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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Biblio 17
- Sprache: Englisch
This new approach to Malherbe's odes interweaves political, cultural, rhetorical, and literary history to show how they constitute a unified sequence whose ambition is to forge a new national community in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, dislodging Malherbe from his moribund critical reception as a grammarian and technician and recovering the brilliance of a poetic genius whose political mythmaking stems from an impassioned patriotism.
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Michael Taormina
Amphion Orator
How the Royal Odes of François de Malherbe Reimagine the French Nation
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag Tübingen
Cover Image: “Amphion, Builder of Thebes.” Illustration from Michel de Marolles, Temple des Muses (Paris, Nicolas Langlois: 1655). Printed by Cornelis Bloemaert and Theodor Matham, after Abraham van Diepenbeeck, circa 1635. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
© 2021 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de • [email protected]
Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.
ISBN 978-3-8233-8464-9 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-8233-0249-0 (ePub)
Contents
movit Amphion lapides canendo
[Amphion moved the stones with his singing]
Horace, Odes 3.11.2
La migliore fortezza che sia, è non essere odiato dal populo; perché, ancora che tu abbi le fortezze, et il populo ti abbi in odio, le non ti salvono.
[The best fortress in the world is not to be hated by the people, because even fortresses will not save you if you are hated.]
Machiavelli, Il Principe [The Prince]
Ce miel attique, cest à dire une oraison perfaictement elabouree, ornee de graves et sages sentences, embellie de belles paroles, où la raison et la verité, illustrees par leur propre et plus riche ornement, reluisent en une splendeur admirable.
[Attic honey, that is, a perfectly composed oration, adorned with grave and wise thoughts, embellished with beautiful diction, where reason and truth, illustrated by the proper and richest ornamentation, radiate with a wondrous splendor.]
Du Vair, De l’eloquence françoise
[Of French Eloquence]
ὥσπερ οὖν ὁ πλωτὴρ εἷς τις τῶν κοινωνῶν ἐστιν, οὕτω καὶ τὸν πολίτην φαμέν.
[Just as a sailor is a member of an association, so too is a citizen].
Aristotle, PoliticsAristotlePolitics 3.4 1276b20,
trans. Ernest Barker.
To Jennifer
my love, my life, my light
Preface
epideictic speakinggenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)This is a book about the corpus of encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry odes that François de Malherbe composed for the Bourbons between 1600 and 1627. It seeks to make an original contribution to Malherbe studies in showing how this series of poems constitutes a unified sequence whose highest ambition is to reimagine the French nation nation in the aftermath of the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion (1562-1598). The broader political and cultural issues that the argument marshals for support grew organically out of the demands of close-reading such complex masterpieces. It has been necessary to gather critical insights from scholarship in the areas of political history, absolutist theory, literary patronage, noble identitynobilityidentity, the history of eloquenceeloquence, and mythologymythology to reclaim the patriotic voice of a poet reduced to a technician by generations of literary critics.
emphasisfigures of thoughtIn trying to make sense of these magnificent literary artifacts, I realized that Malherbe was not simply fashioning a positive public imageimagepublic image for the monarch and shoring up the symbolic power of the monarchy, but was also revising the myths and symbolsnationmyths and symbols of of the French nationnation, whose unifying thread in the odes is no longer the Catholic faith but loyalty and service to king and country. That seemed to me an interesting focus because it upended the formalist approach that has dominated criticism of Malherbe’s poetry. For that reason I have been obliged to investigate the issue of French nationnationhood, although in retrospect I would have preferred to avoid it since it has proved a rather vexed topic. Historians and critics alike acknowledge that there is no scientific definition of a nationnation and disagree about the time and conditions of its emergence in France.1 Accordingly, I feel that I must offer the following caveat right from the start: it has not been my intention to write a chapter in the history of French nationnationhood, and this book does not aim to demystify the royal odes’ ideological construction of the French nationnation.
elocutiostyleBoth projects have already been undertaken by Marcus KellerKeller, Marcus in Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650). KellerKeller, Marcus deserves credit for seeing that Malherbe’s odes could easily be placed in the “series of ideological struggles over the meaning and limits of community” that Timothy Hampton so brilliantly charts in Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France. Despite his avowed chronological limits, Hampton’s powerful theoretical framework and deep historical knowledge suggest several productive points of contact with Malherbe’s royal odes: these latter construct an image of the nationimageof the nation; define the national communitynationnational community in terms of an in-group and various out-groups; search for “a way of expressing new forms of collective experience from within a vocabulary rooted in [waning] institutions” (Hampton 11); mobilize figurative language in the service of centralized power to define the limits of the national communitynationnational community; and, to that end, allegorize prior events and stories to insert them in a new history. KellerKeller, Marcus, freely acknowledging his indebtedness, builds on Hampton’s analysis of the ways in which the figural language of literary texts mediates the historical gestation of the nationnation-state while it at the same time registers the violent struggle, physical or ideological, over “the identity and constitution of community that accompany the emergence of modern nationnationhood” (Hampton 28).
deliberative speakinggenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)Hampton and KellerKeller, Marcus, however, both treat the entwined evolution of the nationnation and the state in early modern France as a “pre-history” to nationnationalism and the modern nationnation-state. In my view, such a long historical arc devalues the creative and imaginative response of artists like Malherbe to the contingent events of their time. Hampton’s and KellerKeller, Marcus’s analysis performs a great service by unmasking the self-serving teleological and revisionist history of nationalist ideology, and yet their approach does not fully resist the temptation to read early modern texts in light of later socio-political categories and developments. It fits within a standard historical narrative that assumes more political centralization than probably existed in sixteenth-century France, presupposes Renaissance literary culture to be secular and autonomous and, therefore, distinct from rhetoric and ideology, imports from later nationalisms such defining criteria as racial purity and nationnational spirit (KellerKeller, Marcus 108), and generally emphasizes nationalist concerns with “language, space, and charactercharacterethos” (Hampton 9).2 In particular, I fail to see how the notion of “nationnational charactercharacter” that appears in the royal odes may be equated with “soul” or “spirit” (KellerKeller, Marcus 5). While there is allegedly a spirit watching over the king and the French nationnation, Malherbe’s nationnational charactercharacter is neither ontological nor metaphysical. It is ethical. The significant interpretive divergences I have with KellerKeller, Marcus stem from his avowed aim of “charting the ideological grounds on which the modern nationnation-state takes shape,” which he sees fit to anchor in “Etienne Balibar’s theory of the nationnation form and some propositions on the idea of nationhood by postcolonial critics” (KellerKeller, Marcus 5-6). “Fictive ethnicity,” for instance, is much less prominent in the royal odes than the notion of public goodcommonwealthpublic good, common interestcommonwealthcommon interest, or commonwealthcommonwealth. Nor does the postcolonial rejection of teleology and transcendence sit well with early modern cultural assumptions. My approach is thus more narrowly historical, more synchronic, and less worried about the “Medusa-like power to fascinate” (Hampton 27) that early modern literature and poetry may exert over readers too willing to accept their ideological claims. I have no stake in Malherbe’s construction of French nationnationhood, and the complexity of the task I found myself engaged in—discovering the grand tapestry of the royal odes, contextualizing the various threads, and showing how they all seamlessly fit together—was so overwhelming that it precluded the critical distance needed to deconstruct Malherbe’s nationnational ideology.
