French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  The French sonnet

  The lure of Italian sophistication and the countervailing pull backwards towards French simplicity appear as themes in Renaissance lyric, particularly in such works as Joachim du Bellay's The Regrets (1558), in which the first-person poetcharacter compares life in Rome to his memories of home. Du Bellay's importance for shaping modern French literature goes beyond his many successes in lyric, for he was also the author of the manifesto of his innovative poetic group, the Pleiade, a group of seven poets formed in the late 1540s that included Pierre de Ronsard. This manifesto, the Defense and Illustration of the French Language (la Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise,1649) argued for enriching the vocabulary of French and building its cultural repertory to make it equal to Italian and the languages of antiquity. The Defense appeared ten years after the royal ordinance of Villers-Cotterets by which Francois I made the vernacular the language of official documents (replacing Latin). Thus the Defense furthers the promotion of French linguistic nationalism that the King had begun, and it also assigns to the professional poet a role that is not limited to singing the praises of kings and military heroes. Not only does the Defense make it clear that poetry - in the broad sense, not only lyric, but also epic, comedy, and tragedy - is a discipline, rather than a sudden inspiration or simply the result of a certain temperament, but also that the poet's work as word-maker and language-builder assigns to him a broad and varied cultural mandate. Du Bellay proposed various ways of creating and importing words into French, but he particularly promoted the idea - the doctrine of imitation - that French writers should make literary equivalents of ancient works rather than simple translations. In other words, that France should have French epics, French lyrics, and so forth, rather than simply import the works of others. Du Bellay's polemical work serves as a document of the serious ambitions of poets in the period, but today we may also see it as an early expression of France's struggle to maintain its own identity in the face of whatever other culture is the dominant global model, whether it be that of Renaissance Rome or of today's Hollywood.

  Following such models as Ovid, Horace, and Catullus, each of the major writers in verse shaped for himself or herself a distinct character or persona in the ballads, rondeaux, poetic epistles, elegies, epitaphs, blazons (verse descriptions, particularly of parts of the female body), complaints, epigrams, and odes that appeared abundantly in the 16th century. Many of the most important works took the form of long sequences of ten-verse (the dizain) or fourteen-verse (the sonnet) units. The dizain is the unit that Maurice Sceve, one of the poets of Lyon (who include also Pernette du Guillet and `Louise Labe'- the latter may in fact be simply a fictitious identity under which a collective of male poets published their works), used for his long hermetic love poem, Delie, object de plus haulte vertu (Delie, object of the highest virtue, 1544), a sequence of 449 dizains. The sonnet, on the other hand, has had more durable success, and the form itself testifies to the impact of Italian literature. Clement Marot, the first great poet of the 16th century, like Rabelais a protege of Marguerite de Navarre, brought the Petrarchan sonnet to France in the 1530s.

  It was in the 1550s, though, that the sonnet triumphed in the works of the Pleiade poets, each of whom gives a different tonality to the form in connection with the different persona the poet wished to create. Pierre Ronsard, for instance, variously portrays the character `Ronsard' as suffering horribly from love or as the triumphant poet whose transcendent verbal gifts will be able to confer immortality upon the woman who grants her favours. Take, for instance, the well-known sonnet from the Second Book of Sonnets for Helene that begins:

  [When you will be very old, during candle-lit evenings, / Sitting next to the fire, carding and spinning, / You will say, singing my verses with amazement, / `Ronsard sang my praises when I was beautiful'.]

  The poet cleverly inserts himself into the text, not by presenting himself here in the first person but rather by having a character speak about him as if he were a prodigy. `Ronsard' becomes a character for retrospective admiration in this text which is a variation on the ancient carpe diem. As the `Prince of Poets', Ronsard was not shy about celebrating his own talent, and, implicitly, the supreme position of the poet in society. In his `Response to Insults and Calumnies', he wrote of his success in reviving ancient poetry and asserts to his detractors, `You cannot deny it, since from my plenitude / You are all filled, I am the centre of your study, / You have all come from the grandeur of me' (Tu ne le peux nier, car de ma plenitude / Vous estes tous remplis, je suis seul vostre estude, / Vous estes tous yssus de la grandeur de moy).

