PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 Caroline Labrune : Fictions dramatiques et successions monarchiques, 1637-1691. Paris, Champion, 2021. 561 p. Ruoting Ding : L’usurpation du pouvoir dans le théâtre français, 1636- 1691. Paris, Champion, 2021. 559 p. A happy coincidence? Two major studies about the French theatre in the seventeenth century have certainly never before been published in the same year by the same publisher. Not since the monumental nine-volume study by Henry Carrington Lancaster (Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University Press,1929-1942) has there been such attention to all the plays written in the tragic and tragic-comedic genres. Why were royal successions and usurpations so interesting to seventeenth-century playwrights and their publics? There are summaries of all the recent works on the public. R. Schneider’s work on self-censorship, Dignified Retreat: Writers and Intellectuals in the Age of Richelieu (New York, Oxford University Press, 2019) merits inclusion here. But neither Caroline Labrune nor Ruoting Ding successfully relates an answer to the question of why such an obsession developed. Let us turn to Labrune first, and her study of 99 plays. Caroline Labrune on Monarchical Succession After reading the Introduction and 150 pages about various plays, it becomes evident that the French fundamental law of succession and usurpation, as well as the sacre and the lit de justice, have nothing to do with these plays. After looking over the rest of the book to check the historical and geographical milieux in which the plays were set, it becomes clear that almost all of them are about Roman imperial history, Tudor England and beyond, the Orient, seventeenth-century Sweden, and Ottoman Turkey. An exception is Gilbert’s Marguerite de France (1641), published by Courbé. Perhaps Richelieu had indicated a desire for plays about French history. Courbé published many works sponsored by the cardinal. It is not surprising that Labrune does not find resonances of the fundamental laws. And after considerable emphasis on the “ceremonial school” of French history founded by Ernst Kantorowicz, only one play, Racine’s Bérénice (1671), offers possibilities for interpreting, thanks to the theory of the king’s two bodies. Labrune has competently worked up a context that is both geographically and chronologically inapplicable. The droit d’ainesse is not necessarily French. The key concept underlying the argument is in the title: fiction. Labrune develops her own definition, rather than relying on Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 430 the word as a legal term. A succinct presentation of the troubles of Roman imperial succession would, by contrast, have been very useful, since many of the plays analyzed derive from that historical moment. And since context always has a memorial dimension (Halbwachs) or even a collective memorial dimension, which should be a first step in characterizing the public, a part of the introduction might have been a succinct account of the travails of the French monarchical successions from 1560 to the 1590’s. There was assassination, impotency, execution (Guises), a movement toward elective kingship, a succession derived from 22 degrees from the crown and an elderly celibate cardinal as the candidate of the Holy League. Other key concepts that receive useful definitions are majesty, legitimacy, God, le peuple, subversion, sublime, the theatrical genres. As for absolutism, there is a definition quoted from a nineteenth-century Larousse borrowed from M. Turchetti: it would be of no use in a close reading. The definition of sublime is the antique one with its connotations of shock, horror, pity, and death, not beauty. The impossible ontological choice and the ruminations about having to murder one’s own son, nourished a political consciousness to which Labrune is insensitive, as a result of her fundamental antipathy for monarchy. While certainly not Orwellian, the royal regard seems only to inhibit writers, but never to inspire them. The phrase le pouvoir is anachronistic because it impedes the recognition of differing degrees of power, and also delegated power. The chancellerie did not “relever” from the parlement. The great Wilhelm Dilthey insisted that for understanding, there has to be some sympathy for whatever or whomever one is studying. Labrune’s notion of monarchical political space appears as if she has taken Maxime’s republicanism to heart from Pierre Corneille’s Cinna. Over the decades, playwrights sought and created plots about every human relation that might influence a royal succession, like the canonists of the thirteenth century who explored every sin, including what to do if a pope became a heretic. To supply names and structure, playwrights sometimes thought up a