characters of stylestyleIn my view, France in the late sixteenth century was not yet a nationnation-state, but it was a nationnation, or at least had achieved sufficient national consciousnessnationnational consciousness to enter a period of dire crisis when, as Mack P. HoltHolt, Mack P. writes in Renaissance and Reformation France, “the advent of ProtestantProtestantism in the 1540s … shattered the unity of religion” and “led to the contesting of the monarchy itself” (HoltHolt, Mack P. 23). The Catholic faith and the monarchy were the two strongest unifying threads in the nationnational tapestry. Four decades of civil war did not succeed in destroying the French state, although it was teetering on the brink, but the 1580s and 90s did witness the emergence of competing ideas of the nationnation. By 1600, Catholic orthodoxy could no longer play the role it once did in nationnational identity. Loyalty to the king and to the commonwealthcommonwealth had gained the upper hand. HoltHolt, Mack P. does not dispute the consensus view that the sixteenth century is the crucial period when the transformation of France into a nationnation-state “first took root” (HoltHolt, Mack P. 2), but he significantly postpones its full-blown emergence until sometime after the Fronde (1648-1652). In 1600, therefore, the monarchy still had major problems to solve before the state could achieve its full strength, and the composition of the French nationnation was still in abeyance.
Malherbe’s reimagining of the French nationnation, it follows, does not represent a precocious step toward the secular nation-state. Rather, his de-emphasis of religious orthodoxy and his choice of new myths and images for the nationnation are a creative response to the rich and confusing national tapestry that was inherited from the late Middles Ages and badly damaged in the late sixteenth century. As Colette Beaune amply demonstrates in The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbolsnationmyths and symbols of of Nation in Late-Medieval France, the consciousness of belonging to a nationnation was “entwined” with the precarious rise of the House of France (Beaune 311) and fostered by the veneration of saints and kings. Its traces are attested in the liturgies, hagiographies, and histories composed by medieval clerics and royal propagandists responding to the changing political environment. There was nothing accidental about it. A shifting web of shared myths and symbolsnationmyths and symbols of gradually and deliberately enveloped disparate cities, towns, and regions by fueling a collective sense of exceptionalism for the kings, the kingdom, and the peoples of medieval France. It was propagated from the Paris basin, though “its slow evolution was far from continuous or unrelenting” (Beaune 314). “Different areas of France were moved by national ideology at different times” (Beaune 323). Unlike most modern nationnation-states, the sacred was the basis for this collective identity, which may be encapsulated by the term Most Christian, “applied without distinction to the French king, the people, and the territory” (Beaune 192). The emergence of an imagined community in France, with some of the basic features of a nationnation, did not have to wait for the waning of religious belief.3
allegoryfigures of thoughtThere are several characteristics of nationnations recognizable in the wealth of material that Beaune mines from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. First, the French nation was thought to be chosen by God.4 Such a notion stresses the continuity of the past with the present and posits a destiny to be realized in the future. Saint Remigius was alleged to have promised that the kingdom of Clovis would triumph over all other rival nationnations as long as it adhered to the true faith (Beaune 181), while successive generations of commentators elided the kingdom’s ethnic and cultural diversity as well as prior political differences to forge the vision of a unified chosen people, a New Israel, “the people of the New Alliance” (Beaune 180). Second, the French nationnation claimed autonomy. The mythical continuity of the royal bloodline (single, pure, sacred, perpetual) from Clovis onward set the kings and the kingdom of France “above the claims of the Church and the Imperium” (Beaune 172). Third, it inspired acts of patriotismpatriotism and xenophobia. As early as 1124 something akin to national sentimentnationnational sentiment was responsible for the spontaneous and unexpected baronial support of Louis VI against Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor. In the fifteenth century, a surge of collective identity swept over parts of France that was tied to the veneration of Saint Michael. Charles VII had turned from Saint Denis to venerate the warrior angel as early as 1418, while royalist armies after the “miraculous” victory at Orleans in 1429 reported sightings of a rider holding an unsheathed sword in the sky and took to processing “behind the banner of Michael’s white cross, like masses of reverent pilgrims” (Beaune 158-159, 18). The crusades to the Holy Land and the persecution of Jews and heretics were the negative flipside to this growing consciousness of French exceptionalism.5 Fourth, the net result of various medieval stories tracing the origins of the Gauls and Franks to the mythical city of TroyTroy was to create a common ancestry, “to root nationnational solidarity in a thick soil of blood ties” (Beaune 226). Such myths promoted the unity of north and south, the three estates, noble and commoner, kings and subjects. They made of the peoples of France a vast clan whose shared and ancient lineage ennobled them, argued for their moral and cultural superiority, and justified their political independence from England, Rome, and the Germanic Empire. Finally, the resistance of nobles and commoners to royal taxation and administrative centralization beginning in the mid-fourteenth century presupposes a developed consciousness of solidarity independent of loyalty to the monarchy. In the War of the Public WealcommonwealthPublic Weal (1465), the question was whether the king and the centralized state were the sole protectors of the public goodcommonwealthpublic good: great nobles asserted that “the commonwealthcommonwealth stood above the king” and that they shared responsibility for its protection (Collins, “State Building” 612). Theoretically, the king defended the public goodcommonwealthpublic good, and when one fought for the king, one fought for both. Occasionally, however, the public goodcommonwealthpublic good could be evoked against private interests, even those of the king, especially if the king’s policy were perceived to be unjust (Collins, “State Building” 617). The goodcommonwealththe good of the French nationnation was then identifiable with the commonwealthcommonwealth, “those interests common to all households living in a given politypolity” (Collins, “State Building” 608).
political eloquencegenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)The issue, therefore, is not whether a French nationnation existed in the early modern period, but whether a sufficient number of people believed that it did and behaved as if it did.6 We know that it was not a pure fiction because material traces of the conditions of its existence persist, but there were indeed phantasmic components that made it, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an imagined community. One of the primary tasks of this book has been to historicize and to analyze the myths and images contained in Malherbe’s royal odes which would have contributed to the reimagining of the national communitynationnational community—if contemporary readers had been up to the task and bought into them. I take no firm position on whether they did, although I suspect that most did not. By all appearances Malherbe’s vision for the French nationnation was overtaken by events and swept aside for other more compelling imagined communities.
