FRENCH LITERATURE: ENTERING THE 19TH CENTURY

Entering the 19th century: from the Revolution to 1850 Revolution and empire The French Revolution of 1789 provided no clean break with the literary traditions of the Enlightenment. Many ways of thinking and feeling and most literary forms persisted with little change from 1789 to 1815. Indeed, the Napoleonic regime encouraged a return to the Classical mode. The insistence on formal qualities, notions of good taste, rules, and appeals to authority implicitly underlined the regime's centralizing, authoritarian, and imperial aims. This Classicism, or, strictly speaking, Neoclassicism, represented the etiolated survival of the high style and literary forms that had dominated the serious literatureand drama in particularin France for almost two centuries. It is the complex series of reactions against this dominance, the search for new forms, the expansion of the vocabulary of literature, and the development of new criteria of taste that, together with the profound impact of the social and political events of the times, provide the main thrust of French Romanticism. The poetry of Andr Chnier Andr Chnier was executed during the last days of the Terror. His work first appeared in volume in 1819 and is thus associated with the first generation of French Romantic poets, who saw in him a symbol of persecuted genius. Although deeply imbued with the Classical spirit, especially that of Greece, he nevertheless exploited Classical myths for modern purposes. He began work on what he planned to be a great epic poem, Herms, a history of the universe and human progress. The completed fragments reflect the Enlightenment spirit but also anticipate the episodic epic poems of the Romantics (such as Victor Hugo's Lgende des sicles, 185983). Chnier, though a moderate in revolutionary terms, was deeply committed in his politics. This is evident in the scathing fierceness of his ambes, many of which were written from prison shortly before his execution. His best known poems, however, are elegies that sing of captivity, death, and dreams of youth and lost happiness. The 16th century Language and learning in 16th-century Europe The literature of the 16th century does not date precisely from 1500 or 1501. The writers who are identified with Renaissance humanism (a term adapted in France in the 19th century from the German word Humanismus) had certain aspirations in common, but they never formed a school. They thought of themselves as the heirs of their predecessors: of Marsilio Ficino, for example, who died in Italy in 1499 but in his lifetime spread Neoplatonic thought widely in Europe, or of Petrarch, who wrote in the 14th century. On the other hand, the period called the Middle Ages in some aspects continued well into the Renaissance, judging by certain titles and subjects of works (even those to which Franois Rabelais, so Gothic in 1532, referred to produce his Pantagruel). Many of the thinkers and writers of the 16th century belong to Europe as a whole more than to a particular nation. This is true of Erasmus, who came originally from Rotterdam but lived in France, England, and Switzerland. The assignment of Jean Lemaire de Belges to a particular country is equally difficult, for he was a Walloon who wrote in French and travelled among various courts. During this period writers made many journeys, either by choice or by necessity. Rabelais, Joachim du Bellay, and Michel de Montaigne all made the trip from France to Italy. Clment Marot died in Turin and Marc-Antoine de Muret, after a long exile, died in Rome. The sometimes intense cultural exchanges (which can be pondered at the crossroads city of Lyon, turned as much toward Italy as toward Paris) explain the influences sometimes submitted to, sometimes acted upon. An example is the rapidity and importance of the diffusion of Martin Luther's writings through France during the decades 152040. And the Geneva Reformation made excellent use of Geneva's publishing trade to introduce Luther's ideas in John Calvin's native France. At the time of the Reformation religious literature belonged to all of Europe. The elevation of the French language The communication of ideas was facilitated by the use of Latin, which remained the language of theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Erasmus polemicized in Latin with the Sorbonne or with Luther. Calvin used Latin to write his first version of Institutio christianae religionis (1536; definitive Latin version, 1559; Institutes of Christian Religion). Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Rame) created a sensation when, after earlier writings in Latin, he produced his Dialectique (1555) in the vernacular French. The 17th century Literature and society Refinement of the 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 is reflected in the numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, which 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 for the serious analysis of moral and psychological problems. The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece of the genre was L'Astre (160727) by Honor d'Urf. Manners are stylized, settings are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the psychology of the characters is handled with insight. Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of Franois de Malherbe: resolutely opposed to the exalted conception held by La Pliade of the poet as inspired favourite of the Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to a critical doctrine imposed on fellow poets by word of mouth and personal example. