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 Francois 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. Clement 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 1520-40. 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 Ramee) created a sensation when, after earlier writings in Latin, he produced his Dialectique (1555) in the vernacular French. La Pleiade The group known as La Pleiade was formed in the mid-16th century by seven poets who wished to elevate the French language to the level of Classical languages. Du Bellay's Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549; The Defence and Illustration of the French Language) served as La Pleiade's manifesto. In response in part to du Bellay's plea on behalf of French, in the second half of the century a great number of scholarly works were written in the vernacular language. Among them were Les Dialogues philosophiques, by Pontus de Tyard, and Six livres de la Republique (1576; The Six Books of a Commonweale) by Jean Bodin. Latin did not disappear, however, from the literature of ideas. The grands rhetoriqueurs Not all of those mistakenly labelled grands rhetoriqueurs ("great rhetoricians") belong chronologically to the 16th century. But Guillaume Cretin, Jean Marot, Jean Bouchet, and above all Lemaire de Belges are all sons of the Renaissance. They left considerable works, sometimes by circumstance (many worked at one time or another as official court historians) and sometimes by desire. As historians, they were "seekers of an origin," to quote Claude-Gilbert Dubois. For example, Lemaire de Belge's Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye (c. 1510; "Illustrations of Gaul and Singularities of Troy") tells the legendary origin of the French people, claiming that they are the issue of Francus, the son of Hector who escaped from Troy. The historians cultivated a sumptuous prose as the expression of their wish for permanence and a desire for glory. The poetry of the grands rhetoriqueurs was often sacrificed for circumstance, as seen in Clement Marot, in Le Voyage de Genes (1507) and Le Voyage de Venise (1509), and in Lemaire de Belges, in Le Temple d'honneur et de vertus (1504) and La Plainte du desire (1509). The poets were fervent partisans of the French language, and the most enthusiastic was Lemaire de Belges, who dared to compare French with Italian in Concorde des deux langages (1513). Strictly speaking, it is less their poetic art than their innovations in form that continue to interest scholars. Major authors and influences Poetry Without the rhetoriqueurs the art of Clement Marot could not have been possible. From them, at least at the beginning of his career, he took his inspirations and borrowed the forms to express it, as in the allegorical poem "Le Temple de Cupidon" or in "L'Epitre de Maguelonne." But a certain humanist culture; the life at court, which he called his schoolmistress (he became valet de chambre to Francis I in 1527); and, above all, the events of his day gave his works a new dimension. As the author of occasional poems Marot preferred the epistle because of its freedom of style and the epigram for its vivacity. With the epistle he reached the summit of the highly subtle art by which he defined himself, a poet of the court but also a Protestant, plagued by the Sorbonne and aspiring to a pure and simple happiness of true religious faith. His allegorical satire on justice, L'Enfer, written in 1526 after his brief imprisonment on charges of violating Lenten regulations, and his religious beliefs explain his voluntary exile after the Affaire des Placards in 1534. His return to Paris in 1537 made him no more prudent, as he continued his translations of the Psalms (published in the late 1530s and early 1540s), which were a brilliant literary achievement but were suspect in the eyes of the religious authorities. Marot's translation, continued by the Protestant leader Theodore Beza (Theodore de Beze), became the Huguenot psalter. Marot had been dead for six years when Pierre de Ronsard made a remarkable entry into the French literary scene with the publication of the first four books of his Odes in 1550. In the Odes he sings alternately of the great figures of his day and of the Vendome countryside. Ronsard indicated in his preface, however, that he started work on his poems at the same time Marot was translating the psalter. The new "school," which at first was merely a group of friends calling itself La Brigade (the name La Pleiade coming into use later), deliberately diverged from the paths taken by their predecessors. The group broke less, on the other hand, with the Lyon school, whose members included Maurice Sceve (Delie, 1544), Pernette du Guillet (Rymes, 1545), and Louise Labe (Oeuvres, 1555). Sceve, above all, left a very important literary work in Delie, in which he mixed Platonism and Petrarchianism in a purposefully difficult language. The poets of La Pleiade were not content to sing of love, the favourite theme of the Lyon poets. True humanists were familiar with antiquity, having read and translated Greek as well as Latin, and antiquity opened to them a vast horizon. They did publish numerous collections of love poems: du Bellay, L'Olive (1549); Ronsard, Les Amours (1552), La Continuation des amours and La Nouvelle Continuation des amours (1555-56), and Les Sonnets pour Helene (1578); and Jean-Antoine de Baf, Les Amours