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French literature
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The 17th century
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Antoine Furetière
Claude Favre, sieur de Vaugelas
Abbé d’Aubignac
Honoré d’Urfé
Francois de Malherbe
Théophile de Viau
Alexandre Hardy
Pierre Corneille
"The Cid"
Jean Chapelain
Jean de Rotrou
Madeleine de Scudéry
Cyrano de Bergerac
Paul Scarron
François de La Rochefoucauld
"Reflections; or
Sentences and Moral Maxims"
Charles de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond
Molière
"Tartuffe Or, the
Hypocrite",
"The Misanthrope",
"The Impostures of
Scapin",
"The Imaginary
Invalid"
Jean Racine
"Phèdre"
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
Jean de La
Fontaine
"Fables"
Illustrations by J. J. Grandville
Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de La Fayette
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal,
marquise de Sévigné
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
Francois de La Mothe-Fénelon
Jean de La Bruyère
Jean-Francois Regnard
Florent Carton
Dancourt
Alain-René Lesage
"Gil Blas"
BOOK I-III,
BOOK IV-VII,
BOOK VIII-XII
Charles Perrault
"The
Tales of Mother Goose"
PART I,
PART II Illustrated by Gustave Dore
Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle
Pierre de Fermat
Pierre Gassendi
Nicholas de Malebranche
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The 17th century
Literature and society
Refinement of the French
language
At the beginning of the 17th century the full
flowering of the Classical manner was still remote,
but various signs of a tendency toward order,
stability, and refinement can be seen. A widespread
desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also
a sign of the pressures to conformity in a society
constructing itself around the king and his court,
is reflected in the numerous manuals of politesse,
or formal politeness, that appeared through the
first half of the century; while at the celebrated
salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly
of bourgeois origin, and the nobility and leaders of
fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to
enjoy the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did
much to refine the literary language and also helped
to prepare a cultured public that could engage in
the serious analysis of moral and psychological
problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early
move to place cultural activity under the patronage
of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions
concerned the standardization of the French
language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s
own Dictionnaire of 1694, though by then rival works
had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre
Richelet (1680) and Antoine Furetière (1690). A
similar desire for systematic analysis inspired
Claude Favre, sieur de Vaugelas, also an
Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise
(1647) records polite usage of the time. In the
field of literary theory the same rational approach
produced the Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”)
of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the
Abbé d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The
Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which
strongly influenced the development of Classical
doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect
the new taste for moral analysis and refinement was
written in imitation of the pastoral literature of
Italy and Spain; the masterpiece of the genre was
L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners
are stylized, settings are conventional, and the
plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the
characters are highly refined, and the psychology of
their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the
self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted
conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to
his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets.
Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and a
sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic
fancy. His influence helped to make French lyric
verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined
but lacking imaginative inspiration. Malherbe’s
alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and
energetic—was a metre marvelously suited to be a
vehicle for
Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted
Malherbe’s
lead. The most distinguished of the independents was
Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis
of Malherbe in style and technique but also
expressed the free thought inherited from
Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s verse, with its
engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows
a sensual delight in the natural world. He was the
leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen
and men of letters, practising and preaching social
and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this:
libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The
poetry of Théophile and other independents is a last
example of that exuberant and extravagant manner
developed in the late 16th century to which modern
criticism has given the name Baroque.
Antoine Furetière

born Dec. 28, 1619, Paris
died March 14, 1688, Paris
French novelist, satirist, and
lexicographer, remarkable for the
variety of his writing.
The son of a lawyer’s clerk,
Furetière entered the legal profession
but soon resigned his office and took
holy orders to qualify himself for
benefices, which provided an income that
enabled him to pursue his literary
vocation. After publishing three books
of comic and satirical verse, he wrote
Nouvelle Allégorique ou Histoire des
derniers troubles arrivés au royaume
d’Eloquence (1658), a facetious survey
of the contemporary Parisian world of
letters, in which he wrote so favourably
of the members of the Académie Française
that he was, in 1662, himself elected.
He soon forfeited the good will of
his colleagues, however. His Le Roman
bourgeois (1666) was a pioneer work in
the history of the French novel because
it dealt realistically with the Parisian
middle classes instead of “heroic”
personages or picaresque vagrants. But
it gave offense to the academy, not so
much by the formlessness of its
construction as by its fidelity to a
subject matter deemed unworthy of an
academician.
Furetière incurred worse displeasure
when, late in 1684, he revealed his
intention of publishing his own
universal dictionary of the French
language, on which he had been working
for some 40 years. This enterprise
infuriated some of his fellow
academicians, whose own long-projected
dictionary was still incomplete. They
expelled him from the academy, and,
though King Louis XIV did his best to
protect him, the rest of Furetière’s
life was spent in controversy with his
former colleagues. His great
Dictionnaire, soon to be recognized as
more comprehensive and much more useful
than the academy’s, was first printed in
Holland in three volumes in 1690.
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Claude Favre, sieur de Vaugelas

born January 6, 1585, Meximieux,
France
died February 1650, Paris
French grammarian and an original
member of the Académie Française who
played a major role in standardizing the
French language of literature and of
polite society. A courtier, he was a
habitué of the salon of the Marquise de
Rambouillet, where his taste and
judgment in questions of speech and
writing earned the respect of men of
letters.
In his Remarques sur la langue
françoise, utiles à ceux qui veulent
bien parler et bien escrire (1647;
“Remarks on the French Language, Useful
for Those Who Wish to Speak Well and
Write Well”), Vaugelas recorded what he
considered good usage: the speech of the
“soundest” elements of the court and the
written language of the most intelligent
authors. His contemporaries soon
accepted his decisions as authoritative
in cases of doubtful or conflicting
usage; parler Vaugelas meant to speak
not merely correctly but elegantly, and
the Remarques became la bible de l’usage.
Vaugelas was sensible enough to
realize that good usage changed with
changes of interest in society. But when
Richelieu took over his literary
discussion group of nine to form the
Académie Française, he instructed them
to create firm rules for the language
and to render it pure and eloquent.
Vaugelas’ dicta were then taken too
literally. The rigidity imposed by the
Académie was resisted by authors in the
second half of the 17th century, and,
even some of Vaugelas’ contemporaries,
not content with the formal language of
the court, spiced their writing with
language of the common people.
Ultimately, however, the Académie
eliminated the excesses of Renaissance
diction and set a standard of literary
taste.
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Abbé d’Aubignac

born Aug. 4, 1604, Paris, France
died July 25, 1676, Nemours
associate of the statesman Cardinal de
Richelieu, playwright, and critic who
influenced French 17th-century writing
and encouraged dramatic standards based
on the classics. He wrote plays,
fiction, translations of Homer and Ovid,
and, most important, studies of dramatic
technique and presentation.
Although trained as a lawyer,
Aubignac soon turned to the Church
(1628) and was named tutor to
Richelieu’s nephew. Encouraged by the
Cardinal, he wrote several prose
tragedies, three of which survive:
Cyminde (published 1642), La Pucelle
d’Orléans (1642; “The Maid of Orleans”),
and Zénobie (1647). His polemical
writings include four critical essays on
the plays of Pierre Corneille and
several other critical commentaries,
some of which offended members of the
Académie Française. When, in
consequence, he was not admitted to
membership, he founded his own academy
in 1654. Despite his political
connections, however, he was unable to
enlist the king’s support for it, and
the group disbanded not long after
Aubignac’s death.
His major work, La Pratique du
théâtre (1657; The Whole Art of the
Stage, 1684), was commissioned by
Richelieu and is based on the idea that
the action on stage must have
credibility (vraisemblance) in the eyes
of the audience. Aubignac proposed,
among other things, that the whole play
should take place as close as possible
in time to the crisis, that audiences
should not be asked to imagine changes
of scene or character, and that the
number of actors be restricted so there
is no confusion. Despite the Pratique’s
small sale, it was probably a force in
the formation of French Classical taste
as put into practice by Corneille and
Racine. Another work, Projet pour le
rétablissement du théâtre français
(“Plan for Reorganizing the French
Theatre”), published after the Pratique,
called for the establishment of a
general directorship over all public
theatres in order to raise comedies, in
particular, from disrepute. He adamantly
opposed the idea that advances in
theatre were harmful to religion.
Aubignac was also one of the first men
of letters to question the existence of
Homer. He theorized that the Iliad was
in fact a series of ballads by several
different authors.
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Honoré d’Urfé

born Feb. 10/11, 1567, Marseille,
France
died June 1, 1625, Villefranche-sur-Mer
French author whose pastoral romance
L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) was extremely
popular in the 17th century and inspired
many later writers.
D’Urfé was born into a family of
ancient nobility. He grew up in the
Forez region of southeastern France and
was educated at the Collège de Tournon.
He became a partisan of the Holy League
during the Wars of Religion and was
banished to Savoy before being allowed
to return home in 1599. In 1625 d’Urfé
raised a regiment and campaigned against
the Spaniards in the Valtellina, but he
soon died of pneumonia.
D’Urfé’s first work, Epistres Morales
(1598; “Moral Letters”), reveals the
influence of stoicism and Renaissance
Platonism. His magnum opus, L’Astrée,
appeared in five parts from 1607 to 1627
and altogether consists of some 5,000
pages. Part 4 of the book was edited by
the author’s secretary, Balthazar Baro,
who also added Part 5 based on notes
left by d’Urfé. With its scene set on
the banks of the Lignon River in
5th-century Gaul and its atmosphere one
of paradisiacal innocence, L’Astrée
describes the life and adventures of
shepherds and shepherdesses whose main
preoccupation is love. The book derives
its title from the pair Astrée and
Céladon, who are unable to marry because
of their families’ mutual enmity.
D’Urfé’s models for his novel were
various Spanish and Italian pastoral
romances read in the French court,
notably Diana (1559) by Jorge de
Montemayor. D’Urfé himself was a
remarkable observer of human nature,
however, and his characters are far from
mere conventions. Céladon, Sylvandre,
and Hylas were for generations of French
readers what the characters of Sir
Walter Scott and Charles Dickens were
for the Victorian Age.
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François de Malherbe

born 1555, in or near Caen, Fr.
died Oct. 16, 1628, Paris
French poet who described himself as
un excellent arrangeur de syllabes and
theoretician whose insistence upon
strict form, restraint, and purity of
diction prepared the way for French
Classicism.
Malherbe received a Protestant education
at Caen and Paris and later at the
universities of Basel (1571) and
Heidelberg (1573) but was shortly
converted to a lukewarm Catholicism.
In 1577 he went to Provence as
secretary to the governor, Henri
d’Angoulême. His first published poem
was Les Larmes de Saint Pierre (1587;
“The Tears of St. Peter”), a florid
imitation of Luigi Tansillo’s Lagrime di
San Pietro. His friendship with two
lawyers of Aix, the Stoic philosopher
Guillaume du Vair and the
extraordinarily learned Nicolas-Claude
Fabri de Peiresc, developed his
character and allowed his genius to
mature. In 1600 an ode to the new queen,
Marie de Médicis, made his name more
widely known.
In 1605 Malherbe went to Paris,
supported by his friends Peiresc and du
Vair and by Cardinal Duperron. Henry IV
was neither greatly interested in poetry
nor notably generous, but Malherbe
attained the position of court poet and
a modest living from court patronage. He
gathered a group of disciples, of whom
Honorat de Bueil Racan and François
Maynard are the best known, and much of
his critical influence was exercised in
the form of sharp verbal thrusts, some
of them preserved in Racan’s life of him
and in the pages devoted to him in
Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux’s
Historiettes (c. 1659; published 1834).
Malherbe’s prose writings consist of
translations of Livy and Seneca; about
200 letters to Peiresc, of interest for
their picture of court life; and his
commentary on the works of the poet
Philippe Desportes. These notes are
detailed and entirely negative,
fastening critically on minute points of
workmanship. Nevertheless, certain
positive principles emerge by
implication: verbal harmony, propriety,
intelligibility, and, above all, the
conception of the poet as craftsman
rather than prophet.
Malherbe’s own poetic work shows
poverty of imagination; he wrote little
and slowly, repeating his ideas, images,
and rhymes. But there is a dignity and
even grandeur in the harmony and
strength of his best poems. In
essentials, French verse retained the
characteristics stamped on it by
Malherbe up to the Romantic period and
beyond.
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Théophile de Viau

born 1590, Clairac, near Agen, France
died Sept. 25, 1626, Paris
French poet and dramatist of the
pre-Neoclassical period.
Born into a Huguenot family of the
minor nobility, Viau went to Paris,
where he soon won a reputation as the
leader of the freethinkers (libertins).
He was briefly house dramatist to the
Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, writing one
important tragedy, Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623). This period of prosperity ended
when he was charged with irreligious
activities. He fled, was sentenced in
absentia to death, was rearrested, and
was finally released in 1625 under
sentence of banishment. His health
broken, he died soon afterward.
Viau wrote odes and other poems on a
wide range of topics. His verse is
marked by a strong feeling for nature,
great musicality, a use of original and
ingenious imagery, and an epicurean
outlook that is tempered by apocalyptic
visions and the thought of death. He
defended spontaneity and inspiration
against the set of literary rules laid
down by the influential poet François de
Malherbe. Viau’s poetry was rediscovered
by the Romantics in the 19th century.
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The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous
generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and foremost
a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house
writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the company
established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he
wrote hundreds of plays, of which 34 were published
(1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he
developed the tragicomedy and the pastoral play,
which became the most popular genres between 1600
and 1630. In the theatre as elsewhere, the pastoral
was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for
the subtle analysis of feeling. Although the finest
play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s
Pyrame et Thisbé (1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which
shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at
its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices
such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a
crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined
alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on the
conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and
action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority of
Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions
regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the
mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new
style, defined by
Corneille as “une peinture de la
conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the
conversation of the gentry”), simply transposes the
pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time,
ambitious young playwrights competing for public
favour and the support of the two Paris theatre
companies, the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais,
did not neglect other types of drama; and
Corneille,
together with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François
L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated
“regular” tragedy. But it was some time before
Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned
exclusively to tragedy. The eclecticism of these
years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique
(performed 1636; The Comedy of Illusion), a
brilliant exploitation of the interplay between
reality and illusion that characterizes Baroque art.
The two trends come together in
Corneille’s theatre
in Le Cid (performed 1637;
The Cid), which, though
often called the first Classical tragedy, was
created as a tragicomedy. The emotional range
Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is
something previously unmatched. Contemporary
audiences at once recognized the play as a
masterpiece, but its form was subjected to an
unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid
(“quarrel of The Cid”) caused such a stir that it
led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu,
who referred the play to the judgment of the newly
founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on
Corneille’s
evolution is unmistakable: all his experimentation
was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter
Classical formula. A remarkable spell of creative
activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640),
Cinna (1641), and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The
Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement.
In terms of form, the essence of Classical French
tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés,
Jean Chapelain,
began in the 1630s to exert an influence similar to
that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was
a major architect of Classicism in France. More
liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that
intangible element (“le je ne sais quoi”) that rules
cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638;
“The Opinions of the Academy”), compiled by
Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent
compromise, but one can sense beneath the pedantry
of certain comments a genuine feeling for the
harmony and regularity that Classical tragedy was to
achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative.
Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-Genest (1647;
“The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an
interesting contrast with Polyeucte, treating in the
Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and
conversion. By the 1640s the mixture of modes was
falling out of favour. Writers and their public had
become more responsive to various standardizing
influences.
René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode
(1637; Discourse on Method), with its opening
sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la
mieux partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in
the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if
properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as
regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649;
Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that
could claim to represent the moral and cultural
values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole
of the first half of the century. The spirit of
insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of
civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in which the
high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial
bodies known as parlements in an attempt to reassert
their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is
clearly marked in the writing of the time, not least
in
Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes,
meeting every challenge and overcoming every
obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral
code that animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de
Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but
futile resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither
Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from
self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation
of others is as necessary as the desire to leave an
example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic
attitudes may seem incompatible with a tragic view
of the world; indeed,
Corneille provides the key to
his originality in substituting for the traditional
Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration.
Corneille asks that his audience admire
something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
Alexandre Hardy
born 1572?, Paris, France
died 1632?
playwright, the first Frenchman known
to have made his living as a dramatist,
who claimed authorship of some 600
plays.
Hardy was a hired poet for troupes of
actors both in the provinces and in
Paris. His works were widely admired in
court circles, where he wrote for royal
companies. The actors who bought his
plays rarely allowed him to publish
them, and fewer than 50 survived.
Shortly after Hardy’s death his plays
ceased to be produced. Nearly all the
succeeding dramatists, among them Pierre
Corneille and Jean Racine, the two
masters of the classical French tragedy,
affected contempt for his work, but they
profited from his dramatic technique.
Hardy’s work violated many of the
later strictures of the French Academy
governing the writing of plays,
especially in neglecting the unities of
time and place. He cut down or
eliminated the role of the chorus and
depicted violence on stage. His plots
were faster paced than those of the
tragedies modeled on ancient Greek and
Roman works. Action was linked with the
psychology of the characters: the
protagonists acted rather than
declaimed, developed as human beings,
and sometimes experienced inner
conflict. His pastorals improved on
earlier ones through their fast-moving
plots and naturalness. Many plays were
demanded of him, and his style was
unpolished.
Unlike other 17th-century
playwrights, Hardy took few stories from
the Greek and Latin dramatists or the
Bible. He drew instead upon such writers
as Ovid, Cervantes, and Boccaccio.
Despite his lack of major achievements,
his influence on the development of the
French theatre was considerable.
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Pierre Corneille
"The Cid"

