Neoclassicism

The gradual progress made by Jesuit colleges in educating French youth in the sixteenth century accelerated in the following century, no doubt aided by their principle of offering free education to nonboarding pupils. In some respects, they continued many of the traditions of the humanist colleges that they were supplanting, including the composition and staging of annual plays in Latin, but in other respects the return to scholasticism and the restrictions on authors included in the curriculum led to a narrowing of what constituted the classical canon (Snyders 1964: 74-83). Didactic poetry was particularly prized, leading to a burgeoning of the genre both amongst the Jesuits themselves and more generally (Haskell 2003: 1-69). The Jesuits did not, however, have a monopoly on education, and from 1637 the rival Jansenist movement provided one of the best classical educations available in France at their petites ecoles, set up in various locations by lay members of the order. Unlike the Jesuits, they paid considerable attention to Greek as well as Latin, providing a more rounded knowledge of the classics, while their austere view of religion had a surprisingly profound effect on the intellectual elite of seventeenth-century France.

If poetry was the greatest beneficiary of the classical tradition in Renaissance France, there can be no doubt that it was the theater that benefited most in the seventeenth century. Although the tradition of humanist drama was prolonged until the 1630s by the prolific playwright Alexandre Hardy (ca. 1572-1632), who is credited with some six hundred plays, two main influences helped shape the direction that tragedy in particular would take in the course of the century. On the one hand, Jesuit drama would espouse a Senecan approach to the genre, with Martin Antonio Delrio’s Syntagma tragoediae Latinae (Essay on Latin tragedy) of 1593-4 offering a commentary on the plays of Seneca that was inspired by Aristotle’s Poetics, but seen through Jesuit eyes. Certain Stoic notions are privileged: the inevitability of Providence, the importance of reason in the control of the emotions, and the role of the sententia or gnomic expression as a means of moral education. The other powerful influence in the early decades of the century was Cardinal Richelieu, who quickly grasped the propaganda potential of drama as a means of changing society. He commissioned the abbe d’Aubignac to produce a summary of the classical theory of tragedy, and although La Pratique du theatre (Theatrical method) did not appear until 1657, the debate that Richelieu provoked was instrumental in the formation of the neoclassical theater (Phillips 1980).

The effects of both these influences may be seen in the theater of Corneille (1606-84), who was educated at the Jesuit college in Rouen between 1615 and 1622 before training as a lawyer. His greatest tragedies show his characters grappling with fate, but their reliance on reason rather than the emotions frequently allows them to overcome what may appear to be impossible odds, nowhere more notably than in Cinna, where the Stoic Auguste triumphs over his feelings of vengeance and wins around the other characters (Maurens 1966). Although Corneille was criticized for the happy endings of many of his tragedies in apparent defiance of Aristotle, d’Aubignac justifies such denouements by appealing to the actual practice of the Athenian theater and by defining tragedy in terms of the nobility of its characters rather than the downfall of the tragic hero. However people viewed these issues, there is no doubt that the debate was governed by classical notions of the theater, whether it be Aristotle’s enormously influential description of tragedy in the Poetics, or the plays of the Greek and Roman tragedians themselves. Verisimilitude, as defined by Aristotle, emerged as one of the central issues in what developed into the querelle du theatre (quarrel over the theater): in an increasingly austere religious climate, only plays that carried a convincing moral message were defendable, and to be convincing a play had to avoid anything that might weaken the suspension of disbelief (Phillips 1980: 18-22). The three unities of time, place, and action, decorum in the presentation of the characters, as well as the plots themselves, were all governed by this central consideration.

Moral improvement presented more of a challenge for comedy, where the traditions of the Roman stage, often mediated by Italian commedia erudita (learned comedy) and the commedia dell’arte, were adapted to suit modern tastes. Writers such as Pierre Larivey (ca. 1540-1612) and Jean Rotrou (1609-50), who frequently drew on Plautus and Terence as well as Italian dramatists, helped prepare the way for the genius of Moliere (1622-73), whose often-controversial plays got him into trouble with the authorities on more than one occasion. Although the basic plots of his plays are typical of the Roman theater - one or more young men are in love with apparently unsuitable young women, but aided by servants to win over their disapproving fathers - Moliere’s originality lies in his use of contemporary stereotypes: the precieuse, the religious hypocrite, the doctor, the social climber, the femme savante (bluestocking). Nevertheless, many of his plays such as Amphithryon, L’Avare (The miser), and Les Fourberies de Scapin (The trickeries of Scapin) owe much to the Roman tradition (Howarth 1982: 106-24).

