French literature of the 17th century: Encyclopedia II - French literature of the 17th century

In France, the period following the Wars of Religion saw the appearance of a new form of narrative fiction – that some critics have since termed the "sentimental novel" – which very quickly became a literary sensation thanks to the enthusiasm of a reading public searching for delight after so many years of conflict.

These relatively short (and often realistic) novels of love (or "amours" as they are frequently called in the titles) included extensive examples of gallant letters and polite discourse, amorous dialogues, letters and poems inserted in the story; gallant conceits and other rhetorical figures. These texts played an important role in the elaboration of new modes of civility and discourse of the upper classes (leading to the notion of the noble "honnête homme"). None of these novels have been republished since the early part of the seventeenth century and they remain largely unknown today. Authors associated with "les Amours": Antoine de Nervèze, Nicolas des Escuteaux and François du Souhait.

Meanwhile, the tradition of the dark tale - coming from the tragic short story ("histoire tragique") associated with Bandello and frequently ending in suicide or murder - continued in the works of François de Rosset.

French literature of the 17th century - The Baroque adventure novel

By 1610, the short novel of love had largely disappeared as tastes returned to longer adventure novels ("romans d'aventures") and their clichés (pirates, storms, kidnapped maidens) that had been popular since the Valois court (Amadis of Gaul was the favorite reading matter of Henri IV; Béroalde de Verville was still writing and Nicolas de Montreux had just died in 1608). Both Nervèze and Des Escuteaux, in their later works, attempted multi-volume adventure novels, and over the next twenty years the priest Jean-Pierre Camus adapted the form to tell harrowing moral tales heavily influenced by the "histoire tragique". But the most well known of these long adventure novels is perhaps Polexandre (1629-49) by the young author Marin le Roy de Gomberville.

All of these authors were eclipsed however by the international success of Honoré d'Urfé's immense novel l'Astrée (1607-1633) -- centered around the shepherd Céladon and his love Astrée -- which combined a frame tale device of shepards and maidens meeting each other and telling their stories and philosophizing on love (a form derived from the ancient Greek novel "the Aethiopica" by Heliodorus of Emesa) and a pastoral setting (derived from the Spanish and Italian pastoral tradition from such writers as Jacopo Sannazaro, Jorge de Montemayor, Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Guarini) of noble and idealized shepherds and maidens tending their sheep and falling in and out of love.

The influence of d'Urfé's novel was immense, especially in its discursive structure which permitted an infinite number of separate stories and characters to be introduced and their resolution to be constantly delayed for thousands of pages. D'Urfé's novel also promoted a rarified neo-platonism which differed profoundly with the frequent physicality of the knights in the Renaissance novel (such as Amadis of Gaul). The only element of d'Urfé's work which did not produce countless imitations was in its "roman pastoral" setting.

In theorizing the origins of the novel, the early seventeenth century conceived of the novel as "an epic in prose", and in truth the epic poem at the end of the Renaissance had few thematic differences from the novel: novelistic love had spilled into the epic and adventurous knights had become the subject of novels. The novels from 1640 to 1660 would make this melding complete. These novels extended to multiple volumes and were structurally complicated, using the same techniques of inserted stories and tale-within-a-tale dialogues as d'Urfé. Often called "romans de longue haleine" (or "deep-breath books"), they usually took place in an ancient historical period like Rome, Egypt or ancient Persia, used historical characters (for this reason they are called "romans héroiques" heroic romances) and told the adventures of a series of perfect lovers separated by accident or misfortune to the four corners of the world. Unlike the chivalric romance, magical elements and creatures were relatively rare. Furthermore, there was a concentration in these works on psychological analysis and on moral and sentimental questions that the Renaissance novel lacked. Many of these novels were actually "romans à clé" which described actual contemporary relationships under disguised novelistic names and characters. The most famous of these authors and novels are:

French literature of the 17th century - Baroque comic fiction

Not all fiction from the first half of the century was a wild flight of fancy in far-flung lands and rarified adventurous love stories. Influenced by the international success of the picaresque novel from Spain (such as the novel Lazarillo de Tormes), and by Miguel de Cervantes's short story collection Exemplary Tales (French translations started to appear in 1614) and "Don Quixote de la Mancha" (French translation 1614-1618), the French novelists of the first half of the century also chose to describe and satirize their own epoque and its excesses. Other important models of satire were provided by Fernando de Rojas's "Celestina" and John Barclay's (1582-1621) two satirical works in Latin "Euphormio sive Satiricon" (1602) and "Argenis" (1621).

