PFSCL XLIV, 87 (2017) 362 « seulement ». C’est bien « le point crucial de l’incompréhension entre Corneille et Racine, celui de l’élocution versifiée » (p. 357). La dernière page, sur la « désaffection du public » (p. 360), remet en perspective le « changement profond des mentalités » depuis l’échec de la Fronde et note avec justesse que la publicité autour de l’affrontement avec Racine vient finalement transformer « la simple baisse de popularité d’un poète démodé » en « combat de titans » plus glorieux pour l’un et l’autre. Belle idée, que cet hommage polémique au vieux génie dramatique de la part de celui dont « la beauté du langage est toujours un atout » (p. 360) ! Emmanuel Minel Malina Stefanovska and Adrien Paschoud (eds.) : Littérature et politique : Factions et dissidences de la Ligue à la Fronde. Paris: Garnier, 2015. 242 p. What an interesting and most welcome series of close readings anent the use of words indicating protest, difference, or non-majoritarian thought or action. Faction is a trans-historical word from the Latin - i.e., persons joined together for a common end or purpose. The charioteers of the Roman circus were called factions (Gibbon, chap. XL), with a not necessarily negative connotation. After a brief and strong Introduction by the editors which poses new and interesting questions (e. g. is one born a factieux? ), comes a note alerting the reader to watch for shifts from negative to positive meanings, or the reverse, for key words such as party. With mastery and clarity, Nicolas Le Roux ferrets out changing meanings and shifting terms during the civil wars, 1560s to 1590s. The Crown legislated against separatist movements but could really do little. Exemplary punishments were to no avail. By 1567 Condé was the “chef du party Huguenot”; but a mere seven years later, the partis and the ligues had developed into aristocratic powers. The faction or the league can be negative or positive, according to political grouping. Ruth Stawarz-Luginbühl explores the conceits and imagery associated with the successor of the heirless Henry III in M. Philone’s Adonis (1586). Amy Graves-Munroe reviews what is known about the nefarious Catherine de Lorraine, widowed duchess of Montpensier. Sister of the Guise brothers who were executed by Henry III, “la” Montpensier mobilized preachers to support the aims of the Sainte Union. Her public presence prompted attacks not only for her politics but also for her gender. Wearing her famous dirty green sash as she walked about the city, Montpensier’s Comptes rendus 363 lofty rank and wealth impeded her from becoming part of the League leadership, but it is also unclear whether she ever really sought it. Astute player in the game of urban political upheaval, and expert plotter under the veil of religion, she had her own faction within a faction. After listing several key trans-historical aspects of satire, Christopher M. Flood describes two almost primordial conceptual-mythical schemes that underlay French political culture in the sixteenth century: 1) the Roman Catholic mystical body of France, and 2) the sacred mother. Satirists frequently had the one or the other in mind as they lashed out against the writers, factions, and general sources of disorder that were in contretemps, from the inside, as it were, to a perspective on commonly shared values. Protestants in the early years of civil war accepted more readily “hybridization,” or alternate schemes to the two major ones, while in the 1590s it would be the non-League Catholics who accepted nuances and even changes in the French identity. Flood offers the most convincing analysis of the Dialogue d’entre le Maheustre et le Manant that I have ever read, beginning with the critical point that the differences between the two are differences between two Catholic factions, with the manant emphasizing hope and faith in the Pope and in a Catholic king who seeks to restore the French mystical body as one, and the maheustre appealing to God “who can never support rebels against their king,” an assurance of Navarre’s legitimacy. Flood concludes by showing how the two primordial (my word) schemes are a backdrop to d’Aubigné’s Tragiques. Jean-Raymond Fanlo has edited many of d’Aubigné’s works, notably Les Tragiques, where factions and divisions are characterized as “monstrous things.” The Huguenots are not a faction, they are a parti, a major factor since it is linked to the fate of the body politic, broken by the rise of a new one, the Huguenot one, that will not triumph throughout France, partly as a result of Navarre’s conversion to Catholicism. There is recognition that the violence of civil war has inspired some of his poetry. The broken body of France is almost an obsession for d’Aubigné: how could Navarre’s conversion be God’s will? Gilbert Schrenk’s very thoughtful account of Biron’s fate begins by emphasizing d’Aubigné’s word for what developed: conjuration, in lieu of the typical menées, sédition, cabale, or complot, although these are employed as synonyms. D’Aubigné pulls together multiple causes such as Navarre’s poor relations with the grands and his payoffs to high-ranking League aristocrats as well as his own conversion and the international tensions; but he also sketches a portrait of the would-be tyrant who plots for personal gain. The shadow of Machiavelli looms over d’Aubignés complex and incon- PFSCL XLIV, 87 (2017) 364 clusive study of Biron’s fate. From the Discorsi, d’Aubigné pulls together the features of the conspiration; but was there not also the concetto of the new prince from The Prince? Shrenk’s elucidation of d’Aubigné-the-historian and d’Aubigné-the-pamphleteer - on Biron - is a model study that future scholars might consider adopting. After five studies that present vocabularies in opposition politics, six studies in the second part center on more formal analyses of the thought about factions by major and lesser thinkers and writers, notably Bacon, Hobbes, Retz, La Mothe Le Vayer, the Campions, Priolo, Sorel, Priorato, and