The author who comes closest in spirit to the ancient stage is the Jansenist-educated Jean Racine (1639-99). His mastery of Greek as well as Latin allowed him to develop a far greater feeling for the Greek theater, and in particular Euripides (Phillippo 2003), than many of his contemporaries, while his assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics leads to some of the most moving works to be produced in the seventeenth century. In many ways, the Jansenist concept of predestination fitted in perfectly with the Greek notion of fate, and it is this heroic struggle with the inevitable that Racine presents in his tragedies, whether they be inspired by classical mythology and history, or the Bible. As in the Greek theater, there is a sense in many of his protagonists (Polynice and Eteocle in La Thebatde, Oreste in Andromaque, Neron in Britannicus, Phedre, and Athalie) of an inherited pollution (Dodds 1951: 35-7), which they can do little or nothing to control. Though aware of their corrupt nature (another Jansenist theme), their lucidity in no way allows them to counter their emotions, in contrast to Corneille’s more Stoical heroes. Racine exploits to the full all of Aristotle’s precepts in the Poetics in a form of tragedy that emphasizes at the same time the wretchedness and the nobility of unredeemed Man.

The form of classicism that ultimately triumphed in seventeenth-century France can be seen to have its roots in the aesthetic judgments of Scaliger, with verisimilitude, reason, and elegance being its prime qualities. Yet there were other aspects of the classical past that appealed to early seventeenth-century writers, and amongst these it is important to recognize the influence of Lucretius and Epicureanism in the development of libertinism in France. Developing from the skepticism of the late Renaissance, this movement embraced many of the new scientific ideas of men such as Galileo in seeking a rational explanation for natural phenomena. Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) was the principal exponent of these ideas in France, and we see his influence in the works of writers such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-55), notably in his fictional works Les Etats et empires de la lune (The states and empires of the moon) and Les Etats et empires du soleil (The states and empires of the sun), as well as in Moliere’s Dom Juan.

In the realm of poetry, it is the more didactic genres, such as the fable (La Fontaine, 1621-95) and satire (Boileau, 1636-1711), that have their clearest roots in the classical past. Boileau was also responsible for writing what may be considered as the ultimate summary of French classicism in the four-book didactic poem L’Art poetique (The art of poetry) of 1674. For generations of French schoolchildren, this work has embodied in a readily memorizable form the aesthetic judgments of the period. Alongside Boileau’s translation of pseudo-Longinus’ Treatise on the Sublime, it also embodied the classicizing tradition in the so-called Querelle desAnciens et desModernes (quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), which rumbled on from the mid-1660s until the early years of the following century (Adam 1974: 158-64). It was at its height between 1687 and 1700 when the two sides formed rival factions, the Modernes led by Charles Perrault and Fontenelle, the Anciens under Boileau, supported by the likes of Racine, La Fontaine, and La Bruyere. At stake was nothing less than the role of Greek and Roman literature as literary sources, with the Modernes supporting a notion of cultural progress that saw no place for the intellectual claims of the past.

The seventeenth century, then, is a period of retrenchment for the classics in France. The expectation that an educated reader would have read all of classical literature no longer holds, and the classical canon came to favor Latin over Greek texts, didactic and moral works over the more exuberant kind. There are exceptions: the libertins (free-thinking) poets and writers, and even La Fontaine; but the form of classicism that ultimately emerges is sober and rational, Aristotelian rather than Platonic. If the Renaissance had attempted to integrate the thinking of the Greco-Roman world into the Christian world view, the seventeenth century largely turned its back on syncretism, so that even the mention of the pagan gods in Christian contexts was gradually eradicated. In language terms, French made inroads into the use of Latin as a literary language outside of Jesuit circles. All this led in turn to a rejection of the literary heritage of the French Renaissance, summed up in Boileau’s view of Ronsard, criticized for ‘‘speaking Greek and Latin in his French poetry’’ (Artpoetique 1.126).