French Literature

B

1550 to 1600

The French Renaissance came to full flowering around the middle of the 16th century with the group of poets known as La Pléiade. In his Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française (In Defence and Praise of French as a Literary Language, 1549), their spokesman Joachim Du Bellay argued that French literature would rival and even surpass that of Italy if French authors were to follow the example of the Italians by enriching their language with Classical borrowings and expressing their own poetic ideas in Classical forms, as well as competing directly with them in the field of the Petrarchan sonnet. In his own masterpiece Les Regrets (1558) Du Bellay used the sonnet form to record his disillusionment with life in Rome and his nostalgia for France in tones of intense melancholy and bitter satire. Pierre de Ronsard, the greatest poet of the group, showed his mastery in transmuting Classical forms, themes, and myths into original French creations, in his Odes (1550-1552). He also attempted but never finished an epic poem La Franciade (The Epic of France) of which four books were published in 1572. His fame rests above all on three collections of love poetry, culminating in the bitter-sweet Sonnets pour Hélène (Sonnets for Helen, 1578).

Tragedy, which, next to epic, was perceived as the greatest challenge for a Renaissance poet, was first attempted by the Pléiade poet Étienne Jodelle in Cléopâtre Captive (1552), which is declamatory rather than dramatic. The Protestant Robert Garnier, on the other hand, achieved real tragic conflict and suspense with his tragedy Les Juives (The Jewish Women, 1583). His play drew much of its strength from its echoes of the religious conflict raging at the time. The Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants (known as Huguenots) lasted from 1562 to 1598. They dispelled the optimistic climate in which the idealism of the Pléiade had flourished. The conflict brought very different reactions from poets. Philippe Desportes wrote stylish love poetry as if nothing were happening around him (Premières Oeuvres, 1573) while Ronsard, though initially inspired to biting eloquence in the Discours des Misères de ce Temps (Discourse on the Wretchedness of Our Times, 1562), then turned away from the topic. The best poets were those inspired by the personal anguish caused by the wars. Most notable are Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné in his often moving Printemps (Spring, written 1572; published 1874) and Jean de Sponde, whose Sonnets et Stances de la Mort (Sonnets and Stanzas on Death) and Sonnets d’Amour (Love Sonnets), both hardly known before the mid-20th century, show him to be probably the finest of the post-Pléiade poets.

The three books of Essais (1580-1588) by Michel de Montaigne cover almost every topic that ever aroused the author’s wide-ranging curiosity. Montaigne responded to the Renaissance with a unique blend of fascination and detachment. His essays purvey a new type of humanism based on clear-sighted acknowledgement of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of human beings. Montaigne’s delight in Renaissance learning is tempered by the conviction that human thought is in a continual state of flux and intellectual certainty is impossible. The true humanist is a pragmatist who judges everything by the light of observation and experience of life, beginning with his own life: the Essais are a unique form of autobiography. Among other things, this leads Montaigne to advocate religious tolerance and to urge that education should emphasize the acquisition of understanding rather than factual information. Montaigne’s characteristic scepticism is echoed in his digressive style and in the contradictions left in the text by his lifelong practice of adding new material but never deleting anything.

IV

The 17th Century

This rich and varied period culminated in what has been called the “Classical Moment” (1660-1680), which saw the production of some of the most enduring masterpieces of French literature.

A

1600 to 1650

At the beginning of the 17th century, French literature had much in common with the Baroque painting of the time. It was personal, colourful, and dynamic, and used images for their immediate impact on the reader’s or spectator’s senses. Form was governed by the pressure of the emotional content. In lyric poetry, Saint-Amant and Théophile de Viau composed light-hearted fantasies, while Jean-Baptiste Chassignet and La Ceppède used deliberately shocking images in order to stimulate religious devotion. In the theatre, the tragicomedies of Alexandre Hardy and Jean de Rotrou dramatized conflicts of love and honour among high-born characters, and aimed at surprising and astonishing the spectator with violent action and lavish changes of scenery. Around 1630 a reaction set in, spearheaded by the poet François de Malherbe. It led to the simplification of poetic language, rigorous constraints on form and versification, and a preference for general and impersonal themes. These reforms proved popular in the aristocratic salons where poetry was looked upon as little more than a social accomplishment. In the theatre, they were reflected in a move from tragicomedy, with its reliance on external excitement, to tragedy, in which a unified and psychologically motivated plot focused the spectator’s undivided attention on the character and destiny of the hero. The leading writer of tragedies was Pierre Corneille, whose first outstanding success had been a tragicomedy, Le Cid (1637). In his tragedies Horace (1640), Polyeucte (1642), and Nicomède (1650), Corneille portrays the inner vulnerability of the hero as well as his strength of will. Although he is habitually called a “Classical” dramatist, Corneille’s early tragedies are still Baroque in their celebration of heroic individualism and their aim of exciting admiration (awe and wonder) rather than the pity and fear expected of Greek tragedy.

