quart Livre, published in 1552, represents a world wracked by intractable wars and mutually exclusive ideologies, with Papimanes (pope maniacs) on one side, and Papefigues (those who make obscene gestures at the pope) on the other; the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V on one side, and the Lutheran German princes on the other; “Matagotz, Cagotz, et Papelars” of the Roman Catholic Church on one side, and “Demoniacles Calvins imposteurs de Geneve” on the other. By this time Erasmus, Marguerite, and Marot were all dead, and Rabelais, first and last of the French Erasmians, had only a year to live. With Rabelais’s death in 1553, an era of precarious brilliance came to an end. What both sides of the ideological divide viewed—mistakenly—as a fainthearted middle ground shrank to nonexistence, leaving only hardened and mutually excommunicating orthodoxies in its place. Although some distinctive features of Erasmus’s writing can still be found in later years—the Erasmian form of dialogue that survives intact in the feminist dialogues of Catherine Des Roches, for example, and the digressive ruminative style of the Adagia that lives on in Montaigne’s Essais—the humane, ironic, and optimistic Christian humanism that Erasmus had come to represent could not survive the clash of hardened creeds, inquisitions, and martyrdoms. Erasmianism itself was dead.

  As a consequence of this demise, literature produced by the next generation of French writers was entirely different from that of the first generation. The characteristic fusions of classical and biblical antiquity, of high and low cultures, of popular simplicity and elite erudition, of comedy and piety, of “medieval” and “Renaissance,” disappeared without a trace, giving way to a “purer” literary Renaissance that cultivated classical themes in classical forms, channeled Christian and secular influences into completely separate spheres, and never, ever, treated religion with humor. This was the era of the Pléiade, whose project was to re-create classical poetry in the French vernacular, bestowing on their king, their nation, and themselves all the prestige that Pindar and Homer, Horace and Virgil, had bestowed on Greece and Rome and themselves. This second Renaissance was proclaimed with great fanfare in 1549, through publication of the Défense et illustration de la langue française, in which Joachim du Bellay called for a complete break with the literary past and the creation of a completely new French literature. But the seeds of this Renaissance had in fact been sown earlier. The final paradox of a paradoxical generation of French writers is that the first sonnets in French, the first epigrams in French, some of the first elegies and eclogues in French, and the very first translations and imitations of Petrarch, cynosure of the new Renaissance poets, were written not by members of the Pléiade but by that most versatile and mercurial of first-Renaissance poets, Clément Marot.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  The complete works of Erasmus are currently being made available in excellent critical editions, thanks to two ongoing projects, both expertly annotated by large teams of the most prominent Erasmus scholars of the past fifty years. The Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam: North-Holland and Elsevier; Leiden: Brill, 1969–), now almost complete with some forty-three volumes published (but no plans to publish the letters), offers the definitive text of the Latin original. The standard Latin edition of the letters remains the Opus Epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–58). The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), progressing nicely with fifty-seven of eighty-six projected volumes now published, offers the most complete collection of English translations. The letters (vols. 1–25) are unfortunately incomplete as of 2016, extending only through July 1530 (vol. 16). Erasmus’s correspondence with Noël Béda quoted in this chapter is from letters 1579 and 1581 in The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1535–1657, ed. Charles G. Nauert and Alexander Dalzell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), identical text in both letters. Until the remaining volumes appear, the reader may consult a French translation of the complete letters, La correspondance d’Erasme, ed. Aloïs Gerlo and Paul Foriers, 12 vols. (Paris: Gallimard; Bruxelles: Presses Académiques Européennes, 1968–84). Erasmus’s complete correspondence with Guillaume Budé is also available in a French translation by the foremost Budé scholar, Marie-Madeleine de la Garanderie (Paris: Vrin, 1967).

  The best-known works of Erasmus are also available individually in English: The Praise of Folly in a fine translation with excellent notes by Clarence H. Miller (1979; 2nd ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); the complete Colloquia in Craig R. Thompson’s The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); and a good sampling of the Adagia with a very helpful introduction by Margaret Mann Phillips, in The “Adages” of Erasmus: A Study with Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).

  Many good critical biographies of Erasmus are available in English. Among them are György Faludy, Erasmus of Rotterdam (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1970); Léon-E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography, trans. John Tonkin (1987; Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); and especially Richard J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe: The Making of a Humanist, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990–93). Useful studies of a more analytical nature include Margaret Mann Phillips, Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance (1949; rev. ed., Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981); and Erika Rummel, Erasmus (London: Continuum, 2004). Also useful is Erika Rummel, Erasmus and His Catholic Critics, 2 vols. (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1989). A very handy encyclopedia is the supplement to the Collected Works of Erasmus, titled Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985–87).

  Two good editions of Marot’s complete work exist in French. The Œuvres complètes, ed. François Rigolot, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Flammarion, 2007–9), has the distinct advantage in presenting the poet’s works as they appeared in first editions. The Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux, Classiques Garnier, 2 vols. (Paris: Bordas, 1990–93) is more erratic in this regard and contains many errors, but is more copiously (perhaps excessively) annotated. There are at present no reliable translations of Marot’s most interesting poetry. There are, however, several good studies in English. These include Pauline M. Smith, Clement Marot: Poet of the French Renaissance (London: Athlone, 1970); M. A. Screech, Clément Marot: A Renaissance Poet Discovers the Gospel; Lutheranism, Fabrism and Calvinism in the Royal Courts of France and of Navarre and in the Ducal Court of Ferrara (Leiden: Brill, 1994); and Dick Wursten, Clément Marot and Religion: A Reassessment in the Light of His Psalm Paraphrases (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

  For bibliographical details regarding Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre, see the chapters on both in this volume. Rabelais’s letter to Erasmus quoted in this chapter is from The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 746. The passage from Pantagruel is from ibid., 227. Marguerite de Navarre’s Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan can be found in Œuvres complètes, vol. 4: Théâtre, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Olivier Millet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002).

  Rabelais and the Low Road to Modernity

  RAYMOND GEUSS

 
; In 1532, or conceivably 1531, a rather old-fashioned-looking volume appeared at the booksellers in Lyons with the title Pantagruel: Les horribles et espouventables faictz et prouesses du tresrenomé Pantagruel Roy des Dipsodes, filz du grant géant Gargantua (Pantagruel: The Horrifying and Dreadful Deeds and Prowesses of the Most Famous Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua). It recounts the fantastic adventures of a young giant named Pantagruel and his good friend Panurge in war and peace; the author is given as Maître Alcofrybas Nasier, an anagram of François Rabelais. In 1534, or possibly 1535, a kind of prequel to the story of Pantagruel appeared in the form of a narrative of the adventures of his father Gargantua: La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel (The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel). The year 1546 saw the publication of a third volume, Le tiers livre des faicts et dicts heroique du bon Pantagruel (The Third Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Good Pantagruel), where the author is openly named as François Rabelais, Doctor of Medicine. Le quart livre des faicts et dicts heroiques du bon Pantagruel (The Fourth Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Good Pantagruel) was published in 1552, the year of Rabelais’s death.

  What is a contemporary English-speaking reader to make of a series of four books written in an incessantly punning, not yet standardized, sixteenth-century French with lashings of Latin, Greek, Basque, Italian, Gascon, German, Limousin, and several other real—and some imaginary—languages by an absconded monk turned physician, which satirizes archaic social customs, monastic and legal institutions, forms of education and dress, eating habits, and obscure philosophical doctrines and literary genres? Since virtually no one can read these texts unprepared, not even modern francophones, we are all in one way or another dependent on translations and an appended explanatory apparatus.