the troubled Jesuit Surin. Bacon observes the relation between the size of the party and the cohesion: the smaller it is, the more unified. Monarchs ought to fear party politics. Secrecy is one of their sources of strength. After describing various types of groups and how they accord with Nature, Hobbes argues that it is largely the middle-sized groups that are better at assuring the security of their members. Scorning (and fearing) these middle-sized groups, Hobbs makes the case for an absolute monarchy in which there are virtually no groups founded illegally. He admires how merchants conduct themselves, however. Retz’s heroization of the chef de parti would lead him to propose principles for how to create, extend, and manage a faction. Speedy action in the face of changing circumstances is one of his principles; another is the delicacy with which relations with the people are considered. Retz would help pull together a very strong anti-Mazarin party, and he speculated that Anne would turn to him to - eventually - but that never happened, because the individualist-egotistical character of a chef de parti failed to hold opposition groups together. Simply attacking Mazarin with a view to replacing him would not be enough to disgrace permanently the wily Roman. After a close reading of a large number of memoirs written during or around the time of the Fronde, Jean-Marie Constant finds an increase in the key descriptive words: for example, “fit un parti” in Beauvais-Nangis on the Guises, and “cabale” denotes the pressure groups that may, or may not, become a parti. What is usually referred to as the parti dévot (the Marillac brothers, Bérulle, Marie de Médicis) is a “cabale” for Tallemant des Réaux. Similarly, the Importants are likewise described as a cabale by La Rochefoucauld. Constant finds that “les factions sont une première mobilization de la noblesse avant la creation d’un parti” (p. 150). With decades of research and reflection on these terms, Constant finds that noble plots were usually made up of “friends” in their opposition to Richelieu - with affective and familial ties being more influential in their meaning than ideologies. Comptes rendus 365 In La Mothe Le Vayer’s too-often-studied religious faith, Ioana Manea uses almost interchangeably the words écrivain and philosophe to characterize the author of De la Vertu des païens. Had the history of ancient philosophy become sufficiently studied in the 1670s to permit the assignment of specific philosophical perspectives (e.g. Stoic, Epicurean, skeptic) to a specific philosopher and his work? Yes, of course, and La Mothe Le Vayer’s skeptic thought was known as such - by Richelieu, for example - and it did not deter the Cardinal from nominating him as tutor to the prince-king, Louis le Dieu-Donné. Naudé’s description of a philosophical school as “comme par cabale, et traditions bien secretes” (p. 166), and positively confirms what we know about his playfulness with words. There have already been several instances in this volume where the specific aim, character, and links to larger opposition parties are explored by writers whose political engagement, rather than their creative expression, has prompted them to write. Éric Méchoulan faces all the issues in his model study pf the Campion brothers, political actor-writers for the Soissons-led rebellion of 1641. Writing to attract support for Soissons’s cause, the Campions reframed the debate over dueling in a way reminiscent of Montaigne’s views. Du Guesclin’s exemplarity becomes problematic as a deeper understanding of his career develops and shifts toward history. The turn to the classical binaries, particularly to whether it is better for a ruler to be feared than loved, restated by Machiavelli, leads the reader farther still from cogent argument in support of Soissons. Like Montrésor, the Campions are short on savoir and are not at all the equals of a Guez de Balzac or a La Rochefoucauld. This is perhaps a reason to refer to them as “intellectuals,” as Méchoulan does. In over their heads, like Georges de Scudéry in his critique of Le Cid, the Campions traded on their nobility to compensate for their lack of learning. Méchoulan asserts that, for Richelieu, the Soissons rebellion was the most dangerous of all for Richelieu. I would opt for the rebellion of 1632 led by Gaston and Montmorency: in either case, the choice involved fathoming the unfathomable mind of Louis XIII. Bruno Tribout seeks to discern the historicization of faction (as in the Mémoires de la Ligue): it is writing distinctively about a faction as contrasted with writing memoirs about one person, for example, Retz. This is an excellent topic. Some factions in seventeenth-century English politics actually did generate histories written from their perspective. Priolo is a transitional figure, for he seeks to employ exemplarity to write about a dark, if not totally corrupt Mazarin; but he never seems to perceive the Condé party any more than, say, Joly does, when his articulation of a public perspective becomes reduced to a faction that claims to be PFSCL XLIV, 87 (2017) 366 public: the Parlement! I miss a reference to S. Uomini’s Cultures historiques dans la France du XVII e siècle (Paris, 1998). Béatrice Guion is also suggestive on how post-classical topics are generated in her Du bon usage de l’histoire (Paris, 2008). In his study of Jean-Joseph Surin’s Le Triomphe de l’Amour divin sur les puissances de l’Enfer, Adrien Paschoud moves too quickly to the general contexts (theological, anthropological, institutional). He does not give a context for understanding the meaning of faction in the two passages where the Jesuit uses of that word. The result is a general interpretation of Surin’s work, and comments by Surin about his former colleague, Labadie. The editors of this excellent collection of studies are to be congratulated for bringing together a coherent and significant body of research and analysis on a very important topic. Orest Ranum