If the particulars of medieval French nationnationhood constitute the symbolic strata against which to compare and to appreciate the imagined community of the royal odes, it is because Malherbe was uprooting and planting in the same medieval soil as his sixteenth-century predecessors. The significant social and political developments that separate Malherbe from his Renaissance counterparts are what account for the noticeable differences in their political and esthetic commitments. One must remember that Malherbe was writing from the other side of the religious warsreligious wars. Henri IV had managed to tamp down the violence and to win the peace by 1600. The first royal odes were thus composed not only against the backdrop of the crisis of nationnational identity, but also in the afterglow of the patriotic feelingpatriotismpatriotic feeling, fervor, sentiment that surged through France in the 1580s and 90s, a phenomenon that echoes previous waves of nationnational pride, notably Bouvines (1214) and Orleans (1429). In addition, the support that Henri IV enjoyed among noble elites and the people, and the profound lassitude with the destruction caused by civil conflict, created a reservoir of goodwill and fostered a general spirit of reconciliation. Pockets of resistance and mistrust were the exception that proved the rule. Therefore, in their inception, the royal odes partake of this eagerness to bury the past and to move forward, striving to erect a linguistic monumentmonuments whose universal eloquenceeloquence will move, with persuasive arguments and powerful emotionemotions, the hearts and minds of French subjects of every ideological stripe to rejoin the nationnational fabric. Malherbe’s royal odes reflect the blurring of the boundaries between rhetoric and poetry, or between literature and propaganda, that occurred during the Wars of Religion, and they echo arguments, opinions, affects, and images found in the polemical pamphlet literature that arose to spread the ideology and propaganda of the competing religious factions.7 An important difference between these pamphlets and the odes, however, is that the latter are less concerned with an ontology of Frenchness. Rather, what they seek to instill is an ethical commitment to king and commonwealthcommonwealth. While they crucially offer up alternative imagesimage of the king, the monarchypolitymonarchy, and the nationnation, it is less a question of representation than persuasion.ethosēthosproof The nationnational ethosethos they ethosmegalopsychosmagnanimitypropose for the nationnation is not the result of blood, soil, or climate, but is the product of consent and choice. Their figural language is not about resisting a collective identity or critiquing the claims of a centralized monarchy. On the contrary, it seeks to inspire subjects with the sense of belonging to a new national communitynationnational community, with a sense of loyalty to the crown and to fellow subjects, and with hatred for enemies of the state. The Other in the royal odes is less an object of fear than of hatred and anger—it is an enemy, domestic or foreign, that must be expelled from the body politicbody politic for the return of the Golden AgeGolden Age to begin. The royal odes are thus about closing ranks, consolidating gains, and questhero cyclequesting for greatness. If in the sixteenth century, as Timothy Hampton notes, generic and rhetorical multiplicity is the imaginative response to “the breakdown of community” (Hampton ix, 28-29), the royal odes respond in contrary fashion with an elaborate and intricate unity—a “higher, hidden order,” to borrow the phrase from David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee, one of Malherbe’s most perceptive readers. The rhetorical and esthetic unity of the odes prefigures, if only in the symbolic order, the national unitynationnational unity they seek to bring about.
virtueintellectualphronēsisSuch are the reasons why the arguments of this book do not constitute a chapter in the deconstruction of French nationnationhood. Rather than critique Malherbe’s ideology of the nationnation, or tease out its puzzles and contradictions, I have tried to assemble all the threads of the imaginary nationnational tapestry composed by the royal odes and to describe the grand tableau without losing sight of the details and their proper contexts. It follows that the construction of the French nationnation by the royal odes has been analyzed using their own terms for the sake of demonstrating the sequence’s amazing unity. The primary intention has been to share with contemporary readers my sincere and profound admiration for Malherbe’s poetic artistry. In the process, however, I believe this book has uncovered surprising and significant connections to the most contested notions of early modern France (i.e. nationnational and religious identity, nobiliary identity, absolutismabsolutism, female kingship, literary autonomy, etc.), which receive novel and, in some cases, prescient formulations in the royal odes. The highest compliment this book could be paid would be for its historical and rhetorical analyses to inform future critiques of French nationnational ideology.
Introduction
great soulmagnanimityFrançois de Malherbe (1555-1628) is one of France’s greatest poets. Between 1600 and 1627, he published a series of encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry odes whose grandstylegrandeur and complexity are unmatched in the history of French literature. Although Malherbe is arguably the most influential lyriclyric poetry poet of seventeenth-century France, his legacy is puzzling for a twenty-first-century reader. A poetic doctrine bears his name, yet he never wrote it down. He is renowned for his strict rules of versification, yet one of his mentors, Du PerronDu Perron, a lesser poet, more skillfully composes meters.1 He supposedly rejected far-fetched metaphormetaphors, dense and convoluted syntax, and obscure mythological allusions, yet these pervade his poetry. The royal odes have been praised for their harmony, logic, and majesty, and disparaged for their disorder, formalism, and dullness. Their loftiest ambition is to forge a new nationnation after the Wars of Religion; yet Malherbe allegedly scoffed at poets in private conversation, famously ridiculing himself and his peers as “excellent arrangers of syllables” (Racan, Malherbe 34). His celebrated translation of the letters of SenecaSeneca between 1601 and 1605 reflects the shift in French eloquenceeloquence toward the “classical compromise,” which balances judgment and invention, citation and imitation, argument and style.2 Yet Malherbe’s mature poetic style embodies the CiceroCiceronian AtticismCiceroAtticism described by Du VairDu Vair in De l’éloquence françoise [On French Eloquence] (1594), albeit tinged with the plainstyleplainer variety of HellenisticstyleHellenisticgrandstylegrandeur that was flourishing in contemporary sacredeloquencesacred oratory oratory. Malherbe was a provincial noble educated for a career in the magistracy, yet his odes aspire to achieve a universal eloquenceeloquence that transcends the idioms of caste and region and surmounts the vicissitudes of history.
