Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature
pfscl
0343-0758
2941-086X
Narr Verlag Tübingen
61
2010
3772
Laurence Giavarini (éd.): Construire l’exemplarité. Pratiques littéraires et discours historiens. Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2008, 250 p.
61
2010
Orest Ranum
pfscl37720239
PFSCL XXXVII, 72 (2010) Laurence Giavarini (éd.) : Construire l’exemplarité. Pratiques littéraires et discours historiens. Dijon : Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2008. 250 p. In Laurence Giavarini’s thoughtful Introduction to this volume under review, the major recent studies of exemplarity are not simply cited, they are presented (T. Hampton, J. Lyons, R. Koselleck, V. Descombes, and K. Stierle) and brought together as a problematic that will not only prepare the reader for the chapters that follow but will also inspire further research. The work by J.-L. Passeron and J. Revel on the cas, probably best translated as “case study,” adds an interdisciplinary dimension and informs the reader about the strengths and weaknesses confronting writers who attempt to expand or limit significances that readers may find in an example or a case study. F. Cornilliat’s analysis of exemplarity in Jean Bouchet’s panegyric of Louis II de la Trémouille explores how the hero is in history, yet transcends it by serving his king, the state, and his own dynasty. Bouchet settles accounts over decisions about peace and war, and he finds that emulation of the Gaulois is the only way to restore French courage in battle. Bouchet’s sense of form in his chosen genre is compared with Champier’s on Bayard; but the thematic clutter over differences with the king suggests less respect for some antique models than Seyssel reveals in his panegyric of Louis XII. After some cogent introductory remarks on the Bérullian synthesis of religion and royalism, C. Jouhaud offers a close reading of Balzac’s Le Prince from that perspective. Since piety was recognized as the first virtue (Tyvaert) in the ideal of kingship, it would automatically become central to any “mirror” held up to Louis XIII. Balzac suggests that the king really has no sins to confess, and therefore seeks edifying conversation rather than absolution! This whiff of casuistry in the form of panegyric undermines the image of royal humanity, an interesting failed exemplarity. A. Duprat’s model study of exemplarity in texts about plagues and urban fires begins by comparing two accounts of an epidemic in Milan (1576- 1577), the first one about Charles Borromeo’s grandiose propitiatory processional that recreated Jesus’s procession carrying the cross. The second one narrates the courageous initiatives of the city fathers that becomes a celebration of civic identity. The saintly versus the civic are both exemplary, but they talk about the same events in distinct ways. Some accounts of the Great Fire of London of 1666 were framed in Biblical exemplarity, while others displayed juridical and philosophical learning in conclusions about PFSCL XXXVII, 72 (2010) 240 God’s hand having something to do with the fire, unlike the fire in Moscow, 1575, supposedly set by the Tatars. M.-P. Gaviano’s close reading of a chapter on examples in Scipion Dupleix’s book on logic (ed. of 1607) presents Aristotelian and Quintilianian perspectives. Having made a definition, Dupleix proposes a syllogism about civil war. He pays attention to the feigned example, something that has not happened, and he argues that this type of example may be efficacious. Aristotle was not consistent in treating single examples and series of examples, but the differences appear to result from using syllogisms to interpret exemplarity. Attention is also paid to exemplary fables. Through close readings of Corneille and La Rochefoucauld, C. Noille- Clauzade elucidates the exemplarity of the monstrous (e.g., Médée) by establishing how the epideictic in medieval homilies offers a third way to approach moral issues centering on the bad example. Inspired by reading the pre-Aristotelian Rhétorique d’Alexandre, and restated by the Jesuits, is the notion that depicting the monstrous gives pleasure, the aim of all theater for Aristotle. An Augustinian perspective inspires La Rochefoucauld to observe the disjuncture between exemplarity and what humans actually do. This essay is indispensable reading for dix-septièmistes. Using as a point of departure the Passeron-Revel work on the cas, M. Brunet explores the paradox proposed by Boileau regarding the possibility of finding beauty in the monstrous. Diderot would remain faithful to the classical idea of beauty, despite his acceptance of an idea of Nature that accounts for the monstrous as variation. Diderot’s aesthetics thus do not logically cohere with his idea of Nature. In his four-volume Cataractes de l’Imagination, 1779, J.-M. Chassaignon, a late eighteenth-century Lyonnais, brought aesthetics into line with Nature as variation, by concluding that there were, indeed, no criteria to discern absolute beauty. In his reading of François Rosset’s Histoires tragiques, J.