French poet and dramatist
born June 6, 1606, Rouen, France
died Oct. 1, 1684, Paris
Main
French poet and dramatist, considered
the creator of French classical tragedy.
His chief works include Le Cid (1637),
Horace (1640), Cinna (1641), and
Polyeucte (1643).
Early life and career.
Pierre Corneille was born into a
well-to-do, middle-class Norman family.
His grandfather, father, and an uncle
were all lawyers; another uncle and a
brother entered the church; his younger
brother, Thomas, became a well-known
poet and popular playwright. Pierre was
educated at the Jesuit school in his
hometown, won two prizes for Latin verse
composition, and became a licentiate in
law. From 1628 to 1650 he held the
position of king’s counselor in the
local office of the department of
waterways and forests.
Corneille’s first play, written before
he was 20 and apparently drawing upon a
personal love experience, was an elegant
and witty comedy, Mélite, first
performed in Rouen in 1629. When it was
repeated in Paris the following year, it
built into a steady (and, according to
Corneille, surprising) success. His next
plays were the tragicomedy Clitandre
(performed 1631) and a series of
comedies including La Veuve (performed
1632; The Widow), La Galerie du palais
(performed 1633; The Palace Corridor),
La Suivante (performed 1634; The
Maidservant), La Place royale (performed
1634), and L’Illusion comique (performed
1636). His talent, meanwhile, had come
to the attention of the Cardinal de
Richelieu, France’s great statesman, who
included the playwright among a group
known as les cinq auteurs (“society of
the five authors”), which the Cardinal
had formed to have plays written, the
inspiration and outline of which were
provided by himself. Corneille was
temperamentally unsuited to this
collective endeavour and irritated
Richelieu by departing from his part
(Act III) of the outline for La Comédie
des Tuileries (1635). In the event,
Corneille’s contribution was
artistically outstanding.
During these years, support had been
growing for a new approach to tragedy
that aimed at “regularity” through
observance of what were called the
“classical” unities. Deriving from
Italy, this doctrine of the unities
demanded that there be unity of time
(strictly, the play’s events were to be
limited to “the period between sunrise
and sunset”), of place (the entire
action was to take place in the one
locus), and of action (subplots and the
dramatic treatment of more than one
situation were to be avoided). All this
was based on a misunderstanding of
Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the
philosopher attempted to give a critical
definition of the nature of tragedy. The
new theory was first put into dramatic
practice in Jean Mairet’s Sophonisbe
(1634), a tragedy that enjoyed
considerable success. Corneille, not
directly involved in the call for
regular tragedy of this kind,
nevertheless responded to Sophonisbe by
experimenting in the tragic form with
Médée (1635). He then wrote Le Cid
(performed early 1637), first issued as
a tragicomedy, later as a tragedy.
Le Cid, now commonly regarded as the
most significant play in the history of
French drama, proved an immense popular
success. It sparked off a literary
controversy, however, which was chiefly
conducted by Corneille’s rival
dramatists, Mairet and Georges de
Scudéry, and which resulted in a bitter
pamphlet war. Richelieu, whose motives
are not entirely clear, instructed the
then recently instituted Académie
Française to make a judgment on the
play: the resulting document (Les
Sentiments de l’Académie française sur
la tragi-comédie du Cid, 1637), drafted
in the main by Jean Chapelain, a critic
who advocated “regular” tragedy, was
worded tactfully and admitted the play’s
beauties but criticized Le Cid as
dramatically implausible and morally
defective. Richelieu used the judgment
of the Académie as an excuse for
suppressing public performances of the
play.
Corneille, indeed, had not observed the
dramatic unities in Le Cid. The play has
nevertheless been generally regarded as
the first flowering of French
“classical” tragedy. For the best French
drama of the “classical” period in the
17th century is properly characterized,
not so much by rules—which are no more
than a structural convention—as by
emotional concentration on a moral
dilemma and on a supreme moment of
truth, when leading characters recognize
the depth of their involvement in this
dilemma. In Le Cid, Corneille rejected
the discursive treatment of the subject
given in his Spanish source (a long,
florid, and violent play by Guillén de
Castro y Bellvis, a 17th-century
dramatist), concentrating instead on a
conflict between passionate love and
family loyalty, or honour. Thus Le Cid
anticipated the “pure” tragedy of
Racine, in whose work the “classical”
concept of tragic intensity at the
moment of self-realization found its
most mature and perfect expression.
Major tragedies.
Corneille seems to have taken to
heart the criticisms levelled at Le Cid,
and he wrote nothing for three years
(though this time was also taken up with
a lawsuit to prevent the creation of a
legal office in Rouen on a par with his
own). In 1640, however, appeared the
Roman tragedy Horace; another, Cinna,
appeared in 1641. In 1641 also Corneille
married Marie de Lampérière, the
daughter of a local magistrate, who was
to bear him seven children to whom he
was a devoted father. Corneille’s
brother Thomas married Marie’s sister,
and the two couples lived in
extraordinary harmony, their households
hardly separated; the brothers enjoyed
literary amity and mutual assistance.
Le Cid, Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte,
which appeared in 1643, are together
known as Corneille’s “classical
tetralogy” and together represent
perhaps his finest body of work for the
theatre. Horace was based on an account
by the Roman historian Livy of a
legendary combat between members of the
Horatii and Curiatii families,
representing Rome and Alba; Corneille,
however, concentrated on the murder by
one of the patriots of his pacifist
sister, the whole case afterward being
argued before the king (a “duplicity” of
action admitted by Corneille himself,
who otherwise seems by now to have
decided to follow the classical rules).
Cinna was about a conspiracy against the
first Roman emperor, Augustus, who
checkmates his adversaries by granting
them a political pardon instead of
dealing them the expected violent fate,
boasting that he has strength enough to
be merciful. The hero of Polyeucte
(which many critics have considered to
be Corneille’s finest work), on adopting
Christianity seeks a martyr’s death with
almost militaristic fervour, choosing
this as the path to la gloire (“glory”)
in another world, whereas his wife
insists that the claims of marriage are
as important as those of religion.
These four plays are charged with an
energy peculiar to Corneille. Their
arguments, presented elegantly,
rhetorically, in the grand style, remain
firm and sonorous. The alexandrine verse
that he employed (though not
exclusively) was used with astonishing
flexibility as an instrument to convey
all shades of meaning and expression:
irony, anger, soliloquy, repartee,
epigram. Corneille used language not so
much to illumine character as to
heighten the clash between concepts,
hence the “sentences” in his poetry
which are memorable even outside their
dramatic context. Action here is
reaction. These plays concern not so
much what is done as what is resolved,
felt, suffered. Their formal principle
is symmetry: presentation, by a poet who
was also a lawyer, of one side of the
case, then of the other, of one position
followed by its opposite.
Contribution to comedy.
The fame of his “classical tetralogy”
has tended to obscure the enormous
variety of Corneille’s other drama, and
his contribution to the development of
French comedy has not always received
its proper due. The Roman plays were
followed by more tragedies: La Mort de
Pompée (performed 1644; The Death of
Pompey), Rodogune (performed 1645),
which was one of his greatest successes,
Théodore (performed 1646), which was his
first taste of failure, and Héraclius
(performed 1647). But in 1643 Corneille
had successfully turned to comedy with
Le Menteur (The Liar), following it with
the less successful La Suite du Menteur
(performed 1645; Sequel to the Liar).
Both were lively comedies of intrigue,
adapted from Spanish models; and Le
Menteur is the one outstanding French
comedy before the plays of Molière,
Corneille’s young contemporary, who
acknowledged its influence on his own
work. Le Menteur, indeed, stands in
relation to French classical comedy much
as Le Cid does to tragedy.
In 1647 Corneille moved with his family
to Paris and was at last admitted to the
Académie Française, having twice
previously been rejected on the grounds
of nonresidence in the capital. Don
Sanche d’Aragon (performed 1650),
Andromède (performed 1650), a
spectacular play in which stage
machinery was very important, and
Nicomède (performed 1651) were all
written during the political upheaval
and civil war of the period known as the
Fronde (1648–53), with Don Sanche in
particular carrying contemporary
political overtones. In 1651 or 1652 his
play Pertharite seems to have been
brutally received, and for the next
eight years Corneille wrote nothing for
the theatre, concentrating instead on a
verse translation of St. Thomas à
Kempis’ Imitatio Christi (Imitation of
Christ), which he completed in 1656, and
also working at critical discourses on
his plays that were to be included in a
1660 edition of his collected works.
Years of declining power.
Corneille did not turn again to the
theatre until 1659, when, with the
encouragement of the statesman and
patron of the arts Nicolas Fouquet, he
presented Oedipe. For the next 14 years
he wrote almost one play a year,
including Sertorius (performed 1662) and
Attila (performed 1667), both of which
contain an amount of violent and
surprising incident.
Corneille’s last plays, indeed, were
closer in spirit to his works of the
1640s than to his classical tragedies.
Their plots were endlessly complicated,
their emotional climate close to that of
tragicomedy. Other late plays include La
Toison d’or (performed 1660; The Golden
Fleece), his own Sophonisbe (performed
1663), Othon (performed 1664), Agésilas
(performed 1666), and Pulchérie
(performed 1672). In collaboration with
Molière and Philippe Quinault he wrote
Psyché (1671), a play employing music,
incorporating ballet sequences, and
striking a note of lyrical tenderness. A
year earlier, however, he had presented
Tite et Bérénice, in deliberate contest
with a play on the same subject by
Racine. Its failure indicated the
public’s growing preference for the
younger playwright.
Corneille’s final play was Suréna
(performed 1674), which showed an
uncharacteristic delicacy and
sentimental appeal. After this he was
silent except for some beautiful verses,
which appeared in 1676, thanking King
Louis XIV for ordering the revival of
his plays. Although not in desperate
poverty, Corneille was by no means
wealthy; and his situation was further
embarrassed by the intermittent stoppage
of a state pension that had been granted
by Richelieu soon after the appearance
of Horace in 1640. Corneille died in his
house on the rue d’Argenteuil, Paris,
and was buried in the church of Saint-Roch.
No monument marked his tomb until 1821.
Assessment.
Corneille did not have to wait for
“the next age” to do him justice. The
cabal that had led the attack on Le Cid
had no effect on the judgment of the
public, and the great men of his time
were his fervent admirers. Balzac
praised him; Molière acknowledged him as
his master and as the foremost of
dramatists; Racine is said to have
assured his son that Corneille made
verses “a hundred times more beautiful”
than his own. It was left to the 18th
century, largely because of the
criticisms of Voltaire, to exalt Racine
at Corneille’s expense; but the Romantic
critics of the late 18th century began
to restore Corneille to his true rank.
It cannot be denied, however, that
Corneille signed much verse that is dull
to mediocre. Molière acknowledged this
fact by saying: “My friend Corneille has
a familiar who inspires him with the
finest verses in the world. But
sometimes the familiar leaves him to
shift for himself, and then he fares
very badly.” But the importance of his
pioneer work in the development of
French classical theatre cannot be
denied; and, if a poet is to be judged
by his best things, Corneille’s place
among the great dramatic poets is beyond
question.
Not only did Pierre Corneille produce,
for nearly 40 years in all, an
astonishing variety of plays to
entertain the French court and the
Parisian middle class: he also prepared
the way for a dramatic theatre that was
the envy of Europe throughout the 17th
century. His own contribution to this
theatre, moreover, was that of master as
much as of pioneer. Corneille’s
excellence as a playwright has long been
held to lie in his ability to depict
personal and moral forces in conflict.
In play after play, dramatic situations
lead to a finely balanced discussion of
controversial issues. Willpower and
self-mastery are glorified in many of
his heroes, who display a heroic energy
in meeting or mastering the dilemma that
they face; but Corneille was less
interested in exciting his audiences to
pity and fear through visions of the
limits of man’s agony and endurance than
he was in stirring them to admiration of
his heroes. Thus, only a few of his
plays deal in tragic emotion.
Nevertheless, because his most famous
work, Le Cid, anticipated the tragic
intensity of plays by Jean Racine, his
younger contemporary, Corneille has
often been referred to as the “father”
of French classical tragedy; and his
contribution to the rise of comedy has,
in comparison, often been overlooked.
From a 20th-century vantage point,
however, it is as a master of drama that
he appears, rather than of tragedy in
particular.
Robert J. Nelson
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Jean Chapelain

born Dec. 4, 1595, Paris, Fr.
died Feb. 22, 1674, Paris
French literary critic and poet who
attempted to apply empirical standards
to literary criticism.
Chapelain’s approach was a challenge
to others of his day who appealed in
doctrinaire fashion to classical Greek
authorities. His critical views were
advanced primarily in short articles and
monographs and in his voluminous
correspondence. Chapelain’s own poetic
works are considered mediocre. His epic
La Pucelle (“The Maid”), which he began
in 1630, was a failure when the first 12
cantos were published 26 years later.
Chapelain first attracted attention in
1619–20 with a translation of Mateo
Alemán’s picaresque novel, Guzmán de
Alfarache. He subsequently became a
pupil of the aged poet and critic
François de Malherbe and was later
instrumental in founding the French
Academy. His prestige in literary
circles became such that in 1663, when
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of
finance to King Louis XIV, decided to
grant pensions to deserving writers,
Chapelain was entrusted with the naming
of candidates. A number of other writers
opposed him, however, and readily
expressed their views in pamphlets and
epigrams and in a skit entitled
Chapelain décoiffé (1663; “Chapelain
Dewigged”).
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Jean de Rotrou

Jean Rotrou (19 August or 20 August
1609 - June 1650) was a French poet and
tragedian.
"La sœur", Paris, T. Quinet (1647)Rotrou
was born at Dreux in Normandy. He
studied at Dreux and at Paris, and,
though three years younger than Pierre
Corneille, began writing before him. In
1632 he became playwright to the actors
of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. (This hall is
the setting for the first act of
Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac, and
Rotrou's name is mentioned - as is
Corneille's) With few exceptions, the
only events recorded of Rotrou's life
are the successive appearances of his
plays and his enrolment in 1635 in the
band of five poets who had the duty of
turning Richelieu's dramatic ideas into
shape.
Rotrou's own first piece,
L'Hypocondriaque (first produced in
1631), dedicated to the Comte de
Soissons, seigneur of Dreux, appeared
when he was only eighteen. In the same
year he published a collection of Œuvres
poetiques, including elegies, epistles
and religious verse. His second piece,
La Bague de l'oubli (1635), an
adaptation in part from the Sortija del
Olvido of Félix Lope de Vega, was much
more characteristic. It is the first of
several plays in which Rotrou
endeavoured to naturalize in France the
romantic comedy which had flourished in
Spain and England instead of the
classical tragedy of Seneca and the
classical comedy of Terence.
Corneille had leanings in the same
direction. Rotrou's brilliant but hasty
and unequal work showed the marks of a
stronger adhesion to the Spanish model.
In 1634, when he printed Cleagénor et
Doristée (acted 1630), he said he was
already the author of thirty plays; but
this probably includes adaptations.
Diane (acted 1630; pr. 1633), Les
Occasions perdues (acted 1631; printed
1635), which won for him the favour of
Richelieu, and L'Heureuse Constance
(acted 1631; pr. 1635), which was
praised by Anne of Austria, succeeded
each other rapidly, and were all in the
Spanish manner.
In 1631 Rotrou imitated Plautus in
Les Mentyhmes, and in 1634 Seneca in his
Hercube mourant. Comedies and tragi-comedies
followed. Documents exist showing the
sale of four pieces to Antoine de
Sommarille for 750 binres tournois in
1636, and in the next year he sold ten
to the same bookseller. He spent much
time at Le Mans with his patron, de
Belin, who was one of the opponents of
Corneille in the quarrel over Le Cid. It
has been generally assumed, partly
because of a forged letter long accepted
as Corneille's, that Rotrou was his
generous defender in this matter. He
appears to have been no more than
neutral, but is credited with an attempt
at reconciliation between the parties in
a pamphlet printed in 1637, L'Inconnu et
veritable amy de messieurs de Scudéry et
Corneille.
De Belin died in 1637, and in 1639
Rotrou bought the post of lieutenant
particulier au baüliage at Dreux. In the
next year he married Marguerite Camus,
and settled down as a model magistrate
and père de famille. Among his pieces
written before his marriage were a
translation of the Amphitryon of
Plautus, under the title of Les Deux
Sosies (1636), Antigone (1638), and
Laure Persecutie (acted 1637; pr. 1639),
in the opposite style to these classical
pieces.
In 1646 Rotrou produced the first of
his four masterpieces, Le Veritable
Saint Genest (acted 1646; pr. 1648), a
story of Christian martyrdom containing
some amusing byplay, one noble speech
and a good deal of dignified action.
Rotrou uses with considerable success
the device of a play within a play to
assert a Christian perspective on the
theatrum mundi theme. The Roman actor
Genest becomes a real convert while
playing the part of a Christian martyr.
Incidentally (Act i. Sc. v.) Rotrou pays
a noble tribute to the genius of
Corneille. Don Bertrand de Cabrère
(1647) is a tragi-comedy of merit;
Venceslas (1647; pr. 1648) is considered
in France his masterpiece, and has had
several modern revivals; Cosroès (1649)
has an Oriental setting, and is claimed
as the only absolutely original piece of
Rotrou.
These masterpieces follow foreign
models, and Rotrou's genius is shown in
the skill with which he simplifies the
plot and strengthens the situations.
Saint Genest followed Lope de Vega's Lo
fingido verdadero; Venceslas followed
the No ay ser padre siendo rey of
Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla. In this
play Ladislas and his brother both love
the princess Cassandra; Ladislas makes
his way into her house and in the
darkness kills a man whom he thinks to
be the duke of Courland, but who is
really his brother Alexandre, the
favoured lover. In the early morning he
meets the king and is confronted by the
duke of Courland. The outline of this
incident is in the Spanish play, but
there the spectators are aware of the
ghastly mistake at the time of the
murder. Rotrou shows his dramatic skill
by concealing the real facts from the
audience until they are revealed to the
horror-struck Ladislas himself.
In 1650 the plague broke out at Dreux.
Rotrou remained at his post, although
urgently desired to save himself by
going to Paris; caught the disease, and
died in a few hours. He was buried at
Dreux on 28 June 1650. Rotrou's great
fertility (he left thirty-five collected
plays besides others lost, strayed or
uncollected), and perhaps the
uncertainty of dramatic plan shown by
his hesitation almost to the last
between the classical and the romantic
style have injured his work. He has no
thoroughly good play, hardly one
thoroughly good act. But his situations
are often pathetic and noble, and as a
tragic poet properly so called he is at
his best almost the equal of Corneille
and of Jean Racine. His single lines and
single phrases have a brilliancy and
force not to be found in French drama
between Corneille and Victor Hugo.
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The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is
reflected in the midcentury novels. These resemble
L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume
adventure stories with highly complicated plots, but
they have moved from the world of the pastoral to
that of ancient history. The two best-known
examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53;
Artamenes; or, The Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60;
Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry,
are set in Persia and Rome, respectively. Such
novels reflect the society of the time. They also
show again what influenced the readers and playgoers
of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial
concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of
Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more
individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de Bergerac
returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional
travel as a vehicle for social and political satire
and may be seen as an early exponent of science
fiction. So provocative were the ideas expressed in
his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune
(1656; “Comical Tale of the States and Empires of
the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires
du soleil (1661; “Comical Tale of the States and
Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in
English translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano
de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (1923),
that neither work was published until after 1655,
the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an early
practitioner of more realistic writing, was more
down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in Le Roman
comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic
novels.
Madeleine de Scudéry

born , 1607, Le Havre, Fr.
died June 2, 1701, Paris
French novelist and social figure
whose romans à clef were immensely
popular in the 17th century.
De Scudéry was the younger sister of
the dramatist Georges de Scudéry.
Madeleine de Scudéry moved to Paris to
join her brother after the death of her
uncle, who had cared for her after she
and her brother had been orphaned.
Clever and bright, she soon made her
mark on the literary circle of the Hôtel
de Rambouillet; by the late 1640s, she
had replaced Madame de Rambouillet as
the leading literary hostess in Paris
and had established her own salon, known
as the Société du Samedi (the Saturday
Club).
Her first novel, Ibrahim ou
l’illustre bassa (1642; Ibrahim or the
Illustrious Bassa), was published in
four volumes. Her later works were even
longer; both Artamène ou le grand Cyrus
(1649–53; Artamenes or the Grand Cyrus)
and Clélie, histoire romaine (1654–60;
Clelia) were published in 10 volumes.
Contemporary readers, accustomed to such
long novels, appreciated De Scudéry’s
works both for their bulk and for the
glimpses they provided into the lives of
important society figures of the day.
These individuals were thinly disguised
as Persian, Greek, and Roman warriors
and maidens; De Scudéry herself appears
in Artamène as Sappho, a name by which
she was known to her friends.
Other of her works include Almahide,
ou l’es- clave reine (1660–63;
“Almahide, or the Slave Queen”),
Mathilde d’Aguilar, histoire espagnole
(1667; “Mathilda of Aguilar, a Spanish
Tale”), and La Promenade de Versailles,
ou l’histoire de Célanire (1669; “The
Versailles Promenade, or the Tale of
Celanire”). Most of the novels were
published anonymously or under the name
of her brother Georges. They included
long passages devoted to conversations
on such topics as the education of
women; these were excerpted and
published separately.
Although her novels were
exceptionally popular and were lauded by
such notables as Madame de Sévigné, they
also met with some criticism. The poet
and critic Nicolas Boileau, for
instance, satirized them harshly.
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Cyrano de Bergerac