crisis situation and hunted down in history an event that supposedly really happened. At other times, they entered the competition by relying on wellknown crises in Roman imperial history. In the 99 plays about succession that are under study here, there are 31 executions, 89 murders, and 195 deaths, some of which occur on-stage; 51 plays begin with a violent death. Absent is a study of blood, which of course was a key question in the French royal succession. Nor is God given much attention. The parlementaire Louis D’Orleans, a Holy Leaguer, wrote that kings did not just represent God, they were Gods. The idea did not receive Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 431 much attention in France, because it violated religious doctrines; but James I of England incorporated it into his writings about monarchy. As the reviewer turns over the plays in his mind, a blur develops about what Richelieu called la zizanie: Cleopatra gave birth to twins, so she alone knew which was born first. This gave her power over the succession. Was she really alone? When Anne of Austria was about to give birth to the future Louis XIV in 1638, she asked Président de Nesmond of the parlement to witness the event. Nesmond was the prince of Condé’s personal attorney! Condé was not the heir apparent, but neither Louis XIII nor his brother had a son. There would be no warming-pan story in French history. There are numerous examples of playwrights who produce works from the same material in the same year. These differences do not result from literairiness, but from differing views on the same political and cultural climate. Des Fontaines’s Véritable Semiramis (1647) causes her husband’s death because he had murdered her father in order to usurp the Assyrian throne. As if this were not enough to engage the public, Des Fontaines has her unknowingly sleep with her son, and commit suicide offstage. In the Semiramis (1647) by Gilbert, a heroic queen endowed with the courage to lead her subjects successfully in war, kills her husband’s enemy, and then has her husband tried and executed because he usurped the throne that rightly belongs to her. It is as if Gilbert had read Le Moyne’s Gallerie des Femmes Fortes (1647), and Des Fontaines had not. Does the shadow of Anne of Austria loom over Gilbert’s play? A reviewer has the duty to point out examples of non-thinking. On p. 474 it is the Duchesse d’Aiguillon who is the dedicatee of Gilbert’s Semiramis, and on p. 510 it is the Duchesse de Rohan. The latter is rather condescendingly identified as the daughter of a surintendant des finances, which was true; but Sully was also a royal councilor, a maréchal de France, and a governor of the Bastille, among other honors. That does not make the marriage a mésalliance. On p. 45, Louis XIII’s death date is given as 1643, which is correct. On p. 47, he is still involved with the Hotel de Bourgogne in 1647. On p. 512, Le Vayer de Boutigny is not identified. See François Bluche’s study of parlementaire families (1956, p. 283), for a well-known family from Le Mans and distant relative of the philosopher La Mothe Le Vayer. W. Leiner’s pioneering study of writers and patrons (Heidelberg, 1965) would have been a welcome context, and might have supplied additional identifications. Pierre Charron was not a jurist. In one of her turns to history there is a claim that Henry IV’s assassination had popular support. Of course there were ex-Holy Leaguers in the closet, but Babelon, Hennequin and Mousnier do not find this to be so. The images of le peuple in some of the mid-century plays is the probable source Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 432 for this view of France’s most popular monarch. There is also commentary about fear of le peuple as memories of the barricades of 1588 resurfaced in the Fronde. As Jean-François Senault climbed up into a pulpit to extol monarchy and fear of le peuple, how many in attendance recalled that his father was a fanatical Holy Leaguer who no doubt had supported the move to have a king elected by the Estates General? The plays that are centered on the succession in the family of the Roman emperors have the deepest political resonances, no doubt because the imperial family had been a staple of rhetoric classes in colleges, and because of the immensity of power the emperors wielded. Labrune offers little analysis of the contexts for the use of the word “absolute”: and she does not remark that the lack of power-sharing might contribute to conspiracies. Magnon’s Séjanus of 1647 is interesting about notions of le peuple and the public as actors in affairs of state. The army’s role and that of the guards are effectively explored. Labrune’s pages on ambition, favoritism, and tyranny are very strong; every historian of the political should read them. The result will be a