Reveries of Community: French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572-1616
200
Reveries of Community: French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572-1616
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810135833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2017 |
| Series: | Rethinking the Early Modern |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Empires of Erasure in Pierre de Ronsard's Franciade (1572)
In 1550, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) announced his intention to compose his epic poem La Franciade in the "Ode de la paix," a poem written for the French king Henri II to celebrate the Treaty of Boulogne. The ode introduces the epic poem's protagonist, Francus, the son of Hector and Andromache. Summarizing the poem's plot, the ode relates how Francus, having survived the fall of Troy, will set forth to found a new Troy ("une nouvelle Troie"), first on his own near the Danube and then, through his descendants, on the banks of the Seine. Through a prophecy recounted by his father, the future protagonist learns that his lineage will culminate in Henri II,
Des meilleurs le meilleur roi,
The best king of the best,
These verses associate Ronsard's future epic with the imperial dream of the translatio imperii, investing the Valois dynasty with the founding of an empire that expands to the horizons, encompassing all known space. Ronsard's adoption of this framework places his poem soundly within Virgilian tradition; Virgil often served as a source of inspiration for Renaissance poets since his "celebration of the newly established Empire and its ruler, Augustus, offered a parallel for those poets who were similarly eulogizing the Valois dynasty in France." In its reference to imperial conquest, the ode offers a flattering comparison between Henri and theemperor Augustus. In addition, as in Aeneid 1, where a limitless empire is predicted for Augustus, the ode transforms the imperial, conquering ruler into a messianic monarch of peace. The French king's realm will ultimately become a City at Peace "laquelle plus ne sentira / Le fer meurtrier d'un autre Achille" (that will no longer feel / The murderous blade of another Achilles). Like Augustus, who is promised a realm where the gates of war will be closed, Henri will conquer first in order to reestablish a golden age. The sword of Achilles will be put away, and the state of peace will resemble the one on the shield in Iliad 18. This peace is "la garde vigoureuse / Des peuples, & leurs cités" (the vigorous protector of peoples and their cities), and its benefits will be shared by a community able to enjoy games, dancing, and love. From its inception, then, the Franciade was associated not only with the story of the founding of an empire but also with the creation of peace through empire, a new pax augusta.
In spite of this ode, Henri did not seem keen to support Ronsard's plans to write an epic, but the project of the Franciade lived on even after he died in a jousting accident in 1559. Henri's son, Charles, and his mother, Catherine de' Medici, either directly or indirectly, seem to have absorbed the connections between epic and peace put forth in the "Ode de la paix." As they attempted to reestablish their authority after the conclusion of the Peace of Amboise, the treaty that ended the first civil war in 1563, the two embarked on a royal tour of France (1564–66). As part of the journey, the king and the queen regent visited Ronsard at his home in 1565, and this visit signaled the rebirth of the Franciade. In 1566, the poet received royal benefices to help cover his financial needs during the seven-year composition of the poem. Thus, in their postwar efforts to promote a powerful image of the king's authority, the royal family commissioned the Franciade, in a time of tenuous peace when the poem's endorsement of a Valois version of Augustan empire and Augustan peace would serve their political purposes.
In spite of the auspicious new beginning for Ronsard's epic project, composition stalled after four of the projected twenty-four books appeared in September 1572. In 1578, four years after the death of his patron Charles IX, Ronsard publicly abandoned the poem (although he did continue to revise those four books throughout his life). As a result, the incomplete poem represents for many literary critics the French epic that should have been. Critics, both past and present, have spilled much ink in describing what they view as the failure of the Franciade and its possible causes, and the poem has even been held up as proof that the French are simply not capable of writing epic, contributing to a phenomenon that Siegbert Himmelsbach has termed the "complèxe de l'épopée" (epic complex). One result of fixating on the poem's failure is that critics tend to view the Franciade from a retrospective perspective, focusing on historical events that came after the poem's publication and interpreting the poem in light of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 (which occurred a month before the poem appeared in print for the first time), Charles IX's death in 1574, and above all, Ronsard's decision to abandon his epic project in 1578.
