A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  DIEU transmit la JUSTICE en l’âge d’or ça bas

  Quand le peuple innocent encor’ ne vivait pas

  Comme il fait en peché, et quand le VICE encore

  N’avoit franchi les bords de la boette à Pandore:

  Quand ces mots, Tien & Mien, en usage n’estoient,

  Et quand les laboureurs du soc ne tourmentoient

  Par sillons incongneuz les entrailles encloses

  Des champs, qui produisoient, de leur gré, toutes choses …

  (God sent Justice to earth in the golden age / When innocent people did not yet live / As they do now in sin, and when Vice / Had not yet crossed the rims of Pandora’s box: / When these words, Yours and Mine, were not in use, / And when workers of the plough did not torture / Through unknown furrows the closed entrails / Of the fields, that produced, of their own accord, all things.)

  The hymn continues with the growing human evils that degrade the golden age (and this garden of Eden) until Justice flees back to heaven, and God/Jupiter threatens not another Flood, but a universal Fire. Temporarily saved by Mercy and Destiny, eventually comes great king Henri II, in whose lieutenant and minister, Charles de Guise, Justice will again come to earth. The twelve-syllable line in successive rimes plates tells an inexorable story, whose outcome we know from the title dedication and first lines. These lines’ regularity typify the meter for the next three centuries. Each line is halved in hemistiches by a caesura that must fall on a strong sixth syllable/ vowel, of a syntactically and lexically strong word or phrase (verb, noun, adjective, adverb, full or nearly so in meaning). The special force of mute-e can serve to stretch out that syllable even when it does not count in the meter. In the first line here, the first accent falls on JusTICE, even as its mute elongates into the en. The next caesural stresses fall on the last syllables of innoCENT, pechÉ, BORDS, MIEN, labourEURS, incongNEUZ, whose meanings for conflicts of sin and innocence, vice and virtue, work and leisure, are clear. Meantime, the stronger stresses of successive rhymes bear the argument/story sternly forward. And, as Jacques Roubaud notes, the paired rhymes work to enlarge the unit from one line to two, providing twenty-four places for potential changes in rhythm rather than twelve (Ronsard’s lingering line memory)—indeed, the rhymes being pairs of pairs, the unit grows to forty-eight (I refer especially to chapters 4 and 5 of Vieillesse d’Alexandre). For Ronsard, this is what risks making the alexandrine prose. I parse this passage because it also contains so much future philosophical argument (and terms), from Montaigne to Rousseau and indeed Hugo.

  Alexandrines were not just this. Du Bellay opened his 1558 Les regrets by defying Ronsard’s lead, in an alexandrine sonnet no less regular:

  Je ne veux point fouiller au sein de la nature,

  Je ne veux point chercher l’esprit de l’univers,

  Je ne veux point sonder les abîmes ouverts,

  Ni dessiner du ciel la belle architecture.

  (I do not want to rummage in nature’s breast, / I do not want to search the universe’s spirit, / I do not want to sound the open deeps, / Nor to draw the heavens’ lovely architecture.)

  The series of denials, the caesural stress on verbs of human hubris, the rimes embrassées, the sonnet form, all counter the “heroic” or epic alexandrine; or tragic, says Ronsard. He does likewise. Indeed, in the sequence of sonnets for Marie, he queries his intellectual ambitions and the alexandrine in which he most lately expressed them. He does so by bookending the sequence with a first sonnet that, asking his friend for a solution, opens: “Tyard, everyone said of my beginning / That I was too obscure for the ordinary person: / Today, everyone says the opposite, / And that I betray myself by speaking in too low a manner”; and with a closing sonnet:

  Marie, tout ainsi que vous m’avés tourné

  Mon sens, & ma raison, par vôtre voix subtile,

  Ainsi m’avés tourné mon grave premier style,

  Que pour chanter si bas n’estoit point destiné.

  (Marie, just as you have turned / My sense and my reason, with your gentle voice, / So have you turned my first grave style, / That was not destined for such low song.)

  Just as the first poem is in rimes embrassées, so is this last (indeed, the abba/abba was usual in all the quatrains of Ronsard’s sonnets, alexandrine or decasyllabic). The first caesura is not, this time, on a major syntactical term (ainSI), though the others are, and this first line uses, too, a heavy enjambment: … tourné Mon sens.