new and much deeper understanding of public political consciousness under Louis XIV. However, the use of the phrase public cultivé is to be avoided. It belongs to the later nineteenth century. In the 1640’s, Cureau de la Chambre began to publish his great work on the passions; and in 1649, Descartes came out on the same subject. Did the results deepen and render more complex intimate relations on the stage? The borrowings of older vocabularies about love enhance the possibilities for reaching the sublime by means other than terror, violence, and death. And the passion to kill a tyrant became much more intense, dutiful but still rational, as Pierre Corneille in Heraclius (1647) portrays. The only true, unpardonable sin, suicide, comes into its own for the first time in the theatre in Pierre Corneille’s Rodogune (1647), where Cleopatra addresses the snake that will be permitted to kill her. The great theme taken up by playwrights is the subversion of monarchy itself, as a form of government. Labrune considers the following to be unrestrained subversion, and she makes a good case: La Mort d’Agrippine (1654) by Cyrano de Bergerac; L’ Adieu du Trône by Du Bosc de Montandre (1654); Semiramis by Gilbert; Arsace, roi des Parthes (1666) by de Prade; Pulcherie (1673) by Pierre Corneille; and Nitocris, reine de Babylone (1650) by du Ryer. Taken together the subversive, even nihilistic thought found in these plays is a profound refutation of Labrune's assertion that all the French were “agents” of monarchy (p. 55). Labrune notes the most important written context for Cyrano’s Agrippine (1654} as Pierre Dupuy’s Histoire des plus illustres favoris (1659), published Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 433 by his brother Jacques. Cyrano’s Séjanus is nakedly ambitious, and Agrippine seeks to exploit him while pretending to love him. There is savagery and nihilism, and a categorical critique of all the political and social metaphors about the special qualities of aristocratic and royal blood, which is no different than that of a peasant. There would be no need to mention the disgusting parallel with the winner of the Fronde, Mazarin, despite the price on his head of 50,000 livres and hundreds of savage written ad hominem attacks. Agrippine is simply too odious to be paralleled with Anne of Austria. Suétonius would be read for the effects of power on intimate life; Tacitus had been read to find the arcana imperii, but after the Fronde he would be read as a classical republican whose image of Tiberius was monstrous, like the image of Mazarin in the mazarinades. Du Bosc’s Adieu du Trône (1654) depicts a murderous Diocletian who does not know what to do with himself after gaining power. He enters into a power-sharing arrangement with Maximian, but that arrangement breaks down because Maximian’s son tries to gain power at the expense of his father. There are reflections on whether the father should murder the son. The anxious emperor is a trope that goes back at least to Sulla (see Plutarch) and to Auguste in Cinna: “pour ma tranquilité mon coeur en vain soupir,” II, 1. Du Bosc’s dedication to Christine of Sweden and another play suggesting that her abdication had resulted from constitutional constraints. Her power affirms the playwright’s special variety of ambition, the passion to advise the monarch and of course, to be pensioned. None other than Plato and Descartes had fallen into the same seductive feature of monarchy and tyranny. The fascination with the grandes âmes seems to have infected everyone but Cyrano. Actually, Gilbert was a secretary to Christine for a while. Labrune disparages this fact. Why? At Fontainebleau one of Christine’s servants angered her and she had him killed on the spot. Mazarin informed her that that was not the way things were done in France. Du Ryer’s Nitocris (1650) seems to this reviewer to be more about the perception of the readership and theater-goers than about queenliness. There is an attempt to avoid alienating Anne’s supporters as well as those who opposed her. Taken together, the subversive and dangerous thought in these plays is a profound refutation to Labrune’s assertion that everyone in France in the seventeenth century was an “agent” of the monarch (p.55). Labrune gives an exemplary reading of Racine’s Bérénice (1671), a fully accomplished chef d’oeuvre. The theory of the king’s two bodies presented in the Introduction is at last useful for illuminating the terrible ontological choices between love and power. Roland Barthes’ analysis is presented, and Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 434 refuted. Labrune bears down to the literalism of the text, and is free of presuppositions, always a good formula for the study of literature or history. True, there is a whiff of the storm over Bérénice, which took place