  An exemplary sonnet-sequence: du Bel lay's The Regrets

  Let us return to Ronsard's companion du Bellay, whose The Regrets, often considered his greatest work, is particularly useful for capturing the emulation, enthusiasm, and anxiety that French writers felt when facing the more advanced culture of Italy. The poet, as first-person character of his own disillusioning adventures in the capital of Roman antiquity, highlights national and linguistic identity, promoting the idea of a humble, frank-speaking native son of the Loire valley adrift in the pomp and decadence of the papal court. But The Regrets is also a book that advances the idea of a poetry based on accidental encounter - `Following the various incidents of this place, / Whether they are good or bad, I write at random' (Mais, suivant de ce lieu les accidents divers, / Soit de bien, soit de mal, j escris a l'adventure). While this claim is literally unsustainable in the context of a sequence written in the dauntingly artful and constraining form of the sonnet, it situates the poetic `I' as a humble observer of the contemporary world. This is a poetic persona that, even if it is somewhat rooted in Villon and Rutebeuf, gains momentum much later in the French tradition, with Baudelaire and the Surrealists, and even appears to prefigure James Joyce, insofar as du Bellay, while exploring the city, tries on a comparison to ancient poets and epic heroes, most strikingly Ulysses.

  The Regrets are an open-ended, varied work with multiple tones - satiric, elegiac, conversational, descriptive, and at times stirringly celebratory ('France, mother of arts, of arms, and of laws', France, mere des arts, des armes et des lois - a striking reversal of his nation's relation to Rome). Its most direct successor in modern French literature may be Baudelaire's post-Romantic Fleurs du mal. It was only a few years after The Regrets that the wars of religion between varying factions of Protestants and Catholics (1562-98) profoundly changed French culture and set the stage for the more highly structured and often less personal literature of the 17th century.

  Joachim du Bellay, from Les Regrets

  Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has travelled well, or like that man who conquered the fleece, and has then returned, full of experience and wisdom, to live among his kinsfolk the rest of his life.

  When, alas, will I again see smoke rising from the chimney of my little village and in what season will I see the enclosed field of my poor house, which to me is a province and much more still?

  The home my ancestors built pleases me more than the grandiose facades of Roman palaces, fine slate pleases me more than hard marble,

  My Gallic Loire more than the Latin Tiber, my little Lire more than the Palatine hill, and more than sea air, the sweetness of Anjou.

  Translated by Richard Helgerson

  A precarious peace and the new civility

  Politeness, moderation, discretion, self-censorship, irony, and a great attention to the formal rituals of civil and religious life are the hallmarks of 17th-century France. Looking back from today, it is tempting to speak of a very repressed and repressive society. Seen from the point of view of those who had lived through the ferocious civil and religious wars of the late 16th century, the peace and stability, and a modicum of religious tolerance, were no doubt welcome. The 1594 coronation of the first Bourbon monarch, Henri IV, brought peace to France through compromise. Henri, son of the intransigent Protestant Jeanne d'Albret, converted to Catholicism, while the militant Catholic League, bane of the lat
e Valois monarchs (accused of being too willing to coexist with the Huguenots), put down their arms.

  In 1598, Henri proclaimed the Edict of Nantes, granting Protestants the right to worship. Under Henri IV and his son and successor Louis XIII, Paris grew rapidly in size and became the habitual home of the royal court. Both the nobility and a prosperous middle class flocked to the new neighbourhoods - especially to the Marais (named from the reclaimed swamp on which it was built) on the right bank of the Seine slightly upriver from the Louvre. The upper classes of French society became more urban and more urbane, though not without effort. Many books, plays, and letters attest to the earnest discussions of how to achieve the proper skill in witty conversation, letter-writing, and dress. This effort to fit in and to avoid giving offence, or at least to channel violence into inventive verbal forms, hints that physical aggression was lurking just under the surface. Henri IV was assassinated in 1610, as his predecessor Henri III had been in 1589. Repeated edicts failed to prevent duels - there were as many as four hundred a year under Henri IV.

