A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Despite their burlesque and satirical tone, the works of La Fontaine and Cyrano provide a reflection on the cruelty and savagery of politics—a politics that, at the same time, refers to the sovereign power but also to the community, to the difficulty of living together. Both La Fontaine and Cyrano lived through the Fronde (1648–53), a violent civil war that divided France. The revolts, which began while Louis XIV was still a child, sought to oppose the establishment of an absolute monarchy (the concentration of power in the hands of the king). Richelieu, in particular, who was then minister to the king, greatly contributed to the preservation and consolidation of the monarch’s power. When Louis XIV came of age, he continued to assert his power over the nobility. A way of controlling the nobles was to incorporate them into his court. It is in this context that Louis XIV thought it prudent to imprison the rich and influential minister Fouquet.

  La Fontaine alludes to these unsettling events during his comical voyage. For instance, when he wishes to leave Richelieu, he finds the doors locked: “There was a rumor that some gentlemen of the province had formed a plot to save certain prisoners, suspected of the murder of the Marquis de Faure.” Upon arriving at Etampes, he notices “some vestiges of our wars, … the work of Mars, worthless mason if ever there was one,” and recalls the wounds left by the Fronde: “Beaucoup de sang françois fut alors répandu: / On perd des deux côtés dans la guerre civile; / Notre prince eût toujours perdu, / Quand même il eût gagné la ville.” (Much French blood was then spilled; / Both sides lost in the civil war. / Our prince would have always lost, / Even if he had won the city.)4 Once again, the poet provides a glimpse of both the danger of power (those who decide, who can declare war and impose exile) and its vulnerability (the most powerful can, in an instant, fall). He also underscores vanity of authority, inscribed in a version of vanitas vanitatum. At the Richelieu estate, when in the queen’s room, La Fontaine remarks, “There is so much gold that in the end I was bored. Consider what the great lords can do, and what misery it is to be rich: it was necessary to invent rooms of stucco, where magnificence hides itself under the appearance of simplicity.” Through oxymoron (the misery or poverty of being rich), if he wishes, the poet can, in one line, sweep away all the grandeur of the world. It is he who decides whether or not to offer a literary legacy to great men. The poet also can take up his own place in this creation of historical and literary memory, which in seventeenth-century thought and culture was characteristically a response to the transience and vanity of existence. In sum, La Fontaine, as later in the Fables, constructs a poetic realm, a lyrical garden that is similar to but also contrasts with the gardens where the kings flaunt their power.

  As we have seen, Cyrano also questions everyday oppression. Although Etats et empires cannot be considered descriptions of utopias in our normal understanding of the genre (they propose no ideal social model), certain passages can be read as “great escapes.” For instance, on the moon, one can offer poems for the payment of dues; thus, “no one dies of hunger except the blockheads, and men of wit live in perpetual good cheer.” It is the dream of a society where writers are never penniless or dependent on rich patrons to survive, and where spirit is valued over wealth and worldly power. When, on the sun, the oaks of Dodone recount the mythological love stories of Hermaphrodite, Narcissus, or the young prince Artaxerxes to the main character, the stories take the form of a eulogy to forbidden love. These passages stage all possible affective relations. It is this utopian dimension of the “possible” that opens up a new horizon in the text: where we can love someone of the same sex, where nothing prevents us from falling in love with an animal or a tree. For instance, Artaxerxes, because he was nourished by the fruit of Orestes, falls in love with a plane tree: “It was even noticed that the tree jealously ranged and pressed its leaves together for fear lest the rays of daylight as they glided through should also kiss him. The king for his part placed not limits to his love. He caused his bed to be made at the foot of the plane-tree and the plane-tree, not knowing how to repay such a friendship, gave the most precious thing trees have—honey and dew—which it distilled every morning upon him.”

  If these loves are possible, it is because Cyrano imagines a world where matter circulates so freely that identities, genres, and categories blur. Trees, flowers, cabbages, humans, monkeys, and daimons appear to be living, changing from one form into another, coming together to make other things and other beings. The main character, in his travels, is continuously transformed under the influence of the sun, moon, or heat. He is rejuvenated, loses his hair, is famished, satisfied, made transparent or opaque. The text provides the loose map of another, a “possible,” world, where movement and transformation permit escape from categorization and from all forms of power. In this context, friendship plays an essential role and, in a certain way, provides an alternative space. The main character is saved from death, suffering, or persecution by his friends, whether they be human, magpie, or daimon. In Toulouse, he takes refuge at the home of his friend Colignac, and the two of them spend their time with the marquis of Cussan. This episode provides a brief narrative respite, because although the main character is persecuted for his novel, the domain of Colignac becomes a refuge and pretext for the protagonist to celebrate another realm: “In one word we enjoyed, so to speak, both ourselves and all that is most agreeably produced by Nature for our use; we placed no limits to our desires save those of reason.” Concisely stated, this extraordinary voyage is, at the same time, the experience of belonging to nowhere and freedom to cultivate places other than those to which nature, history, and culture typically confine us.