-L. Martine interprets a casuistry about evil anachronistically, that is, from a Kantian perspective. In Rosset’s deliberate exploration of the performative boundaries where the ignorant and heretical reader might infer that evil was something other than the absence of good, the crucial sites are, of course, human will and evil angels. No Manichean, Rosset may not have been consciously able to perceive his writing as anything but reassuring to the Augustinian; but like painters of St. Sebastian, he seems almost aware that exploring the edges of heresy gave him intellectual pleasure. Augustine might have summed up Rosset’s views in a single word: Vanitas. Through reading various sources (Siri is a late one) about a duel that took place in 1613, E. Mechoulan discerns, in Rosset’s Histoires tragiques, interesting distinctions that frame or control the meanings of an example, Comptes rendus 241 and how anecdotes are more for the present, and examples more timeless or trans-historical. He also makes interesting reflections on fictional exemplarity, and on evidence about the possibilities for value-free thought in general. In taking up just one of Tallemant des Réaux’s Historiettes, R. Descimon proposes to suspend the typical “literature as power” approach, in order to propose how the social and exemplarity may elucidate what really interested Tallemant. He characterizes the social as an ensemble of relations, aspirations, ranks, and indicators of personal measurement. Women are brokers (my word) in these relations, sometimes as wives, sometimes as something else. The paternity of children in these lower legal-professional families would not seem to be all that important. From research in the notarial archives, Descimon clarifies and deepens the non-exemplarity and non-case-study of Tallemant’s texts. Irony and honesty toward their society, with its absurd aspects, permitted Tallemant to gossip about the vagaries of the human condition, while Molière elevated them into universal types that could easily be responded to by cruel laughter. L. Rauline proposes an exemplary libertin as someone who falls into radical Individualism. Abandonment, betrayal, and isolation through fantasizing leave Tristan L’Hermite and Dassoucy without affective relations and public identities. In a particular and unique casuistry, each elaborates what Montaigne’s non-exemplarity first proposed. If Dassoucy rejects the pursuit of glory, he asserts that his works will be read forever. There are occasional, very strong inferences that are not supported by the notes (e.g., p. 210, note 5, whether God lied to man) but the general relation between radical Individualism and Libertinage is very suggestive. Asking the interesting question, How do the excluded become empowered and exemplary? T. Debbagi-Baranova prepares the reader for a fundamentally political and civic discussion about sixteenth-century merchants; but when she suggests that “merchant” and “bourgeois” are synonymous terms, her reading of a 1565 dialogue on the characteristics of their empowerment becomes a missed opportunity. Is the reader to assume that everyone on the list of merchants (pp. 217-18) is a bourgeois, when that term does not in fact always appear? The assertion that merchants are endowed with reason, that their families are well established in Parisian society, that they travel, and that like the ancient romans they have participatory civic rights, suggests humanist civic thought grounded on historical exemplarity. Setting the dialogue in a garden might well have been adapted from Machiavelli’s Art of War. A. Duprat’s discussion of elements in Milanese civic identity, presented above, sheds light on Louis Regnier de la Planche’s writing. PFSCL XXXVII, 72 (2010) 242 Jean-Antoine Le Vachet’s exemplary life of the shoemaker, Henry Buch, is not only revealing of a dévot social program aimed at limiting or eliminating promiscuity among artisans, it is also suggestive of just how elites’ “projections” of social roles onto their inferiors may function as hagiographic exemplarity. D. Ribaud asserts that Buch wished to repress compagnonnage (p. 233), but she then quotes the source, which says that he wished to “renverser les impiétés du compagnonnage,” a quite different aim. Buch’s most striking activity would seem to have been giving the handicapped and the untrained a chance by offering them work. Does Nicolas Delamare’s Traité de la Police, or his manuscripts at the B.N.F., give more information about what presumably was a dévot, and later on, about governmental programs to reform the shoemakers? There has recently been much new research on exemplarity - for example, C. Huchard, D’Encre et de Sang: Simon Goulart et la Saint-Barthélemy (Paris: Champion, 2007); but nowhere else has this reviewer read a study of it with the approach on which all such studies ought to begin, namely, the history of philosophy. M.-P. Gaviano’s study of Dupleix on exemplarity is just that, exemplary! Orest Ranum Béatrice Guion : Du bon usage de l’Histoire. Histoire, morale et politique à l’âge classique. Paris : Champion, 2008. 631 p. By beginning with what would seem to be a consensus - grounded on pioneering studies by philosophers and, more recently, by historians - that history stagnated in the seventeenth century, or perhaps regressed from what it had been in the sixteenth, Béatrice Guion frames her study in order to confirm or nuance this conclusion. What happened between the great generation led by Baudouin, Bodin, La Popelinière, and Pasquier, and the generation led by Mabillon, Leclerc, and Bayle? After exploring all the programmatic sources, and after personal reflection, she works through all the possible conditions, except the later rhetorical and political, that might have affected historical writing; and stating clearly the facts, she lets the reader draw the conclusions. The readings and themes are so complex and extensive that summarizing them here would be too lengthy. The following little essay raises her main points and occasionally offers, with great respect, other readings. How to characterize the sources that B. Guion reads in order to explore early-modern, primarily French, historical thought? Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Humanists developed something similar to a genre,