Agrippa d'Aubigné's "Les Aventures du baron de Faeneste" portrays the rude manners and comic adventures of a Gascon in the royal court.

Charles Sorel's "L'histoire comique de Francion" is a picaresque inspired story of the ruses and amorous dealings of a young gentleman, and his "Le Berger extravagant" is a satire of the d'Urfé-inspired pastoral, which (taking a clue from the end of "Don Quixote") has a young man take on the life of a shepherd. Despite its "realism", Sorel's works remain, none the less, highly baroque with dream sequences and inserted narrations (for example, when Francion tells of his years at school) typical of the adventure novel. This use of inserted stories also follows Cervantes who inserted a number of nearly autonomous stories into his "Quixote".

Paul Scarron's most famous work, "Le Roman comique", uses the narrative frame of a group of ambulant actors in the provinces to present both scenes of farcical comedy and sophisticated inserted tales.

Cyrano de Bergerac -- made famous by the 19th century play by Edmond Rostand -- wrote two novels that, sixty years before Gulliver's Travels or Voltaire (not to mention science-fiction), use a journey to magical lands (the moon and the sun) as pretexts for satirizing contemporary philosophy and morals. By the end of the century, Cyrano's works would inspire a number of philosophical novels in which Frenchmen travel to to foreign lands and strange utopias.

The early half of the century also saw the continued popularity of the comic short story and collections of humorous discussions, such as in the "Histoires comiques" of François du Souhait; the playful, chaotic, sometimes obsene and almost unreadable Moyen de parvenir by Béroalde de Verville (a parody of books of "table talk", of Rabelais and of Michel de Montaigne's "The Essays"); the anonymous "Caquets de l'accouchée" (1622); and Molière d'Essertine's "Semaine amoureuse" (a collection of short stories).

In the latter half of the century, a contemporary setting would be also used in many classical "nouvelles" (or short novels), especially as a form of moral critique of contemporary society.

French literature of the 17th century - The Nouvelle classique

By 1660, the multi-volume baroque historical novel had largely fallen out of fashion. The tendency was for much shorter works ("nouvelles" or "petits romans") without the complex structure or adventurous elements (pirates, shipwrecks, kidnappings). An interest in love, psychological analysis, moral dilemmas and social constraints permeates these novels. When the action was placed in an historical setting, this was increasingly a setting in the recent past, and although still filled with anacronisms, these novels showed an interest in historical detail; these are generally called "nouvelles historiques". A number of these short novels recounted the "secret history" of a famous event (like Villedieu's "Annales galantes"), linking the action generally to an amorous intrigue; these were called "histoires galantes". Some of these short novels told stories of the contemporary world (like Préchac's "L'Illustre Parisienne").

The most famous of all of these is clearly Madame de Lafayette's La princesse de Clèves. Reduced to essentially three characters, the short novel tells the story of a married noble woman in the time of Henri II who falls in love with another man, but who reveals her passion to her husband. Although the novel includes a couple of inserted stories, on the whole the narration concentrates on the unspoken doubts and fears of the two individuals living in a social setting dominated by etiquette and moral correctness; despite the historical setting, Lafayette was clearly describing her contemporary world. The psychological analysis is close to the pessimism of La Rochefoucauld, and the abnegation of the characters leads ultimately to tragedy. For all of its force however, Madame de Lafayette's novel is not the first to have a recent historical setting or psychological depth, as some critics state; these elements can be found in novels of the decade before, and in fact are already present in certain of the "Amours" at the beginning of the century.

French literature of the 17th century - Other novelistic forms after 1660

The obsessions of the "nouvelle classique" (an interest in love, psychological analysis, moral dilemmas and social constraints) are also apparent in the anonymous epistolary novel Lettres d'une religieuse portugaise ("Letters of a Portuguese Nun") (1668), attributed to Guilleragues, which were a major sensation when they were published, in part because of their perceived authenticity. These letters written by a scorned woman to her absent lover were a powerful representation of amorous passion with many similarities to the language of Racine. Other epistolary novels followed, written by Claude Barbin, Vincent Voiture, Edme Boursault, Fontenelle (who used the form to introduce discussion of philosophical and moral matters, prefiguring Montesquieu's Lettres persanes in the 18th century) and others; actual love letters written by noble ladies (Madame de Bussy-Lameth, Madame de Coligny) were also published.