B

1650 to 1700

By the middle of the 17th century, authors and readers belonged to the same tightly knit society centred on Paris and the court, and literature’s principal focus was the life of the aristocracy and the upper-middle classes. Drama in particular flourished, with regular performances by three different companies until their forced merger to form the Comédie-Française in 1680. In tragedy, Pierre Corneille turned for his subject matter to the dynastic problems of absolute monarchy, as heroic individualism went out of fashion in the reign of Louis XIV. Other dramatists such as Thomas Corneille and Philippe Quinault became popular by writing sentimental drama in which the love affairs of contemporary nobles were flatteringly portrayed under the outward trappings of the tragic form. Jean-Baptiste Racine first rivalled, and then eclipsed, both Pierre Corneille and the sentimental dramatists, in a series of plays, produced between 1664 and 1677, which showed the traditional public image of great figures of history and myth undermined by their private passions. In contrast to most of his contemporaries (though Thomas Corneille had taken a step in this direction), Racine eliminated unnecessary complexity from his initial choice of subject matter which he then used as the basis for tightly constructed and suspense-laden plots. After the greatest of his tragedies, Phèdre (1677), Racine stopped writing for the public stage. Towards the end of his life, he wrote two plays for private performance, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), the second of which eventually entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.

Comedy at first relied on a traditional repertoire of farce and comedy of intrigue, with obvious indebtedness to Italian and Spanish theatre, with Pierre Scarron as the most successful dramatist. Scarron’s comedies were regularly performed by Molière (pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) who, as actor, director, and manager, as well as author, created what was effectively a new genre by fusing different comic registers, from farce to romantic comedy, in order to produce plays aimed, as he put it, to “faire rire les honnêtes gens” (“to make respectable people laugh”). Molière’s liking for satire caused him problems with the authorities: Le Tartuffe (1664), in which a confidence trickster pretends to be a man of piety, was banned for five years, and Dom Juan (1665), where the licentious and atheistical hero is a trickster who torments an entire society, was not played again until the 19th century.

In poetry, the focus on society favoured the genres of satire and the epistle. Their most versatile exponent was Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (usually known simply as Boileau) who used them for a wide range of subjects from poetry to theology. Boileau’s L’Art Poétique (The Art of Poetry, 1674) is not a versified rule-book, but a poem about poetry written from the standpoint of a creative artist, in which the author praises the methods of his great contemporaries Molière and Racine. Personal lyricism was largely confined to religious poetry. St Jean de Brébeuf, Racan, and the poets whose works appeared in the Recueil de Poésies Chrétiennes et Diverses (Collection of Christian and Other Poems, 1671), edited by Jean de La Fontaine, express personal sentiments in harmonious post-Malherbian verse. La Fontaine himself was the most original poet of the entire century. His choice of a non-traditional genre, the fable, left him free to experiment with unconventional metrical forms and to revive obsolete but colourful linguistic usages in his creation of an imaginary world, in which the parallels between animal and human behaviour often have uncomfortable implications for the society in which he and his readers were living.

In prose, the multi-volume romances of Madelaine de Scudéry and La Calprenède, depicting the sentimental adventures of contemporary courtiers dressed up as Classical heroes and heroines, were replaced in popularity by the nouvelle (a short fictitious narrative), in which the interest was concentrated on one incident in the life of a single, lifelike character. In La Princesse de Clèves (1678), by Madame de La Fayette, the story of a triangular love affair that can only end unhappily, the nouvelle form was transformed to produce the finest real roman (novel) of the period. The tightly controlled plotting recalls Racine, and the psychological insight owes much to Madame de La Fayette’s friend François de La Rochefoucauld. La Rochefoucauld’s own Maximes (1665-1678) is a series of pithy aphorisms about social behaviour and the role of the subconscious mind in motivating human conduct. La Rochefoucauld’s pessimistic view of human nature recalls that of the Jansenists, a group of theologians within the Roman Catholic Church who were eventually declared to be heretics. They were defended by Blaise Pascal, whose Lettres Provinciales (1656-1657), attacked the Jesuits, their principal enemy, with fierce satire and comic verve, and sold more copies than any other work of the period. Pascal’s lasting monument has proved to be his Pensées (Thoughts on the Christian Religion, 1670), a collection of fragments ranging from a few words to several paragraphs in length, in which he dramatizes the problem of religious belief, often “talking through” issues in fictitious dialogues. In Les Caractères ou les Moeurs de ce Siècle (The Characters or the Morals of Our Times, 1688-1696) by Jean de La Bruyère, the focus shifts from the inner life of the individual to its outward expression in a society in which self-seeking individuals have lost their humanity and behave like machines in their unremitting pursuit of wealth and power.

It is customary to speak of the literature of this period as “Classical”, a term introduced only in the 19th century. Only Racine can be considered truly “Classical”, since only he successfully revived the authentic spirit of Classical antiquity: the Greek tragedies were a true source of inspiration to him alone among contemporary dramatists, and only he properly understood Aristotle’s definition of the tragic catharsis. “Classicism” in most people’s minds is associated with restraint, conformity to the three Classical unities in drama, and emphasis on perfection of form. Unfortunately, when codified by the Académie Française and influential theorists of the period like Jean Chapelain, l’Abbé François Hédelin d’Aubignac, and Père René Rapin, these principles hardened into a doctrine that was used to regulate standards of taste and literary practice, and which laid a dead hand on French literature until well into the following century.

V

The 18th Century

The 18th century is a turning point between two worlds. Its literary taste often perpetuates the old canons of the previous century. Its thought, expressed both in philosophical writing and in fiction, is questioning, forward-looking, and sometimes revolutionary. Already, at the end of the previous century, some of these features were to be found in the works of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Bernard de Bovier de Fontenelle, and Pierre Bayle, who all challenged traditional beliefs and assumptions. This is the age known as the Enlightenment.