  Everyone was aware of the precarious peace, and throughout France there was an effort to promote ways of interacting politely and to avoid setting off a new round of hostility. In this climate flourished a literature that promoted an ideal of moderation, discretion, and even concealment, yet was fascinated by excess, by the exceptional, and by the superlative. It is as if the polite and decorous 17th-century French still dreamed of the martyrdom and the transgressive heroism of the preceding century and also reflected on the difficulty of determining a set of norms. There was great emphasis on avoiding highly visible partisanship and zealotry, and on being a reasonable person, an amusing, sensitive, and accommodating companion - in short, an honnete homme. This term is not easily translated, and it is important to note right away that it does not mean `honest man' in the sense of someone who speaks with sincerity and complete frankness. The honnete homme is someone who `fits in, who is not notably eccentric. On the other hand, 17th-century readers and authors were captivated by the stories of protagonists who go far beyond the norm, who do not `fit in' at all and who are excessive in word and deed.

  Moliere's comedy of character

  As the ideal of the polite society reached its peak, theatre showed that politeness and heroism were an uneasy fit. Take Moliere's comic hero Alceste in The Misanthrope (1666, called in French Le Misanthrope, on lAtrabilaire amoureux). The full title refers to the medical doctrine that character was based on substances in the blood, the `humours'. Hence, Alceste is a man with too much black bile who is in love. The role of Alceste, performed by the playwright himself in the first production, was certainly played for laughs. Moliere was known for his comic stagecraft, and there is much to laugh about. The hero, who insists that one should speak one's mind fearlessly in all matters, falls in love with a woman who is his complete opposite, a flirtatious young widow. Celimene carefully cultivates a number of suitors by making each think that he is the exclusive object of her affection. Alceste also refuses to conform to many ordinary social norms. He will not condescend to flatter the judge in an important legal matter involving his entire fortune, and he even refuses to utter the usual formulas of polite approval when an amateur poet shows him a sonnet. He recognizes that he is a misfit in the court where an important quality is the gift to `hide what is in one's heart' (as Alceste's friend Philinte says). For his sincerity, Alceste faces three risks: losing Celimene's love, losing his fortune, and losing his life or his reputation in a duel. These risks seem to be of quite unequal importance, and it is probably Moliere's comic intent to show the bizarre disproportion between various gestures of frankness and their results. The possible duel, a serious matter and reflective of the brittle civility that could pass in minutes from witty repartee to drawn swords, leads to the intervention of the Marechaux de France, a high tribunal charged with settling conflicts of honour and thus avoiding bloodshed. Despite Alceste's repeated proclamations that he will not conform to society and that he will eventually run away to live in solitude, he seems to need society - if for no other reason than for the pleasure of his own indignation. In this respect, he differs from such other contemporary outsiders as the wolf in Jean de La Fontaine's fable, `The Wolf and the Dog' (Le Loup et le chien, in Fables, 1668). The wolf, despite the many material advantages that the dog enjoys in captivity, really prefers to remain entirely outside society. The misanthrope, on the other hand, seems only to be able to exist within proximity to those he distains.