imagoimageThis book does not propose to unravel such a Gordian knot. Rather, it by-passes the circular dead end in which Malherbe studies languished until fairly recently.3 The formalist impulses of twentieth-century criticism, bolstered by testimony cherry-picked from Malherbe and his contemporaries, encouraged successive generations of literary historians to reduce the poet to a technician.4 This assessment must have had the appearance of self-evidence, echoing as it does early criticism of Malherbe’s poetry. Chapelain famously wrote that it lacked genius and inspiration, an opinion which gained wider acceptance as the seventeenth century progressed.5 The view of Malherbe as a fastidious versifier also confirmed the modern prejudice that early seventeenth-century poetry was merely a game, while a poet was, in Malherbe’s own words, “‘pas plus utile à l’État qu’un bon joueur de quilles’” [no more useful to the State than a good player of skittles] (Racan, Malherbe 37). This book, however, rejects the view of the royal odes as mere sophistical argument or playfulness. Instead, it recognizes them as an earnest response to the political challenges facing the new Bourbon dynasty, and thus it takes seriously their ideological mission, attending to their rational persuasion and emotionemotional power. What pulls them more toward oratory and away from sophistry is the way they subordinate their esthetic achievement, and their desire for glory and applause, to the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the monarchy and the nationnation.
judicial speakinggenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)The present reexamination of Malherbe’s royal odes has been made possible in large part by the scholarly recovery of the rhetorical tradition in early modern France. As Marc FumaroliFumaroli, Marc writes in the preface to his magisterial L’Âge de l’éloquence: Rhétorique et ‘res literataria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique: “Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, traverses social, political, and religious spheres, embracing and capturing all human experience without sacrificing its connections to philosophy, law, ethics, and theology” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge x). “Evolving with the passage of time, this mother of all structures presents the historian with the advantage of accounting for tradition, recurrence, and re-use” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge ii). Although poetry was classified, taught, and practiced as a branch of rhetoric, literary critics have yet to think systematically about the rhetorical strategies and tactics of Malherbe’s royal odes. Even FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s history of French eloquenceeloquence overlooks these magnificent poems, reducing Malherbe to the influence of his celebrated stylistic reforms. In FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s eyes, French poetry in the age of eloquence is an ornament of power, a benign form of sophistry, removed from the real battles of public life. Following the success of Ronsard, it had only just hoisted itself to cultural and political prominence through emulation of Greek and Latin models (Italian models played a significant role as well), and even so, the membership and prestige of ancient poets in the res literaria [literary canon] depended entirely on their eloquenceeloquence, that is, their poetry’s perceived stylistic power and beauty, especially to the extent that these were invested with social, political, or religious value.
FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s point is well taken, but Malherbe’s royal odes aspire to much more. Although encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry in nature, they stake out clear positions in political matters. Their debt to artistic pistis, pisteisproofpersuasion (pisteisproofartistic (pistis, pisteis, pl.): logosprooflogos, ēthosproofēthos, pathosproofpathos) situates them in the Aristotelian tradition, where rhetoric has always maintained a close relationship to practical reasonphronēsispractical reason (phronēsisphronēsis).6 When we take seriously the idea that Malherbe’s royal odes partake of both rhetoric and poetry, it becomes possible to ascertain how much these poems share in common with “ethical and political activities that are matters of virtuevirtue” (GarverGarver, Eugene 7). Although eloquenceeloquence, the highest accomplishment of rhetoric, is often, and erroneously, reduced to questions of style (Gr. lexis, L. elocutiostyleelocutio), it has in fact always depended on broader and more fundamental principles: 1. an external purpose given by the social context in which public speaking is practiced; 2. expert knowledge of the artistic means to achieve the goals of the speech; and 3. the speaker’s close attention to the historical particulars of the occasion. Again, to cite FumaroliFumaroli, Marc: “All rhetoric implies a sociology of social roles and of the institutions in which these roles acquire meaning” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge iii). Therefore, when one examines Malherbe’s royal odes through the prism of their eloquenceeloquence, one is forced to treat them as more than well-wrought urns whose classical allusions are purely decorative. To reexamine the odes from this perspective is to insist that any historically grounded reading of them must also take into account—besides their noteworthy style—their purpose and goals, the substance and modes of their argumentation, their emotionemotional force, and their conception of audience, real or imagined. Such is the undertaking of this book.
logosproofThe first and most apparent goal of Malherbe’s royal odes was to inspire literate contemporaries with admiration for the early Bourbon monarchs: Henri IV, “Qui ne confesse qu’Hercule / Fut moins Hercule que toi” [Who does not admit that HerculesHercules / Was less HerculesHercules than you] (“Ode au feu Roi sur l’heureux succès du voyage de Sedan,” vv. 99-100); Marie de Médicis,7 “C’est Pallas que cette Marie, / Par qui nous sommes gouvernés” [She is Pallas AthenaAthena, this Marie / By whom we are governed] (“Pour la Reine mère du roi pendant sa régence,” vv. 179-180); and Louis XIII, “Prends ta foudre, Louis, et va comme un lion / Donner le dernier coup à la dernière tête / De la rébellion” [Take your thunderbolt, Louis, and like a lion, / Deliver the last blow to the last head / Of the rebellion] (“Pour le Roi allant châtier la rébellion des Rochelois,” vv. 2-4). Such mythic heroization, more than mere exaggeration and flattery, aimed to produce awe and reverence. These were the proper feelings for a subject to have toward his or her monarch, and they were weakened, if not destroyed, during the religious warsreligious wars. Catholics and ProtestantProtestants, in their zeal to prevail ideologically and militarily over their adversaries, flouted royal authority and developed theories of sovereignty exploring justifications of principled disobedience and even regicide (especially on two occasions, after the Saint-Bartholomew massacre in 1572, and following Henri III’s assassination of the Guise brothers in 1588). This change of attitude could be characterized as a prerevolutionary desacralizationdesacralization, that is, the effacement of the divine aura attaching to Henri III and the unintended abdication of his role as leader of the French Church and defender of Catholic orthodoxy. Henri IV, a newcomer to the throne, publicly reviled as a relapsed heretic, would have wanted to reclaim this aura of sacrality for himself and his kingship, however problematic that may have appeared to contemporaries. When he abjured his ProtestantProtestantism in 1593, he could have been heeding the dictates of his conscience, or he could have been heeding Machiavelli’s well-known advice to a ruler who wished to consolidate his power. In any event, the new king would have wanted not to be hated, but rather to be feared and loved. Thus the first relationship which the odes seek to repair, between monarch and subject, rests on a complex network of ambivalent feelings: fear and love, but also dread, awe, and reverence. Such affects informed the early modern experience of admiration, that is to say, wonderwonder.8 The emotions inspired by divinity, miracles, unknown peoples and nationnations, and powerful natural phenomena were also provoked by royal majesty. A monarch’s ability to astonish reinforced this power (BiesterBiester, James 10). Because the prestige of wonderwonder extended “throughout Europe, in disciplines and activities ranging from rhetoric and poetry to philosophy and theology, from outward colonial enterprise to internal competition for power and patronage” (BiesterBiester, James 9), the textual and cultural genealogy developed by BiesterBiester, James, set against the sociology of Marc FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s L’Âge de l’éloquence, sheds valuable light on the political functions of wonderwonder in early seventeenth-century France and its rhetorical production in Malherbe’s royal odes, allowances made, of course, for changed sociopolitical circumstances and, therefore, distinct purposes and artistic means.
