Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature
pfscl
0343-0758
2941-086X
Narr Verlag Tübingen
61
2010
3772
Béatrice Guion: Du bon usage de l’Histoire. Histoire, morale et politique à l’âge classique. Paris: Champion, 2008, 631 p.
61
2010
Orest Ranum
pfscl37720242
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, Comptes rendus 243 without a specific name, for exploring, commenting on, and philosophizing on virtually all aspects of intellectual inquiry. Often bearing provocative titles such as On the Dignity of Man, or Discourse on the Little Certainty in History, translations of ancient texts and commentaries on them became the foundation not only for criticism but for modern disciplines. Dionysius of Halicarnassus would be considered the first critic of history, when he wrote about it but did not write it. Guion uses the tag ars historica to delineate her sources, but to develop her analysis, she does not hesitate to use what historians wrote about in their histories, thereby complementing her emphasis on the art-of-history genre. She also makes forays into the mirror-of-princes genre, and into pedagogical treatises on occasion. Recent research by historians of science, literature, and rhetoric (A. Blair, F. Goyet, and A. Moss) have elucidated the fundamentally Aristotelian approaches developed in these Humanists’ writings. Reliance on commonplaces remains pervasive, because Aristotle argues that only general truth can be known, not the particular. His ethical dialectics also pervade these works, e.g., whether history is useful or not, or whether it should please or instruct, and so forth. In some instances, the works on history and poetry have very similar modes of thought: to appreciate the artes historicae they must therefore be read with an understanding of what their authors intended. In stating this, the reviewer recognizes his own shortcomings when he proposed readings of some of these texts in Artisans of Glory (1980). The analysis (I am avoiding the term “critical”) of sources developed by the juridical historians and La Popelinière, for example, is not explored by B. Guion; thus it is not possible to compare his critical understanding with Bayle’s. Père Daniels’s pyrrhonist critiques of sources and state secrecy differ little from La Popelinière’s, for example in the Introduction to his History of the Admiralty. The topical structure of Guion’s book is complex and filled with concepts that do not seem to change their meaning, though their contexts do. There are numerous discussions of Prudence, the Providential, and exemplarity, but no general analysis of their change or continuity is proposed. When she confronts an element of the ars rhetorica that is not part of her discussion in the beginning section, she recognizes it for what it is, and hurries on. The result is, in many respects, an illuminating analysis about history’s [sic] attempt to free itself from ancient rhetoric; but of course, as historical thought evolved, so did rhetoric. Other disciplinary frames would enable historians to keep rhetoric at a distance, namely Legal Humanism, perhaps Skepticism, and certainly Millenarianism (C.G. Dubois) in the sixteenth century. Lorenzo Valla’s critical perspective on texts would inspire Gallicans to deepen knowledge of the Early Church. Similarly, Budé’s De Asse (known for its mediocre Latin, read: PFSCL XXXVII, 72 (2010) 244 not conforming to the latest rules of grammar and rhetoric), and Cujas’s editions of and commentary on Roman law, would establish a very strong critical attitude toward historical sources and their interpretation. It would inspire Bayle, Le Clerc, Fauchet, the Duchesnes, the Godefroys, the Dupuys, the Sainte-Marthes, and others such as Lacurne de Saint-Palaye. B. Guion quotes Mabillon: “plusieurs habiles gens depuis cent ans se sont occupé [sic] à éclaircir l’histoire” (p. 10). Mabillon thus sees no break or decline between the work of the critical historians of the sixteenth century and his own. If we can trust Mabillon, and I believe we should, the notion of decline of historical thought in the seventeenth century ought to be rejected. Similarly, efforts to discern skeptical and moral philosophical influences such as Augustinianism on learned historical scholarship, though worth exploring, may not be convincing. Rapin, in his Instructions... (1677), a model Aristotelian programmatic statement if ever there was one, finds himself in dialogue with Strada on questions about just how much historians can know, still another mark of continuity. Guion finds that at least Bayle read skeptical works, if only to reject their views about history, and Mabillon’s comment on ethical questions raised by Saint-Réal confirms the oft-stated finding that within each and every tendency or approach, there would occasional be exchanges and influences among them. There may have been points of influence within the different sub-genres of history, but