  The travel literature of La Fontaine and Cyrano dramatizes a number of pregnant seventeenth-century questions: the relativity of customs and beliefs, the relationship between political power and art, the modes of constituting a literary history, the particularity of the human soul, and the place of humans in creation. Through many different kinds of reflection in many different registers—moral, political, historical, rhetorical, epistemological, and metaphysical—travelogues, by playing with points of view and reversals, find an entertaining way of inviting readers to deal with some of these questions by, in turn, questioning their own beliefs, opinions, and prejudices. Generic hybridity and polyphony are symptomatic of this experience of decentring and displacement. The “decentred” and the “displaced” are modes of experience and representation we tend to associate with our own time, but, in their own specific ways, they are also a feature of the landscape of the seventeenth century. Walking, wandering, and continual movement are signs of a vitality that creates the conditions for an encounter with the Other, but also the life of a spirit that meanders from one idea to another, from one pleasure to another. La Fontaine and Cyrano can be read as adhering to the axiom ambulo ergo sum because their characters are ever-changing and protean. In a certain way, it is in traveling or walking that they better perform this complex, plural identity. We are here far from the “modern subject” in that other sense of “modern,” a subject sure of its own existence and nature with which we often associate the seventeenth century.

  NOTES

  1. I would like to sincerely thank Julian Menezes for translating this text. I also thank Eglantine Morvant and Karina Cahill for their help and suggestions.

  2. The “hood” is, as indicated by the context, made of velour and worn on a woman’s head. When La Fontaine wrote his text, this accessory was no longer in style. The poet thus dreams of visiting this strange country where time has stopped, where clothing is so outdated that it is no longer known in Paris.

  3. Here I have changed the translation to better reflect the original.

  4. Here again I have changed the translation to more closely reflect the grammatical construction of the original.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Campanella, Tommaso. The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue. Translated by Daniel J. Donno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

 
; Cartier, Jacques. Voyages of Jacques Cartier. Translated by Ramsay Cook. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

  Champlain, Samuel de. Voyages to New France. Translated by Michael Macklem. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1977.

  Chapelle, Claude Emmanuel Lhuillier, and François Le Coigneux de Bachaumont. Voyage d’Encausse (1665). Edited by Y. Giraud. Paris: H. Champion (Sources classiques), 2007.

  Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien de. Les Etats et Empires de la Lune. Paris: Flammarion, 1984.

  ———. Les Etats et Empires du Soleil. Paris: Flammarion, 2003.

  ———. Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun. Translated by Geoffrey Strachan. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

  Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

  ———. Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

  Gassendi, Pierre. Recherches métaphysiques, ou doutes et instances contre la métaphysique de R. Descartes et ses réponses. Translated by Bernard Rochot. Paris: Vrin, 1962.

  Godwin, Francis. The Man in the Moone. Edited by William Poole. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009.

  La Fontaine, Jean de. Lettres à sa femme: Voyage de Paris en Limousin. Paris: Valmonde, 1995.

  ———. Journey from Paris to Limousin: Letters to Madame de La Fontaine. Translated by Robert W. Berger. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008.

  ———. Le songe de Vaux. Paris: Droz, 1967.

  Léry, Jean de. History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. Translated by Jeanet Whatley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

  Lucian of Samosata. True Story. Translated by Charles Whibley and Francis Hickes. N.p: Nabu Press, 2010.

  Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin Classics, 1993.

  Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by David Raeburn. London: Penguin, 2004.

  The critical literature on La Fontaine is vast, but there is relatively little on the Voyage. The articles by Jean-Pierre Collinet and Madeleine Defrenne in La découverte de la France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1980) introduce the reader to many of the issues raised by the text. Patrick Dandrey, La Fontaine ou les métamorphoses d’Orphée (Paris: Gallimard, 2008) offers an overall view of his life, works, and poetics. On the political context of La Fontaine’s writings and its relation to power, the classic study remains Marc Fumaroli, The Poet and the King: Jean de La Fontaine and His Century (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). Cyrano has regained a degree of popularity over the past few years. Two works are good introductions to the complexities of L’autre monde and to the different approaches to it: Bérengère Parmentier, ed., Lectures de Cyrano de Bergerac (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004); and Michèle Rosellini and Catherine Constantin, Cyrano de Bergerac: Les états et empires de la lune et du soleil (Neuilly: Atlande, 2005). The work of Mary Jo Muratore, Mimesis and Metatextuality in the French Neo-classical Text: Reflexive Readings of La Fontaine, Molière, Racine, Guilleragues, Madame de La Fayette, Scarron, Cyrano de Bergerac and Perrault (Paris: Droz, 1994) situates the fictional approach of Cyrano in relation to his contemporaries.