megalopsychosmagnanimityEvery one of Malherbe’s odes contains at least one term related to wonderwonder (merveille, miracle, étonnement), while the events and the deeds they describe, not to mention the rhetorical devices they use, are deeply infused with this protean emotion. Aligned with Henri’s broader ideological program, this poetic production of wonderwonder has two purposes. The first is to demobilize political resistance to the Bourbons. Contemplative feelings inspired by the miraculous turn of events, by the extraordinary virtuevirtue of the historical actors, or by the inscrutable destiny of France, transform both greater and lesser subjects into spectators whose fear and reverence encourage them to accept forces beyond their control. The second purpose, more active, is to transport the subject “beyond logical demonstration” (BiesterBiester, James 44). Such emotionemotional force serves the loftier ambitions of the royal odes, namely to renovate the monarchy and to instill a sense of unity in a fractured nationnation.
pathosproofThe goal of inspiring subjects with feelings of wonderwonder for the Bourbons is indeed an attempt to sacralize, or re-sacralize, the new monarchs. However, such sacralization was filtered through a reinvigorated national sentimentnationnational sentiment in the early seventeenth century, and to that end, the royal odes aimed to restore the prestige and authority of the monarchy itself:
Le fameux Amphion, dont la voix nonpareille,
Bâtissant une ville étonna l’univers,
Quelque bruit qu’il ait eu, n’a point fait de merveille
Que ne fassent mes vers. (vv. 149-156)
[The famous Amphion, whose incomparable voice / Astonished the universe by building a city, / Whatever fame he may have had, has not accomplished any greater wonder / Than my own verse.]
Taken from the final ode of the sequence, “Ode pour le roi allant châtier la rébellion des Rochelois” (1627; 1635), this stanza looks back on Malherbe’s career and asks the reader to rate his achievement as no less marvelous than AmphionAmphion building the walls of Thebes. By grounding the unity of the nationnation inpatrienation something other than the Catholic faith, the royal odes claim they have erected ideological ramparts around the monarchy more effective than any physical wall. The stones, as it were, are the hearts of the French people moved by the odes’ eloquenceeloquence and henceforth united in support of an ethnically French monarchy, as required by the Salic Law. The mythical city that the odes claim to have built represents the new nationnation. Of course, it is less a place or a territory than an imagined community expressed in the form of a patriotic ethospatriotismpatriotic ethos modeled on the monarch, the nationnation’s protector and embodiment, and defined as loyalty and service pro rege et patriapro rege et patria [for king and fatherland].9 The creation of this new national communitynationnational community bound by affective ties between monarch and subject, as well as among subjects, is the highest purpose and final end at which the royal odes take aim.
King, monarchy, nationnation: the odes indeed reimagine all three. A new image for the monarch presupposes a new image of the monarchyimageof the monarchy, and this in turn rests on a new image of the nationimageof the nation. The first two are evident in the odes; the last is more difficult to perceive. Nowhere do the odes use the term patrienationla patrie [fatherland; nationnation; country], a neologism in sixteenth-century France. Instead, they use the collective “nous” [we, us], sometimes refer to “France” and “les Français” [the French], and mention recognizable enemies of the monarchy and the French: “Espagne” [Spain], “les Anglais” [the English], the Holy Roman Empire (“l’aigle”), the Ottoman Empire (“l’infidèle Croissant” [infidel Crescent]), and a few minor antagonists. However, the concept is always there, lurking like a noumenal ground requiring close reading, logical inference, and affective sensibility to be apprehended. The excellence, remoteness, and knowability of the nationnation in the royal odes belongs to the same “‘ancient dilemma of knowledge and representation’” affecting the objects of faith in sacredeloquencesacred oratory oratory.10 Similar to a Christian orator charged with bringing the objects of faith, the most remote and the most worth knowing, into some kind of relationship with what human beings are able to grasp, Malherbe uses mythologymythology and figures of thoughtfigures of thought to strike the imagination of his contemporaries and fill their hearts with emotionemotions attaching them to the new national communitynationnational community. The words “étonner” (to astonish) and “merveille” (marvel, wonderwonder) of the somewhat obscure analogyproofanalogy in the stanza above (Malherbe : nationnation :: AmphionAmphion : Thebes) indicate which feelings contemporary readers—including a young Louis XIII—were supposed to experience once they had solved the stanza’s riddle and—only then—accurately reckoned the central role that the royal odes allege to have played in the rebirth of France following the Wars of Religion.
The Malherbe that emerges from this interpretation of the odes is still the consummate craftcraftsman, but one who also dared to claim a political voice for himself. The mythological figure of AmphionAmphion symbolically reunites the disunion that CiceroCicero lamented in De OratoreCiceroDe Oratore (1.8.33-44), the divorce of phronēsisphronēsis from eloquenceeloquence, ofpractical reasonphronēsis the practical wisdomphronēsisman of action from the man of words. What substitutes for this lost unity is the dyad of monarch and poet, which the royal odes recoup from the social practice of literary patronage. When Henri IV selected Malherbe, in his capacity as poet, to speak for the new dynasty, he did so knowingly and purposely. This alliance of king and poet marked a return to a normal state of affairs following the religious warsreligious wars.