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of imaginative poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration. Malherbe's alexandrine, howeverclear, measured, and energeticwas a metre marvellously 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 Thophile de Viau (referred to as Thophile), who not only opposed Malherbe in style and technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Thophile's verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the natural world. His whole way of life was a provocation to the bien-pensants (right-minded): he was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of letters, practicing and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution, imprisonment, and early death ended all this, however: libertinage went underground, and repressive orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Thophile and other independents exemplifies that manner to which modern criticism has given the name baroque. The baroque poet has been said to possess a vision of life distorted through imagination and sensibility. Whereas in the case of Malherbe and his school sensibility is constantly controlled by common sense, baroque writers embellish their descriptions of nature by subjective flights of fancy that may even assume an absurd or surrealist flavour, resulting in an intensely personal picture of the world, far removed from Malherbe's clich-like generalizations. Development of drama Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was nothing if not a man of the theatre. Pote gages (staff poet) to the Comdiens du Roi company at the Htel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which 34 were published (162328). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and pastoral, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. While Hardy's plays possess the vigour and colour of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, his style is unattractive; but, 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, Thophile's Pyrame et Thisb (1623), 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 focussed on the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to Aristotle), but the biensances (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; and the new style, defined by Corneille as une peinture de la conversation des honntes 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 Htel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together with Jean Mairet, Tristan (Franois 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 L'Illusion comique (1635), 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 (1637), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in Le Cid is something previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece, but it was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (quarrel of Le Cid) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of the Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred the play to the judgment of the newly founded Acadmie Franaise. The formation of the Acadmie, an early move to place cultural activity under the patronage of the state, dates from 1634; examination of Le Cid on Richelieu's orders was an exception to its normal functions, which concerned the standardization of the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Acadmie's own Dictionnaire of 1694, though by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of Richelet (1680) and Furetire (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue franoise (1647) record polite usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the Potique of La Mesnardire (1639) and the Abb d'Aubignac's Pratique du thtre (1657), both treatises, which strongly influenced the establishment of Classical doctrine being instigated by Richelieu's personal patronage. Meanwhile another protg, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Although he produced no important doctrinal work and made his mark in the salons and in occasional writings, Chapelain was nevertheless 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'Acadmie (1638), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on Le Cid, reflect 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. 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 (1640), and Polyeucte (1643), which, with Le Cid, represent the playwright's highest achievement: a triumphant justification of the formula that Mairet and others had helped to develop but which Corneille himself perfected. The essence of Classical tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point. Despite the prominence always given to the unities of time and place, it is unity of action that gives Classical tragedy its essential character. The other unities merely help to make unity of action effective. Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Rotrou's Saint-Genest (1647), for example, provides an interesting contrast with Polyeucte, treating in the baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. But by the 1640s writers and their public had become more responsive to various standardizing influences. Ren Descartes's Discours de la mthode (1637; Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partage . . . (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 Trait des passions de l'me (1649; Treatise on Passions). In the field of creative writing, poets sometimes come to distrust their individual sensibilities and prefer to mold their imaginations to the common denominator of a social group. In lyric poetry, the linguistic tendencies crystallized by the reforms of Malherbe and Vaugelas combine with the preoccupations of the salons to produce writing that is seldom more than mannered wordplay. Generally speaking, such tendencies toward a literature expressing the cultural values of a homogeneous society affect form more than content. For the self-centred aristocratic idealism that inspired the Fronde (a series of civil wars between 1648 and 1653) also finds expression in the literature of the period, and nowhere more clearly than 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 the Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. In neither case is devotion to a cause free from self-glorification; in both, 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.