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FRENCH LITERATURE - Part 3

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THE TRIUMPH OF CLASSICISM

France's political position as the most powerful nation in Europe during the reign of Louis XIV was reflected in the preeminence French literature attained in the 17th century. This Golden Age literature still forms the foundation of French liberal education. The period showed a continuing trend toward the reinforcement of royal authority and, except at the end, of Catholic influence. In 1635, Cardinal Richelieu created the Académie Française with the aim of regulating language and literary expression. The conflict between two literary tendencies--one toward greater creative freedom, which modern critics call baroque, and the other toward an acceptance of literary rules--had been virtually resolved in favor of CLASSICISM by 1660. The components of this creed would be codified by Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, the founder of French literary criticism, in his Art of Poetry (1674; Eng. trans., 1683), in which reason, proportion, and harmony were defined as the outstanding literary values.

France's greatest dramatists emerged during this period. Pierre Corneille, whose tragic masterpiece The Cid (1637), dramatizing the conflict between duty and passion, remains unequaled in the grandeur of its conception, wrote over 30 plays, most of them, after 1634, in accordance with the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. He was surpassed in popularity and critical esteem only by Jean Racine, whose simpler style and more realistic characters and plot structures, as in Andromache (1667; Eng. trans., 1675) and Phaedra (1677; Eng. trans., 1776), reveal a world of ferocious passions beneath a veneer of elegant poetry. In the comic arena, Molière, ranging from the farcical to the sharpest explorations of social, psychological, and metaphysical questions, created a body of plays that seem as fresh and pointed today as they were when first produced. His masterpieces were Tartuffe (1664; Eng. trans., 1670) and The Misanthrope (1666; Eng. trans., 1709).

The French novel, which in the first part of the 17th century was long, diffuse, and full of improbable adventures (L'Astree, 1607-28, for instance), also came of age. In The Princess of Clèves (1678; Eng. trans., 1925), a concise psychological analysis of a moral problem in married life, the Comtesse de la Fayette fashioned a perfect model of the novel of character as the genre would develop in France.

Minor literary forms were ennobled by such brilliant practitioners as Madame de Sevigne, who in her correspondence created definitive models of letter writing; the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, whose Maxims (1665; Eng. trans., 1694) wittily analyzed human motives in terms of self-interest; and Jean de la Bruyère, whose wide-ranging and insightful study of social conditions and types in his Characters (1688; Eng. trans., 1699) anticipated the liberal, scientifically oriented tendencies of the 18th century. The poet Jean de la Fontaine achieved lasting fame with his successive volumes of Fables (1668, 1678, 1694; Eng. trans., 1734), a genre he made indelibly his own by combining sophisticated "morals" with a deliberately archaic and deceptively simple style. The art of memoir writing assumed a new power and subtlety when composed by such participants in historical events as the Duc de Saint-Simon, La Rochefoucauld, and Cardinal de Retz.

The enormously influential DISCOURSE ON METHOD (1637) not only established its author, René Descartes, as the first modern philosopher but set the precedent for that clarity, precision, and rationalism with which French thinking and writing would subsequently be associated. Another philosopher admired as much for the perfection of his prose as for the character of his thought was Blaise Pascal. His Lettres provinciales (1656-57; Eng. trans., 1816) demonstrated the devastating effectiveness of a simplicity informed by intelligence and wit, whereas the Pensées (1670; Eng. trans., 1688) directed the reader to faith in the Christian God through an eloquent combination of reason, passion, and insight into the human condition. More grandiloquent, and certainly better representative of 17th-century religious orthodoxy, were the sermons and funeral orations of the great preacher and theological polemicist Jacques BOSSUET. His Quietist opponent, François Fenelon, combined the interests of a classicist with the critical spirit of the 18th century in his didactic novel Telemaque (1699; Eng. trans., 1743).


Jean Boorsch.
Source: The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Release #8, ©1996.

Introduction to French Literature || The Middle Ages

The French Renaissance || The Triumph of Classicism

The French Enlightenment

19th Century || 20th Century

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