Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

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СКАЧАТЬ The perceived magnanimitymagnanimity of Henri IV determines the ethosethos of the royal odes, and this ethosethos in turn selects appropriate arguments and style. Its logic of intrinsic merit helped advance Henri’s political agenda and reinforced Bourbon political authority after Henri’s death. In presenting the monarch’s magnanimitymagnanimity as a patriotic idealpatriotismpatriotic ideal that transcends sectarian loyalties, Malherbe exploits the collective identity of ethosethos to appeal to noble elites and, through them, to the nationnation as a whole. Henri IV may not have taken a strong interest in poetry, but he could not have failed to notice that Malherbe’s “Prière pour le Roi allant en Limousin” (1605; 1607)—the ode which earned the poet a position at courtcourt (royal)—advocates the healing of the wounds inflicted on the French nationnation. The patronage of Malherbe was a practical tool for the dissemination of an ideological public imageimagepublic image which reaffirmed the authority of the monarchy and modeled the patriotismpatriotism of the new nationnation.

      Chapter 2. The Evolution of Noble Identity

      The first three decades of the seventeenth century in France were marked by rapid and widespread change at almost every level of society. A fairly steady economic expansion began. The monarchy by fits and starts more aggressively asserted its power, attempting to centralize authority and to raise revenues with the paulette and through various commercial treaties. The regency of Marie de Médicis saw the great nobles challenge the crown’s authority in 1614, while a sixteen-year-old Louis XIII assumed his office with a dramatic coup d’état that wrested the reins of power from his mother in 1617. Louis XIII’s military campaigns in the early 1620s in the southwest of France, the bastion of ProtestantProtestant resistance, culminated in the siege of La RochelleLa Rochelle in 1628, resulting in the defeat of the ProtestantProtestants and the disarmament of all their strongholds. Monarchal and noble patronage flourished, while new centers of cultural authority and literary production emerged in aristocratic salonsalonss. French literature abandoned the gloomy themes inspired by the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion and embraced larger-than-life heroism in novels, theater, and prose encomia, the amorous intrigue of pastoral, and the social refinements of salonsalons culture.

      Noble identitynobilityidentity was not immune to all these changes. This period was the crucible for the emergence of a new nobiliary ethosethos, the honnêtehonnête homme homme [honorable man]. In 1630, the publication of Nicolas Farethonnête hommeFaret, Nicolas’s L’Honnêtehonnête homme Homme; ou l’art de plaire à la cour [The Honorable Man; or How to Please at Courtcourt (royal)] marked the transition of nobiliary ethos from the heroic warrior to the worldly courtiercourt (royal)courtier based on a reassessment of the virtuevirtue best adapted to the social and political conditions of courtcourt (royal)ly life. To be sure, the definition of honnêtehonnête hommehonnêtetété [nobilitynobility; dignity; propriety] would significantly evolve over the course of the seventeenth century, and it would be another forty years before the great nobles embraced honnêtehonnête hommehonnêtetété, sometime after 1668, when the recalcitrant Grand CondéGrand Condé (also duke of Enghien) was reabsorbed into Louis XIV’s absolutist regime (Bannister, Condé 155). In the interim, however, before its decline, the older warrior ethosethos, which Mark Bannister identifies with the class myth of the sword nobilitynobilityof the sword, would blaze forth in spectacular fashion. In 1637, Corneille’s Le Cid announced the outbreak of a veritable cult of the hero, which was taken up, amplified, and refined in novels written between 1640 and 1660 as well as in various prose encomia composed for the intrepid Enghien in the 1640s and 50s.1 On the question of noble identitynobilityidentity in the first half of the seventeenth century, Malherbe’s royal odes, published between 1600 and 1627, stake out a clear commitment to the older warrior ethosethos based on the heroic conception of virtuevirtue, the very sort that would ignite the aristocratic imagination a decade after the poet’s death.