born March 6, 1619, Paris
died July 28, 1655, Paris
French satirist and dramatist whose
works combining political satire and
science-fantasy inspired a number of
later writers. He has been the basis of
many romantic but unhistorical legends,
of which the best known is Edmond
Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac
(1897), in which he is portrayed as a
gallant and brilliant but shy and ugly
lover, possessed (as in fact he was) of
a remarkably large nose.
As a young man, Cyrano joined the
company of guards and was wounded at the
Siege of Arras in 1640. But he gave up
his military career in the following
year to study under the philosopher and
mathematician Pierre Gassendi. Under the
influence of Gassendi’s scientific
theories and libertine philosophy,
Cyrano wrote his two best known works,
Histoire comique des états et empires de
la lune and Histoire comique des états
et empires du soleil (Eng. trans. A
Voyage to the moon: with some account of
the Solar World, 1754). These stories of
imaginary journeys to the Moon and Sun,
published posthumously in 1656 and 1662,
satirize 17th-century religious and
astronomical beliefs, which saw man and
the world as the centre of creation.
Cyrano’s use of science helped to
popularize new theories; but his
principal aim was to ridicule authority,
particularly in religion, and to
encourage freethinking materialism. He
“predicted” a number of later
discoveries such as the phonograph and
the atomic structure of matter; but they
were merely offshoots from an inquiring
and poetic mind, not attempts to
demonstrate theories in practical terms.
Cyrano’s plays include a tragedy, La
Mort d’Agrippine (published 1654, “The
Death of Agrippine”), which was
suspected of blasphemy, and a comedy, Le
Pédant joué (published 1654; “The Pedant
Imitated”). As long as classicism was
the established taste, Le Pédant joué, a
colossal piece of fooling, was despised;
but its liveliness appeals to modern
readers as it did to Molière, who based
two scenes of Les Fourberies de Scapin
on it. La Mort d’Agrippine is
intellectually impressive because of its
daring ideas, and the direct and
impassioned character of the tragic
dialogue makes it interesting
theatrically.
As a political writer, Cyrano was the
author of a violent pamphlet against the
men of the Fronde, in which he defended
Mazarin in the name of political realism
as exemplified in the tradition of
Machiavelli. Cyrano’s Lettres show him
as a master of baroque prose, marked by
bold and original metaphors. His
contemporaries regarded them as absurdly
farfetched, but they came to be esteemed
in the 20th century as examples of the
baroque style.
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Paul Scarron

baptized July 4, 1610, Paris, Fr.
died Oct. 7, 1660, Paris
French writer who contributed
significantly to the development of
three literary genres: the drama, the
burlesque epic, and the novel. He is
best known today for Le Roman comique
(“The Comic Novel”) and as the first
husband of Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise
de Maintenon, the influential second
wife of King Louis XIV.
Scarron’s origins were bourgeois, and
it was originally intended that he
should enter the church. After a period
in Brittany and a visit to Rome,
however, Scarron settled in Paris and
devoted himself to writing. His first
works were burlesques. The poet
Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant had
already started the vogue for parodies
of the classics, but Scarron is mainly
responsible for making the burlesque one
of the characteristic literary forms of
the mid-17th century. His seven-volume
Virgile travesty (1648–53) had a
tremendous success. Modern readers,
perhaps because they are less impressed
than Scarron’s contemporaries by the
daring of parodying the Aeneid, often
find the humour facile and too drawn
out.
Scarron, who married d’Aubigné in
1652, was also a considerable figure in
the theatrical life of Paris in the
years immediately preceding Molière’s
arrival in the capital. He often wrote
with particular actors in mind; for
example, Le Jodelet (produced 1645) was
written to include a starring role for
the popular comedian of the same name.
Scarron’s plots are usually based upon
Spanish originals, and even his most
successful comedy, Dom Japhet d’Arménie
(produced 1647), owes a good deal to a
play by Castillo Solórzano. Though no
longer performed, Scarron’s plays are of
real historical importance, and Molière
took many hints from them.
Scarron’s profound practical
experience of the theatre is reflected
in Le Roman comique, 3 vol. (1651–59).
This novel, composed in the style of a
Spanish picaresque romance, recounts
with gusto the comical adventures of a
company of strolling players. The humour
of Le Roman comique has lasted better
than that of the parodies, probably
because it is more human and less
literary. The realism of the novel makes
it an invaluable source of information
about conditions in the French provinces
in the 17th century.
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The honnete homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and
partly as a result of disillusionment at the failure
of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually
replaced in the 1650s by the concept of honnêteté.
The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern
sense but refers rather to an ideal aristocratic
moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere
refinement of tastes and manners. Unlike the
aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme
(“gentleman”) cultivated the social graces and
valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A
cultured amateur, modest and self-effacing, he took
as his model the Renaissance uomo universale
(“universal man”).
François de La Rochefoucauld, an
aristocrat who had played a leading part in the
Fronde, provides an interesting illustration of the
transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665;
Maxims and Moral Reflections), his principal
achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic
reflections on human behaviour, expressed in the
most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly
cynical, self-interest being seen as the source of
all actions. If a more positive message is to be
seen, it is the recognition of honnêteté as a code
of behaviour that holds society together. However,
even this is touched with cynicism.
La
Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic
one, falling as far short of the ideal defined by
Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours
de la vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True
Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by
Charles de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond,
who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the
culture, the taste, and the temperament to practice
the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the
ideal of tolerant, cultured Epicureanism for a while
set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.

This period also saw the fullest development of
the cult of préciosité, a style of thought and
expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and
sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité
for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments
and manners satirized by
Molière in Les Précieuses
ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young
Ladies) do not represent the whole picture, however,
and, although the performance of some followers of
the mode led to ludicrous extremes or, worse,
degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses
such as Madeleine de Scudéry were responsible for
introducing a new subtlety into the language,
establishing new standards of delicacy in matters of
taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the
equality of the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus
ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the
ideal of the educated, emancipated woman was the
female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme
in imaginative literature is to be found in the
theatre of
Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a
courtier, and an honnête homme,
Molière was also an
actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the
provinces with his theatre troupe from about 1645
until 1658, when they returned to Paris.
Molière
soon succeeded in winning audiences to a completely
new type of comedy. While his early plays may be
divided conventionally into literary comedy and
popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed
1662; The School for Wives) onward he fused these
two strains, creating a formula that combined the
Classical structure, the linguistic refinement, and
the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional
French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for
Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le Tartuffe
(first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or
Les Femmes savantes (1672; The Learned Ladies), the
comedy of manners merely provides a framework for
the comic portrait of a central character, in which
exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part.
However topical the subject and however prominent
the contemporary satiric element in
Molière’s plays,
his characters always possess a common denominator
of universal humanity. Most of his plays contain,
alongside the comic character, one or more examples
of the honnête homme; and the social norm against
which his comic characters offend is that of a
tolerant, humane honnêteté. In Le Tartuffe, and in
Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric
implications were so provocative in dealing with the
delicate subject of religious belief that there were
strong reactions from churchmen. However, from the
start of his Paris career
Molière could count on the
active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of
his plays were written for performance at Versailles
or other courts; and Molière also wrote several
comédies-ballets and collaborated with Jean-Baptiste
Lully and others in other divertissements that
brought together the arts of poetry, music, and
dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century,
judged by length of first run, was the Timocrate
(1656) of
Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas,
a prolific playwright adept at gauging the public
taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the
précieux novels of Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like
Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the
author reproduced the disguises and amorous
intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between
two acknowledged masters of serious drama. Pierre
Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a
hiatus, wrote several more plays; but, though
Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna
(performed 1674), bear comparison with earlier
masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction.
While Corneille retained his partisans among older
playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new
generation.
François de La Rochefoucauld
"Reflections; or
Sentences and Moral Maxims"

born September 15, 1613, Paris,
France
died March 16/17, 1680, Paris
French classical author who had been one
of the most active rebels of the Fronde
before he became the leading exponent of
the maxime, a French literary form of
epigram that expresses a harsh or
paradoxical truth with brevity.
Heritage and political activities.
La Rochefoucauld was the son of
François, Count (comte) de La
Rochefoucauld, and his wife, Gabrielle
du Plessis-Liancourt. In 1628 he was
married to Andrée de Vivonne, with whom
he had four sons and three daughters. He
served in the army against the Spaniards
in Italy in 1629, in the Netherlands and
Picardy in 1635–36, and again in
Flanders in 1639. The public lives of
both father and son were conditioned by
the policies of Louis XIV’s government,
which by turns threatened and flattered
the nobility. Though his father was
created duke and made governor of
Poitou, he was later deprived of that
post when the loyalty of the family was
called into question. The younger La
Rochefoucauld was allowed by Cardinal
Mazarin, the infant king’s chief
minister, to resume the governorship in
1646. The fact that his château at
Verteuil was demolished by the crown,
apparently without notice, in 1650
throws light on a main cause of the
series of revolts between 1648 and 1653
known as the Fronde: the distrust and
fear felt by the monarchy for the local
independence of the nobility.
La Rochefoucauld was more vulnerable
than most of his contemporaries, because
throughout his life he seems to have
been susceptible to feminine charm. In
1635 the Duchess (duchesse) de Chevreuse
had lured him into intrigues against
Cardinal de Richelieu, the chief
minister of Louis XIII, an adventure
that only procured for La Rochefoucauld
a humiliating interview with Richelieu,
eight days of imprisonment in the
Bastille, and two years of exile at
Verteuil. Later, his hatred for Mazarin
and his devotion to Anne de Bourbon,
Duchess de Longueville, sister of the
Great Condé, who was the leader of the
Fronde, led to an even more disastrous
outcome. His own account of the weary
alternation of plots and campaigns of
the mutinous nobles throughout the
revolts (1648–53) may be read in his
Mémoires. His loyalty to the House of
Condé did not increase his popularity
with the crown and prevented him from
pursuing any single policy for reform of
royal or ministerial government. How far
toward treason he allowed himself to be
led, when the intentions of the
reforming princes and nobility were
superseded by personal ambitions, is
shown by the draft of the so-called
Treaty of Madrid of 1651, which laid
down conditions of Spanish help to the
French nobility. La Rochefoucauld not
only signed the treaty but is thought by
one scholar to have drafted it.
Two other features of his public
career deserve mention, since they
explain much of his writing—courage and
litigation. The man who was to pen the
aphorisms on courage and cowardice had
certainly been in the forefront of
battle. Within six years he was wounded
in no fewer than three engagements. The
injuries to his face and throat were
such that he retired from the struggle,
his health ruined and his peace of mind
lost.
His financial difficulties were no
doubt intensified by war, his lands were
heavily mortgaged, and but for the
astute help of his agent he might not
have been able to keep his establishment
in central Paris, as he did from 1660
onward. He was forced to pay not only
for fine living but for endless
litigation. There is evidence of no
fewer than five lawsuits in the space of
three years, chiefly against other noble
families, over questions of precedence
and court ceremonial.
Yet in 1655 his literary endeavours
were still before him. Thanks to the
lasting and intellectually stimulating
friendships with Mme de Sablé, one of
the most remarkable women of her age,
and Mme de Lafayette, he seems to have
avoided politics for a while and
gradually won his way back into royal
favour, a feat sealed by his promotion
to the knightly order of the
Saint-Esprit at the end of 1661. Reading
and intellectual conversation occupied
his time as well as that of other men
and women of a circle who listened to
private readings of Pierre Corneille’s
classical tragedies and Nicolas
Boileau’s didactic poem on the
principles of poetic composition, L’Art
poétique. The circle was enlivened by a
new game that consisted of discussing
epigrams on manners and behaviour,
expressed in the briefest, most pungent
manner possible. The care with which La
Rochefoucauld kept notes and versions of
his thoughts on the moral and
intellectual subjects of the game is
clear from the surviving manuscripts.
When the clandestine publication of one
of them in Holland forced him to publish
under his own name, it was clear that he
had satisfied public taste: five
editions of the Maximes, each of them
revised and enlarged, were to appear
within his lifetime.
The Maximes.
The first edition of the Maximes,
published in 1665, was called Réflexions
ou sentences et maximes morales and did
not contain epigrams exclusively; the
most eloquent single item, which
appeared only in the first edition and
was thereafter removed by the author, is
a three-page poetic description of
self-interest, a quality he found in all
forms of life and in all actions. The
manuscripts also contain epigrams
embedded in longer reflections; in some
cases the various versions show the
steps by which a series of connected
sentences was filed down to the point of
ultimate brevity. Beneath the general
single statement, however, can be found
a personal reaction to the Fronde, or to
politics, often violent in its
expression. For example:
Les crimes deviennent innocents, même
glorieux, par leur nombre et par leurs
qualités; de là vient que les voleries
publiques sont des habiletés, et que
prendre des provinces injustement
s’appelle faire des conquêtes. Le crime
a ses héros, ainsi que la vertu. (Crimes
are made innocent, even virtuous, by
their number and nature; hence public
robbery becomes a skillful achievement
and wrongful seizure of a province is
called conquest. Crime has its heroes no
less than virtue has.)
It may have been hostile reception or
the fear of revealing a political
attitude that made him abandon this kind
of epigram except for the almost
unrecognizable No. 185: “Il y a des
héros en mal comme en bien” (“Evil as
well as good has its heroes”). Modern
readers forget that La Rochefoucauld’s
contemporaries would read recent history
into statements that appear cryptic and
opaque to posterity.
The Fronde was to La Rochefoucauld
one of those moments of history that
seemed to reveal men’s motives at their
worst. His exposure of the self-seeking
that lay beneath conventional homage to
morality has earned for him the
reputation of a cynic, but his keener
contemporaries are no less severe. The
pungency and absence of explanation make
his epigrams seem more scornful than
similar statements embedded in memoirs.
But La Rochefoucauld was concerned with
conveying something more than scorn, and
beneath his professions of idealism he
pinpointed a restless and unquenchable
thirst for self-preservation. Virtue in
the pure state was something he did not
find:
Les vertus se perdent dans l’intérêt
comme les fleuves se perdent dans la
mer. (Virtues are lost in self-interest
as rivers are lost in the sea.)
This image of the sea recurred:
Voilà la peinture de l’amour-propre,
dont toute la vie n’est qu’une grande et
longue agitation; la mer en est une
image sensible; et l’amour-propre trouve
dans le flux et reflux de ses vagues
continuelles une fidèle expression de la
succession turbulente de ses pensées et
de ses éternels mouvements. (Such is the
picture of self-love, of which all life
is one continuous and immense ferment.
The sea is its visible counterpart and
self-love finds in the ebb and flow of
the sea’s endless waves a true likeness
of the chaotic sequence of its thoughts
and of its everlasting motion.)
La Rochefoucauld has been called an
Epicurean but his imaginative insights
attached him to no doctrine. Like Michel
de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, he was
aware of the mystery around man that
dwarfs his efforts and mocks his
knowledge, of the many things about man
of which he knows nothing, of the gap
between thinking and being, between what
man is and what man does: “La nature
fait le mérite et la fortune le met en
oeuvre” (“Nature gives us our good
qualities and chance sets them to
work”). Some epigrams show a respect for
the power of indolence, and others
reveal an almost Nietzschean respect for
strength. All these insights seem common
to the French classical school of which
he is so brilliant a member—though as an
aristocrat he disdained being called a
writer. These insights also accounted
for his fame and influence on his
disciples: in England Lord Chesterfield,
the orator and man of letters, and the
novelist and poet Thomas Hardy; in
Germany the philosophers Friedrich
Nietzsche and Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg; in France the writers and
critics Stendhal, Charles-Augustin
Sainte-Beuve, and André Gide.
Yet his chief glory perhaps is not as
thinker but as artist. In the variety
and subtlety of his arrangement of words
he made the maxime into a jewel. It is
not always the truth of the maxim that
is so striking, but its exaggeration
which can surprise one into a new aspect
of the truth. He describes and
defines—he has no time for more—but of
the single metallic image he makes
amazing use. He handles paradox to such
effect that a final word can reverse the
rest:
On ne donne rien si libéralement que
ses conseils (We give nothing so
generously as . . . advice). C’est une
grande folie de vouloir être sage tout
seul (It is great folly to seek to be
wise . . . on one’s own).
La Rochefoucauld authorized five
editions of the Maximes from 1665 to
1678. Two years after the last
publication, he died in Paris.
Though he did a considerable amount
of writing over the years La
Rochefoucauld actually published only
two works, the Mémoires and the Maximes.
In addition, about 150 letters have been
collected and 19 shorter pieces now
known as Réflexions diverses. These,
with the treaties and conventions that
he may have drawn up personally,
constitute his entire work and of these
only the Maximes stand out as a work of
genius. Like his younger contemporary,
Jean de La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld was
a man of one book.
Will G. Moore
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Charles de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond

born 1614?, Saint-Denis-le-Gast,
France
died Sept. 20, 1703, London, Eng.
French gentleman of letters and
amateur moralist who stands as a
transitional figure between Michel de
Montaigne (d. 1592) and the 18th-century
philosophes of the Enlightenment.
Pursuing a military career in his
early life, he won promotion for loyalty
to King Louis XIV’s minister Cardinal
Mazarin during the civil wars of the
Fronde (1648–53). In 1661, however, a
facetious letter of Saint-Évremond’s
deriding the late Mazarin’s Treaty of
the Pyrenees (1659) was accidentally
brought to light, and he fled from
France to escape arrest. Welcomed to
London by King Charles II, he spent the
rest of his life there except for an
interval in Holland (1665–70).
Saint-Évremond wrote for his friends,
not for publication; but a few of his
pieces were leaked to the press in his
lifetime. The 1705 edition of his works
is largely superseded by a modern
collection of his prose works and
letters, published in 1962. His poems,
mainly occasional pieces, are
negligible; but Les Académiciens (1643),
a comedy in verse, is still amusing, as
is his prose comedy “in the English
style,” Sir Politick Would-Be (c. 1664).
Saint-Évremond’s prose consists of
letters and discourses ranging from
hilarious satire (Retraite de M. le duc
de Longueville, 1649; Conversation du
Maréchal d’Hoquincourt avec le Père
Canaye, c. 1663) to literary criticism,
distinguished by antidogmatic common
sense, on the various genres. It also
includes a series of ethical writings,
which plead for a prudently moderated
hedonism and for religious toleration.
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Molière
"Tartuffe Or, the
Hypocrite"
"The Misanthrope"
"The Impostures of
Scapin"
"The Imaginary
Invalid"