One must recall that poetry at this time had not yet achieved literary autonomy. Poets relied on royal and aristocratic patrons for financial and political protection, and this dependence forced poets to straddle conceptually distinct categories: poetry and politics, eloquenceeloquence and virtuevirtue, and two kinds of ethosethos—the rhetorical and the moral. How did these arrangements work? As Peter W. Shoemaker so beautifully explains in Powerful Connections: The Poetics of Patronage in the Age of Louis XIII, the monarch, members of the royal family, powerful nobles and prelates, and upwardly mobile bourgeois, all seeking the prestige conferred by belles-lettres, collaborated with poets to use poetry in the service of social standing and political influence. They looked to poetry to craft idealized representations of their characterethoscharacter—a kind of public imageimagepublic image destined for their literate peers—while poets did not miss the opportunity to use such alliances to promote their own work, often portraying themselves in similarly idealized terms. No longer mystics, prophets, or religious militants, early seventeenth-century poets became spokespersons addressing elites on behalf of elites. Malherbe was not the first but certainly the most visible to turn away from the humanist audience of Ronsard toward courtcourt (royal)ly elites, which by default included in their numbers some erudite Gallicans and Jesuits but were composed mostly of relatively uneducated aristocratic connoisseurs of belles-lettres.
In the first decade of the seventeenth century, literary patronage was only beginning to get back on its feet. Prolonged military conflict had suppressed the normal levels of literary and cultural production. In his monumental Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, Antoine Adam sneeringly asserts that Henri IV was “profoundly indifferent to literature, concerned only with repairing the country’s finances” (Adam, Histoire vol. 1, 24). But royal finances were in genuine disarray after more than three decades of civil war, and Henri had promised large sums to LeagueLeaguer governors to secure their submission to his authority. Real financial worries motivated Henri IV’s placement of Malherbe not in his own clientele, but that of the duke de BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de. However, without a political use for the poet, such a shrewd politician as Henri IV would not have bothered at all. The first odes, enhancing Henri IV’s personal image, were meant to play a part in the king’s broad and on-going public relations campaign. It was understood that Malherbe was the king’s man.
Henri had acceded to the throne a weak king, mistrusted by political enemies on both sides of the sectarian divide. In his new role, therefore, he took a variety of steps to strengthen his personal authority. Some of these were aggressive policies that fostered state-building and administrative centralization.11 Others involved a drive to remake his public imageimagepublic image: he made a point to be seen praying in every church in Paris; he undertook extensive public building projects; he welcomed the Jesuits back to France; he encouraged royal panegyric. He also took the crucial step of renegotiating his conjugal alliance. Henri had his marriage to Marguerite de Valois annulled, and he wed the ultra-Catholic and fabulously rich Marie de Médicis. Receptions of the new queen in Avignon and in Paris were carefully choreographed events whose idealized images portrayed the sovereign couple as Olympian gods. Similar imagery, though with a different meaning, occurs in Malherbe’s odes.12
After the untimely death of Henri, with Marie de Médicis serving as regent, the particulars of Malherbe’s project changed in a significant way, but the immediate purpose of the odes, as well as their lofty ambition, remained fundamentally unaltered, as the poet now worked to bolster her authority amid noble discontent and rebellion. If Malherbe’s panegyrics lapsed into silence after 1613, it was almost certainly due to the delicate task of navigating the dangerous waters of courtcourt (royal) patronage during a time of growing political instability. The insurrection of Condé in 1614, and the young Louis XIII’s coup d’état in 1617, followed by the exile of Marie de Médicis to Blois, could not have been encouraging signs for the poet, who had published strong support for the queen mother. The difficulty that Malherbe had in getting the royal treasury to pay his stipend could not have helped. Then, after more than a decade, following a tentative rapprochement signaled by a few sonnets, an aging Malherbe composed an ode for Louis XIII, who in 1627 was still consolidating the bases of royal power when he launched the final siege against the last ProtestantProtestant stronghold at La RochelleLa Rochelle. That ode would be Malherbe’s last.
The loftier ambitions of Malherbe’s poetic sequence, namely renovating the monarchypolitymonarchy and uniting the national communitynationnational community, become visible only when the odes are set against the crisis of nationnational identity precipitated by the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion. This sectarian civil war in the second half of the sixteenth century nearly unraveled the tapestry of the French nationnation. In Renaissance and Reformation France, Mack P. HoltHolt, Mack P. observes that the rapid growth of Calvinism in the 1550s and 60s forced the national communitynationnational community of subjects to question the nature of their ties to the king. The traditional sacred oath sworn by the monarch to protect the kingdom from heresy created a destructive double-bind during the Reformation. If the king honored his oath, he was bound to persecute ProtestantProtestants who nevertheless considered themselves to be “good Frenchmen,” that is, loyal to the king and, therefore, still belonging to the national communitynationnational community. For most HuguenotsHuguenots, religious differences were a question of conscience, not of disloyalty. But if the crown appeared to accept peaceful coexistence with them, “then it was very easy for the HuguenotsHuguenots to remain loyal to a king who recognized their legal rights and protected them, while French Catholics’ links to the crown were thus jeopardized by the monarch’s own straying from his constitutional and sacred duty to defend the Catholic religion of his subjects” (HoltHolt, Mack P., Renaissance 26). The Holy LeagueLeague in the 1590s, formed by Catholics wishing to enforce the Catholicity of France, both the crown and the nationnation, grew out of deeply held religious conviction and a genuine “spiritual panic” that unchecked heresy and the evils of civil war presaged God’s disfavor and imminent judgment (Crouzet 75). Hard-line French Catholics, led by the Guises, were genuinely prepared to scrap the Salic Law and accept a Spanish monarch.
