French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  Though important for any consideration of heroism, the general paradox of the warrior's return to the city is less original than the insight into Horace's own experience of this status that Corneille subtly conveys. Generations of audiences and readers have generally found Horace to be much less appealing a character than his opponent Curiace, but the play suggests a terrible suffering within the hero. The price of his victory has been the sacrifice of all feeling, all perception that is not directly oriented towards slaying the designated enemy. And that sacrifice is directed at a single moment, after which, inevitably, the hero begins to decline into an ordinary life that is forever closed to him. Horace asks to be executed, claiming that `Death alone today can preserve my glory / And it should have come at the moment of my triumph'. At the end of Horace, just as at the end of The Misanthrope, the audience is left to puzzle over how such an outsized, unyielding protagonist can fit back into the ordinary social world.

  The decline of the hero

  Heroes, in other words, are useful to have around at certain moments, but fit awkwardly into the social framework over the long haul. They are not necessarily even `good' by prevailing moral standards. La Rochefoucauld wrote memorably that `There are heroes of evil as well as of good'; we need only think of two of Corneille's other protagonists, both heroic and monstrous - Medea in his first tragedy Medee (1635) and Cleopatra in Rodogune, princesse des Parthes (1644) - or of Racine's later depiction of the Emperor Nero in Britannicus (1669). As literary theorists tried to square the heritage of ancient tragedy with Christian, modern values, there was considerable unease at placing characters capable of extreme acts, good and bad, in the position of `hero'. Corneille's younger rival Jean Racine paraphrased Aristotle's dictum in the Poetics on tragic heroes, saying that they should have `a middling goodness, that is, a virtue susceptible to weakness'. Racine worked to create characters with this middling goodness, or bonte mediocre. Avoiding the spectacular qualities and acts of such Corneille protagonists as Horace, Chimene in Le Cid, and Auguste in Cinna, Racine in most of his tragedies depicted protagonists who are quite middling, even `mediocre' in the modern sense. They are people like ourselves, or like the version of ourselves we see on day-time television, but in magnificent verse. Such are the protagonists of Phedre, in which the eponymous protagonist is an unfortunate woman who has fallen in love with her adolescent stepson - she considers herself a monster, but this is the `monster' next door, who, once rebuffed, acquiesces to a plan to accuse Hippolyte of raping her.

  We can see why it has been said that Racine turned tragedy into bourgeois melodrama. In his Andromaque (1668), a tragedy which takes its title from Andromache, the widow of the Trojan hero Hector, now become the slave of Achilles' son Pyrrhus, Racine illustrates this concept of the protagonist of middling goodness with such thoroughness that one might even be tempted to say with Karl Marx that `history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce'. The main characters of this play belong - with the possible exception of Andromaque herself - to a post-heroic generation. Their parents were the great Homeric heroes and heroines of the Iliad, Agamemnon, Helen, Menelaus, Achilles, and yet the new generation of Hermione, Orestes, and even (though to a less marked extent) Pyrrhus is obsessed with a desire to live up to and compete with its forebears. Hermione recalls that her mother was so beautiful that the Trojan war was fought to bring her back to Greece, yet she cannot even get Pyrrhus to honour his promise of marriage to her. Orestes dithers irresolutely over his unrequited love for Hermione, failing to carry out his ambassadorial mission, which is to find and slay Hector's son Astyanax to eliminate all trace of the royal family of Troy. Pyrrhus himself is described as the `son and rival of Achilles'. But while their parents shook the world with epic battles, this group ends up with a sordid palace intrigue of murder and suicide.

  Yet despite the clear difference between the larger-than-life protagonists of Corneille and even Moliere and Racine's selfconsciously mediocre characters, there is a remarkable similarity with regard to the ambivalent theme of heroism. The reason that the protagonists ofAndromaque arrive at their dreadful end is that they tried to stage heroic feats for which they did not have the ability and which, in any event (and this is the most striking parallel with the historical situation of 17th-century France) belonged to the past and should have been left in the past. InAndromaque, just as in Horace, the moment in which it was useful to act as violent military heroes has gone by, and the protagonists would have been well advised to adopt the skills of peacetime. A certain amount of heroism is admirable, as Moliere's honnete homme Philinte might have said, but there is a time and place for everything.

  These major dramatic works give us some sense of the continuity in the way civility, conformity to circumstance, and politeness were proposed as ideals, even when they were projected back into the French version of Greco-Roman antiquity. But we should now recall the social circumstances that gave these ideals such weight, and even urgency. The transition from the religious wars of the 16th century to the more stable, and even more bureaucratic, regime of the Bourbon monarchs was not at all easy. The assassination of Henri IV was a great blow; the subsequent regency of Marie de Medicis ended with a coup d'etat staged by her son, King Louis XIII, whose long-serving prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, executed, imprisoned, or exiled members of the `devout party' which derived in large part from the Catholic League that had been such a challenge to the last Valois and to Henri IV before his conversion. But outright civil war returned at mid-century during the tumultuous and complicated time known as the `Fronde' (`slingshot' in French), which lasted from 1648 to 1653, and set troops loyal to the regent Queen Anne of Austria against a fluctuating alliance of nobility and parlementaires (members of the Paris legislative court).