French dramatist
original name Jean-Baptiste Poquelin
baptized Jan. 15, 1622, Paris, France
died Feb. 17, 1673, Paris
Main
French actor and playwright, the greatest of all writers of French
comedy.
Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France
often combined against him, the genius of Molière finally emerged to win
him acclaim. Comedy had a long history before Molière, who employed most
of its traditional forms, but he succeeded in inventing a new style that
was based on a double vision of normal and abnormal seen in relation to
each other—the comedy of the true opposed to the specious, the
intelligent seen alongside the pedantic. An actor himself, Molière seems
to have been incapable of visualizing any situation without animating
and dramatizing it, often beyond the limits of probability; though
living in an age of reason, his own good sense led him not to
proselytize but rather to animate the absurd, as in such masterpieces as
Tartuffe, L’École des femmes, Le Misanthrope, and many others. It is
testimony to the freshness of his vision that the greatest comic artists
working centuries later in other media, such as Charlie Chaplin, are
still compared to Molière.
Beginnings in theatre
Molière was born (and died) in the heart of Paris. His mother died when
he was 10 years old; his father, one of the appointed furnishers of the
royal household, gave him a good education at the Collège de Clermont
(the school that, as the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, was to train so many
brilliant Frenchmen, including Voltaire). Although his father clearly
intended him to take over his royal appointment, the young man renounced
it in 1643, apparently determined to break with tradition and seek a
living on the stage. That year he joined with nine others to produce and
play comedy as a company under the name of the Illustre-Théâtre. His
stage name, Molière, is first found in a document dated June 28, 1644.
He was to give himself entirely to the theatre for 30 years and to die
exhausted at the age of 51.
A talented actress, Madeleine Béjart, persuaded Molière to establish
a theatre, but she could not keep the young company alive and solvent.
In 1645 Molière was twice sent to prison for debts on the building and
properties. The number of theatregoers in 17th-century Paris was small,
and the city already had two established theatres, so that a continued
existence must have seemed impossible to a young company. From the end
of 1645, for no fewer than 13 years, the troupe sought a living touring
the provinces. No history of these years is possible, though municipal
registers and church records show the company emerging here and there:
in Nantes in 1648, in Toulouse in 1649, and so on. They were in Lyon
intermittently from the end of 1652 to the summer of 1655 and again in
1657, at Montpellier in 1654 and 1655, and at Béziers in 1656. Clearly
they had their ups as well as downs. These unchronicled years must have
been of crucial importance to Molière’s career, forming as they did a
rigorous apprenticeship to his later work as actor-manager and teaching
him how to deal with authors, colleagues, audiences, and authorities.
His rapid success and persistence against opposition when he finally got
back to Paris is inexplicable without these years of training. His first
two known plays date from this time: L’Étourdi ou les contretemps (The
Blunderer, 1762), performed at Lyon in 1655, and Le Dépit amoureux (The
Amorous Quarrel, 1762), performed at Béziers in 1656.
The path to fame opened for him on the afternoon of October 24, 1658,
when, in the guardroom of the Louvre and on an improvised stage, the
company presented Corneille’s Nicomède before the king, Louis XIV, and
followed it with what Molière described as one of those little
entertainments which had won him some reputation with provincial
audiences. This was Le Docteur amoureux (“The Amorous Doctor”); whether
it was in the form still extant is doubtful. It apparently was a success
and secured the favour of the King’s brother Philippe, duc d’Orléans. It
is difficult to know the extent of the Duc’s patronage, which lasted
seven years, until the King himself took over the company known as
“Troupe du roi.” No doubt the company gained a certain celebrity and
prestige, invitations to great houses, and subsidies (usually unpaid) to
actors, but not much more.
From the time of his return to Paris in 1658, all the reliable facts
about Molière’s life have to do with his activity as author, actor, and
manager. Some French biographers have done their best to read his
personal life into his works, but at the cost of misconstruing what
might have happened as what did happen. The truth is that there is
little information except legend and satire. The fact that authors like
Montaigne, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, and Seneca may have been in his
library (according to a legal inventory of 1708), for example, does not
mean that his plays should be read with the doctrines of such authors in
mind.
Although unquestionably a great writer, Molière was not an author in
the usual sense: he wrote little that could be called literature or even
that was meant to be published—some poems and a translation of the
ancient Latin writings of Lucretius, incomplete. His plays were made for
the stage, and his early prefaces complain that he had to publish to
avoid exploitation. (Two of them were in fact pirated.) He left seven of
his plays unpublished, never issued any collected edition, and never (so
far as is known) read proofs or took care with his text. Comedies, in
his view, were made to be acted. This fact was forgotten in the 19th
century. It took such 20th-century actors as Louis Jouvet, Charles
Dullin, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Jean Vilar to present a new and exact
sense of his dramatic genius.
Nor was he at all a classical author, with leisure to plan and write
as he would. Competition, the fight for existence, was the keynote of
Molière’s whole career. To keep his actors and his audiences was an
unremitting struggle against other theatres. He won this contest almost
single-handed. He held his company together by his technical competence
and force of personality.
Molière’s first Paris play, Les Précieuses ridicules (The Affected
Young Ladies), prefigured what was to come. It centres on two provincial
girls who are exposed by valets masquerading as masters in scenes that
contrast, on the one hand, the girls’ desire for elegance coupled with a
lack of common sense and, on the other, the valets’ plain speech
seasoned with cultural clichés. The girls’ fatuities, which they
consider the height of wit, suggest their warped view of culture in
which material things are of no account. The fun at the expense of these
affected people is still refreshing and must have been even more so for
the first spectators.
Les Précieuses, as well as Sganarelle (first performed in October,
1660), probably had its premiere at the Théâtre du Petit-Bourbon, a
great house adjacent to the Louvre. The Petit-Bourbon was demolished
(apparently without notice), and the company moved early in 1661 to a
hall in the Palais-Royal, built as a theatre by Richelieu. Here it was
that all Molière’s “Paris” plays were staged, starting with Dom Garcie
de Navarre, ou le prince jaloux in February 1661, a heroic comedy of
which much was hoped; it failed on the stage and succeeded only in
inspiring Molière to work on Le Misanthrope. Such failures were rare and
eclipsed by successes greater than the Paris theatre had known.
Scandals and successes
The first night of L’École des femmes (The School for Wives), December
26, 1662, caused a scandal as if people suspected that here was an
emergence of a comic genius that regarded nothing as sacrosanct. Some
good judges have thought this to be Molière’s masterpiece, as pure
comedy as he ever attained. Based on Paul Scarron’s version (La
Précaution inutile, 1655) of a Spanish story, it presents a pedant,
Arnolphe, who is so frightened of femininity that he decides to marry a
girl entirely unacquainted with the ways of the world. The delicate
portrayal in this girl of an awakening temperament, all the stronger for
its absence of convention, is a marvel of comedy. Molière crowns his
fantasy by showing his pedant falling in love with her, and his
elephantine gropings toward lovers’ talk are both his punishment and the
audience’s delight.
From 1662 onward the Palais-Royal theatre was shared by Italian
actors, each company taking three playing days in each week. Molière
also wrote plays that were privately commissioned and thus first
performed elsewhere: Les Fâcheux (The Impertinents, 1732) at Vaux in
August 1661; the first version of Tartuffe at Versailles in 1664; Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme at Chambord in 1670; and Psyché in the Tuileries
Palace in 1671.
On February 20, 1662, Molière married Armande Béjart. It is not
certain whether she was Madeleine’s sister, as the documents state, or
her daughter, as some contemporaries suggest. There were three children
of the marriage; only a daughter survived to maturity. It was not a
happy marriage; flirtations of Armande are indicated in hostile
pamphlets, but there is almost no reliable information.
Molière cleverly turned the outcry produced by L’École des femmes to
the credit of the company by replying to his critics on the stage. La
Critique de L’École des femmes in June 1663 and L’Impromptu de
Versailles in October were both single-act discussion plays. In La
Critique Molière allowed himself to express some principles of his new
style of comedy, and in the other play he made theatre history by
reproducing with astonishing realism the actual greenroom, or actors’
lounge, of the company and the backchat involved in rehearsal.
The quarrel of L’École des femmes was itself outrun in violence and
scandal by the presentation of the first version of Tartuffe in May
1664. The history of this great play sheds much light on the conditions
in which Molière had to work and bears a quite remarkable testimony to
his persistence and capacity to show fight. He had to wait five years
and risk the livelihood of his actors before his reward, which proved to
be the greatest success of his career. Most men would surely have given
up the struggle: from the time of the first performance of what was
probably the first three acts of the play as it is now known, many must
have feared that the Roman Catholic Church would never allow its public
performance.
Undeterred, Molière made matters worse by staging a version of Dom
Juan, ou le festin de Pierre with a spectacular ending in which an
atheist is committed to hell—but only after he had amused and
scandalized the audience. Dom Juan was meant to be a quick money raiser,
but it was a costly failure, mysteriously removed after 15 performances
and never performed again or published by Molière. It is a priceless
example of his art. The central character, Dom Juan, carries the
aristocratic principle to its extreme by disclaiming all types of
obligation, either to parents or doctors or tradesmen or God. Yet he
assumes that others will fulfill their obligations to him. His servant,
Sganarelle, is imagined as his opposite in every point, earthy,
timorous, superstitious. These two form the perfect French counterpart
to Don Quixote and Sancho.
Harassment by the authorities
While engaged in his battles against the authorities, Molière continued
to hold his company together single-handedly. He made up for lack of
authors by writing more plays himself. He could never be sure either of
actors or authors. In 1664 he put on the first play of Jean Racine, La
Thébaïde, but the next year Racine transferred his second play,
Alexandre le Grand, to a longer established theatre while Molière’s
actors were actually performing it. He was constantly harassed by the
authorities. These setbacks may have been offset in part by the royal
favour conferred upon Molière, but royal favour was capricious. Pensions
were often promised and not paid. The court wanted more light plays than
great works. The receipts of his theatre were uncertain and fluctuating.
In his 14 years in Paris, Molière wrote 31 of the 95 plays that were
presented on his stage. To meet the cumulative misfortunes of his own
illness, the closing of the theatre for seven weeks upon the death of
the Queen Mother, and the proscription of Tartuffe and Dom Juan, he
wrote five plays in one season (1666–67). Of the five, only one, Le
Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 1914), was a
success.
In the preceding season, however, Le Misanthrope, almost from the
start, was treated as a masterpiece by discerning playgoers, if not by
the entire public. It is a drawing-room comedy, without known sources,
constructed from the elements of Molière’s own company. Molière himself
played the role of Alceste, a fool of a new kind, with high principles
and rigid standards, yet by nature a blind critic of everybody else.
Alceste is in love with Célimène (played by Molière’s wife, Armande), a
superb comic creation, equal to any and every occasion, the incarnate
spirit of society. The structure of the play is as simple as it is
poetic. Alceste storms moodily through the play, finding no “honest” men
to agree with him, always ready to see the mote in another’s eye, blind
to the beam in his own, as ignorant of his real nature as a Tartuffe.
The church nearly won its battle against Molière: it prevented public
performance, both of Tartuffe for five years and of Dom Juan for the
whole of Molière’s life. A five-act version of Tartuffe was played in
1667, but once only: it was banned by the President of Police and by the
Archbishop on pain of excommunication. Molière’s reply was to lobby the
King repeatedly, even in a military camp, and to publish a defense of
his play called Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur. He kept his
company together through 1668 with Amphitryon (January 13), George
Dandin (Versailles, July 18), and L’Avare (September 9). Sooner or later
so original an author of comedy as Molière was bound to attempt a modern
sketch of the ancient comic figure of the miser. The last of his three
1668 plays, L’Avare, is composed in prose that reads like verse; the
stock situations are all recast, but the spirit is different from
Molière’s other works and not to everyone’s taste. His miser is a living
paradox, inhuman in his worship of money, all too human in his need of
respect and affection. In breathtaking scenes his mania is made to
suggest cruelty, pathological loneliness, even insanity. The play is too
stark for those who expect laughter from comedy; Goethe started the
dubious fashion of calling it tragic. Yet, as before, forces of mind and
will are made to serve inhuman ends and are opposed by instinct and a
very “human” nature. The basic comic suggestion is one of absurdity and
incongruity rather than of gaiety.
His second play of 1668, George Dandin, often dismissed as a farce,
may be one of Molière’s greatest creations. It centres on a fool, who
admits his folly while suggesting that wisdom would not help him
because, if things in fact go against us, it is pointless to be wise. As
it happens he is in the right, but he can never prove it. The subject of
the play is trivial, the suggestion is limitless; it sketches a new
range of comedy altogether. In 1669, permission was somehow obtained,
and the long run of Tartuffe at last began. More than 60 performances
were given that year alone. The theme for this play, which brought
Molière more trouble than any other, may have come to him when a local
hypocrite seduced his landlady. Of the three versions of the play, only
the last has survived; the first (presented in three acts played before
the King in 1664) probably portrayed a pious crook so firmly established
in a bourgeois household that the master promises him his daughter and
disinherits his son. At the time it was common for lay directors of
conscience to be placed in families to reprove and reform conduct. When
this “holy” man is caught making love to his employer’s wife, he
recovers by masterly self-reproach and persuades the master not only to
pardon him but also to urge him to see as much of his wife as possible.
Molière must have seen even greater comic possibilities in this theme,
for he made five acts out of it. The final version contains two
seduction scenes and a shift of interest to the comic paradox in
Tartuffe himself, posing as an inhuman ascetic while by nature he is an
all-too-human lecher. It is difficult to think of a theme more likely to
offend pious minds. Like Arnolphe in L’École des femmes, Tartuffe seems
to have come to grief because he trusted in wit and forgot instinct.
Last plays
The struggle over Tartuffe probably exhausted Molière to the point that
he was unable to stave off repeated illness and supply new plays; he
had, in fact, just four years more to live. Yet he produced in 1669
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac for the King at Chambord and in 1670 Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme treated a contemporary theme—social climbing
among the bourgeois, or upper middle class—but it is perhaps the least
dated of all his comedies. The protagonist Jourdain, rather than being
an unpleasant sycophant, is as delightful as he is fatuous, as genuine
as he is naïve; his folly is embedded in a bountiful disposition, which
he of course despises. This is comedy in Molière’s happiest vein: the
fatuity of the masculine master is offset by the common sense of wife
and servant.
Continuing to write despite his illness, he produced Psyché and Les
Fourberies de Scapin (The Cheats of Scapin, 1677) in 1671. Les Femmes
savantes (The Blue-Stockings, 1927) followed in 1672; in rougher hands
this subject would have been (as some have thought it) a satire on
bluestockings, but Molière has imagined a sensible bourgeois who goes in
fear of his masterful and learned wife. Le Malade imaginaire (Eng.
trans., The Imaginary Invalid), about a hypochondriac who fears death
and doctors, was performed in 1673 and was Molière’s last work. It is a
powerful play in its delineation of medical jargon and professionalism,
in the fatuity of a would-be doctor with learning and no sense, in the
normality of the young and sensible lovers, as opposed to the
superstition, greed, and charlatanry of other characters. During the
fourth performance of the play, on February 17, Molière collapsed on
stage and was carried back to his house in the rue de Richelieu to die.
As he had not been given the sacraments or the opportunity of formally
renouncing the actor’s profession, he was buried without ceremony and
after sunset on February 21.
Molière as actor and as playwright
Molière’s acting had been both his disappointment and his glory. He
aspired to be a tragic actor, but contemporary taste was against him.
His public seemed to favour a tragic style that was pompous, with
ranting and roaring, strutting and chanting. Molière had the build, the
elasticity, the india-rubber face, as it has been called, of the born
comedian. Offstage he was neither a great talker nor particularly merry,
but he would mime and copy speech to the life. He had the tireless
energy of the actor. He was always ready to make a scene out of an
incident, to put himself on a stage. He gave one of his characters his
own cough and another his own moods, and he made a play out of actual
rehearsals. The characters of his greatest plays are like the members of
his company. It was quite appropriate that he should die while playing
the part of the sick man that he really was.
The actor in him influenced his writing, since he wrote (at speed)
what he could most naturally act. He gave himself choleric parts,
servants’ parts, a henpecked husband, a foolish bourgeois, and a
superstitious old man who cursed “that fellow Molière.” (The comparison
with Charlie Chaplin recurs constantly.) Something more than animal
energy and a talent for mime was at work in him, a quality that can only
be called intensity of dramatic vision. Here again actors have helped to
recover an aspect of his genius that the scholars had missed, his stage
violence. To take his plays as arguments in favour of reason is to miss
their vitality. His sense of reason leads him to animate the absurd. His
characters are imagined as excitable and excited to the point of
incoherence. He sacrifices plot to drama, vivacity, a sense of life. He
is a classical writer, yet he is ready to defy all rules of writing.
To think of Molière as a cool apostle of reason, sharing the views of
the more rational men of his plays, is a heresy that dies hard; but
careful scrutiny of the milieu in which Molière had to work makes it
impossible to believe. The comedies are not sermons; such doctrine as
may be extracted from them is incidental and at the opposite pole from
didacticism. Ideas are expressed to please a public, not to propagate
the author’s view. If asked what he thought of hypocrisy or atheism, he
would have marvelled at the question and evaded it with the observation
that the theatre is not the place for “views.” There is no documentary
evidence that Molière ever tried to convey his own opinions on marriage,
on the church, on hell, or on class distinctions. Strictly speaking, his
views of these things are unknown. All that is known is that he worked
for and in the theatre and used his amazing power of dramatic suggestion
to vivify any imagined scene. If he has left a sympathetic picture of an
atheist, it was not to recommend free thought: his picture of the earthy
serving man is no less vivid, no less sympathetic. Scholars who have
tried to make his plays prove things or to convey lessons have made
little sense of his work and have been blind to its inherent fantasy and
imaginative power.
Since the power of Molière’s writing seems to lie in its creative
vigour of language, the traditional divisions of his works into comedies
of manners, comedies of character, and farce are not helpful: he does
not appear to have set out in any instance to write a certain kind of
play. He starts from an occasion in Le Mariage forcé (1664; The Forced
Marriage, 1762) from doubts about marriage expressed by Rabelais’s
character Panurge, and in Le Médecin malgré lui he starts from a
medieval fable, or fabliau, of a woodcutter who, to avoid a beating,
pretends he is a doctor. On such skeleton themes Molière animates
figures or arranges discussion in which one character exposes another or
the roles are first expressed and then reversed. It is intellectual
rhythm rather than what happens, the discussion more than the story,
that conveys the charm, so that to recount the plot may be to omit the
essential.
His unique sense of the comic
The attacks on Molière gave him the chance in his responses to state
some aesthetic home truths. Thus, in La Critique de L’École des femmes,
he states that tragedy might be heroic, but comedy must hold the mirror
up to nature: “You haven’t achieved anything in comedy unless your
portraits can be seen to be living types . . . making decent people
laugh is a strange business.” And as for the rules that some were
anxious to impose on writers: “I wonder if the golden rule is not to
give pleasure and if a successful play is not on the right track.”
The attacks on L’École des femmes were child’s play in comparison
with the storm raised by Tartuffe and Dom Juan. The attacks on them also
drew from the poet a valuable statement of artistic principle. On Dom
Juan he made no public reply since it was never officially condemned.
The documents in defense of Tartuffe are two placets, or petitions, to
the King, the preface to the first edition of 1669 (all these published
over Molière’s own name), and the Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur
of 1667. The placets and preface are aesthetically disappointing, since
Molière was forced to fight on ground chosen by his opponents and to
admit that comedy must be didactic. (There is no other evidence that
Molière thought this, so it is not unfair to assume that he used the
argument only when forced.) The Lettre is much more important. It
expresses in a few pregnant lines the aesthetic basis not only of
Tartuffe but of Molière’s new concept of comedy:
The comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has
attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid,
it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the
absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity
is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying, disguise,
cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality,
all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single
source, all this is in essence comic.
Molière seems here to put his finger on what was new in his notion of
what is comic: a comedy, only incidentally funny, that is based on a
constant double vision of wise and foolish, right and wrong seen
together, side by side. This is his invention and his glory.
A main feature of Molière’s technique is a mixing of registers, or of
contexts. Characters are made to play a part, then forget it, speak out
of turn, overplay their role, so that those who watch this byplay
constantly have the suggestion of mixed registers. The starting point of
Le Médecin malgré lui, the idea of beating a man to make him pretend he
is a doctor, is certainly not subtle, but Molière plays with the idea,
makes his woodcutter enjoy his new experience, master the jargon, and
then not know what to do with it. He utters inanities about Hippocrates,
is overjoyed to find a patient ignorant of Latin, so that he need not
bother about meaning. He looks for the heart on the wrong side and,
undeterred by having his error recognized, sweeps aside the protest with
the immortal: “We have changed all that.” The miser robbed of his money
is pathetic, but he does not arouse emotions because his language leads
him to the absurd “ . . . it’s all over . . . I’m dying, I’m dead, I’m
buried.” He demands justice with such intemperance that his language
exceeds all reason and he threatens to put the courts in the court.
Molière’s Misanthrope is even more suggestive in his confusion of
justice as an ideal and as a social institution: “I have justice on my
side and I lose my case!” What to him is a scandal of world order is to
others just proof that he is wrongheaded. Such concision does Molière’s
dramatic speech achieve.
A French genius
When Voltaire described Molière as “the painter of France,” he suggested
the range of French attitudes found in the plays, and this may explain
why the French have developed a proprietary interest in a writer whom
they seem to regard in a special sense as their own. They stress aspects
of his work that others tend to overlook. Three of these are noteworthy.
First, formality permeates all his works. He never gives realism—life
as it is—alone, but always within a pattern and a form that fuse light
and movement, music and dance and speech. Modern productions that omit
the interludes in his plays stray far from the original effect.
Characters are grouped, scenes and even speeches are arranged, comic
repartee is rounded off in defiance of realism.
Second, the French stress the poetry where foreigners see psychology.
They take the plays not as studies of social mania but as patterns of
fantasy that take up ideas, only to drop them when a point has been
made. Le Misanthrope is not considered as a case study or a French
Hamlet but as a subtly arranged chorus of voices and attitudes that
convey a critique of individualism. The play charms by its successive
evocations of its central theme. The tendency to speak one’s mind is
seen to be many things: idealistic or backbiting or rude or spiteful or
just fatuous. It is in this fantasy playing on the mystery of
self-centredness in society that Molière is in the eyes of his own
people unsurpassed.
A third quality admired in France is his intellectual penetration in
distinguishing the parts of a man from the whole man. Montaigne, the
16th-century essayist who deeply influenced Molière, divided qualities
that are acquired, such as learning or politeness or skills, from those
that are natural, such as humanity or animality, what might be called
“human nature” without other attributes. Molière delighted in opposing
his characters in this way; often in his plays a social veneer peels
off, revealing a real man. Many of his dialogues start with politeness
and end in open insults.
Molière opposed wit to nature in many forms. His comedy embraces
things within the mind and beyond it; reason and fact seldom meet. As
the beaten servant in Amphitryon observes: “That conflicts with common
sense. But it is so, for all that.”
Will G. Moore
|
Racine’s fatalism
Whether
Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing
determined his view of a human nature controlled by
perverse and willful passions—or whether his
knowledge of Greek tragedy explains the fatalism of
his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered.
Certainly, both are engaged in the service of a
creative imagination that reflects powerfully the
frustrating limits placed on individual desire by
society’s conventions and constraints. The world and
the sensibility of his heroes could not be more
different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to
a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot is of
the simplest; the play opens with the action at
crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters,
locked together by conflicting ambitions and
desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling
circumstances. Racinian poetic language represents
preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous
nature of frustrated passion is thrown into relief
by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations
that carry it. His work set a standard and a model
for the study of the entanglement of the public and
the personal that continued into the 20th century.
The language of such diverse playwrights as
Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-Marie Koltès interacts
(albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity
of Racinian style. In the 1960s and ’70s the
director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and
Athalie fresh relevance for contemporary society.

Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first
performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal Legacy, a
Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of
Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by Alexandre le
Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the
manner of Quinault. The masterpieces date from the
highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject
from Greek legend, after which, for Britannicus
(1669) and Bérénice (1670),
Racine turned to topics
from Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on
modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there
followed two plays with Greek mythological subjects:
Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and
Phèdre (1677). His last two plays, Esther (1689) and
Athalie (1691), written not for the professional
theatre but for the girls’ school at Saint-Cyr, at
the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old
Testament subjects; but, in Athalie in particular,
the challenge of the individual will to power
against the decrees of an authoritarian father-god
presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any
of his secular plays.
Jean Racine
"Phèdre"

French dramatist
in full Jean-baptiste Racine
baptized December 22, 1639, La Ferté-Milon, France
died April 21, 1699, Paris
Main
French dramatic poet and historiographer renowned for his mastery of
French classical tragedy. His reputation rests on the plays he wrote
between 1664 and 1677, notably Andromaque (1667), Britannicus (1669),
Bérénice (1670), Bajazet (1672), and Phèdre (1677).
Life.
Racine was born into a provincial family of minor administrators. His
mother died 13 months after he was born, and his father died two years
later. His paternal grandparents took him in, and when his grandmother,
Marie des Moulins, became a widow, she brought Racine, then age nine,
with her to the convent of Port-Royal des Champs near Paris. Since a
group of devout scholars and teachers had founded a school there, Racine
had the opportunity—rare for an orphan of modest social origins—to study
the classics of Latin and Greek literature with distinguished masters.
The school was steeped in the austere Roman Catholic reform movement
known as Jansenism, which had recently been condemned by the church as
heretical. Since the French monarchy suspected the Jansenists of being
theologically and politically subversive, Racine’s lifelong relationship
with his former friends and teachers remained ambivalent, inasmuch as
the ambitious artist sought admittance into the secular realm of court
society.
Racine spent the years from 1649 to 1653 at Port-Royal, transferred
to the College of Beauvais for almost two years, and then returned to
Port-Royal in October 1655 to perfect his studies in rhetoric. The
school at Port-Royal was closed by the authorities in 1656, but Racine
was allowed to stay on there. When he was 18 the Jansenists sent him to
study law at the College of Harcourt in Paris. Racine had both the
disposition and the talent to thrive in the cultural climate of Paris,
where to conform and to please—in Racine’s case, to please by his
pen—were indispensable assets. One of the first manifestations of
Racine’s intentions was his composition of a sonnet in praise of
Cardinal Mazarin, the prime minister of France, for successfully
concluding a peace treaty with Spain (1659). This tribute reveals
Racine’s strategy of social conquest through literature.
There were three ways for a writer to survive in Racine’s day: to
attract a royal audience, to obtain an ecclesiastical benefice, or to
compose for the theatre. The first was out of the question for the
neophyte Racine, though he would eventually receive many gratuities in
the course of his career. In 1661 Racine tried, through his mother’s
family, to acquire an ecclesiastical benefice from the diocese of Uzès
in Languedoc, though without success after residing there for almost two
years. He then returned to Paris to try his hand as a dramatist, even if
it meant estrangement from his Jansenist mentors, who disapproved of his
involvement with the theatre. A reaction from them was not long in
coming. In the same month that Racine’s play Alexandre le grand (1665)
received its premiere, his former teacher Pierre Nicole published a
public letter accusing novelists or playwrights of having no more
redeeming virtues than a “public poisoner.” Though Nicole avoided any
direct reference to him, Racine believed that he was the object of
Nicole’s wrath and responded with a stinging open letter entitled Lettre
à l’auteur des ‘Hérésies imaginaires’.
Racine’s first play, Amasie, was never produced and has not survived.
His career as a dramatist began with the production by Molière’s troupe
of his play La Thébaïde ou les frères ennemis (“The Thebaide or the
Enemy Brothers”) at the Palais-Royal Theatre on June 20, 1664. Molière’s
troupe also produced Racine’s next play, Alexandre le grand (Alexander
the Great), which premiered at the Palais Royal on Dec. 4, 1665. This
play was so well received that Racine secretly negotiated with the Hôtel
de Bourgogne—a rival troupe that was more skilled in performing
tragedy—to present a “second premiere” of Alexandre on December 15. The
break with Molière was irrevocable—Racine even seduced Molière’s leading
actress, Thérèse du Parc, into joining him personally and
professionally—and from this point onward all of Racine’s secular
tragedies would be presented by the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne.
Of the three audiences that a dramatist had to win over to succeed in
the theatre—the court, the general public, and the scholar
critics—Racine doggedly pursued all three, though he had sharp clashes
with the third group, who were mostly friends of his great rival, the
older dramatist Pierre Corneille. Racine followed up his first
masterpiece, Andromaque (1667), with the comedy Les Plaideurs (1668; The
Litigants) before returning to tragedy with two plays set in imperial
Rome, Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670). He situated Bajazet (1672)
in nearly contemporary Turkish history and depicted a famous enemy of
Rome in Mithridate (1673) before returning to Greek mythology in
Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; Iphigenia in Aulis) and the play that was his
crowning achievement, Phèdre (1677). By this time Racine had achieved
remarkable success both in the theatre and through it; his plays were
ideally suited for dramatic expression and were also a useful vehicle
for the social aspirations of their insecure and quietly driven author.
Racine was the first French author to live principally on the income
provided by his writings.
Within several months of the appearance of Phèdre, Racine married the
pious and unintellectual Catherine de Romanet, with whom he would have
two sons and five daughters. At about the same time, he retired from the
commercial theatre and accepted the coveted post of royal
historiographer with his friend Nicolas Boileau. Racine’s withdrawal
from the stage at the height of his prestige as a professional
playwright probably sprang from a combination of factors. The preface he
wrote for Phèdre leads one to believe that he was seeking a
reconciliation with the Jansenists. He was, at the same time, leaving
the socially disadvantageous situation of a playwright for the rarefied
atmosphere of the court of King Louis XIV. Having to quit the theatre to
assume his new duties near the king, Racine could now afford to effect a
rapprochement with the Jansenists. He may also have found it difficult
to continue to respect the cardinal principle of classical art—unity. In
Phèdre there is fragmentation at significant levels: cosmic, social,
psychological, and physical. Since fragmentation is a subversive notion
in classical art, perhaps Racine abandoned a genre to whose classical
tenets he no longer subscribed.
As one of the royal historiographers, Racine chronicled Louis XIV’s
military campaigns in suitable prose. In 1679 he was accused by
Catherine Monvoisin (called La Voisin) of having poisoned his mistress
and star actress, the Marquise du Parc, but no formal charges were
pressed and no consequences ensued. Racine’s official duties culminated
in the Eloge historique du Roi sur ses conquêtes (1682; “The Historical
Panegyric for the King on His Conquests”). He also wrote the Cantiques
spirituels (1694) and worked hard to establish his status and his
fortune. In 1672 he was elected to the French Academy, and he came to
exert almost dictatorial powers over it. In 1674 he acquired the noble
title of treasurer of France, and he eventually obtained the higher
distinctions of ordinary gentleman of the king (1690) and secretary of
the king (1696).
In response to requests from Louis XIV’s consort Madame de Maintenon,
Racine returned to the theatre to write two religious plays for the
convent girls at Saint-Cyr: Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691). His other
undertakings during his last years were to reedit, in 1687 and finally
in 1697, the edition of his complete works that he had first published
in 1676, and to compose, probably as his last work, the Abrégé de
l’histoire de Port-Royal (“Short History of Port-Royal”). Racine died in
1699 from cancer of the liver. In a codicil to his will, he expressed
his wish to be buried at Port-Royal. When Louis XIV had Port-Royal razed
in 1710, Racine’s remains were transferred to a tomb in the Parisian
church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.
Works.
French classical tragedy pivots around two basic subjects: passion and
politics. Since Racine’s audience was naturally intrigued by plots that
dealt with the succession to a throne, he doubled their pleasure in his
first successful play, La Thébaïde, by creating two legitimate
pretenders who are also identical twins. The play centres on the twin
sons of Oedipus who slay one another in mortal combat, one defending,
the other attacking, their native city of Thebes. The deep hatred
between the two brothers sounds the notes of separation, disunion, and
alienation that would characterize all Racinian tragedy. Though its
structure is flawed and its characters lack inflection, La Thébaïde was
already typically Racinian in several fundamental aspects. It focuses on
a tight knot of characters caught in an episode near the end of a
mythical or historical story. Much of the physical action is relegated
to narrative reports so that the events on stage are condensed and all
the more explosive by the time they reach their climax. The audience’s
attention is fixed on the interior conflicts of the characters, rather
than on exterior events, and language is used for the subtly nuanced and
dramatically memorable expression of emotions, not the recital of a
plot.
Racine evidently conceived his next play, Alexandre, as his ticket to
royal favour, since the audience was sure to see in the portrait of the
Macedonian conqueror a reflection of the young King Louis XIV of France
who, as the play suggests, could surpass Alexander by restraining his
aggressive tendencies and becoming a morally superior hero who champions
Roman Catholic virtues. Posterity has decreed the play a misguided
attempt by Racine to pour his tragic vision into Corneille’s heroic
mold.
In Andromaque (1667) Racine replaced heroism with realism in a
tragedy about the folly and blindness of unrequited love among a chain
of four characters. The play is set in Epirus after the Trojan War.
Pyrrhus vainly loves his captive, the Trojan widow Andromache, and is in
turn loved by the Greek princess Hermione, who in her turn is loved by
Orestes. Power, intimidation, and emotional blackmail become the
recourses by which these characters try to transmit the depths of their
feelings to their beloved. But this form of communication is ultimately
frustrated because the characters’ deep-seated insecurity renders them
self-absorbed and immune to empathy. Murder, suicide, and madness have
destroyed all of them except Andromache by the play’s end. Andromaque’s
audience was fully aware that they were witnessing a new and powerful
conception of the human condition in which passionate relationships are
seen as basically political in their means and expression. Andromaque is
more skillfully crafted than Racine’s previous efforts: its exposition
is a model of clarity and concision; the interplay of love, hate, and
indifference are subtly yet compellingly arranged; and the rhetoric is
forceful but close to normal speech. The play was the first of Racine’s
major tragedies and enjoyed a public success comparable to Corneille’s
Le Cid 30 years before.
The three-act comedy Les Plaideurs (The Litigants) of 1668 offered
Racine the challenge of a new genre and the opportunity to demonstrate
his skill in Molière’s privileged domain, as well as the occasion to
display his expertise in Greek, of which he had better command than
almost any nonprofessional classicist in France. The result, a brilliant
satire of the French legal system, was an adaptation of Aristophanes’
The Wasps that found much more favour at court than on the Parisian
stage.
With Britannicus (1669) Racine posed a direct challenge to
Corneille’s specialty: tragedy with a Roman setting. Racine portrays the
events leading up to the moment when the teenage emperor Nero cunningly
and ruthlessly frees himself from the tutelage of his domineering
mother, Agrippina, and has Britannicus, a legitimate pretender to the
throne, poisoned in the course of a fatal banquet of fraternal
reconciliation. Despite its failure when it premiered in 1669,
Britannicus has remained one of Racine’s most frequently produced
dramas, especially in the 20th century.
Bérénice (1670) marks the decisive point in Racine’s theatrical
career, for with this play he found a felicitous combination of elements
that he would use, without radical alteration, for the rest of his
secular tragedies: a love interest, a relatively uncomplicated plot,
striking rhetorical passages, and a highly poetic use of time. Bérénice
is built around the unusual premise of three characters who are
ultimately forced to live apart because of their virtuous sense of duty.
In the play, Titus, who is to become the new Roman emperor, and his
friend Antiochus are both in love with Berenice, the queen of Palestine.
The play’s “majestic sadness,” as Racine put it in his preface to the
play, flows from the tragic necessity of separation for individuals who
yearn for union with their beloved and who express their sorrow in some
of the most haunting passages of Racine’s entire oeuvre.
Racine followed the simplicity of Bérénice and its three main
characters with a violent, relatively crowded production, Bajazet
(1672). The play’s themes of unrequited love and the struggle for power
under the unrelenting pressure of time are recognizably Racinian, but
its locale, the court of the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, is the
only contemporary setting used by Racine in any of his plays, and was
sufficiently far removed in distance and in mores from 17th-century
France to create an alluring exoticism for contemporary audiences. In
the play, the main characters—the young prince Bajazet, his beloved
Atalide, and the jealous sultana Roxane—are the mortal victims of the
despotic cruelty of the absent sultan Amurat, whose reign is maintained
by violence and secrecy.
In 1673 Racine presented Mithridate, which featured a return to
tragedy with a Roman background. Mithradates VI, the king of Pontus, is
the aging, jealous rival of his sons for the Greek princess Monime. The
rivalry between the two brothers themselves for the love of their
father’s fiancée is another manifestation of the primordial tragic
situation for Racine, that of warring brothers. Against the backdrop of
this conflict, the play presents the demise of King Mithradates, who
becomes conscious of his own eclipse as a heroic figure feared by Rome.
Despite a competing play mounted by his enemies on the same general
subject, Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide (1674) was a resounding success
that confirmed him as the unrivaled master of French theatre. It is an
adaptation of a play by Euripides about the prospective sacrifice of
Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but contains a happy ending in which
Iphigenia is spared. Racine’s deft insertion in Iphigénie of the future
as an intrusive force determining the present creates a rehearsal of the
Trojan War that culminates in a profound moral illumination revolving
around the title character. The play’s denouement, typical of Racine’s
practice, projects the imagination of the spectator beyond the present
action to the future consequences of the acts portrayed on stage.
Phèdre (1677) is Racine’s supreme accomplishment because of the
rigour and simplicity of its organization, the emotional power of its
language, and the profusion of its images and meanings. Racine presents
Phaedra as consumed by an incestuous passion for her stepson,
Hippolytus. Receiving false information that her husband, King Theseus,
is dead, Phaedra declares her love to Hippolytus, who is horrified.
Theseus returns and is falsely informed that Hippolytus has been the
aggressor toward Phaedra. Theseus invokes the aid of the god Neptune to
destroy his son, after which Phaedra kills herself out of guilt and
sorrow. A structural pattern of cycles and circles in Phèdre reflects a
conception of human existence as essentially changeless, recurrent, and
therefore asphyxiatingly tragic. Phaedra’s own desire to flee the snares
of passion repeatedly prompts her to contemplate a voluntary exile.
References to ancient Greek mythological figures and to a wide range of
geographical places lend a vast, cosmic dimension to the moral itinerary
of Phaedra as she suffers bitterly from her incestuous propensities and
a sense of her own degradation. Phèdre constitutes a daring
representation of the contagion of sin and its catastrophic results.
Esther (1689) is a biblical tragedy complete with musical choral
interludes composed by Jean-Baptiste Moreau, who would serve in this
same role for Racine’s last play, Athalie. The play shows how Esther,
the wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus (Xerxes I), saves the Jews from a
massacre plotted by the king’s chief minister, Haman. With its three
acts, its chorus, and its transcendent message that God and truth can be
made manifest on stage, Esther breaks sharply with Racine’s previous
practice in tragedy. It is not one of his major works, despite the
beauty of its choruses.
In Athalie (1691) Racine reverted to his customary approach. Within
the one day that is always the temporal duration of his plays, a
situation of human origin must be resolved by divine intervention so
that the child Joas, the rightful king of Judah, will be saved from his
murderous grandmother Athalie. Athalie is a typical Racinian drama
except for the fact that fate is replaced in this instance by divine
providence. The title character, Athalie, though evil, still remains
admirable in her titanic struggle against this superior adversary. Of
all the characters never seen on stage but who enrich Racine’s texts,
from Hector and Astyanax in Andromaque through Venus, Minos, Neptune,
and Ariane in Phèdre, the God of the Old Testament in Athalie exerts the
greatest impact on the course of dramatic events.
Assessment.
Racine has been hailed by posterity as the foremost practitioner of
tragedy in French history and the uncontested master of French
classicism. He became the virtuoso of the poetic metre used in
17th-century French tragedy, the alexandrine line, and paid unwavering
attention to the properly theatrical aspects of his plays, from actors’
diction and gestures to space and decor. Ultimately, Racine’s reputation
derives from his unforgettable characters who, much like their creator,
betray an inferiority complex in their noble yet frustrated attempts to
transcend their limitations. The Racinian view, then, is of a humanity
consumed by feelings of incompleteness and by a compensatory drive for
acceptance in a world of passionate self-interest. Racine’s art has
influenced French and foreign authors alike, among them Émile Zola,
Marcel Proust, François Mauriac, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, and Samuel
Beckett.
Ronald W. Tobin
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Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige,
as shown in Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s L’Art
poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the
genres most highly esteemed are the epic (of which
no distinguished example was written during the
century), the ode (a medium for official
commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau
himself, in his satires (from c. 1658) and epistles
(from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry,
established himself as the foremost critic of his
day; but, despite a flair for judging
contemporaries, his criteria were limited by current
aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The
Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s Lutrin: A
Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The
Rape of the Lock, he produced a masterpiece of comic
writing in the Classical manner.
Jean de La
Fontaine’s Fables (1668; 1678–79; 1694;
The Complete
Fables of
Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in
transcending the limitations of the genre; and,
although readers formerly concentrated heavily on
the moral teaching they offer, it is possible to
appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature
skills of a highly imaginative writer who displays
great originality in adapting to his needs the
linguistic and metrical resources of the Classical
age.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