the influence on actual historical writing of the humanist philosophical currents of Skepticism and Libertinism remains to be confirmed. Another very important strain from the sixteenth century would be the Machiavellian-Guicciardinian-even-Tacitean. The Prince is in the mirror-ofprinces genre, and it would first be read along with Tacitus’s Annals to create a perspective that seemed dangerous to many moralists, because negative exempla and arguments on behalf of dissimulation were included. Religion was just another instrument for manipulating subjects. This perspective contributed to Pibrac’s and Naudé’s justification of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacres, and formed the approach for collecting commonplaces about the use of power (arcana imperii). The coup d’État would be celebrated by Naudé, but P. Stacey suggests that the Prince ought to be read as ironic, and S. Gouverneur has found little influence by Naudé on historical thought; so it would seem that this vein of thought would nourish political theory rather than history. Naudé’s writing on coups d’État, the Machiavelli of the Discourses, Guicciardini, and a classical-republican or senatorial view of Tacitus’s Annals and On Germany, would be refracted not only in Lipsius but also, no doubt, in Bodin. La Popelinière, and de Thou. After seeming to lack representation except in Frondeur memoirs, Amelot de la Houssaye’s Comptes rendus 245 “translation” of Machiavelli as a Tacitean would go on to inspire much Enlightenment historical thought modeled on the Histoire de la République de Venise. A thread of doubt about the value of exemplarity runs through this approach to history. The skeptical critique of historical thought inspired by the publications of Sextus Empiricus and developed by Montaigne, Charron, and La Mothe Le Vayer, has been studied by L. Bianchi and L. De Nardis. Guion essentially adopts their conclusions without offering her own readings of La Mothe Le Vayer’s Discours du peu de certitude de l’Histoire, which despite its title is a quite conventional work in the Humanist tradition of the ars historica. The continuators of this ars-historica perspective (discussed above) certainly took La Mothe’s work seriously, as they reordered their commonplaces to take mild skepticism into account; but Rapin would seem to ignore it or downplay it, as he restates what had been started at least a century earlier by Patrizzi, le Roy, and Mascardi. On occasion, the heirs of Cujas and Fauchet would express regret about the lack of eloquence in their learned prose; but the skeptical critique was never, to my knowledge, engaged, except to be rejected. The Augustinian moral and religious currents that developed not only around Port-Royal but elsewhere, after mid-century, prompted questions about just how heroic such figures as Alexander the Great and Scipio Africanus really were, a critique that did not undermine the panegyric (Louis XIV) just as the latter genre virtually cuts its moorings from history. If Balzac had made the ancient Romans into salonniers, Augustinianism saw brutality and violence beneath virtu. The Stoic celebration of austerity and even poverty (one thinks of Poussin’s Eudamides) came in for questions from an Epicurean perspective. B. Guion is right to note that Saint- Evremond did not rank among the learned critical historians, but his critique of earlier images of Romans as well as his Plutarchian parallels of great men of his own time (Condé) and in Antiquity, prompted reflection and criticism of the very simplified image of the heroic derived from authors such as Quintus Curtius. Sorting out the currents that influenced Saint-Evremond is beyond the ambition of this reviewer, but it would seem that Epicurean thought, with its acceptance of living well, played more of a part than the Augustinian, which was austere and even ascetic. Hobbes may be brought to bear here, perhaps, but not particularly strongly in this quotation (p. 500), since it is a paraphrase from Book I of Machiavelli’s Discourses. It may well be antique, with Livy obviously the first place to look. Balzac and Saint-Evremond jumped the traces of the ars historica by writing history, as Bayle would, not just writing about historians and their works. PFSCL XXXVII, 72 (2010) 246 There are judicious explorations of the commonplaces about the usefulness of history and politics, Providentialism, exemplarity, and public and secret history; but the most original and illuminating is about the general effects of the Augustinian moral and, to use jargon, psychological climate on programmatic historical thought after the Fronde. The debates about the use of negative examples became intense (again! ). Since at least Erasmus, this question depended on one’s views of human nature and the individual’s capacity to discern right from wrong. T. Hampton’s and J. Lyons’s works on exemplarity are cited, but the argument about the decline