de Meline (1552) and Les Amours de Francine (1555). But love for them was not only individual sentiment. Love presided over the life of the entire cosmos, as sung by Jacques Peletier in L'Amour des amours (1555) and by all the poets influenced by the Neoplatonic view of life. The most celebrated collection by du Bellay, Les Regrets (1558), thus draws to a close on a loving vision of beauty. Others engaged in philosophical poetry, of which Ronsard's Les Hymnes (1555-56) is the best example. The spectacle of nature enchanted the poets who, like Peletier, were also learned men. A "scientific" poetry appeared and expressed itself in many ways, from the hymn reinvented by Ronsard to the highly polished verse form chosen by Remy Belleau in his Amours et nouveaux echanges des pierres precieuses (1576). This poetry found its justification in the idea that the poet, because of his inspiration, acceded to knowledge of the world, which conferred upon him a dignity at least equal to that of a priest. When the civil wars broke out in 1562, the members of La Pleiade sided with the monarchy and the church, which Ronsard eloquently defended in Discours (1562-63). Their commitment was guided by a conviction that the French monarchy was the best and that the Roman Catholic Church, subject perhaps to internal reforms, was the true heir of the church established in the first centuries after Christ. If their beliefs at times led them to write cruel verse, notably at the time of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day (beginning August 23, 1572, when Catholics rampaged and murdered some 3,000 Huguenots in Paris alone), all defended their sincere convictions and, at the same time, certain ideas of literary expression. The Reformation, in fact, was not limited to dogmatic, liturgical, or ecclesiastical changes. It brought cultural change as well. Ronsard became aware of it when Protestant ministers launched against him a series of scurillous charges, to which he replied with the Responce . . . aux injures et calomnies (1563). Calvin and his disciples allowed neither humanism's global admiration for antiquity nor the poets' taste for mythology. Calvin assigned to the poet an imperative and even exclusive duty: to praise God and serve his Word. This is why Calvin had encouraged Marot's translation of the Psalms and why, after Marot, many Protestant poets, such as Theodore Beza, Jean de Sponde, and Theodore-Agrippa d'Aubigne, paraphrased or pondered them. Humanist tragedy was born in 1553 with Cleopatre captive by Etienne Jodelle. But before him, in a totally different spirit, Beza had written (and produced in Lausanne) Abraham sacrifiant (1550), which retained many qualities of the medieval mystere and, using a celebrated biblical episode, illustrated above all the combat of faith. The formula chosen by Beza was taken up again by Loys Desmasures, also a Protestant, in his tragedies saintes (1563): David combattant, David triomphant, and David fugitif. But this formula had no influence on the development of regular tragedy that blossomed in the works of Robert Garnier, published from 1568 to 1580. Theodore-Agrippa d'Aubigne represented the perfect synthesis of humanism and Calvinism. He studied to perfection the three traditional languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and he was familiar with modern languages, especially Italian. He was so faithful to his church that he was given the sobriquet "Le Bouc du Desert" ("Goat of the Desert," implying "scapegoat") at a time (during the reign of Henri IV) when religious compromise and the rallying of numerous Protestants rendered his intransigence almost inappropriate. Earlier he had written of love, and he had written verse modelled on Petrarch in Printemps (composed between 1568 and 1580). These poems would not be distinguished from so many other collections were it not for the melancholy inspiration and force of their rhetoric. His rhetoric is found, without the melancholy, in his master poem Les Tragiques, composed for the most part at the end of the century but not published until 1616. The seven cantos of the poem invited the reader to a theological understanding of history. The first cantos ("Miseres," "Princes," and "Chambre doree") successively depicted a sombre tableau of France exhausted by the civil wars, the debauchery of Henri III's court, and the corrupt and cruel institutions of justice. In the fourth and fifth cantos, "Feux" and "Fers," Aubigne began a long list of the Protestant martyrs and of the fight of their coreligionists in defense of their faith. Aubigne's theological vision is even more accentuated in the last two cantos, "Vengeances" and "Jugement." In "Vengeances" the poet explains the judgments made by God against tyrants and then turns his attention to those who God will lift up at the end of time. "Jugement" is the apotheosis of the poem, the cry of joy of those murdered by history. It is the summit of a work that draws to a close--rare in Protestant works--with a mystical vision. The term baroque has been used for a style that gives precedence to forms. It would be more just to underline the importance of a rhetoric of persuasion, with all its means: apostrophe, antithesis, descriptions. The pen that wrote Les Tragiques is not the same pen that wrote, albeit at the same time, the Histoire universelle, in which objectivity regained its hold. With Aubigne