  Ronsard’s love sonnets are typically more rhythmically complicated than the longer forms—odes, hymns, elegies, discours. While the first two quatrains usually follow that abba/abba rhyme, the tercets, always intertwined in rhyme, may be ccd/eed, cdc/dcd, ccd/dee. Enjambment is common; caesural stress on a weak syllable, lexically or syntactically, is not unusual. Yet in the main sonnet series to Marie and Hélène, the alexandrine is the preeminent meter. Indeed, in the latter, I think there is one exception in both books (1.16), while even the latter sequence’s two Chansons are in a meter of twelve- and six-syllable lines: demi-alexandrines. The many such sonnets that are so familiar as to be almost proverbial suggests that their meter does manifest in some fundamental way the rhythms of the language, the thought and emotions it expresses—or have historically come to do so. Here, Cécile Alduy’s strong book on the 1550s craze in France for Amours lets me take conclusions a bit further. After hesitations over the preferred form (Scève wrote Délie in dizains), these sequences were invariably sonnets, really modeled after du Bellay’s Olive. Alduy asks why, in France, against the diversity of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, most sequences kept to one genre. Ronsard’s Hymne de l’éternité offers a clue, voicing unity in its capacious epic alexandrines, as parts in concord that describe love sonnet sequences as a genre, as it does their emotional and spiritual drives and goal of their principal images. Alduy also asserts the importance of these sequences in forging a national language, often in “competition” with Italy, despite the seeming legèreté of their matter. This makes them sketches and even figures of amity/love (Aristotle’s and Cicero’s amicitia) as essence of the well-ordered society and state (suggesting why love became crucial to the later politics of tragic theater).

  Apropos of Ronsard, this brings into view a last set of poems I would like to address, the Discours des misères de ce temps, written mostly in 1562–63 (each first in print as a pamphlet), with three from 1560–61; these were gathered in 1567 as a potent defense of Catholic France, but especially of the monarchy and Catherine’s efforts at permanent negotiated peace. These were not Ronsard’s last foray into political verse. They were his one skirmish in fierce polemic. As such, one wonders how far the 1574–84 Protestant alexandrine epics Judith and Sepmaines by Guillaume du Bartas (1544–90) and Les tragiques (1616) by Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552–1630, a great Ronsard admirer) reply to Ronsard’s 1562–63 Discours and 1572 nationalist and monarchic epic (in no sense Catholic propaganda, but firmly for Charles IX, his Valois dynasty, and the Christian France he takes them to embody, and that unhappily went on sale two weeks after the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day massacre, with evident effects on interpretation). One can ponder, too, the far larger aesthetic (and political) success and influence of these epics, leading in turn back to the Discours, whose flexibility of alexandrine is more redolent of the sonnet sequences than of the Hymnes, Elégies, or even Franciade’s decasyllables. I give just one example, taken from what became the opening Discours, addressed to Catherine, first printed as a separate plaquette after the outbreak of the first War of Religion, begging her to continue piloting her child Charles and France:

  Il faut premierement qu’il ait devant les yeux

  La crainte d’un seul Dieu: qu’il soit devotieux

  Envers la sainte Eglise, & que point il ne change

  La foy de ses ayeulz pour en prendre une estrange.

  Ainsi que nous voions instruire nostre Roy

  Qui par vostre vertu n’a point changé de loy. (ll. 37–42)

  (First he must have before hi
s eyes / Fear of one God: [he must] be reverent / Toward the holy church, and not at all change / The faith of his ancestors to adopt a foreign one. / As we see taught our king / Who by your virtue has not at all changed law.)

  This awkward translation tries to catch these lines’ layout as well as their sense. In late 1561, Ronsard had written a verse Institution for young King Charles IX—a short “Education” or “Mirror” (published alone in 1562, then included in the Discours collection)—recalled here, thus implicitly setting Catherine’s right religious education of Charles against Jeanne d’Albret’s wrong, “foreign,” training of her son Henri. These six lines work what became a virtual battle cry: “Une foi, un roi, une loi” (one faith, one king, one law). Ronsard can easily accent two of the terms as rimes plates (ll. 41–42). He cannot do the same for the third because of the rule of alternating masculine and feminine pairs. Breaching another rule in repeating a rhyme, he could place foy three lines away. His solution is stronger and more interesting. He signals the primacy of the slogan’s first term by leading into it with the full first hemistiches of lines 38 and 39 (fear of God, devotion to the church) and by encasing it in its two negating words at the feminine rhyme, change and estrange and, above all, setting it at the head of line 40 by enjambment: “que point il ne change la foy de ses ayeulz.” Using this device, Ronsard breaches the rule that hemistiches, and above all lines, should usually be “whole” in sense. Certainly “que point il ne change” can be called whole. The run-on is nonetheless strong enough to draw attention to foy in its relation to roy and loy.