born Nov. 1, 1636, Paris
died March 13, 1711, Paris
poet and leading literary critic in
his day, known for his influence in
upholding classical standards in both
French and English literature.
He was the son of a government
official who had started life as a
clerk. Boileau made good progress at the
Collège d’Harcourt and was encouraged to
take up literary work by his brother
Gilles Boileau, who was already
established as a man of letters.
He began by writing satires (c.
1658), attacking well-known public
figures, which he read privately to his
friends. After a printer who had managed
to obtain the texts published them in
1666, Boileau brought out an
authenticated version (March 1666) that
he toned down considerably from the
original. The following year he wrote
one of the most successful of
mock-heroic epics, Le Lutrin, dealing
with a quarrel of two ecclesiastical
dignitaries over where to place a
lectern in a chapel.
In 1674 he published L’Art poétique,
a didactic treatise in verse, setting
out rules for the composition of poetry
in the classical tradition. At the time,
the work was considered of great
importance, the definitive handbook of
classical principles. It strongly
influenced the English Augustan poets
Dr. Johnson, John Dryden, and Alexander
Pope. It is now valued more for the
insight it provides into the literary
controversies of the period.
In 1677 Boileau was appointed
historiographer royal and for 15 years
avoided literary controversy; he was
elected to the Académie Française in
1684. Boileau resumed his disputatious
role in 1692, when the literary world
found itself divided between the
so-called ancients and moderns (see
ancients and moderns). Seeing women as
supporters of the moderns, Boileau wrote
his antifeminist satire Contre les
femmes (“Against Women,” published as
Satire x, 1694), followed notably by Sur
l’amour de Dieu (“On the Love of God,”
published as Epitre xii, 1698).
Boileau did not create the rules of
classical drama and poetry, although it
was long assumed that he had—a
misunderstanding he did little to
dispel. They had already been formulated
by previous French writers, but Boileau
expressed them in striking and vigorous
terms. He also translated the classical
treatise On the Sublime, attributed to
Longinus. Ironically, it became one of
the key sources of the aesthetics of
Romanticism.
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Jean de La
Fontaine
"Fables"
Illustrations by J. J. Grandville

born July 8?, 1621, Château-Thierry,
France
died April 13, 1695, Paris
poet whose Fables rank among the
greatest masterpieces of French
literature.
Life
La Fontaine was born in the
Champagne region into a bourgeois
family. There, in 1647, he married an
heiress, Marie Héricart, but they
separated in 1658. From 1652 to 1671 he
held office as an inspector of forests
and waterways, an office inherited from
his father. It was in Paris, however,
that he made his most important contacts
and spent his most productive years as a
writer. An outstanding feature of his
existence was his ability to attract the
goodwill of patrons prepared to relieve
him of the responsibility of providing
for his livelihood. In 1657 he became
one of the protégés of Nicolas Fouquet,
the wealthy superintendent of finance.
From 1664 to 1672 he served as
gentleman-in-waiting to the dowager
duchess of Orléans in Luxembourg. For 20
years, from 1673, he was a member of the
household of Mme de La Sablière, whose
salon was a celebrated meeting place of
scholars, philosophers, and writers. In
1683 he was elected to the French
Academy after some opposition by the
king to his unconventional and
irreligious character.
The Fables
The Fables unquestionably represent
the peak of La Fontaine’s achievement.
The first six books, known as the
premier recueil (“first collection”),
were published in 1668 and were followed
by five more books (the second recueil)
in 1678–79 and a twelfth book in 1694.
The Fables in the second collection show
even greater technical skill than those
in the first and are longer, more
reflective, and more personal. Some
decline of talent is commonly detected
in the twelfth book.
La Fontaine did not invent the basic
material of his Fables; he took it
chiefly from the Aesopic tradition and,
in the case of the second collection,
from the East Asian. He enriched
immeasurably the simple stories that
earlier fabulists had in general been
content to tell perfunctorily,
subordinating them to their narrowly
didactic intention. He contrived
delightful miniature comedies and
dramas, excelling in the rapid
characterization of his actors,
sometimes by deft sketches of their
appearance or indications of their
gestures and always by the expressive
discourse he invented for them. In
settings usually rustic, he evoked the
perennial charm of the countryside.
Within the compass of about 240 poems,
the range and the diversity of subject
and of treatment are astonishing. Often
he held up a mirror to the social
hierarchy of his day. Intermittently he
seems inspired to satire, but, sharp
though his thrusts are, he had not
enough of the true satirist’s
indignation to press them home. The
Fables occasionally reflect contemporary
political issues and intellectual
preoccupations. Some of them, fables
only in name, are really elegies,
idylls, epistles, or poetic meditations.
But his chief and most comprehensive
theme remains that of the traditional
fable: the fundamental, everyday moral
experience of mankind throughout the
ages, exhibited in a profusion of
typical characters, emotions, attitudes,
and situations.
Countless critics have listed and
classified the morals of La Fontaine’s
Fables and have correctly concluded that
they amount simply to an epitome of more
or less proverbial wisdom, generally
prudential but tinged in the second
collection with a more genial
epicureanism. Simple countryfolk and
heroes of Greek mythology and legend, as
well as familiar animals of the fable,
all play their parts in this comedy, and
the poetic resonance of the Fables owes
much to these actors who, belonging to
no century and to every century, speak
with timeless voices.
What disconcerts many non-French
readers and critics is that in the
Fables profundity is expressed lightly.
La Fontaine’s animal characters
illustrate the point. They are serious
representations of human types, so
presented as to hint that human nature
and animal nature have much in common.
But they are also creatures of fantasy,
bearing only a distant resemblance to
the animals the naturalist observes, and
they are amusing because the poet
skillfully exploits the incongruities
between the animal and the human
elements they embody. Moreover—as in his
Contes, but with far more delicate and
lyrical modulations—the voice of La
Fontaine himself can constantly be
heard, always controlled and discreet,
even when most charged with emotion. Its
tones change swiftly, almost
imperceptibly: they are in turn
ironical, impertinent, brusque, laconic,
eloquent, compassionate, melancholy, or
reflective. But the predominant note is
that of la gaieté, which, as he says in
the preface to the first collection, he
deliberately sought to introduce into
his Fables. “Gaiety,” he explains, is
not that which provokes laughter but is
“a certain charm . . . that can be given
to any kind of subject, even the most
serious.” No one reads the Fables
rightly who does not read them with a
smile—not only of amusement but also of
complicity with the poet in the
understanding of the human comedy and in
the enjoyment of his art.
To the grace, ease, and delicate
perfection of the best of the Fables,
even close textual commentary cannot
hope to do full justice. They represent
the quintessence of a century of
experiments in prosody and poetic
diction in France. The great majority of
the Fables are composed of lines of
varying metre and, from the
unpredictable interplay of their rhymes
and of their changing rhythms, La
Fontaine derived the most exquisite and
diverse effects of tone and movement.
His vocabulary harmonizes widely
different elements: the archaic, the
precious and the burlesque, the refined,
the familiar and the rustic, the
language of professions and trades and
the language of philosophy and
mythology. But for all this richness,
economy and understatement are the chief
characteristics of his style, and its
full appreciation calls for keener
sensitivity to the overtones of
17th-century French than most foreign
readers can hope to possess.
Miscellaneous writings and the Contes
La Fontaine’s many miscellaneous
writings include much occasional verse
in a great variety of poetic forms and
dramatic or pseudodramatic pieces such
as his first published work, L’Eunuque
(1654), and Climène (1671), as well as
poems on subjects as different as Adonis
(1658, revised 1669), La Captivité de
saint Malc (1673), and Le Quinquina
(1682). All these are, at best, works of
uneven quality. In relation to the
perfection of the Fables, they are no
more than poetic exercises or
experiments. The exception is the
leisurely narrative of Les Amours de
Psiché et de Cupidon (1669; The Loves of
Cupid and Psyche), notable for the lucid
elegance of its prose, its skillful
blend of delicate feeling and witty
banter, and some sly studies of feminine
psychology.
Like his miscellaneous works, La
Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles en vers
(Tales and Novels in Verse) considerably
exceed the Fables in bulk. The first of
them was published in 1664, the last
posthumously. He borrowed them mostly
from Italian sources, in particular
Giovanni Boccaccio, but he preserved
none of the 14th-century poet’s rich
sense of reality. The essence of nearly
all his Contes lies in their
licentiousness, which is not presented
with frank Rabelaisian verve but is
transparently and flippantly disguised.
Characters and situations are not meant
to be taken seriously; they are meant to
amuse and are too monotonous to amuse
for long. The Contes are the work far
less of a poet than of an ingenious
stylist and versifier. The accent of La
Fontaine the narrator enlivens the story
with playfully capricious comments,
explanations, and digressions.
Personality and reputation
Though he never secured the favour
of Louis XIV, La Fontaine had many
well-wishers close to the throne and
among the nobility. He moved among
churchmen, doctors, artists, musicians,
and actors. But it was literary circles
that he especially frequented. Legend
has exaggerated the closeness of his
ties with Molière, Nicholas Boileau, and
Jean Racine, but he certainly numbered
them among his friends and
acquaintances, as well as La
Rochefoucauld, Mme de Sévigné, Mme de La
Fayette, and many less-well-remembered
writers.
The true nature of the man remains
enigmatic. He was intensely and naively
selfish, unconventional in behaviour,
and impatient of all constraint; yet he
charmed countless friends—perhaps by a
naturalness of manner and a sincerity in
social relationships that were rare in
his age—and made apparently only one
enemy (a fellow academician, Antoine
Furetière). He was a parasite without
servility, a sycophant without baseness,
a shrewd schemer who was also a
blunderer, and a sinner whose errors
were, as one close to him observed,
“full of wisdom.” He was accommodating,
sometimes to the detriment of proper
self-respect, but he was certainly not
the lazy, absent-minded simpleton that
superficial observers took him for. The
quantity and the quality of his work
show that this legendary description of
him cannot be accurate: for at least 40
years La Fontaine, in spite of his
apparent aimlessness, was an ambitious
and diligent literary craftsman of
subtle intelligence and meticulous
conscientiousness.
He was an assiduous and
discriminating reader whose works abound
in judicious imitations of both the
matter and the manner of his favourite
authors. He was influenced by so many
16th- and 17th-century French writers
that it is almost invidious to mention
only François Rabelais, Clément Marot,
François de Malherbe, Honoré d’Urfé, and
Vincent Voiture. The authors of
classical antiquity that he knew best
were Homer, Plato, Plutarch—these he
almost certainly read in
translation—Terence, Virgil, Horace, and
Ovid. Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli,
Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso
were his favourites among the Italians.
La Fontaine was no romantic; his work
derives its substance and its savour
less from his experience of life than
from this rich and complex literary
heritage, affectionately received and
patiently exploited.
Too wise to suppose that moral truths
can ever be simple, he wrote stories
that offer no rudimentary illustration
of a certain moral but a subtle
commentary on it, sometimes amending it
and hinting that only the naive would
take it at face value. Thus, what the
Fables teach is trivial in comparison
with what they suggest: a view of life
that, although incomplete (for it takes
little account of man’s metaphysical
anguish or his highest aspirations), is
mature, profound, and wise. Enjoyed at
many different levels, the Fables
continue to form part of the culture of
every Frenchman, from schoolchildren to
such men of letters as André Gide, Paul
Valéry, and Jean Giraudoux, who have
given fresh lustre to La Fontaine’s
reputation in the 20th century.
Leslie Clifford Sykes
Ed.
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The Classical manner
Though the novel was still
considered to be a secondary genre, it produced one
masterpiece that embodied the Classical manner to
perfection. In La Princesse de Clèves (1678) by
Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de La Fayette, the
narrative forsakes the fanciful settings of its
pastoral and heroic predecessors and explores the
relationship between the individual and contemporary
court society in a sober, realistic context. The
language achieves its effects by understatement and
subtle nuance rather than by rhetorical flourish.
The expressive medium forged in the salons is here
used to generate original insights into the inchoate
feelings of confusion and disarray that overwhelm
the naive, unformed young woman confronted with the
experienced seducer. The other great woman writer of
her age, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de
Sévigné, produced an intimate, informal style of
letter writing that was nevertheless composed with a
careful eye to literary effect. Mme de Sévigné not
only was an admirable example of the cultured reader
for whom the grands classiques wrote but was herself
one of the most skillful prose writers of her day.
The most distinguished prose writer of the age,
however, was a man who, if he does reflect the
society he lived in, does so in a highly critical
light. The Pensées (1669–70; “Thoughts”; Eng. trans.
Pensées) of
Blaise Pascal present an uncompromising
reminder of the spiritual values of the Christian
faith. The work remains incomplete, so that, in
spite of the aphoristic brilliance, or the lyrical
power, of many fragments, some of the thinking is
enigmatic, incoherent, or even contradictory.
Nevertheless, the central theme is clearly and
strongly posed.
Pascal’s view of human nature has
much in common with that of La Rochefoucauld or Mme
de La Fayette, but
Pascal contrasts the misery of
godless man with the potential greatness attainable
through divine grace.
Pascal is the first master of
a really modern prose style. Whereas
Descartes’s
prose is full of awkward Latinisms,
Pascal uses a
short sentence and is sparing with subordinate
clauses. The clarity and precision he achieves are
equally appropriate to the penetrating analysis of
human nature in the Pensées and to the irony and
comic force of the Provinciales (1656–57; The
Provincial Letters), his masterly satire of Jesuit
casuistry.
Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de La Fayette

baptized March 18, 1634, Paris
died May 25, 1693, Paris
French writer whose La Princesse de
Clèves is a landmark of French fiction.
In Paris during the civil wars of the
Fronde, young Mlle de la Vergne was
brought into contact with Madame de
Sévigné, now famous for her letters. She
also met a leading political agitator,
the future Cardinal de Retz. Married in
1655 to François Motier, comte de La
Fayette (1616–83), she lived for some
time with him on his estates in the
province of Auvergne. In 1659, however,
they separated, and she returned to
Paris.
Throughout the 1660s Madame de La
Fayette was a favourite of Henrietta
Anne of England, duchesse d’Orléans.
During this time she also began what was
to be a lasting and intimate friendship
with La Rochefoucauld, author of the
famous Maximes. With him she formed a
distinguished literary circle. After
producing two conventional romances, she
wrote her masterpiece, La Princesse de
Clèves, published anonymously in 1678.
Set in the middle of the 16th century,
though its manners are those of the
author’s own time, it is notable as
France’s first serious “historical”
novel, as distinct from “heroic”
romances. It is the story of a virtuous
young wife who suppresses her passion
for a young nobleman. Its outstanding
literary merits are the dignified pathos
of the dialogue and the author’s
psychological insight into the theme of
tragically but deliberately
unconsummated love.
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Marie de Rabutin-Chantal,
marquise de Sévigné

born Feb. 5, 1626, Paris, France
died April 17, 1696, Grignan
French writer whose correspondence is of
both historical and literary
significance.
Of old Burgundian nobility, she was
orphaned at the age of six and was
brought up by her uncle Philippe II de
Coulanges. She had a happy childhood and
was well educated by such famous tutors
as Jean Chapelain and Gilles Ménage. She
was introduced into court society and
the précieux world of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet in Paris after her marriage
in 1644 to Henri de Sévigné, a Breton
gentleman of old nobility who squandered
most of her money before being killed in
a duel in 1651. He left his widow with
two children, Françoise Marguerite (b.
1646) and Charles (b. 1648). For some
years Mme de Sévigné continued in the
fashionable social circles of Paris
while also devoting herself to her
children.
In 1669 her beautiful daughter,
Françoise Marguerite, married the Count
de Grignan and then moved with him to
Provence, where he had been appointed
lieutenant general of that province. The
separation from her daughter provoked
acute loneliness in Mme de Sévigné, and
out of this grew her most important
literary achievement, her letters to Mme
de Grignan, which were written without
literary intention or ambition. Most of
the 1,700 letters that she wrote to her
daughter were composed in the first
seven years after their separation in
1671. The letters recount current news
and events in fashionable society,
describe prominent persons, comment on
contemporary topics, and provide details
of her life from day to day—her
household, her acquaintances, her
visits, and her taste in reading. The
letters provide little that historians
cannot find information about elsewhere,
but Sévigné’s manner of telling her
stories makes her version of current
events and gossip unforgettable. Once
her imagination had been caught by an
incident, her sensibility and her powers
as a literary artist were released in
witty and absorbing narratives.
Sévigné took no literary model for
her artistry. Before her, critics had
held that epistolary literature should
conform to certain rules of composition
and should observe a unity of tone
(e.g., “serious” or “playful”). By
contrast, Sévigné’s letters demonstrate
a spontaneity and a natural disorder
that have a highly interesting
conversational tone.
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Religious authors
A new intellectual climate can be recognized from
1680 onward, as the centralizing authority of
absolute monarchy tightened its hold on nation and
culture. An increased spiritual awareness resulting
from Jansenist teaching, the preaching of
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and others, and the
influence of Mme de Maintenon at court marked French
cultural life with a new moral earnestness and
devotion. The position of Bossuet is an ambivalent
one. In spite of his outspoken criticism of king and
court, his view of kingship and of the relationship
between church and state made him one of the
principal pillars of the regime of the Sun King
(Louis XIV), carrying Richelieu’s policies to their
logical conclusion. His ultraorthodox views are
expressed in writings such as the Discours sur
l’histoire universelle (1681; Discourse on Universal
History); but he also exerted a considerable moral
influence in his sermons and funeral orations, which
took the art of pulpit oratory to a new high level.
François de La Mothe-Fénelon was a much less
orthodox churchman, and the influence he wielded was
of a more liberal nature. Like Bossuet, he was a
tutor in the royal household, and he was also author
of a novel, Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699;
Telemachus, Son of Ulysses), that combines moral
lessons with Classical romance.
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

