French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  At the time the Rose was being written, the poet Rutebeuf (c. 1245-85) offered a much more concrete poetic persona when he made himself and his everyday misfortunes the subject in such narratives as`Rutebeuf's Lament about his Eye' (Ci Encoumence la plainte Rutebeuf de son ceul ). Willing to write about the non-heroic events of his own life (such as his own unfortunate marriage -'I recently took a wife / A woman neither charming nor beautiful'), he also creates a poetic voice that tells of the concrete happenings of his time in a world that was falling into decay. Rutebeuf had two major successors, poets who, like him, made themselves and the events of their lifetime the focus of their work. The first is Christine de Pizan (c. 1364-c. 1434) and the second Francois Villon (c. 1431-63). Christine de Pizan, born in Venice, came to Paris as an infant when her father became advisor to King Charles V. Much of her work takes an autobiographical form, such as `Christine's Vision' (LAdvision Christine, 1405) and particularly `The Mutation of Fortune' (Le livre de la mutacion de Fortune, 1403). For Christine (the use of the first or given name for this author, and many other woman writers of the early period such as Marguerite de Navarre, in preference to the surname, is a feature of the literary-critical tradition), the use of the first person singular, the `I', in writing is itself an important gesture, or rather a construct, the creation of an authoritative voice for a woman. This is vividly conveyed in a passage of `The Mutation of Fortune', in which Christine, become a widow, is symbolically transformed into a man, her voice deepening so that she can pursue the career of a professional writer.

  Francois Villon, though his life was brief and his writings few, has commanded a place of choice in French letters since the 15th century, reprinted continuously since the Renaissance, when he was popularized by the poet Clement Marot (1496-1544), who recognized in Villon a precursor both in lyricism and misfortune. Villon is the quintessential poete maudit ('the accursed poet', or poet with endless bad luck). His mythic life, very much embellished, has been the subject of a half-dozen films, and his poems have often been put to music - in 1953, Georges Brassens recorded a musical setting of Villon's `Ballad of Ladies of Olden Days' (Ballade des dames du tempsjadis). A student, poet, thief, and convicted murderer, Villon may be called the first of a long series of criminal protagonists (whom we see later in the picaresque novel). Although many, if not most, French poets have been middle or upper class, there is a persistent attraction in the lyric tradition to the marginal (perhaps precisely to compensate for the rigid social stratification of society).

  Villon sets the pattern for much subsequent French poetry in which the passing of time and the coming of death are the overwhelming themes, linked to concrete details of life in Paris. The main character, the poet, defines himself as a creature whose ephemeral existence is measured by the fragility of the world around him, as in `The Ballad of Ladies', which gave the world the ubiquitous refrain, `Where are the snows of yesteryear?' (Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?). Despite the anti-heroic nature of Villon's self-description as literate singer living on the fringes of society (a persona very welcome to such 19th-century successors as Nerval and Baudelaire), there is much in this description that parallels the life of a saint, for the saint also lives in the constant presence of death, in abjection, and in disillusion.

  In the poem known as the Balade des pendus', Villon takes his typically elegiac stance. Here is the first stanza.

  [Brother humans who live after us / Do not harden your hearts against us, / For if you take pity on us wretches, / God will more quickly have mercy on you. / You see us here, strung up, five or six / As for the flesh, which we have too much fattened / It is long ago devoured and rotted, / And we the bones are becoming ash and dust. / At our misfortune let no one laugh: / But pray to God that He forgive us all!]

  The Renaissance, renewing contact with antiquity, challenged French cultural identity and the identity of each individual in France. For France and Frenchness, the cultural vitality of Italy was a source of emulation and of anxiety. The odd reversal that constituted Renaissance culture meant that the recent achievement of French writers, painters, architects, and musicians was increasingly seen as out of date, while the much older literary, philosophical, and artistic legacy of Greece and Rome, being rediscovered, had an aura of freshness. In Italy, this shift had occurred much earlier, beginning in the mid-15th century with the fall of Constantinople and the influx of Greek scholars and manuscripts to the peninsula.