  A few lines later, Ronsard transforms the virtually absolute hemistich-divisional rhythm of his alexandrines: “Que dira Pharamond! Clodion, & Clovis! / Nos Pepins! nos Martels! nos Charles, nos Loys …?” (What will say Pharamond! Clodion, and Clovis! Our Pepins! our Martels! our Charles, our Louis …?) (ll. 57–58). The first line quite hammers its two six-syllable divisions, its exclamation at the caesura, “Clodion” fairly flows, as it were, into “Clovis,” the second hemistich closed with another exclamation. The next line jerks us into stresses on its third as well as its sixth syllables. We start actually to feel the potential dynastic rupture. No conjunction flows from king to king, each and all (nos … nos … nos … nos) a separate moment. This is what will happen if Catherine and, through her, Charles, cannot keep control, by negotiation if possible, force if necessary, of religion and the nation, foi, roi, loi. Such moments show the alexandrine’s power and flexibility, generally visible in the sonnets, which lies (as appears in these fraught Discours) in the twelve-syllable meter’s provision of more combinatory “places” (Roubaud) for rhythmic variation. It was a power that would live on, as Mallarmé would note. What difference they might have made to La Franciade we cannot know. Nor can we ever know which of Ronsard’s reasons for not writing it in alexandrines was more important.

  Royal order and his own tentativeness about “heroic verse” clearly coexisted. But the latter is (perhaps) the more interesting. It shows Ronsard struggling, beyond the superficialities of expanding his language’s vocabulary with new words, ever greater use of figures, terms of art, dialect, and so forth (chief objects of later criticism), with the very nature of language in its rhythms and metrics. He knew that these affected what it could say as well as how. In the Odes, the Elégies, the Discours, the Hymnes, and the Franciade, at stake were the nation, the state, its principal representatives and leaders, as well as what he referred to as “the most excellent conceptions”: the deepest possibilities of thought and action. Experiment in such things was more “safely” committed to sonnets. But there, too, at heart, the issue was the grounds of human relations and that amicitia, amor, that from antiquity to Ronsard’s own time had been taken as the enabling force of all human society. The Discours were especially tensed because the conflicts they feared tore amicitia, broke social relations (all too clearly for Ronsard, losing his friend Louis des Masures and Châtillon/ Coligny patrons), and forced them potentially to be replaced by something else: maybe a coerced contract that late-nineteenth-century poets would see epitomized in the alexandrine. Perhaps the Valois fell because they insisted on (thinking in) decasyllables.

  That may be a joke. But Ronsard’s poetic and intellectual grandeur lies not least in his unbroken engagement with what in it is not a joke.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  I cite Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier, Raymond Lebègue, and Isidore Silver 20 vols. (Paris: STFM, 1914–75). Ronsard revised nonstop, and this edition alone presents the work chronologically. Its eighteen text volumes are online (not 19 and 20: Addenda, Errata, tables, and indexes). The latest Pléiade Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), follows Ronsard’s own last edition (1584) with all variants. Du Perron’s eulogy is in Oraison funèbre sur la mort de Monsieur de Ronsard (1586), ed. Simonin (Geneva: Droz, 1985). Mauduit’s requiem is online (score in Mersenne’s 1636–37 Harmonie universelle). The first Life has two modern digitized editions: La vie de P. de Ronsard de Claude Binet (1586), ed. Laumonier (Paris: Hachette, 1910); and Helene M. Evers, “Critical Edition of the Discours de la vie de Pierre de Ronsard” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1905).

