Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

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      Taken from the final ode of the sequence, “Ode pour le roi allant châtier la rébellion des Rochelois” (1627; 1635), this stanza looks back on Malherbe’s career and asks the reader to rate his achievement as no less marvelous than AmphionAmphion building the walls of Thebes. By grounding the unity of the nationnation inpatrienation something other than the Catholic faith, the royal odes claim they have erected ideological ramparts around the monarchy more effective than any physical wall. The stones, as it were, are the hearts of the French people moved by the odes’ eloquenceeloquence and henceforth united in support of an ethnically French monarchy, as required by the Salic Law. The mythical city that the odes claim to have built represents the new nationnation. Of course, it is less a place or a territory than an imagined community expressed in the form of a patriotic ethospatriotismpatriotic ethos modeled on the monarch, the nationnation’s protector and embodiment, and defined as loyalty and service pro rege et patriapro rege et patria [for king and fatherland].9 The creation of this new national communitynationnational community bound by affective ties between monarch and subject, as well as among subjects, is the highest purpose and final end at which the royal odes take aim.

      King, monarchy, nationnation: the odes indeed reimagine all three. A new image for the monarch presupposes a new image of the monarchyimageof the monarchy, and this in turn rests on a new image of the nationimageof the nation. The first two are evident in the odes; the last is more difficult to perceive. Nowhere do the odes use the term patrienationla patrie [fatherland; nationnation; country], a neologism in sixteenth-century France. Instead, they use the collective “nous” [we, us], sometimes refer to “France” and “les Français” [the French], and mention recognizable enemies of the monarchy and the French: “Espagne” [Spain], “les Anglais” [the English], the Holy Roman Empire (“l’aigle”), the Ottoman Empire (“l’infidèle Croissant” [infidel Crescent]), and a few minor antagonists. However, the concept is always there, lurking like a noumenal ground requiring close reading, logical inference, and affective sensibility to be apprehended. The excellence, remoteness, and knowability of the nationnation in the royal odes belongs to the same “‘ancient dilemma of knowledge and representation’” affecting the objects of faith in sacredeloquencesacred oratory oratory.10 Similar to a Christian orator charged with bringing the objects of faith, the most remote and the most worth knowing, into some kind of relationship with what human beings are able to grasp, Malherbe uses mythologymythology and figures of thoughtfigures of thought to strike the imagination of his contemporaries and fill their hearts with emotionemotions attaching them to the new national communitynationnational community. The words “étonner” (to astonish) and “merveille” (marvel, wonderwonder) of the somewhat obscure analogyproofanalogy in the stanza above (Malherbe : nationnation :: AmphionAmphion : Thebes) indicate which feelings contemporary readers—including a young Louis XIII—were supposed to experience once they had solved the stanza’s riddle and—only then—accurately reckoned the central role that the royal odes allege to have played in the rebirth of France following the Wars of Religion.

      The Malherbe that emerges from this interpretation of the odes is still the consummate craftcraftsman, but one who also dared to claim a political voice for himself. The mythological figure of AmphionAmphion symbolically reunites the disunion that CiceroCicero lamented in De OratoreCiceroDe Oratore (1.8.33-44), the divorce of phronēsisphronēsis from eloquenceeloquence, ofpractical reasonphronēsis the practical wisdomphronēsisman of action from the man of words. What substitutes for this lost unity is the dyad of monarch and poet, which the royal odes recoup from the social practice of literary patronage. When Henri IV selected Malherbe, in his capacity as poet, to speak for the new dynasty, he did so knowingly and purposely. This alliance of king and poet marked a return to a normal state of affairs following the religious warsreligious wars.

      One must recall that poetry at this time had not yet achieved literary autonomy. Poets relied on royal and aristocratic patrons for financial and political protection, and this dependence forced poets to straddle conceptually distinct categories: poetry and politics, eloquenceeloquence and virtuevirtue, and two kinds of ethosethos—the rhetorical and the moral. How did these arrangements work? As Peter W. Shoemaker so beautifully explains in Powerful Connections: The Poetics of Patronage in the Age of Louis XIII, the monarch, members of the royal family, powerful nobles and prelates, and upwardly mobile bourgeois, all seeking the prestige conferred by belles-lettres, collaborated with poets to use poetry in the service of social standing and political influence. They looked to poetry to craft idealized representations of their characterethoscharacter—a kind of public imageimagepublic image destined for their literate peers—while poets did not miss the opportunity to use such alliances to promote their own work, often portraying themselves in similarly idealized terms. No longer mystics, prophets, or religious militants, early seventeenth-century poets became spokespersons addressing elites on behalf of elites. Malherbe was not the first but certainly the most visible to turn away from the humanist audience of Ronsard toward courtcourt (royal)ly elites, which by default included in their numbers some erudite Gallicans and Jesuits but were composed mostly of relatively uneducated aristocratic connoisseurs of belles-lettres.

      In the first decade of the seventeenth century, literary patronage was only beginning to get back on its feet. Prolonged military conflict had suppressed the normal levels of literary and cultural production. In his monumental Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, Antoine Adam sneeringly asserts that Henri IV was “profoundly indifferent to literature, concerned only with repairing the country’s finances” (Adam, Histoire vol. 1, 24). But royal finances were in genuine disarray after more than three decades of civil war, and Henri had promised large sums to LeagueLeaguer governors to secure their submission to his authority. Real financial worries motivated Henri IV’s placement of Malherbe not in his own clientele, but that of the duke de BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de. However, without a political use for the poet, such a shrewd politician as Henri IV would not have bothered at all. The first odes, enhancing Henri IV’s personal image, were meant to play a part in the king’s broad and on-going public relations campaign. It was understood that Malherbe was the king’s man.

      Henri had acceded to the throne a weak king, mistrusted by political enemies on both sides of the sectarian divide. In his new role, therefore, he took a variety of steps to strengthen his personal authority. Some of these were aggressive policies that fostered state-building and administrative centralization.11 Others involved a drive to remake his public imageimagepublic image: he made a point to be seen praying in every church in Paris; he undertook extensive public building projects; he welcomed the Jesuits back to France; he encouraged royal panegyric. He also took the crucial step of renegotiating his conjugal alliance. Henri had his marriage to Marguerite de Valois annulled, and he wed the ultra-Catholic and fabulously rich Marie de Médicis. Receptions of the new queen in Avignon and in Paris were carefully choreographed events whose idealized images portrayed the sovereign couple as Olympian gods. Similar imagery, though with a different meaning, occurs in Malherbe’s odes.12

      After the untimely death of Henri, with Marie de Médicis serving as regent, the particulars of Malherbe’s project changed in a significant way, but the immediate purpose of the odes, as well as their lofty ambition, remained fundamentally unaltered, as the poet now worked to bolster her authority amid noble discontent and rebellion. If Malherbe’s panegyrics lapsed into silence after 1613, it was almost certainly due to the delicate task of navigating the dangerous waters of courtcourt (royal) patronage during a time of growing political instability. The insurrection of Condé in 1614, and the young Louis XIII’s coup d’état in 1617, followed by the exile of Marie de Médicis to Blois, could not have been encouraging signs for the poet, who had published strong support for the queen mother. The difficulty that Malherbe had in getting the royal treasury to pay his stipend could not have helped. Then, after more than a decade, following a tentative rapprochement signaled by a few sonnets, an aging Malherbe composed an ode for Louis XIII, who in 1627 was still consolidating the bases of royal power when he launched the final siege against the last ProtestantProtestant stronghold at La RochelleLa Rochelle. That ode would be Malherbe’s last.

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