in the 1960s; but curiously neither Raymond Picard’s views nor his works are mentioned. Picard had remarked (1950) that Racine had deliberately coupled lines and distorted Suetonius’s meaning. Georges Forestier also notes this great poet’s daring act—referring to it as a loi fondamentale (an anachronism)—the impossibility of marriage between a foreign woman and a Roman emperor. Perhaps Picard was not the first to note this. Paulin says as much, but after reading Labrune about what amounts to be the absence of actual laws about succession, did Racine also distort the Roman imperial experience framed much more by blood than laws? Did the Roman people allow their emperors to marry into royal families? The hero accepts the religion of his beloved. There would seem to be nothing about a prohibition on marrying foreigners. Kings, queens, and princes of France in the seventeenth century are not in the index. Nor are any of the interesting statistics that are developed about the number of murders, and so forth. Ruoting Ding on usurpation It was only in 1762 that the French expression “chef d’oeuvre” came into English from its artisan-artistic origin, and characterized a masterwork. Ruoting Ding’s scholarship has all the masterwork features developed by the great scholars of literature since Lanson. It inspires awe and wonder. How to capture a masterwork in just a few pages? After a brief Introduction that centers on the bibliography of theater studies, and after a succinct summary of some of the works of the “ceremonial school” of studies on the French “constitution” by Ernst Kantorowicz and his students, Ding proposes her readings under three concepts: the right to reign, the duty to reign, and the will to reign—an absolutely brilliant plan. Over 200 plays are cited in the bibliography. This reviewer will select one play for a brief discussion of each of the three concepts that are the armature of the study. In order to study usurpation, Ding finds it necessary to discuss succession. For many of the plays, there is a silent dialogue between Ding and Carrington Lancaster. There is also some critical attention to commentary by Georges Forestier. Throughout her study, Ding presents her own reading, focusing on the strongest previous commentary on a theme. Historical contexts are brought to bear; and since they are just that—contexts—and are not repeated, they Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 435 are often present only once but are needed several times. This could not be helped. When the principal themes are succession and usurpation, the fateful reigns of Henry III and Henry IV cannot but come to mind. Did the Duc de Guise seek the throne of the heirless Henry III? The “certainty” of the French succession, touted in the fundamental laws, was tested to an extreme limit when a heretic prince who was 21 or 23 degrees from the Valois extinction—depending on how one counts—became the heir to the throne. We must not forget the Cardinal de Bourbon, that elderly and celibate uncle who was promoted by many in the Holy League. Others favored elected kingship by a rump Estates-General. The intensity and violence of the Holy League is not noted—a sign, perhaps, that playwrights avoided drawing parallels to it. Assassinations or regicides? The legitimacy of both Henry III and Henry IV was questioned by radical Catholics, among whom were saintly killers. Pierre Corneille's Nicomède (1651) is given special consideration. Simply put, a king has married twice and has a son by each wife. By primogeniture, the eldest son is heir, and he conducts himself as if he were born to rule. A conspiracy develops around the second son and his mother. By French fundamental law the king cannot choose his own successor. A love interest develops, but it does not really determine the course of the action. The eldest son becomes king, and the fundamental laws are respected. Ding finds that there is a mentalité established on such questions as primogeniture, and that it forms the underwork of the seventeenth-century theatrical experience. In his Le Labyrinthe de l’État (Paris, Champion, 2004), Hubert Carrier discerned a similar consciousness that was indispensable to readers eager to comprehend the mazarinades. Other plays are presented to confirm these findings, and this reviewer is convinced that this is correct. Primogeniture may be found in many monarchical legal systems, but the lack of authority to choose one’s successor may be prevalent only in European monarchies. Usurpation, adoption (disastrous results in 1421), and abdications were not to be found among the French fundamental laws. Indeed, not every aspect of family living was dressed up in legal language over the centuries. Even regencies were only vaguely framed by law and precedent. The caution that Ding asserts on the