  The French had been at war in Italy since 1494. These campaigns, continuing under Francois I, King of France (ruled 1515-47), intensified the importation of cultural influences from Italy. We can say that Francois quite literally brought Italian Renaissance culture to France when he invited Leonardo da Vinci to reside at his chateau of Amboise in the Loire valley, where the artist and polymath died in 1519. Leonardo was followed by such other Italian artists as Cellini, Primaticcio, and Serlio. The Italian influence in France was intensified by the 1531 marriage of Francois's son, the future Henri II, to Caterina de' Medici, who brought with her a large entourage from Florence. Francois also established the College des lecteurs royaux (now called the College de France) as an alternative to the medieval Sorbonne and appointed, often from abroad, the most distinguished scholars of Greek, Hebrew, and classical Latin to provide the means for French people to have direct textual contact with the ancient world. Towards the end of the 15th century, printing arrived in France from Germany, and the rapid spread of printing shops made books, including the Bible, available to a growing public of readers.

  Two major issues of identity soon arose. The first was the nature of the French language and French culture themselves - could French rival the languages of antiquity and contemporary Italian as a vehicle of poetic and intellectual expression? And the second was the volatile matter of religion. Evangelical movements, urging direct knowledge of the Biblical text, offered the responsibility or the burden of choice to individual consciences. Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples published the first French translation of the Bible in 1529.

  A French Boccaccio

  Close to Francois I, there was a heady sense of opportunity and renewal. His sister, Marguerite de Navarre, encouraged and patronized the evangelical movement. She also wrote (or collaborated in the writing of) one of the most fascinating collections of short stories in the French tradition, LHeptameron (first printed in 1558, nine years after her death). The title is not the author's but was given to the collection because it has seventy stories; Marguerite de Navarre seems to have intended the finished book to have one hundred. Each of the stories centres on a person, often a woman, said to have been a contemporary of Marguerite herself. There are kings, queens, duchesses, and knights, but also mule-keepers, monks, ferry-tenders, nuns, and notaries. Rapes, murders, imprisonment, and adulterous liaisons are common, but so are scatological jokes. Often the villains are members of Catholic religious orders or servants of the King, and the characters who are cast in a good light are, frequently (it is difficult to generalize about this apparently simple but deeply complex book), those who follow their conscience and struggle against institutional abuses. Although the term `realism' was not used to describe literature until several centuries later, the prologue to Marguerite's book makes a claim to accurate representation of the contemporary world.

  Marguerite relates this claim directly and forcefully to France's attempt to define its national culture in the wake of Italian Renaissance influence. The prologue establishes a frame-narrative for the tales that follow: a group of five ladies and five gentlemen agree to tell stories that they know from personal experience to be true. In this way, the book asserts simultaneously a form of literary `nationalism' in that it acknowledges Boccaccio's Decameron as its model but declares that in this, French, collection, the stories will all be true and will not be altered by rhetoric. Whether this rule is strictly followed is a matter of debate, but its statement, and other subsequent details of timing and localization in the stories, show an attempt to create a domestic literar
y model of realism that is closely connected with a critical attention to themes of confession, truthtelling, and willingness to assert individual righteousness against traditional Church, familial, and other social structures. In short, Marguerite's work, though it includes stories that are reminiscent of earlier storytelling traditions (the medieval fabliaux), emphasizes a new sense of the nation as literary milieu while it also grounds the `truth' in the consciousness of individuals. While kings remain kings and innkeepers remain innkeepers, all of the characters of the Heptameron have an equal claim to our attention.

