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FRENCH LITERATURE - Part 3
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THE TRIUMPH OF CLASSICISM
France's political
position as the most powerful nation in Europe during the reign of
Louis XIV was reflected in the preeminence French literature attained
in the 17th century. This Golden Age literature still forms the
foundation of French liberal education. The period showed a
continuing trend toward the reinforcement of royal authority and,
except at the end, of Catholic influence. In 1635, Cardinal Richelieu
created the Académie Française with the aim of
regulating language and literary expression. The conflict between two
literary tendencies--one toward greater creative freedom, which
modern critics call baroque, and the other toward an acceptance of
literary rules--had been virtually resolved in favor of CLASSICISM by
1660. The components of this creed would be codified by Nicolas
Boileau-Despreaux, the founder of French literary criticism,
in his Art of Poetry (1674; Eng. trans., 1683), in which reason,
proportion, and harmony were defined as the outstanding literary
values.
France's greatest
dramatists emerged during this period. Pierre Corneille, whose
tragic masterpiece The Cid (1637), dramatizing the conflict between
duty and passion, remains unequaled in the grandeur of its
conception, wrote over 30 plays, most of them, after 1634, in
accordance with the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action.
He was surpassed in popularity and critical esteem only by Jean
Racine, whose simpler style and more realistic characters and
plot structures, as in Andromache (1667; Eng. trans., 1675) and
Phaedra (1677; Eng. trans., 1776), reveal a world of ferocious
passions beneath a veneer of elegant poetry. In the comic arena,
Molière, ranging from the farcical to the sharpest
explorations of social, psychological, and metaphysical questions,
created a body of plays that seem as fresh and pointed today as they
were when first produced. His masterpieces were Tartuffe (1664; Eng.
trans., 1670) and The Misanthrope (1666; Eng. trans., 1709).
The French novel,
which in the first part of the 17th century was long, diffuse, and
full of improbable adventures (L'Astree, 1607-28, for instance), also
came of age. In The Princess of Clèves (1678; Eng. trans.,
1925), a concise psychological analysis of a moral problem in married
life, the Comtesse de la Fayette fashioned a perfect model of
the novel of character as the genre would develop in France.
Minor literary forms
were ennobled by such brilliant practitioners as Madame de
Sevigne, who in her correspondence created definitive models of
letter writing; the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, whose Maxims
(1665; Eng. trans., 1694) wittily analyzed human motives in terms of
self-interest; and Jean de la Bruyère, whose wide-ranging and
insightful study of social conditions and types in his Characters
(1688; Eng. trans., 1699) anticipated the liberal, scientifically
oriented tendencies of the 18th century. The poet Jean de la Fontaine
achieved lasting fame with his successive volumes of Fables (1668,
1678, 1694; Eng. trans., 1734), a genre he made indelibly his own by
combining sophisticated "morals" with a deliberately archaic and
deceptively simple style. The art of memoir writing assumed a new
power and subtlety when composed by such participants in historical
events as the Duc de Saint-Simon, La Rochefoucauld, and
Cardinal de Retz.
The enormously
influential DISCOURSE ON METHOD (1637) not only established its
author, René Descartes, as the first modern philosopher
but set the precedent for that clarity, precision, and rationalism
with which French thinking and writing would subsequently be
associated. Another philosopher admired as much for the perfection of
his prose as for the character of his thought was Blaise
Pascal. His Lettres provinciales (1656-57; Eng. trans., 1816)
demonstrated the devastating effectiveness of a simplicity informed
by intelligence and wit, whereas the Pensées (1670; Eng.
trans., 1688) directed the reader to faith in the Christian God
through an eloquent combination of reason, passion, and insight into
the human condition. More grandiloquent, and certainly better
representative of 17th-century religious orthodoxy, were the sermons
and funeral orations of the great preacher and theological polemicist
Jacques BOSSUET. His Quietist opponent, François
Fenelon, combined the interests of a classicist with the
critical spirit of the 18th century in his didactic novel Telemaque
(1699; Eng. trans., 1743).
Jean Boorsch.
Source: The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Release #8, ©1996.
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