Antoine Furetière (1619-1688) is responsible for a longer comic novel which pokes fun at a bourgeois family: "Le Roman bourgeois" (1666). The choice of the bourgeois "arriviste" or "parvenu" (a "social climber" trying to ape the manners and style of the noble classes) as a source of mockery appears in a number of short stories and in theater of the period (such as Molière's "Bourgeois Gentihomme").

The long adventurous novel of love continued to exist after 1660, albeit in a far shorter form than the novels of the 1640s. Influenced as much by the "nouvelles historiques" and the "nouvelles galantes" as by the "roman d'aventures" and the "roman historique", these galant and historical novels -- whose settings range from ancient Rome to Renaissance Castille or France -- were published in to the first decades of the 18th century. Authors include: Madame d'Aulnoy, Mlle Caumont de la Force, Mlle de La Roche-Guilhem, Catherine Bernard, Catherine Bédacier-Durand.

An important history of the novel was written by Pierre Daniel Huet, Traitté de l'origine des romans (1670), which (much like theoretical discussions on theatrical "vraisemblance", "bienséance" and the nature of tragedy and comedy) stressed the need for moral utility and made important distinctions between history and the novel, and between the epic (which treats of politics and war) and the novel (which treats of love).

The first half of the century had seen the development of the biographical mémoire (see below), and by the 1670's this form began to be used in novels. Madame de Villedieu (her real name was Marie-Catherine Desjardins), author of a number of "nouvelles", was also the author of a longer realistic work that represented (and satirized) the contemporary world via the fictionalized "mémoires" of young woman telling her amorous and economic hardships: Mémoires de la vie d'Henriette Sylvie de Molière (1672-1674).

The fictional "mémoire" form was used by other novelists as well. Courtilz de Sandras's novels -- "Mémoires de M.L.C.D.R." (1687), "Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan" (1700), "Mémoires de M. de B." (1711) -- describe the world of Richelieu and Mazarin without galant clichés: spies, kidnappings, poitical machinations predominate. Among the other "mémoires" of the period, the most famous was the work of a Englishman Anthony Hamilton, whose "Mémoires de la vie du comte de Grammont..." was published in France in 1713 and tells of his years in the French court from 1643-1663. Many of these works were published anonymously; in some cases it is difficult to tell whether they are fictionlized or biographical. Other authors include: abbé Cavard, abbé de Villiers, abbé Olivier, le sieur de Grandchamp. The realism and occasional irony of these novels would lead directly to the novels of Alain-René Lesage, Marivaux and Abbé Prévost in the 18th century.

In the 1690s, the Fairy tale began to appear in French literature. The most famous collection of traditional tales (liberally adapted) was by Charles Perrault (1697), although many others were published. A major revolution would occur however with the appearance of Antoine Galland's first French (and indeed modern) translation of the Thousand and One Nights (or "Arabian Nights") (from 1704; another translation appeared in 1710-12), which would influence the 18th century short stories of Voltaire, Diderot and countless others.

The period also saw several novels with voyages and utopian descriptions of foreign cultures (in imitation of Cyrano de Bergerac, Thomas More and Francis Bacon):

Of similar didactic aims was Fénelon's "Les Aventures de Télémaque" (1694-6), which represents a classicist's attempt to overcome the excesses of the baroque novel: using a structure of travels and adventures (grafted onto Telemachus the son of Ulysses) Fénelon exposes his moral philosophy. This novel would be copied by numerous didactic novels in the 18th century.

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Prose fiction", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction

French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction: Encyclopedia II - French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction

See also:

French literature of the 17th century: Encyclopedia II - French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction

French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction

French literature of the 17th century - Les Amours and Les histoires tragiques

French literature of the 17th century - The Baroque adventure novel

French literature of the 17th century - Baroque comic fiction

French literature of the 17th century - The Nouvelle classique

French literature of the 17th century - Other novelistic forms after 1660

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French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction

French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction: Encyclopedia II - French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction

See also:

French literature of the 17th century: Encyclopedia II - French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction

French literature of the 17th century - Prose fiction

French literature of the 17th century - Les Amours and Les histoires tragiques

French literature of the 17th century - The Baroque adventure novel

French literature of the 17th century - Baroque comic fiction

French literature of the 17th century - The Nouvelle classique

French literature of the 17th century - Other novelistic forms after 1660

Other related archives

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