  A new genre: the essay

  The central character of Michel de Montaigne's writing is himself, and this first-person character, this moi, appears in greater detail than what we found in Rutebeuf, Christine de Pizan, or Villon. The Essais (literally, `attempts') cover everything from digestion, sexual dysfunction, and fantasy to man's place in the universe, the existence of God, friendship, and eloquence. Coming a generation later than Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), Michel de Montaigne experienced the fervour of the newly established humanism (that is, the study of ancient letters) from his very infancy. His father had been a soldier in the French armies in Italy, and apparently brought back great enthusiasm for an uncorrupted classical Latin (as opposed to the Church Latin of the medieval French universities). Montaigne may very well be the last person whose first spoken language was Latin. He gives an account of this seemingly impossible situation in his chapter `On the Education of Children', where he explains that his father hired a scholar of classical Latin not only to speak Latin to the baby but to provide all family members and servants with enough Latin to interact with the child from day to day. Montaigne knew the language of Cicero before learning that of Chretien de Troyes. Montaigne was, then, in a sense, the last Roman and an emblematic figure of the French Renaissance, holding together in one person an active social, economic, and civic life (he was mayor of Bordeaux and a politique - a political moderate - during the wars of religion) and both an intellectual and imaginative commitment to the texts of Greek and Latin antiquity. In `Of Vanity', Montaigne recalls that he was familiar with accounts of the Roman capital before he saw the Louvre and that he knew about Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio before he knew anything about famous Frenchmen. His attachment to the language of Rome was so deep that when, as an adult, years after he had ceased speaking the language of his infancy, he saw his father fall, the first spontaneous expressions of alarm that came to his lips were in Latin. And to complete this life-long identification with Rome, in March 1581 he received the title of `citizen of Rome' in the form of a bulla (certificate with seal), or, as he wrote in French in `Of Vanity', a bulle, which means both `bull' in the sense of certificate but also `bubble' - the quintessential representation of vanity itself.

  Montaigne's detailed self-description in his Essays (1580, with multiple revisions in the 1582 and especially the 1588 and posthumous 1595 edition) had an immediate international resonance. Not only did Montaigne give the world a new genre, the `essay' (his book was translated into English in 1603 by John Florio as The essays or Morall, politike and militarie discourses), but he helped set in motion two trends that became hugely important in the following century: the introspective study of the self, the moi, on the one hand, and the dispassionate and often demystifying description of society, on the other. These two trends, most visible in the 17th-century writings known as`moralist' literature, were not the individual creation of Montaigne nor were they exclusively French. We can see a demystified view of society in Machiavelli earlier and soon after Montaigne in the Spanish writer Gracian, for instance, but more than the analysis of an individual person and of social interaction, the Essays show a mind at work, thus drawing the reader in and providing one model for an early-modern personality.

  Montaigne's style of writing provided an ideal of naturalness, the kind of book where, as Blaise Pascal wrote later, you expect to find an author but you are surprised and charmed to find a man. Pascal points here to the newness of the essay as a genre. When he says that one does not find an `author', he means an authoritative figure whose words are received with reverence. Although the Essays draw upon many classical sources which, in retrospect, we can call `essays' (Plutarch's Moralia and many texts by Seneca, for instance), Montaigne's decision to say that his book was a collection of `attempts' signalled this shift in the relation of writer and reader. The author's declared tentativeness about his writing invited readers to be more engaged, perhaps to disagree, and perhaps to find similarities between their own experiences and those of Montaigne. In Montaigne's wake, over the centuries a large number of French writers excelled in this form. Most recently these include Charles Peguy, Paul Valery, Albert Camus, Paul Nizan, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Pascal Quignard.

  Montaigne represents himself as a multi-faceted character. It is, of course, essential to remember that what we have in the Essays is not an historical figure pieced together from multiple documents, but rather the first-person character that Montaigne has created through his writing. He insists on the facets of his personality, presenting them often as the opposition between inside and outside, between a Roman and a Frenchman, between `Montaigne and the mayor of Bordeaux', and between the solitary reader in the tower of his chateau and the household scene outside his windows. Such awareness of his own complexity permits an ironic detachment leading to surprising juxtapositions: comments on his digestion or his kidney stones appear alongside soaring philosophical speculations, and the activities of simple country people teach as much as the deeds of princes and popes. One of the most memorable examples of this ironic levelling occurs at the end of the chapter `Of Cannibals', where Montaigne reflected in memorable terms on the valuation of cultural difference and the term `barbarism'. In a typically sinuous text that starts with a quotation from Plutarch's `Life of Pyrrhus', turns to the recently discovered American continent and its inhabitants, Atlantis, divination, Stoic philosophy, and many other matters, Montaigne concludes that the `savages' or `cannibals' of the New World were not inferior to the French. Montaigne met such an American in Rouen in 1562, and finding his conversation quite intelligent, exclaims, with delicious irony, All of that is pretty good. But, of all things, they don't wear breeches!'