This question of the poem's incompletion, while of interest, has detracted from other areas of exploration. In this sense, I agree with Phillip John Usher's approach to the poem, which is to accept that "like so many great works of literature, including Virgil's Aeneid, the Franciade is unfinished and we must read it despite this fact, not as a fragment of what might have been, but a text within its own right." To this end, I propose to consider the poem from the perspective of the years when Ronsard was most active in writing the Franciade, from 1566 to 1571, when the poet was forced to imagine French community in his poetry in the face of a potentially irresolvable rupture in religious unity. Early in the 1560s, Ronsard intervened in public debates about the wars, taking a strong political stance for the royalist side in the Discours des misères de ce temps. This interest in the political developments of the civil wars did not fade in the years leading up to the Franciade's publication; the poet also composed poems about the wars at the end of the decade, in particular during the Third War of Religion. I argue that the Franciade should be read as a continuation of Ronsard's poetic reflections on the wars. Significantly, Ronsard's epic was completed and published in the context of a shift in approach to royal pacification, represented in the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1570), which concluded the Third War of Religion. As Andrea Frisch has shown, this treaty was unique in that it "explicitly introduce[d] the question of memory into the politics of pacification," proposing the forgetting of the wars as a strategy for achieving peace. The edict's first and second articles both addressed the question of memory:
1. Que la mémoire de toutes choses passées d'une part et d'autre, et dès et depuis les troubles advenus en notre dit Royaume, et à l'occasion d'iceux, demeure éteinte et assoupie comme de chose non advenue. ... 2. Défendant à tous nos sujets de quelque état et qualité qu'ils soient, qu'ils n'aient à en renouveler la mémoire, s'attaquer, injurier ni provoquer l'un l'autre par reproche de ce qui s'est passé, en disputer, contester, quereller ni s'outrager ou offenser de fait ou de parole, mais se contenter de vivre paisiblement ensemble comme frères, amis et concitoyens.
1. May the memory of all events that have happened on either side, and since the troubles began in our kingdom, and as a result of these troubles, remain extinguished and quieted as if nothing had happened. ... 2. Forbidding any of our subjects of whatever estate and condition they may be, to renew the memory of it, attack each other, abuse or provoke each other with the fault of what has happened; to dispute, contest, quarrel, outrage or offend in deed or word, but rather be content to live peacefully together as brothers, friends, and countrymen.
After this treaty in 1570, forgetting, or oubliance, became a recurring stipulation in royal peace treaties, including the treaty Henri IV signed to end the civil wars officially, the Edict of Nantes (1598). While many of the 1570 treaty's articles speak to juridical processes, the first articles make it clear that all French people ("tous nos sujets"), not only those in the justice system, were being asked to forget the wars.
This chapter offers a window into how policies of forgetting enter into the composition of the Franciade. As Mark Greengrass has noted, it is often difficult to determine how royal peace policies might have affected the lives of the king's subjects; Frisch also stresses that the purview of these policies was opaque to those who were supposed to obey them. However, by tracing various steps of the poem's composition and publication, it is possible to see how the Franciade erases vestiges of contemporary unrest and religious difference to promote a peaceful French realm under Charles IX. Above all, the poem encourages what Benedict Anderson has termed "amnesias of nationalism," characterized by "collective acts of remembering [that] are inextricably intertwined with, indeed brought into being by, collective acts of forgetting." Yet, in the Franciade, instead of "amnesias of nationalism," it might be more apt to say that the poem creates "amnesias of imperium." The Franciade's composition and publication reveal Ronsard's attempts to erase the wars and to unify his readers through a fantasy of imperial France, but they also expose the fault lines of this strategy. Such erasure creates a tension between memory and forgetting that strikes at the goal of Virgilian epic to unify a people through a shared narrative; it also risks committing a kind of textual violence, a violence to memory, that perpetuates the divisions among the poet's readership.