      This chapter recalls the debate over noble identitynobilityidentity that occurred toward the end of the religious warsreligious wars and that culminated in Farethonnête hommeFaret, Nicolas’s L’Honnêtehonnête homme Homme because it shows that the concept of virtuevirtue remained indispensable to noble identitynobilityidentity in the first three decades of the century and that the choice between the older warrior ethosethos and the new worldly ethosethos was the choice between two virtuevirtues, magnanimitymagnanimity and moderationvirtuemoderation, respectively. While it is true that, by convention, the function of encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry discourse is to praise virtuevirtue, Malherbe’s choice to put magnanimitymagnanimity at the center of the royal odes invites closer scrutiny when one considers that this virtuevirtue underpinned the class myth of the sword nobilitynobilityof the sword, in whose upper echelons Henri of Navarre moved before acceding to the throne. The sword nobilitynobilityof the sword was not only a key constituency that needed to be won over, but its class myth would be used by Malherbe to fashion a nationnational myth. The significance of the virtuevirtue of magnanimitymagnanimity in the royal odes, I argue, resides in its aptitude for birthing the civic community of the new nationnation. It gives the sequence of odes a logical coherence and a political ground.

      A few words should be said about the range of meanings of the term “vertu” [virtuevirtue] in the early seventeenth century. Today in French, as in English, it usually refers to “a disposition or a pattern in someone’s characterethoscharacter or personality that leads them to act morally” (van Hooft 1). This acceptation occurs as the second definition of the word in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie [Dictionary of the Academy] (1694): “Virtuevirtue, means also, A habit of the soul, which prompts it to do good, & to avoid evil.” But the first definition shows that the word used to have a much wider semantic field: “Efficacy, power, strength, property.” For instance, plants and stones had “virtuevirtues,” such as curative properties or magnetic force. The term also implied moral greatness or excellence, a meaning borrowed from the Greek aretē. As Paul Bénichou notes in Morales du grand siècle: “The writers of this period are defined less by their preference for beauty or truth, than the case they make, to a greater or lesser degree, for human virtuevirtue, defined in the general sense of couragevirtuecourage, power, or greatness” (Bénichou 12). Much like the early modern Italian “virtù,” this sense of the French word left its mark on French writers as diverse as Corneille, Racine, and Molière. The heroic novels of Gomberville, La Calprenède, and Madeleine de Scudèry, also use the word in this sense to designate the exceptional qualities or powers that make a monarch or a noble specially fit to protect and to command (Bannister, Privileged Mortals 7-8, 27-33, 47-48). When assimilated to “vertu héroïque,” it could reach superhuman proportions. Nor should we overlook the term’s stylistic implications. Moral excellence is esthetically pleasing. Virtuevirtue is beautiful because it is good. This coupling of the ethical and the esthetic is captured by the Greek term “to kalon,” translated as “the beautiful,” “the fine,” or “the noble”—and one should add the French term l’honnêtehonnête hommehonnêteté [honorable, noble, fine]. Aristotelian scholars signal yet another shade of meaning: “the admirable” (Donahue 69). All these connotations of the term are relevant in Malherbe’s royal odes.

      What made the concept of virtuevirtue so attractive to nobles in the early seventeenth century was that it gave them a way to tie outward displays of distinction—feats of valor, good taste, politesse [etiquette]—to what they considered intrinsic merit. To be virtuous was to perform actions, to say words, to observe rules of civility, to possess objects, that were considered noble, fine, beautiful, or admirable. These were not just fitting to one’s social station, they were themselves the marks of virtuevirtue. Causality was turned on its head: to exhibit the mark of virtuevirtue was to be virtuous. By the 1660s, noble identitynobilityidentity had evolved to the point where virtuevirtue was no longer necessary to legitimize the social distinction conferred by the performance, the possession, the consumption, or the appreciation of all things fine. La Rochefoucauld found the notion of virtuevirtue suspect and deconstructed it in his Maximes (1664), while two decades later the Chevalier de Méré replaced it with taste and the graceful mastery of social etiquette.

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