  For Montaigne, and for many of his contemporaries, the newly discovered peoples of the Americas seemed a possible parallel to the rediscovered ancients. So for his first readers it was probably not so strange to see the Essays pass back and forth, as they often did, between Greco-Roman life and that of contemporary Brazil. These new-found peoples offered a glimpse of noble and simple life like that of Homeric heroes or, indeed, a possible pre-Adamite race of humans. The parallel between the distant European past and the American present appears in Montaigne's chapter `On Coaches', where he describes the Mexican conception of the major epochs of the world. Like us, he writes, they believe that the world is drawing to its end and is degenerating. In the past there were giants, both figuratively and literally.

  Rabelais's mysterious giants

  Two of the world's most memorable giants appear in the books of the physician Francois Rabelais (c. 1490-1553), who also gave the world two important adjectives: Gargantuan and Pantagruelian. Rabelais did not invent the two giants Gargantua and Pantagruel - they existed already, as witnessed by an anonymous chapbook of tales that appeared in 1532 under the title Gargantua: Les grandes et inestimables cronicques du grand et enorme geant Gargantua - but he turned them into important characters in the literary pantheon, in a series of books published from 1532 to 1552, the first under the anagrammatic pseudonym Alcofrybas Nasier. Successively a Franciscan and then a Benedictine monk, before becoming a physician and making at least three trips to Italy, Rabelais was associated with reformist movements within the Catholic Church and was keenly interested in the new humanist learning and its implications for education and for religion.

  The prologue to Gargantua sets forth the idea that the book contains s
ecret wisdom and urges readers to suck out the `substance in the marrow' (la sustantfcque mouelle). This metaphor of a hidden core is preceded by such sayings as `the habit does not make the monk' for `one may be dressed in monastic garb who, inside, is quite other than a monk'. Are Rabelais's books coded messages addressed to Evangelical Christian sympathizers who were deeply sceptical of the Catholic theologians of the universities and of the monastic orders? Are they, on the contrary, the opinions of a rationalistic atheist? Or is the claim to convey a hidden message simply an additional joke accompanying the openly comic material? The debate still rages, but it is clear that for all the carnivalesque goings-on (for instance, Garguantua, arriving in Paris, relieves himself and drowns several hundred thousand Parisians) there are major questions about social institutions raised in the midst of the drinking, urinating, and brawling. The discontinuous, episodic nature of each book in the series thrusts the main characters to the foreground as the major structural elements. Pantagruel is the hero of the first book, and then his father Gargantua becomes the hero in the second book (a flashback, or `prequel', to the first), while Pantagruel's companion Panurge is the focus of the third book - Panurge wishes to marry but fears being cuckolded and tries a variety of ways to predict his fate in marriage.

  2. Illustration by Gustave Dore (1854) for Rabelais's Gargantua (1534)

  As we look backwards from our modern vantage point towards Rabelais's heroes, it is striking to note the quite relaxed integration of popular and learned cultures, of grossly physical with highly erudite and spiritual questions - the eating and drinking in Gargantua is explicitly connected with Plato's Symposium. Although some works of the following century strive to maintain this mix of character, subject, and tone (for example, Charles Sorel's Histoire comique de Francion, 1623-33, quite clearly inspired by Rabelais), for the most part the enormous physicality and appetite of Gargantua and Pantagruel and their humour are absent from the high-culture novels, comedies, and tragedies of the 17th century. In terms of the century-long effort to assimilate the humanistic culture of antiquity into a French, as opposed to an Italian or Italianate, model, Rabelais clearly succeeded in giving the French hugely learned and subtle protagonists deeply rooted in French geography, customs, and language.