effects of absolutism after the Fronde is admirable. Was there an interdiction of discourse about the overmighty subject, which would, one supposes, be absolutism? Not until 1659 was the Grand Condé reintegrated into the court and France, and he would have a clique around him for his whole life. But the parlement and the Parisians were wary, and so was Louis XIV! Condé had du Bosc de Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 436 Montaudré to write plays and mazarinades that justified his morally rebellious conduct. Love and power come into their own under the heading “duty,” beginning with a princess’s or queen’s duty to marry. Ding notices effectively how the political is nourished by interiorization, as characters become more complex. There still is, however, a mostly single or at most a double-motive behavior. Disguises and subplots seem to be gaining in the later century. Divine intervention, and appeals to it, seem to have been declining also, but in his religious plays Racine and the devout mood of an old king may have stopped a trend. For the concept of duty, Ding gives a close reading of La Chapelle’s Téléphonte of 1683. A legitimate prince and the daughter of the usurper have fallen in love. Her father has killed the princely lover’s father and brothers. From duty, and from the obligation to free his mother, the prince renounces his love. Initially his plan is to assassinate the usurper, but then he decides to make war on him and his army, as a more heroic approach. Murky complexities come into play, with the result that the princely hero is in prison, about to be executed. But some courtesans (or courtiers? ) who hate the usurping tyrant mobilize le peuple. Too late. The prince commits suicide before the tyrant can murder him. This is suicide to preserve heroic dignity by the refusal to accept defeat, not unlike Roxanne in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters) One thinks of the reader or the theater-goer who dozes off for just a moment. Téléphonte will not make much sense for the rest of the play. Ding includes excellent brief summaries of the dynastic troubles of the French Monarchy from its beginnings down to the end of the sixteenth century. No wonder Louis IX had sculpted a series of coffins disposed to create the image in St. Denis of trouble-free dynastic inheritances. There are oblique references to the Salic law and primogeniture in the plays. And religion is not just the theory of divine right. The question of whether or not a Roman emperor could be dethroned for religious reasons (Colonia’s Jovien) leads Ding back to the fantasmagoric attacks on Henry III by the Sorbonne (p. 312) From 1630 to the end of the century there are 24 plays about the restoration of order, usually by the murder of an usurper. Ding relies on the works by M. Turchetti and Y.C. Zarka on tyranny and resistance in her analysis of the plays about the will to power. Lessons from Machiavelli are freely used to show how the usurper must act once he has gained power. And there is the occasional good usurper-tyrant (Aristotle gives lots of advice on actions that legitimate). Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 437 There are about 159 pages on the right to rule, even by usurpation, 145 on the duty to usurp power, and 129 on the will to usurp power. There are clearly understandable and predictable elaborations of the first theme as introductory. In the third part, it is the heroic conspirator who is center stage. In plotting for a political ideal, Scudéry’s Mort de César (1636) and Pierre Corneille’s Cinna (1643) lay out aspirations for the restoration of republican government. In both plays characters used conjuration, not individual action, to plan assassinations that join moral righteousness with justice. Ding asks how these plays turn around to celebrate monarchy. The republican hero becomes a tragic figure as the regime changes from republican to monarchical government. A poignant reading of Cinna is provided, including one element that often is not mentioned: popular support for Caesar. In his Pierre Corneille and Political Drama under Louis XIII (Cambridge, 1992), David Clarke has legitimacy well up in Auguste’s breast, beautifully confirming Ding’s general argument about how the Corneillian hero manifests himself from within. Ding accepts John D. Lyons’s point from The Tragedy of Origins (Stanford, 1996): Auguste acts not only to determine what will happen in the future, but also what has happened in the past, a very important insight into monarchy. As the reader moves through part 3 on the will to power, it is impossible not to notice how action becomes more about philosophical issues than about personal ones—until arriving at Racine, who balances these like no other playwright. A case in point is Aristotle’s remark that the