born Sept. 25, 1627, Dijon, Fr.
died April 12, 1704, Paris
bishop who was the most eloquent and
influential spokesman for the rights of
the French church against papal
authority. He is now chiefly remembered
for his literary works, including
funeral panegyrics for great personages.
Early life and priesthood.
Bossuet was born of a family of
magistrates. He spent his first 15 years
in Dijon and was educated at the Jesuit
college there. Intended early for an
ecclesiastical career, he was tonsured
at the age of 10. In 1642 he went to
study in Paris, where he remained for 10
years, receiving a sound theological
education at the Collège de Navarre. In
1652 he was ordained priest and received
his doctorate of divinity. Refusing a
high appointment offered him at the
Collège de Navarre, he chose instead to
settle in Metz, where his father had
obtained a canonry for him.
Though Bossuet belonged to the Metz
clergy until 1669, he divided his time
between Metz and Paris from 1656 to
1659, and after 1660 he left Paris
hardly at all. When in Metz, he
zealously performed his duties as canon.
His main concerns, however, were
preaching and controversy with the
Protestants, and it was at Metz that he
began to master these skills. His first
book, the Réfutation du catéchisme du
sieur Paul Ferry (“Refutation of the
Catechism of Paul Ferry”), was the
result of his discussions with Paul
Ferry, the minister of the Protestant
Reformed church at Metz. Bossuet’s
reputation as a preacher spread to
Paris, where his “Panégyrique de
l’apôtre saint Paul” (1657; “Panegyric
of the Apostle Saint Paul”) and his
“Sermon sur l’eminente dignité des
pauvres dans l’église” (1659; “Sermon on
the Sublime Dignity of the Poor in the
Church”) were particularly admired.
Lenten sermons and funeral orations.
Bossuet’s career as a great popular
preacher unfolded during the next 10
years in Paris. He preached the Lenten
sermons of 1660 and 1661 in two famous
convents there—the Minims’ and the
Carmelites’—and in 1662 was called to
preach them before King Louis XIV. The
Lenten sermons, abundant with biblical
citations and paraphrases, epitomize
Baroque eloquence; yet, while they
exhibit the majesty and the pathos of
the Baroque ideal, the exaggeration and
mannerism are conspicuously absent. He
was summoned in 1669 to deliver the
funeral orations that were customary
after the death of an important national
figure. These first “Oraisons funèbres”
(“Funeral Orations”) include panegyrics
on Henrietta Maria of France, queen of
England (1669), and on her daughter
Henrietta Anne of England, Louis XIV’s
sister-in-law (1670). Masterpieces of
French classical prose, these orations
display dignity, balance, and slow
thematic development; they contain
emotionally charged passages but are
organized according to logical
argumentation. From the life of the
departed subject, Bossuet selected
qualities and episodes from which he
could draw a moral. He convinced his
listeners by the passion of his
religious feelings, which he expressed
in clear, simple rhetoric.
Apart from his work as a preacher,
Bossuet, as a doctor of divinity, felt
compelled to intervene in the
controversy over Jansenism, a movement
in the Roman Catholic church emphasizing
a heightened sense of original sin and
the role of God’s grace in salvation.
Bossuet tried to steer a middle course
in the quarrel caused by the movement,
devoting himself to his controversy with
the Protestants.
In 1669 Bossuet was designated bishop
of Condom, a diocese in southwest
France, but had to resign the see in
1670 after his appointment as tutor to
the dauphin, the king’s eldest son. This
post brought about his election to the
Académie Française. Thoroughly absorbed
in the duties of his new office, Bossuet
found time to publish a work against
Protestantism, Exposition de la doctrine
de l’église catholique sur les matières
de controverse (1671; “Exposition on the
Doctrine of the Catholic Church on the
Matters of Controversy”). He preached
only occasionally thereafter. Though
primarily concerned with the dauphin’s
religious and moral instruction, he also
taught Latin, history, philosophy, and
politics. His major political work, the
Politique tirée des propres paroles de
l’Écriture sainte (“Statecraft Drawn
from the Very Words of the Holy
Scriptures”)—which uses the Bible as
evidence of divine authority for the
power of kings—earned Bossuet his
reputation as a great theoretician of
royal absolutism. In the Politique he
developed the doctrine of divine right,
the theory that any government legally
formed expresses the will of God, that
its authority is sacred, and that any
rebellion against it is criminal. But he
also emphasized the dreadful
responsibility of the sovereign, who was
to behave as God’s image, govern his
subjects as a good father, and yet
remain unaffected by his power.
In 1681 Bossuet became bishop of
Meaux, a post he held until his death.
In this period he delivered his second
series of great funeral orations,
including those of Princess Anne de
Gonzague (1685), the chancellor Michel
Le Tellier (1686), and the Great Condé
(1687). Though he kept in close touch
with the dauphin and the king, he was
not primarily a court prelate; he was,
rather, a devoted bishop, living mostly
among his diocesans, preaching, busying
himself with charitable organizations,
and directing his clergy. His excursions
outside the diocese were in relation to
the theological controversies of his
time: Gallicanism, Protestantism, and
Quietism.
The Gallican controversy.
In the Gallican controversy, Louis
XIV maintained that the French monarch
could limit papal authority in
collecting the revenues of vacant sees
and in certain other matters, while the
Ultramontanists held that the pope was
supreme. An extraordinary general
assembly of the French clergy was held
to consider this question in 1681–82.
Bossuet delivered the inaugural sermon
to this body and also drew up its final
statement, the Déclaration des quatre
articles (“Declaration of Four
Articles”), which was delivered, along
with his famous inaugural sermon on the
unity of the church, to the assembly of
the French clergy in 1682. The articles
asserted the king’s independence from
Rome in secular matters and proclaimed
that, in matters of faith, the pope’s
judgment is not to be regarded as
infallible without the assent of the
total church. They were accepted by all
parties of the assembly, and his role in
this controversy remained perhaps the
most significant of Bossuet’s life.
Concurrently he was engaged in the
controversy with the Protestants. Though
he opposed persecution and endeavoured
to convert the Protestants by
intellectual argument, Bossuet supported
the king’s revocation in 1685 of the
Edict of Nantes, an action that in
effect prohibited French Protestantism.
In 1688 he published a history of
variations in the Protestant churches,
Histoire des variations des églises
protestantes, which was followed by
information and advice to Protestants,
Avertissement aux protestans (1689–91).
Although Bossuet had displayed
moderation in the Gallican quarrel and
in the controversy with the Protestants,
he showed himself less tolerant in other
cases, condemning the theatre as
immoral, for example. Above all, he led
an attack on the form of religious
mysticism known as Quietism, which was
being practiced by the archbishop of
Cambrai, François Fénelon. Bossuet was
by nature very intellectual and had been
nourished on theology, and thus he was
unable to understand a form of mysticism
that consisted of passive devotional
contemplation and total abandonment to
the divine presence of God. He wrote
such harsh works against the “new
mystics” as his statement on Quietism,
Instruction sur les états d’ oraison
(1697; “Instructions on the Calling of
Oration”) and the Relation sur le
quiétisme (1698; “Report on Quietism”).
After a duel of pamphlets and some
unpleasant intrigue, he obtained
Fénelon’s condemnation in Rome in 1699.
Reputation.
In the centuries since his death,
Bossuet’s reputation has been the
subject of much controversy. The only
point of agreement is the excellence of
his style and eloquence. From a
political point of view, he was praised
by nationalists and monarchists, but
spurned by the liberal tradition. From a
religious point of view, he was often
quoted as a master of French Roman
Catholic thought, but he has been
opposed by the Ultramontanists, Catholic
progressives and modernists, and many of
Fénelon’s numerous admirers. His
emphasis on immutability of doctrine and
the perfection of the church made him
seem old-fashioned in the atmosphere of
Catholicism after the second Vatican
Council (1962–65).
Jacques Truchet
Ed.
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François de La Mothe-Fénelon

born Aug. 6, 1651, Château de
Fénelon, Périgord, Fr.
died Jan. 7, 1715, Cambrai
French archbishop, theologian, and man
of letters whose liberal views on
politics and education and whose
involvement in a controversy over the
nature of mystical prayer caused
concerted opposition from church and
state. His pedagogical concepts and
literary works, nevertheless, exerted a
lasting influence on French culture.
Descended from a long line of
nobility, Fénelon began his higher
studies in Paris about 1672 at
Saint-Sulpice seminary. Ordained a
priest in 1676, he was appointed
director of Nouvelles Catholiques (“New
Catholics”), a college for women who
instructed converts from French
Protestantism. When King Louis XIV
heightened the persecution of the
Huguenots (French Calvinists) in 1685 by
revoking the Edict of Nantes, Fénelon
strove to mitigate the harshness of
Roman Catholic intolerance by open
meetings with the Protestants (1686–87)
to present Catholic doctrine in a
reasonable light. While unsympathetic to
Protestant belief, he equally repudiated
forced conversions.
From his pedagogical experiences at
Nouvelles Catholiques, he wrote his
first important work, Traité de
l’éducation des filles (1687; “Treatise
on the Education of Girls”). Although
generally conservative, the treatise
submitted innovative concepts on the
education of females and criticized the
coercive methods of his day.
In 1689, with the support of the
renowned bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet,
Fénelon was named tutor to Louis, Duke
(duc) de Bourgogne, grandson and heir to
Louis XIV. For the prince’s education,
Fénelon composed his best-known work,
Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), in
which the adventures of Telemachus in
search of his father, Ulysses,
symbolically expressed Fénelon’s
fundamental political ideas. During the
period of his popularity in official
circles, Fénelon enjoyed various
honours, including his election to the
French Academy in 1693 and his selection
as archbishop of Cambrai in 1695.
Anxious about his spiritual life,
Fénelon sought an answer from the
Quietist school of prayer. Introduced in
October 1688 to Quietism’s leading
exponent, Mme Guyon, Fénelon sought from
her some means of personally
experiencing the God whose existence he
had intellectually proved. But his
search for spiritual peace was
short-lived. Bossuet and other
influential people at court attacked Mme
Guyon’s teaching, and a document
investigating Quietism’s doubtful
orthodoxy even obtained Fénelon’s
signature. When Bossuet, however, next
launched a personal attack on Mme Guyon,
Fénelon responded with Explication des
maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure
(1697; “Explanation of the Sayings of
the Saints on the Interior Life”).
Defending Mme Guyon’s integrity, Fénelon
not only lost Bossuet’s friendship but
also exposed himself to Bossuet’s public
denunciation. As a result, Fénelon’s
Maximes des saints was condemned by the
pope, and he was exiled to his diocese.
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Satire
Just as Fénelon chose an ancient model—his novel
purports to be the continuation of Book Four of the
Odyssey—so Jean de La Bruyère chose to write his
Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec, avec les
caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle (1688; “The
Characters of Theophrastus Translated from the
Greek, with the Characters or Manners of This
Century”; Eng. trans. The Characters, or the Manners
of the Age) in the style of the Greek moralist
Theophrastus. However, his work, appended to his
translation of Theophrastus, was from the beginning
more specific in its reference to his own times; and
successive editions, up to 1694, made of it a
powerful indictment of the vanity and pretensions of
the high-ranking members of a status-conscious
society. La Bruyère attacks the extravagance and
warmongering of the king himself. He writes as an
ironic commentator on the social comedy around him,
in a highly personal, visual, fast-moving prose that
brings his targets to vivid life.
An equally satiric picture of the age is left by
a number of
Molière’s successors writing for the
comic theatre (which, from the founding of the
Théâtre Français in 1680, was organized on a
monopoly basis). Comedy, at the hands of such
writers as Jean-François Regnard, Florent Carton
Dancourt, and
Alain-René Lesage, continued to be
lively and inventive; but the writing of tragedy, by
contrast, with the exception of the work of Racine,
already had become a much more derivative exercise.
Jean de La Bruyère

born August 1645, Paris, France
died May 10/11, 1696, Versailles
French satiric moralist who is best
known for one work, Les Caractères de
Théophraste traduits du grec avec Les
Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle
(1688; The Characters, or the Manners of
the Age, with The Characters of
Theophrastus), which is considered to be
one of the masterpieces of French
literature.
La Bruyère studied law at Orléans.
Through the intervention of
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the eminent
humanist and theologian, he became one
of the tutors to the Duke de Bourbon,
grandson of the Prince de Condé, and
remained in the Condé household as
librarian at Chantilly. His years there
were probably unhappy because, although
he was proud of his middle-class origin,
he was a constant butt of ridicule
because of his ungainly figure, morose
manner, and biting tongue; the
bitterness of his book reflects the
inferiority of his social position. His
situation, however, afforded him the
opportunity to make penetrating
observations on the power of money in a
demoralized society, the tyranny of
social custom, and the perils of
aristocratic idleness, fads, and
fashions.
La Bruyère’s masterpiece appeared as
an appendage to his translation of the
4th-century bc character writer
Theophrastus in 1688. His method was
that of Theophrastus: to define
qualities such as dissimulation,
flattery, or rusticity and then to give
instances of them in actual people,
making reflections on the “characters,”
or “characteristics,” of the time, for
the purpose of reforming manners. La
Bruyère had an immense and richly varied
vocabulary and a sure grasp of
technique. His satire is constantly
sharpened by variety of presentation,
and he achieves vivid stylistic effects,
which were admired by such eminent
writers as the 19th-century novelists
Gustave Flaubert and the Goncourt
brothers.
Eight editions of the Caractères
appeared during La Bruyère’s lifetime.
The portrait sketches were expanded
because of their great popularity.
Readers began putting real names to the
personages and compiling keys to them,
but La Bruyère denied that any was a
portrait of a single person.
Topical allusions in his book made
his election to the French Academy
difficult, but he was eventually elected
in 1693. The Duke de Saint-Simon, the
diplomat and memoirist, described him as
honourable, lovable, and unpretentious.
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Jean-François Regnard

born Feb. 8, 1655, Paris, France
died Sept. 4, 1709, Château de Grillon
French dramatist, one of the most
successful of the successors of Molière,
whose wit and style he openly imitated.
Born into a wealthy family, Regnard
travelled extensively as a young man. On
one of his trips he was captured by
Algerian pirates and imprisoned for
seven months until ransomed by his
family in 1679. His experiences and
impressions provided material for a
series of books.
In 1683 Regnard obtained the position
of treasurer of France, a profitable
post that he held for 20 years. From
1688 on, however, he devoted most of his
time to writing, first for the Italian
comedians in Paris and then for the
Comédie-Française. He depicted a
brilliant but decadent society in a
light and facile style, free of
moralizing. His prime concern was to
make an audience laugh as often as
possible. His best known plays are Le
Joueur (1696; “The Gamester”), Le
Légataire universel (1708; “The Heir”),
and La Sérénade (1694).
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Florent Carton
Dancourt

born Nov. 1, 1661, Fontainebleau, Fr.
died Dec. 7, 1725, Courcelles-le-Roi,
near Orléans
actor and playwright who created the
French comedy of manners and was one of
the most popular of French dramatists
before the Revolution.
Born into an established bourgeois
family, Dancourt was educated in Paris
by Jesuits and studied law. In 1680 he
married an actress, Thérèse de La
Thorillière. They debuted with the
Comédie-Française in 1685, beginning an
association that flourished for 33
years. Dancourt’s skill as a comic actor
and playwright brought him the favour of
Louis XIV and established him as the
successor to Molière.
Like Molière, Dancourt was expert at
portraying current social types, and his
comedies often seized on recent scandals
to ridicule the decadence and social
pretenses of the period. Written in
prose and never assuming artistic
greatness, they were peopled by
characters whose vices were made
hilarious by Dancourt’s witty,
effortless dialogue and his ability to
make the most of a comic situation. His
best-known work, Le Chevalier à la mode
(1687; “The Knight à la Mode”), deals
with a fortune hunter’s simultaneous
courtship of three women. Other plays
are Les Bourgeoises à la mode (1692) and
Les Bourgeoises de qualité (1700), in
which middle-class women ape the
nobility, La Désolation des joueuses
(1687), on the current gambling rage,
and La Maison de campagne (1688; “The
Country House”), making fun of crude
provincial manners.
Of over 50 plays printed under
Dancourt’s name, an undetermined number
were collaborations with other writers.
In 1718 Dancourt abruptly retired to his
estate, devoting himself until his death
to translating the Psalms.
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Alain-René Lesage
"Gil Blas"
BOOK I-III,
BOOK IV-VII,
BOOK VIII-XII

born May 6, 1668, Sarzeau, France
died Nov. 17, 1747, Boulogne
prolific French satirical dramatist and
author of the classic picaresque novel
Gil Blas, which was influential in
making the picaresque form a European
literary fashion.
Although he was orphaned at age 14
and was always quite poor, Lesage was
well educated at a Jesuit college in
Brittany and studied law in Paris. He
was well liked in the literary salons
but chose a family life over a worldly
one, marrying Marie-Elisabeth Huyard in
1694. He abandoned his legal clerkship
to dedicate himself to literature and
received a pension from the Abbot of
Lyonne, who also taught him Spanish and
interested him in the Spanish theatre.
Lesage’s early plays were adaptations
of Spanish models and included the
highly successful adapted comedy
Crispin, rival de son maître (Crispin,
Rival of His Master), performed in 1707
by the Théâtre Français. His prose work
Le Diable boiteux (1707; The Devil upon
Two Sticks) is of Spanish inspiration,
but its satire is aimed at Parisian
society. The more popular Théâtre de la
Foire gave Lesage greater freedom as an
author, and he composed for that company
more than 100 comédies-vaudevilles, for
which he is considered successor to
Molière.
Lesage’s Histoire de Gil Blas de
Santillane (1715–1735; The Adventures of
Gil Blas of Santillane) is one of the
earliest realistic novels. It concerns
the education and adventures of an
adaptable young valet as he progresses
from one master to the next. In the
service of the quack Dr. Sangrado, Gil
Blas practices on the poorer patients
and soon achieves a record equal to his
master’s, i.e., 100 percent fatalities.
In service to Don Mathias, a notorious
seducer, he also learns to equal and
surpass his master. The sunnier spirit
of Gil Blas had a civilizing effect on
the picaresque tradition. Unlike most
novels of the genre, it ends happily, as
Gil Blas retires to marriage and a quiet
country life.
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The Ancients and the Moderns
The end of Louis XIV’s reign witnessed the critical
debate known as the querelle des anciens et des
modernes (“Quarrel of the Ancients and the
Moderns”), a long-standing controversy that came to
a head in the Académie and in various published
works (see Ancients and Moderns). Whereas Boileau
and others saw imitation of the literature of
antiquity as the only possible guarantee of
excellence, “moderns” such as
Charles Perrault in
his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1688–97;
“Comparison of the Ancients and Moderns”) and
Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle, in his
Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688;
“Digression on the Ancients and Moderns”), claimed
that the best contemporary works were inevitably
superior, because of the greater maturity of the
human mind. It was a sterile and inconclusive
debate, but the underlying issue was most important,
for the moderns both indirectly and explicitly
anticipated those 18th-century thinkers whose
rejection of a single universal aesthetic in favour
of a relativist approach was to hasten the end of
the Classical age.
William Driver Howarth
Jennifer Birkett
Charles Perrault
"The
Tales of Mother Goose"
PART I,
PART II
Illustrated by Gustave Dore