flickered the last light of 16th-century poetry. The Histoire universelle, his masterpiece, was published in the 17th century but escaped notice. Aubigne was foreign to Classical taste, which Malherbe inaugurated early in the 17th century. Prose The production of poetry in the 16th century did not outdo the other genres in quantity. Readers turned above all to works in prose, many of which do not belong to literature as strictly defined: accounts of voyages, lives of saints, and collections of diverse lecons or lectures (readings). Prose was slow in freeing itself from the heavy yoke thrown over it by the medieval humanists in their concern for the use of language. With Lemaire de Belges prose became eloquent, and with Francois Rabelais it became a prodigious domain of experimentation. The work of Rabelais, who Voltaire called a "drunken philosopher," escapes all labels. Humanism rightfully claims Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534 or 1535), with their celebrated pages on education, war and peace, and the true religion. They resound with the voice of the man who called Erasmus his spiritual father and who befriended numerous Protestants. But it is important to remember that Rabelais in the first two books of his great work intended to laugh and to give laughter and that nothing, not even the most beautiful humanist philosophy, escaped the corrosive power of laughter. The humanist reading of the work is embarrassed when it comes to interpreting the last three books, published long after the first two: Le Tiers Livre in 1546, Le Quart Livre in 1552, and the Cinquieme Livre in 1564 (and of questionable authenticity). Certain episodes, such as Panurge's posing of the question of marriage, or the voyage of Pantagruel and his companions, often derail the critic who interprets on too high a level. It is possible, as Verdun-Louis Saulnier thought, that Rabelais tried to deliver an essentially religious message for the world to decode, that of the Protestant humanists who, at the moment of persecution, abandoned the fight for doctrine and took refuge in silence and prayer. It is also quite possible that Pantagruel's voyage is the philosophical symbol for the search for truth against the dogmatism of all orders: dogmas are represented by the islands encountered on the voyage. Perhaps the work of Rabelais makes evident the crisis of pre-Cartesian philosophy, which oscillates between the for and the against, the doxa and the paradox, without arriving at the desired synthesis. But if the philosophy is blocked, the language is liberated, alternately solemn and clownish, clear and obscure. Rabelais was acquainted with the milieu of learned men and their jokes and delighted in multiplying their ambiguity, their implications, and their wordplay. He produced a unique work that no one could imitate. Contemporaries did not err in calling Rabelais a poet. Michel de Montaigne ranked Rabelais among the "simply pleasant" authors. Indeed, the purpose of Montaigne's Essais (Essays) had little in common with any of Rabelais's intentions. This is not to say that Montaigne disdained laughter and, above all, humour. But if he retired to the tower of his chateau while still young, it was to write something other than buffoonery. He too produced adventure novels, but he also invented a new genre, that of the Essais. At first he devoted his time to putting down on paper all the thoughts inspired by his numerous readings. But soon he took an interest in himself and became the material of his own book. The first two volumes of the Essais were published in 1580. A third was added in 1588, along with an enlarged edition of the first two. When he died in 1592 he left his own copy of the Essais, with numerous revisions written in his own hand. This revised text was published in 1595. Montaigne had stated that he could have continued to write indefinitely. The subject given him--his own self--was fathomless, as each day revealed anew, and introspection was endless. Montaigne rejected any form of dogmatism (though leaving aside the question of the truths of religion). He was constantly on the watch for whatever he could learn about man, from conversation or from books, and especially from books on history and accounts of travels. He declared himself to be a Pyrrhonist, not a Skeptic, because the error of the Skeptic is to say that he knows nothing, while the Pyrrhonist refuses to make even that affirmation. The essay as Montaigne conceived it adapts itself perfectly to that philosophy. Free in form, the essay permits the author to pass from one idea to another at will, according to his whim, and to the despair of those who seek a plan in his chapters. If there is no plan, it is because Montaigne invented a spontaneous style of writing that invites spontaneity in cognizant readers as well. In contrasting ways Montaigne and Aubigne both enlightened the end of the 16th century. Aubigne was a party man, a herald of religion, and he deliberately put his poetry at the service of these. Montaigne was a man without party who invented a literature for the honnete homme ("gentleman"; the ideal of refinement), which may explain his success in the 17th century. But the qualities represented by Aubigne do not disappear in the 17th century, "the century of saints," which saw the birth of many great religious works. The richness of the 16th century is found also in its legacy. |