fallen hero is not interesting: he does not inspire sympathy for what he has done, but for what is done to him. La Mesnardière finds this to be true in his Poétique. Regarding conspiracies, Corneille might have known about them and been inspired by Cinq Mars’s and De Thou’s conspiracy of 1642, which come immediately to mind (p. 379, n. 100). The plots involved killing Richelieu, as in the plot to kill the cardinal mounted by Montrésor in 1636. But Gaston did not give the signal, because the potential victim was an ecclesiastic. What about the plotter who is also in love? Magnon’s Séjanus (1647) combines ambition with blind, adulterous passion for Livilla. In Laodice (1668) Thomas Corneille creates a female usurper so passionately in love that, as regent, she puts five sons to death and has ordained the assassination of a sixth. But Ding finds that it is Cyrano who creates the most particular and different play, his Mort d’Agrippine (1643, but published in 1647or 1648). With a touch of scorn, Ding points out that critics have got it wrong when they concentrate on Séjanus. The title must be taken seriously Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 438 when a philosopher is writing the play. To be sure, Séjanus is ambitious, and he expounds atheism, but the exemplary figure is that of Agrippine, the widow who seeks vengeance. Her husband, Germanicus, has been murdered on Tiberius’s orders. Poussin’s monumental painting (Minneapolis) of the death scene cannot but come to mind. There is an encounter between Agrippine and Tiberius when the former assures the latter that she has the strength to murder him. She is, after all, a granddaughter of the first Caesar, while Tiberius descends only from the adopted son of Auguste. Thus her blood is stronger and more legitimate. But murder the emperor, that Agrippine does not do, to the dismay of literary scholars whose definition of tragedy as a play where somebody dies does not apply. Cyrano’s interest is elsewhere, according to Ding. Destroy what Ding refers to as the soubassements of monarchy, which indeed, the play does. He also perhaps sought to confirm that history can be just as terrifying as exemplary fiction. Tiberius would really be murdered by his householders off in Capri—one translator has them doing it by suffocating him in his bed linens. Soubassement becomes the principal analytic concept for the rest of the book. It would seem that there were many playwrights who wrote horrifying plots about ambition and murder, without ever shaking the legitimacy of the particular regime in which their plays were set. Ding’s presentation of the scholarly literary and historical material is everywhere brief and authoritative. And then she rises to remarkable generalizations such as about the Cornellian hero who is absolutely conscious all the time of his état as prince. No one below that rank, no matter how ambitious he is, becomes truly heroic and legitimate. Auguste says at one point: Je suis maître de moi comme de l’Univers; Je le suis, et je veux l’être. (Corneille, Cinna, V, iii) At the same time, Ding mentions that she has been unable to discern a typology in all the plays about conspiracies. Dedications receive attention and rightly so, as Racine’s to Colbert attests. Though their high language may be off-putting, there are certainly elements of soubassement in them, notably patriotic for a town or province. Ding is now in a position to make a comparative study of the mentalities that she found with those that Carrier has found. Certainly, the playwrights were not like cultural anthropologists, trying professionally through selfexamination to eliminate any soubassements they might have. In her conclusion Ding integrates reflections on usurpation and the theatre with the scholarly literature on mirrors of princes (prudence,) dis- Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0030 439 simulation, and absolutism. There is special attention to Charron and to Guez de Balzac. Who would dare to ask for more? Education? In the Jesuit Jouvançy’s L’Élève de Rhétorique, recently translated and published by Garnier, there is a mine of contexts on how Roman history was read before playwrights became playwrights. The book concludes on a transcendental note. Ding finds that despite the continuities, there is less (maybe less and less? ) representation of degenerate monarchy across the century, and great (maybe more and more? ) caution regarding the aesthetics of the heroic criminal. Absolutism is manifest in the duty to submit. In the end, seventeenth-century playwrights did not just entertain, they prompted reflection. Philosophers and political philosophers would do well to take Ding’s remarks into account. There is a remarkably useful index with the brief titles of each play listed after the author’s name. Orest Ranum