  This confrontation ended, after devastating large parts of the country, by reaffirming the monarchy. The ambivalence towards aristocratic, independent heroism - newly illustrated by the rebellion or treason of the Prince de Conde and of the King's uncle Gaston d'Orleans who allied themselves with Spain against the Queen - could only be reinforced by this catastrophic and wasteful adventure, which left a deep impression on the young Louis XIV, only ten years old when the Fronde began. In the decisive steps taken to further centralize power and to remove any remaining independence from the upper aristocracy, Louis made conformity - outward conformity, at least - a central value of French culture of the second half of the century. This certainly is one of the reasons why the status of the hero as it appears in the three major dramatists shows a significant downward trajectory from Corneille to Racine, even though all three show heroism as leading to conflict.

  Another reason for the change in the status of the hero may be the rise in influence, towards mid-century, of a disenchanted worldview associated with the religious movement known as Jansenism, centred on the convent of Port-Royal, and influential with many leading writers of the `moralist' tendency, such as Blaise Pascal and Francois de La Rochefoucauld. This movement was not simply about advocating austere morality (though some, like Pascal, were quite ascetic), but rather in large part it consisted of giving a pessimistic view of human society and its motives, and aimed at a dispassionate analysis of relationships. It saw mankind as anything but heroic.

  In the second half of the century, a different type of protagonist emerged, in keeping with the intensification of court and urban life in proximity to the court, with the domestication of the aristocracy, and with moralist disenchantment. This new protagonist is typical of a trend - or of a number of converging trends - in which there is an `inward turn' of literature, a turn towards `literature of psychological analysis', a social and cultural movement called preciosite, and the rise of social spaces, the salons, organized by women.

  Salons and the rise of literary women

  The term `salon' is now used somewhat anachronistically (the term itself became prominent only in the 18th century) to describe the private meeting places where women received guests in the
17th century - major contemporary terms for such places were ruelle, alcove, or reduit, meaning the narrow space between a bed and the nearby wall in which guests might stand or sit to converse with the hostess, who remained recumbent. Two such salons stand out: the Chambre bleue of the Marquise de Rambouillet and the samedis (Saturdays) of Madeleine de Scudery. These cultivated women controlled the space into which they invited distinguished male as well as female guests, making the salons women-centred conversational places in sharp distinction to the taverns in which male writers might meet on their own. The values promoted in this environment included freedom from arranged marriages and friendship between women and men. Detractors of women such as Boileau called them precieuses, a term Moliere popularized in his Precieuses ridicules (1659) and LEcole des femmes (The School for Wives, 1662).

  The novel of courtly manners

  In this context, emphasis shifts to a new conception of the hero, or rather of the protagonist (since the term `hero' was generally not used for non-military distinction): the person who exemplified exquisite refinement in friendship and love and was capable of exceptional fidelity to ideals. No one exemplifies this type of protagonist better than the central figure of Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette's brief novel, La Princesse de Cleves (published anonymously, 1678). This work, often praised as one of the first `psychological novels' or `novels of analysis', is set in the Valois court of the previous century. Arriving at Paris with her widowed mother at age 16, the protagonist, an innocent young woman, receives from her mother three basic instructions about the world she is about to enter. The first is to distrust appearances: what seems to be is almost never the case. The second, somewhat contradictory, lesson is to learn from listening to stories about the wretched experiences of other men and women at the court. And the third lesson is that for a woman, the only way to happiness consists of loving her husband and being loved by him in return - in short, to be completely different from other women, typified by those whose tales she hears and who are engaged in multiple, unhappy, adulterous love affairs. From the very start of her story, then, the heroine aims both to understand and to be different from other women, and to find that elusive happiness that is said to be available only to the happily married woman.

  As the wife of the perfectly honourable Prince de Cleves, the young woman soon meets the highly desirable Duc de Nemours, whose reputation as a lover is universal. The love affair that follows is one in which the Princess and the Duke are alone on only two occasions, never touch, and are never publicly known to have feelings for one another. Despite the constant surveillance, intense curiosity, and gossip of the court, the story of the Princess's discovery of love and of her own nature is known to no one except, in part, to the Princess, her husband, her mother, and the Duke himself. It is tempting to say that it is a story in which nothing happens, yet, adjusting the scale of perception, we can see how Lafayette has moved events inward, into the minds and feelings of her characters, where life-and-death struggles occur and virtue is pitted against betrayal. Tiny, almost imperceptible, signals allow the characters to communicate with one another. For instance, the Duke, wishing to show his affection for the Princess in a way that could never be understood by anyone except herself, identifies himself at a tournament by wearing yellow and black. Everyone wonders why, since these colours had no apparent connection to him. The Princess, however, immediately understands that it is a favour to her, for one day at a conversation at which the Duke was present, she had said that she liked yellow but could not wear it because she was blonde. On another occasion, the Princess did not go to a ball, claiming to be ill (though she appeared to be in radiant good health). This is another of those secret signals, since the Princess has heard it reported that the Duke said that there was no greater suffering for a lover than to know that his mistress was at a ball that he himself was not able to attend.