The importance of this historical backdrop for Malherbe’s royal odes has not gone unnoticed. Jean-Pierre Chauveau, in Poètes et poésie au XVIIè siècle, acknowledges their participation in the wider artistic and literary effort to restore the unity of the French nationnation in the early decades of the seventeenth century, while in Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650), Marcus KellerKeller, Marcus analyzes their construction of French nationnationhood and offers an insightful, though somewhat anachronistic critique, focusing on the composition of a nationnational “nous” [we] and the key figures that define it. But neither critic examines in a comprehensive way the odes’ rhetorical constitution of the nationnation. The ideological make-over which the royal odes propose for the monarch and the monarchypolitymonarchy, in addition to repairing the vertical relationship between subject and sovereign, also requires that they redefine the complex network of horizontal relationships, among subjects, that constitute the basis of any national communitynationnational community. This unity, while remaining focused on the monarch as protector and embodiment of the nationnation, proceeds from a complex mode of address (ēthos), KellerKeller, Marcus’s national “nous” [we], but the analysis of this ethosproofēthos must push beyond the level of figuration to include the constitutive roles played by argument (logosprooflogos) and emotionemotion (pathosproofpathos). Representation is important to the extent that the odes consistently offer a choice between alternatives: the chaos and destruction of civil war versus the political utopia of Bourbon rule. But that means persuasion is even more crucial. The royal odes propose to unite the diverse subjects of France by moving them both cognitively and emotionally to make the right choice.
The importance to the royal odes of the stoicstoicism revival of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has also been noted. One might think that Malherbe’s sustained engagement with stoicstoicism philosophy, or the image of Henri IV as HerculesHercules, would confirm Denis Crouzet’s sweeping historical argument that the propaganda campaign of royalist Politiques, infused with the tenets of Christian stoicstoicismism, enabled an ethnically French absolutismabsolutism to triumph over LeagueLeaguer demands for European Catholicity.13 But the royal odes do not make a good fit. Besides the fact that they fall back on stoicstoicismism only when disaster strikes, their stoicstoicismism is far from orthodox. Their imagery and argument certainly echo royalist pamphlets of the 1580s and 90s and, in a limited sense, arise from them. Like those Politiques who condemned religiously motivated violence as the surest way to undermine the state, Malherbe clearly places the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the nationnation above confessional loyalties.14 However, contrary to stoicstoicism fatality, the heroism of the royal odes underscores the monarch’s power to shape the outcome of events, while their patriotismpatriotism, contrary to the stoicstoicism condemnation of the passions, seeks to move the French subject with an array of powerful feelings, including anger and hatred. Even in their darkest moments, the royal odes still offer a moral choice, using both rational and irrational means of persuasion to produce the consensual allegiance to king and commonwealthcommonwealth that is at the core of the new national communitynationnational community.
What has escaped the attention of critics is the allegoryfigures of thoughtallegory of the ship of stateship of state that joins the royal odes into a unified sequence. Like the word “patrienationla patrie” [fatherland, nationnation, country], one cannot find anywhere in the odes such a phrase as “le navire de l’État” or “le vaisseau de l’État” [the ship of stateship of state]. Even today it is not a common syntagm in French. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, the analogyproofanalogy was commonplace (see QuintilianQuintilian 8.6.44). The figurative variants of this suppressed semantic nucleus appear in every ode. Such ubiquity raises the reader’s suspicion that the imagery means more than it says, a figure of thought known as emphasisfigures of thoughtemphasis or significatiofigures of thoughtsignificatio (QuintilianQuintilian 8.3.83; 9.2.64; Rhet. ad HerenCiceroRhetorica ad Herennium. 4.53.67 ff.). Provoked by the ship of stateship of state motif, the reader’s active understanding is able to weave a series of odes with loose thematic connections into a fully integrated grand tableau.
The classical allegoryfigures of thoughtallegory, more significantly, constitutes a substantive revision of the traditional myths and symbolsnationmyths and symbols of ofmythologyunderlying myth of the sequence the nationnation. The replacement of the myth of TroyTroy with the ArgoArgo myth redefines the basis for political association in France. It is no longer blood and soil but the collective good that binds the head and members of the body politicbody politic. Such a motif also reflects a de-emphasis of religion. If Henri IV is treated as quasi-divine, it is due to his superlative virtuevirtue, which participates in the virtuevirtue that orders the universe. It is no longer the Church that confers the aura of sacrality, but rather the monarch himself that inflects the sacrality of his mystical bodymystical body (of the king), the patrianationpatria, the nationnation. In the new imagined community, modeled on the Bourbons and guided by them, the unforgiveable crime is therefore no longer heresy but sedition. Continued rebellion against the crown is seen as threatening the safety of the ship, that is, the state, whose wreck will undermine the monarchy, the last unifying thread of the nationnation. It is noteworthy that the royal odes appropriate the all-important task of forging a nationnational identity which traditionally belongs to epicepic poetry poetry. Yet they accomplish it with images and argument rather than narrative, replacing the plot of epicepic poetry fiction with metaphormetaphor and exampleexample, but creating a no less powerful nationnational mythologymythology.
