French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (5 page)

[Brother humans who live after us / Do not harden your hearts
against us, / For if you take pity on us wretches, / God will more
quickly have mercy on you. / You see us here, strung up, five or
six / As for the flesh, which we have too much fattened / It is long
ago devoured and rotted, / And we the bones are becoming ash
and dust. / At our misfortune let no one laugh: / But pray to God
that He forgive us all!]

The Renaissance, renewing contact with antiquity, challenged
French cultural identity and the identity of each individual in
France. For France and Frenchness, the cultural vitality of Italy
was a source of emulation and of anxiety. The odd reversal
that constituted Renaissance culture meant that the recent
achievement of French writers, painters, architects, and musicians
was increasingly seen as out of date, while the much older literary,
philosophical, and artistic legacy of Greece and Rome, being
rediscovered, had an aura of freshness. In Italy, this shift had
occurred much earlier, beginning in the mid-15th century with
the fall of Constantinople and the influx of Greek scholars and
manuscripts to the peninsula.

The French had been at war in Italy since 1494. These campaigns,
continuing under Francois I, King of France (ruled 1515-47),
intensified the importation of cultural influences from Italy. We
can say that Francois quite literally brought Italian Renaissance
culture to France when he invited Leonardo da Vinci to reside
at his chateau of Amboise in the Loire valley, where the artist
and polymath died in 1519. Leonardo was followed by such other
Italian artists as Cellini, Primaticcio, and Serlio. The Italian influence in France was intensified by the 1531 marriage of
Francois's son, the future Henri II, to Caterina de' Medici, who
brought with her a large entourage from Florence. Francois
also established the College des lecteurs royaux (now called the
College de France) as an alternative to the medieval Sorbonne and
appointed, often from abroad, the most distinguished scholars of
Greek, Hebrew, and classical Latin to provide the means for French
people to have direct textual contact with the ancient world.
Towards the end of the 15th century, printing arrived in France
from Germany, and the rapid spread of printing shops made books,
including the Bible, available to a growing public of readers.

Two major issues of identity soon arose. The first was the nature
of the French language and French culture themselves - could
French rival the languages of antiquity and contemporary Italian
as a vehicle of poetic and intellectual expression? And the second
was the volatile matter of religion. Evangelical movements, urging
direct knowledge of the Biblical text, offered the responsibility or
the burden of choice to individual consciences. Jacques Lefevre
d'Etaples published the first French translation of the Bible in 1529.

A French Boccaccio

Close to Francois I, there was a heady sense of opportunity
and renewal. His sister, Marguerite de Navarre, encouraged
and patronized the evangelical movement. She also wrote (or
collaborated in the writing of) one of the most fascinating
collections of short stories in the French tradition, LHeptameron
(first printed in 1558, nine years after her death). The title is
not the author's but was given to the collection because it has
seventy stories; Marguerite de Navarre seems to have intended
the finished book to have one hundred. Each of the stories centres
on a person, often a woman, said to have been a contemporary
of Marguerite herself. There are kings, queens, duchesses, and
knights, but also mule-keepers, monks, ferry-tenders, nuns, and
notaries. Rapes, murders, imprisonment, and adulterous liaisons are common, but so are scatological jokes. Often the villains are
members of Catholic religious orders or servants of the King,
and the characters who are cast in a good light are, frequently
(it is difficult to generalize about this apparently simple but
deeply complex book), those who follow their conscience and
struggle against institutional abuses. Although the term `realism'
was not used to describe literature until several centuries later,
the prologue to Marguerite's book makes a claim to accurate
representation of the contemporary world.

Marguerite relates this claim directly and forcefully to France's
attempt to define its national culture in the wake of Italian
Renaissance influence. The prologue establishes a frame-narrative
for the tales that follow: a group of five ladies and five gentlemen
agree to tell stories that they know from personal experience to be
true. In this way, the book asserts simultaneously a form of literary
`nationalism' in that it acknowledges Boccaccio's Decameron as its
model but declares that in this, French, collection, the stories will
all be true and will not be altered by rhetoric. Whether this rule is
strictly followed is a matter of debate, but its statement, and other
subsequent details of timing and localization in the stories, show an
attempt to create a domestic literary model of realism that is closely
connected with a critical attention to themes of confession, truthtelling, and willingness to assert individual righteousness against
traditional Church, familial, and other social structures. In short,
Marguerite's work, though it includes stories that are reminiscent of
earlier storytelling traditions (the medieval fabliaux), emphasizes
a new sense of the nation as literary milieu while it also grounds
the `truth' in the consciousness of individuals. While kings remain
kings and innkeepers remain innkeepers, all of the characters of the
Heptameron have an equal claim to our attention.