Charles Perrault (12 January 1628 – 16
May 1703) was a French author who laid
foundations for a new literary genre,
the fairy tale, and whose best known
tales, often derived from pre-existing
folk tales, include Le Petit Chaperon
rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), La Belle
au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty), Le
Maître chat ou le Chat botté (Puss in
Boots), Cendrillon ou la petite
pantoufle de verre (Cinderella), La
Barbe bleue (Bluebeard), Le Petit Poucet
(Hop o' My Thumb), Les Fées (Diamonds
and Toads), La Marquise de Salusses ou
la Patience de Griselidis (Patient
Griselda), Les Souhaits ridicules (The
Ridiculous Wishes), Peau d'Âne (Donkeyskin)
and Riquet à la houppe (Ricky of the
Tuft). Perrault's most famous stories
are still in print today and have been
made into operas, ballets (e.g.,
Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty), plays,
musicals, and films, both live-action
and animation.
Biography
Perrault was born in
Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family, son of Pierre Perrault and Paquette
Le Clerc. His brother, Claude Perrault, is remembered as the architect
of the severe east range of the Louvre, built between 1665 and 1680.
Charles attended the best schools and studied law before embarking on a
career in government service. He took part in the creation of the
Academy of Sciences as well as the restoration of the Academy of
Painting. When the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres was
founded in 1663, Perrault was appointed its secretary and served under
Jean Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to King Louis XIV.[2] He married
Marie Guichon, age 19, in 1672, who died in 1678 after giving birth to a
daughter. The couple also had three sons. When Colbert died in 1683, he
stopped receiving the pension given to him as a writer.
He was a major participant in the French Quarrel of the Ancients and
the Moderns (Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes), which pitted
supporters of the literature of Antiquity (the "Ancients") against
supporters of the literature from the century of Louis XIV (the
"Moderns"). He was on the side of the Moderns and wrote Le Siècle de
Louis le Grand (The Century of Louis the Great, 1687) and Parallèle des
Anciens et des Modernes (Parallel between Ancients and Moderns,
1688–1692) where he attempted to prove the superiority of the literature
of his century.
In 1695, when he was 67, he lost his post as secretary. He decided to
dedicate himself to his children and published Tales and Stories of the
Past with Morals (Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé) (1697), with the
subtitle: Tales of Mother Goose (Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oie). Its
publication made him suddenly widely-known beyond his own circles and
marked the beginnings of a new literary genre, the fairy tale. He had
actually published it under the name of his last son (born in 1678),
Pierre (Perrault) Darmancourt, (Armancourt was the name of a property he
bought for him), probably fearful of criticism from the "Ancients".[3]
In the tales, he used images from around him, such as the Chateau Ussé
for Sleeping Beauty and in Puss-in-Boots, the Marquis of the Château
d'Oiron, and contrasted his folktale subject matter, with details and
asides and subtext drawn from the world of fashion. He died in Paris in
1703 at age 75.
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Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de Fontenelle

born Feb. 11, 1657, Rouen, Fr.
died Jan. 9, 1757, Paris
French scientist and man of letters,
described by Voltaire as the most
universal mind produced by the era of
Louis XIV. Many of the characteristic
ideas of the Enlightenment are found in
embryonic form in his works.
Fontenelle was educated at the Jesuit
college in Rouen. He did not settle in
Paris until he had passed the age of 30
and had become famous as the writer of
operatic librettos. His literary
activity during the years 1683–88 won
him a great reputation. The Lettres
galantes (1683, “Gallant Letters”;
expanded edition, 1685) contributed to
this, but the Nouveaux Dialogues des
morts (1683, “New Dialogues of the
Dead”; 2nd part, 1684) enjoyed a greater
success and is more interesting to a
modern reader. The Dialogues,
conversations modelled on the dialogues
of Lucian, between such figures as
Socrates and Montaigne, Seneca and
Scarron, served to disseminate new
philosophical ideas. The popularization
of philosophy was carried further by the
Histoire des oracles (1687; “History of
the Oracles”), based on a Latin treatise
by the Dutch writer Anton van Dale
(1683). Here Fontenelle subjected pagan
religions to criticisms that the reader
would inevitably see as applicable to
Christianity as well. The same
antireligious bias is seen in his
amusing satire Relation de l’île de
Bornéo (1686; “Account of the Island of
Borneo”), in which a civil war in Borneo
is used to symbolize the dissensions
between Catholics (Rome) and Calvinists
(Geneva).
Fontenelle’s most famous work was the
Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes
(1686; A Plurality of Worlds, 1688).
These charming and sophisticated
dialogues were more influential than any
other work in securing acceptance of the
Copernican system, still far from
commanding universal support in 1686.
Fontenelle’s basis of scientific
documentation was meagre, and some of
his figures were wildly erroneous even
for his own day. He was unfortunate in
the moment of his publication: the
Cartesian theory of vortices, on which
his work was based, was refuted the next
year in Isaac Newton’s Principia. But
the Entretiens were nevertheless
exceedingly successful. Fontenelle was
elected to the Académie Française in
1691 and was elected to the Académie des
Inscriptions in 1701.
As permanent secretary of the
Académie des Sciences from 1697,
Fontenelle held a highly influential
office. He published the memoirs
presented to the academy and wrote its
history. He kept abreast of new
developments in science, corresponding
with scientists in most European
countries, and developed his talent for
lucid popular exposition, notably in
some of his obituary notices read to the
academy (e.g., those of Newton and
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).
Fontenelle was a close friend of
Montesquieu and well known to Voltaire,
who mocked him in his Micromégas (1752),
a dissertation on the smallness of man
in relation to the cosmos. Fontenelle’s
most original contribution was in his
approach to historiography, shown in his
De l’origine des fables (1724; “Of the
Origin of Fables”), in which he supports
the theory that similar fables arise
independently in several cultures and
also tentatively addresses himself to
comparative religion.
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APPENDIX
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Pierre de Fermat

born August 17, 1601, Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France
died January 12, 1665, Castres
French mathematician who is often called the founder of the
modern theory of numbers. Together with René Descartes, Fermat
was one of the two leading mathematicians of the first half of
the 17th century. Independently of Descartes, Fermat discovered
the fundamental principle of analytic geometry. His methods for
finding tangents to curves and their maximum and minimum points
led him to be regarded as the inventor of the differential
calculus. Through his correspondence with Blaise Pascal he was a
co-founder of the theory of probability.
Life and early work
Little is known of Fermat’s early life and education. He was of
Basque origin and received his primary education in a local
Franciscan school. He studied law, probably at Toulouse and
perhaps also at Bordeaux. Having developed tastes for foreign
languages, classical literature, and ancient science and
mathematics, Fermat followed the custom of his day in composing
conjectural “restorations” of lost works of antiquity. By 1629
he had begun a reconstruction of the long-lost Plane Loci of
Apollonius, the Greek geometer of the 3rd century bc. He soon
found that the study of loci, or sets of points with certain
characteristics, could be facilitated by the application of
algebra to geometry through a coordinate system. Meanwhile,
Descartes had observed the same basic principle of analytic
geometry, that equations in two variable quantities define plane
curves. Because Fermat’s Introduction to Loci was published
posthumously in 1679, the exploitation of their discovery,
initiated in Descartes’s Géométrie of 1637, has since been known
as Cartesian geometry.
In 1631 Fermat received the baccalaureate in law from the
University of Orléans. He served in the local parliament at
Toulouse, becoming councillor in 1634. Sometime before 1638 he
became known as Pierre de Fermat, though the authority for this
designation is uncertain. In 1638 he was named to the Criminal
Court.
Analyses of curves.
Fermat’s study of curves and equations prompted him to
generalize the equation for the ordinary parabola ay = x2, and
that for the rectangular hyperbola xy = a2, to the form an - 1y
= xn. The curves determined by this equation are known as the
parabolas or hyperbolas of Fermat according as n is positive or
negative. He similarly generalized the Archimedean spiral r =
aθ. These curves in turn directed him in the middle 1630s to an
algorithm, or rule of mathematical procedure, that was
equivalent to differentiation. This procedure enabled him to
find equations of tangents to curves and to locate maximum,
minimum, and inflection points of polynomial curves, which are
graphs of linear combinations of powers of the independent
variable. During the same years, he found formulas for areas
bounded by these curves through a summation process that is
equivalent to the formula now used for the same purpose in the
integral calculus. Such a formula is:
It is not known whether or not Fermat noticed that
differentiation of xn, leading to nan - 1, is the inverse of
integrating xn. Through ingenious transformations he handled
problems involving more general algebraic curves, and he applied
his analysis of infinitesimal quantities to a variety of other
problems, including the calculation of centres of gravity and
finding the lengths of curves. Descartes in the Géométrie had
reiterated the widely held view, stemming from Aristotle, that
the precise rectification or determination of the length of
algebraic curves was impossible; but Fermat was one of several
mathematicians who, in the years 1657–59, disproved the dogma.
In a paper entitled “De Linearum Curvarum cum Lineis Rectis
Comparatione” (“Concerning the Comparison of Curved Lines with
Straight Lines”), he showed that the semicubical parabola and
certain other algebraic curves were strictly rectifiable. He
also solved the related problem of finding the surface area of a
segment of a paraboloid of revolution. This paper appeared in a
supplement to the Veterum Geometria Promota, issued by the
mathematician Antoine de La Loubère in 1660. It was Fermat’s
only mathematical work published in his lifetime.
Disagreement with other Cartesian views
Fermat differed also with Cartesian views concerning the law of
refraction (the sines of the angles of incidence and refraction
of light passing through media of different densities are in a
constant ratio), published by Descartes in 1637 in La
Dioptrique; like La Géométrie, it was an appendix to his
celebrated Discours de la méthode. Descartes had sought to
justify the sine law through a premise that light travels more
rapidly in the denser of the two media involved in the
refraction. Twenty years later Fermat noted that this appeared
to be in conflict with the view espoused by Aristotelians that
nature always chooses the shortest path. Applying his method of
maxima and minima and making the assumption that light travels
less rapidly in the denser medium, Fermat showed that the law of
refraction is consonant with his “principle of least time.” His
argument concerning the speed of light was found later to be in
agreement with the wave theory of the 17th-century Dutch
scientist Christiaan Huygens, and in 1849 it was verified
experimentally by A.-H.-L. Fizeau.
Through the mathematician and theologian Marin Mersenne, who,
as a friend of Descartes, often acted as an intermediary with
other scholars, Fermat in 1638 maintained a controversy with
Descartes on the validity of their respective methods for
tangents to curves. Fermat’s views were fully justified some 30
years later in the calculus of Sir Isaac Newton. Recognition of
the significance of Fermat’s work in analysis was tardy, in part
because he adhered to the system of mathematical symbols devised
by François Viète, notations that Descartes’s Géométrie had
rendered largely obsolete. The handicap imposed by the awkward
notations operated less severely in Fermat’s favourite field of
study, the theory of numbers; but here, unfortunately, he found
no correspondent to share his enthusiasm. In 1654 he had enjoyed
an exchange of letters with his fellow mathematician Blaise
Pascal on problems in probability concerning games of chance,
the results of which were extended and published by Huygens in
his De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae (1657).
Work on theory of numbers
Fermat vainly sought to persuade Pascal to join him in research
in number theory. Inspired by an edition in 1621 of the
Arithmetic of Diophantus, the Greek mathematician of the 3rd
century ad, Fermat had discovered new results in the so-called
higher arithmetic, many of which concerned properties of prime
numbers (those positive integers that have no factors other than
1 and themselves). One of the most elegant of these had been the
theorem that every prime of the form 4n + 1 is uniquely
expressible as the sum of two squares. A more important result,
now known as Fermat’s lesser theorem, asserts that if p is a
prime number and if a is any positive integer, then ap - a is
divisible by p. Fermat seldom gave demonstrations of his
results, and in this case proofs were provided by Gottfried
Leibniz, the 17th-century German mathematician and philosopher,
and Leonhard Euler, the 18th-century Swiss mathematician. For
occasional demonstrations of his theorems Fermat used a device
that he called his method of “infinite descent,” an inverted
form of reasoning by recurrence or mathematical induction. One
unproved conjecture by Fermat turned out to be false. In 1640,
in letters to mathematicians and to other knowledgeable thinkers
of the day, including Blaise Pascal, he announced his belief
that numbers of the form 22n + 1, known since as “numbers of
Fermat,” are necessarily prime; but a century later Euler showed
that 225 + 1 has 641 as a factor. It is not known if there are
any primes among the Fermat numbers for n > 5. Carl Friedrich
Gauss in 1796 in Germany found an unexpected application for
Fermat numbers when he showed that a regular polygon of N sides
is constructible in a Euclidean sense if N is a prime Fermat
number or a product of distinct Fermat primes. By far the best
known of Fermat’s many theorems is a problem known as his
“great,” or “last,” theorem. This appeared in the margin of his
copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica and states that the equation xn
+ yn = zn, where x, y, z, and n are positive integers, has no
solution if n is greater than 2. This theorem remained unsolved
until the late 20th century.
Fermat was the most productive mathematician of his day. But
his influence was circumscribed by his reluctance to publish.
Carl B. Boyer
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Pierre Gassendi

French mathematician, philosopher, and scientist
Gassendi also spelled Gassend
born Jan. 22, 1592, Champtercier, Provence, France
died Oct. 24, 1655, Paris
Main
French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, who
revived Epicureanism as a substitute for Aristotelianism,
attempting in the process to reconcile mechanistic atomism
with the Christian belief in an infinite God.
Early life and career
Born into a family of commoners, Gassendi received his early
education at Digne and Reiz. He studied at universities in
Digne and Aix-en-Provence and received a doctorate in
theology at the university in Avignon in 1614. After being
ordained a priest in 1616 he was appointed professor of
philosophy at Aix-en-Provence. There he delivered critical
lectures on the thought of Aristotle from 1617 to 1622, when
the new Jesuit authorities of the university, who
disapproved of Gassendi’s anti-Aristotelianism, compelled
him to leave. Gassendi’s work Exercitationes paradoxicae
adversus Aristoteleos (“Paradoxical Exercises Against the
Aristotelians”), the first part of which was published in
1624, contains an attack on Aristotelianism and an early
version of his mitigated skepticism. Gassendi thereafter
engaged in many scientific studies with his patron,
Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, until the latter’s death in
1637. A considerable portion of his researches during this
period involved astronomical observations, including his
discovery in 1631 of the perihelion of Mercury (the point of
the planet’s closest approach to the Sun).
Skepticism and atomism
In 1641 the theologian and mathematician Marin Mersenne
invited Gassendi and several other eminent thinkers to
contribute comments on the manuscript of René Descartes’s
Meditations (1641); Gassendi’s comments, in which he argued
that Descartes had failed to establish the reality and
certainty of innate ideas, were published in the second
edition of the Meditations (1642) as the fifth set of
objections and replies. Gassendi enlarged upon these
criticisms in his Disquisitio metaphysica, seu duitationes
et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et
responsa (1644; “Metaphysical Disquisition; or, Doubts and
Instances Against the Metaphysics of René Descartes and
Responses”).
In 1645 Gassendi was appointed professor of mathematics
at the Collège Royal in Paris. During the remainder of the
decade he published a work on the new astronomy, Institutio
astronomica juxta hypotheseis tam veteram quam Copernici et
Tychonis Brahei (1647; “Astronomical Instruction According
to the Ancient Hypotheses as Well as Those of Copernicus and
Tycho Brahe”), as well as two of his three major works on
Epicurean philosophy, De vita et moribus Epicuri (1647; “On
the Life and Death of Epicurus”) and Animadversiones in
decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est de vita, moribus,
placitisque Epicuri (1649; “Observations on Book X of
Diogenes Laërtius, Which Is About the Life, Morals, and
Opinions of Epicurus”).
In his final Epicurean work, Syntagma philosophicum
(“Philosophical Treatise”), published posthumously in 1658,
Gassendi attempted to find what he called a middle way
between skepticism and dogmatism. He argued that, while
metaphysical knowledge of the “essences” (inner natures) of
things is impossible, by relying on induction and the
information provided by “appearances” one can acquire
probable knowledge of the natural world that is sufficient
to explain and predict experience. Adopting a view
characteristic of ancient Skepticism, Gassendi held that
experienced events can be taken as signs of what is beyond
experience. Smoke suggests fire, sweat suggests that there
are pores in the skin, and the multitude of events suggests
that there is an atomic world underlying them. The best
theory of such a world, in Gassendi’s opinion, is the
ancient atomism expounded by Epicurus (341–270 bce),
according to which atoms are eternal, differently shaped,
and moving at different speeds. Gassendi argued that such
atoms must have some of the physical features of the visible
objects they constitute, such as extension, size, shape,
weight, and solidity. The atoms collide and agglomerate,
resulting in events in the perceptible world. A mechanical
model of atomic movement and agglomeration, ultimately based
on experience, would allow one to discover probabilistic
empirical laws, to make predictions, and to explain
relationships between different kinds of phenomena. Because
the phenomenal world is thus related to the atomic world,
there is no need to explain events in terms of purposes,
goals, or final causes, as in Scholastic and Aristotelian
teleology.
Gassendi believed that there was no conflict between his
mechanistic atomism and the doctrines of Roman Catholicism;
indeed, he took pains to emphasize their compatibility.
Although he was a heliocentrist, he presented his
astronomical views in a way that made them at least
superficially consistent with the teachings of the church,
which had condemned Galileo for his heliocentrism in 1633.
Although Gassendi’s atomism was as complete an account of
nature as any other scientific theory of its time, it was
eventually replaced by the physics of Sir Isaac Newton. No
important discoveries are attributed to Gassendi’s
scientific program.
Religious and moral views
Gassendi rejected the Epicurean account of the human soul,
according to which it is material but composed of lighter
and more subtle atoms than those of other things. Souls are
genuinely immaterial, and their existence is known through
faith. Likewise, his theology, unlike Epicurus’s, did not
conceive of God as a material body. God’s existence is
proved by the harmony evident in nature. Following Epicurus,
Gassendi held that the proper goal of human life is
happiness, which consists in the peace of the soul and the
absence of bodily pain.
It has long been debated whether Gassendi was really a
secret libertine—a freethinker in matters of religion and
morals. Although he was a close associate of some notorious
religious skeptics and even took part in their retreats, he
was also good friends with some leading church figures, such
as the theologian and mathematician Marin Mersenne. Indeed,
Gassendi and Mersenne had quite similar views about science
and its foundations. Gassendi’s associations with a wide
range of other intellectual figures, including Thomas Hobbes
and Blaise Pascal, lend themselves to varied
interpretations.
Influence and assessment
In 1648 Gassendi resigned his post at the Collège Royal
because of poor health. After nearly five years in Provence
he returned to Paris in 1653, taking up residence in the
house of his new patron, Henri-Louis Habert, lord of Montmor.
He died there two years later.
Gassendi’s ideas were extremely influential in the 17th
century. Although his works were originally published as
huge Latin tomes, a French abridgement of them appeared in
the second half of the century, as did English translations
of various excerpts. His ideas were taught in Jesuit schools
in France, in English universities, and even in newly
founded schools in North America. Because Gassendi’s
epistemological views seem to be echoed in major sections of
John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690),
one of the founding works of British empiricism, some
scholars have concluded that Locke was directly influenced
by Gassendi. It is interesting to note in this connection
that the Syntagma was published in English in Thomas
Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–62), a work that Locke
knew. Locke also met some of Gassendi’s disciples during his
exile in France.
At the turn of the 21st century there was growing
interest in Gassendi’s critique of Cartesianism, and his
scientific researches were shedding new light on the early
development of botany, geology, and other fields. He is now
regarded as an original thinker of the first rank.
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Nicholas de Malebranche

born Aug. 6, 1638, Paris, France
died Oct. 13, 1715, Paris
French Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and major
philosopher of Cartesianism, the school of philosophy
arising from the work of René Descartes. His philosophy
sought to synthesize Cartesianism with the thought of St.
Augustine and with Neoplatonism.
Malebranche, the youngest child of the secretary to King
Louis XIII, suffered all his life from malformation of the
spine. After studying philosophy and theology at the Collège
de la Marche and the Sorbonne, he joined the Congregation of
the Oratory and in 1664 was ordained a priest. Chancing to
read Descartes’s Traité de l’homme (“Treatise on Man”), he
felt compelled to begin a systematic study of mathematics,
physics, and the writings of Descartes.
Malebranche’s principal work is De la recherche de la
vérité, 3 vol. (1674–75; Search After Truth). Criticism of
its theology by others led him to amplify his views in
Traité de la nature et de la grâce (1680; Treatise of Nature
and Grace). His Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la
religion (1688; “Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion”),
a series of 14 dialogues, has been called the best
introduction to his system. His other writings include
research into the nature of light and colour and studies in
infinitesimal calculus and in the psychology of vision. His
scientific works won him election to the Académie des
Sciences in 1699. Also influential are his Méditations
chrétiennes (1683; “Christian Meditations”) and Traité de
morale (1683; A Treatise of Morality).
Central to Malebranche’s metaphysics is his doctrine that
“we see all things in God.” Human knowledge of both the
internal and the external world is not possible except as
the result of a relation between man and God. Changes,
whether of the position of physical objects or of the
thoughts of an individual, are directly caused not, as
popularly supposed, by the objects or individuals themselves
but by God. What are commonly called “causes” are merely
“occasions” on which God acts to produce effects. This view,
known as Occasionalism, hesitantly and inconsistently
applied by Descartes, was more completely developed by
Malebranche. Cartesian dualism between body and mind was
also rendered compatible with orthodox Roman Catholicism by
Malebranche. The inability of minds and bodies to interact
is, according to Malebranche, simply a special case of the
impossibility of interaction between created things in
general.
With reference to sensation, Malebranche believed that
sensory experiences have only a pragmatic value, appraising
men of harm or benefit to their bodies. As aids in reaching
knowledge, they are deceptive because they do not bear
genuine witness to the actual nature of things perceived.
Ideas alone are the objects of human thought processes. All
such ideas are eternally contained in a single archetypal or
model idea of the essence of matter called “intelligible
extension.” God’s mind or reason contains ideas of all of
the truths that men can discover. God’s creation occurred
after his contemplation of the same ideas, which are known
only partially by men but are completely known to God. In
contrast to Descartes’s notion that men can directly
perceive themselves, Malebranche declared that a person can
know that he is but not what he is. He also reversed the
Cartesian dictum that human existence can be known without
demonstration, whereas God’s requires demonstration;
Malebranche held that man’s own nature is completely
unknowable, whereas God’s is an immediate certainty needing
no proof.
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