  3. Chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, designed by Louis Le Van, in an engraving by Perelle (1660)

  It is tempting to think that Alceste is entirely ridiculous, an unstable individual with too much bile, no social skills, and no sense of proportion. Yet the play dispels that view by having the other characters in Le Misanthrope admire Alceste and vie for his friendship, love, and approval. Some of these characters may themselves be lacking in judgement, like Oronte, author of the sonnet, but others, like Alceste's friend Philinte and Celimene's cousin Eliante appear to be good judges of character. Philinte is a fine example of the 17th-century honnete homme: he never advances any particular achievement of his own (La Rochefoucauld said just this in his 1664 Maxims: `The true honnete homme is the one who does not attach his pride to anything in particular'), he views human imperfections with tolerance and detachment, saying that `there is no greater madness than to try to set the world straight'. Alceste describes Philinte as phlegmatic (another imbalance of the humours), meaning that he is too placid. And this may be a key to Alceste's attractiveness for those around him, men and women alike: they are spellbound by his vigorous, unbending candour, reflected in his physical agitation: he seems to be constantly in motion, with the others running after him. They may well find it refreshing to see someone free of the self-consciousness and dissimulation that is their daily lot.

  4. Engraving by Francois Chauveau (1668) for La Fontaine's fable Le Loup et le ehien

  Corneille's outsized heroes

  This ambivalence about heroism in the Misanthrope may be a comic example, but it is not isolated. The pattern we see there, of a society that is spellbound, yet appalled, by the energetic, dissenting hero, appears in other, more serious forms. We can see that the 17th-century insistence on politeness - the expectation of conformity to what fits the situation (in French, convenance or bienseance) - is based on the fear that people who stand out and who say heroically what they think could so easily cross over into the explosive violence of the still-recent civil wars. In Horace (1640), based on Livy's account of the ancient combat between the three Roman champions, the Horatii, and the three champions of the nearby city of Alba Longa, the Curiatii, Corneille presents the moral dilemma of one of the three Romans, who must fight his best friend and brother-in-law, Curiace. The fight will be limited to three warriors from each city, in the interest of a quick and relatively bloodless decision about political dominance. Unlike the reluctant Curiace, Horace claims to be so completely focused on his duty that from the moment when he learns the identity of his adversary he no longer `knows' Curiace: Alba named you, I know you no more'. So far, this may be no more than a case of doing what it takes in the line of duty - a bit cold-hearted, perhaps, and not very polite, but the way to victory. Indeed, Horace does win for the Roman side, for he is the last man standing of the six.

  However, it is at this point, the moment of the hero's return from the battlefield, that Horace's attitude towards his own heroism crosses the line into civil violence. Horace's sister Camille was Curiace's lover, and she does not greet him with the respect that he demands, saying to her `render [the honour] that you owe to the fortune of my victory'. He is, to say the least, unfeeling, focused entirely on his brilliant achievement and, as he said earlier, unwilling to recognize any personal attachment or identity in this state of war. But this extremism, or even fanaticism, is matched by his sister's - it runs in the family, apparently - for instead of yielding and keeping silent, she insults him and escalates the verbal co
mbat to the point of cursing the Rome that Horace claims to incarnate. She calls down the fire of heaven on the city. The altercation between Camille and her brother is the most violent part of the play as it appears on stage, for the sword fight between Albans and Romans takes place off stage, as does almost all physical violence in French drama after the 1630s.

  And this second encounter ends badly for Horace. He becomes so enraged that he kills his sister. For what he then calls `an act of justice', he is put on trial. The play culminates, then, in a full act devoted to the incompatibility between unflinching, unfeeling, Horatian-style heroism and the requirements of a society of laws, individual identities and duties, and political hierarchy. In the civil society that is depicted in Corneille's version of Rome, the purely masculine virtues required in war cannot be allowed to run unchecked. As Horace's chief accuser, Valere, points out, by shedding his sister's blood, Horace has not only killed an unarmed woman but a Roman citizen. The violence that was tolerable when it took place outside the city and aimed itself against non-Romans has now entered the city itself to threaten all. The most general paradox that Corneille displays here is that while the peaceful civil order is based on fratricide (Rome's war against its kindred city Alba, like Horace's murder of his sister, is set in the perspective of Rome's legendary founding by Romulus, killer of his brother Remus), such violence should never be rekindled.