of exemplarity is not really addressed. Saint- Evremond is, it would seem, ambivalent on this, since his parallels of the great cast doubt on greatness, while still measuring it. Guion’s discussions of Plutarch turn on his use of the mirror metaphor, and prudence, but it is not evident that Plutarch’s construction of portraits through moral language was strengthened or weakened by the restatement of human failings drawn from the author of the Confessions. B. Guion’s overly complicated topical structure makes it almost impossible to grasp an overall or general assessment of any single historian’s thought. For example, reading in all the various places where Bodin is discussed would not yield a general view, because the various contexts are stated so strongly as to make this impossible. As previously noted, rhetoric seems static; yet through his discernment of Asianism and Atticism, M. Fumaroli found not only a deepening of historical understanding of rhetoric, but also a synthesis in a new canon of rules that would come to be known as classicism. Bossuet’s Discours sur l’Histoire universelle is, in its rhetoric, a “new” history. An almost celebratory tone develops in the chapters on the critical historians, notably Le Clerc and Bayle; Saint-Evremond and Fontanelle are also lifted into this Pantheon; it is unclear whether Père Daniel, the Jesuit, is. Criticism, modernity, secularization, and continuity are terms charged with different meanings in different contexts. Guion’s caution is to be commended, but tentativeness in characterizing the programmatic in history leaves the reader in doubt, not a skeptical doubt, just a plain old commonsense doubt about whether critical historical thought in the late seventeenth century marked a more modern development as a result of skeptical, Augustinian, and Epicurean currents that were influential after 1650, or was a continuity from the world of Bodin, La Popelinière, and Pasquier. There are words with stable semantic fields since ancient Roman times, and example-exemplum is one of them. Contexts inevitably render meanings more or less complex, sometimes more vague, sometimes more precise, but in translation exemple is still usually translated as “example.” When Cicero refers to an example in a law case to firm up an argument by history, the Comptes rendus 247 reason for using the example is evident. In St. Jerome, when Jesus talks to his disciples about washing feet: “Exemplum enim dedi vobis” (John 13: 15), the term is obviously entirely free from its earlier judicial contexts. In Béatrice Guion’s discussions of exemplarity, she quite rightly relies on this trans-historical meaning. When Montaigne and Pascal offer critiques of exemplarity, they also rely on this stable signification. Orest Ranum Erec R. Koch: The Aesthetic Body. Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. 390 p. Most studies on corporeality in the seventeenth century focus on the radical difference of psyche and soma while accepting the hierarchization of the substances, with references to Descartes and Jansenist moralists. The history of science in early modern Europe has recently become a field of new theoretical approaches that seek to correct these hierarchical binaries and to rectify the flawed assessment of the inferior role of the body, the passions, and sensations in the Cartesian era. Erec R. Koch’s innovative study argues persuasively that the body is far from being secondary, alienated, or purely mechanical within seventeenth-century thought. By drawing on sources from the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, the author explores the way in which corporeal sensibilities gave rise to a subject-body that announced in a remarkable way the discoveries of corporal sensibilities by eighteenth-century thinkers. Founding his analysis on a vast array of sources (philosophical thought, metaphysical writings, theories on the cosmos, political theory, and moralistic thought), in each chapter Koch turns to one particular sense and its relation to passion-production. Koch’s connected arguments are that for seventeenth-century thinkers, “the body becomes the source and site of passion and sensation, which the mind receives” (14), that “sensibility and passion are the products of forces of a universe of plenitude and matter in motion, which act on the body” (13), and that these two developments converge into an aesthetic body. Chapter one describes the physiological underpinning of corporeal sensibility through an in-depth analysis of its history in both the sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, culminating in Descartes’s late treatise Les Passions de l’âme. After a brief and pertinent review of Ancient Greek thought on the organic unity between the physical and the spiritual, as well as anatomical discoveries in the Renaissance, the chapter gives full attention to Descartes’s treatises and correspondences. Koch highlights the impor-