A new genre: the essay

The central character of Michel de Montaigne's writing is himself,
and this first-person character, this moi, appears in greater detail than what we found in Rutebeuf, Christine de Pizan, or Villon.
The Essais (literally, `attempts') cover everything from digestion,
sexual dysfunction, and fantasy to man's place in the universe,
the existence of God, friendship, and eloquence. Coming a
generation later than Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), Michel
de Montaigne experienced the fervour of the newly established
humanism (that is, the study of ancient letters) from his very
infancy. His father had been a soldier in the French armies in Italy,
and apparently brought back great enthusiasm for an uncorrupted
classical Latin (as opposed to the Church Latin of the medieval
French universities). Montaigne may very well be the last person
whose first spoken language was Latin. He gives an account of this
seemingly impossible situation in his chapter `On the Education
of Children', where he explains that his father hired a scholar of
classical Latin not only to speak Latin to the baby but to provide
all family members and servants with enough Latin to interact
with the child from day to day. Montaigne knew the language of
Cicero before learning that of Chretien de Troyes. Montaigne was,
then, in a sense, the last Roman and an emblematic figure of the
French Renaissance, holding together in one person an active
social, economic, and civic life (he was mayor of Bordeaux and a
politique - a political moderate - during the wars of religion) and
both an intellectual and imaginative commitment to the texts of
Greek and Latin antiquity. In `Of Vanity', Montaigne recalls that
he was familiar with accounts of the Roman capital before he
saw the Louvre and that he knew about Lucullus, Metellus, and
Scipio before he knew anything about famous Frenchmen. His
attachment to the language of Rome was so deep that when, as
an adult, years after he had ceased speaking the language of his
infancy, he saw his father fall, the first spontaneous expressions
of alarm that came to his lips were in Latin. And to complete this
life-long identification with Rome, in March 1581 he received
the title of `citizen of Rome' in the form of a bulla (certificate
with seal), or, as he wrote in French in `Of Vanity', a bulle, which
means both `bull' in the sense of certificate but also `bubble' - the
quintessential representation of vanity itself.

Montaigne's detailed self-description in his Essays (1580, with
multiple revisions in the 1582 and especially the 1588 and
posthumous 1595 edition) had an immediate international
resonance. Not only did Montaigne give the world a new genre, the
`essay' (his book was translated into English in 1603 by John Florio
as The essays or Morall, politike and militarie discourses), but he
helped set in motion two trends that became hugely important in
the following century: the introspective study of the self, the moi,
on the one hand, and the dispassionate and often demystifying
description of society, on the other. These two trends, most visible
in the 17th-century writings known as`moralist' literature, were
not the individual creation of Montaigne nor were they exclusively
French. We can see a demystified view of society in Machiavelli
earlier and soon after Montaigne in the Spanish writer Gracian, for
instance, but more than the analysis of an individual person and of
social interaction, the Essays show a mind at work, thus drawing the
reader in and providing one model for an early-modern personality.

Montaigne's style of writing provided an ideal of naturalness,
the kind of book where, as Blaise Pascal wrote later, you expect
to find an author but you are surprised and charmed to find a
man. Pascal points here to the newness of the essay as a genre.
When he says that one does not find an `author', he means an
authoritative figure whose words are received with reverence.
Although the Essays draw upon many classical sources which, in
retrospect, we can call `essays' (Plutarch's Moralia and many texts
by Seneca, for instance), Montaigne's decision to say that his book
was a collection of `attempts' signalled this shift in the relation of
writer and reader. The author's declared tentativeness about his
writing invited readers to be more engaged, perhaps to disagree,
and perhaps to find similarities between their own experiences
and those of Montaigne. In Montaigne's wake, over the centuries
a large number of French writers excelled in this form. Most
recently these include Charles Peguy, Paul Valery, Albert Camus,
Paul Nizan, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Marguerite
Yourcenar, and Pascal Quignard.

Montaigne represents himself as a multi-faceted character. It
is, of course, essential to remember that what we have in the
Essays is not an historical figure pieced together from multiple
documents, but rather the first-person character that Montaigne
has created through his writing. He insists on the facets of his
personality, presenting them often as the opposition between
inside and outside, between a Roman and a Frenchman, between
`Montaigne and the mayor of Bordeaux', and between the solitary
reader in the tower of his chateau and the household scene outside
his windows. Such awareness of his own complexity permits an
ironic detachment leading to surprising juxtapositions: comments
on his digestion or his kidney stones appear alongside soaring
philosophical speculations, and the activities of simple country
people teach as much as the deeds of princes and popes. One of
the most memorable examples of this ironic levelling occurs at
the end of the chapter `Of Cannibals', where Montaigne reflected
in memorable terms on the valuation of cultural difference and
the term `barbarism'. In a typically sinuous text that starts with a
quotation from Plutarch's `Life of Pyrrhus', turns to the recently
discovered American continent and its inhabitants, Atlantis,
divination, Stoic philosophy, and many other matters, Montaigne
concludes that the `savages' or `cannibals' of the New World were
not inferior to the French. Montaigne met such an American in
Rouen in 1562, and finding his conversation quite intelligent,
exclaims, with delicious irony, All of that is pretty good. But, of all
things, they don't wear breeches!'

For Montaigne, and for many of his contemporaries, the newly
discovered peoples of the Americas seemed a possible parallel to
the rediscovered ancients. So for his first readers it was probably
not so strange to see the Essays pass back and forth, as they often
did, between Greco-Roman life and that of contemporary Brazil.
These new-found peoples offered a glimpse of noble and simple
life like that of Homeric heroes or, indeed, a possible pre-Adamite
race of humans. The parallel between the distant European past
and the American present appears in Montaigne's chapter `On Coaches', where he describes the Mexican conception of the major
epochs of the world. Like us, he writes, they believe that the world
is drawing to its end and is degenerating. In the past there were
giants, both figuratively and literally.