Before the Franciade: A Poetics of Oblivion
In the years when he was writing the Franciade, Ronsard also wrote poetry to celebrate royal victories over Protestant armies during the Third War of Religion, in particular those at Jarnac (March 13, 1569) and Montcontour (October 3, 1569). Three poems, "Prière à Dieu pour la victoire," "Elemens ennemis de l'hydre," and "L'hydre desfaict," chronicle these victories; they were later included as part of the Discours des misères de ce temps. As some of the most violent and partisan poetry that Ronsard ever composed, these poems advocate for a particularly brutal treatment of royal enemies. Harkening back to the Imprecatory Psalms, the "Prière à Dieu pour la victoire" (1569), presumably written before the battle of Montcontour and published as a separate pamphlet a few days later, expresses the hope that during the upcoming battle the enemies of the crown will be butchered and dismembered, "sanglant de mille coups persé[s]" (v. 3; bleeding from being pierced by a thousand blows), "sans bras, sans teste" (vv. 15–16; armless, headless). The poem expresses the hope that Charles's younger brother and lieutenant general, the Duke of Anjou (and the future Henri III), will celebrate their future victory with a parade of their enemies:
Ô TOUT-PUISSANT, donne que nostre Prince Sans compagnon maistrise sa province:
O ALL-POWERFUL ONE, grant that our Prince Without equal might bring his domain under control:
In this fantasized textual version of an ancient triumphal entry, the march through Paris commemorates the humiliation of the enemy as much as it commemorates royal power. The act of dragging the enemy behind a chariot brings to mind two epic examples of humiliating the enemy: first, the relentless vengeance of Achilles when he does much the same to Hector in Iliad 22, and second, the parade of Augustus's defeated enemies on the shield of Aeneas (8:723–28). Like these examples, the king and his brother reestablish order through violence and put those who do not submit on display as an affirmation of their power. While depicting the public humiliation of the defeated enemy, the poem is itself a kind of display that enacts a dismembering of enemy bodies in order to rebuild and refound a political body under the aegis of the king and his brother. However, the "Prière à Dieu pour la victoire" not only publicizes the imagined violent death of the enemy; it also proposes the erasure of the future memory of those who oppose the king, so that no trace of them remains:
Donne, SEIGNEUR, que l'infidelle armée Soit par soy-mesme en son sang consumée:
Grant, LORD, that the infidel army Might destroy itself in its own blood:
Ideally, then, the royal forces will not only defeat and humiliate the enemy; they will erase the enemy entirely. "Sans grace et sans misericorde," the Valois cannot count Christian clemency among their virtues. Similarly, in another poem of the same era, the "Elemens ennemis de l'hydre" (1569), the narrator asks that the body of Protestant Admiral Gaspard de Coligny be devoured by wild animals or that his remains be scattered to the wind so that no memory of him survives for posterity: "Que de son histoire / Ne soit jamais ny livre ny memoire" (vv. 73–74; That there will be neither a book nor a memory of his story). The construction "ny livre ny memoire" grants the same weight to both terms: indeed, the absence of a book bearing Coligny's name — the lack of a written mark — for Coligny is the absence of memory.
Andrea Frisch has already identified what she has aptly termed "une poétique de l'oubli" (a poetics of oblivion) in these poems, a poetics that begins in Ronsard's earlier poems from Discours des misères de ce temps. She argues that in the political poems that Ronsard composed in response to the French Wars of Religion, he progressively erases the wars, thus denying them a place in collective memory. She observes that this call for the erasure of Coligny and other royal enemies carries particular weight in the work of Ronsard. Throughout his career, the poet conceives of memory primarily in terms of its written form, and as Nicolas Russell has observed, "when he thematizes poetic immortality, he most often associates it with written texts through words such as encre, papier, plume, livre, and escriture." Conversely, as these poems indicate, a lack of commemorative monuments like tombs and temples — or, more importantly for Ronsard, the lack of commemorative writing about the subject — will ensure a perpetual forgetting of his subject. In these poems of the Third War of Religion, the Protestant Coligny and his associates will soon be dead, and the absence of commemoration of their deeds will deprive them of a past and a future. The worst punishment that Ronsard can imagine, it seems, is eternal forgetting. Thus, in these poems, Ronsard posits the forgetting and erasure of the enemy as purposeful acts that shape the memory of those who read these poems as much as commemoration itself could, as Frisch observes: "Les vers servent à faire oublier leur propre sujet, à faire mourir sa renommée en refusant de raconter son histoire" (The verses serve to make one forget their own subject, to make his or her fame die by refusing to recount his or her story).
These poems of erasure, however, also have an unexpected connection to Ronsard's epic project. A third poem from 1569, "L'hydre desfaict," presents the Duke of Anjou as a hero whose deeds make him comparable to Achilles and Hercules. Like Achilles, Henri faced a tumultuous political situation and vanquished the enemy, facing the mutiny of "la France estonnée / De factions de troubles et menée / Sans frein sans bride" (vv. 67–69; France stunned / by factions of unrest and led / without bit or bridle). Like Hercules, Henri has successfully defeated a hydra: "Or ce Henry a fait chose impossible, / Tuant un Hydre au combat invincible" (vv. 91–92; Yet this Henry did an impossible thing, / Killing a Hydra invincible in combat). This hydra, as it turns out, represents Protestant leadership, and Henri has cut of all of its "heads" save one: Coligny, who escaped after being defeated. The narrator implores Henri to finish his work by destroying Coligny's body and putting it on display:
Il faut, mon Duc, la despouille attacher Toute sanglante au dessus de la porte Du Temple sainct, dont les pierres je porte Que Calliope ourdist de son marteau Non gueres loin où Loire de son eau Baigne de Tours ses rives solitaires,
It is necessary, my Duke, to attach the hide All bloody above the door Of the holy Temple, whose stones I carry That Calliope crafts with her hammer Not far from the Loire whose water Bathes the solitary banks of Tours And will be called THE TEMPLE OF THE TWO BROTHERS.
(Continues…)
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