  The heroism of the battlefield, the exotic locations, the very visible hostilities that pit the protagonists against one another in tragedy, epic, and the huge romance novels of earlier in the century, have here been replaced by the subtle decoding of glances, details of dress, and presence or absence at balls and other social gatherings. But what gives the Princess a status equivalent to the protagonists of these other texts is her problematic uniqueness. With her mother's initial guidance, the Princess formed and then executed a heroic project: to be different from all other women. Some of this distinction is visible to a few of the members of the court. One of the queens says that the Princess is the only woman who tells her husband everything. In fact, the Princess confesses privately to her husband that she loves someone else, while keeping that man's name secret and promising never to be unfaithful - this avowal was one of the most shocking and controversial aspects of the novel when it appeared. But the Duke himself is the only person in the novel who knows the full extent of her heroic resolve. After her husband's death (of a broken heart, because he has improperly decoded a set of appearances and wrongly believes his wife to be unfaithful - this is a novel in which misinterpretation is lethal), in a brief conversation, the Princess admits to her lover that their passion is mutual, but that she will never marry him. She intends, as she tells him, to act according to a duty that `only exists in my imagination' not to marry the man who was, indirectly and unwittingly, the cause of her husband's death. Throughout the novel, and particularly in its conclusion, the Princess is described as being unparalleled, unique, and exceptional. The last sentence of the novel ends: `her life, which was rather short, left examples of inimitable virtue'.

  With The Princess of Cleves, Lafayette showed the cost of being exceptional and not following the prevailing model of conduct - in this, the story fits the model we saw earlier in tragedy and comedy - but she also shows how changes in French culture and in the status of women modified the standard for what is worthy of attention and for what constitutes exceptional achievement. For 17th-century feminists, a woman's decision to be independent, not to remarry, and to form her own ideal of conduct constituted a story at least as interesting as that of a male military hero. Starting with her mother's lesson that a happy marriage was the only worthy goal for a woman, the Princess ended with a very different achievement.

  The problem of `nature'

  Given the intense focus on society and its norms that characterized the 17th century, it is perhaps not surprising that the 18th century should react in part against this exclusive focus and shift the discussion to the question of nature. The opposition between nature and culture (or between physis and nomos) is very ancient, but it took on a new vitality in the 18th century. 17th-century French thought, particularly in literary circles, was not kind to nature. It seemed clear that the world was defective and that religion and art had the mission of correcting things or, at the very least, of filtering out the naturally occurring errors. Left to himself - to his temperament, since that was determined by the imbalance in his humours - Moliere's Alceste would be miserable and unfit for society. His friends try to counterbalance that tendency by teaching him manners. In a more serious vein, Pascal taught that mankind's nature had been fundamentally altered by Original Sin, so that what we call `natural' is only a perverse illusion - Pascal is here very close to Thomas Hobbes, a long-time resident of Paris, who had nothing good to say about the `state of nature'. Finally, by the literary doctrine of vraisemblance, the French Academy and others taught that dramatists should not portray what happens in the ordinary course of things but rather what should happen, if the world were not imperfect. In short, any 17th-century writer who used the term `nature' in a positive way meant something that was far removed from the world of experience. Writers often praised the `natural' manner of speaking, only to point out that such a style could only be achieved by careful imitation of the best models; in other words, le naturel was the best form of artifice. As for the relatively modern notion that one could go `into nature' (dans la nature) by leaving the city, such a sense of a privileged unspoiled space would have appeared comple
te nonsense to the subjects of Louis XIV.

  This uniformly dismissive view of nature began to change in the 18th century. Society was still at the forefront of intellectual and literary discussions, but now nature became a component of that discussion in a much more varied and less predictable way. Indeed, for the Enlightenment, Nature - both human nature and the wild forces of the earth - was, broadly speaking, at the core of most important questions. Was nature good but somehow concealed and distorted by social institutions and habits? Or was nature indifferent, or even hostile, to mankind, and should people therefore cease to appeal to nature as the source of concepts of `good' and `rights'? Was nature composed of spirit and matter, or was nature purely material and fully available to us through sensations? Nature no longer seemed inaccessible to experience. The earlier, more optimistic views of Montaigne and Rabelais now returned in a very much amplified and better documented way. While Montaigne found much to praise (and many things that shocked him) in what he learned of the indigenous Americans, exploration, commerce, and colonialism brought much more information about life outside of Europe. It was not simply that the peoples of Brazil or of the South Pacific islands were closer to `nature' (in the sense that their settlements were smaller and seemed less urban and technologically advanced), but also that the multitude of customs and fundamental laws, things that seem entirely self-evident, was found to be so different from one culture to another that what French people took for granted as `nature' no longer seemed secure. The quest to discover, or rediscover, nature and to refound society on the basis of this surer knowledge was perhaps the major theme of the Enlightenment, l'&ge des Lumieres.