  English translators have belabored the love poetry. Besides various twentieth-century medleys, Humbert Wolfe offers a good bilingual Sonnets pour Hélène (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1934); and Morris Bishop provides a beautifully rendered multitude in his romanticized Ronsard, Prince of Poets (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). Recently, Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock deliver a wide French Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2002) with English prose crib; Philip John Usher gives a fine Franciade (New York: AMS, 2010); and Clive Lawrence a splendid Cassandra (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015), hitting tone, rhythm, rhyme, even run-ons—with literal inaccuracies yielding to affective verity.

  Of criticism and history, I cite two French works, one among several still key to Ronsard study from the 1910–20s, the second recent: Gustave Cohen, Ronsard, sa vie et son oeuvre (1924), new ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); and Cécile Alduy, Politique des “Amours”: Poétique et genèse d’un genre français nouveau (1544–1560) (Geneva: Droz, 2007). The early group is chiefly Pierre Chamard, Pierre Champion, Paul Laumonier, Pierre de Nolhac, and Marcel Raymond. Their compatriots’ later output is giant. On the alexandrine, I note Jacques Roubaud, La vieillesse d’Alexandre: Essai sur quelques états du vers français récent (Paris: Maspero, 1978). English books bulk less, perhaps owing to Ronsard’s resistance to translation.

  The dean is still Isidore Silver, Ronsard and the Hellenic Renaissance in France, 4 vols. (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press; Geneva: Droz, 1961–87); and The Intellectual Evolution of Ronsard, 3 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1969–92). Some monographs need mention: Dudley Wilson, Ronsard, Poet of Nature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); Elizabeth Armstrong, Ronsard and the Age of Gold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Richard A. Katz, Ronsard’s French Critics, 1585–1828 (Geneva: Droz, 1966), which sinks claims of Ronsard’s 250-year eclipse; K.R.W. Jones,, Pierre de Ronsard (New York: Twayne, 1970), still a sterling introduction; Malcolm Quainton, Ronsard’s Ordered Chaos: Visions of Flux and Stability in the Poetry of Pierre de Ronsard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); Ullrich Langer, Invention, Death, and Self-Definitions in the Poetry of Pierre de Ronsard (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1986); Sara Sturm-Maddox, Ronsard, Petrarch, and the “Amours” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), the book in English on Petrarch and Ronsard; Virginia Scott and Sara Sturm-Maddox, Performance, Poetry, and Politics on the Queen’s Day: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainebleau (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), which studies a likely 1564 performance; and Carla Zecher, Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments, Poetry, and Art in Renaissance France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), on Ronsard’s music. Terence Cave’s chapter in his Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the Frenc
h Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979) is basic, and his edited Ronsard the Poet (London: Methuen, 1973) is still fruitful critical work. Grahame Castor’s Pléiade Poetics: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Thought and Terminology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) transformed its topic’s study. So, now does Poétiques de la Renaissance: Le modèle italien, le monde franco-bourguignon et leur héritage en France au XVIe siècle, ed. Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn (Geneva: Droz, 2001). Many musical settings exist, old and new: for example, Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud.

  Du Bellay and La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse

  HASSAN MELEHY

  The word “Renaissance,” in the sense of a vast rebirth of society, culture, and politics, was not used in sixteenth-century France, when major changes in these areas occurred, but rather, for the first time, in the mid-nineteenth century by historian Jules Michelet. Nonetheless, the idea of a great renewal of literature, by way of a modern rebirth of the culture of Greek and Roman antiquity in close connection with the growing international presence of the French state, is a central concern in Joachim du Bellay’s La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (The Defense and Illustration of the French Language). This artfully written text, which appeared in 1549, the very middle of the sixteenth century, stands out among the poetic treatises of the time in a number of ways. Signing the work only with his initials,1 du Bellay proposes a wholesale revitalization of French poetry as a national literature that will find its place among the other literatures of Europe, with the aim that before long it will surpass them in quality. He speaks on behalf of a group of young writers, commonly known as the Pléiade, who regarded themselves as responsible for inventing a new poetry, distinct from the poetry of the previous several centuries (the period we now call the Middle Ages). Although there is a lot of variety in the work of these poets—who included, among others, Pierre de Ronsard, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Etienne Jodelle, Rémy Belleau, Pontus de Tyard, Jacques Peletier du Mans, and du Bellay himself—they shared the common mission of renewing poetry, and the Deffence is, for the most part, their manifesto.