There are several good reasons why these complex poems deserve to be the focus of a book-length study. First, both supporters and detractors of Malherbe’s reputation as the father of French poetry, reformer of the French language, and founder of the Grand Siècle, have looked to the odes time and again to bolster their diametrically opposed arguments. While it is true that Malherbe’s literary preeminence was beginning to wane by mid-century, particular odes would nevertheless remain for many seventeenth-century critics unquestionable models of eloquenceeloquence, nobilitynobility, and finesse.15 Second, as I mentioned, the odes form a unified sequence composed over the course of a quarter century. David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee asserted the thematic unity of the odes, but he never posited that the odes form a unified sequence based on a recurrent intertext, a common ideological goal, and shared rhetorical tools. This books does so. It shows that the sequence as a whole fashions an overarching nationnational mythmythologyunderlying myth of the sequence that imagines the Bourbons as quasi-divine heroes commanding the ship of stateship of state and steering it through the storms of political discord to a new Golden AgeGolden Age, where peace, justicevirtuejustice, and prosperity at home are matched by French hegemony abroad. The major odes in the sequence are well over a hundred lines, and they were, by all accounts, difficult to write and long in the making. Odes were often an easy way to make a splash in the literary world, but Malherbe did not write them simply to get noticed. Rather, the odes themselves, here and there, suggest that they aspire to outdo not just contemporary rivals but ancient models as well. Indeed, and this is the third point, their public occasions, their royal addressees, and their illustrious association with HoraceHorace and Pindar (two of the great models of eloquenceeloquence handed down from antiquity) make the odes a privileged vehicle for the demonstration of la grande éloquence [the grandstylegrand style], the most elevated and powerful genus dicendi [kind of speaking]. This style was so prized by both ancients and early moderns, it was endlessly reinvented by them. Malherbe’s own formulation of the grandstylegrand style would certainly have been credited to the poet’s genius, but showing off the potentialities of the French language would have been even more valuable to the fledgling Bourbon dynasty. The vernacular brought to the height of esthetic perfection in poetry offered an image of the political and moral excellence, and therefore the permanence, to which the French monarchy aspired. Malherbe’s odes strove to set the standard for royaleloquenceroyaleloquenceeloquence in a political and cultural climate where the exact formulation of the style best suited to royal majesty was passionately disputed. 16
What is more, the royal odes’ attempt to erect a linguistic norm perceived as the perfection of the French language accords with their ambition to foster nationnational coherence and unity. FumaroliFumaroli, Marc justly sees Malherbe’s role at the Bourbon courtcourt (royal) as “the magistrate of the royal language, dictating its grammatical, lexical, and rhetorical use, and crystallizing its laws in the example of his verse” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 95). What FumaroliFumaroli, Marc calls “the only true mission of the poet,” namely “to accord the language with royal grandstylegrandeur” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 95), simultaneously serves the ambition to unite the French nationnation. In La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion, Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam stresses that the French language was a crucial vector of national consciousnessnationnational consciousness: “the language was seen as a basic element of one’s love of country [patrienationla patrie]. Any effort that aimed at its diffusion, its implantation, or its embellishment becomes an act of patriotismpatriotism. This sentiment is not limited to the narrow milieu of the educated and extends far beyond the ivory-tower patriotismpatriotism of scholars and poets. All understand that the language is their national heritage [patrimoine]” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 43). Malherbe’s proverbial obsession with purity of diction, grammatical correctness, and polished sonorousness, criteria borrowed from CiceroCiceronian AtticismCiceroAtticism (CiceroCicero, De OrCiceroDe Oratore. 3.38. 53-54; BrutusCiceroBrutus 252; OratorCiceroOrator 24-25), parlays the perceived universality of the Tullianus stylus [CiceroCiceronian style] into a national language that seeks to transcend dialects of region, caste, and profession.17
By far the most compelling reason to reexamine the royal odes, however, is to retrieve their impassioned patriotismpatriotism. To anyone familiar with the prosodic and philological niggling that still surrounds Malherbe’s poetry, the focus on patriotic sentimentpatriotismpatriotic feeling, fervor, sentiment should be a welcome breath of fresh air. Close inspection of the odes invariably reveals a speaker who raises up his voice at a crucial political juncture. The future of France always seems to hang in the balance, and the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the nationnation rides on his utterance. Such public and political speech grew out of the political turmoil that prevailed during the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion. “Deliberativeeloquencedeliberative, that is, politicalpoliticaleloquenceeloquence,” writes FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, “crept through the whole kingdom, no longer in its discreet form, appropriate to the spirit of courtcourt (royal), or the ‘Council of the Prince,’ but as public harangues in the ‘republican’ style which could claim direct descent from CiceroCicero and Demosthenes” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 492). “In the midst of a civil war recalling the Rome of CiceroCicero, CaesarCaesar, Octavian, and Antony, the clergy and the magistracy, by turns, shifted toward a deliberativeeloquencedeliberativeeloquenceeloquence foreign to the character and the tradition of the French monarchy” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 493). A vigorous pamphlet literature amplified these orations, publicizing the competing ideological claims of ProtestantProtestants and Catholics and politicizing the rhetorical climate. When Henri IV acceded to the throne and politicalpolitical eloquence was no longer welcome, epideicticeloquenceepideictic oratory took up the slack (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 238). As orators and poets competed “to remake and to perfect national unitynationnational unity around the king, and to secure a dearly won peace” (Chauveau 63), “the art of royal praise became the crucible of a literary language transcending provincial particularisms and caste idioms. Remaining the privileged route for poets to obtain honors, titles, pensions or commissions, this prime vector of literary change between 1600 and 1630 mingled eloquenceeloquence and poetry” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 98). Catapulted to the forefront of emerging literary trends, encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry poetry became a natural outlet for the expression of political aspirations.
Jacques Morel has documented the poetic climate of Malherbe’s early years, finding almost identical rhetorical strategies and political imagery in the work of Bertaut, Du PerronDu Perron, Laugier de Porchères, Rosset, and Vauquelin des Yveteaux. Malherbe shares their use of a current event as a pretext for praising the virtues of Henri IV, their recourse to amplification, their heroic idealization of the king, and their occasional remonstration (Morel, “Henri IV et ses poètes” 214). But Malherbe sets himself apart from this crowded field in several important ways. First, if it need be said, Malherbe distills and clarifies the poetic tendencies of his contemporaries. He does what they do, only better. The prominence given to Malherbe’s poetry in Toussaint du Bray’s anthologies suggests the dominant reputation for eloquenceeloquence that Malherbe enjoyed in poetic circles, while the poet’s love letters and letters of consolation were coveted models of epistolary eloquenceeloquence.18 In Le Secrétaire de la Cour (1625), dedicated to Malherbe, Puget de La Serre declared: “you are the most eloquent of men” (ctd. in Winegarten, p. 18).
Second, building on Ronsard’s ennoblement of poetry in the 1550 Odes and the political engagement of Les Discours (1560-1584), Malherbe’s royal odes boldly chart a new political course. The kingdom’s leading orators preserved, even cultivated, a sacerdotal aura (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 489), and this includes a royal magistrate like Guillaume Du VairDu Vair, one of Malherbe’s early mentors. However, despite typical commonplaces invoking Apollo, the Malherbian speaker is less a prophet than a statesman. The reimagination of the national communitynationnational community in the royal odes depends on the construction of a primarily civic relation between the poet and the reader as the crucial step toward reestablishing trust among subjects of the French king. That is why the notion of ethosethos, both moral and rhetorical, is so important. It is not simply a tool of persuasion; rather, its power to produce trust in an audience makes it a cornerstone of political community. The royal odes define it neither by poetic inspiration, nor by some transcendent link to God, but by practical reasonphronēsispractical reason (phronēsisphronēsis), the moral virtuevirtues and, paradoxically, superior craftcraftsmanship. This latter is not as formalist as it might at first appear. If we understand craftcraft to mean artistic persuasion, induced by argument or style, then it has a causal relationship with eunoia [goodwill]ethos