  More general studies of the travel fiction genre in seventeenth-century France include Norman Doiron, L’art de voyager (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995); and Marie-Christine Pioffet, Ecrire des récits de voyage (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008). Ellen R. Welch, The Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011) places the genre within the contemporary scientific context.

  The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns

  LARRY F. NORMAN

  In the second half of the seventeenth century, at the height of the reign of Louis XIV, it is hardly surprising that France indulged in some exuberant triumphalism. Abroad, its predominance on the Continent naturally proved a powerful stimulant to self-esteem. On the domestic front, the systematic reorganization of power by a centralized monarchy was extolled for eradicating the vestiges of feudal disorder and superstitions. A new epoch had arrived, and they called it the age of Louis le Grand, the Sun King. And there was yet more reason for satisfaction. Beyond national confines, France applauded a wider set of advances. The achievements of the natural sciences and rationalist philosophy, forged decades earlier by figures such as Galileo and Descartes, were recognized as having now exponentially increased not only knowledge of the universe, but also the basic human capacity for acquiring such knowledge through innovative empirical and deductive methods. They called it the age of philosophy. Daily life too appeared happily transformed. The vast refinement of manners and sociability, first disseminated from Italian courts, was hailed as the hallmark of a sophisticated civilization cleansed of the barbarity that sullied past centuries. They called it the age of politeness.

  In short, the period understood itself as uniquely new, or more precisely as modern, as fundamentally different from—and better than—the past. The old Renaissance dream of remodeling the present age by emulating the glories of the classical past was fast losing pertinence. Why admire antiquity? Had not the prestige of Louis eclipsed that of Augustus? Had not critical reason exposed the absurdity of ancient philosophy and cosmology? Had not the graciousness and gallantry of Paris and Versailles surpassed Athenian elegance or Roman urbanity?

  The answer, almost all seemed to agree, was affirmative. Or, more precisely, most accepted the evidence of progress in most arenas. For there remained this nagging question: might not certain domains of human activity progress at different rhythms than others, or not progress at all? Indeed might not progress in some spheres inevitably entail decay in others? It is here that what we call literature posed some vexing problems. Does national power produce poetic excellence? Are the rigors of methodical reason conducive to the flights of creative imagination? Can refined manners coexist with fiery genius?

  These are the fundamental questions concerning the very nature of literature and the arts that fed a long-running debate called the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. Under consideration was the relation of literature to the political, moral, and philosophical good; whether the two cohered or conflicted; and whether poetry and the arts progressed in lockstep with other human endeavors or instead marched to their own peculiar beat.

  The debate was officially inaugurated in 1687 with the public reading at the hallowed Académie française of a poem, “Le siècle de Louis le Grand” (The century of Louis the Great) that argued that the splendors of the current regime also signaled the superiority of modern French literature over Greek and Roman classics. The author of the panegyric, Charles Perrault, was a man of letters who had been instrumental in the regime’s propaganda efforts but who would become better known to posterity for publishing the first French literary fairy tales, including “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” In reaction to what was perceived as a provocative attack on classical antiquity, the most prominent literary critic and satirist of the day, Nicolas Boileau, was according to all reports visibly and audibly scandalized. But the fracas was hardly surprising. The two were long spoiling for a fight. They and their allies had been skirmishing for well over a decade, debating for example the relative merits of the newly fashioned art of French opera (with Perrault championing as modern innovators its first great composer and librettist team, Lully and Quinault) as opposed to those of classical verse tragedy (with Boileau lauding Racine’s proclaimed fidelity to Greek and Roman sources). Now the skirmishes became a battle, indeed a decades-long polemical war, immediately known as the Querelle and dividing the literary world into opposing “parties” supporting
the two respective chiefs. Among the “ancient” partisans were many of the writers who were later fixed in the firmament of the French canon and who supported Boileau, sometimes relatively quietly or tactfully (Racine or La Fontaine), sometimes forcefully (La Bruyère). Perrault, on his side, could count among the “moderns” one of the great rising stars of the world of letters, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, whose popularization of the new sciences and whose irreverent wit would later provide a potent model for Enlightenment philosophes.

  The quarrel produced an explosion of printed texts aimed at the general reading public, ranging from Perrault’s four-volume modern-party manifesto in dialogue form, the Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (Parallel of the ancients and moderns, 1688–97) to a massive array of shorter essays, poems, and polemical prefaces. After a lull in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the debate was reignited when Anne Dacier’s earlier translation and vigorous defense of Homer’s Iliad was pitted in 1714 against Houdar de La Motte’s avowedly modernizing adaptation, which condensed the Greek epic into a trimly decorous tale suitable to contemporary tastes. Another set of writers entered the fray, with a literary lion like Fénelon taking up Homer’s defense in his 1714 “Lettre à l’Académie française” (Letter to the French Academy), while on the other side the relative newcomer Marivaux mocked the Greek poet with the bitingly parodic verse of his 1716 L’Homère travesti (Homer travestied).